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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

RC-GeoCP: Geometric Consensus for Radar-Camera Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception (CP) enhances scene understanding through multi-agent information sharing. While LiDAR-centric systems offer precise geometry, high costs and performance degradation in adverse weather necessitate multi-modal alternatives. Despite dense visual semantics and robust spatial measurements, the synergy between cameras and 4D radar remains underexplored in collaborative settings. This work introduces RC-GeoCP, the first framework to explore the fusion of 4D radar and images in CP. To resolve misalignment caused by depth ambiguity and spatial dispersion across agents, RC-GeoCP establishes a radar-anchored geometric consensus. Specifically, Geometric Structure Rectification (GSR) aligns visual semantics with geometry derived from radar to generate spatially grounded, geometry-consistent representations. Uncertainty-Aware Communication (UAC) formulates selective transmission as a conditional entropy reduction process to prioritize informative features based on inter-agent disagreement. Finally, the Consensus-Driven Assembler (CDA) aggregates multi-agent information via shared geometric anchors to form a globally coherent representation. We establish the first unified radar-camera CP benchmark on V2X-Radar and V2X-R, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced communication overhead. Code will be released soon.

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

Encode Errors: Representational Retrieval of In-Context Demonstrations for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) involves detecting and correcting the wrong usage of grammar. While large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning (ICL) capabilities have shown significant progress on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their few-shot performance on GEC remains suboptimal. This is mainly due to the challenge of retrieving suitable in-context demonstrations that capture error patterns instead of semantic similarity. In this paper, we demonstrate that LLMs can inherently capture information related to grammatical errors through their internal states. From these states, we extract the Grammatical Error Representation (GER), an informative and semantically neutral encoding of grammatical errors. Our novel GER-based retrieval method significantly boosts performance in ICL settings on multilingual GEC datasets, improving the precision of correction. For high-resource languages, our results on 8B-sized open-source models match those of closed-source models such as Deepseek2.5 and GPT-4o-mini. For low-resource languages, our $F_{0.5}$ scores surpass the baseline by up to a factor of 1.20. This method provides a more precise and resource-efficient solution for multilingual GEC, offering a promising direction for interpretable GEC research.

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

When AUC Misleads: Polarization-Aware Evaluation of Deepfake Detectors under Domain Shift

Recent advances in generative AI, such as diffusion models and face-swapping tools, have enabled the creation of highly realistic deepfakes, leading to real-world harms including financial fraud and non-consensual explicit content. In response, deepfake detection has become an active research area, with recent methods increasingly focusing on improving generalization to unseen manipulations. This is typically evaluated using the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) measured separately across multiple datasets. However, such an evaluation fails to reflect real-world scenarios where detectors face a mixture of data sources and varying artifact types. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel metric, Cross-dataset AUC (Cross-AUC) that averages per-domain AUCs with a measure of prediction polarization for taking into account the robustness to domain shift. The polarization extent is quantified by the Wasserstein Distance between class score distributions. Cross-AUC not only assesses the generalization capabilities of deepfake detectors under domain shifts more realistically, but it is also interpretable as it better explains the reason behind a drop in performance. Experiments performed on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate its practical relevance.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Counterfactual Credit Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2603.21563v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding. We introduce two optimizer-agnostic credit assignment methods for converting joint outcomes into agent-specific learning signals. Counterfactual Credit for Policy Optimization (CCPO) estimates an agent's marginal contribution by comparing the realized joint outcome with a counterfactual outcome where that agent is removed. Self-Evaluated Credit for Policy Optimization (SEPO) uses constrained self- and peer-evaluations as a verifier-anchored credit signal while keeping the external task outcome dominant. Both operate at the reward-construction layer rather than as policy optimizers, producing role-specific rewards or advantages for GRPO, GSPO, or REINFORCE++. We instantiate these credit signals in a sequential Think–Solve setting and evaluate them on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results show that explicit credit assignment often improves dual-agent reasoning, especially on MATH500 and several out-of-distribution settings, while gains vary across models and datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/bhai114/ccpo.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

National trends and operational drivers of vaccine wastage in Uganda, 2020-2025: a descriptive analysis of four tracer antigens

Background Vaccine wastage reduces immunisation efficiency, increases costs, and complicates supply forecasting. Uganda routinely monitors vaccine use, but national evidence comparing observed wastage with World Health Organization (WHO) and Uganda-specific planning thresholds has been limited. We described national and sub-national trends for four tracer antigens to inform supply-chain planning and forecasting. Methods We conducted a retrospective descriptive analysis of routinely reported immunisation data from Ugandas District Health Information Software 2, 2020-2025. We analysed Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG), measles-rubella (MR), oral polio vaccine (OPV), and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis-containing vaccine (DPT). Vaccine wastage was calculated as the proportion of issued doses not administered. Annual wastage rates were summarised using medians, and temporal trends were assessed using the Mann-Kendall test. Observed wastage was compared with WHO thresholds: BCG[≤]50%, MR[≤]25%, OPV[≤]10%, DPT[≤]15%, and Ugandas planning thresholds: BCG[≤]70%, MR[≤]40%, OPV[≤]15%, DPT[≤]10%. Effective Vaccine Management reports were reviewed to summarise reported reasons for wastage. Results During 2020-2025, median national wastage was 40.6% for BCG, 25.9% for MR, 10.0% for OPV, and 9.2% for DPT. OPV wastage declined from 12.8% in 2020 to 8.0% in 2025, with a significant downward trend ({tau}b=-1.00; p=0.008). OPV and DPT wastage remained largely within their respective Uganda in-country thresholds ([≤]15% and [≤]10%) for most of the study period, while BCG generally remained below the WHO threshold ([≤]50%) and MR frequently exceeded the WHO threshold ([≤]25%) but remained within Uganda's planning threshold ([≤]40%) in most years. The proportion of districts exceeding both WHO and Uganda thresholds declined for OPV from 36.3% to 5.5% (p=0.024) and for DPT from 22.6% to 1.4% (p=0.013). Wastage was consistently higher in lower-level (Health Centre II and III) facilities, compared to hospitals. Among 50 service delivery points, reported reasons included low session attendance (66%), multi-dose vial policy non-compliance (28%), and vaccine expiry (12%). Conclusion Uganda achieved reductions in OPV wastage and district-level improvements in DPT wastage, while BCG and MR remained more variable and frequently had higher wastage. Strengthening adherence to the multi-dose vial policy and improving session planning at lower-level facilities could strengthen vaccine utilisation and forecasting.

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

Quantum statistical enhancement of collective behaviour in a bosonic active Ising model

arXiv:2606.18091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collective behaviour such as flocking (the collective motion of a spontaneously formed group along a common direction) or aster formation (the binding of opposing flocks, inhibiting each others motion) are intriguing emergent phenomena in active systems with local alignment rules. Until recently, their occurrence was mainly studied for classical systems, a prime example being the active Ising model (AIM), which translates the main ingredients of flocking and aster formation (i.e., alignment and self-propulsion) to a lattice framework. Here we introduce and study a one-dimensional (1D) quantum lattice variant of the AIM, based on ideal bosons with a spin degree of freedom. We find that both the collective behaviours of the 1D classical model, flocking and aster formation, are markedly enhanced by the bosonic quantum statistics. This contrasts with a recent quantum generalization of the AIM based onto hard-core bosons [Khasseh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 248302 (2025)], where flocking, but neither its quantum-statistical stabilization nor aster states were observed as a consequence of interactions. Moreover, we investigate the competition of this quantum statistical stabilization of collective phases with their suppression by the quantum fluctuations induced by a transverse external magnetic field.

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

ASTEROID: A Spatiotemporal Information Transformer for Forecasting Multi-Step Time Series of Molecular Dynamics

arXiv:2606.17668v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is computationally demanding, particularly for large-scale systems requiring long-term analysis. Accurate forecast of the outcomes of a MD simulation is not only an attractive scientific challenge but also has substantial practical value. In this work, we developed a data-driven framework, termed ASTEROID (Advanced Spatiotemporal TransformER fOr Inferring Dynamics), that can directly predict multi-step atomic coordinates, avoiding conventional iterative integration. For this purpose, our ASTEROID reformulates MD trajectories as high-dimensional spatiotemporal sequences and integrates the Spatiotemporal Information (STI) Transformation equation into a Transformer architecture. The core innovation of ASTEROID lies in its ability to model multiscale spatiotemporal dependencies. In particular, for spatial dependencies, a local-global self-attention mechanism captures both short- and long-range interactions. For temporal dependencies, an encoder-decoder structure integrates global context with autoregressive forecasting. ASTEROID was evaluated on several quantum-mechanics derived molecular datasets. Our results indicate that ASTEROID achieved not only a higher level of accuracy in multi-step prediction than existing methods on various benchmarks, but also significantly reduced computational cost of conventional MD simulation. Moreover, the model supports iterative multi-step forecasting over an extended time scale. This work establishes a robust and generalizable data-driven paradigm for accelerating MD simulations.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Phase locking nuclear spins in silicon with spin-orbit coupling

arXiv:2606.20340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Because they have such long coherence times, nuclear spins have extraordinary potential for use in quantum information processing devices. However, coherent nuclear spin control generally requires external phase references, such as microwave control fields. Here, we phase-lock a $^{29}$Si nuclear spin ensemble in a silicon quantum dot using only the internal electronic spin-orbit coupling as a phase reference. When driven with the quantum-dot electrons, the nuclear spins align themselves to a phase determined by the electronic spin-orbit coupling and the timing of the drive protocol. This enables us to measure the coherent precession and inhomogeneous dephasing of the nuclear spins. We corroborate our results with detailed numerical simulations of the many-body electron nuclear system. Our work opens new routes for coherently controlling solid-state nuclear spin ensembles.

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

A Zero-shot Generalized Graph Anomaly Detection Framework via Node Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.12673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-domain graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to identify abnormal nodes in unseen target graphs, showing strong potential in real-world applications with heterogeneous graph data. However, existing methods often depend on dataset-specific feature semantics and structural patterns, which limits their ability to generalize across different domains. To address this challenge, we propose AlignGAD, a zero-shot generalized graph anomaly detection framework. Our framework is built upon three key components: a Global Unification Module that aligns heterogeneous node features and normalizes graph signals in the spectral domain; a Clustering Module that constructs cluster-aware graph views to capture group-level abnormal patterns; and a Node Discrepancy Scoring Module that measures reconstruction discrepancy and aggregates anomaly evidence from different graph views. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AlignGAD under the zero-shot GAD setting.

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

Diversity-Driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization via Nested Pareto Set Learning

arXiv:2606.15115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives. In many practical scenarios, function evaluations are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, necessitating optimization solely based on a fixed offline dataset. In this setting, known as offline MOO, the goal is to find out the Pareto set without access to the true objective functions. This setting suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, where the surrogate model is not accurate for unseen designs. Due to the OOD issue, surrogate errors may cause the optimizer to select solutions that do not lie on the true Pareto front and are biased toward its extremes. To address this, this paper proposes Diversity-driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization (DOMOO), which aims to find out a diverse and high-quality set of solutions. First, DOMOO incorporates an accumulative risk control module that estimates the potential risk of candidate solutions and alleviates the OOD issue between the training data and the generated solutions. In addition, a nested Pareto set learning (PSL) strategy is proposed to jointly learn preference and PSL parameters, then optimize them, enabling adaptation to diverse Pareto front geometries. To further enhance solution quality, we design a diversity-driven selection strategy that extracts a representative and well-distributed set of final solutions. To achieve this diversity-driven selection strategy, we propose $IGD_offline$, a tailored indicator for the offline setting that considers both diversity and convergence, and avoids the bias of hypervolume indicator. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DOMOO achieves the best average rank across tasks in both convergence and diversity among the compared methods.

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

A Turbo-Inference Strategy for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

Object detection and instance segmentation tasks are closely related. Existing top-down instance segmentation methods usually follow a detect-then-segment paradigm, where an initial detector is used to recognize and localize objects with bounding boxes, followed by the segmentation of an instance mask within each bounding box. In such methods, the detection accuracy directly influences the subsequent segmentation performance. However, previous research has seldom explored the impact of the instance segmentation task on object detection. In this paper, we present a turbo-inference strategy for the top-down methods that leverages the complementary information between detection and segmentation tasks iteratively. Specifically we design two modules: turbo-detection head and turbo-segmentation head, which facilitate communication between the tasks. The two modules form a closed loop that interlaces the detection and segmentation results without retraining the model. Comprehensive experiments on the COCO, iFLYTEK, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our method substantially enhances both detection and segmentation accuracies with a certain increase in computational cost. The proposed method represents a tradeoff between prediction accuracy and inference speed. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhaozhen2333/Turbo-Learning.git.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

CANN-EUCLID: unsupervised constitutive artificial neural network model discovery from full-field data

arXiv:2606.14565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs) provide interpretable material model discovery, but have so far been used in stress-supervised settings based on apparent stress-strain data from homogeneous tests. Because each test samples only a narrow loading path and provides homogenized rather than local stress information, robust discovery typically requires multiple loading modes to constrain the multidimensional response. This is challenging for soft biological tissues, where repeated testing, damage, and sample variability limit reliable information from a single specimen. Here, we combine CANNs with the stress-unsupervised full-field discovery framework EUCLID to identify sparse hyperelastic laws directly from displacement fields and reaction forces in one heterogeneity-inducing loading case. CANN-EUCLID minimizes equilibrium imbalance with sparsity-promoting regularization selecting compact active terms, without local stress measurements or a prescribed law. We evaluate the approach on isotropic and anisotropic benchmarks with prescribed ground-truth laws. When the ground truth is representable by the chosen CANN basis, our method recovers the correct terms with near-exact accuracy, including exponential terms with embedded parameters. When it is not contained in the basis, the method retains shared terms and approximates missing contributions using available basis functions. Generalization depends strongly on sampled deformation states: exponential strain-stiffening terms can be recovered accurately when sufficiently probed, but can produce large extrapolation errors when the stiffening regime lies outside the sampled domain. Forward FE validation simulations show that the discovered behavior accurately replicates the ground truth. These results establish stress-unsupervised CANN discovery as a promising framework for interpretable full-field constitutive model identification.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Absolute continuity, supports and idempotent splitting in categorical probability

arXiv:2308.00651v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Markov categories have recently turned out to be a powerful high-level framework for probability and statistics. They accommodate purely categorical definitions of notions like conditional probability and almost sure equality, as well as proofs of fundamental results such as the Hewitt–Savage 0/1 Law, the de Finetti Theorem and the Ergodic Decomposition Theorem. In this work, we develop additional relevant notions from probability theory in the setting of Markov categories. This comprises improved versions of previously introduced definitions of absolute continuity and supports, as well as a detailed study of idempotents and idempotent splitting in Markov categories. Our main result on idempotent splitting is that every idempotent measurable Markov kernel between standard Borel spaces splits across another standard Borel space, and we derive this as an instance of a general categorical criterion for idempotent splitting in Markov categories.

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

A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and Defenses

LLM-based agents are now used throughout cybersecurity. While these agents facilitate powerful and autonomous security applications, their autonomy opens up new attack surfaces, and the security community is actively building defenses to secure them. Yet the literature on this subject has grown quickly and unevenly. Existing surveys treat applications, threats, and defenses in isolation, leaving no unified account of how an agent's capabilities, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures interconnect. In this work we present the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring the field around the fundamental pillars of Applications, Threats and Defenses. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of over 260 papers, explaining how agents are used in downstream cybersecurity applications, inherent threats to agentic systems, and countermeasures designed to protect them. In addition, we provide detailed pillar-specific and cross-cutting analyses that show the security-lifecycle coverage of agentic applications, comparison between red-teaming and blue-teaming agents, and the adversarial use of red-teaming applications. On the threat side, we analyze the entry points and agent-loop stages that attacks target, their specificity to the agentic setting, and the threat models they assume. On the defense side, we analyze the prevailing defense strategies, their cost and security trade-offs, and where in the agent lifecycle they are deployed. We further map which defenses cover which attack classes and chart trends in agent architecture, backbone model usage, data modality coverage, and the growth of attack and defense research over time. Taken together, these findings indicate that agentic systems are structurally fragile by default and that securing them will require defenses that span the full agent lifecycle rather than single-layer fixes.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CACR:Reinforcing Temporal Answer Grounding in Instructional Video via Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning

The task of temporal answer grounding in instructional video (TAGV), which aims to locate precise video segments that respond to natural language queries, is increasingly important for direct video answer retrieval. This task remains challenging due to the need to comprehend semantically complex questions and to address the significant length mismatch between untrimmed videos and short target moments. Existing methods often suffer from sensitivity to irrelevant content or insufficient visual reasoning capabilities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning (CACR) framework. Our approach first employs a Visual-Language Pre-training based Candidate Selection (VBCS) algorithm to efficiently generate K candidate segments, then applies a temporal logic reasoning module enhanced by a rejection reward mechanism and optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for robust inference. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), providing a new perspective for reasoning-based retrieval in long videos.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Compressed Quantum Operators and Roots of Hermite Polynomials

arXiv:2606.24792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The fundamental position and momentum operators of quantum mechanics are unbounded, but finite rank compressions of the operators can be considered to obtain partial information on the operators and their properties. Motivated by problems in photonic quantum computing, we bring together results from quantum theory and the theory of orthogonal polynomials to show that a natural finite rank compression of the position and momentum operator representation on Fock space Hilbert space has eigenvalues given by roots of the classical Hermite polynomials. We discuss the corresponding compressed displacement operators and potential applications in approximate quantum error correction.

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

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

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

R2RDreamer: 3D-aware Data Augmentation for Spatially-generalized 2D Manipulation Policies

Spatial generalization is critical for imitation-learned manipulation policies, but achieving it typically requires scaling demonstrations across diverse object poses, robot configurations, and camera viewpoints. Data augmentation from a few source demonstrations offers a practical alternative to costly real-world collection. Simulation-based augmentation can create controllable variation, but requires complex environment and object setup and may introduce a sim-to-real gap. Recent real-to-real methods avoid these issues by jointly editing 3D observations and action trajectories from real demonstrations, yet they still rely on strong 3D scene parsing and geometry completion, and often produce observations tailored to 3D pointcloud policies rather than RGB-based 2D policies. We propose R2RDreamer, a real-to-real demonstration augmentation framework that preserves the geometric consistency of 3D action-observation editing while moving visual completion to 2D video space. Specifically, R2RDreamer first performs lightweight 3D augmentation by editing incomplete object pointclouds and end-effector trajectories in a shared 3D frame; it then projects the edited scene into masked image-space control videos with occlusion-aware reasoning and uses a dense-control image-to-video model to complete temporally coherent RGB observations. Experiments on spatially shifted manipulation tasks with both 2D diffusion-style policies and vision-language-action policies show that R2RDreamer improves spatial generalization from limited source demonstrations, with analyses validating the contributions of 3D editing, occlusion-aware projection, and video completion.

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

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

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

Contaminated Collaboration: Measuring Gender Bias Transfer in LLM-Assisted Student Writing

Gender bias in LLMs has been studied extensively in model outputs, with biased prompts shown to amplify stereotyped generations. Whether such bias propagates into text produced by humans who use these systems, however, remains underexplored. We investigate whether gender bias in an LLM writing assistant transfers into career plan essays written by students. We first verify that a gender-biased prompt induces gender-differentiated language in LLM-generated essays, while a neutral prompt does not. We then recruited participants (N = 123) in a controlled environment to write career plan essays for paired biographical profiles differing only in gender under three conditions: no AI assistance, neutral LLM assistance, or gender-biased LLM assistance. Students in the biased condition produced essays with a significantly larger agentic gap and more gender-stereotypic occupation suggestions than those in the control and neutral conditions. Our results also reveal that this bias transfer is asymmetric: agency is suppressed in female-target essays while male-target writing remains largely unaffected. Our findings highlight the risk of bias propagation in AI-assisted writing, calling for fairness-aware design in educational AI tools.

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

Multi-View Decompilation for LLM-Based Malware Classification

arXiv:2606.20436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Malware analysts often inspect compiled binaries through decompiled pseudo-C, when source code is unavailable. Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) can assist this process by classifying decompiled code as benign or malicious, but existing pipelines typically rely on a single decompiler view. We argue that this assumption is fragile: decompilers are lossy heuristic tools, and different decompilers can expose different artefacts of the same binary. We curate a benchmark of benign utilities and malicious programs spanning a range of threat behaviors. Each sample is compiled and decompiled with both Ghidra and RetDec, yielding matched pseudo-C views. Across a range of LLMs from major model families, we find that providing both decompiler views improves malicious-class F1, mainly by increasing recall on malicious samples. Agreement analyses further show that Ghidra and RetDec make partially different errors, supporting the view that decompiler outputs provide complementary evidence. Our results suggest that multi-decompiler prompting is a simple, training-free way to improve LLM-based malware triage in practical settings.

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

Rethinking Structural Anomaly Detection: From Decision Boundaries to Projection Operators

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

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

A Benchmark for Hallucination Detection in VLMs for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

arXiv:2606.24115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are prone to hallucination, which remains a major barrier to their safe deployment in clinical practice. To date, most hallucination detection methods have been evaluated on radiology benchmarks such as MIMIC-CXR and VQA-RAD, while gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we benchmark nine hallucination detection methods on the Gut-VLM dataset, a GI diagnostic Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset with 4,392 test VQA pairs, across five VLMs (MedGemma-4B, MedGemma-27B, LLaVA-Med-7B, LLaVA-v1.6-7B, and Lingshu-32B). The methods span three categories: black-box methods (RadFlag, SelfCheckGPT-NLI), gray-box methods (AvgProb, AvgEnt, MaxProb, MaxEnt, Semantic Entropy, and VASE), and a white-box method (ReXTrust). Our results show that ReXTrust, a white-box method, achieves the highest AUC across all five models, outperforming the strongest alternative method on each VLM by a statistically significant margin (paired permutation test, p < 0.001 in all cases), reaching a peak AUC of 93.0 on MedGemma-4B. White-box hidden-state access provides a consistent advantage of 19.5 AUC points on average (range: 9.5–33.5), with ReXTrust maintaining strong performance even on LLaVA-v1.6-7B (AUC 79.9), where black-box methods and clustering-based gray-box methods collapse to near-chance performance. Among non-white-box methods, token-level gray-box statistics (MaxEnt, MaxProb) are the strongest alternatives, outperforming both clustering-based gray-box methods (Semantic Entropy, VASE) and black-box approaches on average. We further identify confident confabulation, a failure mode in which models hallucinate with high inter-sample consistency or high token-level probability, as a systemic failure for both consistency and uncertainty-based methods.

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

Is Code Better Than Language for Algorithmic Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For tool-augmented language models, comparing natural-language reasoning with code-execution pipelines is difficult because the comparison changes both the intermediate representation and the execution mechanism. We separate these factors with an intermediate intervention: the model expresses its reasoning as executable code, and the language model simulates that code in context to produce an answer. On a 40-task verifiable algorithmic benchmark, deterministic code execution outperforms natural-language reasoning by +31.6pp. We observe that the intermediate intervention is not meaningfully different from natural-language reasoning (+0.15pp). These results suggest that, in our evaluated setting, changing the intermediate representation alone does not explain the tool-use advantage, providing evidence for the performance gains requiring reliable external execution. We formalize this intuition with a simple statistical decision-theoretic model that characterizes when execution dominates end-to-end risk in our disentangled trace-generation/execution regime. We validate our theory using a reconstruction intervention that leverages a proxy language model to infer natural-language reasoning traces from code representations, recovering performance comparable to the original natural-language reasoning pipeline. All experiments are at https://github.com/TerryTong-Git/ToolProj.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CCKS: Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing

arXiv:2606.12281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Decentralized Training and Decentralized Execution (DTDE) for cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), action-advising-based knowledge sharing promotes interpretable and scalable cooperation among agents. However, current action advising approaches often adhere too much to the teacher's guidance without evaluating teacher-student compatibility, which causes excessive advising, suboptimal stability, and degraded performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing (CCKS) framework, which allows agents to adopt recommendations based on consensus-derived constraints and to follow the teacher's instructions more smartly. This mechanism enables agents to balance exploration and learning from experienced teachers, improving overall performance. The key is the consensus model construction, for which we propose to employ contrastive learning to construct consensus models based on local observations in the agents' training phase. In action selection, agents score and choose actions based on consensus and shared knowledge. Designed as a plug-and-play solution, CCKS integrates seamlessly with existing DTDE algorithms. Experiments conducted in the Google Research Football environment and the complex StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge demonstrate that the integration with CCKS significantly improves cooperation efficiency, learning speed, and overall performance compared with current DTDE baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanxpy/CCKS.