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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

FineDialFact: A benchmark for Fine-grained Dialogue Fact Verification

Large language models are known to produce hallucinations - factually incorrect or fabricated information - which poses significant challenges for many natural language processing applications, such as dialogue systems. As a result, detecting hallucinations has become a critical area of research. Current approaches to hallucination detection in dialogue systems primarily focus on verifying the factual consistency of generated responses. However, these responses often contain a mix of accurate, inaccurate or non-verifiable facts, making the use of a single factual label overly simplistic and coarse-grained. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark, FineDialFact, for fine-grained dialogue fact verification, which involves verifying atomic facts extracted from dialogue responses. To support this, we construct a dataset based on publicly available dialogue datasets and evaluate it using various baseline methods. Experimental results demonstrate that methods incorporating Chain-of-Thought reasoning can enhance performance in dialogue fact verification. Despite this, the best F1-score achieved on the HybriDialogue, an open-domain dialogue dataset, is only 0.74, indicating that the benchmark remains a challenging task for future research. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/XiangyanChen/FineDialFact.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum-Classical Hierarchical Equations of Motion

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a quantum-classical hierarchical equations of motion (QC-HEOM) approach for simulating non-Markovian open quantum systems. The method combines the ensemble-averaged classical path reference of the quantum-classical path integral formalism with a hierarchy of auxiliary quantum influence functionals. By incorporating thermal fluctuations through an ensemble average over reference trajectories, the hierarchy is required to represent only the residual quantum memory associated with the imaginary part of the bath response function. Consequently, unlike conventional hierarchical equations of motion, QC-HEOM does not require Matsubara or Padé expansions of the thermal kernel and exhibits only weak temperature dependence of the hierarchy size. Furthermore, because thermal fluctuations are supplied through reference classical trajectories, the framework naturally extends beyond harmonic baths and enables the incorporation of anharmonic and molecular environments through externally generated trajectories. We derive the formalism and demonstrate its exactness for a harmonic bath. Applications to an asymmetric spin-boson model and the seven-site Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex illustrate the accuracy of QC-HEOM. It reproduces benchmark quasi-adiabatic path integral and hierarchical equations of motion results while requiring substantially fewer auxiliary objects, particularly at low temperatures. These results establish QC-HEOM as an efficient framework for treating residual quantum memory in quantum-classical descriptions of open-system dynamics. The separation of thermal fluctuations from residual quantum memory through the use of Wigner trajectories provides an approximate route toward hierarchical treatments of complex anharmonic environments that are inaccessible to conventional HEOM approaches.

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

FORGE: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings

arXiv:2508.20330v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Still, learning-based approaches to accelerate combinatorial optimization often require solving a large number of difficult instances to collect training data, incurring significant computational cost. Existing learning-based methods require training dedicated models for each problem distribution, for each downstream task, severely limiting their scalability and generalization. We introduce Forge: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings, a framework that pre-trains a vector-quantized graph autoencoder on a large, diverse collection of mixed-integer programming (MIP) instances in an unsupervised manner, without relying on optimization solvers or optimal solutions. Vector quantization produces discrete code assignments that serve as a vocabulary for representing optimization instances. We evaluate Forge in both unsupervised and supervised settings. In the unsupervised setting, Forge embeddings effectively cluster unseen instances across problem domains and sizes. In the supervised setting, we fine-tune Forge embeddings and show that a single pre-trained model helps predicting both the integrality gap for cut-generation and variable hints for search guidance across multiple problem and size distributions. In both tasks, we improve the performance of a commercial optimization solver and outperform state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Finally, we open-source our training code, pre-trained Forge weights, and embeddings for multiple MIP distributions to foster further research in representation learning for optimization problems https://skadio.github.io/forge/

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2510.21978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models. However, the RLVR recipe introduces a significant risk of capability regression, in which models forget foundational skills after prolonged training without employing regularization strategies. We empirically confirm this concern, observing that open-source reasoning models suffer performance degradation on core capabilities such as perception and faithfulness. While imposing regularization terms like KL divergence can help prevent deviation from the base model, these terms are computed on the current task and therefore do not guarantee preservation of broader knowledge. Meanwhile, commonly used experience replay across heterogeneous domains makes it nontrivial to decide how much training emphasis each objective should receive. To address this, we propose RECAP-a replay strategy with dynamic objective reweighting for general knowledge preservation. Our reweighting mechanism adapts online using short-horizon signals of convergence and instability, shifting the post-training focus away from saturated objectives and toward underperforming or volatile ones. Our method is end-to-end and readily applicable to existing RLVR pipelines without training additional models or heavy tuning. Extensive experiments on benchmarks using Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which not only preserves general capabilities but also improves reasoning by enabling more flexible trade-offs among in-task rewards.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Mathematical Theory of Value: a synthesis on goal-directed agency under resource constraints

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose that value – the quantity goal-directed agents create, destroy, and exchange – is a lawful structural quantity in the same category as information. Following Shannon's method, we make one ruthless abstraction: value is the rate at which an agent converts a resource into goal-progress, relative to a frame fixed by its goal. A scale-invariance axiom forces a logarithmic measure, $V=\sum_i k_i \ln e_i$; compounding of a reinvested resource forces the same form via the ergodicity argument of Peters (2019). The two routes are kin rather than independent; their agreement is a consistency check, not an over-determination. We derive a coding theorem of value: $\Delta G \le I(X;Y)$, achieved by Bayes-proportional allocation; realized value decomposes as $G=D(q\|r)-D(q\|p)$, identifying misalignment with measurable waste. For populations, value is frame-relative while price is frame-independent; a fleet that pools its resource and fuses its perception inherits the ceiling $G_{\mathrm{fleet}} \le I(X;Y_{1:m}) \le H(X)$ (a corollary; an earlier sum-form claim was wrong and is corrected in v5). A dynamical layer yields an is/ought asymmetry from which alignment emerges as a control-stability condition with a closed-form residual. We test the single-frame laws on live language models in a pre-registered scale-up: perception mutual information tracks realized capability rather than parameter count (Spearman $\rho = 0.977$ pooled over 30 model$\times$domain points), out-of-sample $\Delta G$ tracks $I(X;Y)$, and over-confidence is measurable dissipation; a further pre-registered test shows the bridge is shape-invariant across four task shapes ($n=42$, slope 0.953). None of the mechanisms is individually new – generalized Kelly, Armstrong & Mindermann (2018), classical control; the contribution is their unification and the governance mapping (incentive design over oversight) that follows.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On a class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks

arXiv:2504.14767v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A step-reinforced random walk is a discrete-time stochastic process with long-range dependence. At each step, with a fixed probability $\alpha$, the so-called positively step-reinforced random walk repeats one of its previous steps, chosen randomly and uniformly from its entire history. Alternatively, with probability $1-\alpha$, it makes an independent move. For the so-called negatively step-reinforced random walk, the process is similar, but any repeated step is taken with its direction reversed. These random walks have been introduced respectively by Simon (1955) and Bertoin (2024) and are sometimes refered to the self-confident step-reinforced random walk and the counterbalanced step-reinforced random walk respectively. In this work, we introduce a new class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks for which we prove the strong law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. In particular, our work provides a unified treatment of the elephant random walk introduced by Schutz and Trimper (2004) and the positively and negatively step-reinforced random walks.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Fast When, Careful Who: Dual-Process Multiparty Turn-Taking with Diffusion Augmentation

Reliable turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems. However, most existing methods are designed for two-speaker interaction and struggle with realistic multiparty audio containing overlap and rapid speaker changes. We study multiparty turn-taking on the VoxConverse dataset and propose an audio-only two-stage pipeline that separates when to trigger a turn boundary from whether the floor is actually transferring. A fast trigger scans the audio and proposes candidate end-of-turn times, while a lightweight verifier runs only at those times to decide \textsc{Hold} or \textsc{Shift} and support next-speaker prediction. We report results in the full multiparty setting and a controlled dyadic top-2 projection for comparability. We also investigate diffusion-based, label-preserving background-audio mixing as a data augmentation strategy. Results show improved shift detection over a baseline, with further improvements from diffusion augmentation.

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

When Does Mixing Help? Analyzing Query Embedding Interpolation in Multilingual Dense Retrieval

While mixed-language querying is ubiquitous in multilingual communities, the sensitivity of dense retrievers to such queries remains poorly understood. We present a ratio-controlled study on mMARCO that systematically evaluates retrieval performance by varying the mixing proportion of parallel query translations via embedding-level mixing – constructing mixed queries as an interpolation of monolingual embeddings. Experiments with BGE-M3 demonstrate that an optimal mixing ratio outperforms the best monolingual endpoint in 88/105 cases. We uncover a distinct asymmetry driven by English dominance: mixing is uniformly beneficial when retrieving from non-English document indices, whereas indices containing English are best served by pure English queries. Furthermore, English acts as the strongest mixing partner for every non-English document language. Finally, when controlling for English dominance, mixing gains correlate negatively with typological distance. We conclude that language-mix sensitivity is structured and predictable, and we validate the robustness of these patterns across model families and scales.

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

RepFusion: Leveraging Multimodal Priors for Denoising in Representation Space

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in text-to-image (T2I) systems, but they are typically limited to text encoding, while denoising is handled by newly trained generative backbones. The emergence of representation autoencoders (RAEs) shifts the generation target toward semantically structured visual representations, creating a latent space that is more compatible with pretrained LLM priors. Inspired by multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), where an MLP projector is sufficient to align clean visual representations with a pretrained LLM, we repurpose the MLLM itself as a noisy representation encoder, extending this mechanism from clean to noisy inputs. We present RepFusion, which uses the resulting MLLM outputs as the conditioning signal for a diffusion transformer. In controlled comparisons at similar inference budgets, RepFusion outperforms baselines that devote comparable capacity to newly initialized denoisers. These results demonstrate that MLLMs provide strong priors for denoising visual representations and that, by conditioning on evolving noisy representations, test-time compute can be productively spent on repeated MLLM conditioning in modern T2I systems.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure Bioinformatics of Eight Human ATP Synthase Fo Subunits and Their AlphaFold3-Predicted Water-Soluble QTY Analogs

Human mitochondrial ATP synthase is an essential rotary motor enzyme that produces most of the cellular ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. Its membrane-embedded Fo sector contains highly hydrophobic transmembrane subunits that are challenging to study in aqueous environments without detergents. This study explores whether applying the QTY code can reduce the hydrophobicity of selected ATP synthase Fo subunits while preserving their overall molecular structures. We applied the QTY code to eight human ATP synthase Fo subunits: ATP6, ATP8, ATPK, ATP68, ATPMK, AT5G1, AT5G2, and AT5G3. Hydrophobic amino acids leucine (L), isoleucine (I), valine (V), and phenylalanine (F) in transmembrane regions were systematically replaced with hydrophilic glutamine (Q), threonine (T), and tyrosine (Y). Four native subunits with available CryoEM structures from human ATP synthase (PDB: 8H9S) were superposed with their AlphaFold3-predicted QTY analogs. The native ATP synthase Fo subunits superposed well with their respective QTY analogs. For the CryoEM-native comparisons, RMSD values ranged from 0.565[A] to 2.546[A]. For the AlphaFold3-native comparisons of subunits without CryoEM structures, RMSD values ranged from 0.204[A] to 0.297[A]. Despite substantial QTY substitutions in the transmembrane regions, ranging from 38.89% to 50.79%, the QTY analogs retained similar overall folds, molecular weights, and isoelectric points. Hydrophobic surface analysis showed that the QTY analogs had reduced hydrophobic patches compared with their native counterparts, with average hydrophobicity decreasing from 0.2959 in native proteins to -1.1023 in QTY analogs. These structural bioinformatics studies suggest that the QTY code can be applied to ATP synthase Fo subunits to generate more hydrophilic, potentially water-soluble analogs while preserving overall structural similarity. These results extend the application of the QTY code to the membrane-embedded Fo sector of ATP synthase and provide a foundation for future experimental studies testing whether these QTY analogs can be expressed, purified, and evaluated for assembly or proton-transfer-related functions.

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

Detecting Historical Turning Points in Italian Media: A Complex Systems Approach to a Diachronic News Corpus

The increasing availability of large-scale textual corpora has opened new possibilities for data-driven, quantitative approaches to historical analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, diachronic corpora with historical relevance from the pre-digital era remain scarce and often incomplete. We present a quantitative approach to historical analysis based on the reconstruction and exploration of a diachronic corpus of around 600,000 articles from the Italian newspaper "La Repubblica", covering all the articles published from the 1st of January 1985 to the 31st of December 2000 - a period of major political, social, and geopolitical change in Italy and globally. Using NLP techniques, we analyze the text at both lexical and semantic levels; we then apply tools from complex systems and statistical physics to trace shifts in media discourse over time. This allows us to detect key transition periods, such as the transition from the First Republic to the Second Republic in Italy, or major international conflicts like the Gulf War or the Kosovo War, without relying on prior labeling. The results show how combining computational linguistics with ideas from complex systems can offer new quantitative insight into historical changes, opening up new paths for studying the dynamics of media and society through large-scale textual data.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Probabilistic Contrastive Pretraining for Multi-task ADME Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited. We propose a molecular graph-transformer pretraining framework that combines chemistry-specific self-supervision with contrastive mutual information machine learning (cMIM). Our method encodes molecular graphs into latent variables, reconstructs SMILES strings from the graph-derived latent codes, and augments the contrastive objective with domain-specific self-supervised chemistry tasks. Rather than treating these tasks as auxiliary regularizers with separately tuned loss weights, we formulate reconstruction, contrastive discrimination, and chemistry-specific supervision as unit-weighted log-probability factors in a single probabilistic latent-variable objective. For fine-tuning, we propose a multi-task GNN readout architecture with task-specific multilayer perceptron heads, preserving shared representation learning while mitigating negative transfer and improving the modeling of heterogeneous, nonlinear task relationships. Across Biogen, ExpansionRX, and ChEMBL-MT, the resulting Contrastive KERMT pretraining improves over the KERMT baseline by 7.6%, 9.9%, and 9.5% respectively (averaged over significantly-improved endpoints). Adding ADME-adjacent molecules to the pretraining corpus further improves transfer, and the contrastive component sharpens chemically meaningful latent neighborhoods.

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

Pathway-Structured Privileged Distillation for Deployable Computational Pathology

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

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

Priority-Aware Shapley Value

arXiv:2602.09326v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Shapley values are widely used for model-agnostic data valuation and feature attribution, yet they implicitly assume contributors are interchangeable. This can be problematic when contributors are dependent (e.g., reused/augmented data or causal feature orderings) or when contributions should be adjusted by factors such as trust or risk. We propose Priority-Aware Shapley Value (PASV), which incorporates both hard precedence constraints and soft, contributor-specific priority weights. PASV is applicable to general precedence structures, recovers precedence-only and weight-only Shapley variants as special cases, and is uniquely characterized by natural axioms. We develop an efficient adjacent-swap Metropolis-Hastings sampler for scalable Monte Carlo estimation and analyze limiting regimes induced by extreme priority weights. Experiments on data valuation (MNIST/CIFAR10) and feature attribution (Census Income) demonstrate more structure-faithful allocations and a practical sensitivity analysis via our proposed "priority sweeping".

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

AGDN: Learning to Solve Traveling Salesman Problem with Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network

arXiv:2606.19185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization and arises in many practical scenarios. Although graph-based learning approaches have been explored for TSP, the question of how to exploit graph structure more effectively remains open. We present the Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network (AGDN), a new Graph Neural Network framework designed to solve TSP. Our method tackles two central difficulties: (1) the lack of informative topological prior in fully connected TSP graphs, and (2) losing connected nodes in the optimal solution after the commonly used graph sparsification techniques. To overcome these issues, we construct a MixScore transition matrix that merges node similarity with pairwise distance, and we develop an anisotropic graph diffusion strategy that supports efficient information exchange across multiple hops. Comprehensive experiments spanning diverse instance sizes and node distributions show that AGDN consistently outperforms existing methods while keeping computation time competitive. Furthermore, AGDN generalizes well to problem sizes and distributions beyond those seen during training. The implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/LabRAI/AGDN.

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

The N-Body Problem: Parallel Execution from Single-Person Egocentric Video

Humans can intuitively parallelise complex activities, but can a model predict this from observing a single person? Given one egocentric video, we introduce the N-Body Problem: predicting how N individuals, can hypothetically perform the same set of tasks. The goal is to maximise speed-up, but naive assignment of video segments to individuals often violates real-world constraints, leading to physically impossible scenarios like two people using the same object or occupying the same space. To quantify this, we formalise the N-Body Problem and propose a suite of metrics to evaluate both performance (speed-up, task coverage) and feasibility (spatial collisions, object conflicts and causal constraints). As a proof of concept, we introduce a structured prompting strategy that guides a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to reason about the 3D environment, object usage, and temporal dependencies, producing a viable parallel execution. On 100 videos from EPIC-Kitchens and HD-EPIC, for $N = 2$, our structured prompt improves action coverage by 45% over a baseline prompt for Gemini 2.5 Pro, while simultaneously slashing collision rates, object and causal conflicts by 51%, 52% and 55% respectively.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

CIPHER: An end-to-end framework for designing optimized aggregated spatial transcriptomics experiments

by Zachary Hemminger, Haley De Ocampo, Fangming Xie, Zhiqian Zhai, Jingyi Jessica Li, Roy Wollman Motivation Most imaging-based spatial transcriptomics methods measure individual genes, which limits scalability and typically requires integration with scRNA-seq to recover full cellular states. Recent approaches such as CISI, FISHnCHIPs, and ATLAS address this limitation by measuring aggregate transcriptional signatures, where multiple genes are pooled into each channel to increase throughput. While aggregate measurements improve scalability, they shift the problem from gene selection to feature design. For effective integration with scRNA-seq, these signatures must be not only discriminative in transcriptional space but also straightforward to measure, with balanced signal, sufficient dynamic range, and robustness to experimental noise. By optimizing decoding accuracy in isolation, existing methods leave substantial performance on the table. Results We present CIPHER (Cell Identity Projection using Hybridization Encoding Rules), a neural-network framework that jointly optimizes the experimental encoding matrix, i.e., the way that genes are aggregated to signatures, and the downstream cell embedding. CIPHER integrates the physical limits of imaging assays directly into its loss function, shaping the latent space to maximize discriminability while maintaining robustness to measurement noise and signal constraints. Using a large-scale mouse brain scRNA-seq reference, we show that CIPHER-designed encodings yield latent spaces with improved cell-type separability, uniform signal utilization, and greater resilience to hybridization variability, resulting in higher decoding accuracy from both simulated and experimental data. Conclusion CIPHER formulates aggregate signature design as a joint optimization problem over decoding accuracy and experimental measurability. This enables systematic, scRNA-seq-aligned feature design for scalable spatial transcriptomics based on aggregate measurements. Availability Code and documentation are available at https://github.com/wollmanlab/Design/.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DipSkmer: Reference-free population genomics with diploid genome skims

Ecologists and conservation biologists rely on genetic diversity as a key essential biodiversity variable (EBV) used to track population health and dynamics, and utilize the population parameter {theta} (estimated by the average pairwise genomic distance) as a key metric of diversity. While whole-genome-sequencing (wgs) is increasingly affordable, it will be considerable time before the full diversity of life is represented by high-quality assembled genomes; even then, constant monitoring will still require repeated sampling of populations. In contrast, genome skimming (low-coverage, short-read wgs) is highly cost-effective but challenging to analyze because the coverage is too low for assembly and reliable error correction. Mature methods, such as Mash, exist for estimating pairwise genomic distances based on the Jaccard similarity of k-mer sets computed using sketching techniques. Some, such as Skmer, additionally model the impacts of low coverage. These methods have been successfully applied to assembly-free species identification and phylogenetics; however, their use in population genetics has been limited. This is because these methods implicitly treat genomes as haploid and heterozygosity confounds true estimates of genomic distance for diploid organisms. In this paper, we address this problem through a number of technical advances. First, we use coalescent theory to mathematically derive how the Jaccard index between two diploid samples changes with the scaled population size parameter ({theta}). Next, we derive an estimator that computes {theta} from the Jaccard index, in addition to several auxiliary variables, which we also estimate from the genome skims. The resulting method, DipSkmer, enables more accurate estimates of coverage, sequencing error, and pairwise nucleotide distance for diploid samples. Analyses of both simulated and empirical datasets show that for diploids and low distances (e.g.,

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

Reasoning in Computer Vision: Taxonomy, Models, Tasks, and Methodologies

Visual reasoning matters for many computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite progress in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys typically cover only one part of the problem, such as visual question answering, scene-graph generation, neuro-symbolic AI, or multimodal chain-of-thought, and rarely analyze reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols together. This survey addresses that gap. Following a structured literature review, we group visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and examine how each is implemented across methods that range from graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems to reasoning with vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including visual chain-of-thought, visual programming, and tool-augmented and test-time reasoning. We then review evaluation protocols for functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and we analyze their limits in generalizability, reproducibility, faithfulness, and explanatory power. We also identify open challenges: scaling to complex scenes, integrating symbolic and neural paradigms more deeply, the shortage of comprehensive benchmarks, language-prior shortcuts and hallucination in foundation models, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we set out a research agenda for vision systems and argue that connecting perception and reasoning is necessary for transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain models, especially in high-stakes settings such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Resources and Wigner Symmetry in Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering from Effective Field Theory

arXiv:2606.17148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study quantum resources in the spin degrees of freedom, such as entanglement, stabilizer magic, and non-local magic, in low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering through next-to-leading order in pionless effective field theory. Treating each nucleon spin as a qubit, we calculate the corresponding resource-generating powers of the scattering operator at generic center-of-mass momentum and scattering angle $\Theta$. The analysis retains $S$- and $P$-wave channels generated by two-derivative contact interactions. When the microscopic physics exhibits Wigner's $SU(4)$ spin-flavor symmetry, the neutron-proton amplitude becomes proportional to the spin-space identity operator and therefore generates no new resources after scattering, extending an observation previously made for leading-order $S$-wave scattering. The same-nucleon channel remains resource-generating because constraints from identical particles project out part of the Hilbert space. These results show how enhanced symmetries, partial-wave structure, and resource generation are intertwined in low-energy two-body scattering.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Low-Rank Subspace Analysis of LLM Interventions

arXiv:2606.14388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interventions designed to modify a particular behavior in LLMs, such as refusal or sycophancy, often produce unintended changes in other behaviors. This lack of targeted control makes it difficult to design and implement reliable safety controls. To understand these side-effects, we introduce a diagnostic framework for analyzing interacting behaviors in LLMs. We model behaviors as low-rank subspaces in activation space, and study how interventions influence across behaviors. Across multiple instruction-tuned models (7B-70B) and across refusal, jailbreak, and sycophancy settings, we find that different behaviors share internal representations, and intervening on one behavior alters others in asymmetric ways. Some behaviors act as upstream control points whose interventions propagate broadly across other behaviors, while others remain more isolated. We relate these effects to two geometric quantities: (i) the overlap between behavior subspaces, measured as the average squared cosine of principal angles, and (ii) the angle between each behavior subspace and the decision subspace (capturing the model's final decision e.g., refuse vs. comply). Empirically, intervention effects on other behaviors tend to be larger for behavior pairs with higher subspace overlap, and for source behaviors whose subspaces lie closer (smaller angle) to the decision subspace. These findings highlight a challenge for targeted behavior control: behaviors are difficult to modify independently, as interventions can propagate through shared representations and asymmetric interactions.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Safety-Aware Denoiser for Text Diffusion Models

arXiv:2605.08116v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and typically rely on post-hoc filtering or inference-time interventions. These are inadequate for effectively addressing safety risks in text diffusion models. We propose the Safety-Aware Denoiser (SAD), a safety-guidance framework in text diffusion models. The SAD modifies the iterative denoising process such that the text sample at the final denoising step is steered toward provably safe regions of the text space. This inference-time method can integrate safety constraints into the denoiser, avoiding computationally expensive retraining of the underlying diffusion model and enabling flexible, lightweight safety guidance. We evaluate the safety of the generated text using the SAD, with respect to hazard taxonomy, memorization, and jailbreak. Experimental results show that SAD substantially reduces unsafe generations while preserving generation quality, diversity, and fluency, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate that our safety guidance during denoising provides an effective and scalable mechanism for enforcing safety in text diffusion models.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Combinatorial docking and molecular generation to navigate over 100-billion molecules for prospective ligand discovery

Commercially available make-on-demand libraries now exceed 100 billion compounds, requiring over 50 years to screen on 2,000 CPU cores using conventional docking. We present two complementary approaches to address this challenge. CombiDOCK, a combinatorial docking framework, enables exhaustive screening at the 100-billion scale within 40 days. MINT-Dock, a generative framework, accelerates navigation of this space by integrating CombiDOCK with Monte Carlo Tree Search. Benchmarked on 46 diverse targets, CombiDOCK matched full-molecule docking accuracy, and MINT-Dock achieved a 4,800-fold enrichment over random selection. Compared with prior billion-scale brute-force campaigns against {sigma}2, VMAT2, and VAChT, prospective CombiDOCK screens of the 100-billion-molecule library yielded higher hit rates and more potent ligands, while MINT-Dock achieved comparable outcomes across single- and multi-target objectives with >20-fold computational cost reductions. Docking-predicted poses of the best VAChT-binding compounds were confirmed by cryo-EM structures. These methods provide exhaustive and generative paths for navigating the trillion-molecule frontier of drug discovery.