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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Open-SWE-Traces: Advancing Dual-Mode Multilingual Distillation for Software Engineering Agents

arXiv:2606.16038v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The path toward autonomous software engineering is currently bottlenecked by a severe deficit of diverse, large-scale trajectory data. We address this by introducing \ourdataset, an expansive dataset of 207,489 agentic trajectories spanning nine programming languages (Python, Go, TS, JS, Rust, Java, PHP, C, C++). Sourced from 20,000 real-world PRs via OpenHands and SWE-agent harnesses, the dataset utilizes a hybrid-reasoning synthesis: Minimax-M2.5 generates trajectories with explicit "thinking" processes, while Qwen3.5-122B provides high-quality "non-thinking" traces. Filtered for permissive licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD) from SWE-rebench-V2, this data facilitates the training of models capable of long-horizon reasoning. We validate the dataset by fine-tuning the Qwen3-30B-A3B series (Thinking, Instruct, and Coder). The best performing model achieves resolve rates of 61.7% on SWE-bench Verified, 57.1% on SWE-bench Multilingual, and 36.8% on SWE-bench Pro. These results establish Open-SWE-Traces as a premier resource for distilling human-level software engineering capabilities into efficient, open-source agentic LLMs.

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

LiFT: Local Search via Linear Programming for Overfitting-Controlled Transformers

This paper proposes a Linear Programming (LP)-based local search framework for fine-tuning pretrained transformer models with explicit control against overfitting. The approach formulates transformer fine-tuning as a bilevel optimization-based regularization problem, in which model parameters and regularization hyperparameters are jointly updated. Information collected during initial warm-up iterations, including validation gradients and training Hessian information, is used to construct a local descent direction by solving an LP that minimizes a scaled directional derivative while preserving training optimality. This validation-aware descent direction enables focused local updates of both parameters and regularization hyperparameters, reducing overfitting without requiring repeated full retraining cycles. The resulting method, termed Linear Programming-based Fine-Tuning (LiFT) for transformers, differs from conventional fine-tuning by systematically identifying task-specific updates rather than relying on heuristic or grid-based hyperparameter selection. Experiments on GPT-2 Small fine-tuned on WikiText-2 demonstrate that LiFT enables effective adaptation through selective tuning of transformer blocks and regularization parameters, yielding consistent improvements in test perplexity across multiple layer configurations and regularization settings, with particularly pronounced gains in overfitting-prone scenarios. Beyond empirical performance, LiFT establishes a principled connection between transformer fine-tuning, bilevel optimization, local search, and regularization theory.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Constrained Variable Projection for Structured Problems

arXiv:2606.23939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variable projection is a classical technique for separable nonlinear least-squares problems, in which variables that enter linearly are eliminated exactly, yielding a reduced nonlinear problem. By expressing this framework as a particular instance of a broader class of bilevel optimization problems, we develop a constrained variable-projection framework for data-science models, where the remaining variables are subject to convex constraints and the eliminated variables arise from a lower-level least-squares problem. In particular, by interpreting variable projection as a collapsed bilevel optimization problem, we derive exact reduced-gradient formulas compatible with automatic differentiation and propose a conditional-gradient algorithm for the resulting constrained reduced problem. We establish convergence guarantees under standard smoothness and compactness assumptions, and discuss extensions to structured lower-level variables. Numerical experiments on sparse autoencoding, dictionary learning, blind deconvolution, and few-shot learning suggest that the method can improve wall-clock efficiency and data efficiency relative to natural joint-optimization baselines.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hybrid Transformer-Mamba for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Medical Segmentation

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

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Marked random graphs with given degree sequence: large deviations on the local topology

arXiv:2401.00351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked graphs in the framework of local weak convergence. Here we extend known results by considering uniform random graphs with given degree sequences and i.i.d. marks on half-edges and vertices. We establish a large deviation principle for such families of empirical measures. The proof builds on Bordenave and Caputo's seminal 2015 paper, and Delgosha and Anantharam's 2019 introduction of BC entropy, relying on combinatorial lemmas that allow one to construct suitable approximations of measures supported on marked trees. Possible applications of these results are in the study of interacting diffusions on top of random graphs.

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

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

arXiv:2606.20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Teach-and-Repeat: Accurately Extracting Operational Knowledge from Mobile Screen Demonstrations to Empower GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.12817v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the digital world on mobile devices is shifting from static UI perception to dynamic action comprehension. This capability enables models to convert visual state transitions into operational knowledge, defined as short natural-language sentences that describe action types, target UI elements, textual arguments, and execution orders. However, due to the highly diverse and heterogeneous UI designs across applications, existing vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to accurately infer these underlying operations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Teach VLM, a core model designed to translate mobile screen trajectories into step-wise operational knowledge by extracting and analyzing operation-related keyframes from demonstration videos. To address the scarcity of aligned training data, we develop a systematic data flywheel for scalable data acquisition. We further introduce a novel Chinese Mobile Screen Teach Benchmark for fine-grained evaluation. Building upon Teach VLM, we propose the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm, where the generated operational knowledge serves as an interpretable procedural reference to guide downstream screen-based execution agents. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Teach VLM significantly outperforms strong VLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in operation semantics prediction. Furthermore, experiments in Android World show that our paradigm yields consistent Task Success Rate improvements for downstream agents. Together, Teach VLM and the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm offer a practical pathway from raw demonstrations to reusable task automation.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Retrofitters, pragmatists and activists: Public interest litigation for accountable automated decision-making

arXiv:2511.03211v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper examines the role of public interest litigation in promoting accountability for AI and automated decision-making (ADM) in Australia. Since ADM regulation faces political and geopolitical headwinds, effective governance will have to rely on the enforcement of existing laws. Drawing on interviews with Australian public interest litigators, technology policy activists, and technology law scholars, the paper positions public interest litigation as part of a larger ecosystem for transparency, accountability and justice with respect to ADM. The paper explores the tactics and strategies of what one participant described as 'retrofitting' old laws to ADM. These go beyond creative legal argumentation, to encompass practices of community-building, collaboration on theories of change, canny selection of clients and causes of action, and the alignment of the interests of stakeholders in litigation. Naturally, the paper also contends with the limits of these strategies, and of the Australian legal system. Where limits are, however, capable of being overcome, the paper presents findings on urgent needs: the enabling institutional arrangements without which effective litigation and accountability will falter. The paper is relevant to law and technology scholars; individuals and groups harmed by ADM; public interest litigators and technology lawyers; civil society and advocacy organisations; and policymakers.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Extreme Learning based on Gaussian Boson Sampling

arXiv:2606.15230v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir models offer a hardware-efficient learning paradigm for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices by exploiting untrained quantum dynamics as a fixed feature map and restricting optimization to a simple classical readout layer. We propose a quantum extreme learning machine implemented using gaussian boson sampling and an encoding strategy that achieves high classification accuracy while reducing optical resource requirements. Classical inputs are jointly encoded in the squeezing parameters and in the interferometer unitary, enabling sampling-based, highly nonlinear feature maps while leveraging large-scale GBS output statistics, which are conjectured to be classically intractable. We systematically compare multiple families of quantum features accessible in the same setup and find that photon-number sampling probabilities provide the best performance, consistent with their higher effective feature dimensionality. Finally, we benchmark against classical nonlinear baselines and analyse robustness under noisy scenarios, showing competitive performance with fewer trainable parameters and indicating practical promise for near-term photonic implementations.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Establishing an $\Omega(\sqrt{d})$ complexity lower bound for PDMP samplers and how to break it: a sub-$\sqrt{d}$ algorithm for Gaussian-tailed targets

arXiv:2606.19909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the theoretical appeal of their non-reversibility, to date, no Piecewise Deterministic Markov Process (PDMP) samplers have been developed that scale better than $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{d})$ in computational complexity with respect to the target dimension $d$. We prove that this is a fundamental limitation by establishing an $\Omega(\sqrt{d})$ lower bound on the algorithmic complexity of PDMP samplers in a standard setup. By relaxing the assumption that the target density must remain invariant at all continuous times, we then demonstrate how to bypass this barrier. Specifically, we introduce a novel PDMP sampling scheme and show that it achieves an empirical complexity of $\mathcal{O}(d^\alpha)$, where $\alpha \in [0.2, 0.3]$ for Gaussian-tailed targets. In addition, this PDMP scheme is locally adaptive in both trajectory length and distance between velocity updates.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Weight-Space Geometry of Offline Reasoning Training

arXiv:2606.23740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement-learning losses (RFT, RIFT, DFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) are widely used to distill reasoning from large teachers into smaller students, and are typically compared on downstream accuracy alone. We ask whether they are mechanistically distinct or converge to a similar weight update. Training six methods (SFT, RFT, DFT, RIFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) on identical math rollouts from a single base model (Qwen3-4B) with attention-only LoRA, we analyze the resulting deltas via cosine similarity, principal-angle subspace analysis, linear mode connectivity, and CKA. We observe: (i) SFT, RFT, and RIFT have nearly colinear weight deltas (cosine >= 0.97, top-1 principal angle ~7 deg median over 144 modules) and comparable GSM8K accuracy (87-88%, n=1319; pairwise McNemar p >= 0.15); (ii) DFT diverges further in direction than any reward-weighted method despite using the same data; (iii) Offline GRPO adds a substantial component orthogonal to the SFT direction (~67% globally, up to ~86% in late layers) while staying in the SFT loss basin; (iv) DPO sits in a near-orthogonal subspace, shows a mode-connectivity barrier, and collapses late-layer CKA to ~0.46. DPO also reaches the highest accuracy in our protocol on both GSM8K (93.5%, McNemar p < 10^-9 vs. each other method) and AIME26 (30.0% vs. 3.3-10.0%); its training uses a 10x smaller learning rate than the others (the standard convention), so the update-norm and accuracy gaps reflect loss-function and optimizer choices jointly, and a learning-rate-matched DPO comparison is left for future work.

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

Sentinel: Decoding Context Utilization via Attention Probing for Efficient LLM Context Compression

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) often suffers from long and noisy retrieved contexts. Existing context compression methods typically rely on heuristic relevance estimation or supervised compression models rather than on how LLMs utilize retrieved context during inference. We propose Sentinel, a lightweight sentence-level compression framework that decodes inference-time contextual utilization behaviors from head-wise attention patterns of frozen LLMs. To ground supervision in retrieval-dependent answering behavior, Sentinel trains a lightweight probe using QA examples where the model succeeds only when retrieved context is available. Sentinel performs compression using only a single non-autoregressive forward pass without dedicated compression training or autoregressive scoring. Empirically, we find that effective contextual utilization signals remain accessible even in compact proxy models. On LongBench, Sentinel with a 0.5B proxy model achieves up to 5$\times$ compression while attaining question-answering performance competitive with compression methods built on 7B-scale models. Despite being trained only on English QA data, Sentinel also generalizes effectively to Chinese and out-of-domain settings.

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

Amortized Probabilistic Retrieval of Atmospheric CO2 from OCO-2 Spectra Using Deep Learning with Laplace Approximations and Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2606.17413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Space-based monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is essential for constraining the global carbon budget. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) estimates column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO2 (XCO2) using high-resolution spectra. However, current operational retrieval algorithms are computationally expensive and do not properly quantify uncertainties. We present a novel deep learning framework that addresses these challenges. Due to the difficulties of ground-truth data for real satellite observations, we develop and validate our approach using a high-fidelity simulation dataset. This dataset, created to support OCO-2 uncertainty quantification (UQ), incorporates realistic forward model errors. Our architecture encodes spectral bands using a multi-branch neural network and estimates posteriors of the full CO2 column or desired summaries thereof using two scalable UQ methods: Laplace approximations and normalizing flows. Our approach has five key advantages relative to operational "full-physics" solvers: (1) Amortization: Inference is orders of magnitude faster, enabling real-time processing of massive data streams; (2) Model error robustness: By training on simulations that explicitly include model discrepancies, our method accounts for systematic errors often neglected by standard inversions; (3) Point estimate accuracy: We achieve superior predictive accuracy compared to baseline methods; (4) Improved UQ: The probabilistic outputs yield better-calibrated uncertainty estimates; and (5) Non-Gaussian posteriors: When utilizing normalizing flows, our framework successfully models complex, asymmetric posterior distributions, overcoming the limitations of the Gaussian assumption. These results suggest that simulation-based deep learning is a viable path toward next-generation operational processing systems.

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

AgentSpec: Understanding Embodied Agent Scaffolds Through Controlled Composition

LLM agents are increasingly built not as single model calls, but as scaffolded systems that combine reasoning, memory, reflection, action execution, and learning. While such scaffolds often improve performance, they are often embedded in tightly coupled pipelines, making it difficult to isolate component contributions, compare alternative designs, or understand how module interactions shape agent behavior. We introduce AgentSpec, a modular specification framework that represents embodied agents as typed compositions of reusable policy components with standardized interfaces. AgentSpec standardizes the interfaces among perception, memory, reasoning, reflection, action, and optional learning, enabling components to be swapped and recombined under controlled conditions. We instantiate this framework across DeliveryBench, ALFRED, MiniGrid, and RoboTHOR, and analyze reasoning, memory, reflection, and reinforcement-learning modules across model backbones. Our results show that agent performance is governed by scaffold compatibility and interaction effects rather than isolated module strength. In particular, structured multi-granularity memory improves long-horizon state tracking, reasoning and memory interact non-uniformly across environments, reflection trades off correction and cost, and RL-trained policies compose best when optimized with deployment-time scaffold structure. AgentSpec provides a controlled foundation for studying, comparing, and designing composable LLM agents. Our code, baselines and interactive playground are publicly available at https://agentspec-embodied.github.io.

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

PathRouter: Aligning Rewards with Retrieval Quality in Agentic Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Agentic GraphRAG trains language-model agents to iteratively retrieve and reason over graph-structured evidence, enabling more accurate and context-aware decision-making by efficiently navigating complex information networks. However, outcome-only reinforcement learning suffers from answer-path reward aliasing, where correct answers may come from shortcuts rather than useful evidence paths. It also exhibits search-update ambiguity, as scalar trajectory-level feedback does not indicate which retrieval actions to adjust. To mitigate these shortcomings, we present PathRouter, a path-aware training framework for agentic GraphRAG. PathRouter jointly evaluates each trajectory along answer correctness and evidence-path overlap, yielding four trajectory categories with differentiated GRPO advantage scaling that suppresses shortcut reinforcement while preserving evidence-seeking behavior. For evidence-poor trajectories, a frozen gold-evidence teacher provides token-level KL guidance on reasoning and search-query tokens, excluding answer tokens to avoid direct response imitation. Experiments on six QA benchmarks across three model sizes show that PathRouter consistently improves answer F1 and evidence-path overlap, achieving average F1 gains of 3.1 on 3B and 4.9 on 7B models compared to a strong baseline.

17.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19

Efficient site-specific gene addition using R2 retrotransposons in tobacco and rice

Authors:

Precise integration of multikilobase DNA fragments remains a major technical barrier in plants. Here we introduce non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) R2 retrotransposons as a versatile system for targeted gene integration in plants. We reconstituted R2 activity in Nicotiana benthamiana and benchmarked insertion efficiency and fidelity using a TMV-based episomal reporter system. We demonstrate site-specific integration of GFP (2.2 kb) and recombinase-compatible landing pads (0.6 kb) into 28S rDNA arrays, with intact cassette insertion frequencies up to 75% and 53%, respectively. To temporally constrain donor availability and avoid DNA intermediates, we combined in planta effector expression with recombinant RNA virus-mediated donor delivery. We apply R2 retrotransposons for targeted insertion of resistance cassettes within the rDNA of rice callus, achieving integration efficiencies up to 17%. These results position R2 retrotransposons as a double-strand break-free system for RNA-templated insertion of multikilobase gene cassettes at rDNA loci, for safe-harbor trait stacking in plants with potential applications in crop improvement and synthetic biology. Retrotransposons are applied in plants for safe-harbor transgene integration.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Adherence to Red Reflex and Vision Screening Recommendations: A Deep Dive into Primary Care Implementation Gaps

Introduction: Early childhood vision screening is critical for detecting amblyopia and other vision-threatening conditions. Despite screening recommendations during well-child visits, rates remain low. Red reflex assessment is recommended to identify serious ocular pathology, yet its use in primary care is not well described. We examined rates and drivers of vision screening in pediatric primary care. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of electronic health records for children 3 to 5 years attending well-child visits in 2022 in one of three representative primary care clinics within a university health system. Outcomes were documented red reflex and functional vision tests. We evaluated associations with patient demographics and clinic site using multivariable logistic regression Results: Among 1,003 visits, 21.1% (n=212) had a documented red reflex assessment, and 60.8% (n=610) a functional vision test. Younger children (ages 3 and 4 vs. 5 years) had higher odds of red reflex assessment [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 9.00 and 8.64], and lower odds of a functional vision (aOR 0.47 and 0.59) test. Females had higher odds of red reflex assessment (aOR 1.53). Other/Multiracial children had lower odds of red reflex assessment than Non-Hispanic White children (aOR 0.48). Screening rates varied significantly by clinic site Conclusions: Visual function and red reflex assessment are inconsistently performed in pediatric primary care, with particularly low rates of red reflex documentation. Screening rates varied between clinics and were affected by age. These findings highlight missed opportunities for early detection of vision-threatening conditions and identify targets for improving adherence to pediatric vision screening recommendations

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Revealing Training Data Exposure in Vision Language Large Models via Parameter Gradients

Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) trained on massive crawled corpora raise pressing copyright and data-provenance concerns. These concerns are particularly acute in healthcare, where patient medical images paired with clinical reports demand rigorous privacy safeguards. However, existing training data detection methods either fail in cross-modal scenarios or rely on superficial output signals with insufficient discriminative power. We introduce GradAudit, a gradient-based auditing framework that examines internal optimization dynamics rather than treating VLLMs as black boxes. Our approach builds on a key observation: model parameters converge to regions where gradients on training samples become stable and well-aligned, whereas gradients on non-training samples remain noisy and inconsistent. By analyzing these gradient signatures, GradAudit achieves strong separability and detects genuine image-text associations learned during training, not merely individual modality membership. Empirically, across both medical and general-domain datasets, GradAudit substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both pretraining and fine-tuning VLLMs. In a case study employing copyrighted content, we show that existing training data detection methods not only underestimate the extent of unauthorized data usage, but that this underestimation becomes more pronounced as models become more recent and more advanced.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation. This shift has sparked interest in using intermediate visualizations as a reasoning aid, akin to human mental imagery. Central to this idea is the ability to form, maintain, and manipulate visual representations in a goal-oriented manner. To evaluate and probe this capability, we develop MentisOculi, a procedural, stratified suite of multi-step reasoning problems amenable to visual solution, tuned to challenge frontier models. Evaluating visual strategies ranging from latent tokens to explicit generated imagery, we find they generally fail to improve performance. Analysis of UMMs specifically exposes a critical limitation: While they possess the textual reasoning capacity to solve a task and can sometimes generate correct visuals, they suffer from compounding generation errors and fail to leverage even ground-truth visualizations. Our findings suggest that despite their inherent appeal, visual thoughts do not yet benefit model reasoning. MentisOculi establishes the necessary foundation to analyze and close this gap across diverse model families.

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

SkillVetBench: LLM-as-Judge for Multi-Dimensional Security Risk Evaluation in Open-Source LLM Agent Skills

arXiv:2606.15899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLM agent ecosystems are growing rapidly, yet the security of community-contributed skills - modular tool definitions that extend agent capabilities - remains largely unvetted. The gap we fill: existing scanners operate at the code layer and are structurally blind to instruction-layer and multi-agent risk - natural-language directives that hijack an agent, exfiltrate data through encoded side channels, or chain harm across pipelines - so what is needed is a semantic, multi-dimensional vetting system rather than another signature matcher. We present SKILLVETBENCH, a live public leaderboard on Hugging Face that uses an LLM-as-Judge to vet agent skills. What is new: SARS (Skill Agentic Risk Score), a five-dimensional agentic-risk metric with a principled weighted formula for instruction-following systems. What is integrated: full CVSS v4.0 vector decomposition and a ClawHub dual-view that places our LLM-generated review beside the official marketplace verdict. What is demonstrated: drawing on our companion benchmark paper [ 1], the LLM-as-Judge stage achieves zero false negatives across 78 confirmed-malicious skills and zero false positives across 22 benign controls, while the best static baseline (SKILLSIEVE) still misses 15%; for instruction-layer categories such as Prompt Injection and Memory Poisoning, conventional tools miss between 89% and 100% of threats (e.g., CODEBERT detects none of nine memory-poisoning skills). Detection rates vary from 35% to 95% across four LLM evaluators, motivating ensemble scoring in production deployments.

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

Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto: A Survey

arXiv:2606.13892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The intersection of crypto x AI is spawning papers, products, online posts, and companies. All the surrounding buzz, though, obscures what exactly has been done, what the opportunities and challenges are, and what open questions deserve attention. This survey paper asks what AI can do for blockchain-based technologies (broadly construed as "crypto") (crypto x AI), and vice versa (AI x crypto). We systematize existing work, summarize key takeaways, highlight open research questions, and offer a perspective on pervasive industry misconceptions, concluding that AI and crypto are still in the very early stages of meaningful integration.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental quantum state learning with pairs of photons

arXiv:2606.16932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tomography allows one to estimate the density matrix describing the state an ensemble of quantum systems are prepared in (for example, polarization tomography determines the polarization state of a beam of identically prepared photons). In general, it is not possible to uniquely decompose the density matrix into its pure state components. Agarwal et al. proposed a protocol which, for a mixture composed of any two pure states of a qubit (with arbitrary probabilities), allows an observer to infer not only the density matrix but the identity of those specific pure states and their weights - the additional requirement being that the qubits arrive in pairs, where both qubits in each pair are in the same state. We experimentally demonstrate this learning-from-pairs concept using photons in the polarization degree of freedom. We use tomography to measure a sequence of single photons and make use of their time-of-arrival information to 'pair up' the photons after the measurement. From here we are able to infer the photons' polarization states and their respective probabilities, and we demonstrate this for various different choices of polarization states and ratios. Finally, we investigate our ability to discriminate between two equal mixtures of distinct pairs of orthogonal polarization states. We find that on the order of approx. 10e4 photons is typically enough to achieve tomography fidelities of approximately 0.9999. This is sufficient to discriminate between two different preparations of the same mixed state, differing by angles of less than 5 degrees between the pure states used in the two preparations.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

ClaimFlow: Tracing the Evolution of Scientific Claims in NLP

Scientific papers advance $claims$ that later work supports, extends, or sometimes refutes. Yet existing methods for citation and claim analysis capture only fragments of this dialogue. In this work, we make these interactions explicit at the level of individual scientific claims. We introduce $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, a claim-centric view of the NLP literature, built from $1{,}617$ ACL Anthology papers $(1979 - 2025)$ that are manually annotated with $5{,}689$ claims and $4{,}871$ cross-paper claim relations, indicating whether a citing paper $\texttt{supports}$, $\texttt{extends}$, $\texttt{qualifies}$, $\texttt{refutes}$, or references a cited claim as $\texttt{background}$. Building on $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, we define a new task – $Claim Relation Classification$ – which requires models to infer the scientific stance toward a cited claim from the text and citation context. Evaluating neural models and large language models on this task, we report baseline performance of $0.81$ macro-F1, suggesting that the task is tractable while leaving room for improvement. We then scale this framework to $\sim$$13k$ NLP papers to study claim evolution across decades of NLP research. We show that $63.5\%$ claims are never reused; only $11.1\%$ are ever challenged. Widely propagated claims are more often $reshaped$ through qualification and extension than supported or refuted. Overall, $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$ offers a lens for examining how ideas shift and mature within NLP.