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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Ontology Memory-Augmented ASR Correction for Long Text-Speech Interleaved Conversations

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) correction has traditionally focused on isolated utterances or short local contexts. However, as text and speech become increasingly interleaved in long interactions, ASR correction requires conversation-level contextual evidence. Existing ASR correction methods often rely on the current hypothesis or concatenate raw dialogue history. In such contexts, sparse correction evidence can be difficult to locate amid redundancy and noise. Addressing these challenges, we propose an ontology memory-augmented ASR correction framework for long text-speech interleaved conversations. The framework organizes preceding interaction history into a dynamically updatable ontology memory, where entities, terminology, surface variants, potential ASR confusions, and semantic relations are stored as retrievable nodes for context-grounded correction. To evaluate this setting, we construct RAMC-Corr, a dataset derived from MAGIC-RAMC for long-range ASR correction with grounded context. Experiments on RAMC-Corr show that our method improves over direct correction in 9 out of 10 paired backbone-setting combinations and encourages more selective and evidence-grounded corrections for context-dependent ASR errors.

02.
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.

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

DRIFT: Refining Instruction Data via On-Policy Data Attribution

arXiv:2606.18307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing the training data distribution for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) dictates the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing data curation methods excel at accelerating training under constrained budgets, they are less suited to elevating the capability upper bound. The challenge here is no longer to identify a smaller subset that preserves performance, but to refine the data distribution toward instances most capable of improving the final model. To address this problem, we explore instance-level data attribution using Influence Functions (IF). We identify that standard IF formulations struggle in this setting due to two structural limitations: a proximity gap caused by off-policy validation targets, and a severe bias towards gradient norm. We propose DRIFT (Data Refinement via On-Policy Influence Functions for Supervised Fine-Tuning). Instead of relying on external reference data, DRIFT utilizes the model's on-policy rollouts as validation targets, which empirically minimizes the parameter proximity gap and better aligns with the local neighborhood assumption of IF. It further applies signed weighting based on trajectory correctness and debiases influence scores against the gradient hacking issue, allowing a small set of validation queries to act as reliable anchors for attributing the full dataset. Experiments on 7B-parameter instruction and reasoning models show that DRIFT consistently raises the performance ceiling on both, outperforming existing data curation baselines.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Structural basis for chaperone-guided assembly of RNA-induced silencing complex

The RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), comprising an Argonaute (AGO) protein and a small RNA, is the central effector in RNA silencing. Small RNAs are loaded onto AGO as bulky duplexes in an HSP70- and HSP90-dependent process1–3, but the molecular mechanism remains poorly understood. Here we identify the human AGO–HSP90–p23 complex, which captures AGO in an RNA-free state, termed the AGO maturation complex (AMC). The purified AMC enables RNA loading and AGO folding, faithfully recapitulating de novo RISC assembly. Using cryogenic electron microscopy, we determined the structure of AMC bound to a microRNA duplex. In contrast to its conformation in the RISC, AGO adopts a highly open conformation in the AMC: the N domain and the RNA-binding module (PAZ–MID–PIWI) are fully detached and anchored to opposite sides of the HSP90 dimer, connected solely by the unfolded L1 linker. This arrangement exposes a positively charged cleft that accommodates an RNA duplex. AGO folding is facilitated by a small RNA duplex containing a 5′-terminal phosphate—but not by single-stranded RNAs—revealing a role for the RNA duplex as a chaperone-like cofactor that directs AGO domain assembly. These findings elucidate the RISC assembly mechanism and establish the AMC as a molecular tool for probing optimal RNA features and chemical modifications for the rational design of small interfering RNA therapeutics. Our study also sheds light on how chaperones, together with ligands, can guide the folding of client proteins. Structures of the AGO maturation complex reveal how chaperones and an RNA duplex drive assembly of the RNA-induced silencing complex.

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

Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

arXiv:2509.14959v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate discrete optimal transport (DOT) as a black-box attack against modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) and anti-spoofing countermeasure (CM) systems. Our attack operates as a post-processing distribution-alignment step. Frame-level WavLM embeddings of generated speech (or another person speech) are aligned to an unpaired bona fide speech pool using entropic optimal transport and a top-k barycentric projection, followed by neural vocoding. Unlike gradient-based attacks, the proposed method requires no access to model parameters, gradients, or training data. Experiments on ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof5 demonstrate that DOT attack substantially increases CM EER and substantially degrades ASV performance across multiple spoofing attacks. The attack transfers across datasets and remains effective after CM fine-tuning. Analysis using speaker similarity, Fréchet Audio Distance, and visualization of embedding distributions suggests that DOT succeeds by shifting source speech toward bona fide regions of the representation space rather than by maximizing speaker similarity. These results indicate that optimal-transport-based distribution alignment represents a previously underexplored attack vector for contemporary ASV and anti-spoofing systems.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

A MULTICENTER SWEDISH HISTOPATHOLOGY IMAGE DATASET OF PEDIATRIC CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM TUMORS

Refined detection methods, more detailed tumor characterization, and adequate distinction between different pediatric tumor subtypes are necessary to improve diagnosis and treatment, enable precision medicine, and advance patient prognosis. However, the application of computational approaches to pediatric brain tumors remains limited, largely due to the lack of accessible datasets. To address part of this gap, we provide whole slide images (WSIs) of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained tissue sections from all pediatric central nervous system (CNS) samples collected in Sweden between 2013 and 2023. These data represent a population-based national cohort encompassing all six pediatric oncology centers in Sweden and are available through the Swedish Childhood Tumor Biobank (BTB). The dataset includes 1,446 WSIs of sufficient image quality with confirmed CNS tumor diagnoses, derived from 537 unique subjects (562 cases). In addition, diagnosticrelevant clinical information is included. Corresponding whole-genome sequencing (WGS), wholetranscriptome sequencing (WTS), and methylation array data are available for most tumor samples through separate resources. This H&E dataset has been specifically curated to support artificial intelligence-based analyses, while also serving broader applications in medical research and education. When combined with matched molecular data, it provides a valuable resource for advancing multimodal and precision diagnostic approaches in the pediatric population. Refined detection methods, more detailed tumor mapping and adequate distinction between different subtypes of pediatric tumors are necessary to improve treatment, enable precision medicine and improve patient prognosis. Application of computational algorithms for pediatric brain tumors is very limited mainly due to the unavailability of pediatric histology brain tumor data sets. To enable the development of AI models comprehensive datasets covering a wide range of pediatric brain tumors are needed.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Machine learning evaluation of gene expression-based ALS subtypes across brain and blood tissues

The clinical and molecular heterogeneity observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) presents a challenge for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. RNA sequencing of post-mortem brain samples from ALS patients has identified several subtypes with distinct molecular signatures. We sought to evaluate these subtypes across diverse tissues and datasets and assess the feasibility of supervised machine learning models for sample classification. Unsupervised clustering and pathway analysis were performed to confirm the presence of ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples. Three machine learning strategies were then used to create models based on post-mortem motor cortex expression data of 112 people with ALS from the London Neurodegenerative Diseases Brain Bank. These models were subsequently improved through feature selection and evaluated in independent cohorts from motor cortex (n = 257, NYGC ALS Consortium) and blood (n = 96, Macquarie University Neurodegenerative Disease Biobank) samples. Multi-class linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models were then used for subtype classification. Clustering of ALS post-mortem motor cortex samples confirmed the presence of three subtypes: neuroinflammation (ALS-Neu), extracellular matrix organisation and muscle contraction (ALS-OxA), and synaptic and neuropeptide signalling (ALS-SNs). Among all machine learning strategies, random forests produced the most accurate and stable models for binary classification (~93% accuracy across the three subtypes). After feature selection, random forest models were able to classify samples from an independent post-mortem motor cortex cohort in their respective subtypes (AUC of ~0.98 across the three subtypes). When these models were evaluated in blood using LDA, we found consistent clustering patterns, with samples aligning in the same subtype regions of the post-mortem motor cortex samples, with ALS-SNs being the subtype in which samples were classified with the highest confidence (LDA class probability ~86%). Moreover, classification for this subtype improved when blood samples were collected closer to death. Our findings support the presence of three gene expression-based ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples and the utility of machine learning strategies for subtype classification. We also observed that the subtypes identified in the brain partially match those in the blood, with samples from the late stages of the disease more likely to be correctly predicted into the ALS-SNs cluster. This suggests a longitudinal effect in subtype identification that requires further investigation.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

An Open-Source Monitoring Framework for Data Exploration and Progress Tracking in Multi-Center Radiology Studies

Multi-center studies are crucial for advancing medical and radiological research. Data exploration, collaboration discovery, and study progress monitoring are essential for maximizing their potential. However, in practice these processes often rely on manual communication and shared tables, which quickly become outdated and hinder efficient coordination in large distributed studies. This highlights the need for dedicated monitoring solutions that provide transparent and up-to-date insights into study progress. We propose a lightweight, open-source monitoring architecture for multi-center studies based on the widely used Grafana-Prometheus stack. The framework collects aggregated monitoring metrics from distributed study sites and visualizes them through configurable dashboards. As a real-world deployment example, the framework is integrated into the medical imaging platform Kaapana and evaluated within a large multi-center research network. By deploying our solution within the Germany-wide RACOON consortium, we demonstrate its ability to enable privacy-preserving data exploration and study progress monitoring across all 38 German university clinics. The monitoring framework supports transparent coordination of distributed research activities and can facilitate more efficient management of large-scale multi-center studies. The source code and Kaapana integration are publicly available at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/study-monitoring-kaapana.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Symplectic Transversality and Endpoint Green Estimates for Finite-Horizon Pontryagin Systems

arXiv:2606.17762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study horizon-uniform local branches of finite-horizon discrete-time Pontryagin boundary value systems after smooth control elimination. The central input is a two-point endpoint inverse for the linearization. We verify this inverse from scaled stable–unstable boundary transversality, prove the associated endpoint-corrected Green estimate, and combine it with weighted contractions to obtain existence, uniqueness, Lipschitz dependence, and first-order expansions with constants independent of the horizon. The framework covers smooth nonlinear endpoint maps, including the original Pontryagin rows that fix the initial state and couple the terminal costate to the terminal state. Symplectic and Riccati criteria verify the inverse hypothesis at the level of the matrix data; in particular, every stabilizable linear-quadratic system with invertible dynamics and definite weights is covered, including noncommuting coupled data. A numerical section illustrates the certificates and the horizon-uniform first-order expansion.

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

Token-Level Entropy Reveals Demographic Disparities in Language Models

We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and 5,760 implicit sentence-completion prompts (e.g., "Tanisha walked into the office on a Monday morning and"), we find that Black-associated names produce higher first-token entropy than White-associated names across all six architectures - opposite to the output-level homogeneity bias documented under explicit demographic prompting (Lee et al., 2024) - and Black-associated names always produce greater entropy above identity-neutral baselines than White-associated names ($\Delta\Delta > 0$ in all six models). Women-associated names co-occur with lower first-token entropy (DL-pooled $\hat\beta = -0.041, p = .019$) and more homogeneous outputs ($\hat\alpha = +0.024, p < .001$) than men-associated names - a pattern convergent with homogeneity bias; race and gender effects are additive. Instruction tuning does not attenuate the race gap (matched-format DL-pooled $\hat{\beta}=+0.153$). Running the same templates with explicit group labels instead of names yields null race effects in 10 of 12 models where implicit probing is significant - establishing that probing methodology is a primary determinant of which distributional structure is recovered.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

PMOF: A Dataset and Benchmark for Passenger Monitoring Using Overhead Fisheye Cameras

Autonomous staff-free public transport requires reliable in-vehicle passenger monitoring. However, perception inside moving vehicles is challenged by confined spaces, variable illumination, motion-induced background variation, occlusion, and limited viewpoints. To mitigate these spatial constraints, ceiling-mounted fisheye cameras provide full-scene coverage from a single viewpoint. Yet existing public overhead fisheye datasets are recorded in static environments and do not capture the domain shift introduced by vehicle motion. To fill this gap, we introduce PMOF, Passenger Monitoring using Overhead Fisheye cameras, the first public dataset of top-view fisheye imagery captured inside a moving vehicle, comprising over 19k manually annotated frames. PMOF provides rotated bounding boxes, tracking identifiers, and action labels, supporting object detection, tracking, and action recognition. We benchmark PMOF using YOLO26m-obb models fine-tuned under multiple dataset configurations that combine PMOF with existing overhead fisheye datasets. Cross-domain fine-tuning with custom rotation-aware augmentation achieves 94.8% AP50 on PMOF and 96.5% AP50 on an unseen overhead fisheye dataset from a different domain. Our results highlight the domain gap between static and moving environments and show that incorporating PMOF improves detection performance and advances generalization beyond passenger monitoring to broader fisheye-based person detection tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://swermuth.github.io/pmof/.

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

From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decoding

Despite the success of end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, maintaining strict context adherence in multi-round conversations remains a challenge. While prior works attribute these failures to models forgetting dialogue history, we highlight an equally critical but overlooked bottleneck: a gap between latent context awareness and active adherence. Although models internally recognize relevant past utterances, strong parametric priors often overshadow these signals during decoding. To bridge this gap, we propose an audio-adapted Context-Aware Decoding (CAD) approach. By leveraging internal attention mechanisms to isolate key historical rounds, our approach contrasts output distributions with and without this key context during inference, directly amplifying multimodal contextual signals. Evaluations on the Audio MultiChallenge benchmark demonstrate significant improvements in Semantic Memory and Self Coherence subtasks, successfully enforcing strict, context-faithful adherence.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies

Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs.

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

Position: Modular Memory is the Key to Continual Learning Agents

arXiv:2603.01761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining and increased test-time compute. Despite surpassing human performance in several domains, these models remain fundamentally limited in continuous operation, experience accumulation, and personalization, capabilities that are central to adaptive intelligence. While continual learning research has long targeted these goals, its historical focus on in-weight learning (IWL), i.e., updating a single model's parameters to absorb new knowledge, has rendered catastrophic forgetting a persistent challenge. Our position is that combining the strengths of In-Weight Learning (IWL) and the newly emerged capabilities of In-Context Learning (ICL) through the design of modular memory is the missing piece for continual adaptation at scale. We outline a conceptual framework for modular memory-centric architectures that leverage ICL for rapid adaptation and knowledge accumulation, and IWL for stable updates to model capabilities, charting a practical roadmap toward continually learning agents.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Dissociating Decodability and Causal Use in Bracket-Sequence Transformers

When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering. However, it remains unclear whether these representations are causally used or merely decodable. We examine this gap in transformers trained on the Dyck language (a formal language of balanced bracket sequences), where the hierarchical ground truth is explicit. By probing and intervening on the residual stream and attention patterns, we find that depth, distance, and top-of-stack signals are all decodable, yet their causal roles diverge. Specifically, masking attention to the true top-of-stack position causes a sharp drop in long-distance accuracy, while ablating low-dimensional residual stream subspaces has comparatively little effect. These results, which extend to a templated natural language setting, suggest that even in a controlled setting where the relevant hierarchical variables are known, decodability alone does not imply causal use.

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

Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks with AI: A Survey

arXiv:2503.17867v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed Denial of Service attacks represent an active cybersecurity research problem. Recent research shifted from static rule-based defenses towards AI-based detection and mitigation. This comprehensive survey covers several key topics. Preeminently, state-of-the-art AI detection methods are discussed. An in-depth taxonomy based on manual expert hierarchies and an AI-generated dendrogram are provided, thus settling DDoS categorization ambiguities. An important discussion on available datasets follows, covering data format options and their role in training AI detection methods together with adversarial training and examples augmentation. Beyond detection, AI based mitigation techniques are surveyed as well. Finally, multiple open research directions are proposed.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods in computational pathology rely on a multi-stage paradigm: class activation map (CAM) generation, offline pseudo-mask refinement, and fully supervised retraining. While established, this decoupled approach presents fundamental limitations. The multi-stage process not only incurs high computational training costs but also suffers from error propagation: local texture biases in shallow CNN layers generate false-positive artifacts that subsequent refinement steps often fail to correct. To address these persistent challenges through a simple yet highly effective approach, we propose the Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification (SSHR) framework. Rather than passively refining CAMs post-hoc, our method proactively purifies intermediate feature representations during the forward pass. We introduce a Hierarchical Feature Rectification Module (HFRM) that utilizes deep global semantic context to filter out local anomalies in shallow layers. This mechanism generates high-fidelity activation maps directly within a single training loop. Experiments on the LUAD-HistoSeg and BCSS datasets demonstrate that SSHR outperforms state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Furthermore, SSHR reduces training duration by 2 to 5 times. This efficiency minimizes computational overhead and accelerates clinical translation for large-scale histopathology workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/trongduc-nguyen/SSHR

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Enhancing Graph Neural Networks Using Proximity Graphs for Dust Source Emission Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of dust source emissions is critical for mitigating the significant environmental and health hazards posed by dust storms. Traditional forecasting methods often struggle to capture the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of these phenomena. In this paper, we demonstrate that proximity graphs enable Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to effectively model the intricate spatial and temporal relationships between data points. Specifically, we use proximity graphs–such as Delaunay triangulation, Gabriel graph, k-Nearest Neighbor graph, and Yao graph–as the input for GNNs (including GraphSAGE, Graph Convolutional Networks, and Graph Attention Networks) to perform message passing. Our approach highlights the effectiveness of integrating proximity graphs with GNNs for robust and accurate dust source forecasting. To emphasize the importance of proximity graph representations, we compare our method against GNNs using random graphs for message passing. The results show that GNNs with proximity graphs significantly outperform those with random graphs and are also far superior to Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model in dust source emission forecasting.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Can I Buy Your KV Cache?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Right now, across the world, AI agents are repeating the same absurd act: to read one document, they each recompute it from scratch. Every agent re-runs prefill, the most compute-intensive step a large model takes, over identical text, only to rebuild a key-value (KV) cache identical to the one the agent before it just built. The same answer, computed a million times. We make a proposal that is almost offensively simple: compute it once. Let a publisher precompute a document's KV cache, and let every other agent buy the right to load it and skip prefill. It works, and it is token-exact: loading a precomputed KV and continuing matches prefilling from scratch (24/24 greedy tokens, and at the logits level), with no accuracy cost. On Qwen3-4B, reuse is 9-50x cheaper in compute than prefill, and the gap widens with length (prefill's attention scales with L^2), so a single reuse already pays it back. Then the part that matters: where the KV lives. Shipping it fails, because KV is nearly incompressible, so per-load egress costs more than the prefill it saves. Hosting it provider-side, exactly as production prompt-caching works, removes egress entirely. The size of the prize is set by our measured compute saving: serving one hot 3774-token document to 80M agents costs ~$1.5M to re-prefill but only ~$0.03M of reuse compute (49.7x less). The 0.1x cache-read tariff APIs charge passes a 10x discount to users while sitting inside this measured envelope, so the 10x is a floor that the measured ~50x compute saving clears, and the gap to the physical ~50x is provider margin: millions of dollars per popular document. We frame the resulting agent-native prefill CDN and leave lossless KV compression and a cross-party payment layer as the open problems.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

WildIFEval: Instruction Following in the Wild

Recent LLMs have shown remarkable success in following user instructions, yet handling instructions with multiple constraints remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce WildIFEval - a large-scale dataset of 7K real user instructions with diverse, multi-constraint conditions. Unlike prior datasets, our collection spans a broad lexical and topical spectrum of constraints, extracted from natural user instructions. We categorize these constraints into eight high-level classes to capture their distribution and dynamics in real-world scenarios. Leveraging WildIFEval, we conduct extensive experiments to benchmark the instruction-following capabilities of leading LLMs. WildIFEval clearly differentiates between small and large models, and demonstrates that all models have a large room for improvement on such tasks. We analyze the effects of the number and type of constraints on performance, revealing interesting patterns of model constraint-following behavior. We release our dataset to promote further research on instruction-following under complex, realistic conditions.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Reasoning Models Know What's Important, and Encode It in Their Activations

Language models often solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, consisting of many steps with varying importance. While some steps are crucial for generating the final answer, others are removable. Determining which steps matter most, and why, remains an open question central to understanding how models process reasoning. We investigate if this question is best approached through model internals or through tokens of the reasoning chain itself. We find that model activations contain more information than tokens for identifying important reasoning steps. Crucially, by training probes on model activations to predict importance, we show that models encode an internal representation of step importance, even prior to the generation of subsequent steps. The internal representations of importance in different models yield high agreement on which steps are important. The representation is distributed across layers, and does not correlate with surface-level features, such as a step's relative position or its length. Our findings suggest that analyzing activations can reveal aspects of reasoning that surface-level approaches fundamentally miss, indicating that reasoning analyses should look into model internals.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Hermitian Crystalline Braid Topology from Hermitian Projection: A Zero-Mode Resonance Mechanism

arXiv:2606.06626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian topological phases are typically engineered through gain and loss, nonreciprocity, or interaction with an environment. Here we show that they can instead emerge purely by projecting a fully Hermitian, topologically trivial parent lattice onto an embedded subsystem. The mechanism is general: when a zero mode of the eliminated degrees of freedom couples to the retained subsystem, the embedding self-energy develops a pole, the zero-frequency description becomes singular, and topology is carried by the finite-frequency projected Green's function. We realize the mechanism exactly in a trivial nearest-neighbor square lattice with an embedded one-dimensional zig-zag brane. In the periodic transverse geometry, the parity of the eliminated complement selects the outcome: even sectors reduce to a regular Schur complement and yield conventional SSH-type descendants, whereas odd sectors host a sublattice-imbalance zero mode and follow the resonant route. There, the complex bands braid through isolated finite-frequency exceptional points (EPs), while a parity symmetry inherited from the embedding, together with $\mathrm{TRS}^{\dagger}$, induces conjugated pseudo-Hermiticity and quantizes the complex Berry phase. The stable bulk invariant of the nondegenerate phases is this quantized complex Berry phase; adjacent sectors are separated by parity-paired exceptional points whose half-integer vorticities encode the local exchange of complex-energy strands.The absence of the non-Hermitian skin effect ensures that the invariant is defined directly on the ordinary Brillouin zone. A topolectrical implementation of the projected response predicts momentum-resolved transmission minima at the exceptional-point transition frequencies together with a characteristic low-frequency resonant admittance, providing an experimentally testable signature of the mechanism.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Discrete Autoregressive Transformer for Generative Mechanism Synthesis

arXiv:2606.17409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planar path synthesis requires mechanisms whose coupler curves match a prescribed trajectory; the mapping from curve to linkage is inherently one-to-many across four-, six-, and eight-bar topologies. We address this design problem with simulation-grounded evaluation on a curated corpus of over one million mechanisms, reporting Chamfer distance and dynamic time warping after forward kinematics and geometric alignment. We formulate synthesis as conditional autoregressive sequence modeling: joint coordinates are uniformly quantized to tokens and generated by a decoder-only transformer with a variational-autoencoder (VAE) latent of the target curve and an explicit mechanism-type token. Training combines token cross-entropy with a Gaussian-smoothed bin auxiliary loss that respects ordinal structure among bins. At inference, a bounded latent-noise schedule decodes all mechanism types at each noise level; we retain the top five candidates by geometric error, yielding diverse accurate families without dataset lookup. On held-out tests, aggregate mean Chamfer distance is $0.0132$ and mean dynamic time warping is $0.153$; a latent $k$-nearest-neighbor baseline that conditions on training-set neighbor latents in VAE space achieves matched-topology mean Chamfer distance $0.0071$ and mean dynamic time warping $0.117$ using the same decoder.

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

Speech-Driven End-to-End Language Discrimination towards Chinese Dialects

Language discrimination among similar languages, varieties, and dialects is a challenging natural language processing task. The traditional text-driven focus leads to poor results. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of speech-driven features towards language discrimination among Chinese dialects. First, we systematically explore the appropriateness of speech-driven MFCC features towards CNN-based language discrimination. Then, we design an end-to-end speech recognition model based on HMM-DNN to predict Chinese dialect words. We adopt attention to extract the discriminative words related to different Chinese dialects. Finally, through a CNN, we combine the word-level embedding and the MFCC-based features. Evaluation of two benchmark Chinese dialect corpora shows the appropriateness and effectiveness of the proposed speech-driven approach to fine-grained Chinese dialect discrimination compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Polar: A Benchmark for Evaluating Political Bias in LLMs

Political bias in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly significant, but difficult to measure reproducibly across political and linguistic contexts. We introduce Polar, a 4,026-instance multiple-choice benchmark that measures political bias through option-level likelihoods rather than prompt-based generation. Polar covers two ideological axes and eight issue categories derived from the Manifesto Project, and evaluates models in parallel across U.S. and South Korean political contexts. Across 38 LLMs, measured bias varies systematically with political context, issue category, model group, and presentation language. All models lean left-progressive on U.S. political content, but show more centered and mixed patterns on South Korean content. Translation experiments further show that presentation language alone can shift measured bias. These findings highlight the need for multilingual and cross-contextual evaluation of political bias in LLMs.