Prime assembly uses a Gibson-like strategy for large DNA insertions
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arXiv:2606.19023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing reliance on pre-trained Machine Learning (ML) models has introduced new attack surfaces. Recent vulnerabilities demonstrate that malicious behavior can be embedded within model artifacts, often bypassing existing defenses. Current model-scanning solutions primarily rely on static, format-specific rules or known attack signatures, which limit their ability to generalize across frameworks and to detect novel exploitation paths. In contrast, we propose a solution that focuses on the effects an attack has on the host system executing the model and builds on foundational intuitions about ML model execution. In particular, we observe that ML models operate within well-defined lifecycle phases and that, within each phase, interactions with the host system are highly structured and predictable. We translate these intuitions into Moat, a dynamic lifecycle-aware approach for securing ML model execution, and instantiate this design in Re-Moat, our reference implementation. We evaluate Re-Moat across multiple ML frameworks using 77,974 real-world model artifacts from the Hugging Face Hub, 31 Proofs-of-Concept (PoCs) from CVEs, and 334 models from a state-of-the-art dataset, and compare it against state-of-the-art model-scanning solutions. Our results show that our approach detects all evaluated attack classes while maintaining a close-to-zero false-positive rate, validating our intuitions and motivating dynamic analysis for securing ML model execution.
arXiv:2606.12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy. To address this problem, we ask: can we inspect a preference dataset before optimization and decide, at the level of concepts, which behaviors a model should be allowed to learn? Motivated by this, we introduce a data-centric post-training pipeline that uses interpretability protocols to develop statistical hypotheses for the latent concepts separating preferred from dispreferred generations, making them explicit for fine-grained user feedback. Building on this view, we unify several interpretability-based training protocols as ways of shaping rewards via feature or data interventions. Empirically, we show that our pipeline diagnoses undesirable signals in existing preference data, mitigates off-target learning, and can also help amplify or shape desired properties such as safeguards and model personality. More broadly, our results suggest that interpretability can turn post-training from optimizing opaque proxy rewards into a process of auditing and sculpting the learning signal itself.
arXiv:2606.01963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study local pure coordination games on finite social networks, continuing the framework of Hutchcroft, Rospuskova, and Tamuz. They showed that low inefficiency in local coordination forces the underlying graph to be amenable, with a square-root loss in the amenability parameter. We improve this loss in the binary unbiased setting. Using Shapley values of a mutual-information game associated with the players' local outputs, we prove that if the average disagreement is at most $\varepsilon$, then the graph is $(O(\varepsilon\log(1/\varepsilon)),r)$-amenable. This gives a sharper quantitative converse between local coordination and graph amenability.
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.
Remote-sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs) have advanced Earth-observation analysis toward visual interpretation and instruction-following, yet fall short of operational geo-intelligence, which demands tool-grounded spatial reasoning and structured, evidence-backed decisions. We introduce GeoDisaster, an operational geospatial disaster reasoning benchmark with 2,921 verified instances across 43 question types and five task families: deforestation monitoring, multi-hazard analysis, building-damage assessment, flood-safe routing, and Sentinel-1 SAR flood monitoring. Instances integrate heterogeneous EO/GIS evidence-optical and SAR imagery, raster masks, vector geometries, road networks, and exposure layers-spanning hazard detection, damage assessment, exposure estimation, and diagnostic report generation. Ground-truth answers are grounded in executable geospatial workflows and deterministic consistency checks, removing the need for language-model annotation. We further propose an orchestrated multi-agent framework with 18 disaster-oriented tools, where role-specialized agents coordinate through explicit execution contracts, aligned via Role-Contract Expectation Alignment (RCEA): failure-aware supervised fine-tuning combined with contract-grounded reinforcement learning over dense step-level signals. Experiments show that GeoDisaster challenges existing RS-VLMs and agentic systems, while RCEA improves tool use, evidence grounding, state consistency, and decision generation.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on fine-grained visual perception, even when high-resolution inputs preserve the necessary local details. We identify this limitation as visual context rot: decisive evidence may exist in the full image, yet fail to be reliably selected and used amid redundant visual context. We propose LOCUS (LOcal visual CUe Search), a training framework that teaches MLLMs to internalize local evidence search through a verifiable proxy task. During training, LOCUS provides a local crop as a visual cue and optimizes the model to recover its spatial support in the full image using an IoU-based reward. The visual cue is used only during training, leaving the standard image-question inference interface unchanged. Experiments across fine-grained perception, hallucination, general understanding, and reasoning benchmarks show that LOCUS improves localization-sensitive visual understanding while preserving broad capabilities. Attention analyses further indicate stronger focus on task-relevant evidence regions, suggesting that training-time visual cue search provides an effective route to internalized fine-grained evidence selection.
Deploying vision transformers (ViTs) on sensor-edge systems is limited not only by on-device compute, but also by the energy and bandwidth required to transmit high-dimensional image data from the sensor to the processor. While in-sensor and near-sensor computing reduce this cost through early feature extraction, existing methods often provide only modest compression. We observe that the frequency domain provides a naturally compact representation of visual information and can be exploited at the sensor level to reduce sensor-to-processor data movement. Building on this insight, we present FrequencyFormer, a co-designed sensor-to-processor pipeline for efficient ViT inference. FrequencyFormer includes: (1) a multi-scale DCT tokenizer that compresses a 224x224 image into compact frequency-domain tokens, achieving up to 128x reduction in off-chip data volume with modest accuracy loss; (2) a LUT-based near-sensor hardware implementation that leverages fixed DCT coefficients for multiplier-free, energy- and area-efficient tokenization; and (3) a modified MIPI-based low-power communication architecture that further reduces transfer energy. FrequencyFormer serves as a drop-in replacement for standard ViT patch embedding and remains compatible with pretrained backbones across classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. The pipeline achieves 28.8 TOPS/W, reduces communication energy by 230x, and lowers total sensor-side energy by 2.22x, demonstrating frequency-domain tokenization as a scalable foundation for in-sensor ViT deployment.
Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation. We first revisit the definition of enthymemes and propose annotation guidelines anchored in Walton's argumentation schemes, offering a structured and constrained approach that nonetheless preserves room for the interpretive nature of the task. This contrasts with past resources, which tend to eliminate disagreement, obscuring its sources and preventing investigation of its potential benefits for model performance. We further propose a complexity analysis of the task, identifying where annotation imposes high cognitive load and may give rise to inconsistent annotation. Our preliminary experiments show that models trained on annotator disagreement outperform models trained on hard majority-vote labels. We close by reflecting on how structural openness in enthymeme definitions and guidelines enables the study of variation in subjective inferential processes for future resources and downstream NLP applications concerned with human inference.
arXiv:2606.18897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent-based recommender systems have gained significant attention for improving accuracy and interpretability by modeling the underlying motivations behind user behaviors. Most existing models derive intents directly from user sequences via clustering or prototype learning. However, they are sensitive to sequence quality, require presetting the number of intents, and lack explicit semantic grounding. These issues lead to an incomplete and coarse intent set and limit the effectiveness of recommendation. In this paper, we propose the Sparse Autoencoder for intent-based recommendation (SAERec), a novel recommender that automatically constructs a fine-grained and interpretable intent space from a textual corpus to guide recommendation. Rather than treating texts as side signals, SAERec leverages them as high information density evidence for intent construction. Specifically, we first extract a comprehensive set of fine-grained interpretable intents from the latent space of large language models (LLMs) by using a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to disentangle and interpret text embeddings, which isolates intent-related semantics from textual noise. Then, for each user, we retrieve relevant intents from this set as priors to guide recommendation. It contains personal intents matching a user's current interests and public intents capturing general item patterns shared across users (e.g., quality, price). Finally, to integrate retrieved intents into sequence modeling, we propose a multi-branch attention mechanism that captures temporal dependencies and injects both personal and public intent signals, followed by an adaptive fusion layer to construct the final user representation for recommendation. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAERec, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while providing human-understandable explanations.
Large language models are how hundreds of millions of people now encounter contested political questions, raising a subtle measurement problem: a model that simply agrees with whatever it is told can masquerade as biased, contaminating any claim that models hold political opinions. We address this by importing balanced keying from survey psychometrics, posing each proposition and its swapped reverse and signing the response so acquiescence cancels and genuine conviction accumulates. The result is a reproducible, quantitative instrument that maps geopolitical stance across 11 models and 2 languages (19,712 responses). Developer origin, query language and issue domain emerge as three near-equal, additive factors; every model, including those built in the United States, leans more Pro-China in Mandarin; and two models with identical agreement bias are told apart, one neutral, one biased. We release it as an open, interactive tool that extends to any contested-opinion domain.
arXiv:2606.13331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a pathwise integration theory based on Faber–Schauder energy spaces. The approach replaces the classical Hölder–Young and finite-variation Young conditions by dyadic summability conditions expressed in terms of Faber–Schauder coefficients. On the normalized interval $[0,1]$, these conditions define Banach spaces $\mathcal{E}^p$, which we call Faber–Schauder energy spaces. For $p,q>1$ satisfying $1/p+1/q\ge1$, we prove that every pair $f\in\mathcal{E}^p$ and $g\in\mathcal {E}^q$ admits a continuous pathwise integral $I_{f,g}$, constructed from dyadic left Riemann sums. We call $I_{f,g}$ the Faber–Schauder integral, and show that it depends boundedly and bilinearly on $(f,g)$ in the corresponding energy norms. The integral satisfies additivity, integration by parts, and a dyadic Young–Loève estimate. It is also the uniform limit of classical Riemann–Stieltjes integrals of finite Faber–Schauder approximations. The Faber–Schauder integral agrees with the classical Young integral whenever the latter is available, but also applies to deterministic and Gaussian examples for which neither the Hölder–Young condition nor the finite-variation Young condition can be verified. In this sense, it provides a Faber–Schauder coefficient-based extension of Young's framework.
In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.
arXiv:2606.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.
arXiv:2606.18135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce the Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD), a publicly accessible data set developed for the analysis of firearm muzzle blast sounds. The dataset aims to provide a wide variety of firearms, calibers, cartridges, microphones, and microphone locations with metadata detailed beyond what is currently otherwise available. It comprises more than 8000 field-collected data points from 28 firearms across 16 calibers. Because data collection in the field is costly, much of the existing research has been done using gunshot audio collected from the internet, which increases the risk of low-quality data and label noise. This dataset is primarily focused on caliber classification, but can also be used for gunshot detection, audio separation, and audio signal processing, providing a diversified and real-world reference. The dataset aims to provide enough diversity to be able to generalize to more real-world applications while also providing enough metadata for detailed academic analysis.
We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.
Visual localization in complex indoor environments remains a critical challenge for robotics and AR applications. Sequential localization, where pose estimates are refined over time, is important for autonomous agents. However, traditional methods often require storing extensive image databases or point clouds, leading to significant overhead. This paper introduces a novel, lightweight approach to sequential visual localization using 3D scene graphs. Our method represents the environment with a compact scene graph, where nodes represent objects (with coarse meshes) and edges encode spatial relationships. For each image in the localization phase, we extract per-patch semantic features, predicting object identities. Localization is performed within a particle filter framework. Each particle, representing a camera pose, projects the coarse object meshes from the scene graph into the image, assigning object identities to patches based on visibility. The similarity of the per-patch features, in the input image, and object features from the scene graph determines the weight of a particle. Subsequent images are incorporated sequentially, refining the pose estimate. By leveraging a compact scene graph and efficient semantic matching, our method significantly reduces storage while maintaining performance on real-world datasets. The code will be available at https://github.com/DmblnNicole/sg2loc.
Textual reuse pervades the Hebrew Bible, yet the computational methods used to detect it still rest largely on lexical overlap, and they falter once a parallel involves paraphrase, lexical substitution, or syntactic reworking. This paper introduces MiqraBERT, a Sentence-BERT model finetuned from AlephBERT (a Modern Hebrew encoder) for verse-level semantic similarity in Biblical Hebrew. The training set comprises 1,650 labeled verse and half-verse pairs: 825 true parallels drawn from the Chronicles synoptic material and from foundational studies of poetic parallelism, balanced against 825 randomly sampled negatives. Through cosine-similarity regression, the model learns an embedding space in which parallel verses cluster together and unrelated verses move apart. We evaluate separation with distribution-based metrics, Wasserstein distance and the overlap coefficient, across ten random seeds. MiqraBERT improves distributional separation 2.7-fold over the pre-trained baseline and reduces the ambiguous overlap region from roughly 24% to about 6%. Narrative synoptic parallels reach a recall@10 of 87.1%; poetic parallels remain difficult, below 9%. This genre-dependent asymmetry confines the model's reliable scope to narrative textual reuse. MiqraBERT is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/davidmsmiley/MiqraBERT
Despite significant advancements in point cloud analysis, reducing energy consumption and improving robustness remain understudied, largely due to the inherent limitations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the primary visual cortex and propose a Dendritic-Connected Continuous-Coupled Neural Network (DC-CCNN), a novel Brain-Inspired Neural Network (BINN) architecture for point cloud analysis. By combining discrete and continuous encoding, our design replaces traditional Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) with more efficient and robust BINNs. Building upon this framework, we further propose an extended model, DC-CCNN++, to improve robustness under complex corruption conditions. Specifically, we introduce a Neuro-Inspired Robust Modulation-and-Readout Module (NRMR) to enhance feature stability and decision robustness through global-context gain modulation and dual-code evidence integration. We also design a Cortically Inspired Progressive Variability Training (CPVT) strategy, which progressively exposes the model to structured environmental variability while preserving stable clean-sample anchors during training. Experimental results show that DC-CCNN++ improves the performance of brain-inspired networks on point cloud analysis while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the original DC-CCNN, it achieves stronger results on both classification and part segmentation, and exhibits enhanced robustness against sparsity, occlusion, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and spatial transformations. With its efficiency, robustness, and biologically grounded design, DC-CCNN++ provides a promising alternative to traditional deep learning methods for point cloud analysis. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DC-CCNNpp-44E3.
arXiv:2606.15653v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The validation of networking and security solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) requires realistic and reproducible experimental data. However, existing platforms often achieve scalability by replicating a limited set of device types, which restricts profile diversity and fails to capture the heterogeneity of real-world IoT environments. In this paper, we present IoT-Zoo, a container-based testbed designed to support reproducible experimentation through heterogeneous, dataset-driven IoT device profiles. Built upon Containernet, IoT-Zoo automates the deployment of multi-domain scenarios and supports real application protocols such as MQTT and RTSP. The platform provides a single-command interface for environment provisioning and automated traffic capture (PCAP), enabling the generation of consistent traffic baselines and reducing the operational effort required to evaluate networking and security solutions.
Eukaryotic genomes generate a plethora of polyadenylated (pA+) RNAs1,2, which are packaged into ribonucleoprotein particles (RNPs). To ensure faithful gene expression, functional pA+ RNPs, including protein-coding RNPs, are exported to the cytoplasm, whereas transcripts within non-functional pA+ RNPs are degraded in the nucleus1–4. How cells distinguish these opposing fates remains unknown. The DExD-box ATPase UAP56 (also known as DDX39B) is a central component of functional pA+ RNPs, and promotes their docking to the nuclear pore complex-anchored TREX-25,6, which triggers transcript release from UAP56 to facilitate export7. Here we reveal that the poly(A) tail exosome targeting (PAXT) connection8 binds a TREX-2-like module, which releases pA+ RNAs from UAP56 for decay by the nuclear exosome. The core of this module consists of a LENG8–PCID2–SEM1 trimer, which we show is structurally and biochemically equivalent to the central GANP–PCID2–SEM1 trimer of TREX-2. Mutagenesis and transcriptomic data demonstrate that the nuclear fate of pA+ RNPs is governed by the contending actions of nucleoplasmic PAXT and nuclear pore complex-associated TREX-2, which interpret RNA-bound UAP56 as a signal for RNA decay or export, respectively. As RNA targets of PAXT are generally short and intron-poor, we propose an overall model for pA+ RNP fate determination whereby the distinct sub-nuclear localizations of PAXT and TREX-2 govern the degradation of short non-functional pA+ RNAs while allowing export of their longer and functional counterparts. Biochemical, structural and cell biological analyses reveal that UAP56 (DDX39B) assembles with a TREX-2–like module that redirects non-functional polyadenylated RNAs from export to degradation.
arXiv:2606.13147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the interface separating $+1$ and $-1$ spins in the near-critical planar random field Ising model (RFIM) with Dobrushin boundary conditions has a scaling limit, whose law is conformally covariant and almost surely absolutely continuous with respect to SLE$_3$. The limiting curve can be seen as a massive version of SLE$_3$ in the sense of Makarov and Smirnov, but in a random environment. We then show that the outermost spin loops of the near-critical planar RFIM with $+1$ boundary conditions have subsequential limits and that any of these limits is almost surely singular with respect to CLE$_3$. This dichotomy between absolute continuity of the single interface and singularity of the outermost loops reflects the fact that a single interface does not explore enough of the magnetization field of the near-critical RFIM to detect the singularity of this field with respect to the critical Ising magnetization field, whereas the outermost spin loops do.
Understanding drug effects and drug-drug interactions is essential for developing combination therapies. We present Drug-Prot, a computational framework that leverages large-scale perturbation proteomics to quantify causal drug effects, drug-drug interactions, and dynamic protein relationships. Using data from 63 single drugs and 59 drug combinations applied to 18 breast cancer cell lines at 6, 24, and 48 hours, Drug-Prot estimates drug effects on protein expression and reconstructs directed temporal protein dependency networks. The publicly available software enables targeted analyses of user-defined protein sets, substantially reducing the multiple-testing burden. Through an interactive web application, users obtain corrected p-values for single-drug and combination effects, directed temporal dependency networks, and downloadable results without requiring access to the underlying proteomic dataset. As a use case, we apply invariance-regularized Random Forests to triple-negative breast cancer cell lines to identify proteins associated with drug response. Querying these proteins in Drug-Prot reveals drug-specific and interaction effects at the protein-network level, illustrating how the framework links candidate causal protein features to actionable drug combinations.
arXiv:2606.16987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) code classification is essential for customs clearance, duty assessment, trade statistics, and regulatory compliance in maritime logistics. However, exact HTS classification remains challenging because product descriptions are often short, incomplete, or ambiguous, while correct classification depends on hierarchical tariff structures, legal notes, and jurisdiction-specific rules. This paper proposes an agentic large language model (LLM) framework for Canadian 10-digit HTS code classification in smart-port and maritime logistics environments. The framework integrates multi-agent information retrieval, semantic retrieval over official tariff documents, evidence-grounded reasoning, consensus-based validation, element-wise voting across hierarchical code components, confidence estimation, and human-in-the-loop escalation. We evaluate the framework on a private dataset of 3,300 domain-expert-labeled product records collected from logistics and delivery contexts. Experimental results show that exact 10-digit classification remains difficult even for advanced LLMs, with performance decreasing from coarse chapter-level prediction to fine-grained tariff and statistical suffix assignment. These findings demonstrate the need for evidence-grounded, uncertainty-aware, and human-centered classification workflows rather than fully autonomous single-step prediction. The proposed framework supports more interpretable, accountable, and compliance-oriented HTS classification for maritime logistics and smart-port operations. Our code is available at https://github.com/Analytics-Everywhere-Lab/hts.
Query-key (QK) normalization stabilizes attention by controlling the scale of queries and keys before the dot product, but is not immediately compatible with Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA). MLA achieves efficient decoding by caching low-dimensional latent states instead of full keys, whereas post-projection QK RMSNorm appears to require the fully projected key for every cached token. We show this apparent incompatibility is an implementation artifact, not an architectural constraint. RMSNorm decomposes into a static affine weight and a dynamic scalar RMS statistic. The static key-side weight can be absorbed into the MLA query-side projection; the dynamic key statistic reduces to one inverse-RMS scalar per token and KV group. The resulting formulation is exactly equivalent to explicit post-projection QK RMSNorm in exact arithmetic and preserves MLA's latent decode path. In our 400M runs trained for up to 100B tokens, QK-Normed MLA achieves lower training loss and better downstream accuracy than QK clipping, while H800 decode benchmarks show less than 2% latency overhead up to 256k context. These results make QK normalization a practical stabilization option for MLA models without requiring full-key caching.