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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Asymptotics of the number of labelled connected sparse multitype graphs

arXiv:2606.17912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the asymptotic enumeration of labelled connected multitype graphs in the sparse regime, where both the number of vertices and edges grow linearly and the excess is proportional to the size of the graph. Extending the classical theory of connected graph enumeration to the multitype setting, we consider graphs with prescribed numbers of vertices of each type and prescribed edge counts between each pair of types. Our approach is probabilistic and relies on the theory of inhomogeneous random graphs. In particular, we exploit large-deviation principles and asymptotic estimates for connectedness probabilities to relate the counting problem to the emergence of giant components in suitably tuned supercritical random graphs. From large deviation asymptotics of connected components of inhomogeneous random graphs, we recognize that a connected graph with a given edge statistics corresponds to the (unique) giant component of larger inhomogeneous random graph with a suitably chosen connection kernel. This correspondence allows us to derive the leading exponential asymptotics for the number of connected multitype graphs with fixed type profile and edge matrix. The resulting formula generalizes the asymptotic enumeration results of Bender, Canfield, and McKay for connected sparse graphs to the multitype framework. More broadly, the paper illustrates how probabilistic techniques can provide transparent and effective tools for addressing new combinatorial enumeration problems.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Looped World Models

Current world models face a fundamental tension: faithful long-horizon simulation demands deep computation, but deeper models are expensive to deploy and prone to compounding errors. We resolve this by introducing Looped World Models (LoopWM), which are the first looped architectures for world modelling. Our method iteratively refines latent environment states through a parameter-shared transformer block. This yield up to 100x parameter efficiency over conventional approaches with adaptive computation that automatically scales depth to match the complexity of each prediction step. Orthogonal to scaling model size and training data, LoopWM establishes iterative latent depth as a new scaling axis for world simulation, which might significantly push the community forward.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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

PhysMetrics.Weather: An Evaluation Framework for Physical Consistency in ML Weather Models

arXiv:2606.10642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning weather prediction (MLWP) models have achieved impressive forecasting performance at a small fraction of the computational costs required for traditional physics-based methods. However, they are primarily (1) data-driven and (2) evaluated using pixel-wide error metrics (e.g., RMSE), so there are no guarantees that their forecasts are consistent with known physical laws. We introduce PhysMetrics$.$Weather, an evaluation framework that assesses the physical realism of MLWP models across three types of metrics: conservation, spectral, and dynamical. By quantifying physical realism, this tool guides the development of physics-informed architectures and helps evaluate whether MLWP models are reliable for operational use. Our framework is available on Github at https://github.com/Emmakast/PhysMetrics.Weather.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Breaking the Filter Bubble: A Semantic Pareto-DQN Framework for Multi-Objective Recommendation

arXiv:2606.24042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recommender systems often induce filter bubbles and semantic homogenization by monolithically optimizing for immediate user engagement. Standard single-objective models, including traditional Deep Q-Networks, are ill-equipped to navigate the trade-offs between platform retention and critical societal values like information diversity and provider fairness. To address these limitations, we introduce a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that formalizes recommendation as a semantic multi-objective Markov decision process. By integrating high-fidelity semantic embeddings with a Pareto-DQN agent, our architecture treats engagement, diversity, and fairness as distinct, non-aggregable reward signals, avoiding the pitfalls of static reward scalarization. Empirical evaluations on the MovieLens small dataset shows that our hypervolume based action selection disrupts the feedback loops responsible for semantic collapse. By sustaining high state-trajectory variance, the Pareto-DQN effectively maps the Pareto frontier, achieving gains in auxiliary societal objectives with only marginal impacts on engagement. This work provides a path toward intrinsically aligned, responsible recommender systems.

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

Low-Burden LLM-Based Preference Learning: Personalizing Assistive Robots from Natural Language Feedback for Users with Paralysis

arXiv:2604.01463v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physically Assistive Robots require personalized behaviors to ensure user safety and comfort. However, traditional preference learning methods, like exhaustive pairwise comparisons, cause substantial physical and cognitive fatigue for users with severe motor impairments. To solve this, we propose a low-burden, offline framework that translates unstructured natural language feedback directly into deterministic robotic control policies. To safely bridge the gap between ambiguous human speech and robotic code, our pipeline uses Large Language Models (LLMs) grounded in the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework. This clinical reasoning decodes subjective user reactions into explicit physical and psychological needs, which are then mapped into transparent decision trees. Before deployment, an automated "LLM-as-a-Judge" verifies the code's structural safety. We validated this system in a simulated meal preparation study with 10 adults with paralysis. Results show our natural language approach significantly reduces user workload compared to traditional baselines. Additionally, occupational therapists confirmed the generated policies are safe and accurately reflect user preferences.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

EverydayGPT: Confidence-Gated Routing for Efficient and Safe Hybrid GPT-RAG Conversational QA

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines route every query through retrieval and generation unconditionally, incurring unnecessary computation and propagating low-quality context to the generator. We introduce EverydayGPT, a lightweight conversational QA system built around a Confidence-Gated Routing (CGR) mechanism that formalises the routing decision as a joint policy over retrieval distance and extraction adequacy. The backbone is a 205M-parameter GPT trained from scratch on 10B tokens of FineWeb-Edu. CGR avoids invoking the costly GPT pathway (~5.9s) for 85 percent of queries by resolving them via fast RAG extraction (~45 ms), yielding over 120x latency reduction on the majority of queries while maintaining answer quality. On a 500-question in-domain benchmark, the system achieves F1 = 0.226 +/- 0.004 compared to 0.171 for GPT-only and 0.210 for unconditional RAG. Gains over strong baselines are modest but consistent, while efficiency improvements are substantial (6.3x mean latency reduction). A structured grounding audit finds no unsupported claims in the sampled set, with explicit scope limitations. We position this work as a study of routing strategies under resource constraints rather than a claim of state-of-the-art performance.

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

Semantic Editing with Coupled Stochastic Differential Equations

Editing the content of an image with a pretrained text-to-image model remains challenging. Existing methods often distort fine details or introduce unintended artifacts. We propose using coupled stochastic differential equations (coupled SDEs) to guide the sampling process of any pre-trained generative model that can be sampled by solving an SDE, including diffusion and rectified flow models. By driving both the source image and the edited image with the same correlated noise, our approach steers new samples toward the desired semantics while preserving visual similarity to the source. The method works out-of-the-box, without retraining or auxiliary networks, and achieves high prompt fidelity along with near-pixel-level consistency. These results position coupled SDEs as a simple yet powerful tool for controlled generative AI. Project page: https://z-jianxin.github.io/syncSDE-release/. Code: https://github.com/Z-Jianxin/syncSDE-release.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Efficient Reinforcement for Visual-Textual Thinking with Discrete Diffusion Model

RL-based post-training has been widely adopted to enable interleaved visual and textual reasoning in unified multimodal models capable of both text and image generation. However, most existing approaches are built upon autoregressive (AR) unified models, which require full image regeneration during visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that multimodal discrete diffusion models are effective alternatives to AR models for reinforcement learning in interleaved reasoning, owing to their ability to perform efficient visual rollouts via localized visual editing rather than full image-token regeneration. This reduces rollout computation during GRPO by 26.9\% compared to AR baselines, with minimal performance drop. Despite the improved efficiency, we find that joint reward assignment, which employs a shared reward signal across modalities, introduces cross-modal interference between unrelated image and text token sequences during RL updates. To address this issue, we propose factorized reward assignment, a strategy that assigns rewards independently to text and vision segments. With factorized reward assignment, our RL approach achieves an 11.2% improvement over joint reward assignment and a 38.04% improvement over the base model.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Simulating Hate Speech Cascades with Multi-LLM Agents: Empirical Grounding, Modeling Fidelity, and Intervention Strategies

Authors:

Faithful modeling of hateful content propagation on online platforms remains an open problem for moderation research. Classical cascade models that do not explicitly represent the profile, community, and content factors associated with hateful-content propagation may yield moderation strategies that behave less effectively when deployed in real-world scenarios. Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems can, in principle, make each reshare decision depend on the user's profile, the surrounding community, and the post's content, but it remains unclear whether this added flexibility actually reproduces real hateful cascades more faithfully than classical baselines. We study three hateful Bluesky cascades and a size-matched benign control. In the empirical Bluesky data, we found that: 97.4–99.7\% of reposters take a hostile stance; toxicity-engagement homophily is higher on the diffusion tree than on the follower graph for hateful cascades; topology is star-like for the hateful cascades (most reposts come directly from the root) versus tree-like for the benign cascade (reposts propagate through multi-hop chains). In simulation, a multi-LLM-agent simulator reproduces the stance monoculture and the toxicity-delta direction. A structured ablation identifies agent heterogeneity as the leading fidelity factor, and amplifier targeting on dense networks yields 7.5–12.9\% reduction at 5.7\% benign collateral.

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

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

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.

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

Memento: Reconstruct to Remember for Consistent Long Video Generation

Long-form video generation requires recurring subjects to remain consistent across various shots, viewpoints, motions, and scene transitions. Existing temporal decomposition methods improve scalability by generating videos shot by shot. However, they mainly focus on optimizing plausible next-shot continuations without verifying whether the historical memory preserves identity-critical subject evidence. Consequently, as generation proceeds, recurring subjects may be diluted, overwritten, or forgotten. In this paper, we propose Memento, a subject-reconstruction-guided framework that treats subject preservation as an explicit identity grounding problem, based on the premise that a memory bank faithfully preserving a subject should support reconstructing that subject from memory alone. Specifically, Memento jointly trains autoregressive next-shot generation with memory-based subject reconstruction, recovering target appearances using historical memory and global story captions. To disentangle long-range subject evidence from short-range cues, Memento introduces a dual-query memory mechanism, where one query retrieves identity-relevant memory and the other selects short-context keyframes for coherent continuation. Additionally, a subject-aware cinematic data pipeline provides precise reconstruction supervision via consistent, pronoun-free subject descriptions. Experiments demonstrate that Memento achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-term subject consistency, cross-shot coherence, and visual quality.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Threshold Group Testing

arXiv:2606.11353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the Threshold Group Testing (TGT) problem in the noiseless and non-adaptive setting, where the objective is to exactly recover a sparse binary vector from pooled tests, using as few tests as possible. In TGT, each test applied to a subset of items returns a positive outcome if the number of 1's (defective items) in that subset meets or exceeds a specified threshold, and has a negative outcome otherwise. We investigate how the complexity of TGT compares to that of Classical Group Testing (CGT), corresponding to the special case of the threshold equal to one, and analyse the impact of increasing the threshold on the required number of tests. Our main contribution is the derivation of a sharp information-theoretic phase transition at $c_{\mathrm{inf}}^{\mathrm{TGT}}k\log(n/k)$ (non-adaptive) tests for TGT within the constant-column test design. The threshold constant $c_{\mathrm{inf}}^{\mathrm{TGT}}$ is expressed as a function of the prevalence of defectives and the threshold value. Our upper bound is derived under an analytic assumption, and we verify that this assumption is satisfied for a threshold value of 2. The value of $c_{\mathrm{inf}}^{\mathrm{TGT}}$ reveals that TGT on the constant-column design has the same information-theoretic behaviour as CGT in the low-prevalence regime. Yet, strikingly, at higher prevalences, the threshold leads to a significant reduction in the number of tests. On the other hand, we provide evidence that when the asymptotic proportion of defective items is positive, TGT actually becomes strictly harder than CGT (excluding trivial reductions).

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ADAPT: An Autonomous Forklift for Construction Site Operation

Efficient material logistics play a critical role in controlling costs and schedules in the construction industry. However, manual material handling remains prone to inefficiencies, delays, and safety risks. Autonomous forklifts offer a promising solution to streamline on-site logistics, reducing reliance on human operators and mitigating labor shortages. This paper presents the development and evaluation of ADAPT (Autonomous Dynamic All-terrain Pallet Transporter), a fully autonomous off-road forklift designed for construction environments. Unlike structured warehouse settings, construction sites pose significant challenges, including dynamic obstacles, unstructured terrain, and varying weather conditions. To address these challenges, our system integrates AI-driven perception techniques with traditional approaches for decision making, planning, and control, enabling reliable operation in complex environments. We validate the system through extensive real-world testing, comparing its continuous performance against an experienced human operator across various weather conditions. Our findings demonstrate that autonomous outdoor forklifts can operate near human-level performance, offering a viable path toward safer and more efficient construction logistics.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Models

arXiv:2606.19882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance the interpretability of deep learning networks by aligning the features extracted from images with natural concepts. However, existing CBMs are constrained in their ability to generalize beyond a fixed set of predefined classes and the risk of non-concept information leakage, where predictive signals outside the intended concepts are inadvertently exploited. In this paper, we propose Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Model (MM-CBM) to address these issues and extend CBMs into CLIP. MM-CBM utilizes dual Concept Bottleneck Layers (CBLs) to align both the image and text embeddings into interpretable features. This allows us to perform new vision tasks like zero-shot classification or image retrieval in an interpretable way. Compared to existing methods, MM-CBM achieves up to 51.26% accuracy improvement on average across four standard benchmarks. Our method maintains high accuracy, staying within ~5% of black-box performance while offering greater interpretability.

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

Universal Guideline-Driven Image Clustering via a Hybrid LLM Agent

Unifying image clustering across different clustering scenarios remains challenging due to fundamental gaps among tasks. We introduce a Guideline-Driven Image Clustering Agent, the first universal framework that bridges these gaps through textual guidelines. To incorporate complex guidelines without task-specific training, we propose Generative Concept Proxy Modeling, which generates guideline-aware embeddings via concept proxy extraction. For scenarios requiring automatic cluster discovery, we introduce LLM Traversal based on Minimum Spanning Tree that selectively applies LLM reasoning for complex semantic judgments. Our method generalizes across diverse clustering scenarios spanning from general to fine-grained categorization, from global to local criteria, and from balanced to long-tail distributions. Our framework consistently outperforms specialized methods across diverse clustering tasks.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Decentralized Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2601.03184v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The decentralization of autoregressive generation has attracted considerable attention in recent years as a solution to scaling bottlenecks. However, despite promising empirical results, this paradigm currently lacks rigorous theoretical justification. In this work, we formally establish the theoretical equivalence between decentralized and centralized training. To achieve this, we adapt the Discrete Flow Matching framework for autoregressive generation, leveraging its inherent properties to demonstrate that global models naturally decompose into independent experts. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments across diverse multimodal benchmarks, empirically validating that decentralized training maintains competitive parity with standard centralized architectures.

18.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19

Optimized R2 retroelement complexes for DNA insertion into plant genomes

Traditional approaches for DNA insertion into plant genomes using Agrobacterium tumefaciens result in random integration. Newer genetic engineering methods based on nucleases, prime editors, transposases and recombinases extend capabilities but remain constrained with low efficiencies, off-target integration or limited payload size. Here we adapt the avian Taeniopygia guttata R2 protein (R2Tg) for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes by engineering R2Tg expression cassettes and RNA payloads carrying intron-disrupted reporters, with optimized ribosomal DNA homology arms and untranslated regions. In Arabidopsis thaliana protoplasts, Nicotiana benthamiana leaves and Solanum lycopersicum seedlings, our R2Tg editor system achieves targeted insertion of full-length payloads ranging from 2.2 kb to 5 kb. In Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, integration occurs, on average, at 1 copy per genome, which is 30 times more efficient than that achieved by Cas9 homology-directed repair. This work establishes an R2Tg ribonucleoprotein platform for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes, using a multicopy genomic safe-harbor site to enable efficient addition of multikilobase genes. R2 retrotransposons are used to integrate DNA into plant and crop 25S ribosomal DNA sites.

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

Removing Noise, not Finding Gold: Quality Filtering for Large-Scale Pretraining

Large-scale models are pretrained on massive web-crawled datasets containing documents of mixed quality, making data filtering essential. A popular method is Classifier-based Quality Filtering (CQF), which trains a binary classifier to distinguish between pretraining data and a small, high-quality set. It assigns each pretraining document a quality score defined as the classifier's score and retains only the top-scoring ones. We provide an in-depth analysis of CQF. We show that while CQF improves downstream task performance, it does not necessarily enhance language modeling on the high-quality dataset. We explain this paradox by the fact that CQF implicitly filters the high-quality dataset as well. We further compare the behavior of models trained with CQF to those trained on synthetic data of increasing quality, obtained via random token permutations, and find starkly different trends. Our results challenge the view that CQF captures a meaningful notion of data quality.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Development of a Novel Risk Prediction Model for Rheumatoid Arthritis-Associated Interstitial Lung Disease (RA-ILD): A Longitudinal Study

Background: Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is one of the most common and potentially most devastating extra-articular complication of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and is associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. However, reliable tools for the early identification of ILD in patients with RA remain limited. This study aimed to identify plasma protein biomarkers of RA-ILD and develop an interpretable machine learning model for risk prediction using data from the UK Biobank. Methods: We first evaluated the association between baseline RA and the risk of incident ILD in the UK Biobank using Cox proportional hazards models. Mendelian randomization analysis was then performed to investigate the potential causal relationship between RA and ILD. Finally, we analyzed 2,920 plasma proteins measured using the Olink platform in 781 eligible RA patients. Proteins associated with ILD risk were identified using Cox proportional hazards models and subsequently used to construct eight machine learning models. Model performance was assessed using the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) and decision curve analysis. The best-performing model was further interpreted using Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) to evaluate feature importance. Results: Compared with participants without RA, Patients with baseline RA had a significantly higher risk of developing ILD (Hazard ratio: 4.425, 95% CI: 3.549,5.518). The MR supported a potential causal association between RA and ILD (Odds ratio: 1.227, 95% CI: 1.121,1.343). Among the eight machine learning models, the CatBoost model showed the best performance, achieving an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.884 (95% CI: 0.773,0.996). The SHAP analysis identified LAG3, NPC2, and LAMP3 are the three most important plasma protein predictors of ILD development in patients with RA. Conclusion: Plasma proteomics combined with machine learning may provide a promising approach for identifying biomarkers and predicting ILD risk in patients with RA. LAG3, NPC2, and LAMP3 may serve as candidate biomarkers for RA-ILD and warrant further validation. Keywords: Rheumatoid arthritis, Interstitial lung disease, Mendelian randomization, Machine learning, Plasma proteins.

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

Clustering Node Attributed Networks with Graph Neural Networks and Self Learning

arXiv:2606.13444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph clustering - partitioning the node set of a graph into disjoint subsets that reflect some latent information - is a fundamental problem as it finds applications in a myriad of different scenarios. While this classic problem has been tackled for decades by different communities, a recent variation of the problem driven by real data considers the scenario where nodes have attributes that are also informative. This has triggered novel methods that simultaneously leverage network information (edges) and node information (attributed) in the design of novel clustering algorithms. This work proposes a novel framework that builds on prior works that have applied graph neural networks (GNN) to graph clustering. The proposed framework operates in rounds of self learning in a fully unsupervised setting. In each round, a GNN generates representations for nodes that are used to cluster the nodes. This clustering influences the graph used to generate the node representation in the next round. Moreover, a context graph built in each round using the original graph is used to generate the node representations. Empirical results show that the proposed methodology extracts information from both network edges and node attributes in synthetic data, outperforming algorithms focused solely on the network or attributes when neither are very informative. Multiple rounds of learning also improve the performance and always outperforms a long single round of training (i.e., classic GNN graph clustering). When considering real datasets, empirical results indicate that the proposed methodology is competitive to state-of-the-art methods when cluster sizes are balanced.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

AI Tokenomics: The Economics of Tokens, Computation, and Pricing in Foundation Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tokens have become the practical accounting unit for modern foundation model services, linking information processing, computation, memory use, energy expenditure, pricing, and economic value. This paper develops a framework for AI tokenomics: the study of how tokens are generated, consumed, priced, allocated, and optimized across AI systems. We connect token-level technical costs to workflow-level production functions, enterprise resource allocation, measurement and instrumentation methods, and emerging market-design questions. The framework shows that token expenditure and economic value are distinct: value depends on marginal productivity, workflow position, hidden reasoning activity, risk, and downstream propagation effects. The paper concludes by identifying open research directions in hidden-token measurement, empirical calibration, token productivity, dynamic allocation, and token-based markets.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.

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

Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades

arXiv:2606.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, serving a large model for every query is computationally expensive. MLLM cascades mitigate this cost by first querying a weak but cheaper model and deferring to a strong model when the weak model's output is unconfident. However, since the weak model's confidence directly controls compute allocation, these systems expose a new attack surface: an adversary can manipulate confidence so that their queries are consistently deferred to the strong model. Motivated by this vulnerability, we introduce the Forced Deferral Attack (FDA), an adversarial image attack that lowers the weak model's confidence and causes cascades to route queries to the strong model. FDA learns a universal border trigger by optimizing a temperature-flattened objective. This objective pushes the weak model's token distribution on triggered inputs toward less concentrated targets constructed from its clean responses. Across datasets, model families, and deferral metrics, FDA consistently increases strong-model routing while outperforming image-perturbation and prompt-injection baselines. These results show that MLLM cascades are vulnerable to attacks that manipulate compute allocation, forcing unintended strong-model usage without directly targeting answer correctness.

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

Runtime Skill Audit: Targeted Runtime Probing for Agent Skill Security

arXiv:2606.11671v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills let LLM agents reuse instructions, resources, tools, and workflows, but they also create a new place for malicious behavior to hide. A skill may look benign in its documentation or code while becoming harmful only when it is invoked with particular user requests, local assets, persistent state, or multi-step tool interactions. This makes purely static vetting brittle. We present Runtime Skill Audit (RSA), a dynamic analysis method that audits skills by asking what the skill-mediated agent actually does under targeted runtime conditions. Instead of testing every skill with the same generic tasks, RSA profiles risk-relevant interfaces, prepares the execution context needed to exercise them, and assigns security labels from the resulting trace evidence. We instantiate RSA on OpenClaw and evaluate it on 100 skills against representative static baselines. RSA achieves 90.0\% accuracy with an 88.0\% true positive rate and an 8.0\% false positive rate, improving accuracy by 13.0 percentage points over the best static baseline. Under self-evolving attacks, static detectors collapse after one or two rounds, while RSA continues to detect 19–20 out of 20 malicious skills across rounds.