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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Encoding parameters by measurement: Forgetting can be better in quantum metrology

arXiv:2512.10541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce quantum parameter estimation with the encoding being via a quantum measurement. We quantify the precision for estimating parameters characterizing a general two-outcome qubit measurement, considering two cases: when the outcomes of the encoding measurement are recorded and when the same are ignored. We find that in a large variety of such estimation scenarios, forgetting the outcomes yields higher precision. We derive a necessary criterion under which remembering the measurement outcomes provides better precision in comparison to the outcome-forgotten strategy. Furthermore, we establish a necessary and sufficient criterion for the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters encoded by an arbitrary quantum process, including those involving measurements, using qubit probes, and find when the quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound is valid and achievable. For simultaneous estimation of two parameters characterizing the measurement, we find that the achievable quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound can be a valid precision bound only when the measurement direction depends on the parameters of interest.

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

Multi-entropy in random tensor networks

arXiv:2606.04470v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the evaluation of Rényi multi-entropies $S^{(q)}_n$ in Random Tensor Network (RTN) states in the large bond-dimension limit. For the case of Rényi index $n=2$ and arbitrary number of parties $q$, we prove that that multi-entropies are determined by minimal multiway cuts through the network. When the minimal multiway cut is degenerate, we characterize the full minimizer set via compatible families of minimal cuts and give a criterion for all minimizers to come from ordinary cut partitions. For $n=2$, this gives a natural generalization of the minimal cut description of bipartite entanglement to multipartite systems with arbitrarily many parties. For the case of integer $n>2$, we show that the minimal multiway cut conjecture is in general not true by providing explicit counter examples for both the single random tensor and for the network built from isometric tilings. We discuss the implication for our results on the multipartite entanglement structures in RTN and holography.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Minimal surfaces, Knots, and Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.26234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A recent conjecture by Joel Fine posits a relationship between the coefficients of the HOMFLY polynomial of a knot $K$ in the 3-sphere $S^3$, and the signed count of minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 4-space $\mathrm{H}^4$ meeting the sphere at infinity at $K$, with prescribed genus and self-intersection number. In this paper, we develop a novel machine learning framework based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to solve the minimal surface equation in hyperbolic space. We utilise this framework to test Fine's Conjecture by constructing near-minimal surfaces bounding various families of knots in $S^3$. Furthermore, we develop an algorithmic method to find self-intersections and compute their sign. For every knot analysed, the computationally discovered minimal surfaces and their self-intersection numbers perfectly align with the predictions of Fine's Conjecture, providing empirical evidence for it.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Measuring Semantic Progress in Multi-turn Dialogue via Information Gain

Evaluating multi-turn dialogue is challenging because quality emerges across turns rather than within individual responses. We focus on a key dimension of information-seeking dialogue: semantic progress, defined as the accumulation of new, question-relevant, and non-redundant information over the course of a conversation. We formalize semantic progress as question-conditioned uncertainty reduction and introduce an information-theoretic metric that approximates it in embedding space. Our main estimator uses a tractable Gaussian formulation with closed-form updates, while a complementary maximum-entropy argument shows why log-determinant structure arises more broadly when only second-order embedding information is retained. This formulation yields desirable theoretical properties, including monotonicity, additive decomposition of total information gain across turns, and diminishing returns for redundant evidence. Unlike LLM-as-a-judge approaches, our metric requires no autoregressive inference at evaluation time and is fully reproducible for a fixed embedding model. Experiments on MT-Bench, Chatbot Arena, and UltraFeedback show that the proposed metric achieves competitive agreement with human judgments despite targeting only semantic progress, with improved alignment on MT-Bench and UltraFeedback compared to several LLM-based judges. Notably, the method remains effective with lightweight embedding models under CPU-only execution, indicating that semantic progress can be captured without reliance on large model capacity.

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

Send a SCOUT First: Pre-hoc Reasoning for Adaptive Detector Allocation in Prompt-Injection Defense

arXiv:2605.30837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are heterogeneous: each is strong on a different slice of attacks, and none is always reliable. Yet existing systems still treat detection as a fixed single-detector pipeline, committing every request to one detector's blind spots. We reframe defense as detector allocation: given a heterogeneous pool, decide per request which detectors to run and whether to escalate to an LLM judge. Our framework SCOUT (Scalable and Controllable Outcome-prediction for Uncertainty-aware Triage) makes this decision dynamic by predicting each detector's per-sample reliability and latency from how it behaved on similar past inputs, and exposes a single safety-utility threshold to the operator (where utility bundles benign-pass rate and wall-clock). To evaluate this setting, we build SCOUT-450, a benchmark that captures the structurally complex, agent-facing injections that older prompt-injection sets under-represent. On SCOUT-450, a safety-oriented operating point reduces attack-success rate by 46% and total wall-clock by 40% relative to an always-on GPT-4o judge, at a 5.1-point benign-utility drop. SCOUT also transfers to three external benchmarks (BIPIA, IPI, and IHEval), improving the safety-utility frontier.

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

SHIFT: Semantic Harmonization via Index-side Feature Transformation for Multilingual Information Retrieval

arXiv:2606.18801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the rapid expansion of massive multilingual corpora, Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR) has emerged as a critical technology for global information access. MLIR enables users to retrieve semantically relevant documents from multilingual text collections using a single-language query. However, recent multilingual dense retrieval models often exhibit a strong preference for documents in the same language as the query. This leads to severe language bias, where top-ranked results are dominated by documents of specific languages, even when documents in other languages contain more semantically relevant information. To address this issue, we propose SHIFT, a training-free method applicable in the indexing stage. Specifically, SHIFT utilizes parallel translation pairs to estimate a relative language vector for each target language with respect to a source language. Subsequently, SHIFT corrects the language-specific offset by subtracting this relative language vector from document embeddings during indexing. Our comprehensive evaluation across four MLIR benchmarks and diverse dense retrieval models confirms that SHIFT can effectively mitigate language bias and enhance MLIR performance.

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

MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry

Monocular visual odometry (MVO) is foundational to autonomous navigation and robotic localization. However, existing learning-based MVO approaches often struggle with either a lack of interpretable, complementary features or overly complex multi-stage architectures. These limitations inherently restrict their robustness and cross-domain generalization. In this work, we propose MVOFormer, a novel transformer framework for robust monocular visual odometry. Our architecture features a Flow-Semantic Dual Branch Encoder that synergizes dense geometric motion cues with object-centric semantic priors, explicitly distinguishing static structures from dynamic distractors. These representations are then fused by an Iterative Multimodal Decoder, enabling coarse-to-fine pose refinement while dynamically suppressing attention on unreliable regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, without any target-domain fine-tuning, MVOFormer achieves superior zero-shot generalization and robustness, significantly outperforming prior learning-based frame-to-frame methods across diverse benchmarks including TartanAir, KITTI, TUM-RGBD, and ETH3D-SLAM.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

TensorKit.jl: A Julia package for large-scale tensor computations, with a hint of category theory

arXiv:2508.10076v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TensorKit$.$jl is a Julia-based software package for tensor computations, especially focusing on tensors with internal symmetries. This paper introduces the design philosophy, core functionalities, and distinctive features, including how to handle abelian, non-abelian, and anyonic symmetries through the ``TensorMap'' type. We highlight the software's flexibility, performance, and its capability to extend to new tensor types and symmetries, illustrating its practical applications through select case studies.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

ChronoID: Infusing Explicit Temporal Signals into Semantic IDs for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.14260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic IDs are crucial in generative recommendation, but with a fundamental limitation: temporal information is not well incorporated into semantic IDs. Instead, time influences recommendation only implicitly (e.g., through session construction heuristics, preference alignment, or sequence order), while existing semantic ID learning remains entirely time-agnostic. This design conflates interactions occurring under distinct temporal contexts into identical semantic representations, implicitly assuming that item semantics and user intent are temporally stationary. Such an assumption is misaligned with real-world recommendation scenarios, where evolving interaction rhythms play a central role. In this work, we investigate where and how the explicit time should be incorporated into semantic ID for generative recommendation. First, we systematically characterize the design space along three orthogonal dimensions of temporal signals and present a unified framework, ChronoID, for time-aware semantic ID learning. Then, by contributing a new time-explicit generation recommendation benchmark, ChronoID answers the questions: what is the effective way of infusing time, how to design the architecture, and where does the gain come from.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A polynomial-time approximation scheme for minimum-weight decoding of topological codes

arXiv:2606.18145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two-dimensional topological translationally invariant (2D TTI) stabilizer codes lie at the heart of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but using them requires solving the decoding problem. Minimum-weight decoding of these codes was recently shown to be NP-hard, even in basic settings, such as the color code with Pauli $Z$ errors and the toric code with Pauli $X$, $Y$ and $Z$ errors. Here, we prove that minimum-weight decoding of 2D TTI codes nonetheless admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS), i.e., for any constant $\varepsilon>0$, a recovery operator of weight within a multiplicative factor of $1+\varepsilon$ of the minimum can be found in polynomial time. Our approach builds on Arora's PTAS for Euclidean problems, such as the traveling salesman problem, and applies when decoding can be cast in terms of point-like excitations connected by string-like errors. It therefore extends beyond two dimensions, covering certain higher-dimensional topological codes and quantum memories, including the toric code with phenomenological or circuit-level noise.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Dressed Floquet scars from protected zero modes in a Rydberg chain

arXiv:2606.15605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this Letter, we present an approximate analytic construction of two zero quasienergy quantum many-body scars in a periodically driven model of Rydberg atoms on a ring, which persist over a range of driving amplitudes and frequencies for finite sizes. An index theorem protects an exponentially large number (in system size) of exact zero energy modes of the Floquet Hamiltonian in this setting. Unlike most of these zero modes which continuously change with drive parameters, these two quantum many-body scars retain the memory of particular states. They can be expressed as {\it dressed versions} of two contrasting states, the Rydberg vacuum and a unitarily rotated variant of a volume-law scar [Ivanov and Motrunich, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 134}, 050403 (2025)], respectively. We provide an analytic understanding of their existence using a Floquet perturbation theory and show their resilience beyond the perturbative regime using exact diagonalization in finite systems. Our study provides insight into the structure of protected zero modes in interacting Floquet settings.

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

ALAS: An Automatic Latent Alignment Score for Audio Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extended into Speech-LLMs, and the quality of the audio–text alignment they learn affects most downstream Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) behavior. Yet despite a growth of fusion strategies, there is no standard way to measure how well a Speech-LLM internally binds audio frames to text tokens. We introduce ALAS (Automatic Latent Alignment Score), a model and task-agnostic metric that probes the LLM's per-layer hidden states, scoring the cross-modal cosine similarity between audio and text representations against a Whisper-derived reference. ALAS needs only a frozen forward pass and an off-the-shelf ASR reference, with no training or fitted classifier, and is calibrated to an interpretable uniform baseline comparable across tasks. Applying ALAS to four open-source Speech-LLMs (AF3, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen-Omni, SALMONN) across emotion recognition (IEMOCAP), open-ended SQA (LibriSQA), and multi-choice audio understanding (MMAU-speech), we find that the depth and strength of alignment reflect each model's audio-encoder design and the acoustic-versus-semantic demands of the task, and that ALAS tracks but does not duplicate task accuracy, exposing models that score well without genuinely grounding in the audio. We release ALAS as an open-source library so that practitioners can probe their own Speech-LLMs or try it on new tasks.

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

Using Explainability as a Training-Time Reliability Signal for Efficient ECG Classification

arXiv:2606.12252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training deep neural networks for clinical time-series analysis is computationally demanding, yet many healthcare settings lack the resources required for repeated model development and deployment. This challenge is particularly evident in electrocardiogram classification, where large datasets and long training schedules make efficiency practically important. Progressive Data Dropout reduces training cost by excluding samples from gradient updates once they are learned, but it relies on model confidence and may retain samples that are difficult due to noise or ambiguity rather than useful signal. In this work, we introduce ERTS, an explainability-based reliability training signal for efficient ECG classification. ERTS uses explanation quality during training to distinguish between informative and unreliable uncertainty. Building on progressive data selection, we compute Grad-CAM attention maps for candidate samples and derive a focus score that measures whether model predictions are supported by coherent and localised patterns. Samples with low focus are filtered out, while those with meaningful attention are prioritised for gradient updates. We evaluate ERTS across three ECG datasets and multiple backbone architectures, showing consistent improvements in macro-F1 alongside reduced effective training cost. These results suggest that explanation quality can serve as a practical signal for improving both efficiency and reliability in clinical time-series learning. Code will be released.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The Almost Intelligent Revolution: Options for Scaling Up Deliberation and Empowering People with AI

Authors:

The increasing prominence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in public discourse presents both opportunities and challenges for democratic deliberation. While red teaming strategies help mitigate specific risks, broader concerns persist regarding linguistic constraints, biases, and the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs. This chapter explores how LLMs can be used to significantly scale up and democratise deliberation, particularly in fostering inclusivity and empowering traditionally marginalised groups. Drawing on concepts from Systemic-Functional Linguistics, the chapter examines how variations across language users (for example, with respect to socio-demographic groups) and across language use (for example, with respect to communicative functions) shape participation in AI-supported deliberation. The chapter presents AI-driven deliberation studies and assesses their potential to scaffold argumentation, enhance access, and reduce the influence of exclusionary linguistic norms and biases which are embedded in prestigious registers. At the same time, the chapter cautions against both overclaiming, which leads to unrealistic expectations, and underclaiming, which risks missed opportunities for AI-assisted engagement. The chapter concludes by identifying future research directions to maximise the democratic potential of AI-assisted participation while embedding ethical safeguards to counteract the reproduction of linguistic inequalities.

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

CineOrchestra: Unified Entity-Centric Conditioning for Cinematic Video Generation

Cinematic video depicts multiple subjects acting or interacting at specific moments, captured with deliberate camera movement, and stitched together by shot transitions. Together, these elements demand a level of fine-grained control beyond current text-to-video models. Existing work addresses each axis in isolation: multi-subject personalization, temporal control, multi-shot synthesis, or camera control; no prior framework jointly integrates all four. We present CineOrchestra, a unified video diffusion model that controls subjects, events, cameras, and shot transitions simultaneously. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous cinematic elements share a fundamental structure: each is an entity acting over a specific temporal interval, which can therefore all be expressed through one shared structure of entity-centric conditioning primitives, augmented with reference images for visual entities. This formulation reduces the architectural challenge to a single positional encoding problem, which we solve with two parameter-free coordinated rotary embeddings: (a) an interval-sampled temporal RoPE that yields consistent attention behavior across events of dramatically varying duration, and (b) a 2D entity-temporal cross-attention RoPE that disambiguates per-entity conditions and routes each to its corresponding spatiotemporal region. On two new benchmarks, CineOrchestra outperforms six per-axis specialists on dense caption following and shot-transition timing, with consistent gains in a pairwise user study and component ablations.

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

Comparing Commercial Depth Sensor Accuracy for Medical Applications

Depth estimation has numerous medical and surgical applications. We benchmark four depth sensors on a porcine bone specimen, a porcine belly specimen, and a silicone kidney phantom using stylus-sampled references. These objects contain several real-world challenges, including homogeneous surfaces, specular surfaces, and subsurface scattering. The comparison includes stereo, structured-light, and time-of-flight sensors at a distance of approximately 50 cm. Specifically, the Intel RealSense D405 (Intel RealSense, United States), PMD Flexx2 (pmdtechnologies, Germany), Stereolabs ZED 2i (Stereolabs, France), and Zivid 2M+ 60 (Zivid, Norway) are compared. The Zivid 2M+ 60 performed best across all objects and metrics considered in this work. The ZED ranked second for real tissue, but last on the phantom.

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

Dual Cross-Attention Siamese Transformer for Rectal Tumor Regrowth Assessment in Watch-and-Wait Endoscopy

Increasing evidence supports watch-and-wait (WW) surveillance for patients with rectal cancer who show clinical complete response (cCR) at restaging following total neoadjuvant treatment (TNT). However, accurate methods to early detect local regrowth (LR) from follow-up endoscopy images during WW are essential to manage care and prevent distant metastases. Hence, we developed a Siamese Swin Transformer with Dual Cross-Attention (SSDCA) to combine longitudinal endoscopic images at restaging and follow-up and distinguish cCR from LR. SSDCA leverages pretrained Swin Transformers to extract domain agnostic features and enhance robustness to imaging variations. Dual cross attention is implemented to emphasize features from the paired scans without requiring any spatial alignment to predict response. SSDCA as well as Swin-based baselines were trained using image pairs from 135 patients and evaluated on a held-out set of image pairs from 62 patients. SSDCA produced the best balanced accuracy (81.76% $\pm$ 0.04), sensitivity (90.07% $\pm$ 0.08), and specificity (72.86% $\pm$ 0.05). Robustness analysis showed stable performance irrespective of artifacts including blood, stool, telangiectasia, and poor image quality. UMAP clustering of extracted features showed maximal inter-cluster separation (1.45 $\pm$ 0.18) and minimal intra-cluster dispersion (1.07 $\pm$ 0.19) with SSDCA, confirming discriminative representation learning. Code and weights available at: https://github.com/Jotanator/SSDCA

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SICI: A Semantic-Pragmatic Complexity Index Reveals Regime Shifts in LLM Stance Detection

Prompt-based LLMs are increasingly used for stance detection, but harder examples are not always repaired by clearer instructions, reasoning prompts, retrieval, or debate. We introduce SICI (Stance Inference Complexity Index), a seven-dimensional diagnostic measure of the semantic-pragmatic burden imposed by a target–text pair. Across SemEval-2016 and VAST, SICI predicts LLM accuracy better than surface proxies and shows substantial cross-scorer reliability ($\alpha=0.771$). More importantly, LLM errors change regime as SICI increases: low-complexity examples invite over-attribution, especially Against predictions; intermediate examples form an unstable boundary; and high-complexity examples rapidly concentrate on None. This phase-transition-like structure persists across GPT-3.5, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3, and GPT-4o, although stronger models move the boundaries. A 15-method intervention study further shows that prompting, retrieval, and debate often shift models along the attribution–abstention axis rather than removing the high-complexity bottleneck.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Steady-state entanglement of spin qubits mediated by nonreciprocal and chiral magnons

arXiv:2509.13094v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid quantum system in which a magnet supporting non-reciprocal magnons, chiral magnons, or both mediates the dissipative and unidirectional coupling of spin qubits. By driving the qubits, the steady state of this qubit-qubit coupling scheme becomes the maximally entangled Bell state. We devise a protocol where the system converges to this entangled state and benchmark it including qubit decay and dephasing. The protocol is numerically tested on a hybrid system consisting of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers coupled to magnon surface modes of an yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film. We show that the dephasing time of the NV centers forms the bottleneck for achieving the entanglement of NV centers separated by a distance within the magnon coherence length. Our findings identify the key technological requirements and demonstrate a viable route toward steady-state entanglement of solid-state spins over distances of several microns using magnonic quantum networks, expanding the toolbox of magnonics for quantum information purposes.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Hardy and Cabello Arguments in Spatial and Temporal Frauchiger-Renner Scenarios

arXiv:2606.15467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate Hardy- and Cabello-type logical structures within spatial and temporal extensions of the Frauchiger–Renner (FR) framework, embedding these constructions directly into the FR multi-observer architecture. In the spatial multi-observer scenario, both Hardy and Cabello contradictions arise, with the Cabello construction yielding the stronger violation,$\(\Delta_Cabello^{\max}=0.1078\)$, which exceeds the maximal Hardy probability $\(P_{H}^{\max}=\frac{5\sqrt{5}-11}{2}\approx 0.09017\)$. We then develop a sequential temporal FR protocol based on coherent multi-observer measurements performed on a single spin-$\tfrac12$ system. In this temporal setting, the Hardy contradiction disappears identically due to dynamical constraints imposed by sequential state updates, whereas a finite Cabello-type violation survives, \(\Delta_Cabello^{\max}\approx 0.0674\). Our results establish a fundamental structural distinction between spatial entanglement and temporal multi-observer correlations in FR-type logical scenarios, and demonstrate that certain observer-independent description failures persist even without spacelike separation.

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

Heteroskedastic Signals in Budgeted LLM Verification: Structural Heterogeneity Limits Optimization Gains

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly use uncertainty signals to allocate limited computation across verification, test-time scaling, tool execution, and other selective-compute decisions. Such policies rely on a global signal comparability assumption: equal scores should carry comparable decision value across inputs. Using budgeted verification as a controlled diagnostic setting, we identify a failure mode of this assumption: uncertainty quality is heteroskedastic across cost strata, with some regions exhibiting near-random discriminability despite concentrating many errors. Under an explicit local model, we characterize the resulting distortion of global allocation and show that its upper bound scales with cross-stratum signal-quality dispersion. We separate weak signals, optimization instability, and structural heterogeneity through a controlled intervention hierarchy: Threshold, MP-Adapt, MP-Strat, and a deliberately simple cost-stratified thresholding intervention (CST). Across MBPP and MATH using Qwen3-8B, LLaMA3-8B, and GPT-4o-mini, global online adaptation yields inconsistent gains over static thresholding; MP-Strat partially recovers performance, while CST improves hit rate by up to 17 percentage points in strongly heterogeneous settings without gradient updates. These results identify structural heterogeneity, rather than optimizer weakness alone, as the primary bottleneck in the observed settings. More broadly, misaligned feedback structure cannot always be repaired by stronger optimization.

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

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.03108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

From Concept-Aligned Tokens to Vulnerable Features: Mechanistic Localization of Jailbreaks

Jailbreak attacks expose a persistent failure mode in safety-aligned LLMs: models can be pushed into harmful behavior, but the internal representations enabling this shift remain poorly localized. Recent mechanistic safety studies often explain such behavior through broad representational objects, including global refusal directions, activation steering vectors, and refusal-related SAE features. We instead ask whether jailbreak vulnerability can be traced to finer-grained, prompt-conditioned SAE feature subgroups. We introduce a token-driven mechanistic pipeline that decomposes the residual stream of Gemma-2-2B into Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features and identifies feature subgroups associated with unsafe behavior. Using single-category unsafe examples from BeaverTails to reduce cross-category interference, we extract harmful concepts from adversarial responses and align them with concept-relevant prompt tokens through subspace similarity. We then apply three feature-grouping strategies: cluster-based, hierarchical-linkage, and single-token-driven, to identify SAE feature subgroups across all 26 layers. Finally, we amplify the top features in each subgroup and evaluate the resulting generations with a standardized harmfulness judge. Single-token-driven grouping achieves harmfulness comparable to full cluster-based grouping, showing that individual harmful prompt tokens are sufficient to localize vulnerability-relevant SAE feature subgroups without relying on broader cluster-level aggregation. These subgroups appear across early and mid-to-late layers, with stronger concentration in mid-to-late layers, where targeted steering exposes specific model vulnerabilities. Overall, our results suggest that jailbreak susceptibility can be traced to sparse, token-localized SAE feature subgroups, complementing prior accounts based on broad adversarial, refusal, or steering directions.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Unified Framework for Structured Flow Modeling: From Representation to Verification and Model Discovery

Authors:

arXiv:2605.18250v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many dynamical systems can be described in terms of structured flows combining source/sink behavior, cyclic dynamics, and topology-constrained transport. These features arise across a wide range of physical, engineered, and data-driven systems. The objective of this work is to establish a unified perspective on such systems, to identify modeling approaches that balance expressivity, interpretability, computational complexity, and data requirements, and to investigate how highly expressive models can be used to uncover the dominant mechanisms underlying observed dynamics. Starting from the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition of continuous vector fields, we review the recently proposed Graph Vector Field (GVF) framework and its discrete representation on simplicial complexes. We then introduce a hierarchy of alternative approaches, including parametric conditional models, linear graph dynamical systems, and reduced Hodge representations. Finally, we propose a verification and validation methodology based on benchmark datasets from well-understood physical systems and on systematic model-reduction and ablation studies. The resulting family of structured-flow models within a common framework, ranging from low-dimensional parametric representations to full GVF formulations, supports a diagnostic methodology in which gradient, curl, harmonic, and topological contributions are systematically assessed through ablation studies. This process enables the identification of dominant mechanisms underlying the observed dynamics and guides the construction of simplified models tailored to the available data and operational constraints. By separating structural verification, behavioral verification, and domain-specific validation, the proposed approach provides a foundation for scalable and interpretable analysis of complex dynamical systems across multiple application domains.

25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

A new method for augmenting short time series, with application to pain events in sickle cell disease

Authors:

by Kumar Utkarsh, Nirmish R. Shah, Tanvi Banerjee, Daniel M. Abrams Researchers across different fields, including but not limited to ecology, biology, and healthcare, often face the challenge of sparse data. Such sparsity can lead to uncertainties, estimation difficulties, and potential biases in modeling. Here we introduce a novel data augmentation method that combines multiple sparse time series datasets when they share similar statistical properties, thereby improving parameter estimation and model selection reliability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through validation studies comparing Hawkes and Poisson processes, followed by application to subjective pain dynamics in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD), a condition affecting millions worldwide, particularly those of African, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Indian descent.