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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails

Authors:
Yuguang Zhou↗Xunguang Wang↗Pingchuan Ma↗Zhantong Xue↗Zhaoyu Wang↗Shuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.14517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents. However, we reveal that the very reasoning and task-following capabilities enabling this protection introduce a novel vulnerability: attackers can inject crafted data to trap the guardrail in extended reasoning loops, effectuating a systematic denial-of-service (DoS) attack. To systematically expose this threat, we design a beam-search optimization framework that crafts natural-language payloads to maximize guardrail reasoning length, utilizing an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank. Based on the observation of guardrail's schema-following nature, we also provide another attack framework driven by mechanism-aware structural mutations with less computational load. The attack efficacy is systematically evaluated in two parts. First, in standalone evaluations, the attack generalizes across diverse guardrail architectures, safety templates, and agent benchmarks. Payloads optimized on a single open-source surrogate successfully transfer to eight leading model backbones (e.g., Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen), achieving a 13–63$\times$ token amplification. Second, in end-to-end real-world agent deployments (web, desktop, code, and multi-agent systems), the attack reveals up to a 148$\times$ latency amplification. We show that a single poisoned document can saturate shared guardrail infrastructures, effectively starving co-located agents and paralyzing the entire system. By uncovering this availability flaw, our work underscores the urgent need to develop cost-bounded, reasoning-robust guardrails.

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03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Reference-guided immune recovery matching prioritizes traditional Chinese medicine ingredients

Authors:
Hu↗Xiao↗Chen↗C. Y.-C↗

Therapeutic prioritization from single-cell transcriptomes requires a target that is closer to treatment response than disease-signature reversal. In immune diseases, post-treatment recovery may follow patient- and cell-type-specific trajectories rather than a simple return along the pretreatment disease axis. We developed ImmuneNavi, a healthy-reference-anchored recovery-matching workflow for ranking traditional Chinese medicine ingredients from paired PBMC data. The workflow maps heterogeneous PBMC cohorts to a common healthy immune coordinate system, constructs patient-cell-type disease and recovery states, and processes ITCM treated-control profiles into a fixed ingredient perturbation bank. Patient and ingredient states are represented in matched gene, pathway and transcription-factor views, allowing the model to combine local transcriptional direction with more stable program-level features. A matcher trained on one paired treatment cohort preserved recovery-aligned ingredient rankings in independent PBMC cohorts without redefining the feature space, candidate set or preprocessing procedure. This provides a reusable transcriptomic pipeline for moving from paired immune-state measurements to prioritized natural-product candidates for experimental follow-up.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Trainable Quantum Channels as Computational Primitives for Quantum Learning

Authors:
Jingwei Wen↗Ling Qian↗Shijie Wei↗Guilu Long↗

arXiv:2606.15808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum learning is traditionally constrained to unitary dynamics, often treating quantum channels as detrimental noise. In this work, we reformulate the quantum channels as trainable computational primitives and establish a non-unitary quantum machine learning framework grounded in open-system dynamics. We demonstrate that the outputs of channel-enhanced quantum models form a structured superposition of multiple functional components. Each component is governed by an effective observable whose spectrum can be adaptively modulated during training, a significant departure from the spectral invariance in unitary transformations. Moreover, the proposed framework generalizes conventional unitary quantum models by retaining them as a special case while introducing additional non-unitary degrees of freedom. Furthermore, we reveal that trainable quantum channels enrich the optimization geometry through ensemble-averaged gradient and additional optimization directions induced by the Kraus operators. Empirical evaluations on classification tasks using trainable amplitude-damping and phase-damping channels confirm enhanced optimization dynamics and predictive performance. Our work provides a principled approach for leveraging quantum channels as trainable resources and advances the design of high-performance quantum learning architectures.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

The Benchmark Illusion: Pruned LLMs Can Pass Multiple Choice but Fail to Answer

Authors:
Rui Wen↗Lu Sun↗Jiayang Liu↗Zesheng Xu↗Tianshuo Cong↗Zheng Li↗

Compressing large language models reduces memory use and inference cost, but it can also create failures that standard benchmarks miss. A pruned model may still perform well on multiple-choice evaluations, yet fail to answer the same question in open generation. We ask what pruning changes: does it erase the correct answer, or does it make the answer harder to produce as the top output? We study this question with multilingual question answering, tracking the same questions before and after pruning. We find a benchmark illusion. Under high-sparsity pruning, especially Wanda, models often fail in greedy open generation while still selecting the correct answer under multiple-choice scoring. In these recognition-only errors, the answer is usually not gone, but demoted: it often reappears with beam search, sampling, or one in-context example. Overall, multiple-choice benchmarks can overstate the usability of compressed LLMs, creating an evaluation blind spot. Compressed models should be tested on what they can produce, not only on what they can recognize.

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

Diffuse AI Control on Fuzzy Tasks

Authors:
Mikhail Terekhov↗Caglar Gulcehre↗Vivek Hebbar↗Joe Benton↗

arXiv:2606.08892v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI models deployed in critical domains, such as AI safety research, may subtly sabotage our efforts due to misalignment. Diffuse AI Control is a subfield of AI safety concerned with mitigating risks from AI sabotage distributed over long deployment horizons (diffuse threats). These risks are particularly pernicious on fuzzy tasks, i.e. tasks which are hard to grade or require intuition. To understand diffuse threats on fuzzy tasks, we introduce a framework that considers AI control as an adversarial game between a blue team and a red team. The blue team uses a weak trusted model to construct a weak score against which they would train a strong, potentially subversive model to remove the subversion propensity if it were present. The red team then tries to find model behaviors that are rated highly by the weak score, and thus might not be trained out, but actually correspond to poor performance. We test our framework on the task of writing experimental proposals for research questions from recent ML papers. We use a language model with access to the original paper as a proxy "ground-truth" scorer. Our red team discovers subversive behaviors using multi-objective evolutionary prompt optimization. We show that Opus~4.6 can write proposals that are worse according to the ground truth proxy than those of GPT-OSS-20B, while the weak scorer rates them as highly as the best proposals from Opus 4.6. We then propose an adversarial optimization algorithm for the blue team that discovers more robust prompts for the weak model. This algorithm produces a blue team prompt that our red team optimization fails to exploit.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory

Authors:
Zhexiao Xiong↗Yizhi Song↗Hao Kang↗Qing Yan↗Liming Jiang↗Jenson Yang↗Zhoujie Fu↗Stathi Fotiadis↗Angtian Wang↗Zichuan Liu↗Bo Liu↗Yiding Yang↗…

Interactive world models aim to simulate environment dynamics under real-time user actions. However, their action vocabulary is largely confined to navigation: most actions correspond to motion (e.g., walk, turn, look around), while interaction with objects in the scene (e.g., pick up plates, open doors, or trigger physical responses) is either absent, restricted to game domains, or relegated to prompt-to-full-video scenarios. The resulting worlds are visually explorable but not truly actionable. In this work, we present ActWorld, an interactive world model that extends prior navigation-centric generators to support mid-rollout object interaction within a chunk-autoregressive framework. We argue that the navigation-interaction gap stems from two bottlenecks. First, a data bottleneck: the lack of human-object interaction data with accurate, dense labels. Second, a memory bottleneck: recency-biased history compression in existing world models discards the event-transition frames that causally determine subsequent object states, leading to an action-forgetting pathology. On the data side, we construct a 100K interaction video dataset, each annotated with per-chunk captions via chain-of-thought reasoning. On the model side, we introduce a hierarchical action-aware memory design that routes history compression by interaction importance, complemented by a persistent memory bank that maintains event-update and object-identity tokens across long rollouts. Experiments show that ActWorld supports both flexible navigation and rich object interaction within a single model, substantially improving interaction fidelity over navigation-only baselines without sacrificing viewpoint control. Project page is available at https://interactwm.github.io/ActWorld.

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

S23DR 2026: End-to-End 3D Wireframe Prediction via DETR-Style Set Prediction with Contrastive Denoising

Authors:
Nitiz Khanal↗

We present WireframeDETR, our submission to the Structured Semantic 3D Reconstruction (S23DR) 2026 Challenge, which requires predicting a 3D building wireframe from multi-view COLMAP point clouds. Our method applies DETR-style set prediction directly to 3D point clouds, producing wireframes as sets of edge coordinate pairs without any intermediate vertex detection stage. We introduce three technical contributions: (1) contrastive denoising training that stabilises noisy Hungarian matching in early epochs; (2) a multi-scale encoder that aggregates the last encoder layer outputs via learned scalar weights; and (3) progressive auxiliary loss weighting that concentrates gradient signal on the decoder layers that most benefit from it. Our model achieves a public test HSS of 0.575 (F1~=~0.664, IoU~=~0.516) and a best validation HSS of 0.534 on the cleaned val split.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Physics-Inspired Optimizer: Velocity Regularized Adam

Authors:
Pranav Vaidhyanathan↗Lucas Schorling↗Natalia Ares↗Maike Osborne↗

arXiv:2505.13196v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Velocity-Regularized Adam (VRAdam), a physics-inspired optimizer for training deep neural networks that draws on ideas from quartic terms for kinetic energy with its stabilizing effects on various system dynamics. Previous algorithms, including the ubiquitous Adam, operate at the so-called adaptive edge of stability regime during training, leading to rapid oscillations and slowed convergence of loss. However, VRAdam adds a higher order penalty on the learning rate based on the velocity such that the algorithm automatically slows down whenever weight updates become large. In practice, we observe that the effective dynamic learning rate shrinks in high-velocity regimes, and damping oscillations. By combining this velocity-based regularizer for global damping with per-parameter scaling of Adam, we create a powerful hybrid optimizer. For this optimizer, we provide rigorous theoretical analysis of operation at the edge of stability from a physical and control perspective for the momentum. Furthermore, we derive convergence bounds with the rate $\mathcal{O}(\ln(N)/\sqrt{N})$ for a stochastic non convex objective under mild assumptions. We demonstrate that VRAdam exceeds the performance against standard optimizers including AdamW. We benchmark various tasks such as image classification, language modeling, and generative modeling using diverse architectures and training methodologies including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Transformers, and GFlowNets.

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

Pixels to Proofs: Probabilistically-Safe Latent World Model Control via Parallel Conformal Robust MPC

Authors:
Devesh Nath↗Anutam Srinivasan↗Haoran Yin↗Ruitong Jiang↗Jeffrey Fang↗Glen Chou↗

We present SLS^2, a framework for safe feedback motion planning from pixels using robust model predictive control (MPC) in learned latent world models. Our approach trains an action-conditioned joint-embedding world model with compact Markovian latent states, enabling efficient gradient-based trajectory optimization through learned latent dynamics. To enforce safety for the true system despite imperfect latent predictions, we inform a GPU-accelerated system level synthesis (SLS) robust MPC scheme with conformal prediction to obtain calibrated latent error bounds and robust latent-space constraint sets. We further learn and conformalize a latent constraint checker, allowing the SLS planner to impose probabilistic safety constraints during closed-loop execution. We evaluate our method on vision-based control tasks, where it improves both goal-reaching performance and safety over latent world-model and safe-planning baselines.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging

Authors:
Zhuoran Li↗Rui Xu↗Jian Yang↗Junnan Liu↗Zhijun Chen↗Qianren Mao↗Hongcheng Guo↗Jiaheng Liu↗Likang Xiao↗Ming Li↗Xiaojie Wang↗

Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

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

Data-Centric Benchmarking of Exploit Generation in LLMs: Understanding the Impact of Fine-Tuning

Authors:
Yiwei Chen↗Lichi Li↗Kai Cheung↗Vinny Parla↗Ganesh Sundaram↗

arXiv:2606.15123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the task of CVE-conditioned exploit generation, where a model drafts proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits given software vulnerability context. We adopt a data-centric approach, constructing a high-quality dataset via multi-stage preprocessing and introducing a scalable evaluation framework with LLM-as-judge and fine-grained rubrics. Under this unified setup, we benchmark 17 large language models across 8 evaluation criteria, providing systematic insights into their zero-shot capabilities. We further show that a compact 8B open-weight model, when fine-tuned on curated data, achieves over 42.5% improvement in exploit quality and rivals some proprietary models when combined with simple test-time rejection strategies. Our results highlight the importance of data quality, structured supervision, and evaluation design for reliable exploit generation, suggesting that these factors can be as critical as model scale in adapting LLMs to cybersecurity tasks.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reconstructing Template-Memorized Images from Natural Prompts

Authors:
Sol Yarkoni↗Mahmood Sharif↗Roi Livni↗

arXiv:2507.07947v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative models, such as diffusion models, have raised concerns related to privacy, copyright infringement, and data stewardship. To better understand and control these risks, prior work has introduced techniques and attacks that reconstruct images, or parts of images, from training data. While these results demonstrate that training data can be recovered, existing methods often rely on high computational resources, partial access to the training set, or carefully engineered prompts. In this work, we present a new attack that requires low resources, assumes little to no access to the training data, and identifies seemingly benign prompts that can lead to potentially risky image reconstruction. We further show that such reconstructions may occur unintentionally, even for users without specialized knowledge. For example, we observe that for one existing model, the prompt ``blue Unisex T-Shirt'' generates the face of a real individual. Moreover, by combining the identified vulnerabilities with real-world prompt data, we discover prompts that reproduce memorized visual elements. Our approach builds on insights from prior work and leverages domain knowledge to expose a fundamental vulnerability arising from the use of scraped e-commerce data, where templated layouts and images are closely tied to pattern-like textual prompts. The code for our attack is publicly available at https://github.com/TheSolY/lr-tmi.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

Authors:
Zhao-Heng Yin↗Guanya Shi↗Pieter Abbeel↗C. Karen Liu↗

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (

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

E-MRL: Cross-view Aligned Evidence-driven Multimodal Reinforcement Learning for Reliable 3D Tumor Analysis

Authors:
Sijing Li↗Zhongwei Qiu↗Zhuoya Wang↗Boxiang Yun↗Zhenyu Yi↗Jianwei Xu↗Wenqiao Zhang↗Yingda Xia↗Ling Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.23888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show great promise in volumetric medical report generation, they frequently suffer from visual hallucinations and a lack of grounding in 3D CT data. Current Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategies typically optimize text fidelity alone, essentially rewarding correct diagnoses derived from language priors rather than genuine visual perception. To address this, we propose cross-view aligned Evidence-driven Multimodal Reinforcement Learning (Evidence-MRL, noted as E-MRL), a reliable RL reasoning framework that formulates the generation process as a Markov Decision Process of "diagnosis-localization-verification". Unlike standard approaches, our model is explicitly trained to identify a "key evidence slice" alongside the global diagnostic report, grounding its findings in verifiable visual evidence. Crucially, we introduce a novel cross-view consistency reward, which validates the semantic alignment between the golden-standard report and a local visual re-query of the selected key slice, providing additional rewards for correctly-localized reasoning. Experiments on large-scale 3D CT tumor datasets demonstrate that E-MRL significantly reduces hallucinations and improves diagnostic accuracy compared to SFT and RL baselines, offering a clinically interpretable solution for visually-grounded and tumor analysis.

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

Constrained Variable Projection for Structured Problems

Authors:
Emanuele Zangrando↗Sara Venturini↗Francesco Rinaldi↗Francesco Tudisco↗

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

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

Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

Authors:
Yuxuan Chen↗Haoyuan Yu↗Peize He↗

Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equalization cancellation baseline and a GCC PHAT positive control we evaluate nine frozen audio models spanning binaural SSL, monaural SSL, and neural audio codecs. Four monaural negative controls yield zero BMLD confirming binaural specificity. Two general purpose binaural SSL models exhibit minimal phase sensitivity while dedicated binaural spatial SSL models achieve BMLD comparable to the analytical baseline. Progressive physical ablations show that general purpose binaural SSL models rely on spectro temporal interference textures rather than cross channel phase computation. High detection rates in speech reflect a confounding reliance on broadband envelopes rather than genuine phase encoding.

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

HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers

Authors:
Guozhen Zhang↗Xuerui Qiu↗Yutao Cui↗Tianhui Song↗Changlin Li↗Junzhe Li↗Tao Huang↗Xiao Zhang↗Yang Li↗Jianbing Wu↗Miles Yang↗Zhao Zhong↗…

Holistic visual tokenizers are fundamental to unified multimodal models (UMMs) as they map diverse visual inputs into a unified representation space. In this paper, we present HYDRA-X, the first UMM that unifies image and video tokenization within a single Vision Transformer (ViT). Our design is driven by two core challenges: efficiently injecting spatiotemporal reconstruction capability into a native ViT, and embedding image- and video-level semantic awareness into the latent space. To address the first, comprehensive ablations reveal two key findings: (1) frame-level causal temporal attention suffices for visual reconstruction, whereas full spatiotemporal attention degrades it; and (2) hierarchical temporal compression substantially outperforms single-step alternatives. To tackle the second, we propose a lightweight decompressor that upsamples temporally compressed features under joint image-video teacher supervision, thereby enforcing complementary semantic structures within the compact latent space. Building on this holistic tokenizer, we further propose a principled improvement of the editing pipeline: source-target interaction should occur at the latent level inside the tokenizer rather than at the semantic level inside the LLM, substantially improving editing consistency and accelerating convergence. Instantiated at the 7B dense model, HYDRA-X achieves strong performance across image and video understanding and generation tasks, paving the way for future unified-tokenizer UMMs.

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

Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Omar Adalat↗Edwin Hamel-De le Court↗Francesco Belardinelli↗

arXiv:2606.14130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $\phi$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $\phi$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Predictive Analytics in E-Commerce for CustomerBehavior Forecasting using hybrid Ret-DNN withXGBoost Model

Authors:
Degala Pushpa Sri↗Mayank Atreya↗Lakshmi. H↗Navin Chhibber↗Mukesh Soni↗

arXiv:2606.17931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, electronic (E) commerce services have rapidly increased in the daily lives of people, which helpsthem to purchase products online. However, retail platforms have struggled to understand customer behavior and make it difficult to predict their future purchases. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid Retail Deep NeuralNetwork (Ret-DNN) with an Extreme Gradient Boosting(XGBoost) model for capturing temporal features and tabular dynamics of retail data. First, data were sourced from a UnitedKingdom (UK)-based online retailer that contains transactions with almost 500,000 records. Then, the collected data were pre-processed using a series of techniques, such as data cleaning, outlier handling, temporal feature extraction, feature encoding, and z-score normalization, to ensure that the data were ready for model training and testing. Subsequently, the preprocessed data were fed into the Ret-DNN model, which acts as a feature extractor to understand the complete context of customer transactions. Further, the extracted data were fed as input into the XGBoost model, which predicted the final output as the purchase probability of customers. Finally, the proposed Ret-DNN XGBoost model achieved better results by attaining aMean Absolute Error (MAE) 0.2193 when compared to the existing Ret-DNN model. Keywords: Customer behavior forecasting, extreme gradientboosting, electronic commerce, predictive analytic, retail deepneural networks.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OmniOPD: Logit-Free On-Policy Distillation via Speculative Verification

Authors:
Yuhang Zhou↗Lizhu Zhang↗Yifan Wu↗Mingyi Wang↗Bo Peng↗Jiayi Liu↗Xiangjun Fan↗Zhuokai Zhao↗

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own generative trajectories under dense token-level feedback from a stronger teacher, mitigating both the off-policy distribution shift of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and the sparse credit assignment of Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, standard OPD faces two coupled limitations. First, it requires direct access to the teacher's token-level logits, excluding a broad class of capable proprietary models from serving as teachers. Second, the token-level logit signal itself is brittle, depending on a narrow overlap of plausible next tokens between teacher and student, and prone to amplifying degenerate patterns such as repetition loops. In this paper, we introduce OmniOPD, a novel framework that addresses both limitations through a logit-free, chunk-level supervision signal. OmniOPD replaces deterministic logit matching with Monte Carlo rollouts that approximate the teacher's local preferences through a continuous semantic similarity metric over multi-token chunks, and concentrates this supervision via a peak-entropy scheduler that audits the student only at its high-uncertainty reasoning forks. A Dirichlet-Multinomial Bayesian prior and a base-model KL anchor further bound the variance of discrete sampling and prevent policy collapse across unaudited tokens. Across competitive benchmarks, OmniOPD surpasses the standard OPD approach by up to +28.64% on math, confirming that chunk-level semantic verification extracts a more reliable learning signal than token-level logit matching, whose high information density is offset by significant noise and brittleness. Furthermore, when paired with stronger black-box teachers such as Claude-4.5-Haiku and Gemini-2.5-Flash, OmniOPD achieves an additional +9.54% relative on math over its open-weight teacher counterpart, advancing the student past the performance of self-exploratory RL.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Fine-Tuning a 7B Advisor on Free-Tier GPUs: An Adapter-Handoff Recipe and a Synthetic-Data Reliability Caution

Authors:
Md Millat Hosen↗

arXiv:2504.15610v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning a 7B language model for specialized advising is attractive in resource-constrained settings, but multi-epoch runs routinely exceed the wall-clock limits of the free-tier GPUs (Kaggle, Colab) such users rely on. We report two things. First, a practical recipe: a three-epoch QLoRA fine-tune of Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (4-bit NF4, LoRA rank 16, via Unsloth) completed across two free-tier 16 GB GPUs (Tesla P100 then T4) by checkpointing only the small LoRA adapter (41.9M parameters) and resuming on the second machine. Adapter-only handoff is sufficient – optimizer and scheduler state need not be transferred – so the binding constraint is per-step VRAM and per-session wall-clock, not aggregate compute. Second, and more importantly, an honest evaluation that returns a cautionary result. On a blind held-out comparison against the un-fine-tuned base model, the fine-tuned model scored higher on similarity to the synthetic training distribution (BERTScore F1 +0.063, a fidelity not quality signal) but lower on advising quality: a blind LLM-as-judge preferred the base model on 46% of prompts versus 18%, and a source-verified factuality audit found four confident errors from the fine-tuned model on policy-sensitive topics against zero for the base. Auditing the training data with the same method, we find this is not a fine-tuning artifact: each audited error is already present in the Gemini-generated training answers, and a random-sample audit finds verifiable errors in a sizable fraction of responses (28-40%; single-judge, n=40). The data is therefore sufficient to account for the errors, which we attribute to the synthetic-data pipeline rather than the adapter-handoff method. We release the dataset, adapter, cross-GPU notebooks, and full evaluation harness so every result reproduces on a single 16 GB GPU.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Bimanual Robot Manipulation via Multi-Agent In-Context Learning

Authors:
Alessio Palma↗Indro Spinelli↗Vignesh Prasad↗Luca Scofano↗Yufeng Jin↗Georgia Chalvatzaki↗Fabio Galasso↗

arXiv:2604.20348v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control. In particular, In-Context Learning (ICL) enables off-the-shelf, text-only LLMs to predict robot actions without any task-specific training while preserving their generalization capabilities. Applying ICL to bimanual manipulation remains challenging as the high-dimensional joint action space and tight inter-arm coordination constraints rapidly overwhelm standard context windows. To address this, we introduce BiCICLe (Bimanual Coordinated In-Context Learning), the first framework that enables standard LLMs to perform few-shot bimanual manipulation without fine-tuning. BiCICLe frames bimanual control as a multi-agent leader-follower problem, decoupling the action space into sequential, conditioned single-arm predictions. Evaluated on 13 tasks from the TWIN benchmark, BiCICLe achieves 70.5% average success rate, outperforming the best training-free baseline by 6.1 percentage points and surpassing most supervised methods. We also demonstrate superior real-world performance on 3 tasks without hardware-specific retraining.

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

A Low-Rank Subspace Analysis of LLM Interventions

Authors:
Angira Sharma↗Christian Schroeder de Witt↗Philip Torr↗Anisoara Calinescu↗Jialin Yu↗

arXiv:2606.14388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interventions designed to modify a particular behavior in LLMs, such as refusal or sycophancy, often produce unintended changes in other behaviors. This lack of targeted control makes it difficult to design and implement reliable safety controls. To understand these side-effects, we introduce a diagnostic framework for analyzing interacting behaviors in LLMs. We model behaviors as low-rank subspaces in activation space, and study how interventions influence across behaviors. Across multiple instruction-tuned models (7B-70B) and across refusal, jailbreak, and sycophancy settings, we find that different behaviors share internal representations, and intervening on one behavior alters others in asymmetric ways. Some behaviors act as upstream control points whose interventions propagate broadly across other behaviors, while others remain more isolated. We relate these effects to two geometric quantities: (i) the overlap between behavior subspaces, measured as the average squared cosine of principal angles, and (ii) the angle between each behavior subspace and the decision subspace (capturing the model's final decision e.g., refuse vs. comply). Empirically, intervention effects on other behaviors tend to be larger for behavior pairs with higher subspace overlap, and for source behaviors whose subspaces lie closer (smaller angle) to the decision subspace. These findings highlight a challenge for targeted behavior control: behaviors are difficult to modify independently, as interventions can propagate through shared representations and asymmetric interactions.

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25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Symplectic coherence: a measure of position-momentum correlations in quantum states

Authors:
Varun Upreti↗Ulysse Chabaud↗

arXiv:2507.15738v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The interdependence of position and momentum, as highlighted by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, is a cornerstone of quantum physics. Yet, position-momentum correlations have received little systematic attention. Motivated by recent developments in bosonic quantum physics that underscore their relevance in quantum thermodynamics, metrology, and computing, we establish a general framework to study and quantify position-momentum correlations in quantum states. We introduce symplectic coherence, a faithful and easily computable measure defined as the Frobenius norm of the block of the covariance matrix encoding position-momentum correlations, and demonstrate that symplectic coherence is monotone under relevant operations and robust under small perturbations. Furthermore, using a recent mapping by Barthe et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 070604) which relates the covariance matrix of a bosonic state to the density matrix of a finite-dimensional system, we show that position-momentum correlations correspond to beyond-classical correlations in a virtual finite-dimensional quantum state, with symplectic coherence mapping naturally to geometric quantum discord. Taking energy constraints into account, we determine the maximal position-momentum correlations achievable at fixed energy, revealing structural insights about the corresponding optimal states. Finally, we illustrate the operational relevance of symplectic coherence through several examples in quantum information tasks and quantum thermodynamics. In the process, we establish new technical results on matrix norms and quantum covariance matrices, and demonstrate the conceptual significance of viewing covariance matrices as density matrices of virtual quantum states.

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