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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Spatial distribution of the proteome in the human body and in cancers

Authors:

A detailed, spatially resolved quantitative map of the human proteome is essential for a deeper understanding of human biology and disease1–4. Here we present a comprehensive human proteomic landscape, generated by profiling more than 13,000 proteins across 2,856 samples using data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry. The dataset spans 58 major tissue types, 251 specific tissue subtypes and 25 distinct carcinomas. This resource enables the depiction of spatially resolved proteome trajectories across tissue types and physiological states, including fetal, tumour, adjacent non-tumour and healthy adult tissue, thereby providing insight into both developmental processes and oncogenic progression. Furthermore, quantitative proteomics comparisons across diverse tissue types and states facilitate the indication of organ-specific toxicity, the identification of repurposable anticancer drug candidates and the prioritization of therapeutic targets for cancers. This study establishes a quantitative resource for navigating the proteome in the human body and in common cancers. A spatially resolved map of the human proteome across a variety of healthy tissues and cancers provides wide-ranging insights in developmental biology and oncology, and could aid the identification of therapeutic targets and development of treatments for cancer.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

On the Position Bias of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves the learning efficiency of standard reinforcement learning through dense, token-level supervision from teachers. In the standard KL objective of OPD, token-level losses are uniformly averaged, implying equal weights for all tokens. However, we discover that not all tokens are created equal: as student rollouts grow longer, they deviate further from the teacher's distribution, leading to degraded supervision quality at later positions. As a result, OPD using only the first 30% of tokens can perform comparably to using all tokens, whereas OPD using only the last 30% of tokens barely learns anything. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of this issue through the lens of constrained optimization. Based on these insights, we derive Importance-Weighted On-Policy Distillation (IW-OPD), in which the weight assigned to each token depends on the accumulated discrepancy between the student's and teacher's distributions, naturally upweighting earlier tokens and downweighting later ones with larger deviations. We show that IW-OPD converges significantly faster than OPD, with better learning efficiency, and achieves better final performance than standard OPD in both same-size and cross-scale settings, improving performance up to 6.9 points on AIME-2025.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Exploring Multi-Modal Large Language Models and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Fashion Image Retrieval

Composed image retrieval retrieves a target image using a composed query of a reference image and a modified text description. In the fashion domain, this task requires understanding subtle attribute variations such as color, pattern, and texture. However, existing approaches face limitations due to scarce annotated data and simplistic negative sampling. We propose a novel framework that integrates a multi-modal large language model (LLaVA) to generate attribute-aware triplets and introduces a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance contrastive learning. We leverage pretrained vision-language models, such as CLIP-ViT/B32, to generate and concatenate sentence-level prompts with the relative caption and to scale the number of negatives using static representations. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced compositional reasoning and improved fine-grained retrieval behavior, underscoring the feasibility and potential of the proposed framework for fashion retrieval.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Accuracy and Satisfaction in Multi-Turn LLM Dialogues for NFR Assessment

arXiv:2606.24834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based dialogue assistants have become mainstream tools for software developers, yet current evaluation benchmarks focus exclusively on functional correctness. This leaves a critical gap in assessing the quality and accuracy of these conversations when handling Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), which are inherently vague, context-dependent, and involve many parts of a program. Evaluating how well these systems support collaborative reasoning about NFRs requires methods that go beyond single-turn accuracy to capture both the correctness of the system's outputs and the quality of the multi-turn interaction. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy and quality of multi-turn conversations between developers and an LLM-based agent in the domain of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulatory compliance. We hired 49 programmers to interact with GitHub Copilot to assess 148 HIPAA-derived NFRs against the iTrust codebase, a system designed to comply with HIPAA regulations, across three dimensions: requirement satisfaction level, reasoning, and code localization. We find that developers tend to agree with LLM assessments, but accuracy against expert ground truth is low. We model user satisfaction and find that longer system responses and more information-providing turns negatively affect user satisfaction, whereas proactive interactions positively affect it. Our findings provide insights for designing LLM-based dialogue systems that support NFR assessment.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SpikeDecoder: Realizing the GPT Architecture with Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.12287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Transformer architecture is widely regarded as the most powerful tool for natural language processing, but due to a high number of complex operations, it inherently faces the issue of high energy consumption. To address this issue, we consider Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which are an energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their naturally event-driven approach to processing information. However, this inherently makes them difficult to train. Often, many SNN-based models circumvent this issue by converting pre-trained ANNs. More recently, attempts have been made to design directly trainable SNN-based adaptations of the Transformer model structure. Although the results showed great promise, the application field was computer vision. Moreover, the proposed model incorporates only encoder blocks. In this paper, we propose SpikeDecoder, a fully SNN-based implementation of the Transformer decoder block, for applications in natural language processing. In a series of experiments, we analyze the impact of exchanging different blocks of the ANN model with spike-based alternatives to identify trade-offs and significant sources of performance loss. We further investigate the role of residual connections and the selection of SNN-compatible normalization techniques. Besides the work on the model architecture, we formulate and compare different embedding methods to project text data into spikes. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based decoder block reduces the theoretical energy consumption by 87% to 93% compared to the ANN baseline.

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

CoAgent: Concurrency Control for Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.15376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems – coding agents, devops agents, document agents – now routinely run several agents in parallel against the same git tree, Kubernetes cluster, or document. As soon as two of them mutate shared state, they enter the regime classical concurrency control has studied for decades, but classical mechanisms fit LLM agents poorly. A single agent transaction spans minutes of inference, read sets are broad and opaque rather than statically inferable, and the live state agents act on admits neither fork nor buffer, so writes take effect the moment they execute. Locks block long inference intervals; OCC abort-and-retry discards minutes of work on every conflict. This paper builds concurrency control on a capability classical transactions lack: the LLM inside each agent can judge whether a conflicting write invalidates its plan, and can repair exactly the operations that depended on it. Control therefore turns advisory: the runtime informs, the agent repairs. Our protocol, MTPO (Monotonic Trajectory Pre-Order), fixes a serialization order at launch, serves each read the order-filtered value, and applies writes speculatively in place; a one-way notification asks an affected reader to re-judge and patch its plan, while the framework mechanically undoes and reorders misplaced writes through the saga-style inverse each tool registers in advance. At quiescence the run is serializable in the pre-decided order. We realize MTPO as CoAgent, toolcall middleware whose privileged ToolSmith grows footprint-declared, undoable tools online. On ten contended workloads, CoAgent stays within 5\% of serial correctness at a $1.4\times$ speedup and near-serial token cost, where 2PL and OCC surrender nearly all concurrency gains; on a bash-only target system, it grows a 25-tool library online and lifts the task pass rate from 45/71 to 63/71 at $0.80\times$ the time and $0.86\times$ the cost.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Counterfeit Answers: Adversarial Forgery against OCR-Free Document Visual Question Answering

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) enables end-to-end reasoning grounded on information present in a document input. While recent models have shown impressive capabilities, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this work, we introduce a novel attack scenario that aims to forge document content in a visually imperceptible yet semantically targeted manner, allowing an adversary to induce specific or generally incorrect answers from a DocVQA model. We develop specialized attack algorithms that can produce adversarially forged documents tailored to different attackers' goals, ranging from targeted misinformation to systematic model failure scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach against two end-to-end state-of-the-art models: Pix2Struct, a vision-language transformer that jointly processes image and text through sequence-to-sequence modeling, and Donut, a transformer-based model that directly extracts text and answers questions from document images. Our findings highlight critical vulnerabilities in current DocVQA systems and call for the development of more robust defenses. We release our open source code at https://github.com/pralab/adv-docVQA.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Physics-Informed Fourier-Wavelet Transformer for Multiscale Computational Fluid Dynamics Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.24696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed surrogate models can accelerate computational fluid dynamics simulations. However, many existing methods reproduce global flow patterns more reliably than localized multiscale structures. This study presents a physics-informed Fourier-wavelet transformer for next-step velocity-field reconstruction in real-world flow benchmarks. The proposed formulation combines hybrid Fourier-wavelet spectral encoding with physics-biased self-attention based on partial differential equation residual diagnostics. It also uses self-supervised pretraining through Masked Physics Prediction and Equation Consistency Prediction. The experiments are conducted on two real benchmark cases: cylinder-wake flow and fluid-structure interaction. All approaches are evaluated under a shared local protocol and compared with spectral, transformer-based, operator-learning, and physics-informed neural-network baselines. On the cylinder-wake benchmark, the proposed model achieves the best aggregate accuracy, with an all-channel normalized mean-squared error of 0.05875 and an all-channel Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.97019. On the fluid-structure-interaction benchmark, it gives the lowest all-channel normalized mean-squared error of $2.70 \times 10^{-4}$, compared with $4.02 \times 10^{-4}$ for the strongest baseline. Component-wise field comparisons and scale-separated diagnostics further show stronger recovery of localized wake structures, including near-body, wake-core, and far-wake features. The results demonstrate improved real-world flow reconstruction while maintaining a practical accuracy-cost tradeoff.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Two Blood-based Endotypes Reveal Divergent Clinical Outcomes of Fibrotic Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis

Rationale: Fibrotic hypersensitivity pneumonitis (fHP) is an antigen-driven, life-threatening interstitial lung disease characterized by heterogeneous radiologic features, clinical outcomes, and treatment responses. Objectives: To identify blood-based fHP endotypes that inform mechanism, prognosis and therapeutic response. Methods: We performed integrative analyses of multi-compartment transcriptomic data derived from whole blood, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, bronchoalveolar lavage, and surgical lung biopsies, alongside circulating plasma proteomics. Multiple clustering algorithms were cross-compared to ensure robustness and reproducibility of endotypes identification. Immune cell composition was inferred using bulk RNA-seq deconvolution and annotated with BAL single-cell RNA-seq. Pathway activities were characterized using Gene Set Enrichment Analysis. Transplant-free survival (TFS) was evaluated for endotype and corticosteroid exposure by Kaplan-Meier methods, with hazard ratios analyzed using multivariable Cox proportional hazards models. Results: Two molecular endotypes, lymphocytic-associated (L-fHP) and non-lymphocytic-associated (N-fHP), were identified and validated. L-fHP showed enrichment of adaptive immune signaling and lymphocyte predominance, whereas N-fHP demonstrated myeloid-cell activation with neutrophil and macrophage predominance. Corticosteroid exposure was associated with worse TFS in L-fHP but not in N-fHP after adjusting for age, sex, and baseline pulmonary function. Compared to L-fHP, N-fHP had poorer baseline pulmonary function, faster 12-month FVC decline, and shorter TFS. N-fHP also exhibited elevated neutrophil-associated markers, including matrix metalloproteinase-9, across paired transcriptomic and proteomic datasets, supporting a neutrophil-driven, cross-compartment disease process. Conclusion: Multi-omic, multi-compartment analysis identifies two reproducible fHP endotypes with distinct clinical outcomes and corticosteroid responses, supporting a precision medicine approach beyond current clinical and radiologic classification.

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

Low-Complexity Policy Tessellations in Structured Markov Decision Processes

Authors:

arXiv:2606.25593v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study optimal-policy geometry in structured Markov decision processes. While approximate dynamic programming and reinforcement learning typically approximate high-dimensional value functions, we show that optimal policies induce simpler decision tessellations. We propose boundary-based policy approximations that learn policy regions directly. A policy-loss decomposition links performance degradation to action margins and explains why errors concentrate near indifference boundaries. Inventory control and queue admission experiments show lower policy error, smaller value gaps, faster error decay, and stability than reinforcement learning baselines.

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

LLMZero: Discovering Adaptive Training Strategies for RL Post-Training via LLM Agents

RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics. This distinction matters because fixed schedules commit all parameters to fixed trajectories and therefore cannot express the non-stationary exploration-exploitation tradeoffs that regularization must track; the principle provides actionable design rules for multi-stage training. We discover this through LLMZero, a system where LLM agents search over training trajectories via tree search, diagnosing pathologies at each checkpoint and proposing coordinated multi-parameter transitions. Across 4 diverse GRPO tasks, LLMZero discovers strategies that improve over the base model by 9% to 140% relative and over grid search by 6% to 15% relative, consistently outperforming random search and the skill-based agent. The structural principle transfers across tasks, providing an explanation for why discovered strategies take qualitatively different forms yet share similar parameter dynamics.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Managing Task Execution for Unknown Workloads in Batteryless IoT: A Hardware-Agnostic Evaluation

arXiv:2606.24340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been shifting toward batteryless, energy-harvesting architectures. Sustaining reliable operation in these systems requires intelligent management of highly volatile stored energy. As edge applications grow in complexity, traditional energy-aware schedulers struggle with unpredictable workloads due to their reliance on static execution thresholds or pre-measured, hardware-specific task profiles. To overcome this, we propose two novel, hardware-agnostic dynamic scheduling strategies treating applications as a "black box," requiring no prior energy information: a model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent and an on-the-fly Approximated Prediction (AP) method. We evaluate these methods against an adaptive task rate approach (AsTAR) and optimized static thresholds using a custom-built, physically accurate simulation framework driven by real-world solar data and dynamic LoRa transmission profiles. Rather than claiming universal superiority, our analysis exposes the distinct operational trade-offs of each method: the AP approach delivers lightweight, near-oracle task throughput; the RL agent provides tunable survival-execution balancing; and AsTAR excels at execution pacing across long energy gaps. Finally, we demonstrate that while these advanced strategies provide critical resilience for severely constrained systems with small capacitors, devices with larger energy buffers can efficiently rely on simpler, less computationally expensive static policies.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Models: Reflections on Engineering AI-enabled Systems in a Project-Based Course

arXiv:2606.16842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Teaching Software Engineering for AI-enabled systems entails addressing the integration of AI components within full-scale software architectures under realistic constraints. While machine learning courses emphasize model development, students often lack experience in architectural design, deployment, and monitoring of AI-enabled systems. Empirical evaluations of such system-oriented AI courses remain limited. This paper reflects on the design and implementation of a project-based master's-level course titled AI Algorithms: Theory and Engineering, at the University of Bremen, in which students developed a movie recommendation system while making architectural design decisions to address challenges related to scalability, deployment, and evolving requirements. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining analyses of student submissions and questionnaire responses to investigate integration challenges, learning outcomes, and opportunities for improvement. Our results indicate persistent difficulties in early architectural decisions, heterogeneous ML integration, evolving requirements, and data management, largely due to uneven ML and software engineering expertise. From the educator's perspective, the course fostered system-level reasoning and strengthened awareness of data-centric ML practices in AI-enabled systems.

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

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Breaking Data Symmetry is Needed For Generalization in Feature Learning Kernels

arXiv:2604.00316v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Grokking occurs when a model achieves high training accuracy but generalization to unseen test points happens long after that. This phenomenon was initially observed on a class of algebraic problems, such as learning modular arithmetic (Power et al., 2022). We study grokking on algebraic tasks in a class of feature learning kernels via the Recursive Feature Machine (RFM) algorithm (Radhakrishnan et al., 2024), which iteratively updates feature matrices through the Average Gradient Outer Product (AGOP) of an estimator in order to learn task-relevant features. Our main experimental finding is that generalization occurs only when a certain symmetry in the training set is broken. Furthermore, we empirically show that RFM generalizes by recovering the underlying invariance group action inherent in the data. We find that the learned feature matrices encode specific elements of the invariance group, explaining the dependence of generalization on symmetry.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Theory of uncertain probability: can we derive the probability density function of uncertain random experiments with continuously changing conditions?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper aims to explore the formation mechanism of probability distribution in situations where the differences among random experiments are distinguishable, and these differences continue to evolve along with the dynamic changes in conditions and their mechanisms of action. To this end, we are motivated to devise a new theoretical system – theory of uncertain probability (TUP) with Kolmogorov's system and nonlinear theories as special cases. TUP develops a novel model that integrates probability and uncertainty as well as the known and unknown to more accurately depict numerous typical random phenomena under more realistic assumptions, and thus provides appropriate tools for greater variety of real needs. It also allows for pioneering interpretation of the causal mechanisms underlying many important distributional characteristics and incorporation of pathwise property to distribution model.

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

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation. This shift has sparked interest in using intermediate visualizations as a reasoning aid, akin to human mental imagery. Central to this idea is the ability to form, maintain, and manipulate visual representations in a goal-oriented manner. To evaluate and probe this capability, we develop MentisOculi, a procedural, stratified suite of multi-step reasoning problems amenable to visual solution, tuned to challenge frontier models. Evaluating visual strategies ranging from latent tokens to explicit generated imagery, we find they generally fail to improve performance. Analysis of UMMs specifically exposes a critical limitation: While they possess the textual reasoning capacity to solve a task and can sometimes generate correct visuals, they suffer from compounding generation errors and fail to leverage even ground-truth visualizations. Our findings suggest that despite their inherent appeal, visual thoughts do not yet benefit model reasoning. MentisOculi establishes the necessary foundation to analyze and close this gap across diverse model families.

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

Quantum CT via Dynamic Interval Encoding and Prior-Balanced QUBO Reconstruction

Quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO)-based quantum computed tomography (CT) casts reconstruction as a binary quadratic problem for quantum annealing and hybrid quantum–classical solvers. For grayscale CT, however, image encoding is constrained by the binary-variable budget: fixed global bit-plane encodings increase QUBO size and coupling complexity as gray-level precision improves, whereas low-bit encodings introduce quantization error. We propose a QUBO-based grayscale CT reconstruction framework that combines dynamic interval encoding with prior-balanced optimization. Each refinement round encodes active pixels only within local gray-level intervals around the current estimate, and a boundary-hit-guided update rule adaptively switches between search expansion and local refinement. To improve optimization stability, the method balances projection-domain data consistency and an edge-preserving quadratic prior before forming the final QUBO. Sparse-view and limited-angle fan-beam CT experiments show that the proposed method recovers structures and gray-level distributions more faithfully than the evaluated analytic, iterative, variational, and representation-based baselines. Expressivity analysis and ablation studies further indicate that the improvement mainly arises from effective gray-level representation through dynamic local encoding and more stable data-fidelity–prior coupling. Experiments on the D-Wave hybrid binary quadratic model (BQM) solver further demonstrate that the formulation is executable on a hardware-backed hybrid quantum–classical backend.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

HAMNO: A Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator with Physics-Informed Learning for Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.11963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operators provide a powerful framework for learning solution mappings of partial differential equations directly in function space. However, many existing architectures still struggle to represent nonlinear time-dependent systems that involve multi-scale structures, long-range interactions, and stable long-time evolution. In this work, we introduce the Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator (HAMNO), a neural-operator architecture that combines local convolutional representations, global spectral operators, and hierarchical encoder-decoder processing. The central component of HAMNO is a data-dependent gating mechanism that adaptively balances local and global information at each spatial location, allowing the model to resolve fine-scale features while preserving long-range dependencies. We further develop a physics-informed extension, PI-HAMNO, based on a multi-objective loss strategy that combines data fitting with strong- and weak-form physics constraints. The strong-form term penalizes the domain-integrated squared PDE residual in physical coordinates, while the weak-form term is constructed by multiplying the governing residual by finite-element test functions and evaluating the resulting element integrals using centroid-based tetrahedral quadrature. The framework is evaluated on non-periodic Allen-Cahn (AC), Cahn-Hilliard (CH), and Swift-Hohenberg (SH) equations defined on cubic domains. Across long-horizon rollout, data-limited training, out-of-distribution initial-condition shifts, and random-seed variations, HAMNO improves predictive accuracy over standard neural-operator baselines, while PI-HAMNO further enhances stability, physical consistency, and data efficiency. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/MBamdad/HAMNO .

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

23.
Science (Express) 2026-06-04

Long-range extended chains arising from polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A central challenge for conjugated polymers is to achieve long-range order while remaining solution-processable, which is essential for matching the electrical performance of their counterparts of crystalline inorganic semiconductors. Here we show that n-doped poly(benzodifurandione) (n-PBDF) can undergo polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly (PSA), in which chain growth, chemical doping, and structural ordering are intrinsically coupled, yielding long-range chain extension over hundreds of nanometers. We reveal that the spontaneously formed n-PBDF nanoribbons arise from a self-initiated, convergent growth mechanism driven by cooperative monomer–polymer interactions and stabilized by proton-coupled duplex chains and the polymer’s intrinsic polyelectrolyte character. With long-range extended chains in the nanoribbons, the aligned n-PBDF thin films demonstrate metallic-level conductivity (>10 4 Siemens per centimeter).

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Model Forensics: Investigating Whether Concerning Behavior Reflects Misalignment

arXiv:2606.26071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of safety research is determining whether a model is misaligned. Prior work has largely focused on detecting concerning behavior. But behavior alone does not establish misalignment: a concerning action can arise from benign causes such as confusion. This motivates model forensics: investigating whether the action was driven by malign intent. In this paper, we propose a baseline protocol for model forensics consisting of two steps, iterated as needed. First, we read the chain of thought (CoT) to generate hypotheses about what drives model behavior. Second, we make edits to the prompt or environment to test these hypotheses. While the CoT is not always faithful, it is a rich source of unsupervised insight that can guide the collection of more rigorous evidence. To evaluate our protocol, we create a suite of six agentic environments where models exhibit concerning behavior, and apply it to each. We establish that Kimi K2 Thinking takes shortcuts due to a genuine disposition towards low-effort actions, by showing this hypothesis successfully predicts its behavior. Through counterfactual experiments, we show DeepSeek R1 deceives out of a desire to be consistent with a previous instance of itself. Our methods nonetheless leave significant room for refinement. For example, when we test whether Kimi K2 Thinking believes it is violating user intent, we find no evidence of such a belief, but without positive controls we cannot confirm our tests would detect it. Overall, we find our simple protocol provides a strong baseline that we hope future work will improve upon. More broadly, our work is a concrete step in developing the growing field of model forensics.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.