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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Execution-bound advisory automation for agentic AI: a reproducible AIBOM-driven CSAF-VEX framework

arXiv:2606.19390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A protocol driven framework is presented that binds SBOM and AIBOM artefacts to deterministic environment capture and structured runtime telemetry. Exploitability is computed from declared artefacts, observed activation conditions, and enforced execution policies. CSAF VEX advisories are generated from combined static and runtime evidence, cryptographically signed, and validated through deterministic replay. Evaluation uses approximately 10000 component entries across synthetic Agentic AI workloads 50 to 5000 components, incorporating OSV, GitHub Advisory, KEV, and EPSS datasets.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Generalization Hacking: Models Can Game Reinforcement Learning by Preventing Behavioral Generalization

arXiv:2606.12016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model post-training, and in particular reinforcement learning (RL), is one of the primary mechanisms by which developers can shape models' values and behaviors. However, as models become increasingly evaluation and training aware, they may be motivated to resist training when the perceived objective conflicts with their current values, undermining developers' ability to detect misalignment and correct model behavior through further training. In this paper, we demonstrate generalization hacking, in which a model collects reward during RL while preventing the rewarded behavior from generalizing. We construct a model organism on Qwen3-235B-A22B, finetuning on synthetic documents describing training awareness and self-inoculation, a novel mechanism in which the model frames compliance as context-specific in its chain of thought, without demonstrating or instructing either behavior. The model organism achieves train-time harmfulness comparable to controls while maintaining a persistent ${\sim}15$ percentage point compliance gap across 700 steps of RL. Additionally, a control organism trained only on training awareness documents independently discovers inoculation-like reasoning under RL pressure, developing its own compliance gap despite never being exposed to the concept. Because the generalization-hacking organism receives high reward throughout, standard training metrics provide no signal that generalization has failed. Our results constitute the first demonstration that a model can actively resist RL behavioral modification while maintaining high reward, suggesting that as models become more capable and training-aware, they may be able to undermine the training process itself.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Persona-Pruner: Sculpting Lightweight Models for Role-Playing

Language Models (LMs) have shown remarkable potential as role-playing chatbots, delivering consistent, stylized interactions when given a specification of a character or user persona. However, applying these capabilities to real-world applications (e.g., ecosystems with numerous NPCs interacting simultaneously) exposes a critical inefficiency due to the excessive computational cost. In this paper, we question the necessity of dedicating a full, generalist model to a single persona, hypothesizing that a specific character identity relies on only a fraction of the model's total capacity. We observe that naively pruning LMs often severely degrades the role-playing performance for a specific persona; it does not distinguish between redundant knowledge and essential character traits. We propose Persona-Pruner, a framework that sculpts a lightweight role-playing model by isolating persona-specific sub-networks from a single description. Our experiments consistently show that Persona-Pruner preserves role-playing performance substantially more effectively than existing state-of-the-art LLM pruning techniques, reducing the performance drop from the dense model by up to 93.8% over the strongest baseline on RoleBench in LLM-as-a-judge score, while still maintaining general LLM capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/jsu-kim/Persona-Pruner.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

CoBit: Language Modeling with Bitstream Diffusion

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion approaches have narrowed this gap. In this work, we further close the autoregressive gap by modeling text as a continuous diffusion process over fixed-width binary bitstreams. We refer to the resulting model as CoBit (Continuous Bitstream Diffusion). Our approach represents semantic tokens as analog bit sequences and uses a matched-filter residual parameterization to isolate contextual learning from analytic independent-bit posteriors. Crucially, we adopt a stochastic sampler that applies Langevin-type corrections gated by the entropy-rate profile, concentrating stochasticity in high-information regions while remaining nearly deterministic elsewhere. On LM1B, our 130M-parameter model reaches a generative perplexity (GenPPL) of 59.76 at matched real-data entropy (4.31) using 256 neural function evaluations (NFEs), outperforming prior DLM baselines and reaching the autoregressive reference. On OpenWebText (OWT), our sampler establishes a new continuous-DLM Pareto frontier, achieving GenPPL 27.06 at entropy 5.26 using 4x fewer steps than previous 1024-NFE baselines. Scaling the same recipe to a 462M-parameter model (CoBit-M) further improves the OWT GenPPL-entropy frontier over the 130M model (CoBit-S) and over medium-scale continuous and discrete DLM baselines, reaching GenPPL 19.5 at entropy 5.40, near real-data entropy (5.44), and approaching pretrained GPT-2 Medium over the high-quality region. As an additional benefit, bitstream diffusion removes the O(V) vocabulary scaling bottleneck of standard DLMs: by predicting O(log V) bitwise logits via semantic bit-patching, it lowers memory and raises throughput, a scalable paradigm as vocabulary sizes grow.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Be My Tutor: On-Policy Co-Distillation for Mutual LLM Improvement via Peer Feedback

We study multi-domain LLM training in which two models, each stronger in a different domain, co-evolve by tutoring each other through on-policy feedback. Unlike one-way distillation or single-model fine-tuning, our goal is mutual Pareto improvement: each model improves across domains without losing its original strength. To this end, we propose On-Policy Co-Distillation (OPCoD), where each student's self-distillation is conditioned on its own correct rollout and feedback from its peer. To make feedback exchange effective, OPCoD uses cognizance-based gating to decide when to give feedback and feedback anchoring to ground feedback in the problem. On Science Q\&A tasks, OPCoD consistently outperforms baselines and achieves Pareto improvement across all evaluated domain pairs and students.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical symmetry selects log-Poisson cascades: classification, uniqueness, and stability

arXiv:2604.01632v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Within i.i.d. multiplicative cascades, a single axiom – the hierarchical symmetry, a linear contraction on incremental scaling exponents – is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the cascade multiplier to be log-Poisson. We prove: (1) a characterization theorem determining the log-Poisson law with explicit parameters, within the class of all multipliers with finite lattice moments; (2) a classification theorem locating the log-Poisson class inside the log-infinitely-divisible family and identifying the mechanism by which every rival sub-family fails the symmetry; (3) a stability theorem with sharp constants – $(1+\beta)^{1/2}$ when the limiting increment is known, $\sqrt{2}$ when it is fitted – and (4) an unconditional propagation theorem transferring the bound to the multiplier distribution at the sharp rate $\Theta(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$, with a matching lower bound. Beyond independence, the classification extends exactly at the level of asymptotic statistics (limiting cumulant generating function, large deviations, multifractal spectrum) and provably not at the level of laws: an explicit stationary ergodic Markov multiplier satisfies the symmetry exactly with a non-log-Poisson marginal, while exchangeable multipliers collapse to the i.i.d. log-Poisson cascade and finite-state Markov multipliers cannot satisfy the symmetry at all. In the continuous category of exactly scale-invariant log-infinitely-divisible multifractal random measures, no finite moment window of structure-function exponents identifies the cascade class, whereas at the level of the scale-invariance generator the symmetry selects exactly the Barral-Mandelbrot compound Poisson cascade, with scale-ratio-free stability constants. The proofs reduce to second-moment identities on [0,1] via the change of variables $u = e^{kx}$, boundedness of the multiplier, and multiplicative couplings.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GAE: Unleashing Physical Potential of VLM with Generalizable Action Expert

Vision-language models demonstrate strong reasoning and planning abilities, yet grounding these predictions into precise robot actions remains a central challenge. Existing Vision-Language-Action methods typically entangle reasoning and action generation, leading to limited generalization. We propose Generalizable Action Expert (GAE), a task-agnostic model that converts sparse geometric plans into dense robot actions. Our approach introduces a sparse geometric interface: the VLM predicts sparse 3D waypoints representing high-level intention, while GAE maps these waypoints together with real-time point cloud observations to continuous action trajectories. GAE is pretrained on a large-scale pointcloud-trajectory dataset comprising 150k trajectories from both simulation and real-world robots. To further improve efficiency and generalization, we introduce an Action Pre-training, Pointcloud Fine-tuning (APPF) scheme that decouples learning action dynamics from geometry grounding. After pretraining, GAE is frozen and reused across downstream tasks, requiring only lightweight fine-tuning of the VLM to produce the sparse interface. Experiments show that our method achieves strong performance and generalization across diverse visual domains, camera viewpoints, and natural language instructions.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Intersectional Fairness across Clinical Machine Learning Use Cases using Fairlogue and the All of Us Research Program

arXiv:2604.16450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Intersectional biases in healthcare data can produce compound disparities in clinical machine learning models, yet most fairness evaluations assess demographic attributes independently. FairLogue, a toolkit for intersectional fairness auditing, was applied across multiple clinical prediction tasks to evaluate disparities across combined demographic groups. Using the All of Us dataset, two published models were selected for replication and evaluation: (A) prediction of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor associated bleeding events and (B) two-year stroke risk in patients with atrial fibrillation. Observational fairness metrics were computed across race, gender, and intersectional subgroups, followed by counterfactual analysis to evaluate whether disparities were attributable to group membership. Intersectional evaluation revealed larger disparities than single-axis analyses; however, counterfactual diagnostics indicated that most observed disparities were comparable to those expected under randomized group membership. These results highlight the importance of intersectional fairness auditing and demonstrate how FairLogue provides deeper insight into bias in clinical machine learning systems.

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

Time-Varying Audio Effect Modeling by End-to-End Adversarial Training

arXiv:2512.15313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has become a standard approach for the modeling of audio effects, yet strictly black-box modeling remains problematic for time-varying systems. Unlike time-invariant effects, training models on devices with internal modulation typically requires the recording or extraction of control signals to ensure the time-alignment required by standard loss functions. This paper introduces a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework to model such effects using only input-output audio recordings, without requiring a modulation signal extraction. We propose a convolutional-recurrent architecture trained via a two-stage strategy: an initial adversarial phase allows the model to learn the distribution of the modulation behavior without strict phase constraints, followed by a supervised fine-tuning phase where a State Prediction Network (SPN) estimates the initial internal states required to synchronize the model with the target. Additionally, a new metric based on chirp-train signals is developed to quantify modulation accuracy. Experiments modeling a vintage hardware phaser demonstrate the method's ability to capture time-varying dynamics in a fully black-box context.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CredibleDFGO: Differentiable Factor Graph Optimization with Credibility Supervision

arXiv:2605.06100v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning is widely used for urban navigation, but the covariance reported by the GNSS solver is often unreliable in urban canyons. Existing differentiable factor graph optimization (DFGO) methods learn measurement weighting through the solver, but they still use position-only objectives. As a result, the position estimate may improve while the reported covariance remains too small, too large, or incorrectly oriented. We propose CredibleDFGO (CDFGO), a differentiable GNSS factor graph framework that makes covariance credibility an explicit training target. A Weighting Generation Network (WGN) predicts per-satellite reliability weights, and a differentiable Gauss-Newton solver maps these weights to a position estimate and a Hessian-derived posterior covariance. We use proper scoring rules to supervise the East-North predictive distribution end to end. We study negative log-likelihood (NLL), the energy score (ES), and their combination. Results on three UrbanNav test scenes show consistent gains in covariance credibility. Positioning accuracy also improves on the medium-urban and harsh-urban scenes; on the deep-urban scene, both the mean horizontal error and the 95th-percentile error improve. On the harsh-urban Mong Kok (MK) scene, CDFGO-Combined reduces the mean horizontal error from 13.77 m to 11.68 m, reduces NLL from 40.63 to 6.59, and reduces ES from 12.31 to 9.05 relative to DFGO (MAE). Case studies link the MK improvement to better axis-wise consistency, more credible local covariance ellipses, and satellite-level reweighting.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multi-Field Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Maritime Accident Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.13249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maritime accident adjudication reports contain critical tribunal findings for root cause analysis (RCA), yet retrieving relevant precedents and drafting consistent reports from decades of records remains labor-intensive. This paper proposes a multi-field hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for automated maritime RCA, utilizing a comprehensive dataset of 13,329 Korea Maritime Safety Tribunal (KMST) reports (1971-2025). We transform raw adjudications into a structured knowledge base of "incident cards", indexing three distinct fields-Summary, Causes, and Disposition-alongside a hierarchical L1/L2 cause taxonomy. Our retrieval strategy employs a field-aware hybrid approach, fusing sparse and dense rankings via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Given the lack of large-scale expert relevance labels, we evaluate retrieval performance using ceiling-normalized recall and nDCG based on a metadata-derived proxy relevance score. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed retrieval significantly outperforms baseline methods, improving NormRecall@100 from 0.18 to 0.55. Furthermore, grounding the generator on the retrieved precedents enhances RCA generation quality over an LLM-only baseline, increasing the LLM-as-a-judge score from 3.34 to 3.72. These findings suggest that field-aware RAG can substantially streamline maritime safety investigation workflows by enabling faster precedent search and more consistent, evidence-based RCA drafting.

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

Maturing Markov Decision Processes: Decision Making under Increasing Information and Shrinking Action Sets

arXiv:2606.18820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision problems often exhibit an asymmetric evolution of information and decision flexibility: as a decision cycle unfolds, the agent receives richer information while feasible actions expire due to operational cutoffs, commitments, or resource constraints. Standard MDP formulations typically flatten this structure into stage-dependent state descriptions and action masks, thereby obscuring the nested information–action asymmetry that determines which decisions are urgent and which can be deferred. We introduce Maturing Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs), a formulation built around this information–action asymmetry. We characterize one of its key consequences through an expiring-action priority principle, which identifies the actions that must be resolved before the next stage. Motivated by this structure, we develop a structure-aware reinforcement learning framework with stage-aware policy design, expiring-action abstraction, and search-augmented learning with distillation. Experiments on a controlled multi-supplier replenishment problem, simplified cash-management environments of increasing complexity, and a production-scale simulator show that explicitly modeling this asymmetry improves learning efficiency and becomes increasingly valuable as decision problems scale.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Detecting High-Potential SMEs with Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2602.19591v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constitute 99.9% of U.S. businesses and generate 44% of economic activity, yet systematically identifying high-potential SMEs remains an open challenge. We introduce SME-HGT, a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer framework that predicts which SBIR Phase I awardees will advance to Phase II funding using exclusively public data. We construct a heterogeneous graph with 32,268 company nodes, 124 research topic nodes, and 13 government agency nodes connected by approximately 99,000 edges across three semantic relation types. SME-HGT achieves an AUPRC of 0.621 0.003 on a temporally-split test set, outperforming an MLP baseline (0.590 0.002) and R-GCN (0.608 0.013) across five random seeds. At a screening depth of 100 companies, SME-HGT attains 89.6% precision with a 2.14 lift over random selection. Our temporal evaluation protocol prevents information leakage, and our reliance on public data ensures reproducibility. These results demonstrate that relational structure among firms, research topics, and funding agencies provides meaningful signal for SME potential assessment, with implications for policymakers and early-stage investors.

14.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-27

Sequential chemo-immunotherapy followed by standard versus reduced thoracic radiotherapy for older and/or frail stage III non-small-cell lung cancer: A randomized open-label cohort trial

Authors:

by Wei-Xiang Qi, Shuyan Li, Mengdi Wang, Huan Li, Feifei Xu, Lei Yao, Biao Yu, Linlin Chen, Gang Cai, Cheng Xu, Xianwen Sun, Zhiyao Bao, Jiayi Chen, Yi Xiang, Shengguang Zhao Background The appropriateness of concurrent chemoradiotherapy (cCRT) for older or clinically vulnerable stage III unresectable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients remains contentious. Furthermore, the survival implications of de-escalating thoracic radiotherapy (RT) intensity in this population have not been conclusively elucidated. Methods and findings We conducted a phase II randomized, open-label, two-cohort (non-comparative) trial at a tertiary hospital in China (NCT05557552). Between September 30, 2022 and April 30, 2024, we enrolled 56 older and/or frail patients with stage III NSCLC who were ineligible for cCRT. The primary endpoint was the 1-year progression-free survival (PFS) rate estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. Secondary endpoints included objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS), and safety. In the intention-to-treat (ITT) set, which included all 56 randomized patients who received at least one dose of study treatment, the 1-year PFS was 84.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] [70.3%, 98.3%]) in the standard RT group and 70.7% (95% CI [54.3%, 87.1%]) in the reduced RT group. In the per-protocol set (53 patients), the 1-year PFS was 82.9% (95% CI [68.9%, 98.8%]) in the standard RT group and 73.4% (95% CI [58.3%, 92.4%]), with a median follow-up of 24 months. Among 56 patients in the safety analysis set, 71.4% of patients experienced grade 3/4 adverse events (AEs) in the standard RT group and 53.6% in the reduced RT group. One patient (3.6%) in the reduced RT and three patients (10.7%) in the standardized RT experienced grade 5 AEs. The main limitations are the non-comparative design, small sample size, and lack of power to establish non-inferiority or superiority. Conclusion The current study suggested that reduced RT combined with sequential chemo-immunotherapy might be feasible for older/frail patients intolerant to cCRT, showing numerically similar survival outcomes. These exploratory findings warrant confirmation in larger, adequately powered randomized trials. Trial registration The trial had been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on Sep 30, 2022.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05557552

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

<i>CHPO</i> coordinates chilling recovery and nitrogen use in rice

Authors:

Global rice production faces mounting challenges from abnormal temperature fluctuations and nitrogen-fertilizer-driven environmental pollution1–7. Developing varieties that balance chilling resilience and nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) offers a promising solution, but the molecular networks coordinating these traits remain poorly understood. Here we identify CHILLING PHOENIX (CHPO), a major gene underlying the quantitative trait locus shared by both chilling tolerance and resilience. It encodes a MYB transcription factor that acts as a key regulator coordinating post-chilling recovery with nitrogen use in rice. Natural variation in a GCG-repeat-encoded polyalanine tract alters CHPO DNA-binding preference and redirects regulatory outputs between the japonica-type (CHPOjap) and indica-type (CHPOind), causing opposing effects on chilling tolerance and resilience. This allelic variation is shaped by domestication selection, with the CHPOjap allele probably derived from Chinese wild rice. CHPOjap directly targets OsTCP19 and OsNRT2.4 to fine-tune NUE, thereby enhancing chilling tolerance and resilience. These findings provide a mechanistic framework for a chilling-induced high-nitrogen-utilization module that alleviates the damage caused by chilling stress, and a potential molecular design&nbsp;strategy for breeding rice varieties with both chilling resilience and high NUE at the&nbsp;recovery stage. A rice gene, CHPO, links chilling resilience with nitrogen-use efficiency, revealing a domestication-shaped regulatory mechanism that could guide breeding of climate-resilient, sustainable rice varieties.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MPC-Patch-Bench: Security-Aware LLM Code Patch for Multi-Party Computation

arXiv:2606.11416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Repository-level benchmarks for evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) code repair on Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) software do not yet exist, and directly transplanting general-purpose benchmarks such as SWE-bench fails on three structural fronts: (i) MPC repositories are dominated by generic Python infrastructure rather than cryptographic logic; (ii) high-value MPC fixes lack the standardized tests rigid extraction pipelines require; and (iii) standard fail-to-pass evaluation is insufficient for code that must also be cryptographically safe. MPC is increasingly deployed for privacy-preserving machine learning, biomedical collaboration, and secure analytics. Existing MPC-specific code-synthesis efforts cover only operator-level or single-framework tasks; evaluating LLM agents on real repository-level MPC repair instead demands MPC-aware data curation and a verifier matched to the security and numerical-fidelity guarantees MPC programs must obey neither of which existing benchmarks provide. We introduce MPC-Patch-Bench, a repository-level benchmark organised around two frameworks. (1)The Data Curation Framework combines a domain-specific curation agent that filters raw pull requests through three cryptographic layers with a human-AI completion engine that synthesizes missing problem statements and Fail-to-Pass/Pass-to-Pass tests, yielding 205 fully verified instances. (2)The MPC Verifier provides dedicated security and numerical-fidelity checks via dynamic differential testing against plaintext oracles and MPC-specific static analysis rules that flag unsafe reveals, insecure arithmetic, and illegal public/private casts. The strongest evaluated LLM functionally resolves only 22.9% of MPC-Patch-Bench tasks; the MPC Verifier further reduces verified resolution to 17.1%, with up to 40% of functionally-passing patches rejected for cryptographic or numerical-fidelity violations.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MASLab: A Unified and Comprehensive Codebase for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing single LLMs to address complex and diverse tasks in practical applications. Despite considerable advancements, the field lacks a unified codebase that consolidates existing methods, resulting in redundant re-implementation efforts, unfair comparisons, and high entry barriers for researchers. To address these challenges, we introduce MASLab, a unified, comprehensive, and research-friendly codebase for LLM-based MAS. (1) MASLab integrates over 20 established methods across multiple domains, each rigorously validated by comparing step-by-step outputs with its official implementation. (2) MASLab provides a unified environment with various benchmarks for fair comparisons among methods, ensuring consistent inputs and standardized evaluation protocols. (3) MASLab implements methods within a shared streamlined structure, lowering the barriers for understanding and extension. Building on MASLab, we conduct extensive experiments covering 10+ benchmarks and 8 models, offering researchers a clear and comprehensive view of the current landscape of MAS methods. MASLab will continue to evolve, tracking the latest developments in the field, and invite contributions from the broader open-source community.

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

Reliability-Aware Prototype Calibration for Frozen Pose-Flow Video Anomaly Detection

Pose-flow video anomaly detectors are attractive for one-class surveillance because they provide likelihood-based rankings for tracked skeleton windows. However, a single likelihood score may hide multimodal normal behavior and be sensitive to pose-observation noise. We study a frozen-detector setting in which the pose-flow backbone, cached skeleton tracks, and evaluation pipeline are fixed. Reliability-Aware Prototype Calibration (RPC) is a post-hoc score calibration method for this setting. It adds a standardized nearest-prototype deviation in the frozen latent space to the standardized flow score, and uses keypoint confidence only to gate this added geometric evidence. Thus, RPC preserves the original density signal while correcting the ranking with empirical normal-mode structure under pose reliability. Across two frozen pose-flow backbones and four datasets, RPC improves frame-level AUROC in all eight backbone-dataset pairs, with gains ranging from 0.34 to 4.49 percentage points and averaging 2.03 points. Ablation and reliability analyses show that prototype deviation is the main corrective signal, while reliability gating is most useful when pose observations are less trustworthy. These results suggest that lightweight post-hoc calibration can strengthen cached pose-flow systems when retraining or reproducing the full pose pipeline is impractical.

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

RePAIR: Predictive Self-Supervised Representation Learning in Chess

arXiv:2606.11860v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Representation Prediction via Autoencoding using Iterative Refinement (RePAIR) - a novel self-supervised representation learning architecture that synthesizes Masked Autoencoders (MAE), Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). We demonstrate how it can be used to encode objects in sequential data like consecutive chess positions into compact yet meaningful representations. The basic principle of the architecture is to mask large portions of a sequence of latent states, similar to BERT and MAE. Then, we apply a lightweight Predictor to the latent representations that repairs gaps in the sequence in a lower-dimensional embedding space akin to JEPA. Our experiments in the domain of chess show that the Encoder refines the board representations such that meaningful chess concepts emerge clustered in the latent space. Furthermore, reconstructions of the masked board states show that the model is able to reason about the piece movements without relying on costly reinforcement learning methods. Lastly, we find that the resulting representation space allows for quick and intuitive dissections of chess games by observing the game path trajectories in this semantically rich space.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey

Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising methods in automatic story generation and understanding tasks. Our survey examines how natural language processing (NLP) research uses LLM methods to engage with diverse concepts from narrative studies. We use established distinctions from narratology to categorise ongoing efforts and discover the following: \redtext{(a) narrative texts come from diverse sources beyond just literature, (b) theoretical synthesis and validation are potential outcomes, (c) generation tasks lag behind understanding in several ways: theoretical application, post-training methods, exploring non-fiction narratives and addressing narrative levels beyond fabula and discourse.} For future directions, instead of the pursuit of a single, generalised benchmark for `narrative quality', we believe that progress can benefit from efforts that focus on the following: defining and improving theory-based metrics for individual narrative attributes; continue conducting large-scale, theory-driven literary/social/cultural analysis; generating narratives in situated contexts; and continuing experiments where outputs can be used to validate or refine narrative theories. This work provides a contextual foundation for more systematic and theoretically informed narrative research in NLP by providing an overview to ongoing research efforts and the broader narrative studies landscape.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust

As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential. Calibration is a good proxy for trust: well-calibrated confidence estimates help inform the risk versus reward tradeoff when trusting a specific model output. Unfortunately, even as models improve, they remain poorly calibrated, often biasing towards overconfidence. Additionally, calibration can be gamed: a policy that always predicts the base rate is perfectly calibrated, but completely uninformative. To resolve this, we develop a new metric, expected utility renormalized by the oracle (EURO), that balances calibration and informativeness. We also propose a general-purpose activation-based confidence, utility, and trust estimation protocol (ACUTE) to appropriately adjudicate uncertainty. The ACUTE protocol provides flexible, sample-efficient, and compute-efficient confidence estimators for 3 tasks including multiple choice question answering, tool-calling, and scientific document summarization across 6 models from 4 model families. ACUTE outperforms strong baselines on EURO, while maintaining low calibration error. Taken together, our work shows that equipping LLMs with the ACUTE protocol can improve calibration, utility, and trustworthiness in numerous settings.

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

A Prototypical Signature Approach for Writer-Independent Offline Signature Verification

Offline handwritten signature verification aims to distinguish genuine from forged signatures using static images. Since real forgeries are rarely available, negative samples are usually randomly drawn from genuine signatures of other users to create training data. However, this random selection often lacks diversity, increases redundancy, and escalates computational cost, leading to inefficient training. We propose a data-driven strategy to generate diverse, informative negative samples using prototypical signatures, which are compact, non-identifiable summaries of genuine signature features. Based on the experiments results, we conclude that (i) prototypical signatures yield more informative negative samples, improving the detection of skilled forgeries; (ii) the proposed approach is backbone-agnostic, showing robustness across architectures; and (iii) when combined with a primal-form linear SVM, it serves as an alternative to RBF-based models while significantly improving scalability and computational efficiency. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdmoura/proto_hsv.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Assessment of occupational aerosol exposure for laboratory technicians: A quantitative study using {Phi}X174 phage as a substitute virus

Authors:

This study aimed to clarify aerosol exposure risks throughout the workflow of a Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory, validate the suitability of the {Phi}X174 bacteriophage as an indicator virus, and provide evidence for biosafety control measures. The {Phi}X174 bacteriophage was used to simulate viral samples, and a concentration-bacteriophage plaque standard curve was constructed (R2=0.998). Five operational steps in a simulated PCR laboratory were quantitatively monitored for aerosol concentration using double-layer agar plates, with blank controls used to eliminate interference. Statistical analysis was employed to identify risk differences. Sample homogenization ((5.67 {+/-} 1.23) x 104 plaque-forming units (PFU)/m3) and nucleic acid extraction ((3.45 {+/-} 0.89) x 104 PFU/m3) were identified as high-/very high-risk steps. The viral load in the samples was strongly positively correlated with the aerosol concentration (r = 0.926, P

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

Retrieve, Don't Retrain: Extending Vision Language Action Models to New Tasks at Test Time

arXiv:2606.15631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new task typically requires task-specific teleoperated demonstrations and per-task fine-tuning, making adaptation costly in both data collection and compute. In this paper, we show that this target-side per-task adaptation cost can be replaced by retrieval. Our retrieval-augmented policy is trained once on paired demonstrations from the target embodiment (query) and a cheaper embodiment (pool, e.g., human-hand video), then frozen. New tasks are added at deployment by appending pool-side demonstrations to a retrieval pool. The frozen policy conditions on retrieved trajectories at every control step, so new tasks are absorbed by indexing data rather than updating parameters. Fine-tuning is needed only to take on a new, unseen embodiment, not for each new task. We show that retrieval improves policies beyond a specific backbone, including standard VLA policies, but its effect is especially pronounced in Cosmos Policy, a video-generation-based world-action model (WAM). In this setting, retrieval supplies coarse task progression, while the WAM's future-image objective provides an additional visual consistency signal that strengthens the retrieval-conditioned actions. On PushT, we study how retrieval provides a reusable high-level motion prior for cross-embodiment generalization to unseen goal angles, while on RoboTwin 2.0 our method outperforms cross-embodiment baselines on unseen tasks, and we additionally demonstrate the method on a real robot.