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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HorusEye: Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis

Authors:
Armel Yara↗

We introduce HorusEye, Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis. Our investigation followed five stages. The first one is benchmarking RefCOCO-Degraded, a dataset of 15,244 images (3,811 base images x 4 conditions: Clean, Fog, Smoke and Thermal) with systematic visual degradation. Through four research questions, we evaluate multiple VLMs (Gemini, Qwen2-VL, BLIP-2, LLaVA, Kosmos-2) across visual grounding the second stage, language feedback recovery the third one, health VQA tasks the fourth, and hallucination analysis the final stage. Our key finding is that language feedback effectiveness is model-dependent: Gemini achieves +47.3% improvement in thermal conditions through iterative language feedback, while Qwen2-VL shows -5.1% degradation under the same protocol. We also identify the 'Thermal Paradox' where cropping strategies that improve RGB performance catastrophically fail in thermal imagery. Furthermore, BLIP-2 uniquely hallucinates more under degradation, making it unsuitable for emergency deployment

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

What Do Flow-Based Inverse Solvers Approximate? A Posterior-Transport View

Authors:
Jian Xu↗Delu Zeng↗John Paisley↗Qibin Zhao↗

A growing family of training-free solvers – FlowDPS, FLOWER, PnP-Flow and their diffusion ancestors (DPS, DAPS) – repurpose a pretrained flow-matching prior to solve imaging inverse problems by adding a measurement-guidance term to the deterministic probability-flow ODE. Despite strong empirical results, what these per-step corrections actually approximate – and how far the resulting samples are from the true posterior $p(x\mid y)$ – has not been characterized. We give a posterior-transport account of flow-based inverse problem solving. Our starting point is a simple but consequential fact: for a deterministic flow prior, Bayesian conditioning is realized entirely by a reweighting of the source distribution, not by a drift correction; pushing the reweighted source through the unmodified velocity field yields exact posterior samples. From this we show that trajectory-guidance solvers can be read as the minimum-kinetic-energy correction field needed to morph the unconditional source into the posterior, and that FlowDPS / FLOWER / PnP-Flow correspond to distinct zeroth-order / Gaussian / proximal approximations of this single object; we bound the resulting posterior bias in Wasserstein distance. A controlled $2$D study with a closed-form posterior confirms the theory decisively: source reweighting matches the true posterior to the Monte-Carlo floor on every metric, whereas trajectory guidance incurs $200$–$800\times$ larger error and collapses posterior modes, regardless of guidance strength. Guided by the analysis we propose a cheap, principled velocity-correction solver that is competitive across two in-domain priors (AFHQ, CelebA) and two out-of-distribution settings while, unlike point-estimate source-space optimizers, producing diverse posterior samples with uncertainty that correlates with reconstruction error.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Utility of genetic screening for the prediction of severe arrhythmic outcomes in mitral valve prolapse

Authors:
Jhawar↗Cristin↗Small↗Bibby↗Tastet↗Rich↗Delling↗F. N↗

Background: Cardiomyopathy and channelopathy (CC) gene variants have been linked to sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) or death (SCD) in small, selected pedigree or post-mortem studies of arrhythmic mitral valve prolapse (MVP). However, the utility of clinical whole exome sequencing (WES) panels as a risk stratification tool in unselected MVP samples is unknown. Objectives: The goal of the study was to test the utility of clinical WES panels with CC variant screening for arrhythmic risk stratification in MVP. Methods: We performed research based WES in 203 consecutive MVPs without other arrhythmic substrate. Variants were filtered for rare (

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Rethinking Shrinkage Bias in LLM FP4 Pretraining: Geometric Origin, Systemic Impact, and UFP4 Recipe

Authors:
Qian Zhao↗Kunlong Chen↗Changxin Tian↗Zhonghui Jiang↗Haitao Zhang↗Chaofan Yu↗Peijie Jiang↗Mingliang Gong↗Jia Liu↗Ziqi Liu↗Zhiqiang Zhang↗Jun Zhou↗…

arXiv:2606.20381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial reductions in memory and computation cost for LLM pretraining, yet current FP4 hardware paths and recipes, including NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin-class systems and AMD MI350-series GPUs, remain centered on E2M1 data elements. In this study, we identify a fundamental limitation of that choice: non-uniform formats such as E2M1 inherently suffer from Shrinkage Bias, a systematic negative rounding error caused by the geometric asymmetry of their representable bins. We show that this bias accumulates multiplicatively across layers and is amplified by the Random Hadamard Transform (RHT), providing a unified explanation for the training instability observed in existing E2M1-based FP4 recipes. In contrast, uniform grids (E1M2/INT4) bypass this grid-geometry error and better convert the improved bucket utilization from RHT into higher quantization quality. Based on this finding, we propose UFP4, a uniform 4-bit training recipe that applies RHT to all three training GEMMs while restricting stochastic rounding to dY alone. On Dense 1.5B, MoE 7.9B, and MoE 124B long-run pretraining, UFP4 consistently achieves lower BF16-relative loss degradation than strong E2M1-based baselines, supported by scaling-law analysis and ablation studies. Our results suggest that future accelerators should support E1M2/INT4-style uniform 4-bit grids as first-class training primitives alongside E2M1.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

How Large Language Models Source Brand Reputation Across Languages and Markets

Authors:
Dmitrij Zatuchin↗

When a large language model (LLM) answers a question about a company, it grounds the answer in retrieved web sources, and those sources decide what the model says. Most analysis of AI brand visibility looks at the answer text. This study looks one step earlier, at the citations. We merge three Rankfor.AI datasets covering 128 brands across 12 home markets and 13 languages, and analyse 167,551 URL-grounded citations (189,974 total attribution rows). We classify each citation by domain and source type and measure where AI gets its brand information, by language and by market. Four patterns hold. First, AI grounds brand answers overwhelmingly in third-party sources: 85.7% of citations point to sites the brand does not own, against 14.3% owned. Second, the source base is concentrated and long-tailed: 80% of citations come from about 18% of domains, fitting a Zipf law (alpha = 0.86, R^2 = 0.983). Third, one reference site dominates almost everywhere: Wikipedia is the most-cited domain in 11 of 12 languages, the exception being Lithuanian, where the business daily vz.lt edges it (4.38%). Fourth, the source mix is market-specific at the margin: for 46 Polish national brands the most-cited domain is YouTube, and four HR and careers portals supply 637 citations against 297 for Polish Wikipedia, about twice as many.

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

Quantum Reservoir Computing for Short-Term Power Load Forecasting in Resource-Constrained Energy Systems

Authors:
Mansi Od↗Param Pathak↗Nouhaila Innan↗Muhammad Shafique↗

arXiv:2606.12806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Short-term load forecasting is essential for reliable energy management, but practical deployment on edge devices requires models that remain accurate under limited memory, finite measurement budgets, and hardware noise. This work proposes a hardware-efficient Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) framework for energy load forecasting, where a fixed quantum reservoir transforms temporal input windows into high-dimensional features and only a classical Elastic Net readout is trained. To reduce deployment cost, the trained readout is compressed using post-training fixed-point quantization at bit widths from 8 to 2 bits. The framework is evaluated on the Tetouan and Spain energy load datasets under exact statevector simulation, 512-shot finite sampling, and realistic hardware-noise models from IBM FakeTorino and IBM FakeMarrakesh. Results show that 6-bit readout precision preserves full-precision forecasting performance while reducing readout memory by 81.2%. Below this point, degradation becomes dataset dependent, with Tetouan showing stronger sensitivity and Spain degrading more gradually. Hardware-noise validation further shows that the trained readout transfers to noisy reservoir states without retraining. These findings support quantized QRC as a resource-aware forecasting approach for near-term quantum time-series applications.

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

Entity Binding Failures in Speech LLM Reasoning: Diagnosis and Chain-of-Thought Intervention

Authors:
Ming-Hao Hsu↗Xiaohai Tian↗Jun Zhang↗Zhizheng Wu↗

Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) underperform their text counterparts on complex reasoning. We reveal that this gap is not a uniform cognitive deficit. Evaluating two architecturally diverse SLLMs, we show speech-to-text (S2T) matches or exceeds text-to-text (T2T) on spatial, syntactic, and factual tasks. Yet on logical tasks requiring entity tracking, S2T accuracy collapses to chance. We diagnose this as an entity binding failure: continuous speech features blur precise entity-property associations during implicit reasoning. To validate this diagnosis, we introduce Entity-Aware Chain-of-Thought (EA-CoT), a lightweight inference-time intervention forcing SLLMs to enumerate entities and bind them to claims before reasoning. EA-CoT bridges the gap, even when spoken names are misrecognized, yielding up to a 24.4 percentage-point accuracy gain. Ablations confirm the gains stem from explicit semantic binding, reframing the gap as an elicitation failure rather than a missing capability.

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

Information Leakage Detection through Approximate Bayes-optimal Prediction

Authors:
Pritha Gupta↗Marcel Wever↗Eyke H\"ullermeier↗

arXiv:2401.14283v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In today's data-driven world, the proliferation of publicly available information raises security concerns due to the information leakage (IL) problem. IL involves unintentionally exposing sensitive information to unauthorized parties via observable system information. Conventional statistical approaches rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between observable and secret information for detecting ILs, face challenges of the curse of dimensionality, convergence, computational complexity, and MI misestimation. Though effective, emerging supervised machine learning based approaches to detect ILs are limited to binary system sensitive information and lack a comprehensive framework. To address these limitations, we establish a theoretical framework using statistical learning theory and information theory to quantify and detect IL accurately. Using automated machine learning, we demonstrate that MI can be accurately estimated by approximating the typically unknown Bayes predictor's log-loss and accuracy. Based on this, we show how MI can effectively be estimated to detect ILs. Our method performs superior to state-of-the-art baselines in an empirical study considering synthetic and real-world OpenSSL TLS server datasets.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

Authors:
Ricardo Hidalgo-Arag\'on↗Jes\'us M. Gonz\'alez-Barahona↗Gregorio Robles↗

arXiv:2604.00730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation–while providing certainty–based triggers for human intervention.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Thermodynamic assessment of machine learning models for solid-state synthesis prediction

Authors:
Jane Schlesinger↗Simon Hjaltason↗Nathan J. Szymanski↗Christopher J. Bartel↗

arXiv:2602.04075v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning models have recently emerged to predict whether hypothetical solid-state materials can be synthesized. These models aim to circumvent direct first-principles modeling of solid-state phase transformations, instead learning from large databases of successfully synthesized materials. Here, we assess the alignment of several recently introduced synthesis prediction models with material and reaction thermodynamics, quantified by the energy with respect to the convex hull and a metric accounting for thermodynamic selectivity of enumerated synthesis reactions. A dataset of successful synthesis recipes was used to determine the likely bounds on both quantities beyond which materials can be deemed unlikely to be synthesized. With these bounds as context, thermodynamic quantities were computed using the CHGNet foundation potential for thousands of new hypothetical materials generated using the Chemeleon generative model. Four recently published machine learning models for synthesizability prediction were applied to this same dataset, and the resultant predictions were considered against computed thermodynamics. We find these models generally overpredict the likelihood of synthesis, but some model scores do trend with thermodynamic heuristics, assigning lower scores to materials that are less stable or do not have an available synthesis recipe that is calculated to be thermodynamically selective. In total, this work identifies existing gaps in machine learning models for materials synthesis and introduces a new approach to assess their quality in the absence of extensive negative examples (failed syntheses).

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When English Isn't the Best Teacher: Source Language Effects in Cross-Lingual In-Context Learning

Authors:
Fred Philippy↗Siwen Guo↗Jacques Klein↗Tegawend\'e F. Bissyand\'e↗

Cross-lingual transfer in multilingual NLP has been widely explored in supervised fine-tuning contexts, where factors like data availability and linguistic similarity largely determine transfer quality. As the field shifts toward few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), it is often presumed that insights from fine-tuning carry over unchanged. Yet this assumption has not been rigorously evaluated, leaving open the question of how to choose source languages for cross-lingual ICL. We conduct a broad empirical study of cross-lingual transfer in ICL spanning seven tasks, six models, and a typologically diverse set of languages. We further analyze language confusion, a key obstacle for generative tasks in cross-lingual ICL. Our results show that conventional fine-tuning-based expectations do not consistently apply in the ICL regime and point to alternative heuristics for selecting source languages effectively.

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

Essential Subspace Merging for Multi-Task Learning

Authors:
Longhua Li↗Lei Qi↗Xin Geng↗Qi Tian↗

arXiv:2606.19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.

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

To GAN or Not To GAN: Segmentation Analysis on Mars DEM

Authors:
Douglas Dziedzorm Agbeve↗Aditya V. Handrale↗Salim Fares↗Seif E. Idani↗

arXiv:2606.13252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To better understand Martian Surface, which is needed to enable Rovers navigate Mars with ease, it is necessary to be able to determine the location of mounds. Detecting and studying these morphologies can also help us find evidence of extraterrestrial life, in this case, more specifically, water or signs of life conducive environments. Detection of mounds was done by manually mapping morphological parameters onto Digital Elevation Models. This paper solves the problem by automatically detecting and or predicting mounds on Mars using Neural Network based Semantic Segmentation methodologies. This is done by using supervised semantic segmentation model and generative adversarial approach. A comparison of the approaches shows that adding extra artificially generated data did not improve the result.

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

ATOM-Bench: A Real-World Benchmark for Atomic Skills and Compositional Generalization in Manipulation Policies

Authors:
Zenan Wu↗Bingqing Wei↗Lu Liu↗Zheqi He↗Xi Wang↗Jiakang Liu↗Zehui Li↗Guocai Yao↗Jing-Shu Zheng↗Xi Yang↗Yongtao Wang↗

arXiv:2606.16826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist manipulation policies are increasingly presented as foundation models for robotic control, but their real-world generalization remains difficult to diagnose. A policy may succeed on demonstrated tasks while still failing to execute fine-grained atomic skills or recombine learned skills in new task structures. We introduce ATOM-Bench, a real-world benchmark for evaluating both atomic skills and compositional generalization in manipulation policies. ATOM-Bench factorizes tabletop manipulation into motor atoms and instruction atoms, and contains 30 atomic tasks and 24 held-out compositional tasks across paired single-arm and dual-arm robot tracks. We collect 3,000 human demonstrations for atomic fine-tuning and release both the demonstration data and evaluation rollout data to support reproducible real-world evaluation. Policies are fine-tuned on atomic tasks and evaluated on both atomic skill acquisition and held-out compositional tasks. We further introduce Atomic Score (AS) and Compositional Failure Share (CFS) to distinguish failures caused by weak atomic skills from failures caused by limited compositional reuse. Through 2,700 physical rollouts on five representative manipulation policies, we find that current policies can acquire simple instruction-grounding skills, but still struggle with fine-grained motor atoms, counting, and logical filtering. More importantly, strong atomic performance does not reliably transfer to held-out compositional tasks. ATOM-Bench provides a diagnostic testbed for studying whether failures arise from weak motor execution, poor instruction grounding, or limited compositional reuse.

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15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Delayed acceptance sampling with Hamiltonian proposal subchains for random field materials inference

Authors:
Simona B\'ere\v{s}ov\'a↗Michal B\'ere\v{s}↗Tom\'a\v{s} Luber↗Stanislav Sysala↗

arXiv:2606.14743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper focuses on accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling in Bayesian inverse problems in which forward model evaluations dominate the computational cost. It builds on several established ingredients previously used in related scenarios: delayed acceptance, neural network surrogate models, Hamiltonian proposals, and proposal subchains. The main framework is the delayed-acceptance Metropolis-Hastings algorithm of Christen and Fox (2005). The first-stage proposal distribution is constructed from a subchain of Hamiltonian trajectories targeting the surrogate posterior. For each fixed surrogate model, the Hamiltonian subchain and delayed-acceptance correction define a kernel invariant with respect to the exact posterior. In the present work, the surrogate is updated only during a burn-in phase, after which the production run uses a fixed surrogate model. The sampling framework is implemented in Python using parallel processes. Several chains are generated in parallel and share a single surrogate model trained during burn-in on all collected data. The forward model is treated as a black box; therefore, the application area is broad. However, the main motivation is efficient solution of geotechnical inverse problems with material properties represented by Gaussian random fields. In this study, the sampling framework is applied to a geotechnical inverse problem in which hydraulic conductivity and porosity are modeled as non-stationary Gaussian random fields approximated using truncated Karhunen-Loeve expansions. Based on a precomputation, the truncation dimensions are chosen separately for hydraulic conductivity and porosity. The forward model outputs are pore pressure values at control points and selected observation times. These are compared with in situ pore pressure measurements collected over one year during the Tunnel Sealing Experiment in an underground laboratory in Canada.

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

Scalable Peptide Design via Memory-Efficient Equivariant Transformer

Authors:
Rui Jiao↗Xiangzhe Kong↗Yinjun Jia↗Yijia Zhang↗Ziyi Yang↗Yang Liu↗Jianzhu Ma↗

arXiv:2606.25006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Target-specific peptide design requires sequence and structure co-design under full atom geometric constraints. Latent generative frameworks offer an effective route for this problem by compressing fine grained atomic structures into block level latent representations and performing conditional generation in a compact latent space. However, the scalability of such systems depends heavily on the geometric backbone used throughout their encoding, decoding, and denoising components. We introduce MEET (Memory Efficient Equivariant Transformer), an E(3) equivariant backbone for scalable atomistic peptide modeling. MEET maintains coupled invariant scalar and equivariant vector feature streams, while reformulating geometric computation around memory efficient attention. It initializes vector features through global coordinate aggregation, incorporates pairwise distances through augmented query and key dot products, and injects covalent bond information through sparse bond adaptation. Integrated into a VAE and latent diffusion pipeline for full atom peptide generation, \model{} achieves linear memory scaling with atom count and improves generation quality over existing peptide design methods. Experiments on large scale AFDB derived datasets further show that the proposed backbone supports systematic model and data scaling, leading to better binding affinity, physical validity, and sample diversity.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ZeSTA: Zero-Shot TTS Augmentation with Domain-Conditioned Training for Data-Efficient Personalized Speech Synthesis

Authors:
Youngwon Choi↗Jinwoo Oh↗Hwayeon Kim↗Hyeonyu Kim↗

arXiv:2603.04219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.

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18.
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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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Yuan Meng↗Bo Wang↗Juan de los Rios Ruiz↗Xiangtong Yao↗Zhenshan Bing↗Fuchun Sun↗Alois Knoll↗

arXiv:2606.18132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% – 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

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

CaReTS: A Multi-Task Framework Unifying Classification and Regression for Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Fulong Yao↗Wanqing Zhao↗Chao Zheng↗Xiaofei Han↗

arXiv:2511.09789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in deep forecasting models have achieved remarkable performance, yet most approaches still struggle to provide both accurate predictions and interpretable insights into temporal dynamics. This paper proposes CaReTS, a novel multi-task learning framework that combines classification and regression tasks for multi-step time series forecasting problems. The framework adopts a dual-stream architecture, where a classification branch learns the stepwise trend into the future, while a regression branch estimates the corresponding deviations from the latest observation of the target variable. The dual-stream design provides more interpretable predictions by disentangling macro-level trends from micro-level deviations in the target variable. To enable effective learning in output prediction, deviation estimation, and trend classification, we design a multi-task loss with uncertainty-aware weighting to adaptively balance the contribution of each task. Furthermore, four variants (CaReTS1–4) are instantiated under this framework to incorporate mainstream temporal modelling encoders, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), and Transformers. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CaReTS outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms in forecasting accuracy, while achieving higher trend classification performance.

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

BadWorld: Adversarial Attacks on World Models

Authors:
Linghui Shen↗Mingyue Cui↗Xingyi Yang↗

Visual world models (VWMs) synthesize interactive, action-conditioned rollouts from a single context image. However, it remains an open question how robust these models are to adversarial perturbations. Standard adversarial attacks fail to assess this vulnerability because attackers lack ground-truth future videos and cannot predict subsequent user controls. We introduce BadWorld, a label-free adversarial framework tailored for autoregressive VWMs that systematically overcomes both constraints. First, to bypass the need for future supervision, we propose a self-supervised velocity attack that directly disrupts the early denoising dynamics of the model. Second, to ensure the attack generalizes across unpredictable user actions, we formulate a trajectory-adaptive bi-level optimization that actively mines hard control sequences to forge control-agnostic perturbations. Evaluated on representative VWMs with continuous and discrete controls, BadWorld exposes severe structural fragility. Visually indistinguishable adversarial images reliably trigger catastrophic degradation in future rollouts, leading to incomplete denoising, structural collapse, and control inconsistency. These findings reveal critical risks for deploying VWMs in safety-critical systems while highlighting a practical mechanism for privacy protection.

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

Tail-Shape Estimation in LLM Evaluation Is Fragile: A Protocol for Diagnosing False Positives

Authors:
Luca Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.16511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work motivates moving large language model (LLM) evaluation from mean-based to tail-aware metrics, including conditional value-at-risk and tail-index estimates of reward-model error. We ask whether the canonical extreme-value-theory tail-index parameter, which isolates how heavy a tail is from how large the tail mass is, adds discriminative information beyond the mean and a standard tail-magnitude statistic in LLM evaluation. We pre-register a protocol covering admissibility, goodness-of-fit, threshold-stability, and effect-size requirements for any positive tail-shape claim. The protocol is the contribution of this paper; the empirical study below is a demonstration of what its gates catch. Applied to a standard LLM toxicity-evaluation setup under two structurally different scorer families, the protocol catches three distinct modes of false positives that a naive analysis would have published, and rejects the headline tail-shape claim on both scorers. We conclude that tail-shape estimation in the LLM toxicity-evaluation setups we examined is more fragile than the recent literature suggests, and recommend the protocol as a starting point for tail-index claims in similar setups.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimal Probe State for Phase Estimation Under Covariant Measurement

Authors:
Qipeng Qian↗Christos N. Gagatsos↗

arXiv:2606.18169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the optimization of input states for phase estimation under covariant measurements. Building on Holevo's framework, which provides the optimal covariant measurement for a fixed input state, we further optimize over the input state itself. For a general even $2\pi$-periodic cost function with non-negative Fourier coefficients, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the optimal input state: Its Fock coefficients are determined, up to arbitrary phases, by the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue of a Toeplitz matrix defined by the cost function. This characterization yields an explicit expression for the attainable lower bound of the average cost under optimal covariant measurements and shows that this bound asymptotically approaches zero in the infinite-energy limit. For the specific cost function $W(\theta,\tilde{\theta})=4\sin^2[(\theta-\tilde{\theta})/2]$, we obtain the optimal input state and the corresponding minimum average cost in closed form, demonstrating Heisenberg scaling with respect to the mean photon number.

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

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

Authors:
Abhinit Sen↗Ajeet Kumar↗Manaranjan Pradhan↗

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

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

The limits of interpretability in multiple linear regression

Authors:
Anand Sharma↗Chen Liu↗Daniele Coslovich↗Misaki Ozawa↗

arXiv:2606.16013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interpreting machine-learning models has attracted increasing attention, particularly in the physical sciences, where one often seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms rather than merely make predictions. Multiple linear regression is often regarded as an interpretable alternative to more complex models, such as deep neural networks, because its predictions are expressed as explicit weighted sums of input features. However, when input features are strongly correlated, namely in the presence of multicollinearity, the learned weights can exhibit large dataset-to-dataset fluctuations and oscillatory behavior across physically similar features, making their interpretation difficult or even impossible. Although the instability of the weights under multicollinearity is well known in statistics, its consequences for physical interpretation, in particular its connection to oscillatory weights across physically similar features, have not been systematically clarified. Here, we theoretically discuss the mechanism behind this loss of interpretability by analyzing the eigenmodes of the feature correlation matrix. We show that small-eigenvalue modes associated with multicollinearity amplify fluctuations in the weights and generate oscillatory patterns that do not necessarily reflect meaningful contributions. We test this theoretical picture numerically on physics datasets and show that Ridge regularization suppresses these unstable modes, although the resulting weights must still be interpreted with caution. We further confirm the generality of our findings beyond physics by analyzing a diverse collection of publicly available datasets. Our results clarify why, in the presence of multicollinearity, physical interpretation can remain difficult even for linear regression models.

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