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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

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

I'm Sorry Driver, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That: Appraising the Safety of LLMs within Automotive Contexts

arXiv:2606.14327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper appraises recent frameworks within AI development to integrate LLMs into control tasks in automotive contexts from the perspective of safety assurance. This work has built upon the rapid integration of LLMs across automotive settings. However, we find that at present, these frameworks face significant challenges, limiting their efficacy in real-time safety-critical contexts. Firstly, we consider conceptual challenges, including the fact that deployers are faced with a dual challenge, wherein they must assure a model which has been developed upstream, i.e. as general-purpose tools by the large AI labs, in a downstream context, i.e. into specific vehicle architectures. Secondly, we consider concrete challenges from across existing standards. We show that there are currently both fundamental engineering constraints covered in ISO21448, such as latency, and novel LLM-specific issues, such as alignment-related issues covered in ISO/PAS8800. We ground both examples in a concrete introductory, experimental case study exploring an existing open-source repository, Talk2Drive. We present a safety argument in order to make explicit the limitations of existing solutions. Nonetheless, given that the use of LLMs in automotive contexts is being explored at a technical level and operationalised, we propose potential assurance mechanisms for LLM-related hazardous events going forward.

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

Mitigating Legibility Tax with Decoupled Prover-Verifier Games

arXiv:2602.23248v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models become increasingly capable, it is critical that their outputs can be easily checked by less capable systems. Prover-verifier games can be used to improve checkability of model outputs, but display a degradation in accuracy compared to a baseline trained only to maximize correctness – a phenonemon named legibility tax. We propose a solution by decoupling the correctness from the checkability condition and instead training a "translator" model that turns a fixed solver model's solution into a checkable form. This allows us to first train the solver to maximize correctness, and then train the translator to translate the solver into a checkable form while retaining the solver's answer. To accommodate this new objective of translation, we formulate a decoupled prover-verifier game (DPVG) where the equilibria correspond to faithful and checkable translators.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Auto-Configured Explainable Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Site Pollution Prediction

arXiv:2606.24978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate particulate matter (PM) prediction is crucial for mitigating air pollution. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) effectively model spatiotemporal dependencies, but predefined graphs limit adaptability, and some datasets complicate learning. This study introduces a graph construction method based on a confusion matrix from a supervised learning process to dynamically capture inter-class relationships. Additionally, a hybrid loss function that combines energy distance and Huber loss is applied to address the vanishing gradient problem and improve learning stability. The approach is evaluated using air pollution data from the University of Utah AirU Pollution Monitoring Network in Salt Lake City, UT, with five GNN models: Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), Simple Graph Convolutional Networks (SGConv), Graph Isomorphism Networks (GINs), Graph Attention Networks (GATs), and GraphSage. The experimental results of single- and multistep predictions confirm that GraphSage achieves the highest accuracy in predicting the concentrations of PM${1}$, PM${10}$, and PM$_{2.5}$ over different time horizons. Furthermore, {\color{black} GNNExplainer (Graph Neural Network Explainer) and PGExplainer (Probabilistic Graph Explainer)} are applied to interpret feature importance and graph structure, ensuring model transparency. Results show improved prediction accuracy, with GNN models outperforming traditional machine learning \textcolor{black}{and deep learning models (i.e., Prophet, Long short-term memory, Gated recurrent units} in air pollution forecasting.

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

The Measurement Gap in the Automation of EU Law: Benchmarking Doctrinal Legal Reasoning under the EU AI Act

Large language models now produce legal text of at least median quality, yet no existing benchmark can evaluate whether they perform doctrinal legal reasoning, which forms the interpretive core of legal work, rather than the ancillary, paralegal tasks that most current legal-AI evaluations measure. This measurement gap is not only methodological but legal: the EU AI Act makes "appropriate accuracy" a binding requirement for high-risk AI used in the judicial domain, yet that requirement cannot acquire operational content without the very doctrinal-reasoning benchmark the field lacks.

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

Two Stages of Folding: Convergent Mechanisms in AI Protein Folding Trunks

arXiv:2602.06020v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How do protein structure prediction models fold proteins? We investigate this question through causal interventions on the folding trunks of ESMFold, OpenFold, and Boltz-1. Across all three models, we find a shared two-stage computational structure. In the first stage, early blocks initialize pairwise biochemical signals: features like charge propagate from sequence into pairwise representations through architecture-specific pathways. In the second stage, late blocks develop pairwise spatial features: distance and contact information accumulate in the pairwise representation. We verify these mechanisms causally by showing that steering charge and distance features induces predictable structural changes. Furthermore, these representations are functionally interchangeable: pairwise states can be linearly aligned and substituted across models. Together, these results suggest that folding trunks with different architectures, inputs, and training procedures converge on a shared representational organization for mapping sequence chemistry into spatial geometry.

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

CycliST: A Video Language Model Benchmark for Reasoning on Cyclical State Transitions

We present CycliST, a novel benchmark dataset designed to evaluate Video Language Models (VLM) on their ability for textual reasoning over cyclical state transitions. CycliST captures fundamental aspects of real-world processes by generating synthetic, richly structured video sequences featuring periodic patterns in object motion and visual attributes. CycliST employs a tiered evaluation system that progressively increases difficulty through variations in the number of cyclic objects, scene clutter, and lighting conditions, challenging state-of-the-art models on their spatio-temporal cognition. We conduct extensive experiments with current state-of-the-art VLMs, both open-source and proprietary, and reveal their limitations in generalizing to cyclical dynamics such as linear and orbital motion, as well as time-dependent changes in visual attributes like color and scale. Our results demonstrate that present-day VLMs struggle to reliably detect and exploit cyclic patterns, lack a notion of temporal understanding, and are unable to extract quantitative insights from scenes, such as the number of objects in motion, highlighting a significant technical gap that needs to be addressed. More specifically, we find no single model consistently leads in performance: neither size nor architecture correlates strongly with outcomes, and no model succeeds equally well across all tasks. By providing a targeted challenge and a comprehensive evaluation framework, CycliST paves the way for visual reasoning models that surpass the state-of-the-art in understanding periodic patterns.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

On-site interactions in quantum thermal machines: efficiency, rectification and entanglement beyond local and global master equations

arXiv:2606.14593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in experimental techniques have opened new routes for harnessing non-equilibrium dynamics in mesoscopic quantum systems. In this context, we study the impact of on-site interactions on the transport properties of a continuous quantum thermal machine composed of two coupled oscillators connected to two thermal reservoirs. In the weak system-reservoir coupling regime, where a long-standing debate concerns which reduced description should be preferred, we first show that the Redfield master equation (RME) provides an accurate and unifying framework that interpolates between two well-known limits: the local and global master equations. By relying on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), a numerically exact stochastic method, we then explore the full parameter space and show that interactions can be leveraged to tune the efficiency of the thermal machine at high temperatures (while leaving it essentially unchanged at low temperatures), induce non-reciprocal transport under asymmetric reservoir couplings, and generate steady-state entanglement within the junction. We derive expressions for system-bath correlators, such as heat and particle currents, consistently across different frameworks. Our work features on-site interactions to enhance the versatility of quantum thermodynamic junctions and clarifies the role of non-Markovianity and non-linearities in quantum transport.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Stochastic Linear Contextual Bandits with Bounded Noise: A Set-Membership Approach

arXiv:2606.20022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers stochastic linear contextual bandits (SLCB) with bounded reward noise. Existing works typically assume sub-Gaussian reward noise and bounded expected rewards, under which the optimal regret bound scales as $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ in terms of horizon $T$. However, in many applications, realized/observed rewards are also naturally bounded, implying bounded reward noise. Bounded noise is more informative than the sub-Gaussian condition but has not been leveraged explicitly in the SLCB literature. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm SME-OFU by utilizing an uncertainty quantification method called set-membership estimation (SME) and applying the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU). Our algorithm enjoys an improved regret bound $O(\log T)$. Notice that this does not contradict the existing optimal bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for sub-Gaussian noise because bounded noise is a stronger condition. Finally, simulations show empirical improvements of SME-OFU over a benchmark algorithm designed for sub-Gaussian noise when the reward noise is bounded.

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

Stop When Further Reasoning Won't Help: Attention-State Adaptive Generation in Reasoning Models

By incorporating test-time compute scaling, large reasoning models (LRMs) can solve complex problems through explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning processes. However, they often suffer from overthinking, resulting in redundant token outputs and degraded accuracy. Current methods to mitigate this issue remain limited: training-based approaches require substantial computational resources, while training-free methods rely on well-crafted prompts or unreliable confidence signals. In this work, we investigate early stopping from the perspective of attention distributions and propose a simple method, ASAG, which infers the model's reasoning state and adaptively adjusts the generation strategy. The proposed framework is training-free and plug-and-play, enabling seamless integration into existing LRMs. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across mainstream LRMs with varying parameter scales, including the DeepSeek-R1-Distill and Qwen3 series. Specifically, ASAG improves average accuracy by 3.2% while reducing the number of generated tokens by nearly 40% across all reasoning tasks on Qwen3-8B.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Marginal Advantage Accumulation for Memory-Driven Agent Self-Evolution

arXiv:2606.20475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In batch-style trace distillation, the same memory operation may receive contradictory feedback across different batches. Existing methods lack a cross-batch, operation-level evidence accumulation mechanism, making it impossible to distinguish stably effective operations from accidental hits. This paper formalizes the requirement as two structural conditions, alignability and comparability, and proposes Marginal Advantage Accumulation (MAA). MAA constructs differential signals to make them comparable across batches, accumulates signed evidence per operation via EMA, and ensures cross-batch traceability through semantic identity merging. As a post-processing architecture, MAA achieves the best results in 14 out of 16 settings across 4 benchmarks and 4 target models, consistently outperforming existing batch-level distillation baselines and matching or surpassing online alternatives in most settings, while reducing optimization-phase token consumption by approximately 75%.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Differential Recovery Trajectories of Emergency Otolaryngologic Conditions across the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Six-year Longitudinal Study from an Urban Emergency Center

Authors:

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic markedly altered social activity patterns, healthcare utilization, and the epidemiology of infectious diseases. However, its long-term impact on emergency otolaryngologic conditions remains incompletely understood. This study investigated long-term trends in emergency otolaryngologic conditions before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic using comprehensive data from a large urban emergency clinic in Osaka, Japan. Methods: All new otolaryngologic outpatients who visited the Chuo Emergency Medical Clinic (CEMC) in Osaka City between 2019 and 2024were retrospectively analyzed. Annual trends in absolute numbers and relative proportions of emergency otolaryngologic conditions were examined by anatomical region and disease category, using 2019 as the pre-pandemic baseline. Results: A total of 99,324 new otolaryngologic outpatients were analyzed. Overall emergency visits declined sharply to approximately half of baseline in 2020, followed by a gradual but incomplete recovery toward pre-pandemic levels by 2024. Most anatomical categories declined to 45-61% of baseline in 2020 and exhibited gradual yet incomplete recovery through 2023; in stark contrast, laryngeal conditions diverged sharply, surging beyond pre-pandemic levels after 2022. Acute infectious otorhinolaryngologic diseases fell to 23-50% of baseline in 2020 and showed variable recovery (69-103%) by 2024. Notably, laryngitis exceeded the baseline, reaching 132% in 2023, whereas epiglottic edema exhibited only a transient increase approaching the baseline in 2021. Non-infectious emergency conditions generally showed only a marginal decrease in 2020 and remained relatively stable throughout the study period, except for sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL), which dropped sharply to 39% of the baseline in 2020 and remained persistently reduced through 2024. Traumatic emergencies declined variably to 53-81% of the baseline in 2020, followed by an incomplete recovery, reaching only 55-69% by 2024. Conclusion: Emergency otolaryngologic conditions demonstrated heterogeneous recovery trajectories following the COVID-19 pandemic. While most infectious and traumatic conditions gradually but incompletely normalized, laryngeal conditions showed a distinct post-pandemic surge, and SSNHL remained persistently suppressed. These findings reveal heterogeneous, condition-specific recovery trajectories that reflect both genuine shifts in community pathogen burden, true traumatic incidence, and persistent alterations in healthcare-seeking behaviors, insights essential for resource allocation during future public health emergencies.

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

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

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

Bistable by Construction: Wall-Clock-Calibrated State Monitors Have No Moment-Detection Regime at Agent Cadence

arXiv:2606.19386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime monitors for autonomous agents commonly threshold an accumulated internal state - a behavioural baseline, a drift statistic, or, in our prior work, a modelled affective state. We previously reported a State Saturation Trap: threshold-on-state triggers over a continuous affect engine become near-constant alarms on SWE-bench debugging agents (Modgil 2026). A post-release audit found the engine received dt=0 between actions, so its exponential decay never operated: the published trap is a pure-accumulator result. We correct the record (erratum, v2) and treat the flaw as an experiment. The key variable it exposes is whether a monitor's dynamics are calibrated in sample time (per observation, as in CUSUM) or wall-clock time (half-lives in seconds, as in affect models and EMA baselines). On fixed-rate streams these coincide; on agent streams, where inter-action time varies by orders of magnitude, they do not. A pre-registered sweep over uniform intervals (dt in {0..600}s) on 20 trajectories shows the wall-clock level trigger has two regimes: at dt=60s silent. Every critical dt lies in (1,30]s. Real agent runs measure latency at median 1.53s (p90 2.33s); real coding cadence sits inside the trap regime, vindicating the empirical finding under a corrected mechanism. The structure is a property of the calibration class, not the engine: a minimal wall-clock accumulator over the raw error stream reproduces the same cliff, while a sample-time CUSUM over the identical stream is exactly dt-invariant (20/20). A rising-edge trigger with hysteresis fires 0-3 times per trajectory in every condition. We conclude that wall-clock-calibrated leaky-integrator monitors admit no regime in which they act as moment detectors on agent streams; transition detection escapes the trap at every cadence, but does not recover human intervention timing.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

A welding penetration prediction model for laser welding process based on self-supervised learning using physics-informed neural networks

The laser welding full-penetration is of critical importance, as it constitutes one of the fundamental factors in achieving defect-free welded joints. Accurate prediction of the penetration state is therefore essential for ensuring weld quality. To this end, this paper introduces SimPhysNet, a novel algorithm that achieves high classification accuracy in laser welding penetration prediction using only a limited number of labelled images. This approach effectively overcomes the limitations of supervised learning classification algorithms, which are hindered in industrial applications by their dependence on extensive, high-quality labelled data. The core of SimPhysNet is a unique self-supervised learning paradigm that embeds physical priors into a contrastive learning framework. By incorporating a physics-informed neural network (PINN), the model is guided to extract physically meaningful features of the molten pool and keyhole from a large set of unlabelled data, while three image augmentation tasks further enhance its generalization capabilities. Subsequently, a few-shot learning strategy, based on prototypical networks, enables robust classification by constructing class representations from a minimal set of labelled images. Experimental results demonstrate that SimPhysNet achieves a classification accuracy of 96.06% using only 200 labelled images (approximately 5% of the total labelled dataset), which is comparable to the performance of conventional supervised learning algorithms that utilize the entire labelled dataset. This work presents a new, efficient, and highly accurate method, providing the way for the intelligent automation of laser welding.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Adaptive Speech-to-Spike Encoding for Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.19039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The mismatch between continuous acoustic signals and discrete event-driven processing remains a fundamental bottleneck for neuromorphic speech processing. Current systems typically rely on fixed spike encoders, forcing downstream Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to compensate for non-adaptive input representations. To address this, we present a learnable residual speech-to-spike encoder jointly trained end-to-end with a Recurrent Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (R-LIF) backbone. We validate this approach on the Google Speech Commands v2 (GSC-v2) benchmark, achieving up to 94.97% accuracy. Notably, the learned encoder remains highly parameter-efficient with a compact 35k-parameter variant that reaches 89.8%, matching or exceeding prior baselines that require an order of magnitude more parameters. Our encoder-focused analysis, including linear probing and gradient-residual inspection, indicates that the encoder does not target faithful signal reconstruction but instead learns task-aligned spike representations that enhance class separability. Finally, we benchmark bio-inspired, hardware-friendly credit assignment by comparing Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) with surrogate-gradient BPTT under identical architectures and training conditions. We find that DFA reaches 91.5% accuracy, quantifying the performance trade-off of bio-inspired learning rules for modern neuromorphic audio.

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

The Metric Picks the Winner: Evaluation Choice Flips Model Rankings for Drug-Response Prediction in Unseen Chemistry

arXiv:2606.12639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting how a cell's transcriptome responds to a drug it has never seen is a core, hard problem in computational cell biology: recent benchmarks show complex models often fail to beat trivial baselines once test compounds are held out by chemistry. We study one cell line and assay, THP-1 cells profiled by DRUG-seq, scored by the active-compound weighted MSE(wMSE) of the VCPI prediction contest. We propose a staged approach: dumb baselines (untreated control and mean training-compound response) that the field keeps failing to beat; non-parametric retrieval (a Tanimoto-weighted average of a held-out compound's nearest training compounds); and a fusion stage combining a frozen chemistry embedding with retrieval-support features to predict the residual over the mean, with an uncertainty head and gene programs. On the released VCPI THP-1 drug-seq data (14,026 training compounds), under a Bemis-Murcko scaffold split, the model ranking inverts depending on the metric. Under an inverse-variance per-gene proxy, a regularized linear regression on Morgan fingerprints appears to win over the deep models, retrieval, and ChemBERTa – the textbook "simple baselines win" result. But under the contest's true active-set metric (per-(gene, compound) Mejia weights, validated against the official scorer; mean baseline 0.535 vs the organizers' 0.507 reference), that reverses: the deep models win, our fusion decoder significantly beats the linear fingerprint baseline (-0.012 wMSE, paired bootstrap p < 10^-4), and the proxy's winner becomes the worst chemistry-aware predictor. Picking the metric picks the winner – to our knowledge the first demonstration on real held-out drug chemistry of the metric-calibration effect established largely on genetic perturbation. We release a reproducible pipeline wired to the official scorer that emits a valid submission over the real 1064 x 12,995 grid.

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

NARRAS: Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference for CSI-Based Localization in Vehicular IoT Networks

arXiv:2606.11914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: CSI-based localization with spatially distributed antenna arrays exposes a basic resource trade-off. Each array can provide a rich view of the channel, but forwarding observations from all arrays to a fusion center is wasteful when only a few carry useful information, and the shared uplink supports only a limited number of simultaneous transmissions. We let each array decide locally whether its current observation is worth reporting, subject to a budget on the average number of active transmitters. We refer to this abstraction as Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference (ETDI). It captures a broader class of task-oriented communication problems where resource-constrained devices share an access channel for a common inference task. We instantiate ETDI for CSI-based localization, a common scenario in vehicular IoT networks. Spatially distributed remote antenna arrays (RAAs) encode local channel state information (CSI) from user equipment (UE) transmissions into latent features, and the fusion center estimates the UE position from the subset of reported features. We propose NARRAS, a decentralized reporting policy in which each RAA combines a recurrent summary of its recent observations with a memory of the last latent it transmitted. Training controls an explicit activity budget through differentiable activity penalties and validation-calibrated deterministic thresholds, and uses channel-chart regularization to shape the latent geometry. Experiments show that, at comparable uplink activity, NARRAS improves localization accuracy over learned and heuristic sparse-reporting strategies, while dense full-report models remain useful budget-free references. In low-activity regimes, chart regularization further reduces high-percentile localization errors, suggesting that geometry-aware latent representations are more robust under sparse reporting.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Evolutionary Bilevel Reward Shaping for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation when deployed in environments that differ from those encountered during training. Existing techniques such as domain randomization (DR) mitigate this, but require access to diverse training environments and full trajectory observability, assumptions that fail in privacy-preserving or restricted scenarios where only scalar performance metrics are available. We propose Generalization via Evolutionary Reward Shaping (GERS), a bilevel optimization approach to improve generalization on unseen test environments using only scalar feedback from validation environments. At the lower level, an RL agent guided via a reward function shaped by the upper level learns a policy on a limited set of training environments with accessible trajectory data; at the upper level, CMA-ES optimizes the reward shaping parameters to maximize the cumulative unshaped reward on separate validation environments for which trajectory access is unavailable. Results on continuous control tasks indicate that GERS outperforms the standard RL baseline on unseen test environments. GERS performance is comparable to DR, despite DR treating the combined set of training and validation environments of GERS as a single training set that requires trajectory access, whereas GERS cannot access validation trajectories. These results confirm that GERS effectively enhances generalization under restricted data access constraints.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Semiclassical limit of Polyakov-Liouville measure and Q-Curvature Uniformization on evev-dimensional manifolds

arXiv:2606.14443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the semiclassical limit of the Polyakov-Liouville measure $\boldsymbol{\nu}_\gamma$, which is a non-Gaussian measure on $H^{-\eps}(M)$ that has recently been extended from Riemann surfaces to general Riemannian manifolds $(M,g)$ of even dimension. We show that under an appropriate rescaling in the semiclassical limit as $\gamma\to0$, the normalized Polyakov-Liouville measure $\Q_\gamma$ concentrates on the unique smooth weight $u$ for which the conformal metric $e^{2u}g$ on $M$ has constant $Q$-curvature.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Epistemic Bias Injection: Manipulating LLM Opinion via Selective Context Retrieval

arXiv:2512.00804v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When answering user queries, LLMs often retrieve knowledge from external sources stored in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) databases. These are often populated from unvetted sources, e.g. the open web, and can contain maliciously crafted data. This paper studies attacks that can manipulate the context retrieved by LLMs from such RAG databases. Prior work on such context manipulation primarily injects false or toxic content, which can often be detected by fact-checking or linguistic analysis. A more subtle threat, which we call epistemic bias injection (EBI), is where adversaries inject factually correct yet epistemically biased passages that systematically favor one side of an open-ended issue. Although linguistically coherent and truthful, such adversarial passages effectively crowd out alternative viewpoints during retrieval from the RAG and push LLM outputs towards an attack-desired stance. As a core contribution, we propose a novel characterization of the problem: We give a geometric metric that quantifies stance polarity and epistemic bias. This metric can be computed directly on embeddings of text passages. Leveraging it, we construct EBI attacks and develop a lightweight prototype defense called BiasDef for them. We evaluate them both on a comprehensive benchmark constructed from public question answering datasets. Our results show that: (1) the proposed attack induces significant stance polarity shifts, effectively evading existing retrieval-based sanitization defenses, and (2) BiasDef substantially reduces adversarial retrieval and epistemic bias in LLM's answers. Overall, this demonstrates the new threat as well as the ease of employing epistemic bias metrics for filtering in RAG-enabled LLMs.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Hermitian Crystalline Braid Topology from Hermitian Projection: A Zero-Mode Resonance Mechanism

arXiv:2606.06626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian topological phases are typically engineered through gain and loss, nonreciprocity, or interaction with an environment. Here we show that they can instead emerge purely by projecting a fully Hermitian, topologically trivial parent lattice onto an embedded subsystem. The mechanism is general: when a zero mode of the eliminated degrees of freedom couples to the retained subsystem, the embedding self-energy develops a pole, the zero-frequency description becomes singular, and topology is carried by the finite-frequency projected Green's function. We realize the mechanism exactly in a trivial nearest-neighbor square lattice with an embedded one-dimensional zig-zag brane. In the periodic transverse geometry, the parity of the eliminated complement selects the outcome: even sectors reduce to a regular Schur complement and yield conventional SSH-type descendants, whereas odd sectors host a sublattice-imbalance zero mode and follow the resonant route. There, the complex bands braid through isolated finite-frequency exceptional points (EPs), while a parity symmetry inherited from the embedding, together with $\mathrm{TRS}^{\dagger}$, induces conjugated pseudo-Hermiticity and quantizes the complex Berry phase. The stable bulk invariant of the nondegenerate phases is this quantized complex Berry phase; adjacent sectors are separated by parity-paired exceptional points whose half-integer vorticities encode the local exchange of complex-energy strands.The absence of the non-Hermitian skin effect ensures that the invariant is defined directly on the ordinary Brillouin zone. A topolectrical implementation of the projected response predicts momentum-resolved transmission minima at the exceptional-point transition frequencies together with a characteristic low-frequency resonant admittance, providing an experimentally testable signature of the mechanism.

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

Corpus Augmentation for Sign Language Translation via LLM-Guided Video Stitching

Sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language video into spoken language text and holds significant promise for improving accessibility and enabling communication between signing and non-signing communities. While large weakly-aligned datasets have enabled pre-training at scale and gloss-free methods have reduced reliance on expert annotation, high-quality parallel sign video-text pairs for fine-tuning remain scarce, limiting generalisation on long-tail vocabulary and unseen constructions. We propose a corpus augmentation approach that requires no additional human annotation, external sign-language video corpora, or generative video models, relying only on the existing gloss-annotated training corpus and an LLM for sentence generation: per-gloss clips are extracted from training videos via CTC forced-alignment, novel gloss-sentence pairs are generated by a corpus-anchored LLM, and synthetic sequences are assembled through random sentence sampling and clip assignment. The resulting synthetic RGB video-text pairs are architecture-agnostic at the downstream training stage and can be consumed directly by RGB-based SLT models, or converted into pose or feature representations by pipelines that derive such inputs from video. Sincan et al. re-evaluated five recent gloss-free methods under strictly identical conditions; the largest verified gain over the GFSLT-VLP baseline was only 0.98 BLEU-4. Our augmentation, applied within the same framework, achieves +2.92 BLEU-4 without any change to architecture or training protocol. We further identify that synthetic data harms vision-language pretraining despite improving its objectives, and that optimising clip transitions for visual smoothness is counter-productive under L2-based criteria; we propose that abrupt boundaries may act as a form of implicit regularisation. Code is available at https://github.com/robizso/slt-datagen.

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

AlignCoder: Aligning Retrieval with Target Intent for Repository-Level Code Completion

arXiv:2601.19697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Repository-level code completion remains a challenging task for existing code large language models (code LLMs) due to their limited understanding of repository-specific context and domain knowledge. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches have shown promise by retrieving relevant code snippets as cross-file context, they suffer from two fundamental problems: misalignment between the query and the target code in the retrieval process, and the inability of existing retrieval methods to effectively utilize the inference information. To address these challenges, we propose AlignCoder, a repository-level code completion framework that introduces a query enhancement mechanism and a reinforcement learning based retriever training method. Our approach generates multiple candidate completions to construct an enhanced query that bridges the semantic gap between the initial query and the target code. Additionally, we employ reinforcement learning to train an AlignRetriever that learns to leverage inference information in the enhanced query for more accurate retrieval. We evaluate AlignCoder on two widely-used benchmarks (CrossCodeEval and RepoEval) across five backbone code LLMs, demonstrating an 18.1% improvement in EM score compared to baselines on the CrossCodeEval benchmark. The results show that our framework achieves superior performance and exhibits high generalizability across various code LLMs and programming languages.

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

Faithful by Construction: Claim-Anchored Attribution for Multi-Document Summarization

Authors:

End-to-end large language models (LLMs) produce fluent multi-document summaries but remain prone to hallucination, and the attributions they offer are typically coarse (whole documents or passages) and generated post hoc, leaving each summary statement hard to verify. We revisit the modular Extract–Select–Rewrite paradigm and recast its intermediate representation as the unit of attribution. We present CAMS, a Claim-Anchored Multi-document Summarization framework that (i) extracts atomic claims with token-level provenance from every source document, (ii) clusters equivalent claims across documents while flagging inter-source conflicts, (iii) selects a support-aware and salient subset, and (iv) rewrites the selection into a summary in which every sentence is anchored to a support-checked claim that links back to one or more source spans. Because content is localized before it is realized, the pipeline is attribution-oriented by construction and faithfulness-oriented by construction: it structurally preserves fine-grained, multi-source traceability while using support-aware selection, constrained rewriting, and verification to encourage, rather than guarantee, factual faithfulness. We evaluate quality, faithfulness, and localization on MultiNews, analyze conflict handling on DiverseSumm, and test zero-shot transfer on WCEP, using a two-regime protocol that separates reference-free citation quality from gold-aligned localization accuracy, and we add an evaluator-decoupled audit that tests citation precision with a support model never used for selection or verification. CAMS matches strong end-to-end and span-attribution baselines on summary quality while substantially improving faithfulness and citation precision, lifting multi-source attribution accuracy by roughly two-thirds, and exposing a controllable faithfulness–coverage trade-off that end-to-end models leave implicit.