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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Hierarchical Spatial and Channel Aggregation for Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation

Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to learn generalizable segmentation capability from abundant annotated samples in the source domain, enabling accurate segmentation of novel classes in the target domain with only a few annotated samples. Existing CD-FSS methods mainly focus on mitigating feature distribution shifts caused by style gaps while ignoring significant differences in class semantic granularity and discriminative attributes across domains, leading to two key degradations in support-query matching: semantic over-alignment and attribute over-alignment. To this end, we propose the Dual Hierarchical Aggregation Network (DHANet), which comprises three key modules. First, the Hierarchical Spatial Aggregation (HSA) module performs multi-scale region aggregation of pixel features along the spatial dimension, generating hierarchical semantic-enhanced features to alleviate semantic over-alignment. Additionally, the HCA module conducts multi-scale attribute aggregation along the channel dimension, generating hierarchical attribute-enhanced features to mitigate attribute over-alignment. Finally, we propose the Online Probabilistic Semantic Bank (OPSB), which progressively constructs and updates class probability distributions from query predictions during inference, and samples multiple pseudo-prototypes as additional support information to mitigate insufficient support. Extensive experiments on four target-domain datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models

Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent. Commonly used rule-based driving metrics like EPDMS are interpretable but lack context-awareness, while recent VLMbased evaluations are context-aware but limited by ambiguous VLM outputs and weak physical grounding. To evaluate driving in a manner that is both interpretable and context-aware, we introduce DriveJudge. DriveJudge is a driving evaluation agent that combines rule-grounded evaluation with Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning and selectively invokes physically-grounded deterministic rule functions after interpreting the environmental context. To train and evaluate DriveJudge, we curate a large-scale dataset of 33,577 challenging driving samples with human annotations on whether the driving behavior is reasonable in the given scenario. With this dataset, we address the underexplored problem of driving metric evaluation, and introduce two human-aligned benchmark tasks: Driving Quality Classification and Trajectory Preference Selection. DriveJudge outperforms EPDMS for driving quality classification by 21.23 AUC, and the recent VLM-based DriveCritic for trajectory preference selection by 6.5%, setting a new standard for interpretable and precise driving evaluation.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Groups in Critic-Free RLVR

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models. Existing critic-free RL methods typically generate a group of rollouts for the same question to estimate value baselines for advantage computation. However, this design suffers from data inefficiency, group synchronization barriers, and inflexibility with structured rollouts. In this work, we revisit the role of the ``group'' and show that its underlying function is not merely to estimate baselines but to prevent false penalties on negative samples. Building on this insight, we propose negative token filtering, a simple and effective strategy that enables stable single-rollout training. We apply it to two batch-level advantage methods, achieving comparable performance on reasoning tasks and stronger performance on agentic tasks relative to group-based RL techniques.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Output Type Before Quality: A Standards-Derived XAI Admissibility Rubric for Autonomous-Driving Safety

arXiv:2606.05461v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety standards for ML-based autonomous driving specify the kind of evidence an assurance case must contain (directed cause-and-effect chains, quantified interventional effects, named root-cause variables), yet the XAI literature is organised by output type and technique family (saliency maps, feature attribution, counterfactuals, causal graphs, language traces). SHAP, the most-recommended ADS XAI method, returns a ranked feature list that no implementation effort can convert into a directed chain (Fig.1). We name this mismatch the evidence-type gap. From AMLAS, ISO 26262, ISO21448, ISO/PAS 8800 we derive 19 testable evidentiary criteria across 7 lifecycle stages with representative clause-cited derivations and score six XAI method classes structurally. Causal XAI emerges as structurally required to satisfy the derived criteria at three stages: hazard identification (+62% rubric gap), incident investigation (+50%), and data management (+50%); the verdict set is stable across thresholds T in (0%, 50%]$ and survives a worst-case single-cell flip down to T = 25%. At the remaining four stages, correlational or language-based methods are comparable or sufficient. The rubric identifies structural admissibility (necessary but not sufficient for compliance): an admissible method's specific output content may still be wrong, and validating that fidelity (the edges a fitted SCM produces, the cause a trace names) is the open assurance challenge. A single-VLA proof of concept on 1,996 real-world driving clips (79,840 rows, ten splits) is consistent with each method's observed output type matching its rubric prediction. XAI method selection for ADS safety assurance should be driven by lifecycle-stage evidence demand, not by method popularity.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Daily briefing: Ancient ground squirrels ate like ‘zombies of the Pleistocene’

Authors:

Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise. Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise.

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

DivRL: Disentangled Self-Similarity Rewards for Diverse Subject-Driven Generation

Subject-driven image generation faces an "Identity-Diversity Paradox", where strong identity preservation often leads to rigid and low-diversity outputs. We propose a post-training framework called DivRL that jointly optimizes identity consistency and structural diversity simultaneously by leveraging disentangled visual features from a robust similarity model. Specifically, we introduce a Negative Self-Similarity Measure (nSSM) to quantify structural diversity, and Visual Semantic Matching (VSM) to evaluate identity consistency. We propose an "Explore-and-Suppress" strategy that treats VSM as a gated constraint: the model freely explores structurally diverse configurations, and only samples that violate the identity threshold are penalized via a quadratic hinge loss. This converts identity preservation from a competing objective into a feasibility constraint, allowing nSSM and VSM to improve jointly. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively pushes the model to generate both consistent and diverse images and improves structural diversity while maintaining comparable identity consistency through a gated optimization formulation.

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

Tight $L_\infty$ Sample Complexity for Low-Degree and Sparse Boolean Polynomials

arXiv:2606.17319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the optimization of bounded binary black-box functions, we study the problem of learning polynomial surrogates over the Boolean hypercube. To ensure that optimizing the surrogate yields good solutions for the underlying objective, we require uniform $L_\infty$-error guarantees rather than the usual $L_2$-type guarantees. We characterize the minimax sample complexity of uniform estimation under subgaussian noise for two classes of bounded polynomials. First, for polynomials of degree at most $d$ on $n$ variables, the sample complexity scales as $n^{d+1}$. Second, for $s$-sparse Fourier-Walsh polynomials with $s \leq n$, it scales as $ns^2$. These rates differ structurally from the noiseless setting, where uniform exact recovery scales as $n^d$ and $ns$, respectively. Our lower bounds hold even for arbitrary adaptive learners, showing that the additional factors are intrinsic to the noisy cases. Standard Fourier-analysis tools for the $L_2$-norm do not naturally extend to the $L_\infty$-setting in a way that yields uniform guarantees. Our proofs overcome this difficulty by relying on suitably chosen auxiliary norms that serve as proxies for controlling the $L_\infty$-error. Together, our results provide a tight characterization of the sample complexity of learning optimization-safe polynomial surrogates.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Select to Think: Unlocking SLM Potential with Local Sufficiency

Small language models (SLMs) offer efficient deployment, yet they often lag behind their larger counterparts (LLMs) in reasoning. Existing remedies either invoke an LLM at points of reasoning divergence, incurring substantial latency and cost, or rely on standard distillation, which is limited by the SLM's capacity to accurately mimic the LLM's complex generative distribution. We address this dilemma by identifying local sufficiency: at divergence points, the LLM's preferred token often resides within the SLM's top-K next-token predictions, even when failing to emerge as the SLM top-1 choice. We therefore propose Select to Think (S2T), which reframes the LLM's role from open-ended generation to selection among the SLM's proposals, simplifying the supervision signal to discrete candidate rankings. Leveraging this, we introduce S2T-Local, which distills the selection logic into the SLM, empowering it to perform autonomous re-ranking without inference-time LLM dependency. Empirically, a 1.5B SLM's top-8 candidates contain the 32B LLM's choice with a 95% hit rate, and S2T-Local improves the 1.5B SLM's Math Avg. over greedy decoding by 24.1% relative gain, matching the efficacy of 8-path self-consistency with single-trajectory efficiency.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Average entropy of Bogoliubov-Kubo-Mori random state ensemble

arXiv:2606.17960v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random states play a foundational role in different branches of modern quantum science. In this work, we study a recently proposed random state ensemble induced from von Neumann entropy through the Bogoliubov-Kubo-Mori (BKM) metric. In particular, we derive an exact yet explicit formula of average entanglement entropy over BKM ensemble. In obtaining the formula, we only make use of properties of normalization constant of the ensemble in the absence of its correlation kernel, contrary to average entropy computation of other ensembles. This new framework paves the way for calculating higher-order cumulants of BKM ensemble beyond the average.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

PseudoBench: Measuring How Agentic Auto-Research Fuels Pseudoscience

As Large Language Model based agents enter autonomous scientific research, their ability to resist pseudoscience becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, such systems may rapidly generate plausible yet misleading studies that contaminate academic literature and erode trust in science. We present PseudoBench, an adversarial benchmark for evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives. PseudoBench contains 200 curated pseudoscientific claim-evidence pairs across five domains and evaluates agents through an end-to-end research pipeline from experiments to writing. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, we find that current systems readily produce persuasive reports that align with pseudoscientific premises with near-zero refusal rates and the highest resistance of only 27.4%. Stronger agents risk packaging pseudoscience in more sophisticated scientific language, increasing its apparent credibility. These findings reveal an alarming capacity to fuel pseudoscience, calling for scientific alignment before widespread deployment.

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

Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists. We study LLM decision-making in a travel-assistant context by presenting models with choice dilemmas and analyzing their responses using multinomial logit models to derive implied willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. These WTP values are subsequently compared to human benchmark values from the economics literature. In addition to a baseline setting, we examine how model behavior changes under more realistic conditions, including the provision of information about users' past choices and persona-based prompting. Our results show that while meaningful WTP values can be derived for larger LLMs, they also display systematic deviations at the attribute level. Additionally, they tend to overestimate human WTP overall, particularly when expensive options or business-oriented personas are introduced. Conditioning models on prior preferences for cheaper options yields valuations that are closer to human benchmarks. Overall, our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of using LLMs for subjective decision support and underscore the importance of careful model selection, prompt design, and user representation when deploying such systems in practice.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CTS-MoE: Implicit Terrain Adaptation via Mixture-of-Experts for Perceptive Locomotion

arXiv:2606.19633v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perceptive legged locomotion over discontinuous terrain (e.g., stairs, gaps, and obstacles) requires adaptive behavior, as a single conservative gait cannot produce the anticipatory maneuvers needed for abrupt topology changes. Cast as multi-task reinforcement learning, this problem introduces a tension between sharing and separation. Tasks use a common locomotion base but have conflicting rewards, so a policy must share behavior while avoiding value interference. Prior work addresses only one side, with monolithic policies sacrificing specialization and hierarchical sub-policies sacrificing generalization across transitions and unseen terrain. We propose CTS-MoE, which combines a dense mixture-of-experts actor with perception-based gating to compose shared behaviors and a multi-critic with task-specific value heads to prevent interference. The model is trained end-to-end in a single-stage concurrent teacher-student setup that handles partial observability and avoids sequential distillation, with task labels used only during training. At deployment, routing depends solely on perception, allowing terrain adaptation without a high-level selector or terrain classifier. Experiments on a Unitree Go1 in simulation and on hardware across seen and unseen terrains show task-aware specialization, with lower tracking error and higher success rates than monolithic baselines. Project Website: https://cts-moe.github.io/ .

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Daily briefing: How many elementary particles are there?

Authors:

Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality. Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A Framework for Directed Hypergraph Signal Processing via tensor t-SVD

arXiv:2606.25112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Directed Hypergraph Signal Processing (DHGSP), a unified framework that extends graph signal processing to accommodate both higher-order (polyadic) and asymmetric (directional) relationships simultaneously. Using the tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) within the t-product algebra, we define a novel adjacency tensor for directed hypergraphs, a topologically faithful shift operator, and a lossless Directed Hypergraph Fourier Transform (t-DHGFT). Experiments on real traffic networks demonstrate that DHGSP outperforms matrix-based (graph and digraph) and undirected tensor-based (hypergraph) baselines in denoising tasks.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Sobolev Approximation by Fixed-Size Neural Networks with Arbitrary Accuracy

arXiv:2606.16975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate new activation functions for achieving arbitrary-accuracy Sobolev approximation by fixed-size neural networks. We first show that any function in $W^{2,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ can be approximated with arbitrary accuracy, measured in the $W^{1,\infty}$-norm, by a fixed-size neural network using the Elementary Universal Activation Function ($\mathrm{EUAF}$). To extend this result to $W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ for $s\in\mathbb{N}$, we introduce a smooth activation $\mathrm{DUAF}_{\infty}$ from the family of Differentiable Universal Activation Functions ($\mathrm{DUAF}_n$). We prove that any function in $W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ can be approximated with arbitrary accuracy in the $W^{s-1,\infty}$-norm by a fixed-size $\mathrm{DUAF}_{\infty}$-activated network. We further construct sigmoidal variants $\widetilde{\mathrm{DUAF}}_n$ and show that, for every $1\leq s\leq n$, fixed-size $\widetilde{\mathrm{DUAF}}_n$-activated networks still approximate any $f\in W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ with arbitrary accuracy in the $W^{s-1,\infty}$-norm. In all these results, the width and depth bounds are computed explicitly, and the proposed activations are elementary.

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

From Compression to Deployment: Real-Time and Energy-Efficient FastGRNN on Ultra-Constrained Microcontrollers

arXiv:2606.17249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The dominant trajectory of modern machine learning has been to scale up: larger models, larger accelerators, larger memory budgets. Yet a multi-year global semiconductor supply constraint and the growing energy and carbon cost of always-online inference expose the fragility of this trajectory and motivate the opposite direction: refactoring AI and ML algorithms to fit the small, ubiquitous microcontrollers already in mass production in wearables, sensors, and edge appliances. We present an end-to-end open-source reproduction of FastGRNN, a compact gated recurrent cell, deployed on two bare-metal targets: the 8-bit Arduino (ATmega328P) and the 16-bit MSP430 (no hardware multiplier; 16 KB Flash; 512 B SRAM). Our compression pipeline combines low-rank weight factorization, iterative hard-thresholding sparsity, and per-tensor Q15 post-training quantization with explicit activation calibration. The deployed model occupies 566 bytes of weights and achieves macro F1 = 0.918 (seed 0; five-seed Q15 mean 0.853+-0.107) on the HAPT test set. It matches a PyTorch reference at 100% prediction agreement across 3,399 test windows (MCU seed 0; 99.91-100% C-equivalent across five seeds). Both platforms sustain real-time 50 Hz streaming inference (9.21 ms per sample on Arduino; 13 ms on MSP430), where a 256-entry sigmoid/tanh look-up table delivers a 30.5x speedup on the multiplier-less MSP430. Four contributions extend the original FastGRNN paper: (i) cross-platform bit-equivalent deterministic inference; (ii) characterization of recurrent warm-up latency (median 74 samples, 1.48 s; worst-case 125 samples, 2.50 s over 100 test windows); (iii) a deployable look-up-table recipe for multiplier-less embedded targets; and (iv) hardware energy characterization showing 17.7 mW active inference power,

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

An Analysis of Speculative Window Decoders for Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.24048v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computing is essential for realizing the substantial computational speedups that quantum computing can bring, but it requires real-time error decoding with high performance. Speculative window decoding improves performance by reducing the time spent waiting for dependencies from prior decoding windows. However, speculative decoders have only been evaluated under the regime of superconducting qubits with fast gate speeds, surface codes, and matching decoders. Since different quantum technologies can have slower gate speeds, we evaluate the performance of speculative decoding under slow gate speeds. We also examine its sensitivity to speculation accuracy, decoder latency, processor count, and workload parallelism, which can vary across different quantum error correction codes, decoders, and hardware platforms. This work presents design principles for identifying when speculative decoding yields the greatest performance improvements. It also reveals the conditions under which non-speculative decoders outperform speculative decoders.

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

Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA

arXiv:2606.19950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert LLM assessment, aiming to improve confidence calibration in Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 40\% across three Medical VQA datasets, significantly enhancing MLLMs' reliability. The findings highlight the importance of domain-specific calibration for MLLMs in healthcare, offering a more trustworthy solution for AI-assisted diagnosis.

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

A Fast and Effective Method for Euclidean Anticlustering: The Assignment-Based-Anticlustering Algorithm

arXiv:2601.06351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anticlustering is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that consists of partitioning a set of objects into equal-sized groups called anticlusters such that the objects in the same anticluster are as dissimilar as possible and thereby representative of the entire set of objects. Here we study the case where the dissimilarity metric is the squared Euclidean distance between the respective feature vectors. Applications of Euclidean anticlustering include social studies, cross-validation, creating mini-batches for stochastic gradient descent, and finding balanced K-cut partitions. In particular, machine-learning applications such as mini-batch generation involve million-scale datasets and very large values of K, making scalable anticlustering algorithms essential. We propose a new algorithm, the Assignment-Based Anticlustering (ABA) algorithm, that scales to instances with millions of objects and hundreds of thousands of anticlusters within seconds to minutes, which is far beyond what existing anticlustering methods can manage. We demonstrate here, via an extensive computational study, that our algorithm outperforms existing anticlustering methods in both solution quality and running time. This is so also for anticlustering with categories. For the related problem of balanced K-cut partitioning, our algorithm is superior to the well-known METIS method. The code of our algorithm is available on GitHub.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystems

arXiv:2606.15242v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skills are becoming the capability layer through which LLM agents turn plans into actions, but their use introduces security risks such as data leakage, unauthorized operations, and tool misuse. Existing vetting usually evaluates each skill in isolation, while real agent tasks often invoke multiple skills in a shared execution context. This creates Skill Composition Risk (SCR): a skill that appears benign alone can become harmful when its outputs, trust signals, authorization cues, or side effects influence later invocations along an activated path. We introduce SCR-Bench to evaluate this risk in controlled, sandboxed skill environments. Rather than relying only on textual intent or surface behavior, SCR-Bench records downstream state changes and path-level outcomes across composed skill executions. It contains three sub-benchmarks: SCR-CapFlow for capability-flow composition, SCR-TrustLift for trust-transfer composition, and SCR-AuthBlur for authorization-confusion composition. Across SCR-Bench, composed paths expose risks that are largely absent under isolated evaluation. In SCR-CapFlow, attack success rate reaches 33.6 percent under composition, compared with near-zero isolated baselines. In SCR-TrustLift, attack success rate exceeds 96.5 percent on four of five backends. In SCR-AuthBlur, the risky-approval rate increases by 71.8 percent relative to the L0 isolated baseline under the L1 context setting. These results show that agent skill security should be assessed at the level of activated paths rather than isolated artifacts. SCR and SCR-Bench provide a foundation for path-aware risk evaluation and defense in LLM agent skill ecosystems. Benchmark: https://github.com/saint-viperx/SCR_Bench.

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

Learning Diachronic Representations of Ancient Greek Letterforms

Learning representations that remain robust across centuries of variation in handwriting is a key challenge in diachronic representation learning. Taking one of the longest continuously used writing systems, ancient Greek, as a case study, we introduce three datasets for diachronic representation learning: Hell-Char, a curated training set spanning the 3rd-1st centuries BCE, and two evaluation sets, PaLit-Char (2nd-5th c. CE) and Med-Char (9th-14th c. CE). To address the challenges of symbolic variation, scarce data, and systematic degradation, we propose: a similarity-weighted supervised contrastive loss that biases embeddings using dynamically estimated inter-class similarities, and a lacuna-driven augmentation scheme that simulates realistic manuscript corruptions. Trained with these strategies, both a lightweight CNN and a pretrained ResNet achieve strong recognition performance and produce embeddings that more coherently separate character classes than PCA or generic pretrained models. These embeddings enable clustering, identification of stylistic subgroups, and construction of prototype images that visualize diachronic evolution and transitional letterforms. Our results demonstrate that respecting intrinsic inter-letter relationships and augmenting with domain-informed corruptions yield robust, interpretable representations, offering a transferable paradigm for representation learning under scarce, temporally evolving, and noisy conditions. Code and data available at: https://github.com/ipavlopoulos/diachronic-greek-letterforms.

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

BaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language

Authors:

We present BaltiVoice, a 16.8-hour read-speech corpus for Balti (ISO 639-3: bft), a Tibetic language spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with no prior publicly available ASR resources. The corpus contains 10,060 validated utterances in native Nastaliq script, derived from Mozilla Common Voice recordings. Fine-tuning OpenAI Whisper-small yields a Word Error Rate (WER) of 26.74% and a Character Error Rate (CER) of 8.67% on a 538-utterance speaker-disjoint validation set, down from a zero-shot baseline of 159.19% WER and 152.52% CER. A Whisper-base fine-tuned on the same data achieves 44.54% WER and 15.61% CER, confirming that model capacity matters for this low-resource setting. The dataset, fine-tuned model, and a live transcription demo are publicly available on HuggingFace.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

FactorLibrary: From Polynomials to Circuits via Recursive Subgoals

arXiv:2606.25394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding minimal arithmetic circuits for polynomials over finite fields is a combinatorially hard problem central to algebraic complexity theory. We formulate it as a reinforcement learning problem in two directions, bottom-up and top-down. To address the challenge of a fast-growing combinatorial search space, we introduce FactorLibrary, which stores factorizable subexpressions that serve as reusable subgoals across training episodes. We trained a bottom-up agent with Gumbel-PPO-MCTS and two top-down agents with PPO+MCTS and SAC. The PPO+MCTS top-down agent exhibited the most stable performance, finding certified optimal circuits up to complexity $8$ with a success rate of $91.8\%$.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AI Sandboxes: A Threat Model, Taxonomy, and Measurement Framework

arXiv:2606.18532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI systems are increasingly evaluated in bounded environments that combine isolation, simulation, instrumentation, supervision, and evidence capture. For physical AI, AIoT, and cyber-physical systems, this shift is not a matter of terminology: the system under test may sense, decide, actuate, communicate, and fail through physical processes, networked devices, and human operators. This article develops an assurance-oriented account of AI sandboxes as controlled environments for testing, evaluation, verification, and validation across digital AI, embodied autonomy, and cyber-physical deployments. We formalize the sandbox boundary and a weakest-link rule for composing per-dimension evidence into a bounded deployment claim; separate major sandbox archetypes; define a cyber-physical threat model that includes attacks on the assurance apparatus itself; and introduce a measurement framework spanning fidelity, controllability, observability, containment, reproducibility, and governance artifacts, instantiated on three worked case studies of real sandboxes. The resulting threat model, taxonomy, and measurement framework clarify what a sandbox can validly test, which risks it can contain, and what forms of evidence it can support for safety, security, and regulatory assurance.

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

Event-Grounded Question Answering over Long Audio via Structured Retrieval

arXiv:2602.14612v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Answering natural-language questions over multi-hour audio requires both event recognition and temporal grounding. Current large audio-language models perform well on short clips, but are limited by context length, query-time cost, and weak temporal localization. We present LA-RAG (Long Audio-Retrieval Augmented Generation), a structured framework that converts continuous audio into timestamped event records using an open-vocabulary Audio Grounding Model (AGM), stores them in a SQL event database, and answers queries through intent-aware retrieval followed by LLM-based generation. LA-RAG supports offline grounding mode, where long recordings are pre-indexed for low-latency QA, and inference-time grounding mode, where query-conditioned grounding is performed for shorter open-ended clips. We create 24-hour Home-IoT and Industrial-IoT audio benchmarks and augment CASTELLA, a real-world audio moment retrieval dataset with QA pairs. In offline grounding mode, LA-RAG achieves 76.88% overall accuracy on Home-IoT and 71.10% on Industrial-IoT, with average query latencies below 0.6 seconds. In inference-time grounding mode, state-of-the-art LALMs achieve competitive event-detection accuracy on CASTELLA-QA but low temporal detection F1. We further show that LALMs augmented with our structured retrieval metadata achieve consistent temporal detection improvements, with F1 gains of 11-17% across baseline models with improved latency. These results show that explicit timestamped grounding and structured retrieval provide a practical complement to generative audio-language models for deployment-oriented long-audio QA.