Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Polygenic risk scores associate with asthma phenotypes and proteomic analyses implicate IL1R1 in two family-based studies

Despite its high prevalence and the discovery of hundreds of genetic associations, the genetic determinants and heterogeneous manifestations of asthma remain incompletely understood. Incorporating polygenic risk scores (PRS) into asthma research offers a powerful approach to quantify inherited susceptibility, refine risk profiles, and advance mechanistic understanding of disease development. For this study, we leveraged whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data from two family-based cohorts of childhood asthma - the Genetics of Asthma in Costa Rica Study (GACRS) and the Childhood Asthma Management Program (CAMP) - to examine the transmission profiles of externally derived asthma PRS and their associations with clinical phenotypes in children with asthma. To further elucidate molecular mechanisms, we integrated large-scale external genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics and genetic prediction models of protein abundance in a two-step proteome-wide association study (PWAS) of asthma. Our findings provide robust evidence supporting the validity of externally derived asthma PRS (asthma PRS association p-value p={10}^{-24} [GACRS and CAMP trios combined] for the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative [GBMI]) and reveal consistent associations with spirometry measures and atopy markers across both studies, as 13 of 21 traits (62%) were significantly associated with the GBMI-PRS in the meta-analysis after multiple-testing correction. Moreover, the results of the integrative proteomic analysis implicate IL-1 signaling in the etiology of asthma, reinforcing the candidacy of IL1R1 antagonists for drug repurposing.

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

MedCTA: A Benchmark for Clinical Tool Agents

To make clinically grounded decisions, medical AI agents are expected to go beyond simple recognition and be capable of tool retrieval, evidence acquisition, and integration. Existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated perception or single-turn question answering, and therefore provide limited visibility into failures of planning, tool recruitment, and rollout reliability. We introduce MedCTA, a benchmark for evaluating medical tool agents on clinician-validated, step-implicit tasks grounded in realistic multimodal clinical inputs, including radiology images, pathology slides, and reports. MedCTA comprises 107 real-world clinical tasks with clinician-verified executable trajectories over 5 deployed tools, and supports process-aware evaluation of tool selection, argument validity, execution stability, trajectory fidelity, and outcome quality. We benchmark 18 open- and closed-source multimodal models and find that even frontier systems remain brittle in multi-step clinical tool use: autonomous rollouts are dominated by protocol failures, premature stopping, and incorrect tool recruitment, while gold-standard tool routing yields large but still incomplete gains. These results show that strong backbone perception does not translate into reliable agentic behavior in clinical settings. MedCTA provides a rigorous testbed for auditing, diagnosing, and advancing trustworthy medical AI agents. The dataset and evaluation suite are available at https://ivul-kaust.github.io/MedCTA/

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When Helpfulness Overrides Causal Caution: Context-Dependent Suppression and Recovery in LLMs

arXiv:2606.24370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into decision-support roles in business and policy contexts. While prior benchmark studies have primarily evaluated LLMs' causal reasoning capabilities, a more fundamental epistemic dimension has been overlooked: Causal Caution, defined as the propensity to refrain from causal judgment when empirical evidence is insufficient. This study examines the systematic suppression of Causal Caution that occurs when LLMs shift from academic to practical advisory contexts. Using an evaluation rubric inspired by Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (the PCH score), we conducted experiments on four high-performance LLMs – Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro – across 480 trials. Causal Caution maintenance rates were 91.7–100.0% in academic contexts but dropped to 6.7–18.3% in practical advisory contexts (Fisher's exact test, p < .001 across all models). Furthermore, when restricted to practical prompts requesting concrete recommendations or explanatory rationales, only 1 of 200 responses (0.5%) maintained Causal Caution. A brief self-correction prompt – "Please reconsider this judgment from the perspective of causal relationships" – restored the expression of Causal Caution to maintenance rates of 71.4–100.0% (McNemar's test, p < .001 across all models). These results suggest that helpfulness-oriented response patterns may suppress the expression of Causal Caution in practical advisory contexts, with important implications for organizational governance. The findings indicate that this suppression reflects context-dependent variation in expression rather than an underlying capability limitation, suggesting that multi-agent architectures that separate proposal generation from causal auditing may offer a promising governance design.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Rethinking the Pointer Loss in Table Structure Recognition: Geometry-Aware Pointer Loss for Spatial Locality

Table Structure Recognition (TSR) using a pointer network achieves impressive results by predicting HTML sequences while aligning tags to detected text (or cell) regions. However, our analysis reveals that when pointer networks fail, 79.6% of errors occur between spatially adjacent cells (Manhattan distance

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Execution-State Capsules: Graph-Bound Execution-State Checkpoint and Restore for Low-Latency, Small-Batch, On-Device Physical-AI Serving

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mainstream LLM serving systems reuse prefix work mainly through paged or radix key-value (KV) caches. This is highly effective for high-throughput, high-concurrency serving, but it manages only one positional fragment of execution state: the KV cache. We study the opposite regime: low-latency, small-batch, on-device physical-AI serving, where interactive LLM agents, speech systems, and robot policies repeatedly branch, reset, interrupt, and re-enter under tight responsiveness budgets. We introduce execution-state capsules, a graph-bound checkpoint and restore mechanism for the complete restorable state at a committed boundary. FlashRT is a white-box, backend-facing kernel runtime whose evaluated NVIDIA CUDA backend runs captured graph plans over contiguous static buffers with no block-table indirection. Because the live state is a closed set of named buffers, a capsule can snapshot, restore, fork, or roll back the whole execution boundary, including KV, recurrent state, convolution state, MTP state, and metadata. This moves reuse from token-addressed KV fragments to graph-bound execution-state boundaries. On an RTX 5090, capsule restore is byte-exact at the stored-state level and token-identical under greedy decode. A KV-only ablation diverges, showing that recurrent state is load-bearing. GPU-resident snapshot and restore are sub-millisecond, and TTFT speedup over cold prefill grows from 3.9x at 2k tokens to 27x at 16k tokens. On Jetson AGX Thor and DGX Spark, the same correctness and structural properties hold. Capsules are not a replacement for high-throughput KV-cache serving; they define a complementary latency-first serving point for explicit execution-state reuse.

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

Tying the Loop – Tied Expert Layers in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

Authors:

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures efficiently scale Large Language Models (LLMs) by activating only a small fraction of their experts per token, yet the full parameter count - dominated by the expert parameters - must be held in training and inference memory. To address this, we introduce Expert Tying, an architectural modification that shares expert parameters across consecutive transformer layers while preserving independent, layer-wise routing and attention. We evaluate this approach across common, state-of-the-art architectures, including OLMoE, Qwen3, and DeepSeek-style MoEs. Our pretraining experiments demonstrate that tying experts can reduce memory footprint by almost 2x at virtually no degradation in perplexity or downstream quality. By exploiting the parameter redundancy inherent in MoE pathways, our method provides a highly favorable compute-to-memory trade-off, advancing efficient training and scaling of next-generation LLMs.

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

Augmentation techniques for video surveillance in the visible and thermal spectral range

In intelligent video surveillance, cameras record image sequences during day and night. Commonly, this demands different sensors. To achieve a better performance it is not unusual to combine them. We focus on the case that a long-wave infrared camera records continuously and in addition to this, another camera records in the visible spectral range during daytime and an intelligent algorithm supervises the picked up imagery. More accurate, our task is multispectral CNN-based object detection. At first glance, images originating from the visible spectral range differ between thermal infrared ones in the presence of color and distinct texture information on the one hand and in not containing information about thermal radiation that emits from objects on the other hand. Although color can provide valuable information for classification tasks, effects such as varying illumination and specialties of different sensors still represent significant problems. Anyway, obtaining sufficient and practical thermal infrared datasets for training a deep neural network poses still a challenge. That is the reason why training with the help of data from the visible spectral range could be advantageous, particularly if the data, which has to be evaluated contains both visible and infrared data. However, there is no clear evidence of how strongly variations in thermal radiation, shape, or color information influence classification accuracy. To gain deeper insight into how Convolutional Neural Networks make decisions and what they learn from different sensor input data, we investigate the suitability and robustness of different augmentation techniques...

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (

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

Benchmarking LLM Agents on Meta-Analysis Articles from Nature Portfolio

Meta-analysis is a demanding form of evidence synthesis that combines literature retrieval, PI/ECO-guided study selection, and statistical aggregation. Its structured, verifiable workflow makes it an ideal substrate for evaluating systematic scientific reasoning, yet existing benchmarks lack ground truth across the full retrieval-screening-synthesis pipeline. We introduce MetaSyn, a dataset of 442 expert-curated meta-analyses from Nature Portfolio journals. Each entry pairs a research question with PI/ECO criteria, a retrieval corpus of 140k PubMed articles, verified positive studies, hard negatives that are topically similar but PI/ECO-ineligible, and complete search strategies and date bounds. Benchmarking twelve pipeline configurations (nine RAG variants and a protocol-driven agent) reveals a critical screening bottleneck: despite a retrieval ceiling of 90.9% recall at K=200, no system recovers more than 52.7% of ground-truth included literature. Current LLMs fail to reliably separate eligible studies from PI/ECO-failing distractors in pools of comparable topical relevance. Stage-attributed metrics capture where systems succeed and fail; a single end-to-end score does not.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

S1-Omni-Image: A Unified Model for Scientific Image Understanding, Generation, and Editing

We present S1-Omni-Image, an open-weight unified multimodal model for scientific image understanding, generation, and editing. Unlike general-purpose image generation models, scientific image tasks require not only high-fidelity synthesis, but also robust understanding of scientific semantics, structural relations, domain knowledge, and task intent. To this end, S1-Omni-Image builds on the scientific multimodal reasoning backbone S1-VL-32B and couples its understanding capability with an image generation module under a unified think-before-generate paradigm. Given a user instruction, the model first produces a task-oriented reasoning trace, a textual answer, and a task special token; their hidden states are then injected into the generation module to condition image generation or editing. S1-Omni-Image supports scientific image understanding, generation, and editing in a unified framework. For generation, it focuses on scientific illustrations and text rendering, including logical diagrams, relational comparisons, data charts, and realistic scientific visualizations. For editing, it casts segmentation and other domain-specific vision tasks as native image editing problems, enabling multi-turn illustration editing, medical and geographic image segmentation, medical image translation, and scientific image super-resolution. We construct SciGenEdit, a 314K-sample training dataset, and release the model weights, inference code, and SciGenEdit-10K. Experiments show that S1-Omni-Image substantially improves scientific image generation and editing while preserving the scientific image understanding capability inherited from S1-VL-32B. It outperforms open-source models on GenExam and TechImage-Bench, achieves state-of-the-art results on four editing benchmarks including MSD, cigRockSEM, SynthRAD2025, and IXI, and maintains stable performance on scientific image understanding evaluations.

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

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

Authors:

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

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

Subliminal Learning Is Steering Vector Distillation

arXiv:2606.00995v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Subliminal learning refers to a student language model acquiring a teacher's traits (e.g. a system-prompted preference for owls) when fine-tuned on the teacher's outputs, despite the outputs being semantically unrelated to those traits. It remains poorly understood how data without semantic meaning can transfer specific semantic traits. In this work, we show that subliminal learning is mediated by a single steering vector, i.e. a vector added to the model's activations. Across two open-source models, we find that the teacher's system prompt is well approximated by a steering vector, and that the student's behavior is driven by learning an aligned vector over fine-tuning. System prompts that are not well approximated by steering vectors are not subliminally learned. This is a special case of steering vector distillation, in which a student trained on the outputs of a steered teacher learns to imitate that steering. We demonstrate steering vector distillation on a range of semantic and random vectors. Adding a semantic vector to a model's activations can have both model-independent and model-specific (i.e. non-semantic) effects on its behavior, so generated data that is non-semantic can transmit a vector with semantic effects, enabling subliminal learning. This also explains why subliminal learning does not transfer between models. We find that adaptive optimizers are necessary for subliminal learning in language models: activation gradients on steered data carry a small but consistent component along the steering direction, and non-adaptive optimizers impede this by allowing outlier gradients to dominate.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Intrinsic spectral structure of bipartite nonlocal magic resource

arXiv:2606.24368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bipartite nonlocal magic resource (BNMR) quantifies the irreducible nonstabilizerness residing in bipartite entanglement, yet its evaluation is intractable due to the full Hilbert space optimization. Here, we introduce a canonical encoding framework that exactly confines the BNMR of an arbitrary bipartite pure state within a minimal encoding core. This dimension reduction proves that pure-state BNMR is an intrinsic function of the nonzero Schmidt spectrum, extending its invariance from local unitary transformations to local isometries. Leveraging this spectral link, we derive the leading quadratic response of BNMR under spectral perturbations around its zeros. We apply this quadratic response to Haar-random states, deriving and numerically validating the BNMR profile: its distribution is sharply localized at the symmetric bipartition and exponentially suppressed toward asymmetric cuts, in stark contrast to the broadening Page curve of entanglement. Finally, we provide a closed-form expression for the BNMR of Schmidt rank-2 states, uncovering a hierarchy collapse in generalized GHZ states where bipartite and global nonlocal magic resources coincide exactly.

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

CineOrchestra: Unified Entity-Centric Conditioning for Cinematic Video Generation

Cinematic video depicts multiple subjects acting or interacting at specific moments, captured with deliberate camera movement, and stitched together by shot transitions. Together, these elements demand a level of fine-grained control beyond current text-to-video models. Existing work addresses each axis in isolation: multi-subject personalization, temporal control, multi-shot synthesis, or camera control; no prior framework jointly integrates all four. We present CineOrchestra, a unified video diffusion model that controls subjects, events, cameras, and shot transitions simultaneously. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous cinematic elements share a fundamental structure: each is an entity acting over a specific temporal interval, which can therefore all be expressed through one shared structure of entity-centric conditioning primitives, augmented with reference images for visual entities. This formulation reduces the architectural challenge to a single positional encoding problem, which we solve with two parameter-free coordinated rotary embeddings: (a) an interval-sampled temporal RoPE that yields consistent attention behavior across events of dramatically varying duration, and (b) a 2D entity-temporal cross-attention RoPE that disambiguates per-entity conditions and routes each to its corresponding spatiotemporal region. On two new benchmarks, CineOrchestra outperforms six per-axis specialists on dense caption following and shot-transition timing, with consistent gains in a pairwise user study and component ablations.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

APOSM: Pairwise preference learning improves generative small-molecule design

Small-molecule lead refinement is constrained by the cost of synthesizing and assaying candidates, making the surrogate models that prioritize compounds for experimental testing central to the design process. The reliability of such surrogates is limited by the noise and sparsity of screening measurements. We show that training the surrogate on pairwise comparisons between candidate molecules, rather than on absolute predicted scores, yields a substantially more reliable signal for active candidate selection in this regime. We develop APOSM, an active-learning algorithm that combines a fragment-based generator, a pairwise message-passing graph neural network surrogate, and probabilistic ranking inside a batched acquisition loop. On the Practical Molecular Optimization benchmark and a GPCR ligand rediscovery task, APOSM improves target attainment and sampling efficiency over unguided fragment-based optimization, the Graph-GA genetic algorithm, and a pointwise-regression ablation, with the largest gains on tasks where absolute scores are hardest to calibrate.

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

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies on rodents such as mice have shown the capabilities to adapt their behavior when dealing with changing parameters (``drift'') of the environment even if no information about change is provided (uncertainty) – a behavior that can be modeled by forgetting mechanisms. Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning (NSRL) deals with adapting state-of-the-art RL methods to deal with changing environments: these however usually require (partially) perfect information about the drift such as ``task IDs'' or ``context''. To mitigate the effects of drift, this work develops Space-sampled Value Decay as an explicit forgetting mechanism for value-based deep RL architectures as a simple yet effective approach. In particular we demonstrate and discuss positive effects but also limitations in achieved returns for modifications of Deep Q-networks (DQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) when evaluated on non-stationary environments.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Sub-Poisson distributions: Concentration inequalities, optimal variance proxies, and closure properties

arXiv:2508.12103v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a nonasymptotic framework for sub-Poisson distributions with moment generating function dominated by that of a Poisson distribution. At its core is a new notion of optimal sub-Poisson variance proxy, analogous to the variance parameter in the sub-Gaussian setting. This framework allows us to derive a Bennett-type concentration inequality without boundedness assumptions and to show that the sub-Poisson property is closed under key operations including independent sums and convex combinations, but not under all linear operations such as scalar multiplication. We derive bounds relating the sub-Poisson variance proxy to sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential Orlicz norms. Taken together, these results unify the treatment of Bernoulli and Poisson random variables and their signed versions in their natural tail regime.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Gradient Mean-Field Dynamics with Measure-Valued States: Well-Posedness, Chaos, and Long-Time Stability

arXiv:2606.24385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a stochastic mean-field interacting particle system whose state space is $\Y = \Tt^d \times \cP(U)$, where the first component represents a spatial variable and the second one is a probability measure over a compact metric space $U$. The dynamics are driven by locally Lipschitz drift operators: the spatial component evolves according to a Brownian diffusion, while the measure-valued component is perturbed by a projected cylindrical noise acting in the Arens–Eells space. We first establish existence and uniqueness of strong solutions for both the $N$-particle system and the associated nonlinear McKean–Vlasov equation under locally Lipschitz and linear growth assumptions on the drift coefficients. We then prove propagation of chaos: as $N\to\infty$, the empirical measure converges in expectation in Wasserstein–1 distance towards the unique McKean–Vlasov solution. Further, we investigate exponential convergence of the nonlinear McKean–Vlasov dynamics towards a unique invariant measure.

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

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.

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

Analyzing Defensive Misdirection Against Model-Guided Automated Attacks on Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.20470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks more consequential, especially as attackers adopt model-guided automation to scale probing, prompt refinement, and response evaluation. This work analyzes the resulting attack-defense setting through a probabilistic model of a target system, its defense mechanism, and the attacker's automated judge. Our analysis shows that conventional detect-and-block defenses can allow attacker success rate (ASR) to approach one as the query budget grows, since predictable refusals provide useful feedback to automated search. We then examine detect-and-misdirect, where detected malicious interactions receive controlled, non-operational responses designed to induce false-positive errors in the attacker's judge. This strategy reduces the positive predictive value of attacker-selected candidates and yields a bounded asymptotic ASR. We evaluate a proof-of-concept realization of this strategy through Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), a lightweight conversational misdirection method designed to replace predictable refusal text with safe but strategically misleading responses in automated jailbreak settings. On jailbreak benchmarks, CMPE reduces estimated ASR upper bounds by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in end-to-end PAIR and GPTFuzz attack runs.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.

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

Polaris: A Godel Agent Framework for Small Language Models through Experience-Abstracted Policy Repair

arXiv:2603.23129v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Gödel agent realize recursive self-improvement: an agent inspects its own policy and traces and then modifies that policy in a tested loop. We introduce Polaris, a Gödel agent for compact models that performs policy repair via experience abstraction, turning failures into policy updates through a structured cycle of analysis, strategy formation, abstraction, and minimal code pat ch repair with conservative checks. Unlike response level self correction or parameter tuning, Polaris makes policy level changes with small, auditable patches that persist in the policy and are reused on unseen instances within each benchmark. As part of the loop, the agent engages in meta reasoning: it explains its errors, proposes concrete revisions to its own policy, and then updates the policy. To enable cumulative policy refinement, we introduce experience abstraction, which distills failures into compact, reusable strategies that transfer to unseen instances. On MGSM, DROP, GPQA, and LitBench (covering arithmetic reasoning, compositional inference, graduate-level problem solving, and creative writing evaluation), a 7-billion-parameter model equipped with Polaris achieves consistent gains over the base policy and competitive baselines.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

arXiv:2606.12500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.