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

StreamMemBench: Streaming Evaluation of Agent Memory for Future-Oriented Assistance

arXiv:2606.14571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central role of personal-agent memory is to turn stored information and prior interactions into future-oriented assistance. In daily use, useful cues come from what the agent observes and how the user interacts with the agent, and the agent must carry them forward from the current request to similar future tasks. Existing memory benchmarks usually test dialogue recall or task improvement in isolation, leaving the trajectory from streaming observations to later assistance largely untested. We introduce StreamMemBench, a streaming benchmark that constructs a two-step task sequence around each evidence anchor from EgoLife egocentric streams. The initial task tests evidence use, while the follow-up task tests whether feedback and interaction experience are reused. Four metrics diagnose evidence recall, initial evidence use, feedback incorporation, and follow-up reuse. Experiments with eight memory systems across two backbones show that current systems often fail to use observed evidence or turn feedback into reliable follow-up behavior, even when evidence is stored or feedback is incorporated locally. StreamMemBench is publicly available at https://github.com/landian60/StreamMemBench.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

MORTAR: Multi-turn Metamorphic Testing for LLM-based Dialogue Systems

With the widespread application of LLM-based dialogue systems in daily life, quality assurance has become more important than ever. Recent research has successfully introduced methods to identify unexpected behaviour in single-turn testing scenarios. However, multi-turn interaction is the common real-world usage of dialogue systems, yet testing methods for such interactions remain underexplored. This is largely due to the oracle problem in multi-turn testing, which continues to pose a significant challenge for dialogue system developers and researchers. In this paper, we propose MORTAR, a metamorphic multi-turn dialogue testing approach, which mitigates the test oracle problem in testing LLM-based dialogue systems. MORTAR formalises the multi-turn testing for dialogue systems, and automates the generation of question-answer dialogue test cases with multiple dialogue-level perturbations and metamorphic relations (MRs). The automated MR matching mechanism allows MORTAR more flexibility and efficiency in metamorphic testing. The proposed approach is fully automated without reliance on LLM judges. In testing six popular LLM-based dialogue systems, MORTAR reaches significantly better effectiveness with over 150\% more bugs revealed per test case when compared to the single-turn metamorphic testing baseline. Regarding the quality of bugs, MORTAR reveals higher-quality bugs in terms of diversity, precision and uniqueness. MORTAR is expected to inspire more multi-turn testing approaches, and assist developers in evaluating the dialogue system performance more comprehensively with constrained test resources and budget.

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

UltraSketchLLM: Sub-1-Bit LLM Compression via Sketch and Hardware-Friendly Operators

arXiv:2506.17255v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require larger GPU memory size these days, necessitating efficient and extreme weight compression methods. Existing compression methods are either theoretically limited by 1 bit per weight or face severe performance degradation and inefficiency. To deploy LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we introduce UltraSketchLLM, compressing LLMs with data sketch. It reduces peak GPU memory footprint with a high compression rate down to 0.5 bit per weight. Combined with hardware-friendly implementation, UltraSketchLLM keeps tolerable performance degradation and extremely low latency overhead with 14.9x speedup compared to naive sketch solution.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

RePAIR: Predictive Self-Supervised Representation Learning in Chess

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

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Before You Think: System 0, AI-Mediated Cognition and Cognitive Colonization

arXiv:2606.13658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper examines three recent frameworks for understanding the cognitive and epistemic consequences of artificial intelligence: Tri-System Theory, Thinkframes, and System 0. It argues that while the first two capture important dimensions of AI's influence on individual reasoning and collective epistemic practices, System 0 occupies a theoretically distinctive position that neither can fully replicate. The paper introduces the concept of cognitive colonization, according to which AI systems can embed external interests within the architecture of the self in ways that are difficult for users to perceive. Because such systems are already widely deployed, understanding these invisible forms of influence is an urgent philosophical and practical task.

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

Learning Hybrid Biophysical Neuron Models with Neural ODEs

arXiv:2606.16693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biophysical neuron models link measurements of neural activity to underlying cellular mechanisms. Yet, a central challenge is that the kinetics of many ion channels are poorly characterized, and practical simplifications – omitting channels or reducing morphological detail – introduce systematic gaps between model and biology. Bridging these gaps requires approaches that can flexibly discover unmodeled dynamics while preserving mechanistic interpretability. Here, we introduce a hybrid modeling framework that embeds neural ordinary differential equations into conductance-based biophysical models to capture unknown currents or mis-specified channel kinetics. By parameterizing the neural ODE in terms of voltage-dependent steady-state and time-constant functions, we recover interpretable gating dynamics directly from voltage recordings without assuming a functional form. We show that the hybrid model fits the gating kinetics of 2400 ion channel models and recovers unknown gating dynamics from single current-clamp recordings, generalizing to out-of-distribution stimulus regimes under realistic inputs and parameter misspecification. We also use our method to reduce a multicompartment model of a cortical neuron into a single-compartment hybrid model with a learned axial current, yielding up to an order of magnitude lower computational cost. Together, our results establish a plug-and-play framework for selectively replacing unknown components of conductance-based models with neural ODEs while preserving their mechanistic structure.

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

The Discrete-Log Clock: How a Transformer Learns Modular Multiplication

arXiv:2606.17399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When small transformers grok modular multiplication, prior work reports that the learned embedding has a "dense" Fourier spectrum requiring all frequencies. This contrasts with modular addition, where only a sparse set of key frequencies suffices. We show this density is an artifact of analyzing in the wrong basis. The natural Fourier transform for multiplication is not the standard additive DFT but the multiplicative character transform, which decomposes functions on the multiplicative group $(\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z})^*$ into its irreducible representations. Applying this transform to a grokked transformer trained on $a \cdot b \bmod 113$, we find the embedding spectrum becomes highly sparse (Gini coefficient 0.58 vs. 0.07 in the additive basis) with only 4 key frequencies carrying significant energy. Furthermore, 96.9% of MLP neurons are cleanly tuned to a single multiplicative frequency, and neuron activation heatmaps reveal 2D-periodic structure when reordered by the discrete logarithm. These results demonstrate the transformer reduces multiplication to addition in discrete-log space, implementing a "Discrete-Log Clock" algorithm analogous to Nanda et al.'s Clock algorithm for addition. The methodology generalizes: matching the analysis basis to the algebraic structure of the task reveals interpretable structure where standard tools see noise.

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

Quantum algorithm for dephasing of coupled systems: decoupling and IQP duality

arXiv:2601.06298v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Noise and decoherence are ubiquitous in the dynamics of quantum systems coupled to an external environment. In the regime where environmental correlations decay rapidly, the evolution of a subsytem is well described by a Lindblad quantum master equation. In this work, we introduce a quantum algorithm for simulating unital Lindbladian dynamics by sampling unitary quantum channels without extra ancillas. Using ancillary qubits we show that this algorithm allows approximating general Lindbladians as well. For interacting dephasing Lindbladians coupling two subsystems, we develop a decoupling scheme that reduces the circuit complexity of the simulation. This is achieved by sampling from a time-correlated probability distribution - determined by the evolution of one subsystem, which specifies the stochastic circuit implemented on the complementary subsystem. We demonstrate our approach by studying a model of bosons coupled to fermions via dephasing, which naturally arises from anharmonic effects in an electron-phonon system coupled to a bath. Our method enables tracing out the bosonic degrees of freedom, reducing part of the dynamics to sampling an IQP circuit. The sampled bitstrings then define a corresponding fermionic problem, which in the non-interacting case can be solved efficiently classically. We comment on the computational complexity of this class of dissipative problems, using the known fact that sampling from IQP circuits is believed to be difficult classically.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Efficient time-series prediction on NISQ devices via time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine

arXiv:2602.21544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We proposed a time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine (TD-QELM) for efficient time-series prediction on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. By encoding multiple past inputs simultaneously, TD-QELM achieves shallow circuit depth independent of sequence length, thereby, mitigating noise accumulation and reducing computational complexity. Experiments using the NARMA benchmark on both noiseless simulations and IBM's 127-qubit processor demonstrate that TD-QELM consistently outperforms conventional quantum reservoir computing in prediction accuracy and noise robustness. These results highlight TD-QELM as a practical and scalable framework for time-series learning on current NISQ hardware.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mapping molecular polariton transport via pump-probe microscopy

arXiv:2504.15501v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate how the transport properties of molecular polaritons in optical cavities can be extracted from a microscopic modeling of pump-probe spectroscopy. Our approach combines a mean-field treatment of the light-matter Hamiltonian with a perturbative expansion of both light and matter components, along with spatial coarse-graining. This approach extends semiclassical cavity spectroscopy to multimode light-matter interactions, providing full access to spatially resolved transient spectra. By simulating a microscopy experiment with counter-propagating pump and probe pulses, we compute the differential transmission and show how molecular dephasing and persistent dark exciton populations drive sub-group-velocity transport of the root-mean-square displacement. We analyze transport across the polariton dispersion, showing how velocity renormalization correlates with excitonic weight, consistent with experimental observations, and further its dependence on the rate of molecular dephasing. Our results highlight the need to consider measured spectroscopic observables when characterizing transport in polaritonic systems.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Cluster LOCO: Feature Importance For Interpreting Clusters

arXiv:2606.14592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used for exploratory analysis and scientific discovery, driving insights from market segmentation to biological data analysis, but its outputs can be difficult to interpret, audit, and reproduce as modern datasets become increasingly large and complex. Reliable use of clustering requires understanding which features drive the discovered structure, yet feature-level explanations for clustering remain scarce compared with methods in supervised learning. Furthermore, existing clustering feature importance scores are often tied to specific algorithms and data assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose Cluster LOCO (Leave-One-Covariate-Out), a family of model-agnostic feature importance scores for clustering. Cluster LOCO is built on feature occlusion and clustering generalizability, defined as whether cluster labels learned on one subset of the data can be accurately predicted on held-out samples. For any chosen clustering algorithm, Cluster LOCO quantifies a feature's importance by measuring how much its removal degrades generalizability. We first introduce Cluster LOCO-Split, which relies on data splitting, and then extend it to Cluster LOCO-MP, a minipatch ensemble-based version designed for large-scale data. Across synthetic simulations and an application to cell-type discovery in single-cell transcriptomics, we show that Cluster LOCO more reliably recovers informative features than existing clustering feature importance methods.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

pykarambola: Minkowski tensor morphometry of 3D structures

Three-dimensional biological morphologies encode functional and physiological state, yet the directional, orientational, and topological properties of these shapes are rarely captured by morphometric tools available for bioimage analysis. Minkowski tensors are mathematically rigorous tensor-valued measures that encode surface curvature and directionality for objects of arbitrary topology, with tensor eigensystems that directly quantify elongation axes and anisotropy. A C++ implementation, karambola, computes Minkowski tensors for triangulated surfaces but is inaccessible within Python-based bioimage workflows. Here we present pykarambola, a pip installable Python package that accepts NumPy arrays and standard mesh formats and returns Minkowski tensors, including derived anisotropy and orientation quantities. A high-level label-image API converts 3D integer arrays into per-object Minkowski tensors in a single call, making pykarambola directly compatible with the output of widely used segmentation tools. An optional Cython extension accelerates graph-traversal steps of mesh initialization for large-scale analyses. Benchmarked on 1,584 adrenal gland meshes, pykarambola reproduces all 121 C++ karambola output features to near-floating-point agreement and, in the pure-Python build, is 2.8x faster at 28^3 and 1.5x faster at 64^3 voxel resolution, with speedups primarily attributable to karambola's sequential per-object file I/O. pykarambola is freely available as an open-source software package.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Diagonal-Budgeted Trotterization for Efficient Quantum Hamiltonian Simulation

arXiv:2606.16959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient classical simulation of quantum Hamiltonian dynamics is often bottlenecked by exponential state growth and the overhead of generic sparse linear algebra. We introduce diagonal-budgeted Trotterization, a structure-aware strategy that decomposes Hamiltonians into factors preserving diagonal sparsity while tightly controlling fidelity loss. Our implementation, HamSim, utilizes a compact diagonal-sparse data layout and specialized C++/CUDA kernels to bypass the overheads of generic formats like CSR. By leveraging SIMD vectorization, multithreading, and GPU acceleration, HamSim achieves high performance across heterogeneous architectures. Benchmarks on the HamLib suite show that HamSim significantly outperforms Qiskit-Aer. On CPUs, HamSim attains speedups of $182$–$1,269\times$ on optimization instances (TSP, MaxCut) and $4.8$–$841\times$ on physical models (TFIM, Heisenberg). On GPUs, it achieves up to $178\times$ speedup for $12$–$16$ qubit problems. Unlike traditional Trotterization, HamSim maintains near-perfect fidelity without requiring exponential steps. This demonstrates that diagonal-aware numerical kernels provide a scalable foundation for high-fidelity classical Hamiltonian simulation.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolyFlow: Safe and Efficient Polytope-Constrained Flow Matching with Constraint Embedding and Projection-free Update

arXiv:2606.13400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While flow-based generative models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of domains, deploying them in safety-critical physical systems remains challenging due to strict constraint requirements. Existing approaches typically enforce safety through post-hoc corrections, which incur substantial computational overhead and may distort the learned distribution. We propose PolyFlow, a polytope-constrained flow matching framework that embeds constraints directly into the model and flow dynamics. PolyFlow introduces a discrete-time flow formulation and a projection-free architecture, which eliminate the discretization error and guarantee strict satisfaction of arbitrary polyhedral constraints, without the need for expensive iterative solvers. Experimental results show that PolyFlow achieves zero constraint violation while maintaining high distributional fidelity across a range of planning and control tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art constrained generation baselines, PolyFlow significantly reduces inference latency and demonstrates a favorable trade-off between safety, efficiency, and generative quality. Code is available on https://github.com/MJianM/PolyFlow.

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

When Certainty Is an Artifact: Keyword Lexicon Blindness and the (Mis)Measurement of Rhetorical Stance

Authors:

Can a statistically significant, large-effect-size finding in computational social science be entirely an artifact of the measurement instrument? We present a case where the answer appears to be yes. Analyzing 85 interviews across four public intellectuals (2016–2026), we find a robust negative-affect/emphatic-certainty lexical co-occurrence pattern under keyword-based scoring ($r = 0.72$–$0.93$, $p < 0.01$ for all four speakers). Replacing keyword counting with LLM-based zero-shot semantic classification on the complete diarized corpus (32,625 sentences) dramatically reduces this correlation: Dalio's $r = 0.851$ drops to $r = 0.206$, with two speakers showing negative $r(neg, emphatic)$ and one showing null. In contrast, the LLM reveals a strong negative-hedging coupling across speakers – Rogoff's $r(neg, hedged) = 0.875$ ($p = 0.001$) and Zeihan's $r(neg, hedged) = 0.722$ ($p = 0.008$) – consistent with the conventional expectation that pessimistic discourse attracts hedging, not certainty. Sentence-level error analysis traces this discrepancy to three structural failure modes in keyword lexicons – syntactic blindness, polysemy blindness, and categorical absence – illustrated through cases where keyword counting inverts semantic meaning (e.g., ''never absolutely totally confident'' scored as high-certainty). We argue that keyword lexicons measure a universal lexical co-occurrence tendency – negative discourse naturally attracts emphatic vocabulary – that is orthogonal to, and can systematically invert, rhetorical stance. Treating keyword counts as measurements of epistemic certainty is a category error: a finding that appears to be about a speaker's psychology may be entirely about the counting of words.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

A Hybrid TGN-SEAL Model for Dynamic Graph Link Prediction

arXiv:2602.14239v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting links in sparse, continuously evolving networks is a central challenge in network science. Conventional heuristic methods and deep learning models, including Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are typically designed for static graphs and thus struggle to capture temporal dependencies. Snapshot-based techniques partially address this issue but often encounter data sparsity and class imbalance, particularly in networks with transient interactions such as telecommunication call detail records (CDRs). Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs) model dynamic graphs by updating node embeddings over time; however, their predictive accuracy under sparse conditions remains limited. In this study, we improve the TGN framework by extracting enclosing subgraphs around candidate links, enabling the model to jointly learn structural and temporal information. Experiments on a sparse CDR, email, message dataset show that our approach increases average precision by at least 2% over standard TGNs, demonstrating the advantages of integrating local topology for robust link prediction in dynamic networks.

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

Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing

Existing image editing methods can be generally categorized into textual instruction-based and visual prompt-based ones. Textual instructions are semantically expressive, but are limited by the coarse granularity of spatial control of the editing results. In contrast, visual prompts such as drag and point can provide precise spatial guidance, but are limited by the inherent ambiguity in semantic intent. To unify the strength of textual and visual prompts, we present Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing, which jointly models textual instructions as semantic intent and sparse visual instructions as spatial guidance, aiming to achieve precise and intent-faithful image manipulation. To this end, we first construct a textual-visual instruction paired dataset with more than 23K samples derived from dynamic videos, enabling aligned supervision for cross-modal instruction. We then propose TV-Edit, a Textual-Visual instruction unified Editing framework to contextualize drag or point-based visual instructions with image-text semantics and lift them into semantic-aware control representations for pretrained editing backbones. By integrating semantic intent and spatial constraints, TV-Edit leads to more precise spatial control, less instruction ambiguity, and stronger structural consistency than text-only or drag-based alternatives. Finally, we establish TV-Edit-Bench, a deliberately designed benchmark to evaluate semantic faithfulness, spatial alignment, and visual consistency with ground-truth references and controlled textual-visual variations for reliable assessment. Our experiments across multiple editing backbones demonstrate that TV-Edit consistently yields more precise and intent-faithful edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art instruction-based and drag-based baselines.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Zero-Shot Neural Priors for Generalizable Cross-Subject and Cross-Task EEG Decoding

arXiv:2606.23706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of generalizable electroencephalography (EEG) decoding models is essential for robust brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and objective neural biomarkers in mental health. Conventional approaches have been hindered by poor cross-subject and cross-task generalization, owing to high inter-subject variability and non-stationary neural signals. We address this challenge with a zero-shot cross-subject decoding framework on the large-scale Healthy Brain Network dataset, benchmarking a convolutional neural network baseline, a hybrid LSTM, and a Transformer-based foundation model. To adapt the Transformer for regression while averting catastrophic forgetting, we propose a novel progressive unfreezing strategy. The baseline yielded an nRMSE of 0.9991, whereas our fine-tuned Transformer achieved 0.9799 on unseen subjects. This work advances scalable, calibration-free EEG decoding for computational psychiatry and behavioral prediction.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Nonlocal Games on Graph Ensembles

arXiv:2606.16784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is one of the most striking discoveries in all of science. This effect allows, for instance, two spatially separated agents to coordinate their actions, without communication, to an extent that is both counter-intuitive, and provably impossible by any other physical means. A recently discovered example is that of mobile agents (players) performing spatial coordination tasks such as rendezvous, where the agents aim to meet on a network without communication. Until now, demonstrations of this advantage have relied on highly idealized conditions: agents are assumed to have complete knowledge of the topography, and experiments have been restricted to simulations using data generated by qubits within a single quantum processor. Here we address both limitations by developing a theory for graph ensembles that capture topographical uncertainty and by experimentally demonstrating the advantage in rendezvous scenarios between physically separated ion-trap systems with access to remote entanglement. Moreover, we simulate a broader set of problems on superconducting hardware. Surprisingly, when players are given the ability to gather more local information the quantum advantage increases – a feat impossible by classical means. Our findings establish a concrete route toward practical quantum advantages in motion coordination problems. More broadly, they point to a new way of using portable quantum devices to enhance collective decision-making in uncertain environments.

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

Bayesian Inference and Decision Audits for Public Archives of Frontier AI Evaluations

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public AI evaluations are often read as terminal leaderboards, yet the underlying evidence is a selective time series shaped by reporting rules, benchmark revisions, and missingness. Repeated public archives for LiveBench and Open LLM Leaderboard v2 serve as the primary longitudinal record; LMArena provides a preference stress test; and GAIA and tau-bench contribute limited agentic pilots. Together, these archives instantiate a Bayesian inference problem: under a fixed reporting convention, one constructed terminal-only example over $1{,}000$ systems is compatible with two pre-terminal histories, yielding times of $23.03$ or $75.13$ to reach within $0.05$ of the ceiling under the same terminal-tail model. In synthetic posterior comparisons, action-facing diagnostics differ across observation regimes. The candidate selection-aware frontier model fails synthetic recovery, objective-archive prediction, preference transfer, and uncertainty calibration; correspondingly, fixed audit gates reject its stronger claims. An archive-and-adjudication protocol reconstructs public evaluation histories, isolates a verified timing boundary, and falsifies unsupported frontier claims.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Feasibility-driven QAOA with penalty scheduling

arXiv:2606.25117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most available quantum algorithms address constrained optimization problems by treating constraints as soft penalty terms within a QUBO formulation. This approach requires careful adjustment of the penalty coefficients, which scales poorly with the number of constraints and lacks a proper strategy to balance feasibility and solution quality. In this work, we introduce two extensions of standard linear-ramp QAOA (lr-QAOA) tailored to problems with multiple heterogeneous constraints. We first construct $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA, in which each penalty term is assigned its own linear-ramp schedule, promoting penalty weights from external hyperparameters to internal variational parameters of QAOA, similarly to the objective and mixer parameters. By optimizing all schedules jointly in a single run, this approach eliminates nested penalty tuning and scales more efficiently to multiple constraints. The optimization is guided by a feasibility-driven loss function that pushes the quantum state towards high-quality feasible solutions. As a further refinement, we introduce piecewise-ramp QAOA, in which the linear ramps are replaced by two-segment piecewise schedules, enhancing the expressiveness of the Ansatz at the cost of a small parameter overhead independent of the circuit depth. We benchmark both methods on Earth-observation satellite mission planning tasks formulated as budget-constrained Maximum Weight Independent Set problems. Numerical results show that piecewise-ramp QAOA consistently outperforms lr-QAOA and $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA across circuit depths and system sizes. Furthermore, both $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA and piecewise-ramp QAOA exhibit a high feasibility rate, which is crucial in industrial applications. Our analysis highlights an intrinsic feasibility-optimality trade-off, which we address by introducing a filtered variant of the loss providing a single hyperparameter to tune this balance.

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

Thermodynamic Measure of Intelligence

arXiv:2606.20231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can intelligence be measured? We propose that intelligence can be defined as the lawful amplification of rare but valid futures: a system increases the probability of outcomes that would be unlikely under passive dynamics but remain admissible under the constraints of the domain. We start with the premise that an intelligent system must model the world and its own place within it. Because the system is part of the world it models, this leads naturally to recursive self-simulation: the system represents futures in which its own actions are part of the trajectory. Our central results give a necessity statement and a conditional near-sufficiency statement connecting this architecture to a precise thermodynamic measure of lawful amplification of rare-valid futures: high rare-valid lift is impossible unless the internal simulation identifies rare-valid futures with high fidelity; conversely, when rare-valid fidelity is high and the simulation contains an effective policy, the achievable lift approaches the actuation-limited optimum. Thus recursive self-simulation is not merely a plausible feature of intelligence but, under the stated assumptions, is necessary and nearly sufficient for high thermodynamic intelligence. The resulting framework makes intelligence measurable on a universal scale, from passive matter and feedback controllers, large language models, and humans as text generators to Maxwell-demon-like information engines.

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

Red-Teaming the Agentic Red-Team

arXiv:2606.24496v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The use of agentic systems to perform offensive security operations has moved from a theoretical possibility to a commoditized capability. However, while the community has focused on creating more and more capable agents, less attention has been allocated to assessing the security of those systems. In this work, we present the first in-depth security analysis of the most widely used agentic systems for offensive security operations. We show that most of these tools share common design flaws that enable an active adversary to exfiltrate API keys, establish persistent footholds, and fully compromise the operator's machine, even when the agent operates inside a sandboxed container. To support our analysis, we introduce a full cyber kill chain for such agentic systems, capturing the progression from initial LLM manipulation to lateral movement, persistence, guardrail bypass, and sandbox escape. Building on our security analysis, we derive a robust architecture for agentic offensive-security tools and propose actionable, broadly applicable design principles that mitigate the disclosed attack paths at the architectural level.