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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Natural-Language Temporal Grounding in Hour-Long Videos is a Search Problem: A Benchmark and Empirical Decomposition

Authors:
Sukmin Seo↗Geewook Kim↗

Temporal grounding–returning the interval $[t_s, t_e]$ for a natural-language query over a video–is the language interface to long-form video, yet has been studied on short videos; the dynamics of hour-scale natural-language grounding remain underexplored. We take the position that at hour-scale, the binding constraint is search, not recognition: Video-LLMs are bottlenecked not by localizing a nearby event, but–given a natural-language query–by searching for the relevant region of a long video. To test this, we release ExtremeWhenBench, the first open hour-scale grounding benchmark (2,273 queries over 194 videos, mean 75.7 min, max 9 hr) with an open-form query distribution. Every open Video-LLM collapses while a frame-level retrieval baseline outperforms them; a failure taxonomy attributes 85% of failures to search; and a retrieve-then-ground hybrid recovers 6.7x over the monolithic Video-LLM–mirroring retrieve-then-read in open-domain QA.

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

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

Authors:
Haowen Gao↗Haoran Chen↗Can Wang↗Shasha Guo↗Liang Pang↗Zhaoyang Liu↗Huawei Shen↗Xueqi Cheng↗

arXiv:2606.14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows. Skills rarely remain sufficient after deployment: edge cases, API changes, and deployment constraints become visible only through use, making skill evolution a practical necessity. Existing methods depend on privileged feedback such as held-out validation scores, hidden test outcomes, or environment rewards – signals often unavailable when a practitioner has only a task description and workspace data. We introduce SkillAudit, a framework for evolving agent skills without ground-truth feedback. The key idea is paired trajectory auditing: at each iteration, the same task is executed with and without the candidate skill, isolating how the skill changes agent behavior without external labels. To turn behavioral differences into edit guidance, SkillAudit uses Process-Aligned Contrastive Evaluation (PACE), a cluster of evaluators that maps trajectory divergences to diagnostic signals linked to specific passages in the skill document. A structural verifier, compiled once from the task specification and then fixed, checks task constraints and rolls back harmful updates. SkillAudit routes edits through two pipelines: Refine removes noisy or irrelevant guidance from broadly useful skills, while Repair replaces passages that conflict with the task. Across 89 containerized tasks spanning 8 professional domains, SkillAudit achieves 73.9% average task reward, outperforming an agent without skills (40.9%) and the static expert skill (56.7%). These gains are obtained without accessing hidden tests, reference solutions, or external scoring functions during evolution.

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

Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions

Authors:
Yuntai Bao↗Qinfeng Li↗Xinyan Yu↗Ge Su↗Wenqi Zhang↗Liu Yan↗Haiqin Weng↗Jianwei Yin↗Xuhong Zhang↗

arXiv:2605.05983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones. However, current approaches to fine-tuned SVs suffer from two limitations. First, they require careful selection of steering factors on a per-SV basis to balance steering effectiveness and generation quality at inference time. Second, they operate as full-sequence SVs (FSSVs), which can sacrifice generation quality regardless of factor selection due to excessive intervention on the model generation process. To address the first limitation, we propose joint training of steering factors and directions, such that post-hoc factor selection is no longer required. Using neural network scaling theory, we find that moderately large initialization sizes and learning rates for steering factors are essential for stability and efficiency of joint training. To tackle the second limitation, we draw inspiration from representation fine-tuning and introduce Prompt-only SV (PrOSV), an SV that intervenes only on a few prompt tokens. Our empirical results show that PrOSV outperforms traditional FSSVs on AxBench when using our joint training scheme. We also find that PrOSV achieves a better tradeoff between general model utility and adversarial robustness than FSSV.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Geometry-Aware Style Transfer in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Authors:
Min Hyeok Bang↗Jun Hyeong Kim↗Seung-Wook Kim↗Se-Ho Lee↗

In this paper, we present a novel geometry-aware style transfer framework for 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) that simultaneously transfers appearance attributes and geometric structures. Unlike prior works that primarily focus on color-based stylization and often overlook structural adaptation, our method explicitly incorporates geometry adaptation through a decoupled optimization scheme that alternately updates color and geometry parameters. This strategy alleviates potential interference between color and geometry updates, leading to stable and consistent scene-level geometry transformation. The decoupled optimization is enabled by the proposed geometry-aware contrastive feature matching (GCFM). GCFM integrates RGB, depth, and edge cues into a contrastive objective and is employed in both optimization phases to effectively transfer structural characteristics from style images to Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance in both qualitative fidelity and quantitative metrics, significantly outperforming existing 3DGS-based stylization methods. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/oweixx/gast}{https://github.com/oweixx/gast}.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Ghost Attractor Networks: Basin-Structured Dynamical Decoders for Closed-Loop Sequential Generation

Authors:
Tianyu Wang↗Ying Wang↗Zhihao Liu↗Xi Vincent Wang↗Lihui Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18315v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential output generation with large-scale Transformer and diffusion decoders pays a memory cost that grows with sequence length, plus iterative per-step computation. Replacing them with small feed-forward decoders restores efficiency but produces unstructured latent representations that limit closed-loop control: phase-conditioned action generation and cross-step latent carry-over both require a latent geometry with stable basins. This article proposes Ghost Attractor Networks, a theoretically derived dynamical decoder whose latent evolves under a learned potential with drift and produces a basin-attractor structure by construction. Three desiderata (multi-modality, decoder-level single-pass switching, and constant memory) motivate the potential-drift form, and mode transitions arise as saddle-node bifurcations with ghost-attractor escape. A hierarchical phase-space decomposition separates first-order basin convergence from second-order proprioceptive refinement. Empirically, a Ghost trained end-to-end with a behavioral-cloning and contrastive objective exhibits the predicted gradient-flow contraction in its potential, with the gradient norm decaying by 67 percent across five integration steps on 1430 held-out samples. Ghost is evaluated as a robotic action decoder. A 2.3-million-parameter Ghost matches the offline accuracy of a 1.07-billion-parameter Diffusion Transformer at 462 times fewer parameters and 32 times lower latency, and beats five alternative 2M-parameter decoders (MLP, Neural ODE, CVAE, Transformer, 1-step Diffusion) on offline mean squared error by 5.9 to 29 percent. On the LIBERO-10 closed-loop benchmark, phase conditioning on Ghost's basin-structured latent yields a 13.5 percentage-point success-rate gain over a feed-forward MLP baseline, and persistent-latent ensembling reaches a 95.7 percent final success rate.

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

Many-body chirality of topological stabilizer states

Authors:
Tyler D. Ellison↗Dongjin Lee↗Zhi Li↗Amin Moharramipour↗Yasamin Panahi↗Beni Yoshida↗

arXiv:2606.20472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A defining feature of chirality is the distinction between a system and its mirror image. Despite extensive experimental observations of chiral phases and theoretical advances, a quantum-information theoretic characterization of chirality based solely on the entanglement structure of many-body quantum states remains elusive. Here, we introduce the notion of many-body chirality by formulating it as an obstruction to transforming a quantum state into its complex conjugate through finite-depth local operations. We rigorously establish many-body chirality for stabilizer realizations of $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ anyon theories, proving that complex conjugation can be implemented by local quantum channels if and only if the underlying anyon data are mirror invariant. This reveals forms of chirality that evade conventional diagnostics, including examples with vanishing modular commutator, vanishing chiral central charge, and commuting-projector realizations. We further show that this obstruction is intrinsically four-partite, while invisible to tripartite entanglement structure. Finally, we prove that $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ states with $d>2$ possess intrinsic many-body imaginarity: their complex phase structure cannot be removed by finite-depth local unitaries. Remarkably, this includes states that are not many-body chiral.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Neural network inverse design of nanophotonic scintillators

Authors:
Nathan Regev↗Avner Shultzman↗Francis Loignon-Houle↗Charles Roques-Carmes↗Ido Kaminer↗

arXiv:2606.16309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scintillators are materials converting high-energy radiation into optical light, essential in a range of technologies such as medical imaging systems and security scanners. Scintillator development and optimization have remained limited by the complexity of their underlying physics, involving stochastic cascades of electron-electron, electron-phonon, and electron-photon interactions. Such processes are typically modeled by non-differentiable Monte Carlo simulations, limiting the applicability of machine learning for scintillator development. Here we present a physics-informed neural network that learns the scintillation cascade process from the incident high-energy particle to photon emission, substantially accelerating scintillator design and optimization. Combining this neural network with photonic simulations enables end-to-end differentiable optimization of the scintillator geometry. This allows us to optimize for arbitrary figures of merit, such as specific target emission patterns.. We demonstrate the concept and characterize it relative to previous approaches by inverse design of nanophotonic scintillators for X-ray imaging.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Similarity-based representation factorization for revealing interpretable dimensions in representational data

Authors:
Florian P. Mahner↗Ka Chun Lam↗Francisco Pereira↗Martin N. Hebart↗

The study of representations is widespread across fields, including neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. While representations are often studied and compared through similarities between stimuli, current methods provide only limited access to the dimensions that shape these representations and are often limited in interpretability. To overcome these challenges, here we introduce Similarity-Based Representation Factorization (SRF), a general computational method for recovering low-dimensional, non-negative, interpretable embeddings from similarity matrices derived from measured data. Across simulations and many neural, behavioral, and computational datasets, SRF recovers interpretable dimensions from diverse forms of representational data, even for very sparsely sampled, incomplete data. The dimensions derived from these datasets match those obtained by task-specific models, predict independent behavioral properties, improve exploratory analysis, and offer higher power for confirmatory hypothesis testing than comparing similarity matrices. Together, these results establish SRF as a general-purpose method with broad applications for uncovering, understanding, and using the dimensions underlying representations.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Verifiable Foundation Models for Robot Safety

Authors:
Davide Corsi↗Kyungmin Kim↗Roy Fox↗

arXiv:2606.23754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying foundation models for robot control raises a central challenge: the expressive power that enables rich, multimodal perception also makes these models opaque and difficult to analyze formally, rendering them intractable for existing verification tools. In this paper, we present FEARL (Foundation-Enabled Assured Robot Learning), a framework that addresses this tension through a modular architectural decomposition. FEARL separates the policy into a large Controller (C) responsible for high-dimensional perception and task reasoning, and a small Safety module (S) that receives low-dimensional observations from dedicated safety sensors together with a bounded context embedding from C and produces the final action. Since many robot safety requirements, such as collision avoidance and workspace boundary constraints, can be expressed over these safety sensor observations, formal verification can be applied to S rather than to the full foundation-model backbone. This makes formal analysis tractable with existing tools while preserving the Controller's expressive power for task reasoning. To show that the decomposed policy remains capable of solving diverse tasks, we evaluate FEARL on three simulated robotic domains using multiple Controller backbones and training procedures, including pretrained off-the-shelf vision-language-action models. We further transfer the learned policy from one of our simulated tasks to a physical robot, suggesting that the low-dimensional safety interface supports practical sim-to-real transfer.

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

Is Your Trajectory Displacement Safe in Long-tail?

Authors:
Qiao Sun↗Weicheng Zheng↗Yixin Huang↗Hang Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.16313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-tail scenarios remain a major bottleneck for autonomous driving evaluation, even as datasets grow by orders of magnitude. Existing evaluation pipelines are rarely human-aligned, safety-aware, verifiable, and explainable at the same time: closed-loop metrics often saturate among strong planners, while unstructured human ratings can be noisy without a carefully designed protocol. We formulate planning evaluation as additional-threat detection: given a planner trajectory and an expert reference, does the planner's displacement introduce new unsafe driving behavior? We propose FluidTest, an evaluation pipeline with three components: a pairwise WebUI protocol for reliable human annotation; a taxonomy of 32 semantic threats with evidence-grounded decision graphs; and a three-agent verification system with reflection for precision and auditability. Experiments on the WOD-E2E dataset show that FluidTest produces consistent labels among trained annotators and identifies additional threats in 65% of Poutine trajectories and 51% of RAP trajectories. These results show that state-of-the-art planners can still exhibit substantial safety-relevant failures despite high Rater Feedback Scores (RFS) and low Average Displacement Error (ADE). Additional details, guidance, and code are available at https://fluidtest.web.app.

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

Uncertainty Estimation for Molecular Diffusion Models

Authors:
Paul Seij↗Christian A. Naesseth↗Stephan Mandt↗Metod Jazbec↗

arXiv:2606.13451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have seen wide adoption for 3D molecular generation, yet they offer no principled signal of when a generated molecule is likely to be of low quality. We propose a post-hoc method for estimating per-sample uncertainty in pretrained molecular diffusion models. Building on a Laplace approximation of the denoising network, we measure the variability of the noise prediction across the generation trajectory. Empirically, we show that the resulting uncertainty score is informative of sample quality, exhibiting a negative correlation with established sample-level quality metrics. We further study how the proposed uncertainty score can be used to filter generated samples, improving model performance via test-time scaling.

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12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

Authors:
Nader Karimi↗Foad Shokrollahi↗

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

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

OSCS-SupCon: Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning for Robust Feature Disentanglement

Authors:
Bin Wang↗Fadi Dornaika↗

Supervised Contrastive Learning (SupCon) has achieved strong performance by explicitly modeling pairwise relationships among samples. However, existing SupCon-based methods suffer from two key limitations: negative-sample dilution induced by the standard InfoNCE loss, and feature-space entanglement caused by the lack of explicit constraints separating category-relevant (common) and category-irrelevant (style) features. These limitations reduce feature discriminability and generalization ability. To address these issues, we propose OSCS-SupCon (Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning), a unified framework that combines a sigmoid-based pairwise contrastive objective with explicit orthogonality constraints. Specifically, we introduce a sigmoid-based contrastive loss with two learnable parameters, temperature and bias, which adaptively modulate pairwise decision boundaries and alleviate negative-sample dilution. Furthermore, we enforce orthogonality between common and style feature subspaces via a linear projection with ReLU nonlinearity, thereby reducing feature overlap and improving disentanglement of style-irrelevant representations. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that OSCS-SupCon consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised contrastive learning methods across multiple backbone architectures. In particular, on the fine-grained CUB200-2011 dataset with a ResNet-18 backbone, the proposed method achieves a 3.4% improvement in classification accuracy over CS-SupCon, highlighting its robustness and generalization capability. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component.

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14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Decorated stable $p$-adic self-similar processes with stationary increments

Authors:
Yi Shen↗Zhenyuan Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.24056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We construct new classes of examples of self-similar processes with stationary increments indexed by $\mathbb Q_p$ via stable integrals. Classical constructions arise from the real counterpart and from discounted branching random walks. We discuss a new decoration technique that significantly enlarges these classes. The decoration technique makes use of the special symmetry of $\mathbb{Q}_p$ to obtain self-similarity and stationarity of increments, and it does not have an analogue on the real line. We also show that these enlarged classes of decorated processes are pairwise incomparable under inclusion.

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

C-QUERI: Congressional Questions, Exchanges, and Responses in Institutions Dataset

Authors:
Manjari Rudra↗Daniel Magleby↗Sujoy Sikdar↗

Questions in political interviews and hearings serve strategic purposes beyond information gathering including advancing partisan narratives and shaping public perceptions. However, these strategic aspects remain understudied due to the lack of large-scale datasets for studying such discourse. Congressional hearings provide an especially rich and tractable site for studying political questioning: Interactions are structured by formal rules, witnesses are obliged to respond, and members with different political affiliations are guaranteed opportunities to ask questions, enabling comparisons of behaviors across the political spectrum. We develop a pipeline to extract question-answer pairs from unstructured hearing transcripts and construct a novel dataset of committee hearings from the 108th–117th Congress. Our analysis reveals systematic differences in questioning strategies across parties, by showing the party affiliation of questioners can be predicted from their questions alone. Our dataset and methods not only advance the study of congressional politics, but also provide a general framework for analyzing question-answering across interview-like settings.

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

DeepBD: A Grounded Agentic Workflow for Variant Prioritization and Diagnosis of Genetic Birth Defects

Authors:
Shiyu Li↗Ziqi Yan↗Zhihao Wu↗Jielong Lu↗Weiran Liao↗Jiajun Yu↗Genjie Li↗Zeyu Chu↗Jiajun Bu↗Haishuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.24779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Birth defects are a major cause of fetal loss, neonatal morbidity and long-term disability. In the subset with suspected genetic etiologies, exome and genome sequencing have moved many cases from variant detection to post-sequencing interpretation: clinicians must rank patient-specific candidate variants under incomplete fetal or infant phenotypes and heterogeneous evidence from population genetics, variant-effect prediction, gene-disease validity, phenotype ontologies, cellular and pathway context, protein structure and clinical literature. We present DeepBD, a grounded agentic workflow for variant prioritization and diagnostic interpretation of genetic birth defects. DeepBD organizes the workflow into LLM-assisted case structuring, a pretrained evidence engine, specialist evidence modules and a grounded diagnostic review layer. The evidence engine learns patient-specific variant scores from structured rule evidence, sequence and variant-effect representations and phenotype-conditioned biological context, whereas specialist modules and the agentic layer provide tool-based refinement, candidate-pool review and diagnosis-oriented synthesis from ranked candidates. Developed using an in-house fetal and infant cohort comprising 18,622 cases, DeepBD achieved Recall@1/3/5/10 of 0.658/0.882/0.912/0.929 on an internal held-out solved-case benchmark, outperforming standalone Exomiser, DeepRare and prompted LLM reranking baselines evaluated on Exomiser-derived top-20 candidate variants. Ablation and overlap analyses show that rule evidence, mechanistic context, and specialist refinement provide complementary signals. These findings support a grounded agentic workflow that separates evidence integration, tool-based refinement, and LLM-assisted diagnostic review for retrospective variant prioritization in genetic birth defects.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

LLMs Contain Multitudes: How Deployment Context Reshapes Model-Level Preferences and Values

Authors:
Filip Trhlik↗Aoife O'Flynn↗Angela Yu↗Arduin Findeis↗Paula Buttery↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly characterised in recent evaluation work as having stable, model-level preference and value systems. However, accompanying robustness checks are limited to incidental prompt perturbations such as syntax variation and option reordering. This leaves open whether the measured properties survive when the surrounding task context changes, as it does in most real deployments. We test this directly across two established pairwise paradigms: ranking country preferences and eliciting utility judgements. In both, we make the deployment context – the high-level task the model is performing while making concrete value-dependent choices – our controlled variable, varied across framings such as writing a Reddit post or a news article. Across five LLMs and over 1.2M pairwise decisions, deployment context produces variation far larger than prompt paraphrasing and temperature controls. In country preference rankings over 15 countries, context induces widespread, statistically significant rank shifts; the aggregate Global North favouritism reported in prior work is itself context-dependent, with each model's bias shifting systematically across contexts. In utility elicitation over 50 outcomes, broad cross-category ordering is preserved, but fine-grained rankings within domains vary substantially, and cardinal exchange rates between outcomes (e.g. how many lives in one region equal one in another) shift by a factor of 2.47 at the median. Reported model-level preferences and utilities are therefore better understood as context-conditioned measurements than fixed model-level properties: safety guarantees obtained under one framing provide limited assurance in another.

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

Policies Permitting LLM Use for Polishing Peer Reviews Are Currently Not Enforceable

Authors:
Rounak Saha↗Gurusha Juneja↗Dayita Chaudhuri↗Naveeja Sajeevan↗Nihar B Shah↗Danish Pruthi↗

A number of scientific conferences and journals have recently enacted policies that prohibit LLM usage by peer reviewers, except for polishing, paraphrasing, and grammar correction of otherwise human-written reviews. But, are these policies enforceable? To answer this question, we assemble a dataset of peer reviews simulating multiple levels of human-AI collaboration, and evaluate five state-of-the-art detectors, including two commercial systems. Our analysis shows that all detectors misclassify a non-trivial fraction of LLM-polished reviews as AI-generated, thereby risking false accusations of academic misconduct. We further investigate whether peer-review-specific signals, including access to the paper manuscript and the constrained domain of scientific writing, can be leveraged to improve detection. While incorporating such signals yields measurable gains in some settings, we identify limitations in each approach and find that none meets the accuracy standards required for identifying AI use in peer reviews. Importantly, our results suggest that recent public estimates of AI use in peer reviews through the use of AI-text detectors should be interpreted with caution, as current detectors misclassify mixed reviews (collaborative human-AI outputs) as fully AI generated, potentially overstating the extent of policy violations.

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

SDFLoRA: Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA for Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning with Heterogeneous Clients

Authors:
Zhikang Shen↗Jianrong Lu↗Haiyuan Wan↗Jianhai Chen↗

arXiv:2601.11219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) for large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention as a privacy-preserving approach for adapting models over distributed data, where parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely adopted to reduce communication and memory costs. However, practical deployments often exhibit rank and data heterogeneity: clients operate under different low-rank budgets and data distributions, making direct aggregation of LoRA updates biased and unstable. Existing approaches either enforce a unified rank or align heterogeneous updates into a single shared subspace, which tends to mix transferable and client-specific directions and consequently undermines personalization. Moreover, under differential privacy (DP), perturbing such structurally mixed updates injects noise into directions that should remain purely local, leading to unnecessary utility degradation. To address these issues, we propose Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA (SDFLoRA), a structure-aware LoRA framework that decouples each client update into a shared component for aggregation and a private component that preserves client-specific semantics. Only the shared component participates in subspace alignment, while the private component remains local and uncommunicated, making the training DP-compatible and stabilizing aggregation under rank heterogeneity. By injecting noise only into the aggregated shareable update, this approach avoids perturbations to local directions and improves the utility-privacy trade-off. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SDFLoRA outperforms federated LoRA baselines and achieves a strong utility-privacy trade-off.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

''Circumstantial Determinants'': An Efficient Approach to Reaching People in Need of HIV Prevention?

Authors:
Bagnay↗S. H↗Gregson↗Skovdal↗Maswera↗Moorhouse↗L. R↗Ncube↗Tsenesa↗Mandizvidza↗Pickles↗Garnett↗…

HIV prevention and testing programmes primarily reach people who self-refer or attend routine health services. Higher-risk individuals are missed if they are healthy, under-estimate their risk of infection or under-report sexual risk-behaviours. We assess a new approach to address limitations in existing programmes by targeting HIV services on ''Circumstantial Determinants'' (CDs) of HIV risk - the social circumstances, settings, and norms associated with behaviours that increase risk of HIV acquisition. Data on potential CDs and sexual behaviour were collected in a population survey in Zimbabwe in 2018/19 (N=9141). HIV-negative individuals reporting [≥] 1 sexual risk-behaviours were defined as the 'priority population' for HIV prevention. For each sex, six circumstantial determinants were associated with being in the priority population (aOR [≥] 1.30; p [≤] 0.01). Reach and efficiency of CDs (and combinations) were calculated; ROC curve algorithms evaluated their ability to identify priority population membership; and HIV prevention condom cascades were compared between CD-defined priority population subgroups. Example findings include that targeting men at bars and beerhalls could reach 48.5% of the priority population and 25.1% of lower-risk men. These percentages increase to 77.1% and 53.7% if men with poor mental health, no religious affiliation, negative social capital, or living on agricultural estates are also targeted. Targeting women with poor mental health could reach 32.0% of the priority population and 21.3% of lower-risk women. Targeting additional circumstantial determinants increases these percentages to 54.1% and 37.5%, respectively. Cascade barriers to condom use differed between CD-defined subgroups. The Circumstantial Determinants approach demonstrates proof-of-concept potential to strengthen HIV prevention services.

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

Towards Advanced Mathematical Reasoning for LLMs via First-Order Logic Theorem Proving

Authors:
Chuxue Cao↗Mengze Li↗Juntao Dai↗Jinluan Yang↗Zijian Zhao↗Shengyu Zhang↗Weijie Shi↗Chengzhong Liu↗Sirui Han↗Yike Guo↗

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising first-order logic (FOL) reasoning capabilities with applications in various areas. However, their effectiveness in complex mathematical reasoning involving multi-step FOL deductions is still under-researched. While LLMs perform competitively on established mathematical reasoning benchmarks, they struggle with multi-step FOL tasks, as demonstrated by Deepseek-Prover-V2-7B's low accuracy (4.2%) on our proposed theorem proving dataset. This issue arises from the limited exploration of diverse proof strategies and the potential for early reasoning mistakes to undermine entire proofs. To address these issues, we propose DREAM, a self-adaptive solution that enhances the Diversity and REAsonability of LLMs' generation strategies. DREAM incorporates an Axiom-Driven Strategy Diversification mechanism to promote varied strategic outcomes and a Sub-Proposition Error Feedback to help LLMs reflect on and correct their proofs. Our contributions include pioneering advancements in LLMs' mathematical reasoning through FOL theorem proving, introducing a novel inference stage solution that improves performance by 0.6% to 6.4%, and providing a curated dataset of 447 mathematical theorems in Lean 4 format for evaluation.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

Authors:
Yanjun Shao↗Yundi Chen↗Yashvi Patel↗Aurelien Pelissier↗Mar\'ia Rodr\'iguez Mart\'inez↗

arXiv:2606.18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation. Yet these distributions are learned from broad unlabeled corpora and are not naturally conditioned on task-specific biological contexts such as interaction partners, cellular environments, or therapeutic interventions. Existing contextual matching methods often distort this interface through pooled embeddings, contrastive latent spaces, or task-specific prediction heads. We introduce LOGICA (Logit-space Contrastive Alignment), a framework for context-conditioned prediction that performs contrastive learning directly in output-logit space. Using gated cross-modal adapters compatible with each model's native token head, LOGICA preserves the pretrained likelihood interface and converts contextualized token log-likelihoods into matching scores. Alignment is defined through context-sensitive token probabilities rather than proximity in a shared embedding space, enabling learning from sparse paired data across models with distinct vocabularies, without a shared tokenizer or decoder. LOGICA is particularly effective for mutation-local variant ranking, where comparisons reduce to context-conditioned likelihoods of mutant tokens at perturbed sites. Across protein–ligand binding, TCR–peptide activity, and drug-conditioned resistance prediction, LOGICA improves over prior state-of-the-art methods, including matched latent-contrastive and conditional MLM baselines, while retaining a token-level interface for interpretation and generation. On held-out-gene single-mutation drug-resistance prediction, LOGICA improves AUC from near-random latent-space baselines of $\sim$0.55 to $\sim$0.65.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Linear Combination of Hamiltonian Simulation with Commutator Scaling

Authors:
Junaid Aftab↗Dong An↗Konstantina Trivisa↗

arXiv:2606.11475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Linear Combination of Hamiltonian Simulation (LCHS) framework simulates dissipative linear dynamics by representing time evolution as an integral over unitary operators, which is discretized by quadrature and implemented via Hamiltonian simulation. While existing analyses achieve near-optimal scaling in time and precision using norm-based quantities of the dissipative generator, we show that implementing the Hamiltonian simulation steps with Multi-Product Formulas (MPFs) yields commutator-sensitive error and complexity bounds. We demonstrate that the quadrature rule affects not only discretization error but also commutator structure and query complexity. This dependence is quantified through post-quadrature analysis for abstract MPF error profiles and for general time-independent and local Hamiltonians using known commutator-sensitive MPF error estimates. We compare uniform trapezoidal and free-scale sinh–sinh quadrature, showing improved quadrature-cardinality scaling for the latter, and illustrate the framework with applications to fractional diffusion, advection–diffusion, and open quantum systems.

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

Private Learning with Public Feature Conditioning

Authors:
Shuli Jiang↗Walid Krichene↗Nicolas Mayoraz↗

arXiv:2606.18773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study differentially private (DP) regression in settings where each data sample includes public, non-sensitive features – common in applications such as recommendation and advertising systems. While such label-DP or semi-sensitive-feature settings have been primarily explored in the context of classification, effective approaches for regression remain underexplored. We introduce Cond-DP, a conditioned variant of DPSGD that leverages the structure of public feature matrices to improve optimization under privacy constraints. Motivated by the observation that these public features often exhibit rapidly decaying spectra, Cond-DP incorporates a data-driven conditioning matrix to reshape the optimization landscape and accelerate convergence. We provide convergence guarantees for convex, strongly convex, and non-convex settings, and recover standard DPSGD as a special case when the conditioning matrix is the identity. We show how to construct an effective conditioning matrix for Cond-DP directly from public features, enabling provably faster convergence than DPSGD in private linear regression without incurring additional privacy cost. Empirically, Cond-DP with this conditioning matrix consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a wide range of datasets and model architectures under label DP, demonstrating strong and robust performance in practice.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Symplectic Transversality and Endpoint Green Estimates for Finite-Horizon Pontryagin Systems

Authors:
Pyuyi Chufeng Huang↗Zikang Song↗Xingshu Chen↗

arXiv:2606.17762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study horizon-uniform local branches of finite-horizon discrete-time Pontryagin boundary value systems after smooth control elimination. The central input is a two-point endpoint inverse for the linearization. We verify this inverse from scaled stable–unstable boundary transversality, prove the associated endpoint-corrected Green estimate, and combine it with weighted contractions to obtain existence, uniqueness, Lipschitz dependence, and first-order expansions with constants independent of the horizon. The framework covers smooth nonlinear endpoint maps, including the original Pontryagin rows that fix the initial state and couple the terminal costate to the terminal state. Symplectic and Riccati criteria verify the inverse hypothesis at the level of the matrix data; in particular, every stabilizable linear-quadratic system with invertible dynamics and definite weights is covered, including noncommuting coupled data. A numerical section illustrates the certificates and the horizon-uniform first-order expansion.

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