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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes

Authors:
Zhi-Han Zhang↗Han-Chuan Kou↗Peng Li↗

arXiv:2606.13200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes (ICDZM) in the generalized Creutz ladders using closed quench paths that pass through two critical points successively. By reading out the final zero-mode transfer probability, we find rich ICDZM interference patterns dependent on the quench path. In particular, when the closed path links two topologically nontrivial phases, the ICDZM pattern may either vanish or exhibit period doubling. Within the framework of WKB analysis, this phenomenon is well clarified by the interference phase accumulated in the quench procedure. We also demonstrate that the zero-mode transfer probability can be detected by the deviation of the boundary particle number from its initial fractional value, which arises from the blending of bulk modes in the critical dynamics. As an edge defect, the zero-mode transfer probability captures both the ICDZM oscillation and the known anomalous defect production in a non-closed quench path. These results identify ICDZM and the corresponding edge defect as probes for critical dynamics associated with topological zero modes.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

Authors:
Nikolos Gurney↗

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Green AI Carbon Optimizer: Carbon-Efficient Training Location Recommendation and Global AI Energy Demand Forecasting

Authors:
Yuxin Chen↗Hao Gao↗Chujie Zou↗

arXiv:2606.14707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI training and deployment consume substantial electricity, but carbon outcomes remain weakly integrated into routine model development decisions. This paper presents Green AI Carbon Optimizer with two primary contributions: (i) a carbon aware cloud region recommendation method for training workloads, and (ii) a power law forecasting pipeline for global AI energy demand. For location recommendation, we combine regional grid carbon intensity, renewable share, and data center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) into a unified scoring model across 100+ regions from major cloud providers. For a reference workload (8*A100, 100h), estimated emissions in our sampled regions range from 7.74kg to 272.00kg CO2. Selecting the best region instead of the worst corresponds to a 97.2% reduction relative to the worst case. Ablation shows that ranking by renewable share alone can select regions with higher CO2 emissions than rankings that include grid carbon intensity. For forecasting, we fit a power law relation between parameter count and training energy using 26 anchor models. We combine this fit with scenario assumptions on model growth, hardware efficiency, and training frequency, and evaluate sensitivity to inference ratio and ecosystem scaling. Across scenarios, projected 2030 demand ranges from 7TWh to 1,436TWh under the stated assumptions, highlighting the importance of deployment choices, model scaling discipline, and transparent energy reporting.

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04.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

Authors:
Rami Subhi↗

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

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

ZeSTA: Zero-Shot TTS Augmentation with Domain-Conditioned Training for Data-Efficient Personalized Speech Synthesis

Authors:
Youngwon Choi↗Jinwoo Oh↗Hwayeon Kim↗Hyeonyu Kim↗

arXiv:2603.04219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.

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

DiverseDiT: Towards Diverse Representation Learning in Diffusion Transformers

Authors:
Mengping Yang↗Zhiyu Tan↗Binglei Li↗Xiaomeng Yang↗Hesen Chen↗Hao Li↗

Recent breakthroughs in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have revolutionized the field of visual synthesis due to their superior scalability. To facilitate DiTs' capability of capturing meaningful internal representations, recent works such as REPA incorporate external pretrained encoders for representation alignment. However, the underlying mechanisms governing representation learning within DiTs are not well understood. To this end, we first systematically investigate the representation dynamics of DiTs. Through analyzing the evolution and influence of internal representations under various settings, we reveal that representation diversity across blocks is a crucial factor for effective learning. Based on this key insight, we propose DiverseDiT, a novel framework that explicitly promotes representation diversity. DiverseDiT incorporates long residual connections to diversify input representations across blocks and a representation diversity loss to encourage blocks to learn distinct features. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512 demonstrate that our DiverseDiT yields consistent performance gains and convergence acceleration when applied to different backbones with various sizes, even when tested on the challenging one-step generation setting. Furthermore, we show that DiverseDiT is complementary to existing representation learning techniques, leading to further performance gains. Our work provides valuable insights into the representation learning dynamics of DiTs and offers a practical approach for enhancing their performance.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Judging Against the Reference: Uncovering Knowledge-Driven Failures in LLM-Judges on QA Evaluation

Authors:
Dongryeol Lee↗Yerin Hwang↗Taegwan Kang↗Minwoo Lee↗Younhyung Chae↗Kyomin Jung↗

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for question answering (QA) and other reference-conditioned evaluation tasks, little is known about their ability to adhere to a provided reference. We identify a critical failure mode of such reference-based LLM QA evaluation: when the provided reference conflicts with the judge model's parametric knowledge, the resulting scores become unreliable, substantially degrading evaluation fidelity. To study this phenomenon systematically, we introduce a controlled swapped-reference QA framework that induces reference-belief conflicts. Specifically, we replace the reference answer with an incorrect entity and construct diverse pairings of original and swapped references with correspondingly aligned candidate answers. Surprisingly, grading reliability drops sharply under swapped references across a broad set of judge models. We empirically show that this vulnerability is driven by judges' over-reliance on parametric knowledge, leading judges to disregard the given reference under conflict. Finally, we find that this failure persists under common prompt-based mitigation strategies, highlighting a fundamental limitation of LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and motivating reference-based protocols that enforce stronger adherence to the provided reference.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Quantifying and Auditing LLM Evaluation via Positive–Unlabeled Learning

Authors:
Zilong Zhang↗Yi-Ting Hung↗Lei Ding↗Chi-Kuang Yeh↗

arXiv:2606.19057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for scalable evaluation, yet such LLM–as–a–Judge systems exhibit systematic biases that are decoupled from semantic quality, most notably verbosity bias. Meanwhile, human supervision is costly and typically selective, yielding reliable positive judgments but leaving most outputs unlabelled and potentially mixed in quality. We formulate LLM evaluation under selective human supervision as a positive–unlabelled learning problem and propose a geometric auditing framework based on Partial Optimal Transport. By aligning a small set of human–verified positives with a reliable subset of unlabelled outputs in a fixed embedding space, our method identifies human–consistent preferences and corrects biased judges without retraining. Experiments demonstrate improved alignment with human preferences, increased robustness to presentation biases, and interpretable confidence estimates, offering a scalable and statistically grounded alternative to existing LLM–as–a–judge pipelines.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Towards Fully Automated Exam Grading: Fairness-Aware Recognition of Handwritten Answers with Foundation Models

Authors:
Hartwig Grabowski↗

Correcting handwritten exams by hand is time-consuming and error-prone, particularly for large cohorts, while fully digital exams tend to force a didactic narrowing towards closed question formats. A practical middle ground keeps paper-based, problem-oriented tasks but records the assessment-relevant answers as single capital letters in a table that a machine can read. The open question is whether this reading can be made accurate and, above all, fair enough for unsupervised grading. Earlier automated approaches reached only about 88%–91% recognition – too low – and failed on the cases that matter most: answers placed outside the cell, crossed out, or written in cursive. We show that general-purpose vision-language foundation models (VLMs), which interpret the page rather than match pixel templates, close this gap. On a benchmark of 61 anonymised exams (3141 answer positions) the best model reaches 98.4% accuracy, well above the previous baseline. Crucially, we centre the evaluation on fairness: we distinguish false negatives (a correct answer marked wrong, which disadvantages the student) from false positives, and a lightweight prompt that supplies the reference solution as context lowers the false-negative rate to 0.58%. Under an exemplary grading scheme only three of the 61 exams would be graded worse, all caught by a student self-review step. Fully automated, fairness-aware exam grading at scale is therefore defensible; we release the anonymised benchmark to support reproducibility.

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

Robust Spin Splitting and Strain-Controlled Optical Response in Monolayer CrC2N4 for Valleytronic and Optoelectronic Applications

Authors:
Md. Samrat↗Vivek Chowdhury↗Sake Wang↗Ahmed Zubair↗

arXiv:2606.17329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolayer CrC2N4 recently emerged as a promising two-dimensional semiconductor, yet its spin-orbit-coupled (SOC) physics and strain-tunable optical response remained largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the electronic, valley, charge-transfer, and optical properties of pristine and biaxially strained monolayer CrC2N4 using first-principles calculations. The monolayer exhibited a direct band gap at the K/K' valleys. SOC produced valley contrasting out-of-plane spin polarization, yielding a moderate valence band spin splitting of 51.9 meV and a small conduction band spin splitting of 1.7 meV. Orbital-resolved analysis showed that the edge states were mainly governed by Cr-d and N-p hybridization, while Bader analysis indicated polar-covalent bonding through charge transfer toward N atoms. Biaxial strain in the range of -4% to +4% tuned the band gap from 1.987 to 1.421 eV and drove an indirect-to-direct gap transition near -1% strain. Tensile strain enhanced the Berry curvature and red-shifted the optical response toward the visible-near-infrared region. These results suggested monolayer CrC2N4 as a promising platform for strain-engineered valleytronic and optoelectronic device applications.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Adaptive Memory Crystallization for Autonomous AI Agent Learning in Dynamic Environments

Authors:
Rajat Khanda↗Mohammad Baqar↗Sambuddha Chakrabarti↗Satyasaran Changdar↗

arXiv:2604.13085v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents operating in dynamic environments face a persistent challenge: acquiring new capabilities without erasing prior knowledge. We present Adaptive Memory Crystallization (AMC), a memory architecture for progressive experience consolidation in continual reinforcement learning. AMC is conceptually inspired by the qualitative structure of synaptic tagging and capture (STC) theory, the idea that memories transition through discrete stability phases, but makes no claim to model the underlying molecular or synaptic mechanisms. AMC models memory as a continuous crystallization process in which experiences migrate from plastic to stable states according to a multi-objective utility signal. The framework introduces a three-phase memory hierarchy (Liquid–Glass–Crystal) governed by an Itô stochastic differential equation (SDE) whose population-level behavior is captured by an explicit Fokker–Planck equation admitting a closed-form Beta stationary distribution. We provide proofs of: (i) well-posedness and global convergence of the crystallization SDE to a unique Beta stationary distribution; (ii) exponential convergence of individual crystallization states to their fixed points, with explicit rates and variance bounds; and (iii) end-to-end Q-learning error bounds and matching memory-capacity lower bounds that link SDE parameters directly to agent performance. Empirical evaluation on Meta-World MT50, Atari 20-game sequential learning, and MuJoCo continual locomotion consistently shows improvements in forward transfer (+34–43\% over the strongest baseline), reductions in catastrophic forgetting (67–80\%), and a 62\% decrease in memory footprint.

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13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

High-Order Talagrand and Eldan–Gross Inequalities via Besov-Type Variance Functionals

Authors:
Guangyue Han↗Peijie Li↗

arXiv:2606.14876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: By introducing high-order Besov-type variance functionals that generalize the canonical variance, we develop a unified framework for proving high-order Talagrand-type inequalities that relate high-order energies to Fourier weights. Applying this machinery, we establish high-order Poincaré-type, $L^p$–$L^q$, isoperimetric-type, Falik–Samorodnitsky and Eldan–Gross inequalities, all with explicit constants, in both the Boolean and Gaussian settings. Fundamentally, our semigroup-based framework relies primarily on hypercontractivity and high-order Bismut-type derivative estimates, and is broadly applicable.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents

Authors:
Yujun Zhou↗Kehan Guo↗Haomin Zhuang↗Xiangqi Wang↗Yue Huang↗Zhenwen Liang↗Pin-Yu Chen↗Tian Gao↗Nuno Moniz↗Nitesh V. Chawla↗Xiangliang Zhang↗

Interactive LLM agents are becoming part of daily work, but they do not reliably become easier to work with over time: a correction remembered in one session may still be violated in the next. We study this gap between preference access and preference compliance. In tasks derived from anonymized real-user friction cases, Mem0 memory still leaves 57.5% of applicable preference checks violated. We introduce Test-time Rule Acquisition and Compiled Enforcement (TRACE), a drop-in skill-layer pipeline for coding-agent runtimes that mines user corrections, rewrites them as atomic rules, and compiles them into runtime checks that must pass before an agent completes future tasks. Unlike runtime checks written ahead of time by developers, TRACE skills come from the user's own chat corrections. We evaluate TRACE with simulated user-in-the-loop experiments on ClawArena coding-agent tasks and MemoryArena-derived memory-intensive tasks. On ClawArena, TRACE reduces held-out preference violation from 100.0% to 37.6% on in-distribution tasks and from 100.0% to 2.0% on out-of-distribution tasks. On MemoryArena-derived tasks, TRACE reduces in-distribution violation from 100.0% to 60.5% while matching or exceeding the strongest memory baseline on task pass. These results suggest that compiling corrections into runtime enforcement can address a repeated-friction failure mode that memory alone does not reliably solve, reducing the need for users to restate the same correction across future sessions. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TRACE_exp, and the deployable skill is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Fuzzy-Geometric Branch-Point Modeling for Structure-Aware Augmentation of Handwritten Chinese Characters

Authors:
Dongbin Jiao↗Yibo Lyu↗Qiulu Wei↗Fuxiang Lu↗Shengcai Liu↗Shi Yan↗

Data scarcity and structural distortion significantly limit handwriting recognition in high-security authentication. Existing augmentation methods often cause topological and morphological damage, particularly when processing complex Chinese characters where stroke intersections, ligatures, and sharp turns render traditional branch-point detection unreliable. To address this, this paper proposes a fuzzy geometry-driven structure-aware (FGSA) augmentation framework. We model branch points as fuzzy sets within the skeleton space, constructing a continuous branch-point membership field by integrating topological neighborhood evidence with direction field divergence. This membership field is adaptively optimized via an unsupervised surrogate objective, enabling robust stroke decoupling without manual annotation. Finally, kinematically-aligned samples are synthesized through parameterized cubic Bézier reconstruction and multi-strategy perturbations, ensuring a balance between structural fidelity and sample diversity. Moreover, we establish LZUSig, a large-scale, highly challenging dataset specifically dedicated to fine-grained structural degradation in Chinese handwritten signatures. Extensive experiments on CASIA-HWDB1.1, ChiSig, and LZUSig demonstrate that FGSA significantly reduces the word-level error rate ($\Delta$WER), achieving optimal recognition gains over the compared baselines. More importantly, it strikes a robust trade-off among task gain, structural fidelity, and discriminative feature preservation, offering a highly controllable solution for handwriting augmentation.

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16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Block algebra for morphing circuits

Authors:
Rui Chao↗

arXiv:2606.12724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Morphing circuits are a new paradigm for quantum error correction that relaxes hardware requirements. We present four constructions for CNOT-based CSS morphing circuits with explicit qubit connectivity degrees. All four constructions are specified in block algebra notation, with entries in algebras generated by permutation matrices. The first three are obtained by rewriting existing surface- and color-code morphing circuits; the fourth is a new three-round construction modeled on the 6.6.6 color code. The surface-code construction recovers the morphing circuit of Ref. [ST25] for two-block group algebra codes. Numerical search then instantiates these permutation matrices using regular representations of finite groups. [ST25] M. H. Shaw and B. M. Terhal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 134(9), 090602 (2025).

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Power-law-graded Ising Interactions Stabilize Time Crystals Realizing Quantum Energy Storage and Sensing

Authors:
Ayan Sahoo↗Debraj Rakshit↗

arXiv:2508.14847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study discrete time-crystalline (DTC) phases in one-dimensional spin-1/2 chains with power-law-graded Ising interactions under periodic Floquet driving. By generalizing Stark localization to power-law-graded Ising interaction profiles, we identify robust period-doubled dynamics across a wide range of interaction exponents, stabilized by the interplay between coherent driving and spatially varying coupling. Within the DTC phase, the energy stored in the system, interpreted as a quantum battery, increases superlinearly with system size, although no scaling advantage persists in normalized power. Beyond energy storage, we demonstrate that the DTC phase supports enhanced quantum sensing. The quantum Fisher information associated with estimating timing deviations in the drive scales superextensively with system size, surpassing the Heisenberg limit. The degree of quantum advantage can be tuned by varying the interaction exponent, though DTC behavior remains robust throughout. Our results position power-law-graded Ising interacting Floquet systems as robust platforms for storing quantum energy and achieving metrological enhancement.

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

Automated 3D Kinematic Monitoring for Circadian Activity and Anomaly Detection in Juvenile Fish

Authors:
Chih-Wei Huang↗Chang-Wen Huang↗Chung-Ping Chiang↗Tsung-Wei Pan↗

Precision aquaculture faces a "phenotyping bottleneck" in tracking high-resolution behavioral traits, as conventional methods cannot quantify instantaneous three-dimensional (3D) physical exertion. To address this, we present a high-throughput 3D behavioral phenotyping framework integrating deep learning object detection with binocular stereo vision for real-time monitoring of juvenile tilapia in high-density environments. The system automates non-contact body length estimation and reconstructs 3D swimming trajectories from absolute spatial coordinates. By eliminating 2D perspective distortions, this approach precisely quantifies 3D velocity and acceleration, marking the first estimation of true physical swimming speeds in free-roaming juveniles. Results show the framework successfully establishes circadian locomotor baselines, serving as an early warning system for physiological stress and providing an objective metric for fish vitality.

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

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

Authors:
Taos Transue↗Bohan Chen↗So Takao↗Bao Wang↗

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

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20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Targeting Cancer-Specific Mutations with RNA-Triggered Chromatin Shredding

Authors:
Jingkun Zeng↗

Genetic mutations that drive cancer often occur in tumor suppressor proteins, including the p53 transcription factor which is altered in ~40-50% of cases1,2. However, current therapies fail to target most such mutations because the mutant proteins typically lack defined drug-binding pockets, and restoring the endogenous function has proven challenging. Here, we programmed CRISPR-Cas12a2, an RNA-guided nuclease with trans-nucleolytic cleavage activities3,4, to selectively kill cancer cells by targeting cancer-specific transcripts. This approach limits cell growth by inducing trans shredding of chromatin, triggering DNA damage responses and cell death. Unlike existing methods, RNA-guided Cas12a2 senses cellular RNA signatures, enabling precise targeting of undruggable mutations. Transcript-activated chromatin shredding provides a new approach to precision disease treatments for undruggable targets.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

StatefulDiscovery: Evidence-Calibrated Claim Formation in Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

Authors:
Jiayao Chen↗Shi Liu↗Linyi Yang↗

arXiv:2606.11851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended scientific discovery asks agents to move beyond executing analyses for predefined questions. Across multiple rounds of exploration, a discovery agent must decide which phenomena warrant investigation while avoiding overinterpretation, where emerging claims exceed the evidential scope of the analyses supporting them. This creates an evidence-calibration problem: the exploration trajectory must be coupled with claim status so that evidence can guide both what to investigate next and what can be claimed. We introduce StatefulDiscovery, a discovery framework that externalizes investigation state and uses it to coordinate frontier selection, evidence acquisition, and claim adjudication. We evaluate StatefulDiscovery across 40 real-data discovery tasks. Compared with several baselines, StatefulDiscovery produces more claims overall judged to be both well-supported and high-value. Ablations indicate that structured hypotheses, local adjudication, and frontier control contribute to performance. Together, these results suggest that explicit discovery state can couple exploration with evidence-calibrated claim formation.

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

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents

Authors:
Shawn Li↗Yue Zhao↗

arXiv:2603.19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental capability-alignment paradox: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while failing to prevent sophisticated attacks. Evaluating defended models against undefended baselines across 97 agent tasks and 1,000 adversarial prompts, we uncover three systematic biases unique to multi-step agents. Agent incompetence bias manifests as immediate tool execution breakdown, with models refusing or generating invalid actions on benign tasks before observing any external content. Cascade amplification bias causes early failures to propagate through retry loops, pushing defended models to timeout on 99\% of tasks compared to 13\% for baselines. Trigger bias leads to paradoxical security degradation where defended models perform worse than undefended baselines while straightforward attacks bypass defenses at high rates. Root cause analysis reveals these biases stem from shortcut learning: models overfit to surface attack patterns rather than semantic threat understanding, evidenced by extreme variance in defense effectiveness across attack categories. Our findings demonstrate that current defense paradigms optimize for single-turn refusal benchmarks while rendering multi-step agents fundamentally unreliable, necessitating new approaches that preserve tool execution competence under adversarial conditions.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Uncertainty Is Not a Safety Net for Clinical VQA, but Can It Anticipate Model Failure?

Authors:
Arnisa Fazla↗Alberto Testoni↗Ameen Abu-Hanna↗Barbara Plank↗Iacer Calixto↗

Safe deployment of clinical vision-language models (VLMs) requires reliable uncertainty estimation (UE): a signal indicating when predictions should be trusted or escalated to a clinician. We test whether current UE methods actually deliver this signal. Benchmarking 8 methods across 12 VLMs on clinical visual question-answering (VQA), we find that UE quality is not an intrinsic property of the UE method: it tracks model accuracy, degrading precisely where the model performance is weakest, and therefore where reliability is most needed. When we stress-test models by hiding the correct option among the multiple-choice answers (NOTA perturbations), accuracy collapses while uncertainty barely changes, leaving models systematically miscalibrated. Yet, we find that uncertainty on the unperturbed input reliably anticipates which predictions will collapse under NOTA, indicating that UE in current VLMs carries diagnostic information about model fragility. Our results position UE as a diagnostic tool for identifying fragile predictions and motivate perturbation-based evaluation as a path toward safe clinical deployment.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

Authors:
Xueqing Wu↗Zihan Xue↗Da Yin↗Shuyan Zhou↗Kai-Wei Chang↗Nanyun Peng↗Yeming Wen↗

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

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

TS-Memory: Plug-and-Play Memory for Time Series Foundation Models

Authors:
Sisuo Lyu↗Siru Zhong↗Tiegang Chen↗Weilin Ruan↗Qingxiang Liu↗Taiqiang Lv↗Qingsong Wen↗Raymond Chi-Wing Wong↗Yuxuan Liang↗

arXiv:2602.11550v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) achieve strong zero-shot forecasting through large-scale pre-training, but adapting them to downstream domains under distribution shift remains challenging. Existing solutions face a trade-off: Parametric Adaptation can cause catastrophic forgetting and requires costly multi-domain maintenance, while Non-Parametric Retrieval improves forecasts but incurs high inference latency due to datastore search. We propose Parametric Memory Distillation and implement it as TS-Memory, a lightweight memory adapter that augments frozen TSFMs. TS-Memory is trained in two stages. First, we construct an offline, retrieval-leakage-safe kNN teacher that synthesizes confidence-aware quantile targets from retrieved futures. Second, we distill this retrieval-induced distributional correction into a lightweight memory adapter via confidence-gated supervision. During inference, TS-Memory fuses memory and backbone predictions with constant-time overhead, enabling retrieval-free deployment. Experiments across diverse TSFMs and benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both point and probabilistic forecasting over representative adaptation methods, with efficiency comparable to the frozen backbone. Code: https://github.com/sisuolv/TS-Memory.

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