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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Investigating naming error patterns after non-invasive brain stimulation and language treatment in persons with aphasia

Abstract Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) paired with behavioral language therapy can improve naming in persons with aphasia (PWA), yet naming errors persist. Little is known about how naming error patterns change after non-invasive brain stimulation is combined with language treatment. Aims: To examine whether right cerebellar tDCS plus computerized aphasia therapy changes the types of naming errors in people with chronic aphasia across timepoints, and to determine whether effects differ by cerebellar tDCS polarity (anode vs. cathode). Methods and Procedures: In a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, within-subject crossover study, we retrospectively analyzed behavioral data from 24 individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Each participant completed two 15-session intervention periods (3-5 sessions/week) with active cerebellar tDCS + computerized aphasia therapy and sham + computerized aphasia therapy, separated by a two-month washout. General linear models (GLMs) assessed longitudinal changes in six error types (semantic, phonological real word, phonological nonword, no response, mixed, unrelated) on an untrained picture naming task (Philadelphia Naming Test; PNT) and a trained task (Naming 80; N80). Additional GLMs evaluated polarity effects with 2 (Group: anode vs. cathode) x 2 (Treatment) interactions, and treatment-order effects with 2 (Group: tDCS-first vs. sham-first) x 2 (Treatment) interactions. Outcomes and Results: Active cerebellar tDCS did not significantly change error types for trained items (N80). For untrained items (PNT), active tDCS reduced several error types relative to sham, with the clearest and most durable reduction in phonological nonword errors; more moderate reductions occurred for phonological real word and unrelated errors. Mixed errors showed a marginally opposite pattern, tending to increase after tDCS and decrease after sham. Polarity analyses indicated broadly similar effects across anodal and cathodal stimulation overall, but only the anode group showed a reliable treatment effect for phonological nonword errors on the PNT. Treatment-order analyses revealed no significant order effects. Conclusions: Our results indicate a shift in naming error types, particularly after tDCS treatment for the untrained naming task (PNT). These findings may help guide the course of treatment approaches of those with aphasia and what error naming pattern types may show changes post stroke when combining non-invasive brain stimulation and computerized aphasia therapy. Clinical Trial Registration: Cerebellar Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Aphasia Treatment [NCT02901574] Keywords: aphasia, naming errors, non-invasive brain stimulation, cerebellar tDCS, computerized aphasia treatment

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

Speaker Verification with Speech-Aware LLMs: Evaluation and Augmentation

arXiv:2603.10827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech-aware large language models (LLMs) can accept speech inputs, yet their training objectives largely emphasize linguistic content or specific fields such as emotions or the speaker's gender, leaving it unclear whether they encode speaker identity. First, we propose a model-agnostic scoring protocol that produces continuous verification scores for both API-only and open-weight models, using confidence scores or log-likelihood ratios from the Yes/No token probabilities. Using this protocol, we benchmark recent speech-aware LLMs and observe weak speaker discrimination (EERs above 20% on VoxCeleb1). Second, we introduce a lightweight augmentation that equips an LLM with ASV capability by injecting frozen ECAPA-TDNN speaker embeddings through a learned projection and training only LoRA adapters. On TinyLLaMA-1.1B, the resulting ECAPA-LLM achieves 1.03% EER on VoxCeleb1-E, approaching a dedicated speaker verification system while preserving a natural-language interface.

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

ParkingTransformer: LLM-Enhanced End-to-End Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parking

arXiv:2606.17082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous parking has emerged as a critical task within the realm of autonomous driving. However, existing methods suffer from black-box characteristics, lacking high-level semantic understanding and interpretability, which impedes the realization of seamless long-distance autonomous parking from the road to the target spot. To address these limitations, we propose ParkingTransformer, a novel framework that leverages multi-view perception and the scene understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). By combining trajectory queries with LLMs implicit state features, our method interacts directly with historical information and raw sensor data to output planning trajectories, eliminating the need for dense Bird's-View (BEV) representations. To compensate for the inadequate spatial reasoning ability of LLMs, we introduce 3D positional encoding to explicitly inject spatial geometric awareness. Furthermore, a fixed-window streaming mechanism is designed for historical information processing, significantly improving long-term temporal processing efficiency and inference speed. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy is employed to progressively enhance trajectory precision. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted on the CARLA simulator and real-world vehicle platforms. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 61.32 in CARLA simulator and an average success rate of 88.70% in real-world experiments, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Cluster Aggregated GAN (CAG): A Cluster-Based Hybrid Model for Appliance Pattern Generation

arXiv:2512.22287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic appliance data are essential for developing non-intrusive load monitoring algorithms and enabling privacy preserving energy research, yet the scarcity of labeled datasets remains a significant barrier. Recent GAN-based methods have demonstrated the feasibility of synthesizing load patterns, but most existing approaches treat all devices uniformly within a single model, neglecting the behavioral differences between intermittent and continuous appliances and resulting in unstable training and limited output fidelity. To address these limitations, we propose the Cluster Aggregated GAN framework, a hybrid generative approach that routes each appliance to a specialized branch based on its behavioral characteristics. For intermittent appliances, a clustering module groups similar activation patterns and allocates dedicated generators for each cluster, ensuring that both common and rare operational modes receive adequate modeling capacity. Continuous appliances follow a separate branch that employs an LSTM-based generator to capture gradual temporal evolution while maintaining training stability through sequence compression. Extensive experiments on the UVIC smart plug dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms baseline methods across metrics measuring realism, diversity, and training stability, and that integrating clustering as an active generative component substantially improves both interpretability and scalability. These findings establish the proposed framework as an effective approach for synthetic load generation in non-intrusive load monitoring research.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Focus When Necessary: Adaptive Routing and Collaborative Grounding for Training-Free Visual Grounding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in cross-modal reasoning, they often struggle to perceive fine-grained details in complex high-resolution images. Recent training-free methods address this through image scaling and localized cropping. However, applying these manipulations indiscriminately introduces computational redundancy for simple queries and can degrade accuracy by truncating essential global context or introducing irrelevant background noise. To this end, we propose LazyMCoT, a dynamic and training-free framework that adaptively allocates visual grounding efforts based on sample difficulty. The framework features an Adaptive Routing mechanism that evaluates predictive uncertainty using first-token statistics from a single forward pass. This efficiently bypasses confident cases while ensuring the recall of difficult samples via conformal calibration. For these challenging cases, a Collaborative Grounding module integrates the inherent cross-modal attention of the model with an external visual expert through a two-stage refinement process. This refinement process generates a precise localized display to recover small or occluded targets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that LazyMCoT rivals training-based approaches by simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy and reducing average inference latency. Our code is availble at https://github.com/TencentBAC/LazyMCoT.

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

SoK: AI-Augmented Binary Reversing

arXiv:2606.17398v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary reversing is fundamental to software understanding, vulnerability discovery, malware investigation, and firmware auditing. However, it remains inherently challenging due to the irreversible loss of semantic information during compilation. Recent advances in machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI systems have accelerated the adoption of AI-augmented binary reversing. Yet, the resulting body of work has become increasingly fragmented across reversing domains, artifact representations, learning approaches, and evaluation practices. This paper presents the first comprehensive systematization of knowledge on AI-augmented binary reversing. We analyze 144 research papers published since 2015, and organize them into 22 binary reversing domains according to the inference tasks. We further introduce a unified taxonomy spanning conventional and AI-augmented reversing pipelines. Our taxonomy connects traditional analysis techniques, binary-derived artifacts, representation strategies, learning paradigms, and downstream inference tasks, while clarifying the emerging roles of LLMs and agentic AI systems. By establishing a common vocabulary and structured framework, we provide a holistic view of the field's evolution over the past decade. Our study reveals common structures underlying seemingly disparate approaches, highlights persistent technical challenges and evaluation gaps, and identifies promising opportunities for future research. Collectively, these insights clarify the current state of the field and provide a foundation for the next generation of reliable and scalable AI-augmented binary reversing systems.

07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

Linking reduced prefrontal microcircuit inhibition in schizophrenia to EEG biomarkers in silico

by Sana Rosanally, Frank Mazza, Heng Kang Yao, Faraz Moghbel, Hannah Seo, Etay Hay Reduced cortical inhibition by parvalbumin-expressing (PV) interneurons in schizophrenia is thought to be associated with impaired processing in the prefrontal cortex and altered EEG signals such as oddball mismatch negativity (MMN). Recent studies also suggest loss of somatostatin (SST) interneuron inhibition. However, establishing the link between reduced interneuron inhibition and reduced MMN experimentally in humans is currently not possible. To overcome these challenges, we simulated spiking activity and EEG during baseline and oddball response in detailed models of human prefrontal microcircuits in health and schizophrenia, with reduced PV and SST interneuron inhibition as constrained by postmortem patient data. We showed that reduced PV interneuron inhibition can account for the decreased MMN amplitude seen in schizophrenia, with a threshold below which the amplitude effect was low as seen in at-risk patients. In contrast, reduced SST interneuron inhibition did not affect the MMN amplitude. We further showed that both types of inhibition loss were necessary to account for changes in resting EEG in schizophrenia, with reduced SST interneuron inhibition increasing broadband power, and reduced PV and SST interneuron inhibition both leading to a right shift from alpha to beta frequencies. Our study thus links reduced PV and SST interneuron inhibition in schizophrenia to distinct EEG biomarkers that can serve to improve stratification and early detection using non-invasive brain signals.

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

MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Reranking

LLM-based shopping agents increasingly rely on long purchase histories and multi-turn interactions for personalization, yet naively appending raw history to prompts is often ineffective due to noise, length, and relevance mismatch. We propose MemRerank, a preference memory framework that distills user purchase history into concise, query-independent signals for personalized product reranking. To study this problem, we build an end-to-end benchmark and evaluation framework centered on an LLM-based 1-in-5 selection task, which measures both memory quality and downstream reranking utility. We further train the memory extractor with reinforcement learning (RL), using downstream reranking performance as supervision. Experiments with two LLM-based rerankers show that MemRerank consistently outperforms no-memory, raw-history, and off-the-shelf memory baselines, yielding up to +10.61 absolute points in 1-in-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicit preference memory is a practical and effective building block for personalization in agentic e-commerce systems.

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

Exploration Structure in LLM Agents for Multi-File Change Localization

arXiv:2606.11976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering tools increasingly rely on LLM based agents to localize files to change to resolve a software issue. Most AI agents explore repositories linearly, that is, visiting one directory or file per step. We postulate that this is a structural mismatch for changes that span several subsystems. We compare linear sequential exploration against non-linear, domain-scoped parallel agentic exploration. Using SWE Bench Pro as initial benchmark, we focus on ansible as an exemplar. We construct an approach for persistent-session evaluation of GitHub issues anchored at a single base commit. We compare our non-linear domain-agent file traversal system against a base LLM without direct repository access, a single agent Recursive Language Model (RLM) baseline with a persistent Python REPL and an external CLI baseline using Codex 5.5 High. Domain scoped parallel agent spawning with a small Haiku-class model achieves the highest micro F1 among Haiku class models by a large margin. Domain-agents is the second highest behind only the much larger Codex 5.5 High on our own expanded benchmark including over more recent PRs from 2025 and 2026. On the original, curated, 2020 SWE-bench Pro benchmark, a larger Sonnet plain LLM baseline attains higher micro F1 by predicting few files, leading to higher precision, but at significantly lower all gold recall. We also present three additional findings. First, documentation evolution is a latent dependency unresolved by any approach. Second, naive file system access can degrade localization driven by test-file over prediction. Lastly, forced multi-agent consultation does not measurably help and raises token cost substantially.

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

BRDFusion: Physics Meets Generation for Urban Scene Inverse Rendering

Inverse rendering of urban scenes from captured videos enables numerous applications, including content creation and autonomous driving simulation. Physically-based rendering methods follow and control lighting physics, but suffer from reconstruction and rendering artifacts. While generative models produce realistic videos, they offer limited consistency and controllability. We present BRDFusion, a unified framework that combines two complementary models for inverse and forward rendering. Specifically, BRDFusion recovers explicit, consistent scene properties with physical modeling and alleviates optimization ambiguity with generative priors. During forward rendering, the physical model provides controllable rendering from the scene configuration, and the generative model denoises and fixes artifacts. Therefore, our method produces high-quality videos while allowing precise control, outperforming baselines in real and synthetic scenes. Moreover, BRDFusion supports novel-view relighting, night simulation, and dynamic object insertion/editing. Project page: https://shigon255.github.io/brdfusion-page/

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

Topical Phase Transitions in Artificial Intelligence Research: Large-Scale Evidence and an Early-Warning Signature for Emerging Topics

arXiv:2606.12828v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Do research topics in artificial intelligence grow gradually, or do they advance through abrupt, detectable jumps? Analyzing 80,814 accepted main-track papers from five premier AI conferences (ACL, CVPR, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS) spanning 2017 to 2025, we show major AI topics advance through topical phase transitions: remaining marginal for years, then surging across venues within one to three years. Large language models became the dominant cross-venue topic by 2025, diffusion models rose with comparable abruptness, and language-model methods crossed into computer vision via vision-language models, whereas reinforcement learning compounded smoothly, distinguishing genuine phase transitions from ordinary growth. This structure is our primary contribution: a large-scale, cross-venue characterization of how AI research reorganizes. We then ask whether a transition leaves a detectable footprint before it peaks. We define an early-warning signature, four publication-dynamics criteria frozen on 2017-2021 data, and evaluate it out of sample on 2023-2025 transitions, obtaining a precision of 27% and recall of 63% against a 13.5% base rate. Applied to 2025 data, the signature flags reasoning and test-time compute, agentic AI, multimodal LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and world models as topics to monitor over 2026-2028. The source code is also publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/ai-phase-transitions.

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

Towards End-to-End Automation of AI Research

arXiv:2606.15497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The automation of science is a long-standing ambition in the field of AI. While the community has made significant progress in automating individual components of the scientific process, a system that autonomously navigates the entire research lifecycle – from conception to publication – has remained out of reach. Here, we present the strongest demonstration to date toward automating the entire process end-to-end. We present The AI Scientist, which creates research ideas, writes code, runs experiments, plots and analyzes data, writes the entire scientific manuscript and performs its own peer review. Its ideas, execution, and presentation are of sufficient quality to produce a manuscript generated by an AI system that passes the first round of peer review at a major machine learning conference workshop. The workshop has an acceptance rate of 70 percent. Our system leverages modern foundation models within a complex agentic system. We evaluate The AI Scientist in two settings: a focused mode using human-provided code templates as an initial scaffold to conduct research on a specific topic, and a template-free, open-ended mode that leverages agentic search for wider scientific exploration. Both settings produce diverse ideas and automatically test, report on, and evaluate them. This achievement demonstrates AI's growing capacity for scientific contribution and signifies a potential paradigm shift in how research is conducted. As with any impactful new technology, there could be significant risks, including taxing overwhelmed review systems and adding noise to scientific literature. However, if developed responsibly, such autonomous systems could greatly accelerate scientific discovery.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Preventing postpartum depression through mitigating breastfeeding grief: A convergent parallel mixed methods study

Background: Women who did not meet their breastfeeding goals often experience breastfeeding grief (BG) and may be likely to have postpartum depression (PD). Furthermore, PD is nearly twice as common in African American (AA) women as in Non-Hispanic White women. No research exists on BG and its role in PD. This study examined the BG experiences of AA women and its possible contributions to PD symptoms. Methods: A convergent parallel mixed methods design was used. A purposive sample of 16 AA women with children aged 6 months to 2 years with BG participated in individual semi-structured interviews about their experiences of BG and completed an online survey including the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and descriptive statistics, respectively. Both data were integrated using joint display of data and side-by-side comparison. Results: The mean age of participants was 29.5 years. Four meaning-based themes about BG were generated including: We looked forward to breastfeeding, But it did not go as expected, So we grieve, and These would have helped. From quantitative results, 87.5% of participants reported a history of PD symptoms and almost 44% had EPDS scores >11. All participants reported that experiencing BG contributed to their PD symptoms. Findings suggest that BG influenced PD symptoms in AA women without prior diagnosis of depression. Conclusions: Qualitative and quantitative findings from this novel exploratory study revealed an overlap that AA women with BG report PD symptoms. Clinicians should support women to achieve their breastfeeding goals to prevent BG and PD. Keywords: African American; Breastfeeding grief; Mental health; Mixed methods; Postpartum depression

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CisTransCell: Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction via Gene Function, Regulatory Control, and Cellular Context

arXiv:2606.13713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting cellular transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in single-cell biology, especially in the zero-shot setting where the perturbed gene or gene combination is unseen during training. A major difficulty is that perturbation effects are not determined by expression state alone: they depend on how the perturbed gene product influences other genes and proteins, how those downstream factors act on cis-regulatory elements, and which regulatory programs are active in the current cell state. To better capture this biological complexity, we propose CisTransCell, a cell-conditioned multi-modal framework for single-cell perturbation prediction that augments each gene with two complementary priors: a regulatory-sequence prior that captures how the gene is controlled, and a coding-sequence prior that captures what the gene product does. By integrating these priors with cellular expression state, CisTransCell models perturbation response as a cascade from gene function to regulatory control to downstream transcriptional change. Experiments on benchmark single-cell perturbation datasets show that CisTransCell achieves strong performance in zero-shot perturbation prediction.

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

SurroundNEXO: Ego-Centric Metric Bridging for Spatially Consistent Geometry in Autonomous Driving

Modern autonomous driving depends on accurate metric 3D understanding for perception, reconstruction, and planning, which in turn requires reliable multi-camera depth prediction. However, the outward-facing nature of vehicle-mounted surround-view camera rigs inherently limits visual overlap across views, challenging the correspondence-based assumptions that underpin conventional multi-view geometry. To bridge this gap, we present SurroundNEXO, named after the Spanish word nexo for a geometric link, a low-overlap multi-camera metric depth framework that grounds cross-view reasoning in ego-centric geometry rather than dense visual correspondences. Instead of directly enforcing early global fusion, SurroundNEXO first assigns image tokens globally comparable ego-frame viewing directions through Ego-Ray Positional Encoding, then uses sparse LiDAR measurements as metric anchors to propagate absolute scale cues, and finally expands feature interaction progressively from view-local modeling to decomposed spatio-temporal reasoning and global integration. This design enables metric-scale depth prediction with improved spatial consistency across weakly overlapping cameras. Across low-overlap autonomous driving benchmarks, including NuScenes, Waymo and DDAD, SurroundNEXO reduces single-view error by 33.2%, improves cross-view consistency by 10.5%, and enhances metric reconstruction quality by 25.6% compared with SOTA methods. It further remains robust under extremely sparse depth prompts and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen camera layouts.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Adverse Childhood Experiences and Growth Outcomes in Childhood: A Longitudinal EHR-Based Study

Question Are adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) associated with altered growth trajectories in childhood? Findings In this cohort study of 412,549 children and adolescents, ACEs were associated with lower height throughout childhood, earlier pubertal timing, and shorter final stature. Height differences emerged approximately 2 years before ACE documentation and were greatest among those with earlier documentation. Meaning These findings suggest that early adversity affects physical growth in children and may serve as a measurable indicator of the biological consequences of early-life stress, especially in those with documentation of ACEs prior to the onset of typical pubertal growth. Importance Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are among the strongest risk factors for long-term mental and physical health complications, yet their impact on physical growth in childhood remains incompletely understood. Objective To determine the association of ACEs on childhood growth trajectories and growth dynamics. Design, Setting and Participants Retrospective cohort study using longitudinal electronic health record data. Data was collected from participants between February 1999 and August 2025. A large academic medical center biobank linked to deidentified electronic health records in the southeastern United States. A total of 412,549 individuals with at least 2 recorded height measurements between the ages of 2 and 20 were included in the primary analysis. Growth curve analyses were performed in a subset of 199,844 individuals with at least 3 height measurements spanning at least 2 years. Genetic analyses were performed in a subset of 10,114 individuals of primarily European ancestry. Exposure(s) Documented exposure to adverse childhood experiences before age 18 years identified through a natural language processing algorithm. Main Outcome(s) and Measure(s) Height-for-age z-scores across childhood, final attained height, and growth curve parameters estimated using SuperImposition by Translation and Rotation (SITAR) modeling. Results Among 412,549 participants, 18,502 (4.5%) had clinically documented ACEs during childhood. ACE documentation was associated with lower height-for-age z-scores throughout childhood and adolescence. Final attained height was significantly lower among ACE-documented individuals, with mean differences of -3.0 cm among males (174.0 cm vs 177.0 cm, p < 0.001) and -1.3 cm among females (161.8 cm vs 163.1 cm, p < 0.001). Height differences emerged approximately 2 years before clinical ACE documentation. Earlier age at first ACE documentation was associated with progressively shorter final attained height, with each year decrease in age at ACE documentation associated with a decrease in final height of -0.20 cm in females and -0.35 cm in males. Those with first ACE documented prior to pubertal age also showed the most pronounced growth dynamic differences, with males demonstrating a mean reduction in size of 5.25 cm (95% CI, -6.79 cm to -3.70 cm) and 1.26-year earlier pubertal timing (95% CI, -1.50 to -1.03 years), and females demonstrating a reduction in growth curve size of 3.62 cm (95% CI, -4.83 to -2.41 cm) and 1.14-year earlier pubertal timing (95% CI, -1.29 to -0.99 years). Conclusions and Relevance In this large clinical cohort, clinically documented ACEs were associated with time-dependent reductions in stature, earlier pubertal timing, and short final attained height. These findings suggest that early childhood adversity may have lasting effects on physical development and highlight growth trajectories as a potential marker of the biological consequences of early-life stress.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAE Interventions are Unreliable: Post-Intervention Recovery of Suppressed Behavior

arXiv:2606.18322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) decompose residual-stream activations into interpretable features. Recent latent-space defenses increasingly rely on these decompositions, assuming that identified "unsafe" SAE features serve as actionable handles for monitoring and intervention. In this paradigm, clamping a specific harmful feature is expected to reliably prevent model misbehavior. However, we show that this success may hide a recoverable failure mode: the clamp may block one visible route to a behavior without eliminating the behavior itself. We formulate this vulnerability as post-intervention recovery, a constrained residual-space optimization problem. Starting from the post-intervention residual state, we optimize residual perturbations to recover the pre-intervention behavior while preserving the post-intervention values of the targeted SAE features. Even under a strong threat model where the intervention remains active throughout optimization and generation, recovery remains possible. To rule out that recovery simply undoes the intervention, we use encoder-orthogonal updates for single-layer interventions and the corresponding feature-map Jacobian in the cross-layer setting. Across TPP, unlearning, IOI, and refusal steering experiments, this stress test reveals recoverable behavior despite successful feature-level intervention. Especially in the safety-critical refusal-steering setting, we achieve a 95.8% recovery rate on valid samples while keeping defended-feature relative drift to 0.131, substantially below suffix-based baselines. A recovery-path attribution analysis further localizes this recovery to the SAE reconstruction residual, the component left unexplained by the SAE. These results expose a gap between feature-level control and behavioral completeness: SAE features can support causal intervention, but controlling them does not guarantee control over the underlying behavior.

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

Concatenated Matrix SVD: Compression Bounds, Incremental Approximation, and Error-Constrained Clustering

arXiv:2601.11626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large collections of matrices arise throughout modern machine learning, signal processing, and scientific computing, where they are commonly compressed by concatenation followed by truncated singular value decomposition (SVD). This strategy enables parameter sharing and efficient reconstruction and has been widely adopted across domains ranging from multi-view learning and signal processing to neural network compression. However, it leaves a fundamental question unanswered: which matrices can be safely concatenated and compressed together under explicit reconstruction error constraints? Existing approaches rely on heuristic or architecture-specific grouping and provide no principled guarantees on the resulting SVD approximation error. In the present work, we introduce a theory-driven framework for compression-aware clustering of matrices under SVD compression constraints. Our analysis establishes new spectral bounds for horizontally concatenated matrices, deriving global upper bounds on the optimal rank-$r$ SVD reconstruction error from lower bounds on singular value growth. The first bound follows from Weyl-type monotonicity under blockwise extensions, while the second leverages singular values of incremental residuals to yield tighter, per-block guarantees. We further develop an efficient approximate estimator based on incremental truncated SVD that tracks dominant singular values without forming the full concatenated matrix. Therefore, we propose three clustering algorithms that merge matrices only when their predicted joint SVD compression error remains below a user-specified threshold. The algorithms span a trade-off between speed, provable accuracy, and scalability, enabling compression-aware clustering with explicit error control.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

arXiv:2606.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative – from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Natively Unlearnable Large Language Models

Unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data sources, but this has proved challenging because the contributions of different sources are entangled within the model. Isolating source contributions to disjoint parameters makes removal easier, though it obstructs joint learning across sources. We propose NULLs (Natively Unlearnable LLMs), a model class that satisfies the two opposing goals of isolating source-specific contributions and learning jointly across sources, by training a set of shared backbone neurons alongside a pool of sparsely activated sinks. During training, information specific to a source naturally concentrates in its sinks while information shared across sources accumulates in the backbone. A source is then unlearned at deployment by disabling its corresponding sinks, with no gradient updates and no access to the retained data. We show that NULLs scales to Wikipedia's ~6M articles, isolating each as an independent source. Unlearning a single article removes knowledge specific to it while preserving facts shared with semantically related articles, closely matching retraining from scratch. We note that unlearning with NULLs is also robust: in a case study of unlearning the Harry Potter books, NULLs resists both adversarial extraction and relearning that reverses post-hoc unlearning. Finally, NULLs preserves general language capabilities, matching a standard transformer on downstream benchmarks. Together, these results suggest that source-level unlearning need not be an afterthought. It can be built natively into LLM training while retaining the benefits of shared representation learning.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stochastic Thermodynamics and SDE-based Generative Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SDE-based generative models, including diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge, have found broad applications in signal processing tasks such as speech enhancement, image restoration, and time-series generation. This note presents a modeling framework for such models within the context of stochastic thermodynamics. The main results of this note are trajectory-level definitions of work, heat, and entropy production, along with a generalized Jarzynski identity and a second-law-like inequality. The proposed framework extends the original Jarzynski setup to accommodate time-dependent bath temperature and nonconservative driving forces. This thermodynamic perspective may deepen our understanding of diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge from a nonequilibrium statistical mechanics viewpoint.

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

Simple Domain Generalization Methods are Strong Baselines for Open Domain Generalization

In real-world applications, a machine learning model is required to handle an open-set recognition (OSR), where unknown classes appear during the inference, in addition to a domain shift, where the data distribution differs between the training and inference phases. Domain generalization (DG) aims to handle the domain shift situation where the target domain of the inference phase is inaccessible during the model training. Open domain generalization (ODG) considers DG and OSR. Domain-augmented meta-learning (DAML) is a method targeting ODG; however, it has a complicated learning process. By contrast, although various DG methods have been proposed, they have not been evaluated in ODG situations. In this study, we comprehensively evaluate the existing DG methods in ODG and show that the two simple DG methods, CORrelation ALignment (CORAL) and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), are competitive with DAML in several cases. In addition, we propose simple extensions of CORAL and MMD by introducing the techniques used in DAML, such as ensemble learning and Dirichlet mixup data augmentation. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the extended CORAL and MMD can perform comparably to DAML with lower computational costs. This suggests that the simple DG methods and their simple extensions are strong baselines for ODG.

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

Hierarchical GRU with Input-Conditioned Slot Queries for Ball Action Anticipation

We present a hierarchical model for ball action anticipation in football broadcast video. Given a 30-second observation window, the system predicts actions occurring in the subsequent 5-second window across 10 classes. A shared local Transformer encodes clip-level features within each 5-second sub-window; a GRU then aggregates temporal context across all sub-windows; finally, a Transformer decoder with K input-conditioned event slots decodes the anticipation target via three decoupled heads (objectness, class, temporal offset). We introduce frequency-reweighted Hungarian matching that systematically favours rare action classes, and Gaussian soft targets for temporal bin supervision. On the SoccerNet Ball Action Anticipation benchmark, our method achieves 17.91% mAP on the test server.

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

pFedUL: Layer-Aware Federated Unlearning for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.16304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) enables the removal of specific data contributions from federated learning (FL) models to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, most existing FU methods are designed for the FedAvg paradigm, where all clients share a single global model. In practice, personalized federated learning (pFL) methods such as FedPer, FedRep, Ditto, and FedBN have become widely adopted due to their superior handling of non-IID data. These methods decompose the model into shared global layers and client-specific personalized layers, fundamentally altering the semantics of unlearning, yet this setting has received little attention. We formalize FU under the pFL paradigm, identifying a tension between unlearning completeness on shared layers and personalization preservation for remaining clients. We then propose pFedUL, a layer-aware selective unlearning framework comprising three components: (1) gradient-based layer-wise contribution attribution that separately quantifies the target client's influence on shared and personalized parameters, (2) adaptive selective unlearning that applies differentiated forgetting strategies across layer types, and (3) a lightweight recalibration protocol enabling remaining clients to restore personalization with minimal overhead. We further introduce two new metrics, Personalization Preservation Score (PPS) and Cross-client Fairness Index (CFI), to evaluate pFL-specific unlearning quality. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and FEMNIST under varying non-IID settings indicate that pFedUL achieves unlearning effectiveness comparable to full retraining while maintaining an average of 97.3\% personalized accuracy for remaining clients. Compared with six state-of-the-art FU methods adapted to the pFL setting, pFedUL consistently achieves superior personalization preservation.

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arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Querying an astronomical database using large language models: the ALeRCE text-to-SQL system

arXiv:2606.18108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a text-to-SQL (structured query language) system based on large language models (LLMs) using in-context learning and apply it to the Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events (ALeRCE) astronomical database. ALeRCE is a community broker for the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The system enables users to query the database in natural language (NL) and generates executable SQL queries. To develop and evaluate the system, we constructed a dataset of 110 NL/SQL pairs. We propose a step-by-step generation framework comprising four modules: schema linking, query classification, prompt decomposition, and self-correction. The performance of thirteen LLMs is evaluated using in-context learning and prompt engineering techniques. Text-to-SQL performance is assessed using the perfect-match (PM) rate for row identifiers (e.g., object identifiers) and column identifiers (i.e., column names). The proposed step-by-step framework consistently outperforms a direct-inference baseline, while the self-correction module consistently reduces execution errors. For Claude Opus 4.6, PM performance on row (column) identifiers is high for simple queries, reaching 0.97 (0.94), and decreases with query complexity to 0.44 (0.72) for medium queries and 0.59 (0.49) for hard queries. Among the thirteen evaluated models, the best-performing LLMs for the text-to-SQL task are Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash, and GPT-5.2-Codex.