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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Achieving double-logarithmic precision dependence in optimization-based quantum unstructured search

arXiv:2603.26039v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Grover's algorithm is a fundamental quantum algorithm that achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search problems of size $N$. Recent studies have reformulated this task as a maximization problem on the unitary manifold and solved it via linearly convergent Riemannian gradient ascent (RGA) methods, resulting in a complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}\log (1/\varepsilon))$, where $M$ denotes the number of target items and $\varepsilon$ denotes the success probability error. In this work, we adopt the Riemannian modified Newton (RMN) method to solve the quantum search problem, under the assumption that the ratio $ M/N$ is known. We show that, in this setting, the Riemannian Newton direction is collinear with the Riemannian gradient in the sense that the Riemannian gradient is always an eigenvector of the corresponding Riemannian Hessian. This structure removes the overhead of Hessian inversion and allows the proposed RMN method to retain the local quadratic convergence in terms of the error $\varepsilon$. More precisely, we rigorously prove an overall complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}+\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$. Furthermore, our approach remains Grover-compatible, namely, it relies exclusively on the standard Grover diffusion and oracle operators to ensure algorithmic implementability, and its parameter update process can be efficiently precomputed on classical computers.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Deontic Policies for Runtime Governance of Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.19464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agentic AI systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce a new class of security, privacy, and compliance challenges: an agent that can invoke tools, manipulate data, install software, and coordinate with peer agents across organizational boundaries must be constrained not just by authentication and access control, but by the full structure of enterprise governance. This includes specifying what agents are permitted and prohibited from doing, what they areobliged to do after certain actions (e.g., notify the CISO), under what conditions a standing obligation may be waived, and which rules take precedence when policies conflict. This governance problem exceeds what current policy engines provide. Systems such as XACML, Rego, and Cedar address only the permit/prohibit subset of this governance structure. They do not provide obligation lifecycle management, meta-policy conflict resolution, dispensations that waive obligations in specific circumstances, and ontological reasoning over domain class hierarchies commonly found in applications such as healthcare, cybersecurity, or data privacy. We propose AgenticRei, which realizes key governance requirements such as obligations, dispensations, policy conflict resolutions, and reasoning over policies, as well as the basic permit/prohibit constraints. We use a deontic policy language built on the Rei framework, expressed as OWL (Web Ontology Language) and evaluated at runtime by a high-performance logic engine entirely outside the LLM. The same pipeline governs both tool invocations by the agent and agent-to-agent messages. We show through examples that deontic policies capture governance constraints around security and privacy that mostly cannot be expressed in current production engines. Our approach composes naturally with industry-standard frameworks like A2AS.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Wild3R: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unconstrained Sparse Photo Collection

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) removes the need for time-consuming per-scene optimization required by traditional 3DGS. However, existing feed-forward approaches struggle with real-world photo collections that include diverse lighting conditions and transient objects. In this paper, we present Wild3R, a feed-forward approach for unconstrained sparse photo collections. The main bottleneck is the lack of training data that provides multiple viewpoints, a variety of illuminations, and transient variations necessary for learning robust scene representations. To address this, we introduce the WildCity dataset, which comprises 200 scenes, 170 lighting conditions, and transient objects, resulting in 337,500 images in total. By leveraging the dataset, our model learns appearance consistency across viewpoints conditioned on reference views, while removing transient content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing feed-forward approaches and achieves results competitive with prior per-scene optimization-based methods.

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

AI Researchers Must Help Lead Arms Control to Mitigate Military AI Risks

arXiv:2606.11533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The advancement of AI capabilities compels researchers and the public to be more aware of its potential worldwide impact. A pressing near-term concern is the regulation of military AI applications. Armament manufacturers and defense contractors are increasingly investing in AI capabilities and forging partnerships with AI companies, creating a burgeoning coalition that demands military leaders, arms control diplomacy experts, and AI researchers collaborate to ensure a safer future. While AI researchers often focus on the long-term implications of superintelligent AI, this approach may not adequately address the immediate challenges posed by AI in military applications. Success requires acknowledging and mitigating the emerging risks of frontier AI models that plan to be integrated into defense applications, like military AI systems. Arms control has reduced past catastrophic risks, so lessons learned from nuclear deterrence can guide AI safety and security research towards innovations in verification and diplomacy. AI researchers, however, must assist in leading the technical research that clearly defines and alleviates instability in military settings. Given these new responsibilities and the lack of sufficiently reliable solutions, we argue that AI researchers must take a leading role in advancing arms control research to minimize risk in military AI applications.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Continuous Language Diffusion as a Decoder-Interface Problem

Gaussian-corrupted sentence embeddings have no direct linguistic interpretation, yet continuous diffusion language models can generate fluent text from them. We study this puzzle through Embedded Language Flows (ELF) and identify a decoder-basin mechanism: our evidence suggests that denoising becomes reliable when trajectories reach regions where the native decoder can read stable tokens. We introduce a diagnostic protocol for denoisability, semantic recoverability, order sensitivity, decoder compatibility, and trajectory reliability. It exposes failures hidden by scalar metrics: low mean-squared error can discard linguistic content, low perplexity can reflect low-entropy collapse, and clean latent reconstruction can coexist with a narrow decoder basin. A decoder-margin bound explains why token recovery depends on margin and local decoder sensitivity, not latent error alone. Auditing public ELF checkpoints reveals an interface phase diagram: early predictions are weakly readable, mid-trajectory disagreement marks a competition region, and late predictions enter a high-margin decoder basin. Once inside, token realization is surprisingly simple on generated ELF states: frozen T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer) token-embedding lookup recovers $93$–$96\%$ of native decoder decisions, and a single linear readout reaches $97.9\%$ agreement at 32k samples, leaving an $\approx1.1$–$1.2$ perplexity gap in a structured residual tail. Under conservative held-out gates, a margin rule exits roughly $17$–$28\%$ earlier in denoising steps under an explicit diagnostic monitor. Boundary checks on LangFlow, BitstreamDiffusion, and the Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model (Cola-DLM) show that the same interface questions remain meaningful when the state object and decoder change. Continuous and latent diffusion language models should therefore be evaluated as representation-decoder systems.

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

SignNet-1M: Large-Scale Multilingual Sign Language Video Dataset with Downstream Benchmarks

Sign language models are typically trained on datasets captured under constrained conditions, with limited viewpoint, background, and signer-identity diversity, leading to poor robustness under real-world distribution shifts. We introduce SignNet-1M, a large-scale augmented dataset spanning ASL, CSL, and German Sign Language (DGS). SignNet-1M synthesizes realistic variations along three axes: (i) novel-view rendering (rotation and zoom) via 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), (ii) scene/identity editing via diffusion models for background replacement and signer substitution while preserving sign motion and linguistic content, and (iii) post-rendering augmentations that emulate capture and compression artifacts (e.g., pose/temporal perturbations and video-level corruptions) to better match in-the-wild recordings. Beyond data release, we provide a unified benchmark suite across downstream tasks (e.g., translation and recognition) and ablations that isolate each augmentation component. Experiments across backbones show that training with SignNet-1M consistently improves generalization under cross-view, cross-background, cross-identity, and post-rendering shifts, while maintaining strong in-distribution performance. The dataset, full augmentation pipeline, and benchmark are available at https://signnet.chatsign.ai/.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Vortex: Multi-Modal Fusion System for Intelligent Video Retrieval

This paper presents Vortex, the multimodal video retrieval system developed by our team, FocusOnFun, for the Ho Chi Minh City AI Challenge 2025, designed to advance intelligent multimedia search and temporal reasoning. The system integrates adaptive keyframe extraction, multimodal metadata generation from vision-language and speech models, and a hybrid retrieval strategy that fuses CLIP and SigLIP2 embeddings through Reciprocal Rank Fusion to balance global and fine-grained semantics. To enhance interactivity, Vortex incorporates Rocchio-based relevance feedback and a multi-stage temporal search mechanism for sequential event alignment. Built on Milvus and Elasticsearch, the architecture enables scalable indexing and efficient retrieval. Evaluated in the official competition, our FocusOnFun team's system achieved a score of 79.6/88 (90.5\%) in the Preliminary Round and was further evaluated in the Final Round, achieving an `Excellent' overall performance with `Outstanding' results in the question-answering (QA) task. This demonstrating the complementary strengths of CLIP and SigLIP2 and confirming the effectiveness of the hybrid retrieval approach. The system establishes a robust foundation for future research in intelligent, context-aware, and interactive video retrieval.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

From Sounds to Scenes: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding in Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2606.25391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have achieved remarkable progress in audio perceptual tasks across individual acoustic layers, including speech, sound, and music. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate these layers in isolation, overlooking the complex contextual relationships that arise when multiple acoustic sources co-occur in real-world auditory scenes. Real-world auditory interpretation requires Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding (CASU): the ability to comprehend the holistic scene by integrating sound layers. To evaluate this capability, we introduce the CASU benchmark, which assesses whether Audio LLMs can interpret auditory scenes composed of speech, acoustic events (e.g., announcements), and background environments (e.g., traffic), and reason about the logical relationships between these layers. We propose a scalable pipeline for constructing time-accurate, semi-synthetic audio streams by composing real-world scene sounds with synthetic speech. Building on this data, we design four tasks that probe scene understanding: contextual question answering, entity extraction from the scene, speaker role inference, and counterfactual reasoning where scene is manipulated. Experiments across multiple LALMs demonstrate that effective auditory scene understanding requires integration over all auditory layers, rather than reliance on speech or sound alone, underscoring the necessity of CASU for advancing complex audio understanding in LALMs.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Graph Reduction in Multirelational Networks: A Spreading-Oriented Reduction Benchmark

arXiv:2606.12581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world networks are inherently incomplete, noisy, and dynamically evolving, making it difficult to capture all actors and their relationships. Their scale often renders direct analysis computationally demanding. While influence maximisation (IM) has been widely studied, the role of graph reduction as a preprocessing step, and its impact on IM accuracy, remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce the Spreading-Oriented Reduction Benchmark (SORB), an open-source, standardised framework for systematically evaluating IM models across diverse task settings. SORB provides an extensible pipeline operating on a representative collection of real-world networks, including single- and multilayer structures, and accounts for graph reduction directly into the evaluation process. This design shifts the focus from analysing IM algorithms in isolation to quantifying how graph reduction alters predictive performance. Using SORB, we study the effects of sparsification and coarsening across multiple IM scenarios. Our results show that the impact of reduction is strongly dependent on both the network type (single-layer vs. multirelational) and the downstream task ($Gain@k$ vs. $\mathrm{AUC}_{\mathrm{cutoff}}$): sparsification preserves seed set quality on single-layer networks, whereas flattened multilayer networks exhibit systematic ranking degradation regardless of reduction strategy. These findings highlight the importance of reduction-aware, multi-task evaluation when studying spreading processes in complex networks.

10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

U = U for all: Advancing equity in HIV prevention

by Thiago S. Torres, Paula M. Luz Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U). However, U = U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. Equitable and accurate awareness of U = U requires culturally tailored interventions, improved provider education, and supportive policy environments beyond biomedical evidence alone. Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U). However, U=U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. In this Perspective, Thiago Torres and Paula Luz outline what is needed to improve equity and accuracy in global awareness and education of U=U.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

TensorLDM: A Component-Wise Latent Diffusion Model for Volumetric DTI Reconstruction from Sparse DWIs

Reconstructing diffusion tensors from sparse DWIs is critical for accelerating Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) in clinical settings, yet current deep learning approaches frequently yield anatomically inconsistent or physically implausible tensors. We introduce TensorLDM, a component-wise latent diffusion model that processes the six tensor components through two group-specific encoders (for diagonal and off-diagonal elements) while maintaining anatomical consistency via shared DWI conditioning. TensorLDM uses an Anatomy-Conditioned Autoencoder that encourages the latent to focus on tensor properties rather than re-encoding structural information. A shared Cross-Component Attention (CCA) mechanism, applied in both autoencoder refinement and diffusion fine-tuning, models inter-component dependencies, while a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) DWI conditioner provides component-adaptive conditioning. On the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset under a single-shell, four-volume sparse acquisition, TensorLDM produces the most accurate downstream tractography and tensors with near-ground-truth physical validity (SPD-violation rate 1.54% vs. 1.40%), with the best or comparable voxel-wise reconstruction accuracy. Geodesic tensor error measured by the Log-Euclidean Metric (LEM) corroborates these gains.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Trade-offs in Medical LLM Adaptation: An Empirical Study in French QA

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

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

MemBoost: A Memory-Boosted Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but incur high inference cost in real-world services, especially under workloads with repeated or near-duplicate queries across users and sessions. In this work, we propose MemBoost, a memory-boosted LLM serving framework that enables a lightweight model to reuse previously generated answers and retrieve relevant supporting information for cheap inference, while selectively escalating difficult or uncertain queries to a stronger model. Unlike standard retrieval-augmented generation, which primarily grounds a single response, MemBoost is designed for interactive settings by supporting answer reuse, continual memory growth, and cost-aware routing. Experiments across multiple models under simulated workloads show that MemBoost substantially reduces expensive large-model invocations and overall inference cost, while maintaining high answer quality comparable to the strong model baseline.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

LastAct: Trajectory-Guided Latest-Activity Localization for Real-Time Smart-Home Activity Recognition

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from ambient sensors enables smart-home applications such as health monitoring and assisted living. In realistic deployments, however, sensor events arrive as a continuous stream and activity boundaries are unknown. Sliding-window inference therefore produces many windows that straddle transitions and contain mixed activities, creating boundary contamination that violates the pre-segmented instance assumption used by most benchmarks and models. Moreover, many pipelines under-use spatial context by treating sensor IDs as independent tokens. We present LastAct, a trajectory-centric framework for streaming smart-home HAR that targets the most recent activity under mixed windows while explicitly modeling spatial structure. LastAct projects sensor events onto the home floorplan to form a layout-aligned trajectory image sequence that preserves spatial continuity. A lightweight gate identifies contaminated windows, and a boundary localizer estimates the last transition to enable boundary-guided masking that emphasizes post-boundary evidence and suppresses stale context. For efficiency, we reuse a precomputed layout-aligned template cache to avoid repeated rendering. Empirically, across four public smart-home datasets under near-realistic mixed-activity protocols, LastAct achieves competitive or superior performance on pure windows and yields substantial Macro-F1 gains on cross/mixed windows, demonstrating improved robustness under near-realistic sliding-window regimes.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

TokenMinds: Pretrained User Tokens and Embeddings for User Understanding in Large Recommender Systems

arXiv:2606.25147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: User modeling in industrial recommender systems typically produces dense embeddings, which suffer from representational constraints inherent to fixed-dimensional vectors. An emerging alternative for discrete user representation – using LLMs to generate text-based user tokens – captures topical co-occurrences rather than deep sequential behavior dynamics and produces outputs that are difficult to ground to item attributes. Meanwhile, Semantic ID (SID) based item tokenization has proven effective for improving generalization in generative recommendation, yet discrete SID-based representations for users remain largely unexplored. We propose TokenMinds, an industrial-scale system that extends the PLUM framework from item retrieval to user modeling, generating both discrete SID-based user tokens and dense user embeddings via an encoder-decoder architecture adapted from pre-trained LLMs. This dual-output design provides the complementary benefits of discrete, semantically grounded user representations while maintaining compatibility with existing downstream models that rely on dense embeddings. Additionally, the shared SID vocabulary naturally extends to cross-scenario modeling: by unifying long-form and short-form video behaviors into a single model, we substantially reduce training and serving costs. We validate TokenMinds through extensive offline experiments and live launches on multiple YouTube surfaces, served on full user traffic (billions of users) via an asynchronous infrastructure that decouples representation generation from downstream scoring. Focusing on ranking as the primary downstream use case, our results confirm the practical viability of SID-based user tokens at industrial scale and demonstrate that tokens and dense embeddings provide complementary value across different production ranking systems.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Human-Guided Agentic AI for Multimodal Clinical Prediction: Lessons from the AgentDS Healthcare Benchmark

arXiv:2602.19502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of autonomous data science workflows, yet clinical prediction tasks demand domain expertise that purely automated approaches struggle to provide. We investigate how human guidance of agentic AI can improve multimodal clinical prediction, presenting our approach to all three AgentDS Healthcare benchmark challenges: 30-day hospital readmission prediction (Macro-F1 = 0.8986), emergency department cost forecasting (MAE = $465.13), and discharge readiness assessment (Macro-F1 = 0.7939). Across these tasks, human analysts directed the agentic workflow at key decision points, multimodal feature engineering from clinical notes, scanned PDF billing receipts, and time-series vital signs; task-appropriate model selection; and clinically informed validation strategies. Our approach ranked 5th overall in the healthcare domain, with a 3rd-place finish on the discharge readiness task. Ablation studies reveal that human-guided decisions compounded to a cumulative gain of +0.065 F1 over automated baselines, with multimodal feature extraction contributing the largest single improvement (+0.041 F1). We distill three generalizable lessons: (1) domain-informed feature engineering at each pipeline stage yields compounding gains that outperform extensive automated search; (2) multimodal data integration requires task-specific human judgment that no single extraction strategy generalizes across clinical text, PDFs, and time-series; and (3) deliberate ensemble diversity with clinically motivated model configurations outperforms random hyperparameter search. These findings offer practical guidance for teams deploying agentic AI in healthcare settings where interpretability, reproducibility, and clinical validity are essential.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Predicting optimal growth temperatures of bacteria using learned structural information from a single protein

Temperature is a fundamental determinant of bacterial physiology and ecology. Optimal growth temperature (OGT) is highly variable across species, contributing to differences in where and when species are most likely to thrive. Although the OGTs for most bacteria remain unknown, the increasing availability of genomes from uncultivated and cultivated taxa has made it advantageous to build genomic, cultivation-independent models to infer OGT. However, pre-existing genomic models often lack the generalizability and mechanistic grounding required for robust inferences of OGT. We propose a novel framework for predicting bacterial OGT which uses learned protein structural signatures of thermal adaptation. We hypothesize that biophysical tradeoffs which dictate enzymatic functions across variable temperatures provide a more robust empirical basis for OGT prediction than broad genomic features. Our OGT-predicting model, ROSEATE, is based on a single gene, adenylate kinase (ADK), that encodes for a ubiquitous enzyme essential for energy homeostasis. ROSEATE uses high-dimensional latent space encoding via MSA Transformer, a protein language model which embeds ADKs in a manner which preserves biophysical information about embedded proteins. We show that the accuracy of the ROSEATE model is on par with other genome-based models, has a high degree of phylogenetic generalizability, and the ESM embeddings effectively capture key temperature-adaptive enzyme characteristics derived from AlphaFold structures. Because ROSEATE is based on analyses of a single ubiquitous protein, it can be used with metagenomic data to infer the community-level variation in bacterial OGTs. We demonstrate this feature of ROSEATE by reconstructing ADK sequences from over 500 environmental and host-associated metagenomes, successfully distinguishing community-wide thermal preferences across diverse habitats, from polar oceans to mammalian guts. By transitioning from genomic proxies to informationally dense protein structural features, this work provides an efficient, interpretable tool for predicting bacterial OGTs across taxa and whole communities.

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

Non-Autoregressive Minimum Bayes' Risk Decoding for Fast Speech Recognition

Non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding generates output tokens in parallel, making speech recognition faster than autoregressive decoding, which generates them sequentially from left to right. However, the recognition performance is degraded because NAR decoding cannot resolve uncertainty by conditioning on previously generated tokens. To address this issue, we propose a novel NAR decoding framework based on minimum Bayes' risk (MBR) decoding, termed NAR-MBR decoding, that maximizes the expected utility calculated from samples drawn from the output probability of an NAR model rather than maximizing the output probability. Notably, by leveraging the nature of NAR models, multiple samples are obtained efficiently with a single forward computation. Our experiments across LibriSpeech, Switchboard, AMI, and web presentation corpus demonstrated that our NAR-MBR decoding outperformed previous NAR decoding and ran faster than AR decoding.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Spectral Collapse Under Geometric Alignment of Extreme Events

arXiv:2606.25810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let Q_n = B_n + J_n be the quadratic covariation matrix of a high-dimensional semimartingale, where J_n is the jump component and B_n is the diffusion component. We prove that spectral collapse occurs – meaning the ratio of the leading eigenvalue to the trace converges to 1 and the effective rank converges to 1 – if and only if the jump directions are geometrically aligned in a weighted sense and the background diffusion is asymptotically negligible. The proof separates into two steps: geometric alignment of jump directions forces spectral concentration of J_n; background negligibility then propagates this to the full system. We extend to the stochastic setting and prove convergence in probability under natural conditions on the jump process. The framework gives a scalar diagnostic for detecting when a high-dimensional system is dominated by extreme events.

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

Anticipating the Optimism Gap: Predicting Distribution-Shift Degradation of RF-Impairment Detectors from In-Distribution Statistics

arXiv:2606.22054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detectors for GNSS radio-frequency impairments (jamming, spoofing, multipath) are usually reported with a single AUC measured on the distribution they were tuned on. That number falls once conditions move, and the size of the drop is rarely known in advance because labelled field data is scarce. We ask whether this optimism can be predicted before any out-of-distribution data is seen. On an open, parameter-grounded synthetic testbed with a tunable severity shift, we evaluate thirteen detectors (five physics baselines, full-feature logistic regression and multilayer perceptrons, and single-feature learned controls) across four impairment classes. The optimism gap, the difference between in-distribution and shifted AUC, grows monotonically as the shift deepens (mean Spearman correlation 0.50). It is driven by how many observables a detector uses rather than by whether it is learned, and it varies systematically by class. Centrally, a ridge model built only from in-distribution score statistics predicts the gap for a detector it has never seen (R^2 = 0.47) and for an impairment class it has never seen (R^2 = 0.46); both are significant against a 2000-fold permutation null (p < 0.001) and survive removing the feature that is, by construction, part of the target. The headline findings are synthetic. We then run the pre-registered protocol on three open field corpora: on Jammertest 2024 the cross-detector prediction holds (R^2 = 0.11, p = 0.009), and on SatGrid, whose spoofer power sweep gives a calibrated severity axis, in-distribution AUC overstates higher-severity AUC by up to 0.22 and to the point of sign inversion, with in-distribution AUC and realised gap perfectly rank-correlated (Spearman rho = 1.0). The mechanism survives contact with real data, at smaller magnitude than in simulation. We release the testbed, a software-receiver front end, the ingest adapters and the protocol.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Beyond Runtime Enforcement: Shield Synthesis as Defensibility Analysis for Adversarial Networks

arXiv:2606.13621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shielded reinforcement learning is typically presented as a runtime safety mechanism that compiles temporal-logic specifications into automata restricting an agent's actions. We argue this is the wrong product. The same automata-theoretic machinery – specification compilation, product game construction, attractor computation, and winning-region extraction – is better read as a design-time analytical instrument whose outputs are structural insights about a system rather than runtime constraints on a deployed agent. We instantiate this through a constrained two-player safety game for network defense. The two specifications are enforced asymmetrically: the defender specification defines the unsafe region of the game, whereas the attacker specification restricts the adversary's legal actions during attractor computation. Solving the game yields a defensibility verdict – a formal certificate that a topology-specification pair is or is not defensible – with the associated winning region and shield. Beyond the binary verdict, we derive topology-level metrics from the attractor structure and combine them with post-convergence behavior from shield-constrained adversarial multi-agent reinforcement learning. Together these form a defensibility fingerprint capturing both a network's formal safety properties and its operational behavior under adaptive play. A what-if analysis shows that formal defensibility and operational effectiveness capture distinct aspects of security: small architectural changes can produce large shifts in operational outcomes while leaving formal safety margins nearly unchanged. Shield synthesis is thus most valuable not as a deployment mechanism for safe agents, but as a framework for answering architectural questions about whether, where, and how a system can be defended. The defensibility verdict is the output, not the safe policy.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Hybrid-IR: Dual-Path Hybrid Retrieval with Iterative Reasoning for Complex Medical Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance across a wide range of biomedical applications, including medical question answering (QA), yet they remain prone to hallucinations and outdated knowledge. Although retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can alleviate this issue by incorporating external documents, there still exist two fundamental limitations. First, medical knowledge is often fragmented across documents, while most RAG methods rely on a single retrieval path, which makes it challenging to jointly preserve fine-grained semantic information and structured global associations. Second, static retrieval strategies are typically insufficient to support deep reasoning that is important in complex medical QA. In this paper, we present a dual-path retrieval framework with an iterative retrieval-reasoning mechanism termed "Hybrid-IR" for complex medical QA. The proposed Hybrid-IR integrates graph-based retrieval for exploration of structured knowledge and dense retrieval for fine-grained semantic matching. Moreover, the reasoning trajectory can be progressively refined through an iterative retrieve-reason loop. Experiments on three widely used medical QA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our Hybrid-IR.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Blasto-Net: An Explainable Multi-Task Learning for Blastocyst Segmentation, Grading, and Implantation Prediction

arXiv:2606.25463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study introduces Blasto-Net, a multi-task deep learning model for comprehensive blastocyst analysis. The proposed model performs three tasks simultaneously in a single forward pass: segmentation of the ZP, TE, and ICM compartments, morphological grading, and implantation outcome prediction. Accurate blastocyst analysis in in vitro fertilization (IVF) is challenging. The compartments often have similar textures but very different structures. To address these challenges, Blasto-Net employs an EfficientNet-B3 encoder with a UNet-style decoder enhanced by the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and a novel Edge-Aware Attention Module (EAAM) to effectively capture both semantic and boundary information. To handle distinct compartment topologies, the network employs specialized segmentation heads and a composite region- and boundary-based loss. Additionally, Grad-CAM++ visualizations are used to verify the anatomical consistency of the model's predictions. Evaluated on a public HMC blastocyst dataset, Blasto-Net achieves Dice scores of 94.93%, 91.60%, and 88.82% for ICM, ZP, and TE, respectively, alongside an implantation F1-score of 80.0%. These results demonstrate that Blasto-Net offers an accurate, interpretable, and efficient solution for automated blastocyst assessment, with strong potential to support clinical decision-making in IVF.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle

The emergence of writable, cross-session persistent memory in LLM agents introduces a qualitatively different threat landscape from conventional input-centric security concerns, characterized by three properties: persistence, statefulness, and propagation. To systematically characterize this landscape, we propose a Memory Lifecycle Framework that organizes attacks, defenses, and their cross-phase dependencies along two axes: six lifecycle phases (Write, Store, Retrieve, Execute, Share & Propagate, Forget & Rollback) and four security objectives (Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Governance). This analysis in turn exposes the need for formal security guarantees at the system level, motivating Verifiable Memory Governance(VMG), a framework of five architectural primitives that specifies what verifiable mechanisms a long-term-memory system must provide to maintain auditable, recoverable control over its memory state. Our analysis indicates that robust Long-Term Memory (LTM) security cannot be retrofitted at retrieval or execution time alone, but must be anchored in storage-time provenance, versioning, and policy-aware retention from the outset.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FBSDiff++: Improved Frequency Band Substitution of Diffusion Features for Efficient and Highly Controllable Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation

With large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieving significant advancements in open-domain image creation, increasing attention has been focused on their natural extension to the realm of text-driven image-to-image (I2I) translation, where a source image acts as visual guidance to the generated image in addition to the textual guidance provided by the text prompt. We propose FBSDiff, a novel framework adapting off-the-shelf T2I diffusion model into the I2I paradigm from a fresh frequency-domain perspective. Through dynamic frequency band substitution of diffusion features, FBSDiff realizes versatile and highly controllable text-driven I2I in a plug-and-play manner (without need for model training, fine-tuning, or online optimization), allowing appearance-guided, layout-guided, and contour-guided I2I translation by progressively substituting low-frequency band, mid-frequency band, and high-frequency band of latent diffusion features, respectively. In addition, FBSDiff flexibly enables continuous control over I2I correlation intensity simply by tuning the bandwidth of the substituted frequency band. To further promote image translation efficiency, flexibility, and functionality, we propose FBSDiff++ which improves upon FBSDiff mainly in three aspects: (1) accelerate inference speed by a large margin (8.9$\times$ speedup in inference) with refined model architecture; (2) improve the Frequency Band Substitution module to allow for input source images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio; (3) extend model functionality to enable localized image manipulation and style-specific content creation with only subtle adjustments to the core method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of FBSDiff++ in I2I translation visual quality, efficiency, versatility, and controllability compared to related advanced approaches.