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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Rigidity of infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian marginals

Authors:
Maximillian Newman↗

arXiv:2606.18654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian one-dimensional marginals. We formulate the conjecture that joint Gaussianity of a single pair of coordinates forces the entire sequence to be a Gaussian process. Although this conjecture remains open, we prove that joint Gaussianity of the first four coordinates is sufficient. We also establish the corresponding two-point criterion under the additional assumption that the directing measure is almost surely infinitely divisible.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DarkVGGT: Seeing Through Darkness Using Thermal Geometry without Daylight Tax

Authors:
Minseong Kweon↗Wenyuan Zhao↗Nuo Chen↗Lulin Liu↗Huiwen Han↗Zihao Zhu↗Srinivas Shakkottai↗Chao Tian↗Zhiwen Fan↗

Recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated strong performance and flexibility in efficient end-to-end scene geometry estimation from image streams. However, their reliance on visible-light appearance makes them vulnerable in dark and low-visibility environments, where RGB cues are severely degraded and geometric evidence becomes ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose DarkVGGT, an RGB-T feed-forward geometry framework that uses physics-aware thermal modeling for robust 3D estimation in low-light scenes. DarkVGGT introduces two complementary modules. First, physics-inspired thermal factorization extracts emissive-dominant, geometry-consistent thermal cues while isolating sparse reflective residuals that may introduce geometric ambiguity. Second, geometry-shared thermal routing isolates modality-invariant geometric structures from thermal-specific patterns, selectively injecting reliability-aware structural guidance into the RGB stream. Together, these components enable accurate thermal-informed geometry estimation under degraded RGB conditions while largely preserving performance in well-lit environments. Experiments on low-visibility RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both depth and camera pose estimation over existing feed-forward geometry baselines.

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

TRACE: Learning to Compute on Circuit Graphs

Authors:
Ziyang Zheng↗Jiaying Zhu↗Jingyi Zhou↗Qiang Xu↗

arXiv:2509.21886v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning to compute, the ability to model the functional behavior of a circuit graph, is a fundamental challenge for graph representation learning. Yet, the dominant paradigm is architecturally mismatched for this task. This flawed assumption, central to mainstream message passing neural networks (MPNNs) and their conventional Transformer-based counterparts, prevents models from capturing the position-aware, hierarchical nature of computation. To resolve this, we introduce TRACE, a new paradigm built on an architecturally sound backbone and a principled learning objective. First, TRACE employs a Hierarchical Transformer that mirrors the step-by-step flow of computation, providing a faithful architectural backbone that replaces the flawed permutation-invariant aggregation. Second, we introduce function shift learning, a novel objective that decouples the learning problem. Instead of predicting the complex global function directly, our model is trained to predict only the function shift, the discrepancy between the true global function and a simple local approximation that assumes input independence. We validate this paradigm on various circuits modalities, including Register Transfer Level graphs, And-Inverter Graphs and post-mapping netlists. Across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, TRACE substantially outperforms all prior architectures. These results demonstrate that our architecturally-aligned backbone and decoupled learning objective form a more robust paradigm for the fundamental challenge of learning the functional behavior of a circuit graph.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Stabilizing the Q-Gradient Field for Policy Smoothness in Actor-Critic Methods

Authors:
Jeong Woon Lee↗Kyoleen Kwak↗Daeho Kim↗Hyoseok Hwang↗

arXiv:2601.22970v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policies learned via continuous actor-critic methods often exhibit erratic, high-frequency oscillations, making them unsuitable for physical deployment. Current approaches attempt to enforce smoothness by directly regularizing the policy's output. We argue that this approach treats the symptom rather than the cause. In this work, we theoretically establish that policy non-smoothness is fundamentally governed by the differential geometry of the critic. By applying implicit differentiation to the actor-critic objective, we prove that the sensitivity of the optimal policy is bounded by the ratio of the Q-function's mixed-partial derivative (noise sensitivity) to its action-space curvature (signal distinctness). To empirically validate this theoretical insight, we introduce PAVE (Policy-Aware Value-field Equalization), a critic-centric regularization framework that treats the critic as a scalar field and stabilizes its induced action-gradient field. PAVE rectifies the learning signal by minimizing the Q-gradient volatility while preserving local curvature. Experimental results demonstrate that PAVE achieves smoothness comparable to policy-side smoothness regularization methods, while maintaining competitive task performance, without modifying the actor.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Carbon-Aware Governance Gates: An Architecture for Sustainable GenAI Development

Authors:
Mateen A. Abbasi↗Tommi J. Mikkonen↗Petri J. Ihantola↗Muhammad Waseem↗Pekka Abrahamsson↗Niko K. M\"akitalo↗

arXiv:2602.19718v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) in the software development life cycle (SDLC) increases computational demand, which can raise the carbon footprint of development activities. At the same time, organizations are increasingly embedding governance mechanisms into GenAI-assisted development to support trust, transparency, and accountability. However, these governance mechanisms introduce additional computational workloads, including repeated inference, regeneration cycles, and expanded validation pipelines, increasing energy use and the carbon footprint of GenAI-assisted development. This paper proposes Carbon-Aware Governance Gates (CAGG), an architectural extension that embeds carbon budgets, energy provenance, and sustainability-aware validation orchestration into human-AI governance layers. CAGG comprises three components: (i) an Energy and Carbon Provenance Ledger, (ii) a Carbon Budget Manager, and (iii) a Green Validation Orchestrator, operationalized through governance policies and reusable design patterns.

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

Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation

Authors:
Shinnosuke Matsuo↗

Few-shot font generation aims to synthesize the remaining glyphs of a font given one or a few reference glyphs while preserving stylistic consistency, thereby supporting font designers in efficiently completing a typeface. Existing methods primarily focus on improving generation quality given a fixed reference set. However, when the current reference glyphs are insufficient to represent the target style, few-shot font generation may fail to produce satisfactory results. In practical scenarios, additional reference glyphs can often be obtained from the designer when necessary. Accordingly, we propose a new framework, Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation, in which the model sequentially decides which character to acquire next as an additional reference. Furthermore, we propose a reference part-coverage-based acquisition function to efficiently query the designer. Motivated by the observation that font styles are well characterized by local structural parts, we represent each glyph using a histogram of local features and select query characters that maximize the expected part coverage of the reference set. By prioritizing characters that contain parts not yet covered by the current references, the proposed method progressively expands the diversity of visual parts in the reference set. As a result, generation quality is improved with fewer queries. Experiments on the Google Fonts dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher generation quality than random querying and reference-agnostic baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/matsuo-shinnosuke/ActiveRef-FontGen.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

FLiP: Towards understanding and interpreting multimodal multilingual sentence embeddings

Authors:
Santosh Kesiraju↗Bolaji Yusuf↗\v{S}imon Sedl\'a\v{c}ek↗Old\v{r}ich Plchot↗Petr Schwarz↗

This paper presents factorized linear projection (FLiP) models for understanding pretrained sentence embedding spaces. We train FLiP models to recover the lexical content from multilingual (LaBSE), multimodal (SONAR) and API-based (Gemini) sentence embedding spaces in several high- and mid-resource languages. We show that FLiP can recall more than 75% of lexical content from the embeddings, significantly outperforming existing non-factorized baselines. Using this as a diagnostic tool, we uncover the modality and language biases across the selected sentence encoders and provide practitioners with intrinsic insights about the encoders without relying on conventional downstream evaluation tasks. Our implementation is public https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/FLiP.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DifferAD-R1: A Difference-Guided IndustrialAnomaly Localization with Multimodal LargeLanguage Models

Authors:
Dingrong Wang↗Xian Tao↗Zhen Qu↗Hengliang Luo↗Xinyi Gong↗Fei Shen↗Zhengtao Zhang↗Guiguang Ding↗

Industrial anomaly localization aims to accurately identify and localize abnormal regions in industrial products, addressing the critical challenge of detecting unseen defect categories in real-world scenarios. Traditional closed-set methods often suffer from poor cross-scenario generalization, while existingMultimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approachesface two core limitations: they either adopt QA-style paradigmsmisaligned with the practical demands of localization, or relyon standard optimization techniques such as Group RelativePolicy Optimization (GRPO), which fails to deliver effectivelearning signals for subtle defects. To tackle these issues, thispaper proposes DifferAD-R1, an MLLM-augmented reinforcement learning framework tailored for industrial anomaly localization. We design a Difference-Guided dual-image paradigm,which reformulates the localization task as a one-shot difference grounding problem to effectively explore cross-scenarioanomalies. A Dual-Consistency Localization Reward is developedfor hard-to-detect anomalies, enhancing optimization stabilityand robustness. Additionally, we integrate a difficulty-awarestrategy with adaptive reweighting and group-wise resamplingto prioritize learning on challenging instances. To facilitateevaluations in real-world industrial settings, we construct theAD-DualDiff dataset, comprising 13K paired images across 20categories. Experimental results demonstrate that DifferADR1 significantly outperforms existing baselines and achievescompetitive performance compared to large-scale models likeQwen3-VL (235B parameters). Our code is publicly availableat: https://github.com/Rong2026/work-1.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

FinBalance: A Multi-Document Accounting Reconciliation Benchmark

Authors:
Sasank Tumpati↗Devansh Agarwal↗Ayush Kedia↗Arjun Neekhra↗Murari Mandal↗Krishna Garg↗Yash Sinha↗Suman Gupta↗Dhruv Kumar↗

Existing financial-NLP benchmarks mostly evaluate prepared artifacts such as filings, tables, or extracted values. Real accounting begins earlier: source documents must be reconciled into cited journal entries, aggregated into a balance sheet, and checked for contradictions. We introduce FinBalance, a multi-document accounting reconciliation benchmark built from source-document bundles across eight industries, three period types, and five difficulty levels. Human-authored business scenarios, accounting policies, tax/FX treatments, document schemas, distractors, and inconsistency templates are composed by a deterministic generator whose ledger produces journal entries,balance sheets, and 23 inconsistency-code labels. On a 710-record evaluation split, six contemporary LLMs reach at most 46% exact final-balance-sheet accuracy. Four models show a 26-41 pp gap between BS_exact, the model's reported balance sheet, and BS_recon, the balance sheet obtained by replaying its entries through our ledger. Models often recover numerically plausible entries but fail to bind them to supporting documents and aggregate them consistently. Citation-pressure prompting barely changes document-linking errors, while ledger-feedback ablations substantially improve reported balance sheets and expose inconsistency-detection trade-offs. Expert finance reviewers validate the benchmark design and labels.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

LLM-Powered AI Agent Systems and Their Applications in Industry

Authors:
Guannan Liang↗Qianqian Tong↗

arXiv:2505.16120v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has reshaped agent systems. Unlike traditional rule-based agents with limited task scope, LLM-powered agents offer greater flexibility, cross-domain reasoning, and natural language interaction. Moreover, with the integration of multi-modal LLMs, current agent systems are highly capable of processing diverse data modalities, including text, images, audio, and structured tabular data, enabling richer and more adaptive real-world behavior. This paper comprehensively examines the evolution of agent systems from the pre-LLM era to current LLM-powered architectures. We categorize agent systems into software-based, physical, and adaptive hybrid systems, highlighting applications across customer service, software development, manufacturing automation, personalized education, financial trading, and healthcare. We further discuss the primary challenges posed by LLM-powered agents, including high inference latency, output uncertainty, lack of evaluation metrics, and security vulnerabilities, and propose potential solutions to mitigate these concerns.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Quantification of Uncertainty with Adversarial Models in Medical Image Segmentation

Authors:
Hana Jebril↗Thomas Pinetz↗G\"unter Klambauer↗Hrvoje Bogunovi\'c↗

Reliable pixel-level uncertainty quantification holds the potential to transform clinical workflows by enabling high-fidelity longitudinal monitoring and distinguishing true pathological changes from artifacts. Ideally, these models provide the stability required for critical treatment planning and surgical intervention. However, standard deep learning models often suffer from miscalibration, yielding overconfident predictions that mask underlying vulnerabilities at subtle pathological boundaries. To address this, we propose QUAM-SM, a post-hoc framework using targeted adversarial search to identify "adversarially fragile" pixels. By actively seeking perturbations that expose predictive instability, our method highlights regions where decisions are most vulnerable to being flipped. Importantly, the framework disentangles epistemic uncertainty from aleatoric uncertainty. Experiments on two public datasets with multiple expert annotations demonstrate that QUAM-SM outperforms both standard and recent uncertainty estimation approaches in terms of reliability and boundary sensitivity. Code is available at https://github.com/HanaJebril/quam_sm

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

M\"OVE: A Holistic LLM Benchmark for the German Public Sector

Authors:
Camilla Dalerci↗Thilo Michael↗Robin Schaefer↗Daniel Weinland↗

We present M\"OVE (Modelle für die \"Offentliche Verwaltung Evaluieren), a holistic benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in the context of the German public sector. While LLMs are increasingly adopted in public administration, model selection remains largely ad hoc, and existing benchmarks offer limited guidance: they are predominantly English-centric, US-centric in content, and focus exclusively on task performance. M\"OVE addresses these gaps by evaluating 39 models across two complementary dimensions. Performance criteria cover summarization, question answering, and topic extraction. Governance criteria assess hallucination tendencies, energy consumption, provider transparency, and alignment with German constitutional values and knowledge about positions by German political parties. In total, we utilize ten German-language datasets, including gold- and silverstandard datasets that we constructed to reflect public-administration domains. We employ a multi-metric evaluation strategy combining classical NLP metrics, embedding-based methods, and LLM-as-a-judge approaches. Our results show that no single model dominates across all criteria: top performers differ between tasks, and model size alone is a poor predictor of quality. We further evaluate the benchmark itself, analyzing its statistical precision, LLM judge reliability, the impact of our private datasets on model rankings, the sensitivity of our results to prompt formulation, and the validity of our energy consumption estimates. M\"OVE is designed as a living benchmark under active development; results are publicly available at https://moeve.bundesdruckerei.de/.

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

Hua-Chen New Theory of Economic Optimization

Authors:
Bin Chen↗Yingchao Xie↗Ting Yang↗Qin Zhou↗

arXiv:2504.19134v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Between 1957-1985, Chinese mathematician Loo-Keng Hua pioneered economic optimization theory through three key contributions: establishing economic stability's fundamental theorem, proving the uniqueness of equilibrium solutions in economic systems, and developing a consumption-integrated model 50 days before his death. Since 1988, Mu-Fa Chen has been working on Hua's theory. He introduced stochastics, namely Markov chains, to economic optimization theory. He updated and developed Hua's model and came up with a new model (Chen's model) which has become the starting point of a new economic optimization theory. Chen's theory can be applied to economic stability test, bankruptcy prediction, product ranking and classification, economic prediction and adjustment, economic structure optimization. Chen's theory can also provide efficient algorithms that are programmable and intelligent. {Stochastics} is the cornerstone of Chen's theory. There is no overlap between Chen's theory, and the existing mathematical economy theory and the economics developments that were awarded Nobel Prizes in Economics between 1969 and 2024. The distinguished features of Chen's theory from the existing theories are quantitative, calculable, predictable, optimizable, programmable and can be intelligent. This survey provides a theoretical overview of the newly published monograph [5rw24]. Specifically, the invariant of the economic structure matrix, also known as the Chen's invariant, was first published in this survey.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SP-GCRL: Influence Maximization on Incomplete Social Graphs

Authors:
Haohua Niu↗Yuxuan Yang↗Lingfeng Zhang↗Hao Li↗Jiao Liang↗Zongfu Luo↗Luca Rossi↗

arXiv:2605.12513v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Influence maximization (IM) in real platforms is challenged by incomplete, noisy social graphs and non-stationary diffusion dynamics. We propose SP-GCRL, a social-propagation-aware graph contrastive reinforcement learning framework that learns end-to-end seed selection under partial observability.We first introduce a social-propagation-aware nonlinear diffusion function to model reinforcement/diminishing effects and probability drift under repeated exposure; we then construct dual structural views and perform contrastive learning to obtain node representations robust to missing edges and weak ties, while replacing expensive strategy metrics with a GAT-based regression surrogate to improve efficiency and scalability; finally, we use DDQN to learn an end-to-end seed selection policy on top of these representations. Experiments on multiple real-world networks show that SP-GCRL achieves significant gains over heuristic and learning-based baselines across budgets and topologies, while maintaining strong large-scale scalability.

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

Multiagent Protocols with Aggregated Confidence Signals

Authors:
Ali Elahi↗Barbara Di Eugenio↗

arXiv:2606.13591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Confidence is used for reliability, oversight, and a range of downstream decision tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet no existing method produces or evaluates a confidence for the output of a multiagent system. Prior work uses confidence within multiagent debate (MAD) to weight messages, trigger debate, or calibrate individual agents, but it never aggregates these into a single confidence for the system itself. We introduce three protocols that produce a final answer along with a single aggregated confidence by first transforming raw confidence signals to make them comparable across models, then combining them via soft voting or a probability fusion we call Bayesian fusion. This aggregated confidence is substantially more discriminative (AUARC) than that of the best single agent or the standard debate baselines, while correctness (F1-score) stays stable and recovers the losses MAD incurs on more ambiguous tasks. Analyzing two estimators, sequence probability and self-report, alongside parametric and non-parametric calibrators, we find that calibration improves F1 for both estimators while AUARC is less reliant on it. We evaluate six homogeneous and heterogeneous debating pairs per benchmark, across five benchmarks and four task types, spanning a range of model capabilities and sizes.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM-as-Judge in Education: A Curriculum-Grounded Marking Pipeline

Authors:
Xiwei Xu↗Chen Wang↗Jacky Jiang↗Phil Yang↗Qian Fu↗Mohan Dhall↗Wenjie Zhang↗Liming Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.17507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides.

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

cAPM: Continual AI-Assisted Pace-Mapping with Active Learning

Authors:
Dylan O'Hara↗Pradeep Bajracharya↗Casey Meisenzahl↗Karli Gillette↗Anton J. Prassl↗Gernot Plank↗Saman Nazarian↗Roderick Tung↗John L Sapp↗Linwei Wang↗

arXiv:2606.19373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ventricular tachycardia is a life-threatening rhythm disorder and a major cause of sudden cardiac death. Pace-mapping is a clinical procedure for identifying the intervention target during catheter ablation of VT. It requires clinicians to pace different sites in the ventricles and rapidly interpret the resulting electrocardiograms to determine where to pace next or whether a target site has been identified. Active learning AI models have been proposed to guide clinicians to the next pacing site, showing promise in reducing the number of pacing sites and improving the efficiency of pace-mapping. Existing methods require retraining each target without the ability to transfer knowledge across multiple VTs within the same patient or across patients. We introduce cAPM for continuous AI-assisted pace-mapping to capture and transfer knowledge accumulated from past pace-mapping data to reduce the number of pace-mapping data needed for future target VTs. This is made possible by a task-agnostic surrogate neural network that learns the mapping from pacing sites to 12-lead ECG morphology, an active-learning strategy that refines this surrogate model by selecting the most informative pacing site for each target, and a continual learning strategy to do so sequentially while retaining knowledge from prior targets. Evaluated on an in-silico testbed consisting of sequentially-presented localization tasks across different physiological conditions and ventricular geometries, cAPM with and without replay of past data samples achieved an 81% probability of localizing within clinical tolerance (5 mm accuracy) using 4.5 pace-mapping sites, compared to the state-of-the-art active-learning method achieving 38% probability using 13.7 pacing sites. These results provide a strong basis for preparing cAPM towards in-vivo preclinical and clinical studies where it can be used to guide pace-mapping.

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

Uncertainty-Aware Hybrid Retrieval for Long-Document RAG

Authors:
Hoin Jung↗Xiaoqian Wang↗

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) depends critically on the quality and granularity of retrieved evidence. Large retrieval units preserve context but often introduce irrelevant content, which can dilute answer bearing evidence and worsen long context utilization. Fine-grained units are more compact, but they may be difficult to retrieve reliably because short chunks can lack semantic, lexical, or bridging cues needed to match the query. We propose Uncertainty-aware Multi-Granularity RAG (UMG-RAG), a training-free hybrid retrieval framework that treats chunk granularity as query-specific reliability estimation. Instead of training a new retriever or modifying the generator, UMG-RAG uses existing dense and sparse retrievers as complementary experts across multiple chunk granularities. For each query, it converts each expert-granularity score list into an evidence distribution, estimates reliability from distribution entropy, and fuses candidates according to query-specific semantic, lexical, and granularity confidence. We further introduce UMGP-RAG, a parent promotion variant that uses fine-grained hits to locate relevant evidence while returning broader non-redundant parent chunks for local coherence. Experiments on question answering benchmarks show that uncertainty-aware fusion and parent promotion improve generation quality while maintaining a lightweight, plug-and-play retrieval pipeline.

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

AutoDojo: Adaptive Attacks Expose Superficial Defenses and User-Underspecification Limits in LLM Agents

Authors:
Xinhang Ma↗Taoran Li↗Chaowei Xiao↗Zhiyuan Yu↗Ning Zhang↗Yevgeniy Vorobeychik↗

arXiv:2606.15057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection (IPI) is a major security threat to LLM-powered agents. Thus, a growing body of work have proposed a variety of defensive approaches against IPI. These can be grouped into three broad categories: 1) prompt-based (using prompting as a way to prevent agents from following malicious instructions), 2) detection-based (identifying and filtering malicious instructions), and 3) system-level (using systems insights, such as control and data isolation, for defense). However, commonly used benchmarks for evaluating defense, such as AgentDojo, are inherently static, generating a fixed distribution of IPI attacks. Consequently, static benchmarks do not usefully evaluate defense robustness to adaptive threats. We address this issue by developing AutoDojo, an adaptive extension of AgentDojo that optimizes IPI against a given defense. Using AutoDojo against state-of-the-art IPI defenses across three task suites and five target models, we make two key observations. First, many defenses offer only limited protection: a cheap, black-box adaptive attack using a frontier LLM to iteratively optimize the injection raises attack success rate (ASR) well above the level achieved by static injections against nearly all evaluated defenses. Against a filter that reduces static ASR to 0\%, AutoDojo recovers 28\% overall and 64\% on action-open tasks. Second, for prompt-level and filter-based defenses, ASR is substantially higher on action-open tasks – where the user's request delegates the action itself to attacker-controlled content – than on precisely specified tasks. This is a structural limit: on such tasks the injection can pose as ordinary data rather than an explicit instruction, bypassing defenses that rely on detecting instruction-like text. AutoDojo is publicly available at https://github.com/xhOwenMa/AutoDojo.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Re-feeding Is Not Replaying: Measuring Replay Noise in Counterfactual Token-Credit Estimation

Authors:
Nils Matteson↗

Per-token counterfactual credit estimation asks which token in a language-model rollout caused the final answer to be right or wrong: cut the transcript at a pivot, substitute an alternative token, replay continuations, and compare outcomes. Published methods re-feed the transcript prefix as a fresh prompt, assuming this reproduces the state the model passed through during generation. We measure what that assumption costs on a stock inference engine, with a three-pass design: continuations resumed from the verified decode-time KV state, an identical second exact pass (a replica noise floor), and a re-feed pass. Across six configurations and three models (including a GRPO-trained checkpoint), at low-margin decision tokens, re-feeding changes the credit estimate at rates 14-28 percentage points above the replica floor (7-21pp under a treatment-independent conditioning; problem-clustered t = 2.9-6.4). Most changes are zero-boundary crossings of the quantized estimator rather than polarity reversals, and the perturbation is consistent with mean-zero, so averaged quantities are largely safe; but selection is not: a critical-token set chosen by thresholding $|\hat{A}_t|$ under re-feed overlaps the exact-resume selection at Jaccard 0.34-0.90, versus a 0.63-0.96 replica ceiling. A causal confirmation closes the loop: under vLLM's batch-invariant kernels all three passes are identical on every measured channel, with both disagreement rates exactly zero. Replica passes themselves disagree on 9-23% of eligible estimates: single-sample credit measurements at decision tokens are unreliable under any replay. Settings were fixed in advance; exact-pass cache hits in the second campaign are instrumented (100% hit rate, 3,434 pivots); total compute was under 10 USD. We recommend that counterfactual credit studies resume decoder state or use batch-invariant kernels, and report a replica floor.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward

Authors:
H. Sinan Bank↗Daniel R. Herber↗Thomas Bradley↗

arXiv:2606.19630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The March 2020 INCOSE INSIGHT special issue on AI and Systems Engineering (SE) became the most downloaded issue in the publication's history and launched a research community that now draws over 250 registrants to its annual workshop. In this article, we trace the progress in AI and SE across three phases (labeled here foundational, applied, and LLM inflection) based on the authors' reading of the field's core papers, and describe our opinions of where the community has converged and where critical gaps remain. Separately, a human-AI agreement literature review leveraging both human expertise and six AI models was performed to assess the relevance of 1,712 INCOSE INSIGHT articles and 889 SERC publications. The results identify five critical research gaps and offer guidance for practitioners navigating AI adoption, assurance, and workforce transformation in SE. We share the agreement data and the AI4SE/SE4AI Explorer web application so readers can compare their own relevance judgments with the human and AI raters.

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

Physical Atari: A Robust and Accessible Platform for Real-time Reinforcement Learning on Robots

Authors:
Khurram Javed↗Joseph Modayil↗Gloria Kennickell↗Richard S. Sutton↗John Carmack↗

arXiv:2606.19357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We built a robot called the Robotroller that actuates an Atari CX40+ controller and a device called the Atari Devbox that renders the game frame and the reward signal from the Arcade Learning Environment on a screen. The Robotroller and the Atari Devbox, together with an off-the-shelf camera and a desktop computer, constitute a system that can be used to study reinforcement learning algorithms in the physical world. We call the full system Physical Atari. In this paper, we detail the key decisions that make Physical Atari a robust and accessible platform. To make the system robust, we designed the Robotroller so that all movement is done through bearings, which reduces wear. Additionally, we wrote software that monitors the state of the servos at a high frequency and intervenes to limit stress. To make the system accessible, we used affordable off-the-shelf components and parts that can be manufactured using consumer 3D printers. Physical Atari can be built for under $1,000 and has been used for weeks of non-stop reinforcement learning experiments without any mechanical failures. We used it to validate that reinforcement learning algorithms can learn directly on robots and show that even small distribution shifts between learning and deployment can significantly degrade the performance of policies. Our results underscore the importance of on-device adaptation for strong performance on robots.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Estimating carbon pools in the European Shelf sea environment: replacing reanalysis by model-informed machine learning?

Authors:
Jozef Skakala↗

arXiv:2508.10178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Shelf seas are important for the economy and the carbon cycle, but shelf sea observations for carbon pools are often sparse, or highly uncertain. An alternative can be provided by carbon reanalyses (whether assimilating proxy variables, such as chlorophyll-$a$, or directly carbon), but these are often expensive to run. We propose to use a computationally cheap ensemble of neural networks (i.e. deep ensemble) to learn the relationship between the directly observable (atmospheric, riverine and ocean) variables and marine carbon pools from a coupled physics-biogeochemistry model. The deep ensemble was trained on a North-West European Shelf (NWES) physical-biogeochemistry model free run simulation. After training, the deep ensemble was run using inputs from the NWES reanalysis instead of the free run, demonstrating that it can efficiently predict several NWES carbon pools (e.g., detritus, zooplankton, heterotrophic bacteria) in much better agreement with the reanalysis than the free run, while also providing uncertainty information. We further show that the deep ensemble performs similarly well when it is driven directly by the observations assimilated into the reanalysis, with the limitation that carbon pools can then be predicted only at the observed locations and times. We focus on explainability of the results and demonstrate potential use of the deep ensembles for future climate what-if scenarios. We suggest that model-informed machine learning presents a viable alternative to expensive reanalyses and could complement observations, wherever they are missing and/or highly uncertain.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Clinical Characteristics and mortality outcomes of Atrial fibrillation complicating Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction: A prospective study from South Africa

Authors:
Mboweni↗N. N↗Maseko↗Tsabedze↗N. I↗Toman↗Nel↗Kagodora↗B. S↗

Background: A growing burden of cardiovascular risk factors has raised cardiovascular disease-related mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), driving higher prevalence of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and its complication with atrial fibrillation (AF). No prospective study has examined AF's clinical impact on HFrEF in SSA. Aim: To determine AF prevalence in HFrEF, describe HFrEF-AF clinical characteristics, and determine AF's impact on mortality. Methods: In this prospective observational study at a tertiary hospital in Johannesburg, 136 HFrEF patients were enrolled and categorised as HFrEF- SR (sinus rhythm) or HFrEF-AF. Baseline clinical characteristics and biochemistry were recorded. Comprehensive echocardiography including left atrial strain by 2D speckle-tracking was performed. Median follow-up was 30.6 months. Results: AF was present in 28 patients (21%). The mean age was 58.7 {+/-} 14.9 years (52.9% male) and differed between groups (p < 0.001). Hypertensive heart disease was the leading cause of HFrEF (36%). Compared with SR, HFrEF-AF patients had poorer health status (KCCQ 27 [16-43] vs 45 [32-60], p < 0.001) and lower left atrial strain (26.2 {+/-} 11.3%, p < 0.001). Guideline-directed medical therapy was suboptimal in the AF group: anticoagulation use was higher than SR (60% vs 9.5%, p < 0.001) but overall inadequate; HFrEF-AF patients received lower median doses of carvedilol (15.6 mg vs 25 mg, p = 0.002) and enalapril (10 mg vs 20 mg, p = 0.004), and fewer received spironolactone (50% vs 75.3%, p = 0.013). Survival was significantly lower in HFrEF-AF (0.41 [0.22-0.61]) versus SR (0.73 [0.61-0.82], p < 0.001). Independent predictors of mortality included prior stroke, lower TAPSE and KCCQ, and higher E/e' and heart rate. Conclusion: AF is common among HFrEF patients in this SSA cohort (though lower than in high-income countries) and associates with worse clinical status, suboptimal therapy, and higher mortality.

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

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

Authors:
Tianjie Ju↗Yueqing Sun↗Zheng Wu↗Wei Zhang↗Yaqi Huo↗Xi Su↗Qi Gu↗Xunliang Cai↗Gongshen Liu↗Zhuosheng Zhang↗

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.

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