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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Challenges of Balancing AI Compliance and Technological Innovations in Critical Sectors: A Systematic Literature Review

arXiv:2606.12423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into critical infrastructure including healthcare, finance, energy, and defense, offers transformative benefits but also conflicts with evolving regulatory and governance frameworks. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to examine the challenges of balancing AI compliance and technological innovation across critical infrastructure sectors. The review follows established SLR guidelines to extract and synthesize insights from peer-reviewed articles, report, and institutional sources published between 2020-2025. The study identifies three interrelated challenges: fragmented regulations, excessive compliance burdens for smaller to medium enterprises (SMEs), and misaligned governance models. To address these challenges, the study highlights practical governance strategies, including risk-tiered regulation, compliance by design, and explainable AI, to support scalable and trustworthy AI deployment in critical sectors. Key contributions include a concise mapping of core AI-governance challenges and a conceptual diagram illustrating their overlap, as well as actionable strategies for policymakers and practitioner to harmonize oversight with innovation.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Canonical regularization of the stationary Coulomb problem and an Aufbau-like spectral ordering

arXiv:2606.17359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The stationary hydrogen atom has Coulomb degeneracy across orbital levels, whereas the Aufbau/Madelung ordering is an empirical, many-electron rule established in atomic physics. We examine the hydrogen atom through a regularized de Broglie–Bohm representation, in which stationary amplitude current constraints generate separable Sturm–Liouville branches. In this formulation, the radial, orbital, and magnetic sectors acquire canonical Langer-like inverse square corrections. The modified boundary value problems allow analytical solutions and produce a hydrogen-like spectrum with regularized radial and angular indices. Consequently, radial Coulomb quantization acquires an orbital dependent shift, lifting the Coulomb degeneracy and producing a spectral ordering that follows the Aufbau/Madelung sequence. On this basis, we construct the ordering of the regularized de Broglie–Bohm states and show that the spectral structure retains the standard degenerate Rydberg sequence in the l=0 sector. The separated amplitudes are represented by generalized special function branches, including the associated Laguerre, Legendre, and Bessel functions with non-integral parameters arising from regularized separation. Therefore, the treatment is intended as an analytical examination of spectral ordering in a regularized one center Coulomb problem rather than as a replacement for the many electron atomic structure theory. Keywords: de Broglie–Bohm representation; Coulomb spectrum; canonical regularization; Langer correction; Sturm–Liouville equations; Aufbau principle; Madelung ordering; associated Legendre functions; associated Laguerre functions; Bessel functions.

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

CREST: Deployment-Realistic Hardware-in-the-Loop NAS for Embedded Sensing Systems

arXiv:2606.15004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying neural networks on low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) requires selecting model architectures under tight memory, latency, and energy constraints. Existing workflows often simplify this process along one or more axes: static proxy costs such as FLOPs or parameters, treating one MCU as representative, and continuous-inference tests instead of deployed sensing schedules. These assumptions can mis-rank Pareto-front candidates, miss infeasible deployments, and obscure schedule-dependent energy. We present CREST (Cross-platform Runtime Evaluation and Search Tool), a deployment-realistic hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) neural architecture search (NAS) framework for MCU sensing systems. CREST keeps the optimizer, HIL measurement boundary, logging, and replay workflow fixed while exposing workload, model family, target backend, schedule, quantization, and scoring policy as configurable axes. This makes deployment effects experimentally separable within one reusable workflow. We evaluate CREST on inertial odometry and audio classification across three Arm Cortex-M targets. For inertial odometry, measured-energy HIL search reduces median per-inference energy by 41.7% versus FLOPs-based selection and 40.8% versus memory-traffic-based selection at similar error. FLOPs-based selection also chooses infeasible deployments on memory-constrained targets. On the STM32 N657 target, continuous-inference and duty-cycled searches produce different Pareto frontiers. For audio classification, the same application-level policy selects different DS-CNN architectures on different boards, and cross-board replay changes deployment cost substantially. Overall, CREST shows that deployment-realistic MCU NAS must jointly optimize model architecture, target platform, runtime schedule, and deployment policy rather than relying only on static proxy costs or continuous-inference measurements.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optional Stopping for Superhedging Supermartingales

arXiv:2606.17452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superhedging supermartingales, introduced by the authors in previous work, are non-probabilistic processes defined via subadditive outer integrals that carry a purely financial interpretation in terms of superhedging cost. Building on the Leinert-König theory of non-lattice integration, the present paper establishes several results that are classical in probability theory but whose non-probabilistic proofs require fundamentally new arguments: (i) a tower inequality for the conditional outer integral \overline{\sigma}_j applied at stopping times, reducing to equality when the integrand is conditionally integrable; (ii) three versions of Doob's optional stopping theorem, organised by the class of supermartingale and the range of the stopping times; and (iii) Dubins' upcrossing inequality in both finite- and infinite-time horizons. A key structural result, property (K)-a.e., identifies conditions under which the two superhedging operators \overline{\sigma}_j and \overline{I}_j coincide on non-negative functions, extending the scope of all preceding results to the positive operator \overline{I}_j. None of the proofs invoke classical measure-theoretic tools; in particular, (classical) integrability and measurability are not assumed. The analogues of classical stochastic results acquire a purely financial interpretation and, in this way, gain depth and generality by providing a context that is independent of any a priori probabilistic structure.

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

One Jailbreak, Many Tongues: Learning Language-Insensitive Intention Representations for Multilingual Jailbreak Detection

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications for global multilingual users, yet safety training remains concentrated in dominant languages and has not progressed in parallel with multilingual capability, creating exploitable gaps for jailbreak attacks. Current jailbreak defenses are largely developed and evaluated in dominant languages, and their effectiveness is limited by the scarcity of aligned multilingual supervision and representations dispersion caused by language variation. To address this issue, we propose MLJailDe, a multilingual jailbreak detection framework designed to improve both multilingual robustness and cross-lingual generalization. MLJailDe first introduces a multilingual back-translation data augmentation algorithm to construct a semantically consistent and functionally effective dataset spanning 11 languages, consisting of 2,232 benign and 1,239 jailbreak samples. On this basis, MLJailDe employs relative-distance constraints to reduce cross-lingual representation dispersion and encourage jailbreak prompts with similar intent to form consistent clusters across languages, while an imbalance-aware classification objective is further used to alleviate class imbalance and learn more reliable multilingual decision boundaries. Experimental results show that MLJailDe outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple languages, achieving an F1 score of 98.5\%, and obtains an average F1 score of 97.1\% on unseen languages, demonstrating strong effectiveness and cross-lingual generalization.

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

Learning Survival Models with Right-Censored Reporting Delays

arXiv:2510.04421v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Survival analysis provides statistical methods to model the time until an event occurs. Reporting delays arise when event times are not observed at their occurrence but are only revealed upon reporting. This issue is particularly critical for timely risk evaluation when the observation window is short due to administrative censoring. In this study, we incorporate right-censored reporting delays by jointly modeling parametric hazards for the event and reporting processes. We then construct a consistent estimator for the model parameters and develop a Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm to compute it. To address the challenges posed by administrative censoring, we leverage these findings and propose a transfer-learning procedure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the accuracy of timely risk evaluation under administrative censoring.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Physics-Aware Auxiliary Losses Improve Out-of-Distribution Generalization of a GNN Synthesizability Filter

arXiv:2606.12651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning drug-discovery pipelines increasingly rely on generative models that propose molecules far from the data used to train downstream synthesizability filters. Existing filters (SAScore, SCScore, RAscore, DeepSA) are purely statistical and degrade in exactly this out-of-distribution (OOD) regime. We ask whether cheap, closed-form physical priors, used as auxiliary supervision on a graph neural network (GNN), improve OOD generalization. We add two auxiliary losses to a GINE backbone: a topological complexity regression supervised by the Bertz index, and a strain-energy soft penalty supervised by MMFF94 force-field energy. On a 65,177-molecule corpus (HIV, Tox21, COCONUT) labeled by SAScore thresholds we reproduce a strong in-distribution baseline, then evaluate a 4-way ablation (baseline / +complexity / +strain / +both) on a single-source OOD split (train on drug-like HIV+Tox21, test on COCONUT natural products), repeated over 5 seeds with paired bootstrap confidence intervals. All three physics-aware variants give a small but statistically significant OOD improvement over the baseline (mean OOD AUC 0.9774): +complexity Delta = +0.0060 (95% CI [+0.0023, +0.0102]), +strain Delta = +0.0032 ([+0.0008, +0.0052]), +both Delta = +0.0066 ([+0.0038, +0.0093]); every interval excludes zero, and the combination is best. The variants are indistinguishable in-distribution, so the effect is visible only under OOD evaluation. We are explicit that the effects are modest, and we report a cautionary methodological finding: a single-seed version of this experiment produced a qualitatively different (non-monotone) story that did not survive multi-seed evaluation.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Diffusion Language Models: An Experimental Analysis

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language modeling through autoregressive generation, enabling strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Recently, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as an alternative paradigm that generates text through iterative denoising rather than next-token prediction, allowing parallel refinement of entire sequences. While numerous diffusion-based architectures have been proposed, differences in evaluation protocols, datasets, inference budgets, and generation hyperparameters make it difficult to compare their capabilities and understand the trade-offs they offer. In this work, we present a systematic experimental analysis of modern DLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight state-of-the-art DLMs across eight benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, translation, knowledge, and structured problem solving, while explicitly considering both generation quality and computational efficiency. Beyond downstream evaluation, we analyze the impact of key inference-time factors, including denoising steps, context length, block size, and parallel unmasking strategies, and complement large-scale experiments with controlled comparisons of smaller models trained under identical conditions. Our analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of diffusion-based language modeling across different tasks, architectures, and inference budgets. We show that the behavior of DLMs is strongly influenced by generation-time design choices, leading to distinct trade-offs between performance and computational efficiency. Overall, our study provides practical insights into the capabilities and deployment characteristics of contemporary DLMs.

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

TERMS-Bench: Diagnosing LLM Negotiation Agents Beyond Deal Rate

arXiv:2605.13909v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Negotiation is a central mechanism of economic exchange, shaping markets, procurement, labor agreements, and resource allocation. It is also a canonical testbed for agentic language models, requiring multi-turn interaction under hidden preferences, strategic communication, and binding constraints. These properties make negotiation hard to evaluate: unlike math or code, it has no intrinsic verifier. Existing LLM negotiation evaluations rely on LLM-vs.-LLM interaction or aggregate outcomes such as deal rate, leaving failures opaque. We introduce Terms-Bench, short for Testbed for Economic Reasoning in Multi-turn Strategy, a Bayesian-game framework that makes the environment itself the verifier by specifying the counterpart's latent type, policy, and payoff structure. We instantiate it in bilateral price negotiation, where the counterpart's private state and simulator policy are hidden from the agent but observable to the evaluator. This turns the counterpart from a black-box opponent into a diagnostic instrument, enabling agent-attributable failure analysis and oracle-reference optimality gaps. Evaluating 13 LLM agents spanning frontier systems from major providers, Terms-Bench turns negotiation evaluation from aggregate ranking into actionable diagnosis: where agents fail, why they fail, and what to strengthen. Empirically, frontier models saturate deal rate yet diverge in surplus extraction, cue use, belief calibration, and compliance, revealing agent-specific bargaining bottlenecks masked by prior benchmarks.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Operator Calculus for Population-Based Optimization: A Mean-Field Convergence Theory

arXiv:2606.14289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Population-based and distributional optimization methods, from evolution strategies and consensus-based optimization to covariance-matrix adaptation and stochastic gradient methods viewed as distributional dynamics, are widely used for nonconvex or black-box problems, yet their convergence analyses remain fragmented across algorithm-specific techniques. We introduce an operator calculus in which a broad class of such methods, after choosing an appropriate state space and, where necessary, augmenting the state by memory or strategy variables, is described as a composition of three elementary operators (mutation, selection, and recombination) acting on probability measures. Under explicit stability and regularity conditions, the composite operator admits a pre-generator whose continuous-time limit is a transport-reaction-jump (TRJ) PDE that preserves the operator splitting. On this foundation we establish a modular Lyapunov principle. If a state-space Lyapunov function both dissipates under the full generator and controls the relevant search-space gauges, then the state-space Lyapunov functional and the induced search errors decay exponentially. The additive generator structure allows dissipation estimates to be assembled operator by operator, providing a toolkit for certifying convergence of composite mean-field algorithms.

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

Beyond Artifacts: Towards Generalizable Synthetic Song Detection via Music-Intrinsic Features

arXiv:2606.16612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of AI music generators highlights the urgent need for reliable Synthetic Song Detection (SSD). Existing SSD methods often rely on low-level artifacts or fixed feature assumptions, struggling to capture generator-agnostic cues. To address this, we propose Sofia (Synthetic-song detection framework via music features), a flexible framework that models music-intrinsic attributes via feature-specific experts and an adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. By configuring Sofia with representative Vocal, Audio-effect, Global structure features, and their combinations, we present their individual and complementary contributions. To comprehensively evaluate our framework, we further construct MUSIC8K, a challenging benchmark featuring lastest emerging generators and realistic audio perturbations. Experiments show that Sofia learns generator-agnostic representations from music-intrinsic features, improving the F1 score by 18.5 points over the strongest baseline on MUSIC8K-O while maintaining strong robustness.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Generative AI for Managerial Decision-Making under Ambiguity and Sycophancy

arXiv:2603.03970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly being integrated into complex business workflows, fundamentally shifting the boundaries of managerial decision-making. However, the reliability of its strategic advice in ambiguous business contexts remains a critical knowledge gap. To address this gap, this study compares multiple GenAI models in their ability to detect ambiguity, examines whether a systematic ambiguity-resolution process improves response quality, and investigates their susceptibility to sycophantic behavior when confronted with flawed managerial directives. Using a novel four-dimensional business ambiguity taxonomy, we conducted a human-in-the-loop experiment across strategic, tactical, and operational scenarios. The resulting decisions were assessed through a human-validated automated evaluation framework based on agreement, actionability, justification quality, and constraint adherence. The results show that our approach not only distinguishes different types of ambiguity, but also reveals how ambiguity resolution systematically changes model behavior. In particular, resolving ambiguities improved decision quality across all managerial levels, with the strongest gains observed in constraint adherence. The analysis further showed that sycophantic behavior is not uniform across models: some models challenged flawed assumptions, whereas others tended to comply with them. This study contributes to the bounded rationality literature by positioning GenAI as a cognitive scaffold that can detect and resolve ambiguities managers might overlook, while demonstrating that its artificial limitations require human oversight to ensure its reliability as a strategic partner.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LentiAvatar: Pseudo-Multiview Reconstruction and Subpixel Prism Rendering for Real-Time Stereoscopic Communication

Real-time stereoscopic video communication has long been a goal of immersive telepresence, yet practical systems still require specialized capture rigs or reduce remote users to a single portrait view. We present LentiAvatar, a Gaussian head-avatar system that connects monocular avatar capture with subpixel-encoded glasses-free lenticular display for real-time autostereoscopic communication. From a monocular portrait video, LentiAvatar reconstructs a controllable head avatar and optimizes it for the lateral viewing zones induced by the display. The method uses natural head turns as pseudo-multiview (PMV) supervision to constrain regions that are otherwise weakly observed in monocular training, including hair, ears, jaw contours, and neck boundaries. Reliable side frames are yaw-binned, aligned to virtual cameras, and supervised within a strict head-and-hair domain; contour-aware losses and staged regularization further suppress ghosting, alpha leakage, and depth instability while preserving lateral detail. At runtime, LentiAvatar renders 32 virtual views and encodes them into a 4K lenticular raster with calibrated subpixel-routing masks. The live-tracker prototype sustains 10.65 FPS, and a subject-specific distilled driver raises the same display pipeline to 38.49 FPS.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

HoloCell: A Generative Foundation Model for Holistic Cellular Modeling

Single-cell multi-omics technologies have recently advanced to enable the profiling of epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic layers within individual cells, offering new opportunities to characterize cellular states as integrated biological systems. However, developing a unified framework that can seamlessly integrate diverse omics modalities and remain robust to heterogeneous modality missingness remains challenging. Here we present HoloCell, to our knowledge the first generative foundation model for joint representation learning and generative modeling across all three major single-cell omics modalities, i.e., epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. HoloCell contains over 860 million parameters and is pretrained on the Human-Multi-Omics-Corpus, which comprises approximately 468 million single-cell profiles across these three omics layers, corresponding to over 425 billion tokens. HoloCell introduces a simple yet biologically grounded hierarchical tokenization strategy that encodes cis-regulatory elements, genes, and proteins as structured tokens within a shared modeling framework. We evaluated HoloCell across single-omics representation learning, paired multi-omics integration, unpaired multi-omics alignment, and cross-modal generation via iterative diffusion and remasking, demonstrating its superior performance and flexibility across diverse omics tasks. From a representation perspective, HoloCell provides a unified digital mapping of cellular states across multiple omics layers, capturing cell heterogeneity as an integrated system. From a generation perspective, its iterative diffusion and remasking framework accounts for the inherently unordered nature of biological features, enabling in silico simulation of multi-omics information flow. Together, these capabilities position HoloCell as a versatile foundation model toward the emerging concept of a virtual cell, offering both systematic characterization and generative simulation of cellular systems within a unified framework.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Deep-Learning Based Quantification of Breast Arterial Calcification on Mammography for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning model for automated quantification of breast arterial calcification (BAC) on screening mammography and to assess whether AI-derived BAC burden predicts major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in women. Methods: In this retrospective study, 202,006 women who underwent screening mammography without history of MACE were included. A BAC segmentation model was trained on an expert-annotated dataset using a multi-task U-Net with a ResNet-18 encoder to detect and segment BAC. BAC burden was quantified as area (mm{superscript 2}) from model-generated masks using DICOM pixel spacing and categorized by tertiles into low, intermediate, and high. The PREVENT score and incident MACE were identified from electronic health records. Cox proportional hazards models were developed to evaluate AI-derived BAC burden and PREVENT score alone, and combined models for 5 - and 10-year cardiovascular risk prediction. Results: Among 202,006 women (mean age 54.8{+/-}11.7 years), 23.1% had AI-detected BAC, and 7,701 (3.8%) developed incident MACE during a median follow - up of 7.5 years. On the geographically held-out test set, the BAC model achieved an AUROC of 0.97, Dice score of 0.6678, and Pearson correlation of 0.961 between AI-derived and manually annotated BAC burden. BAC burden increased with age and was higher among women who developed MACE. Five - year MACE incidence increased across BAC categories from 1.5% in women without BAC to 6.9% in those with high BAC burden. BAC burden alone showed modest prediction of MACE, with 5-year and 10-year AUROCs of 0.661 and 0.650, respectively, while PREVENT achieved AUROCs of 0.781 and 0.771. Adding BAC to PREVENT produced minimal improvement in discrimination. Conclusion: Deep learning-based BAC quantification from routine mammography is feasible, accurate, and associated with future cardiovascular risk. Although BAC added little to PREVENT for overall discrimination, it may serve as a scalable opportunistic imaging biomarker to identify women at elevated cardiovascular risk and support preventive care.

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

LLM-Powered AI Agent Systems and Their Applications in Industry

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.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-03

IsoPepTracker: An interactive web application for peptide-driven isoform analysis

Authors:

by Araf Mahmud, Chen Huang Alternative splicing affects 95% of multi-exon genes, generating protein isoforms with distinct functions. While current alternative splicing analyses effectively identify splice events at the RNA level, they provide limited protein-level insight. To address this gap, we developed IsoPepTracker (https://www.isopeptracker.org), a user-friendly web application for analyzing and visualizing differential peptides across canonical and novel isoforms that are theoretically detectable by shotgun mass spectrometry-based proteomics. IsoPepTracker features four modules: Canonical Isoform Analysis, Novel Isoform Discovery, Peptide Sequence Search, and Alternative Splicing Analysis. Each module is tailored for distinct and complementary proteogenomics analyses. Users can input genes, novel cDNA sequences, peptides, or alternative splicing results to pinpoint peptides of interest and identify their associations with target genes or isoforms. We demonstrate the straightforward application of IsoPepTracker in proteogenomics through case studies. IsoPepTracker not only provides informative peptide signatures to understand the protein-level consequences of alternative splicing but also supplies peptide candidates for validation in shotgun proteomics.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Smoothing Dark Areas in Molecular Latent Diffusion

arXiv:2606.13955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion is a promising framework for scalable 3D molecular generation, but it requires a latent space that remains smooth, valid, and navigable beyond posterior samples. Existing molecular VAEs, however, are typically learned through reconstruction-based objectives, which do not guarantee such a latent space. We show that this leads to dark areas: regions of latent space that are reachable during diffusion sampling but decode to disconnected or chemically invalid molecules. Unlike in image generation, molecular decoding requires strict structural and chemical precision, so even small latent perturbations can produce catastrophic failures. We therefore propose TopVAE, a topology-optimized VAE that reduces dark areas by making the decoder internalize structural and chemical constraints during training, eliminating the need for test-time chemical correction. TopVAE greatly improves off-posterior robustness, and when paired with a standard DiT, achieves $77\%$ lower FCD-3D on QM9, the highest V&C, $52\%$ lower FCD-3D on GEOM-Drugs, and $1.29{\times}$ more stable and connected molecules on zero-shot scaffold inpainting.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Certifiable Safe RLHF: Semantic Grounding and Fixed Penalty Constraint Optimization for Safer LLM Alignment

arXiv:2510.03520v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring safety is a foundational requirement for large language models (LLMs). Achieving an appropriate balance between enhancing the utility of model outputs and mitigating their potential for harm is a complex and persistent challenge. Contemporary approaches frequently formalize this problem within the framework of Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) and employ established CMDP optimization techniques. However, these methods exhibit two notable limitations. First, their reliance on reward and cost functions renders performance highly sensitive to the underlying scoring mechanism, which must capture semantic meaning rather than being triggered by superficial keywords. Second, CMDP-based training entails tuning dual-variable, a process that is both computationally expensive and does not provide any provable safety guarantee for a fixed dual variable that can be exploitable through adversarial jailbreaks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Certifiable Safe-RLHF (CS-RLHF) that introduces a cost model trained on a large-scale corpus to assign semantically grounded safety scores. In contrast to the lagrangian-based approach, CS-RLHF adopts a rectified penalty-based formulation. This design draws on the theory of exact penalty functions in constrained optimization, wherein constraint satisfaction is enforced directly through a suitably chosen penalty term. With an appropriately scaled penalty, feasibility of the safety constraints can be guaranteed at the optimizer, eliminating the need for dual-variable updates. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that CS-RLHF outperforms state-of-the-art LLM model responses rendering at-least 5 times efficient against nominal and jail-breaking prompts

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effective discrete-modulated continuous variable QKD under general attacks

arXiv:2606.20346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous variable quantum key distribution via discrete modulations ensures information-theoretic security using standard telecom technologies, providing affordable and scalable quantum communications with simplified classical postprocessing. However, existing security proofs against general attacks often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as a bounded dimension for coherent states, or require impractically large block sizes. In this work, we develop a finite-size security analysis that removes these limitations while incorporating realistic experimental features. Our approach combines the dimension reduction technique, a security proof based on the marginal-constrained entropy accumulation, and a trusted detector model accounting for the receiver imperfections. We report positive key rates in the finite-size regime for relevant block sizes of the order of $10^8$. These results contribute to narrowing the gap between theoretical security proofs and practical implementations of discrete-modulated continuous variable quantum key distribution protocols.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Machine Learning and the Random Walk Puzzle: Forecasting the CAD/USD Exchange Rate with Expanding Window Evaluation and SHAP Interpretability

arXiv:2606.15058v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines whether machine learning (ML) models can outperform the naive random walk benchmark in forecasting the monthly USD/CAD exchange rate. Using daily data from the Bank of Canada spanning January 2017 to May 2026, resampled into 113 monthly observations, five ML models are evaluated: linear regression, random forest, gradient boosting, XGBoost, and AdaBoost. These models are benchmarked against the naive random walk model and exponential smoothing with Holt-Winters seasonality (ETS). All models are evaluated using an expanding-window framework to maintain strict out-of-sample integrity, and forecast-accuracy differences are assessed using the Diebold-Mariano (DM) test. Structural break detection identifies four significant breakpoints in the series, corresponding to the escalation of the US-China trade war in 2018, the COVID-19 economic recovery in 2020, the peak of the Bank of Canada rate-hiking cycle in 2022, and the start of the Bank of Canada rate-cutting cycle in 2024. SHAP, or Shapley Additive Explanations, analysis is applied to interpret the drivers of the best-performing ML model. The results show that the naive random walk model remains a formidable benchmark. Linear regression is the only model that statistically outperforms the naive random walk model, with a DM statistic of 3.0585 and a p value of 0.0071, whereas the ML ensemble models show only marginal differences. Random Forest with an expanding-window framework achieves the lowest MAPE of 1.17 percent among all models except the random walk. SHAP analysis confirms that short-term lags, particularly lag1 and lag2, and recent rolling means dominate predictions, consistent with the near-random-walk behavior of exchange rates.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

X-MADAM-RAG: Diagnosing and Handling Chinese-English Evidence Conflict in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems may receive evidence that is not merely noisy but mutually contradictory. This issue becomes particularly salient in multilingual settings, where retrieved Chinese and English evidence may support incompatible answer candidates. We study this problem through X-RAMDocs-ZHEN, a controlled Chinese-English benchmark derived from RAMDocs for diagnosing evidence conflict in RAG. The benchmark contains 300 examples across six balanced conditions, including monolingual support, bilingual agreement, reversed conflict directions, and conflict with optional noise. We further examine X-MADAM-RAG, an interpretable pipeline that decomposes evidence handling into per-document candidate extraction, visible-evidence repair, deterministic candidate grouping, and conflict-aware aggregation. On the original controlled benchmark with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, X-MADAM-RAG achieves 0.9667 strict accuracy and 0.9767 conflict-aware success, outperforming an evidence-normalized single-call baseline. However, a zero-call rule-only extractor reaches 1.0000 on the same benchmark, revealing strong template regularity. To probe this limitation, we construct a deterministic naturalized stress test that removes explicit answer templates while preserving candidate strings. On its 100-sample subset, rule-only extraction falls to 0.0000, but X-MADAM-RAG also drops to 0.3000 strict accuracy, below both naive and evidence-normalized baselines. A privileged oracle remains perfect, indicating that document-level extraction is the main bottleneck. These findings position X-RAMDocs-ZHEN and X-MADAM-RAG as diagnostic tools for controlled evidence conflict rather than as evidence of general hallucination detection or robustness to natural retrieval.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The proteins that protect us from deadly mutations

Authors:

Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States. Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States.

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

Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.