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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Bridging Creative Intent and Visual Quality: Creator-Driven Recurrent Video Generation with Agentic Feedback Loops

Generative AI has made content creation increasingly accessible, but many AI-generated videos lack narrative coherence and creative direction, issues that become more substantial at longer durations. Unlike coding, where AI generation benefits from reliable feedback and techniques such as recurrent self-improvement, video generation requires subjective feedback about plot, scenes, and narrative, which naturally motivates approaches that incorporate human creative direction. We introduce CHIEF, a human-AI co-creation video generation framework that places the creator at the center of human-in-the-loop iterative video refinement, and supports them by providing automatic subjective feedback. The creator incorporates their creative direction by driving each iteration, while their revisions are incorporated by a specialized refiner agent. The feedback loop is generated by persona-conditioned multimodal LLMs that watch generated videos and produce subjective critique from the audience perspectives, providing feedback that self-evaluation alone cannot capture. To test the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we work with high school and college students with no prior filmmaking experience to create videos, from short 1-minute videos to a complete short 10-minute film with a complicated plot.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Can professional translators identify machine-generated text?

This study investigates whether professional translators without prior specialized training can reliably identify short stories generated in Italian by artificial intelligence (AI). Sixty-nine translators took part in an in-person experiment, where they assessed three anonymized short stories - two written by ChatGPT-4o and one by a human author. For each story, participants rated the likelihood of AI authorship and provided justifications for their choices. While average results were inconclusive, a statistically significant subset (16.2%) successfully distinguished the synthetic texts from the human text, suggesting that their judgements were informed by analytical skill rather than chance. However, a nearly equal number misclassified the texts in the opposite direction, often relying on subjective impressions rather than objective markers, possibly reflecting a reader preference for AI-generated texts. Low burstiness and narrative contradiction emerged as the most reliable indicators of synthetic authorship, with unexpected calques, semantic loans and syntactic transfer from English also reported. In contrast, features such as grammatical accuracy and emotional tone frequently led to misclassification. These findings raise questions about the role and scope of synthetic-text editing in professional contexts.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Fast Human Attention Prediction for Fixation-guided Active Perception in Autonomous Navigation

Human visual attention relies on structured scanpaths to efficiently process scenes, yet instilling this behavior into robot autonomy is in its infancy and hindered by the high,computational costs of existing predictive models. To address this, we introduce GazeLNN, a computationally lightweight,scanpath prediction model that leverages Liquid Neural Networks as its recurrent engine and employs MobileNetV3 for feature extraction. Operating auto-regressively, the architecture predicts sequential fixation heatmaps conditioned on the current visual stimulus and fixation history. Despite requiring only 0.61 GFLOPs, GazeLNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Low Resolution dataset achieving 0.47 ScanMatch score. It outperforms existing recurrent baselines across diverse evaluation metrics, while reducing computational costs by 99.40% and accelerating inference by up to six times. To investigate the role of human attention modeling in robot autonomy and demonstrate the practical utility of this highly efficient architecture, we integrate GazeLNN into an active camera-robot control policy trained via Reinforcement Learning. This integration enables human-fixation-guided perception during autonomous navigation, validated through successful real-world deployments on an aerial robot.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

A Survey on Federated Causal Discovery and Inference

arXiv:2606.23741v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal reasoning, which encompasses the discovery of causal structures and the inference of causal effects, is fundamental to data-driven decision making. In practice, data for reliable causal analysis are often distributed across institutions and cannot be centralized due to privacy regulations or communication constraints. Federated learning (FL) addresses this by enabling collaborative analysis without raw data sharing, giving rise to the rapidly growing field of federated causal discovery (FCD) and inference (FCI). However, the interdisciplinary nature of this field and the absence of a comprehensive survey present barriers to entry for researchers. This paper bridges that gap by providing a systematic review through multi-dimensional taxonomies. Grounded in the three core design decisions underlying any FCD solution, namely how structures are learned, how data are partitioned, and what structural knowledge each party obtains, we organize FCD along three axes: methodological paradigm, federation topology, and structural scope. We further examine key practical dimensions, including temporal dynamics, data heterogeneity, missing data, and non-identical variable sets. For FCI, we categorize methods by target estimand (average versus individualized/conditional treatment effects) and by estimation strategy, from classical weighting methods to modern deep generative architectures. Unlike prior works that treat FCD and FCI separately, we formalize their connection as complementary stages of a unified federated causal reasoning pipeline, where FCD supplies the structural knowledge required for valid effect estimation in FCI. Finally, we highlight their shared concerns regarding privacy, communication efficiency, theoretical guarantees, and application domains, and conclude by identifying open challenges for future research.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Joint convergence in Wiener chaos via transport hierarchy and Malliavin covariances

arXiv:2606.14812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the joint convergence in distribution of a sequence $X_N = I_p(f_N)$ of multiple Wiener–Itô integrals of order $p\geq 2$ that converges to a Gaussian limit $Z\sim N(0,\sigma^2)$, together with another sequence $Y_N = I_q(g_N)$ converging in law. The central finding is that the joint convergence of $(X_N, Y_N)$ is completely governed by the asymptotic behavior of the iterated Malliavin covariances $Y_{r+1,N} = \langle DX_N, DY_{r,N}\rangle_H$, $r\geq 0$: joint convergence holds as soon as these covariances converge jointly with $Y_N$, and the structure of the limiting distribution is then explicitly determined by their limits. Moreover, the convergence of the Malliavin covariances is necessary for joint convergence, as shown by a counterexample. When $q

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

The Cost of Removing Tunability in Quantum Data Re-Uploading

arXiv:2606.25598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fixed encoding data re-uploading quantum circuits provide a striking example of universality emerging from a highly constrained architecture. However, universality alone is insufficient for assessing the theoretical and practical value of fixed and tunable upload circuits. The resource cost of removing tunability remains poorly understood. In this work, we establish quantitative depth-error scaling for approximating tunable upload circuits with fixed upload circuits. We show that a tunable upload circuit can be approximated by a fixed upload circuit using depth \( D = O_\sigma\!\left[(\log(1/\varepsilon))^\sigma\right] \) for every \(\sigma>1\), with a target dependent constant overhead, thereby improving the previously known polynomial dependence on \(1/\varepsilon\) with the same overhead. Our proof is based on an auxiliary extension approximation mechanism that combines Gevrey class construction, Jackson's theorem and generalized quantum signal processing theorem. Thus, the expressive power lost by removing tunability can be recovered using only polylogarithmic growth in circuit depth with a target dependent constant overhead. We further identify a periodic mismatch obstruction intrinsic to fixed upload approximations and use Turán-Nazarov inequalities to prove logarithmic lower bounds \( D = \Omega(\log(1/\varepsilon)) \) for the approximation of mismatch class target tunable upload circuits. Conceptually, our analysis reveals two structural mechanisms underlying approximation in fixed upload architectures: auxiliary extensions and mismatch obstructions. These results provide a quantitative understanding of how expressivity is transferred from tunable frequencies into circuit depth, and suggest a broader framework for studying approximation complexity in quantum signal processing and related quantum learning models.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of a Novel Blood-Based Assay for Brain-Derived Tau and Its Validation in Traumatic Brain Injury

Brain-derived tau (BD-tau) is an emerging blood-based biomarker for neurodegeneration, yet there are currently limited well validated BD-tau assays available for research and clinical use. To enhance access to this vital biomarker for neurological disorders including traumatic brain injury (TBI), we developed a novel blood-based immunoassay for BD-tau on the ultra-sensitive Quanterix HD-X platform using Single Molecule Array technology. Analytical validation assessed dilution linearity, specificity, precision, detection limits, and spike recovery, each recording robust metrics in agreement with international expert recommendations. The assay demonstrated robust validation metrics, achieving between-run stability of 95% when analyzing aliquots from six independent plasma and serum samples across five analytical runs. It also showed strong dilution linearity when diluted four-fold and achieved over 90% recovery when spiked with cerebrospinal fluid. Next, we evaluated the clinical utility of the assay in cohorts of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), where strong performances were recorded whether using the 2-step or 3-step assay formats ({rho}= 0.94; p < 0.0001). Furthermore, plasma BD-tau distinguished samples from TBI patients based on time from injury and severity (AUC=0.93). Plasma BD-tau differentiated between favorable and unfavorable functional outcomes in the acute-severe group. Our findings underscore the significant potential of the BD-tau assay as a biomarker for TBI in the severe phase.

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

Functional Gradient Descent with Adaptive Representations

arXiv:2606.16926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Functional optimization problems are typically solved by optimizing the parameters of a fixed representation, such as a neural network, resulting in highly nonconvex losses that complicate both training and theoretical analysis. An interesting alternative is functional gradient descent (FGD), that is, gradient descent directly in function space, which benefits from strong convergence results and admits a clean theory. However, FGD is difficult to implement in practice because functional gradients are infinite-dimensional, and thus cannot be fully computed nor stored in memory. Existing implementations therefore rely on fixed approximations, which introduce approximation error. We propose a new, theoretically-grounded FGD algorithm that adapts the representation of the functional gradients over the course of optimization. By explicitly incorporating this approximation into the analysis, we establish convergence to a stationary point (for smooth losses) and to a global minimizer (under smoothness + a Polyak-Lojasiewicz-type condition) regardless of our approximations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementable FGD method with such guarantees in a general setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on regression, numerical solution of PDEs, and modern computer vision. Across settings, our method consistently outperforms both FGD with fixed approximations and neural network baselines in efficiency and accuracy.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AfriqueLLM: How Data Mixing and Model Architecture Impact Continued Pre-training for African Languages

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route to language adaptation, but improvements on demanding capabilities such as mathematical reasoning often remain limited. This limitation is driven in part by the uneven domain coverage and missing task-relevant knowledge that characterize many low-resource language corpora. We present \texttt{AfriqueLLM}, a suite of open LLMs adapted to 20 African languages through CPT on 26B tokens. We perform a comprehensive empirical study across five base models spanning sizes and architectures, including Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and systematically analyze how CPT data composition shapes downstream performance. In particular, we vary mixtures that include math, code, and synthetic translated data, and evaluate the resulting models on a range of multilingual benchmarks. Our results identify data composition as the primary driver of CPT gains. Adding math, code, and synthetic translated data yields consistent improvements, including on reasoning-oriented evaluations. Within a fixed architecture, larger models typically improve performance, but architectural choices dominate scale when comparing across model families. Moreover, strong multilingual performance in the base model does not reliably predict post-CPT outcomes; robust architectures coupled with task-aligned data provide a more dependable recipe. Finally, our best models improve long-context performance, including document-level translation. Models and code have been released on [Huggingface](https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-NLP/afriquellm) and [Github](https://github.com/McGill-NLP/AfriqueLLM).

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

Be My Tutor: On-Policy Co-Distillation for Mutual LLM Improvement via Peer Feedback

We study multi-domain LLM training in which two models, each stronger in a different domain, co-evolve by tutoring each other through on-policy feedback. Unlike one-way distillation or single-model fine-tuning, our goal is mutual Pareto improvement: each model improves across domains without losing its original strength. To this end, we propose On-Policy Co-Distillation (OPCoD), where each student's self-distillation is conditioned on its own correct rollout and feedback from its peer. To make feedback exchange effective, OPCoD uses cognizance-based gating to decide when to give feedback and feedback anchoring to ground feedback in the problem. On Science Q\&A tasks, OPCoD consistently outperforms baselines and achieves Pareto improvement across all evaluated domain pairs and students.

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

An Integrated System for Real-Time Student Assessment and Career Guidance Using Neural Networks in Computing Disciplines

arXiv:2606.15831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many undergraduate students in Computer Science (CS) and Software Engineering (SWE) struggle to identify suitable career paths, particularly when their academic performance, abilities, and interests do not fully align. To address this issue, this study proposes an AI-driven Student Assessment and Career Prediction System that integrates a Career Guidance Expert (CGE) system with a Web-Based Student Assessment (WBSA) platform. Within the integrated framework, CGE enhances personalized career recommendations using AI while also assisting students after graduation in identifying suitable jobs, research domains, and higher study opportunities aligned with their skills and interests. The WBSA platform further strengthens interaction between students and faculty through assessments, personalized tasks, mentorship activities, and a secure real-time chat application. The CGE system employs a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model trained on real-world academic and extracurricular data collected using the snowball sampling method from the students of universities, achieving a validation accuracy of 94.71% in predicting personalized career paths. A pre-survey was conducted across universities to evaluate the proposed model before deployment. The WBSA system was developed as a modern web application using technologies such as Node.js, Next.js, and PostgreSQL to ensure scalability, responsiveness, and secure data management. The overall system is supported by a secure cloud-based infrastructure, the platform provides reliable performance while assisting graduates to select suitable career path in IT sector. In addition, a post-survey involving both students and faculty was conducted to gather feedback and further improve the overall effectiveness and usability of the system.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

EveLoad: Cognitive Workload Recognition from Event-Based Eye Movements

arXiv:2606.25177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cognitive workload monitoring is important for adaptive rehabilitation and assistive interfaces, where task difficulty, pacing, and feedback should be adjusted according to the user's cognitive state to avoid overload and under-challenge. Emerging extended reality and robot-assisted rehabilitation environments provide controllable training tasks, but they require unobtrusive sensing methods that can capture rapid ocular dynamics during interaction. Existing eye-movement-based cognitive workload recognition methods mainly rely on frame-based eye trackers, which often suffer from limited temporal resolution and degraded robustness under rapid eye movements. In contrast, event cameras provide microsecond-level temporal resolution, high dynamic range and low latency, making them suitable for capturing fine-grained ocular dynamics. Many previous studies rely on free-viewing or similar paradigms, where gaze locations can vary across tasks. As a result, models may learn associations between gaze-location distributions and cognitive workload, rather than workload-related eye movement characteristics themselves. In this work, we introduce EveLoad, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first event-based eye-movement dataset with graded cognitive workload annotations, collected from 20 healthy participants under spatially constrained and task-driven conditions using a controlled N-back-guided fixation paradigm. Based on this dataset, we establish a benchmark for cognitive workload recognition with six workload levels and propose a learning framework that encodes spatiotemporal event representations. Experimental results show that our approach achieves an average subject-specific accuracy of 96.36% and 96.13% under mixed random split evaluation. These results suggest that event-based eye movements may provide a useful sensing pathway for future workload-aware rehabilitation.

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

Succeeding at Scale: Enterprise Retrieval Benchmark Construction and Index-Preserving Query Adaptation for Multi-Tenant Search

Large-scale multi-tenant retrieval systems generate extensive query logs but lack curated relevance labels for effective domain adaptation, resulting in substantial underutilized "dark data." This challenge is compounded by the high cost of model updates, as jointly fine-tuning query and document encoders requires full corpus re-indexing, which is impractical in multi-tenant settings with thousands of isolated indices. We introduce DevRev-Search, a passage retrieval benchmark for technical customer support built via a fully automated pipeline. Candidate generation uses fusion across diverse sparse and dense retrievers, followed by an LLM-as-a-Judge for consistency filtering and relevance labeling. We further study and systematically evaluate index-preserving query-only adaptation strategies that fine-tune only the query-encoder while keeping the document indices fixed. Experiments on DevRev-Search, SciFact, and FiQA-2018 show that parameter-efficient fine-tuning of the query encoder delivers a remarkable quality-efficiency trade-off, enabling scalable and practical enterprise multi-tenant retrieval.

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

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

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

Federated Foundation Language Model Post-Training Should Focus on Open-Source Models

arXiv:2505.23593v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training of foundation language models has emerged as a promising research domain in federated learning (FL) with the goal to enable privacy-preserving model improvements and adaptations to user's downstream tasks. Recent advances in this area adopt centralized post-training approaches that build upon black-box foundation language models where there is no access to model weights and architecture details. Although the use of black-box models has been successful in centralized post-training, their blind replication in FL raises several concerns. Our opinion is that using black-box models in FL contradicts the core principles of federation such as data privacy and autonomy. In this paper, we critically analyze the usage of black-box models in federated post-training, and provide a detailed account of various aspects of openness and their implications for FL.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.

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

How Fine-Grained Should a RAG Benchmark Be? A Hierarchical Framework for Synthetic Question Generation

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems requires benchmarks that capture diverse question characteristics, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on which dimensions to vary and at what granularity. We present HieraRAG, a hierarchical framework for studying granularity in RAG benchmark construction, defining optimal granularity as the level that maximizes discriminative power (the standard deviation of generation quality across categories) within a given RAG configuration. As a case study, we generate 5,872 synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs from FineWeb-10BT across 3 dimensions (Question Complexity, Answer Type, Linguistic Variation) at 3 granularity levels (2, 4, and 8 categories). With a BM25+Falcon-3-10B pipeline, optimal granularity varies by dimension: complexity benefits from fine-grained distinctions (discriminative power: 0.053) while answer type and linguistic variation peak at medium granularity. We introduce a Coherence Ratio metric to quantify whether fine-grained splits cleanly subdivide parent categories, revealing structural differences across dimensions (Question Complexity: 0.40 vs. Answer Type: 1.44). Human evaluation of 110 stratified QA pairs confirms synthetic quality. While these specific findings reflect a single configuration, HieraRAG provides a portable procedure and validation metric for practitioners to determine evaluation granularity within their own RAG settings.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Inferring Cell Fate Trajectories in Time-Resolved Metabolic RNA Labeling data

Single-cell RNA sequencing provides high-resolution snapshots of cellular states but lacks direct information about transcriptional dynamics. Metabolic RNA labeling addresses this limitation by distinguishing newly synthesized RNA, offering insight into the direction of cell state changes, and providing valuable information when attempting to recover the underlying continuous dynamics from static snapshots of cell distributions. However, existing trajectory inference methods do not fully exploit this additional signal. Here, we propose FLOWSATATE, a framework for single-cell trajectory inference that leverages time-resolved RNA labeling within an Optimal Transport setting. We model cell dynamics as a gradient flow in an inferred potential landscape parameterized by a neural network, integrating both total and labeled RNA across time points. The learned potential enables identification of key genes and transcription factors driving cell fate decisions and supports prediction of future cellular states. We benchmark our approach on its ability to generalize unseen data and recover coherent trajectories. We also apply it to study colorectal cancer response to demethylation treatment as well as neuronal differentiation of embryonic stem cells.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Documented clinical genetic testing among carriers of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer variants: Ancestry and socioeconomic disparities in the All of Us research program

Importance: Hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC) variant carriers benefit from risk-reducing interventions, but only if identified. The extent to which carriers are clinically recognized, and whether recognition is equitable across diverse populations, is poorly characterized in a single large U.S. cohort. Objective: To estimate P/LP HBOC carrier prevalence across genetic ancestry groups, quantify documented clinical genetic testing among carriers, and evaluate ancestry and socioeconomic disparities in testing. Design, Setting, and Participants: Cross-sectional analysis of the All of Us Research Program Controlled Tier (Curated Data Repository v8/C2024Q3R9), comprising participants with short-read whole genome sequencing and linked electronic health record (EHR) and survey data. Carriers were ascertained from research genomic data independent of clinical testing. Exposures: Genetically inferred ancestry (African [AFR], Admixed American [AMR], East Asian [EAS], European [EUR], Middle Eastern [MID], South Asian [SAS]); self-reported household income and educational attainment. Main Outcomes and Measures: (1) Carrier prevalence with Wilson 95% CIs; (2) documented clinical genetic testing (procedure codes) among carriers; (3) adjusted odds of documented testing among women, by ancestry, before and after socioeconomic adjustment, using multivariable logistic regression. Results: Among 414,830 participants, P/LP HBOC carrier prevalence was 1.42% (95% CI, 1.38-1.45) overall and similar across ancestry groups (AFR 1.24%, AMR 1.32%, EAS 1.19%, EUR 1.52%, MID 1.68%, SAS 1.33%; overlapping CIs). Among 250,071 women in the testing analysis, documented clinical genetic testing was rare: only 74 of 5,878 carriers overall (1.3%) and 59 of 3,572 European-ancestry carriers (1.7%) had a documented test, with counts below reportable thresholds in all other ancestry groups. African-ancestry women had lower adjusted odds of documented testing than European-ancestry women (Model 1 adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.32; 95% CI, 0.27-0.39), an association that attenuated but persisted after adjustment for income and education (Model 2 aOR, 0.48; 95% CI, 0.40-0.58; P < 0.001); Admixed American women also had reduced adjusted odds (aOR, 0.71; 95% CI, 0.61-0.84). Lower income and lower education were independently and dose-dependently associated with lower testing odds (income

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Computational Decomposition of New Memory Failure in Alzheimer's Disease Through a Hippocampal Cortical Consolidation Bottleneck Model

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is clinically marked by difficulty retaining newly learned information, yet routine memory scores often conflate poor initial encoding with failure to stabilise information after encoding. This ambiguity limits the mechanistic interpretability of cognitive assessment during the transition from mild cognitive impairment to AD. Here we propose a Hippocampal Cortical Consolidation Bottleneck (HCCB) model to computationally separate these two components of new memory failure. The model represents newly presented information as a rapidly formed hippocampal trace and a slowly stabilised cortical trace, predicting a residual bottleneck when delayed recall falls below the level expected from immediate recall. We operationalised this prediction as Consolidation Bottleneck Index*(CBI*), a cognitively normal reference normalised residual index, and evaluated it using Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) cognitive and MRI data, with independent dynamical support from OpenNeuro EEG. Simulations showed recent memory vulnerability when hippocampal vulnerability exceeded cortical vulnerability. In ADNI, CBI* increased from cognitively normal participants to mild cognitive impairment nonconverters, reached Alzheimer like levels in mild cognitive impairment converters, and was associated with hippocampal atrophy. CBI* added minimal discrimination beyond established clinical and structural predictors, supporting its role as a mechanistic phenotype rather than a replacement prognostic model. OpenNeuro EEG further showed increased neurodynamic rigidity in AD. Our findings provide a computational framework for quantifying failed stabilisation of newly encoded information in AD progression.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces

As autonomous web agents are increasingly deployed to perform real-world tasks, ensuring their safety has become a critical concern. In this work, we study web agent behavior under realistic deceptive interfaces in the e-commerce domain. We introduce WebDecept, a lightweight and configurable plugin framework that enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. Using WebDecept, we instantiate seven deceptive patterns commonly observed on the open web, including targeted advertisements, domain redirection, and shopping manipulation. By injecting these patterns into the frontend during task execution, we perform controlled evaluation of multiple multimodal web agents. Our results show that current web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, and that prompt-based constraints are often insufficient to mitigate these failures. We further analyze how the design choices of deceptive patterns influence the success of such manipulations. These findings highlight safety challenges that should be addressed as web agents are scaled toward real-world deployment.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

UniDrive: A Unified Vision-Language and Grounding Framework for Interpretable Risk Understanding in Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2606.24759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision. Models that rely on single-frame or low-resolution inputs often miss small, distant, or partially occluded hazards, while language-centric driving models frequently provide limited grounded evidence for their explanations. To address this gap, we propose UniDrive, a unified visual-language and grounding framework for interpretable risk understanding in autonomous driving. UniDrive combines a temporal reasoning branch that models scene dynamics from multi-frame visual input with a high-resolution perception branch that preserves fine-grained spatial details from the latest frame. The two branches are integrated through a gated cross-attention fusion module, enabling dynamic context to be aligned with precise spatial evidence. Based on the fused representation, UniDrive jointly generates natural-language risk descriptions and grounded bounding-box outputs for risk objects. Experiments on the DRAMA-Reasoning benchmark show that UniDrive outperforms representative image-based and video-based baselines in both captioning and risk-object grounding. In particular, UniDrive achieves the best overall performance on the validation split and demonstrates clear advantages in small-object localization, zero-shot generalization to NuScenes and BDD100K, and human-rated interpretability and trustworthiness. These results suggest that explicitly combining temporal semantics and high-resolution perception provides a stronger foundation for interpretable and safety-oriented autonomous driving systems. The code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/unidrive-dev.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

On Surjectivity of Neural Networks: Can you elicit any behavior from your model?

arXiv:2508.19445v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given a trained neural network, can any specified output be generated by some input? Equivalently, does the network correspond to a function that is surjective? In generative models, surjectivity implies that any output, including harmful or undesirable content, can in principle be generated by the networks, raising concerns about model safety and jailbreak vulnerabilities. In this paper, we prove that many fundamental building blocks of modern neural architectures, such as networks with pre-layer normalization and linear-attention modules, are almost always surjective. As corollaries, widely used generative frameworks, including GPT-style transformers and diffusion models with deterministic ODE solvers, admit inverse mappings for arbitrary outputs. By studying surjectivity of these modern and commonly used neural architectures, we contribute a formalism that sheds light on their unavoidable vulnerability to a broad class of adversarial attacks.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

ShapeBench: A Scalable Benchmark and Diagnostic Suite for Standardized Evaluation in Aerodynamic Shape Optimization

arXiv:2605.20763v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rapid progress in aerodynamic shape optimization (ASO) has outpaced currently-available standardized evaluation frameworks. Fair comparison requires a unified benchmark spanning diverse shape classes, objective formulations, and matched-budget state-of-the-art baselines. We introduce ShapeBench, an open-source ASO benchmark with a unified API spanning 103 tasks across eight shape categories and multiple optimization regimes. Each ShapeBench task includes a validated surrogate for fast search; when feasible, a high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) pipeline for final verification is available, enabling systematic fidelity-gap analysis. ShapeBench provides a reproducible protocol with well-configured baselines to compare fairly using a consistent budget metric, allowing for comparison among both classical and LLM-driven methods, including general-purpose optimizers and a new domain-specialized evolutionary LLM baseline, ShapeEvolve. Results on ShapeBench demonstrate substantial variance in optimizer rankings across shape categories and problem formulations, with mean pairwise Spearman $\rho = 0.013$, so single-task conclusions do not reliably generalize across problem classes. The benchmark is also far from saturation; classical methods are rarely applicable across all shape categories and tasks, further highlighting the need for more general-purpose approaches.