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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Random coloured digraphs defined by a Markov logic network

arXiv:2606.23715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A Markov Logic Network (MLN) is a probabilistic relational model used in Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence for defining a probability distribution on the set of possible worlds with domain $D$ for an arbitrary finite domain $D$. An MLN consists of soft constraints with associated weights which are nonnegative real numbers. In this study we consider a language speaking about a property $P(x)$ and a relation $R(x, y)$. We consider an MLN for which every Boolean combination of $P(x)$ and $R(x, y)$ is a soft constraint (with associated weight). Let $n$ denote the size (cardinality) of the domain. We show that, for every choice of weights, if the weights are scaled by $1/n$ then, for every first-order sentence $\varphi$, the probability that $\varphi$ holds tends to either 0 or 1 as $n \to \infty$; that is, a 0-1 law for first-order logic holds. Morover, the limit probability does not depend on the weights. If we instead use the standard semantics of MLNs, in the case of which the weights are not scaled, then the limit behaviour is more complicated and depends on the weights. With unscaled weights we get 7 qualitatively different cases which depend on the weights. In some cases we have a 0-1 law for first-order logic, in some cases not, but we may still have a convergence law. The influence of the weights on the asymptotic probability of a first-order sentence may be in the form of a sudden ``phase transition'' from one of the 7 cases to another. The presence of a convergence law has positive implications for inference on large domains.

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

Food4All: An Agentic Framework and Benchmark for Food Resource Navigation with Adaptive User Understanding

Food assistance referral requires conversational agents to translate underspecified, often noisy help-seeking dialogues into locally valid resource recommendations. We present Food4All, an agentic food-resource referral framework and benchmark grounded in 686 structured Indiana food resources. Food4All couples a food-specific search tool with 300 multi-turn evaluation tasks spanning single food needs, composite cases with access or document constraints, and five non-ideal user interaction traits: unreasonable demands, rambling responses, impatience, incomplete answers, and inconsistent information. We evaluate six Large Language Models (LLMs) on requirement grounding, resource retrieval, final referral correctness, and interaction efficiency. Although the strongest model achieves 96.33% referral accuracy, our diagnostics reveal persistent failures in grounding schedule, eligibility, intake, and document constraints, as well as failures to preserve valid retrieved resources in the final recommendation. Trait-level analysis further shows that different non-ideal behaviors stress different parts of the referral pipeline. Food4All provides a controlled testbed for studying tool-calling agents in constraint-sensitive food assistance referral under realistic user interaction challenges.

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

Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, raising concerns that they may be misused to produce malicious code. Meanwhile, Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) has been widely adopted to improve the reliability of LLM-generated code by enforcing syntactic validity. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive risk: this reliability-oriented technique can itself become an attack surface. We uncover a new jailbreak attack, termed CodeSpear, that exploits GCD to induce LLMs into generating malicious code. Our experiments show that simply applying a benign code grammar constraint can effectively jailbreak LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose CodeShield, a safety alignment approach that robustly preserves safe behavior even under attacker-controlled grammar constraints. CodeShield aligns the model in the code modality by teaching it to generate honeypot code under GCD. Such code is semantically harmless, so it does not implement the malicious request, and structurally diverse, so it is difficult to suppress through grammar tightening. At the same time, CodeShield still preserves natural-language refusals when natural language is available. Experiments on 10 popular LLMs across 4 benchmarks show that CodeSpear outperforms representative jailbreak baselines and increases the attack success rate by more than 30 percentage points on average. CodeShield also restores safety under CodeSpear while preserving benign utility. Our findings reveal a fundamental risk of GCD and call for greater attention to its potential security implications.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Action with Visual Primitives

arXiv:2605.22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. A common design in current architectures maps language instructions and visual observations to actions in a single forward pass. While conceptually simple, this formulation entangles instruction comprehension, spatial scene understanding, and motor control within a single learning objective. As a result, the action expert must implicitly relearn cognitive and perceptual capabilities already present in the pretrained VLM, which can limit both learning efficiency and generalization. We introduce AVP (Action with Visual Primitives), an end-to-end architecture that implements this visual-primitive-centric interface: the VLM infers the next-stage target and emits visual-primitive tokens that condition a flow-matching action expert, with supervision derived from end-effector kinematics. Real-robot experiments on general pick-and-place tasks show that AVP improves the success rate by 37.04% over pi_0.5 and outperforms other recent methods, with consistent gains in data efficiency, spatial-compositional generalization, and object-level transfer.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Latent Space Analysis for Interpretable Uncertainty in Melanoma Classification

Melanoma is a highly aggressive skin cancer, making early and accurate diagnosis critical. While deep learning excels in skin lesion classification, standard ``black-box" models struggle to explain diagnostic uncertainty, limiting clinical trust. This work introduces a hybrid framework combining a class-aware adversarial Variational Autoencoder and an XGBoost classifier, transcending simple binary classification by leveraging a generative latent space for interpretable decision support. Guided by adversarial training, the model learns the visual characteristics of skin lesions and projects them into a continuous latent space, ensuring that similar images are grouped closely together. Trained on this latent space, the XGBoost classifier achieves a robust AUC of 0.868, competing closely with state-of-the-art models. For borderline cases, the framework enables clinicians to leverage the latent topology through Content-Based Image Retrieval. This provides a dual benefit: it allows the clinician to visually compare an ambiguous lesion against biopsy-confirmed precedents and acts as an early warning sign since a borderline classification can indicate that a lesion shares features of both nevi and melanomas, potentially requiring close monitoring. Our approach translates algorithmic hesitation into transparent, evidence-based visual support, bridging the gap between predictive performance and clinical trust.

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

Spectral Analysis of Molecular Features: When Richer Features Do Not Guarantee Better Generalization

arXiv:2510.14217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The spectral properties of feature embeddings offer critical insights into model generalization and representation quality. While deep learning models are widely used for molecular property prediction, kernel methods remain competitive in low-data regimes, yet their spectral behavior is largely unexplored. We present the first comprehensive spectral analysis of kernel ridge regression across diverse representations-including molecular fingerprints (ECFP), pretrained transformers, graph neural networks, and 3D descriptors-evaluated on QM9 and 3 MoleculeNet benchmarks. Surprisingly, richer spectral features do not consistently yield better generalization performance, contradicting common representation heuristics used in self-supervised learning (SSL). Across 4 spectral metrics, only ECFP-based kernels show a strictly positive correlation with performance. Transformer and global 3D representations exhibit mixed behavior, whereas local 3D representations show consistently negative correlations. Truncation analysis further emphasizes this disparity: for local 3D representations on thermodynamic targets, fewer than 2\% of eigenvalues (and occasionally as few as 0.02\%) are needed to recover 95\% of performance, whereas ECFP and transformer kernels require significantly more. By demonstrating a strong dependence on both task and representation, our results challenge the heuristic that richer spectra inherently improve generalization, providing new guidance for evaluating representations in SSL and in label-limited scientific tasks.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FLaRA: Predicting Future Latent Representations for Accident Anticipation

Anticipating traffic accidents from dashcam videos is a critical challenge in intelligent transportation systems. Existing methods typically map visual context directly to a collision probability without explicitly modeling the future evolution of the driving scene. In this paper we propose FLaRA (Predicting Future Latent Representations for Accident Anticipation), a novel predictive architecture that shifts this paradigm by forecasting future latent representations for accident anticipation. Building upon the Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA2), our model conditions a predictor network on observed context frames to predict the forthcoming latent features of the scene. A classifier then operates on these predicted future representations rather than only on past observations. To ensure these forecasts remain grounded in realistic future dynamics, we introduce a joint training objective that simultaneously optimizes an auxiliary feature-level reconstruction loss and a cross-entropy classification loss. Extensive evaluations on the Nexar dataset, alongside cross-domain validations on the DAD, DADA-2000, and DoTA benchmarks, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining realistic early warning capabilities.

08.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Multiplexed, precise genome engineering in monocots with twin prime editing systems

Authors:

Simultaneously introducing diverse genomic edits remains a challenge in crop genome engineering. Here we describe a twin prime editing-based knockout (TKO) system that installs stop codon clusters (SCCs) for precise translational termination with minimal in-frame mutations. TKO achieves knockout efficiencies of up to 70.5%, 58.6% and 75.1% in rice, maize and wheat protoplasts, respectively, and produces heritable knockout alleles in 96.8% of regenerated rice plants. In hexaploid wheat, TKO outperforms Cas9 4.2-fold in generating triple-homolog knockouts, largely by reducing in-frame mutations. Orthogonal TKO editors with sequence-divergent SCCs enable simultaneous knockout of up to ten genes without cross-interference. Integration of TKO with conventional prime editing establishes TRIM1 (TKO editor-enabled gene rupture and development of integrated multitype genome modification system) for simultaneous knockout and precise editing, achieving a 22.8% coediting of four genes in rice. TRIM2 extends this capacity to kilobase-scale modifications through a prime editor–recombinase system, enabling a 4.9-kb insertion (1.2% efficiency) and gene knockout (up to 79.8%) in protoplasts. Plant genome editing is multiplexed with twin prime editing.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Mapping the neuronal building blocks of human language with language models

Authors:

Humans can convey new and highly diverse information through language. This ability to form and combine words into elaborate phrases and sentences enables us to express inexhaustible meanings and is fundamental to human cognition1–5. However, understanding the microscopic cellular building blocks and cortical landscape that precisely underlie human language has remained a challenge. Here we used wide-scale single-neuronal recordings combined with natural language processing models to identify fine-grained linguistic representations across the human frontotemporal cortex during language production. We find that, whereas certain neurons represented the detailed grammatical relationships between words or their parts of speech, others tracked the sentences’ higher-order syntactic structure, their phrase transitions and sequence. Collectively, these neurons reliably captured the words’ syntactic and semantic properties but also dynamically incorporated their specific sentence contexts, therefore enabling them to encode information combinatorially and at highly granular levels of detail. We show how these cell populations were locally organized and how their microscale representations differed from that of their wider field potential patterns. We also show how these neurons were distributed broadly across the frontotemporal cortex, but how their ability to encode linguistic information was left-lateralized and varied between cortical regions. Together, these findings identify some of the most basic cellular building blocks by which linguistic information is encoded in humans and begin to define the cortical landscape of language at a combined micro (cellular), meso (local population) and macro (regional) scale. Wide-scale recordings reveal neurons in the human brain that encode fundamental components of language such as the grammatical relationships between words, their parts of speech and the higher-order syntactic structure of phrases and sentences.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

11.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-23

CARGO: A cytometry analysis framework via Regularized graph optimal-transport

by Abida Sanjana Shemonti, Grzegorz B. Gmyrek, Katrien L. A. Quintelier, Sofie Van Gassen, Yvan Saeys, Marcella Willemsen, Joachim G. J. V. Aerts, Eva V. E. Madsen, J. Paul Robinson, Alex Pothen, Bartek Rajwa Conventional data visualization techniques in single-cell analysis (such as two-dimensional dot plots, SPADE, PCA, t-SNE, or UMAP) often fall short in enabling an intuitive understanding of high-parameter flow cytometry data. These methods tend to oversimplify complex biological relationships, lack biologically meaningful interpretations, and offer no principled framework for downstream quantitative analysis. To address these limitations, we present a graph-based (network-based) visualization framework grounded in optimal transport theory. In this framework, cell populations are defined by their marker-expression profiles, and inter-population similarity is quantified using an efficiently computable optimal transport formulation known as the Sinkhorn distance. Our approach produces biologically consistent two-dimensional graph layouts using a phenotype-aware Hamming distance. Structural differences between sample graphs are characterized through a customized graph-edit distance that captures changes in population size, marker expression, and relationships between populations. We demonstrate our methods on two flow cytometry datasets: one from a clinical trial of dendritic cell-based immunotherapy in malignant peritoneal mesothelioma, involving 14 patients sampled at three time points with 14-color panels, and another from FlowCAP-II, which involved 43 acute myeloid leukemia patient samples analyzed with 7-color panels. Our framework produces robust, quantitative visual summaries of cell populations and supports statistical analysis based on graph edit distances, thereby offering new insights into disease progression and treatment response. Ultimately, our method bridges the gap between flow cytometry data visualization and biological interpretation.

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

Selective Rotary Position Embedding

Position information is essential for language modeling. In softmax transformers, Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) encode positions through fixed-angle rotations, while in linear transformers, order is handled via input-dependent (selective) gating that decays past key-value associations. Selectivity has generally been shown to improve language-related tasks. Inspired by this, we introduce Selective RoPE, an input-dependent rotary embedding mechanism, that generalizes RoPE, and enables rotation in arbitrary angles for both linear and softmax transformers. We show that softmax attention already performs a hidden form of these rotations on query-key pairs, uncovering an implicit positional structure. We further show that in state-space models and gated linear transformers, the real part manages forgetting while the imaginary part encodes positions through rotations. We validate our method by equipping gated transformers with Selective RoPE, demonstrating that its input-dependent rotations improve performance in language modeling and on difficult sequence tasks like copying, state tracking, and retrieval.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Redact or Keep? A Fully Local AI Cascade for Educational Dialogue De-Identification

Educational dialogue is a valuable but sensitive resource for research: the same transcripts that capture authentic learning often capture personally identifiable information (PII) entangled with curricular content, where "Riemann" may refer to a real student or to a mathematical concept. Existing approaches force a tradeoff between governance and accuracy. Commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) can handle this ambiguity but require sending student data to third parties, while local named entity recognition (NER) systems preserve governance but over-redact curricular terms. We propose a fully local cascade framework that reframes de-identification from open-ended entity recognition to constrained privacy triage. A recall-first union proposer combines two lightweight encoders with deterministic rules to over-generate candidate spans; a context-aware reviewer then makes a binary Redact/Keep decision for each candidate using surrounding dialogue and speaker role. We evaluate three reviewer configurations against same-family LLM-only baselines and a commercial API on math tutoring transcripts from two large platforms. The strongest local configuration reaches 0.958 macro F1, compared with 0.767 for a same-family LLM-only baseline and 0.706 for the commercial API, while running entirely on a single laptop. On a targeted challenge set of curricular-personal name ambiguity, the same configuration degrades by only 0.03 F1 versus 0.19 to 0.25 for smaller reviewers. These results suggest that for educational de-identification, problem formulation matters more than model scale.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparative Study on Agility, Efficiency, and Impact Absorption of Bipedal Robots with Active Toes

arXiv:2606.19699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human legs exhibit high efficiency, agility, and impact absorption, with toes playing a crucial role in these capabilities. While many attempts have been made to implement human-like toes in robots, they have not fully replicated human characteristics nor rigorously validated their benefits. We propose a 14-DOF biped robot emulating human toes' lightweight, high-torque, robust nature. To quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the active toes in terms of agility, efficiency, and impact absorption, we developed a high-fidelity simulation training environment that reflects actual actuators with coupled transmissions and accurate power consumption. To ensure a fair comparison between configurations with and without active toes, we designed a minimal RL reward function and applied an identical training procedure to both. The simulation results indicate that, at 1.33 m/s walking, the toe-equipped robot reduced CoT by 17.5% and heel-strike GRF by 5.0% compared with the toe-ablation configuration. On the agility test, average and maximum path deviation decreased by 25.0% and 34.0%, respectively.

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

Mosaic: Data-Free Knowledge Distillation via Mixture-of-Experts for Heterogeneous Distributed Environments

arXiv:2505.19699v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables clients to collaboratively train models while preserving data privacy. However, the coexistence of model and data heterogeneity gives rise to inconsistent representations and divergent optimization dynamics across clients, ultimately hindering robust global performance. To transcend these challenges, we propose Mosaic, a novel data-free knowledge distillation framework tailored for heterogeneous distributed environments. Mosaic first trains local generative models to approximate each client's personalized distribution, enabling synthetic data generation that safeguards privacy through strict separation from real data. Subsequently, Mosaic forms a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) from client models based on their specialized knowledge, and distills it into a global model using the generated data. To further enhance the MoE architecture, Mosaic integrates expert predictions via a lightweight meta model trained on a few representative prototypes. Extensive experiments on standard image and multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that Mosaic consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under both model and data heterogeneity. The source code has been published at https://github.com/Wings-Of-Disaster/Mosaic.

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

The Hidden Cost of Approximation in Online Mirror Descent

arXiv:2511.22283v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which, oftentimes, can be solved only approximately, leading to an inexact version of the algorithm. Nonetheless, existing OMD analyses typically assume an idealized error free setting, thereby limiting our understanding of performance guarantees that should be expected in practice. In this work we initiate a systematic study into inexact OMD, and uncover an intricate relation between regularizer smoothness and robustness to approximation errors. When the regularizer is uniformly smooth, we establish a tight bound on the excess regret due to errors. Then, for barrier regularizers over the simplex and its subsets, we identify a sharp separation: negative entropy requires exponentially small errors to avoid linear regret, whereas log-barrier and Tsallis regularizers remain robust even when the errors are only polynomial. Finally, we show that when the losses are stochastic and the domain is the simplex, negative entropy regains robustness-but this property does not extend to all subsets, where exponentially small errors are again necessary to avoid suboptimal regret.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A Framework for Directed Hypergraph Signal Processing via tensor t-SVD

arXiv:2606.25112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Directed Hypergraph Signal Processing (DHGSP), a unified framework that extends graph signal processing to accommodate both higher-order (polyadic) and asymmetric (directional) relationships simultaneously. Using the tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) within the t-product algebra, we define a novel adjacency tensor for directed hypergraphs, a topologically faithful shift operator, and a lossless Directed Hypergraph Fourier Transform (t-DHGFT). Experiments on real traffic networks demonstrate that DHGSP outperforms matrix-based (graph and digraph) and undirected tensor-based (hypergraph) baselines in denoising tasks.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

CrossFusion: A Multi-Scale Cross-Attention Convolutional Fusion Model for Cancer Survival Prediction

Cancer survival prediction from whole slide images (WSIs) is a challenging task in computational pathology due to the large size, irregular shape, and high granularity of the WSIs. These characteristics make it difficult to capture the full spectrum of patterns, from subtle cellular abnormalities to complex tissue interactions, which are crucial for accurate prognosis. To address this, we propose CrossFusion, a novel multi-scale feature integration framework that extracts and fuses information from patches across different magnification levels. By effectively modeling both scale-specific patterns and their interactions, CrossFusion generates a rich feature set that enhances survival prediction accuracy. We validate our approach across six cancer types from public datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, when coupled with domain-specific feature extraction backbones, our method shows further gains in prognostic performance compared to general-purpose backbones. The source code is available at: https://github.com/RustinS/CrossFusion

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

BBR-Net: Boundary-Balanced Replay for Continual Medical Image Segmentation

Continual learning for medical image segmentation remains challenging under domain shift because replay-based methods often preserve appearance information without explicitly modeling anatomical structure. This study investigates whether structural consistency governs knowledge retention in continual cardiac ultrasound segmentation. We propose the Boundary-Balanced Replay Network (BBR-Net), which selects replay samples using boundary-aware priority and class balance to preserve anatomically informative regions. The method is evaluated on CAMUS and CardiacNet under forward (CAMUS to CardiacNet) and reverse (CardiacNet to CAMUS) task orders. In the forward setting, BBR-Net retains source-task performance close to an offline joint-training reference, while markedly reducing catastrophic forgetting and preserving competitive target-task adaptation. Ablation results show that boundary-aware prioritization contributes to retention and improves the balance between source-task preservation and target-task adaptation when combined with class-aware sampling. In contrast, the reverse setting reveals that structure-aware replay fails when initial representations are learned from noisy and structurally inconsistent data. To isolate this effect, we conduct a controlled structural perturbation analysis by progressively corrupting source-task boundaries while keeping the dataset, architecture, and training protocol fixed. Forgetting increases consistently as structural reliability decreases, suggesting that replay effectiveness is strongly influenced by the quality of stored structural information, rather than by memory capacity alone. These findings indicate that preserving anatomical structure under domain shift is a central factor in continual medical image segmentation, and that replay mechanisms should account for structural reliability to support robust knowledge retention.

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

ResEdit: Residual embeddings for precise generative image editing

Conditional diffusion image generators can be repurposed for editing through inversion, without the need for large-scale paired fine-tuning data. However, producing high-quality, targeted edits while maintaining image identity and global consistency remains challenging, as weakly conditioned inversion often embeds conflicting image features into the noise. We demonstrate that incorporating a residual image encoding as additional conditioning enables both improved identity preservation and better editability. We optimize this residual encoding to provide a strong conditioning signal for reconstruction, thereby reducing the reliance on inversion and susceptibility to its aforementioned pitfalls. To ensure this residual does not interfere with desired edits, we incorporate a gradient reversal-based optimization strategy that disentangles the residual from the edited condition. We illustrate our method's ability to produce high-fidelity results across precise intrinsic-based editing and relighting, and show proof-of-concept text-guided manipulation.

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

MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Reranking

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

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

Semantic DLM+: Improving Diffusion Language Models through Bias-variance Trade-off in Transition Kernel Design

arXiv:2606.15327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have demonstrated strong scaling capacity as alternatives to autoregressive language models. However, their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of transition kernels, and poorly designed kernels can lead to issues like training instability, slow convergence, and biased sampling. In this paper, we study this sensitivity through a principled analysis of generalization error and identify three critical factors: asymptotic bias (difficulty in approximating the posterior distribution), exposure bias (error propagation during sampling), and optimization variance induced by kernel dispersion. We further compare different transition kernels: masking diffusion yields sparse and easier posterior-approximation targets, while uniform diffusion provides stronger sampling-side repair but induces harder approximation. Motivated by this trade-off, we revisit a previously overlooked variant, semantic DLM (SemDLM), where the transition kernel corrupts tokens to neighborhoods that are semantically similar. Our theory suggests that SemDLM can serve as a plausible middle ground by reducing the posterior approximation difficulty of uniform diffusion while retaining repair ability. However, we find that SemDLM suffers from a semantic basin problem, where sampling repeatedly stays within a semantic region and produces low-diversity text. To address this, we propose SemDLM+, which adds a global transition and a semantic-frequency penalty during sampling. Experiments on LM1B and OpenWebText show that SemDLM+ improves training dynamics and achieves competitive language modeling and generation quality with satisfactory diversity.

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

Reframing AI Loss of Control: What It Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It

arXiv:2606.12442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: At present, loss of control risks have gained much prominence in public discussion, particularly in relation to AI, with extensive discourse present among academics, frontier labs, and even governments. However, in the existing literature, the concept seems to rest on surprisingly weak foundations, where even those that discuss loss of control extensively do not first establish what control is and what exactly is being lost. Our paper aims to address these gaps. We establish a working definition of control by anchoring it to the "setting and getting of goals". Then, we discuss various aspects of control, built on foundational concepts from related fields like cybernetics, management control, and control theory. This includes who (or what) can be in control, and the things they require to be in control, such as the ability to set goals, having a functional control loop, having requisite variety, and having sufficient goal alignment. Once a framework for control is established, we then discuss how control can be lost, how AIs can contribute to such loss of control, and offer relevant recommendations for how one can maintain control. One interesting consequence of our work is that humanity, as individuals and as groups, can lose varying degrees of control as a result of AI behaviour that is far below the level of superintelligence; the potential for loss of control scenarios (as we define them) already exist, and have existed for a long time.

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

FlowPipe: LLM-Enhanced Conditional Generative Flow Networks for Data Preparation Pipeline Construction

arXiv:2606.24679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data preparation pipelines improve data quality in machine learning by transforming raw tables into learning-ready data through sequential cleaning and feature transformation operators. However, automatically constructing such pipelines is computationally difficult because operator sequences are combinatorial and end-to-end evaluation is expensive. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) Multi-DQN methods still face three key limitations: decoupled value estimators weaken long-horizon credit assignment, dataset context is only weakly injected into the policy, and exploration is inefficient in a sparse search space with many invalid states. To address these issues, we propose FlowPipe, a unified framework that formulates pipeline synthesis as conditional probabilistic flow generation over a directed acyclic graph. FlowPipe uses Conditional Generative Flow Networks (C-GFlowNets) with a Trajectory Balance objective to connect terminal validation rewards with early pipeline decisions. It further introduces Deep Semantic Modulation through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), allowing LLM-derived logical priors to condition the policy's internal activations according to dataset semantics. In addition, FlowPipe incorporates failure awareness into the flow objective to avoid invalid states and concentrate search on high-potential regions. Experiments on two benchmark suites with 74 real-world datasets show that FlowPipe outperforms SOTA baselines, improving accuracy by 11.96% on average and achieving 12.5x faster training convergence. Source code is available at https://github.com/KunyuNi/FlowPipe.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Small-molecule modulation of β-arrestins

β-Arrestins are multifunctional regulators of G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) signalling and orchestrate diverse downstream signalling events and physiological responses across the GPCR superfamily1–3. Although GPCR pharmacology has advanced to target orthosteric and allosteric sites, as well as G proteins and GPCR kinases, direct chemical tools to modulate β-arrestin activities have remained conspicuously absent. Here we report the identification of small-molecule inhibitors that selectively target β-arrestins and delineate their mechanism of action through integrated pharmacological, biochemical, biophysical and structural analyses. These inhibitors disrupt β-arrestin engagement with agonist-activated GPCRs, impairing desensitization, internalization and β-arrestin-dependent physiological functions while sparing G protein–receptor coupling. Cryo-electron microscopy, molecular dynamics simulations and structure-guided mutagenesis reveal that one modulator, Cmpd-5, engages a pocket within the central crest of β-arrestin1 formed by the middle, C and lariat loops, a critical receptor-binding interface, stabilizing a distinct conformation that is incompatible with full β-arrestin–receptor engagement. Together, these findings establish a mechanistic framework for β-arrestin modulation, reveal a novel allosteric site for structure-based drug design, and open new avenues for transducer-targeted, pathway-specific GPCR therapeutic agents. Integrated pharmacological, biochemical, biophysical and structural analyses of small-molecule β-arrestin inhibitors show how they block β-arrestin engagement with activated GPCRs, revealing their mechanism of action and uncovering a previously unrecognized allosteric regulatory site.