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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

InternVideo3: Agentify Foundation Models with Multimodal Contextual Reasoning

Recent progress in foundation models has shifted toward agentic behavior involving multi-step reasoning and tool use. However, open-source efforts largely focus on text-dominant settings, leaving long-horizon multimodal tasks underexplored. This gap is evident in video tasks requiring sustained temporal understanding and iterative interaction. We present InternVideo3, a framework enhancing these capabilities via Multimodal Contextual Reasoning (MCR). MCR treats understanding as a closed-loop process over a shared, evolving context containing observations, instructions, reasoning, tool actions, and memory. This frames long-video understanding as evidence accumulation and verification. To ensure efficiency, we introduce Multimodal Multi-head Latent Attention (M^2LA), a token-preserving reparameterization compressing KV-cache states while retaining the full token stream. Our staged training includes continued pretraining, short-to-long supervised fine-tuning, rule-based reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation. Experiments show InternVideo3 achieves strong performance on benchmarks like Video-MME, MLVU, and EgoSchema. We further instantiate the model as a video agent with retrieval tools, demonstrating robust evidence-grounded behavior. Our results suggest that efficient context handling and closed-loop reasoning are vital for adapting open multimodal models toward long-horizon visually grounded agency.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SciOrch: Learning to Orchestrate Expert LLMs for Solving Frontier Multimodal Scientific Reasoning Tasks

Frontier scientific reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), where even the strongest commercial systems fall short of expert-level performance. A closer look at model behavior reveals substantial complementarity that single-model evaluation hides: different frontier models excel on different question types, and no single model captures the full picture. We present SciOrch, a framework that trains a lightweight 8B model to orchestrate frontier LLMs for scientific reasoning. The orchestrator decomposes each question, delegates sub-problems to selected commercial models through API calls, and synthesizes a final answer. Training such an orchestrator is fundamentally harder than conventional agentic RL: each action triggers an API call that is expensive in both dollar cost and latency, making standard online rollouts infeasible. We address this with MCTS-based approach, producing diverse orchestration trajectories, extracting per-node single-turn samples, and optimizing the orchestrator with GRPO-style training. On a 240-question test set spanning SGI-Reasoning and Scientists' First Exam, SciOrch reaches 56.66% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest single commercial model by 3.74% and the strongest multi-agent baseline by 3.33%. It also attains the best accuracy on both SGI and SFE with less than half the API cost of typical multi-agent methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II

Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

DCD: Domain-Oriented Design for Controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2604.07590v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to ground large language models in external knowledge sources. However, when applied to heterogeneous corpora and multi-step queries, Naive RAG pipelines often degrade in quality due to flat knowledge representations and the absence of explicit workflows. In this work, we introduce DCD (Domain-Collection-Document), a domain-oriented design to structure knowledge and control query processing in RAG systems without modifying the underlying language model. The proposed approach relies on a hierarchical decomposition of the information space and multi-stage routing based on structured model outputs, enabling progressive restriction of both retrieval and generation scopes. The architecture is complemented by smart chunking, hybrid retrieval, and integrated validation and generation guardrail mechanisms. We describe the DCD architecture and workflow and discuss evaluation results on synthetic evaluation dataset, highlighting their impact on robustness, factual accuracy, and answer relevance in applied RAG scenarios.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On the Residual Scaling of Looped Transformers: Stability and Transferability

arXiv:2606.18524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped (weight-tied) Transformers apply a shared residual block $N$ times ($h \leftarrow h + \varepsilon\,f(h)$, same $f$ at each step), increasing effective depth without adding parameters. Prior depth-scaling analyses prescribe $\varepsilon = 1/\!\sqrt{L}$ for depth-$L$ residual networks. We show that this is insufficient for looped architectures: weight sharing makes residual updates correlated across iterations, requiring the stronger scaling $\varepsilon = 1/N$. For multi-layer blocks ($L$ unique layers looped $N$ times), we derive a factored parameterization $\varepsilon = \lambda/(N\!\sqrt{L})$ that separates the two sources of growth: $1/N$ controls the within-layer loop correlation, and $1/\!\sqrt{L}$ controls the across-layer variance. A key consequence is that the optimal learning rate depends only on the number of unique layers $L$, not on the loop count $N$, enabling direct hyperparameter transfer from small to large $N$ without retuning. Experiments on looped Transformers confirm that $1/N$ scaling improves trainability and yields better loss than $1/\!\sqrt{N}$ scaling across loop counts.

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

OmniPlan: An Adaptive Framework for Timely and Near-Optimal Network Planning Optimization

arXiv:2606.18105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network planning optimization is a fundamental problem across diverse domains, including transportation systems, communication networks, and power grids. It requires simultaneous optimization of multiple competing objectives under complex constraints. Existing network planning optimization frameworks rely on mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, heuristics, and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models to compute planning decisions. However, they lack effective adaptability to diverse and dynamic user intents, thus leading to the trade-off between execution time and optimality. In this paper, we propose OmniPlan, an adaptive framework that achieves both timeliness and near-optimality in network planning optimization. To achieve the adaptability lacking in existing solutions, OmniPlan employs a large language model (LLM)-based interpreter to convert heterogeneous natural-language intents into a unified and quantifiable user-preference vector. Then it employs a mixture-of-experts architecture that integrates MIP solvers, heuristics, and DRL models as specialized experts, where OmniPlan adapts to diverse intents by dynamically selecting timely and near-optimal experts. Finally, it incorporates a DRL-based expert configuration module that fine-tunes optimization objective weights to align planning decisions with user-specific preferences. We evaluate OmniPlan with a representative real-world workload, i.e., distributed machine learning (ML), where we leverage OmniPlan to offload a wide spectrum of ML inference tasks, e.g., decision trees, SVM, naive Bayes, XGBoost, and random forests, onto a network of hardware devices. Our experiments on a real-world testbed indicate that OmniPlan achieves near-optimal and low-execution-time offloading for real-world ML inference tasks, reducing latency by up to 97.8\% and network device resource consumption by up to 11.5\%.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Conservation Laws for Modern Neural Architectures

arXiv:2606.17816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding gradient descent dynamics is key to explaining the success of over-parameterized models, where implicit bias manifests through conservation laws in gradient flow. While such laws are well understood for linear and ReLU networks, they remain largely unexplored for modern architectures. This work develops a unified framework to characterize conservation laws for contemporary models, including feedforward networks with GELU, SiLU, and SwiGLU activations, multihead attention with sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings, and Mixture-of-Experts architectures under diverse gating designs. Our theoretical findings are supported by experiments that validate the predicted invariants.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frozen Foundation-Model Embeddings Discard Small-Lesion Signal in Chest Radiography: Implications for Pre-Deployment Evaluation

Frozen vision-transformer (ViT) foundation-model embeddings increasingly serve as the substrate for downstream chest-radiography (CXR) pipelines, yet where small-scale, low-contrast signal is retained or lost in the frozen forward pass has not been systematically quantified across architectures, pretraining domains, and objectives. We probed five frozen ViTs (RAD-DINO, DINOv2-B/14, DINOv3 ViT-7B, BiomedCLIP, MedSigLIP) and a frozen DINO-pretrained ResNet-50 architectural control across three large CXR cohorts (NIH-CXR14, MIMIC-CXR, Emory-CXR; aggregate pool n=492,724) and ChestX-Det10 (n=3,543; 1,462 small-lesion bounding boxes across Calcification, Nodule, Mass). Each model was evaluated with a small-scale-perturbation panel and a region-aware bounding-box-stratified probe on real lesions, comparing three pooling modes from the same forward pass: classification token (CLS), patch-mean (mean over all final-layer patch tokens), and bounding-box-restricted patch-local. On the perturbation panel, CLS embeddings sat at the chance floor (area under the ROC curve [AUC] 0.500-0.524); patch-mean was indistinguishable from CLS on iso-blur and reticular-fine cells but rose with CLS on larger directional-blur footprints, while disease AUC on globally decided tasks ranged 0.642-0.913. Patch-local probes recovered AUC ~1.0 from the same forward pass (per-model mean improvement +0.412 to +0.488); the ResNet-50 control reproduced the chance floor. On ChestX-Det10, image-level CLS classification showed within-class small-versus-large stratum gaps up to +0.243 AUC; bounding-box-level patch-local pooling on the same forward pass recovered AUC >= 0.899 on every (model x class) cell. Frozen ViT embeddings silently suppress small-scale signal at the global-aggregation step; the signal is recoverable from patch tokens conditional on a region of interest.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Notation Matters: A Benchmark Study of Token-Optimized Formats in Agentic AI Systems

Large language models in Agentic AI systems consume tool schemas and execution results and emit tool invocations as structured data. The default language for that exchange, JSON, was designed for application-to-application interchange rather than token efficiency, so its structural elements impose substantial token overhead. Recent work proposes token-optimized alternatives such as TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) and TRON (Token Reduced Object Notation) as more compact replacements, but these formats have been evaluated only on isolated comprehension or generation tasks. Whether their token reductions hold inside end-to-end agentic loops therefore remains an open question. We evaluate TOON and TRON on four agentic benchmarks (BFCL, MCPToolBenchPP, MCP-Universe, StableToolBench) and five open-weight LLMs, decoupling input compression from output compression to measure comprehension and generation independently. TRON reduces tokens by up to 27% with accuracy within 14pp of the JSON baseline. TOON achieves up to 18% reduction at a similar 9pp accuracy cost, but additionally cascades on multi-turn parsing failures and collapses parallel tool-call output for most models. The code is available at: https://github.com/lkutschka/notation-matters

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Unifying Acoustic Features and Text with Multimodal LLMs for Neurodegenerative Screening

arXiv:2606.14788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice-based screening offers a scalable and non-invasive way to assess neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD), but their staging remains challenging due to the difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data. This paper presents NeurMLLM, an efficient multimodal generative framework for neurodegenerative disease staging. NeurMLLM first encodes the spectrograms and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients of audio data with vision transformers and projects their representations into the embedding space of a large language model (LLM), where they are concatenated with transcript and demographic instruction tokens as a single unified sequence. The LLM is then instruction-tuned via Low-Rank Adaptation using task prompts to autoregressively predict a constrained label token, enabling a generative classification. By evaluating on the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset for fine-grained staging of AD and PD, we observe that NeurMLLM achieves strong performance, consistently outperforming classical machine learning methods and existing LLM-based approaches. The results show the high potential of multimodal LLMs in neurodegenerative disease staging, improving staging accuracy and supporting accessible deployment.

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

AlignCoder: Aligning Retrieval with Target Intent for Repository-Level Code Completion

arXiv:2601.19697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Repository-level code completion remains a challenging task for existing code large language models (code LLMs) due to their limited understanding of repository-specific context and domain knowledge. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches have shown promise by retrieving relevant code snippets as cross-file context, they suffer from two fundamental problems: misalignment between the query and the target code in the retrieval process, and the inability of existing retrieval methods to effectively utilize the inference information. To address these challenges, we propose AlignCoder, a repository-level code completion framework that introduces a query enhancement mechanism and a reinforcement learning based retriever training method. Our approach generates multiple candidate completions to construct an enhanced query that bridges the semantic gap between the initial query and the target code. Additionally, we employ reinforcement learning to train an AlignRetriever that learns to leverage inference information in the enhanced query for more accurate retrieval. We evaluate AlignCoder on two widely-used benchmarks (CrossCodeEval and RepoEval) across five backbone code LLMs, demonstrating an 18.1% improvement in EM score compared to baselines on the CrossCodeEval benchmark. The results show that our framework achieves superior performance and exhibits high generalizability across various code LLMs and programming languages.

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

A Dynamical Systems Perspective on the Analysis of Neural Networks

arXiv:2507.05164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this chapter, we utilize dynamical systems to analyze several aspects of machine learning algorithms. As an expository contribution we demonstrate how to re-formulate a wide variety of challenges from deep neural networks, (stochastic) gradient descent, and related topics into dynamical statements. We also tackle three concrete challenges. First, we consider the process of information propagation through a neural network, i.e., we study the input-output map for different architectures. We explain the universal embedding property for augmented neural ODEs representing arbitrary functions of given regularity, the classification of multilayer perceptrons and neural ODEs in terms of suitable function classes, and the memory-dependence in neural delay equations. Second, we consider the training aspect of neural networks dynamically. We describe a dynamical systems perspective on gradient descent and study stability for overdetermined problems. We then extend this analysis to the overparameterized setting and describe the edge of stability phenomenon, also in the context of possible explanations for implicit bias. For stochastic gradient descent, we present stability results for the overparameterized setting via Lyapunov exponents of interpolation solutions. Third, we explain several results regarding mean-field limits of neural networks. We describe a result that extends existing techniques to heterogeneous neural networks involving graph limits via digraph measures. This shows how large classes of neural networks naturally fall within the framework of Kuramoto-type models on graphs and their large-graph limits. Finally, we point out that similar strategies to use dynamics to study explainable and reliable AI can also be applied to settings such as generative models or fundamental issues in gradient training methods, such as backpropagation or vanishing/exploding gradients.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Voronoi Percolation: Topological Stability and Giant Cycles

arXiv:2601.00793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the topological stability of Voronoi percolation in higher dimensions. We show that slightly increasing p allows a discretization that preserves increasing topological properties with high probability. This strengthens a theorem of Bollobás and Riordan and generalizes it to higher dimensions. As a consequence, we prove a sharp phase transition for the emergence of i-dimensional giant cycles in Voronoi percolation on the 2i-dimensional torus.

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

Residual-Space Evolutionary Optimization via Flow-based Generative Models

arXiv:2606.20084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data editing with generative methods typically requires differentiable objectives and gradient-based search. However, these assumptions break down in flow-based settings, where edits are performed through forward and backward integration and often involve non-differentiable or black-box objectives. We introduce residual-space evolutionary optimization, a model-agnostic framework that addresses this gap by combining flow-based generative editing with evolutionary algorithms. Building on the observation that conditional flow matching (CFM) can disentangle condition-controlled factors from instance-specific residuals, our framework directly operates in residual space and separates two complementary search regimes: self-pollination performs local exploitation through feature-preserving residual refinement, and cross-pollination promotes broader exploration by recombining residuals across heterogeneous samples. As a proof of concept, we validate on MorphoMNIST, a benchmark dataset for counterfactual generation, and on crystal data, demonstrating that this exploration–exploitation decomposition provides a useful mechanism for balancing target alignment, instance preservation, and diversity, and extends beyond images to real-world scientific domains.

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

Imbalanced Classification under Capacity Constraints

arXiv:2605.03289v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detecting observations from a minority class under severe class imbalance is a central challenge in applications such as fraud detection, medical screening, and industrial quality control. In these settings, each positive prediction triggers a costly follow-up action, an MRI scan, a transaction audit, whose execution is subject to real operational constraints. This paper proposes a formal classification framework under capacity constraints: given a user-defined bound limit $b$ on the proportion of observations that can be labeled as belonging to the minority class, the goal is to find the classifier that maximizes sensitivity on that class. We characterize the optimal classifier under this constraint and establish its equivalence with the classical Bayes classifier under a reweighting of the prior probabilities. We also introduce a capacity-adjusted performance metric $M$ that accounts for the effective detection rate when the capacity constraint is binding. The framework is implemented on top of standard learning methods, k-NN, SVM, random forests, and neural networks, and statistical consistency is established for each. We further show that these methods reduce to post-hoc thresholding when no hyperparameters are oriented toward the capacity-constrained objective, and introduce a capacity-aware support vector machine that exploits the constraint during training and achieves the strongest empirical performance. Experiments on the Taiwanese credit card default dataset confirm that capacity-constrained classifiers substantially outperform both classical approaches and SMOTE under high imbalance regimes. The framework extends naturally to multiclass settings and online environments.

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

SleepMaMi: A Universal Sleep Foundation Model for Integrating Macro- and Micro-structures

arXiv:2602.07628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While the shift toward unified foundation models has revolutionized many deep learning domains, sleep medicine remains largely restricted to task-specific models that focus on localized micro-structure features. These approaches often neglect the rich, multi-modal context of Polysomnography (PSG) and fail to capture the global macro-structure of a full night's sleep. To address this, we introduce SleepMaMi , a Sleep Foundation Model engineered to master both hour-long sleep architectures and fine-grained signal morphologies. Our framework utilizes a hierarchical dual-encoder design: a Macro-Encoder to model full-night temporal dependencies and a Micro-Encoder to capture short-term characteristics from biosignals. Macro-Encoder is trained via Demographic-Guided Contrastive Learning, which aligns overnight sleep patterns with objective subject metadata, such as age, sex and BMI to refine global representations. Micro-Encoder is optimized via a hybrid Masked Autoencoder (MAE) and multi-modal contrastive objective. Pre-trained on a massive corpus of $>$20,000 PSG recordings (158K hours),SleepMaMi outperforms or matches state-of-the-art existing foundation models across a diverse suite of downstream tasks, demonstrating superior generalizability and label-efficient adaptation for clinical sleep analysis.

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

When Sample Selection Bias Precipitates Model Collapse

arXiv:2606.13732v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The proliferation of recursive training on synthetic data can alleviate data scarcity but risks model collapse, where repeated training erodes distributional tails and homogenizes outputs. Data selection is widely viewed as a remedy, yet its reliability depends critically on the reference distribution used by the verifier. We show that in low-resource verification regimes, where each verifier observes only a small, fragmented, and biased slice of the target manifold, selection itself becomes biased. This situation naturally arises in low-resource data silos such as healthcare consortia or proprietary financial institutions, where raw data cannot be pooled and local references are inherently incomplete. As a result, selection preferentially retains samples aligned with the local manifold while pruning globally relevant tail modes, turning from a safeguard against collapse into a mechanism that precipitates it. We theoretically prove that such siloed selection accelerates collapse and induces power-law diversity decay. As an initial mitigation, we construct Wasserstein proxy references from multiple silos without sharing raw data. Empirical results confirm that local-reference selection fails on skewed distributions, whereas collaborative proxy references mitigate diversity degradation, suggesting that recursive synthetic-data pipelines require particular caution when real-data coverage is fragmented or scarce.

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

ReAge3D: Re-Aging 3D Faces with View Consistency

We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Guide to Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects in Competing Risks Settings

arXiv:2606.18281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) are central to treatment decision-making in personalized medicine. In competing risks settings, estimating CATEs from survival data allows for patient-specific assessments of treatment effectiveness for a specific event of interest while properly accounting for alternative event types. This distinction is essential in the presence of comorbidities, where competing causes of death may otherwise confound the therapeutic benefit. Focusing on right-censored survival times with binary treatment, we examine CATEs defined as covariate-conditional differences in the absolute risk for the event of interest at a fixed time. To this end, we study meta-learners which adapt machine learning algorithms for CATE estimation in competing risks scenarios. We systematically compare six meta-learners, combining Cox regression or random survival forests for risk modeling with elastic net regression or random forests for direct CATE modeling. To provide practical guidance on model selection, we evaluate their performance in multiple simulation settings, that differ in hazard complexity, treatment heterogeneity, treatment assignment, event type distribution and censoring. To facilitate applied use, we provide the R package, crsurvlearners, which implements all considered approaches.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Folded Transport MCMC: Eliminating Label Switching by Sampling on a Fundamental Domain

Authors:

arXiv:2606.04307v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In Bayesian mixture models and other exchangeable-component models, the posterior is invariant under permutation of component labels, creating m! equivalent modes-the label-switching problem. Standard MCMC methods either mix poorly across these modes or rely on post-hoc relabelling that cannot guarantee the sampler has converged. We propose Folded Transport MCMC (FolT-MCMC), which eliminates label switching before sampling by restricting the Markov chain to a fundamental domain-a sorted or reflected subspace containing exactly one representative from each symmetric mode. The proposal is a learned normalising flow whose density is symmetrised over the group orbits, ensuring correct targeting on the reduced space. We show that this construction preserves a computable convergence diagnostic based on the oscillation of the log-density ratio, and that the diagnostic becomes sharper on the fundamental domain whenever the original-space flow under-covers one or more symmetric modes. Experiments on Gaussian mixtures (d=2-20), label-switching targets (up to 24 equivalent modes), a standard Bayesian three-component mixture posterior, and real accelerometer data from a supertall building show improvement ratios of 2x to 145x, with the folded diagnostic stable across dimensions while the unfolded diagnostic collapses.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SCAR: Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval for Efficient Context Expansion in RAG

Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across segments, degrading retrieval recall. While static windowing and parent retrieval improve recall, they introduce significant token overhead. We propose SCAR (Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval), an adaptive retrieval policy that selectively expands neighboring chunks by weighing query-neighbor relevance against a structural continuity penalty. SCAR uses a relative expansion threshold tied to each retrieved chunk's own query-relevance, yielding an approximately scale-invariant decision rule that transfers across embedding models without recalibration. Across four diverse corpora (RFC, GDPR, a 10-K report, and a Merger agreement; N=320 queries; 160 boundary-fragmented), SCAR achieves 92.8% recall on boundary-fragmented queries with only 7.84 chunks, a 22.9% reduction compared to static windowing (10.16 chunks). Paired bootstrap tests (B=10,000) confirm the chunk reduction is highly significant (p

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multi-domain AD risk burden and plasma biomarkers in cognitively unimpaired adults

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology accumulates decades before symptom onset, yet how the cumulative effect of genetic, familial, and modifiable lifestyle risk burden jointly affects plasma biomarker levels and trajectories in cognitively unimpaired older adults remains unknown. Methods: We analyzed data from 261 participants in the PREVENT-AD cohort. A composite risk score integrating APOE e4 status, polygenic score, family history, and modifiable/lifestyle risk was examined against six plasma biomarkers using linear regression and linear mixed-effects models. Results: APOE e4 was the strongest predictor of plasma biomarker levels. Higher composite risk burden was associated with elevated ptau181, ptau217, ptau217/Ab42, and GFAP levels, and lower Ab42/40 levels. A higher risk burden was predictive of accelerated ptau181 accumulation. Discussion: Cumulative AD risk burden is broadly associated with plasma biomarker levels and specifically predicts accelerated ptau181 accumulation in cognitively unimpaired older adults, supporting structured composite risk profiling as a framework for AD risk stratification.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Red-Teaming Agent Execution Contexts: Open-World Security Evaluation on OpenClaw

arXiv:2605.11047v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic language-model systems increasingly rely on mutable execution contexts, including files, memory, tools, skills, and auxiliary artifacts, creating security risks beyond explicit user prompts. This paper presents DeepTrap, an automated framework for discovering contextual vulnerabilities in OpenClaw. DeepTrap formulates adversarial context manipulation as a black-box trajectory-level optimization problem that balances risk realization, benign-task preservation, and stealth. It combines risk-conditioned evaluation, multi-objective trajectory scoring, reward-guided beam search, and reflection-based deep probing to identify high-value compromised contexts. We construct a 42-case benchmark spanning six vulnerability classes and seven operational scenarios, and evaluate nine target models using attack and utility grading scores. Results show that contextual compromise can induce substantial unsafe behavior while preserving user-facing task completion, demonstrating that final-response evaluation is insufficient. The findings highlight the need for execution-centric security evaluation of agentic AI systems. Our code is released at: https://github.com/ZJUICSR/DeepTrap

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Beyond the Linear Separability Ceiling: Aligning Representations in VLMs

A challenge in advancing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) is determining whether their failures on abstract reasoning tasks, such as Bongard problems, stem from flawed perception or faulty top-down reasoning. To disentangle these factors, we introduce a diagnostic framework centered on the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance achievable by a linear classifier on a VLM's raw visual embeddings. Applying this framework to state-of-the-art VLMs, we uncover a pervasive ''alignment gap'', where most models fail to generatively outperform the linear separability of their representations. We find that the few models surpassing this ceiling do so via two mechanisms: by further refining visual representations into a more linearly separable format or by executing non-linear decision logic. We demonstrate that this bottleneck is not a fundamental limitation but a solvable visual alignment issue. Our method augments standard next-token prediction with a contrastive objective to restructure the visual manifold into a more one-dimensionally linear geometry, improving image-to-image comparison and enabling models to significantly surpass the LSC on abstract compositional reasoning tasks.