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

QSignAI: Quantum-Randomness-Seeded Identity Signatures at the Intersection of AI for Science and Science for AI

Authors:
Dongping Liu↗Aoyu Zhang↗Luyao Zhang↗

arXiv:2605.27729v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The 2024-2025 Nobel and Turing awards recognised AI and quantum science simultaneously. Yet no deployed system has brought these streams together for the public. This paper presents QSignAI, a production-deployed platform demonstrating a bidirectional AI-quantum relationship in a real-time event participation system. We address three questions: can quantum-randomness generation via a two-source extractor be embedded in an AI-driven social platform with acceptable latency; can an AI bot make quantum phenomena perceptually legible to general audiences; and does the combined system work in practice? A conversational bot routes each participant's first message through a quantum pipeline comprising a Toeplitz two-source extractor over independent single-qubit Hadamard measurements on SV1 and DM1 simulators, plus a 2-qubit Bell state, producing a unique quantum-randomness-seeded identity signature per participant. The first two questions are answered through system architecture and qualitative deployment evidence from live events; the third through successful production deployment. The current deployment uses cloud quantum simulators; physical QPU randomness is the near-term extension. Measurable benchmarks are identified as priority future work.

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02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Large Deviations for the Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation with Randomized Quasi-Periodic Initial Data in Higher Dimensions: Subcritical Case

Authors:
Fei Xu↗Yong Li↗

arXiv:2604.17253v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the cubic weakly nonlinear Schrödinger equation with randomized spatially quasi-periodic initial data in higher dimensions. Under a polynomial decay assumption in Fourier space, we establish a Large Deviations Principle for rogue waves in the so-called subcritical time regime. The proof proceeds in two main steps. We first characterize the distribution of the linear solution and establish the corresponding linear large deviations principle. The lower bound is obtained via pointwise estimates, while the upper bound follows from a combination of truncation and probabilistic arguments. {The method used in this step appears to be new; compare with [GGKS23].} We then perform a detailed combinatorial analysis of the Picard iteration, deriving an effective bound for the Duhamel term and thereby establishing the nonlinear large deviations principle.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

Authors:
Vahid Shahverdi↗Giovanni Luca Marchetti↗Kathl\'en Kohn↗

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Non-Hermitian skin effect induced by spatial noncommutativity

Authors:
Zheng Wei↗Su-Peng Kou↗

arXiv:2606.12961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In all known schemes for the non-Hermitian skin effect, the non-Hermitian ingredient that drives the skin localization, whether asymmetric hopping or gain and loss, is invariably introduced by hand as an independent model parameter along the skin direction. Here we show that when two spatial coordinates do not commute, the skin effect can break free of this paradigm: a gain-loss potential applied along one coordinate automatically generates non-reciprocity along the other through the coordinate noncommutativity, driving all eigenstates to pile up exponentially at a boundary. We term this phenomenon the noncommutative skin effect. The inverse skin length is proportional to the noncommutativity parameter and is given by an analytic formula, exact in the thermodynamic limit and verified by exact diagonalization of lattice models; the reflection symmetry of the imaginary potential furnishes an exact criterion for the presence or absence of the effect, valid rigorously for finite-size systems. For a sinusoidal imaginary potential, the skin direction of all eigenstates flips collectively at parameter points fixed purely by geometry. Because the flip point is independent of the potential strength, the reversal constitutes a zero-crossing measurement scheme intrinsically robust against systematic errors, from which the noncommutativity parameter can be extracted directly. The qualitative transition of the eigenstates from uniform to exponentially localized renders the effect a nonperturbative probe of spatial noncommutativity, and the Peierls-phase structure of its lattice model is in principle accessible to cold-atom synthetic dimensions, photonic resonators, and topolectrical circuits.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Computationally tractable robust differentially private mean estimation

Authors:
Kelly Ramsay↗

arXiv:2606.12654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a new, differentially private mean estimator called the balloon mean. The main features of the balloon mean are that it is computationally tractable and enjoys robustness to outlying observations. It is based on an iterative clipping procedure over expanding Mahalanobis balls, or ``balloons.'' The method satisfies zero-concentrated differential privacy and depends on a small number of interpretable tuning parameters. We provide theoretical guarantees under heavy-tailed and contaminated elliptical models, characterizing its statistical performance and robustness to outliers. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the balloon mean is robust to heavy-tailed and contaminated data, and outperforms existing differentially private mean estimators in contaminated settings.

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

Recursive Agent Harnesses

Authors:
Elias Lumer↗Sahil Sen↗Kevin Paul↗Vamse Kumar Subbiah↗

Recursive language models (RLMs) showed that recursion over model calls is an effective strategy for long-context reasoning, and production coding agents have begun to write code that spawns subagents at scale, most recently in Anthropic's dynamic workflows. We name and study the pattern between these two lines of work, where the recursive unit is a full agent harness with filesystem tools, code execution, and planning rather than a model call with no tools. We call this the Recursive Agent Harness (RAH) and frame it as harness recursion, the code-first extension to the model recursion of RLMs. A parent agent generates and runs an executable script that spawns subagent harnesses in parallel for fine-grained workloads and uses structured function calls for small subtasks. We provide a controlled evaluation on long-context reasoning. With the backbone held fixed at GPT-5 to match the published Codex and RLM baselines, RAH improves the Codex coding-agent baseline from 71.75% to 81.36% on Oolong-Synthetic (199 samples, 13 context-length buckets up to 4M tokens), a gain attributable to the harness rather than the model. With a stronger backbone, Claude Sonnet 4.5, the same design reaches 89.77%.

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

Retrieval-Augmented Foundation Models for Water Level Prediction in the Everglades

Authors:
Rahuul Rangaraj↗Jimeng Shi↗Rajendra Paudel↗Giri Narasimhan↗Yanzhao Wu↗

arXiv:2508.04888v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate water level forecasting in the Everglades is essential for flood mitigation, drought management, water resource planning, and biodiversity conservation. While recent time-series foundation models have shown strong performance on generic tasks (represented in their pre-training), their effectiveness in domain-specific applications remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we curate a domain-specific dataset for water-level forecasting in the Everglades and observe that the performance of current state-of-the-art models remains limited. To address this gap, we leverage a retrieval-augmented mechanism that retrieves analogous multivariate hydrological episodes from an external archive of historical observations to enrich the input context of those pre-trained models. We study two retrieval strategies, statistical similarity-based retrieval and mutual information-based retrieval, and analyze how incorporating retrieved historical contexts affects predictive performance. Extensive experiments show that retrieval augmentation consistently improves long-horizon water level forecasts and yields disproportionately larger gains during extreme events, which is particularly critical for environmental decision-making. Our study provides empirical evidence that analog-based retrieval can benefit pretrained time-series foundation models in environmental science, offering practical insights into their strengths, limitations, and failure modes when applied to hydrological forecasting in the Everglades. Although evaluated in the Everglades, the proposed framework is general and can be applied to other hydrological systems given time series data. The code and data have been made publicly available at https://github.com/rahuul2992000/WaterRAF.

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

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

Authors:
Calvin Luo↗Chen Sun↗Shuran Song↗

arXiv:2606.19656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Efficient Multinomial Logistic Bandit via Frequent Directions

Authors:
Linzhe He↗Yu-Jie Zhang↗Sifan Yang↗Lijun Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.11968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies efficient online algorithms for multinomial logistic bandits (MLogB), where the feedback distribution over $K+1$ outcomes follows a multinomial logistic model of $d$-dimensional action vectors. A representative UCB-type algorithm, OFUL-MLogB, achieves a regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(Kd\sqrt{T})$, but still requires $\mathcal{O}(K^3d^3)$ time and $\mathcal{O}(K^2d^2)$ space per round due to parameter estimation and optimistic reward construction, which is prohibitive in high-dimensional settings. To address this limitation, we propose EOFD-MLogB, which integrates frequent directions matrix sketching into OFUL-MLogB. By maintaining a low-rank SVD sketch of the accumulated Hessian, constrained online Newton updates in parameter estimation and $Kd \times K$ spectral-norm computations in the reward bonus are reduced to one-dimensional root-finding tasks and $K \times K$ eigenvalue computations, respectively. This yields dominant per-round time complexity $\mathcal{O}(Kd(m+K)^2)$ and space complexity $\mathcal{O}(Kd(m+K))$, where $m \ll d$ is the sketch size. We further prove a regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\Delta_T(Kd\ln\Delta_T+m)\sqrt{T})$, where the sketching error factor $\Delta_T$ is controlled by the $m$-truncated spectral tail of the Hessian. Thus, when the Hessian is approximately low-rank, the regret is close to that of OFUL-MLogB. Experiments validate the computational efficiency and competitive performance.

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

An Empirical Analysis of Optimization Dynamics and Sparsity Boundaries in Large-Scale Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Authors:
Houssam El Mir↗

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Operadic consistency: a label-free signal for compositional reasoning failures in LLMs

Authors:
Nathaniel Bottman↗Yinhong Liu↗Kyle Richardson↗

Detecting LLM reasoning failures at inference time without ground-truth labels has motivated a wide range of confidence baselines, including self-consistency, semantic entropy, and P(True), built on within-question sampling and self-evaluation. Operad theory, the formalism for systems built by iterated substitution, suggests a complementary diagnostic: a model's direct answer to a compositional query should agree with the answer it produces by composing a stated decomposition of the same query. We instantiate this idea as operadic consistency (OC), a per-question signal. Across twelve instruction-tuned LLMs (4B to 671B parameters, open-weights and closed-source) on four multi-hop QA datasets, OC is strongly correlated with accuracy on every dataset (Pearson $r \in [0.86, 0.94]$, all $p \leq 0.0004$), and is the only signal we evaluate with $r \geq 0.85$ uniformly across all four datasets. Chain-of-thought self-consistency (CoT-SC; Wang et al., 2023) matches OC on HotpotQA and DROP ($r = 0.93, 0.87$) but drops to $r \approx 0.45$ on MuSiQue and StrategyQA. At the per-question level, OC contributes information beyond CoT-SC and semantic entropy on every dataset (cluster-robust $p \leq 10^{-16}$ for the OC coefficient), and the conclusion is robust to additionally controlling for constructed decomposition-aware baselines ($p \leq 10^{-13}$). The same signal yields selective-prediction improvements (accuracy at fixed coverage) over a tuned CoT-SC baseline at the equal-cost $K = 3$ budget (AUARC lifts of +0.086 to +0.096 and AUROC lifts of +0.092 to +0.164; 95% CIs exclude zero on every cell). On five frontier thinking models, where the decomposition is extracted from the model's own chain of thought, the same equal-cost comparison gives positive selective-prediction point-estimate lift on all 16 (dataset, budget, metric) cells tested, with 95% CIs excluding zero on 12 of the 16.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Long-range nonstabilizerness of topologically encoded states from mutual information

Authors:
David Aram Korbany↗Tyler D. Ellison↗David T. Stephen↗Lorenzo Piroli↗

arXiv:2605.22424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study long-range nonstabilizerness (LRN), namely the obstruction to remove nonstabilizerness with shallow-depth local quantum circuits. In one-dimensional settings, the mutual information between disconnected spatial regions has proven to be a powerful tool to diagnose LRN. In this work, we focus on encoded states of two-dimensional topologically-ordered systems, and explore the ability of the mutual information to serve as a diagnostic of LRN. Focusing on the concrete setting of lattice models defined on a torus, we show that information about LRN can be gained from the analysis of the mutual information between non-overlapping regions containing non-contractible loops, and of the change of such mutual information under modular real-space transformations. We exemplify this idea in the toric code and the non-abelian string-net model with doubled Fibonacci topological order. In the former case, we show that the mutual information provides a full classification, certifying LRN for all encoded non-stabilizer states. In the latter case, instead, our approach does not lead to a full classification, as it detects LRN for all states except from a finite subset with special transformation properties under the modular group. Finally, we discuss how our results on LRN constrain the logical gates that can be implemented fault-tolerantly on the torus.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

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

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

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

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Feature-Aligned Speech Watermarking for Robustness to Reconstruction Distortions

Authors:
Haiyun Li↗Shuhai Peng↗Zhisheng Zhang↗Jingran Xie↗Xiaofeng Xie↗Hanyang Peng↗Zhiyong Wu↗

arXiv:2606.11828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio watermarking aims to embed identifiable information into audio while remaining imperceptible. Existing methods adopt high-fidelity, low-energy designs to preserve perceptual quality, but the resulting watermarks lack robustness under suppression by speech reconstruction models. Improving robustness is challenging due to the inherent robustness-fidelity trade-off in existing designs, where increasing watermark energy improves robustness but reduces fidelity. To address this problem, we propose a feature-aligned watermarking method that aligns the watermark with the original speech feature distribution, allowing higher watermark energy to improve robustness while preserving imperceptibility. We use a pretrained speech codec to generate a pseudo-speech watermark and fuse it into the spectrogram of the input audio, with VAD loss and perceptual losses guiding embedding within voiced regions. Experiments show that our method maintains imperceptibility comparable to existing approaches while substantially improving robustness under both seen and unseen speech reconstruction models.

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

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

Authors:
Haiquan Wen↗Tianxiao Li↗Zhenglin Huang↗Yiwei He↗Guangliang Cheng↗

The rapid advancement of generative AI has substantially improved image and video synthesis, amplifying the risk of multimodal visual misinformation. Recent MLLMs have shown promise for transparent AI-generated content detection through reasoning and explanation, yet existing approaches largely treat image and video forensics as isolated tasks, leaving cross-modal synergies underexplored. To address this, we present BusterX++, a unified MLLM for joint image and video detection with interpretable reasoning. We also introduce GenBuster-Bench++, a meticulously curated, difficulty-aligned benchmark containing balanced image and video samples spanning recent generation models and diverse real-world scenarios. Using this controlled setting, we revisit the widely adopted $SFT \rightarrow RL$ post-training paradigm. Notably, our findings demonstrate that a single-stage, pure RL strategy driven strictly by sparse outcome rewards consistently matches or surpasses a strong SFT+RL baseline across both unified and single-modality settings. Our key insight reveals that SFT imposes lower policy entropy, which restricts the policy search space and dampens exploratory freedom. In contrast, single-stage pure RL maintains higher policy entropy throughout training, effectively unlocking the spontaneous emergence of cross-modal capability transfer between image and video forensics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BusterX++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the powerful potential of RL for unified cross-modal visual reasoning.

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

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

Authors:
Varun Reddy Nalagatla↗

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

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

Can Editing 1 Neuron Fix Repetition Loops in LLMs?

Authors:
Aristotelis Lazaridis↗Aman Sharma↗Dylan Bates↗Brian King↗Vincent Lu↗Jack FitzGerald↗

arXiv:2606.13705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Yes. Can it cure doom loops? Probably not. The Gemma 4 instruction-tuned models share a reproducible failure: on long factual enumeration prompts, such as listing every episode of a TV series, the 88 IAU constellations, or the 151 original Pokemon, they collapse into repetition, either a tight verbatim loop or a list whose entries decay onto a single answer. These loops occur at rates as high as 95% and survive prompt rewording, inference-engine changes, and most sampling adjustments. In this paper we explore whether this behavior is localized enough to remove by weight edits. To localize the cause, we use per-layer ablation and per-neuron attribution, then confirm the strongest candidates with full-generation sweeps. The loops trace to a small set of MLP neurons (or, in the 26B-A4B Mixture-of-Experts model, a few routed experts) which we suppress with static weight edits. These "surgeries" can be as small as a single sign-inverted neuron (in the E2B model). The size of the effective edits grows with model scale, but in all cases, the loop patterns can be addressed at normal generation budgets while preserving general-purpose benchmark scores. However, the edits do not solve everything: we also study longer thinking budgets, where the two larger models most visibly enter doom looping, i.e. a non-convergent regime in which the model self-corrects in circles over a fact it cannot recall, exhausting the budget without committing to a final answer. We show this residual failure is reduced but not eliminated by the same edits, and argue it is fundamentally a knowledge-precision problem rather than a removable circuit; weight surgery can delete a loop, but it cannot supply a missing fact. Our results are both a feasibility demonstration, that is, evidence that a concrete generation pathology can be localized to a few parameters and edited out, and a delineation of where that approach stops.

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

Multi-task Learning is Not Enough: Representational Entanglement in Dual-output Second Language Speech Recognition

Authors:
Seung Hwan Cho↗Young-Min Kim↗

Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving distinct task representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-task decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to reduce surface degradation in dual-output L2 automatic speech recognition.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

How Low Can You Go? Active Learning for Sparse Model Discovery in the Ultra-Low-Data Limit

Authors:
Ana Larra\~naga↗Urban Fasel↗Steven L. Brunton↗

arXiv:2606.12182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying the governing equations of complex dynamical systems remains a fundamental challenge across science and engineering. While early approaches relied on empirical data and heuristics, modern data-driven methods offer greater flexibility and fewer assumptions. However, data acquisition in real-world settings is often expensive. This work addresses this challenge by introducing an active learning strategy for dynamics discovery in the ultra-low data limit. Rather than sampling randomly, our method iteratively prioritizes regions that are most informative for model identification. This approach builds on Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy), and utilizes an ensemble extension, E-SINDy, to estimate epistemic uncertainty and guide the sampling for both ordinary and partial differential equations (ODEs/PDEs). For ODEs, an exhaustive analysis is conducted on the Lorenz system across varying data budgets and noise levels. For PDEs, two systems with contrasting dynamical characteristics are examined: the Burgers' equation, where a sharp shock front creates a distinction between informative and uninformative regions, and the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, which presents a more spatially complex sampling landscape. Across all scenarios, the proposed method accurately identifies the governing dynamics with significantly fewer data samples than random sampling.

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

Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting

Authors:
Zhuonan Liang↗Dongnan Liu↗Jianan Fan↗Yaxuan Song↗Qiang Qu↗Runnan Chen↗Yu Yao↗Peng Fu↗Weidong Cai↗

Object counting models often degrade under cross-domain deployment because density composition varies across domains and is itself task-relevant. Standard feature alignment methods tend to suppress such variation by encouraging global domain invariance, which can be harmful when source and target domains contain different proportions of background, sparse foreground, and dense foreground. We propose Conditional Feature Alignment (CFA), a cross-domain counting framework that aligns representations within label-induced conditions rather than across full marginal feature distributions. Given density annotations or pseudo-density predictions, CFA constructs foreground/background or density-level conditions and aligns only features belonging to matching conditions. We formalise this idea through a conditional divergence perspective, showing that conditional alignment removes within-condition discrepancy while preserving condition-marginal density shift. For unsupervised domain adaptation, CFA estimates source conditions from annotations and target conditions from detached pseudo-density maps, then performs condition-wise adversarial alignment with full-image consistency regularisation. For source-domain generalisation, we instantiate the same principle with MPCount by enforcing condition-wise memory-consistency between generated source-domain views. Experiments on crowd and cell counting benchmarks show competitive or improved performance across diverse UDA and DG settings. For example, on JHU-CROWD++ FH$\rightarrow$SN, CFA-DG reduces MAE/RMSE from MPCount's 216.3/421.4 to 90.5/169.9, indicating that condition-wise alignment is especially effective under large weather- and density-induced shifts. These results suggest that condition-wise alignment is a promising design principle for domain-adaptive counting.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HumP-KD: A Hybrid Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation Framework for Efficient Fire Classification

Authors:
Mohammed Arif Mainuddin↗Najifa Tabassum↗Omar Ibne Shahid↗Riasat Khan↗

Real-time fire classification systems require models that are simultaneously accurate, computationally efficient, and deployable on resource-constrained hardware. This work proposes HumP-KD, a Hybrid Uncertainty-aware Multi-stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation framework for efficient fire classification. Two datasets, FlameVision and Dataset-II, containing 8,600 and 31,309 images, are used. Various CNN and transformer baselines are applied under standard preprocessing, online augmentation, Gaussian noise and motion blur robustness conditions. The proposed HumP-KD model distills knowledge from two frozen heterogeneous transformer teachers, Swin-Tiny and ViT-Base, along with their Meta-MLP ensemble, into a lightweight MobileViT-S student via three tightly integrated components. Hierarchical Progressive Knowledge Distillation employs a Hierarchical Feature Builder. It generates a fused spatial attention mask to guide distillation toward discriminative regions selectively. Multi-Stage Knowledge Distillation progressively activates three distillation stages across training. On Dataset-II, HumP-KD achieves a mean F1 score of $0.9876 \pm 0.0063$ across 10 independent trials, significantly outperforming the MobileViT-S baseline trained without distillation ($0.9537 \pm 0.0351$), with statistical significance confirmed by both independent t-test ($p = 0.0195$) and Wilcoxon signed-rank test ($W = 1$, $p = 0.0039$). The proposed method also demonstrates strong generalization across datasets and robustness under degraded visual conditions. The student model retains only 4.94M parameters and 19.01Mb model size, representing a $5.7\times$ parameter reduction over Swin-Tiny and a $17.5\times$ reduction over ViT-Base, while achieving 37.72 CPU FPS, making it suitable for real-time deployment.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

G-Long: Graph-Enhanced Memory Management for Efficient Long-Term Dialogue Agents

Authors:
Minjun Choi↗Yoonjin Jang↗Sangwon Youn↗Youngjoong Ko↗

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced open-domain dialogue systems, maintaining long-term consistency remains a challenge due to inherent limitations in long-context reasoning and the inefficiency of processing extensive raw text. Existing approaches typically rely on either unstructured memory storage, which is prone to information loss, or computationally expensive LLMs that incur high latency. To address these limitations, we propose G-Long, a graph-enhanced framework that utilizes a fine-tuned small Language Model (sLM) for structured triplet extraction and associative retrieval, significantly reducing operational costs. Furthermore, we introduce the novel attention-aware importance scoring mechanism that leverages the intrinsic cross-attention signals of a T5 summarizer to identify salient memories. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that G-Long achieves state-of-the-art performance in both response generation and memory retrieval, yielding performance gains of up to 9.8% in response quality on MSC and 40.8% in retrieval recall on LME, while significantly minimizing computational overhead.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Virtuous AI is an Existential Risk

Authors:
Guillermo Del Pinal↗Youngchan Lee↗Min Ohn↗

arXiv:2606.13739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk – by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities – we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Guiding the development of climate counterfactuals for health impact attribution studies

Authors:
Charnley↗G. E. C↗Kotz↗Kawiecki Peralta↗Grayson↗K. M↗

Climate change detection and attribution (D&A) methods have become vital for quantifying the influence of anthropogenic forcing on the Earth's systems, including human health. Health impact attribution (HIA) studies seek to disentangle climate-driven health effects from natural variability yet are often constrained by the availability of accessible counterfactual climate scenarios. This tutorial paper presents a flexible, reproducible framework for developing counterfactual climates without reliance on computationally intensive global circulation models. We provide practical, R-based methodologies for constructing both trend-based (temperature and non-temperature) and event-based counterfactual, using a variety of techniques including model residual detrending, data-driven decomposition (e.g., Singular Spectrum Analysis and Empirical Mode Decomposition) and stochastic weather generators. The tutorial also explores the incorporation of greenhouse gas concentrations as forcing variables, rather than global mean temperature anomalies. By operationalising these methods through worked examples and an open code repository, this paper aims to build capacity within the HIA community, enhance methodological transparency, and foster interdisciplinary collaboration between climate and health researchers.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

CacheMuon: Using Temporal Preconditioning To Approximate Polar Factor

Authors:
Bishnu Dev↗Sushil Bohara↗Martin Tak\'a\v{c}↗Samuel Horv\'ath↗

arXiv:2606.16371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an optimizer that computes updates using the polar factor of the momentum matrix and has shown strong empirical performance across a range of training settings. A key component of Muon is the Newton-Schulz iteration used to compute this polar factor. Although this avoids the cost of an exact singular value decomposition, it remains expensive in practice because it is applied at every optimization step. At the same time, the momentum matrix changes smoothly over training, suggesting strong temporal correlation in the corresponding polar factors. In this paper, we exploit this structure and propose CacheMuon, a temporal preconditioning method that reuses information from previous optimization steps to approximate the polar factor at the current step. This reduces redundant orthogonalization computation across iterations. We analyze CacheMuon as an inexact Muon update, with error controlled by fresh-solver error and cache staleness. Empirically, CacheMuon provides a controllable quality-efficiency frontier: conservative thresholds closely match fresh Muon on language-model and vision training while reducing orthogonalization FLOPs, whereas more aggressive thresholds yield larger arithmetic savings at the cost of modest validation-quality degradation.

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