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01.
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.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Collective Emission in LH2 Assembly Beyond the Point-Dipole Approximation

arXiv:2606.11227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collective emission in light-harvesting assemblies is governed by the local transition dipole and finite geometry of emitting units, a fact that point-dipole approximation obscures. To go beyond this picture, we develop a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian using the quantum electrodynamic dyadic Green's tensor for a purple bacteria. We construct it for the isolated 24-bacteriochlorophyll conical frustum and its P42$_1$2 crystallographic assembly. The P42$_1$2 unit-cell symmetry is found to invert the bright-dark ordering of the single ring, placing subradiant states at the low-energy end and revealing the entire crystal to be the energy-harvesting entity. Tilt-driven switching is activated only in crystal geometries where the finite dipole-carrier (LH2) lies perpendicular to the growth plane. Vacancy and orientational disorder work only in cooperation to renormalize the switching threshold from higher polar angles to lower values.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MassSpecGym in the Wild: Uncovering and Correcting Evaluation Pitfalls in AI-Driven Molecule Discovery

arXiv:2606.19624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable benchmarking is critical for developing machine learning models for tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based molecule discovery. Subtle issues in experimental design and model evaluation procedures can degrade the trustworthiness of such benchmarks and lead to erroneous conclusions. We conduct a thorough review of model evaluation issues in the recent MS/MS machine learning literature, using the standard MassSpecGym benchmark suite as a case study to illustrate the impact of these issues. We find evaluation issues in at least 17 of 26 papers reporting MassSpecGym benchmark results in the first year of its adoption. We isolate three classes of failures: (i) data leakage, (ii) shortcut learning, and (iii) implementation bugs and metric divergence. Through extensive experimentation and code replication, we quantify the impact of these issues and show how they corrupt the evaluation standards MassSpecGym was designed to enforce. We distill our findings into recommendations generalizable to MS/MS challenges, benchmarks, and custom evaluation setups. We also release MassSpecGym v1.5, an implementation of our recommendations in the MassSpecGym benchmarking suite which addresses the failure modes identified in this audit. MassSpecGym v1.5 is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Regulating the Machine Contributor: Governance and Policy Alignment in Open Source

arXiv:2606.14594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted software development has moved from line-level autocomplete to agents that can plan changes, edit files, and submit pull requests with limited human supervision. Open-source software, however, evolves through a process designed for humans: contributor agreements, codes of conduct, and review norms all assume a legally accountable person who can attest to provenance and answer reviewer questions. Autonomous and semi-autonomous AI contributors strain those assumptions, and the 2025-2026 record of agent-driven incidents, AI-generated nuisance volume, and platform-level shutdowns shows that the gap is operationally consequential. Several open-source organisations have responded with contribution policies, but the result is fragmented, and its alignment with emerging AI governance frameworks (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF with the UC Berkeley Agentic AI Profile, ISO/IEC 42001 and 23894) is unmapped at the contribution level. We compare policies across six organisations (SymPy, LLVM, matplotlib, OpenInfra, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Linux Foundation) using Most-Similar Systems Design with indicator-based coding and process tracing for SymPy and LLVM. From this we derive a six-dimensional taxonomy (disclosure, responsibility, human oversight, licensing, enforcement, maintainer workload), an ordinal Policy Maturity Score, and a mapping of documented agent incidents onto the dimensions each policy fails to govern. Aligning the dimensions with the regulatory frameworks above identifies overlapping gaps neither side currently closes, and we close by sketching the shape of a harmonised tiered framework and the empirical evaluation needed to calibrate it.

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

Transformer-Based Language Models Across Domain Verticals: Architectures, Applications and Critical Assessment

Transformer-based language models have become the default substrate for natural language processing and the pace of new releases has made it hard for practitioners to separate durable ideas from the noise of incremental announcements. This review works at two levels. At the level of mechanism, we organise the main transformer families into a working taxonomy, covering encoder-only, decoder-only, encoder-decoder, long-context, permutation-based, and generator-discriminator variants. We then extend the discussion to post-2023 developments that changed the picture in practice: instruction tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, direct preference optimisation, mixture-of-experts scaling, retrieval augmentation and the current flagship model families from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral and DeepSeek. At the level of use, we survey deployments across healthcare, finance, legal, education, customer service, creative writing and scientific work. Based on this we link each to the specific capabilities that make a transformer the appropriate tool. The contribution of this paper is a critical assessment that is based on the survey. We compare architectures on four axes that matter to deployment decisions, we quantify the trade-off between parameter count and energy cost. We also discuss how alignment methods, data provenance and benchmark saturation change what it means to call a model "state of the art". The final section lists the research questions that we think deserve more attention.

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

Learning Survival Models with Right-Censored Reporting Delays

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

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

Filtered Conformal Ellipsoids for Graph-Native Time Series

arXiv:2606.17014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Joint prediction sets for multivariate time series should control a single event while adapting to cross-coordinate dependence. We study filtered conformal ellipsoids: a frozen state-space filter emits a one-step predictive mean and covariance, and split-conformal calibration is applied to the resulting Mahalanobis scores. The filter is used to choose the ellipsoid shape; conformal calibration chooses the scalar radius, so the construction benefits from a learned predictive covariance without relying on Gaussian tail probabilities for coverage. The main difficulty is that filtered scores are dependent and learned recurrent filters need not contract in their raw hidden state; we therefore analyse contraction in an observable predictive-law quotient that identifies hidden states producing the same future sequence of emitted Gaussian laws. Under a stable Bayes Gaussian-projection filter, covariance bounds, and a finite-horizon observability Fisher condition, small excess Gaussian negative log-likelihood implies contraction of the learned emitted laws. Combined with a threshold-autocovariance envelope this yields a Chebyshev-type approximate coverage bound for filtered split-conformal prediction under dependence; a sharper Bernstein-type bound requires an additional geometric-mixing concentration assumption. Under Gaussian oracle realisability we also obtain a near-oracle log-volume comparison within the class of conditionally valid Gaussian ellipsoid rules. We instantiate the framework with a GCN-GRU filter with diagonal-plus-low-rank covariance. On moderate-size graph-native traffic benchmarks (METRLA-$20$ and PEMSBAY-$50$), the learned filter gives sharper at-target ellipsoids than static-covariance and non-filter baselines; at full-graph scale and on non-graph-native datasets, factor and copula baselines can be stronger.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A blinded, counterbalanced rater design for evaluating AI-assisted summarisation of tertiary clinical genomics reports: methodology of the QNOMX-VHIR-CPSP-001 Phase 1 study

Background. Tertiary clinical genomics reports condense layered molecular findings into documents that treating oncologists must read, translate, and act upon; manual summarisation of these reports is time-consuming and variable. Tools that assist summarisation and translation into local languages are emerging, yet the field lacks an agreed methodology for evaluating such tools before any downstream clinical use. The appropriate first endpoint is fidelity of the generated summary to its source report, assessed by qualified human raters under blinded scoring, not downstream variant classification. Methods. QNOMX-VHIR-CPSP-001 Phase 1 is a single-site, non-interventional clinical performance study conducted at Vall d'Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR) under ISO 20916:2019 as a Clinical Performance Study Protocol. De-identified tertiary cancer genomics reports from pediatric oncology cases are summarised by the AI-assisted summarisation system under evaluation and, in parallel, by the standard manual workflow. Qualified raters score both summary types against the source genomics report using the Quality Summary Index (QSI), a six-dimension, five-point rubric adapted from the Provider Documentation Summarization Quality Instrument, under a blinded, counterbalanced, two-period crossover with a minimum fourteen-day washout. Two co-primary composite endpoints, content and presentation, are analysed for non-inferiority under a Bayesian hierarchical model, with a frequentist linear mixed model as the convergence check. Inter-rater reliability is reported as Krippendorff's ; a Monte-Carlo power analysis of the fixed clustered design is pre-specified. Discussion. The design isolates summarisation quality from clinical decision-making by scoring both summary types against the same source report under blinding, counterbalancing, and a fourteen-day washout. Conclusion. The QSI rubric, the counterbalanced crossover, and the pre-specified Bayesian primary with frequentist convergence check define a replicable protocol for early-stage evaluation of AI-assisted summarisation in tertiary genomics reporting; observed variance components will inform sample-size determination for Phase 2.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

FineREX: Fine-Tuned NER-RE for Human Smuggling Knowledge Graphs

Court proceedings contain valuable evidence about human smuggling networks, but this information is often buried within unstructured, jargon-heavy legal documents. While large language models (LLMs) can support knowledge graph construction through automated information extraction, existing approaches rely on general-purpose models that are not tailored to the entity and relationship definitions required in this domain. We introduce FineREX, a streamlined knowledge graph construction pipeline built around a fine-tuned LLM for named entity recognition and relationship extraction (NER-RE). Using a manually annotated dataset of $512$ text chunks, FineREX achieves absolute improvements of 15.50% and 31.46% in entity and relationship F1-score, respectively, compared to a larger general-purpose baseline. These gains translate into higher-quality knowledge graphs, reducing legal noise by nearly half and lowering node duplication on long documents from 17.78% to 11.17%. By eliminating document rewriting and redundant extraction stages, FineREX also reduces end-to-end processing time by 50.0%. Our results demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning can substantially outperform larger general-purpose models while improving both the quality and efficiency of knowledge graph construction for illicit network analysis.

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

Beer-Lambert Guided Representation Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Sub-THz Food Inspection Images

Food manufacturing requires reliable inspection systems to detect foreign material contamination and maintain product safety. Sub-THz transmission imaging provides material-dependent attenuation characteristics that are useful for detecting low-density contaminants in food products. However, existing unsupervised anomaly detection methods mainly rely on RGB-pretrained visual representations, which may not adequately capture the transmission behavior of Sub-THz images. This paper proposes a Beer-Lambert guided representation learning framework for unsupervised anomaly detection in Sub-THz food inspection images. The proposed method introduces an attenuation decomposition module as an auxiliary regularization module that constrains student representations through attenuation reconstruction during training. In addition to the conventional one-class setting, we introduce a Leave-One-Food-Out protocol to evaluate generalization capability under unseen food categories. Experimental results on the Inline-Food-Inspection-THz dataset show that the proposed method improves overall anomaly detection performance over the baseline method.

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

Unlocking air traffic flow prediction through microscopic aircraft-state modeling

arXiv:2605.10083v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Short-term air traffic flow prediction in terminal airspace is essential for proactive air traffic management. Existing approaches predominantly model traffic flow as aggregated time series. However, traffic dynamics are governed by aircraft states and their interactions in continuous airspace. Such aggregation obscures fine-grained information, including aircraft kinematics, boundary interactions, and control intent. Here we present AeroSense, a state-to-flow modeling paradigm that predicts future traffic flow directly from instantaneous airspace situations represented as dynamic sets of aircraft states derived from ADS-B trajectories. By establishing an end-to-end mapping from microscopic aircraft states to future regional traffic flow, AeroSense preserves aircraft-level dynamics while naturally accommodating varying traffic density without relying on historical look-back windows. Experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset show that AeroSense exhibits admirable predictive accuracy and robustness over aggregation-based forecasting approaches, particularly during high-density traffic periods. These findings suggest that aircraft-state situation modeling provides a promising alternative to conventional time-series forecasting in air traffic flow management.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ViPER: Vision-based Packing-Aware Encoder for Robust Malware Detection

Visualization-based malware detection maps raw binary bytes to grayscale images and applies learned visual classifiers, providing an evasion-resistant and disassembly-free alternative to conventional analysis pipelines. However, executable packing remains a critical failure mode: packed binaries produce high-entropy images that obscure the structural patterns these models rely on. Because packing is also prevalent in benign software (e.g., for compression or copy protection), packing state alone is not a reliable indicator of maliciousness, and existing approaches do not address this challenge within a unified supervised framework. We present ViPER, a Vision-based Packing-Aware Encoder for Robust malware detection. ViPER builds on a LoRA-adapted ViT-B/14 backbone with a dual-head architecture that jointly learns malware classification and packing detection. A packing-aware gating mechanism conditions malware predictions on the inferred packing state, enabling distinct decision boundaries for packed and unpacked inputs. To address packing label skew during training, we employ frequency-weighted losses with stratified sampling over joint class-packing strata. Evaluated on 200,000 Windows PE byteplot images, ViPER achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.8521, ROC-AUC of 0.9260, and AUPR of 0.9279, outperforming representative state-of-the-art baselines across all primary metrics, while attaining a packing detection AUC of 0.9949.

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

On the Stability of Growth in Structural Plasticity

arXiv:2605.15435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization. In contrast, a model can also be adapted by editing its structure during training, for example by pruning existing hidden-neuron units or growing new ones. Although growth is appealing for adaptive and continual systems, we show that it is not simply the inverse of pruning. Pruning selects among units that have participated in training from the start, whereas growth inserts new units into an already specialized optimization trajectory. We isolate this insertion problem and show that newborn units are often forward-active but backward-starved: they participate in the forward computation, yet receive much weaker gradient signal than incumbent units. This disadvantage is minor in small MLP benchmarks, but becomes clear in harder image-classification settings with a convolutional trunk. In these settings, \textsc{Grow} can achieve high final accuracy during the structural-editing procedure, while \textsc{Prune} is stronger when performance is averaged over the training trajectory or when the final sparse network is retrained from scratch. Interventions targeting optimizer state, insertion, selection, and trainability show that improving the integration of newborn units can improve adaptive performance, but does not automatically produce better final subnetworks. In continual-learning benchmarks stressing plasticity loss, \textsc{Grow} becomes competitive mainly when new units have enough time to integrate. Together, these results suggest that \textsc{Grow} should be evaluated not only as an architecture-search operator, but as a time-sensitive optimization process whose success depends on insertion stability.

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

EvalStop: Using World Feedback to Detect and Correct Reward Overoptimization in Multi-Tenant RLHF Platforms

arXiv:2606.04145v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cloud LLM fine-tuning platforms increasingly serve RLHF workloads, where a learned reward model is optimized as a proxy for human quality. As Gao et al. (2023) showed, this proxy diverges from world feedback (downstream eval metrics) under sustained optimization pressure, a phenomenon known as reward overoptimization. Existing platform schedulers ignore this divergence: non-clairvoyant schedulers optimize JCT without any quality signal, SLAQ-style quality-aware schedulers use training loss (a weaker proxy that drops monotonically through hacking), and classical per-job early stopping requires human monitoring and does not free shared GPUs. We propose EvalStop, a composable scheduling primitive that terminates jobs on k consecutive eval-score declines, releases GPUs, preserves the best checkpoint, and delegates to any base scheduler. We frame scheduler-level early stopping as a detection problem and evaluate it in a discrete-event simulator whose RLHF workload mixes reward-hacking and structurally healthy runs, with ground-truth labels hidden from schedulers. On RLHF-heavy workloads (80% RLHF, 64 GPUs), EvalStop achieves precision 98% / recall 99% / FPR 1.5% while improving JCT by 9% and cutting wasted compute by 22% over SRTF-Est (p

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

Accelerating Speculative Diffusions via Block Verification

arXiv:2606.13426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding speeds up LLM inference by using a draft model to generate tokens, with an acceptance-rejection scheme that ensures that the output matches the target distribution. Adapting this to continuous diffusions is difficult because speculative sampling requires drawing from a residual distribution. While straightforward in discrete spaces, efficiently sampling this residual in continuous space is non-trivial. Consequently, existing diffusion adaptations either use computationally inefficient sampling techniques or rely on an alternative scheme. In this work, we introduce a novel scheme that efficiently implements the original speculative sampling mechanism for diffusion models. Our approach offers a critical advantage over current methods: it enables us to adapt block verification from LLMs to diffusions – which provably improves the acceptance rate of drafts. Furthermore, we formalize and analyze the Free Drafter, a heuristic self-speculative drafter for diffusions that requires no training. By enabling block verification, our Free Drafter yields up to a 6.3% speedup over existing speculative methods with no additional training and negligible overhead beyond the existing parallel verification pass.

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

EAGG: Embodiment-Aligned Grasp Generation via Geometry-Aware Graph Conditioning

arXiv:2606.18092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-end-effector grasp generation seeks a unified model that generalizes across objects and across embodiments ranging from parallel grippers to dexterous end effectors. Existing grasp generators are typically designed for a fixed embodiment or encode embodiment identity with a static descriptor, which weakens transfer when topology, actuation coupling, and contact geometry differ substantially. We present EAGG, an embodiment-aligned grasp generator that represents each embodiment with a topology-aware end-effector graph and an embodiment-specific low-dimensional end-effector control space. A frozen end-effector-cognition backbone converts the current articulated state into geometry-aware tokens that act as a reusable morphology prior, and iterative geometry injection refreshes these tokens throughout sampling so that conditioning remains synchronized with the evolving end-effector geometry. On the MultiGripperGrasp benchmark, EAGG reaches 56.17% average success across six training end effectors, remaining within 1.10 percentage points of specialized training while preserving transfer to finetuning and zero-shot end effectors. Iterative geometry injection further reduces the pooled median contact distance from 0.239 cm to 0.189 cm. These results show that cross-end-effector grasp generation is strengthened by aligning embodiment structure inside a shared generator rather than suppressing embodiment differences. Code is available at https://github.com/wanhaoniu/EAGG.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dark state spectroscopy in nonlinear waveguide quantum electrodynamics

arXiv:2606.11997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum systems face a fundamental trade-off: they must remain decoupled from the environment to maintain long coherence times, yet they require interactions with the environment to be accessible for measurement. As a prime example, emitter arrays coupled to waveguides facilitate collective modes that, owing to interference, can suppress radiation into the waveguide. While complete destructive interference creates perfectly dark states with infinite lifetimes, their inherent decoupling makes them unmeasurable in standard waveguide quantum electrodynamics. Consequently, current approaches must rely on system non-idealities that permit measurement but limit the coherence times. In this work, we lift this limitation by proposing the use of weakly squeezed light generated in \{chi}(2) nonlinear waveguides for the spectroscopy of completely dark states. We show that the fluorescence spectrum probes transitions between the dressed dark states of the emitter array. This work paves the way towards the measurement and control of dark states, with applications for robust quantum memories, computation, and communication.

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

Scenario-based Probing and Steering Cultural Values in Large Language Models–Extended Version

Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed across cultural contexts but often reflect homogenized values inherited from training data. Evaluations of cultural alignment typically rely on direct prompting with survey-style questions, which frequently elicit neutral or safety-aligned responses and fail to capture underlying model preferences. We propose a framework for probing and steering latent cultural representations in LLMs along the two Inglehart–Welzel axes of the World Values Survey (WVS). By translating social value questions into scenario-based behavioral dilemmas, we extract token-level probabilities to measure implicit values and apply activation steering, optionally combined with country-conditioned prompting, to shift model behavior without retraining. Across three open-source LLMs and four target cultures, we find substantial variation in steerability and identify latent entanglement, where interventions along one cultural dimension induce shifts along another. This coupling mirrors correlations in human WVS data and persists across activation, prompt, and hybrid steering. It constrains axis-independent alignment, though general task performance is largely preserved.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Strong duality for the GROW criterion

arXiv:2606.24768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents general strong duality results when testing hypotheses by betting against them. A bet is an e-variable for a composite null hypothesis $\mathcal{P}$: a nonnegative random variable $X$ whose expected value is at most one under every $\P \in \Pcal$. Following Kelly, Breiman, Cover, Shafer, Grünwald and others, we study a natural minimax log-optimality criterion: given a composite alternative $\Qcal$, we characterize the ``GROW value'' $\sup_{X} \inf_{\Q} \E_{\Q}[\log X]$. This paper generalizes the results of [larsson2025numeraire] from (arbitrary $\Pcal$ and) simple $\Qcal$ to arbitrary $\Qcal$. We identify a weak-$*$ joint information projection pair between arbitrary $\Pcal$ and $\Qcal$ that always exists and show that the GROW value for bounded e-variables always equals the relative entropy of this pair, without any restrictions on $\Pcal$ or $\Qcal$. We also prove a similarly general strong duality for the REGROW criterion with bounded e-variables and arbitrary bounded offsets. Under various assumptions our results extend to unbounded e-variables, and examples show that without any assumptions such extensions fail. Our results are analogous to those in[larsson2026complete], swapping tests for bounded e-variables, minimax risk for the GROW criterion, and total variation for relative entropy.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Robustness of Similarity-based Positional Encoding Under Rotations: Theoretical Analysis and Experimental Validation

Positional encoding is a fundamental component of Transformer architectures, as it injects information about the spatial or sequential arrangement of inputs. Among recent alternatives to standard absolute and sinusoidal encodings, similarity-based positional encoding (simPE) has emerged as a flexible framework for representing positional structure through pairwise relations. simPE was originally designed for medical imaging applications, where geometric robustness is especially relevant: small rotations naturally arise during image acquisition, induced by imaging instruments, patient positioning, or slight acquisition misalignments. Despite its empirical promise, the theoretical behavior of simPE under geometric perturbations has not been fully characterized. In this paper, we study the robustness of simPE with respect to rotations, combining formal theoretical analysis with experimental validation. We first show that simPE is generally not rotation-invariant. We then prove that, under mild Lipschitz assumptions on the elementary components, simPE is stable under rotational perturbations and derive explicit perturbation bounds in Frobenius norm. We validate these findings experimentally on four controlled datasets–a synthetic Arrow dataset, a synthetic Shapes dataset (four geometric shape categories), a synthetic Digits dataset, and a benchmark image classification dataset (FashionMNIST)–in which training and validation images are kept in a fixed canonical orientation while test images are subjected to increasing rotation angles. Across all datasets, simPE consistently outperforms standard learned positional encoding in terms of accuracy, F1 score, precision, and recall under rotation, particularly in the small-to-moderate angle regime, corroborating the theoretical stability guarantees.

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

LEDGER: A Long-Context Benchmark of Corporate Annual Reports for Grounded Financial Retrieval and Extraction

Finance reporting is a natural proving ground for large language models, and the very-long-context capabilities of recent models across all sizes make rigorous evaluation in this domain an increasingly pressing need. Yet most public financial resources reduce the task to plain-text SEC 10-K filings paired with a handful of question-answer items. We release LEDGER (Long-context Evaluation of Documents for Grounded Extraction and Retrieval), a corpus of 4,999 digitized corporate annual reports - full documents with figures, tables, and narrative, not just regulatory filings. Each report is labeled with 31 consolidated financial KPIs to be extracted and linked to the market's reaction at the earnings date. From this data we derive three evaluation benchmarks spanning the difficulty spectrum: a pure page-level KPI retrieval task with TREC-style relevance judgments over 118,048 questions in natural language, a conversational "needle-in-a-haystack" single-value lookup, and a full KPI extraction task, both from long, numerically dense reports. We additionally provide human OCR-quality annotations with inter-annotator agreement and the complete extraction, validation, and scoring toolchain. We further demonstrate the dataset's research utility with a case study linking CEO-letter rhetoric to post-publication market impact.

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

FraudSMSWalker: Benchmarking Agentic Large Language Models for SMS-to-Webpage Fraud Detection

SMS fraud is increasingly cross-channel: a message directs the user to a webpage, and the final risk depends on how the SMS claim aligns with the page content and requested user action. However, existing evaluations either focus on message-only smishing classification or expose URL and domain cues that allow models to rely on reputation shortcuts. To address this gap, we introduce FraudSMSWalker, a controlled benchmark for URL-masked SMS-to-webpage fraud judgment. FraudSMSWalker contains 699 bilingual chains, including 332 fraudulent and 367 benign cases, across ten service scenarios. The model-visible input consists of the SMS context and sanitized webpage evidence, while raw URLs, hosts, domains, IPs, redirects, and reputation metadata are withheld. The benchmark further includes hard benign cases whose pages contain login, payment, verification, or account-management elements that are plausible under the service context but also appear in scam flows. We evaluate nine web agents under masked browser-agent protocols and conduct URL-visibility ablations. The results show that current agents can detect suspicious cues, but struggle to preserve benign recall and often produce positive predictions that are weakly supported by the observed evidence. These findings position FraudSMSWalker as a benchmark for measuring whether web agents can make fraud judgments that remain both accurate and evidence-grounded when direct reputation shortcuts are suppressed. The associated code and dataset are accessible at the \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/w/FraudMessageWalker-Bench}{anonymous link}.

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

MADAR: An Address-Free Processor

arXiv:2606.15535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In a modern processor, computing is the cheap part. Most of its area and energy go to addressing – moving operands to and from a register file and cache, and running the tags, ports, miss queues, and bypass networks that find a value where it was left. MADAR deletes that machinery by abolishing the address. All state circulates in rings of slots that advance one position per clock; instructions and data ride in the same slots; a value is named by its place in an orbit – a \rp{} coordinate – not by an address; a fixed station computes when a circulating instruction sweeps past its operands, on a schedule set at compile time; and a hierarchy of rings of increasing period replaces the cache hierarchy, movement between them scheduled rather than triggered by a miss. No prior circulating-store, dataflow, or statically scheduled machine combines all four of these. We define the execution model, validate it in a cycle-accurate register-transfer-level implementation, show it compilable – a constructive scheduler emits programs cross-checked against the implementation – and price it with a first-order energy model. The payoff is clearest for AI acceleration: the multiply-accumulate at the heart of every matmul and convolution compiles to a streaming form whose energy per operation stays flat as the reduction grows, and the operand reuse that makes matrix multiplication efficient is carried by the ring-period hierarchy – the memory hierarchy doing by rotation what a cache does by tags. MADAR is a new design point for any computation whose data movement is known before the program runs.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Multi-Head Attention-Based Feature Extractor Integration with Soft Actor-Critic for Porosity Prediction and Process Parameter Optimization in Additive Manufacturing

arXiv:2606.20087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Additive manufacturing process optimization requires precise parameter control to minimize defects such as porosity. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) approaches using discrete action spaces suffer from slow convergence and susceptibility to local optima, limiting their effectiveness for high-precision manufacturing tasks. This study addresses these limitations by employing a continuous action space combined with a novel architecture that integrates a multi-head attention mechanism with the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm. The attention-based feature extractor enhances the agent's ability to capture subtle variations in low-dimensional input features, enabling more effective exploration-exploitation balance for navigating value spaces with local minima. We validate our approach on porosity prediction and process parameter optimization in laser powder bed fusion, demonstrating faster convergence and higher final reward values compared to standard RL methods including DQN, PPO, TD3, and vanilla SAC. The proposed methodology achieves a convergence value of 322.79 within 14 episodes, outperforming existing approaches while maintaining stability throughout training.