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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

G-Loss: Graph-Guided Fine-Tuning of Language Models

Traditional loss functions, including cross-entropy, contrastive, triplet, and su pervised contrastive losses, used for fine-tuning pre-trained language models such as BERT, operate only within local neighborhoods and fail to account for the global semantic structure. We present G-Loss, a graph-guided loss function that incorporates semi-supervised label propagation to use structural relationships within the embedding manifold. G-Loss builds a document-similarity graph that captures global semantic relationships, thereby guiding the model to learn more discriminative and robust embeddings. We evaluate G-Loss on five benchmark datasets covering key downstream classification tasks: MR (sentiment analysis), R8 and R52 (topic categorization), Ohsumed (medical document classification), and 20NG (news categorization). In the majority of experimental setups, G-Loss converges faster and produces semantically coherent embedding spaces, resulting in higher classification accuracy than models fine-tuned with traditional loss functions.

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

Transformers Learn the Mestre-Nagao Heuristic

arXiv:2606.15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

VGPT-RSI for RH-Adjacent Formal Progress: Boundary Certificates, Verified Finite Lagarias Inequalities, and Explicit Failure Localization

arXiv:2606.15096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Riemann Hypothesis remains one of the central unsolved problems in mathematics. Rather than claiming proof, we investigate whether a verifiable AI-assisted reasoning system can produce reliable, formally checked partial progress while explicitly identifying the remaining mathematical obstructions. We apply the Verifiable Growing Physical Transformer with Recursive Self-Improvement (VGPT-RSI) to two RH-adjacent certification tasks. First, we construct and verify a finite RH-boundary certificate for inequality on a parameterized safe lower curve over a region. The numerical boundary curve is converted into a certificate-backed lower curve, audited using outward-rounded interval arithmetic and Arb/FLINT ball arithmetic, and then checked in Rocq/CoqInterval for the parameterized theorem. Second, we initiate a formal Lagarias-route certificate. Lagarias criterion states that RH is equivalent to the global inequality. We formalize the finite quantity and produce a Coq-checked finite certificate. The final system identifies the exact unresolved mathematical bottlenecks: formalizing the Lagarias equivalence, proving the global tail theorem beyond any finite cutoff, and potentially reducing counterexamples to colossally abundant or related extremal integers. These results demonstrate that VGPT-RSI can produce certified RH-adjacent formal progress, organize proof dependencies, and avoid overclaiming when the remaining obstruction is genuinely mathematical.

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

ANCHOR: Error-Controlled Adaptive Numerical Correction for Neural Operator Time Marching

arXiv:2512.19643v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Numerical simulation of time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) is central to scientific and engineering applications, but high-fidelity solvers are often prohibitively expensive for long-horizon or time-critical settings. Neural operator (NO) surrogates offer fast inference across parametric and functional inputs; however, most autoregressive NO frameworks remain vulnerable to compounding errors, and ensemble-averaged metrics provide limited guarantees for individual inference trajectories. In practice, error accumulation can become unacceptable beyond the training horizon, and existing methods lack mechanisms for online monitoring or correction. To address this gap, we propose ANCHOR (Adaptive Numerical Correction for High-fidelity Operator Rollouts), an online, instance-aware hybrid inference framework for stable long-horizon prediction of nonlinear, time-dependent PDEs. ANCHOR treats a pretrained NO as the primary inference engine and adaptively couples it with a classical numerical solver using a physics-informed, residual-based error estimator. Inspired by adaptive time-stepping in numerical analysis, ANCHOR monitors an exponential moving average (EMA) of the normalized PDE residual to detect accumulating error and trigger corrective solver interventions without requiring access to ground-truth solutions. We show that the EMA-based estimator correlates strongly with the true relative L2 error, enabling data-free, instance-aware error control during inference. Evaluations on six canonical PDEs: 1D and 2D Burgers', 2D Allen-Cahn, 2D Cahn-Hilliard, 2D Navier-Stokes, and 3D heat conduction, demonstrate that ANCHOR reliably bounds long-horizon error growth, stabilizes extrapolative rollouts, and significantly improves robustness over standalone neural operators, while remaining substantially more efficient than high-fidelity numerical solvers.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Decoherence as Defence and the Magnitude of Noise Regularisation: A Rigorous N -Qubit Theory of Stochastic Quantum Neural Networks for Adversarially Robust Network Intrusion Detection

Stochastic quantum neural networks (SQNNs) encode neuronal activations as qubits, synaptic topology as entanglement, and neural noise through a Lindblad master equation. A recent conference study applied a ring-entangled SQNN to collaborative intrusion detection and reached three conclusions: ring entanglement is essential for non-local anomaly detection; an adversarial-resilience bound holds but is conservative; and the depolarising channel fails to act as a dropout-style regulariser, behaving instead as output noise. It left open whether a per-gate stochastic deactivation (``true quantum dropout'') could regularise where the depolarising channel could not, and whether the loose robustness bound could be replaced by a predictive theory. This paper resolves both and extends the framework to real data and to neutral-atom hardware. We give an $N$-qubit formulation through the stochastic master equation and its vectorised Liouvillian, and prove a decoherence-contraction theorem: a depolarising channel of strength $\gamma$ over $L$ entangling layers contracts every weight-$w$ Pauli read-out by a factor $(1-4\gamma/3)^{wL}$ (for the weight-$1$ read-out used here, $(1-4\gamma/3)^{L}$); building on the general noise-as-defence result of Du et al., we make this quantitative and operational for intrusion detection. On the real NSL-KDD dataset under white-box FGSM and PGD attacks, a depolarising SQNN trained with the channel is, over seven seeds under strong $\ell_\infty$/$\ell_2$ attacks, significantly more robust than the noiseless circuit ($\ell_\infty$ PGD-$20$, $p=0.04$, large effect) and, critically, never suffers the catastrophic robustness collapse that the noiseless model and gradient-trained classical detectors (which fall from $95\%$ to $47\%$) do, cutting robustness variance roughly twofold; we show this robustness arises from a noise-reshaped training boundary rather than from attack-time gradient contraction. For generalisation, we derive an adaptive-penalty formula showing that per-gate dropout implements a curvature-weighted $L_2$ penalty $\tfrac{p(1-p)}{2}\sum\theta^2\partial^2_\theta L$ in weight space, maximised at $p=1/2$, whereas depolarising noise implements an output-space penalty. A $30$-seed study confirms the formula's quantitative prediction: both mechanisms reduce the train-test gap by a small but statistically significant margin ($\approx\!0.01$; $p

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

FOUNDv2: Learning Unified User Quantized Tokenizers for User Representation

arXiv:2508.00956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: User representation learning serves as a fundamental pillar for personalized services on large-scale web platforms. Despite its importance, conventional continuous embedding methods face significant challenges, including the lack of a unified paradigm for multi-source data integration, prohibitive storage overhead due to low information density, and the lack of multi-scale modeling granularity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FOUNDv2, a comprehensive user representation scheme centered on the Unified User Quantized Tokenizer U2QT) framework. FOUNDv2 transforms heterogeneous user data into a standardized discrete token space through a robust two-stage architecture. Specifically, the framework first extracts compact feature representations and subsequently employs a multi-view RQ-VAE to discretize them into storage-efficient tokens using shared and source-specific codebooks. To empower these representations with predictive intelligence, we further design multi-scale alignment objectives to capture both fine-grained behavioral dependencies and macro-temporal periodicity. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that FOUNDv2 consistently outperforms task-specific baselines while achieving substantial reductions in storage and computational costs. Finally, the large-scale deployment of FOUNDv2 on Alipay validates its practical scalability and efficiency across diverse industrial scenarios. The main code is available at: https://github.com/chuanhe1999/FOUNDv2.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

ParaPairAudioBench: Paralinguistic Pairwise Audio Benchmark for LALM-as-a-Judge

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have been widely used as judge models for the automatic evaluation of generated speech. However, prior approaches predominantly focus on holistic naturalness, leaving fine-grained paralinguistic distinctions underexplored. We introduce ParaPairAudioBench, a pairwise benchmark of 5,175 audio pairs across five paralinguistic dimensions: Style, Rate, Emphasis, Age, and Gender. Our experiments show that current LALM judges still lag behind human judgments by 32%p on average and exhibit severe calibration failures, particularly in Tie cases where the correct decision is to abstain. To further analyze lexical versus acoustic reliance, the benchmark includes both same-transcript and cross-transcript conditions. ParaPairAudioBench enables multi-dimensional, calibration-aware assessment of the reliability of LALM-as-a-Judge for paralinguistic speech evaluation.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Universal Design and Physical Applications of Non-Uniform Cellular Automata on Translationally Invariant Lattices

arXiv:2605.13379v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by recent theoretical and experimental advances, hyperbolic lattices have emerged as a paradigmatic setting in which geometry becomes an active organizing principle of quantum systems. Their negative curvature, exponential volume growth, and non-Abelian translation symmetry make them fundamentally distinct from Euclidean lattices and give rise to rich geometry-dependent physics, but also hinder the direct application of well-established analytical and computational approaches originally developed for physical systems defined on Euclidean lattices. To establish a unified framework for geometry-dependent physics on Euclidean and hyperbolic lattices, we develop higher-order non-uniform cellular automata (NUCA) as a local-to-global construction for translationally invariant regular lattices. This construction derives geometry-dependent update rules through a lattice-deforming procedure that embeds hyperbolic lattices into a Euclidean square lattice, thereby encoding hyperbolic geometry while preserving physical locality. It thus provides a systematic route toward quantum and classical physics on hyperbolic lattices. We demonstrate the framework in three applications ranging from quantum many-body physics to non-equilibrium statistical physics. First, on the hyperbolic $\{5,4\}$ lattice, a linear NUCA generates exactly solvable subsystem symmetry-protected topological (SSPT) models and spontaneous subsystem symmetry-breaking models. Second, as a quantum generalization, we construct non-uniform Clifford quantum cellular automata (CQCA) for the hyperbolic cluster state. Third, we formulate a probabilistic NUCA for directed percolation (DP) on the hyperbolic lattice.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago

Plague is among the most devastating diseases in human history1. However, early strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis lacked virulence factors that are required for the bubonic form until around 3,800 years ago2,3. Consequently, the morbidity and mortality of early plague strains remain unclear. Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years). We further note functional differences, including in the ypm superantigen locus, which is also present in present day Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. The new strains diverge ancestrally to known Y. pestis and constrain the timing of its emergence, indicating that this happened before approximately 5,700 years ago. These findings show that plague outbreaks happened earlier than previously thought and were indeed lethal. We contend that the occurrence of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer communities well outside the sphere of Late Neolithic Europe challenges the notion that higher population densities and lifestyle changes during the Neolithic agricultural transition were prerequisites for plague epidemics. Analyses of ancient DNA from hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia around 5,500 years ago indicate that highly virulent Yersinia pestis emerged earlier than previously estimated, far from the next known cases of infection in Late Neolithic Europe.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Lightweight Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Concrete Barrier Design

arXiv:2606.12040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The design of reinforced concrete highway barriers is a safety-critical process that requires strict compliance with regulatory provisions such as the AASHTO-LRFD bridge design guidelines. Current engineering practice relies heavily on manual, iterative, and heuristic calculations to satisfy complex nonlinear material and mechanics constraints. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generative capabilities, their direct application to structural engineering remains limited by hallucination risks and insufficient physical grounding. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel "generation-evaluation-optimization" closed-loop framework for automated concrete barrier design using the multi-agent orchestration capabilities of AutoGen. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed agentic framework achieves over 98% design accuracy, significantly outperforming standalone general-purpose LLMs. More importantly, the study reveals that design performance is not necessarily correlated with model scale, where an 8B-parameter lightweight model could outperform unconstrained 631B-parameter flagship models. This finding highlights the potential to substantially reduce computational costs while improving the accessibility of AI-assisted engineering tools for industry applications. The source code for the proposed multi-agent design framework is available at the project GitHub repository: https://github.com/MXY820/barrier-design. Keywords: Structural Engineering; Multi-Agent Systems; Large Language Models; Concrete Barrier Design; AutoGen; Design Automation.

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

Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging

Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

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

Towards Global AI-Driven Cervical Cancer Screening

The global elimination of cervical cancer is a key public health goal set by the World Health Organization (WHO), with screening programs reducing mortality by up to 80%. However, access to experts and biopsy services is limited in low- to middle-income countries (LMICs). Deep learning (DL)-based algorithms offer promising support for screening, but most existing approaches have been developed and validated on private datasets from single countries. We present the first DL-based approach to cervical cancer screening validated on data from multiple countries. Technically, we phrase the problem of detecting and classifying lesions in colposcopy images as a multi-task learning problem, in which we simultaneously perform image-level classification and lesion segmentation. Our model was trained on a private data set of acid stain colposcopy images with manually generated lesion segmentation masks and corresponding histopathological results, employing extensive data augmentation to address image variability. In an in-distribution validation with pathology results serving as ground truth, our algorithm outperformed medical experts (Balanced Accuracy: 0.68 vs 0.64) in CIN1- (Cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 1 or lower) versus CIN2+ (grade 2 or higher) classification. External validation on four colposcopy data sets from four countries featuring radical differences in prevalence and patient characteristics yielded superior performance of our method compared to baseline methods. Performance variability across countries was high with AUC values ranging from 0.54 - 0.80. Overall, algorithm performance varied with age, transformation zone (cervical area most prone to lesion development), presence of comorbidities and pathognomonic signs, with comorbidities having by far the largest negative effect. Future work should focus on improving model robustness and generalizability.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ERQA-Plus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Reasoning in Embodied AI

Generalist embodied agents require more than object recognition: they must reason about spatial relations, actions, procedures, human intentions, environmental constraints, and commonsense consequences from situated visual observations. Yet existing visual and embodied question answering benchmarks often provide limited control over the reasoning dependencies being tested, making it difficult to distinguish grounded embodied reasoning from shortcut-driven visual or linguistic pattern matching. We present ERQA-Plus, a diagnostic benchmark for reasoning in embodied AI. ERQA-Plus contains 1,766 question-answer instances grounded in 711 robot-centric images and organized according to a structured taxonomy spanning perceptual, action-centric, social-interaction, navigation-environmental, and contextual commonsense reasoning. The dataset is constructed using a multi-stage generation and validation pipeline that combines taxonomy-guided question generation, automatic quality judging, iterative revision, and human assessment to improve visual grounding, answer validity, and reasoning quality. We benchmark representative general-purpose vision-language models and embodied models, including LLaVA-NeXT-8B, Prismatic-7B, MiniCPM-V-4.5-8B, Qwen3-VL, RoboRefer-8B, and RoboBrain2.5-8B. Although the strongest model, Qwen3-VL-32B, achieves 83.4% overall accuracy and 61.4 SBERT score, category-level results reveal persistent weaknesses in spatial reasoning, procedural reasoning, event prediction, and intention inference. ERQA-Plus therefore provides a fine-grained evaluation framework for measuring not only whether embodied agents answer correctly, but also which forms of embodied reasoning they can and cannot perform reliably. The dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingdas/erqa-plus and the project page at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/erqa-plus.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum mechanics in configuration space in context

arXiv:2606.17622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To enhance the way in which wave-particle duality is implemented in the modelling of quantum mechanical systems, Bukhari et al. [New J. Phys. 27, 084501 (2025)] recently introduced an alternative approach to quantum mechanics, namely quantum mechanics in configuration space. This formalism is based on a physically motivated quantisation of Newtonian mechanics and promotes the classical position-velocity states (x,v) to pairwise distinguishable quantum states. The resulting |x,v> states form the basis of the Hilbert space of individual quantum mechanical particles and evolve along classical trajectories. In this paper, we consider the modelling of a mechanical particle in free space and put quantum mechanics in configuration space into context. It is shown that this formalism increases the continuity between quantum and classical mechanics by avoiding a conceptual inconsistency associated with the definition of momentum in canonical quantisation. In addition, we emphasise that standard quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics in configuration space are based on two distinct formulations of classical mechanics.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

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

Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Diagnosis-Driven Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Priors

arXiv:2606.25527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) agents increasingly depend on knowledge acquired offline to achieve practical efficiency. Originally studied in offline-to-online RL, this paradigm now spans foundation model post-training and embodied intelligence, with prior types expanding from offline datasets and pre-trained policies to increasingly diverse knowledge sources such as multimodal foundation models and generative world models. Offline priors have become central to how deep RL is developed and deployed. However, this reliance introduces a challenge that the prevailing benchmark-driven paradigm cannot resolve: because prior validity varies across deployments and shifts during training, no single approach to managing it is universally optimal, and benchmark rankings offer limited guidance for real-world deployments. Rather than pursuing universal solutions, we argue that the field should shift to diagnosis-driven tension management, in which deployment-specific evidence guides how the learner relates to its priors throughout training, enabling both flexible and adaptive deployment. We support this position with a framework characterizing how priors reshape online optimization through three functional roles, controlled experiments demonstrating help-or-hurt reversals, cross-domain evidence from foundation model post-training to embodied intelligence, and engagement with five substantive counterarguments.

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

Effects of sparsity and superposition on loss in simple autoencoders

arXiv:2606.18538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One of the major difficulties in the mechanistic interpretability of neural networks is the occurrence of polysemanticity, which suggests that each neuron is typically responsible for multiple different tasks, impeding a clean interpretation of their function. The seminal paper of Elhage et al. (2022) argues that this occurs due to superposition, a phenomenon where the neural network represents distinct features as non-orthogonal directions in a lower-dimensional space, a strategy that allows much greater compression of the data without sacrificing fidelity due to the feature sparsity of input vectors. Elhage et al. (2022) empirically validates these hypotheses in a rather natural and simple autoencoder with sparse inputs. The contribution of the present work is to analyze the mathematical basis for the occurrence and optimality of superposition, while rigorously corroborating some of their findings. In particular, we provide upper and lower bounds for the L2 reconstruction loss, tight in the very sparse regime, for power activation functions. A short list of interesting open problems are also included at the end.

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

A Red Teaming Framework for Large Language Models: A Case Study on Faithfulness Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across natural language processing tasks, yet their deployment in high-stakes applications raises critical concerns regarding reliability, safety, and trustworthiness. In this paper, we present a red teaming framework that systematically uncovers vulnerabilities in LLM outputs. Our approach employs a novel multi-role architecture comprising target, attacker, and jury models. The attackers generate increasingly effective adversarial prompts while the jury rigorously evaluates response accuracy and consistency across tasks. In a case study, our strategy proved particularly effective at exposing unfaithfulness in LLM responses. Exploitative adversarial prompts increased the attack success rate by up to 7.9% in question-answering tasks, revealing weaknesses in reliability. The approach identifies how structural constraints in summarization can shape vulnerability patterns, with format limitations yielding measurable gains in faithfulness, and shows that architectural design choices typically outweigh parameter scaling in determining model safety. The framework's key strength is its adaptability across evaluation tasks, from English question-answering to Arabic summarization, enabling comprehensive comparison of model vulnerabilities. While it excels at comparing cross-model and cross-linguistic vulnerabilities, it faces challenges in fully automating adversarial prompt generation across languages. Our experiments also reveal limitations in detecting subtle forms of unfaithfulness that do not manifest as explicit factual contradictions, particularly across linguistic contexts. Overall, this architecture provides both actionable insights into current LLM vulnerabilities and a scalable methodology for ongoing safety evaluation as models evolve.

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

DREAM: Extending Vision-Language Models with Dual-Objective Encoding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

In today's media-driven world, the exponential growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and entertainment has made retrieving semantically relevant videos via natural language queries increasingly critical. Early video retrieval systems relied on handcrafted features or shallow cross-modal mappings, limiting their ability to capture complex semantics and temporal dynamics. While large-scale vision-language models have improved cross-modal alignment, challenges remain in modeling fine-grained temporal dependencies and nuanced linguistic structures. In this paper, we introduce DREAM: Dual-path Representation Enhancement and Alignment Model, a novel multimodal framework that addresses these limitations through enhanced visual and textual encoding. DREAM incorporates a hybrid language modeling strategy that combines masked and permuted language modeling objectives to capture both local and global linguistic semantics. On the visual side, we design a hierarchical vision encoder with cascaded group attention, which integrates spatial and temporal information through multi-stage token interaction and coarse-to-fine attention refinement. We validate DREAM through comprehensive evaluations on the widely-used MSRVTT, MSVD and LSMDC benchmark datasets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art R1 scores of 49.4%, 49.7% and 27.3%, respectively. Qualitative analyses further show the model's ability to maintain coherent attention across frames and align complex queries with dynamic video content. These findings underscore the effectiveness of hierarchical attention and dual-objective textual modeling in enabling robust, context-aware video retrieval, and pave the way for future research in advancing cross-modal representation learning.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Neural Phase Correlation

Authors:

Correspondence is fundamentally relational: it seeks the unknown transformation between two observations of a common scene, not the content of either. Yet the dominant learning-based methods do not represent the transformation as a first-class object in the architecture. They encode each image independently and let a learned similarity function or a deep decoder discover the mapping implicitly. Phase correlation is the canonical exception, measuring the inter-image relationship directly in the Fourier domain, but the rigidity of its fixed basis confines it to global translation. We introduce a learned generalization of phase correlation that lifts this restriction by learning the basis on which the transformation decomposes. The same algebraic primitive extends to dense non-rigid deformations and to unitary dynamics. On the ACDC cardiac-MRI benchmark the framework matches or exceeds prior published baselines on both registration directions. On CAMUS echocardiography it matches state-of-the-art without auxiliary scoring or adaptive-smoothness mechanisms. Applied to time-evolved wavefunction pairs of the 1-D quantum harmonic oscillator, the same framework recovers the Hermite-function eigenstates and the quantized energy levels of the unknown Hamiltonian from observation pairs alone.

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

PAL-Bench: Evidence-Grounded Profile Reconstruction from Longitudinal Personal Albums

arXiv:2606.16175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal personal albums are weak-schema multimodal databases: noisy perceptual records whose key facts require joins across faces, text, timestamps, locations, and repeated events. Existing visual, video, document, and lifelog benchmarks test sub-problems, but not album-scale profile reconstruction with social identity binding and evidence citation. Benchmarking this task is difficult because the ground truth needed for evaluation–owner profiles, social graphs, face-name maps, and evidence provenance–is private state that real albums cannot safely release. We introduce PAL-Bench, a controlled benchmark for evidence-grounded reconstruction under a public-record contract. Its Evidence Compiler builds latent private worlds, programs target-level evidence paths, renders album pixels, re-measures them through perception pipelines, and exports audited public/private views. Agents receive only perception-derived public records; targets, identifier maps, and evidence paths remain hidden. PAL-Bench contains 50 synthetic users, 36,659 public photo records, and 2,799 targets over owner facts, identities, and relations. A privacy-preserving audit with 10 participants confirms that PAL-Bench evidence structures match real private albums, though equivalent releases remain privacy-prohibitive. Across seven systems and two compute-matched diagnostics, a seven-metric protocol reveals a gap between plausible profile summarization and faithful social reconstruction: systems recover some owner facts but struggle with recurring identities and evidence citation. PAL-TRACE, a reference framework that freezes identity bindings before owner-fact mining, performs best but leaves hard identity resolution far from solved. PAL-Bench provides a testbed for perceptual entity resolution, multimodal data integration, temporal evidence aggregation, and provenance-aware structured prediction.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Exploration Structure in LLM Agents for Multi-File Change Localization

arXiv:2606.11976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering tools increasingly rely on LLM based agents to localize files to change to resolve a software issue. Most AI agents explore repositories linearly, that is, visiting one directory or file per step. We postulate that this is a structural mismatch for changes that span several subsystems. We compare linear sequential exploration against non-linear, domain-scoped parallel agentic exploration. Using SWE Bench Pro as initial benchmark, we focus on ansible as an exemplar. We construct an approach for persistent-session evaluation of GitHub issues anchored at a single base commit. We compare our non-linear domain-agent file traversal system against a base LLM without direct repository access, a single agent Recursive Language Model (RLM) baseline with a persistent Python REPL and an external CLI baseline using Codex 5.5 High. Domain scoped parallel agent spawning with a small Haiku-class model achieves the highest micro F1 among Haiku class models by a large margin. Domain-agents is the second highest behind only the much larger Codex 5.5 High on our own expanded benchmark including over more recent PRs from 2025 and 2026. On the original, curated, 2020 SWE-bench Pro benchmark, a larger Sonnet plain LLM baseline attains higher micro F1 by predicting few files, leading to higher precision, but at significantly lower all gold recall. We also present three additional findings. First, documentation evolution is a latent dependency unresolved by any approach. Second, naive file system access can degrade localization driven by test-file over prediction. Lastly, forced multi-agent consultation does not measurably help and raises token cost substantially.

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

Which Directions Matter? Sparse Design for Affine Robust Optimization

arXiv:2606.14648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust machine learning and optimization rely on the uncertainty model choice. We investigate which uncertainty directions a model must cover when defined by a finite dictionary and a budget constraint. Selecting a subset forms an atomic uncertainty set with a closed form support function, yielding tractable robust programs for affine objectives. We propose a data driven selection rule based on a coverage objective over evaluation directions, including gradients, adversarial perturbations, or shifts observed on held out data. We prove this objective is monotone and submodular, supporting a greedy method with a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee and a matching hardness barrier. We also provide a certificate bounding the loss from the selected subset and a radius calibration rule with out of sample control.

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

Handling Feature Heterogeneity with Learnable Graph Patches

arXiv:2606.17667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, the rapid development of foundation models and graph pre-training technologies has spurred increasing interest in constructing a universal pre-trained graph model or Graph Foundation Model (GFM). However, a significant challenge is that existing models are unable to address feature heterogeneity in graph data without textual information, which hinders the transferability of graph models across different datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose the concept of learnable graph patches, which we regard as the smallest semantic units of any graph data. We decompose the graph into learnable graph patches by unfolding the node features and constructing corresponding patch structures separately. We then design a framework that mines transferable information from graph data across domains. Specifically, after extracting graph patches, we propose a patch encoder to extract knowledge from each unit and a patch aggregator to learn how the units are combined into a whole. Due to its domain-agnostic nature, the model can be applied to downstream data across different domains. Furthermore, we analyze the connection between our method and existing graph models, as well as the transferability of the node embeddings it generates. Empirically, our method not only achieves the capability to use multi-domain graphs for pre-training, but also shows enhanced performance across various downstream datasets and tasks. Moreover, we observe consistent improvement in downstream performance as the volume of pre-training data increases.

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arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Connecting Quantum Tomography and Quantum Retrodiction

arXiv:2606.23777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum tomography and quantum retrodiction are traditionally viewed as separate inference tasks: tomography reconstructs quantum states from measurement data, whereas retrodiction infers past quantum states from observed outcomes. We show that the two are manifestations of the same underlying principle. We prove that the Petz recovery map associated with a measurement channel is precisely the gradient update of the log-likelihood used in maximum-likelihood tomography. Consequently, repeated applications of the Petz map monotonically increase the likelihood. Extending beyond measurement channels, we derive a noncommutative generalization of the Petz map from the gradient of a generalized likelihood for arbitrary quantum channels. The resulting iterative procedure maximizes the likelihood and provides a general framework for quantum tomography, establishing a direct bridge between retrodiction, recovery maps, and statistical inference.