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01.
Science (Express) 2026-05-06

A 481-meter-high landslide-tsunami in a cruise ship–frequented Alaska fjord | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Early in the morning of 10 August 2025, a >64 × 10 6 m 3 landslide struck Tracy Arm fjord in Alaska. The landslide was preconditioned by glacial retreat caused by climate change. The resulting 481 m runup megatsunami followed an initial 100-m-high breaking wave traveling >70 m s −1 . The landslide was preceded by several days of microseismicity, which increased in rate and magnitude until ~1 hour before failure. The landslide produced globally observed long-period seismic waves equivalent in size to a M5.4 earthquake. A long-period (~66 s) global seismic signal, produced by a landslide-induced seiche trapped within the fjord, persisted for up to 36 hours, the second time a days-long seiche has been thus observed. With fjord regions increasingly visited by cruise ships, and climate change making similar events more likely, this unanticipated, near-miss event highlights the growing risk from landslides and tsunamis in coastal environments.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Authors:
Asaf Yehudai↗Naama Rozen↗Ariel Gera↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tungsten Germanide Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors with Saturated Internal Detection Efficiency at Wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m

Authors:
Benedikt Hampel↗Daniel Kuznesof↗Andrew S. Mueller↗Sahil R. Patel↗Robert H. Hadfield↗Emma E. Wollman↗Matthew D. Shaw↗Dirk Schwarzer↗Alec M. Wodtke↗Khalid Hossain↗Allison V. Mis↗Alexana Roshko↗…

arXiv:2511.20868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are among the most sensitive single-photon detectors available and have the potential to transform fields ranging from infrared astrophysics to molecular spectroscopy. However, extending their performance into the mid-infrared spectral region - crucial for applications such as exoplanet transit spectroscopy and vibrational fingerprinting of molecules - has remained a major challenge, primarily due to material limitations and scalability constraints. Here, we report on the development of SNSPDs based on tungsten germanide, a novel material system that combines high mid-infrared sensitivity with compatibility for large-scale fabrication. Our detectors exhibit saturated internal detection efficiency at wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m, while using 2.7x thicker films (8 nm vs 3 nm) and up to 4.5x wider nanowires (360 nm vs 80 nm) compared to mid-infrared-optimized SNSPDs fabricated from tungsten silicide. This advance will enable scalable, high-performance single-photon detection in a spectral region that was previously inaccessible, opening new frontiers in remote sensing, thermal imaging, environmental monitoring, molecular physics, and astronomy.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Optimal scenario design for climate emulation

Authors:
Christopher B. Womack↗Shahine Bouabid↗Andrei Sokolov↗Popat Salunke↗Glenn Flierl↗Sebastian D. Eastham↗Noelle E. Selin↗

arXiv:2606.19302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As deep learning for physical systems continues to grow in popularity, efforts to improve generalizability have primarily focused on designing architectures that embed physical constraints. However, for machine-learning surrogate climate models (emulators), we show that the low structural diversity in existing scenarios commonly used to generate training data places a ceiling on predictive skill. Here, we examine whether training datasets themselves can be optimized to improve generalization. We introduce a method to create datasets that produce emulators capable of generalizing to new, structurally different scenarios absent from the training data. We use a differentiable Simple Climate Model (SCM) to calculate the sensitivity of emulator loss to perturbations in the training data, iteratively updating the training data to maximize emulator skill. For an SCM, training on one scenario optimized in this fashion outperforms an emulator trained on six standard ScenarioMIP pathways. We achieve this higher predictive skill despite training on a smaller dataset, finding that our emulator successfully isolates distinct physical behaviors of different climate forcing agents (e.g., greenhouse gases vs. aerosols) without single-forcing runs. We then demonstrate that scenarios optimized using an SCM, when used to drive an intermediate-complexity climate model, produce a training dataset that yields a more skillful emulator than training on ScenarioMIP outputs. Our results suggest that, in the compute-constrained environment of running full-scale climate models, generating a small number of dynamically rich scenarios provides greater marginal value for emulation and characterizing system responses than expanding the suite of traditional emissions pathways.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

Authors:
Zirui Cheng↗Zeyu Shen↗Thomas L. Griffiths↗Peter Henderson↗

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

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

Semi-Supervised Speech Confidence Detection using Pseudo-Labelling and Whisper Embeddings

Authors:
Adam Wynn↗Jingyun Wang↗Xiangyu Tan↗

arXiv:2606.16505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding speaker confidence is crucial in educational settings, as it can enhance personalised feedback and improve learning outcomes. This study introduces a novel framework for detecting speaker confidence by integrating human-engineered features with embeddings from the Whisper encoder. To address data limitations, a pseudo-labelling technique is employed to expand the labelled dataset, allowing the model to learn from both human-annotated and model-generated labels. The framework combines traditional speech features including pitch, volume, rate of speech, and the presence of disfluencies and stress, with Whisper embeddings, and uses a co-attention mechanism to fuse these representations and achieve an overall accuracy of 75%. This study contributes to advancing speech analysis, enabling applications that support personalised learning and speaking skill development.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Low-Energy Reduced RISC-V Instruction Subset Processor for Tsetlin Machine Inference at the Edge

Authors:
Chanda Gupta↗Sanidhya Bhatia↗Shaurya Priyadarshi↗Himani Panwar↗Rishad Shafik↗Sudip Roy↗

arXiv:2606.19964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsetlin Machine (TM) is a logic-based machine learning approach that relies on simple bitwise operations and finite-state automata, which makes it attractive for edge AI deployments. Recent work has focused on co-processor and accelerator designs based on Tsetlin Machines (TMs). Although these designs achieve high performance, they typically depend on tightly coupled interfaces, microcode-style programming, and external host processors, limiting flexibility and ease of programming. In this work, we present a domain-specific RISC-V microprocessor architecture and design flow tailored for TM inference. Leveraging the modular structure of RISC-V, we design a reduced instruction subset processor that retains programmability while targeting improved performance and lower energy consumption for TM workloads. Instruction profiling is employed to guide instruction reduction, followed by datapath and control path simplifications tailored to TM inference. Both the baseline RV32IM core and the proposed reduced core are evaluated across multiple datasets and compared with Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), which serve as a hardware-efficient baseline due to their reliance on bitwise operations during inference. Results show that TM achieves comparable or higher accuracy (e.g., up to 88.18% on CIFAR-2 compared to 60.0% for BNN) while reducing execution time by up to 98% across multiple datasets. Furthermore, the proposed design achieves an average $29.7\times$ reduction in energy consumption, demonstrating its effectiveness for programmable and efficient edge AI systems.

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

SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolution

Authors:
Hongyi Liu↗Haoyan Yang↗Tao Jiang↗Bo Tang↗Feiyu Xiong↗Yuyu Luo↗Zhiyu Li↗

Long-horizon LLM agents generate traces that could become reusable experience, but raw trajectories are noisy, local, and hard to govern. Agent Skills offer a structured artifact for combining procedural guidance, executable resources, and applicability boundaries. Yet open skill ecosystems contain redundant, uneven, environment-sensitive artifacts, and indiscriminate updates can pollute future context. We present SkillsVote, a lifecycle-governance framework for Agent Skills across collection, recommendation, attribution, and evolution. SkillsVote profiles a million-scale open source corpus for environment requirements, quality, and verifiability, and synthesizes tasks for verifiable skills. Before execution, it performs agentic library search over structured skill folders to expose instructional context. After execution, it decomposes trajectories into skill-linked subtasks, attributes outcomes to skill-guided execution, agent exploration, environment, and result signals, and admits only successful reusable discoveries to evidence-gated updates. Experiments on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-Bench Pro show that SkillsVote improves agent performance on challenging agentic coding benchmarks. The gains arise from two complementary pathways: online evolution over task streams at test time and offline transfer via frozen libraries built from either historical trajectories or curated open source skills.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Graphical-Probabilistic Modeling of Generative Flows in LLM-Native Software Systems

Authors:
V\'ictor A. Braberman↗Flavia Bonomo-Braberman↗

arXiv:2606.15943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering LLM-native software remains a challenging and immature field. Current practice is largely exploratory, relying on experimentation and heuristic techniques such as prompting and context engineering. These, however, are low-level and lack the principled structure needed to support design-level reasoning or analysis. In contrast, traditional software engineering leverages modularity and abstraction to communicate and analyze system behavior. To bring similar rigor to LLM-native development, we propose methods for documenting generative flows and for stating properties of LLM-based software designs. Such methods must account for the stochastic, prompt-dependent behavior of large language models while remaining expressive enough to capture emergent phenomena. Our initial approach is based on graphical probabilistic models, tailored to capture phenomena characteristic of LLM-native systems. This framework – what we term Generation Networks – aims to provide a foundation for principled reasoning about generative interactions and system-level properties in LLM-centric software architectures.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

Authors:
Yi Yu↗Xinchuan Qiu↗

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

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

HiRo: A Compact Four-Directional Hierarchical Reservoir Token-Mixer for Efficient Image Classification

Authors:
Md Farhadul Islam↗Ishan Thakkar↗J. Todd Hastings↗

Recent image classification models must balance local feature modeling, cross-window interaction, and parameter efficiency. Many high-performing architectures rely on fully trainable token-mixers, which improve representation learning but increase parameter count, optimization complexity and computational cost. We propose a parameter-efficient image classification model called HiRo that integrates shifted-window partitioning with multi-directional hierarchical reservoir computing. Images are divided into non-overlapping patches (treated as tokens), linearly projected, normalized, and enriched with 2D sinusoidal positional encodings, then processed within local windows. Inside each window, tokens are scanned in four directions and passed through a two-stage slice-and-mix reservoir module. In the first stage, directional sequences are split into contiguous slices, each processed by its own fixed reservoir with a trainable closed-loop readout. The resulting slice outputs are summarized using the start, end, and mean representations, and then mixed by a second-stage fixed reservoir for each direction. The mixed slice representations are expanded back to the token level and fused with the first-stage outputs, after which the four directional outputs are realigned and averaged. Consecutive blocks alternate between regular and shifted windows to enable cross-window interaction, followed by layer normalization, a residual feed-forward network, and global pooling for classification. This design combines regular and shifted window partitioning with hierarchical multi-directional reservoirs to make an efficient local-to-cross-window token-mixing framework for image classification. Despite using under 1M trainable parameters and significantly lower memory and time than transformer-style baselines, HiRo also achieves 99.46%, 85.57%, and 59.10% accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, respectively.

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

GeoWorld-VLM: Geometry from World Models for Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Renjie Gu↗Kaichen Zhou↗Yan Luo↗Mengyu Wang↗

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong semantic recognition, yet remain brittle on elementary spatial relations such as left of, on, behind, and between. One cause of this failure arises before language reasoning begins: the visual pathway may compress or discard critical 3D structural cues during feature extraction, so the language model receives image representations that are already insufficient for reliable spatial judgment. We introduce GeoWorld-VLM, a VLM-side distillation framework that transfers geometric structure from frozen camera-conditioned video world models into VLMs. GeoWorld-VLM fine-tunes only the image encoder and multimodal projector, aligning post-projector image features with intermediate world-model representations while leaving the main backbone frozen. Given images, a prompt, and a sampled camera trajectory, the world-model teacher converts static visual input into a synthetic multi-view spatial signal. Training combines spatial answer supervision, teacher-student feature alignment, and a preservation anchor to the original VLM. Since the language model remains frozen, GeoWorld-VLM preserves the original model's linguistic capabilities while attributing spatial improvements to the enhanced visual pathway. To evaluate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method, we apply GeoWorld-VLM to two distinct VLM architectures and observe consistent improvements across both backbones. GeoWorld-VLM improves performance by approximately 4 percent on both the What'sUp and VSR benchmarks, suggesting that world-model-guided visual alignment generalizes across model structures and spatial reasoning datasets.

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

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

Authors:
Ali Dasdan↗Manan Shah↗W. Russell Neuman↗Chad Coleman↗Kund Meghani↗Safinah Ali↗

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HMR-Net: Hierarchical Modular Routing for Cross-Domain Object Detection in Aerial Images

Authors:
Pourya Shamsolmoali↗Masoumeh Zareapoor↗Michael Felsberg↗Nick Pears↗Huiyu Zhou↗Yue Lu↗

Despite advances in object detection, aerial imagery remains a challenging domain, as models often fail to generalize across variations in spatial resolution, scene composition, and semantic label coverage. Differences in geographic context, sensor characteristics, and object distributions across datasets limit the capacity of conventional models to learn consistent and transferable representations. Shared methods trained on such data tend to impose a unified representation across fundamentally different domains, resulting in poor performance on region-specific content and less flexibility when dealing with novel object categories. To address this, we propose a novel modular learning framework that enables structured specialization in aerial detection. Our method introduces a hierarchical routing mechanism with two levels of modularity: a domain routing layer that uses latent geographic embeddings to assign inputs to domain-specialized expert modules, and a scene routing mechanism that allocates image subregions to scene-specific expert modules. This allows our method to specialize across datasets and within complex scenes. Additionally, the framework contains a conditional expert module that uses external semantic information (e.g., category names or textual descriptions) to enable detection of novel object categories during inference, without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. By moving beyond monolithic representations, our method provides an adaptive framework for remote sensing object detection. Comprehensive evaluations on four datasets highlight improvements in multi-dataset generalization, region-level specialization, and open-category detection.

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

Neural Slack Variables for Shape Constraints

Authors:
Ruben Wiedemann↗Antoine Jacquier↗Lukas Gonon↗

arXiv:2606.13803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enforcing functional inequality constraints such as monotonicity and convexity in neural networks is a fundamental challenge in many industrial and scientific applications. Classical one-sided penalty methods, along with primal-dual methods gated by complementary slackness, provide constraint gradients only at violated locations, resulting in fragile satisfaction. Architectures that guarantee feasibility by construction, on the other hand, remain largely limited to elementary cases and impose additional inductive biases. We introduce neural slack variables, a deep learning native primal-side approach that converts constraint enforcement into a regression problem by coupling the primary network with a jointly learned auxiliary network. The auxiliary network serves as a valid target for the primary network's constraint quantities, inducing feasibility and regularity. Neural slack variables achieve zero measured violations on dense-grid monotonicity and convexity test cases, where penalty and primal-dual baselines leave residual violations, and enable arbitrage-free learning of volatility surfaces, an open industrial challenge in quantitative finance.

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

The Algorithm Is Not the Behavior: Learned Priors Override Look-Ahead in a Chess-Playing Neural Network

Authors:
Elias Sandmann↗Sebastian Lapuschkin↗Wojciech Samek↗

arXiv:2508.21380v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent mechanistic work has uncovered learned algorithms within neural networks, from modular arithmetic to search and planning in game-playing agents. But does algorithmic structure guarantee algorithmic behavior? We investigate this in Leela Chess Zero, the strongest neural chess engine, where prior work identified learned look-ahead. By extending the logit lens to its move-selecting policy network, we discover that correct puzzle solutions-including immediate checkmates-often appear in intermediate layers but are systematically overridden in the final output, a phenomenon we term "forgotten puzzles". Replicating prior analyses on these positions, we find that look-ahead operates normally-future moves of the correct continuation are represented, causally important, and linearly decodable-ruling out a failure of the algorithm itself. Instead, late layers increasingly shift toward prioritizing safe play over aggression. To test whether this shift drives the override, we steer the model against these preferences and recover 61.7% of forgotten puzzles, providing causal evidence that safety priors override algorithmically computed solutions. These findings demonstrate that algorithmic structure does not guarantee algorithmic behavior: a model can internally solve a problem and still output the wrong answer.

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17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Hierarchical Random Measures without Tables

Authors:
Marta Catalano↗Claudio Del Sole↗

arXiv:2505.02653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hierarchical Dirichlet process is the cornerstone of Bayesian nonparametric multilevel models. Its generative model can be described through a set of latent variables, commonly referred to as tables within the popular restaurant franchise metaphor. The latent tables simplify the expression of the posterior and allow for the implementation of Gibbs sampling algorithms to approximately draw posterior samples. However, managing their assignments can become computationally expensive, especially as the size of the dataset and the number of levels increase. In this work, we identify a prior for the concentration parameter of the hierarchical Dirichlet process that (i) induces a quasi-conjugate posterior distribution, and (ii) removes the need for tables, leading to more interpretable expressions for the posterior, with both a scalable and an exact algorithm to sample from it. Remarkably, this construction extends beyond the Dirichlet process, leading to a new framework for defining normalized hierarchical random measures and a new class of algorithms to sample from their posteriors. The key analytical tool is the independence of multivariate increments, that is, their representation as completely random vectors.

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

Fisher-Geometric Sharpness and the Implicit Bias of SGD toward Flat Minima

Authors:
Md Sakir Ahmed↗Kumaresh Sarmah↗Hemen Dutta↗

arXiv:2606.20469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A widely held intuition in deep learning is that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) implicitly favors flat minima and that flat minima generalize better, but standard Euclidean measures of flatness such as the trace or maximum eigenvalue of the loss Hessian are not invariant under reparametrizations that preserve the network function, which undermines the theoretical foundations of this narrative. In this study we resolve this issue by grounding flatness in the Riemannian geometry of the statistical manifold induced by the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM). We define Riemannian sharpness mathematically and prove that it is invariant under smooth, function-preserving reparametrizations, which directly addresses the critique of Dinh et al. in the paper ``Sharp minima can generalize for deep nets''.We note that this invariance is a property of the true FIM; the diagonal empirical estimator used in practice (and in all experiments below) inherits invariance only approximately, and exact invariance under arbitrary reparametrizations would require structured estimators such as K-FAC. We formalize the gradient noise of mini-batch SGD as having a covariance structure proportional to the FIM, derive the stationary distribution of the resulting stochastic differential equation, and then show that the probability mass is exponentially concentrated at Riemannian-flat minima. A PAC-Bayes generalization bound controlled explicitly by SR formally links this geometric bias to test performance. Our experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 confirm that SR reliably tracks generalization in ways that Euclidean sharpness does not, and that its scaling with $\eta/B$ matches the theoretical predictions. Together these results provide a rigorous, reparametrization-invariant account of why flat minima generalize.

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

Geometry-Aware Superpixel Graph Transformer with Metadata for Skin Lesion Classification

Authors:
Muhammad Azeem↗Tanveer Hussain↗Amr Ahmed↗Ardhendu Behera↗

Automated skin cancer classification from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion structure, strong intra-class variability, and subtle visual differences between benign and malignant cases. Existing CNN/ViT pipelines typically rely on global or patch-level features and often combine patient metadata via late fusion, which limits spatially grounded multimodal reasoning. We present a novel region-based graph learning framework that explicitly models lesions as graphs of spatially coherent superpixel regions represented as frozen CNN features. To capture fine-grained lesion arrangements, we encode inter-regional geometry as edge attributes and introduce a dedicated metadata context node connected to all regions, providing structured integration of demographic/clinical variables within the same relational space. Node representations are updated using our edge-aware graph transformer followed by attention-driven propagation, and a final graph-level embedding for benign-malignant classification. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that explicit region-level relational modeling and graph-native multimodal fusion yield consistent gains over the state-of-the-art. Consequently, we establish a new graph-centric perspective in which CNN features are modeled as relational nodes and improved through contextual integration, yielding more expressive and robust classifications.

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

Structured Cognitive Loop for Behavioral Intelligence in Large Language Model Agents (Extended Revision: From Behavioral Architecture to Epistemic Accountability)

Authors:
Myung Ho Kim↗

arXiv:2510.05107v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The central challenge for AI agents is not only performance but accountability. Agents that act through opaque prompt sequences may produce correct outputs, but they provide little basis for verifying why an action was permitted, where an error occurred, or how responsibility should be assigned. This paper presents the Structured Cognitive Loop as an architecture for accountable behavior in large language model agents. SCL separates cognition, memory, control, and action into distinct modules. The language model proposes. External memory preserves verified state. A lightweight controller checks preconditions, prevents redundant actions, and authorizes execution before tools are used. We evaluate SCL against ReAct and common LangChain agent variants across travel planning, conditional email drafting, and constraint guided image generation. Across 360 episodes, SCL achieves 86.3 percent task success compared with 70.5 to 76.8 percent for prompt based baselines. It also improves goal fidelity, reduces redundant tool calls, increases reuse of intermediate state, and lowers unsupported assertions. This extended revision situates SCL within a broader architecture of epistemic accountability. Subsequent extensions integrate context aware Human in the Loop control, Pool Gated Retrieval, and the Horizon Warrant Commitment framework. Together these components define an agent architecture in which the model proposes, structure decides, evidence is warranted before use, and human judgment is embedded in the trace rather than imposed after the fact. The result is a foundation for AI agents whose decisions are not only effective but also authorized, inspectable, and accountable.

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21.
Science (Express) 2026-06-11

Laser phase plate improves structure determination of small proteins by cryo-EM | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Phase plates can in principle overcome the poor image contrast in electron cryo–microscopy (cryo-EM) and the resulting limits on the structural reconstruction of small proteins. However, previous designs have been unstable and compromised the high-resolution signal. They have thus been unable to surpass results achieved by standard cryo-EM. Here, we show that the laser phase plate (LPP), installed in a custom, modern Titan Krios microscope, enhances the resolution in single-particle reconstruction of small proteins by improving specimen-motion correction, recovery of information from the early frames, as well as particle visualization, 3D classification, and alignment. These advances use standard defocus ranges and reconstruction procedures, but open the door to LPP-tailored protocols offering further improvements by leveraging the LPP demonstrated here.

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

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

Authors:
Xu Li↗Simon Yu↗Minzhou Pan↗Yiyou Sun↗Bo Li↗Dawn Song↗Xue Lin↗Weiyan Shi↗

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.

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

Identifiable Markov Switching Models with Instantaneous Effects and Exponential Families

Authors:
Roel Hulsman↗Carles Balsells-Rodas↗Sara Magliacane↗

arXiv:2606.02231v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Temporal systems often exhibit non-stationary behaviour, such as seasonal climate variation or glucose fluctuations in patients with type-1 diabetes. One way to model non-stationarity is through discrete latent regimes, i.e., stationary segments of time. Such systems induce a Markov Switching Model (MSM), a class of Hidden Markov Models with autoregressive dependencies among latent regimes and observed variables. Identifying latent regimes is challenging in the presence of frequent regime switches and nonlinear and non-Gaussian dynamics, particularly when there are instantaneous effects between the variables, e.g., due to slow rates of measurements. In this work, we establish the identifiability of both latent regimes and regime-dependent causal structures under temporal regime dependencies, nonlinear lagged and instantaneous effects, and independent noise from the exponential family. Our identifiability theory subsumes non-temporal mixtures of causal models. Furthermore, we introduce FlowMSM, a regime detection framework that can be paired with any stationary causal discovery method to recover regime-dependent causal structures. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and a financial economics dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to detect latent regimes and discover causal structures from non-stationary time series.

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

Prediction-Powered Causal Inference by Automatic Debiased Machine Learning and Semi-Supervised Riesz Regression

Authors:
Masahiro Kato↗

arXiv:2606.12892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates semiparametric efficient estimation of causal and structural parameters in a semi-supervised setting. In our setting, unlabeled auxiliary regressors are available in addition to labeled observations consisting of outcomes and regressors. Our goal is to construct estimators of causal and structural parameters whose asymptotic variances are smaller than those of estimators constructed using only labeled data. We refer to this framework as prediction-powered causal inference (PPCI). We first derive the efficient influence function and the efficiency bound, which imply that the use of auxiliary regressors can attain a smaller asymptotic variance than the efficiency bound attainable from labeled observations alone. Then, by combining the efficient influence function with the debiased machine learning (DML) framework, we propose methods that we call DML-PPCI. If we construct an estimating-equation estimator, we refer to the method as EE-DML-PPCI; if we construct a targeted-learning estimator, we refer to the method as TMLE-DML-PPCI. The asymptotic variances of both estimators match our derived efficiency bound. In the construction of the estimators, estimation of the efficient influence function plays an important role. In our study, the efficient influence function is also a Neyman orthogonal score, which depends on the Riesz representer and the regression function. For Riesz representer estimation, we develop semi-supervised generalized Riesz regression with convergence rate guarantees.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CausalMotion: Structured Physical Reasoning as Keyframe and Trajectory Guidance for Training-Free Video Generation

Authors:
Sihan Zhuang↗Xinyuan Chen↗Tianfan Xue↗Yaohui Wang↗

Recent advances in diffusion-based video generation have significantly improved visual quality and short-term temporal coherence. However, existing methods still struggle to produce videos with physically consistent and causally plausible dynamics, especially in scenarios involving long-horizon interactions. This limitation arises from the fact that video diffusion models primarily learn physical consistency implicitly, while vision-language models can directly model physical laws. Based on this idea, in this work, we propose CausalMotion, a training-free framework that injects explicit physical reasoning into video generation through structured intermediate representations. Our key idea is to decouple reasoning from generation by leveraging a vision-language model to decompose a text prompt into a sequence of causally consistent keyframes and object-centric motion trajectories. These representations are then aligned and integrated as soft constraints to guide a pretrained video diffusion model during inference. This design enables explicit modeling of object dynamics and causal transitions without requiring additional training or supervision. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently improves physical plausibility and temporal coherence, particularly in dynamics-intensive scenarios, while maintaining high perceptual video quality.

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