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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Muse Spark Safety & Preparedness Report

arXiv:2606.12429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muse Spark is the latest large language model developed by Meta. In this report, we first present evaluations for catastrophic risk domains under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework, along with the evidence that informed our launch decision. We then discuss additional considerations, such as Muse Spark's broader content safety and behavioral profile, that are relevant to overall safety but fall outside the catastrophic risk domains governed by the Framework. Our preparedness results covering Chemical and Biological, Cybersecurity, and Loss of Control risks assess Muse Spark's deployment within Meta AI as presenting acceptable levels of residual risks under our Advanced AI Scaling Framework. We conducted a broad set of evaluations targeting dual-use and high-risk capabilities across these catastrophic risk domains. Those evaluations identified elevated risks prior to mitigations, with Chemical and Biological capabilities assessed as likely reaching the "high risk" category under the Advanced AI Scaling Framework before safeguards were applied. We have implemented a multi-layered set of mitigations that address the identified risks, and Muse Spark demonstrates state-of-the-art refusal across a range of benchmarks related to hazardous workflows in chemistry and biology. We therefore release Muse Spark as the underlying model of Meta AI.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Algebraic Dead Directions in LayerNorm Transformers: A Forward-Pass-Only Diagnostic at LLM Scale

arXiv:2606.19491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained transformers sit near singular minima of the loss, where the Fisher information metric degenerates along dead directions: directions in parameter space along which the directional Fisher vanishes. Locating such a direction normally needs a forward pass and an eigendecomposition of activations, or a sampling-based complexity estimate; none returns a direction computable from the network's parameters alone. We give one, for LayerNorm transformers. The inverse-scale direction $\gamma^{-1}/\|\gamma^{-1}\|$ of the LayerNorm affine is an exact algebraic kernel of the post-final-norm centred activation covariance, for any input distribution, and induces a corresponding dead direction in parameter space. It is read from the LN scale parameter alone, with no forward or backward pass and no eigensolve: the cheapest dead-direction read, specific to LayerNorm. We test it on $14$ pretrained transformers ($9$ LayerNorm, $5$ RMSNorm; $160$M-$35$B; language and vision objectives). At random initialisation the predicted direction matches the measured bottom singular direction (one forward pass, direct SVD) to four decimal places on $9/9$ LayerNorm models, and is correctly absent on $5/5$ RMSNorm models, which lack the mean-subtraction projector that creates it. On the trained checkpoint the covariance eigenvalue along this direction deepens by ${\sim}10^3\times$ and further dead directions open; the random-init-to-trained gap is a one-forward-pass, per-checkpoint readout of singular structure along the predicted coordinate. Two consequences follow in closed form: the residual stream's smallest singular value is preserved block-to-block on $13/14$ transformers measured on their own input distribution, the one exception (Gemma$4$-$31$B) a genuine dead direction the same read pinpoints; and the kernel direction's presence classifies a transformer's normalisation from the parameters alone.

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

Decision-Driven Geosteering Under Uncertainty: A Unified Framework for Sequential Decision Optimization

arXiv:2606.17331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geosteering requires navigating a well trajectory through an unknown geological configuration, while sequentially updating decisions based on indirect measurements acquired during drilling. This work presents an uncertainty-aware geosteering framework that tightly integrates particle filtering for probabilistic subsurface interpretation with value-based reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making. Geological uncertainty ahead of the drill bit is represented explicitly through a particle filter (PF), enabling belief-informed control rather than deterministic trajectory correction. The framework couples PF belief updates with belief-informed decision policies and evaluates three decision-making options that operate under identical uncertainty representations: an interpretable Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) scheme, a Deep Q-learning baseline, and a Dual Deep Reinforcement Learning (Dual DRL) architecture trained with a target Q-network scheme for stability, using a dueling (value/advantage) decomposition for Q-value parameterization. Beyond final placement performance, we assess policy behavior using stability-oriented metrics that quantify steering smoothness over time, providing additional operational insight into how decision policies respond as uncertainty evolves. The framework is integrated with an API for validation within an industrial geosteering simulator under realistic measurement noise and drilling constraints. Using identical geological realizations, operational limits, and reward definitions across methods, the experiments provide a controlled and high-fidelity evaluation of how alternative decision policies behave throughout the drilling process, rather than evaluating performance solely from the final well trajectory.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Landsat-Sentinel-2 Algal Bloom Mapping Using Vision Transformers: Model Description, Implementation, and Examples

Coastal algal bloom monitoring requires frequent, spatially detailed, and globally consistent observations, provided by Landsat-8/9 and Sentinel-2 A/B/C. Together, these missions offer over a decade of medium-resolution multispectral imagery with near-global coverage every 2-3 days, enabling the detection of fragmented bloom structures not resolvable by coarse ocean-color sensors. However, their use in aquatic environments remains challenging due to limited spectral coverage and a lack of harmonized reflectance products. As an alternative to traditional bio-optical methods, deep learning-based image classification offers a data-driven approach that can overcome many of these limitations. This study presents the first successful implementation of vision transformer-based coastal algal bloom mapping using 30-m Landsat-Sentinel-2 images. A globally distributed bloom patch dataset was generated across bloom-prone coastal hotspots worldwide. Four transformer-based architectures were compared against a standard convolutional baseline for fine-scale bloom detection, and assessed under different optical water types and atmospheric and surface conditions. All deep learning models showed strong capabilities in detecting floating bloom areas, with omission and commission errors of 8-65%. Under cloud and glint stress in a time series, the Swin Transformer outperformed traditional spectral-index approaches, which produced widespread false positives, effectively avoiding cloud- and glint-affected pixels. Comparisons with MODIS-derived products further highlighted the benefits of higher spatial resolution in detecting fragmented and irregularly affected blooms. Our findings support deep learning as a reliable tool for medium-resolution, consistent monitoring of floating algal blooms in dynamic coastal environments.

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

SkillCAT: Contrastive Assessment and Topology-Aware Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents

Skill self-evolution methods for LLM agents aim to turn execution trajectories into reusable skill documents, but current pipelines typically learn from one trajectory per task, merge candidate skill patches before checking them, and load the full skill corpus before inference. We propose SkillCAT, a training-free framework that separates this process into three stages. Contrastive Causal Extraction (CCE) samples multiple trajectories for each task and compares same-task success/failure pairs to identify evidence that explains outcome differences. Assessment-Augmented Evolution (AAE) replays each candidate patch on source-task clones and keeps only patches that improve or preserve task outcomes before hierarchical skill patch merging. Topology-Aware Task Execution (TTE) compiles the evolved skills into a routable sub-skill topology, so inference loads only the capability nodes relevant to the task. We evaluate SkillCAT on common agent benchmarks, including SpreadsheetBench, WikiTableQuestions, and DocVQA, and further test cross-model and out-of-distribution generalization. Across these settings, SkillCAT raises the average score over baselines by up to 40.40%, demonstrating reliable skill evolution without model training.

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

Spiking Pyramid Wavelet Transformation for High-efficient and Low-energy Image Restoration

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant interest in computer vision due to their potential for efficiency and biological inspiration. While spiking CNN-based methods have shown promise for image restoration (IR) tasks, their performance is constrained by the inherent receptive field limitations of CNN operations. In the paper, we explore the benefits of discrete wavelet transformation and propose a spiking pyramid wavelet-based model (SPWM) for high-efficient and low-energy target. Specifically, we develop a spiking dual pyramid wavelet (SDPW) block to model long-range dependency and exploit the properties of the degradation in the wavelet domain. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that SPWM significantly lowers computational costs and energy consumption while maintaining image quality. Our method showcases the potential of SNNs in the field of IR, offering new insights for future applications of resource-limited devices.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

The Program Is Still There: A Conservation Law for Program Discovery

arXiv:2606.13799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding the shortest program that generates a sequence is uncomputable, and for six decades that fact has been mistaken for a wall around finding any generating program. It is not a wall but a price, and this paper measures it. For every algorithm that learns about a candidate program only through its score, a class spanning Levin search, evolutionary methods, simulated annealing, and the cross-entropy method, we define the coupling width of a search problem and prove an unconditional worst-case lower bound, exponential in that width with base one less than the domain size. From it follows a conservation law: structural knowledge injected into a search trades one for one against the search it removes, and their sum can never fall below the length of the program sought. Levin's 1973 upper bound and the lower bound proved here are the two ends of one conserved quantity, closing on each other as the instruction set grows. The only escape is to read a candidate's structure rather than its score, and its price, which we prove for generic targets, is incompleteness. A deterministic engine built on this theory recovers a generating program, certified by compressing its data and predicting an unseen continuation, for 2,383 of 3,914 sequences across four independent populations, including 244 of the 256 elementary cellular automata, with measured discovery cost rising along program length more than an order of magnitude inside the score-oracle worst case.

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

Let Them Steal: Trapping Large Language Model Extraction Attacks with Knowledge Honeypot

arXiv:2606.15810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models deployed as commercial APIs are vulnerable to model extraction attacks, while existing defenses either act too late or degrade utility for legitimate users. We propose Knowledge Trap, a defense that redirects extraction attacks toward low-transferability knowledge through a Honeypot Knowledge Graph (HKG) and breadcrumb-guided exploration. Instead of blocking queries or perturbing outputs, Knowledge Trap consumes the attacker's limited query budget on knowledge with negligible downstream utility while preserving benign-user performance. Experiments in medical and financial domains show that Knowledge Trap reduces surrogate Agreement by 6.2\% on average without degrading legitimate-user accuracy, outperforming existing defenses that impose measurable user impact. These results suggest that defending knowledge-space traversal is a practical direction for mitigating LLM extraction attacks.

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

Evaluating Local Explainability Metrics for Machine Learning Models on Tabular Data

arXiv:2605.27618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the wide use of explainability techniques to attempt to understand the behavior of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the generated explanations may not always be reliable. An explanation can appear plausible to humans but fail to capture the internal reasoning of a model, particularly when dealing with complex tabular data. This paper studies the trustworthiness of local explainability techniques when applied to complex tabular classification tasks, considering evaluated metrics for three main properties: faithfulness to the model's predictions, robustness to input data variations, and complexity of the explanation itself. A benchmark was performed for Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), Kernel SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Feature Ablation techniques, across 32 datasets and different types of machine learning models. Model performance ranges were analyzed to identify two groups: consensus-correct, which are samples that all models predicted correctly, and consensus-wrong, samples that all models predicted incorrectly. The obtained results demonstrate that that the explanations are not always correlated with a model's predictive performance. Instead, dataset complexity and feature distributions seem to be the main factors affecting explanation quality and reliability.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Inverse Born Rule Equivalence. On the Informational Limits of Real-Valued Amplitude Encodings and the Measurement of Quantum Advantage in Data Embeddings

arXiv:2602.21350v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When does quantum data encoding provide genuine quantum advantage, and when does it merely rephrase a classically solvable problem? We prove an Equivalence Theorem demonstrating that any encoding mapping classical data to real-valued amplitudes, $\vert\psi_c\rangle = \sum_i c_i \vert i\rangle$ with $c_i \in \mathbb{R}$ and $\sum_i c_i^2 = 1$, composed with a data-independent parameterised unitary and computational-basis measurement, yields exactly the class of classical quadratic forms. We identify the geometric mechanism driving this collapse: the restriction to $\mathbb{R}$ forces a vanishing Berry connection, removing the complex phases required for data-dependent quantum interference. To operationalize this boundary, we introduce encoding diagnostics – phase complexity $C[\Phi]$ and mode-wise von Neumann mutual information $I[\Phi]$ – and link them to the information-geometric excess $\Delta g$. We show that for all real-valued encodings, $\Delta g = 0$ identically. We term the misidentification of such models as evidence of quantum computational power the Inverse Born Rule Fallacy. Supported by numerical experiments, our results establish that complex-phase structure is a strictly necessary condition for data-driven (Type~B) quantum advantage.

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

Linear Mode Connectivity under Data Shifts for Deep Ensembles of Image Classifiers

arXiv:2511.04514v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The phenomenon of linear mode connectivity (LMC) links several aspects of deep learning, including training stability under noisy stochastic gradients, the smoothness and generalization of local minima (basins), the similarity and functional diversity of sampled models, and architectural effects on data processing. In this work, we experimentally study LMC under data shifts and identify conditions that mitigate their impact. We interpret data shifts as an additional source of stochastic gradient noise, which can be reduced through small learning rates and large batch sizes. These parameters influence whether models converge to the same local minimum or to regions of the loss landscape with varying smoothness and generalization. Although models sampled via LMC tend to make similar errors more frequently than those converging to different basins, the benefit of LMC lies in balancing training efficiency against the gains achieved from larger, more diverse ensembles. Code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/DLR-KI/LMC. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Achieving Precise Text-To-Cypher Via Grounded Knowledge Graph Data Generation

Property Graphs are rapidly being adopted as database frameworks for representing heterogeneous data sources. To enable precise access to the information contained in them we need conversational interfaces based on Text-To-Cypher (Text2Cypher) parsers. This paper presents an automatic synthetic data generation method that can be leveraged to fine-tune small LLMs for this task. We conduct experiments on all the major Text-To-Cypher benchmarks, demonstrating that with our synthetic data generation approach we can significantly increase the performance of small LLMs, allowing them to compete with much larger proprietary models. This means that in settings in which models must be locally deployed we can ensure data-sovereignty without sacrificing accuracy and without costly annotation campaigns.

13.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

Induction of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies by a two-step mechanism informs vaccine design | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A major obstacle confronting HIV-1 vaccine and cure research is the lack of an outbred animal model for rapid and consistent induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). We designed an epitope-focused simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV.5MUT) that elicited broad and potent V3-glycan-targeted antibodies within a year of infection in 14 of 22 macaques compared with 0 of 14 control animals. SHIV.5MUT elicited bNAbs by a two-step mechanism, inducing an initial wave of V1-directed antibodies that selected for Envs with shortened, hypoglycosylated V1 loops, which in turn primed V3-glycan bNAb precursors. Rhesus bNAbs were immunogenetically and structurally diverse, closely resembling human V3-glycan bNAbs. Env-bNAb coevolution revealed a diverse repertoire of bNAb precursors and the Env variants that matured them, yielding a molecular blueprint for vaccine design.

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

Dynestyx: A Probabilistic Programming Library for Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.16985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State-space models (SSMs) are the standard formalism for Bayesian treatment of dynamical systems, with natural applications in statistics, signal processing, and machine learning. Despite their importance in both theory and application, dynamical systems have proven difficult to incorporate in modern probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), making state-of-the-art methods less accessible to practitioners and introducing friction in following the "Bayesian workflow." We introduce dynestyx, a probabilistic programming library with first-class support for SSMs, including state-of-the-art methods in the estimation of both states and parameters. Through a single, unified interface, users may specify arbitrary priors for discrete-time or continuous-time dynamical systems, perform inference over mixed-effect data, and make state and parameter estimates with principled uncertainty quantification.

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

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differentially Private Learning through Bounded Adaptive Clipping

arXiv:2506.01396v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has become an essential framework for privacy-preserving machine learning. Existing DP learning methods, however, often have disparate impacts on model predictions, e.g., for minority groups. Gradient clipping, which is often used in DP learning, can suppress larger gradients from challenging samples. We show that this problem is amplified by adaptive clipping, which will often shrink the clipping bound to tiny values to match a well-fitting majority, while significantly reducing the accuracy for others. We propose bounded adaptive clipping, which introduces a tunable lower bound to prevent excessive gradient suppression. Our method improves worst-class accuracy by over 10 percentage points on Skewed and Fashion MNIST compared to unbounded adaptive clipping, 7 points compared to Automatic clipping, and 5 points compared to constant clipping. The code is available at https://github.com/TrustworthyMLHelsinki/adaptive-clipping-fairness.

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

Mapping AI Programs in the U.S: A Status Report from Early 2026 and an Analysis of AI Majors and Minors

arXiv:2606.12428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a report on the status of undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the United States in Spring 2026. In so doing, we 1) describe our scraping and mapping tools, which dynamically update to track the state of AI education in the U.S., and 2) create a historic record at a time of great upheaval. The tool we developed, available at https://cicmap.ai, detects, scrapes, and displays data from more than 350 undergraduate AI programs–majors, minors, concentrations, and certificates–at 4-year universities. Our tool searched over 560 institutions to locate these programs, a sample that represents 86\% of all undergraduate Computer Science (CS) graduates in the U.S. This tool allows prospective students, guidance counselors, administrators, and faculty to easily access AI program requirements and is designed to continually update as new programs emerge. To the best of our knowledge, this survey represents the most comprehensive snapshot of the state of AI programs in the U.S. to date. With this work we offer three important contributions: 1) a record of AI programs in the U.S. at a time of great upheaval; 2) a tool to explore AI programs and their requirements; and 3) an analysis of the courses required for 66 AI majors and 87 AI minors. Our analysis of majors and minors shows great variability in the size and the requirements of these degrees, but we note two takeaways. First, not all majors require a general AI course, but if they don't, they do require a Machine Learning (ML) course. Second, while more than a third of majors require an Ethics in AI course, just under a quarter of AI minors do.

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

Measurement Plasticity: Sensor-Level Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

We propose Multi-View Physical-prompt (MVP) for Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), a forward-only framework that moves TTA from tokens to photons by treating the camera exposure triangle (i.e., ISO, shutter speed, and aperture) as physical prompts. At inference, MVP acquires selected multiple physical views using a source-affinity score, evaluates digitally augmented variants of each retained view and filters the lowest-entropy predictions, and aggregates predictions with hard voting. This selection-then-vote design is simple, calibration-friendly, and requires no gradients or model modifications. On ImageNet-ES and ImageNet-ES-Diverse, MVP outperforms digital-only TTA on both Auto-Exposure and a combination with conventional sensor control. MVP remains effective under reduced parameter candidates that lower capture latency, demonstrating its practicality.

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

CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly

arXiv:2605.26195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

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

MA-DLE: Speech-based Automatic Depression Level Estimation via Memory Augmentation

Speech-based automatic estimation of depression levels is essential for enabling early detection and timely intervention, particularly in resource-constrained mental health settings. In recent years, deep learning has demonstrated impressive success across various domains, including affective computing and mental health assessment. Most existing approaches rely on RNN-based architectures (such as LSTM and GRU) to model temporal information for depression estimation. However, the extracted features often emphasize only a few adjacent speech segments, limiting their ability to capture long-range dependencies. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a memory-based feature augmentation method that enhances the representational capacity of GRU-extracted features. Rather than indiscriminately incorporating historical data, our memory bank is designed to selectively integrate two types of components in order to reduce redundancy and irrelevance: (1) historical temporal features that closely resemble the current GRU output, offering complementary contextual information; and (2) dynamic memory features identified based on feature variability, which capture behavioral and emotional fluctuations indicative of depressive symptoms. To effectively fuse the memory-augmented features with GRU outputs, we further design a Hierarchical Attention Fusion (HAF) module. Our method is evaluated on the widely used DAIC-WOZ and E-DAIC datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

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

The Significance of Style Diversity in Annotation-Free Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv:2606.20400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating high-utility synthetic data for intent classification typically requires human-annotated seed data, which is often unavailable in fast-paced industrial settings. In this paper, we propose a framework for synthetic dialogue generation that works entirely without human-annotated data, relying solely on intent definitions. Our proposed dialogue generation framework utilizes two different types of topic and style attributes to improve data diversity. Also, we propose two novel post-hoc stylization models called Univ and Exam to transform synthetic LLM-generated utterances into more varied, human-like linguistic styles. To enhance data quality, we utilize an LLM-as-a-judge filtering process. Experimental results on both industrial and public datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves up to 93.3% of the performance obtained using human-annotated training data. Crucially, the findings reveal that style diversity is more critical than topic diversity for synthetic data utility, as it prevents models from learning spurious stylistic correlations. Furthermore, the study shows that incorporating style attributes during the generation process is more effective than post-hoc style adaptation.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Measuring Curriculum Alignment across Topical Coverage, Competency, and Cognitive Depth: A Longitudinal Framework Applied to CS2013 and CS2023

arXiv:2606.19469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Undergraduate computer science is governed by international curricular guidelines revised about once a decade, yet programs lack a reliable, reproducible way to measure how completely they cover the current guidelines and how that coverage shifts when the guidelines are restructured. We address this with a human-in-the-loop pipeline that measures a program's coverage of an external body of knowledge, applied longitudinally to one accredited BSc in Computer Science against Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) and 2023 (CS2023). The pipeline represents the program and each guideline as structured corpora, generates candidate course-to-knowledge-unit matches by semantic retrieval, and confirms them through human judgment under an explicit coverage definition. Of seven benchmarked retrievers, a reciprocal-rank-fusion ensemble was strongest, and a reputed long-context model underperformed a small sentence model, so retriever choice must be measured. Both maps were validated by an independent second rater (Cohen's kappa 0.64 for CS2023, 0.69 for CS2013). The program covers 49.7% of CS2023 and 50.9% of CS2013 knowledge units, near-constant across a decade. Extending the same retrieve-then-confirm design to competency articulation and cognitive depth shows that the program articulates the competency for ~88% of covered units under each guideline, yet delivers it at the recommended depth for 76% of present units under CS2023 against 95% under CS2013, a gap reflecting the newer guideline's raised expectations, not the program. The longitudinal comparison separates persistent structural gaps (parallel and distributed computing, foundations of programming languages, systems fundamentals), uncovered against both guidelines and ABET, from differences that reflect the standard's evolution. The instrument is reusable and available from the authors on request.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Graph Structured Combinatorial Semi-Bandit with Nonlinear Reward Associations through Separable Signals

arXiv:2606.14650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The identification of optimal structures within vast arrays of interconnected data necessitates significant sampling- and computational effort. Learning and leveraging underlying signal dependencies can improve efficiency and predictive capabilities considerably, but the ubiquity of nonlinear statistical relations amplifies the complexity of such undertakings. In this paper, we develop novel generic and adaptive strategies equipped with routines for graph-based causal reward modeling, analytic reproducing kernel methods, and Taylor approximation of functional processes. We establish theoretical performance guarantees sublinear in time and linear in data volume over time. Our analyses cover robustness to a multitude of uncertainties arising from noise interference, gradual model convergence, and solution space mismatch. The framework's general appeal is substantiated by a minimalistic set of conditions or reliance on prior estimates, while various outlined modifications address specific or extended settings. To demonstrate practical effectiveness, we conduct numerical experiments using both benchmarked synthetic and real-world transportation datasets.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Visual Place Recognition in Forests with Depth-Aware Distillation

Visual place recognition in natural forest environments remains challenging due to repetitive vegetation, weak structural cues, and significant appearance variation across traversals. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a lightweight depth-aware distillation framework that injects geometric cues into a DINOv2-based place recognition model, while maintaining its pre-trained descriptor space. Evaluated on the recent WildCross benchmark, the proposed approach yields gains over an appearance-only counterpart, providing robustness to appearance variations. These results demonstrate the importance of depth as a strong complementary modality for place recognition in natural environments and identify depth-aware distillation as a promising direction for more robust forest perception.

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

ART: Attention Run-time Termination for Efficient Large Language Model Decoding

Long-context decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is constrained by the cost of accessing and processing the Key-Value (KV) cache. Despite evidence that attention outputs depend jointly on keys and values, most existing KV management methods rely on key-only pruning, since incorporating values incurs prohibitive overhead. In this paper, we propose Attention Run-time Termination (ART), a lightweight run-time mechanism that tracks accumulated attention outputs during kernel execution and terminates subsequent KV block accesses once further contributions become negligible. Rather than replacing KV selection, ART dynamically terminates redundant KV traversal on top of existing dense or sparse attention policies. We introduce a stability-based criterion that monitors both magnitude and directional changes of intermediate attention outputs and provideds a theoretical characterization of the resulting truncation error. Experiments on the LongBench and RULER Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks show that ART increases the generation throughput of existing KV-cache methods by up to 20%, without compromising the result quality.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Analyzing Initialization Strategies for the Local Unitary Cluster Jastrow Ansatz within the Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Framework

arXiv:2606.14933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this study, we analyze the choice of local unitary cluster Jastrow (LUCJ) ansatz initialization and sensitivity of the sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) algorithm within the quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework. We examine six initialization strategies, including those based on coupled-cluster singles and doubles (CCSD), M{\o}ller-Plesset second-order perturbation theory (MP2), data-driven coupled-cluster (DDCC), and trivial (zeroes and random) initializations, across twelve molecular systems and three basis sets (STO-3G, cc-pVDZ, and aug-cc-pVDZ). We find that while the mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) between the alternative and CCSD-initialized t2-amplitudes span many orders of magnitude, the resulting SQD energies are largely insensitive to this variation. In particular, most initializations recover energies within chemical accuracy (+/-1.6 mEh) of the CCSD reference, with convergence improving as the basis set size increases. Notably, random initialization achieves performance competitive with CCSD across all basis sets, while zeroes initialization, despite having smaller deviations from CCSD, yields the worst energy agreement. Our results highlight that the proximity to the CCSD initialization is not a reliable predictor of the quality of electronic energies. These findings establish that configuration recovery within SQD, rather than circuit initialization, is the dominant factor governing energy accuracy, and suggest that computationally cheaper initialization strategies are viable alternatives to CCSD for QCSC workflows