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

Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Authors:
Evangelos Pournaras↗Srijoni Majumdar↗Carina Hausladen↗Dirk Helbing↗

arXiv:2606.13026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interfacing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with democracy is one of the most profound challenges of our times. On the one hand, AI comes with opportunities to overcome long-standing challenges in democracy, such as low participation in deliberative and voting processes with poor representation of people. On the other hand, new risks arise from AI algorithms that are privacy-intrusive, biased, manipulative, spread misinformation and influence election results. Moving beyond the over-simplistic question of whether AI is good or bad for democracy, the Handbook on Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence asks instead: how to upgrade democracies and the principles they are built on, using AI? How to engage with AI and on what terms? Which new values and design principles are required to build democratic resilience? In 34 chapters by 59 authors across the world from different disciplines, we explore how AI can empower collective intelligence for democracy (Part 1) and what is the future of deliberative democracy using large language models and social media (Part 2). We also illustrate the role of AI for building resilient self-governance systems (Part 3) and the challenges of transforming democracy in the age of AI (Part 4). We conclude with broader perspectives (Part 5) that re-imagine the interplay of democracy and AI.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ScholaWrite: A Dataset of End-to-End Scholarly Writing Process

Authors:
Khanh Chi Le↗Linghe Wang↗Minhwa Lee↗Ross Volkov↗Luan Tuyen Chau↗Dongyeop Kang↗

Writing is a cognitively demanding activity that requires constant decision-making, heavy reliance on working memory, and frequent shifts between tasks of different goals. To build writing assistants that truly align with writers' cognition, we must capture and decode the complete thought process behind how writers transform ideas into final texts. We present ScholaWrite, the first dataset of end-to-end scholarly writing, tracing the multi-month journey from initial drafts to final manuscripts. We contribute three key advances: (1) a Chrome extension that unobtrusively records keystrokes on Overleaf, enabling the collection of realistic, in-situ writing data; (2) a novel corpus of full scholarly manuscripts, enriched with fine-grained annotations of cognitive writing intentions. The dataset includes \LaTeX-based edits from five computer science preprints, capturing nearly 62K text changes over four months; and (3) analyses and insights into the micro-dynamics of scholarly writing, highlighting gaps between human writing processes and the current capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in providing meaningful assistance. ScholaWrite underscores the value of capturing end-to-end writing data to develop future writing assistants that support, not replace, the cognitive work of scientists.

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

Combating Data Laundering in LLM Training

Authors:
Muxing Li↗Zesheng Ye↗Sharon Li↗Feng Liu↗

arXiv:2604.01904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-hoc unauthorized-training data detection for large language models (LLMs) typically assumes a query-with-originals regime: rights holders query a target LLM with raw proprietary data and assess whether the model assigns them stronger memorization-based detection signals, e.g., higher confidence or lower loss, than held-out non-training reference texts. We show that this regime becomes brittle under data laundering, where the target LLM is trained on semantics-preserving but stylistically or structurally transformed surrogates of proprietary data to obfuscate provenance. Since training-time exposure occurs in the laundered form, memorization signals may no longer appear on the originals, collapsing the candidate-reference signal separation that standard detectors rely on. We counter this threat by studying laundering-aware detection with raw proprietary data, a held-out reference corpus, and query access to the target LLM, while the laundering transformation is undisclosed. Since exact recovery of the laundered corpus is infeasible, we infer a detection-useful synthesis process via an auxiliary LLM that maps originals into training-like queries. To make this search tractable, we introduce Synthesis Data Reversion (SDR), which constrains the unbounded space of natural-language transformations through a goal-details abstraction: a high-level transformation goal, e.g., "lyrical rewriting", and fine-grained details, e.g., "with vivid imagery". SDR identifies the most likely goal and iteratively refines details so synthesized queries elicit stronger target-model detection signals. Evaluated on the MIMIR benchmark against diverse laundering practices and target LLM families (Pythia, Llama2, and Falcon), SDR consistently restores detection signals, offering a practical auditing layer against data laundering.

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

Variable-Length Tokenization via Learnable Global Merging for Diffusion Transformers

Authors:
Dong Hoon Lee↗Seunghoon Hong↗

arXiv:2606.20076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have become dominant in visual synthesis, but their quality-compute trade-off is largely constrained by the tokenizer's fixed compression ratio. Variable-length tokenizers (VLTs) promise adaptive compression by varying token counts, allowing diffusion models to flexibly balance quality and compute. However, conventional VLTs modulate length by truncating ordered token sequences, which makes token semantics depend on token position and breaks representational alignment across lengths. This leads to a cross-length shift in the latent distribution that hinders a single variable-length diffusion model from operating effectively. To address this, we propose a novel variable-length tokenizer that modulates length by merging tokens. We show that encouraging similar tokens to merge enables direct cross-length representation alignment when the diffusion transformer operates according to the merging pattern. Since conventional merging methods are data-dependent, making the merging pattern inaccessible during generation, we introduce learnable global merging, which is data-independent, to ensure compatibility with diffusion transformers. On ImageNet 256$\times$256 generation, our merging-based variable-length tokenizer integrated with a diffusion transformer achieves a superior gFID-compute trade-off compared to prior VLT methods. Code is available at [this https URL](https://github.com/movinghoon/lgm)

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Send a SCOUT First: Pre-hoc Reasoning for Adaptive Detector Allocation in Prompt-Injection Defense

Authors:
Shuhao Zhang↗Jiarui Li↗Qi Cao↗Ruiyi Zhang↗Pengtao Xie↗

arXiv:2605.30837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are heterogeneous: each is strong on a different slice of attacks, and none is always reliable. Yet existing systems still treat detection as a fixed single-detector pipeline, committing every request to one detector's blind spots. We reframe defense as detector allocation: given a heterogeneous pool, decide per request which detectors to run and whether to escalate to an LLM judge. Our framework SCOUT (Scalable and Controllable Outcome-prediction for Uncertainty-aware Triage) makes this decision dynamic by predicting each detector's per-sample reliability and latency from how it behaved on similar past inputs, and exposes a single safety-utility threshold to the operator (where utility bundles benign-pass rate and wall-clock). To evaluate this setting, we build SCOUT-450, a benchmark that captures the structurally complex, agent-facing injections that older prompt-injection sets under-represent. On SCOUT-450, a safety-oriented operating point reduces attack-success rate by 46% and total wall-clock by 40% relative to an always-on GPT-4o judge, at a 5.1-point benign-utility drop. SCOUT also transfers to three external benchmarks (BIPIA, IPI, and IHEval), improving the safety-utility frontier.

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

When Good Verifiers Go Bad: Self-Improving VLMs Can Regress on New Tasks

Authors:
Jianzhe Lin↗

arXiv:2606.14629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verifier-driven self-DPO is a common recipe for self-improving production visual-language models. In this setup, a frozen verifier scores candidate generations, the top- and bottom-scoring candidates form a preference example, and DPO updates the learner. The deployment-time assumption is monotone: a stronger verifier should yield a stronger student. We show that this assumption can fail because verifier quality is highly task-specific. On a four-rung open-source verifier ladder across MathVista, MMMU, and BLINK, the same verifiers that are above-threshold and improve a Qwen-3-VL-2B student on MathVista become sub-threshold on MMMU, where their task-rubric accuracy drops to 8% to 23%. In this regime, every verifier we tested silently regresses the student, producing drops of 3.4 to 10.9 percentage points below the frozen baseline while the DPO training loss continues to decrease. The regression replicates on a second student, Qwen-2.5-VL-3B. Moreover, within the failure regime, damage is confidence-inverted: the more accurate-but-still-wrong verifier causes larger regression than a near-random verifier, suggesting that progress-gated replay amplifies confidently wrong preference pairs. We give a compact mechanistic explanation via a variance theorem for progress-gated replay and its direction-mismatch failure mode. The deployment message is operational rather than purely diagnostic: before running any verifier-driven loop, teams should measure target-task rubric accuracy, rank verifiers by target-task rubric quality rather than parameter count, and treat diminishing returns in above-threshold regimes as a verifier-side compute budget cap.

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

ToolSense: A Diagnostic Framework for Auditing Parametric Tool Knowledge in LLMs

Authors:
Ashutosh Hathidara↗Sai Shruthi Sistla↗Sebastian Schreiber↗Sahil Bansal↗

arXiv:2606.12451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed as agents over large tool catalogs face a critical tool-retrieval bottleneck. As embedding-based retrieval approaches rely on compact encoders that may under-capture specialized tool semantics, parametric tool retrieval addresses this by encoding each tool as a virtual token appended to the LLM vocabulary, fine-tuned in two stages (memorization then retrieval SFT) to use the LLM as a retriever, achieving strong performance on standard ToolBench retrieval benchmarks. Yet these benchmarks use verbose, fully-specified queries, and their evaluation applies constrained decoding that restricts outputs to valid token paths, neither reveals whether the model actually understands its tools. We introduce ToolSense, an open-source LLM-powered diagnostic framework that takes any tool catalog as input and automatically generates three benchmarks: a Realistic Retrieval Benchmark (RRB) with queries at three ambiguity tiers, an MCQ probing benchmark, and a QA probing benchmark. Applying ToolSense to ToolBench (~47k tools) and evaluating five parametric model training configurations reveals a knowledge-retrieval dissociation: on RRB queries, several configurations collapse by ~50-64 percentage points compared to fully-specified ToolBench benchmarks, falling below the embedding-model baseline. Additionally, despite strong retrieval performance, some models score near-random on factual probes, suggesting a knowledge-retrieval dissociation. We open-source the ToolSense framework and the ToolBench diagnostic benchmarks at https://github.com/SAP/toolsense.

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

deFOREST: Fusing Optical and Radar satellite data for Enhanced Sensing of Tree-loss

Authors:
Julio Enrique Castrillon-Candas↗Hanfeng Gu↗Caleb Meredith↗Yulin Li↗Xiaojing Tang↗Pontus Olofsson↗Mark Kon↗

arXiv:2510.14092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper we develop a deforestation detection pipeline that incorporates optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A crucial component of the pipeline is the construction of anomaly maps of the optical data, which is done using the residual space of a discrete Karhunen-Lo\'{e}ve (KL) expansion. Anomalies are quantified using a concentration bound on the distribution of the residual components for the nominal state of the forest. This bound does not require prior knowledge on the distribution of the data. This is in contrast to statistical parametric methods that assume knowledge of the data distribution, an impractical assumption that is especially infeasible for high dimensional data such as ours. Once the optical anomaly maps are computed they are combined with SAR data, and the state of the forest is classified by using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We test our approach with Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (Optical) data on a $92\,km \times 92\,km$ region in the Amazon forest. The results show that both the hybrid optical-radar and optical only methods achieve high accuracy that is superior to the recent state-of-the-art hybrid method. Moreover, the hybrid method is significantly more robust in the case of sparse optical data that are common in highly cloudy regions.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An Analysis of the Coordination Gap between Joint and Modular Learning for Job Shop Scheduling with Transportation Resources

Authors:
Moritz Link↗Jonathan Hoss↗Noah Klarmann↗

arXiv:2604.24117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient job-shop scheduling with transportation resources is critical for high-performance manufacturing. With the rise of "decentralized factories", multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach for the combined scheduling of production and transportation tasks. Prior work has largely focused on developing novel cooperative architectures while overlooking the question of when joint training is necessary. Joint training denotes the simultaneous training of job and automatic guided vehicle scheduling agents, whereas modular training involves independently training each agent followed by post-hoc integration. In this study, we systematically investigate the conditions under which joint training is essential for optimal performance in the job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources. Through a rigorous sensitivity analysis of resource scarcity and temporal dominance, we quantify the coordination gap – the performance difference between these two training modalities. In our evaluation, joint training outperforms the majority of dispatching rule combinations and modular training approaches. However, the coordination gap advantage diminishes in bottleneck environments, particularly under severe transport and processing constraints. These findings indicate that modular training represents a viable alternative in environments where a single scheduling task dominates. Overall, our work provides practical guidance for selecting between training modalities based on environmental conditions, enabling decision-makers to optimize reinforcement learning-based scheduling performance.

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

PAWS: Preference Learning with Advantage-Weighted Segments

Authors:
Aleksandar Taranovic↗Onur Celik↗Niklas Freymuth↗Ge Li↗Serge Thilges↗Huy Le↗Tai Hoang↗Rania Rayyes↗Gerhard Neumann↗

arXiv:2606.11982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) learns policies from human trajectory-level comparisons, avoiding explicit reward design and expert demonstrations. Existing methods typically train utility functions on trajectory or segment-level preferences while relying on per-step utility estimates during policy optimization. This training and inference mismatch induces a distribution shift that severely degrades temporal credit assignment and limits policy learning. We analyze this issue and propose PAWS, a segment-based preference learning method that performs policy updates directly using segment-level advantage functions. By aligning utility training with policy optimization, PAWS preserves trajectory-level preference information and avoids unreliable per-step learning signals. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that PAWS consistently outperforms existing PbRL approaches, highlighting the importance of distribution-consistent preference learning.

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

All-Mem: Agentic Lifelong Memory via Dynamic Topology Evolution

Authors:
Can Lv↗Heng Chang↗Shengyu Tao↗Mingju Chen↗Zhaoxin Fan↗Ziwei Zhang↗Yuchen Guo↗Shiji Zhou↗

Lifelong interactive agents are expected to assist users over months or years, which requires continually writing long term memories while retrieving the right evidence for each new query under fixed context and latency budgets. Existing memory systems often degrade as histories grow, yielding redundant, outdated, or noisy retrieved contexts. We present All-Mem, an online/offline lifelong memory framework that maintains a topology structured memory bank via explicit, non destructive consolidation, avoiding the irreversible information loss typical of summarization based compression. In online operation, it anchors retrieval on a bounded visible surface to keep coarse search cost bounded. Periodically offline, an LLM diagnoser proposes confidence scored topology edits executed with gating using three operators: Split, Merge, and Update, while preserving immutable evidence for traceability. At query time, typed links enable hop bounded, budgeted expansion from active anchors to archived evidence when needed. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-s show improved retrieval and QA over representative baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/LvCan926/All-Mem.

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

SCC-Loc: A Unified Semantic Cascade Consensus Framework for UAV Thermal Geo-Localization

Authors:
Xiaoran Zhang↗Yu Liu↗Jinyu Liang↗Kangqiushi Li↗Zhiwei Huang↗Huaxin Xiao↗

Cross-modal Thermal Geo-localization (TG) provides a robust, all-weather solution for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. However, profound thermal-visible modality gaps introduce severe feature ambiguity, systematically corrupting conventional coarse-to-fine registration. To dismantle this bottleneck, we propose SCC-Loc, a unified Semantic-Cascade-Consensus localization framework. By sharing a single DINOv2 backbone across global retrieval and MINIMA$_{RoMa}$ matching, it minimizes memory footprint and achieves zero-shot, highly accurate absolute position estimation. Specifically, we tackle modality ambiguity by introducing three cohesive components. First, we design the Semantic-Guided Viewport Alignment (SGVA) module to adaptively optimize satellite crop regions, effectively correcting initial spatial deviations. Second, we develop the Cascaded Spatial-Adaptive Texture-Structure Filtering (C-SATSF) mechanism to explicitly enforce geometric consistency, thereby eradicating dense cross-modal outliers. Finally, we propose the Consensus-Driven Reliability-Aware Position Selection (CD-RAPS) strategy to derive the optimal solution through a synergy of physically constrained pose optimization. To address data scarcity, we construct Thermal-UAV, a comprehensive dataset providing 11,890 diverse thermal queries referenced against a large-scale satellite ortho-photo and corresponding spatially aligned Digital Surface Model (DSM). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCC-Loc establishes a new state-of-the-art, suppressing the mean localization error to 9.37 m and providing a 7.6-fold accuracy improvement within a strict 5-m threshold over the strongest baseline. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/FloralHercules/SCC-Loc.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning Problems

Authors:
Christian Walder↗Deep Karkhanis↗

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms sample multiple n>1 solution attempts for each problem and reward them independently. This optimizes for pass@1 performance and prioritizes the strength of isolated samples at the expense of the diversity and collective utility of sets of samples. This under-utilizes the sampling capacity, limiting exploration and eventual improvement on harder examples. As a fix, we propose Pass-at-k Policy Optimization (PKPO), a transformation on the final rewards which leads to direct optimization of pass@k performance, thus optimizing for sets of samples that maximize reward when considered jointly. Our contribution is to derive novel low variance unbiased estimators for pass@k and its gradient, in both the binary and continuous reward settings. We show optimization with our estimators reduces to standard RL with rewards that have been jointly transformed by a stable and efficient transformation function. While previous efforts are restricted to k=n, ours is the first to enable robust optimization of pass@k for any arbitrary k

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CADET: Physics-Grounded Causal Auditing and Training-Free Deconfounding of End-to-End Driving Planners

Authors:
Zikun Guo↗

arXiv:2606.14438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them. Such causal confusion silently compromises reliability in long-tail scenarios, and it is difficult to detect, because prevailing open-loop metrics (L2 displacement and collision rate) are dominated by ego status and do not indicate whether a planner depends on spurious cues. Existing remedies based on causal-intervention training require retraining large models and cannot audit a planner that is already deployed. We present CADET, a training-free framework that audits, benchmarks, and repairs spurious reliance in pretrained E2E planners without any parameter update.

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

Bring My Cup! Personalizing Vision-Language-Action Models with Visual Attentive Prompting

Authors:
Sangoh Lee↗Sangwoo Mo↗Wook-Shin Han↗

arXiv:2512.20014v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well to generic instructions, they struggle with personalized commands such as "bring my cup," where the robot must act on one specific instance among visually similar objects. We study this setting of manipulating personal objects, in which a VLA must identify and control a user-specific object unseen during training using only a few reference images. To address this challenge, we propose Visual Attentive Prompting (VAP), a simple-yet-effective training-free perceptual adapter that equips frozen VLAs with top-down selective attention. VAP treats the reference images as a non-parametric visual memory, grounds the personal object in the scene through open-vocabulary detection and embedding-based matching, and then injects this grounding as a visual prompt by highlighting the object and rewriting the instruction. We construct two simulation benchmarks, Personalized-SIMPLER and Personalized-VLABench, and a real-world tabletop benchmark to evaluate personalized manipulation across multiple robots and tasks. Experiments show that VAP consistently outperforms generic policies and token-learning baselines in both success rate and correct-object manipulation, helping to bridge the gap between semantic understanding and instance-level control.

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16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Hamiltonian description of nonreciprocal interactions

Authors:
Yu-Bo Shi↗Roderich Moessner↗Ricard Alert↗Marin Bukov↗

arXiv:2505.05246v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In a vast class of systems, which includes members as diverse as sedimenting particles and bird flocks, interactions do not stem from a potential, and are in general nonreciprocal. Thus, it is not possible to define a conventional energy function, nor to use analytical or numerical tools that rely on it. Here, we overcome these limitations by constructing a Hamiltonian that includes auxiliary degrees of freedom; when subject to a constraint, this Hamiltonian yields the original nonreciprocal dynamics. We show that Glauber dynamics based on the constrained Hamiltonian reproduce both stationary and nonstationary states of the original Langevin dynamics, as we explicitly illustrate for dissipative XY spins with vision-cone interactions. Further, the symplectic structure inherent to our construction enables us to apply the well-developed notions of Hamiltonian engineering, which we demonstrate by varying the amplitude of a periodic drive to tune the spin interactions between those of a square and a chain lattice geometry. Overall, our framework for generic nonreciprocal pairwise interactions paves the way for bringing to bear the full conceptual and methodological power of conventional statistical mechanics and Hamiltonian dynamics to nonreciprocal systems.

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

Think Fast: Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models

Authors:
Dewi Gould↗Francis Rhys Ward↗Anders Cairns Woodruff↗Rauno Arike↗Josh Hills↗Alex Serrano↗Ida Caspary↗Jason Ross Brown↗Jo J. Jiao↗Patrick Leask↗Twm Stone↗Ram Potham↗…

arXiv:2606.07157v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many efforts to ensure frontier AI models are safe rely on monitoring their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. If models become able to perform sufficiently complex reasoning internally, without explicit thinking tokens, this would undermine such oversight. We measure how well frontier models reason without CoT across a suite of over 30,000 questions spanning 43 benchmarks in domains including math, coding, puzzles, causality, theory-of-mind, and strategic reasoning. To compare models against humans, we estimate the $50\%$-task-completion time horizon (TH): the human time required for tasks a model completes with $50\%$ success rate. We complement this with a $50\%$ reasoning token horizon: the minimum number of o3-mini reasoning tokens needed for tasks a model solves with $50\%$ success rate. We find that the no-CoT $50\%$ TH of frontier models has been doubling roughly every year over the past six years, with GPT-5.5's TH reaching over 3 minutes and reasoning token horizon exceeding 1,500 tokens. Our median estimates predict that frontier no-CoT THs could exceed 7 minutes by 2028, and 25 minutes by 2030, though these projections carry substantial uncertainty. We recommend frontier developers track this explicitly.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Not all Jensen-Shannon Divergence Estimators are Equal

Authors:
Alba Garrido↗Alejandro Almod\'ovar↗Mar Elizo↗Patricia A. Apell\'aniz↗Santiago Zazo↗Juan Parras↗

arXiv:2606.16411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Jensen-Shannon divergence is widely reported as a scalar measure of fidelity for synthetic tabular data. Yet, in practice, it is estimated from finite samples using protocols that are often underspecified. This creates a measurement problem. Although the population divergence is well defined, the empirical value depends on the estimator family, sampling protocol, calibration, dimensionality, and class balance. We show that different protocols can yield non-comparable values: marginal-based estimators ignore dependencies in the joint distribution and can severely underestimate divergence, while classifier-based estimators capture joint structure but exhibit strong estimator dependence. We systematically study this behavior across controlled settings with reference divergences and real-world synthetic tabular benchmarks. Our analysis reveals dependence blindness in marginal estimators, prior-shift bias under class imbalance, and estimator sensitivity in high dimensions. To address prior shift, we derive a closed-form posterior correction for classifier-based Jensen-Shannon estimation. Our results show that empirical Jensen-Shannon divergence values are inherently protocol-dependent, making explicit specification of the estimation procedure necessary for meaningful comparison. We provide practical guidelines and an open-source tool for estimator-aware Jensen-Shannon evaluation.

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

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Authors:
Jia Deng↗Tianyi Tang↗Yanbin Yin↗Wenhao Yang↗Wayne Xin Zhao↗Ji-Rong Wen↗

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fusing Stylometric and Embedding Systems to Estimate Authorship Likelihood Ratios in Japanese

Authors:
Praju Ghatpande↗Satoru Tsuge↗Shunichi Ishihara↗Wataru Zaitsu↗Mitsuyuki Inaba↗

The likelihood ratio framework is widely recognized as the logically and legally sound basis for evidential analysis across forensic sciences, and its importance is increasingly acknowledged in analyses of authorship in textual evidence. To date, however, its application has been confined to English-language texts. Meanwhile, authorship attribution has traditionally relied on a diverse array of stylometric features, even as the rise of pre-trained large language models enables new contextual-embedding approaches. Combining these diverse approaches through fusion promises enhanced performance, yet it has not been applied to integrate stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems within the likelihood ratio paradigm. This study is the first to apply likelihood ratio-based forensic text comparison to Japanese digital texts, using ~1,000-character excerpts from blogs, to 1) evaluate system performance and likelihood ratio magnitudes and 2) assess the impact of fusing stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems. The results demonstrate that the fused system maintains excellent calibration while 1) increasing consistent-with-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes; 2) decreasing contrary-to-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes and 3) improving overall discriminability. The best-performing fusion achieved a log-likelihood-ratio cost of 0.32484, illustrating both the feasibility of likelihood ratio framework for Japanese and the benefits of fusion across heterogeneous systems.

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

BRDFusion: Physics Meets Generation for Urban Scene Inverse Rendering

Authors:
Yi-Ruei Liu↗Jie-Ying Lee↗Zheng-Hui Huang↗Yu-Lun Liu↗Chih-Hao Lin↗

Inverse rendering of urban scenes from captured videos enables numerous applications, including content creation and autonomous driving simulation. Physically-based rendering methods follow and control lighting physics, but suffer from reconstruction and rendering artifacts. While generative models produce realistic videos, they offer limited consistency and controllability. We present BRDFusion, a unified framework that combines two complementary models for inverse and forward rendering. Specifically, BRDFusion recovers explicit, consistent scene properties with physical modeling and alleviates optimization ambiguity with generative priors. During forward rendering, the physical model provides controllable rendering from the scene configuration, and the generative model denoises and fixes artifacts. Therefore, our method produces high-quality videos while allowing precise control, outperforming baselines in real and synthetic scenes. Moreover, BRDFusion supports novel-view relighting, night simulation, and dynamic object insertion/editing. Project page: https://shigon255.github.io/brdfusion-page/

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LongWebBench: Evaluating Structural and Functional Webpage Generation in Long-Horizon Settings

Authors:
Yi Zhao↗Zhen Yang↗Mengpan Chen↗Mingde Xu↗Shanghui Gong↗Xijun Liu↗Jibing Gong↗Jie Tang↗

arXiv:2606.17727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising progress in generating webpages from visual inputs, yet existing evaluations mainly focus on short, single-screen, and largely static webpages. We introduce LongWebBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon webpage generation from both structural and functional perspectives. LongWebBench contains 490 real-world long webpages for structural fidelity evaluation and 507 goal-oriented interaction tasks over 129 webpages for functional evaluation. It employs two complementary protocols: a multi-dimensional VLM-based metric for assessing long-range structural coherence, and a DOM-augmented agent-based pipeline for end-to-end functional verification. We further examine the automatic evaluation protocols through human agreement analysis. Experiments with state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs under single-image and multi-image settings reveal that structural fidelity degrades as webpage length increases, while visually plausible generations often fail to support executable multi-step interactions. These results highlight the need to evaluate long webpage generation beyond visual similarity, with executable interaction as a core criterion. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zheny2751-dotcom/LongWebBench.

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

Surpassing Scale by Efficiency: A Compact 135M Parameter Foundational LLM Natively Adapted for the Bangla Language

Authors:
Rabindra Nath Nandi↗

While the NLP landscape is dominated by multi-billion parameter architectures, their deployment in low-resource, non-Latin scripts remains computationally prohibitive for edge configurations, mobile systems, and decentralized local hardware. This paper presents bangla-smollm-135m, a highly compact 135-million parameter decoder-only foundational model engineered explicitly for high-efficiency language modeling in the Bangla script. By leveraging a deterministic intersect-and-append token merging strategy between TituLLMs and SmolLM2-135M, the model overcomes subword script fragmentation without destabilizing early pretrained parameter states. In zero-shot multi-task benchmark evaluations (PIQA_bn, OpenBookQA_bn, CommonsenseQA_bn, and Bangla_MMLU), bangla-smollm-135m matches or outperforms models twice its size (Gemma-3-270m) and achieves parity with models in the 1B parameter tier. The model is available at rnnandi/bangla-smollm-135m

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

HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers

Authors:
Guozhen Zhang↗Xuerui Qiu↗Yutao Cui↗Tianhui Song↗Changlin Li↗Junzhe Li↗Tao Huang↗Xiao Zhang↗Yang Li↗Jianbing Wu↗Miles Yang↗Zhao Zhong↗…

Holistic visual tokenizers are fundamental to unified multimodal models (UMMs) as they map diverse visual inputs into a unified representation space. In this paper, we present HYDRA-X, the first UMM that unifies image and video tokenization within a single Vision Transformer (ViT). Our design is driven by two core challenges: efficiently injecting spatiotemporal reconstruction capability into a native ViT, and embedding image- and video-level semantic awareness into the latent space. To address the first, comprehensive ablations reveal two key findings: (1) frame-level causal temporal attention suffices for visual reconstruction, whereas full spatiotemporal attention degrades it; and (2) hierarchical temporal compression substantially outperforms single-step alternatives. To tackle the second, we propose a lightweight decompressor that upsamples temporally compressed features under joint image-video teacher supervision, thereby enforcing complementary semantic structures within the compact latent space. Building on this holistic tokenizer, we further propose a principled improvement of the editing pipeline: source-target interaction should occur at the latent level inside the tokenizer rather than at the semantic level inside the LLM, substantially improving editing consistency and accelerating convergence. Instantiated at the 7B dense model, HYDRA-X achieves strong performance across image and video understanding and generation tasks, paving the way for future unified-tokenizer UMMs.

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

A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and Defenses

Authors:
Asif Shahriar↗Md Nafiu Rahman↗Sadif Ahmed↗Farig Sadeque↗Md Rizwan Parvez↗

LLM-based agents are now used throughout cybersecurity. While these agents facilitate powerful and autonomous security applications, their autonomy opens up new attack surfaces, and the security community is actively building defenses to secure them. Yet the literature on this subject has grown quickly and unevenly. Existing surveys treat applications, threats, and defenses in isolation, leaving no unified account of how an agent's capabilities, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures interconnect. In this work we present the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring the field around the fundamental pillars of Applications, Threats and Defenses. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of over 260 papers, explaining how agents are used in downstream cybersecurity applications, inherent threats to agentic systems, and countermeasures designed to protect them. In addition, we provide detailed pillar-specific and cross-cutting analyses that show the security-lifecycle coverage of agentic applications, comparison between red-teaming and blue-teaming agents, and the adversarial use of red-teaming applications. On the threat side, we analyze the entry points and agent-loop stages that attacks target, their specificity to the agentic setting, and the threat models they assume. On the defense side, we analyze the prevailing defense strategies, their cost and security trade-offs, and where in the agent lifecycle they are deployed. We further map which defenses cover which attack classes and chart trends in agent architecture, backbone model usage, data modality coverage, and the growth of attack and defense research over time. Taken together, these findings indicate that agentic systems are structurally fragile by default and that securing them will require defenses that span the full agent lifecycle rather than single-layer fixes.

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