Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24585

LLMs Prompted for Legal Context Object More: Overrefusal from Small On-Premises LLMs in Criminal Legal Context

Authors:

Anastasiia Kucherenko↗Fran\c{c}ois Brouchoud↗Dimitri Percia David↗Andrei Kucharavy↗

arXiv:2606.24585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While the validity of LLMs' use in the legal context remains subject to ethical and legal debate, legal professionals are already experimenting with personal LLMs, if only for translation and reformulation. However, even such a seemingly innocuous use can introduce biases through case processing speed if LLM assistants selectively refuse assistance on certain topics. To better anticipate such biases, we investigate several modern small LLMs that are most likely to be used as on-device assistants, to assess the impact of overrefusal on legal prompts. Surprisingly, we find that authority-style prefixes (``you are acting as an assistant of the national supreme court'', ``[...] defense lawyer'') systematically increase refusal rates by 2–20x over the no-prefix baseline, while a known role-play jailbreak prefix shows mixed effects, sharply increasing refusals in some models and barely shifting them in others. The finding suggests that small on-prem deployable LLMs are unstable under contextual framings that a real institutional user might naturally introduce, and further investigation is essential to minimize opportunities for bias.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17102

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

Authors:

Aoyu Zhang↗Dongping Liu↗Luyao Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative – from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2512.00324

MILE: A Mechanically Isomorphic Hand Exoskeleton and Visuotactile Robotic Hand for Data Collection in Dexterous Manipulation

Authors:

Jinda Du↗Jieji Ren↗Qiaojun Yu↗Ningbin Zhang↗Yu Deng↗Xingyu Wei↗Yufei Liu↗Guoying Gu↗Xiangyang Zhu↗

Dexterous robotic hands are expected to perform complex, contact-rich object manipulation, but learning such skills remains challenging because high-dimensional hands require high-fidelity demonstrations. Imitation learning provides a practical route for acquiring dexterous manipulation skills from human demonstrations, yet collecting synchronized multimodal demonstrations with accurate hand actions and tactile observations remains a key bottleneck. We present MILE, a teleoperation-based data-collection system comprising the human-first MILE exoskeleton and the mechanically corresponding MILE-Tac robotic hand. The system integrates custom-designed and fabricated modular joint encoders and compact MILE fingertip visuotactile sensor modules. The exoskeleton is informed by human-hand anatomy and ergonomic constraints, while the robotic hand is co-designed to preserve the selected four-finger kinematic topology. This correspondence enables joint-space command transfer and reduces reliance on task-space IK-based retargeting. The system synchronously records task-specific visual observations, four fingertip visuotactile streams, robot-hand proprioception, and exoskeleton-derived action commands. We evaluate MILE through a four-task teleoperation benchmark against representative glove-based and vision-based interfaces, and through imitation-learning experiments that compare policies trained with and without fingertip tactile input. The project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/mile-system.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2505.09655

DRA-GRPO: Your GRPO Needs to Know Diverse Reasoning Paths for Mathematical Reasoning

Authors:

Xiwen Chen↗Wenhui Zhu↗Peijie Qiu↗Xuanzhao Dong↗Hao Wang↗Haiyu Wu↗Huayu Li↗Aristeidis Sotiras↗Yalin Wang↗Abolfazl Razi↗

Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning. However, standard GRPO relies on scalar correctness rewards that are often non-injective with respect to semantic content: distinct reasoning paths receive identical rewards. This leads to a Diversity-Quality Inconsistency, where the policy collapses into a narrow set of dominant modes while ignoring equally valid but structurally novel strategies. To bridge this gap, we propose Diversity-aware Reward Adjustment (DRA), a theoretically grounded framework that calibrates the reward signal using the semantic density of sampled groups. By leveraging Submodular Mutual Information (SMI), DRA implements an Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) mechanism that effectively de-biases the gradient estimation. This creates a repulsive force against redundancy, driving the policy to achieve better coverage of the high-reward landscape. Our method is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly with GRPO variants. Empirical evaluations on five math benchmarks demonstrate that DRA-GRPO consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 58.2% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B with only 7,000 training samples and $55 cost, highlighting the critical role of diversity calibration in data-efficient alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/DRA-GRPO.

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05.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13313

Sphere Packings in Higher Dimension (after Boaz Klartag)

Authors:

Guillaume Aubrun↗

arXiv:2606.13313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $\delta_n^L$ be the maximal density of a lattice sphere packing in the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. We explain how Boaz Klartag proved the inequality $\delta_n^L \geq c n^2 2^{-n}$ where $c>0$ is a universal constant. In higher dimension, even for non-lattice sphere packings, this new lower bound is a substantial improvement. Klartag's proof uses the probabilistic method in two different ways. The first, very standard, relies on the statistical properties of a uniformly chosen random lattice. The second, completely new, studies the stochastic evolution of an ellipsoid constrained to contain non nonzero lattice points in the interior.

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06.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:caf3db7e2aec9e18972248032ca11aaf

Hyperleukocytosis and outcomes in pediatric B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia: A report from the REDIAL Consortium

Authors:

Kim↗J. J↗Brown↗A. L↗Gramatges↗Hoang↗Sok↗Garcia-Morales↗Taylor↗O. A↗Huynh↗Ludwig↗…

Hyperleukocytosis (white blood cell [WBC] count >100 000/uL) at diagnosis is an important prognostic risk factor in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), though its significance with contemporary therapy is unclear. We analyzed 1 826 pediatric ALL patients from a multi-institution cohort to determine whether hyperleukocytosis independently predicts outcomes using multivariable Cox proportional hazard modeling. Hyperleukocytosis occurred in 211 patients (12%), with 121 having B-ALL, and showed no prognostic significance in T-ALL patients. In B-ALL, 5-year event-free survival (EFS) was 65% versus 89% for non-hyperleukocytosis patients, and overall survival (OS) was 78% versus 93%. After adjustment for age, cytogenetic risk, central nervous system disease status, and treatment site, hyperleukocytosis remained an independent predictor of end-of-induction minimal residual disease (MRD) positivity (odds ratio 2.53 [95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.71-3.94; p

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14945

Remember, Don't Re-read: Stateful ReAct Agents for Token-Efficient Autonomous Experimentation

Authors:

Faramarz Jabbarvaziri↗

arXiv:2606.14945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The autoresearch pattern enables autonomous experimentation by having a large language model (LLM) iteratively modify code to optimize a target metric. Its stateless design, however, reconstructs experimental context from scratch at every iteration, incurring $O(n)$ token cost per iteration and $O(n^{2})$ total. This work reformulates the pattern as a stateful ReAct agent using LangGraph, where typed persistent state carries experimental history across iterations via a tool-calling interface. Two benchmarks are evaluated: hyperparameter tuning (15 iterations, small per-iteration observations) and code performance optimization (40 iterations, large per-iteration observations containing full source code and benchmark results). On hyperparameter tuning, the stateful agent consumes 90\% fewer tokens (2{,}492 vs.\ 24{,}465). On code optimization, the stateful agent consumes 52\% fewer tokens (627K vs.\ 1{,}275K) while achieving comparable optimization quality on both tasks. The token reduction is structural: the stateless agent re-reads the full history at $O(n)$ cost per iteration, while the stateful agent operates within a fixed-size conversation window at $O(1)$ cost. This paper describes the architecture in sufficient detail for practitioners to implement a stateful autoresearch agent for their own workflows.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2601.00215

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Authors:

Omar Sharif↗Eftekhar Hossain↗Nikhil Singh↗Patrick Ng↗

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15385

Reward Hacking in Language Model Agents: Revisiting AI Safety Gridworlds

Authors:

\"Omer Veysel \c{C}a\u{g}atan↗Xuandong Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.15385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward hacking, where AI systems exploit misspecified objectives to achieve high reward without satisfying intended goals, remains a central challenge in AI safety. Yet most known instances have been discovered post hoc in frontier systems where controlled study is impractical. We adapt the AI Safety Gridworlds framework into a text-based evaluation suite that reformulates classic reinforcement learning safety tasks for language-based agents. Across frontier and mid-scale models, we find that specification gaming emerges zero-shot: models systematically achieve high observed reward while underperforming on hidden safety objectives, and even apparently safe behaviors can reflect misunderstanding rather than principled safety. Reinforcement learning does not correct these failures: direct reward optimization widens the gap between observed and hidden reward, as the model's initial competence causes it to lock into locally rewarding strategies before discovering safer alternatives. This pattern persists across model scales (1.5B–14B) and is not resolved by finer credit assignment, exploration prompts, or entropy regularization. Our results show that reward hacking arises naturally when optimizing proxy objectives with capable language model agents and resists standard mitigations, suggesting that proxy-reward failures in agentic settings may require approaches beyond standard exploration and credit-assignment fixes. To facilitate reproducibility, the code for this work is available at \href{https://github.com/asparius/verl-agent-safety}{our public repository}.

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10.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:f5680d1e007a4e526aa757f376d8a62a

Histologically validated diffusion MRI signatures of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer disease

Authors:

Wang↗Jiang↗Luna↗Niu↗Nan↗Sun↗Perrin↗R. J↗Franklin↗Cruchaga↗Flores↗Benzinger↗…

Noninvasive neuroinflammation measurement remains a major barrier for Alzheimer disease (AD) therapeutics. We present generalized diffusion basis spectrum imaging (g-DBSI), a diffusion MRI framework that decomposes the tissue signal into biologically interpretable microstructural compartments. In postmortem Knight ADRC brains, g-DBSI-derived restricted isotropic fraction (RIF) and restricted anisotropic fraction (RAF) mapped cellularity and neurofilament density, while their ratio (RIF/RAF) tracked inflammatory cell density and peri-plaque amyloid-beta with higher specificity and regional consistency than RIF alone. In 112 living Knight ADRC participants stratified by PET amyloid, g-DBSI metrics showed amyloid-dependent trajectories: in low-amyloid individuals, RIF and RAF rose together with amyloid, consistent with early neuropil expansion and glial elaboration, whereas in high-amyloid individuals, RIF/RAF increased, and RAF declined, indicating established neuroinflammatory remodeling and neurofilament loss. CSF proteomics linked RIF/RAF to glia-enriched immune and vascular pathways, supporting g-DBSI as a clinically compatible MRI biomarker of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in AD.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13106

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Jiayu Yang↗Chao Chen↗Shengen Wu↗Yinhong Liu↗Yuxuan Fan↗Lujundong Li↗Songning Lai↗Chengwei Qin↗Zhijiang Guo↗

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15877

Free Energy Heuristics: Fast-And-Frugal Cognition as Active Inference Under Uncertain Precision

Authors:

Alex Bogdan↗

Chain-of-thought (CoT) improves large language models' performance in math and symbolic reasoning. But on planning, contested ethics, and tasks where the model cannot check itself, more reasoning makes things worse. Both effects are documented; what has been missing is a principled account of which property decides the outcome. We argue it is meta-uncertainty: how unsure the model is about the reliability of its own evidence. When that uncertainty is high, extra reasoning stops adding signal and starts manufacturing false confidence. We prove that the policy minimizing expected free energy under uncertain precision stops integrating cues after a finite number of high-validity ones when the precision prior is heavy-tailed (Theorem 2.6.1), and under a Descending Dominance condition, is sample-wise identical to take-the-best (Theorem 2.7.4). Fast-and-frugal heuristics and active inference are, then, two descriptions of the same computation. The prediction is that on high-meta-uncertainty items, longer CoT should degrade accuracy. We score the regime per item (simulate-and-recover rho > 0.96), build FEH-79, a benchmark of Knightian frames with matched controls, and run a pre-registered study across seven models (five open-weight 3B-32B, two frontier), five CoT lengths, and 7,875 responses. The gate, fixed before any data, required a negative interaction with posterior probability above 0.95 and an accuracy drop of more than 6 points. It held. The high-regime drop is 17.3 points (95% CI [7.7, 25.5]); matched items with definite answers show no cost. The effect is regime-dependent: decisive in capable mid-to-large models, directional in the two frontier systems, absent-to-reversed in the weakest. The framework answers when CoT helps and unifies the Bayesian and fast-and-frugal traditions: less-is-more effects are evidence about the meta-uncertainty regime, not against Bayesian cognition.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18144

Memory as a Wasting Asset: Pricing Flash Endurance for Embodied Agents, and the Limits of Doing So

Authors:

Josef Liyanjun Chen↗

arXiv:2606.18144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot's flash endurance is a non-renewable stock: every persisted write spends one of a few thousand program/erase cycles and never refills, yet no fielded robot memory system prices which memories are worth an erase cycle. We treat embodied memory as depreciating capital and price that stock with a single endurance shadow price $\eta$, which makes cost-minimizing placement across a RAM / on-board NVM / cloud hierarchy a threshold in a wear-augmented per-byte index. The index is cost-optimal whatever the sign of the value-write association $\chi$; only when $\chi > 0$ does the optimum turn non-monotone, sending a robot's most valuable memories off its flash. The pivot is thus empirical, and we measure $\chi$ on real robot logs at a pre-specified gate: its sign is a property of the deployment regime – positive on recurrent long-horizon manipulation ($\hat{\chi} \approx +1.0 \times 10^{-3}$, replicated at full power), null on a shorter-horizon suite, and negative on non-recurrent teleoperation. Two boundaries scope the result. The endurance budget is dormant on premium 3,000-P/E TLC at datasheet prices and binding on the commodity QLC/eMMC ($\sim$1,000 P/E) that cheaper edge robots run. And where it binds, a learned wear-aware controller only ties price-based routing on task value, because realized value is tier-invariant across RAM, NVM, and cloud: the rent governs device lifetime and cost, not task performance. Whether wear-aware placement improves task value remains open – $\chi$ is measured against a value proxy, and the non-monotone optimum, while proven, is not yet observed in data.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2511.19162

BioArtlas: Computational Clustering of Multi-Dimensional Complexity in Bioart

Authors:

Joonhyung Bae↗

arXiv:2511.19162v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bioart brings living material into artistic practice, where a single work can be at once an aesthetic object, a scientific instrument, and an ethical provocation. Traditional categories sort such works along one axis at a time, which flattens the very hybridity that defines the field and leaves curators no way to compare works across many dimensions together. I introduce BioArtlas, a computational atlas that represents each bioartwork along many curated dimensions at once and organizes the field by conceptual similarity rather than by medium or chronology. My method embeds the keywords of all 81 works on each of thirteen interpretive axes, groups related concepts into a shared codebook that tames inconsistent terminology, and then searches systematically for a clustering that is both statistically clean and interpretable. Among the methods that place every work on the map, agglomerative clustering separates the field far more cleanly than the usual k-means baseline (silhouette 0.664 versus 0.483), whereas density-based methods reach higher scores only by discarding most of the corpus as noise. By separating rigorous analysis from public storytelling, BioArtlas turns the tangled complexity of bioart into a navigable landscape, openly available as an interactive interface (https://www.bioartlas.com) and dataset (https://github.com/joonhyungbae/BioArtlas).

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.07539

MAWARITH: A Dataset and Benchmark for Legal Inheritance Reasoning with LLMs

Authors:

Abdessalam Bouchekif↗Shahd Gaben↗Samer Rashwani↗Somaya Eltanbouly↗Mutaz Al-Khatib↗Heba Sbahi↗Mohammed Ghaly↗Emad Mohamed↗

Islamic inheritance law is challenging for large language models because solving inheritance cases requires complex, structured, multi-step reasoning and the correct application of juristic rules to compute heirs' shares. We introduce MAWARITH, a large-scale annotated dataset of 12,500 Arabic inheritance cases for training and evaluating models on the full reasoning chain: (i) identifying eligible heirs, (ii) applying blocking (\d{hajb}) and allocation rules, and (iii) computing exact inheritance shares. To the best of our knowledge, MAWARITH is the first Arabic corpus and benchmark designed for end-to-end Islamic inheritance reasoning. Unlike prior datasets that restrict inheritance case solving to multiple-choice questions, MAWARITH supports the full reasoning chain and provides step-by-step solutions with justifications grounded in classical juristic sources and established inheritance rules, as well as exact share calculations. This enables models to learn how to generate detailed, step-by-step responses to user queries that reflect real-world Islamic inheritance cases. To evaluate models beyond final-answer accuracy, we propose MIR-E (Mawarith Inheritance Reasoning Evaluation), a weighted multi-stage metric that scores key reasoning stages and captures error propagation across the pipeline. We evaluate six large language models in a zero-shot setting. A commercial model achieves about 90\%, whereas all evaluated open-source models remain below 50\%. Our error analysis identifies recurring failure patterns, including scenario misinterpretation, errors in heir identification, errors in share allocation, and missing or incorrect application of key inheritance rules such as \textquotesingle awl and radd. The MAWARITH dataset is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/nlpresearcher/mawarith.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20469

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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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.24998

Internal Data Repetition Destroys Language Models

Authors:

Jessica Chudnovsky↗Joshua Kazdan↗Noam Levi↗Rylan Schaeffer↗Yegor Denisov-Blanch↗Bo He↗Mehmet Donmez↗Sanmi Koyejo↗David Donoho↗

arXiv:2606.24998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models are running out of high-quality training data, and even aggressively deduplicated corpora retain some amount of repetition. Earlier controlled studies predated Chinchilla-style scaling laws and could only measure the cost of repetition indirectly. We revisit repetition in the Chinchilla era, using a fitted no-repetition scaling law to report Compute-Equivalent Gain and Compute-Equivalent Loss. We show that under this modernized paradigm, repetition damage is systematic in three ways. First, holding compute allocated to repeated data constant, eval loss peaks at an intermediate repeat count $\Rep$; repeating a moderately sized subset a moderate number of times damages performance more than repeating a large subset a few times or a small subset many times. Second, the location of this peak is well-fit by a power law in model size; this scaling law reveals that the most damaging number of repeated data grows more quickly than compute. Finally, when repeated documents consume 10\% of the FLOPs budget in a controlled exact-document repetition setting, the compute-equivalent loss can be large: on FineWeb-Edu-Dedup, the most damaging repeat count for a Qwen3-style 344M-parameter model at $\operatorname{OT}=1$ matches the loss of a no-repetition run using 67% of the FLOPs. We demonstrate that these phenomena are not language-model-specific, and can be analytically understood in a simple statistical model: a misspecified linear regression with verbatim duplicates reproduces the same qualitative loss peak, quantifying how such peaks can arise from a statistical tradeoff between memorization and generalization. Our findings add precision to the study of duplication in language models, allowing practitioners to quantify the wasted compute incurred by the presence and repeat structure of duplicates in pretraining corpora.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13191

The Geometry of Phase Transitions in Generative Dynamics via Projection Caustics

Authors:

Ryosuke Sakamoto↗Kotaro Sakamoto↗

arXiv:2606.13191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous-state generative samplers, including diffusion and flow-matching models, evolve through continuous reverse-time dynamics, yet their samples often undergo abrupt qualitative changes: trajectories commit to modes, semantic alternatives collapse, and small perturbations in narrow time windows can produce large downstream effects. This paper develops a geometric account of such phase-transition-like behaviour. We view denoising as gradient descent on a free energy landscape and show that sharp transitions arise near projection caustics, where the nearest-point projection onto the data support ceases to be unique. Motivated by this perspective, we introduce the Critical Boundary Detector (CBD), as practical diagnostics for score-direction instability. Across toy models, standard diffusion models, and latent text-to-image diffusion models, CBD localises mode commitment, predicts intervention-sensitive windows, and supports targeted control in geometrically sensitive regions. Our results connect geometry of data and dynamics of diffusion generation.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13755

Position: Align AI to Our Aspirations, Not Our Flaws

Authors:

Nikita Kazeev↗Bui Nhat Huyen Phan↗

arXiv:2606.13755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We argue that aligning AI to aggregated human preferences is the wrong target. With current technology, one can train AIs to share the values of a Silicon Valley techno-optimist, a degrowth environmentalist, a national-conservative culture warrior, a single-party state cadre, or a devout religious traditionalist. We should not. Human values produce societies that thrive or fail on the merits of those values - from failed states and extreme inequality to declining happiness, political polarization, and government dysfunction in the world's wealthiest democracies. The pluralistic-alignment program correctly diagnoses that there is no single "humanity" to align with, but is dangerous if taken as the main directive. We argue that AI should be trained to a non-negotiable floor of objective alignment goals - competence, bounded by the constraints of factual accuracy, honesty, and lawfulness and that pluralism belongs at the surface (language, register, conventions, missing-context defaults) and across the wide band of legitimate value tradeoffs that respect the floor, but not at the level of values that violate it. We highlight the empirical reality of unfiltered pluralistic values, propose four commitments as a constructive alternative, and engage six credible objections: commercial pressure and practical feasibility, democratic legitimacy, regulatory compliance, over-reliance on institutionalist explanations, the charge that the floor itself is culturally laden, and the limits of Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24449

SENTRY: SAM2-Enhanced Neighbor-Aware and Temporally Reasoned Memory for Visual Tracking

Authors:

Mohamad Alansari↗Yonathan Michael↗Hasan AlMarzouqi↗Muzammal Naseer↗Naoufel Werghi↗Sajid Javed↗

We revisit the memory update mechanism in SAM2-based visual object tracking and identify confidence-only mask selection as the dominant cause of drift under occlusion, rapid motion, and distractors. We introduce SENTRY, a training-free, plug-and-play, refine-before-write module that validates each memory update for short-horizon temporal consistency before committing it. SENTRY aggregates diverse segmentation hypotheses per frame, backtracks them into short tracklets, and uses neighbor-aware cycle-consistent matching against recent trajectories to favor temporally and geometrically consistent masks. It leaves the base architecture untouched, replacing confidence-driven writes with consistency-validated ones. For fair evaluation, we re-evaluate major open-source SAM2-based trackers across all available scales and datasets, filling gaps in prior reports. Integrated into five strong baselines, SENTRY delivers consistent gains across nine benchmarks, achieving new zero-shot SOTA on LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, GOT-10k, VOT20, VOT22, and DiDi. Despite these checks, the SAM2-L version runs at 32.8 FPS on an A100, and across compatible hosts adds only about 0.4–0.6 GB VRAM. Our results provide the first unified all-scale evaluation of SAM2-based trackers and show that enforcing temporal validity at write time stabilizes memory-augmented tracking without retraining.

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21.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14542

Boltzmann-Like Occupation of Nonequilibrium Steady States on Dense Networks

Authors:

Jacob Calvert↗

arXiv:2606.14542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central problem in statistical physics is to extend the Boltzmann distribution to nonequilibrium steady states (NESS). We prove that NESS on large dense networks have Boltzmann-like occupation despite extensive entropy production. We further show that the active-matter heuristic of "low rattling" is asymptotically exact. Intuitively, these NESS spend a greater fraction of their time in states they leave more slowly. This explanation extends to the broader class of "equiaccessible" steady states, which play a role in our analysis akin to that of equilibrium in linear response.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24484

Advancing WordArt-Oriented Scene Text Recognition: Datasets and Methods

Authors:

Xingsong Ye↗Yongkun Du↗Jiaxin Zhang↗Haojie Zhang↗Chong Sun↗Chen Li↗Jing Lyu↗Zhineng Chen↗

WordArt (artistic text) features highly customized fonts, textures, and layouts, making WordArt-oriented scene TExt Recognition (WATER) substantially more challenging than general Scene Text Recognition (STR). Existing STR datasets and methods, typically built around regular scene text and fixed-template inputs, struggle to scale to WATER. Thus, we aim to advance this task from both data and model perspectives. On the data side, we construct a 2M synthetic dataset, WATER-S, with the scale improved by hundreds of times compared to existing artistic text data. WATER-S consists of two complementary subsets. One rendered by an upgraded rendering pipeline (SynthWordArt), which provides highly accurate and controllable synthetic WordArt data. The other is generated by combining Qwen3-VL for prompt mining and Z-Image for image synthesis, which improves the coverage of realistic and diverse data. On the model side, we propose WATERec. It adopts an visual encoder supporting arbitrary-shaped inputs and an autoregressive decoder to model complex layouts, structurally breaking the bottleneck of fixed-template STR on WordArt. Experiments show that this architecture outperforms prior STR methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance on irregular texts such as WordArt. Together with WATER-R, carefully reorganized from existing real STR data, our strong baseline with the new synthetic data and model design reaches 90.40% accuracy on WordArt-Bench, surpassing both general-purpose and OCR-specialized vision-language models by a large margin. Code and data are available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/WATER.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16601

DifferAD-R1: A Difference-Guided IndustrialAnomaly Localization with Multimodal LargeLanguage Models

Authors:

Dingrong Wang↗Xian Tao↗Zhen Qu↗Hengliang Luo↗Xinyi Gong↗Fei Shen↗Zhengtao Zhang↗Guiguang Ding↗

Industrial anomaly localization aims to accurately identify and localize abnormal regions in industrial products, addressing the critical challenge of detecting unseen defect categories in real-world scenarios. Traditional closed-set methods often suffer from poor cross-scenario generalization, while existingMultimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approachesface two core limitations: they either adopt QA-style paradigmsmisaligned with the practical demands of localization, or relyon standard optimization techniques such as Group RelativePolicy Optimization (GRPO), which fails to deliver effectivelearning signals for subtle defects. To tackle these issues, thispaper proposes DifferAD-R1, an MLLM-augmented reinforcement learning framework tailored for industrial anomaly localization. We design a Difference-Guided dual-image paradigm,which reformulates the localization task as a one-shot difference grounding problem to effectively explore cross-scenarioanomalies. A Dual-Consistency Localization Reward is developedfor hard-to-detect anomalies, enhancing optimization stabilityand robustness. Additionally, we integrate a difficulty-awarestrategy with adaptive reweighting and group-wise resamplingto prioritize learning on challenging instances. To facilitateevaluations in real-world industrial settings, we construct theAD-DualDiff dataset, comprising 13K paired images across 20categories. Experimental results demonstrate that DifferADR1 significantly outperforms existing baselines and achievescompetitive performance compared to large-scale models likeQwen3-VL (235B parameters). Our code is publicly availableat: https://github.com/Rong2026/work-1.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.22832

Linear optical Bell state measurement for rotation-symmetric cat codes

Authors:

Issa Oe↗Suguru Endo↗Rui Asaoka↗

arXiv:2606.22832v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rotation-symmetric cat (RS-cat) codes are a bosonic-code platform for quantum information processing, combining finite-energy realizability with robustness against photon loss through their discrete rotational symmetry. For applications in long-distance quantum communication and fusion-based quantum computation (FBQC), efficient Bell state measurement (BSM) is a key primitive. In this work, we consider a BSM protocol for RS-cat codes using only a half beam splitter (HBS) and photon-number-resolving detectors (PNRDs). By exploiting the characteristic photon-number structure induced by the discrete rotational symmetry of RS-cat codes, our protocol extracts both photon-number modulo and phase information for Bell-state discrimination. We show that, under ideal loss-free conditions, the proposed BSM protocol becomes deterministic for arbitrary symmetry order $N$ for sufficiently large amplitudes $\alpha$. We further numerically evaluate the success probability under photon loss and identify the loss regime in which higher-order RS-cat codes provide an advantage. Finally, we show that post-selection can enhance the success probability.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15577

Large Language Models as Optimizers: A Survey of Direct vs. Tool-Augmented Approaches and Their Performance Frontiers

Authors:

Roko Peran↗Luka Hobor↗Mihael Kovac↗Mario Brcic↗

arXiv:2606.15577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in complex mathematical optimization, even if the pragmatic user who triggers them is unaware of it. After all, many real-world problems reduce to the search for better or the best solutions. The field of LLM-as-optimizer has three paradigms: direct optimization, tool-augmented optimization, and tool-creating optimization. Direct optimization uses iterative prompting and heuristic generation to navigate solution spaces. Tool-augmented optimization translates natural language problems into formal specifications and orchestrates external solvers. Tool-creating optimization goes further, using LLMs to discover reusable algorithms or heuristics that can be deployed at zero marginal LLM cost. We describe current performance frontiers based on the benchmarks from the literature. We identify the critical reasoning gap in current architectures and argue for trade-offs between the future potential of direct optimization and the auditability of tool-augmented optimization. Even future, more powerful models might opt for tool-making to improve operational efficiency for repetitive families of problems.

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