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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies

Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs.

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

Dimension-Free Convergence of Discrete Diffusion Models: Adjoint Equations Induce the Right Space

arXiv:2605.17232v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology. Existing convergence theory, however, exhibits fundamental limitations. KL-based analyses diverge under singular priors such as the masked distribution, while bounds in total variation (TV) depend on the state space size $S$ and become vacuous for modern language tasks, where vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of tokens. We develop a unified adjoint-equation-based framework that establishes dimension-free convergence guarantees in any integral probability metric (IPM). To the best of our knowledge, our bounds are the first to be entirely free of $S$ and applicable to both masked and uniform priors. Importantly, our theory relies only on a single standard rate-matrix regularity assumption and applies to general priors. Five novel techniques drive our improvements: working in the space of observables via adjoint equations rather than directly with probability measures, a regularity analysis that yields bounds on any IPM, a coupling argument that removes $S$-dependence under uniform transitions, and score-marginal cancellation and exit-routing techniques that remove $S$-dependence under masked transitions. Our framework thus sharply departs from prior analyses and avoids the shortcomings of pathspace-KL and existing TV-based approaches. Beyond convergence bounds, our framework provides a versatile toolkit for further theoretical study of discrete diffusion models, including principled choices of loss functions and dimension-free step complexity.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Essential Subspace Merging for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2606.19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.

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

Sensory Restoration via Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Unified 2 x 2 Framework and Convergence Roadmap

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Millions of individuals worldwide suffer from sensory and communication deficits caused by neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, or trauma. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a promising avenue for sensory and motor restoration. However, the scientific literature remains highly fragmented between invasive neuroprosthetics and non-invasive electrophysiological decoders, with a lack of consistent terminology and comparison metrics. This chapter proposes a unified 2 x 2 framework categorizing BCIs along two axes: degree of invasiveness (invasive vs. non-invasive) and signal direction (afferent sensory-IN vs. efferent sensory-OUT). We define and distinguish the paradigms of restoration, substitution, and augmentation. Furthermore, we outline a structural roadmap for the convergence of these modalities over near-, medium-, and long-term horizons, focusing on physical limits and the integrative role of machine learning foundation models.

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

LoHoSearch: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Search Agents Beyond the Human Difficulty Ceiling

Search agent benchmarks exemplified by BrowseComp have rapidly saturated over the past year, with the strongest models surpassing 90% accuracy. Since these benchmarks are predominantly human-authored, annotators lack a global perspective on entity statistics and cannot systematically maximize search space size and structural complexity. This creates a difficulty ceiling that is hard to break. To address this, we introduce LoHoSearch (Long-Horizon Search Agents), a challenging benchmark comprising 544 human-verified questions across 11 domains. LoHoSearch is constructed via an automated pipeline built upon a knowledge graph covering over 7 million Wikipedia entities, which selects relations with large search spaces and assembles them into structurally complex questions with KG-verified unique answers. Our evaluation demonstrates that even the strongest model achieves only 34.74% accuracy, and existing context management strategies (best +6.8%) yield far smaller gains than on prior benchmarks. LoHoSearch provides a more demanding standard for evaluating long-horizon reasoning and context management in search agents.

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

StanceNakba Shared Task: Actor and Topic-Aware Stance Detection in Public Discourse

We present StanceNakba 2026, a shared task on stance detection in polarized social media discourse related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, organized as part of Nakba-NLP 2026 at LREC-COLING 2026. The task introduces two subtasks: Subtask A (Actor-Level Stance Detection), which classifies English social media posts as Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel, or Neutral; and Subtask B (Cross-Topic Stance Detection), which identifies Favor, Against, or Neither stances in Arabic posts toward two conflict-related topics, normalization with Israel and refugee presence in Jordan. The task is grounded in an annotated dataset of 2,606 social media posts. A total of 7 teams participated in Subtask A and 6 teams in Subtask B. Participating systems primarily fine-tuned Arabic and multilingual transformer-based models, including MARBERT, AraBERT, and DeBERTa-v3 variants, with several teams employing cross-validation, ensemble methods, and topic-conditioned architectures. The best-performing systems achieved a Macro F1 of 0.9620 on Subtask A and 0.8724 on Subtask B, demonstrating that transformer-based approaches are highly effective for conflict-domain stance detection while highlighting persistent challenges in cross-topic generalization and neutral class prediction.

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

Position: Align AI to Our Aspirations, Not Our Flaws

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.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Temporal Straightening for Latent Planning

arXiv:2603.12231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning good representations is essential for latent planning with world models. While pretrained visual encoders produce strong semantic visual features, they are not tailored to planning and contain information irrelevant – or even detrimental – to planning. Inspired by the perceptual straightening hypothesis in human visual processing, we introduce temporal straightening to improve representation learning for latent planning. Using a curvature regularizer that encourages locally straightened latent trajectories, we jointly learn an encoder and a predictor of a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world model. We show that reducing curvature this way makes the Euclidean distance in latent space a better proxy for the geodesic distance and improves the conditioning of the planning objective. We demonstrate empirically that temporal straightening makes gradient-based planning more stable and yields significantly higher success rates across a suite of goal-reaching tasks. Our code is available at https://agenticlearning.ai/temporal-straightening.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Structural Preservation and the Logical Expressiveness of Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bridges between graph neural networks (GNNs) and logical formalisms have been established by fixing architectural choices, such as the types of aggregation, combination, and activation functions. These choices define restricted classes of GNNs for which tight correspondences with logical formalisms can be obtained, by showing that logical formulae can be translated into equivalent GNNs and, conversely, that GNNs can be translated into equivalent formulae. In this paper we take a semantic perspective by establishing the logical expressiveness of classes of GNN classifiers that are preserved under structural properties: embeddings (extensions), injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms. We show that, for each such property, there exists a fragment of graded modal logic characterising the class of GNNs. In particular, preservation under embeddings, injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms corresponds to existential graded modal logic, its existential-positive fragment, and existential-positive modal logic, respectively. These results characterise the expressiveness of broad classes of GNNs independently of specific architectural choices, but we also show that each of these classes admits a GNN architecture of the same expressiveness. Technically, our approach uses a new well-quasi-order result for trees of bounded height, yielding finite representations of unravelling-invariant classes.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-13

Projected population level impact and cost-effectiveness of clinic and community-based tuberculosis screening approaches

The South Africa National Department of Health have set ambitious targets to scale up TB testing, focusing primarily on clinic attendees. In the context of declining funding for TB care and prevention, the most cost-effective approaches for targeting testing should be identified. We developed a mathematical model of TB in South Africa, explicitly incorporating clinic attendance by sex and HIV/ART status. We simulated six screening approaches over 2026-2035 (individually and in combination): three clinic-based (symptom screening, intensified targeted universal TB testing [TUTT, symptom-agnostic sputum testing of clinic attendees in key risk groups], and intensified TUTT allowing saliva samples) and three targeted community-based (community radiographic screening, symptom screening, and universal Xpert Ultra testing), each implemented at a range of coverage levels. Model outputs were combined with a mechanistic cost function to estimate potential impact and cost-effectiveness from a societal perspective. The most cost-effective standalone approach was community radiographic screening at 10% annual population coverage, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of $421 per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted. 10/11 scenarios along the expansion path included community radiographic screening at progressively higher coverage, combined with a clinic-based approach. Combining complementary approaches to reach both groups at increased risk of TB (e.g. clinic-based screening) and groups with lower screening coverage (e.g. community-based screening) may increase cost-effectiveness of TB screening, compared to standalone approaches. When designing TB screening strategies, both population risk and existing screening coverage should be considered.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Single Photon Cross-Phase Shifts Can Be Enhanced by Localization in both Frequency and Time

arXiv:2606.11516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-photon optical nonlinearities face a fundamental trade-off: maximum nonlinearity requires both spectral resonance (narrow bandwidth) and high peak intensity (short duration), constraints that are incompatible due to the time-energy uncertainty relation. We demonstrate experimentally that this limitation does not need to exist in cases involving post-selection. We measure a cross-phase shift (XPS) produced by a resonant photon from a narrow-band source that is first transmitted through a cold atomic cloud and then localized in time through detection. The peak size of this XPS is greatly enhanced compared to that of Gaussian single-photon-level pulses without post-selection, benefiting from the narrow bandwidth of the resonant prepared state and the high intensity of the post-selected state simultaneously. We measure enhancements in the peak XPS of 6$\pm$1 at an optical depth (OD) of 2.4$\pm$0.1, and our results are in qualitative agreement across a range of optical depths with the recently developed weak value theory of atomic excitation [Thompson et al., APL Quantum 2, 036108 (2025)] for such post-selected photons. This work uncovers new consequences of having simultaneous knowledge of frequency and time, raising new foundational questions about how a particle behaves, and interacts with other systems, when its preparation and post-selection are non-commuting.

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

Surprise-Guided MergeSort: Budget-Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Ranking via Adaptive Comparison Scheduling

arXiv:2606.15623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pairwise comparison is the gold standard for subjective ranking tasks; however, exhaustive annotation requires a massive number of human comparisons ($O(n^2)$). While sorting-based methods have reduced this burden to $O(n\log n)$, they still require expensive human judgment for every single comparison. To further improve annotation efficiency, we propose leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) not as an annotator replacement, but as a question prioritizer to identify which comparisons genuinely require human judgment. The proposed Surprise-Guided MergeSort (SGS) framework achieves this through three integrated components: (1) a bottom-up MergeSort scheduler that structures comparisons and exploits transitivity, (2) a composite Surprise Scorer – combining position-bias-cancelled VLM confidence, Elo gap, and vote entropy – to quantify comparison ambiguity, and (3) an adaptive budget allocator that routes high-surprise pairs to humans while automating low-surprise pairs via transitivity inference. Validation was conducted on six diverse benchmarks spanning text similarity (STS-B, BIOSSES, SICKR-STS) and image quality assessment (KonIQ-10k, TID2013, LIVE Challenge). SGS effectively identified and skipped up to 535 non-informative comparisons per session. Consequently, it achieved Kendall's $\tau{\times}100$ improvements of $+6$ to $+12$ over Active Elo under the same total budget. These results demonstrate that combining VLM-guided surprise metrics with algorithmic sorting provides a generally consistent accuracy-efficiency trade-off across diverse domains.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Silent Cost of Artificial Intelligence Assistance: A Theory of Autonomy Surrender, the Recovery Mechanism, and the Restoration of Human Agency

arXiv:2606.13962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of artificial intelligence into human decision-making environments has introduced a previously undertheorized cost: the gradual surrender of human autonomy in exchange for access to information and computational assistance. Building on the Human Identity and Autonomy Gap (HIAG) framework, this paper advances a theoretical model of autonomy surrender as a measurable, cumulative process driven by cognitive bandwidth depletion. The model proposes three interacting mechanisms: the silent cost of AI assistance, in which autonomy is transferred incrementally and without awareness; the surrender threshold, beyond which reclaiming autonomous function becomes cognitively and psychologically difficult; and the recovery mechanism, which establishes the design obligation and the ethical responsibility accompanying deliberate human re-assumption of control. The paper argues that human re-entry into the decision loop is not a passive option but an active cognitive event requiring intentional bandwidth restoration. The design of AI systems must incorporate structured re-entry pathways, here termed recovery mechanisms, that preserve human agency while appropriately distributing responsibility. The model further predicts a terminal state, here termed preference inversion, in which functional dependence on AI assistance is experienced not as a deficit but as a preference, transforming the restoration of autonomy from a design problem into a cultural and political one. Implications are drawn for AI system design, governance frameworks, and human factors research.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

VISUALSKILL: Multimodal Skills for Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents (CUAs) approach human-level performance on standardised benchmarks but still struggle on long-horizon tasks and unseen software. Existing skill libraries address this with reusable skills, but represent the skill artifact as text only, despite the visual nature of GUI interaction. We propose VISUALSKILL: a hierarchical multimodal skill, tailored to each target application and organised as a central index over per-topic files, which the agent consumes through a load_topic MCP tool that fetches the relevant topic's text and figures on demand. We construct each skill with a two-stage pipeline that combines authored documentation with live-application UI exploration. On two CUA benchmarks, CUA-World and OSExpert-Eval, a Claude Code CLI agent backed by Claude Opus 4.6 reaches an average score of 0.456 with VISUALSKILL, a +15.3 point absolute lift over the no-skill baseline (0.303). Against a matched text-only skill that is generated from the same source content and differs from VISUALSKILL only in modality, VISUALSKILL yields a further +8.3 point absolute gain over the matched text-only skill (0.373 vs. 0.456), providing direct evidence that retaining visual figures in the skill artifact, rather than verbalizing them away, helps the agent both identify UI elements and verify workflow state after each action. Our code is available at https://github.com/XMHZZ2018/VisualSkills.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Impact of Antidiabetic Medications on IgG and Plasma Protein N-Glycosylation in Type 2 Diabetes Patients

Introduction. Diabetes is a growing global health challenge, necessitating effective management strategies. Glycosylation, a highly regulated post-translational protein modification, has emerged as a pivotal factor in diabetes pathophysiology. However, the modulation of protein glycosylation by antidiabetic treatment is still largely unknown. This study explored the longitudinal effects of four distinct antidiabetic therapies - metformin, insulin, sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RA) - on plasma protein and immunoglobulin G (IgG) glycosylation in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Research Design and Methods. Plasma protein and IgG N-glycans were enzymatically released, purified and chromatographically profiled in a cohort of 124 patients, examined at four time points, to assess therapy-induced glycan alterations. Linear mixed models adjusting for covariates and multiple testing (FDR

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

Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference for Dependent Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.15458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variational inference (VI) is a core engine of modern AI, enabling scalable approximate Bayesian learning and uncertainty-aware training of large probabilistic and generative models. In this paper, we propose Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference (SN-VI), a novel framework for modeling complex dependencies among latent variables in posterior approximation, leveraging multivariate spline techniques. Unlike traditional methods that rely on the mean-field assumption, SN-VI preserves intricate latent variable dependencies, providing a flexible and accurate approximation of posteriors with arbitrary shapes. We establish rigorous theoretical guarantees, including the derivation of the lower bound for the variational objective and proof of asymptotic consistency in posterior estimation. To facilitate practical implementation, we develop an algorithm that automatically identifies dependent latent variables and their underlying dependence structure, without requiring manual specification. Simulation studies validate the effectiveness of SN-VI in approximating posterior distributions with bounded support and complex dependencies. The proposed method has been successfully applied to high-dimensional structured data, including computer vision datasets and spatial transcriptomics. In these applications, SN-VI demonstrates improved generative model performance and effectively uncovers coupled biological signals through the learned dependency structure.

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

PEFT-MedSAM: Efficient Fine-Tuning of Medical Foundation Models for Explainable Skin Lesion Segmentation

Automated segmentation of skin lesions using deep learning models for dermoscopic images can be very helpful in finding melanomas earlier than they would normally be detected. However, most deep learning methods available do not perform well. The aim of this paper is to present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called PEFT-MedSAM for adapting the Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to automatically segment dermoscopic skin lesions. The PEFT-MedSAM method uses only the lightweight mask decoder for training the model while keeping the pre-trained image encoder and prompt encoder frozen. The experiments performed on the ISIC 2018 benchmark dataset shows that PEFT-MedSAM obtains a dice coefficient of .9411 and an intersection over union value of .8918 when compared to both a fully trained U-Net baseline (.8715 dice coefficient) and zero-shot MedSAM inference (.8997 dice coefficient). The external validation of the model using PH2 dataset shows .9467 dice coefficient with +/- .0310 standard deviation. Supportive evidence for these claims include a p-value less than .0001 for Wilcoxon signed rank tests comparing the two datasets and bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence intervals of [.9364,.9447] that represent the estimated range of possible values for the average dice coefficient obtained by repeating the test. To increase clinical trustworthiness, we used Grad-CAM explainability along with a pointing game based evaluation methodology to evaluate the CNN baseline model on the validation set. The results showed that we had an accuracy rate of 98.27% on the validation set of 519 images and confirmed that the model classified regions containing skin lesions.

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

Detecting Hallucinations for Large Language Model-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Knowledge graph (KG) reasoning infers new knowledge from existing facts and is widely applied in question answering, recommendation, and decision support. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based KG reasoning frameworks have become increasingly popular by leveraging retrieved KG information. However, hallucinations in LLMs remain a critical issue. Even when relevant KG knowledge is incorporated, models may still generate incorrect outputs, leading to misinformation and unreliable decisions. Existing hallucination detection methods either focus on LLM internal states or verify consistency with retrieved contexts, but both overlook the structural information in KGs, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this gap, we propose LUCID, the first halLUcination deteCtIon method for LLM-based knowleDge graph reasoning frameworks. LUCID jointly leverages LLM attention scores, KG semantics, and structural information. Specifically, it extracts node and edge features from attention scores and semantic similarities, and integrates them with KG structure using a graph neural network. We also construct manually annotated benchmark datasets for evaluation. Experiments on nine datasets show that LUCID achieves state of the art performance compared to 15 baselines.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

A non-invasive liquid biopsy resolves the diagnostic blind spot in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease is a major global health burden, and its early detection is critical for delaying progression to kidney failure using recently developed targeted therapies. However, current diagnostic screening relies heavily on blood markers that are confounded by muscle mass, and on urine tests that frequently miss structural damage occurring without protein leakage. This creates a critical diagnostic blind spot that hinders timely intervention. Here we show a non-invasive liquid biopsy platform that quantifies a specific protein marker, MUC1, on urinary extracellular vesicles to accurately assess renal parenchymal integrity. By bypassing the systemic metabolic noise of traditional blood tests, our assay provides a remarkably stable, person-specific functional signature. Following extensive validation across diverse cohorts, our longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the discrepancy between this novel urine-based readout and standard blood tests unmasks hidden renal vulnerability, successfully predicting rapid functional decline. By comprehensively evaluating both tubular and glomerular integrity from a single spot urine sample, these findings establish a completely non-invasive, highly scalable prescreening tool that resolves the diagnostic blind spot, enabling broader early detection strategies and ushering in a new era of proactive risk management.

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

FFinRED: An Expert-Guided Benchmark Generation and Evaluation Framework for Financial LLM Red-Teaming

arXiv:2606.19887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing safety benchmarks target general adversarial scenarios but miss finance-specific risks. Financial LLMs face regulatory compliance violations, fraud facilitation, and systemic trust erosion that require targeted evaluation. We introduce FinRED, an expert-guided red-teaming framework for financial LLM safety evaluation developed with financial experts. FinRED uses a novel two-level taxonomy mapping global standards (e.g., FATF and EU DORA) to threats ranging from regulatory evasion to complex fraud, integrated with a scalable pipeline that converts real financial documents into context-rich red-teaming Behavioral Prompts (seeds) through an expert-defined schema. Rigorous expert validation confirms seed plausibility and realism for meaningful LLM safety evaluation. We also provide an expert-validated, finance-specific rubric that goes beyond disclaimer checks, aligns more closely with human experts than static one-size-fits-all rubrics, and reduces critical false negatives from 28 to 12. Aligned with internationally adopted risk-management and information-security standards (e.g., ISO/IEC 27001), FinRED is deployed in South Korea's Financial Security Institute (FSI) regulatory sandbox for generative AI security evaluation in real financial services. To mitigate dual-use risks, the dataset, generation pipeline, prompt template, and evaluation framework are gated for qualified researchers at https://github.com/selectstar-ai/FinRED-paper and https://huggingface.co/datasets/datumo/FinRED.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Search Discipline for Long-Horizon Research Agents

arXiv:2606.11522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoresearch agents now propose, evaluate, and select scientific candidates against a metric, and that metric is usually an aggregate reduced over a heterogeneous space of regions, slices, or cohorts. We show that when scientific validity lives in that disaggregated structure, the aggregate can rank the wrong candidate first. The headline number improves while the structure underneath inverts, so a decision made on the number accepts a candidate that quietly breaks the model. The failure is not domain-specific. It appears wherever a candidate's validity is multi-dimensional but its verifier is a single reduction. We demonstrate the inversion on a fire-model task in the Ecosystem Demography model. The highest-scoring candidate and a slightly lower one are within noise of each other on global score, yet the top-scoring one collapses the protected boreal regions while the other preserves them. What separates them is the per-region behavior, not the headline number. This decision should not be left to the agent that produced the candidates. The agent optimizing the score is the last party likely to catch the score being wrong, and a prompt has no remaining turn once the agent has stopped. We move the decision to an external control loop that audits each candidate on its disaggregated behavior and acts after the agent has decided. It can demote a candidate the agent would have accepted, and it can reopen a run the agent had declared finished. Our contribution is the inversion finding itself, and a search-discipline protocol that decides on reviewable candidate-effect evidence instead of the score.

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

PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context

arXiv:2606.12282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive performance rendering (EPR) aims to generate realistic performances constrained on sequences of notes. However, flow matching audio editing models manipulate only synchronized music samples of the same duration, limiting their understanding of expressive timing. We introduce PianoKontext, a flow matching rendering model for classical piano music that generates variable-length performances in the latent space of a pretrained Music2Latent model. We synthesize MIDI scores into deadpan audio and employ Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in the latent space to construct paired data for training. The aligned embeddings are concatenated in DiT blocks, allowing for a simple and effective learning of the dependencies between the score and performances. Audio samples are available at our demo page: https://realfolkcode.github.io/pianokontext_demo/.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efimov Effect in Ultracold Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecules

arXiv:2602.21433v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A quantum-mechanical description is presented for the three-body physics of shielded dipolar molecules, including a prediction of observable Efimov physics. Despite the anisotropic and long-range nature of the interaction, shielding enables a regime in which universality emerges already at the two-body level and extends to the three-body sector, where Efimov physics emerges. On the negative side of the scattering-length resonance, computed trimer binding energies display the characteristic scaling expected for Efimov resonances. Finally, the sudden approximation can be used to create trimer bound states, starting from positive energy trap states as a way to create or detect these molecular trimers. Moreover, the three-body parameter expressed in dipolar units is found to be universal.

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

Amortizing Maximum Inner Product Search with Learned Support Functions

arXiv:2603.08001v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Maximum inner product search (MIPS) is a crucial subroutine in machine learning, requiring the identification of a vector taken within a database (the keys) that best aligns with a given query. We propose amortized MIPS: a regression-based approach that trains neural networks to directly predict MIPS solutions, amortizing the cost of repeatedly solving MIPS for queries drawn from a known distribution over a fixed key database. Our key insight is that the MIPS value function is the support function of the set of keys, a well-studied convex function whose gradient yields the optimal key. This motivates two complementary amortized models: SupportNet, an input-convex neural network trained to regress the support function, and KeyNet, a vector-valued network that directly regresses the optimal key. SupportNet can serve as a cluster router, steering queries toward relevant database partitions, while KeyNet can be used as a drop-in replacement for the original query, fed directly to off-the-shelf indexing pipelines. Our experiments on the BEIR benchmark show that, for document embeddings, learned \SupportNet{}s and \KeyNet{}s significantly improve IVF match rates when accounting for compute effort, whether measured in FLOPs, number of probes, or wall-clock time. Our code is available at: https://github.com/apple/ml-amips.

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

Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces

As autonomous web agents are increasingly deployed to perform real-world tasks, ensuring their safety has become a critical concern. In this work, we study web agent behavior under realistic deceptive interfaces in the e-commerce domain. We introduce WebDecept, a lightweight and configurable plugin framework that enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. Using WebDecept, we instantiate seven deceptive patterns commonly observed on the open web, including targeted advertisements, domain redirection, and shopping manipulation. By injecting these patterns into the frontend during task execution, we perform controlled evaluation of multiple multimodal web agents. Our results show that current web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, and that prompt-based constraints are often insufficient to mitigate these failures. We further analyze how the design choices of deceptive patterns influence the success of such manipulations. These findings highlight safety challenges that should be addressed as web agents are scaled toward real-world deployment.