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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Graph neural networks at war: integrating cybersecurity and drone intelligence in the Israeli-Iranian conflict

arXiv:2606.17119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical cyber systems have brought about new threats and challenges in detection and immediate response. This study examines how Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can be used to aid cybersecurity and drone management in a physical cyber system comprising of cyber intrusions and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). By providing a bridge between structural understanding of graphical neural networks, this work has provided an integrated procedure that allows intrusion detection systems to educate on underlying network structures, identify malicious activity, and facilitates drone response measures. Based on an emulation-based case study, cyberattacks models were created to provoke the responses of the drones, which proved that graph-based learning can assist with the situational awareness, swarm coordination, and adaptive maneuver. According to the performance valuation, this method has a detection rate of 94.2, average area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of 0.955 and an average response time of 1.4 seconds. Comparative experiments reveal that proposed GraphSAGE network is more effective than the Graphical Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and Graphical Attention Networks (GATs) in the identical situation. Such findings prove that graphical neural networks can be used to avert intrusion and response of dynamic cyber-physical systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Ontology Memory-Augmented ASR Correction for Long Text-Speech Interleaved Conversations

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) correction has traditionally focused on isolated utterances or short local contexts. However, as text and speech become increasingly interleaved in long interactions, ASR correction requires conversation-level contextual evidence. Existing ASR correction methods often rely on the current hypothesis or concatenate raw dialogue history. In such contexts, sparse correction evidence can be difficult to locate amid redundancy and noise. Addressing these challenges, we propose an ontology memory-augmented ASR correction framework for long text-speech interleaved conversations. The framework organizes preceding interaction history into a dynamically updatable ontology memory, where entities, terminology, surface variants, potential ASR confusions, and semantic relations are stored as retrievable nodes for context-grounded correction. To evaluate this setting, we construct RAMC-Corr, a dataset derived from MAGIC-RAMC for long-range ASR correction with grounded context. Experiments on RAMC-Corr show that our method improves over direct correction in 9 out of 10 paired backbone-setting combinations and encourages more selective and evidence-grounded corrections for context-dependent ASR errors.

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

Vibrato Expression Control for Singing Voice Conversion with Improving Independent Control

arXiv:2606.17126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Singing style is a crucial aspect of a natural and expressive singing voice. Singers utilize singing styles to convey the feeling or emotion of the songs. Several works have been proposed to control singing style for making the more expressive singing voice. Recently, VibE-SVC successfully controls vibrato by predicting high-frequency F0 contour. In this paper, we introduce a singing voice conversion framework, called VibE-SVC2, to improve singing style conversion performance and controllability. The model offers control over two types of singing styles: a pitch style and a timbre style. For the pitch style, to resolve the pitch-energy entanglement issue that is unresolved in our previous work, we introduce a novel Energy Style Converter to address remaining style information in the energy contour. In addition, we propose a Zero-shot Pitch Style Converter, which mimics the pitch style of reference audio. To expand the controllability of the model, we propose vibrato rate scaling that is an independent control of vibrato extent, which is unavailable in VibE-SVC. For the timbre style, we extend the model to handle a variety of phonation styles. However, addressing specific styles such as vocal fry poses a challenge, as conventional F0 extraction often fails due to their inherent subharmonic characteristics, which degrades the conversion quality. To address this, we propose a novel Subharmonic Correction algorithm to refine the F0 contour for more natural timbre conversion. Through comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations, we demonstrate that VibE-SVC2 provides fine-grained, independent control over two types of singing styles, outperforming existing methods.

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

Computational Safety for Generative AI: A Hypothesis Testing Perspective

Authors:

arXiv:2502.12445v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI safety is a rapidly growing area of research that seeks to prevent the harm and misuse of frontier AI technology, particularly with respect to generative AI (GenAI) tools that are capable of creating realistic and high-quality content through text prompts. Examples of such tools include large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. As the performance of various leading GenAI models approaches saturation due to similar training data sources and neural network architecture designs, the development of reliable safety guardrails has become a key differentiator for responsibility and sustainability. This paper presents a formalization of the concept of computational safety, which is a mathematical framework that enables the quantitative assessment, formulation, and study of safety challenges in GenAI through the lens of signal processing theory and methods. In particular, we explore two exemplary categories of computational safety challenges in GenAI that can be formulated as hypothesis testing problems. For the safety of model input, we show how sensitivity analysis and loss landscape analysis can be used to detect malicious prompts with jailbreak attempts. For the safety of model output, we elucidate how statistical signal processing can be used to detect AI-generated content. Finally, we discuss key open research challenges, opportunities, and the essential role of signal processing in computational AI safety.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Extremal representations of functions of matrices and applications to multivariate prediction

arXiv:2606.19359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by two seminal results of multivariate prediction theory by Helson and Lowdenslager and by Wiener and Masani we prove extremal representations of functions of matrices and derive their prediction-theoretic consequences. We also sketch a way to obtain matricial inequalities from our results. The main goal of the paper is the computation of the infimum of a set of values of the form $tr(A \Delta A^*)$, where $\Delta$ is a given non-negative Hermitian $n \times n$ matrix and the choices for $A$ exhauste a certain set of $n \times n$ matrices. In particular, we focus on norm-bounded unit spheres with certain types of properties of unitary invariance, what allows an application of the theory of majorization.

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

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents

arXiv:2603.19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental capability-alignment paradox: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while failing to prevent sophisticated attacks. Evaluating defended models against undefended baselines across 97 agent tasks and 1,000 adversarial prompts, we uncover three systematic biases unique to multi-step agents. Agent incompetence bias manifests as immediate tool execution breakdown, with models refusing or generating invalid actions on benign tasks before observing any external content. Cascade amplification bias causes early failures to propagate through retry loops, pushing defended models to timeout on 99\% of tasks compared to 13\% for baselines. Trigger bias leads to paradoxical security degradation where defended models perform worse than undefended baselines while straightforward attacks bypass defenses at high rates. Root cause analysis reveals these biases stem from shortcut learning: models overfit to surface attack patterns rather than semantic threat understanding, evidenced by extreme variance in defense effectiveness across attack categories. Our findings demonstrate that current defense paradigms optimize for single-turn refusal benchmarks while rendering multi-step agents fundamentally unreliable, necessitating new approaches that preserve tool execution competence under adversarial conditions.

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

From 50K to 8.2 Million in 24 Hours: Vozinha's Algorithmic Consecration and the Multilingual Making of World Cup Visibility

We present a multilingual computational discourse analysis of how language constructed the algorithmic consecration of Vozinha, the 40-year-old Cape Verde goalkeeper, after Spain 0-0 Cape Verde at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The study contributes a multilingual corpus in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French; a nine-frame narrative taxonomy with cue-based frame annotation; a reproducible annotation pipeline combining LLM-assisted suggestion with human validation; and an analysis of cross-lingual narrative diffusion across discourse phases. We treat the platform follower count itself, narrated as "50k to 8M", as a linguistic object: a circulating and narratable proof of visibility rather than a mere measurement. The follower-growth timeline is used only as contextual metadata: we reconstruct a conservative phase structure, not a continuous API-native series, and type every datapoint by value class, confidence, and evidence type. The only exact primary scraper anchor is 8,235,652 followers at 2026-06-16 15:47 UTC; all other figures are reported as estimated ranges or thresholds, including an estimated pre-match baseline of 45k-56k. Findings suggest that distinct languages carried distinct frames: Portuguese mobilization, Spanish crisis, English nation-making, and a shared platform-metric spectacle through which peripheral athletic performance became globally visible. As a v0.1 pilot, the paper releases the corpus schema, frame taxonomy, annotation guidelines, hashed visual-evidence log, and typed timeline, while flagging full double annotation and inter-annotator agreement as planned work.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Accelerating physics-informed neural networks for full waveform inversion using a hybrid quantum-classical finite-basis architecture

arXiv:2606.01110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Credibility-Weighted Pricing of Autonomous Vehicle Liability Under Operational Design Domain Shift

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated Driving System deployments create a foundational ratemaking challenge: sparse experience, shifting operational design domains, and non-stationary risk across software releases. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian credibility framework pooling across cities, software versions, and territories via a learned ODD-similarity kernel, nesting Buhlmann-Straub as a limiting case. Demonstrated on 648 verified-engaged Waymo crashes across four U.S. metros from the NHTSA Standing General Order database against 116 million matched miles, city-aggregate credibility weights are moderate (0.12-0.46), partial pooling decisively outperforms no pooling, and a power analysis shows the learned kernel's advantage becomes detectable at approximately twelve deployed cities.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Hallucination in Medical Imaging AI: A Cross-Modality Analytical Framework for Taxonomy, Detection, and Mitigation under Regulatory Constraints

arXiv:2606.13211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems are being deployed across medical imaging faster than their failure modes are understood. At this point in time, the failure of greatest clinical concern is hallucination: clinically plausible but factually incorrect outputs, including fabricated anatomical structures, missed findings, incorrect laterality, and invented measurements in generated reports, with direct consequences, for example, for biopsy decisions, staging, and treatment planning. This structured narrative synthesizes peer-reviewed studies, benchmark datasets, and FDA regulatory guidance across five imaging modalities to produce a cross-modality analysis of hallucination taxonomy, etiology, detection, and mitigation. Specifically, we address three questions in this study: (1) how can existing taxonomies be unified across modalities?, (2) how do medical-specialized foundation models hallucinate less than general-purpose ones?, and (3) which mitigation strategies are effective and compatible with FDA lifecycle oversight? We note that three taxonomic frameworks together cover the imaging pipeline in a way no single framework does alone. We also highlight that general-purpose foundation models outperform medical-specialized models on hallucination-specific benchmarks, indicating that narrow domain fine-tuning can introduce overfitting-induced confabulation. At the same time, the oversight of radiologists remains essential; for instance, a very high percentage of of AI-generated flags required expert correction before clinical use. Physics-informed architectural constraints, Chain-of-Thought prompting, and human-in-the-loop safeguards each address different failure modes and is effective when combined. All findings are mapped to the FDA's Total Product Lifecycle and Predetermined Change Control Plan frameworks, which treat hallucination management as a lifecycle obligation rather than a pre-deployment checklist.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning for Single-shot Test-time Ultrasound Image Denoising

The inherent electronic and speckle noise complicates clinical interpretation of ultrasound images. Conventional denoising methods rely on explicit noise assumptions whose validity diminishes under composite noise conditions. Learning-based methods are usually pretrained in a limited image domain using a labeled dataset, which implies inevitable domain shift in complex in vivo environments. This study proposes a Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning (PSCL) framework for test-time ultrasound image denoising without pretraining. Given multiple noisy samples from only one-shot imaging, PSCL disentangles anatomical similarity and noise randomness into separate pyramid latent spaces. The clean image is then decoded from the anatomy space while discarding the noise space. We first apply PSCL to synthetic aperture ultrasound (SAU), where an Aperture-to-Aperture loop serves as a self-supervised proxy task to ensure denoising fidelity. Simulation experiments, including noise levels from 0 to 30 dB and inclusion geometries from simple to complex, demonstrated improvements of 69.3% in SNR and 34.4% in CNR. The in vivo results showed 84.8% SNR and 25.7% CNR gains using only two aperture data of the heart in six echocardiographic views, liver, and kidney. PSCL delivers clear images across diverse imaging targets and configurations, paving the way for more reliable anatomical visualization without domain shift and pretraining costs.

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

PaperJury: Due-Process Review for Bounded LaTeX Revision

Pre-submission hardening of human-authored LaTeX computer science papers differs from drafting assistance because it requires adversarial whole-paper review, explicit no-fix outcomes, and bounded artifact-safe revision. Existing writing assistants, critique generators, and judge-centered loops lack durable issue identity across rounds, deterministic routing from critique to adjudication, and manuscript control that can reject invalid concerns or defer author-dependent ones. We present PaperJury, a closed-loop review-verdict-revise-verify system built on a deterministic-versus-semantic split: deterministic orchestration manages decomposition, a frozen claim spine, a durable ledger, routing, stopping, and exact-once patch application, while semantic agents are limited to bounded review, judgment, and repair. PaperJury combines bounded holistic review, contestability-based routing, a due-process trial, and risk-proportional guard chains for anchor-bounded edits, yielding terminal outcomes of invalid-drop, valid-fixable, and author-required. In a two-arm expert-review evaluation on held-out Vision, natural language processing, and machine learning papers against four baselines, we assess issue quality, verdict and routing quality, edit safety, convergence behavior, and cost, supporting the thesis that load-bearing safety and completion logic should reside in deterministic orchestration rather than model discretion. PaperJury is available at https://github.com/u7079256/paperjury.

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

Context-aware Modality-Topology Co-Alignment for Multimodal Attributed Graphs

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) model real-world entities by coupling graph topology with heterogeneous attributes such as text and images. They support graph-centric tasks requiring structural and class-discriminative representations, and modality-centric tasks requiring fine-grained cross-modal correspondence. However, existing MAG methods often rely on fixed graph contexts or uniformly fused representations, causing task-agnostic propagation and over-compressed fusion that hinder diverse task requirements and modality-specific evidence preservation. To address this, we propose CoMAG, a unified MAG backbone that learns task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment within them. CoMAG first conducts Reliable Context Learning by estimating edge reliability from multimodal semantic consistency, complementing raw topology with semantic neighbors, and selecting context components through a task-aware gate. It then performs Modality-preserving Hop-token Alignment by maintaining modality-specific multi-hop trajectories, matching modality-hop tokens across modalities, and decoupling shared and private representations. Thus, CoMAG produces graph and modality representations from one forward pass while retaining modality-specific cues. We further analyze stable propagation, over-smoothing mitigation, and modality-collapse control. Experiments on nine OpenMAG datasets compare CoMAG with feature-only, graph-only, multimodal, and unified MAG baselines across graph-level prediction, modality matching, and graph-conditioned generation. Results show that CoMAG achieves the best reported performance, demonstrating that task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment improve structural prediction, cross-modal matching, and graph-conditioned generation while retaining sparse edge-linear complexity.

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

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

arXiv:2605.29640v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

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

SafeLLM: Extraction as a Hallucination-Resistant Alternative to Rewriting in Safety-Critical Settings

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to access organisational documentation, including standard operating procedures (SOPs), HR policies and institutional guidelines. However, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that rely on free-form rewriting can introduce hallucinations and unstable trade-offs between completeness and conciseness, particularly in safety- and compliance-critical settings. Objectives: To evaluate extraction as a hallucination-resistant alternative to rewriting-based RAG and compare strategies that balance precision, recall and safety across document types and model scales. Methods: We compare multiple prompting strategies, including line-number-based source selection, extraction of relevant guideline sentences with explicit safety annotations, and a multi-stage pipeline that refines draft answers using supporting evidence from source guidelines. Experiments are conducted on documents of varying length and structure, including local NHS acute care and oncology guidelines and UK-wide NICE guidelines, using both frontier-scale and locally deployable models. Performance is assessed using automatic metrics and human expert evaluation of relevance and completeness. Results: Line-number selection achieves the strongest results, outperforming direct copying and safety-focused strategies across both large and small models while maintaining high term recall (up to 95%) and close alignment with source text. Safety-oriented approaches improve precision but introduce systematic omissions, while multi-stage filtering further amplifies this trade-off. Performance varies with document structure: line-based extraction excels in protocol-like content, whereas alternative strategies perform better on more verbose documents (up to 97% term recall).

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

An Attention-based Model for Robust Forecasting with Missing Modality

arXiv:2606.13970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning with missing modalities is a fundamental challenge in multimodal robot learning, as real-world robotic systems often operate in environments with incomplete sensor data. Attention-based models are appealing for processing multimodal data because they can handle multiple modalities with a single backbone network. However, most multimodal models assume that all modalities are available during both training and inference, limiting their applicability in robotic perception and decision-making. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal model designed to handle missing modalities during both training and inference. The model is formulated as a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) and incorporates a transformer-based architecture that leverages attention mechanisms to learn a unified, fixed-dimensional representation, even when some modalities are missing. We show that our proposed model can be trained with missing modalities while approximating a robust representation of all modalities. We evaluate our approach on five multimodal datasets across two robot learning tasks: human trajectory prediction and robot manipulation forecasting. Experimental results demonstrate that our model effectively learns from incomplete data and is superior to prior multimodal fusion approaches.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Thinking Outside the [Chat]Box: Bridging Computer Science and Industrial Design for Cognitive-Inclusive Generative AI

arXiv:2606.14306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Generative AI (GenAI) interfaces remain largely constrained to chatbox interaction, which can impose high cognitive demands on users and create substantial barriers for people with intellectual disabilities (ID), including prompt formulation difficulties, response overload, and limited mechanisms to assess information reliability. To explore alternative interaction models for cognitive accessibility, we conducted a cross-disciplinary co-design challenge in which two student cohorts (Computer Science and Industrial Design) developed interface concepts from the same set of functional requirements (e.g., prompt scaffolding, structured output, GUI-based refinement, transparency, and personalization). Comparing the resulting proposals reveals both convergence on foundational requirements (notably initial calibration, proactive prompting, and direct manipulation of response fragments) and complementary contributions that outline a multi-layered support system. Computer Science teams primarily produced structural scaffolding, emphasizing predictability, navigability, and trust through mechanisms such as reliability indicators, explicit sources, and context management for long conversations. Industrial Design teams emphasized experiential scaffolding, focusing on pacing, attention guidance, multimodality, and proactive agency, including step-by-step response flows, focus modes, and assistant-like integrations. We synthesize these findings into a dual-layer scaffolding framework that expands the design space for cognitively accessible GenAI interaction beyond chat-centric models and motivates future work on expert refinement, technical feasibility, and empirical validation with users with ID.

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

Beyond Entropy: Learning from Token-Level Distributional Deviations for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.19771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning; however, it faces a fundamental optimization instability: uniform token updates precipitate entropy collapse, leading to premature convergence to suboptimal strategies, whereas excessive Shannon Entropy maximization can cause entropy explosion, driving blind exploration toward incoherent reasoning chains. To resolve this dichotomy, we introduce the Independent Combinatorial Tokens (ICT) framework, which shifts the optimization focus from scalar uncertainty to the distributional properties of token logits. By leveraging the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence between token logits distributions, ICT identifies tokens with distinctive distributional patterns as critical branching points for guiding effective exploration in LLM reasoning. Our theoretical analysis, grounded in both Shannon and second-order Rényi entropy, proves that selectively updating on these tokens regulates policy concentration: it reduces the overall distribution uncertainty measured by Shannon entropy, while controlling probability concentration captured by second-order Rényi entropy. This dual effect prevents over-concentrated token generation from weakening exploration and effectively stabilizes the training landscape. Empirical results demonstrate that updating only the top 10% of unique tokens on Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B/7B) models yields an average pass@4 improvement of 4.58%, with a maximum gain of 14.9%, over GRPO, 20-Entropy, and STAPO baselines across seven benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, and Olympiad-level problems.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Riemannian Approach to Low-Rank Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.12120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank optimal transport (OT) mitigates the quadratic scaling of classical solvers, yet existing approaches rely heavily on first-order mirror-descent updates that require careful hyperparameter tuning and ignore the optimization landscape's curvature. To address these limitations, we propose a unified Riemannian geometric framework for low-rank OT, modeling balanced and unbalanced rank-$r$ positive factored couplings as novel smooth embedded submanifolds of the positive orthant. By equipping these manifolds with the Fisher-Rao product metric, we derive tractable formulations for Riemannian projectors, retractions, and Hessian-vector products. Our cost-agnostic framework seamlessly extends to linear OT, Gromov-Wasserstein (GW), fused GW, and their unbalanced counterparts. For balanced OT, our geometric ingredients are computed via efficient conjugate-gradient and iterative Bregman updates. For the unbalanced OT, our operations elegantly reduce to closed-form scalings, completely eliminating inner iterative loops. In both regimes, per-iteration complexity scales linearly with dataset size, and we provide a rank-sufficiency certificate for global optimality verification. Extensive experiments across a range of problem sizes demonstrate that our regularization-free first- and second-order solvers achieve faster convergence and superior performance over existing state-of-the-art low-rank OT solvers.

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

A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and Defenses

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.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Simplifying the Modeling of Arbitrary Conditionals in Natural Language

Causal Transformers model sequences through an autoregressive factorization of the joint distribution, which enables efficient left-to-right decoding and conditional likelihood computation. However, they cannot tractably sample from or evaluate arbitrary conditionals – e.g., a block of text conditioned on past and future tokens. Recent work aims to solve this problem through novel architectures, but they often lead to sub-optimal modeling of such conditionals and degraded generations. We propose Arbitrary Conditionals GPT (AC-GPT) which introduces a simple modification to standard causal Transformers to enable evaluating and sampling from arbitrary conditionals – including past, future, and mixed contexts – within a single forward pass. Unlike prior approaches, our method preserves the standard left-to-right ordering and next-token prediction objective essential for both strong performance and efficient training on natural language. Crucially, this compatibility allows existing LLMs to be fine-tuned for arbitrary conditioning. Our empirical results indicate that our method outperforms baselines on modeling arbitrary conditionals, without degrading standard left-to-right performance.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Researchers Say Mental Model/Theory of Mind of AI, What Are They Really Talking About?

arXiv:2510.02660v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When researchers claim AI systems possess ToM or mental models, they are fundamentally discussing behavioral predictions and bias corrections rather than genuine mental states. This position paper argues that the current discourse conflates sophisticated pattern matching with authentic cognition, missing a crucial distinction between simulation and experience. While recent studies show LLMs achieving human-level performance on ToM laboratory tasks, these results are based only on behavioral mimicry. More importantly, the entire testing paradigm may be flawed in applying individual human cognitive tests to AI systems, but assessing human cognition directly in the moment of human-AI interaction. I suggest shifting focus toward mutual ToM frameworks that acknowledge the simultaneous contributions of human cognition and AI algorithms, emphasizing the interaction dynamics, instead of testing AI in isolation.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Convergence of a Critical Multitype Bellman–Harris Process with One Infinite-Mean Lifetime

arXiv:2606.11511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a critical multitype Bellman–Harris branching particle system in $\mathbb R^N$ with a finite type space $\mathbb K=\{1,\dots,K\}$. Particles of type $i$ move according to a symmetric $\alpha_i$-stable process and reproduce according to a critical offspring law whose mean matrix is irreducible and stochastic. The lifetime distribution of type $1$ is assumed to have infinite mean with regularly varying tail $$ 1-F_1(t)\sim c_1t^{-\gamma},\, 0 \frac{\gamma}{\beta}, $$ and a local increment condition on the heavy lifetime distribution, we prove convergence of the system to a Poisson random measure concentrated on the infinite-mean type.

25.
Science (Express) 2026-06-04

Long-range extended chains arising from polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A central challenge for conjugated polymers is to achieve long-range order while remaining solution-processable, which is essential for matching the electrical performance of their counterparts of crystalline inorganic semiconductors. Here we show that n-doped poly(benzodifurandione) (n-PBDF) can undergo polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly (PSA), in which chain growth, chemical doping, and structural ordering are intrinsically coupled, yielding long-range chain extension over hundreds of nanometers. We reveal that the spontaneously formed n-PBDF nanoribbons arise from a self-initiated, convergent growth mechanism driven by cooperative monomer–polymer interactions and stabilized by proton-coupled duplex chains and the polymer’s intrinsic polyelectrolyte character. With long-range extended chains in the nanoribbons, the aligned n-PBDF thin films demonstrate metallic-level conductivity (>10 4 Siemens per centimeter).