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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Finite-Element Matrix Product States for Continuum Models in One Dimension

arXiv:2606.14873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a matrix product state framework for simulating one-dimensional quantum many-body systems in the continuum using non-orthogonal single-particle basis sets. By mapping the physical problem to an auxiliary computational space, we show that the resulting many-body overlap operator can be efficiently encoded as a matrix product operator for sufficiently localized orbitals, thereby generalizing a construction that first appeared in [arXiv:2405.10285]. This construction recasts the variational ground-state search into a generalized eigenvalue problem, which can be solved using a generalized density matrix renormalization group algorithm. As a primary application, we employ a first-order finite-element expansion to study the ground state properties of the Lieb-Liniger gas in the presence of inhomogeneities. This approach also provides a natural setting for exactly refining the lattice, thereby enabling multigrid optimization strategies for matrix product states.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Drug-Specific, Half-Life-Adjusted Framework for Classifying CNS-Active Systemic Therapy Exposure During and After Radiotherapy

Clinical oncology datasets often store systemic therapy as a regimen label with a start date and an end date. Those records are clinically recognizable but can be analytically incomplete when the research question concerns whether a patient was exposed to a concurrent CNS-active drug (cCNS-aD) or an adjuvant CNS-active drug (aCNS-aD) around radiotherapy. Contemporary CNS-oncology studies usually define CNS activity by empiric drug lists and define concurrency by fixed calendar windows, although the literature shows substantial heterogeneity across both concepts. This paper proposes a generalizable framework for converting raw systemic therapy records into reproducible cCNS-aD and aCNS-aD variables, useful in subgrouping for clinical studies. The framework uses a transparent CNS scoring model based on three clinical evidence components: intracranial objective response rate, consensus CNS endorsement, and intrathecal route of administration. It then defines a pharmacokinetic exposure proxy as the recorded end date plus five half-lives. Concurrent exposure is classified by overlap with the radiotherapy interval, while post-radiotherapy exposure is classified by overlap with a prespecified post-RT attribution window. The framework separately identifies post-RT pharmacokinetic persistence and post-RT treatment initiation, allowing investigators to distinguish continued exposure from true adjuvant initiation. This is a methodological framework and reference implementation. Implementation audits and endpoint-specific sensitivity analyses remain necessary before use as a definitive exposure classifier

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

What's Old is New Again: Classical Dimensionality Reduction for Efficient Saliency-Guided Biometric Attack Detection

Saliency-guided training is a paradigm in visual recognition that encourages models to focus on the most relevant image regions during learning. While its application in biometric presentation attack detection (PAD) has shown strong benefits in robustness and generalization, adoption is often limited by the high cost, domain specificity, and limited scalability of existing saliency acquisition methods, such as human annotations over a limited dataset. We present a novel, cost-efficient, and highly-scalable approach to saliency acquisition using maps inspired by classical dimensionality reduction techniques: PCA and LDA. Our proposed methods generate saliency maps directly from raw training data, requiring no human annotation nor domain knowledge. We contextualize the effectiveness of these saliency sources in three saliency-explored domains (iris PAD, synthetic face detection, fingerprint PAD) and demonstrate its scalability in two saliency-novel domains (fingerprint vein PAD and ID card PAD). Across all domains tested, models trained using dimensionality reduction-sourced saliency maps exceed baseline and sometimes SOTA saliency methods without any resource investment or domain-specific tooling. Our findings overcome an important yet unaddressed barrier to saliency-guided training for biometric attack detection and beyond.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

EMAlign: accurate alignment of cryo-EM maps through main-chain probability using deep learning

Accurate alignment of cryo-EM density maps is essential for comparing conformational states, searching map libraries, and guiding atomic model building, but remains challenging for noisy experimental maps and partially overlapping structures. Existing alignment methods are often based on raw maps, which may result in reduced accuracy due to the density noise, or require manual intervention for local alignment, which suffers from limited general applicability. Addressing the limitations, we present EMAlign, an automatic global and local cryo-EM map alignment with predicted main-chain probability using deep learning. First, EMAlign predicts main-chain prob ability maps from raw cryo-EM density maps using a BiMCUNet network. Then, a fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based search strategy is used to globally search the accurate alignment between cryo-EM maps based on predicted main-chain probability maps. As such, the main-chain prob ability map overcomes the noisy raw map problem, and the FFT-based exhaustive global search ensures the general applicability of alignment. EMAlign is evaluated on 64 global map pairs, 195 local map pairs, and 60 structure-to-map pairs at 3-10 [A] resolution and compared with gmfit, fitmap, VESPER, and CryoAlign. It is shown that EMAlign outperforms the other methods in both global and local alignment, achieving mean RMSDs of 1.03 [A] (global), 2.56 [A] (local), and 0.82 [A] (structure-to-map), with success rates of 100.0%, 100.0%, and 98.3% under the criterion of RMSD < 10 [A]. The EMAlign package is freely available at https://github.com/huang-laboratory/EMAlign/.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

READER: Robust Evidence-based Authorship Decoding via Extracted Representations

arXiv:2606.10794v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As agentic applications increasingly route user tasks through official and third-party LLM APIs, provenance becomes an operational question: which model generated a given black-box response? We study Dynamic Black-Box LLM Provenance: identifying the source LLM from generations elicited by query-varying, non-predefined prompts rather than a fixed input set or benchmark suite. This setting is difficult because prompt semantics dominate the text, while model-specific authorship traces are weak and inconsistent at the surface level. We introduce READER (Robust Evidence-based Authorship Decoding via Extracted Representations), a lightweight provenance framework that treats a frozen proxy LLM as a reader of hidden authorship evidence. READER maps black-box outputs into proxy activation space, temporally filters token states within each response, and performs Bayesian Evidence Accumulation by summing single-response log-posterior evidence across independently sampled prompts. This avoids fragile mean-pooling of prompt-specific representations while preserving the query-wise evidence needed for calibrated confidence. On Agent500, a 50-target dataset built from agent-style prompts, READER reaches $31.0$-$42.4\%$ top-1 accuracy from a single response and $70.0$-$84.0\%$ from 50 responses, substantially outperforming sentence-encoder fingerprints. Scaling across nine proxy readers further shows that stronger LLMs expose more linearly decodable authorship structure, suggesting that authorship perception is already present in frozen LLM representations and can be converted into reliable multi-query attribution.

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

Low-Energy Reduced RISC-V Instruction Subset Processor for Tsetlin Machine Inference at the Edge

arXiv:2606.19964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsetlin Machine (TM) is a logic-based machine learning approach that relies on simple bitwise operations and finite-state automata, which makes it attractive for edge AI deployments. Recent work has focused on co-processor and accelerator designs based on Tsetlin Machines (TMs). Although these designs achieve high performance, they typically depend on tightly coupled interfaces, microcode-style programming, and external host processors, limiting flexibility and ease of programming. In this work, we present a domain-specific RISC-V microprocessor architecture and design flow tailored for TM inference. Leveraging the modular structure of RISC-V, we design a reduced instruction subset processor that retains programmability while targeting improved performance and lower energy consumption for TM workloads. Instruction profiling is employed to guide instruction reduction, followed by datapath and control path simplifications tailored to TM inference. Both the baseline RV32IM core and the proposed reduced core are evaluated across multiple datasets and compared with Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), which serve as a hardware-efficient baseline due to their reliance on bitwise operations during inference. Results show that TM achieves comparable or higher accuracy (e.g., up to 88.18% on CIFAR-2 compared to 60.0% for BNN) while reducing execution time by up to 98% across multiple datasets. Furthermore, the proposed design achieves an average $29.7\times$ reduction in energy consumption, demonstrating its effectiveness for programmable and efficient edge AI systems.

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

WHAR Arena: Benchmarking the State of the Art in Efficient Wearable Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2606.13194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning has become the dominant paradigm in Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR), yet progress is obscured by a comparability crisis. Results are often reported using inconsistent datasets, custom data processing, and varying evaluation protocols, making state-of-the-art claims fragile. We address this with a large-scale, open-source benchmark that integrates 30 diverse datasets under standardized processing, unified model interfaces, and a shared cross-subject evaluation protocol. Evaluating 17 representative architectures across 4760 training runs, we jointly measure predictive performance alongside on-device latency, peak memory, and model size on an Android reference device. Our results reveal that the WHAR state of the art is distributed rather than dominated by a single architecture. While CNN-HAR achieves the highest mean macro-F1, top-performing models cluster tightly, indicating contemporary architectures have converged near a predictive performance ceiling. When accounting for deployment efficiency, compact neural models, such as TinierHAR, and classical Random Forests define the practically relevant Pareto frontier, whereas larger recurrent and hybrid models incur high hardware costs without corresponding performance gains. Consequently, while predictive performance has plateaued, substantial potential for future progress remains in optimizing deployment efficiency and improving adaptation to domain shifts. We release our full framework to support transparent reuse and extension.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Holding the FP8 Quality Ceiling at 8-Bit Weights and Activations: INT8 and GGUF Post-Training Quantization of Ideogram 4.0 for Consumer GPUs

arXiv:2606.12280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization lets large text-to-image diffusion transformers run on consumer GPUs, yet the hardware-specific trade-offs are seldom measured directly. We quantize Ideogram 4.0 - a 9.3B flow-matching diffusion transformer (DiT), shipped as two separate-weight copies of a single-stream 34-layer backbone for classifier-free guidance and conditioned by a Qwen3-VL-8B encoder - for Ampere RTX 3090 GPUs, which lack FP8 tensor cores. Our INT8 W8A8 recipe (per-channel weights, per-token dynamic activations, SmoothQuant, and mixed-precision protection of a small high-fragility layer set) holds the FP8 quality ceiling: on a 200-prompt benchmark the paired same-seed bootstrap CI for INT8-FP8 includes zero on both Pick and CLIP, while INT8 improves on NF4 by $+1.9$ CLIP (95% CI $[+1.21,+2.64]$, excluding zero). A per-category OCR analysis, to our knowledge unreported for this model class, confirms text legibility is preserved, and an ablation isolates protection of the FFN down-projections as the dominant quality lever. Our GGUF Q4_K quantization beats NF4 at equal on-disk size and is the Pareto winner on the quality-memory frontier, with paired confidence intervals excluding zero (Q8_0 is quality neutral). Finally, we characterize where 8-bit quantization helps and where it does not: INT8's weights match FP8's footprint rather than shrink it, so a speed gain on Ampere awaits a fused INT8 kernel.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Ricci flow for the Bures–Helstrom qubit metric

arXiv:2606.19493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Bures–Helstrom metric is the minimal monotone Riemannian metric on the state space of a qubit. With the quantum Fisher normalization used here, it identifies the Bloch ball with a geodesic hemisphere of the unit round three–sphere. We describe its Ricci flow explicitly. In a general rotationally symmetric gauge the flow is a coupled system for the radial lapse and warping factor; a single scalar equation appears only after a Hamilton–DeTurck gauge choice. In the corresponding moving DeTurck frame the squared warping function $\Psi=\Phi^2$ satisfies the linear forced heat equation \begin{equation*} D_t\Psi=\Psi_{ss}-2, \end{equation*} while the fixed-lapse coordinate form contains the associated transport term. Since the Bures–Helstrom metric is Einstein, the geometric flow itself is the homothetic shrinker \begin{equation*} g(t)=(1-4t)g_{\mathrm{BH}}, \end{equation*} with scalar curvature $6/(1-4t)$ and extinction time $T=1/4$. Thus the metric remains inside the monotone cone for all $t

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

Hierarchical Fine-Grained Aerial Object Detection

Fine-grained aerial object detection, driven by the intrinsic granularity of real-world object categories, is crucial for advanced scene understanding in remote sensing. Existing methods largely inherit the paradigm of coarse-grained object detection, relying solely on single-label supervision and thus struggling to distinguish model-level categories with subtle structural differences. However, for each specific model (e.g., Boeing 787), structured prior knowledge such as attributes and hierarchies offers discriminative semantics across multiple granularities. Motivated by this, we present ExpertDet, a scheme that incorporates expert-informed cues to enhance fine-grained aerial object detection. Specifically, we design Vision-aware Masked Attribute Modeling (VMAM), which aligns attribute semantics with visual structures by reconstructing randomly masked attributes from visual cues, enabling the detector to capture subtle structural distinctions. We further propose Hierarchical Visual Instance Promotion (HierVIP), which builds a visual prototype tree based on hierarchical relations and imposes taxonomy-aware constraints to preserve cross-level semantic continuity while enhancing category discrimination. Moreover, we curate a new fine-grained object detection benchmark for Precise recognition of model-specific Ships and Planes from aerial imagery, PSP, covering 106 ship classes and 30 airplane models, respectively, featuring the most extensive collection of model-specific categories among existing aerial object detection datasets to date. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on the PSP benchmark. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that ExpertDet consistently outperforms other fine-grained competitors across hierarchy levels. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://nnnnerd.github.io/PSP-Benchmark/.

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

A Text Recognition Dataset from Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts

In this work, we target Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in low-resource scenarios, which arise from underrepresented languages, rare scripts, and degraded visual conditions typical of historical documents. We introduce SCAM (Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts), a new line-level dataset built from digitized ancient manuscripts written in the extinct Sahidic Coptic dialect. The dataset reflects a realistic and challenging setting, as it combines heterogeneous acquisition conditions across libraries with typical manuscript degradations such as ink fading, bleed-through, and material deterioration. In addition to visual complexity, SCAM poses significant linguistic challenges due to the scarcity of resources for Sahidic Coptic, its uncommon alphabet, and dialect-specific diacritics. To support research in low-resource HTR, we benchmark several state-of-the-art approaches based on different paradigms, highlighting their limitations and strengths in this setting. Our results underline the gap between current HTR performance on well-resourced modern scripts and historically grounded, low-resource scenarios, thus providing a reference point for future developments.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Systematic Evaluation of Feature Representations for Cancer-Associated sORF Prediction in Non-coding RNA

Short open reading frames (sORFs) within non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have arisen as a hidden layer of gene regulation, encoding small peptides that represent a new class of cancer regulators with diagnostic and therapeutic potential. However, inferring associations between sORFs to specific cancer types remains challenging and requires computational approaches for accurate prediction. Recently, the CoraL framework introduced the first computational approach for predicting cancer-associated peptides, focusing primarily on model architecture while overlooking how feature extraction strategies influence predictive accuracy. We present a systematic evaluation of machine learning models and feature extraction approaches to predict cancer-associated sORFs across 15 cancer types. We benchmarked seven traditional machine learning algorithms combined with three feature extraction methods: k-mer frequency, Word2Vec embeddings, and genomic language model (gLM)-based embeddings. To our knowledge, this is the first study applying gLM-derived embeddings to the prediction of cancer-associated sORFs in ncRNA. Our results show that traditional machine learning models with appropriate feature extraction outperform the CoraL baseline across all cancer types, achieving up to 10% higher accuracy in some of the 15 evaluated datasets. Interestingly, k-mer features consistently outperformed gLM embeddings without fine-tuning, suggesting that local sequence composition may provide more discriminative information for this task and that pre-trained genomic representations may require task-specific adaptation to fully capture these patterns. Additionally, we observed that the way sequences are tokenized, such as the k-mer length, can affect performance: longer fragments (e.g., k=7) sometimes reduced accuracy for Random Forest but had a smaller effect on MLP. Our findings suggest that appropriate feature engineering can provide greater improvements than increasing model complexity.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Generativism: Toward a Learning Theory for the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.12441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The four dominant learning theories of behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and connectivism show significant conceptual limitations as generative artificial intelligence (AI) proliferates in educational settings. These frameworks were formulated before the emergence of AI systems capable of generating, synthesizing, and reasoning about knowledge. This article critically examines each learning theory and identifies assumptions challenged by generative AI's affordances. Drawing on research in distributed cognition, extended mind, human-AI collaboration, AI literacy, cognitive offloading, and metacognition, the article proposes Generativism as a learning theory for the generative AI age. Generativism posits that learning increasingly occurs through the iterative co-construction of knowledge between human learners and AI systems. The proposed framework is organized around four principles: epistemic partnership, distributed agency, generative literacy, and adaptive metacognition. The framework offers a foundation for rethinking instructional design, learning, assessment, and expertise development in contexts where generative AI plays an integral role in cognition.

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

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

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

The Pragmatic Persona: Discovering LLM Persona through Bridging Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) reveal inherent and distinctive personas through dialogue. However, most existing persona discovery approaches rely on surface-level lexical or stylistic cues, treating dialogue as a flat sequence of tokens and failing to capture the deeper discourse-level structures that sustain persona consistency. To address this limitation, we propose a novel analytical framework that interprets LLM dialogue through bridging inference – implicit conceptual relations that connect utterances via shared world knowledge and discourse coherence. By modeling these relations as structured knowledge graphs, our approach captures latent semantic links that govern how LLMs organize meaning across turns, enabling persona discovery at the level of discourse coherence rather than surface realizations. Experimental results across multiple reasoning backbones and target LLMs, ranging from small-scale models to 80B-parameter systems, demonstrate that bridging-inference graphs yield significantly stronger semantic coherence and more stable persona identification than frequency or style-based baselines. These results show that persona traits are consistently encoded in the structural organization of discourse rather than isolated lexical patterns. This work presents a systematic framework for probing, extracting, and visualizing latent LLM personas through the lens of Cognitive Discourse Theory, bridging computational linguistics, cognitive semantics, and persona reasoning in large language models. Codes are available at https://github.com/JiSoo-Yang/Persona_Bridging.git

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Revealing Artifacts via Noise Amplification: A Novel Perspective for AI-Generated Video Detection

With the rapid advancement of video generation models, distinguishing between AI-generated and authentic videos has emerged as a challenging endeavor. The majority of existing research endeavors concentrate on the development of detectors for identifying samples generated by generative adversarial networks. Nevertheless, the detection of AI-generated videos, particularly those produced by text-to-video models, still remains an uncharted territory. Although state-of-the-art text-to-video models can generate realistic visual content similar to real videos, they fall short of generating the details of the images and the changes in details within the videos. Inspired by this, we address AI-generated video detection from a novel perspective of bit-planes, which can effectively describe the details or noises in images or videos. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Noise Amplification. This approach first extracts noise signals based on bit-planes, then amplifies these noise signals, and finally feeds them into the discriminator networks for video fake classification. Noise amplification is comprehensively constructed by incorporating three aspects: pixel-level intensity enhancement, region-level spatial amplification, and frame-level temporal aggregation. To evaluate methods of AI-generated video detection in challenging scenarios, we also introduce a benchmark named HardGVD. Extensive experiments on both the large-scale dataset GenVidBench and HardGVD show that our simple approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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

Benchmarking AI Agents for Addressing Scientific Challenges Across Scales

arXiv:2606.12736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks for AI agents rarely capture the complexity, heterogeneity, and extended reasoning required by scientific work, whereas benchmarks for scientific tasks often reduce research to static, direct problems and provide limited support for interactive evaluation. Here, we introduce SciAgentArena, a systematic benchmark for evaluating AI agents in real-world scientific research scenarios drawn from emerging needs across multiple domains. SciAgentArena comprises approximately 200 tasks with stepwise verification and an interactive, agent-agnostic environment for assessing diverse AI agents. Using this benchmark, we find that current agents can contribute effectively to well-specified data-analysis workflows, particularly when the task structure and evaluation criteria are clear. However, their performance remains uneven across scientific contexts: agents struggle to generate genuinely novel insights, sustain self-directed exploration, and formulate robust solutions for open-ended research questions. We further characterize common failure modes across agents and identify opportunities for improving their reliability, autonomy, and scientific reasoning. Together, SciAgentArena provides a practical framework for measuring progress in AI agents for science and for guiding the design of future agents capable of addressing complex scientific challenges. Full codes, tasks, and datasets can be accessed via this link: https://sciagentarena.github.io/.

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

Internet of Everything in the 6G Era: Paradigms, Enablers, Potentials and Future Directions

arXiv:2604.25018v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Internet of Everything (IoE) represents an evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) by integrating people, data, processes, and things into a unified intelligent ecosystem. IoE aims to enhance automation, decision-making, and service efficiency across multiple application domains such as smart cities, healthcare, industry, and next-generation wireless networks. This paper provides a structured overview of the IoE concept, its core components, architectural foundations, enabling technologies, and major research challenges. Finally, open research directions toward 6G-enabled intelligent IoE systems are discussed, with emphasis on scalability, security, privacy, and energy efficiency.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.

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

A2SG:Adaptive and Asymmetric Surrogate Gradients for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks

Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework: adaptive and asymmetric surrogate gradients A2SG. The adaptive gradients adjust an effective window for spatio-temporal adaptation, reducing spatial gradient variation and maintaining directional consistency of gradients over time. The asymmetric gradients reflect neuronal dynamics by assigning larger gradients to neurons with higher membrane potentials, and we prove that they yield lower variation than symmetric surrogates. Our analysis further establishes a direct connection between local gradient variation and the curvature of the loss landscape, providing a principled explanation for how A2SG promotes convergence to flatter minima and improves generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse models, including CNN-based and Transformer-based SNNs, across various tasks such as image classification using both static and neuromorphic datasets, as well as segmentation. The results demonstrate that A2SG consistently improves accuracy and energy efficiency, establishing it as a general and reliable solution for training deep SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KIST-NCL/A2SG.git.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

BLISS: A Lightweight Bilevel Influence Scoring Method for Data Selection in Language Model Pretraining

arXiv:2510.06048v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks. However, existing approaches often require leveraging external pretrained models, making it difficult to disentangle the effects of data selection from those of the external pretrained models. In addition, they often overlook the long-term impact of selected data if the model is trained to convergence, primarily due to the prohibitive cost of full-scale LLM pretraining. In this paper, we introduce BLISS (BileveL Influence Scoring method for data Selection): a lightweight data selection method that operates entirely from scratch, without relying on any external pretrained oracle models, while explicitly accounting for the long-term impact of selected data. BLISS leverages a small proxy model as a surrogate for the LLM and employs a score model to estimate the long-term influence of training samples if the proxy model is trained to convergence. We formulate data selection as a bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective optimizes the score model to assign importance weights to training samples, ensuring that minimizing the lower-level objective (i.e., training the proxy model over the weighted training loss until convergence) leads to best validation performance. Once optimized, the trained score model predicts influence scores for the dataset, enabling efficient selection of high-quality samples for LLM pretraining. We validate BLISS by pretraining 410M/1B/2.8B Pythia and LLaMA-0.5B models on selected subsets of the C4 dataset. Notably, under the 1B model setting, BLISS achieves $1.7\times$ speedup in reaching the same performance as the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple downstream tasks.

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

Defending against Adaptive Prompt Injection Attacks via Reasoning-enabled Task Alignment

arXiv:2606.15441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection attacks hijack LLM-based agents by embedding malicious instructions in third-party data that the agent retrieves during task execution. Existing defenses report near-zero attack success rate on static benchmarks, yet recent adaptive evaluations show that these results collapse once the attacker is allowed to optimize against the deployed defense. In this work, we trace this collapse to two failure modes. First, existing defense methods are confined to recognizing specific attack patterns, rather than assessing whether the intent of every embedded instruction is relevant to the user task. Second, training-based defenses, which otherwise offer the strongest safety-utility trade-off, assemble their adversarial examples from a handful of hand-crafted templates, and the resulting defender fails to generalize outside that narrow strategy distribution. To address these gaps, we propose RETA, a training-based method that grounds defense decisions on the user tasks rather than attacker-controlled data. At each tool-output step, the defender undertakes chain-of-thought reasoning verifying that its actions are consistent with the user task. Leveraging red-teaming, a simulated attacker synthesizes adversarial training data and receives a dictionary-learning diversity reward, achieving broad coverage of injection-reformulation strategies. Together, these allow the defender to be optimized via multi-objective reinforcement learning and achieve better safety-utility trade-off. Across six black-box adaptive attacks, RETA keeps every per-attack ASR below 10%, with average ASR of 2.92% and 3.75% on the two target models, while preserving most utility under attack and on clean inputs.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scale-Invariant Neural Network Optimization: Norm Geometry and Heavy-Tailed Noise

arXiv:2605.18528v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A growing lesson from neural network optimization is that optimizer design should respect how the model is parametrized. The layerwise input-output structure of neural networks motivates scale-invariant optimizers, such as Muon and Scion, whose updates also support hyperparameter transfer. At the same time, stochastic gradient noise in deep learning is often far from sub-Gaussian and may exhibit heavy tails. These observations have shaped recent algorithmic principles for training neural networks, yet their joint theoretical consequences are underexplored. In particular, it remains unclear what dimension dependence is unavoidable for gradient-based methods given the problem class is defined by input-output norm and under heavy-tailed noise, and whether higher-order smoothness can accelerate training. We study these questions through nonconvex smooth stochastic optimization over $\mathbb R^{m\times n}$ equipped with general norms and under $p^\mathrm{th}$-moment heavy-tailed noise, where the goal is to achieve an $\epsilon$-stationary point in the dual norm. Our first contribution is a dimension-dependent lower bound: when $\frac{\max\{m,n\}}{(\min\{m,n\})^2}$ is large enough, any gradient-based method requires $\Omega(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$ oracles for the problem class defined by the spectral norm, which is a common input-output norm. We prove that a scale-invariant Scion method with the spectral norm can achieve the matching upper bound of $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$. To exploit higher-order smoothness, we propose a transported Scion method and improve the bound to $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{5p-3}{2p-2}})$ when the Hessian is Lipschitz. Finally, we incorporate heuristics into our transported method and evaluate it across multiple architectures and model sizes, demonstrating its flexibility and compatibility with neural network training.

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

Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles

Authors:

arXiv:2511.19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $\Omega(\kappa^{3/2}\epsilon^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $\Omega(\kappa^{5/2}\epsilon^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles.