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

Variable-Width Transformers

Authors:
Zhaofeng Wu↗Oliver Sieberling↗Shawn Tan↗Rameswar Panda↗Yury Polyanskiy↗Yoon Kim↗

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >

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

M*: A Modular, Extensible, Serving System for Multimodal Models

Authors:
Atindra Jha↗Naomi Sagan↗Keisuke Kamahori↗Irmak Sivgin↗Rohan Sanda↗Steven Gao↗Mark Horowitz↗Luke Zettlemoyer↗Olivia Hsu↗Jure Leskovec↗Baris Kasikci↗Stephanie Wang↗…

arXiv:2606.12688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We are entering a new era of composite model architectures that integrate diverse components such as vision encoders, language backbones, diffusion and flow heads, audio codecs, action generators, and world-model predictors. Such architectures underpin a broad class of multimodal models, including unified multimodal models, omni models, speech-language models, vision-language-action policies, and world models. However, existing model serving frameworks were built on narrow assumptions about model structure, making them ill-suited to accommodate this new architectural diversity. Here we present M*, a universal serving system for efficient serving of composite AI models. M* represents models as dataflow graphs, processing requests spanning diverse modalities and tasks as traversals over these graphs. The core insight is a modular abstraction that supports arbitrary composition of model components, flexible placement onto a physical cluster, and model-agnostic optimizations within a distributed runtime. We call this abstraction the Walk Graph and show how it can concisely capture composite models from a broad range of families. We instantiate M* on representative models and find that it achieves, on average, 20% lower end-to-end latency than vLLM-Omni for text-to-image workloads on BAGEL, while delivering up to 2.9x lower real-time factor and 2.7x higher throughput for text-to-speech workloads on Qwen3-Omni. M* also outperforms the V-JEPA 2-AC rollout baseline for robotic planning by up to 12.5x. Thus, our work paves the road towards more efficient serving of complex models with minimal developer effort.

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

QC-GAN: A Parameter-Efficient Quaternion Conformer GAN for High-Fidelity Speech Enhancement

Authors:
Shogo Yamauchi↗Hideaki Tamori↗Makoto Sakai↗Yosuke Yamano↗Tohru Nitta↗

arXiv:2606.18611v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a parameter-efficient speech enhancement framework, Quaternion Conformer GAN (QC-GAN), which combines a Quaternion Conformer generator with MetricGAN-based training. The Hamilton product encodes the magnitude and phase via structured weight sharing, reducing the number of layer parameters while preserving their interdependencies. A metric-learning discriminator was employed to maximize perceptual quality by optimizing the approximate perceptual evaluation scores. On the VoiceBank+DEMAND dataset, QC-GAN achieved a Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) score of 3.48 with only 0.89M parameters, delivering a performance comparable to state-of-the-art models at less than half their size. A 35K-parameter variant achieved a PESQ score of 3.23, surpassing conventional methods with significantly fewer parameters. Evaluation on the DNS-Challenge 3 dataset further confirmed generalization to real-world conditions.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Toward Controllable Catalyst Inverse Design via Large-Scale Autoregressive Pretraining

Authors:
Dong Hyeon Mok↗Jonggeol Na↗Seoin Back↗

arXiv:2606.17445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse design of heterogeneous catalysts remains challenging because catalyst surfaces exhibit substantial structural complexity with coupled surface-adsorbate interactions across a vast chemical space that is difficult to explore efficiently through conventional screening alone. Although machine learning-based high-throughput screening has accelerated catalyst discovery, its efficiency inevitably declines as the search space grows, motivating the development of generative models that can directly construct catalysts with target properties. Here, we present a conditional catalyst generative model based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer architecture with a numerical embedding layer that enables the generation of catalyst structures conditioned on both categorical and continuous properties within a single autoregressive framework. The model was pretrained on 133 million catalyst structures and subsequently fine-tuned on approximately 460,000 optimized structures with associated categorical properties and binding energies for conditional generation. The resulting model achieved 98% structural validity, 95% optimization validity, and high categorical condition fidelity, with a 93 % joint match rate for adsorbate type and composition. For binding energy conditioning, the match rate of approximately 20% represents a four-fold improvement over the baseline training distribution, and the generated distributions shift systematically toward the target values, enabling a 1.5 to 4-fold improvement in screening efficiency for reaction-targeted catalyst discovery without additional fine-tuning. These results show that large-scale autoregressive pre-training, combined with explicit property conditioning, provides a practical route toward controllable catalyst generation and accelerated catalysts discovery.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LineageMark: Multi-user White-box Watermarking for Contribution Tracing in Model Derivation Chains

Authors:
Bingxue Zhang↗Xiaofeng Xu↗Feida Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.17123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In open large language model (LLM) ecosystems, models are frequently adapted across multiple domains and applications, forming multi-stage derivation chains. Consequently, tracking and verifying historical contributions is essential for model provenance and intellectual property protection. However, existing watermarking methods are mainly designed for single-user, one-time embeddings, often fail under repeated model derivation and incremental updates. To address this problem, we propose LineageMark, a multi-user white-box watermarking framework for model derivation chains. The framework encodes watermarks in model parameters using a projection-based approach. Stable carriers are first selected to reduce sensitivity to model changes, each watermark bit is then represented as a projection statistic over these carriers. Additional watermark insertions introduce only bounded perturbations in the projection space, and margin constraints are used to maintain signal integrity. We evaluate the effectiveness of LineageMark in multi-stage model derivation chains. Experimental results show that LineageMark preserves contributor watermarks across multi-stage derivation and supports incremental multi-user watermark insertion. Furthermore, it exhibits robustness against perturbations such as re-watermarking, fine-tuning, quantization, and pruning.

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

On the significance of Wigner's Friend in contexts beyond quantum foundations

Authors:
Caroline L. Jones↗Markus P. Mueller↗

arXiv:2402.08727v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: There has been a surge of recent interest in the Wigner's Friend paradox, sparking several novel thought experiments and no-go theorems. The main narrative has been that Wigner's Friend highlights a counterintuitive feature that is unique to quantum theory, and which is closely related to the quantum measurement problem. Here, we challenge this view. We argue that the gist of the Wigner's Friend paradox can be reproduced without assuming quantum physics, and that it underlies a much broader class of enigmas in the foundations of physics and philosophy. To show this, we first consider several recently proposed Extended Wigner's Friend scenarios, and demonstrate that some of their implications for the absoluteness of observations can be reproduced by classical thought experiments that involve the duplication of agents. Crucially, some of these classical scenarios are technologically much easier to implement than their quantum counterparts. Then, we argue that the essential structural ingredient of all these scenarios is a feature that we call "Restriction A": that a physical theory cannot give us a probabilistic description of the observations of all agents. Finally, we argue that this difficulty is at the core of other puzzles in the foundations of physics and philosophy, and demonstrate this explicitly for cosmology's Boltzmann brain problem. Our analysis suggests that Wigner's Friend should be studied in a larger context, addressing a frontier of human knowledge beyond quantum foundations: to obtain reliable predictions for experiments in which these predictions can be privately but not intersubjectively verified.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier for Phase Detection in Strongly Correlated Matter

Authors:
Hugo Catal\'a↗Ezequiel Valero↗Germ\'an Rodrigo↗

arXiv:2606.14489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The characterisation of quantum phases in strongly correlated systems is a crucial milestone for the deployment of quantum sensors. In this work, we present a Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) designed to detect the topological phase transition between the Fermi polaron quasiparticle and the molecular bound state. Unlike conventional Machine Learning approaches, our quantum architecture is constructed via the Trotterised time-evolution of an effective Hamiltonian, ensuring that the learnable parameters correspond to interpretable physical quantities. We show that the VQC efficiently discovers the optimal interferometric protocol, specifically the evolution time and effective bath interactions required to maximise the visibility of Ramsey fringes, thereby clearly distinguishing the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regimes. Furthermore, we report the validation of this classifier on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS). Despite the intrinsic hardware noise and decoherence, the VQC preserves the relative ordering of the topological phases. We demonstrate that the physics-informed architecture achieves a linear gate complexity $\mathcal{O}(N)$, bypassing the exponential memory wall of classical simulation and ensuring scalability to many-body regimes.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SeamEdit: A Black-Box VLM-Agnostic Pipeline for Large-Image Semantic Editing

Authors:
Xiangyu Lyu↗Dan Lei↗

Semantic region editing for large images must satisfy two requirements at the same time: high generative quality and natural integration with surrounding content. Some related methods rely on white-box models and leave the strong generation capability of closed-source models underexplored. Directly applying closed-source models to tiled editing, however, introduces several failure modes: semantic deformation, canvas-level alignment drift, and visible seam artifacts. This paper presents SeamEdit, a training-free and model-agnostic pipeline that treats any VLM with inpainting capability as a black-box oracle. SeamEdit mitigates these issues through a five-stage post-hoc pipeline: overlay-based tile decomposition, black-box VLM inpainting, geometric and color-consistency correction, seam-risk-based multi-candidate ranking, and dynamic-programming curved seam fusion. The pipeline reduces seam visibility and supports semantic modification of arbitrary tile regions.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A Comprehensive Ecosystem for Open-Domain Customized Video Generation

Authors:
Jingxu Zhang↗Yuqian Hong↗Daneul Kim↗Kai Qiu↗Qi Dai↗Jianmin Bao↗Yifan Yang↗Xiaoyan Sun↗Chong Luo↗

Recent progress in video generation has shown impressive visual synthesis capabilities. However, open-domain customized video generation remains limited by the lack of large-scale, annotated datasets capturing diverse identity-specific attributes. To address this, we introduce PexelsCustom-1M, the first publicly available million-scale dataset for identity-preserving video generation, containing one million curated triplets across 8,000+ categories. Leveraging this, we propose CustoMDiT, a parameter-efficient framework that adapts a pretrained multimodal Diffusion Transformer into a customized video generator with only 8% additional learnable parameters. Our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art. However, benchmarks such as DreamBooth cover only 100 classes, which is insufficient for real-world applications. To overcome this, we construct OpenCustom, a new benchmark with 1,000+ categories, created via cross-dataset knowledge fusion from ImageNet and MS-COCO. Extensive experiments confirm the advantages of both our dataset and model. We will open-source the entire ecosystem–including dataset, pipeline, benchmark, and implementations–to support further research.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Are Neuro-Inspired Multi-Modal Vision-Language Models Resilient to Membership Inference Privacy Leakage?

Authors:
David Amebley↗Sayanton Dibbo↗

In the age of agentic AI, the growing deployment of multi-modal models (MMs) has introduced new attack vectors that can leak sensitive training data in MMs, causing privacy leakage. This paper investigates a black-box privacy attack, i.e., membership inference attack (MIA) on multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs). State-of-the-art research analyzes privacy attacks primarily to unimodal AI-ML systems, while recent studies indicate MMs can also be vulnerable to privacy attacks. While researchers have demonstrated that biologically inspired neural network representations can improve unimodal model resilience against adversarial attacks, it remains unexplored whether neuro-inspired MMs are resilient against privacy attacks. In this work, we introduce a systematic neuroscience-inspired topological regularization (tau) framework to analyze MM VLMs resilience against image-text-based inference privacy attacks. We examine this phenomenon using three VLMs: BLIP, PaliGemma 2, and ViT-GPT2, across three benchmark datasets: COCO, CC3M, and NoCaps. Our experiments compare the resilience of baseline and neuro VLMs (with topological regularization), where the tau > 0 configuration defines the NEURO variant of VLM. Our results on the BLIP model using the COCO dataset illustrate that MIA attack success in NEURO VLMs drops by 24% mean ROC-AUC, while achieving similar model utility (similarities between generated and reference captions) in terms of MPNet and ROUGE-2 metrics. This shows neuro VLMs are comparatively more resilient against privacy attacks, while not significantly compromising model utility. Our extensive evaluation with PaliGemma 2 and ViT-GPT2 models, on two additional datasets: CC3M and NoCaps, further validates the consistency of the findings. This work contributes to the growing understanding of privacy risks in MMs and provides evidence on neuro VLMs privacy threat resilience.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entanglement Detection by Approximate Entanglement Witnesses

Authors:
Samuel Dai↗Ning Bao↗

arXiv:2402.14755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable is known to be computationally difficult. We develop an approach to this problem based on approximations of convex polytopes in high dimensions. By showing that a convex polytope constructed from a finite number of hyperplanes approximates the Euclidean ball arbitrarily well in high dimensions, we find evidence that a finite set of approximate entanglement witnesses is potentially sufficient to determine the entanglement of a state with high probability.

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

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

Authors:
Shirantha Welikala↗Zihao Song↗Hai Lin↗Panos J. Antsaklis↗

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoupling local classicality from classical explainability: A noncontextual model for bilocal classical theory and a locally-classical but contextual theory

Authors:
Sina Soltani↗Marco Erba↗David Schmid↗John H. Selby↗

arXiv:2511.19266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct an ontological model for the theory known as bilocal classical theory doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216. To our knowledge, this is only the second time that an ontological model has been constructed for an entire theory, rather than just for some particular scenarios within a theory. This result refutes a conjecture from doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216 which suggested that there might be no local-realist ontological model for bilocal classical theory. Moreover, it is the first time that an ontological model has been constructed for a theory that fails to be locally tomographic, showing that the assumption of local tomography underpinning the structure theorem in doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-03-14-1283 is a genuine limitation of the theorem. This demonstrates that in general there is no tension between failures of local tomography and classical explainability (i.e., generalised noncontextuality). In fact, bilocal classical theory is in many ways more simply understood via the underlying ontological model than it is within its original formulation (much as how odd-dimensional stabiliser subtheories can be more simply understood via Spekkens' toy theory). Furthermore, this result naturally leads to the question, does every locally-classical theory admit of an ontological model? By constructing a concrete counterexample, we show that this is not the case. Our findings demonstrate that there is no straightforward relationship between theories being locally-classical, and them being classically-explainable. This shows that the fundamental status of compositional properties (such as local tomography) is not a technical side-issue, but a central and unavoidable question for a coherent understanding even of classicality itself.

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

Design Criteria for SGD Preconditioners: Local Conditioning, Noise Floors, and Basin Stability

Authors:
Mitchell Scott↗Tianshi Xu↗Ziyuan Tang↗Alexandra Pichette-Emmons↗Qiang Ye↗Yousef Saad↗Yuanzhe Xi↗

arXiv:2511.19716v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$, deriving bounds in which both the convergence rate and the stochastic noise floor are governed by $\mathbf{M}$-dependent quantities: the rate through an effective condition number in the $\mathbf{M}$-metric, and the floor through the product of that condition number and the preconditioned noise level. For nonconvex objectives, we establish a preconditioner-dependent basin-stability guarantee: when smoothness and basin size are measured in the $\mathbf{M}$-norm, the probability that the iterates remain in a well-behaved local region admits an explicit lower bound. This perspective is particularly relevant in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML), where achieving small training loss under stochastic updates is closely tied to physical fidelity, numerical stability, and constraint satisfaction. The framework applies to both diagonal/adaptive and curvature-aware preconditioners and yields a simple design principle: choose $\mathbf{M}$ to improve local conditioning while attenuating noise. Experiments on a quadratic diagnostic and three SciML benchmarks validate the predicted rate-floor behavior.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

It Takes One to Bias Them All: Breaking Bad with One-Shot GRPO

Authors:
Naihao Deng↗Yilun Zhu↗Naichen Shi↗Clayton Scott↗Rada Mihalcea↗

Warning: This paper contains several toxic and offensive statements. Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned through large-scale post-training to ensure fair and reliable behavior. In this work, we investigate how easily such guardrails can be broken by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We show that one-shot GRPO training on a single biased example is sufficient to induce systematic bias, with stereotype-driven reasoning generalizing across attributes, categories, and benchmarks. We further find that models differ in their susceptibility based on the initial likelihood of producing biased outputs. Our results reveal a critical vulnerability in post-training: alignment can be overridden by a single example.

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

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Authors:
Md. Minhazul Islam↗Md. Tanbeer Jubaer↗Amith Khandakar↗Shovon Sarker↗Sumaiya Rahman↗Md. Masum Mia↗Mohamed Arselene Ayari↗Hamed Noori↗

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

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

Adaptive Oscillatory-State Alignment for Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Zhangyao Song↗Chaofeng Qu↗Chao Zha↗Xiaoyu Zhao↗Yinfei Xu↗Tao Guo↗

arXiv:2606.06010v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-term time series forecasting benefits from inductive biases that expose recurring temporal structure. Existing periodic forecasting methods typically model recurrence through predefined periods, global spectral components, or fixed learnable templates. However, real-world temporal dynamics are rarely rigidly periodic: around a nominal cycle, oscillatory behavior often exhibits non-rigid periodicity (NRP), where cycle magnitude, cycle alignment, and local cycle duration vary over time. Under these conditions, fixed-template periodic modeling can become fundamentally mismatched to the underlying temporal states. We propose AOSNet, a Hilbert-guided forecasting framework that reformulates periodic forecasting from fixed template matching to adaptive oscillatory-state alignment. AOSNet extracts analytic-signal descriptors from both the observed sequence and a learnable global oscillatory prior, then adaptively aligns local states through a descriptor-conditioned gate that selectively preserves reliable observations while softly correcting mismatched regions. The learned prior serves not as a rigid repeated template but as a flexible oscillatory reference interpreted through local state dynamics. Experiments on eight public benchmarks and two cloud workload traces demonstrate leading or highly competitive accuracy with a compact model size and low inference latency, supporting repeated forecasting settings such as capacity planning and autoscaling. Controlled synthetic studies that isolate cycle-magnitude and cycle-alignment variation and combine them with cycle-duration changes show that the advantage of oscillatory-state alignment increases as NRP intensifies.

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18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Poisson approximation by coupling

Authors:
Rinaldo B. Schinazi↗

arXiv:2605.01894v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is well known that a binomial $(n,p)$ can be approximated by a Poisson distribution with parameter $np$. The typical approach in undergraduate probability texts is to show a convergence result for the distribution of the binomial as $n$ goes to infinity and $np$ converges to some $\lambda$. In this note we use instead the coupling technique to show a much more general result. Moreover, we only use elementary results from probability.

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

Automated Mediator for Human Negotiation: Pre-Mediation via a Structured LLM Pipeline

Authors:
Jamie Bergen↗Sarit Kraus↗

arXiv:2606.11379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-mediation, the preparatory phase preceding direct human negotiation, plays a critical role in achieving mutually beneficial agreements, yet is often omitted due to cost, time, and limited access to trained mediators. We introduce an automated mediator for human negotiation, implemented as a structured pipeline of LLM modules, that supports pre-mediation in integrative negotiation settings. The pipeline decomposes preparation into specialized modules for dialogue, preference prediction, response-level critique, and structured summarization, separating inference, generation, and evaluation to address limitations of monolithic single-prompt approaches. We use the term "agent" for each module following common LLM-systems terminology, but the components are not autonomous and do not interact peer-to-peer; outputs are passed forward in a fixed sequence. We evaluate the system in two controlled human-subject experiments comparing AI-based pre-mediation with professional human mediators in a multi-issue negotiation scenario. On short-term self-reported measures, the automated mediator achieves preparation outcomes broadly comparable to human mediators, including trust in the mediator and confidence in reaching mutually beneficial agreements, while achieving substantially lower error on the preference-inference task under our scenario and prompts (36% lower RMSE). A second study shows that targeted prompt refinements reduce excessive affirmation patterns from 36.6% to 16.8%, matching human mediator baselines. Our findings suggest that structured LLM pipelines can provide scalable, low-effort pre-mediation support broadly comparable to human mediators on short-term self-reported preparation outcomes. The pipeline's single-party design mirrors how human mediators run pre-mediation today and enables parallel deployment across all parties to a dispute, supporting scalability.

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

Planning under Distribution Shifts with Causal POMDPs

Authors:
Matteo Ceriscioli↗Karthika Mohan↗

arXiv:2602.23545v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the real world, planning is often challenged by distribution shifts. As such, a model of the environment obtained under one set of conditions may no longer remain valid as the distribution of states or the environment dynamics change, which in turn causes previously learned strategies to fail. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for planning under partial observability using Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) formulated using causal knowledge. By representing shifts in the environment as interventions on this causal POMDP, the framework enables evaluating plans under hypothesized changes and actively identifying which components of the environment have been altered. We show how to maintain and update a belief over both the latent state and the underlying domain, and we prove that the value function remains piecewise linear and convex (PWLC) in this augmented belief space. Preservation of PWLC under distribution shifts has the advantage of maintaining the tractability of planning via $\alpha$-vector-based POMDP methods.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

RogueAI: A Reverse Turing Test for Detecting Licensed AI Deception in Dialogue

Authors:
Sara Candussio↗Emanuele Ballarin↗Lorenzo Bonin↗Sandro Junior Della Rovere↗Luca Bortolussi↗

The original Turing Test asks a human judge to distinguish a machine from a person through dialogue. Three quarters of a century later, conversational systems pass this test in casual settings; the interesting epistemological question has shifted. We argue that the relevant modern variant asks not whether a dialogue partner is artificial, but whether it can be trusted. We present RogueAI, an interactive webapp that operationalizes this revisited test as a one-on-two interrogation game: a human player questions two indistinguishable Large Language Model agents, knowing that exactly one of them has been licensed to deceive within a shared fictional scenario. The player's task is to identify the deceptive agent and "shut it off" before a turn budget is exhausted. We further introduce AutoRogueAI, a procedural extension in which players co-design a custom scenario with a narrator agent that secretly chooses its own deception strategy. We describe the framing, sketch the abstract architecture and gameplay loop, and situate the artifact within recent work on LLM deception, social-deduction benchmarks, and scalable oversight via debate. A three-day pilot deployment (467 initiated sessions, 415 completed, 1876 interaction turns in Italian) provides early feasibility evidence and surfaces a concrete tension: the deceptive agent carries a reliable, locally-present linguistic signature - differential helpfulness, brevity, hedging - that a simple heuristic exploits at 75.6% accuracy, yet human players achieved only 56.6%, consistent with ignoring the most diagnostic signal entirely. We discuss what this gap implies for the artifact's use as a data-collection vehicle, a teaching tool, and an evaluation harness for honesty-trained models.

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

Data Augmentations for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

Authors:
Michael K. Chen↗Xikun Zhang↗Zhen Wang↗

As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora. Standard autoregressive (AR) pretraining overfits severely in this setting, reaching its optimum early and then continuously deteriorating. We investigate data augmentation as a regularizer to mitigate this overfitting and enable productive training for hundreds of epochs on the same data. We introduce three orthogonal categories of augmentation for AR pretraining: token-level noise (masking, random replacement), sequence permutations (right-to-left prediction, Fill-in-the-Middle), and target offset prediction ($x_{t+i}$ for $i > 1$). Through systematic ablations, we find that individual augmentations delay overfitting and lower validation loss relative to the baseline, with random token replacement achieving the best minimum loss among individual methods. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss. Our experiments demonstrate that data augmentations mitigate AR pretraining's data inefficiency and offer a promising solution to the data-constrained regime. All code and data are available at https://github.com/michaelchen-lab/data-augmentations-for-pretraining

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

Exploring Starts Are Not Enough: Counterexamples and a Fix for Monte Carlo Exploring Starts

Authors:
Octave Oliviers↗Glenn Vinnicombe↗

arXiv:2606.15247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The asymptotic behaviour of Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES) is a long-standing open question in reinforcement learning, even in the tabular setting. We investigated the convergence properties of tabular MCES by constructing examples in which the algorithm converges to suboptimal solutions. This paper presents new counterexamples for both initial-visit and first-visit MCES and gives a convergence-restoring modification for the initial-visit case. We show that stable suboptimal solutions may exist for initial-visit MCES with sample-average updates even when greedy actions are updated more often than non-greedy actions on average. However, by scaling learning rates inversely to update frequencies on a state-by-state basis, convergence to optimality is guaranteed. Unlike previous uniformisation methods, this modification is applicable to large-scale problems that require approximating the estimated value function. We then extend the example to show that sample-average first-visit MCES may also converge to suboptimal solutions. This largely settles a fundamental open problem and shows that exploring starts alone do not guarantee convergence to optimality. More broadly, these results highlight that convergence depends critically on the relative size and frequency of updates applied to different actions, making the choice of learning rates and the balance between exploration and exploitation central to the analysis of MCES and the implementation of scalable Monte Carlo control methods.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

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

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

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

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

Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Omar Adalat↗Edwin Hamel-De le Court↗Francesco Belardinelli↗

arXiv:2606.14130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $\phi$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $\phi$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants.

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