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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The algebra of Krom logic programs

Authors:
Christian Anti\'c↗

arXiv:2606.15719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the algebraic structure of Krom logic programs, consisting only of facts and rules with at most one body atom. We show that sequential composition endows the class of Krom programs with a natural monoid structure and that this structure admits rich algebraic extensions to Krom seminearrings, Krom quemirings, Krom-Conway seminearrings, and Krom-Conway omegaseminearrings. Furthermore, we establish explicit generating sets and canonical decompositions, study the associated ${}^\omega$-operator, characterize the Kleene star in graph-theoretic terms, and relate finite Krom monoids to transformation monoids and finite-state automata. These results provide new connections between logic programming, algebraic automata theory, and algebraic graph theory.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

From ASR to ASP: Evaluating Prompt Attack Vulnerabilities Against Open-Source LLMs

Authors:
Jiawen Wang↗Pritha Gupta↗Ivan Habernal↗Eyke H\"ullermeier↗Xiaoxue Gao↗Nancy F. Chen↗

Recent studies demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate harmful or sensitive outputs. As open-source LLMs are increasingly adopted in high-impact applications such as finance, law, and healthcare, systematically investigating their security risks is becoming increasingly important towards trustworthy LLM era. This paper comprehensively studies effective prompt injection attacks against 14 widely used open-source and three closed-source LLMs on five attack benchmarks. Moreover, existing evaluation metrics mostly only consider the attack success rate, overlooking uncertainty in model responses. Our proposed Attack Success Probability (ASP) additionally captures uncertain behaviors for evaluation, where the model may initially refuse a harmful request but subsequently provide harmful guidance or vice versa, reflecting inconsistency and ambiguity in attack feasibility. By systematically analyzing the effectiveness of prompt injection attacks, we propose a straightforward and effective hypnotism attack; results show that this attack causes aligned language models, including Stablelm2, Mistral, Openchat, and Vicuna, to generate objectionable behaviors, achieving around 90% ASP. They also indicate that ignore prefix attacks can break all 14 open-source LLMs, achieving over 60% ASP on a multi-categorical dataset. We find that moderately well-known LLMs exhibit higher vulnerability to prompt injection attacks, highlighting the need to raise public awareness and prioritize efficient mitigation strategies.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Clinically Aware Synthetic Image Generation for Concept Coverage in Chest X-ray Models

Authors:
Amy Rafferty↗Rishi Ramaesh↗Ajitha Rajan↗

Deep learning models for chest X-ray diagnosis are constrained by limited coverage of clinically meaningful concept combinations in publicly available training datasets. While synthetic image generation has been explored to increase data diversity, existing methods rarely enforce clinical or anatomical constraints, limiting utility for improving model reliability. We propose CARPA, a clinically aware and anatomically grounded framework for synthetic chest X-ray generation that applies targeted perturbations to clinical concept vectors while preserving anatomical structure. By producing anatomically faithful synthetic images with controlled concept insertions and deletions, CARPA expands clinically relevant concept coverage. We evaluate CARPA across seven backbone architectures by fine-tuning models on synthetic subsets and testing on a held-out MIMIC-CXR benchmark. Compared to prior concept perturbation approaches, fine-tuning on CARPA-generated images consistently improves precision-recall performance, reduces predictive uncertainty, and improves model calibration. Structural and semantic analyses demonstrate high anatomical fidelity, strong concept alignment, and low semantic uncertainty. Evaluation by two expert radiologists further confirms realism and clinical agreement. Together, these results show that anatomically grounded concept perturbations enable more effective use of synthetic data, improving both performance and reliability of chest X-ray classification models and supporting safer clinical deployment.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Accuracy and Satisfaction in Multi-Turn LLM Dialogues for NFR Assessment

Authors:
Ali Pourghasemi Fatideh↗Wilder Baldwin↗Maria Dhakal↗Collin McMillan↗Sepideh Ghanavati↗

arXiv:2606.24834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based dialogue assistants have become mainstream tools for software developers, yet current evaluation benchmarks focus exclusively on functional correctness. This leaves a critical gap in assessing the quality and accuracy of these conversations when handling Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), which are inherently vague, context-dependent, and involve many parts of a program. Evaluating how well these systems support collaborative reasoning about NFRs requires methods that go beyond single-turn accuracy to capture both the correctness of the system's outputs and the quality of the multi-turn interaction. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy and quality of multi-turn conversations between developers and an LLM-based agent in the domain of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulatory compliance. We hired 49 programmers to interact with GitHub Copilot to assess 148 HIPAA-derived NFRs against the iTrust codebase, a system designed to comply with HIPAA regulations, across three dimensions: requirement satisfaction level, reasoning, and code localization. We find that developers tend to agree with LLM assessments, but accuracy against expert ground truth is low. We model user satisfaction and find that longer system responses and more information-providing turns negatively affect user satisfaction, whereas proactive interactions positively affect it. Our findings provide insights for designing LLM-based dialogue systems that support NFR assessment.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian for Projective Quantum Feature Maps

Authors:
Rafael Sim\~oes do Carmo↗Edson Amaro Junior↗Felipe Fanchini↗

arXiv:2606.13641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projected quantum feature maps provide a strategy for using quantum processors as feature generators for classical machine-learning models. Building on counterdiabatic Ising-glass and one-dimensional Heisenberg PQFMs, we introduce a generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian-based PQFM that provides a unified way to encode classical features through local Pauli fields and pairwise two-qubit Pauli interactions. This construction allows distinct classical variables to be embedded along different Pauli axes of the same qubit, increasing the information density of shallow circuits while remaining compatible with hardware constraints. We develop and implement these methods in pqfmlib, a publicly available Python library for constructing, executing, and benchmarking Hamiltonian-based PQFMs.We then benchmark the generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs against reference PQFMs on four biomedical classification datasets under a nested cross-validation protocol with paired statistical tests. Quantum features are generated using both IBM quantum processors with up to 156 qubits and statevector simulations. Our results show that the generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian family provides the most consistent pattern of statistically supported gains over matched classical baselines, although the performance of all methods depends on the dataset, encoding strategy, measured observables, and hardware conditions. These findings support generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs as a promising route toward near-term quantum utility.

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

Physics-IQ Verified

Authors:
Tim R\"adsch↗Yuki M Asano↗Hilde Kuehne↗Stefan Bauer↗Priyank Jaini↗Robert Geirhos↗Carsten T. L\"uth↗

Video generative models ( VGMs) have become a new frontier that can be used not just for video generation but for a multitude of downstream tasks, including world modeling. To advance these tasks, a good video model must understand the physical reality of the world. Evaluating this understanding is an emerging field and has led to the Physics-IQ benchmark, which quantifies this explicitly by comparing model-generated videos to real-world videos of physical experiments. In this work, we present a systematic audit of the Physics-IQ benchmark, expose shortcomings and propose three solutions that sharpen how we can measure physical understanding of VGMs. Specifically, we improve prompt and ground-truth quality to reduce the influence of confounding factors and further introduce a sample-level scoring system that weights each sample and metric equally. Our resulting benchmark, Physics-IQ Verified, refines 57.6\% of all samples and improves over 34.8\% of prompts. In a comparison study using six image-to-video generative models, we observe moderate but meaningful ranking changes (Kendall's $\tau = 0.46$). We hope Physics-IQ Verified advances the community by providing a more reliable signal toward physically accurate VGMs. The code for the benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-iq-benchmark

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PearlVLA: Progressive Embodied Action-Plan Refinement in Latent Space

Authors:
Bochen Yang↗Lianlei Shan↗

arXiv:2606.17924v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models face a trade-off between efficient action generation and explicit deliberation. Directly decoding actions from vision-language backbone representations enables low-latency control, whereas explicit reasoning through textual chains, pixel-level subgoals, or action search can improve planning but incurs substantial latency and computational cost. We propose PearlVLA, a VLA framework that moves deliberation into the latent space of a vision-language model (VLM). PearlVLA separates VLM meta-query representations into a fixed visual grounding branch and an iterative latent plan branch. At each refinement round, a plan-conditioned world query probes a lightweight frozen latent world model for an action-free future observation latent, which is fed back to guide plan refinement. A future-guided RefineNet then applies scheduled residual updates to progressively refine a coarse semantic draft into a fine-grained latent action plan. The refined plan after K rounds is then decoded in parallel into an action chunk for low-latency execution. We further introduce Causal Refinement-Grouped Process-Reward RL to optimize the latent refinement process with rewards from longer-horizon imagined futures induced by latent plan edits. Empirical evaluations on the LIBERO benchmark demonstrate that PearlVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing methods.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Cryptographic certificates of validity for trustworthy AI

Authors:
Murdoch J. Gabbay↗

arXiv:2606.23768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose cryptographic certificates of validity for agentic AI systems. The core idea is to formally specify a correctness or policy condition as a logical predicate, compile this predicate to a witness-checking problem over polynomial constraints, and use a succinct cryptographic proof system (and optionally zero-knowledge) to certify that the condition holds. This offers a middle ground between formal verification of source code, and cryptographic authentication. An agent's action can be accompanied by an independently checkable proof that it satisfies an agreed formal policy, without requiring the verifier to trust the agent or to re-execute computation. We outline the approach at a high level, give the core mathematical translation, relate the proposal to proof-carrying code, zkVMs, formal methods, and agent governance, and note the specification, auditing, and deployment questions that a full implementation must answer.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SANA: What Matters for QA Agents over Massive Data Lakes?

Authors:
Austin Senna Wijaya↗Jiaxiang Liu↗Haonan Wang↗Eugene Wu↗

Exploratory question answering (EQA) over data lakes requires an LLM agent to discover relevant sources, analyze retrieved data, and adapt its actions based on intermediate results. End-to-end accuracy alone cannot distinguish failures in search, planning, data analysis, or the agent's Action Policy: its decisions about what to do next and when to submit an answer. We present SANA (Search Agent Navigation Ablation framework), a diagnostic ablation framework that transforms EQA tasks into runtime profiles containing gold source sequence, sanitized subquestions, and execution records. SANA uses these profiles to construct idealized search, planning, and data-analysis tools, allowing each component to be ablated; the residual gap is diagnostic evidence for policy failures. To illustrate SANA as a reusable evaluation framework, we adapted two recent EQA benchmarks, LakeQA and KramaBench, and evaluated lightweight and mid-sized agents under fixed prompts, budgets, data lakes, and runtimes. Across both benchmarks, data analysis is a consistent bottleneck while planning is less so. Search is a major limitation in LakeQA's large data-lake setting, but less so for the smaller-scale KramaBench. SANA thus deconstructs end-to-end task accuracies into a diagnosis of where data-lake agents fail, and allows for systematic comparisons of progress in search, planning, data analysis, and agent design.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Towards a Dynamic and Fixed-budget Memory Bank for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding

Authors:
Baiyang Song↗Yuli Lin↗Qiong Wu↗Tao Chen↗Jun Peng↗Xiao Chen↗Yiyi Zhou↗Rongrong Ji↗

Currently, streaming video understanding is still a daunting task for existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Its difficulties not only lie in handling the ever-increasing video frames, but also in the unpredictability of future video content and input instructions. In this paper, we study this task from the perspective of constructing a dynamic but fixed-budget memory bank, and propose a novel and training-free approach termed CausalMem. CausalMem is dedicated to constructing a dynamic visual memory update mechanism, thereby maximizing the amount of information in streaming video within a limited memory space, much like the human brain. In practice, CausalMem estimates the redundancy of visual tokens and updates the memory bank via an online semantic basis, which models the principal semantics of the observed video stream. To validate CausalMem, we apply it to two representative MLLMs, namely LLaVA-OneVision and Qwen2.5-VL respectively, and conduct extensive experiments on both streaming and offline video understanding benchmarks. The experimental results not only show the great advantages than existing methods under both streaming and offline settings, e.g., $+3.2\%$ and $+3.0\%$ average accuracy gains respectively, but also witness the superior semantic preservation for streaming videos, e.g., using 12$k$ token budgets to memorize hour-long streaming videos, which achieves more than 20$\times$ visual token compression ratio and only occupies about 82 MB storage. Our code is given in \href{https://github.com/hktk07/CausalMem}{CausalMem}.

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

Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns

Authors:
Motoki Nakamura↗

arXiv:2604.04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

LLM-as-an-Investigator: Evidence-First Reasoning for Robust Interactive Problem Diagnosis

Authors:
Fabrizio Marozzo↗Pietro Li\`o↗

arXiv:2606.13220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interactive assistants for technical problem solving. However, when users provide incomplete descriptions or plausible but unverified explanations, LLMs may prematurely align with these assumptions and propose solutions before collecting sufficient evidence. We refer to this behavior as user-driven sycophancy: the tendency of an LLM to reinforce a user-provided hypothesis instead of testing alternative explanations. This paper introduces LLM-as-an-Investigator, an evidence-first agentic AI methodology for robust problem diagnosis. The approach is implemented through a Solution Investigator Agent, which estimates the ambiguity of an initial problem description, generates candidate hypotheses, asks targeted clarification questions, and updates hypothesis probabilities after each answer. Rather than producing an immediate response, the agent continues the investigation until the evidence makes one candidate explanation stronger than the alternatives. To evaluate the approach, we build a benchmark from solved technical forum threads in mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic domains. We use a three-agent evaluation pipeline in which a Problem-Solution Extractor Agent converts solved threads into structured cases, a Ground-Truth Evaluator Agent simulates the user while hiding the known solution, and the tested assistant attempts to recover the solution through dialogue. The experiments compare standard assistants, reasoning-oriented LLMs, and the proposed investigator-based model across LLM backbones. In addition to diagnostic accuracy, we analyze how standard assistants follow misleading user hypotheses in diagnostic cases. The results show that the proposed approach identifies the problem more accurately than direct prompting and reasoning-only baselines, while its evidence-first protocol helps reduce user-induced conversational bias.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

Authors:
Frederik vom Ende↗

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Understanding Latent Diffusability via Fisher Geometry

Authors:
Jing Gu↗Morteza Mardani↗Wonjun Lee↗Dongmian Zou↗Gilad Lerman↗

arXiv:2604.02751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion models often degrade in latent spaces, yet the formal causes remain poorly understood. We quantify latent-space diffusability via the rate of change of the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) along the diffusion trajectory. Our framework decomposes this MMSE rate into contributions from Fisher Information (FI) and Fisher Information Rate (FIR). We demonstrate that while global isometry ensures FI alignment, FIR is governed by the interplay between encoder and data geometries. Our analysis decouples diffusion degradation into four penalties: dimensional compression, tangential distortion, high-frequency encoder curvature, and intrinsic data curvature. We derive theoretical conditions for FIR preservation to ensure stable diffusability. Experiments across diverse autoencoding architectures demonstrate the implications of our theoretical bounds. We establish FI and FIR as a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding latent diffusability.

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16.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-23

Efficient generation of epitope-targeted antibodies with Germinal

Authors:
Luis S. Mille-Fragoso↗

Obtaining antibodies to specific protein targets is a widely important yet experimentally laborious process. Meanwhile, computational methods for antibody design have been limited by low success rates that require resource-intensive screening. Here we introduce Germinal, a broadly enabling generative pipeline that designs antibodies against specific epitopes with nanomolar binding affinities while requiring only low-n experimental testing. Our method co-optimizes antibody structure and sequence by integrating a structure predictor with an antibody-specific protein language model to perform de novo design of functional complementarity-determining regions onto a user-specified structural framework. When tested against four diverse protein targets, Germinal designed functional antibodies across all targets and binder formats, testing only 43–101 designs for each antigen. Validated designs also exhibited robust expression in mammalian cells and high sequence and structural novelty. We provide open-source code and full computational and experimental protocols to facilitate wide adoption. Germinal achieves epitope-targeted, de novo complementarity-determining region design with high experimental success rates.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

The table maker's quantum search

Authors:
Benjamin C. A. Morrison↗Stefanos Kourtis↗

arXiv:2601.13306v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that quantum search can be used to compute the hardness to round an elementary function, that is, to determine the minimum working precision required to compute the values of an elementary function correctly rounded to a target precision of $n$ digits for all possible precision-$n$ floating-point inputs in a given interval. For elementary functions $f$ related to the exponential function, quantum search takes time $\tilde O(2^{n/2} \log (1/\delta))$ to return, with probability $1-\delta$, the hardness to round $f$ over all $n$-bit floating-point inputs in a given binade. For periodic elementary functions in large binades, standalone quantum search yields an asymptotic speedup over the best known classical algorithms and heuristics. We then estimate the resources required for a fault-tolerant implementation of the proposed algorithm for the $\sin$ and $\cos$ functions in double precision. We find that, although the algorithm can in principle compete with the fastest known practical method for computing the hardness to round over all binades in the format, it requires qubit coherence times that are unrealistically long for present technology.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When Helpfulness Overrides Causal Caution: Context-Dependent Suppression and Recovery in LLMs

Authors:
Hiroshi Okumura↗

arXiv:2606.24370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into decision-support roles in business and policy contexts. While prior benchmark studies have primarily evaluated LLMs' causal reasoning capabilities, a more fundamental epistemic dimension has been overlooked: Causal Caution, defined as the propensity to refrain from causal judgment when empirical evidence is insufficient. This study examines the systematic suppression of Causal Caution that occurs when LLMs shift from academic to practical advisory contexts. Using an evaluation rubric inspired by Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (the PCH score), we conducted experiments on four high-performance LLMs – Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro – across 480 trials. Causal Caution maintenance rates were 91.7–100.0% in academic contexts but dropped to 6.7–18.3% in practical advisory contexts (Fisher's exact test, p < .001 across all models). Furthermore, when restricted to practical prompts requesting concrete recommendations or explanatory rationales, only 1 of 200 responses (0.5%) maintained Causal Caution. A brief self-correction prompt – "Please reconsider this judgment from the perspective of causal relationships" – restored the expression of Causal Caution to maintenance rates of 71.4–100.0% (McNemar's test, p < .001 across all models). These results suggest that helpfulness-oriented response patterns may suppress the expression of Causal Caution in practical advisory contexts, with important implications for organizational governance. The findings indicate that this suppression reflects context-dependent variation in expression rather than an underlying capability limitation, suggesting that multi-agent architectures that separate proposal generation from causal auditing may offer a promising governance design.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Multi-Stream Temporal Fusion for Financial Fraud Detection

Authors:
Mohammadamin Dashti Moghaddam↗Nick Sciarrilli↗

arXiv:2606.25007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial fraud detection in digital banking requires reasoning over multiple heterogeneous event streams – transactions, login sessions, risk signals – that individually appear benign but collectively reveal fraudulent patterns. We propose the Multi-Stream Fraud Transformer (MSFT), a unified architecture that encodes each event stream with independent Transformer encoders and fuses their representations through configurable mechanisms. We conduct a systematic ablation study comparing five fusion strategies: concatenation, gated fusion, time-aware positional encoding, cross-stream attention, and a full combination. On a large-scale dataset (10M users, 1.5% fraud rate) with 85M parameter models, we demonstrate that (1) sequence models significantly outperform gradient-boosted trees operating on aggregated features (0.74 vs. 0.99 AUROC), (2) per-stream encoding is essential – a single-stream Transformer baseline with matched parameter budget reaches only 0.82 AUROC, an 18-point gap that confirms the multi-stream inductive bias is necessary, (3) time-aware positional encoding achieves the highest discrimination (0.9961 AUROC), (4) gated fusion yields the best precision (0.989) suitable for production deployment, and (5) the risk event stream provides the strongest individual signal contribution. We further validate on proprietary production data from a digital banking platform, showing over 22% relative AUROC improvement over the XGBoost baseline.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Catastrophic Compositional Generation: Why Vanilla Diffusion Models Fail to Extrapolate

Authors:
Duncan Soiffer↗Chandler Squires↗Yuan Guan↗Jason Hartford↗Pradeep Ravikumar↗

arXiv:2606.23920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The task of compositional generation involves using a conditional generative model, trained only on a subset of the possible conditions, to produce samples from compositionally-defined target distributions such as a geometric combination of the source distributions. In this work, we argue that this task is often infeasible for vanilla conditional diffusion models: we conjecture that no inference-time technique can efficiently produce samples from the target distribution in certain well-motivated settings. This idea is supported by theory-guided generalization arguments and carefully-designed experiments on both synthetic and realistic data. In particular, while recent methods such as Feynman-Kac correction reduce inference-time approximation error, our results show that score estimation error has a more catastrophic effect on performance when the target distribution is out-of-distribution with respect to the sources, highlighting the need for a different approach to this task.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

Authors:
Piotr Kit{\l}owski↗Dominik Wi\k{a}cek↗Mateusz Modrzejewski↗

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

MSAVBench: Towards Comprehensive and Reliable Evaluation of Multi-Shot Audio-Video Generation

Authors:
Yujie Wei↗Yujin Han↗Zhekai Chen↗Yongming Li↗Kaixun Jiang↗Zhihang Liu↗Quanhao Li↗Zhiwu Qing↗Xiang Wang↗Zhen Xing↗Ruihang Chu↗Lingyi Hong↗…

Video generation is rapidly evolving from single-shot synthesis to complex multi-shot audio-video (MSAV) narratives to meet real-world demands. However, evaluating such frontier models remains a fundamental challenge. Existing benchmarks are limited in scope and data diversity, and rely on rigid evaluation pipelines, preventing systematic and reliable assessment of modern MSAV models. To bridge these gaps, we introduce MSAVBench, the first comprehensive benchmark and adaptive hybrid evaluation framework for multi-shot audio-video generation. Our benchmark spans four key dimensions, video, audio, shot, and reference, covering diverse task settings, varying shot counts of up to 15, and challenging non-realistic scenarios. Our evaluation framework improves robustness through an adaptive self-correction mechanism for shot segmentation, instance-wise rubrics for subjective metrics, and tool-grounded evidence extraction for complex judgments. Furthermore, MSAVBench achieves high alignment with human judgments, reaching a Spearman rank correlation of 91.5%. Our systematic evaluation of 19 state-of-the-art closed- and open-source models shows that current systems still struggle with director-level control and fine-grained audio-visual synchronization, while modular or agentic generation pipelines offer a promising path toward narrowing the gap between open- and closed-source models. The benchmark data and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/ali-vilab/MSAVBench.

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

Semantic Editing with Coupled Stochastic Differential Equations

Authors:
Jianxin Zhang↗Clayton Scott↗

Editing the content of an image with a pretrained text-to-image model remains challenging. Existing methods often distort fine details or introduce unintended artifacts. We propose using coupled stochastic differential equations (coupled SDEs) to guide the sampling process of any pre-trained generative model that can be sampled by solving an SDE, including diffusion and rectified flow models. By driving both the source image and the edited image with the same correlated noise, our approach steers new samples toward the desired semantics while preserving visual similarity to the source. The method works out-of-the-box, without retraining or auxiliary networks, and achieves high prompt fidelity along with near-pixel-level consistency. These results position coupled SDEs as a simple yet powerful tool for controlled generative AI. Project page: https://z-jianxin.github.io/syncSDE-release/. Code: https://github.com/Z-Jianxin/syncSDE-release.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Exceptional by Design: Long-Range Hopping as a Knob for Exceptional Point Control

Authors:
Carolina Martinez-Strasser↗Dario Bercioux↗Nico Leumer↗

arXiv:2606.24705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points are degeneracies unique to non-Hermitian systems, where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce, rendering the Hamiltonian defective. We investigate the exceptional-point structure and topological properties of a generalized non-Hermitian Rice-Mele model with balanced gain and loss, as well as next-nearest-neighbor hopping. The system hosts only second-order exceptional points under both periodic and open boundary conditions. Under periodic boundary conditions, the exceptional points in parameter space lie on lines and ellipses that are independent of the next-nearest-neighbor hopping, since the latter enters the bulk Hamiltonian only as an identity contribution. Under open boundary conditions, this independence is broken: the next-nearest-neighbor hopping not only shifts the energy of existing exceptional points but also generates new ones, with a specific condition signaling a topological gap closing observed only in the open-boundary spectrum. At special parameter points, multiple simultaneous second-order exceptional points yield degenerate configurations whose degeneracy grows with system size. Exceptional point locations are identified numerically via the condition number of the eigenvector matrix and confirmed by Jordan decomposition. The topological phase diagram, computed via a winding number framework for non-Hermitian systems without symmetry protection, reveals sectors with zero, one, and two edge states; the bulk-boundary correspondence is confirmed, and the non-Hermitian skin effect is absent.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

daVinci-kernel: Co-Evolving Skill Selection, Summarization, and Utilization via RL for GPU Kernel Optimization

Authors:
Dayuan Fu↗Mohan Jiang↗Tongyu Wang↗Dian Yang↗Jiarui Hu↗Liming Liu↗Jinlong Hou↗Pengfei Li↗

GPU kernel optimization represents a paradigm where functional correctness is assumed and execution efficiency is the objective. We present daVinci-kernel, a reinforcement learning framework that couples skill discovery with skill exploitation through a dynamically evolving skill library. daVinci-kernel jointly trains three agents sharing one LLM backbone: a Skill Selection Agent that retrieves relevant techniques via BM25 and LLM reranking, a Policy Agent that generates multi-turn CUDA/Triton kernels conditioned on selected skills, and a Skill Summary Agent that distills successful rollouts into reusable skills. Candidate skills are added only after execution-based verification confirms reproducible speedups. All three agents share a single LLM backbone, are initialized via a structured SFT cold start on diversity-filtered data, and are then jointly optimized end-to-end with multi-turn REINFORCE and per-agent advantage estimation. On KernelBench, daVinci-kernel-14B achieves 37.2%, 70.6%, and 32.2% on Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 under the Fast$_1$ threshold, outperforming the strongest prior RL-trained model, Dr.Kernel-14B.

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