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

Stronger Entanglement Dies Faster: Quantum Mpemba Effect in Dissipative Qubits

arXiv:2605.23197v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classical thermodynamics, the Mpemba effect refers to the counterintuitive observation that hot water can freeze faster than cold water, manifesting as an anomalous crossing of dynamical trajectories. While analogues of this phenomenon have been explored in open quantum systems and spin-chain entanglement asymmetry, its connection to the finite-time decoupling of quantum correlations remains elusive. In this work, we report a distinct Mpemba effect for quantum entanglement in a dissipative quantum system associated with entanglement sudden death (ESD). By analyzing two qubits interacting with local amplitude damping reservoirs, we demonstrate that a more strongly entangled initial state can experience a faster collapse into a separable state than a more weakly entangled state. This anomalous decay stems from the competition between initial coherence and excited-state population, where the latter acts as a catalyst for ESD. We provide exact analytical derivations for the trajectory crossover and ESD time, and map the phase diagram to precisely identify the parameter regime where the effect occurs. Our results offer a new strategy for controlling the lifetime of quantum resources in dissipative environments.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Classical Explanations in (and of) General Probabilistic Theories

arXiv:2603.05627v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a notion of the ``explanation" of one (generalized) probabilistic model by another as particular kind of span in the category $\Prob$ of probabilistic models and morphisms. We show that explanations compose under a standard pullback construction (notwithstanding that $\Prob$ does not support arbitrary pullbacks). We then show that every locally-finite probabilistic model has a canonical, sharp classical explanation. The construction is functorial, so every locally-finite probabilistic theory has a canonical, sharp classical (though of course, usually non-local) representation.

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

GAS-Leak-LLM: Genetic Algorithm-Based Suffix Optimization for Black-Box LLM Jailbreaking

arXiv:2606.15788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) constitute pivotal components within the AI-dominated information technology ecosystem. To mitigate risks associated with harmful or policy-violating outputs, commercial systems employ advanced alignment strategies and multi-layered content moderation mechanisms. Despite these safeguards, recent research has demonstrated that LLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, particularly through jailbreaking and prompt injection techniques. In this work, we propose GAS-Leak-LLM a novel jailbreaking attack based on a genetic algorithm that systematically evolves adversarial suffix to bypass safety constraints. Operating in a strict black-box setting, our method requires no access to model parameters or internals, thereby reflecting realistic threat scenarios in deployed systems. Through the iterative application of selection, mutation, and crossover heuristics, the framework systematically explores the discrete prompt space to identify high-fitness adversarial suffixes. Empirical findings reveal critical shortcomings in existing safety enforcement mechanisms and confirm the effectiveness and practical viability of the proposed attack.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails

arXiv:2606.14517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents. However, we reveal that the very reasoning and task-following capabilities enabling this protection introduce a novel vulnerability: attackers can inject crafted data to trap the guardrail in extended reasoning loops, effectuating a systematic denial-of-service (DoS) attack. To systematically expose this threat, we design a beam-search optimization framework that crafts natural-language payloads to maximize guardrail reasoning length, utilizing an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank. Based on the observation of guardrail's schema-following nature, we also provide another attack framework driven by mechanism-aware structural mutations with less computational load. The attack efficacy is systematically evaluated in two parts. First, in standalone evaluations, the attack generalizes across diverse guardrail architectures, safety templates, and agent benchmarks. Payloads optimized on a single open-source surrogate successfully transfer to eight leading model backbones (e.g., Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen), achieving a 13–63$\times$ token amplification. Second, in end-to-end real-world agent deployments (web, desktop, code, and multi-agent systems), the attack reveals up to a 148$\times$ latency amplification. We show that a single poisoned document can saturate shared guardrail infrastructures, effectively starving co-located agents and paralyzing the entire system. By uncovering this availability flaw, our work underscores the urgent need to develop cost-bounded, reasoning-robust guardrails.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Connecting entanglement growth with local integrals of motion in the disordered Fermi-Hubbard model

arXiv:2606.15481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generically a quantum system initialized in an unentangled state will, under unitary dynamics, rapidly become entangled, a process closely related to information transport and to thermalization. Disorder can suppress the growth of entanglement and result in memory of initial conditions. In non-interacting systems this arises from localization of single-particle states, the occupancy of which is fixed by the initial condition. In interacting systems similar localized conserved quantities persist, but with the added feature that they are coupled, resulting in entanglement growth which is distinct from both non-interacting localized systems and from generic ergodic systems. The Fermi-Hubbard model has two degrees of freedom per site – charge and spin – and disorder may be present in both of these. We study the growth of entanglement in two scenarios – disorder in charge equal and unequal to that in spin, and determine the distinct contributions of charge and spin degrees of freedom by expanding the Hamiltonian in terms of a set of optimally localized conserved quantities with separate charge and spin character. We find that coupling between charge and spin is significantly weaker than charge-charge and spin-spin coupling. While this decoupling is present in all our results, it is only apparent when the strength of the disorder in the two sectors is different such that there is a separation between the characteristic timescales of the contributions to entanglement made by charge and by spin.

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

Agentic Discovery of Non-Canonical Antimicrobial Peptides with AMPGAN v3

arXiv:2606.17127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance causes to over a million deaths annually. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a promising solution, but generative AMP models are not yet ready to design peptides with non-natural amino acids and/or chemical modifications, which are essential for real-world peptide drugs. We present AMPGAN v3, a multi-objective conditional GAN that expands the generative vocabulary to D-amino acids and N/C-terminus modifications such as amidation. By separating adversarial and activity-aware supervision across two specialized discriminators, AMPGAN v3 substantially improves training stability and outperforms prior generative AMP models on external classifiers. We validated five candidates spanning three structural classes in vitro; two showed activity against Gram-positive strains, with the best candidate reaching MIC 8 {\mu}g/mL against B. subtilis. To support downstream curation, we further present PepCraft, a multi-agent framework for end-to-end AMP discovery in which a Planning Agent orchestrates specialized executors for generation, filtering, and verification. Its prioritization recommendations align with our in vitro outcomes. Together, these contributions let us examine, on a small but real scale, how generative and agentic AI compose in therapeutic peptide discovery. Code: https://github.com/marszzibros/AMPGANv3

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Sub-Poissonian Statistics and Quantum Non-Gaussianity from High-Harmonic Generation

arXiv:2602.10882v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum technologies are powered by platforms to generate complex non-classical states of matter or light to realize applications. We investigate the non-classical properties of high-harmonic generation in semiconductors, an emerging photonic platform. Measuring the click statistics of three double-digit orders, we evaluate witness operators to certify the non-classicality of the generated states. We show that higher-order harmonics driven by a coherent laser are squeezed and entangled. The properties of the emission are well retrieved with an entangled Gaussian state model, obtained by numerical state optimization to multiple observables. Additionally, we perform inter-order heralded measurements to engineer the quantum state of the emission. The heralded states have distinct properties, showing sub-Poissonian photon statistics. Further, we witness the generation of a quantum non-Gaussian state, a resource highly relevant for quantum information. With this, we establish high-harmonic generation as a platform for generating quantum optical resources.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Distributionally Robust Set Representation Learning Under Inference-Time Element Corruption

arXiv:2605.30089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard Set Representation Learning methods typically excel on curated data but often overlook the challenge of inference-time element corruption. This refers to scenarios where deployed models encounter element-level degradations, such as outliers or missing components, that may distort set representation and degrade performance. We propose SW-DRSO, a distributionally robust optimization framework tailored for sets. Rather than minimizing loss solely on observed training data, SW-DRSO optimizes a tractable surrogate of the worst-case expected loss over a family of plausible inference-time variations. We introduce a barycentric adversary that approximates the intractable search over corrupted sets by a differentiable training-time optimization over simplex weights. Extensive experiments across four tasks demonstrate that SW-DRSO effectively enhances robustness against corruption while maintaining high overall performance.

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

Visuals Lie, Consistency Speaks: Disentangling Spatial Attention from Reliability in Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical. A common intuition, which we call the Attention-Confidence Assumption, holds that reliability follows from "structural" visual perception: tight attention on relevant regions should signal a trustworthy answer, while scattered attention signals confusion. We challenge this through the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP), a systematic cross-family study of reliability signals in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce structural-attention metrics, cluster counts (C_k) and spatial entropy (H_s), to quantify the visual encoder's gaze, and track its evolution (Delta H_s) across layers. This reveals a "Symbolic Detachment": models often "Early Lock" visual features only to diffuse attention later, severing early perception from final generation. Contrary to the grounding hypothesis, we find a "Cluster Failure": spatial attention has near-zero correlation (R approx 0.001) with accuracy. Instead, reliability is a phenomenon of generation dynamics and internal-state distributions. Self-Consistency, the agreement rate across sampled reasoning paths, is the dominant predictor of truth (R = 0.429). Scaling causal interventions exposes a sharp architectural divergence: LLaVA locks its prediction in a fragile late-stage bottleneck, whereas PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute reliability globally, staying resilient even when ~50% or more of their most predictive layer is destroyed. For current VLMs, reliability signals are detached from visual grounding maps and are best inferred from generation-time dynamics and hidden-state probes.

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

Learning When to Sample: Confidence-Aware Selective Sampling for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong reasoning performance through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet they often generate unnecessarily long reasoning paths that incur high inference cost. Self-consistency-based approaches push accuracy higher still, but they require sampling and aggregating multiple reasoning trajectories, leading to substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce a confidence-aware selective sampling framework that, at inference time, analyzes a single reasoning trajectory to adaptively determine whether to rely on that trajectory alone or trigger multi-path sampling. The framework uses trajectory-level numeric features and sentence-level linguistic features extracted from reasoning states to guide selective multi-path reasoning. We train it on MedQA and evaluate it in-domain on MedQA and under calibration-only transfer on MathQA, MedMCQA, and MMLU, without further fine-tuning. Experimental results show that the proposed framework maintains comparable performance to full and efficient multi-path reasoning baselines, with accuracy changes of $-0.41 \pm 0.58$ and $-0.31 \pm 0.58$ percentage points, respectively, while reducing token usage by $71.7 \pm 5.0%$ and $36.6 \pm 9.1%$. These findings demonstrate that reasoning trajectories contain rich signals for uncertainty estimation, enabling a simple, transferable mechanism to balance accuracy and efficiency in LLM reasoning.

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

Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding for Remote Sensing Images and Videos

Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize a referred target in a remote sensing image or video according to a natural language expression. Existing RSVG methods usually rely on task-specific manual annotations, which are costly to collect and inevitably limited in covering the diversity of real-world geospatial scenarios. As a result, they often struggle to generalize to open-vocabulary queries involving novel objects, fine-grained attributes, complex spatial relationships, and functional semantics. In this paper, we propose RSVG-ZeroOV, a training-free framework that leverages frozen generic foundation models for zero-shot open-vocabulary RSVG. RSVG-ZeroOV follows an Overview-Focus-Evolve paradigm, which exploits the distinct yet complementary attention patterns of vision-language models (VLMs) and diffusion models (DMs) to progressively generate precise grounding results. Specifically, (i) Overview utilizes a VLM to extract cross-attention maps that capture semantic correlations between the referring expression and visual regions; (ii) Focus leverages the fine-grained modeling priors of a DM to compensate for object structure and shape information often overlooked by VLM attention; and (iii) Evolve introduces a simple yet effective attention evolution module to suppress irrelevant activations, yielding purified object masks. To handle video inputs, we further present Video RSVG-ZeroOV, which extends image-level grounding to spatio-temporal grounding through a query-relevant key-frame selector and a temporal propagator, enabling efficient and temporally coherent video grounding without video annotations or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on six image and video grounding benchmarks show that RSVG-ZeroOV consistently outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and achieves competitive or superior performance compared with weakly- and fully-supervised methods.

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

Simple analytical flux-tuned iSWAP pulses for leakage suppression

arXiv:2606.13052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast, high-fidelity two-qubit gates are a key requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Tunable coupler architectures provide a flexible approach for implementing entangling gates through flux control with large on-off ratios, but fast flux modulation can induce diabatic transitions and population leakage to non-computational states, limiting gate performance. Here we present an analytical flux control method enabling derivative removal by adiabatic gate ($\Phi$-DRAG) for suppressing leakage in flux tunable two-qubit gates. We show that $\Phi$-DRAG differs fundamentally from conventional microwave implementations and derive modified flux modulation protocols that suppress leakage below $10^{-4}$ for fast entangling gates. The method remains effective across a range of asymmetry between qubit anharmonicities and different circuit parameters, enabling high-fidelity two-qubit gates within the fifteen nanosecond range.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

When Cars Have Stereotypes: Auditing Demographic Bias in Objects from Text-to-Image Models

While prior research on text-to-image generation has predominantly focused on biases in human depictions, demographic bias in generated objects remains relatively underexplored. We introduce SODA (Stereotyped Object Diagnostic Audit), a novel framework for systematically measuring these biases through automated attribute discovery and three standardized metrics: Base vs. Demographic Divergence (BDS), Cross-Demographic Disparity (CDS), and Visual Attribute Concentration (VAC). Applying SODA to 8,000 images across five state-of-the-art models and eight object categories (e.g., cars), we find that "neutral" prompts produce outputs most visually similar to middle-aged and White people, suggesting these groups are implicitly over-represented in model defaults. Furthermore, demographic cues trigger highly skewed stereotypical outputs: 26.6% of object-model-demographic combinations produce results where all 20 generated images share the exact same attribute value (e.g., rose gold laptops for women). Finally, prompt-level debiasing reduces inter-group disparity but paradoxically collapses within-group diversity, replacing one stereotype with another. SODA offers a practical pipeline for making these implicit associations measurable, serving as a step toward more responsible AI development.

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

TS-Fault: Benchmarking Time Series Forecasters Against Structural Faults

arXiv:2606.18539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting (TSF) underpins consequential decisions in energy, transportation, finance, and healthcare, yet TSF models are almost universally ranked by a single number (e.g., average error) on clean held-out data, under the implicit assumption that it predicts deployed reliability. However, real faults are not i.i.d noise but structured events with temporal shape, broken cross-variable dependencies, regime change coupled with missingness, and causal propagation across a sensing pipeline. Treating TSF robustness as a data-quality problem, we present TS-Fault, a benchmark that evaluates forecasting models under explicit, parameterized fault scenarios with controllable semantic difficulty. TS-Fault organizes recurring failures into four modes along two orthogonal axes (observation- vs mechanism-level; univariate vs multivariate) and injects each fault into the most prediction-critical window via a unified importance score. This design enables robustness to be tested against the structures models actually rely on, rather than reduced to generic noise sensitivity. We evaluate 21 models across 6 datasets, 4 modes, and 5 difficulty levels under a paired clean/corrupt protocol. The results reveal three findings that contradict common leaderboard intuition: (i) clean-data accuracy anti-correlates with robustness; (ii) clean rankings are preserved under observation-level faults but reshuffled under mechanism-level faults; and (iii) all catastrophic failures occur under mechanism-level faults, with foundation models achieving the highest clean-data accuracy yet exhibiting the greatest fragility. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ray-zyy/TS-Fault.

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

SCAN: A Decision-Making Framework for Effective Task Allocation with Generative AI

arXiv:2606.15601v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SCAN – a human-centric decision-making framework to facilitate learners for effective task allocation with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) based on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and Metacognition. In SCAN, we systematize and formalize AI-human interaction by introducing a task-identification approach with four "sub-zones": Substitute, Complement, Aid, and Non-negotiable. After describing the four sub-zones, we demonstrate how SCAN framework can be applied for knowledge workers in the workplace and students in education to metacognitively "scan" their use of Generative AI. We then discuss how such framework can be related to cognitive load theory, cognitive offloading, sycophancy, three decision-making modes in human-AI interactions (automation, augmentation, and collaboration), future of work such as upskilling and deskilling, and how it accounts for both human-human and human-AI learning. We propose that SCAN offers a great starting point before discussing whether GenAI complements or replaces our abilities when completing a task, with a general objective of sustaining lifelong learning, and a specific goal of reaching hybrid intelligence.

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

Scaling Human and G2P Supervision for Robust Phonetic Transcription

Expert phonetic annotation is costly, especially for non-standard dialects and atypical speech. A common alternative is using Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) models to auto-generate phonetic labels from text transcripts at scale. We study how automatic phonetic transcription performance scales with human and G2P supervision in English. Using a curated 80-hour benchmark spanning native, non-native and post-stroke speech, we identify a supervision quality threshold: G2P supervision helps only when fewer than 20-30 hours of human annotation are available. Beyond this threshold, it provides no significant benefit and can reduce cross-dialect robustness. What is effective after this threshold is ASR pretraining which we use to achieve a 2.3x reduction in weighted phone feature error rate over prior systems, with strong gains on non-native and aphasic speech. These results suggest that quantity-driven G2P scaling may yield diminishing returns for robust generalization.

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

CSPO: Constraint-Sensitive Policy Optimization for Safe Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to maximize expected return while satisfying safety constraints, typically modeled as Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). While primal-dual methods scale well to deep RL, they often suffer from delayed constraint correction, leading to oscillatory behavior and prolonged safety violations. In this paper, we propose Constraint-Sensitive Policy Optimization (CSPO), a first-order primal-dual method that incorporates local constraint sensitivity into policy updates. CSPO augments the primal objective with a constraint-sensitive correction derived from the shortest signed distance to the safety boundary, enabling smarter recovery steps back to safety, compensating for delayed Lagrange multiplier updates, reducing oscillations near the boundary, and preserving the KKT solutions of the original constrained problem. Experiments on navigation and locomotion benchmarks demonstrate that CSPO achieves faster safety recovery and high reward preservation, resulting in higher constrained returns compared to state-of-the-art primal-dual and penalty-based methods

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

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

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.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Multimodal Evaluator Preference Collapse: Cross-Modal Contagion in Self-Evolving Agents

作者:

When AI agents use language models to evaluate their own outputs in a feedback loop, systematic biases emerge. We show that Evaluator Preference Collapse (EPC) is dramatically amplified in multimodal settings. Using GPT-4o to evaluate DeepSeek-chat across text and visual tasks, we find that a single strategy (step_by_step) absorbs 48.4% of all weight – 3.2x the collapse observed in text-only self-evaluation – while three visual-domain strategies receive only 9.1% combined weight. We then demonstrate a novel phenomenon we term cross-modal contagion: evaluator preferences acquired on one modality transfer to and corrupt strategy selection on another. Through a four-phase isolation training paradigm, we measure contagion coefficients and document strategy inversion – the optimal strategy for a modality reverses after cross-modal exposure. A Phase 3 statistical validation across four evaluator configurations (N=53 total independent repetitions, 15,592 API calls) reveals a clear hierarchy: cross-model evaluation (GPT-4o, N=8) produces strong but symmetric bidirectional contagion (mean gamma_{T->V}=1.176, gamma_{V->T}=1.089, Delta=-0.088, p=0.575, Cohen's d=0.29); high round counts (DashScope, 50 rounds) cause collapse to single-strategy dominance (70% zero contagion); and self-evaluation provides near-complete immunity – 97% of runs (N=30, DeepSeek-chat) yield exactly zero contagion (mean gamma=0.033, 95% CI [-0.031, 0.010], p=0.642, d=0.07). No evaluator condition shows statistically significant directional asymmetry. We introduce the contagion matrix indexed by evaluator identity, release the MM-EPC experimental framework, and identify cross-model evaluator architecture as the primary risk factor for preference contagion.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Instruct-Particulate: Scaling Feed-Forward 3D Object Articulation with Kinematic Control

Reconstructing articulated 3D objects is important for animation, gaming, and robotic simulations. Recent neural networks can estimate the articulated structure of 3D objects, but their generalization remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data for this task. To address this gap, we introduce Instruct-Particulate, a model that takes a 3D mesh together with a target kinematic specification, including part descriptions, connectivity, joint types, and optional point prompts, and predicts the corresponding kinematic part segmentation and joint motion parameters. The kinematic specification disambiguates the task and allows the model to target annotations of different granularity, thereby making it possible to use more abundant heterogeneous training data. At test time, the kinematic specification can be obtained automatically from large-scale vision-language models, so the model can be applied to any input mesh. To train our model at scale, we construct a heterogeneous dataset of more than 150,000 articulated 3D objects, extending existing publicly available collections with data obtained by partially labelling other 3D models (monolithic or already decomposed into parts) with kinematic labels by means of vision-language models. Experiments show that our model generalizes better across categories and to AI-generated meshes, enabling articulated asset reconstruction from real-world images via image-to-3D models.

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

Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning via Label Refinement and Threshold Adjustment

arXiv:2407.05370v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms often struggle to perform well when trained on imbalanced data. In such scenarios, the generated pseudo-labels tend to exhibit a bias toward the majority class, and models relying on these pseudo-labels can further amplify this bias. Existing imbalanced SSL algorithms explore pseudo-labeling strategies based on either pseudo-label refinement (PLR) or threshold adjustment (THA), aiming to mitigate the bias through heuristic-driven designs. However, through a careful statistical analysis, we find that existing strategies are suboptimal: most PLR algorithms are either overly empirical or rely on the unrealistic assumption that models remain well-calibrated throughout training, while most THA algorithms depend on flawed metrics for pseudo-label selection. To address these shortcomings, we first derive the theoretically optimal form of pseudo-labels under class imbalance. This foundation leads to our key contribution: SEmi-supervised learning with pseudo-label optimization based on VALidation data (SEVAL), a unified framework that learns both PLR and THA parameters from a class-balanced subset of training data. By jointly optimizing these components, SEVAL adapts to specific task requirements while ensuring per-class pseudo-label reliability. Our experiments demonstrate that SEVAL outperforms state-of-the-art SSL methods, producing more accurate and effective pseudo-labels across various imbalanced SSL scenarios while remaining compatible with diverse SSL algorithms. The code is publicly available (https://github.com/ZerojumpLine/SEVAL).

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

Unstable Features, Reproducible Subspaces: Understanding Seed Dependence in Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret neural network representations, but their utility depends on whether the learned features are reproducible across training runs. We study this question through feature stability: for each SAE feature, we estimate the probability that a similar feature reappears in an independently trained SAE. This yields a scalable per-feature signal that separates stable from unstable features. In a large-scale study across seeds, models, layers, dictionary sizes, and SAE variants, we find a pronounced functional asymmetry: stable features carry most of the reconstruction- and prediction-relevant signal, while unstable features have weak marginal impact and are dominated by low-frequency surface-form triggers in both activation statistics and automatic explanations. Geometrically, unstable features are individually non-reproducible but concentrate in reproducible lower-rank subspaces, suggesting that seed dependence often reflects basis ambiguity within a shared region of activation space rather than pure noise. A controlled synthetic model makes this mechanism explicit, showing that low-rank ground-truth features can be recovered at the subspace level while remaining non-identifiable as individual SAE latents across seeds. Finally, by pooling unique cross-seed features, we construct more stable SAEs while preserving explained variance in this setting. Together, these results show that unstable features are not merely failed or noisy latents: they have weak individual functional impact, but reflect reproducible low-dimensional structure that standard SAEs resolve differently across seeds.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers

arXiv:2412.03716v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) computing and data centers consume large amounts of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage effectiveness for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our estimates suggest that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume as much as {0.66 liters} of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about {59 liters}. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about {0.13 liters} and {2.9 liters} of water, respectively. All the numbers for generative model inference tasks are based on public information available in 2024, when we initially prepared the analysis. Since then, AI inference systems have improved substantially. For example, recent disclosures suggest that energy efficiency improved by more than 30x between May 2024 and May 2025. Accordingly, our 2024 estimates should be interpreted as historical reference values rather than as representative of current performance. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 9 of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Same-Origin Policy for Agentic Browsers

Agentic browsers integrate autonomous AI agents into web browsers, enabling users to accomplish web tasks through natural-language instructions. The same-origin policy (SOP) is a fundamental browser security mechanism that prevents unauthorized automated cross-origin data flows induced by scripts. However, whether SOP remains effective in agentic browsers is an open question that has not been systematically studied. In this work, we bridge this gap. We first observe that an agentic browser can itself serve as an automated channel for cross-origin data flows, potentially leading to SOP violations. To investigate this phenomenon, we construct SOPBench, a benchmark for evaluating SOP violations in agentic browsers. Our evaluation shows that existing agentic browsers frequently violate SOP, both in benign settings and under attacks. To address this problem, we propose SOPGuard, an SOP enforcement mechanism tailored to agentic browsers. We implement SOPGuard in BrowserOS, an open-source agentic browser. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SOPGuard effectively enforces SOP while preserving utility and incurring only a small runtime overhead. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/wxl-lxw/BrowserOS-SOPGuard.

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

Koshur Diacritizer: A Byte-Level Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Kashmiri Diacritic Restoration

Kashmiri, an Indo-Aryan language written in a modified Perso-Arabic script, frequently omits diacritic marks in digital text, creating ambiguity and challenging downstream NLP applications. We present Koshur Diacritizer, a ByT5-small byte-level sequence-to-sequence model for restoring diacritics in Kashmiri text. To support this task, we release a publicly available dataset of 23.7k aligned undiacritized diacritized Kashmiri sentence pairs. The proposed framework combines script-aware normalization, alignment validation, and skeleton-preserving inference to ensure reliable restoration while maintaining the original base-letter sequence. Experimental results on a held-out test set achieve a DERm of 0.2012 and a WER of 0.2159. Additionally, evaluation by a native Kashmiri linguistic expert yields a mean accuracy of 77.5%. The dataset, model, and source code are publicly released to provide a reproducible baseline for Kashmiri diacritic restoration and future low-resource language research.