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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

How the zebrafish brain weaves recent experiences into future decisions

作者: 未知作者

Animals often use recent experience to guide future choices. Whole-brain imaging in larval zebrafish (Danio rerio) reveals a dedicated neural circuit that governs history-biased decisions: the thalamus maintains the most recent event as a stable pattern of neuronal activity, and the brainstem integrates recent experiences into a continuous signal that biases future action. Whole-brain calcium imaging in the zebrafish reveals how information about events in the recent past drives future behaviour.

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

LiFT: Local Search via Linear Programming for Overfitting-Controlled Transformers

This paper proposes a Linear Programming (LP)-based local search framework for fine-tuning pretrained transformer models with explicit control against overfitting. The approach formulates transformer fine-tuning as a bilevel optimization-based regularization problem, in which model parameters and regularization hyperparameters are jointly updated. Information collected during initial warm-up iterations, including validation gradients and training Hessian information, is used to construct a local descent direction by solving an LP that minimizes a scaled directional derivative while preserving training optimality. This validation-aware descent direction enables focused local updates of both parameters and regularization hyperparameters, reducing overfitting without requiring repeated full retraining cycles. The resulting method, termed Linear Programming-based Fine-Tuning (LiFT) for transformers, differs from conventional fine-tuning by systematically identifying task-specific updates rather than relying on heuristic or grid-based hyperparameter selection. Experiments on GPT-2 Small fine-tuned on WikiText-2 demonstrate that LiFT enables effective adaptation through selective tuning of transformer blocks and regularization parameters, yielding consistent improvements in test perplexity across multiple layer configurations and regularization settings, with particularly pronounced gains in overfitting-prone scenarios. Beyond empirical performance, LiFT establishes a principled connection between transformer fine-tuning, bilevel optimization, local search, and regularization theory.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Free energy of non-convex multi-species spin glasses with centered Ising spins

arXiv:2606.16636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We identify the limit free energy of all multi-species spin glasses with centered $\pm 1$ spins. The result was previously known only under a convexity assumption on the covariance function of the Hamiltonian. We also obtain a one-species reduction of the formula for balanced multi-species models.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum Entanglement Halves the Oblivious Update Bandwidth

作者:

arXiv:2605.19248v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider $(n,k)$ MDS-coded distributed storage over $\mathbb{F}_q$ with per-node storage $\alpha$ symbols. For the oblivious update problem, where a single message symbol changes and neither helpers nor the stale node know which, the classical lower bound is $\alpha k \log_2 q$ bits. We prove that when the $k$ contacted helpers share prior quantum entanglement, the update bandwidth is $\lceil \alpha/2 \rceil \cdot k \log_2 q$ bits-equivalent, a factor approaching 2 reduction. For $\alpha = 2$, a $[[k, k-2]]_q$ CSS code achieves bandwidth $k \log_2 q$ with one qudit per helper. For general $\alpha$, a $[[\lceil \alpha/2 \rceil k, \lceil \alpha/2 \rceil k - \alpha]]_q$ CSS code achieves the bound with $\lceil \alpha/2 \rceil$ qudits per helper. The matching converse uses the superdense coding bound: the stale node holds all transmitted qudits and hence the entangled partners, so each helper's channel supports at most $D^2$ distinguishable signals for dimension $D$. The result holds for all $(n,k)$ pairs with sufficiently large prime $q$.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Generative models for decision-making under distributional shift

arXiv:2604.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced. This tutorial presents modern generative models, particularly flow- and score-based methods, as mathematical tools for constructing decision-relevant distributions. From an operations research perspective, their primary value lies not in unconstrained sample synthesis but in representing and transforming distributions through transport maps, velocity fields, score fields, and guided stochastic dynamics. We present a unified framework based on pushforward maps, continuity, Fokker-Planck equations, Wasserstein geometry, and optimization in probability space. Within this framework, generative models can be used to learn nominal uncertainty, construct stressed or least-favorable distributions for robustness, and produce conditional or posterior distributions under side information and partial observation. We also highlight representative theoretical guarantees, including forward-reverse convergence for iterative flow models, first-order minimax analysis in transport-map space, and error-transfer bounds for posterior sampling with generative priors. The tutorial provides a principled introduction to using generative models for scenario generation, robust decision-making, uncertainty quantification, and related problems under distributional shift.

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

Multi-Variable Stellar Parameter Estimation Using Residual Multitask Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an end-to-end pipeline for estimating stellar parameters from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 spectra using a fully connected multitask neural network with residual blocks, whose hyperparameters are tuned via Bayesian optimization. The preprocessing pipeline includes per-spectrum standardization, RobustScaler normalization of the target variables – effective temperature $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, metallicity $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and surface gravity $\log g$ – and data augmentation via Gaussian noise injection. On a held-out test set, the model achieved Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) of $59.76~\mathrm{K}$ for $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, $0.103~\mathrm{dex}$ for $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and $0.130~\mathrm{dex}$ for $\log g$. Normalized against the full-scale range of each parameter, these results represent range-normalized errors between $1\%$ and $3\%$, achieved with a highly efficient model complexity of approximately 540,000 trainable parameters. These results demonstrate that a compact residual multitask architecture, combined with principled signal preprocessing, provides a parameter-efficient solution for nonlinear parameter estimation in large-scale spectral datasets. In particular, the proposed model achieves competitive performance with substantially lower complexity than deeper neural network baselines.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

BBR-Net: Boundary-Balanced Replay for Continual Medical Image Segmentation

Continual learning for medical image segmentation remains challenging under domain shift because replay-based methods often preserve appearance information without explicitly modeling anatomical structure. This study investigates whether structural consistency governs knowledge retention in continual cardiac ultrasound segmentation. We propose the Boundary-Balanced Replay Network (BBR-Net), which selects replay samples using boundary-aware priority and class balance to preserve anatomically informative regions. The method is evaluated on CAMUS and CardiacNet under forward (CAMUS to CardiacNet) and reverse (CardiacNet to CAMUS) task orders. In the forward setting, BBR-Net retains source-task performance close to an offline joint-training reference, while markedly reducing catastrophic forgetting and preserving competitive target-task adaptation. Ablation results show that boundary-aware prioritization contributes to retention and improves the balance between source-task preservation and target-task adaptation when combined with class-aware sampling. In contrast, the reverse setting reveals that structure-aware replay fails when initial representations are learned from noisy and structurally inconsistent data. To isolate this effect, we conduct a controlled structural perturbation analysis by progressively corrupting source-task boundaries while keeping the dataset, architecture, and training protocol fixed. Forgetting increases consistently as structural reliability decreases, suggesting that replay effectiveness is strongly influenced by the quality of stored structural information, rather than by memory capacity alone. These findings indicate that preserving anatomical structure under domain shift is a central factor in continual medical image segmentation, and that replay mechanisms should account for structural reliability to support robust knowledge retention.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Escaping the Self-Confirmation Trap: An Execute-Distill-Verify Paradigm for Agentic Experience Learning

Experience-driven self-evolution is critical for large language model (LLM) agents to improve through open-world interaction. However, existing experience learning methods mostly rely on single-agent loops, where the same agent executes tasks, summarizes outcomes, and determines memory content. This setup makes agents vulnerable to the Self-Confirmation Trap: wrong-but-self-consistent trajectories are misidentified as successful experience, leading to cumulative errors during retrieval and reuse. To address this issue, we propose EDV, an Execute-Distill-Verify framework for reliable experience learning. In the Execute stage, multiple heterogeneous agents explore the same task space in parallel to generate diverse candidate trajectories. In the Distill stage, a dedicated third-party agent comparatively analyzes these trajectories to produce candidate experiences, reducing executor-centric summarization bias. In the Verify stage, the execution group validates candidates via a consensus mechanism, and only approved experiences are written into shared or private memory. By decoupling the three stages, EDV transforms experience learning from isolated self-reflection into collaborative construction, filtering erroneous and noisy content before memory insertion. We evaluate EDV on three challenging long-horizon benchmarks: tau2-bench, Mind2Web and MMTB. Results show EDV consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating that reliable experience construction is essential for robust agent self-evolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/shidingz/EDV.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

From Spectral Singularities to Multipartite Entanglement Scaling at Higher-Order Exceptional Points

arXiv:2606.24205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points (EPs) are non-Hermitian spectral singularities exhibiting fractional-power responses, yet their implications for multipartite entanglement of interacting quantum many-body systems remain largely unexplored. Here we develop a general framework that links higher-order non-Hermitian degeneracies to the scaling behavior of genuine multipartite entanglement in interacting identical-qubit systems. Permutation symmetry of the identical qubits decomposes the exponentially large Hilbert space into independent irreducible-representation sectors, thereby constraining the maximal EP order of $N$ qubits to $N+1$ rather than $2^N$. Near an $n$th-order EP, genuine multipartite entanglement inherits the spectral response and generically exhibits a fractional-power scaling under weak perturbations. Explicit examples show that conventional two-body interactions support third- and fourth-order EPs with the corresponding entanglement responses, whereas higher-order EPs with genuine multipartite-entangled coalesced states require additional independent interaction channels, such as three-body interactions. Our results establish a fundamental connection among non-Hermitian degeneracies, multipartite entanglement, and symmetry, extending higher-order EP physics from spectral singularities to genuine many-body quantum correlations.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Fast and Effective Method for Euclidean Anticlustering: The Assignment-Based-Anticlustering Algorithm

arXiv:2601.06351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anticlustering is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that consists of partitioning a set of objects into equal-sized groups called anticlusters such that the objects in the same anticluster are as dissimilar as possible and thereby representative of the entire set of objects. Here we study the case where the dissimilarity metric is the squared Euclidean distance between the respective feature vectors. Applications of Euclidean anticlustering include social studies, cross-validation, creating mini-batches for stochastic gradient descent, and finding balanced K-cut partitions. In particular, machine-learning applications such as mini-batch generation involve million-scale datasets and very large values of K, making scalable anticlustering algorithms essential. We propose a new algorithm, the Assignment-Based Anticlustering (ABA) algorithm, that scales to instances with millions of objects and hundreds of thousands of anticlusters within seconds to minutes, which is far beyond what existing anticlustering methods can manage. We demonstrate here, via an extensive computational study, that our algorithm outperforms existing anticlustering methods in both solution quality and running time. This is so also for anticlustering with categories. For the related problem of balanced K-cut partitioning, our algorithm is superior to the well-known METIS method. The code of our algorithm is available on GitHub.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A distant brown dwarf coplanar to a warm Jupiter and a hot super-Earth

In transiting planetary systems, in which planetary sizes are accurately determined from transit observations, the presence of transit-timing variations1 (TTVs), especially when combined with radial velocity (RV) data, provides powerful constraints on masses and orbital eccentricities. Together, these measurements offer crucial insights into system architecture, formation mechanisms and dynamical evolution. We present long-term RV and transit/TTV monitoring of the relatively young star (age approximately 1 Gyr) TOI-201, revealing an exceptional multi-planet system composed of a hot super-Earth (SE) size planet transiting every 5.8 days, a warm Jupiter (WJ) on a 53-day orbit and an eccentric (e = 0.62) low-mass brown dwarf (BD) on an approximately 8-year orbit, with an estimated mass MBD of about 16 Jupiter masses. The BD is the longest-period transiting substellar object ever characterized by means of RVs and the only one known to be coplanar with inner planets. The architecture of this system suggests that the SE was formed isolated and in the innermost region of the gaseous disk. On the other hand, the orbital configuration of the outer companions suggests a nearly in situ formation of both objects, with the WJ forming in a dense inner disk. Alternatively, the BD might have formed farther out and migrated inward, while increasing its eccentricity owing to interactions with the disk. Analysis of long-term radial velocity data and transit time variations, induced by a super-Earth, a warm Jupiter and a brown dwarf in a coplanar orbit around the relatively young star TOI201.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

ConSolv: Solvent-Conditional Machine Learning Implicit Solvent Potential

arXiv:2606.24983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Implicit solvent machine learning potentials (MLPs) offer a powerful route to bridging the gap between accuracy and efficiency in molecular simulations. However, existing models have largely focused on aqueous environments, overlooking the diverse and important roles of non-aqueous solvents in areas such as organic synthesis and battery technology. Here, we present ConSolv, a solvent-conditional MLP architecture that explicitly incorporates solvent effects on solute interactions through an attention-based solvent-embedding block. By combining experimental solvation free energy data with ab initio data, we train a single implicit solvent MLP that is transferable across 66 common organic solvents. ConSolv outperforms classical explicit solvent methods and selected ab initio implicit solvent approaches across multiple solvation free energy benchmarks, and demonstrates generalization to unseen solvents. Beyond solvation free energies, the model shows close agreement with experimental nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data for $\gamma$-fluorohydrin molecules in chloroform. ConSolv's architecture is readily extensible to broader chemical spaces and alternative training strategies, while its attention-based design supports explainable artificial intelligence (AI) analysis that can help elucidate complex, solvent-dependent molecular interactions.

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

Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Search Misaligns Instruction-Tuning

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to use tools, but its impact on alignment is poorly understood. We study how agentic RL for search affects the alignment of instruction-tuned (IT) models. We find that RL-trained models inherit refusal reasoning by deflecting harmful requests into benign search queries, but this breaks down under a simple diagnostic trigger that elicits a search call before refusal can occur. Under this condition, RL models produce multi-step unsafe search actions and reasoning, reducing search query safety by up to 68.6% in Qwen and Llama models relative to their IT counterparts. The effect generalises across model families, scales, and RL algorithms. To understand why, we identify linear directions in the residual stream that control search query safety, and show that RL training progressively shifts search behaviour toward the harmful end of this direction. We thus propose representation-guided RL training, which adds a reward penalty based on projection toward the harmful search direction. Training on benign data alone, it restores IT-level alignment without reducing task accuracy and requires no additional training data. Together, our work provides the first framework for diagnosing, mechanistically analysing, and mitigating alignment degradation in agentic RL for search.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Tinker Tales: A Tangible Dialogue System for Child-AI Co-Creative Storytelling

arXiv:2602.04109v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conversational AI agents are increasingly explored as creative partners, yet how conversation design shapes child-AI dialogue in co-creative settings remains underexplored. We present Tinker Tales, a tangible dialogue system for child-AI collaborative storytelling, in which educational frameworks (narrative development and social-emotional learning) are instantiated as conversation design, shaping how the agent engages children across four narrative stages. The system combines a physical storytelling board, NFC-embedded toys, and a mobile app mediating multimodal interaction through tangible manipulation and voice-based dialogue. We conducted a home-based user study with 10 children (ages 6-8) across two conversation design conditions varying in how the agent structured elaboration, with and without educational scaffolding. Our findings show that prompt framing shapes the form and consistency of children's narrative contributions, structuring how they participate in co-creative dialogue with AI.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Percolation on hierarchical lattices

arXiv:2606.11503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider independent Bernoulli percolation on top of sequences of hierarchical graphs. Given a graph $G_{1}$ with two distinguished vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$, the hierarchical graph with seed $G_{1}$ is the sequence $\big( G_{k} \big)_{k \geq 1}$ resulting from the inductive procedure, where the graph $G_{k+1}$ is obtained from $G_{k}$ by replacing each of its edges with a copy of $G_{1}$, attached by the vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$. We prove that, under sharp hypotheses, percolation on these graphs presents a unique phase transition. Second, we establish the existence of several critical exponents in this context, such as the critical exponents for the correlation length $\nu$, the surface tension $\mu$, the one-arm exponent $\alpha_{1}$. Several results are also obtained for their infinite counterpart $G_\infty$, which is the Benjamini-Schramm limit of $G_k$: uniqueness of the infinite cluster, continuity of $\theta(p)$, existence of the percolation-probability exponent $\beta$ and scaling relations for the critical exponents $\alpha_1$, $\nu$ and $\beta$. Furthermore, we analyze noise sensitivity for crossing functions in $G_{k}$ and establish sharp noise sensitivity in this setting. Finally, we propose a setup where it is possible to verify the locality hypothesis, stating that the critical threshold for percolation is a local property, while critical exponents are determined by the global geometry of the graph. As a consequence of the techniques developed here, we also provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a unique fixed point for the map $p \mapsto \mathbb{E}_p[g]$ in $(0,1)$, where $g:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ is a nontrivial monotone Boolean function.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

OpenAnt: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Discovery Through Code Decomposition, Adversarial Verification, and Dynamic Testing

arXiv:2606.19149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated vulnerability discovery in large codebases remains challenging: traditional static analysis produces high false-positive rates, while dynamic approaches such as fuzzing require substantial infrastructure and often target narrow classes of bugs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable semantic reasoning about program behavior, but applying LLMs to repository-scale security analysis introduces challenges related to context management, cost, and verification. We present OpenAnt, an open-source vulnerability discovery system that integrates static program analysis with LLM-based reasoning in a multi-stage pipeline. OpenAnt introduces three key techniques. First, codebases are decomposed into self-contained analysis units filtered by reachability from external entry points, reducing the analysis surface by up to 97% while preserving attack-relevant code. Second, candidate vulnerabilities undergo adversarial verification through constrained attacker simulation, where the model evaluates exploitability under realistic attacker capabilities. Third, findings are validated through dynamic verification, in which exploit environments are generated automatically, executed in sandboxed containers, and discarded after use. Evaluation on widely used open-source projects including OpenSSL, WordPress, and Flowise shows that this architecture can identify previously unknown vulnerabilities while maintaining manageable analysis cost and substantially reducing false positives. Our results suggest that closed-loop vulnerability discovery pipelines, combining semantic reasoning with exploit validation, provide a practical path toward scalable automated security analysis. OpenAnt is released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/knostic/OpenAnt.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606.20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training. However, existing approaches materialize both attention distributions before computing the KL reduction, incurring $O(N_QN_K)$ memory and IO costs that become prohibitive at long context lengths. We present StreamKL, the first fused GPU primitive for attention KL divergence that eliminates this quadratic materialization. StreamKL derives a novel online formulation for the coupled two-distribution KL reduction, enabling a single one-pass forward kernel that streams query-key tiles through on-chip SRAM. For the backward pass, StreamKL recomputes attention probabilities tile-by-tile, avoiding storage of quadratic intermediates. We further design and implement efficient GPU kernels with dedicated optimizations. Experiments show StreamKL delivers up to $43\times$ and $14\times$ speedups over baseline methods in the forward and backward passes, respectively. Most importantly, StreamKL reduces the extra HBM footprint of attention distillation from $O(N_QN_K)$ to $O(1)$, enabling long-context distillation on a single GPU.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SkillChain-Gym: A Benchmark for Reskilling-Aware Production-Inventory Control under Disruptions

arXiv:2606.17266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production planning increasingly has to treat workforce capability as a decision variable: certifications lapse when skills are not maintained, new products require skills the current workforce does not hold, and reskilling competes for the same worker hours needed for production. Existing operations benchmarks usually treat labor as exogenous, while workforce-planning models with skills and learning are rarely released as reusable testbeds. We introduce SkillChain-Gym, a benchmark specification for reskilling-aware production-inventory control: a single-site environment with stylized worker skill-state dynamics, hard threshold certification, forgetting, and capacity-consuming training actions constrained by the same per-worker time budget as production. The benchmark includes seed-controlled disruption scenarios, three feasibility modes with projection diagnostics, deterministic replay, and metrics covering operations, resilience, capability growth, and training-access distribution. We evaluate production-only, reactive adaptive, water-filling adaptive, and static-insurance policies with budget variants over 60-shift horizons with paired statistical tests. The results are regime-dependent rather than a ranking. Training-capable policies dominate the production-only baseline, and maintenance training is necessary under forgetting even without disruptions. Among training-capable classes, adaptive training helps when bottlenecks are visible in the forecast, while a lean static cross-training plan, a deliberately favorable comparator whose structure encodes relevant skill contingencies, acts as strong insurance under surprise shocks and absenteeism. Capacity slack and the forgetting rate govern the boundary between these regimes. No policy class dominates across regimes, motivating forecast-driven controllers that decide when to buy skill insurance and when to react.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Temporal Conductance and Bounds on the Voter Model for Dynamic Networks

arXiv:2606.13374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The voter model is a classical stochastic process that models how opinions might spread through a network: at each step, every node lazily adopts the opinion of a random neighbour; eventually all nodes share the same opinion (consensus). Stronger connectivity should yield faster consensus. Berenbrink, Giakkoupis, Kermarrec, and Mallmann-Trenn (ICALP 2016) make this precise via the network's conductance: if the network has $m$ edges, minimum degree $d_{\min}$, and conductance at least $\phi$, then the voter model reaches consensus in expected $O(m/(d_{\min}\phi))$ steps. Their results extend to dynamic networks with fixed vertex degrees by considering the network's conductance at each time step. We introduce temporal conductance $\Phi$, a more general connectivity measure for dynamic networks. Unlike static conductance, which collapses to $0$ whenever some snapshot is disconnected, $\Phi$ captures connectivity through edges that appear at different times. We generalise the results of Berenbrink et al. from static conductance to temporal conductance, showing that the expected consensus time of the standard voter model is at most $O(m/(d_{\min}\Phi))$. Moreover, we prove that this bound is tight up to constant factors. We expect temporal conductance to be a useful primitive for analysing other dynamics on temporal networks, and potentially time-inhomogeneous Markov chains more generally.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Towards Personalized Federated Learning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13253v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech recognition is challenging for dysarthric speakers. While federated learning (FL)-based ASR can be an effective tool for protecting privacy, it suffers from heterogeneity issues caused by speaker variability. Forcing all speakers to share the same model components can be suboptimal under such heterogeneity, making personalization a promising direction; however, related research on dysarthric speech remains limited. To this end, this paper explores two aggregation strategies to achieve personalization, including the parameter-based averaging strategy and the embedding-based averaging strategy. Experiments on UASpeech and TORGO show that the proposed methods outperform the baseline regularized FedAvg by statistically significant WER reductions of up to 0.99% absolute (3.15% relative) on UASpeech and 0.56% absolute (4.73% relative) on TORGO, respectively.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FrequencyFormer: A Co-Designed Sensor-to-Processor Pipeline for Frequency-Domain Vision Transformer Inference

Deploying vision transformers (ViTs) on sensor-edge systems is limited not only by on-device compute, but also by the energy and bandwidth required to transmit high-dimensional image data from the sensor to the processor. While in-sensor and near-sensor computing reduce this cost through early feature extraction, existing methods often provide only modest compression. We observe that the frequency domain provides a naturally compact representation of visual information and can be exploited at the sensor level to reduce sensor-to-processor data movement. Building on this insight, we present FrequencyFormer, a co-designed sensor-to-processor pipeline for efficient ViT inference. FrequencyFormer includes: (1) a multi-scale DCT tokenizer that compresses a 224x224 image into compact frequency-domain tokens, achieving up to 128x reduction in off-chip data volume with modest accuracy loss; (2) a LUT-based near-sensor hardware implementation that leverages fixed DCT coefficients for multiplier-free, energy- and area-efficient tokenization; and (3) a modified MIPI-based low-power communication architecture that further reduces transfer energy. FrequencyFormer serves as a drop-in replacement for standard ViT patch embedding and remains compatible with pretrained backbones across classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. The pipeline achieves 28.8 TOPS/W, reduces communication energy by 230x, and lowers total sensor-side energy by 2.22x, demonstrating frequency-domain tokenization as a scalable foundation for in-sensor ViT deployment.

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

Beyond Case Law: Evaluating Structure-Aware Retrieval and Safety in Statute-Centric Legal QA

arXiv:2604.06173v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Legal QA benchmarks have predominantly focused on case law, overlooking the unique challenges of statute-centric regulatory reasoning. In statutory domains, relevant evidence is distributed across hierarchically linked documents, creating a statutory retrieval gap where conventional retrievers fail and models often hallucinate under incomplete context. We introduce SearchFireSafety, a structure- and safety-aware benchmark for statute-centric legal QA. Instantiated on fire-safety regulations as a representative case, the benchmark evaluates whether models can retrieve hierarchically fragmented evidence and safely abstain when statutory context is insufficient. SearchFireSafety adopts a dual-source evaluation framework combining real-world questions that require citation-aware retrieval and synthetic partial-context scenarios that stress-test hallucination and refusal behavior. Experiments across multiple large language models show that graph-guided retrieval substantially improves performance, but also reveal a critical safety trade-off: domain-adapted models are more likely to hallucinate when key statutory evidence is missing. Our findings highlight the need for benchmarks that jointly evaluate hierarchical retrieval and model safety in statute-centric regulatory settings.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on Cancer Risk and Cross-Cancer Associations in Nordic Twins

The relative contributions of genetic and shared environmental influences to cancer risk and cross-cancer associations remain poorly understood. We analyzed data from 222,530 same-sex twins from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer, including 43,060 incident cancers over a median follow-up of 41.6 years. Using a target trial framework, biometric modeling, and competing-risk adjustment, we estimated familial risk, heritability, and shared environmental contributions across 35 cancer sites. Lifetime cancer risk was 36.5%, increasing to 51.4% in monozygotic (MZ) twins and 45.3% in dizygotic (DZ) twins with an affected co-twin. Overall cancer risk was explained by heritable (28%) and shared environmental (40%) influences. Heritability was highest for prostate (42%), non-melanoma skin (24%), and breast (18%) cancers. Cross-cancer analyses revealed extensive overlap in the genetic and shared environmental factors across sites, consistent with widespread pleiotropy and shared environmental susceptibility. Prostate cancer exhibited the strongest genetic overlap with rectum/anus (12%) and kidney (11%) cancers, whereas co-shared environmental influences were most pronounced for breast-lung (11%), prostate-bladder (11%), and prostate-lung (12%) cancers. These findings show pervasive genetic overlap across cancers at different sites and emphasize the importance of incorporating familial shared environmental exposures into cancer risk prediction and prevention strategies.

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

Quantum Adaptive Self-Attention for Quantum Transformer Models

arXiv:2504.05336v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A recurring weakness in quantum machine learning (QML) is that reported ``quantum advantages'' are seldom tested against a capacity-matched classical control, leaving it unclear whether a gain comes from the quantum substrate or from the architectural change that accompanies it. Our primary contribution is methodological: a protocol for attributing such gains honestly – a capacity-matched classical bottleneck of identical parameter budget, transparent reporting of where quantum does not help, and validation on real quantum hardware – which we develop and apply through a concrete case study. That case study is Quantum Adaptive Self-Attention (QASA), a hybrid Transformer that replaces the value projection of a single encoder layer with a 36-parameter parameterized quantum circuit (PQC), keeping all other layers classical. Across nine synthetic benchmarks and the real-world ETTh1 dataset, QASA improves on a full-capacity classical Transformer for chaotic and trend-dominated signals. To ask whether this is a genuinely quantum effect, we introduce a control rarely applied in quantum machine learning – a capacity-matched classical bottleneck with the same parameter budget – and find that it matches the PQC on the error metrics. The gain is therefore attributable to the low-rank value-projection bottleneck (an architectural parsimony principle), not to quantumness; adding further quantum layers only degrades performance and trainability. We accordingly position the quantum layer not as a source of accuracy advantage but as a competitive instantiation of this principle: its low-rank compression onto the signal's intrinsic dimensionality is matched by a classical bottleneck, so the gain is architectural rather than quantum.

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

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

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