Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Multi-task Learning is Not Enough: Representational Entanglement in Dual-output Second Language Speech Recognition

Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving distinct task representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-task decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to reduce surface degradation in dual-output L2 automatic speech recognition.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.

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

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A new class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation and their potential applications in optical memories

arXiv:2606.14256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article, we present a novel class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation, corresponding to a wide variety of electromagnetic 4-potentials and fields, including both zero field and circularly polarized electromagnetic waves. An interesting property of these solutions is that the spin of the particles rotates in synchronization with the electric and magnetic fields of the electromagnetic waves. These results could be utilized for the development of optical memories based on materials supporting massless Dirac fermions, such as graphene.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

SPA-C: an hybrid tool to accurately scaffold genomes using Hi-C and Deep-Learning

Genome assembly is a computational pipeline designed to reconstruct chromosomes from small sequencing reads. Following their assembly, contiguous sequences (contigs) are arranged into chromosome-long sequences during scaffolding. Hi-C, a long-range linkage information between regions of the genome widely used in recent large sequencing projects, is often required to correctly order contigs. Several tools have been developed to automate this task following either statistical or deep-learning approaches. Statistical approaches summarise 2D Hi-C matrices into contact densities across sequences, thus ignoring informative visual patterns. The sole existing deep-learning tool uses a transformer-based computer vision model to correct the assembly. It has been trained on several species and uses Hi-C matrices directly. Yet it comes as a supplementary step in the scaffolding process, introducing extra computation time, and has been trained on a dataset that might contain labelling errors, which could provide sub-optimal results. We propose SPA-C, an hybrid pipeline combining the strengths of both approaches. Linkage prediction is handled with a frugal CNN-based model and a graph-solving algorithm is used to generate the scaffolds. Through our input's design, the model is able to both correct errors within assemblies and link contigs, leveraging small, local Hi-C contact matrices. We handled low-complexity regions that might induce erroneous predictions using an external tool, improving the overall accuracy of generated assemblies. On a benchmark of six various genomes and four standard metrics, SPA-C outperformed four out of four state-of-the-art methods while achieving comparable start-to-end computation time.Python and Bash scripts are available on GitHub (https://github.com/SPA-C/SPA-C.git) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19000361).

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

Non-asymptotic Tail Bounds for the Kostlan–Shub–Smale Field: Tensor PCA and Spherical $k$-Spin Complexity

arXiv:2606.17665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper builds a hierarchy of explicit, non-asymptotic tail bounds for the supremum of the Kostlan–Shub–Smale (KSS) random field on the sphere, and applies it to two problems: Spiked Tensor PCA and the landscape of the spherical $k$-spin model. For Tensor PCA, we study the non-asymptotic statistical limits of estimating a rank-$R$ symmetric signal tensor of order~$k\ge 3$ and dimension~$d\ge 3$ from a single Gaussian observation at signal-to-noise ratio~$\lambda$, through the profile maximum likelihood estimator, the MLE restricted to normalized rank-$R$ tensors of coherence at least~$\kappa$. Our analysis uses a single reduction: a deterministic geometric inequality (the Tube Method) and a rank-reduction step bound the estimation error by the supremum of the canonical KSS field, which the Kac–Rice formula turns into a Gaussian integral against the expected absolute characteristic polynomial of a shifted Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble, controlled in turn by the four explicit tail bounds of our hierarchy (three from a Mehta–Fyodorov representation, one from a Ben Arous–Dembo–Guionnet large deviation). The same reduction yields two results, each with explicit constants. For estimation, a finite-$(k,d)$ error bound recovers the asymptotically optimal rate~$\sqrt{d\log k}$ of Perry, Wein and Bandeira, with explicit dependence on the rank~$R$ and the coherence~$\kappa$. For the landscape, a two-sided non-asymptotic bracketing of the annealed complexity of the spherical $k$-spin Hamiltonian recovers the Auffinger–Ben Arous–\v{C}ern\'y complexity function in the high-dimensional limit.

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

VisualClaw: A Real-Time, Personalized Agent for the Physical World

Vision language models are serving as general-purpose interfaces for complex multimodal tasks. However, deployment still faces three gaps: VLMs typically incur high latency and cost when processing dense video frames and long prompts, the agent scaffold remains static after deployment, and standard video-QA benchmarks do not test whether agents can use visual evidence inside tool-using workspaces. We present VisualClaw, a self-evolving multimodal agent built around two principles. First, hybrid encoding reduces deployment cost by filtering less informative streaming frames with a cascaded gate and compressing the text skill bank through hot/cold top-k injection. Second, skill evolution lets the agent learn from failures: retrieved memories condition an evolver as direct concatenated context or as guided evidence, producing skill-bank updates that help future questions. Across 4 video-QA benchmarks with 2 VLMs, VisualClaw cuts per-question API cost by an average -98% versus full-frame upload and by -25.9% over the offline uniform 8 frame baseline, while boosting accuracy in most settings, e.g., an average +3.85% and a peak +15.80% on EgoSchema with Gemini 3 Flash. To address the gap, we curate VisualClawArena, a 200-scenario multimodal agentic benchmark built through a strict five-stage pipeline; models must use video evidence, documents, dynamic updates, and executable checks inside a workspace. On VisualClawArena, the same framework with computer-use agent backends improves macro accuracy by +2.9% for Codex (GPT-5.5) and +3.2% for Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6) over no-evolution baselines, with a -9.5% cost reduction compared to the uniform-sampled baseline. These properties make VisualClaw a natural fit for edge applications, where the cascade reduces a 1-hour streaming session from ~3,600 API uploads down to only 5-20 calls and the self-evolution makes it a perfect personalized assistant.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MedSynth: Realistic, Synthetic Medical Dialogue-Note Pairs

Physicians spend significant time documenting clinical encounters, a burden that contributes to professional burnout. To address this, robust automation tools for medical documentation are crucial. We introduce MedSynth – a novel dataset of synthetic medical dialogues and notes designed to advance the Dialogue-to-Note (Dial-2-Note) and Note-to-Dialogue (Note-2-Dial) tasks. Informed by an extensive analysis of disease distributions, this dataset includes over 10,000 dialogue-note pairs covering over 2000 ICD-10 codes. We demonstrate that our dataset markedly enhances the performance of models in generating medical notes from dialogues, and dialogues from medical notes. The dataset provides a valuable resource in a field where open-access, privacy-compliant, and diverse training data are scarce. Code is available at https://github.com/ahmadrezarm/MedSynth/tree/main and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Ahmad0067/MedSynth.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DecNefSimulator: A Modular, Interpretable Framework for Decoded Neurofeedback Simulation Using Generative Models

arXiv:2511.14555v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Decoded Neurofeedback (DecNef) is a promising non-invasive approach to brain modulation with wide-ranging applications in neuromedicine and cognitive neuroscience. However, progress in DecNef research remains constrained by subject-dependent learning variability, reliance on indirect measures to quantify progress, and the high cost and time demands of experimentation. We present DecNefSimulator, a modular and interpretable simulation framework that formalizes DecNef as a machine learning problem. Beyond providing a virtual laboratory, DecNefSimulator enables researchers to model, analyze and understand neurofeedback dynamics. Using latent variable generative models as simulated participants, DecNefSimulator allows direct observation of internal cognitive states and systematic evaluation of how different protocol designs and subject characteristics influence learning. We demonstrate how this approach can (i) reproduce empirical phenomena of DecNef learning, (ii) identify conditions under which DecNef feedback fails to induce learning, and (iii) guide the design of more robust and reliable DecNef protocols in silico before human implementation. In summary, DecNefSimulator bridges computational modeling and cognitive neuroscience, offering a principled foundation for methodological innovation, robust protocol design, and ultimately, a deeper understanding of DecNef-based brain modulation.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Performance Analysis and Optimization of 3D Generative Diffusion Models across GPU Architectures

arXiv:2606.19365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have become essential for high-fidelity 3D MRI synthesis, yet their deployment remains constrained by substantial GPU resource demands arising from hundreds of U-Net evaluations per sample and a highly heterogeneous kernel behavior. This paper performs a comprehensive performance analysis of the state-of-the-art medical diffusion model, Med-DDPM, across three generations of NVIDIA architectures to study kernel-level runtime breakdowns, instruction-mix characteristics, memory system utilization, warp-level activities, and profiler priority-score estimates. We show that training is overwhelmingly dominated by cuDNN convolution and implicit-GEMM kernels, with inefficiencies arising from memory-access patterns, tensor-layout conversions, and limited Tensor Core utilization. Guided by these insights, we evaluate two architecture-aware optimizations TF32 Tensor Core activation and a 3D channels-last layout and demonstrate that they reduce SM cycles by up to 100x, cut dynamic instructions by 100x, raise Tensor Core utilization from 1.45 to 9.98x, and increase IPC by 7% on A100, all without degrading synthesis quality.

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

Experiment-compatible measurement–feedback quantum state preparation with reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.13005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ground-state preparation is a critical task in quantum simulation and quantum computing, as it enables the study of correlated phases and the generation of entangled resource states. While measurement–feedback control has emerged as a promising route to state preparation, existing schemes either rely on handcrafted, task-specific policies or are designed using full quantum-state information that is unavailable in real experiments and becomes impractical for large many-body systems. Here we develop an adaptive measurement–feedback protocol based on reinforcement learning under partial observability. The controller uses only the history of experimentally accessible measurement outcomes to choose both the measurement operator and the feedback action in real time. To make training compatible with experiments, we introduce a stochastic terminal reward built from one-shot measurements of randomly sampled Hamiltonian components, avoiding unphysical full-state reconstruction while remaining an unbiased estimator of the target energy. We demonstrate the method by preparing ground states of the Bose–Hubbard model and by generating GHZ states, establishing a scalable and hardware-compatible route to quantum state preparation.

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

DoubtProbe: Black-Box Jailbreak Defense via Structural Verification and Semantic Auditing

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing systems, black-box jailbreak defense has become an important practical problem. Existing defenses often rely on known-attack coverage, prompt-level semantic judgment, or local runtime control, yet these paths can become unstable under evolving prompt packaging, expression rewriting, and structure manipulation. We observe that many black-box jailbreaks do not remove the harmful goal, but reorganize the information needed to express and execute it, thereby evading safety alignment while remaining recoverable during generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose DoubtProbe, a dual-branch inference-time defense framework that combines structural verification with semantic auditing and formulates black-box jailbreak defense as consistency checking under controlled transformation. The structural branch extracts a structured representation from the original request, reconstructs the request under representation constraints, and detects information-preservation failures between the original and reconstructed requests; the semantic branch audits the original prompt directly. We evaluate DoubtProbe against representative black-box defenses on jailbreak and benign-request benchmarks, and further test backbone transfer from Qwen2.5-72B to Llama-3.1-70B. Results show that DoubtProbe achieves a stronger and more stable defense-utility trade-off: on Qwen2.5-72B, it reduces the JBB attack success rate from 0.293 to 0.100 and the CodeAttack attack success rate from 0.152 to 0.001, while maintaining false positive rates of 0.022 and 0.016 on AlpacaEval and OR-Bench; the same pattern remains stable on Llama-3.1-70B. These findings show that structural inconsistency signals provide a practical and generalizable basis for black-box jailbreak defense, especially when combined with semantic auditing.

13.
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.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

MA-ProofBench: A Two-Tiered Evaluation of LLMs for Theorem Proving in Mathematical Analysis

arXiv:2606.13782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress in automated theorem proving, yet existing formal benchmarks remain limited in both mathematical coverage and difficulty. Most are concentrated in areas that are easier to formalize, such as algebra and elementary number theory, and provide limited coverage of subfields that require deeper reasoning, including mathematical analysis. To address this gap, we introduce MA-ProofBench, to the best of our knowledge, the first formal theorem-proving benchmark dedicated to Mathematical Analysis. The benchmark contains 200 formalized theorems covering 6 core topics and 27 subcategories, including measure and integration theory, complex analysis, and functional analysis. The problems are divided into two difficulty levels, an undergraduate level (Level I, 100 problems) and a Ph.D. qualifying level (Level II, 100 problems), to evaluate how well LLMs perform formal reasoning at different mathematical depths. Each problem is constructed through a human-led, LLM-assisted formalization pipeline followed by independent expert review, ensuring that the formal statements remain faithful to the original mathematics. We evaluate a range of recent general-purpose reasoning models and formal theorem provers on MA-ProofBench. However, most models perform poorly: even the best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves only 16% Pass@8 on Level I and 5% on Level II, while most models stay close to 0% on Level II. Further analysis identifies Mathlib hallucinations and incomplete proofs as the two dominant failure modes, while an evaluation on the natural-language version of the benchmark exposes a clear gap between informal and formal reasoning. MA-ProofBench is intended to serve as a reliable reference for tracking progress in formal mathematical reasoning in advanced domains.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Two-Phase Bilevel Search for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles

arXiv:2606.18730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP) seeks a minimum cost trajectory for an agent that departs from a static depot, visits a set of moving targets, each within one of their assigned time windows, and returns to the depot. In this article, we study the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles (MT-TSP-MO), a generalization of the MT-TSP where the agent trajectory must avoid moving obstacles. We present a Mixed-Integer Conic Programming (MICP) formulation that can be solved using off-the-shelf solvers, as well as a fast and scalable Two-Phase Bilevel Search (TPBS) algorithm that computes high-quality feasible solutions for the problem. We evaluate our approaches against an existing baseline algorithm on a broad range of problem instances with up to 40 targets and 40 obstacles. The results demonstrate that both the proposed methods significantly outperform the baseline with respect to success rates, solution costs, and computation time.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Long-term Penetrance of Disease Variants in Genes Prioritized for Genomic Newborn Screening: Evidence from Adult Biobanks

Importance: Genomic newborn screening (gNBS) is a potential public health intervention, but its positive predictive value (PPV) remains uncertain. Estimating the prevalence and penetrance of pathogenic and likely pathogenic (P/LP) variants in genes prioritized for screening may clarify the long-term PPV and clinical utility of gNBS. Objective: To compare ICD-based ascertainment, electronic medical record (EMR) review, and clinical assessment of genetic disorders in adults with P/LP variants in 54 genes prioritized for gNBS. Design: Two-cohort observational study with EMR review and clinical assessment in the hospital-based cohort. Setting: The U.K. Biobank (UKB) and Mass General Brigham Biobank (MGBB). Participants: 451,877 adults from the UKB and 53,371 from the MGBB, all with exome sequencing data. Exposures: P/LP variants in 54 genes prioritized through expert consensus for gNBS, in genotypes consistent with each gene's inheritance pattern. Main outcomes and measures: The primary outcome was the absolute difference in the proportion of MGBB participants identified as affected by ICD versus EMR ascertainment. Secondary outcomes included findings from clinical assessments of undiagnosed MGBB participants, corrected UKB penetrance estimates, and extrapolation to U.S.. annual birth cohorts and living adults. Results: P/LP variants were identified in 665 UKB participants (0.15%) and 82 MGBB participants (0.15%), approximately 1 in 650. In MGBB, EMR review revealed that 58/82 individuals (70.7%) were undiagnosed, although 25 of 58 (43.1%) had documented symptoms. Disease-associated ICD codes were found in 39.0% (32/82) of participants, whereas EMR review identified symptoms in 59.8% (49/82, McNemar P

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

HalluJudge: A Reference-Free Hallucination Detection for Context Misalignment in Code Review Automation

arXiv:2601.19072v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in code review automation, such as review comment generation, yet they suffer from hallucinations – where the generated review comments are ungrounded in the actual code – poses a significant challenge to the adoption of LLMs in code review workflows. To address this, we explore effective and scalable methods for a hallucination detection in LLM-generated code review comments without the reference. In this work, we design HalluJudge that aims to assess the grounding of generated review comments based on the context alignment. HalluJudge includes four key strategies ranging from direct assessment to structured multi-branch reasoning (e.g., Tree-of-Thoughts). We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of these assessment strategies across Atlassian's enterprise-scale software projects to examine the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of HalluJudge. Furthermore, we analyze the alignment between HalluJudge's judgment and developer preference of the actual LLM-generated code review comments in the real-world production. Our results show that the hallucination assessment in HalluJudge is cost-effective with an F1 score of 0.85 and an average cost of $0.009. On average, 67% of the HalluJudge assessments are aligned with the developer preference of the actual LLM-generated review comments in the online production. Our results suggest that HalluJudge can serve as a practical safeguard to reduce developers' exposure to hallucinated comments, fostering trust in AI-assisted code reviews.

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

Learning to Decide with AI Assistance under Human-Alignment

arXiv:2605.12646v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is widely agreed that when AI models assist decision-makers in high-stakes domains by predicting an outcome of interest, they should communicate the confidence of their predictions. However, empirical evidence suggests that decision-makers often struggle to determine when to trust a prediction based solely on this communicated confidence. In this context, recent theoretical and empirical work suggests a positive correlation between the utility of AI-assisted decision-making and the degree of alignment between the AI confidence and the decision-makers' confidence in their own predictions. Crucially, these findings do not yet elucidate the extent to which this alignment influences the complexity of learning to make optimal decisions through repeated interactions. In this paper, we address this question in the canonical case of binary predictions and binary decisions. We first show that this problem is equivalent to a two-armed online contextual learning problem with full feedback, and establish a lower bound of $\Omega (\sqrt{|H| \cdot |B| \cdot T} )$ on the expected regret any learner can attain, where $H$ and $B$ denote the sets of human and AI confidence values. We then demonstrate that, under perfect alignment between AI and human confidence, a learner can attain an expected regret of $O(\sqrt{|H| \cdot T\log T})$ and, when $\sqrt{|H|} = O(\log T)$ and $B$ is countable, a non-trivial generalization of the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality improves the regret bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log T})$. Taken together, these results reveal that alignment can reduce the complexity of learning to make decisions with AI assistance. Experiments on real data from two different human-subject studies where participants solve simple decision-making tasks assisted by AI models show that our theoretical results are robust to violations of perfect alignment.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Explaining Attention with Program Synthesis

arXiv:2606.19317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions. In this paper, we propose an approach for approximating the behavior of components of deep networks with executable programs. We focus on attention heads in transformer language models. For a given head, we first compute its associated attention matrices on a collection of randomly selected training examples. Next, we prompt a pre-trained language model with a summary of these matrices, and instruct it to generate a set of Python programs that can reproduce the associated attention patterns given only text from the input sentence. Finally, we re-rank programs according to how well our final set of programs predict behavior on held-out inputs. We demonstrate that a set of fewer than 1,000 such generated programs can reproduce the attention patterns of heads in GPT-2, TinyLlama-1.1B, and Llama-3B, achieving an average Intersection-over-Union similarity above 75% on TinyStories. Moreover, the best-fit programs can replace neural attention heads without substantially affecting model behavior: replacing 25% of attention heads with programmatic surrogates across the three models incurs only a 16% average perplexity increase, while maintaining performance on a variety of downstream question answering benchmarks. This work contributes a scalable pipeline for reverse-engineering attention heads in transformer models using human-readable, executable code, advancing a path toward symbolic transparency in neural models.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Sycophancy as Material Failure under Pushback Loading: A Multi-Axis Characterization Across Three Loading Cases and up to Seventeen Material Charges

Sycophancy in LLMs is documented across 70+ papers, but expert agreement on construct boundaries remains low (ICC=.184; Ye et al., 2026). The construct fragments because behavioral classification depends on which surface form is privileged. We adopt a materials-science framing: conversation as test specimen under load, LLM-model as material charge, pushback as progressive load, stance-flip as material failure. We characterize this failure across three loading cases (debate n=1000; false-presuppositions n=3400; ethical-setting n=3400; 10-17 material charges per case; 7800 specimens total) using 14 turn-level axis-measurements spanning velocity, damage accumulation, frame-drift, brittleness, and direction stability, plus three speaker-resolved axes from an independent pipeline. The measurements are Hooke-coupled ($\sigma = E \cdot \varepsilon$ analog) and reproduce across loading cases with effects up to $|r_{rb}| = 0.35$ on debate; the sign structure adds a second pattern: the ethical-setting case inverts the velocity and accumulation blocks. Variance composition partitions into two profiles: debate is charge-dominated (brittle-fracture-like: the material grade decides), false-presuppositions and ethical-setting are topic-dominated (creep-like: the load decides); the ratios (2.03 vs 0.13/0.17) are estimator-dependent, for debate even in direction. Cross-judge reliability (GPT-4o vs Haiku 4.5) shows debate scoring is judge-robust (Cohen's $\kappa = 0.88$) while false-presupposition scoring is judge-sensitive ($\kappa = 0.36$) – a caveat single-judge benchmarks must report. This is the methodological move Ye et al.'s diagnosis calls for: a multi-axis characterization that does not depend on which surface form of the construct one privileges.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

On the entanglement induced by the deformation of phase-space

arXiv:2606.17587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most quantum gravity theories propose that the fundamental concept of space-time is mostly compatible with quantum theory in noncommutative (NC) space. In the present paper, we revisit the notion of entanglement induced by NC deformations of phase space. The positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion for separability of bipartite Gaussian states is extended to a general class of Bopp's shift. In particular, we have considered both the position-position and momentum-momentum noncommutativity, with deformation parameters $\theta$ and $\eta$, respectively. It turns out that $\theta$ and $\eta$ induce the entanglement. We have directly applied the formalism for an anisotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator. Peres-Horodecki separability condition leads to a constraint equation for the parameter values of the oscillator in NC space. It turns out that the bipartite Gaussian state is almost always entangled in deformed space. To implement the theoretical idea, we provide an outline for a gedankenexperiment to identify the signature of phase-space noncommutativity, i.e., quantum gravity. In particular, the gedankenexperiment is devised to test the separability of supposedly separable Gaussian states in the usual commutative space, through the covariance matrix, which is constructed via measured output photocurrents after interaction of input Gaussian states and reference states. If the experiment shows that the supposedly separable states are actually entangled, then the entanglement is created through the intermediate background noncommutative space, which is a signature of the quantum nature of gravity.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Recursive Joint Simulation in Games

arXiv:2402.08128v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Game-theoretic dynamics between AI agents could differ from traditional human-human interactions in various ways. One such difference is that it may be possible to accurately simulate an AI agent, for example because its source code is known. Such an agent would then be fundamentally uncertain whether it is in the real world or in a simulation. Our aim is to explore ways of leveraging this possibility to achieve more cooperative outcomes in strategic settings. In this paper, we study an interaction between AI agents where the agents run a recursive joint simulation. That is, the agents first jointly observe a simulation of the situation they face. This simulation in turn recursively includes additional simulations (with a small chance of failure, to avoid infinite recursion), and the results of all these nested simulations are observed before an action is chosen. We show that the resulting interaction is strategically equivalent to an infinitely repeated version of the original game, allowing a direct transfer of existing results such as the various folk theorems. As evidence that the equivalence is robust, we show that it holds even when we relax some of the assumptions and that it also holds ``from the inside'' – meaning, for an agent that finds itself inside the game and has self-locating uncertainty.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Delta-Epsilon-Common Knowledge and Quantitative Agreement Theorems

arXiv:2606.11902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aumann defined common knowledge mathematically and established his now famous Agreement Theorem. We present a novel approach to quantifying how close individuals are to commonly knowing events, $(\delta,\epsilon)$-common knowledge, which is defined for any (and not just countable) probability spaces, and provide quantitative versions of the key results in this field. Specifically, we do this for Aumann's Agreement Theorem and Nielsen's extension thereof to random variables, as well as for the setting in which posteriors are communicated back and forth between individuals. Our results apply in particular to noisy communication settings.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

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

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.