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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

How Linear Is a Transformer Feed-Forward Block? Per-Block Linear Recoverability Is Learned, Not Architectural

作者:

Transformer feed-forward networks (FFNs) are often treated as nonlinear stores of computation, yet how nonlinear a trained FFN block actually is has rarely been measured. We treat each FFN as a position-wise input-to-output map and split it into the exact least-squares linear approximation plus a residual. The held-out variance the closed-form linear map explains defines a block's linear recoverability (R^2_lin), an optimiser-free measure of its linearity. Across all twelve blocks of GPT-2, Pythia-160m, and llama-160m, R^2_lin is highly heterogeneous and non-monotone with depth, ranging from near-linear (>0.99) to strongly nonlinear (

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Many-Body Protection of Topological Edge Memory in Strong Interacting Quenches

arXiv:2606.19437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum quenches drive edge states far from equilibrium, yet whether the memory of a topological initial state survives in a non-integrable, interacting system has remained largely unexplored. We study this question in the bond-alternating XXZ chain – an interacting Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model hosting symmetry-protected topological edge modes with markedly enhanced boundary magnetization – and analyze quenches across all combinations of single-particle and many-body initial and final Hamiltonians. The results organize by a single distinction as we rigorously establish in this work: whether the post-quench Hamiltonian is free or genuinely interacting. For a free post-quench Hamiltonian, the dynamics is solved exactly by a correlation-matrix approach; the boundary-mode return amplitude decays as $t^{-3/2}$, and initial interactions enter only through a dressed one-body density matrix. For a genuinely interacting post-quench Hamiltonian, finite-time stability bounds prove that away from local resonances the first-dimer magnetization remains stable on time windows growing as arbitrarily large powers of the inverse inter-dimer coupling. Matrix product state simulations across all four protocols show that interactions in the final Hamiltonian markedly extend finite-time boundary memory – with local suppression near the isotropic $SU(2)$ point – revealing a many-body protection mechanism in a non-integrable system where scrambling would otherwise wash out initial-state memory fast.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Extreme Meta-Classification for Large-Scale Zero-Shot Retrieval

arXiv:2606.25237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop accurate and efficient solutions for large-scale retrieval tasks where novel (zero-shot) items can arrive continuously at a rapid pace. Conventional Siamese-style approaches embed both queries and items through a small encoder and retrieve the items lying closest to the query. While this approach allows efficient addition and retrieval of novel items, the small encoder lacks sufficient capacity for the necessary world knowledge in complex retrieval tasks. The extreme classification approaches have addressed this by learning a separate classifier for each item observed in the training set which significantly increases the representation capacity of the model. Such classifiers outperform Siamese approaches on observed items, but cannot be trained for novel items due to data and latency constraints. To bridge these gaps, this paper develops: (1) A new algorithmic framework, EMMETT, which efficiently synthesizes classifiers on-the-fly for novel items, by relying on the readily available classifiers for observed items; (2) A new algorithm, IRENE, which is a simple and effective instance of EMMETT that is specifically suited for large-scale deployments, and (3) A new theoretical framework for analyzing the generalization performance in large-scale zero-shot retrieval which guides our algorithm and training related design decisions. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on a wide range of retrieval tasks which demonstrate that IRENE improves the zero-shot retrieval accuracy by up to 15% points in Recall@10 when added on top of leading encoders. Additionally, on an online A/B test in a large-scale ad retrieval task in a major search engine, IRENE improved the ad click-through rate by 4.2%. Lastly, we validate our design choices through extensive ablative experiments. The source code for IRENE is available at https://aka.ms/irene.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Reinforcement Learning for Neural Model Editing

作者:

Editing pretrained neural networks requires specialized algorithms tailored to specific objectives. Designing such algorithms is often time-consuming and demands significant effort. We present an exploratory framework that formulates neural model editing as a reinforcement learning problem, where agents modify models using reward feedback. We introduce two environments: MaskWorld, where agents scale weights multiplicatively, and ShiftWorld, where agents apply additive weight updates. The reward function combines a utility-preservation objective with a task-specific editing objective, enabling agents to learn targeted modifications while maintaining overall model performance. We evaluate the framework on bias mitigation in text classification and machine unlearning in image classification, both of which traditionally rely on specialized algorithms. Our results show that the learned policies reduce forget set accuracy to nearly 0% while preserving over 90% retain set accuracy on the unlearning task. In the bias mitigation setting, the learned policies improve bias-related performance by more than 5% while maintaining general classification utility. Our findings show that neural model editing can be cast as a reinforcement learning problem, allowing editing policies to be learned from reward feedback rather than manually engineered for each task.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Indirect Computing Model with Indirect Formal Method

作者:

This paper,from the perspective of a collaborative intelligent computing system formed by combining human-computer interface and collaborative computing programs, discusses the principles of optimized cloud computing technology supported by the combination of an indirect computing model and an indirect formal method. On the basis of systematically reviewing the influence of previous theoretical achievements Turing's computability theory,Kleene's formal theory of small strings,von Neumann's digital computer architecture and Turing's hypothesis on AI judgment on the mainstream general-purpose digital computer paradigm,the author focuses on introducing an indirect computing model and an indirect formal theory compatible with both large and small strings. Using Chinese information data as an example,the design concept of a collaborative intelligent computing system prototype is presented. The significance is that this achievement facilitates optimization of cloud computing from data centers to knowledge centers.

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

Exposing the Unsaid: Visualizing Hidden LLM Bias through Stochastic Path Aggregation

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit representational and syntactic biases that are difficult to evaluate due to the stochastic nature of text generation. Standard auditing methods rely on a single output inspection or static automated metrics. These approaches obscure the underlying probability distributions and fail to capture biases hidden in lower-probability generation branches. This paper introduces TreeTracer, a visual analytics tool designed to evaluate LLM bias through aggregated comparison. Using a systematic perturbation analysis pipeline, the tool replaces ontology-defined terms in each input prompt, aggregates hundreds of stochastic generations into a syntax-aligned hierarchical structure, and then performs classification-aware node merging with an auxiliary language model. The resulting structure is visualized through a custom Sankey diagram. By juxtaposing two ontology-driven trees, the workspace enables direct comparison between semantic contexts and supports systematic bias detection. Because any visualization reflects only a subset of the model's learned behavior, the system further applies contrastive inference to compute and directly display counterfactual token probabilities across contexts, reducing the risk of misinterpreting the presence of bias. We validate the workspace through case studies comparing an unaligned baseline model GPT-2 XL against the constitutionally aligned Apertus models. The visual aggregation successfully exposes hidden representational harms, such as counterfactual pronoun suppression and conversational marginalization of individuals. A preliminary user study confirms that the aggregated comparative interface reduces cognitive load and effectively supports analysts in detecting systemic biases.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Heat kernel estimates for Markov processes with blowing-up jump kernels

arXiv:2512.24807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we establish sharp two-sided heat kernel estimates for a large class of purely discontinuous symmetric Markov processes on closed subsets $F$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, whose jump kernels blow up on a Borel subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. We assume that $F\setminus \Sigma$ is a $\kappa$-fat set and is dense in $F$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work establishing sharp heat kernel estimates for jump processes whose jump kernels blow up on part of the state space. The jump kernels under consideration take the form $J(x,y)=|x-y|^{-d-\alpha}{\mathcal B}(x,y)$, where $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and the function ${\mathcal B}(x,y)$ blows up at a subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. A fundamental obstacle is that the tails of the jump measures are not uniformly bounded, and hence standard techniques in heat kernel analysis do not provide a priori off-diagonal estimates. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a new approach based on weighted integral estimates for the heat kernel that are sensitive to both the blow-up behavior of the jump kernel and the geometry of $F\setminus \Sigma$. Examples of processes falling within our general framework include traces of isotropic $\alpha$-stable processes in $C^{1,\rm Dini}$ sets, processes in Lipschitz sets arising in connection with the nonlocal Neumann problem, and a large class of resurrected self-similar processes in the closed upper half-space.

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

Amortized mean-shift interacting particles

arXiv:2606.15871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bayesian inference for inverse problems is run to evaluate integrals – posterior expectations, tail probabilities, and risks – across a stream of observations. The standard estimate averages the integrand over posterior samples, a Monte-Carlo average whose error decays only as the square root of the sample size, so accuracy demands many samples – prohibitive when each one calls a partial-differential-equation forward model. Mean-shift interacting particles need far fewer: they return a small set of signed-weight nodes – a deterministic quadrature whose weighted averages estimate those integrals. Finding the nodes, however, is a per-observation optimization that, in its most accurate form, reads the posterior score at every step – returning the cost it meant to save. We introduce amortized mean-shift interacting particles, a learned map that emits the weighted nodes from an observation and a few posterior samples in a single forward pass. Training asks only for joint parameter-observation samples and a posterior to draw from – a conditional normalizing flow, an empirical conditional, or any reference the user can sample – and the map learns to integrate that posterior from samples alone, evaluating neither its density nor its score. Once trained, it generalizes to unseen observations and integrands at any node budget and improves on independent samples in two ways: by reweighting them, provably no worse than the equal weights of Monte-Carlo; and by moving them, which empirically lowers it further. Across closed-form, sampled, learned, and physics-based posteriors – up to a thousand-coefficient groundwater field – it integrates more accurately than the same number of samples at every budget, and a posterior-whitened, dimension-aware kernel removes the high-dimensional wall. The result is a Pareto improvement on Monte-Carlo integration, not a competitor to drawing more samples.

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

SEED: Semi-supervised Continual MalwarE Detection for Tackling ConcEpt Drift on a BuDget

arXiv:2605.24903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning based malware detectors become obsolete over time due to concept drift in benign and malware applications. Recent methods rely on fully labeled data and use hierarchical contrastive loss (HCL) with active learning to improve robustness against drift by exploiting semantic structure in malware representations. However, obtaining labeled data in the security domain is difficult. Under partially labeled settings, HCL suffers significant performance degradation in detecting unseen malware, especially on datasets such as BODMAS where strong semantic structure may not exist. In this paper, we propose SEED, a semantic-structure-agnostic method for malware detection under limited supervision. SEED combines a tailored binary cross-entropy objective with semi-supervised continual learning and active learning. For partially labeled seen tasks, unlabeled samples are projected into a representation space constructed from previously seen data using singular value decomposition, and paired with suitable labeled samples to encourage representation consistency. For unseen tasks with fully unlabeled data, uncertainty is quantified using cosine distance in representation space, and the most uncertain samples are selected for analyst labeling. We evaluate SEED on both Windows and Android malware datasets. Using only 20% labeled data on seen tasks, SEED achieves average AUT improvements of 40% on BODMAS and 14% on AndroZoo for unseen malware detection compared to HCL* (the semi-supervised adaptation of HCL), while remaining competitive on APIGraph. Finally, we introduce a delayed buffer update strategy to reduce label noise propagation during replay and improve learning stability.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Computing noise-canceling observables via Pauli propagation

arXiv:2606.20441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The pursuit of quantum advantage is driving the co-evolution of quantum processors and classical simulation methods. Despite advances in scale and quality, the accuracy of quantum simulation is ultimately limited by error rates and sampling overheads. Similarly, while classical simulation methods such as Pauli propagation have made remarkable progress, their accuracy is ultimately limited by the exponential growth of operator paths and the truncations needed to control memory and runtime. Here we show that these complementary limitations can be mitigated by embedding Pauli propagation within a hybrid error-mitigation framework that reduces quantum sampling overhead while achieving lower truncation errors with fewer classical resources than traditional Pauli propagation alone. In this framework, a target observable is classically propagated through noise-canceling inverse channels, producing a modified observable that is measured directly on a quantum processor. We prototype two implementations and benchmark their performance numerically on canonical models that challenge traditional Pauli propagation. We also perform experiments on a quantum processor using 56 superconducting qubits, revealing the tradeoffs of their respective truncation strategies. These results illustrate how classical and quantum resources can be orchestrated to extend observable estimation beyond the limits of either approach alone, providing a foundation for quantum-centric supercomputing and future demonstrations of quantum advantage.

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

SAMark: A Self-Anchored Text Watermarking with Paragraph-Level Paraphrase Robustness

Semantic-level watermarking (SWM) improves robustness against text modifications by treating sentences as the basic unit. However, robustness to paragraph-level paraphrasing remains difficult because such attacks globally disrupt watermark signals by changing sentence order. In this work, we propose SAMark, a self-anchored watermarking framework that removes the dependency on sentence order by establishing a step-independent green region in semantic space. To improve detectability, we introduce a multi-channel hyperbolic scoring mechanism that amplifies watermark signals while suppressing noise from weakly aligned candidates. We further propose a diversity-aware filtering strategy that combines hard filtering with soft regularization, extending beyond simple n-gram repetition filters to address semantic redundancy. Experimental results show that SAMark achieves up to 90.2% TP@FP1% under typical paragraph-level paraphrasing attacks, outperforming the strongest prior baseline by more than 30% on average, while maintaining generation quality competitive with unwatermarked text and breaking the robustness-quality trade-off that limits prior methods.

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

Bernstein-Schur Kernels: Random Features by Sketched Modulation and Radial Randomization

arXiv:2606.11255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bernstein–Schur kernels are products of a finite-feature kernel (one with an explicit finite-dimensional feature map) and a completely monotone shift-invariant kernel: nonstationary kernels that fall between the shift-invariant and dot-product templates random features usually exploit, so in general neither Bochner sampling nor polynomial sketching applies to the full kernel directly. We give one random-feature construction for the whole class that randomizes both factors: it sketches the finite modulation and randomizes the completely monotone radial factor, sampling the latter's one-dimensional Bernstein–Widder scale and then applying Gaussian random Fourier features (whose frequency is still $d$-dimensional). The feature dimension is then $Dm$, set by the sketch size $m$ and the radial-draw count $D$, free of the $O(d^2)$ size of the exact modulation feature. Keeping the modulation \emph{exact is the analyzable limit ($m\to\infty$): there we prove unbiasedness, an exact variance for the recommended flat estimator, an expected matrix-Bernstein operator-norm bound (with a matching high-probability tail) controlled by the top eigenvalues of the kernel and modulation Gram matrices together with an intrinsic dimension rather than the crude $N\max_{ij}$ entrywise route, and a deterministic relative-spectral kernel-ridge stability result. By conditioning on the sketch, the doubly-randomized estimator inherits the same intrinsic-dimension operator-norm guarantee plus a single additive sketch term, tunable by $m$ independently of $D$. The motivating instance is the biased $yat$-kernel $k_{yat,b}(w,x)=(w^\top x+b)^2/(\|w-x\|^2+\varepsilon)$, $b\ge0$, whose family span contains the inverse-multiquadric kernel by finite differences in $b$; for it the radial mixture is the IMQ spectral sampler, and one frequency per scale is variance-optimal at a fixed radial-feature budget.

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

Language Models as Interfaces, Not Oracles: A Hybrid LLM-ML System for Pediatric Appendicitis

Large language models (LLMs) can make clinical decision support more accessible by interpreting free-text documentation, but their direct use as diagnostic engines is limited by sensitivity to prompts, information order, and plausible but incorrect outputs. Structured machine-learning models offer more stable risk prediction, yet they require tabular inputs that are difficult to integrate with narrative clinical workflows. We present ClaMPAPP (Clinical Language-assisted Machine-learning Pipeline for Appendicitis), a hybrid system that uses an LLM as an interface rather than as the final decision-maker. ClaMPAPP extracts schema-constrained clinical features from note-like narratives, applies deterministic plausibility checks, and passes validated features to an XGBoost classifier trained on clinical, laboratory, and ultrasound variables. We evaluated ClaMPAPP on two independent pediatric appendicitis cohorts from German hospitals and compared it with end-to-end LLM baselines, including open-source and proprietary models. To preserve ground truth while testing free-text input, narratives were generated from structured electronic health records through template rendering and constrained LLM rewriting, with additional sentence-order permutation to assess positional robustness. ClaMPAPP achieved the strongest overall diagnostic performance in both internal and external validation while minimizing missed appendicitis cases, the key safety concern in acute triage. End-to-end LLMs showed unstable sensitivity-specificity trade-offs and greater degradation under narrative reordering. These results support an LLM-as-interface, ML-as-predictor design that separates natural-language usability from predictive inference and provides a more auditable pathway for clinical decision support.

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

How Large Language Models Source Brand Reputation Across Languages and Markets

When a large language model (LLM) answers a question about a company, it grounds the answer in retrieved web sources, and those sources decide what the model says. Most analysis of AI brand visibility looks at the answer text. This study looks one step earlier, at the citations. We merge three Rankfor.AI datasets covering 128 brands across 12 home markets and 13 languages, and analyse 167,551 URL-grounded citations (189,974 total attribution rows). We classify each citation by domain and source type and measure where AI gets its brand information, by language and by market. Four patterns hold. First, AI grounds brand answers overwhelmingly in third-party sources: 85.7% of citations point to sites the brand does not own, against 14.3% owned. Second, the source base is concentrated and long-tailed: 80% of citations come from about 18% of domains, fitting a Zipf law (alpha = 0.86, R^2 = 0.983). Third, one reference site dominates almost everywhere: Wikipedia is the most-cited domain in 11 of 12 languages, the exception being Lithuanian, where the business daily vz.lt edges it (4.38%). Fourth, the source mix is market-specific at the margin: for 46 Polish national brands the most-cited domain is YouTube, and four HR and careers portals supply 637 citations against 297 for Polish Wikipedia, about twice as many.

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

NatureBench: Can Coding Agents Match the Published SOTA of Nature-Family Papers?

We introduce NatureBench, a cross-discipline benchmark of 90 tasks distilled from peer-reviewed Nature-family publications, designed to evaluate whether AI coding agents can move beyond reproduction toward discovery on real scientific problems. NatureBench is built on NatureGym, an automated pipeline that constructs a standardized, per-task containerized environment from a source paper, addressing the environment-fragmentation problem that has limited the credibility of prior agent-on-research benchmarks. Evaluating ten frontier agent configurations under a strict web-search-disabled protocol, we find that the strongest model surpasses SOTA on only 17.8% of tasks under the g>0.1 criterion. Analysis of method pathways reveals that agents succeed primarily through methodological translation, converting scientific tasks into familiar supervised prediction problems, rather than through genuine scientific invention. Failures are dominated by wrong method choice and insufficient compute budget, not by task misunderstanding. We release the benchmark, the NatureGym pipeline, and a public leaderboard with maintainer-side reproduction. Code: https://github.com/FrontisAI/NatureBench

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

EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors

arXiv:2606.20108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

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

Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models

Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address this gap, we present a million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy resource, Pollen AI Atlas, assembled from pure-species whole-slide bright-field images spanning four geographic origins, four scanner settings and 46 taxon labels across 31 botanical families. Seeded by one manually selected exemplar per source slide, token-level mining and filtering produced 1,511,390 released grain detections with 99.6\% proposal precision in expert-curated test regions. Each detection was paired with machine-generated grain-level morphological captions from five open-weight vision-language models, guided by expert-verified palynological anchors, yielding structured descriptions of aperture systems, wall ornamentation, shape and size. Among the evaluated models, Gemma4 provided the most controlled primary caption set, combining tight length control, no leakage and the strongest text-retrieval performance. Baseline benchmarks with frozen visual features reached 88.16\% top-1 accuracy, while cross-regional retrieval showed that caption-derived text embeddings remained robust when image similarity degraded (mAP@20 0.811 versus 0.262). Released data, annotations, captions, splits, code, and weights provide a benchmark for pollen recognition, cross-regional domain adaptation and domain-specific multimodal microscopy learning.

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

Polynomial-Time Mistake-Bounded Language Generation

arXiv:2606.16077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this note, we introduce a polynomial-time version of the mistake-bounded language generation (MBLG) framework due to Kleinberg, Peale, and Reingold (2026). We observe that the family of parities of variables, and the family of conjunctions of literals, are polynomial-time MBLG. Our main result states that the family of monotone Boolean functions with polynomially-many maxterms is polynomial-time MBLG. This family includes all monotone Boolean functions, computable by polynomial-size decision trees. Our technique can be presented as a new combinatorial game about writing numbers on a board.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Global high-resolution mapping of seagrass to support conservation

Seagrass ecosystems underpin coastal biodiversity1 and provide vital ecosystem services, including shoreline protection2, food security3 and climate mitigation4. Despite growing recognition as a nature-based climate solution, seagrasses are among the least mapped and most poorly understood vegetated coastal ecosystems5. Here we present, to our knowledge, the first global 10-m spatial resolution maps and change analysis of seagrass extent in clear, shallow coastal waters, derived from 4.75 million Sentinel-2 MSI satellite images for two periods (2019–2020 and 2023–2024). Using a deep-learning classifier trained on curated reference data, we identified 148,506 km2 of seagrass globally, including 5,961 km2 of intertidal and 142,545 km2 of subtidal areas. Sixty-nine per cent of global seagrass extent is concentrated in The Bahamas, Cuba, the USA, Australia and Indonesia, yet only 21% of seagrass areas are located within marine-protected areas. Over the 4 years of the study, 5,969 km2 (4%) of seagrass was lost, and an additional 6,221 km2 (4.2%) was degraded from dense to sparse cover in tropical regions. Our findings identify seagrass meadow hotspots and vulnerable regions to inform conservation and climate policy. Global high-resolution mapping shows widespread seagrass loss and degradation since 2019, with most meadows outside protected areas, highlighting urgent conservation and climate-policy needs.

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

C2-Faith: Benchmarking LLM Judges for Causal and Coverage Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably assess process faithfulness rather than merely answer plausibility. We introduce C2-Faith, a benchmark built from PRM800K that explicitly decomposes faithfulness into two complementary dimensions: causality (whether each step logically follows from prior context) and coverage (whether essential intermediate inferences are present). Using controlled perturbations, we construct examples with known causal error positions by replacing a single step with a logically inconsistent variant, and with controlled coverage deletions at varying rates, enabling direct measurement against reference labels. We evaluate three frontier LLM judges across three tasks: binary causal detection, causal step localization, and coverage scoring. Our results reveal that judge reliability is highly task-dependent, with no single model dominating across settings. While models often detect that an error exists, they struggle to accurately localize it, indicating a substantial gap between detection and attribution. Moreover, all judges systematically overestimate reasoning completeness, assigning high coverage scores even when substantial portions of intermediate reasoning are missing. These findings expose fundamental limitations of LLM judges in process-level evaluation and highlight the need for more reliable and calibrated methods when using LLMs to assess reasoning quality.

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

RoTRAG: Rule of Thumb Reasoning for Conversation Harm Detection with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Detecting harmful content in multi turn dialogue requires reasoning over the full conversational context rather than isolated utterances. However, most existing methods rely mainly on models internal parametric knowledge, without explicit grounding in external normative principles. This often leads to inconsistent judgments in socially nuanced contexts, limited interpretability, and redundant reasoning across turns. To address this, we propose RoTRAG, a retrieval augmented framework that incorporates concise human written moral norms, called Rules of Thumb (RoTs), into LLM based harm assessment. For each turn, RoTRAG retrieves relevant RoTs from an external corpus and uses them as explicit normative evidence for turn level reasoning and final severity classification. To improve efficiency, we further introduce a lightweight binary routing classifier that decides whether a new turn requires retrieval grounded reasoning or can reuse existing context. Experiments on ProsocialDialog and Safety Reasoning Multi Turn Dialogue show that RoTRAG consistently improves both harm classification and severity estimation over competitive baselines, with an average relative gain of around 40% in F1 across benchmark datasets and an average relative reduction of 8.4% in distributional error, while reducing redundant computation without sacrificing performance.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grounded Chess Reasoning in Language Models via Master Distillation

arXiv:2603.20510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models often lack grounded reasoning capabilities in specialized domains where training data is scarce but bespoke systems excel. We introduce a general framework for distilling expert system reasoning into natural language chain-of-thought explanations, enabling compact models to acquire domain expertise and the ability to generate faithful, grounded explanations. Rather than distilling only final outputs, we capture the full reasoning process, transforming opaque expert computations into transparent, step-by-step explanations. We demonstrate this approach in chess, a canonical reasoning domain where language models continue to underperform. Our 4B parameter model, C1, advances from a near-zero baseline to 48.1\% accuracy, outperforming all open-source models and most frontier proprietary systems. Notably, C1 surpasses its distillation teacher and generates solutions in two orders of magnitude fewer tokens than baselines. Unlike prior neural chess approaches that predict only best moves, C1 generates explainable solutions revealing strategic reasoning. Our pipeline combines supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with theme-balanced data sampling for comprehensive tactical coverage. Master Distillation demonstrates how to inject expert-level knowledge into compact models for under-optimized domains, offering a recipe for unlocking RLVR where LLMs lack sufficient base capabilities.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning to Distort: Weakly-Supervised Image Quality Transfer for Prostate DWI Correction

Single-shot echo-planar prostate diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is frequently complicated by geometric distortions, which impact the ability to derive reliable diagnoses from such images. Developing automated correction methods is challenged by the absence of paired distorted and undistorted clinical scans. In this paper, we first propose a novel weakly-supervised image quality transfer (IQT) framework from undistorted to distorted images that utilizes image quality assessment (IQA) signals to supervise the transfer process. Unlike traditional methods that require expensive, voxel-wise paired data or resort to developing unpaired algorithms, our approach utilizes image-level quality labels (here, distorted vs. undistorted) to establish latent quality prototypes within a pre-trained feature space. Recognizing that simulating realistic distortions is more reliable than direct unpaired correction, we describe a weakly-supervised prototype flow matching algorithm to explicitly regularize generative trajectories towards distorted prototypes, producing realistic susceptibility artifacts that mimic clinical degradations. By synthesizing these realistic pairs, we enable a second IQT model to be trained in the forward direction for distortion correction. Experimental results demonstrate that our generated images successfully mimic the diagnostic interference of real-world artifacts, which leads to more capable distortion correction IQT models. In addition to qualitative comparisons, we also conduct exhaustive quantitative evaluations that compare our approach with existing unpaired approaches (e.g., CycleGAN, UNIT-DDPM, and OT-FM) - as either forward or reverse alternatives - by assessing clinical downstream task performance in PI-RADS and Gleason score classification, using both in-distribution and external data sets.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

The Effective Number of Nonzeros: Theory and Regularization for Sparse Recovery

arXiv:2603.13826v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical sparse recovery treats all nonzero entries equally, though numerical noise often creates long tails of negligible coefficients. This paper develops an entropy-based notion of effective sparsity to measure the coefficients carrying significant mass. The central quantity, the effective number of nonzeros (ENZ), is obtained by exponentiating the Shannon entropy of the normalized magnitude distribution. We show that ENZ decomposes exactly into the support cardinality multiplied by a distributional efficiency factor, thereby making precise its relation to the $\ell_0$ count and explaining how it discounts uninformative coefficients. Furthermore, the Shannon ENZ is embedded into a parallel Rényi family that recovers several scale-invariant sparsity measures, including the $\ell_1/\ell_2$ ratio, as special cases. We then prove a stability result under a restricted isometry condition, establishing an explicit bound that depends on the tail energy, measurement perturbation, and restricted isometry constant. For computation, a separable unnormalized entropy surrogate is introduced to avoid global coupling. Numerical experiments on sparse signal recovery and gradient-domain image denoising demonstrate that the resulting regularizer is robust, computationally efficient, and competitive with standard sparsity penalties.

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

CRAFTIIF: Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.13486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is challenged by four structurally distinct anomaly types – point (isolated spikes), distributional (level shifts), temporal (rhythm changes), and collective (inter-sensor correlation breakdowns) – each requiring different feature representations. Most unsupervised methods target only one or two types and provide limited interpretability. We present CRAFTIIF (Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest), a fully unsupervised framework targeting all four types without dataset-specific tuning. CRAFTIIF generates K=500 random analytic wavelet feature draws across four families (Morlet, DOG, Haar, Coiflet), each targeting a specific anomaly type, feeding five structured Isolation Forests – one per type plus a meta-IF for compound anomalies. An adaptive Otsu/MAD threshold calibrates detection automatically across anomaly rates from 0.1% to 69.2%. Because each IF is trained exclusively on type-specific features, branch firing provides direct anomaly-type attribution by construction, without post-hoc explanation. Evaluated on all 19 datasets of the mTSBench benchmark (Zhou et al., TMLR 2026), CRAFTIIF achieves mean F1=0.228 (all 19 datasets) and F1=0.322 (13 detectable datasets), ranking first among all 25 evaluated methods on VUS-PR (0.463 vs. previous best 0.329, +40.7%). A diagnostic framework – oracle F1, detectability limits, and branch separation ratios – identifies 6 of 19 datasets as fundamentally undetectable by any unsupervised method. Ablation over 11 conditions confirms adaptive thresholding (+38% F1), four-branch structure (+20%), and meta-IF (+23%) are each essential. Code: https://github.com/smitswil/craftiif