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

SkillVetBench: LLM-as-Judge for Multi-Dimensional Security Risk Evaluation in Open-Source LLM Agent Skills

arXiv:2606.15899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLM agent ecosystems are growing rapidly, yet the security of community-contributed skills - modular tool definitions that extend agent capabilities - remains largely unvetted. The gap we fill: existing scanners operate at the code layer and are structurally blind to instruction-layer and multi-agent risk - natural-language directives that hijack an agent, exfiltrate data through encoded side channels, or chain harm across pipelines - so what is needed is a semantic, multi-dimensional vetting system rather than another signature matcher. We present SKILLVETBENCH, a live public leaderboard on Hugging Face that uses an LLM-as-Judge to vet agent skills. What is new: SARS (Skill Agentic Risk Score), a five-dimensional agentic-risk metric with a principled weighted formula for instruction-following systems. What is integrated: full CVSS v4.0 vector decomposition and a ClawHub dual-view that places our LLM-generated review beside the official marketplace verdict. What is demonstrated: drawing on our companion benchmark paper [ 1], the LLM-as-Judge stage achieves zero false negatives across 78 confirmed-malicious skills and zero false positives across 22 benign controls, while the best static baseline (SKILLSIEVE) still misses 15%; for instruction-layer categories such as Prompt Injection and Memory Poisoning, conventional tools miss between 89% and 100% of threats (e.g., CODEBERT detects none of nine memory-poisoning skills). Detection rates vary from 35% to 95% across four LLM evaluators, motivating ensemble scoring in production deployments.

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

Look Again Before You Abstain:Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition for Reliable Vision-Language Model

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hallucinate: they assert visual details that the image does not support. A principled remedy is selective prediction with a distribution-free guarantee-verify each claim and abstain when the claim is not grounded, so that the hallucination rate among asserted claims is provably bounded. We show, however, that this guarantee is bought at a brutal price: to keep the hallucination rate below $5\%$ on a balanced object-existence benchmark, a state-of-the-art conformal filter must abstain on more than $80\%$ of claims. We argue that abstention is wasteful when more visual evidence is cheaply available, and introduce Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition (BCEA), which replaces the binary answer/abstain decision with a three-way choice: answer, abstain, or acquire additional visual evidence by re-examining the image (zooming, cropping, or applying a claim-specific intervention) under a bounded compute budget. We make two observations. First, acquisition that is plugged naively into a calibrated filter breaks the statistical guarantee – realized risk overshoots the target by up to $17$ points – because the acquisition step destroys the exchangeability that conformal calibration relies on. Second, folding the entire acquisition policy into the score function and re-calibrating on post-acquisition scores restores the finite-sample guarantee while still recovering coverage. BCEA further uses structured, claim-type-specific interventions. Across the POPE benchmark and COCO-constructed existence and spatial-relation claims, on four open VLMs, BCEA controls the hallucination rate at the target level and consistently improves coverage over a guaranteed-abstention baseline.

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

Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of SAM 3 for Automated ITV Generation from 4DCT Images

Four-dimensional computed tomography (4DCT) captures the full respiratory cycle of thoracic anatomy, yet current Internal Target Volume contouring workflows process each phase in isolation, discarding temporal coherence and leaving contours vulnerable to phase-specific artifacts. We present a lightweight framework that applies parameter-efficient fine-tuning to the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) via low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to align its text-prompted segmentation with the medical domain using only seven annotated 3D CT volumes. Furthermore, the framework incorporates a hard negative mining strategy to improve boundary discrimination in low-contrast thoracic regions. At inference, phase-wise predictions are refined through phase-coherent temporal filtering and spatial connectivity analysis. Since respiratory motion is continuous and periodic, genuine anatomy appears in contiguous blocks of phases, whereas transient artifacts appear sporadically and are thus effectively suppressed. Experiments on pulmonary and cardiac structures yield median Dice scores of 0.968 and 0.910 with 95th-percentile Hausdorff distances of 0.998 mm and 2.931 mm, respectively. The proposed framework effectively eliminates the severe false-positive predictions inherent in the zero-shot inference of the unadapted SAM 3. With only seven annotated volumes, the framework retains over 95% of full-data accuracy, and the entire pipeline is trainable on a single consumer-grade GPU, demonstrating a scalable, data-efficient solution for adaptive radiotherapy.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Quantitative Oppenheim Conjecture for Random Quadratic Forms and Optimal Variance Bounds in Function Fields

arXiv:2606.16699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove a quantitative version of Oppenheim's conjecture in the function field setting. In order to do so, we compute the higher moments of the Siegel transform. In particular, we find an optimal bound on the variance of the number of lattice points in a set. Moreover, we compute the exact variance of the number of lattice points in a ball, which is of independent interest.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Extrema of microscopically slowed-down Gaussian fields

作者:

arXiv:2606.19207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a family of Gaussian fields whose covariance structure exhibits an inhomogeneous, microscopic slowdown and it interpolates between a $\log$ profile (for a certain interpolation parameter $\alpha=0$) and a $\log\log$ profile (when the interpolation parameter is $\alpha=1/2$). We consider both one dimensional such objects (which we call {\it Branching Brownian Motions in a cooling environment}) as well as higher dimensional, spatial fields. We identify the correct centering of the maximum at time $T$ and prove tightness of the recentered maximum. While the exponent in the first-order growth varies linearly with $\alpha$, giving a leading order of $T^{1-\alpha}$, the second-order correction exhibits a phase transition at $\alpha=1/3$.

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

The Optimal Rate Function in Covariant Quantum State Tomography

arXiv:2606.16948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The problem of quantum tomography is to estimate an unknown quantum state $\rho$ from a measurement of $n$ copies of $\rho$. One can ask which tomography protocol, i.e.\ which choice of multi-copy measurement, gives the best possible estimate of $\rho$. To do so, we characterize tomography protocols by their rate function, which governs the exponential rate at which a protocol assigns probability to a particular estimate $\sigma$ of the true state $\rho$. This rate function is a quantum mechanical generalization of the classical relative entropy between the true state and its estimate, and depends on the choice of protocol. It is bounded by the quantum relative entropy, and we show that this bound is sharp: for any $\rho$ and $\sigma$ we construct a family of protocols whose rate functions converge to the quantum relative entropy $D(\sigma\|\rho)$. We consider the family of covariant tomography protocols; these are the basis independent state estimation schemes that assume no prior information about $\rho$ and $\sigma$. Keyl described a specific tomography protocol based on Schur sampling, and conjectured that among all covariant tomography protocols it has the largest possible rate function for all $\sigma$ and $\rho$. We prove this conjecture. The resulting rate function is an annealed version of quantum relative entropy, due to the cost of learning the eigenbasis in covariant quantum state tomography.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Human-Guided Agentic AI for Multimodal Clinical Prediction: Lessons from the AgentDS Healthcare Benchmark

arXiv:2602.19502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of autonomous data science workflows, yet clinical prediction tasks demand domain expertise that purely automated approaches struggle to provide. We investigate how human guidance of agentic AI can improve multimodal clinical prediction, presenting our approach to all three AgentDS Healthcare benchmark challenges: 30-day hospital readmission prediction (Macro-F1 = 0.8986), emergency department cost forecasting (MAE = $465.13), and discharge readiness assessment (Macro-F1 = 0.7939). Across these tasks, human analysts directed the agentic workflow at key decision points, multimodal feature engineering from clinical notes, scanned PDF billing receipts, and time-series vital signs; task-appropriate model selection; and clinically informed validation strategies. Our approach ranked 5th overall in the healthcare domain, with a 3rd-place finish on the discharge readiness task. Ablation studies reveal that human-guided decisions compounded to a cumulative gain of +0.065 F1 over automated baselines, with multimodal feature extraction contributing the largest single improvement (+0.041 F1). We distill three generalizable lessons: (1) domain-informed feature engineering at each pipeline stage yields compounding gains that outperform extensive automated search; (2) multimodal data integration requires task-specific human judgment that no single extraction strategy generalizes across clinical text, PDFs, and time-series; and (3) deliberate ensemble diversity with clinically motivated model configurations outperforms random hyperparameter search. These findings offer practical guidance for teams deploying agentic AI in healthcare settings where interpretability, reproducibility, and clinical validity are essential.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When and How Severely: Scenario-Specific Safety Envelopes for Driving VLAs

arXiv:2606.14238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety certification of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving planners under ISO 21448 (SOTIF) rests on an Operational Design Domain (ODD) specification that answers two complementary questions: when does the planner start to fail, and how severely does it fail once it does? We evaluate Alpamayo R1, a 10B-parameter open-weight driving VLA, on 15,968 (clip, attack) pairs. We find a conservative-aggregate gap: an aggregate safe threshold of $\sigma \leq 50$ under a 15% average displacement error (ADE) budget masks well-sampled scenarios that tolerate the top of the tested grid ($\sigma = 70$). A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) on the changed-explanation subset identifies six discrete severity bands (BIC-optimal $k{=}6$), so two perturbation conditions with the same mean error can differ materially in their share of high-severity (C4/C5) failures. Joining the two analyses on the same corpus surfaces a finding neither yields in isolation: the scenarios with the loosest noise thresholds are not those with the lowest high-severity rate: STOP_SIGNAL concentrates roughly $4\times$ the C4/C5 share of LANE_KEEPING despite tolerating a larger $\sigma$. A deployable SOTIF ODD specification for driving VLAs therefore requires a two-dimensional safety envelope, not a single aggregate value per hazard.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Supersymmetry of dissipative Bose-Fermi systems with application to Jaynes-Cummings and Dicke models

arXiv:2606.12682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate how supersymmetries of Hamiltonians for coupled Bose-Fermi systems can be used to place the Hamiltonians of the Jaynes-Cummings model and Dicke model under the rotating wave approximation in matrix form and provide explicit analytic solutions for their eigenvalues. We then use this supersymmetry to place the Liouvillians of the associated Markovian open systems in matrix form and provide explicit solutions for their eigenvalues. These results are a consequence of the fact that the Hamiltonian of the Jaynes-Cummings model commutes with the linear Casimir invariant of the superalgebra $u(1|1)$ and that the Hamiltonian of the Dicke model commutes both with the linear invariant of $\sum_{i} u_{i}(1|1)$ and with the invariant of an additional $su(2)$ algebra. Our methods apply to various coupled Bose-Fermi systems with $u(1|1)$ and more generally with $u(n|m)$ dynamical superalgebras, and may provide efficient tools for studying more complicated examples.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multiagent Protocols with Aggregated Confidence Signals

arXiv:2606.13591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Confidence is used for reliability, oversight, and a range of downstream decision tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet no existing method produces or evaluates a confidence for the output of a multiagent system. Prior work uses confidence within multiagent debate (MAD) to weight messages, trigger debate, or calibrate individual agents, but it never aggregates these into a single confidence for the system itself. We introduce three protocols that produce a final answer along with a single aggregated confidence by first transforming raw confidence signals to make them comparable across models, then combining them via soft voting or a probability fusion we call Bayesian fusion. This aggregated confidence is substantially more discriminative (AUARC) than that of the best single agent or the standard debate baselines, while correctness (F1-score) stays stable and recovers the losses MAD incurs on more ambiguous tasks. Analyzing two estimators, sequence probability and self-report, alongside parametric and non-parametric calibrators, we find that calibration improves F1 for both estimators while AUARC is less reliant on it. We evaluate six homogeneous and heterogeneous debating pairs per benchmark, across five benchmarks and four task types, spanning a range of model capabilities and sizes.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Absolute continuity, supports and idempotent splitting in categorical probability

arXiv:2308.00651v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Markov categories have recently turned out to be a powerful high-level framework for probability and statistics. They accommodate purely categorical definitions of notions like conditional probability and almost sure equality, as well as proofs of fundamental results such as the Hewitt–Savage 0/1 Law, the de Finetti Theorem and the Ergodic Decomposition Theorem. In this work, we develop additional relevant notions from probability theory in the setting of Markov categories. This comprises improved versions of previously introduced definitions of absolute continuity and supports, as well as a detailed study of idempotents and idempotent splitting in Markov categories. Our main result on idempotent splitting is that every idempotent measurable Markov kernel between standard Borel spaces splits across another standard Borel space, and we derive this as an instance of a general categorical criterion for idempotent splitting in Markov categories.

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

Robin-Neumann Coupling of PINN and FEM Solvers: A Steklov-Poincaré View, with Application to Fluid-Structure Interaction with Contact

arXiv:2606.14181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are meshless and carry moving geometry and topology change through resampling of collocation points; the finite-element method (FEM) is the workhorse for boundary-fitted discretisations. Coupling the two across a shared interface promises the best of both, yet existing PINN-FEM schemes are validated only empirically. We put the coupling on a domain-decomposition footing: viewing each solver as a Steklov-Poincaré (trace-to-flux) operator, we transfer the classical Dirichlet-Neumann (DN) divergence diagnosis and its Robin-Neumann (RN) cure, including a closed-form, sweep-free interface impedance, and prove a PINN-specific contraction theorem: a trained network realises only a perturbed Steklov operator with a per-step training residual, and RN still contracts, with no shared-eigenbasis hypothesis, to a floor set by the achieved training loss. Because a PINN has no stiffness matrix, we introduce a Fourier-mode interface probe that recovers the network's resolvable Steklov eigenvalues to within 0.5% and doubles as a diagnostic of the network's spectral cap. The theory predicts measured PINN-FEM contraction rates to within 7% on 1D and 2D Poisson couplings, and a two-slab analogue of the large-added-mass regime shows RN's per-mode impedance matching winning decisively where tuned scalar relaxation saturates. We demonstrate the framework on a Stokes/rigid-disc problem with Alart-Curnier contact: the meshless PINN fluid absorbs the topology change at contact by collocation exclusion alone, no remeshing and no cut cells, and the static-equilibrium contact reaction matches the submerged weight to 0.4% under mesh refinement. We quantify remaining limitations: the warm-started PINN drifts off the Stokes manifold over long horizons, and matched FEM-FEM benchmarks attribute pre-impact squeeze-film signatures to PINN under-resolution.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

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

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

From 50K to 8.2 Million in 24 Hours: Vozinha's Algorithmic Consecration and the Multilingual Making of World Cup Visibility

We present a multilingual computational discourse analysis of how language constructed the algorithmic consecration of Vozinha, the 40-year-old Cape Verde goalkeeper, after Spain 0-0 Cape Verde at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The study contributes a multilingual corpus in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French; a nine-frame narrative taxonomy with cue-based frame annotation; a reproducible annotation pipeline combining LLM-assisted suggestion with human validation; and an analysis of cross-lingual narrative diffusion across discourse phases. We treat the platform follower count itself, narrated as "50k to 8M", as a linguistic object: a circulating and narratable proof of visibility rather than a mere measurement. The follower-growth timeline is used only as contextual metadata: we reconstruct a conservative phase structure, not a continuous API-native series, and type every datapoint by value class, confidence, and evidence type. The only exact primary scraper anchor is 8,235,652 followers at 2026-06-16 15:47 UTC; all other figures are reported as estimated ranges or thresholds, including an estimated pre-match baseline of 45k-56k. Findings suggest that distinct languages carried distinct frames: Portuguese mobilization, Spanish crisis, English nation-making, and a shared platform-metric spectacle through which peripheral athletic performance became globally visible. As a v0.1 pilot, the paper releases the corpus schema, frame taxonomy, annotation guidelines, hashed visual-evidence log, and typed timeline, while flagging full double annotation and inter-annotator agreement as planned work.

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

A Differentiable Composite Approximation Framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Maneuvering Modeling from Sea-Trial Data

arXiv:2606.19711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-based modeling from onboard measurements can produce autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) maneuvering models that reflect real operating characteristics. From an approximation perspective, conventional maneuvering models use predefined constraint polynomial bases, whereas data-driven models use data-adaptive bases. Motivated by this basis-function view, this paper presents a differentiable composite-approximation formulation, in which the polynomial-basis component and the data-adaptive basis component are treated as differentiable parts of a single predictor and calibrated jointly. A gradient-based co-calibration method is developed for full-scale AUV maneuvering prediction, where a sensitivity-aware mechanism regulates bounded polynomial updates while the neural residual captures remaining nonlinear discrepancies under a shared prediction objective. To account for ocean-current effects in field data, a turning-motion-based current estimation and compensation procedure is incorporated to construct current-compensated learning targets for training and rollout. The framework is evaluated using sea-trial data collected from a 7-meter AUV under multiple maneuvering conditions. Results show that the proposed method improves recursive trajectory and velocity prediction compared with polynomial-only, neural-only, and frozen-prior hybrid baselines, demonstrating its applicability to field-data-based AUV maneuvering modeling.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Mind the Perspective: Let's Reason Recursively for Theory of Mind

arXiv:2606.11724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning requires inferring agents' beliefs from partial and asymmetric observations, which remains an open challenge for LLMs. Existing prompting-based approaches improve ToM reasoning through observable-event filtering or temporal belief chains, without explicitly modeling nested beliefs. We introduce RecToM, an inference-time framework for ToM reasoning that models nested beliefs via recursive perspective construction. RecToM constructs each character perspective from the preceding character perspective along the character chain specified by the question, reducing higher-order belief questions to actual-world questions within the final constructed perspective. We further provide a KD45 analysis showing that RecToM's perspective construction induces a well-formed belief modality beyond simple event filtering. Experiments on ToM benchmarks, including Hi-ToM, Big-ToM, and FanToM, across multiple LLM backbones show that RecToM consistently outperforms recent advanced approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, RecToM reaches 100\% accuracy on Hi-ToM with GPT-5.4 and Qwen3.5, a benchmark requiring higher-order ToM reasoning.

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

Vibrato Expression Control for Singing Voice Conversion with Improving Independent Control

arXiv:2606.17126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Singing style is a crucial aspect of a natural and expressive singing voice. Singers utilize singing styles to convey the feeling or emotion of the songs. Several works have been proposed to control singing style for making the more expressive singing voice. Recently, VibE-SVC successfully controls vibrato by predicting high-frequency F0 contour. In this paper, we introduce a singing voice conversion framework, called VibE-SVC2, to improve singing style conversion performance and controllability. The model offers control over two types of singing styles: a pitch style and a timbre style. For the pitch style, to resolve the pitch-energy entanglement issue that is unresolved in our previous work, we introduce a novel Energy Style Converter to address remaining style information in the energy contour. In addition, we propose a Zero-shot Pitch Style Converter, which mimics the pitch style of reference audio. To expand the controllability of the model, we propose vibrato rate scaling that is an independent control of vibrato extent, which is unavailable in VibE-SVC. For the timbre style, we extend the model to handle a variety of phonation styles. However, addressing specific styles such as vocal fry poses a challenge, as conventional F0 extraction often fails due to their inherent subharmonic characteristics, which degrades the conversion quality. To address this, we propose a novel Subharmonic Correction algorithm to refine the F0 contour for more natural timbre conversion. Through comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations, we demonstrate that VibE-SVC2 provides fine-grained, independent control over two types of singing styles, outperforming existing methods.

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

From Concept-Aligned Tokens to Vulnerable Features: Mechanistic Localization of Jailbreaks

Jailbreak attacks expose a persistent failure mode in safety-aligned LLMs: models can be pushed into harmful behavior, but the internal representations enabling this shift remain poorly localized. Recent mechanistic safety studies often explain such behavior through broad representational objects, including global refusal directions, activation steering vectors, and refusal-related SAE features. We instead ask whether jailbreak vulnerability can be traced to finer-grained, prompt-conditioned SAE feature subgroups. We introduce a token-driven mechanistic pipeline that decomposes the residual stream of Gemma-2-2B into Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features and identifies feature subgroups associated with unsafe behavior. Using single-category unsafe examples from BeaverTails to reduce cross-category interference, we extract harmful concepts from adversarial responses and align them with concept-relevant prompt tokens through subspace similarity. We then apply three feature-grouping strategies: cluster-based, hierarchical-linkage, and single-token-driven, to identify SAE feature subgroups across all 26 layers. Finally, we amplify the top features in each subgroup and evaluate the resulting generations with a standardized harmfulness judge. Single-token-driven grouping achieves harmfulness comparable to full cluster-based grouping, showing that individual harmful prompt tokens are sufficient to localize vulnerability-relevant SAE feature subgroups without relying on broader cluster-level aggregation. These subgroups appear across early and mid-to-late layers, with stronger concentration in mid-to-late layers, where targeted steering exposes specific model vulnerabilities. Overall, our results suggest that jailbreak susceptibility can be traced to sparse, token-localized SAE feature subgroups, complementing prior accounts based on broad adversarial, refusal, or steering directions.

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

How Reliable are Fairness Audits with Unreliable Data?

arXiv:2506.23033v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fairness audits are a key component of responsible machine-learning deployment. Yet, audit-recommendation reliability under incomplete protected-label access is still poorly understood. In this work, we focused on protected-label missingness in fairness mitigation audits. We introduced a seed-calibrated stress test to separate missingness effects from seed-to-seed movement already present under complete labels. Across ACS/Folktables tasks, missingness settings that retain some protected labels usually do not move selected mitigation methods beyond a complete-label seed-to-seed baseline. At $0%$ protected-label access, candidates collapse to an empirical-risk-minimization baseline and deterministic tie-breaking rather than revealing a broad missingness effect. We also found that threshold optimization can turn fairness gains on a single protected axis into intersectional harm above a seed baseline, and this threshold-optimizer finding persists under random-forest validation. Overall, our results highlight that protected-label missingness should be reported with seed-null calibration, candidate-set context, and intersectional consequences before it is treated as evidence of audit fragility.

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

Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

arXiv:2509.14959v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate discrete optimal transport (DOT) as a black-box attack against modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) and anti-spoofing countermeasure (CM) systems. Our attack operates as a post-processing distribution-alignment step. Frame-level WavLM embeddings of generated speech (or another person speech) are aligned to an unpaired bona fide speech pool using entropic optimal transport and a top-k barycentric projection, followed by neural vocoding. Unlike gradient-based attacks, the proposed method requires no access to model parameters, gradients, or training data. Experiments on ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof5 demonstrate that DOT attack substantially increases CM EER and substantially degrades ASV performance across multiple spoofing attacks. The attack transfers across datasets and remains effective after CM fine-tuning. Analysis using speaker similarity, Fréchet Audio Distance, and visualization of embedding distributions suggests that DOT succeeds by shifting source speech toward bona fide regions of the representation space rather than by maximizing speaker similarity. These results indicate that optimal-transport-based distribution alignment represents a previously underexplored attack vector for contemporary ASV and anti-spoofing systems.

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

MatchLM2Lite: A Scalable MLLM-to-Lite Framework for Reproduced Content Identification

Content moderation is critical for online video platforms to ensure content safety, protect creators, and sustain positive user experiences. Beyond filtering harmful content, platforms must guarantee content authenticity at scale so that users are exposed to diverse, original videos rather than low-value reproductions. We present MatchLM2Lite, a real-time, production-grade reproduced content identification (RCI) system that leverages the powerful understanding of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) distilled into a small and fast-inference model. Our system jointly models video, audio, and text signals, operating on pairs of videos to produce fine-grained reproduction scores. The system comprises two modules, MatchLM and MatchLite, and a two-stage training recipe. First, our high-capacity MLLM, MatchLM, serves as a teacher model to define the upper bound of RCI performance. Its capabilities are then distilled into a compact student model, MatchLite. This design allows MatchLite to deliver low-latency, high-throughput inference on video pairs while preserving much of MatchLM's accuracy, making it suitable for integration into real-time recommendation systems. MatchLM achieves an F1-score improvement of +8.57 compared to our previous production model. After knowledge distillation, MatchLite retains a +6.55 gain in F1-score while reducing computational cost by 35x. Deployed at scale, MatchLM2Lite enables efficient, pairwise multimodal RCI, stably serving online traffic at high queries per second (QPS) with an end-to-end latency below 30 seconds. This system has reduced the reproduced video view rate on our platform by 2.5% without degrading user engagement, demonstrating its effectiveness in a large-scale production environment.

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

Breaking the Solver Bottleneck: Training Task Generators at the Learnable Frontier

The limiting resource for training agents via reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly frontier task supply: valid, solvable tasks just difficult enough to train the current model. As reasoning and agentic models improve, fixed task distributions saturate, while naive synthetic generation yields tasks that are trivial, impossible, or ill-posed. Training a task generator with RL to optimize validity and learnability can address this bottleneck, but direct optimization requires repeated solver rollouts per candidate. For software-engineering (SWE) tasks, a single rollout can take tens of minutes; solver-in-the-loop generator training is intractable. We introduce PROPEL, a solver-amortized framework for training task generators at the targeted solve rate. PROPEL trains a lightweight activation probe on a one-time labeled corpus of generated tasks and solver outcomes. The probe predicts target-solver pass rate from a frozen generator reference model and serves as a proxy for solve rate during generator optimization, reducing generator evaluation to a single forward pass. Across math, code, and software-engineering at multiple model scales, PROPEL shifts generation toward the targeted solve rate: for coding, tasks generated at the learnable frontier increase from $10.1\% \rightarrow 20.0\%$ for a Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct solver and from $5.3\% \rightarrow 12.6\%$ for a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct solver. For SWE, PROPEL increases the share of generations at the targeted solve rate from $9.8\% \rightarrow 19.6\%$ for Qwen3.5-27B on repositories not seen during training of probe and generator.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing

Flow matching based video generative models have been increasingly relying on prepended Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to handle complex, instruction-based video editing. The prevailing assumption underlying this paradigm is that a connector module can seamlessly align the VLM's rich multi-modal reasoning with the original text embedding space of DiTs. However, we hypothesize that this alignment acts as a severe semantic bottleneck, degrading fine-grained structural variables. Verifying this is challenging, as end-to-end evaluations conflate alignment failures with generation errors, and natural datasets lack disentangled annotations. To rigorously investigate this, we propose a controlled data processing pipeline based on video composition that results in TRACE-Edit, a diagnostic dataset focusing on relation-based editing. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic protocol to analyze two important designs of meta-query and connector in the existing video editing models. Systematic evaluation of four representative model cases reveals that fine-grained structural semantics can be severely degraded during alignment. Our findings overturn the assumption of lossless semantic transfer, identifying the VLM-to-DiT alignment as a major bottleneck and providing a new diagnostic foundation for future multi-modal alignment architectures.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

We present an automated approach to distinguish between ply instances in semantic segmentation masks of high-resolution carbon-fiber reinforced polymer micrographs. Interpreting the segmentation mask as a graph with pixels as vertices, enables us to use a shortest-path algorithm yielding the ply-separating paths. Thereby, we bridge the gap between semantic segmentation and ply instance segmentation using global information. We successfully apply our approach on high-resolution micrographs featuring a broad range of characteristics like artificially added gaps in single or multiple plies, different stacking sequences and ply traversing cracks. Assigning each fiber pixel to a ply based on the calculated paths, allows for a comprehensive, quantitative ply analysis with respect to its microstructural properties like the local fiber volume fraction as well as locally resolved ply and interleaf layer thickness. These insights help to reveal manufacturing-induced inhomogeneities, draw conclusions on manufacturing parameters and link mechanical properties to underlying microstructural imperfections.