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

Fast and high-fidelity transfer of edge states via dynamical control of topological phases and effects of dissipation

arXiv:2505.16606v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological edge states are robust against symmetry-preserving perturbations and noise, making them promising for quantum information and computation, particularly in topological quantum computation through the braiding operations of Majorana quasiparticles. Realizing these applications requires fast and high-fidelity dynamic control of edge states. In this work, we theoretically propose a high-fidelity protocol for transferring topological edge states by dynamically moving a domain wall between two regions with different topological numbers in one dimension. This protocol fundamentally relies on Lorentz invariance and relativistic effects, because moving the domain wall at a constant speed is described by a mass term with the uniform linear motion in the Dirac equation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol in transferring edge states with high fidelity using a one-dimensional quantum walk with two internal states, which is feasible with current experimental technology. We also investigate how bit-flip and dephasing dissipation to the environment affect transfer efficiency. Remarkably, bit (dephasing) dissipation does not affect the fidelity at the slow (fast) transfer limit, which can be explained by the relativistic effects on the edge states.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

NavWM: A Unified Navigation World Model for Foresight-Driven Planning

Conventional visual navigation policies often struggle with myopic decision-making and mode collapse in complex environments. While world models offer a promising alternative, existing paradigms typically isolate perception, generation, and control, failing to capture their shared spatio-temporal dynamics. In this paper, we propose NavWM, a unified navigation world model that seamlessly integrates latent world reasoning, multimodal action prediction, and controllable visual generation. At its core, NavWM leverages latent world tokens to distill geometric and semantic priors, endowing the agent with robust structural understanding. To overcome the limitations of deterministic policies, we introduce an anchor-based multimodal trajectory forecasting framework that generates a diverse action space. This inherent diversity explicitly empowers the generative world model to act as a robust closed-loop planner, utilizing visual foresight to evaluate and select the optimal path. Extensive experiments across diverse robotics datasets demonstrate that NavWM significantly advances the state-of-the-art, delivering remarkable improvements in both high-fidelity future state generation and zero-shot navigation success.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Approximating optimal decoding of quantum LDPC codes with narrow frontiers

arXiv:2606.20513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Frontier decoder, a pruned dynamic-programming decoder for sparse quantum decoding problems. Frontier processes error variables in a chosen order, merges prefixes with the same residual syndrome and logical label, and approximates logical-coset posterior masses by retaining only a narrow scored frontier. Without pruning, the recursion is exact ordered inference with exponential complexity. In the code-capacity setting, the decoder reaches thresholds close to optimal for the surface code and the color code. In the circuit-level noise model, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small average retained list size: less than 100 for the gross code $[[144,12,12]]$ at a physical error rate of $0.001$. When the list size is constant, the decoder has linear complexity, suggesting the possibility of low-latency implementations.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Multi-LCB: Extending LiveCodeBench to Multiple Programming Languages

arXiv:2606.20517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LiveCodeBench (LCB) has recently become a widely adopted benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on code-generation tasks. By curating competitive programming problems, constantly adding fresh problems to the set, and filtering them by release dates, LCB provides contamination-aware evaluation and offers a holistic view of coding capability. However, LCB remains restricted to Python, leaving open the question of whether LLMs can generalize across the diverse programming languages required in real-world software engineering. We introduce Multi-LCB, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs across twelve programming languages, including Python. Multi-LCB transforms Python tasks from the LCB dataset into equivalent tasks in other languages while preserving LCB's contamination controls and evaluation protocol. Because it is fully compatible with the original LCB format, Multi-LCB will automatically track future LCB updates, enabling systematic assessment of cross-language code generation competence and requiring models to sustain performance well beyond Python. We evaluated 24 LLMs for instruction and reasoning on Multi-LCB, uncovering evidence of Python overfitting, language-specific contamination, and substantial disparities in multilingual performance. Our results establish Multi-LCB as a rigorous new benchmark for multi-programming-language code evaluation, directly addressing LCB's primary limitation and exposing critical gaps in current LLM capabilities.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

CADO: From Imitation to Cost Minimization for Heatmap-based Solvers in Combinatorial Optimization

arXiv:2602.08210v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heatmap-based solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for Combinatorial Optimization (CO). However, we argue that the dominant Supervised Learning (SL) training paradigm suffers from a fundamental objective mismatch: minimizing imitation loss (e.g., cross-entropy) does not guarantee solution cost minimization. We dissect this mismatch into two deficiencies: Decoder-Blindness (being oblivious to the non-differentiable decoding process) and Cost-Blindness (prioritizing structural imitation over solution quality). We empirically demonstrate that these intrinsic flaws impose a hard performance ceiling. To overcome this limitation, we propose CADO (Cost-Aware Diffusion models for Optimization), a streamlined Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning framework that formulates the diffusion denoising process as an MDP to directly optimize the post-decoded solution cost. We introduce Label-Centered Reward, which repurposes ground-truth labels as unbiased baselines rather than imitation targets, and Hybrid Fine-Tuning for parameter-efficient adaptation. CADO achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks, validating that objective alignment is essential for unlocking the full potential of heatmap-based solvers.

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

Streaming Interventions: Can Video Large Language Models Correct Mistakes as They Occur?

arXiv:2606.09547v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning everyday skills, like cooking a dish, relies increasingly on instructional media such as online videos. This opens the door to the use of video (and multimodal) large language models (LLMs) as task guidance assistants. A crucial capability for the real-world success of a prospective task guidance assistant is it's ability to intervene proactively as soon as a mistake is apparent in order to guide the user. To evaluate this crucial capability, we introduce Ego-MC-Bench (Mistake Corrections), a benchmark for evaluating reactive, step-by-step task guidance in realistic cooking scenarios. Extensive experiments show that Ego-MC-Bench is highly challenging for state-of-the-art video LLMs. We argue that a key reason is the limited availability of training data for fine-tuning models on this task. Although there exists a wide range of cooking video datasets, existing datasets lack examples of mistakes along with appropriately timed interventions. To help address this data limitation, we also introduce Ego-CoMist, a counterfactual synthetic dataset created by transforming non -interactive cooking videos into supervised training examples showing proactive interventions. We show that fine-tuning on Ego-CoMist yields performance gains especially for smaller and more efficient video LLMs that are well suited for delivering assistance on edge devices.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Exposing the Illusion of Fairness: Auditing Vulnerabilities to Distributional Manipulation Attacks

arXiv:2507.20708v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains, including those classified as high-risk under the The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has intensified the need for reliable compliance auditing. For binary classifiers, regulatory risk assessment often relies on global fairness metrics such as the Disparate Impact ratio, widely used to evaluate potential discrimination. In typical auditing settings, the auditee provides a subset of its dataset to an auditor, while a supervisory authority may verify whether this subset is representative of the full underlying distribution. In this work, we investigate to what extent a malicious auditee can construct a fairness-compliant yet representative-looking sample from a non-compliant original distribution, thereby creating an illusion of fairness. We formalize this problem as a constrained distributional projection task and introduce mathematically grounded manipulation strategies based on entropic and optimal transport projections. These constructions characterize the minimal distributional shift required to satisfy fairness constraints. To counter such attacks, we formalize representativeness through distributional distance based statistical tests and systematically evaluate their ability to detect manipulated samples. Our analysis highlights the conditions under which fairness manipulation can remain statistically undetected and provides practical guidelines for strengthening supervisory verification. We validate our theoretical findings through experiments on standard tabular datasets for bias detection. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ValentinLafargue/Inspection.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Eigen-Spike Emergence and Quadratic Equivalents for Conjugate Kernels on Nonlinearly Separable Data

arXiv:2605.29669v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work in random matrix theory (RMT) has developed the notion of deterministic equivalents: typically linear surrogate models that approximate the spectral behavior of large nonlinear random matrices, such as nonlinear feature maps in neural networks (NNs). Such equivalents make theoretical predictions tractable by reducing a complex model to a simpler one with properties that fall under the umbrella of classical RMT tools. However, this leaves open the question of whether this idealized linear equivalence remains meaningful for classification of high-dimensional nonlinearly separable data. Motivated by this, we consider the conjugate kernel (CK), which is the nonlinear feature map of a one-layer feedforward NN, under a canonical nonlinearly separable dataset for the XOR problem; and we use the study of informative outlier eigenvalues in the CK and whether their corresponding eigenvectors asymptotically align with XOR labels as a proxy for nonlinear learnability. We develop a robust quadratic equivalent of the CK matrix that enables a precise analysis of emergent informative spikes, as one modifies various knobs common in ML practice: sample complexity, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), nonlinear activation choice, and pretrained features. We identify regimes in which these knobs move the CK beyond the linear equivalent and produce BBP-type transitions to label-aligned outlier eigenspaces. Our analysis helps bring deterministic-equivalence tools from RMT to bear on problems of practical relevance in ML.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Conservation Law for Equilibrium Propagation and Coupled Learning

arXiv:2606.15444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we show that the physical learning methods known as coupled learning (CL) and equilibrium propagation (EP) conserve a mass-like quantity in the trainable parameters in the continuous-time, small-nudging limit. We prove that this conservation holds in a broad range of physically relevant settings. We then show that the conservation law constrains the training dynamics in a way that makes convergence reliable in important settings for linear circuits. We conclude by discussing some practical implications of this conservation law.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Emergent Bell Phase in an Electro-Nanomechanical Quantum Simulator

arXiv:2511.02613v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Suspended carbon nanotubes hosting electrostatically defined quantum dots allow for exceptionally strong and tunable electromechanical coupling as well as mechanical modes that can reach the quantum ground state of motion simply by cryogenic cooling. This makes them a unique platform for quantum simulation of electron-phonon coupling. Here, we propose an experimentally realisable setup with two such carbon nanotubes in parallel, each hosting four quantum dots. Our system not only exhibits phonon-mediated electron-electron attraction, but also supports a robust, maximally entangled Bell phase at mesoscopic scales shared across the subsystems. These features highlight its potential as a simulator of strongly correlated quantum systems.

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

Distribution-Agnostic Robust Trajectory Optimization via Chance-Constrained Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.13605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a distribution-agnostic robust trajectory-optimization framework based on chance-constrained reinforcement learning. The uncertainty is represented here through initial conditions and process noise, with the only requirement being that it can be sampled. A deterministic nominal trajectory is first computed offline, and reinforcement learning is then used only to robustify that baseline through a structured affine closed-loop correction law comprising a feedforward control adjustment and time-varying feedback gains. Probabilistic feasibility is enforced empirically through rollout-based upper-tail quantiles, while terminal dispersion is regulated through covariance-feasibility penalties. The framework is assessed on two materially different trajectory design problems. The flagship case study is a three-dimensional multi-impulse Earth-Mars transfer, where the learned policy is benchmarked against a recent robust trajectory-optimization reference under Gaussian uncertainty and then evaluated under bounded uniform uncertainty and under process disturbances not seen during training. The second case study is a stochastic atmospheric pinpoint rocket landing problem, used to assess portability to a short-horizon continuous-thrust setting with drag, mass depletion, and glide-slope constraints. The results show that the proposed framework can remain competitive in upper-tail fuel cost while preserving probabilistic feasibility, and that the same robustification scaffold can be carried across heterogeneous spacecraft trajectory planning problems without redesign of its core stochastic-control structure.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

GLARE: A Natural Language Interface for Querying Global Explanations

arXiv:2606.19735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While global explanations are crucial for understanding vision models across datasets, classes, and decision contexts, their complex and monolithic nature often hinders practical exploration. Because users typically seek targeted answers to specific questions rather than static artifacts, we present an LLM-based interactive interface that provides natural language access to global explanations for black-box image classifiers. The system's core LLM acts as a mediator, translating natural language questions into structured SQL queries over local explanation data. This enables flexible aggregation without exposing users to low-level representations. For each query, the interface outputs statistics-augmented natural language responses, supporting local explanations, and intent-aligned visualizations. We evaluate the system on intent interpretation, query mapping accuracy, generalization to novel queries and datasets, and robustness to linguistic errors. Our results demonstrate that LLM-mediated querying substantially improves the accessibility and usability of global explanations for human-centered XAI.

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

Revisiting Chebyshev Polynomial and Anisotropic RBF Models for Tabular Regression

arXiv:2602.22422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smooth-basis models such as Chebyshev polynomial regressors and radial basis function (RBF) networks are well established in numerical analysis. Their continuously differentiable prediction surfaces suit surrogate optimisation, sensitivity analysis, and other settings where the response varies gradually with inputs. Despite these properties, smooth models seldom appear in tabular regression, where tree ensembles dominate. We ask whether they can compete, benchmarking models across 55 regression datasets organised by application domain. We develop an anisotropic RBF network with data-driven centre placement and gradient-based width optimisation, a ridge-regularised Chebyshev polynomial regressor, and a smooth-tree hybrid (Chebyshev model tree); all three are released as scikit-learn-compatible packages. We benchmark these against tree ensembles, a pre-trained transformer, and standard baselines, evaluating accuracy alongside generalisation behaviour. The transformer ranks first on accuracy across a majority of datasets, but its GPU dependence, inference latency, and dataset-size limits constrain deployment in the CPU-based settings common across applied science and industry. Among CPU-viable models, smooth models and tree ensembles are statistically tied on accuracy, but the former tend to exhibit tighter generalisation gaps. We recommend routinely including smooth-basis models in the candidate pool, particularly when downstream use benefits from tighter generalisation and gradually varying predictions.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Utility of genetic screening for the prediction of severe arrhythmic outcomes in mitral valve prolapse

Background: Cardiomyopathy and channelopathy (CC) gene variants have been linked to sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) or death (SCD) in small, selected pedigree or post-mortem studies of arrhythmic mitral valve prolapse (MVP). However, the utility of clinical whole exome sequencing (WES) panels as a risk stratification tool in unselected MVP samples is unknown. Objectives: The goal of the study was to test the utility of clinical WES panels with CC variant screening for arrhythmic risk stratification in MVP. Methods: We performed research based WES in 203 consecutive MVPs without other arrhythmic substrate. Variants were filtered for rare (

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

An Improved Generative Adversarial Network for Micro-Resistivity Imaging Logging Restoration

An improved GAN-based imaging logging image restoration method is presented in this paper for solving the problem of partially missing micro-resistivity imaging logging images. The method uses FCN as the generative network infrastructure and adds a depth-separable convolutional residual block to learn and retain more effective pixel and semantic information; an Inception module is added to increase the multi-scale perceptual field of the network and reduce the number of parameters in the network; and a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block are added to combine the channel attention. The multi-scale module adds a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block, which combine the channel attention mechanism and the residual block to achieve multi-scale feature extraction. The global discriminative network and the local discriminative network are designed to gradually improve the content and semantic structure coherence between the restored parts and the whole image by playing off each other and the generative network. According to the experimental results, the average structural similarity measure of the five sets of imaged logging images with different sizes of missing regions in the test set is 0.903, which is an improvement of about 0.3 compared with other similar methods. It is shown that the method in this study can be used for the restoration of micro-resistivity imaging log images with good improvement in semantic structural coherence and texture details, thus providing a new deep learning method to ensure the smooth advancement of the subsequent interpretation of micro-resistivity imaging log images.

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

Shepherd: Enabling Programmable Meta-Agents via Reversible Agentic Execution Traces

arXiv:2605.10913v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As LLM agent systems take on more complex tasks, they increasingly rely on meta-agents: higher-order agents that create, operate on and manage other agents. Meta-agent operations such as coordinating agents, halting risky actions before execution, or repairing failed runs, require runtime manipulation of agentic execution. Yet existing agentic substrates make this difficult: they expose only transcripts and environment snapshots, forcing meta-agents to build ad hoc tooling to reconstruct and operate over full execution state. Therefore, we introduce Shepherd, a Python substrate grounded in functional programming principles, where an agent's execution is itself a first-class object that a meta-agent can easily inspect and transform. Every model action, tool call, and environment change becomes a structured event in a reversible, Git-like execution trace, where any past state can be reverted 5x faster than docker commit and fork. Three example use cases show Shepherd's versatility: (1) a supervisor meta-agent prevents conflicts among parallel coding agents, lifting pair-coding pass rate from 28.8% to 54.7% on CooperBench; (2) a counterfactual optimization meta-agent repairs agent workflows by proposing edits and replaying runs from the point of changed behavior, outperforming MetaHarness on Terminal-Bench 2.0 by 12.8% with 58% lower wall-clock; (3) a training meta-agent picks fork points during rollouts to improve credit assignment in long-horizon agentic RL, doubling GRPO's uplift on Terminal-Bench 2.0. We open-source Shepherd to enable principled and efficient operations over agentic execution for both users and meta-agents.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Image-based deep learning for emergency electrocardiogram classification

Automated electrocardiogram analysis has advanced largely through digital waveforms, yet many emergency-care workflows rely on ECGs available only as printed tracings, scanned reports, PDFs or mobile photographs. We developed an image-based deep learning system for emergency ECG classification and evaluated it in InCor-EMG, an expert-adjudicated dataset of 18,519 emergency ECGs spanning 12 ECG categories, with labels from 19 cardiologists. On the held-out test set, the final ConvNeXt ensemble achieved a macro F1-score of 0.807 (95% CI, 0.788-0.825), compared with 0.820 (95% CI, 0.805-0.832) for annotating cardiologists, and higher F1-scores than Mortara Veritas in most evaluated categories. Performance was associated more strongly with inter-reader agreement than with training sample size and remained informative across scanned and photographed ECGs, with supportive performance in model-enriched temporal and heterogeneous public-image evaluations. These findings support ECG image classification when digital waveforms are unavailable.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Model selection with proper scoring rules on data sets of time series

arXiv:2606.24715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of model selection between probabilistic models on data sets of time series. Chosen a proper scoring rule, we denote by the term score the average value of the scoring rule on the test of an individual time series. For model selection, we need aggregating the values of the scores across multiple time series. Three summary statistics are commonly used for model selection: mean score, median score, and mean rank. Results in previous papers show that these statistics can yield conflicting decisions; we show how the conflicting conclusions are due to the skewness of the distribution of scores. We also show that as the test set of each time series of the data set increases, the different model selection criteria progressively converge to the same conclusion. However, for short tests sets, only the mean score identifies the true model as the best. We illustrate these phenomena with an analysis on intermittent time series, including the data set of the M5 competition, where we underline the importance of having a large test set. In such experiments, we further notice that model selection based on mean ranks remains unchanged using different scaling factors.

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

When LLMs Analyze Scars: From Images to Clinically-Meaningful Features

Medical image classification faces a fundamental dilemma: while deep learning models achieve remarkable performance at scale, real-world clinical scenarios often suffer from severe data scarcity due to annotation costs, privacy constraints, and disease rarity. This challenge is particularly pronounced in pathological scar classification, where differentiating keloids from hypertrophic scars requires subtle expert knowledge and labeled images are extremely limited. We propose a novel paradigm that repositions large language models (LLMs) as knowledge-driven feature engineers rather than end-to-end classifiers. We call this framework ScaFE (Scar Feature Engineering). Our key insight is that LLMs encode rich medical knowledge that can be externalized as executable feature extraction code, enabling the transformation of high-dimensional images into low-dimensional, clinically interpretable representations. Specifically, we prompt an LLM with established scar assessment criteria to generate deterministic Python code that extracts features aligned with clinical scoring systems such as the Vancouver Scar Scale. Our approach offers three key advantages: (1) data efficiency, achieving robust performance with limited training samples by decoupling knowledge acquisition from statistical learning; (2) privacy preservation, as raw images are processed locally without exposure to external LLMs; and (3) interpretability, through explicit features grounded in clinical reasoning. Extensive experiments on scar classification demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms end-to-end deep learning baselines or using LLMs as black-box classifiers under limited data conditions, establishing a promising direction for integrating LLMs into data-efficient and clinically transparent medical AI systems.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Light-induced nonadiabatic dissipative quantum dynamics of the Na2 molecule

arXiv:2606.15292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Strong light-matter coupling between molecules and optical or plasmonic cavity modes has emerged as a promising platform for advancing photonics, materials science, and chemistry. However, optical cavities and plasmonic resonators in particular are inherently lossy systems characterized by finite photon lifetimes. Accurate theoretical descriptions of molecular dynamics under strong coupling therefore require a proper treatment of cavity losses. In this work, we compare three theoretical approaches for modeling dissipative molecule-cavity dynamics within a realistic parameter regime: the Lindblad master equation, the stochastic Schrödinger equation, and the non-Hermitian Schrödinger equation. As an example, we consider the two lowest energy state of Na2 molecule coupled to a cavity mode and analyze the time evolution of the excited-state population and the mean photon number. Our results demonstrate that the stochastic Schrödinger equation provides an accurate and computationally efficient alternative to the Lindblad master equation, while the non-Hermitian Schrödinger approach is found to be applicable only within a limited range of conditions. Furthermore, we show that inclusion of molecular rotation leads to rotational-vibrational-photonic coupling and gives rise to pronounced nonadiabatic dynamics through light-induced conical intersections. These findings highlight the importance of both dissipation and rotational degrees of freedom for a realistic description of molecular dynamics in strongly coupled molecule-cavity systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Graph-Based Phonetic Error Correction of Noisy ASR

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, despite low overall word error rates, produce residual lexical errors that disproportionately affect semantically critical tokens such as named entities, negations, and sentiment-bearing words. These errors are often structured, arising from phonetic similarity rather than random noise, making naive token-level correction insufficient. We propose a structured ASR correction framework, that we call G-SPIN, that combines phonetic graph modeling with contextual language understanding. A graph neural network (GNN) first constructs acoustically plausible candidate neighborhoods for flagged tokens, explicitly restricting the correction search space to phonetic alternatives. A masked language model (MLM) then provides local contextual scoring, and an instruction-tuned large language model (LLM) performs final context-aware re-ranking over this compact candidate set. By decoupling structured phonetic reasoning from contextual semantic selection, our method avoids unconstrained generation while improving correction accuracy. The framework is lightweight, modular, and operates entirely at inference time.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Learning with Monotone Adversarial Corruptions

arXiv:2601.02193v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the extent to which standard machine learning algorithms rely on exchangeability and independence of data by introducing a monotone adversarial corruption model. In this model, an adversary, upon looking at a "clean" i.i.d. dataset, inserts additional "corrupted" points of their choice into the dataset. These added points are constrained to be monotone corruptions, in that they get labeled according to the ground-truth target function. Perhaps surprisingly, we demonstrate that in this setting, all known optimal learning algorithms for binary classification can be made to achieve suboptimal expected error on a new independent test point drawn from the same distribution as the clean dataset. On the other hand, we show that uniform convergence-based algorithms do not degrade in their guarantees. Our results showcase how optimal learning algorithms break down in the face of seemingly helpful monotone corruptions, exposing their overreliance on exchangeability.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Learn from Your Mistakes: Tree-like Self-Play for Secure Code LLMs

arXiv:2606.03489v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in code generation, they remain prone to replicating subtle yet critical vulnerabilities endemic to their training data. Current alignment techniques, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically apply coarse-grained optimization at the sequence level. This approach often fails to address the localized nature of security flaws, where a single incorrect token choice can compromise an entire program. To bridge this gap, we introduce Tree-like Self-Play (TSP), a framework that reframes secure code generation as a fine-grained sequential decision process. Unlike standard methods that blindly maximize likelihood, TSP constructs a decision tree where the model explores branching trajectories–generating both secure "golden paths" and vulnerable variants. By treating code generation as a self-play game, the model learns to strictly discriminate against its own localized errors. This provides a dense, on-policy learning signal that forces self-correction precisely at the critical decision nodes where vulnerabilities typically emerge. Our experiments demonstrate that TSP fundamentally enhances model reliability. In Python security benchmarks, TSP boosts CodeLlama-7B's pass rate (SPR@1) to 75.8%, significantly outperforming SFT (57.0%) and unstructured self-play baselines. Crucially, TSP induces robust out-of-distribution generalization: the model not only reduces vulnerabilities in unseen categories (CWEs) by 24.5% but also successfully transfers security principles learned from C/C++ to diverse languages, including Python, Go, and JavaScript. This suggests that TSP does not merely memorize patches, but internalizes abstract, language-agnostic security logic.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gender Differences in AI Literacy Workshop Outcomes and Deepfake Engagement

arXiv:2606.14718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy initiatives expand in K-12 settings, understanding how gender shapes student baseline perceptions, tool-use, and responsiveness to interventions is essential for equitable curriculum design. This study examines gender differences in AI literacy, safety awareness, and STEM career aspirations among Australian secondary students (Years 7, 8, and 10; N(pre) = 199, n(post) = 136) from two co-educational government schools who participated in a one-day AI literacy workshop. Using statistical regression methods controlling for year level and school, we found that pre-workshop, male students reported significantly higher STEM career interest across all three domains (AI, computer science, and engineering), while female students were significantly more likely to use AI for schoolwork and to seek advice from AI tools. Gender-differentiated patterns also emerged in deepfake behaviours: males were significantly more likely to have created or shared deepfake content. Both genders improved in AI knowledge post-intervention, yet females showed a richer profile of gains: wider conceptual understanding, greater confidence, and meaningful increases in AI and CS career interest that partially narrowed the gender STEM gap. These findings highlight the need for gender-responsive AI curricula, particularly deepfake safety education for male students, and demonstrate that even single-day workshops can narrow gender gaps in STEM aspirations and AI confidence.

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

Token-Level Entropy Reveals Demographic Disparities in Language Models

We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and 5,760 implicit sentence-completion prompts (e.g., "Tanisha walked into the office on a Monday morning and"), we find that Black-associated names produce higher first-token entropy than White-associated names across all six architectures - opposite to the output-level homogeneity bias documented under explicit demographic prompting (Lee et al., 2024) - and Black-associated names always produce greater entropy above identity-neutral baselines than White-associated names ($\Delta\Delta > 0$ in all six models). Women-associated names co-occur with lower first-token entropy (DL-pooled $\hat\beta = -0.041, p = .019$) and more homogeneous outputs ($\hat\alpha = +0.024, p < .001$) than men-associated names - a pattern convergent with homogeneity bias; race and gender effects are additive. Instruction tuning does not attenuate the race gap (matched-format DL-pooled $\hat{\beta}=+0.153$). Running the same templates with explicit group labels instead of names yields null race effects in 10 of 12 models where implicit probing is significant - establishing that probing methodology is a primary determinant of which distributional structure is recovered.