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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

A Tanaka-Type Formula for Compact Sets and Equilibrium Measures of L\'{e}vy Processes

arXiv:2606.17472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tanaka's formula is a classical identity for Brownian motion, and Tsukada (2018) extended it to L\'{e}vy processes not necessarily symmetric. From a potential-theoretic point of view, this formula shows that the invariant function for the process killed upon hitting a singleton can be decomposed into the sum of a martingale part and a local time. In this paper, we generalize this singleton setting and derive a Tanaka-type formula for a compact set $B$. To this end, we introduce the equilibrium measure, defined as the rescaled limit of the $q$-capacity measures, and show that the invariant function for the process killed upon hitting $B$ can be represented as the integral, with respect to the equilibrium measure, of the invariant functions associated with processes killed upon hitting singletons, up to an additive constant called the Robin constant. Moreover, when $B$ is an interval, we obtain explicit representations of the equilibrium measure, the Robin constant, and the martingale part for recurrent stable processes as well as for recurrent spectrally negative L\'{e}vy processes. Finally, we discuss how an analogous Tanaka-type formula can also be established for transient L\'{e}vy processes.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Governing Technical Debt in Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2605.29129v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly being explored as production infrastructure: they reason over multiple steps, call tools, act through workflows, and adapt through memory and feedback. These systems create governance challenges that are not fully captured by traditional software or predictive ML technical debt. We define Agentic Technical Debt as the accumulated liability created when prompts, memory, tool schemas, orchestration graphs, control policies, and observability routines are patched together faster than they can be validated, standardized, and governed. We define Stochastic Tax as the recurring operating burden of keeping probabilistic agent behavior within acceptable bounds. The distinction matters: debt is a stock of design and governance liability, while the tax is a flow of operating cost that arises because stochastic agents act through tools and workflows. We outline how managers can make both visible through lightweight dashboards and governance controls.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Activation Functions, Statistics and Learning of Higher-Order Interactions in Restricted Boltzmann Machines

arXiv:2605.19178v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The great success of neural networks primarily arises from the presence of the large number of weight parameters combined with nonlinearities in the input-output relationship of single neurons. In this work, we study the relationship between the statistical properties of the weights and the nonlinearity of the hidden unit in Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) on the one side, and the distribution induced on binary visible units. We do this for four commonly used activation functions: Linear, Step, ReLU, and Exponential, and make qualitative predictions about the ability of these models to learn distributions with strong higher order interactions over the visible nodes. We show that in general, in an ensemble of RBMs with Gaussian weights, these distributions are rare and hard to learn, except when the hidden unit activation function is an Exponential.

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

ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?

World Action Models (WAMs) commonly rely on video generation to bridge visual world modeling and robot control. However, video-based WAMs face three coupled limitations: dense multi-frame future tokens make inference costly, full video prediction spends capacity on action-irrelevant temporal and appearance details, and long-horizon future imagination may introduce errors that mislead action prediction. These issues raise a simple question: Does world action model really need video generation? We propose ImageWAM, a simple WAM framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for robot action prediction. In contrast to video generation, image editing provides a better-matched prior: it only needs to model a target-frame transformation, focuses on action-relevant current-to-target visual differences, and grounds task instructions to localized visual changes through edit pretraining. In practice, ImageWAM does not decode the target frame at inference time; instead, it conditions a flow-matching action expert on the KV caches produced by image-editing denoising, using them as a compact world-action context. ImageWAM outperforms standard VLA baselines and matching competitive WAMs without additional policy pretraining across different simulator and real-world experiments. It also reduces FLOPs to 1/6 and latency to 1/4 of video-based WAMs. Attention analysis further shows that editing caches focus on task-relevant change regions, supporting image editing as an effective alternative to video-based world-action modeling.

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

Learning Permutation Distributions via Reflected Diffusion on Ranks

arXiv:2603.17353v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The finite symmetric group S_n provides a natural domain for permutations, yet learning probability distributions on S_n is challenging due to its factorially growing size and discrete, non-Euclidean structure. Recent permutation diffusion methods define forward noising via shuffle-based random walks (e.g., riffle shuffles) and learn reverse transitions with Plackett-Luce (PL) variants, but the resulting trajectories can be abrupt and increasingly hard to denoise as n grows. We propose Soft-Rank Diffusion, a discrete diffusion framework that replaces shuffle-based corruption with a structured soft-rank forward process: we lift permutations to a continuous latent representation of order by relaxing discrete ranks into soft ranks, yielding smoother and more tractable trajectories. For the reverse process, we introduce contextualized generalized Plackett-Luce (cGPL) denoisers that generalize prior PL-style parameterizations and improve expressivity for sequential decision structures. Experiments on sorting and combinatorial optimization benchmarks show that Soft-Rank Diffusion consistently outperforms prior diffusion baselines, with particularly strong gains in long-sequence and intrinsically sequential settings.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

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

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

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Stochastic Linear Contextual Bandits with Bounded Noise: A Set-Membership Approach

arXiv:2606.20022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers stochastic linear contextual bandits (SLCB) with bounded reward noise. Existing works typically assume sub-Gaussian reward noise and bounded expected rewards, under which the optimal regret bound scales as $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ in terms of horizon $T$. However, in many applications, realized/observed rewards are also naturally bounded, implying bounded reward noise. Bounded noise is more informative than the sub-Gaussian condition but has not been leveraged explicitly in the SLCB literature. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm SME-OFU by utilizing an uncertainty quantification method called set-membership estimation (SME) and applying the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU). Our algorithm enjoys an improved regret bound $O(\log T)$. Notice that this does not contradict the existing optimal bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for sub-Gaussian noise because bounded noise is a stronger condition. Finally, simulations show empirical improvements of SME-OFU over a benchmark algorithm designed for sub-Gaussian noise when the reward noise is bounded.

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

Large Language Models as Optimizers: A Survey of Direct vs. Tool-Augmented Approaches and Their Performance Frontiers

arXiv:2606.15577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in complex mathematical optimization, even if the pragmatic user who triggers them is unaware of it. After all, many real-world problems reduce to the search for better or the best solutions. The field of LLM-as-optimizer has three paradigms: direct optimization, tool-augmented optimization, and tool-creating optimization. Direct optimization uses iterative prompting and heuristic generation to navigate solution spaces. Tool-augmented optimization translates natural language problems into formal specifications and orchestrates external solvers. Tool-creating optimization goes further, using LLMs to discover reusable algorithms or heuristics that can be deployed at zero marginal LLM cost. We describe current performance frontiers based on the benchmarks from the literature. We identify the critical reasoning gap in current architectures and argue for trade-offs between the future potential of direct optimization and the auditability of tool-augmented optimization. Even future, more powerful models might opt for tool-making to improve operational efficiency for repetitive families of problems.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A non-asymptotic bound on the TV distance between a Wishart matrix and an appropriately scaled GOE matrix

arXiv:2606.16018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this note, we prove a non-asymptotic version of a theorem by Bubeck, Ding, Eldan, and Rácz, showing that a Wishart matrix is close in total variation to an affine transformation of a GOE matrix. The proof mirrors the proof given by Bubeck et al., with some changes made to make it non-asymptotic.

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

TIGER: Taming Identity, Geometry, and Generative Priors for High-Quality Face Video Restoration

Face Video Restoration (FVR) aims to recover high-fidelity facial videos from degraded input while preserving identity and semantic consistency across frames. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously address three key challenges: identity shift, viewpoint-entangled guidance, and perceptual realism. To tackle these issues, we propose TIGER, a structured tri-prior fusion framework that Tames Identity, Geometry, and gEnerative pRiors for high-quality FVR. Specifically, an Identity Prior is first established by injecting subject-discriminative embeddings into the latent space, effectively anchoring the subject's identity against severe degradations. Then, to provide temporally consistent structural guidance for dynamic videos, TIGER constructs a Geometry Prior by lifting 2D reference cues into a disentangled 3D parameter space, creating a geometric anchor through cross-source parameter fusion. Moreover, to achieve maximum efficiency without compromising realism, we harness the video generation model's Generative Prior through a one-step rectified flow. We further design a progressive three-stage training optimization strategy that refines structural fidelity, textural reconstruction, and distribution-level realism to ensure robust optimization. We also construct a large-scale FVR dataset to facilitate robust training and standardized evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TIGER achieves state-of-the-art performance in both identity fidelity and temporal stability, delivering a high-quality, efficient and identity-consistent FVR. Project page: https://yzhoulv.github.io/Tiger/.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Information Is Not Physical: Possibility Spaces, Erasure, and the Structure of Unrealized Alternatives

arXiv:2606.15120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The slogan ``information is physical,'' introduced by Rolf Landauer and developed through quantum information theory and black-hole thermodynamics, has achieved near-axiomatic status in modern physics. Yet the ontological status of information remains surprisingly underexamined: most discussions either reduce information to a form of energy or treat it as a purely mathematical object. This paper proposes a third position. I argue that information is neither a physical substance nor a free-floating abstraction, but rather the structure of physically realizable alternatives – a counterfactual structure that a physical system instantiates in virtue of the possibility space available to it. Building on Shannon's combinatorial definition, the Landauer principle, the no-cloning theorem, and the black-hole information paradox, I show that the informational content of any physical event is constituted by the set of outcomes that could have occurred but did not. This counterfactual reading dissolves several persistent confusions: it explains why erasing information dissipates heat without making information ``material,'' why quantum superposition is informationally richer than any classical mixture, and why information loss in black holes is physically significant beyond mere bookkeeping. The proposal sits within a structural-realist framework but departs from standard structural realism by locating the relevant structure in modal, not merely actual, relations. I conclude by sketching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and scientific ontology more broadly.

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

Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Society

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, enabling large language models (LLMs) to learn from rewards. We observe that societal regulations are structurally similar to reward functions. They define measurable outcomes, thresholds, and exceptions, while often leaving institutional intent only partially specified. We hypothesise that the RL training process may exploit these gaps and therefore ask whether models' well-known tendency to hack reward functions during RL can scale into a more consequential failure mode named societal hacking: discovering loopholes in the rules society runs on. To study this phenomenon, we introduce SocioHack, a sandbox of 72 societal environments, and find that within these environments, reward hacking naturally emerges and leads to regulatory loophole discovery. Models learn to hack the social rules and generate strategies that remain technically compliant while defeating regulatory intent, and current LLM safeguards provide only limited mitigation. Therefore, collecting in-the-wild feedback for model training requires greater caution, and we need a next-generation post-training paradigm for safely iterating LLMs in real society.=

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

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

14.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Apitegromab for lean mass preservation during tirzepatide-induced weight loss: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 trial

Loss of lean mass in proportion to total weight loss is observed with incretin mimetic therapies such as tirzepatide and has the potential to adversely affect health and function. Apitegromab is an investigational, fully human monoclonal antibody that selectively inhibits myostatin activation and is, thereby, capable of increasing muscle mass. In the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 EMBRAZE study, adults with overweight or obesity (n = 102) were randomized 1:1 to receive tirzepatide plus apitegromab (10 mg kg−1) or tirzepatide plus placebo. At week 24, apitegromab resulted in a least square mean (80% confidence interval (CI)) of 1.9 (1.2−2.7) kg less lean mass loss than placebo (P = 0.001), despite similar total body weight loss between groups, representing a 54.9% retention of lean mass relative to placebo. In participants receiving apitegromab, trough concentrations of apitegromab and total latent myostatin, a pharmacodynamic marker, both increased over time and reached a plateau after approximately 16 weeks. Incidence of adverse events (AEs) (% (95% CI)) was generally similar across apitegromab-treated participants and placebo-treated participants, with 39 of 51 (76% (63−86%)) and 36 of 51 (71% (57−81%)) participants experiencing an AE, respectively. Serious adverse events (SAEs) were balanced and experienced by one of 51 (2% (0−10%)) participants in each arm. In summary, this proof-of-concept study demonstrated that selective targeting of myostatin by apitegromab was well tolerated and effective in preserving lean mass when combined with tirzepatide. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT06445075 . In the phase 2 EMBRAZE study, participants receiving tirzepatide and apitegromab lost less lean mass compared to participants receiving tirzepatide and placebo.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Uncovering the fitness of endemically circulating Zika virus strains

Zika virus (ZIKV) is an arbovirus that usually causes few symptoms and has circulated endemically in Asia for decades. However, a large outbreak in South America in 2015 uncovered the serious risk of congenital Zika syndrome in infants born from ZIKV infected mothers. It is unknown whether a lineage with distinct pre-existing fitness advantage emerged from Asia to cause the South American outbreak, and whether there is ongoing evolution that can result in future globally fit strains. Here we used 107 sequences from a single setting (Thailand) collected over an 18 year period (2006-2023). We used novel analytical tools to identify distinct lineages that have circulated in the population and estimated their relative epidemiological fitness. We found there have been six lineages circulating sequentially in the country, with regular emergence and replacement of lineages showing higher fitness than their predecessors. We identified 15 lineage-defining amino acid changes, including four well-documented fitness-enhancing mutations, and two UTR substitutions. The lineage that emerged in South America was evolutionarily linked to the highest-fitness lineage in Thailand, carrying seven of our lineage-defining substitutions acquired during endemic circulation there, and subsequently accumulating four additional changes. After the global pandemic, endemic ZIKV in Thailand continued to evolve, with newly emerged lineages showing novel mutations and increased fitness. Our findings have key implications for the monitoring of ZIKV and can help identify the pathway to increased transmissibility of this globally important pathogen.

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

CPS4: Class Prompt driven Semi-Supervised Spine Segmentation with Class-specific Consistency Constraint

Vision Language Model (VLM) has great potential to enhance the quality of pseudo labels in semi-supervised spine segmentation by leveraging textual class prompts to generate segmentation map, but no one has studied it yet. Although promising, it lacks explicit constraints to ensure consistency between spine class prompts and spine unit region, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in multi-class segmentation map generation. In this paper, we propose CPS4, the first text-guided semi-supervised spine segmentation network using class prompts to enhance the quality of spine pseudo labels. Specifically, CPS4 is implemented through two training stages. (i) Class-specific consistency constrained VLM pretraining stage: we propose token- and pixel-level attention loss to optimize the consistency between class prompts and spine units, forcing the textual class prompt to be closely coupled with the target spine unit in the semantic space. (ii) Class Prompt driven semi-supervised spine segmentation stage: using the pretrained vision-text encoder, we derive each class-specific binary segmentation map for the unlabeled spine image and integrate them into an unified multi-class segmentation map, improving the quality of the spine pseudo label generated by the semi-supervised spine segmentation network. Experimental results show that our CPS4 achieves superior spine segmentation performance with Dice of 80.44%, only using 5% labeled data on the public spine segmentation dataset, surpassing popular semi-supervised learning and VLM methods. Our code will be available.

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

AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Breaking Entropy Bounds: Accelerating RL Training via MTP with Rejection Sampling

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key component in modern large language models, yet the rollout stage remains the key bottleneck in RL training pipelines. Although Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) offers a natural solution to accelerate rollouts through speculative decoding, many studies have observed that MTP acceptance rates degrade significantly during RL training, leading to limited speedup performance. To address this bottleneck, we present Bebop, a systematic study of MTP in LLM post-training, and offer practical recipes to integrate MTP into large-scale RL pipelines. First, we reveal that the MTP acceptance rate is fundamentally bounded by the fluctuation of model entropy, which demonstrates a clear negative linear relationship with the rise of entropy in the RL stage. Second, we show that probabilistic rejection sampling largely alleviates the disturbance introduced by entropy in RL compared to greedy draft sampling. We further identify that the conventional MTP training objectives (cross-entropy or KL) are suboptimal in such settings, and therefore we propose a novel end-to-end TV loss that directly optimizes multi-step rejection sampling acceptance rate, yielding ~10% acceptance rate improvements, achieving up to 95% acceptance rates and up to 25% extra inference throughput gains across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and agentic tasks. Third, we test various online MTP training strategies during RL and show that pre-RL MTP training with e2e TV loss and rejection sampling achieves a consistent acceptance rate and speedup throughout the entire RL, eliminating the need for costly online MTP updating. We provide extensive experiments and analysis that validate our findings. Experimental results show our method achieves up to 1.8x end-to-end acceleration in async RL training of Qwen3.5, Qwen3.6, and Qwen3.7 models.

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

Beyond Function Calling: Benchmarking Tool-Using Agents under Tool-Environment Unreliability

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that solve tasks by interacting with external tool environments. Although recent tool-use benchmarks increasingly cover complex task settings, they still largely assume clean, stable, and trustworthy tool environments, leaving tool-environment unreliability insufficiently examined. We introduce ToolBench-X, a benchmark for evaluating agents under recoverable reliability hazards. ToolBench-X contains executable multi-step tasks across diverse domains and sequential, parallel, and mixed workflows, each paired with deterministic tools and a canonical final answer for automatic evaluation. Starting from clean tool environments, ToolBench-X injects five structured hazard types: Specification Drift, Invocation Error, Execution Failure, Output Drift, and Cross-source Conflict. Crucially, each injected instance remains solvable through at least one valid recovery path, such as retrying, fallback, verification, or cross-checking. Experiments reveal a substantial reliability gap: agents that perform well with reliable tools often fail under recoverable hazards. Further analysis shows that failures are driven less by tool-use volume or inference budget than by limited hazard diagnosis and ineffective recovery. Targeted recovery hints recover many failed tasks, while test-time scaling yields more limited gains. These results suggest that tool-use evaluation should move beyond function-call accuracy toward task completion under unreliable tool environments. The code and data is available at https://github.com/Foreverskyou/ToolBench-X.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Multifidelity-Augmented Gaussian Process Inputs for Surrogate Modeling from Scarce Data

arXiv:2603.22050v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised machine learning describes the practice of fitting a parameterized model to labeled input-output data. Supervised machine learning methods have demonstrated promise in learning efficient surrogate models that can (partially) replace expensive high-fidelity models, making many-query analyses, such as optimization, uncertainty quantification, and inference, tractable. However, when training data must be obtained through the evaluation of an expensive model or experiment, the amount of training data that can be obtained is often limited, which can make learned surrogate models unreliable. In many engineering and scientific settings, cheaper low-fidelity models may be available, for example arising from simplified physics modeling or coarse grids. These models may be used to generate additional low-fidelity training data. The goal of multifidelity machine learning is to use both high- and low-fidelity training data to learn a surrogate model which is cheaper to evaluate than the high-fidelity model, but more accurate than any available low-fidelity model. This work proposes a new multifidelity training approach for Gaussian process regression which uses low-fidelity data to define additional features that augment the input space of the learned model. Similarly to cokriging estimators, the proposed approach conditions the high-fidelity surrogate model on the predictions of all available low-fidelity surrogate models, while benefiting from the computational efficiency of autoregressive estimators. Numerical experiments on several test problems demonstrate both increased predictive accuracy and reduced computational cost relative to the state of the art.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PI-Hunter: Automated Red-Teaming for Exposing and Localizing Prompt Injections

arXiv:2606.12737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into agentic systems that interact with external tools and environments, introducing new security risks such as indirect prompt injection attacks through untrusted external sources. Existing defenses mainly focus on blocking malicious content at inference time, and current red-teaming methods primarily optimize attack success. As a result, developers have limited visibility into how latent prompt injections emerge and propagate through agents. We propose PI-Hunter, an automated agentic auditing framework for proactive vulnerability exposure in LLM agents. PI-Hunter constructs realistic source-aware test cases and iteratively evolves them through feedback-driven exploration to induce agents to retrieve and reveal latent malicious instructions embedded within external environments. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, agent architectures, attacks, and defenses demonstrate that PI-Hunter substantially improves vulnerability exposure and attack-surface coverage over strong automated red-teaming baselines, while remaining effective under existing prompt injection defenses.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NRITYAM: Language Models Meet Art and Heritage of Dance

Language models have become essential tools in shaping modern workflows. However, their global effectiveness hinges on a nuanced understanding of local socio-cultural contexts. To address this gap, we present NRITYAM, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the cultural comprehension capabilities of language models in the context of global dance traditions. NRITYAM comprises 9,260 carefully curated question-answer pairs spanning 12 languages, making it the largest dataset dedicated to evaluating cultural knowledge in dance. The dataset has been developed from the ground up through close collaboration with native dance artists and native speakers of the languages, who authored and validated culturally relevant questions specific to their regions. We evaluate a broad set of models, including large language models, small language models, multimodal large language models, and small multimodal language models. As a multilingual and multicultural benchmark, NRITYAM sets a new standard for evaluating the ability of AI systems to understand and reason about traditional performing arts. Detailed dataset samples are available at~\url{https://github.com/niladrighosh03/NRITYAM}.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Bias Fitting to Mitigate Length Bias of Reward Model in RLHF

arXiv:2505.12843v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on reward models to align large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward hacking, wherein policy learning exploits flaws in the trained reward model to maximize reward scores without genuinely aligning with human preferences. A significant example of such reward hacking is length bias, where reward models usually favor longer responses irrespective of actual response quality. Previous works on tackling length bias have notable limitations, these approaches either mitigate bias without characterizing the bias form, or simply assume a linear length-reward relation. To accurately model the intricate nature of length bias and facilitate more effective bias mitigation, we propose FiMi-RM (Bias Fitting to Mitigate Length Bias of Reward Model), a framework that autonomously learns and corrects underlying bias patterns. Our approach consists of three stages: First, we warm up by training a standard reward model which inherently contains length bias. Next, we deploy a lightweight fitting model to capture the non-linear relation between length and reward. Finally, we incorporate this learned relation into the reward model, effectively decoupling length from reward while preserving preference modeling capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that FiMi-RM achieves a more balanced length-reward distribution. Furthermore, when applied to alignment algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Best-of-N (BoN), our debiased reward model improves length-controlled win rate and reduces verbosity without compromising its performance.

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

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

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

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

Score Approximation for Diffusion Models on Arbitrary Low-Dimensional Structures

arXiv:2606.19894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of score-based diffusion models has spurred significant efforts to establish their theoretical foundations. However, existing complexity bounds for score approximation rely heavily on restrictive assumptions like Lipschitz continuous densities or smooth manifold supports, which are routinely violated by the singularities, sharp boundaries, and disjoint clusters inherent to real-world perceptual data. This work establishes a universal score approximation theorem that works for any distribution supported on any compact set of upper Minkowski dimension $d$. Using a novel discrete-mixture formulation, we prove that the score function can be approximated with a ReLU network whose complexity grows exponentially only with $d$, thus breaking the exponential curse of ambient dimensionality. Combined with existing theories on accurately solving the backward diffusion SDE for arbitrary compact distributions, our work shows that diffusion models readily adapt to irregular, non-smooth data structures, explaining their competence in real-world generative tasks.