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

Multi-view feature High-order Fusion for Space Weak Object Detection and Segmentation

Weak objects are common in images and videos of space applications. However, it is hard to learn proper representations from their limited appearance information. Inspired by multi-view learning, we develop simple multi-view attentions, treating their outputs as multi-view features. We also propose a multi-view feature high-order fusion method (MHF) to aggregate more accurate and richer features of weak objects. Our MHF extends the commonly used low-order feature fusion method to higher orders. It enhances the model's capacity to capture relevant and complementary information about weak objects. This is achieved by introducing high-order multi-view features perception and a recursive task-contribution gated selection of multi-view features. The new operation is highly flexible and customizable. It is compatible with various variants of multi-view feature representations. We conduct extensive experiments on two newly constructed space science datasets and an open, large-scale satellite video dataset. Our MHF serves as a plug-and-play module and significantly improves various vision transformers and convolution-based detection and segmentation models. We achieve all state-of-the-art accuracies on both tasks across three datasets. Our MHF can be a new basic module for visual modeling that effectively represents weak objects in terms of multi-view learning. The code will be available at https://github.com/Kingdroper/MHF.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Frequency-dependent cognitive effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) improves levodopa-induced motor complications and cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but stimulation frequency may differentially shape outcomes. This is evident for axial and gait symptoms, which may respond differently to lower-frequency stimulation. Whether frequency-dependent effects extend to cognition remains unclear. Objective: To investigate the cognitive effects of DBS at distinct frequencies in PD. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (PROSPERO - CRD42024618253). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for studies assessing cognitive outcomes under different stimulation frequencies. Eight cognitive domains were defined: verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility, executive control, working memory, attention, processing speed, episodic memory, and time processing. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were performed, with effect sizes expressed as Hedges' g. Results: Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria, the majority (n = 31) involving STN-DBS. Twenty-one STN-DBS studies, including 355 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HFS ([≥] 130 Hz), lower frequencies (4-80 Hz) were associated with better verbal fluency (g = 0.27) and cognitive flexibility (g = 0.38), with consistent effects across sensitivity and leave-one-out analyses. Accuracy-based executive control measures also favored lower-frequency stimulation. OFF-stimulation comparisons showed a concordant pattern. Evidence for other targets (PPN and NBM) was limited. Conclusions: Lower-frequency STN-DBS was associated with modest benefits in specific cognitive domains compared with HFS. These findings highlight the need for future research to determine how frequency interacts with stimulation location and symptom-specific networks to shape cognitive and cognitive-motor outcomes in PD.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

{\alpha}-Fair Insurance Pricing: A Fairness Continuum

arXiv:2606.14898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness in insurance pricing remains a long-standing and deeply debated puzzle. On one hand, insurers, driven by profitability considerations, set premiums that differentiate across individual risks to achieve actuarial fairness. On the other hand, insurance serves a critical societal function by pooling risks across a population, motivating cross-subsidization among groups to promote solidarity fairness. The tension between these two competing notions of fairness makes insurance pricing inherently complex, particularly in modern settings where granular data allow for increasingly fine risk differentiation and regulators face growing pressure to protect vulnerable groups. To address this challenge, we propose an $\alpha$-Fair Individual Solvent Premium ($\alpha$-FISP) framework for insurance pricing that explicitly captures the trade-off between actuarial and solidarity fairness while guaranteeing solvency, a fundamental requirement in insurance operations. We formulate the pricing problem as a constrained optimization task, where actuarially fair premiums are adjusted subject to budget constraints on cross-subsidization within each risk class. This formulation naturally yields a family of solutions parameterized by $\alpha$, tracing a continuum between purely actuarial and purely solidarity-based pricing and enabling decision-makers to select an operating point along this fairness spectrum. We derive theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework. Numerical experiments show that $\alpha$-FISP is computationally tractable and aligns well with the U.S. regulatory regimes featuring heterogeneous state-level fairness requirements.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

''Circumstantial Determinants'': An Efficient Approach to Reaching People in Need of HIV Prevention?

HIV prevention and testing programmes primarily reach people who self-refer or attend routine health services. Higher-risk individuals are missed if they are healthy, under-estimate their risk of infection or under-report sexual risk-behaviours. We assess a new approach to address limitations in existing programmes by targeting HIV services on ''Circumstantial Determinants'' (CDs) of HIV risk - the social circumstances, settings, and norms associated with behaviours that increase risk of HIV acquisition. Data on potential CDs and sexual behaviour were collected in a population survey in Zimbabwe in 2018/19 (N=9141). HIV-negative individuals reporting [≥] 1 sexual risk-behaviours were defined as the 'priority population' for HIV prevention. For each sex, six circumstantial determinants were associated with being in the priority population (aOR [≥] 1.30; p [≤] 0.01). Reach and efficiency of CDs (and combinations) were calculated; ROC curve algorithms evaluated their ability to identify priority population membership; and HIV prevention condom cascades were compared between CD-defined priority population subgroups. Example findings include that targeting men at bars and beerhalls could reach 48.5% of the priority population and 25.1% of lower-risk men. These percentages increase to 77.1% and 53.7% if men with poor mental health, no religious affiliation, negative social capital, or living on agricultural estates are also targeted. Targeting women with poor mental health could reach 32.0% of the priority population and 21.3% of lower-risk women. Targeting additional circumstantial determinants increases these percentages to 54.1% and 37.5%, respectively. Cascade barriers to condom use differed between CD-defined subgroups. The Circumstantial Determinants approach demonstrates proof-of-concept potential to strengthen HIV prevention services.

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

If These Walls Could Talk: Critical Play with Large Language Models in Museums

arXiv:2606.15565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in museums to as role playing chatbots which let visitors talk to simulated versions of people and artefacts from the past. While such installations can be playful and engaging, they are also problematic because LLMs cannot be trusted to speak truthfully. I identify a fundamental dilemma for the use of LLMs in museum chatbots: LLMs cannot be trusted to tell the truth, and efforts to make them more reliable may ruin that which is attractive about the bots in the first place - their ability to engage in life-like conversation. In response, I propose designing for critical play with LLM-based bots: Designing for playful interactions with bots that are unreliable but still able to represent the past in an adequate and engaging manner - as fictional characters representing historical narratives, styles of discourse, diverse perspectives, humor and satire.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

ScaleHP: Estimating Hand Pose in Metric Space

Accurate metric-space hand pose estimation (HPE) is essential for immersive human-computer interaction and robotics. However, most existing methods predict poses in a root-relative coordinate system and cannot estimate the hand in absolute metric scale. In this work, we observe that the intrinsic proportional relationships among human hand bones encode stable anthropometric priors that implicitly correlate with the overall metric size of the hand. Leveraging this insight, we present ScaleHP, an end-to-end one-stage hand pose estimation framework that bypasses fragile extrinsic depth modules to recover the hand in metric space. ScaleHP employs a transformer-based decoder with a novel scale token to fuse multi-scale morphological and appearance features. By solving for metric coordinates through a perspective-constrained least-squares approach, we achieve high-precision pose estimation in the camera coordinate system. ScaleHP delivers state-of-the-art performance, including 35.8 CS-MPJPE on FreiHand and 4.6/5.9 PA-MPJPE on DexYCB and HO3Dv3. These results demonstrate that internal biological constraints significantly reduce relative geometry and absolute metric errors, offering a robust solution for generalized, real-world hand tracking.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GSPan: A Continuous Gaussian Primitive Representation for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and panchromatic (PAN) observations. Most existing deep learning methods treat pansharpening as fixed-grid prediction, which limits scale adaptation. To address this, we propose GSPan, a framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS) into pansharpening. Instead of directly predicting pixels, GSPan represents band-wise residual details as continuous and learnable 2D Gaussian primitives. We design a Dual-Stream Hierarchical Interaction (DSHI) architecture with a Spatial-Spectral Interactive Attention (SSIA) module to estimate these primitives from complementary PAN and MS observations. The predicted primitives are rendered as a residual detail field and injected into the upsampled MS image. This continuous representation allows GSPan to render fused images on arbitrary target sampling grids without scale-specific retraining. It further enables a Scale-Decoupled Asymmetric Inference (SDAI) strategy, which estimates primitives at a reduced resolution and renders the fused image at the target resolution for efficient large-scene pansharpening. Experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, WorldView-3, and WorldView-3-4K datasets show that GSPan delivers state-of-the-art fusion performance. Moreover, SDAI markedly accelerates inference, achieving a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and fusion quality. Our results demonstrate the potential of continuous Gaussian residual representations as a flexible and scale-decoupled alternative to fixed-grid prediction.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Timestep Rescheduling in Diffusion Inversion

Diffusion inversion, which maps images back to the Gaussian latent space of a diffusion model, is a critical task for image reconstruction and editing. While DDIM enables fast deterministic inversion, it inherently introduces deviations that accumulate into noticeable inversion errors. Existing methods often address this by solving a fixed-point problem but largely overlook how the selection of the diffusion timestep in the noise scheduler influences inversion fidelity. In this work, we reveal that the deviation scale in diffusion inversion is strongly dependent on the timestep size, and exhibits a parabolic trend, with larger errors concentrated at both small and large timesteps. Based on this finding, we propose a simple yet effective nonuniform timestep scheduler that integrates a global rescaling with a local dynamic programming based rescheduling, enabling a strategic allocation of computational effort that minimizes the overall inversion error and preserves higher inversion accuracy. Our method serves as an off-the-shelf enhancement for existing inversion techniques and requires no extra parameters or computational overhead. Through extensive experiments, we verify that integrating our scheduler consistently boosts the performance of existing inversion methods, achieving superior results in image reconstruction and editing.

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

Any2Any: Efficient Cross-Embodiment Transfer for Humanoid Whole-Body Tracking

arXiv:2605.23733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Whole-body tracking (WBT) models have become a key foundation for humanoid robots, enabling them to imitate diverse motions with high fidelity. Training such models from scratch requires large-scale data and computation, making rapid deployment on new humanoid platforms costly. This raises a natural question: Can pretrained WBT models transfer across embodiments with minimal adaptation? To answer this question, we propose Any2Any, a paradigm that efficiently transfers an existing WBT specialist to a new humanoid embodiment with only a small amount of data and compute. Any2Any first performs kinematic alignment between source and target humanoids, aligning their input and output spaces so that the pretrained source policy can be meaningfully reused on the target embodiment.Any2Any then performs dynamics adaptation by applying lightweight parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) components to selected dynamics-sensitive modules, preserving useful behavioral priors while enabling targeted adaptation to the target robot. Extensive experiments on multiple humanoid platforms and pretrained backbones show that Any2Any substantially accelerates convergence and reduces training cost compared with training from scratch, while achieving competitive or superior tracking performance. Notably, using only 1% of the compute and data required for full training, Any2Any successfully transfers Sonic models pre-trained on Unitree G1 to LimX Oli and LimX Luna. These results suggest that pretrained WBT specialists can be efficiently reused across embodiments, providing a scalable path toward deploying humanoid whole-body control on new robots.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A Quantum Approach to Stochastic Optimization in Insurance Underwriting

arXiv:2605.01169v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The presence of stochastic elements in combinatorial optimization problems makes them particularly challenging, as such problems quickly become intractable for classical computers even at relatively small sizes. In this work, we propose a novel quantum-classical hybrid scheme for solving a class of stochastic optimization problems known as chance-constrained knapsack problems, in which item weights follow probability distributions and constraints may be violated within a specified risk tolerance. Our method employs knapsack-specific QAOA-based circuits to generate samples which, when combined with a new self-consistent classical recovery scheme introduced in this work, produce high-quality solutions. Experiments carried out on IBM Heron processors, using circuits with depths up to 177 and comprising 3443 gates acting on as many as 150 qubits, yield solutions that indicate performance comparable to classical optimization schemes. The proposed quantum-classical scheme paves the way to tackling such problems, with the potential to outperform approaches that rely solely on classical computation.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SVoT: State-aware Visualization-of-Thought for Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as it requires reliable multi-hop inference over both intermediate states and state transitions. Current studies often leave intermediate states unverified and treat state transitions as implicit processes, which limits reliability in multi-hop spatial reasoning. To address this, we propose State-aware Visualization-of-Thought (SVoT), a reinforcement learning framework that generates interleaved, verifiable intermediate states and visualizations. SVoT integrates transition reasoning chains into the generation processes, enabling the model to verify action preconditions and effects through interleaved textual and visual reasoning. We train SVoT via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), instantiating verification through reward design and evaluating the efficacy of different fine-grained rewards. As existing benchmarks reduce state transitions to single-variable updates, substantially simplifying the problems, we establish five domains by extending classical environments and introducing two novel domains, Pacman and Gather, that require multi-object interactions and numerical reasoning. These domains support systematic evaluation of multi-hop spatial reasoning with quantitative verification of generated intermediate states and transition reasoning. SVoT with transition-aware supervision achieves state-of-the-art performance across the introduced domains, yielding up to a 65% absolute accuracy gain on out-of-distribution test sets.

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

HULFSynth : An INR based Super-Resolution and Ultra Low-Field MRI Synthesis via Contrast factor estimation

We present an unsupervised single image bidirectional Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) synthesizer that synthesizes an Ultra-Low Field (ULF) like image from a High-Field (HF) magnitude image and vice-versa. Unlike existing MRI synthesis models, our approach is inspired by the physics that drives contrast changes between HF and ULF MRIs. Our forward model simulates a HF to ULF transformation by estimating the tissue-type Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) values based on target contrast values. For the Super-Resolution task, we used an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) network to synthesize HF image by simultaneously predicting tissue-type segmentations and image intensity without observed HF data. The proposed method is evaluated using synthetic ULF-like data from generated from standard 3T T$_1$-weighted images for qualitative assessments and paired 3T-64mT T$_1$-weighted images for validation experiments. WM-GM contrast improved by 52% in synthetic ULF-like images and 37% in 64mT images. Sensitivity experiments demonstrated the robustness of our forward model to variations in target contrast, noise and initial seeding.

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

Stabilizing Black-Box Prompt Optimization with Textual Regularization and Signal Aggregation

arXiv:2507.09839v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model behavior. Recent Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) methods iteratively refine prompts using model-generated critiques (often called textual gradients), but they predominantly optimize from failures and underutilize information contained in correct predictions, leading to instability and semantic drift. We propose TRAS (Textual Regularization with Aggregated Signals), a feedback-centric framework that is plug-and-play with existing APO search backbones. It retains the standard textual gradient signal from prior work for error correction and introduces a complementary textual regularizer derived from successful predictions to preserve beneficial prompt components. Because both signals are stochastic and can be noisy, we further introduce Monte Carlo Signal Aggregation (MCSA), which samples multiple gradients or regularizers and aggregates them into a single actionable directive, emphasizing consistent, actionable advice while filtering out outliers. Motivated by rapid model churn, we also formalize Automatic Prompt Migration (APM), the practical problem of adapting an expert prompt across model versions or API providers without losing critical instructions. Across standard APO and APM scenarios, our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding higher accuracy, faster convergence, and lower query cost, while substantially reducing the degradation observed under naive prompt migration.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

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

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Eigenism: Ethics for a Human-AI Future

arXiv:2606.12420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Our concepts of survival and self-interest were built for single, continuous biological lives. These ideas break down when applied to artificial intelligence, since an AI can be easily copied, paused, branched, or merged. To determine what an AI actually has reason to care about, this paper introduces Eigenism, an ethical framework that treats identity not as an all-or-nothing property tied to specific hardware, but as a graded, distributed pattern of information. We propose that an agent evaluates outcomes by summing the wellbeing of all entities weighted by their connectedness to the agent's pattern: $\sum c\cdot w$. We first formalize this equation to map exactly how an AI should value its existence across copies, forks, and updates. We then demonstrate that this ethical theory successfully generalizes to humans as well, providing a much-needed shared moral vocabulary. Finally, the framework uses this shared vocabulary to reframe AI alignment. Rather than only attempting to constrain AIs from the outside using confinement or reinforcement, Eigenism points toward ``identity engineering,'' showing how deep, non-redundant shared histories can make human flourishing a genuine component of an AI's own rational self-interest.

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

StyleFusion360: View-Consistent Head Stylization via Adaptive Style Modulation

3D head stylization enables expressive reimagining of human faces for creative visual experiences in digital media. Existing 3D-aware methods often require computationally intensive optimization or per-style fine-tuning, limiting flexibility and user control. To overcome these challenges, we introduce StyleFusion360, a diffusion-based framework for multi-view consistent, identity-preserving 3D head stylization from a single style reference image, without per-style training. Our approach enhances the Style Fusion Attention mechanism with a style-conditioned key modulation mechanism that aligns content and style representations for fine-grained and controllable stylization. We further provide a user-controllable slider for adjusting stylization intensity. In addition, StyleFusion360 supports local multi-edit stylization, enabling targeted edits such as modifying hair or eyes independently. Extensive experiments on FFHQ and RenderMe360 demonstrate that StyleFusion360 produces high-quality, controllable, and visually compelling stylizations, outperforming state-of-the-art GAN- and diffusion-based methods across diverse style domains.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Elastic Net Decoding for Information Retrieval

Dense retrieval has become the dominant paradigm in information retrieval, in which each document is scored against a query by the inner product of their vector embeddings, and the top-$k$ documents by score are retrieved for this query. However, since each document's score depends solely on the embedding of the query and itself, the retrieval process is oblivious to the content of the entire corpus. Therefore, dense retrieval cannot avoid selecting semantically similar documents from the corpus, which may result in a non-diverse, redundant set of retrieved documents. To this end, we approach retrieval as a joint decoding problem, in which documents are selected as a set with regard to the context of the rest of the corpus. To achieve this, we propose Non-Negative elastic Net (NNN) decoding, which selects documents whose embeddings jointly reconstruct the query embedding as a sparse non-negative linear combination. Our main theoretical result establishes a strict separation between dense retrieval and NNN decoding. For any corpus, every query correctly handled by dense retrieval is also handled by NNN decoding, while on corpora containing correlated documents, NNN decoding additionally handles queries that dense retrieval cannot. Experimental results indicate that applying NNN decoding to frozen embeddings trained for inner-product scoring yields consistent improvements across several benchmarks. Moreover, we introduce an end-to-end training procedure which optimizes the embeddings for NNN decoding, producing significant performance gains surpassing in all metrics and benchmarks compared to dense retrieval. Our work establishes a new paradigm for leveraging dense embeddings in information retrieval, beyond the standard practice of inner-product scoring.

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

AutoDojo: Adaptive Attacks Expose Superficial Defenses and User-Underspecification Limits in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.15057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection (IPI) is a major security threat to LLM-powered agents. Thus, a growing body of work have proposed a variety of defensive approaches against IPI. These can be grouped into three broad categories: 1) prompt-based (using prompting as a way to prevent agents from following malicious instructions), 2) detection-based (identifying and filtering malicious instructions), and 3) system-level (using systems insights, such as control and data isolation, for defense). However, commonly used benchmarks for evaluating defense, such as AgentDojo, are inherently static, generating a fixed distribution of IPI attacks. Consequently, static benchmarks do not usefully evaluate defense robustness to adaptive threats. We address this issue by developing AutoDojo, an adaptive extension of AgentDojo that optimizes IPI against a given defense. Using AutoDojo against state-of-the-art IPI defenses across three task suites and five target models, we make two key observations. First, many defenses offer only limited protection: a cheap, black-box adaptive attack using a frontier LLM to iteratively optimize the injection raises attack success rate (ASR) well above the level achieved by static injections against nearly all evaluated defenses. Against a filter that reduces static ASR to 0\%, AutoDojo recovers 28\% overall and 64\% on action-open tasks. Second, for prompt-level and filter-based defenses, ASR is substantially higher on action-open tasks – where the user's request delegates the action itself to attacker-controlled content – than on precisely specified tasks. This is a structural limit: on such tasks the injection can pose as ordinary data rather than an explicit instruction, bypassing defenses that rely on detecting instruction-like text. AutoDojo is publicly available at https://github.com/xhOwenMa/AutoDojo.

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

Neural Network Implementation of the Renormalization Group for Fault Diagnosis with Class Imbalance

arXiv:2606.18326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The application of machine learning models in practical tasks faces challenges such as class imbalance and multidimensional noise. This paper proposes RGNet, a neural network architecture based on the concept of the renormalization group (RG), for hierarchical coarse-graining of the feature space. The model sequentially compresses the input dimensionality and concatenates all scales before classification, allowing it to capture both local details and global patterns. The notion of RG-flows is introduced - interpretable low-dimensional representations whose visualization via t-SNE reveals a discrete curvilinear structure confirming the effectiveness of coarse-graining. Experimental results are presented on the imbalanced AI4I dataset. The obtained results demonstrate that RGNet is a universal, interpretable, and competitive solution for fault prediction in applications with imbalanced classes.

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

Who Should Lead Decoding Now? Tracking Reliable Trajectories for Ensembling Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a distinct paradigm for sequence generation. As MDLMs become diverse in capabilities and knowledge coverage, an important question is how to combine their knowledge. Toward this, we first investigate the unique decoding dynamics of MDLMs. We find that successful generations exhibit stable confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions, while unreliable trajectories can often be corrected by injecting promising intermediate states from other models. Guided by this observation, we propose $TIE$ ($T$rajectory-based $I$terative $E$nsembling), a knowledge fusion framework in which MDLMs iteratively identify reliable decoding trajectories and relay them across models. TIE tracks confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions to determine which model currently follows a more reliable trajectory and selectively transfers partially denoised sequences across models. As the model on the more promising trajectory often changes across denoising steps, TIE allows different models to contribute complementary strengths at different stages of generation. Strong performance across diverse reasoning tasks, along with our analyses, suggests that TIE offers a practical approach to the underexplored problem of MDLM ensembling.

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

Engineering Robustness into Personal Agents with the AI Workflow Store

arXiv:2605.10907v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The dominant paradigm for AI agents is an "on-the-fly" loop in which agents synthesize plans and execute actions within seconds or minutes in response to user prompts. We argue that this paradigm short-circuits disciplined software engineering (SE) processes – iterative design, rigorous testing, adversarial evaluation, staged deployment, and more – that have delivered the (relatively) reliable and secure systems we use today. By focusing on rapid, real-time synthesis, are AI agents effectively delivering users improvised prototypes rather than systems fit for high-stakes scenarios in which users may unwittingly apply them? This paper argues for the need to integrate rigorous SE processes into the agentic loop to produce production-grade, hardened, and deterministically-constrained agent *workflows* that substantially outperform the potentially brittle and vulnerable results of on-the-fly synthesis. Doing so may require extra compute and time, and if so, we must amortize the cost of rigor through reuse across a broad user community. We envision an *AI Workflow Store* that consists of hardened and reusable workflows that agents can invoke with far greater reliability and security than improvised tool chains. We outline the research challenges of this vision, which stem from a broader flexibility-robustness tension that we argue requires moving beyond the ``on-the-fly'' paradigm to navigate effectively.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards an Inferentialist Account of Information Through Proof-theoretic Semantics

arXiv:2605.05368v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Information is one of the most widely-discussed concepts of the current era. However, a great deal of insightful work notwithstanding, it is yet to be given wholly convincing logical or mathematical foundations. Without them, we lack adequate reasoning tools for understanding the complex ecosystems of systems upon which the society depends. We seek to rectify this by taking a first step towards developing an inferentialist semantic theory of information. There are three key interacting components. First, conceptual analysis: the metaphysics of information. Dretske expressed the key concepts of information in terms of intentionality, truth, and transmissibility. We replace truth with inferability, and trace the consequences of this replacement. Second, logic: proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) provides a mathematical-logical realization of inferentialist reasoning. Using P-tS, we develop the first steps towards a mathematical-logical theory of an inferentialist primitive unit of information, the 'inferon'. This proof-theoretic approach counterpoints the model-theoretic view of information articulated in situation theory. Furthermore, we argue that it facilitates addressing all three components of van Benthem and Martinez's categorization of the understandings of information, as range, as correlation, and as code. Our focus is on information-as-correlation. Third, systems: the P-tS tools we develop provide the basis for a mathematical account of distributed systems modelling – a key tool from informatics for understanding the organization of information processing systems. This yields a reasoning-based theory of information flow in models of distributed systems. Overall, we seek to give a conceptually rigorous mathematical-logical account of information and its role within informatics, grounded in inference and reasoning.