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

Transformation-driven generation of comparable projection images from multimodal anatomical scenes

This work addresses the computational problem of generating reproducible projection-space observations from heterogeneous anatomical scenes whose components may undergo independent spatial transformations. We propose a transformation-driven framework for synthetic projection imaging from multimodal anatomical data and demonstrate it on mandibular-motion scenarios. In contrast to conventional Digitally Reconstructed Radiograph (DRR) approaches primarily designed for registration, projection realism, or rendering efficiency, the proposed formulation treats projection imaging as an observation process operating on an explicitly represented anatomical scene. Independently transformable volumetric and surface-based anatomical objects are embedded within a shared scene representation and propagated directly into projection space through explicit transformations. Projection geometry, acquisition modelling, material interpretation, and image presentation remain explicitly separated, enabling controlled exploration of methodological assumptions while preserving reproducibility and direct comparability between generated projections. Particular emphasis is placed on transformation-driven anatomical scenarios relevant to craniofacial analysis, including mandibular motion and therapeutic repositioning. Using a shared anatomical reference scene composed of CT/CBCT volumes, segmented structures, surface models, and auxiliary anatomical or therapeutic objects, the framework enables generation of directly comparable VirtualRTG projections from multiple anatomical configurations while preserving identical imaging assumptions. Rather than aiming at fully physically faithful radiographic simulation, the proposed approach provides a controllable and reproducible methodological environment for studying anatomy–projection relationships, motion observability, and transformation-aware imaging workflows.

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

Stalls and Spequlation: Pipelined Execution for Fault Tolerant Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.19593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computation requires the coordinated action of three distinct systems: classical control logic, quantum hardware, and classical error decoders. Current scheduling models treat logical operations as atomic, hiding the fact that these subsystems operate sequentially and spend significant time idle. We present a pipelined execution framework that decomposes each logical operation into its component stages i.e. Control, Execute, and Decode. Building on this, we discuss some speculation strategies that allow successor operations to begin processing before their predecessors have completed decoding. We evaluate our framework on several common benchmarks and show that pipelining with speculation reduces total pipeline steps by 20-40% compared to a no-speculation baseline. The most aggressive strategy consistently outperforms conservative alternatives, even though partial rollback is needed at times, because the per-rollback penalty is small relative to the parallelism gained. We further show that speculation facilitates load balancing by distributing work more evenly across the heterogeneous subsystems of a fault-tolerant quantum computer, converting idle time into useful computation while also saving on execution time.

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

CausalDrive: Real-time Causal World Models for Autonomous Driving

World models have emerged as a promising paradigm for scaling autonomous driving (AD) data, yet existing video generative models fall short as interactive simulators. Layout-conditioned renderers rely on "oracle" future trajectories of all background agents, rendering them strictly non-reactive. Conversely, pure action-conditioned predictors lack semantic control over complex interactions and suffer from prohibitive diffusion latencies, hindering closed-loop policy learning. To bridge this gap, we present CausalDrive, a controllable, real-time foundation driving world renderer. CausalDrive operates solely on the initial front-view frame, the ego-vehicle's trajectory, and a macroscopic text prompt. By excluding future NPC layouts, we compel the model to intrinsically predict causal interactions, enabling text-driven control over Driving Sociology, allowing users to dynamically orchestrate diverse counterfactual reactions to identical ego-actions. To overcome the efficiency bottleneck and address the covariate shift in autoregressive generation, we propose a novel Context-Forced DMD architecture. This combines continuous flow-matching with a self-correcting distillation objective, achieving interactive speeds of 12 FPS. This breakthrough transforms the passive video generator into a playable neural simulator. We demonstrate its versatility across three downstream applications: (1) generative closed-loop evaluation with significantly mitigated collision artifacts, (2) large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training driven by a Video2Reward module, and (3) real-time human-in-the-loop simulation. Extensive experiments validate that policies trained within CausalDrive's reactive scenarios exhibit superior interaction capabilities in the real world.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Improved Amenability Bounds for Local Coordination Games

arXiv:2606.01963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study local pure coordination games on finite social networks, continuing the framework of Hutchcroft, Rospuskova, and Tamuz. They showed that low inefficiency in local coordination forces the underlying graph to be amenable, with a square-root loss in the amenability parameter. We improve this loss in the binary unbiased setting. Using Shapley values of a mutual-information game associated with the players' local outputs, we prove that if the average disagreement is at most $\varepsilon$, then the graph is $(O(\varepsilon\log(1/\varepsilon)),r)$-amenable. This gives a sharper quantitative converse between local coordination and graph amenability.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FOSC-X: An Extended Framework for Optimal Local Cuts and Non-Horizontal Cluster Selection from Clustering Hierarchies

arXiv:2606.18972v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting a flat clustering solution from a hierarchy is a common task in practical cluster analysis and can be formulated as an optimisation problem. Existing approaches focus on finding a single optimal solution. We introduce FOSC-X, a framework for extracting the top-M globally optimal flat clusterings from local, non-horizontal cuts of a hierarchical cluster tree, while optionally enforcing constraints on the number of clusters. This enables automatic identification of multiple high-quality alternative clusterings that capture different aspects of the hierarchical structure. Without constraints, the top-M problem can be solved in polynomial time using dynamic programming, exploiting the property that locally optimal partial candidates within subtrees can be combined to form globally optimal solutions while automatically determining the number of clusters. However, this can lead to solutions with numbers of clusters that are ultimately undesirable – e.g., too large to be meaningful or practically analysed within a particular application domain. Imposing cluster-count constraints breaks the optimality property underlying the unconstrained dynamic programming approach, since locally optimal partial candidates may no longer combine into feasible globally optimal solutions. FOSC-X addresses this challenge through a dynamic programming strategy that maintains compact sets of feasible candidates using lower and upper feasibility bounds while pruning infeasible or dominated combinations. The resulting method guarantees optimal rankings of the top-M solutions with linear-time complexity in the number of cluster nodes and dataset size, both with and without cluster-count constraints. Experiments show that FOSC-X efficiently reveals alternative clustering structures overlooked by single-solution extraction methods.

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

Bayesian 3D Steerable CNNs: Enabling Equivariance and Uncertainty Quantification Simultaneously

arXiv:2606.15479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Steerable convolutional neural networks (Steerable-CNNs) guarantee SE(3)-equivariance by parameterizing kernels as linear combinations of steerable basis functions, but their deterministic nature precludes uncertainty quantification - limiting their use in settings where confidence estimates are essential. We propose a Bayesian Steerable-CNN that places posterior distributions over the basis coefficients, yielding stochastic kernels while preserving equivariance exactly. The loss function of the model is obtained via variational inference and minimized by Bayes-by-Backpropagation. The framework admits a decomposition of predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components. Empirically, the model attains competitive classification accuracy alongside an expected calibration error of 0.0263 and outperforms its deterministic counterpart by up to 6.17% under distributional shift induced by additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we leverage the model's uncertainty estimates to enhance its performance significantly, achieving a notable gain - approximately 4% higher accuracy across 84% of the test dataset. A statistically significant negative correlation between epistemic uncertainty and prediction error confirms that the learned posterior variance is semantically meaningful. The framework unifies Bayesian uncertainty quantification with the inductive bias of equivariant CNNs.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Unassigned Agents in Compilation-based Multi-agent Path Finding

arXiv:2606.15797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compilation-based techniques represent an important stream of solvers for multi-agent path finding (MAPF) due to their modularity and adaptability for non-standard variants of the problem. While in the standard MAPF the task is to navigate all agents from their initial positions to given individual goal positions without any collision, variants where a different requirement for agents is used are also relevant. Such a variant is MAPF with unassigned agents (UA-MAPF) where some agents have the same setting as in the standard MAPF with initial positions and goals while the remaining agents have the initial position but have no goal - unassigned agents. Despite unassigned agent do not need to reach any goal position they have to be moved out of the way of the standard agents if needed which represent a specific challenge. We show in this paper that UA-MAPF can be expressed in recent compilation-based techniques for MAPF based on formulating the problem as Boolean satisfiability, namely we adapt SMT-CBS and NRF-SAT, the recent solvers based on counterexample guided abstraction refinement and non-refined abstractions.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Internet of Everything in the 6G Era: Paradigms, Enablers, Potentials and Future Directions

arXiv:2604.25018v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Internet of Everything (IoE) represents an evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) by integrating people, data, processes, and things into a unified intelligent ecosystem. IoE aims to enhance automation, decision-making, and service efficiency across multiple application domains such as smart cities, healthcare, industry, and next-generation wireless networks. This paper provides a structured overview of the IoE concept, its core components, architectural foundations, enabling technologies, and major research challenges. Finally, open research directions toward 6G-enabled intelligent IoE systems are discussed, with emphasis on scalability, security, privacy, and energy efficiency.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Fulde-Ferrell superfluids in an asymmetric three-component Fermi Gas

arXiv:2602.24006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An asymmetric three-component Fermi gas, featuring Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling between the first and second components and contact interaction only between the first and third components, introduces both spin-orbit coupling and population imbalance-two mechanisms known to stabilize the Fulde-Ferrell superfluids.We systematically study Fulde-Ferrell superfluids in an asymmetric three-component Fermi gas { in two dimensions and at zero temperature} by finding the global minima of the thermodynamic potential. We reveal a new class of composite Fulde-Ferrell superfluids that emerges when strong spin-orbit coupling generates a double-well structure in momentum space within the lower spin-orbit-coupled band. The key features of these composite superfluids are identified.

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

Interpolation between Convolution and Attention via K-Nearest Neighbors

作者:

The shift from Convolutional Neural Networks to Transformers has reshaped computer vision, yet these two architectural families are typically viewed as fundamentally distinct. Convolutional Neural Networks are defined by spatially local convolution operations, while Transformers rely on global self-attention. We argue that convolution and self-attention, despite their apparent differences, can be unified within a single k-nearest neighbor aggregation framework. The critical insight is that both operations are special cases of neighbor selection and weighted aggregation. Convolution selects neighbors by spatial proximity while self-attention selects by feature similarity, revealing that they lie on a continuous spectrum rather than representing categorically different computations. We introduce Convolutional Nearest Neighbors (ConvNN), a unified framework that formalizes this connection. ConvNN exactly recovers standard and depthwise convolution by restricting neighbor selection to normalized spatial coordinates, and exactly recovers self-attention and its sparse variants, including KVT-attention, by replacing spatial proximity with scaled dot-product similarity. Beyond these special cases, ConvNN serves as a drop-in replacement for both convolution and attention layers, enabling systematic exploration of the intermediate spectrum between local and global aggregation through configurable similarity functions, neighbor selection strategies, positional encodings, and aggregation kernels.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Distributionally Robust Set Representation Learning Under Inference-Time Element Corruption

arXiv:2605.30089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard Set Representation Learning methods typically excel on curated data but often overlook the challenge of inference-time element corruption. This refers to scenarios where deployed models encounter element-level degradations, such as outliers or missing components, that may distort set representation and degrade performance. We propose SW-DRSO, a distributionally robust optimization framework tailored for sets. Rather than minimizing loss solely on observed training data, SW-DRSO optimizes a tractable surrogate of the worst-case expected loss over a family of plausible inference-time variations. We introduce a barycentric adversary that approximates the intractable search over corrupted sets by a differentiable training-time optimization over simplex weights. Extensive experiments across four tasks demonstrate that SW-DRSO effectively enhances robustness against corruption while maintaining high overall performance.

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

Dialogue SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Dialogue-Driven Coding Agents

AI coding agents have rapidly transformed software engineering, powering widely used interactive coding assistants. Despite their interactive real-world use, existing benchmarks evaluate them as fully-autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce Dialogue SWE-Bench, an automatic benchmark dataset for evaluating the ability of coding agents to resolve real-world software engineering problems through dialogue with a user. We design a novel, persona-grounded user simulator to support our task evaluation, and augment our task evaluation with automatic evaluations of dialogue quality. We also propose a new schema-guided agent, aimed at improving the dialogue capabilities of off-the-shelf coding agents, which improves over strong baselines by 3-14%. Our results indicate that better coding models do not always correspond to better dialogue models, suggesting that dialogue capability is a distinct and currently understudied dimension of coding agent performance.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Uncertainty Estimation for Molecular Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.13451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have seen wide adoption for 3D molecular generation, yet they offer no principled signal of when a generated molecule is likely to be of low quality. We propose a post-hoc method for estimating per-sample uncertainty in pretrained molecular diffusion models. Building on a Laplace approximation of the denoising network, we measure the variability of the noise prediction across the generation trajectory. Empirically, we show that the resulting uncertainty score is informative of sample quality, exhibiting a negative correlation with established sample-level quality metrics. We further study how the proposed uncertainty score can be used to filter generated samples, improving model performance via test-time scaling.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Pfaffian quantum Hall state of ultracold bosons

arXiv:2606.12409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fractional quantum Hall states are a cornerstone of topological physics, hosting fractionally charged quasiparticles with exotic statistics that promise to enable topologically protected quantum information processing. Among these, the Pfaffian state introduced by Moore and Read implements a p-wave pairing structure that supports excitations with non-Abelian exchange statistics. Despite extensive study in electronic systems, direct access to its pairing structure has remained limited. Here we realize a three-particle bosonic Pfaffian state of ultracold $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms in an optical lattice subject to a Floquet-engineered synthetic magnetic field. Using a Bayesian-optimized adiabatic protocol, we prepare a state exhibiting Pfaffian pairing correlations. Site-resolved measurements of multi-point density correlations reveal a pronounced suppression of short-range three-body coincidences, reflecting the underlying pairing structure. We further probe the state's transport response through Hall drift measurements. Our results establish a bottom-up approach to engineering non-Abelian topological order and lay the groundwork for future explorations of anyonic braiding in synthetic matter.

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

How Much Do Reviews Really Contribute? A Study on Text-Enriched Matrix Factorization for Recommendations

arXiv:2606.16973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Incorporating textual reviews into a Recommender System has become a prominent strategy for enriching collaborative signals with semantic information. However, the actual contribution of review-derived representations remains an open question, particularly when strong collaborative baselines are employed. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of textual information on Matrix Factorization by introducing and comparing three enrichment strategies over a common collaborative backbone. First, we propose a learnable gating mechanism that adaptively balances collaborative and textual signals during training. This mechanism is applied to two distinct review representations: (i) aggregated topic profiles extracted from user and item histories, and (ii) full text embedding representations derived from reviews. Additionally, we explore a cross-attention mechanism that identifies and emphasizes the most informative dimensions of the textual representation before fusion with collaborative factors. We evaluate six variants: pure, enriched with topic profiles and text via gating; enriched with topics and text via gating; and enhanced with cross-attention over textual features. Experiments across multiple review-based datasets reveal that although adaptive fusion mechanisms improve representation flexibility, the marginal contribution of textual signals remains limited compared to the collaborative backbone. These findings suggest that, under typical rating-prediction settings, collaborative information continues to dominate performance, raising important considerations for the effective integration of semantic review signals into recommendation models.

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

CUPID: Reconstructing UV Texture Maps for Interpretable Person-of-Interest Deepfake Detection

Deepfakes targeting a high-profile individual, known as Person-of-Interest (POI), are a threat to modern democracies and societies. Current POI deepfake detection methods still struggle to combine robustness to post-processing, efficiency and interpretability, focal aspects of modern deepfake detectors. In this paper we propose CUPID, a POI video deepfake detector that combines UV texture maps, a facial appearance representation derived from 3D face reconstructions, with the representation learning capabilities of the Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Our method does not require any deepfake videos in its training phase. Moreover, it does not even require to include a specific POI in the training set: the combination of UV texture maps extracted from real video frames and the MAE context-guided reconstruction yields a latent space that captures rich and discriminative facial features also for identities unseen during training. In the testing phase, the embeddings extracted from a query video depicting the POI can be matched against pristine reference videos to assess the video authenticity. Furthermore, operating in the UV space naturally provides an additional layer of interpretability. Specifically, we can extract decoded residual maps that highlight which facial regions of a test video deviate most from the identity representation of the corresponding POI. Experiments on four deepfake datasets show that CUPID outperforms current state of the art on most datasets and achieves the best overall robustness against strong downscaling and compression, providing also substantially faster inference. Our experimental code will be released at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/CUPID.

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

Noise-Driven Escape from Metastable Phases explains Grokking in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit first order phase transitions under variations of the L2 regularization strength, with each transition marking the onset of a new learnable feature. Below a critical regularization strength, all features are in principle learnable, but coexisting metastable states, separated by energy barriers, can trap the network and impede convergence. A strength of DNNs is their ability to generalize. But many open questions remain, among them the origin of so called grokking: the abrupt, delayed onset of generalization after prolonged apparent overfitting. We show for linear DNNs that grokking is consistent with hysteresis in first-order L2 phase transitions: using L2 regularization to engineer deliberate trapping, we demonstrate that a model in a low-accuracy metastable state escapes only when SGD noise drives it across an energy barrier, with escape times following Arrhenius scaling. We reproduce grokking-like delayed convergence across two orders of magnitude in escape time by deliberately trapping models in metastable phases. Using sparse sub-sampling we also reproduce the canonical grokking curve where test error eventually approaches the final training error. Our work suggests that the number of metastable states equals the number of learnable features – one per singular value of the data covariance – the potential for hysteresis grows naturally with task complexity. We provide evidence that the same mechanism likely operates in general nonlinear DNNs. Our results provide routes toward more efficient learning schemes.

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

Compressed Computation is (probably) not Computation in Superposition

arXiv:2606.14673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether the Compressed Computation (CC) toy model (Braun et al., 2025) is an instance of computation in superposition. The CC model appears to compute 100 ReLU functions with just 50 neurons, achieving a better loss than expected from only representing 50 ReLU functions. We show that the model mixes inputs via its noisy residual stream, corresponding to an unintended mixing matrix in the labels. Splitting the training objective into the ReLU term and the mixing term, we find that performance gains scale with the magnitude of the mixing matrix and vanish when the matrix is removed. The learned neuron directions concentrate in the subspace associated with the top 50 eigenvalues of the mixing matrix, suggesting that the mixing term governs the solution. Finally, a semi-non-negative matrix factorization (SNMF) baseline derived solely from the mixing matrix reproduces the qualitative loss profile and improves on prior baselines, though it does not match the trained model. These results suggest CC is not a suitable toy model of computation in superposition.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Value of XOR-Game-Induced Side Information in a Szilard Engine

arXiv:2605.12044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a Szilard-type thermodynamic valuation of side-information channels induced by Bell-type correlations. In each round, a two-level working system is thermalized with a degenerate Hamiltonian, so that its physical microstate is a uniform classical bit. A trusted referee embeds this bit into a finite two-player XOR game, and a correlation resource produces a compressed controller bit. The controller uses only this compressed bit as side information for feedback. The construction is formulated first for arbitrary finite XOR games. The referee encoding makes the game-winning event equivalent to correct prediction of the physical microstate. Consequently, the induced side-information channel is binary symmetric, with success probability equal to the XOR-game winning probability of the supplied behaviour. The reversible Szilard feedback value is therefore fixed by the mutual information between the microstate and the controller record. Optimizing over local, quantum, and nonsignalling behaviour sets turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, and nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. The construction is an effective-channel valuation, not a claim that Bell nonlocality is thermodynamic fuel. The controller receives only the compressed prediction bit, not the auxiliary variables that define the game. The thermodynamic costs of the referee, the correlation resource, and the preprocessing are not included. When controller-memory reset is included in a full cycle, the net work is non-positive, consistently with the second law.

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

Masked Neural Detection for Constrained Channel Coding in Molecular Communication

arXiv:2606.12489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular communication (MC) suffers from severe diffusion memory because molecules released for one symbol may arrive during later symbols. Neural sequence detectors, especially sliding bidirectional recurrent neural networks (SBRNNs), can substantially outperform threshold detectors in such channels. This raises a central question for MC channel coding: does a code whose advantage was established under threshold detection retain it when both coded and uncoded transmission are evaluated with neural detection? This letter answers this question for run-length-limited ISI-mitigation (RLIM) codes, a class of constrained codes previously shown to provide large BER gains in MC. Across the tested operating points, the best RLIM-SBRNN receiver beats the best uncoded receiver, chosen between threshold and SBRNN detection, in $46$ of $59$ cases, with a mean gain of $10.36\times$ over those wins. We also propose an RLIM-tailored training mask for compact SBRNN detectors, improving the unmasked RLIM-SBRNN in $227$ of $236$ comparisons with $3.267\times$ mean gain when masking is beneficial. Finally, the compact masked RLIM-SBRNN is competitive with channel-state-aware MLSE despite using no channel knowledge.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

LoSoNA: A Benchmark for Local Social Norm Adaptation in Group Conversations

Online group chats are social spaces with local conversational norms that are rarely stated explicitly. The ability and willingness of LLM-based agents to recognize and adapt to these norms remains mostly unexplored. We introduce LoSoNA, a benchmark for local social norm adaptation in multi-party chat. Each scenario gives a subject model a curated group-chat transcript in which non-subject participants demonstrate a hidden local norm, followed by a final elicitor turn that forces a response revealing whether the subject has inferred that norm. We evaluate eight frontier and open-weight models under four prompting conditions that vary how explicitly the model is told to treat the prior conversation as evidence for how it should answer. Naive prompting remains limited for most models; explicit norm-aware prompting helps unevenly, with Gemini 3.1 Pro reaching $84.2\%$ and Claude Fable 5 reaching $81.6\%$, while several other models show small gains or regressions. LoSoNA contributes to recent calls for evaluating LLM social capabilities by testing whether models can infer local conversational norms from precedent and use them in a one-turn group-chat response.

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

When Cognitive Graphs Meet LLMs: BDEI Cognitive Pathways for Panic Emotional Arousal Prediction

Predicting individual panic emotional arousal timing before manifestation is essential for proactive emergency intervention. Existing methods incorporate cognitive elements but none explicitly model the emotional arousal process, making them ill-suited for emotional arousal timing prediction. We argue that grounding prediction in appraisal emotion theory is necessary because it explicitly models this process, but three problems must be solved. (1) Appraisal theory posits that emotion arises from simultaneous evaluation across multiple threat dimensions, yet no prior work fuses these inputs into risk perception. (2) Existing cognitive models lack an Emotion node, decoupling threat appraisal from emotional arousal and forcing emotions to be inferred indirectly from behaviors. (3) Given their generalizable cognitive reasoning, current approaches adopt LLMs as the primary decision-maker, yet overlook the fragility and hallucination-proneness of their outputs. To address these issues, we introduce PanicCognitivePath (PCP), a framework that addresses all three. A Psychological Safety Distance (PSD) model, grounded in psychological distance theory, maps four-domain signals into a unified risk metric as the entry condition for subsequent cognitive reasoning. An explicit Emotion node grounded in appraisal emotion theory is introduced into BDI, forming a Belief-Desire-Emotion-Intention (BDEI) pathway. Agents whose risk metric exceeds the PSD threshold enter this pathway, coupling threat appraisal directly to emotional arousal. The BDEI pathway governs all state transitions while the LLM is confined to parameter estimation for the Belief-to-Desire transition, confining hallucinations to a single step and preventing error propagation. Experiments on Hurricane Sandy show PCP improves arousal timing accuracy by 10.68% over baselines, reduces peak count error to 7.07%.

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

AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Models

The worldwide surge of authoritarianism, combined with the increasing central role in users' everyday lives, raises the question of to what extent specific models exhibit or promote authoritarian attitudes and characteristics. We introduce AuAu, a comprehensive benchmark that aims to assess the risk of LLMs generating responses with authoritarian tendencies. This benchmark combines three evaluation approaches: (i) psychometric questions from an extensive pool of 15 human validated instruments; (ii) contextual behavior vignettes probing intended actions in concrete situations; and (iii) responses to realistic user prompts. Unlike prior work, AuAu evaluates not only a general closeness towards authoritarianism but also the established sub-concepts Authoritarian Aggression, Authoritarian Submission, and Conventionalism. Evaluating 17 models from China, the EU, Russia, and the USA, we find that all tested models exhibit substantial authoritarian response rates under the psychometric evaluation, though rates drop significantly in increasingly more realistic downstream task. We further find that an authoritarian system prompt easily manipulates 15 out of 17 models to promote increased authoritarianism. Our results underscore the need for continued, systematic auditing of LLM-based AI systems to detect and ultimately mitigate undesired authoritarian tendencies in generated output. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/andreaseinwiller/AuAu

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

KVEraser: Learning to Steer KV Cache for Efficient Localized Context Erasing

Post-hoc context erasing over the KV cache is challenging because a local edit has a global consequence: once a span has been processed, its influence propagates into the cached states of all subsequent tokens. This issue arises naturally in long-context LLM applications, where stale retrieved facts, incorrect tool observations, retracted user preferences, or harmful prompt injections may be identified only after prefill. Exact erasing must then recompute all tokens after the deleted span, making its computational cost depend on suffix length rather than erased-span length. We introduce KVEraser, a learned KV-cache editing method for efficient localized context erasing. Given a processed context and a span to remove, KVEraser replaces only the KV states of the erased interval with learned steering states while reusing the remaining cache unchanged. To learn a transferable erasing mechanism, we build a two-stage training pipeline: generic span-neighbor pre-training teaches the eraser to suppress the influence of the erased span, while task-specific fine-tuning adapts this capability to downstream scenarios. Experiments show that KVEraser nearly matches full recomputation in post-erasure performance on in-domain tasks across 1K–32K context lengths, while its latency increases by only 24% compared with a 17.6x increase for full recomputation. KVEraser also generalizes to unseen long-document QA tasks with harmful factual distractors, achieving the best performance among approximate baselines with a 3–4x speedup over full recomputation.