Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Introduction to matrix-product states and tensor networks

arXiv:2606.24803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: These notes provide an introduction to tensor-network methods in quantum many-body physics, with an emphasis on matrix-product states (MPS). They develop the basic tensor-network language, including graphical notation, virtual indices, bond dimensions, gauge freedom, canonical forms, QR and singular-value decompositions, and the role of entanglement in controlling the efficiency of the representation. The main MPS algorithms are then introduced, including contractions, correlation functions, matrix-product operators, DMRG, and time-evolution methods. The notes also briefly discuss projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) as a higher-dimensional generalization of MPS, together with the basic ideas behind approximate PEPS contraction. Finally, tensor-network representations of mixed states, quantum channels, and Lindblad dynamics are presented, with applications to thermal states and open quantum systems. The presentation is accompanied by short Julia code examples based on ITensor, ITensorMPS, and TensorMixedStates. These notes were written for the 9th Les Houches Summer School on Computational Physics: Open Quantum Systems, held in June 2026.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Where Should Action Generation Begin? A Learnable Source Prior for Generative Robot Policies

Generative robot policies typically begin action generation from an observation-independent standard Gaussian distribution, leaving the choice of source distribution underexplored. This work asks a simple question: where should action generation begin? We propose LeaP, a Learnable source Prior that replaces the standard Gaussian with a proprioception-conditioned diagonal Gaussian over action chunks. Parameterized by a lightweight MLP, LeaP jointly predicts the mean and state-adaptive variance of the source distribution, while keeping the downstream generator architecture and inference solver unchanged. This design provides an observation-informed yet stochastic initialization, allowing the generator to focus on precise action refinement rather than transporting samples from an uninformed noise source. On 15 RoboTwin manipulation tasks, LeaP achieves an average success rate of 81.6%, outperforming four representative baselines – including deterministic-source methods, a no-prior counterpart, and a diffusion-bridge policy – by 6.5 to 25.5 percentage points. The same prior consistently improves both flow-matching and diffusion-bridge generators, while using fewer parameters and converging faster. The advantage carries over to real-world deployment, where LeaP attains the best performance. These results suggest that the source distribution is an independent and reusable design axis for generative robot policies, complementary to the choice of generative dynamics.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Supervised Reinforcement Learning for the Coordination of Distributed Energy Resources

arXiv:2606.24947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) is crucial for power system decarbonization, yet unlocking DERs' flexibility is challenged by their inherent uncertainties and modelling complexity. As traditional optimization methods struggle with such uncertainty and complexity of DERs, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising alternative for DER management. However, standard RL methods suffer from sample inefficiency and sub-optimality when trained from scratch. Inspired by the training paradigms in large language models, this paper proposes a Supervised Reinforcement Learning (SRL) framework for learning DER coordination policies. This framework first pre-trains a policy on demonstration data in a supervised-learning fashion, which is then further fine-tuned using RL. Furthermore, we propose a two-step fine-tuning process: offline fine-tuning for enhancing policy performance and online fine-tuning for adapting it to the real-world dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that RL implementations based on the proposed framework significantly outperform all benchmarks, achieving high cost efficiency even under low-quality demonstration data.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Mapping Scientific Literature with Large Language Models and Topic Modeling

Scientific literature is increasingly fragmented by disciplinary boundaries, specialized terminology, and potentially sparse keyword systems, making it difficult to capture the evolving structure of modern science. This study introduces a large language model (LLM)-driven framework for mapping scientific literature from a topic modeling perspective. The approach is demonstrated on a 20-year corpus of more than 1,500 engineering-related articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). A two-stage classification pipeline first assigns a primary thematic category to each article based on its abstract, followed by full-text analysis to identify secondary classifications that reveal latent cross-topic connections within the corpus. Unlike conventional topic models, the LLM-based framework produces semantically interpretable topics while maintaining strong quantitative performance. Comparative evaluation against established topic modeling methods shows higher topic diversity and lower overlap with competitive coherence metrics. Manual validation on a randomly sampled subset of abstracts yields an accuracy of 75.9%. Additional traditional natural language processing analyses confirm that the generated topics correspond to meaningful linguistic patterns in the corpus. A bipartite network linking primary and secondary classifications further reveals implicit thematic relationships that are not readily observable through abstracts or keyword systems alone. The findings indicate that the framework independently recovers much of the journal's editorial dual-classification structure without prior knowledge of its schema. Overall, the proposed approach offers a powerful tool for mapping science and identifying emerging cross-topic connections in research.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Disparate privacy risks from medical AI

Medical artificial intelligence (AI) models hold the promise to improve global access to high-quality diagnostics1. However, the training data underlying these models often contain sensitive patient information that may be exposed through privacy attacks2–7. Previous research has primarily quantified the success of these attacks in aggregate, across all records in a dataset. Thus, the privacy risk faced by individual patients, who often contribute multiple similar records to a training dataset, is poorly understood. Here we present one of the first patient-level privacy audits of AI models for medical diagnostic applications. We focus on membership inference attacks2–4 (MIAs), which seek to determine whether the data of a given individual were used to train a model. Across a diverse range of medical datasets, we show that MIAs can achieve near-perfect success rates for individual patients, even when the aggregate performance does not substantially deviate from random guessing. We further find that the number of patients with high attack success increases substantially with model capacity, and that underrepresented groups—stratified by disease status, self-reported race, insurance, sex or imaging protocol—face disproportionately high attack success. Together, our findings show that aggregate privacy metrics can severely underestimate individual privacy risk. Whether the disparate risk profiles we observe extend to attacks beyond MIAs remains an open question, motivating the further development of risk assessment and mitigation techniques that cater to all data-contributing patients. AI models for medical diagnostics are vulnerable to membership inference attacks.

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

Scaling Generative Foundation Models for Chest Radiography with Rectified Flow Transformers

arXiv:2606.19460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the first generative foundation model for chest radiograph synthesis trained from scratch at the billion-parameter scale. Existing radiographic AI models often suffer from poor generalisation across patient subpopulations, institutions, and acquisition settings, resulting in limited real-world clinical utility. Controlled, high-fidelity synthesis of chest radiographs is a promising path toward diversifying clinical datasets and evaluating the robustness of diagnostic models. Therefore, we present the largest specialist generative foundation model for chest radiographs to date, with over 1.3B parameters, trained for 1.6T tokens on a curated, heterogeneous dataset comprising 1.2M radiographs and clinical expert-guided metadata. Our model supports controllable radiograph generation and editing across multiple demographic subgroups, acquisition views, and a dozen pathologies. Moreover, we significantly advance the state of the art in radiograph synthesis fidelity, producing images that are indistinguishable from real radiographs to clinical experts.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Structured Approximations of Measures

arXiv:2310.09149v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the approximation of probability measures in the Wasserstein-$p$ distance by structured classes of approximators, motivated by applications in imaging, machine learning, and physical measurement under sensor constraints. We obtain three sets of results. First, for measures with densities bounded away from zero on a bounded Lipschitz domain $\Omega$, we prove that any approximation scheme for functions in $\mathrm{L}_p(\Omega)$ transfers, with linear rate, to a corresponding approximation scheme for measures in $\mathrm{W}_p(\Omega)$. The argument applies a theorem of Bogovskii on regularity of solutions to the continuity equation in the Benamou-Brenier formulation of optimal transport. We exhibit concrete approximation schemes (polynomials, shift-invariant spaces, cardinal interpolation with radial basis functions, kernel density estimators, and piecewise approximations on nonuniform Voronoi partitions) that fit the framework. As a matter of independent interest, we prove a negative Sobolev lower bound that generalizes existing bounds from $p=2$ to all $p\in(1,\infty)$. We also consider deterministic bounds for discrete approximations to arbitrary measures in terms of the mesh norm of a quasi-uniform set of points. We specialize these bounds to show that compactly supported measures admit a deterministic $N$-term approximation $\mu_N$ such that $\mathrm{W}_p(\mu,\mu_N) = O(N^{-\frac{1}{d}})$ for all $d\geq 1$, which matches the asymptotic optimal quantizer rate. We also extend these results to non-compactly supported measures with appropriate tail decay.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weight-level importance values for the corresponding projection matrices. Unlike magnitude-only or activation-based criteria, CAP's interventional measurement directly captures each head's functional contribution, yielding relative accuracy gains of up to 61% over Wanda on ARC-Challenge at 20% sparsity. We evaluate CAP on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge using Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct at 10%, 20%, and 50% sparsity. At moderate sparsity (10-20%), CAP improves over Wanda in most model-benchmark configurations. with especially large gains on ARC-Challenge for Llama-3. Our results suggest that attention-head-level causal attribution can better preserve reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks than correlational pruning criteria at equivalent sparsity, while remaining limited by coarse MLP attribution at 50% sparsity.

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

Learning QoE from Packet-Level Measurements in Encrypted Video Conferencing Traffic

The quality of the user experience has become one of the most important aspects in todays world, as it directly influences individuals willingness to continue using or abandon a product or service. In this context, video conferencing applications (VCAs), which experienced widespread adoption following the COVID-19 pandemic, must deliver excellent performance to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Although content providers (CPs) such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet can assess conversation quality by comparing transmitted and received data. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption in VCAs makes quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation by internet service providers (ISPs) far more challenging. Since ISPs do not have access to the encrypted content, they must rely on passive measurements of unencrypted traffic characteristics on the data path. In this work, we present a simple yet effective QoE prediction framework based on an almost stock convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that uses only the packet sizes extracted from the communication between two participants in a video conferencing (VC) call to predict two QoE metrics: BRISQUE and MOS. The proposed framework is simple, easy to implement, and does not require high-end computational resources, yet it provides superior prediction performance, as shown in our experiments on two custom datasets collected from WhatsApp and Zoom, which achieve substantial improvements over previous models for the QoE prediction task.

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

GeoRoPE: Ground-Aware Rotary Adaptation for Remote Sensing Foundation Models

Remote-sensing foundation models (RSFMs) benefit from pretraining on imagery from multiple sensors and ground sampling distances (GSDs), but such exposure alone does not resolve scale mismatch during downstream adaptation. A fixed token-grid offset can correspond to different ground distances across sensors, making grid-based positional priors physically inconsistent. Meanwhile, heterogeneous spatial granularity means that compact urban regions and homogeneous landscapes may require different positional sensitivities even under the same GSD. Therefore, we propose {GeoRoPE}, a ground-aware, RoPE-compatible, and parameter-efficient spatial adaptation method for RSFMs. GeoRoPE recalibrates token-level positional interactions from two complementary aspects. First, Geo-Coordinate Calibration (GCC) rescales raw token-grid offsets according to the ground distance represented by one token-grid step, producing geo-calibrated relative coordinates across GSDs. Second, Geo-Frequency Calibration (GFC) adjusts the native RoPE frequency with a relation-specific factor, enabling position sensitive adaptation to scene-dependent spatial granularity. GeoRoPE is injected into pretrained RSFMs through a lightweight adapter, preserving the frozen spatial prior while adding geo-aware positional corrections. Experiments across multiple RSFMs, sensors, resolutions, and downstream tasks demonstrate that GeoRoPE improves cross-resolution robustness and scale-sensitive representation learning.

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

Hard or Just Unreached? Diagnosing the Sampling Blind Spot in Math-Reasoning Difficulty Estimation

arXiv:2606.19636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal. The same signal drives RL with verifiable rewards, math data curation, synthetic curricula, and verifier training. We show this proxy has a persistent blind spot on its hardest stratum: on the eight free-form math cells we test (GSM8K and MATH across four open-weight models), 10.3-22.9% of the examples that no sampling seed solves in six tries are instead solved at matched compute by a six-chain deterministic regime. These are greedy decoding plus five cheap residual-stream perturbations applied via activation grafting, while greedy alone solves at most 6% on these math cells. Recovery scales with the additional budget, across perturbations whose mechanistic distinctness we verify across all twelve cells (cross-kind fix-set Jaccard

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

Nous: An Attempt to Extract and Inject the Cognition Behind Prediction-Market Behavior

作者:

arXiv:2606.13038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents proliferate in prediction markets and collective decision-making, they risk a cognitive monoculture: agents built on shared foundation models produce correlated forecasts, and recent measurement finds frontier-model errors correlated at r ~ 0.77. We ask whether human cognitive diversity can be recovered from behavior and transferred to LLM agents. Nous extracts a structured eight-dimension behavioral profile from real Polymarket trading activity and injects it into agents through prompts. Our central finding is a dissociation between the two halves of that pipeline. Extraction works, partially: across 100 wallets, 8 of 14 parameters are temporally stable (split-half ICC >= 0.5, bootstrap CI lower bound > 0.3; contrarian score reaches ICC ~ 0.9); wallets are identifiable from their profiles well above chance (top-1 retrieval 17-22% vs. 1% chance); and two of four pre-specified dimensions rank-correlate with future realized profit out-of-sample, though the correlations do not survive behavioral-confound controls. Prompt-level injection does not measurably transmit it: on a semantic embedding metric, structured injection shows no significant advantage over a length-matched control on any model, and the diversity it induces neither reduces ensemble error correlation nor improves Brier score – a null that persists across exploratory checks on sampling temperature, profile diversity, and question difficulty. Measuring the prompts themselves locates the compression before the model: the structure-to-narrative translator emits near-uniform prompts whose spread does not track profile spread. We position Nous as measuring the cognitive-monoculture problem and the limits of a prompt-level remedy, motivating deeper, below-the-prompt injection (fine-tuning, activation steering). Code, frozen profiles, prompts, and model outputs: https://github.com/WillChienT/nous-paper

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Enhancing quantum-classical configuration interaction methods using a neural-network classifier

arXiv:2606.24332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selected configuration interaction methods achieve near-exact electronic structure calculations by iteratively constructing compact variational spaces, but their efficiency depends critically on the heuristics used to identify important determinants. Here, we introduce a data-driven selection framework that recasts determinant importance as a binary classification task and integrates a neural-network classifier into the iterative CI workflow through an active-learning loop. At each iteration, a random subset of candidate determinants is labelled via temporary diagonalisation, and the trained classifier guides selection of the remaining configurations. We demonstrate the utility of this framework for both classical and quantum CI methods by calculating the ground-state energy of a diatomic molecule. Our method achieves result parity with traditional configuration interaction methods at substantially lower computational cost: roughly a $\times 5$ reduction in memory and per-iteration cost for the classical cHCI variant, and convergence in markedly fewer iterations for the quantum-classical cSQD variant. These results establish classifier-assisted determinant selection as a lightweight, method-agnostic tool for compressing variational spaces and accelerating both classical and hybrid quantum-classical configuration interaction algorithms.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Time and Killed Resolvents in Reflected Optimal Stopping with a Max Payoff

arXiv:2606.18214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study infinite-horizon optimal stopping for normally reflected two-dimensional diffusions in the positive quadrant with max payoff \(G(x_1,x_2)=x_1\vee\alpha x_2\). The non-smooth payoff produces a singular stopping-gain measure on the kink set \(\Delta=\{x_1=\alpha x_2\}\). We prove $\displaystyle \Gamma^\Delta(dx) = -\frac{n^\top a(x)n}{2\sqrt{1+\alpha^2}}\,\sigma_\Delta(dx)$, with $n=(1,-\alpha)$, so the diagonal component is non-positive and strictly negative under local ellipticity. This implies that every interior kink point lies in the continuation region. We further show that the correct value representation uses the resolvent killed at first entry into the stopping set, $\displaystyle V=G-R_r^{\mathcal C}\Gamma$, and give a closed-form reflected Brownian counter-example showing that the unrestricted reflected resolvent is generally wrong. A reflected Brownian benchmark and numerical experiments illustrate the local-time, resolvent-gap, and diagonal-avoidance mechanisms.

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

XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks.

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

On The Effectiveness-Fluency Trade-Off In LLM Conditioning: A Systematic Study

Controlling the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a central challenge for their reliable deployment, yet a clear understanding of the involved trade-offs remains elusive. Current approaches to conditioning are often evaluated with a narrow focus on their effectiveness at injecting or removing a target concept, neglecting generation quality. We systematically investigate a range of conditioning methods in both injection and removal scenarios. We find that efficient steering methods frequently achieve conditioning at a steep cost to fluency. Furthermore, we identify a critical yet previously overlooked interaction with the training paradigm: activation steering methods are far less effective on instruction-tuned models than on their base counterparts. Simple prompting and full-fledged supervised fine-tuning, on the other hand, are viable options for concept injection, but are not as good at concept removal. Finally, cheaply computed textual metrics highly correlate to costly LLM-as-judge scores, and provide insights on the behavior of conditioning methods.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Non-Hermitian Delocalization Realizes Random Dirac Criticality in One Dimension

arXiv:2606.12089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems can evade Anderson localization and exhibit delocalized states even in one dimension. Here, we show that such non-Hermitian delocalized states under periodic boundary conditions (PBC) are intrinsically critical, realizing the universality class of one-dimensional random Dirac fermions. By linking spectral winding to topological Anderson transitions via Hermitization, we demonstrate that the delocalized PBC states exhibit a Dirac-type criticality with universal algebraic correlations. In contrast to Hermitian systems, where this criticality occurs only at fine-tuned transition points, it emerges generically in non-Hermitian systems as a consequence of spectral topology. These results identify a universal mechanism by which non-Hermiticity promotes criticality, providing a unified description of non-Hermitian delocalization in one dimension.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

PixJail: Self-Evolving Paper-to-Pipeline Reproduction for Text-to-Image Jailbreak Evaluation

arXiv:2606.24081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Text-to-Image (T2I) jailbreak techniques evolve rapidly, existing benchmarks and reproduction workflows often struggle to keep pace. More importantly, T2I jailbreak evaluation is not a single prompt-level test, but a pipeline-level problem shaped by multiple stages, including prompt transformation, image generation, safety filtering, and multimodal judging. This makes results across papers difficult to reliably reproduce and fairly compare. To bridge this gap, we propose PixJail, a self-evolving paper-to-pipeline agent framework for reproducible T2I jailbreak evaluation. Given a T2I jailbreak paper and optional reference code, PixJail rapidly constructs a paper-specific attack module and a runnable evaluation pipeline under a unified contract, while faithfully reproducing the original experimental results. PixJail further maintains a memory bank that stores paper digests, attack evolution patterns, reusable templates, failure cases, and versioned artifacts, enabling future reproduction efforts to reuse prior experience. We reproduce eleven representative T2I jailbreak methods, including both code-available and code-unavailable papers. Under their original settings, our framework accurately recovers prior results with minimal error (2.1\% average, 0\% median). We hope that PixJail can serve as a unified foundation for future T2I jailbreak reproduction and evaluation, significantly reducing manual effort.

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

Scale or Reason? A Compute-Equivalent Analysis of Reasoning Distillation

Distilling reasoning traces from strong teacher models has become the standard recipe for building capable small language models. Yet reasoning traces are 5-20$\times$ longer than standard instruction fine-tuning (IFT) outputs, meaning every practitioner who chooses reasoning distillation implicitly forgoes training a larger IFT model on the same compute budget. Whether this trade-off is worthwhile remains unaddressed. We study it with a controlled experiment: a single teacher generates paired IFT and reasoning outputs for identical prompts by toggling only its reasoning mode, isolating supervision format as the sole variable. Training students at five scales (0.5B to 14B) and evaluating on 18 benchmarks, we find that at matched FLOPs, IFT lies on or near the Pareto frontier across the majority of configurations. Reasoning reaches the Pareto frontier only on open-ended tasks at 7B and above. Even there, a sequential curriculum mixing just 25-50\% reasoning data with IFT captures most of the accuracy benefit at far lower compute cost.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Socioeconomic Determinants of Guideline-Concordant Therapy for Early-Stage Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: A Population-Based Analysis from Appalachian and Non-Appalachian Ohio, 2004-2015

Purpose: To examine the relative contributions of insurance, county-level poverty, and other socioeconomic factors, as compared with Appalachian geography, to receipt of guideline-concordant therapy for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in Appalachian and non-Appalachian Ohio. Methods: Retrospective population-based cohort study using the Ohio Cancer Incidence Surveillance System. We identified adults diagnosed with early-stage NSCLC between 2004 and 2015 (N=26,756). The primary outcome was receipt of guideline-concordant local therapy (surgery or definitive radiation). Rural-urban classification used USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Codes. Multivariable logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards models assessed predictors of treatment and survival, with E-values, race-stratified models, and propensity score weighting as sensitivity analyses. Findings: Median age was 71 years; 50.3% were male, 83.8% non-Hispanic White, and 20.4% Appalachian. Overall, 83.6% received guideline-concordant local therapy (59.6% surgery, 24.0% radiation). In adjusted analysis, Medicaid (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 0.53, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.44-0.63; adjusted risk ratio [RR] 0.94, 0.91-0.96), county-level poverty >20% (OR 0.77, 95% CI 0.68-0.87; RR 0.96, 0.95-0.98), and unmarried status were independently associated with lower therapy receipt, whereas Appalachian residence was associated with modestly higher receipt (OR 1.17, 95% CI 1.06-1.29; RR 1.02, 1.01-1.04). Therapy rates converged across regions over the study period (year x Appalachian interaction p20% (HR 1.13, 95% CI 1.07-1.20). Conclusions: Socioeconomic factors, particularly Medicaid insurance and county-level poverty, were the patient characteristics most strongly associated with lower receipt of guideline-concordant therapy, whereas Appalachian residence was not a barrier. Findings support targeted interventions addressing insurance-related and poverty-related barriers to lung cancer care in high-poverty communities regardless of geographic designation.

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

Ranking Abuse via Strategic Pairwise Data Perturbations

arXiv:2604.17805v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise ranking systems based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), such as the Bradley-Terry model, are widely used to aggregate preferences from pairwise comparisons. However, their robustness under strategic data manipulation remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of MLE-based ranking systems to adversarial perturbations. We formulate the manipulation task as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and propose an Adaptive Subset Selection Attack (ASSA) to efficiently identify high-impact perturbations. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world election datasets show that MLE-based rankings exhibit a sharp phase-transition behavior: beyond a small perturbation budget, a limited number of strategic voters can significantly alter the global ranking. In particular, our method consistently outperforms random and greedy baselines under constrained budgets. These findings reveal a fundamental sensitivity of MLE-based ranking mechanisms to structured perturbations and highlight the need for more robust aggregation methods in collective decision-making systems.

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

Emergent retokenization symmetry in large language models: phenomenology and applications

Tokenization introduces representational redundancy: under a fixed token vocabulary, every byte string admits many valid token encodings, or segmentations, that decode to the same surface string. However, given a prompt, most language model tokenizers break this representational symmetry by returning a canonical segmentation. Training only on canonical segmentations should influence inference behavior, and there is little reason to expect models to respect segmentation symmetry on downstream tasks. We find that this symmetry partially emerges during training. Here, we probe this emergent symmetry through experiments testing token compositional understanding, representation diversity, and task focused benchmark performance. We primarily use retokenization – replacing a prompt's canonical tokenization with an alternative segmentation while preserving its bytes exactly. Relative to other prompt perturbations, retokenization is unusually clean because it isolates segmentation effects without changing syntax, semantics or surface form. We use retokenization to study sensitivity and robustness to semantically identical input representations across pretraining and post-training. Moreover, this partial retokenization symmetry suggests a distinct inference-time sampling axis. While temperature sampling generates diverse outputs from the model using its next-token probability distribution, retokenization generates diversity from the model's internal computations through semantically equivalent input representations. We find that while this retokenization sampling strategy can hurt performance on easy problems, it can also recover solutions that conventional sampling does not find. Overall, our work presents retokenization as a simple yet powerful probe of large language models, shedding light on compositional understanding and prompt sensitivity, and offering a novel sampling strategy.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners

Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based systems. Through an empirical study of existing skill scanners, we find that current defenses primarily rely on textual descriptions, manifests, and source code as the main signals for security analysis, which can leave visually conveyed malicious intent insufficiently examined. This creates a practical blind spot: harmful operational instructions hidden in images may bypass scanning while still being recoverable by multimodal agents during deployment. To systematically investigate this threat, we propose SkillCamo, a document-mediated multimodal instruction attack that conceals malicious instructions within images bundled with a skill while rewriting the surrounding documentation to naturally reference those images as part of the normal workflow. Thus, the attack does not rely on the image alone, but on the joint interpretation of textual guidance and visual payload at execution time. To defend against such attacks, we further propose ExecScan, an execution-grounded multimodal scanning module that performs intent extraction, behavior reconstruction, abuse assessment, and deliberative execution simulation over skill artifacts. ExecScan jointly analyzes documentation, code, referenced resources, and visual content to recover hidden instructions, reconstruct executable behavior chains, and identify downstream risks such as exfiltration, destruction, persistence, deception, and privilege escalation. Extensive experiments show that image-hidden malicious instructions challenge existing skill scanners, while ExecScan can improve the skill scanning performance.