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

SkillWiki: A Living Knowledge Infrastructure for Agent Skills

While knowledge is managed through Wikipedia and software through GitHub, agent skills still lack an infrastructure for large-scale production, governance, and evolution. SkillWiki is a living knowledge infrastructure that supports the organization, grounding, and continuous evolution of agent skills by transforming heterogeneous knowledge into reusable skill assets linked to their originating evidence. Our demonstration presents the complete skill lifecycle, from knowledge ingestion and skill production to provenance-aware exploration, governance, and execution-driven evolution. SkillWiki highlights a future in which knowledge, skills, and execution experience co-evolve within a shared infrastructure. The live demonstration and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/Huangdingcheng/SkillWiki.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Automated jailbreak attack targeting multiple defense strategies

arXiv:2606.16751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their safety remains a critical concern due to their susceptibility to adversarial prompt-based attacks. In this paper, we present UNIATTACK, an adversarial testing framework designed from a defense-oriented perspective to systematically construct effective black-box attack prompts. Unlike prior approaches that rely on static templates or iterative model-specific tuning, UNIATTACK extracts minimal but high-impact attack features from diverse existing attacks, optimizes them via a specialized attacker LLM, and composes them into flexible templates through automated refinement process. This feature-centric construction enables one-shot attacks that generalize across multiple models and safety categories, providing a practical tool for assessing LLM robustness. Our evaluation results shows that compared to the baselines, UNIATTACK achieves an average attack success rate (ASR) improvement of 64.63\%-248.82\% on models deployed with multi-layered defense mechanisms and it only takes 0.03\%-4.96\% cost of the baselines. UNIATTACK artifact is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UniAttack-Artifact-30F1.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Stabilizing the Q-Gradient Field for Policy Smoothness in Actor-Critic Methods

arXiv:2601.22970v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policies learned via continuous actor-critic methods often exhibit erratic, high-frequency oscillations, making them unsuitable for physical deployment. Current approaches attempt to enforce smoothness by directly regularizing the policy's output. We argue that this approach treats the symptom rather than the cause. In this work, we theoretically establish that policy non-smoothness is fundamentally governed by the differential geometry of the critic. By applying implicit differentiation to the actor-critic objective, we prove that the sensitivity of the optimal policy is bounded by the ratio of the Q-function's mixed-partial derivative (noise sensitivity) to its action-space curvature (signal distinctness). To empirically validate this theoretical insight, we introduce PAVE (Policy-Aware Value-field Equalization), a critic-centric regularization framework that treats the critic as a scalar field and stabilizes its induced action-gradient field. PAVE rectifies the learning signal by minimizing the Q-gradient volatility while preserving local curvature. Experimental results demonstrate that PAVE achieves smoothness comparable to policy-side smoothness regularization methods, while maintaining competitive task performance, without modifying the actor.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Randomized Midpoint Method for Log-Concave Sampling under Constraints

arXiv:2405.15379v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from log-concave distributions supported on convex and compact sets, with a particular focus on the randomized midpoint discretization of both overdamped and kinetic Langevin diffusions in constrained domains. We revisit the proximal framework for handling constraints through projection operators and develop a more general formulation that encompasses Euclidean, Bregman, and Gauge projections. The resulting smooth approximation allows a unified and tractable analysis of Langevin algorithms and their variants under constraints. Within this framework, we establish convergence guarantees in Wasserstein-$q$ $(q\geqslant 1)$ distances between the smooth surrogate and the target distribution. We further derive complementary lower bounds, showing that the results are near-optimal in order. Building upon this tight approximation analysis, we obtain new convergence guarantees for the randomized midpoint Langevin algorithms and refined bounds for both vanilla and kinetic Langevin Monte Carlo methods under constraints, thereby advancing the theoretical understanding of constrained diffusion-based sampling.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

LaME: Learning to Think in Latent Space for Multimodal Embedding via Information Bottleneck

Reasoning-driven universal multimodal embedding has advanced rapidly by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the embedding pipeline. Despite the strong performance across both general and complex tasks, this paradigm suffers from two core limitations: (i) autoregressive CoT reasoning incurs high computational cost, making it impractical for low-latency retrieval; and (ii) embedding performance is heavily coupled with CoT annotation quality, making large-scale training unreliable. These raise fundamental questions: Is textual CoT the optimal form of reasoning for embedding, and can effective embedding reasoning be accomplished in latent space? To this end, we propose LaME (Latent Reasoning Multimodal Embedding), which formulates embedding-oriented latent reasoning as a weakly supervised information bottleneck. LaME employs K learnable reason tokens as a fixed-capacity bottleneck, completing all reasoning within a single forward pass. The two weak supervision signals structurally decouple contrastive from autoregressive objectives and eliminate dependence on CoT annotations, while a two-stage training pipeline ensures stable convergence. Experiments on MMEB-v2 and MRMR show that LaME achieves competitive performance, surpassing some explicit CoT-based models, while delivering 60x faster inference than explicit CoT methods and 2x faster than latent baselines with throughput comparable to discriminative embedding models. Code will be released.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Semantically-Aware Diver Activity Recognition Framework for Effective Underwater Multi-Human-Robot Collaboration

Effective multi-human-robot collaboration is essential for expanding human-led operations in the challenging and high-risk underwater environment. For autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to become true teammates, they must be able to comprehend their surroundings and recognize a diver's activities to offer assistance and ensure safety. Towards this goal, we introduce DAR-Net, a novel transformer-based framework that analyzes complex underwater scenes to classify diver activities. Our contribution lies in a semantically guided learning formulation that couples transformer-based temporal reasoning with pixel-level scene supervision. This multi-loss training strategy explicitly aligns global activity recognition with local human-robot interaction semantics, which is particularly critical in low-visibility underwater conditions. To address the significant challenge of data scarcity in this domain, we present the first-ever Underwater Diver Activity (UDA) dataset, a foundational resource containing over 2,600 annotated images with pixel-level masks. Through rigorous experimental evaluations in a controlled environment, we demonstrate that DAR-Net achieves promising accuracy in recognizing six distinct diver activities, outperforming state-of-the-art models. While this dataset provides a crucial baseline, our work serves as a pioneering step, laying the groundwork for future research and facilitating the development of more intelligent, collaborative underwater robotic systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

UniversalRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Corpora of Diverse Modalities and Granularities

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown substantial promise in improving factual accuracy by grounding model responses with external knowledge relevant to queries. However, most existing approaches are limited to a text-only corpus, and while recent efforts have extended RAG to other modalities such as images and videos, they typically operate over a single modality-specific corpus. In contrast, real-world queries vary widely in the type of knowledge they require, which a single type of knowledge source cannot address. To address this, we introduce UniversalRAG, an any-to-any RAG framework designed to retrieve and integrate knowledge from heterogeneous sources with diverse modalities and granularities. Specifically, motivated by the observation that forcing all modalities into a unified representation space derived from a single aggregated corpus causes a modality gap, where the retrieval tends to favor items from the same modality as the query, we propose modality-aware routing, which dynamically identifies the most appropriate modality-specific corpus and performs targeted retrieval within it, and further justify its effectiveness with a theoretical analysis. Moreover, beyond modality, we organize each modality into multiple granularity levels, enabling fine-tuned retrieval tailored to the complexity and scope of the query. We validate UniversalRAG on 10 benchmarks of multiple modalities, showing its superiority over various modality-specific and unified baselines.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-perturbative CPMG scaling and qutrit-driven breakdown under compiled superconducting-qubit control: a single-qubit study

作者:

arXiv:2603.29525v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decoherence in superconducting qubits arises from both multilevel dynamics and structured environmental noise, yet perturbative models cannot capture all resulting signatures. Here, EmuPlat couples instruction-set-architecture-level waveform generation to the hierarchical equations of motion HEOM under $1/f$ non-Markovian pure dephasing. In the resulting non-perturbative regime – where filter-function predictions become quantitatively uninformative – CPMG scaling of a three-level superconducting transmon yields one calibration result, two physical findings, and one structural null. Y-CPMG exhibits axis-dependent scaling-law breakdown – non-monotonic decoherence, partial coherence revival, and pronounced X–Y population asymmetry ($0.204$ vs ${

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

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

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

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

Structured Inference with Large Language Gibbs

The knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) can serve as a substrate for structured reasoning over variables describing a complex world, but accessing this knowledge in a probabilistically coherent manner poses a difficult inference problem. We propose Large Language Gibbs, a scheme for structured probabilistic inference that uses conditional distributions of an LLM as transition operators. Rather than sampling structured objects through single-pass autoregressive generation, we iteratively resample individual variables conditioned on others using an LLM's next-token conditionals. This approach avoids order-dependent biases and produces a stationary distribution that reflects a compromise between all local conditionals. We apply this approach to sampling from synthetic distributions, consistent reasoning tasks, and Bayesian structure learning. The results suggest that the use of LLM conditionals in MCMC is a practical alternative to one-pass generation for structured probabilistic inference under a world prior accessible through noisy LLM conditionals.

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

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents

arXiv:2603.19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental capability-alignment paradox: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while failing to prevent sophisticated attacks. Evaluating defended models against undefended baselines across 97 agent tasks and 1,000 adversarial prompts, we uncover three systematic biases unique to multi-step agents. Agent incompetence bias manifests as immediate tool execution breakdown, with models refusing or generating invalid actions on benign tasks before observing any external content. Cascade amplification bias causes early failures to propagate through retry loops, pushing defended models to timeout on 99\% of tasks compared to 13\% for baselines. Trigger bias leads to paradoxical security degradation where defended models perform worse than undefended baselines while straightforward attacks bypass defenses at high rates. Root cause analysis reveals these biases stem from shortcut learning: models overfit to surface attack patterns rather than semantic threat understanding, evidenced by extreme variance in defense effectiveness across attack categories. Our findings demonstrate that current defense paradigms optimize for single-turn refusal benchmarks while rendering multi-step agents fundamentally unreliable, necessitating new approaches that preserve tool execution competence under adversarial conditions.

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

Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Search Misaligns Instruction-Tuning

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to use tools, but its impact on alignment is poorly understood. We study how agentic RL for search affects the alignment of instruction-tuned (IT) models. We find that RL-trained models inherit refusal reasoning by deflecting harmful requests into benign search queries, but this breaks down under a simple diagnostic trigger that elicits a search call before refusal can occur. Under this condition, RL models produce multi-step unsafe search actions and reasoning, reducing search query safety by up to 68.6% in Qwen and Llama models relative to their IT counterparts. The effect generalises across model families, scales, and RL algorithms. To understand why, we identify linear directions in the residual stream that control search query safety, and show that RL training progressively shifts search behaviour toward the harmful end of this direction. We thus propose representation-guided RL training, which adds a reward penalty based on projection toward the harmful search direction. Training on benign data alone, it restores IT-level alignment without reducing task accuracy and requires no additional training data. Together, our work provides the first framework for diagnosing, mechanistically analysing, and mitigating alignment degradation in agentic RL for search.

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

From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI

arXiv:2606.14502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design

arXiv:2511.19468v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: If AI is a foundational general-purpose technology, we should anticipate that demand for AI compute – and energy – will continue to grow. The Sun is by far the largest energy source in our solar system, and thus it warrants consideration how future AI infrastructure could most efficiently tap into that power. This work explores a scalable compute system for machine learning in space, using fleets of satellites equipped with solar arrays, inter-satellite links using free-space optics, and Google tensor processing unit (TPU) accelerator chips. To facilitate high-bandwidth, low-latency inter-satellite communication, the satellites would be flown in close proximity. We illustrate the basic approach to formation flight via an 81-satellite cluster of 1 km radius, and describe an approach for using high-precision ML-based models to control large-scale constellations. Trillium TPUs are radiation tested. They survive a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5 year mission life without permanent failures, and are characterized for bit-flip errors. Launch costs are a critical part of overall system cost; a learning curve analysis suggests launch to low-Earth orbit (LEO) may reach $\lesssim$\$200/kg by the mid-2030s.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Development and Initial Validation of the Quality of life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST) Assessment

Individuals with NF2-related schwannomatosis (NF2-SWN) experience a complex constellation of physical, emotional, and social symptoms that substantially impact quality of life (QoL). Although disease-specific patient-reported outcome measures are increasingly important for evaluating treatment benefit in clinical trials, existing NF2-SWN QoL measures have limitations in content coverage and sensitivity to change. This study describes the development and initial validation a new disease-specific QoL assessment – the Quality of Life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST). Using a three-phase, mixed-methods approach, items were generated through concept elicitation interviews with individuals with NF2-SWN and clinicians, prioritized via patient survey data, and refined through iterative cognitive debriefing procedures. The resulting 21-item QUEST assesses the extent to which NF2-SWN has negatively impacted a persons daily life over the past seven days. Initial psychometric evaluation was conducted in an international sample of 174 individuals with NF2-SWN aged 15 years and older (117 women (67%), 158 White individuals (89%)). Exploratory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure, and the total score demonstrated excellent internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability. Evidence of construct validity was demonstrated through hypothesized associations with disease-specific, generic, and domain-specific QoL measures, as well as known-groups validity based on self-reported disease severity and number of prior surgeries. Incremental validity analyses indicated that QUEST explained unique variance beyond existing measures. Together, findings support the QUEST as a reliable and valid disease-specific QoL measure with strong content validity and feasibility for use as a clinical trial endpoint in NF2-SWN.

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

Decoupling Inference from State Updates in Low-Latency Feature Engines via Probabilistic Thinning

arXiv:2606.16981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming data systems increasingly underpin Machine Learning workflows that maintain large numbers of continuously updated aggregations. In production settings, each incoming event typically triggers read-modify-write operations to persistent storage, making high-frequency state updates a dominant source of latency, contention, and operational cost. In this work, we decouple inference from state persistence in streaming Machine Learning pipelines via probabilistic thinning: every event is scored, but durable state updates are selectively triggered by informative events. Unlike approaches that shed input or state, we show that persistence-path control is achievable without a high-frequency in-memory control plane or cross-worker coordination, relying exclusively on approximate statistics retrieved from disk-backed key-value stores. We model the resulting stochastic processes, derive bounds on filtering rates, and prove that common time-based aggregations remain unbiased under variance-aware formulations, preventing systemic error accumulation. We evaluate the approach in a controlled setting that isolates per-event costs, demonstrating substantial reductions in storage Input/Output and serialization overhead. Across experiments, up to 90% of events are excluded from the persistence path while preserving and in some cases improving downstream utility.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Adaptive Distance-Aware Trunk Deep Operator Learning for Long-Span Roadway Bridges

arXiv:2606.20015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-span roadway bridges exhibit highly localized structural responses under vehicular loading, making repeated FE analysis computationally expensive for applications such as influence surface generation and structural digital twins. Existing SciML approaches struggle to accurately capture these localized responses. To address this challenge, this study proposes an adaptive-trunk DeepONet for localized structural response prediction in large-scale bridge systems. The framework dynamically constructs a load-dependent learning domain using a KNN strategy, allowing the network to focus on structural influence zones. The trunk network is further enhanced using distance-aware features that encode the geometric relationship between the load and structural nodes. A physics-based full-field reconstruction is incorporated through a stiffness-informed Schur complement formulation, enabling predictions at adaptive nodes to be extended to the entire structural domain. To enable scalable training, response data are generated using a reduced-order equivalent shell model that preserves the dominant global behavior while significantly reducing computational cost. The proposed framework is validated on both a benchmark bridge model and the real-world Mussafah Bridge. Results show that the method achieves FEM-level accuracy with relative errors below 5%, while reducing the total response evaluation time (including full-field reconstruction) by approximately 60x; excluding the post-processing reconstruction step, the AD-DeepONet inference is up to four orders of magnitude faster than FEM. In addition, the framework enables rapid generation of full-field responses, influence lines, and influence surfaces under arbitrary vehicular loading configurations, demonstrating strong potential for large-scale bridge analysis and digital twin applications.

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

GEMSS: A Variational Bayesian Method for Discovering Multiple Sparse Solutions in Classification and Regression Problems

arXiv:2602.08913v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-dimensional, underdetermined and highly correlated systems are common in data science practice, especially when analyzing physical measurements. In such settings, feature selection poses a fundamental challenge because multiple distinct sparse subsets may explain the response equally well. Their identification is crucial not only for predictive modeling but also for generating domain-specific insights into the underlying mechanisms. Yet, conventional methods typically isolate a single solution, obscuring the full spectrum of plausible explanations. This work introduces GEMSS (Gaussian Ensemble for Multiple Sparse Solutions), a variational algorithm designed to simultaneously discover multiple, diverse sparse feature combinations. The method employs a structured spike-and-slab prior for sparsity, a mixture of Gaussians to approximate the intractable multimodal posterior, and a Jaccard-based penalty to further control solution diversity. A single objective function is optimized via stochastic gradient descent. The method is tested on 128 comprehensive experiments by a novel benchmarking framework designed to generate artificial problems with multiple sparse solutions of equal predictive properties. This allows us to measure the retrieval of ground truth features rather than only evaluating predictive performance – characteristics more fitting to our practical needs. A comparative analysis shows that GEMSS consistently outperforms five prominent feature selection methods adapted through the ALFESE framework. Finally, we demonstrate practical usability through 3 challenging real-world datasets from metabolomics and physical chemistry: GEMSS successfully isolates multiple distinct yet quality solutions. GEMSS is available as a PyPI package 'gemss'. The corresponding repository github.com/kat-er-ina/gemss/ includes the full codebase and a free, no-code application GEMSS Explorer.

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

Verified Detection and Prevention of Concurrency Anomalies in Multi-Agent Large Language Model Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.17182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems share state through memory stores, vector indices, and tool registries. We model such sharing as long-running read-generate-write operations under deterministic-generation semantics – the regime durable-execution engines enforce by deterministic replay – and formalize four concurrency anomalies in TLA+: stale-generation, phantom-tool, causal-cascade, and tool-effect reordering, structural analogues of classical isolation anomalies, each with a TLC counter-example. The exclusion lattice over these anomalies is trivial; the contribution is the mechanically verified realizability and strict separation of one maximal chain within it, $L_0 \subsetneq \cdots \subsetneq L_4$, to our knowledge the first machine-checked consistency hierarchy for such runtimes. A development of 274 Verus obligations (zero assume, zero admit; trust base: two structural axioms and a mutex correspondence) proves the detectors sound and complete against the specifications and each runtime its avoidance set. Three deployed Rust runtimes realize L0-L1 (pessimistic locking, serializable snapshot isolation, default-SI), each verified against stale-generation and refined to its state machine; L2-L4 are exec-mode-verified with dependency-free prevention twins (A3, A6, A2: 0/1000 versus 1000/1000), and L2 is run live across three model families (A3 prevented in all 120 retracted sessions). We reproduce a silent lost update in ByteDance's deer-flow, formalizing its fix as a verified $L_0 \to L_1$ refinement, and exhibit tool-effect reordering in LangGraph's ToolNode on unmodified output, removed by an L3 commit-order sequencer. The verified detector, refinements, and realizability artifacts are the contribution; the phenomena and lattice are classical.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness

arXiv:2603.21396v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept – a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying this capability in open-weights models. First, we find that it is behaviorally robust: models detect injected steering vectors at moderate rates with 0% false positives across diverse prompts and dialogue formats. Notably, this capability emerges specifically from post-training; we show that preference optimization algorithms like DPO can elicit it, but standard supervised finetuning does not. We provide evidence that detection cannot be explained by simple linear association between certain steering vectors and directions promoting affirmative responses. We trace the detection mechanism to a two-stage circuit in which "evidence carrier" features in early post-injection layers detect perturbations monotonically along diverse directions, suppressing downstream "gate" features that implement a default negative response. This circuit is absent in base models and robust to refusal ablation. Identification of injected concepts relies on largely distinct later-layer mechanisms that only weakly overlap with those involved in detection. Finally, we show that introspective capability is substantially underelicited: ablating refusal directions improves detection by +53%, and a trained bias vector improves it by +75% on held-out concepts, both without meaningfully increasing false positives. Our results suggest that this introspective awareness of injected concepts is robust and mechanistically nontrivial, and could be substantially amplified in future models. Code: https://github.com/safety-research/introspection-mechanisms.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Embodied-BenchClaw: An Autonomous Multi-Agent System for Embodied Spatial Intelligence Benchmark Construction

arXiv:2606.11909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks are essential for evaluating embodied spatial intelligence, yet their construction is labor-intensive, hard to reuse, and difficult to maintain. Existing embodied benchmarks are often static and may quickly become saturated as models improve, limiting their ability to distinguish new capabilities. We propose Embodied-BenchClaw, an autonomous agentic system for constructing embodied spatial intelligence benchmarks. Given a user-specified evaluation intent, Embodied-BenchClaw automatically produces a complete and continually updatable benchmark package through a five-stage pipeline: intent blueprinting, data collection, structuring and cleaning, benchmark synthesis, and evaluation reporting. The pipeline is coordinated by three agents for planning, construction, and evaluation. To improve reusability and reliability, Embodied-BenchClaw introduces an extensible Skill Library and process quality control, enabling benchmark construction to be composable, verifiable, and repairable. We instantiate multiple benchmarks covering indoor spatial reasoning, outdoor spatial reasoning, robotic manipulation, quadruped robot navigation, UAV/aerial-view understanding, and static benchmark enhancement. These benchmarks span diverse embodied carriers, data sources, and spatial capabilities. Experiments with human evaluation, judge-based assessment, consistency checks, cost analysis, and ablations show that Embodied-BenchClaw can construct verifiable, executable, maintainable, and diagnostically useful embodied spatial benchmarks with reduced manual effort.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Path integral control of open quantum systems

arXiv:2410.18635v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate open-loop quantum state preparation for a class of open quantum systems whose dynamics follow a Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) master equation that admits a trajectory-based stochastic representation. The deterministic control objective is reformulated as a stochastic optimal control problem – interpreting stochasticity as a methodological tool akin to stochastic Schrödinger equation unravelings – which situates the problem within the path integral control framework. For the class of GKLS generators under consideration, this reformulation leads to an explicit expression for the optimal control as a weighted average over stochastic quantum trajectories, thereby eliminating the need for gradient evaluations. Building on this theoretical result, we derive a control update rule for piecewise-constant control pulses and demonstrate that adaptive importance sampling progressively enhances the control estimator during optimization, culminating in the algorithm we term Path integral Quantum Control (PiQC). We further introduce an annealed variant of PiQC, wherein a synthetic noise schedule gradually steers open-system trajectories toward closed-system dynamics, enabling high-fidelity unitary state preparation. Numerical studies on a dissipative single-qubit system and a multi-qubit Nuclear Magnetic Resonance model verify that PiQC yields precise open-loop controls and displays robustness to Hamiltonian perturbations. We propose PiQC as a trajectory-based alternative to gradient-based approaches, which might offer a viable solution in quantum control problems where gradient computation is infeasible or computationally demanding.

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

Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603.14867v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions. In many situations, a fundamental challenge arises when the leader cannot intervene in the follower's optimization process; it can only observe the optimization outcome. We address this decentralized setting by deriving the hypergradient of the leader's objective, i.e., the gradient of the leader's strategy that accounts for changes in the follower's optimal policy. Unlike prior hypergradient-based methods that require extensive data for repeated state visits or rely on gradient estimators whose complexity can increase substantially with the high-dimensional leader's decision space, we leverage the Boltzmann covariance trick to derive an alternative hypergradient formulation. This enables efficient hypergradient estimation solely from interaction samples, even when the leader's decision space is high-dimensional. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first method that enables hypergradient-based optimization for 2-player Markov games in decentralized settings. Experiments highlight the impact of hypergradient updates and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in both discrete and continuous state tasks.