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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Observation of Non-Gaussian Magnon Dynamics in a Two-Dimensional Long-Range XY Model

arXiv:2606.13499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Gaussian evolution of high-order spin correlations characterizes important properties of quantum many-body systems. In practice, decoherence, statistical fluctuation and miscalibration of experimental parameters all hinder the witness of non-Gaussian dynamics. Here we demonstrate the crossover between Gaussian and non-Gaussian dynamics on a two-dimensional XY model with long-range and spatially structured interaction using a trapped ion quantum simulator. We prepare different initial densities of magnon excitations and verify the dynamics of single-spin observables for the engineered Hamiltonian. Then we compare the high-order spin correlations with the mean-field solution and the Holstein-Primakoff approximation, and demonstrate the non-Gaussian behavior in a way independent of the calibration errors. Our work provides a verifiable path from classically simulatable dynamics to regimes where quantum advantage may emerge.

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

LatentGym: A Testbed For Cross-Task Experiential Learning With Controllable Latent Structure

arXiv:2606.15306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision continually learning agentic systems that become more useful over time: as they encounter sequences of related tasks, they should infer the hidden structure shared across those tasks and use it to improve future decisions. This cross-task experiential learning capability is pivotal in domains such as personalization and interactive assistance, but existing training/evaluation frameworks do not provide shared, controllable latent structures and cannot measure whether or why agents improve. We introduce LatentGym: a controllable suite in which each environment is organized around a ground-truth latent variable governing the structure across tasks. Our construction yields metrics that separate exploration (whether the agent's actions gather information about the latent) from exploitation (whether the agent uses what it has gathered). We demonstrate our suite on empirical studies addressing three questions: how and why frontier models fail to adapt across related tasks; whether post-training on related task sequences improves general cross-task adaptation, and where those gains come from; and how design choices such as inter-task feedback shape training dynamics and generalization. Together, these results establish a controlled foundation for studying how LLM agents learn from experience across tasks, and for designing agents that adapt more reliably in sequential, personalized, and interactive settings.

03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

PepAnno: A structure-aware deep learning framework for bioactive peptide prediction, structural visualization, and physicochemical profiling

作者:

by Enyan Liu, Yueming Hu, Liya Liu, Yifan Chen, Shilong Zhang, Sida Li, Haoyu Chao, Luyao Xie, Yi Shen, Liangwei Wu, Julio Raúl Fernández Massó, Ming Chen Peptides are gaining prominence as therapeutic candidates due to their diverse physiological functions and structural simplicity. Although multiple computational tools exist for bioactive peptide prediction, many suffer from limitations such as non-intuitive interfaces, sequence-only representations, insufficient structural awareness, restricted interpretability, or fragmented analysis workflows, leading to reduced research efficiency and higher costs. To address these challenges, we present PepAnno (https://bis.zju.edu.cn/pepanno/), a comprehensive and user-friendly web server for multi-functional peptide annotation. PepAnno is powered by a novel structure-aware, multi-view geometric deep learning framework that integrates pre-trained sequence embeddings with predicted 3D structural graphs through a dual-stream architecture combining a Transformer and a GATv2 network. A cross-modal attention mechanism is employed to effectively fuse semantic and geometric representations, enabling accurate multi-task prediction across 7 key bioactivities, including antimicrobial and anticancer properties. Comprehensive evaluation on seven curated bioactivity datasets demonstrates that PepAnno achieves robust and competitive predictive performance across tasks, consistently outperforming or matching existing methods in terms of discrimination and stability. Beyond functional prediction, PepAnno provides automated calculation of physicochemical properties, structure visualization, and access to an integrated repository of peptide-related databases and tools. By enabling one-click peptide annotation, PepAnno offers an efficient and interpretable solution for large-scale peptide analysis and facilitates downstream experimental design and peptide-based drug discovery.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Low-resource Language Discrimination Towards Chinese Dialects with Transfer learning and Data Augmentation

Chinese dialects discrimination is a challenging natural language processing task due to scarce annotation resource. In this article, we develop a novel Chinese dialects discrimination framework with transfer learning and data augmentation (CDDTLDA) in order to overcome the shortage of resources. To be more specific, we first use a relatively larger Chinese dialects corpus to train a source-side automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. Then, we adopt a simple but effective data augmentation method (i.e., speed, pitch, and noise disturbance) to augment the target-side low-resource Chinese dialects, and fine-tune another target ASR model based on the previous source-side ASR model. Meanwhile, the potential common semantic features between source-side and target-side ASR models can be captured by using self-attention mechanism. Finally, we extract the hidden semantic representation in the target ASR model to conduct Chinese dialects discrimination. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark Chinese dialects corpora.

05.
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.

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

Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

arXiv:2506.09046v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. Our framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, our work surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

A Finite-Volume Scheme for the Continuum Extrapolation of Lattice Step-Scaling in (2+1)D Hamiltonian U(1) Gauge Theory

arXiv:2606.20029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a finite-volume scheme to perform controlled continuum extrapolations of the lattice step-scaling function, a key ingredient for determining the running coupling in a Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory in small volumes. As a testbed, we employ a dual Hamiltonian formulation of pure U(1) gauge theory in (2+1) dimensions and an operator basis that remains efficient toward weak coupling. We describe the implementation of static external charges on the spatial lattice and study, using matrix product states, the resulting confining string, from which we extract the static potential and a force-based renormalized coupling. Using the proposed finite-volume scheme, we demonstrate a stable continuum limit of the step-scaling function on the lattice sizes accessible to present Hamiltonian simulations. The method is readily extendable to other gauge groups and dimensions, providing a pathway toward Hamiltonian step-scaling studies in other theories.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Structured vs. Unstructured Pruning: An Exponential Gap

arXiv:2603.02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient. Pruning methods are typically classified as unstructured, where individual weights can be removed from the network, and structured, where parameters are removed according to specific patterns, as in neuron pruning. Existing theoretical results supporting the SLTH rely almost exclusively on unstructured pruning, showing that logarithmic overparameterization suffices to approximate simple target networks. In contrast, neuron pruning has received limited theoretical attention, despite its practical appeal for direct hardware speedups. In this work, we consider the problem of approximating a single bias-free ReLU neuron by pruning hidden units of a randomly initialized two-layer ReLU network, effectively isolating the intrinsic limitations of neuron pruning. We show that achieving an $\varepsilon$-approximation requires a starting network size of $\Omega(1/\varepsilon)$ for neuron pruning, whereas weight pruning succeeds with only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ hidden units, revealing an exponential separation between the two approaches.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Transformers Learn the Mestre-Nagao Heuristic

arXiv:2606.15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Multi-Agent Systems are Mixtures of Experts: Who Becomes an Influencer?

arXiv:2605.25929v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The effectiveness of multi-agent LLM deliberation depends not only on the agents' individual predictions, but also on how they communicate and collaborate. We study this mechanism through the lens of Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) opinion dynamics, a tractable model for analyzing stubbornness, influence, and opinion change in multi-agent systems that captures empirically observed deliberation patterns. We show that the FJ parameters are input-dependent, turning multi-agent deliberation into a mixture of experts. This perspective implies that multi-agent systems can outperform single agents and static ensembles when routing reflects agent competence. Since competence is latent in practice, we analyze how influence is established through observable proxies: agents' self-assessed confidence, their perceived confidence, and initial alignment with other agents' views.

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

Environment-Adaptive Covariate Selection: Learning When to Use Spurious Correlations for Out-of-Distribution Prediction

arXiv:2601.02322v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A common approach to out-of-distribution prediction restricts models to causal or invariant covariates to avoid spurious associations that may change across environments. Despite its theoretical appeal, this strategy can underperform empirical risk minimization when only a subset of the causal parents of the outcome is observed. In such settings, non-causal covariates can serve as proxies for unobserved causal parents and improve prediction when the proxy relationship is stable, but they can hurt when shifts disrupt that relationship. Thus, the optimal covariate set can depend on the specific shift encountered. Because different shifts leave signatures in the unlabeled covariate distribution, we propose an environment-adaptive covariate selection algorithm that maps environment-level summaries to environment-specific covariate sets. These summaries may be hand-crafted or learned from multi-environment data, and prior causal knowledge can be incorporated as constraints. Across simulations and applied datasets, the proposed method improves over static causal, invariant, and other non-adaptive rules under diverse shifts.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Robust Privacy: Inference-Stage Privacy through Certified Robustness

arXiv:2601.17360v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adversary observing a model's released prediction can infer sensitive attributes of the queried input, or even reconstruct representatives of the model's training data. The inference interface thus acts as a side channel for privacy leakage. We introduce Robust Privacy (RP), an inference-stage privacy notion inspired by certified robustness: if a model's prediction is provably invariant within a radius-R neighborhood around an input x with confidence at least $1-\alpha$, then x enjoys $(R,\alpha)$-Robust Privacy, under which we prove that any adversary observing the released prediction has at most $\alpha/2$ advantage in distinguishing x from any input within distance R of x. Building on RP, we formalize Robust Attribute Privacy (RAP), an attribute-level privacy notion that characterizes the set of sensitive-attribute values that remain compatible with a released prediction. On a classification task, RP increases the median length of the RAP-compatible inference interval from 23.50 to 29.96, reducing attribute-inference precision. Model inversion attacks, often treated as a training-stage threat, in fact rely on fine-grained signals leaked through the inference interface; RP masks these signals at the inference stage, reducing attack success rate (ASR) from 73% to 4% on a black-box inversion attack. This direct targeting of the leakage channel enables RP to dominate DP-SGD and randomized response in the privacy-utility tradeoff space: RP retains 98.4% accuracy at 21% ASR, whereas DP-SGD must drop accuracy to 61.7% to reach a comparable ASR. Across both experiments, increasing the smoothing sample size N strengthens privacy and improves utility together. Finally, we examine model distillation as a scope boundary and show that RP mitigates attribute-level and instance-level inference-stage privacy leakage, but not function-level extraction through model distillation.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Decompose Sparsely Where You Should, Absorb Densely Where You Should No

arXiv:2606.14040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are typically trained to reconstruct the entire residual stream through a sparse dictionary, implicitly assuming that all activation content is amenable to sparse, monosemantic decomposition. We question this assumption and hypothesize that activations contain a low-rank, dense component that is computationally important to the model yet inherently unsuitable for sparse representation, which serves as a major source of the persistent dense latents widely observed in trained SAEs. To test this, we add a small rank-$r$ linear bottleneck in parallel with standard SAEs (BatchTopK and Matryoshka), allowing dense structure to be absorbed before sparse reconstruction. On Gemma-2-2B layer 12, a rank-24 bottleneck reduces dense latent count by up to 84\% while improving sparse probing and targeted probe perturbation on both architectures at matched sparsity. The absorbed component is (i) structurally identifiable as the top principal components and outlier dimensions; (ii) causally necessary, with removing it raising next-token cross-entropy by 7.5$\times$, far exceeding the 2.8$\times$ from removing the geometrically near-identical top-24 PCA directions; and (iii) redundantly encoded by sparse dictionaries, with ablating 787 maximally aligned sparse features raising cross-entropy by only 2.9$\times$ and ablating 2,048 topic-aligned features leaving MMLU topic classification virtually unchanged, whereas removing the scaffold drops it from 98.7\% to chance. Together, our findings identify a compact, semantically informative and causally important component of residual stream activations (which we term a computational scaffold) that standard sparse dictionaries represent inefficiently, suggesting that the scope of sparsity-based interpretability methods warrants careful re-examination.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SorryDB: Can AI Provers Complete Real-World Lean Theorems?

arXiv:2603.02668v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SorryDB, a dynamically-updating benchmark of open Lean tasks drawn from 78 real world formalization projects on GitHub. Unlike existing static benchmarks, often composed of competition problems, hillclimbing the SorryDB benchmark will yield tools that are aligned to the community needs, more usable by mathematicians, and more capable of understanding complex dependencies. Moreover, by providing a continuously updated stream of tasks, SorryDB mitigates test-set contamination and offers a robust metric for an agent's ability to contribute to novel formal mathematics projects. We evaluate a collection of approaches, including generalist large language models, agentic approaches, and specialized symbolic provers, over a selected snapshot of 1000 tasks from SorryDB. We show that current approaches are complementary: even though an agentic approach based on Gemini Flash is the most performant, it is not strictly better than other off-the-shelf large-language models, specialized provers, or even a curated list of Lean tactics.

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

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

arXiv:2606.13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled. We evaluate this question on a corpus of ten Japanese listed firms across three rubric axes – quantitative targets, progress-tracking infrastructure, and external-standard alignment – using a four-model consensus design that combines a reasoning-on frontier model with three reasoning-off contemporaries. Across 120 firm x axis x model scores, the pooled mean absolute deviation between the reasoning-on model and each reasoning-off counterpart is 0.38 on a 5-point scale; only 2% of pairwise comparisons reach a two-point deviation, and none exceeds two points. Per-firm cost accounting shows the reasoning-on arm alone costs roughly 5.6x as much as the three-provider reasoning-off ensemble, for outcomes that differ only within small margins. We conclude that in span-based ESG narrative scoring, reasoning-heavy deployment does not materially improve outcomes relative to reasoning-off consensus, while substantially increasing operational cost. We discuss implications for cost-effective ESG auto-scoring pipelines and LLM deployment governance in applied accountability settings. An earlier version of this work is available on SSRN (Abstract ID 6683303).

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

Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes. To address this, a growing body of work has sought to extend masked dLLMs with self-correcting (remasking) capabilities. One appealing subset of these methods does so in a training-free, post-hoc manner based on token confidences, with encouraging early reported results. In this work, we revisit the empirical evaluation of a representative post-hoc remasking method, WINO [Hong et al., 2026], and find that under standard decoding settings (shorter block lengths) it brings little-to-no benefit over confidence-based unmasking alone [Wu et al., 2025]. Extending the evaluation to non-greedy decoding, we find that while confidence-based remasking can mitigate errors introduced by increased stochasticity to some extent, it also exacerbates the diversity collapse previously reported for confidence-based unmasking. Overall, our results show that the benefits of post-hoc confidence-based remasking are highly setting-dependent, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework.

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

Calibration Drift Under Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Budgets Induce Overconfidence in Large Language Models

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve accuracy and reliability, but its effect on calibration is not fully understood. We show that this picture is incomplete: in some settings, increasing the reasoning budget beyond a task-specific threshold can cause models to become systematically overconfident, assigning high confidence to incorrect answers. We call this phenomenon Calibration Drift Under Reasoning (CDUR) and study it both theoretically and empirically. We define reasoning budget B and analyze conditions under which Expected Calibration Error ECE(B) follows a non-monotonic pattern: it first decreases as reasoning corrects errors, then increases as longer reasoning produces internally consistent but incorrect explanations. We propose a Hypothesis Lock-In model based on autoregressive generation to explain this behavior. We evaluate Llama-3.1-8B and Llama-3.3-70B on 47 reasoning-trap questions across four reasoning budgets and three seeds (1,368 API calls; 574 valid responses). The 8B model shows non-monotonic calibration behavior, while results for the 70B model are limited to baseline evaluation and are inconclusive for budget-dependent effects. We introduce CABStop, a calibration-aware stopping rule that halts reasoning when confidence diverges from an auxiliary accuracy estimate. These results suggest that increasing reasoning depth does not always improve reliability and should be monitored carefully.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Symmetry and Topology of Monitored Quantum Dynamics

arXiv:2412.06133v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The interplay between unitary dynamics and quantum measurements induces diverse phenomena in open quantum systems with no counterparts in closed quantum systems at equilibrium. Here, we generally classify Kraus operators and their effective non-Hermitian dynamical generators, thereby establishing the tenfold classification for symmetry and topology of monitored free fermions. Our classification elucidates the role of topology in measurement-induced phase transitions and identifies potential topological terms in the corresponding nonlinear sigma models. Furthermore, we establish the bulk-boundary correspondence in monitored quantum dynamics: nontrivial topology in spacetime manifests itself as topologically nontrivial steady states and gapless boundary states in Lyapunov spectra, such as Lyapunov zero modes and chiral edge modes, leading to the topologically protected slowdown of dynamical purification.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Bounded Context Management for Tabular Foundation Models on Stream Learning

arXiv:2606.18677v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular stream learning requires predictions on sequentially arriving examples under distribution shift. While standard methods adapt by updating model states, tabular foundation models (TFMs) make predictions conditioned on a labeled context in an in-context manner, making them a natural alternative for stream learning. This shifts the challenge from how to update the model to how to manage the context. We propose a future information view that yields three practical requirements for context management: preserve recent examples, retain uncertain examples, and remove redundant examples. We instantiate these requirements as CURE (Context management via Uncertainty-aware admission and Redundancy aware Eviction), a context-managing policy with entropy-gated admission and redundancy-aware eviction. Across seven streams, CURE shows up to 27.0% relative improvement over classical stream learners, remains robust across multiple TFM backbones, and ranks first among other policy variants. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/morcellinus/CURE-ICML-FMSD.

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

How Much Can We Trust LLM Search Agents? Measuring Endorsement Vulnerability to Web Content Manipulation

Large language model (LLM)-based search agents synthesize open-web content into actionable recommendations on behalf of users, creating a risk that attacker-published pages are transformed into endorsed claims. We introduce SearchGEO, a controlled evaluation framework for measuring endorsement corruption in LLM-based web-search agents, combining a web-evidence manipulation pipeline, a five-mode attack taxonomy, and multiple output-level metrics. We evaluate 13 LLM backends on 308 cases each. Results show that vulnerability patterns vary across backends: overall attack success rate (ASR) ranges from 0.0% on Claude-Sonnet-4.6 to 31.4% on Gemini-3-Flash, the strongest attack mode differs by model family, and the same deployment scaffold could amplify or decrease ASR on different backends. An auxiliary agent-skill probe, where endorsement becomes an install command, exposes a sharp split among otherwise robust backends: Claude over-rejects while GPT over-trusts. These findings argue for treating recommendation reliability under adversarial search content as a first-class dimension of backend safety evaluation.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Ordinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Severity Using Structural MRI and Clinical Data

arXiv:2606.11794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) require accurate and scalable tools for assessing disease severity, yet current clinical staging remains time-intensive and prone to variability. We propose an attention-enhanced multimodal machine learning framework with ordinal regression for automated and interpretable AD severity staging. The framework integrates T1-weighted MRI with demographic and genetic variables and compares unimodal and multimodal architectures using ordinal and non-ordinal prediction heads. Models were trained and validated using cohort-stratified splits derived from the ADNI, AIBL, and NIFD datasets. A strictly held-out test set was constructed using subjects excluded from all training, validation, preprocessing, and hyperparameter tuning procedures, with subject-level splitting employed throughout to prevent data leakage. Among unimodal approaches, the T1-weighted MRI model achieved slightly higher adjacent-stage accuracy (0.963) and agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.444) than the tabular model (QWK 0.433). Integrating imaging, demographic, and genetic information improved overall performance. The multimodal non-ordinal baseline achieved the lowest prediction error (MAE 0.340), whereas the ordinal multimodal model achieved the highest adjacent-stage accuracy (0.970) and strongest agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.549). These findings indicate that ordinal formulations better capture the ordered structure of the CDR scale and yield predictions more consistent with clinical staging. Explainability analyses using Grad CAM++ and SHAP demonstrated anatomically and clinically plausible model behavior, supporting transparent decision-making. Overall, attention-based multimodal learning with ordinal regression represents a robust, interpretable, and scalable approach for automated AD severity staging and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

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

SPARK: Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement learning for Knowledge distillation

Low-bit quantization enables deployment of image restoration (IR) networks on resource-constrained devices, but introduces rounding noise that disproportionately degrades high-frequency regions such as edges and fine textures. Existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods apply distillation signals uniformly across all spatial locations, overlooking the varying reconstruction difficulty across image regions. To address this, we propose SPARK (Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Distillation), a framework that adaptively allocates distillation effort using a lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) policy network. At each training step, a difficulty feature extractor computes four signals, namely Laplacian variance, pixel variance, student reconstruction error, and teacher-student knowledge gap, which are fed into a compact policy CNN that produces a stochastic spatial weight map to modulate the KD loss during quantization-aware training (QAT). SPARK is IR task-agnostic, adds no inference cost, and integrates into any existing QAT pipeline without architectural changes. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPARK consistently outperforms PTQ, QAT, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) KD approaches across multiple student architectures, achieving reconstruction quality closest to the full-precision teacher under significant computational constraints.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

arXiv:2606.12603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous long-horizon sidewalk navigation is essential for micro-mobility applications such as robotic food delivery and assistive electronic wheelchairs. Unlike autonomous driving on the road, long-horizon sidewalk navigation requires precise maneuvering through unpredictable sidewalk terrains and pedestrians, with a lightweight perception stack as minimal as a single monocular RGB camera. While imitation learning (IL) from demonstrations offers a practical solution, the resulting autopilot policy often suffers from compounding errors, a lack of social compliance on sidewalks, and deficiencies in counterfactual reasoning to handle complex situations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlowPilot, a mapless navigation policy that achieves robust and efficient long-horizon navigation performance using only a monocular RGB camera. We first propose to use anchored flow matching as an action representation for policy pre-training on large-scale robot fleet data and to capture the diverse, complex, multimodal distribution of sidewalk navigation behaviors. To bridge the gap between imitation and alignment, we further design a human-in-the-loop preference learning scheme to tune the policy on a small amount of human intervention data. It strengthens the model's counterfactual reasoning and social compliance on sidewalks. We evaluate FlowPilot through extensive simulation and real-world experiments in diverse sidewalk environments. FlowPilot achieves 42% success rate and 66% route completion in simulation, while FlowPilot-HP further improves real-world robustness and social compliance, reducing IR by 40.0% and NIR by 52.1% relative to the base model.

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

Interpretation as Linear Transformation: A Cognitive-Geometric Model of Concepts and Meaning

arXiv:2512.09831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling concepts, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Evaluative concepts are formalized as structured vectors, abstract beings, whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. An abstract being survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, and concept death. Within this framework, I show how conceptual distortion, motivational drift, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result, the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition, characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing conceptual dynamics across heterogeneous agents.