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 (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Analysis of the asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In an asymmetric shelf shuffle, a deck of $n$ cards is dealt sequentially from the bottom and assigned one of the $m$ shelves uniformly at random. The card is placed at the top of the assigned shelf with probability $p$, and at the bottom of the assigned shelf with probability $(1-p)$. Analysis of the shelf shuffle has gained much attention recently, and the case $p=1/2$ was first treated by Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes [Ann. Appl. Prob. 23 (2013), no. 4, 1692–1720]. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the shelf shuffle to general $p\in (0, 1)$. In particular, we study the distribution of cycles, cycle lengths, number of descents, number of valleys, number of inversions, and the RSK shape of a permutation obtained from an asymmetric shelf shuffle. Our results extend the analysis of Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes to arbitrary $p$. Furthermore, our analysis of the distribution of descents and inversions is new even for $p=1/2$.

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

Clinically Aware Synthetic Image Generation for Concept Coverage in Chest X-ray Models

Deep learning models for chest X-ray diagnosis are constrained by limited coverage of clinically meaningful concept combinations in publicly available training datasets. While synthetic image generation has been explored to increase data diversity, existing methods rarely enforce clinical or anatomical constraints, limiting utility for improving model reliability. We propose CARPA, a clinically aware and anatomically grounded framework for synthetic chest X-ray generation that applies targeted perturbations to clinical concept vectors while preserving anatomical structure. By producing anatomically faithful synthetic images with controlled concept insertions and deletions, CARPA expands clinically relevant concept coverage. We evaluate CARPA across seven backbone architectures by fine-tuning models on synthetic subsets and testing on a held-out MIMIC-CXR benchmark. Compared to prior concept perturbation approaches, fine-tuning on CARPA-generated images consistently improves precision-recall performance, reduces predictive uncertainty, and improves model calibration. Structural and semantic analyses demonstrate high anatomical fidelity, strong concept alignment, and low semantic uncertainty. Evaluation by two expert radiologists further confirms realism and clinical agreement. Together, these results show that anatomically grounded concept perturbations enable more effective use of synthetic data, improving both performance and reliability of chest X-ray classification models and supporting safer clinical deployment.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Signatures of Reasoning: Free-Energy and Spectral-Form-Factor Diagnostics for Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models

作者:

Hallucination detection in large language models (LLMs) is deployment-critical, and recent work shows that the spectrum of attention-derived graph Laplacians carries strong signal about reasoning quality. Prior spectral diagnostics, however, summarize the Laplacian spectrum by a handful of eigenvalues or hand-picked scalars, leaving most of its structure unused. We propose Free-Energy Signatures (Fes), a spectral descriptor that treats each layer's attention Laplacian as a Hamiltonian and extracts its thermodynamic potentials partition function, free energy, spectral entropy, heat capacity together with the random-matrix-theory (RMT) spectral form factor. We prove three results: (i)~Lipschitz stability of Fes under attention perturbation; (ii)~an expressiveness result showing that Fes enriches finite spectral summaries and approximates moment-derived spectral functionals under explicit regularity and grid-resolution assumptions; and (iii)~a finite-sample PAC bound on the AUROC of a training-free detector built from Fes. Empirically, across six open-weight LLMs and six benchmarks, a lightweight probe on Fes descriptors achieves the strongest aggregate AUROC among attention-spectral baselines, improving over LapEig by $+6.5$ AUROC points and over GoR-4 by $+2.4$ points on average, while requiring no update to the underlying LLM. In the fully unsupervised setting, an RMT-deviation score achieves mean AUROC $0.71$, providing a label-free but weaker detector. A complementary RMT analysis shows that correct generations exhibit more Wigner-Dyson like spectral statistics, whereas hallucinations exhibit more Poisson-like statistics. The anonymized code and config are provided in the supplementary material.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Simulation of Non-Markovian Quantum Accelerated Dynamics via Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation

arXiv:2606.20024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation (TFSE) is an effective tool for simulating the dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems. The Quantum Speed Limit (QSL) time characterizes the minimum time required for the evolution of a non-Markovian quantum system. In this paper, Wei's TFSE is employed to simulate the non-Markovian quantum accelerated evolution process in the Resonant Dissipative Jaynes-Cummings (RDJC) model. By solving the QSL time of a time-fractional single-qubit open system, the enhancement mechanism of the system evolution speed induced by the non-Markovian memory effects of the environment is revealed. Further studies show that the optimized acceleration of the system evolution can be achieved by jointly regulating the fractional order, coupling strength, and photon number. Comparative analyses indicate that Wei's TFSE can accurately capture the non-Markovian accelerated dynamical features of the system over the entire fractional order range, whereas Naber's TFSE is applicable only within a limited fractional order interval. In addition, the comparisons of the average simulation time for calculating the dynamical trajectory of the excited-state probability demonstrate that Wei's TFSE has a significant simulation advantage in computational efficiency. Therefore, Wei's TFSE is more accurate and efficient for simulating the accelerated dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems.

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

Reasoning in Computer Vision: Taxonomy, Models, Tasks, and Methodologies

Visual reasoning matters for many computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite progress in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys typically cover only one part of the problem, such as visual question answering, scene-graph generation, neuro-symbolic AI, or multimodal chain-of-thought, and rarely analyze reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols together. This survey addresses that gap. Following a structured literature review, we group visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and examine how each is implemented across methods that range from graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems to reasoning with vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including visual chain-of-thought, visual programming, and tool-augmented and test-time reasoning. We then review evaluation protocols for functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and we analyze their limits in generalizability, reproducibility, faithfulness, and explanatory power. We also identify open challenges: scaling to complex scenes, integrating symbolic and neural paradigms more deeply, the shortage of comprehensive benchmarks, language-prior shortcuts and hallucination in foundation models, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we set out a research agenda for vision systems and argue that connecting perception and reasoning is necessary for transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain models, especially in high-stakes settings such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

07.
Science (Express) 2026-06-11

Laser phase plate improves structure determination of small proteins by cryo-EM | Science

作者: 未知作者

Phase plates can in principle overcome the poor image contrast in electron cryo–microscopy (cryo-EM) and the resulting limits on the structural reconstruction of small proteins. However, previous designs have been unstable and compromised the high-resolution signal. They have thus been unable to surpass results achieved by standard cryo-EM. Here, we show that the laser phase plate (LPP), installed in a custom, modern Titan Krios microscope, enhances the resolution in single-particle reconstruction of small proteins by improving specimen-motion correction, recovery of information from the early frames, as well as particle visualization, 3D classification, and alignment. These advances use standard defocus ranges and reconstruction procedures, but open the door to LPP-tailored protocols offering further improvements by leveraging the LPP demonstrated here.

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

ReCal: Reward Calibration for RL-based LLM Routing

arXiv:2606.12479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) routing has emerged as an effective paradigm for leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs through dynamic model and reasoning-strategy selection. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based routing methods further improve routing quality by optimizing routing policies from interaction feedback. However, they still struggle to provide informative and comparable learning signals under heterogeneous tasks with varying difficulty. In practice, multiple objectives (e.g., correctness, format behavior) are aggregated into a single scalar reward, leading to ambiguous credit assignment and conflicting optimization signals. Moreover, reward signals exhibit significant variability across instances, where some instances produce higher or more variable rewards, introducing optimization bias that favors trivial samples over informative ones. To address these issues, we propose ReCal, a \underline{Re}ward \underline{Cal}ibration framework for RL-based LLM routing. We first introduce a hierarchical reward decomposition mechanism with component-wise advantage estimation. We further propose a distribution-aware optimization strategy that calibrates optimization variability through variance-aware reweighting and per-dataset normalization. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that ReCal consistently improves routing performance, and training stability over baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReCal.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Benchmark and Framework for Evaluating Next Action Predictions in Spreadsheets

arXiv:2606.13802v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive code completion greatly accelerates how quickly developers work. In spreadsheets, despite being much more common, such auto-completion features are virtually non-existent. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark for systems that observe a sequence of user actions in a spreadsheet and predict future actions. Two challenges are (1) the absence of edit histories in public spreadsheet corpora and (2) the complex space of spreadsheet actions (spatial, temporal, composite). To address (1), we manually curate 52 sequences of 12K actions that recreate spreadsheets from public corpora, seeded by parametrized heuristics and LLM refinement. To address (2), we propose an online evaluation that expects a prediction after each user action, accepts or rejects that prediction, updates the future actions upon acceptance, and repeats this until the target spreadsheet is obtained. We use multiple baseline predictors (including zero-shot LLMs, fine-tuned SLMs, and classical models) and analyze different properties that our benchmark teaches us, including but not limited to: properties of saved actions and false positives, efficiency, effect of user profiles, effect of triggers, and effect of context.

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

Skill-to-LoRA: From Using Skills to Learning Behaviors for Token-Efficient LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly distributed as SKILL.md files: human-readable procedural documents that describe workflows, tools, resources, and domain conventions. While convenient for inspection and reuse, this design requires the same reusable procedure to be repeatedly injected into the runtime context. We propose Skill-to-LoRA(S2L), a behavior-centric skill representation that replaces runtime skill text with skill-specific LoRA adapters. Rather than compressing the skill document itself, S2L models the behavioral change induced by the skill text: offline, the complete SKILL.md is used to synthesize skill-guided demonstrations; online, the full document is omitted and the corresponding LoRA adapter is dynamically loaded to activate the learned skill behavior. We evaluate S2L with Qwen3.6-27B on a 21-skill subset of SWE-Skills-Bench. Compared with the no-skill and Full Skill Text baselines, S2L improves pass rate by 2.9 and 5.2 percentage points, respectively, while reducing per-step token cost by 6.6% relative to Full Skill Text prompting. S2L matches or improves Full Skill Text on 18/21 skills and the no-skill baseline on 15/21 skills. Control experiments further show that the gains depend on skill-specific adapter alignment: Wrong-LoRA and Shared-LoRA both reduce performance. These results suggest that many procedural agent skills can be converted from runtime instructions into trainable, dynamically loadable behavioral modules. Code will be released upon acceptance.

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

ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory

Interactive world models aim to simulate environment dynamics under real-time user actions. However, their action vocabulary is largely confined to navigation: most actions correspond to motion (e.g., walk, turn, look around), while interaction with objects in the scene (e.g., pick up plates, open doors, or trigger physical responses) is either absent, restricted to game domains, or relegated to prompt-to-full-video scenarios. The resulting worlds are visually explorable but not truly actionable. In this work, we present ActWorld, an interactive world model that extends prior navigation-centric generators to support mid-rollout object interaction within a chunk-autoregressive framework. We argue that the navigation-interaction gap stems from two bottlenecks. First, a data bottleneck: the lack of human-object interaction data with accurate, dense labels. Second, a memory bottleneck: recency-biased history compression in existing world models discards the event-transition frames that causally determine subsequent object states, leading to an action-forgetting pathology. On the data side, we construct a 100K interaction video dataset, each annotated with per-chunk captions via chain-of-thought reasoning. On the model side, we introduce a hierarchical action-aware memory design that routes history compression by interaction importance, complemented by a persistent memory bank that maintains event-update and object-identity tokens across long rollouts. Experiments show that ActWorld supports both flexible navigation and rich object interaction within a single model, substantially improving interaction fidelity over navigation-only baselines without sacrificing viewpoint control. Project page is available at https://interactwm.github.io/ActWorld.

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

CRUMB: Efficient Prior Fitted Network Inference via Distributionally Matched Context Batching

arXiv:2606.11473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior-fitted networks (PFNs) are a promising class of tabular foundation models that perform in-context learning, whereby the entire labelled training set is supplied as context, and predictions for test queries are produced in a single forward pass. However, the quadratically scaling self-attention mechanism in many PFN architectures makes inference prohibitive for very large training datasets. We propose CRUMB (Clustered Retrieval Using Minimised-MMD Batching), a three-stage inference wrapper that (i) clusters the test queries, (ii) selects a small, distributionally matched training subset for each cluster by greedily minimising the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), and (iii) runs exact PFN inference on each reduced-context batch. CRUMB is architecture-agnostic and requires no retraining. On the 51-dataset TabArena benchmark, evaluated across three PFN architectures (TabPFNv2, TabICLv1, TabICLv2), we show that CRUMB outperforms similar state-of-the-art context selection strategies. We also show that CRUMB is resilient to covariate drift, as the MMD-minimisation step naturally helps align the training context distribution to match the current test batch distributions.

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

Communication-Efficient Neural Tangent Kernels for Heterogeneous Decentralized Federated Learning

作者:

arXiv:2512.12737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized federated learning (DFL) enables collaborative model training without a central server, but converges slowly under statistical heterogeneity. Recent work has shown that neural tangent kernel (NTK) methods achieve faster convergence than gradient-based updates in DFL, while momentum has proven effective for accelerating gradient-based FL. However, applying momentum to NTK updates can destabilize training under heterogeneous data. We propose SPARK, which addresses this instability with a stage-wise annealed soft-label regularizer evaluated on neighborhood-aggregated data, so that momentum can accelerate NTK updates stably. Under high heterogeneity, SPARK converges about 3$\times$ faster than baselines and lowers the total communication to a target accuracy by up to about 70\%, and it attains higher accuracy across heterogeneity levels. We further study random projection as an optional Jacobian-compression strategy for bandwidth-constrained settings. We validate the approach across multiple datasets, network topologies, and heterogeneity levels.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Learning to Inject: Automated Prompt Injection via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.05746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt injection is a critical vulnerability in LLM agents, yet the strongest methods still rely on human red-teamers and hand-crafted prompts. Adapting automated jailbreak optimizers does not close this gap: jailbreaks shape models toward generic compliance, while prompt injection requires emitting specific tool calls with correct parameters. The success signal is binary, and randomly sampled suffixes almost never trigger it, so standard optimizers have no gradient to follow. We present AutoInject, a black-box reinforcement learning (RL) framework that learns adversarial suffixes for prompt injection. A learned comparison-based reward scores each candidate against the best suffix seen so far, turning the binary signal into a dense reward suitable for RL optimization. The framework supports both online query-based attacks and offline-trained transferable suffixes that need no utility access at deployment, and incorporates a utility objective when task-completion feedback is available. On AgentDojo, AutoInject outperforms template attacks, GCG, TAP, and adaptive attack across production models, with statistically significant improvements under McNemar's test with p

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

Learning Variable-Length Tokenization for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2605.17779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative recommendation reformulates recommendation as next-token prediction over discrete semantic identifiers (IDs). A fundamental yet unexplored design choice is that existing methods employ fixed-length tokenization for all items, implicitly assuming uniform encoding capacity regardless of item characteristics. Through systematic experiments across four datasets, we discover the Popularity-Length Paradox: popular items achieve optimal performance with short IDs, while tail items require substantially longer codes to capture discriminative semantics. This reveals a critical mismatch where popular items benefit from abundant collaborative signals and require minimal semantic detail, whereas tail items must rely on fine-grained content features due to sparse interaction data. To address this, we propose VarLenRec, a framework for learning variable-length tokenization. We develop Popularity-Weighted Information Budget Allocation (PIBA), an information-theoretic framework proving that optimal ID length should scale as a negative power of popularity. Directly implementing variable-length allocation faces two technical challenges: standard Euclidean residual quantization lacks geometric capacity to support diverse code lengths without distortion, and discrete length decisions are non-differentiable. We address these through Hyperbolic Residual Quantization, which leverages the exponential volume growth of the Poincaré ball to naturally stratify encoding capacity, and a Soft Length Controller, which enables differentiable length prediction via continuous layer retention probabilities regularized by PIBA-derived priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VarLenRec achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in recommendation accuracy and training/inference efficiency, revealing the importance of adaptive encoding capacity in generative recommendation.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Control for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems

arXiv:2606.19069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper compares the performance of model-free controllers on a nonlinear system under cyberattacks, including false data injection and denial-of-service attacks. Four RL reward types are analyzed for accuracy, cost, and resilience. Results show that the Lyapunov reward offers the best resilience with low tracking error. Exponential mode also provides good trade-offs with acceptable resilience under moderate training conditions. Progressive and linear rewards converge faster but are less robust. RL-MPCs show strong steady-state resilience but require longer training times; RL-PID controllers are faster with significantly less training time. Proximal Policy Optimization outperforms Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient with a significant reduction in KPI variance. This study serves to highlight how well-designed RL rewards can improve performance and resilience against cyber threats.

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

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent work has demonstrated that diffusion language models are well suited for this setting, as they can generate entire blocks of draft tokens in parallel and thereby alleviate the sequential constraints of autoregressive drafting. A subtlety of this regime is that block-diffusion drafters generate tokens bidirectionally within a block, whereas verification is performed by an autoregressive target model that evaluates tokens in a strictly left-to-right manner, leaving a gap between the symmetric training-time objective and the asymmetric verification-time reward. In this work, we offer an empirical analysis of three training-time interventions that narrow this gap: token positional weighting, a first-error focal loss that targets the position that breaks the accepted prefix within each block, and a chain loss term that substitutes a differentiable surrogate for the expected accepted length. The three interventions act along orthogonal axes (position, block-conditional first error, joint prefix) and compose additively; they are likewise orthogonal to test-time alignment mechanisms such as multi-draft self-selection, with which they can in principle be combined. Across four target models and six reasoning, code, and dialogue benchmarks, the three interventions raise accepted draft length by 21-76% per benchmark over a position-uniform baseline, without adding additional forward passes and without changing the inference pipeline or the rejection-sampling exactness contract.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Phase-Aware Guidance Injection for Recurrent MAPPO in Assembly-Line Disruption Recovery

arXiv:2606.16330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Disruption recovery in industrial assembly lines requires timely decisions under machine faults, worker absence, and emergency orders. Existing methods either rely on rigid handcrafted recovery logic or learn adaptive policies that do not readily exploit heterogeneous external recovery knowledge at decision time to reduce abnormal recovery time (ART) and preserve on-time delivery (OTD). To address this gap, we propose a phase-aware guidance injection framework that augments a trained recurrent MAPPO (RMAPPO) scheduling policy through logit-level action bias during evaluation. The framework provides a unified decision-time interface for rule-based, replay-based, and online LLM-based guidance, while activating intervention only during abnormal and recovery phases. Experiments on a custom AssemblyLineEnv show that high-quality rule guidance yields the strongest gains, replay-based guidance degrades smoothly under imperfect availability, and online LLM guidance still provides useful intermediate improvements. These results show that decision-time guidance injection can exploit heterogeneous recovery hints without redesigning the actor.

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

Accelerating Speculative Diffusions via Block Verification

arXiv:2606.13426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding speeds up LLM inference by using a draft model to generate tokens, with an acceptance-rejection scheme that ensures that the output matches the target distribution. Adapting this to continuous diffusions is difficult because speculative sampling requires drawing from a residual distribution. While straightforward in discrete spaces, efficiently sampling this residual in continuous space is non-trivial. Consequently, existing diffusion adaptations either use computationally inefficient sampling techniques or rely on an alternative scheme. In this work, we introduce a novel scheme that efficiently implements the original speculative sampling mechanism for diffusion models. Our approach offers a critical advantage over current methods: it enables us to adapt block verification from LLMs to diffusions – which provably improves the acceptance rate of drafts. Furthermore, we formalize and analyze the Free Drafter, a heuristic self-speculative drafter for diffusions that requires no training. By enabling block verification, our Free Drafter yields up to a 6.3% speedup over existing speculative methods with no additional training and negligible overhead beyond the existing parallel verification pass.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Toward Trustworthy AI: Multi-Target Adversarial Attacks and Robust Defenses for Continuous Data Summarization

arXiv:2606.11804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trustworthy AI requires reliable data-processing pipelines, not only robust downstream predictive models. As an upstream component, data summarization determines which information is retained and passed to subsequent learning or decision modules. Therefore, adversarial perturbations to the summarization process can compromise trustworthy AI in an upstream manner: they may alter the selected summary, reduce its representativeness, and further degrade the utility of subsequent learning tasks. In this paper, we study adversarial attacks on continuous data summarization under similarity-level perturbations through DR-submodular optimization. We show that a class of multi-resolution image summarization objectives can be formulated as multilinear extensions of non-negative submodular set functions and satisfy DR-submodularity with $m$-weak monotonicity. We then formulate multi-target attack generation as a min-max problem, where one admissible perturbation of the similarity structure is optimized to degrade multiple target summarization models. To mitigate such perturbations, we formulate robust defense against mixed attack types as a regularized max-min problem. For both problems, we develop approximation algorithms with theoretical guarantees. Experiments on real-data and controlled clustered benchmarks show that the proposed attack is effective in representative low-to-moderate budget regimes and can induce downstream task-performance loss. The proposed defense improves the robustness–mitigation trade-off in structured settings, while also revealing the parameter sensitivity of robust protection on real data.

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

GENIE: A Fine-Grained Measure for Novelty

Large Language Models have consistently demonstrated a lack of creativity and diversity across tasks. Prior work has focused on addressing whether models are capable of generating creative outputs. Here, we aim to consider novelty and investigate what makes model-generated content novel or not novel in a task-specific manner. We propose a fine-grained evaluation metric GENIE to measure the novelty of responses along task-specific features with respect to a population of responses. We show that unlike GENIE, holistic metrics struggle to capture the high-dimensionality of novelty and do not provide insight on which properties they target. Finally, we use GENIE to measure the effectiveness of mitigation methods that address creativity to better understand where these methods can improve novelty.

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

\texttt{Range-Arithmetic}: Verifiable Deep Learning Inference on an Untrusted Party

arXiv:2505.17623v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Verifiable computing (VC) has gained prominence in decentralized machine learning systems, where resource-intensive tasks like deep neural network (DNN) inference are offloaded to external participants due to blockchain limitations. This creates a need to verify the correctness of outsourced computations without re-execution. We propose \texttt{Range-Arithmetic}, a novel framework for efficient and verifiable DNN inference that transforms non-arithmetic operations, such as rounding after fixed-point matrix multiplication and ReLU, into arithmetic steps verifiable using sum-check protocols and concatenated range proofs. Our approach avoids the complexity of Boolean encoding, high-degree polynomials, and large lookup tables while remaining compatible with finite-field-based proof systems. Experimental results show that our method not only matches the performance of existing approaches, but also reduces the computational cost of verifying the results, the computational effort required from the untrusted party performing the DNN inference, and the communication overhead between the two sides.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LingxiDiagBench: A Multi-Agent Framework for Benchmarking LLMs in Chinese Psychiatric Consultation and Diagnosis

Mental disorders are highly prevalent worldwide, but the shortage of psychiatrists and the inherent subjectivity of interview-based diagnosis create substantial barriers to timely and consistent mental-health assessment. Progress in AI-assisted psychiatric diagnosis is constrained by the absence of benchmarks that simultaneously provide realistic patient simulation, clinician-verified diagnostic labels, and support for dynamic multi-turn consultation. We present LingxiDiagBench, a large-scale multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on both static diagnostic inference and dynamic multi-turn psychiatric consultation in Chinese. At its core is LingxiDiag-16K, a dataset of 16,000 EMR-aligned synthetic consultation dialogues designed to reproduce real clinical demographic and diagnostic distributions across 12 ICD-10 psychiatric categories. Through extensive experiments across state-of-the-art LLMs, we establish key findings: (1) although LLMs achieve high accuracy on binary depression–anxiety classification (up to 92.3%), performance deteriorates substantially for depression–anxiety comorbidity recognition (43.0%) and 12-way differential diagnosis (28.5%); (2) dynamic consultation often underperforms static evaluation, indicating that ineffective information-gathering strategies significantly impair downstream diagnostic reasoning; (3) consultation quality assessed by LLM-as-a-Judge shows only moderate correlation with diagnostic accuracy, suggesting that well-structured questioning alone does not ensure correct diagnostic decisions. We release LingxiDiag-16K and the full evaluation framework to support reproducible research at https://github.com/Lingxi-mental-health/LingxiDiagBench.

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

How Seemingly Inconsequential Design Choices Dictate Performance of LLMs in Pathology

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are routinely used as baselines when evaluating specialized pathology models on whole-slide images (WSIs). Because WSIs exceed contemporary model context limits, LLM baselines routinely use small, high-magnification patches processed independently via majority voting, without systematic evaluation of seemingly inconsequential design choices such as patch size, patch count, and magnification. Generalist LLMs have consistently underperformed specialized systems, reinforcing the perception that domain-specific training or architectural adaptation is necessary for pathology tasks involving WSIs. Here, we conduct a systematic factorial analysis of four input design factors: inference mode, patch size, magnification, and patch count. We demonstrate that prior studies have overstated the gap between specialized models and general-purpose LLMs by choosing non-optimized input configurations. On the MultiPathQA benchmark, switching to a single balanced configuration (large patches at lower magnification, processed jointly) raises GPT-5 from 15.1% to 39.5% on cancer-type classification (TCGA) and from 38.1% to 62.9% on organ classification (GTEx). Per-task optimization yields further gains up to 43.9% (TCGA) and 71.6% (GTEx). The same configuration generalizes to two other models and to a fully held-out CPTAC cohort, where it improves Gemini 3 Flash by 23.4 percentage points without any task-specific tuning.

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

On the Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LLM Judges

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges, e.g., for image quality and safety assessment. However, their adversarial robustness remains largely unexplored, threatening the fairness and reliability of automated judging. To bridge this gap, we introduce RobustMLLMJudge, the first general framework for evaluating the adversarial robustness of general-purpose MLLMs when functioning as judges. It covers diverse attacks against popular judge approaches across quality and safety evaluation scenarios. Using RobustMLLMJudge, we reveal that i) different MLLM judges are highly vulnerable to score-inflating adversarial attacks; and ii) although effective, these attack methods face a critical challenge due to unique constraints in the evaluation protocols of MLLM judges. We further propose MGSIA, namely Manifold-Guided Semantic Induction Attack, a novel method that bypasses these constraints to enable more effective and transferable attacks on MLLM judges. The core idea of MGSIA is to combine affirmative semantic induction with high-score manifold alignment: it maximizes the probability that judges yield affirmative responses (e.g., "Yes") to binary semantic queries, while regularizing adversarial representations toward high-score centers estimated from proxy protocols. Together, these objectives yield transferable score-inflating perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of MGSIA in deceiving advanced MLLM judges under different evaluation scenarios, highlighting the need for robust MLLM judges. Code and data will be made available at https://github.com/mala-lab/RobustMLLMJudge.