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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AGORA: An Archive-Grounded Benchmark for Agentic Workplace Document Reasoning

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that reason over documents rather than answer from parametric knowledge. We study archive-grounded reasoning: locating sparse evidence across a large, messy collection of workplace files, reconciling inconsistent terminology, units, and time conventions, and computing an answer. Existing benchmarks address only parts of this setting and none jointly stresses archive-groundedness, agentic exploration, and cross-domain coverage. We introduce Agora, a benchmark pairing 362 questions with eight domain collections of 9,664 authentic documents and 372M tokens, far exceeding any model's context window, so agents must explore deliberately rather than scan exhaustively. Agora is built by an agentic pipeline combining cross-document task synthesis, leakage-preventing obfuscation, and difficulty filtering. Evaluating eight models, we find the task far from solved: even the strongest reaches only 59.4% accuracy, with notable variation across domains.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PCA-Enhanced Adaptive NVAR Framework for High-Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting in the East Sea

arXiv:2606.12141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate forecasting of sea surface temperature (SST) in regional seas such as the East Sea is crucial for monitoring marine ecosystems, assessing climate risks, managing fisheries, and conducting naval operations. Traditional numerical ocean models provide reliable predictions but are computationally expensive and often unsuitable for real-time forecasting. Many deep learning methods also struggle with high-dimensional spatiotemporal ocean data and experience error accumulation over longer forecasting periods. This study builds on our previously proposed Adaptive Next-Generation Reservoir Computing (Adaptive NVAR) framework, initially introduced and tested on synthetic dynamical systems, and extends it to ocean forecasting. We present a reduced-order forecasting framework that combines Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with Adaptive NVAR to predict SST dynamics in the East Sea. SST fields are compressed into a low-dimensional representation using SVD, which extracts dominant modes of ocean variability. Adaptive NVAR models the temporal evolution of these latent states, and the predicted states are reconstructed into SST forecasts. We evaluate the framework using regional ocean datasets and compare it with the standard NG-RC/NVAR. Results show that Adaptive NVAR consistently achieves lower forecasting errors across multiple prediction horizons. In addition, SVD reduces computational complexity, resulting in a fast and scalable framework suitable for real-time ocean forecasting.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

LLMs are Bayesian, In Expectation, Not in Realization

arXiv:2507.11768v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bayesian accounts of in-context learning face a direct objection: exact posterior predictives for exchangeable data are invariant to task-preserving order, yet transformers change next-token probabilities when the same examples are serialized differently. We show this objection targets a structural invariant rather than the quantity scoring online prediction. For any Bayesian reference, excess prequential code length is exactly cumulative predictive KL. For unordered support sets that must be serialized, the expected regret of a single admissible ordering decomposes into that of the order-averaged predictor plus an order-averaging gain. Exchangeability violations are therefore not binary refutations; they are priced by log loss. We instantiate the theory with KT/Dirichlet finite-alphabet prediction and coarsened Bayesian linear-regression (BLR) predictive distributions. On Qwen2.5-7B/14B, floored candidate distributions at support $256$ have one-step excess code lengths of $0.020/0.011$ bits for Bernoulli and $0.039/0.022$ bits for four-way categorical prediction, with candidate mass above $0.999$; coarsened BLR continuations increasingly match the posterior-predictive digit distribution as support grows. A frequentist plug-in baseline sharpens the reading: the predictive distributions sit closer to the Bayesian posterior predictive than to the maximum-likelihood plug-in, by a margin largest at small support, where the plug-in is degenerate, and vanishing as the references converge. Position interventions and a from-scratch ablation localize order sensitivity to the positional encoding, activation patching tests causal use of decoded sufficient statistics, and permutation mixtures quantify the downstream log-loss cost of arbitrary orderings. Transformers need not realize exchangeable posterior predictives for every serialization to be Bayes-competitive prequential predictors.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems

arXiv:2606.13079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.

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

Multi-Task Bayesian In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.20538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bayesian predictive inference provides a principled framework for uncertainty quantification, data efficiency, and robust generalization. However, exact inference is often intractable, and scalable approximations may remain computationally expensive or require restrictive modeling assumptions that degrade predictive performance. Prior-Data Fitted and in-context models have recently emerged as an amortized alternative by learning to map datasets directly to predictive distributions, but existing approaches are tightly coupled to the support of the training prior and lack explicit mechanisms for adapting to new priors at test time, resulting in limited robustness under distribution shift. We introduce a multi-task in-context learning framework for amortized hierarchical Bayesian predictive inference that explicitly represents prior information as a prefix of in-context datasets. A transformer trained on sequences of prior and target tasks learns to adapt its predictions across families of priors. On a suite of evaluations with increasing difficulty, including out-of-meta-distribution priors and priors with high-dimensional latent structures, our method matches oracle Bayesian predictors while being orders of magnitude faster. We further demonstrate its practical relevance on a real-world spatiotemporal temperature prediction benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/martianmartina/multi-task-bayesian-icl/.

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

Morphology-resolved scrambling in a chaotic quantum billiard

arXiv:2606.16865v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chaotic quantum systems can retain spatial memory through scarred eigenstates, but whether these static structures control scrambling remains unclear. This work establishes a morphology-resolved connection between scarred eigenstates and eigenstate-resolved OTOCs in a peanut-shaped quantum billiard. Scalar localisation diagnostics, including differential entropy and continuum participation ratios, detect anomalous concentration but discard spatial architecture. A scale-normalised density overlap, in contrast, directly compares probability density profiles, revealing families of orthogonal eigenstates with nearly identical spatial morphology. Comparing the complete OTOC time traces of these orthogonal eigenstates reveals that morphological recurrence has dynamical content: moderate density overlap yields no universal prediction, whereas strongly recurring morphologies exhibit nearly identical OTOC growth and saturation. Thus, scarred structures act as spatial templates for operator growth, not merely static violations of ergodicity. This morphology-resolved framework turns eigenstate shape into a quantitative predictor of scrambling and provides a scale-controlled diagnostic of weak ergodicity breaking in quantum chaos.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Improving Human-Robot Teamwork in Urban Search and Rescue Through Episodic Memory of Prior Collaboration

arXiv:2606.18836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective human-robot teamwork requires robots to adapt to partners, situations, and task dynamics from the start of an interaction. In the MATRX Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) environment, people can externalize collaboration patterns (CPs) they discover during teamwork through a chat and reflection interface. We study whether a robot can use such prior team experience to become a better teammate in future interactions. To this end, we represent historical CPs as knowledge-graph episodic memories and use graph representation learning with a node-classification objective to identify a representative and effective memory for reuse. We then initialize the robot with this memory before a new collaboration episode begins. Across 20 participants and 160 round-level observations, initializing the robot with a single automatically selected prior CP increases rescue success from 25.7% to 41.3% and reduces average task time by 283 seconds. The strongest gains appear at the beginning of interaction, suggesting that reusable episodic memory can help robots enter collaboration with more effective task knowledge and support smoother early teamwork.

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

Learning-Based Decision Making for Combustion Phasing Control in Multi-Fuel CI Engines with Latent Fuel Reactivity Estimation

arXiv:2606.18393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression-ignition engines offer fuel flexibility but introduce uncertain, time-varying fuel reactivity, represented by cetane number (CN), which complicates cycle-to-cycle combustion-phasing control. This work formulates CA50 regulation under latent CN variation as a partially observable sequential decision problem and systematically evaluates controllers with increasing temporal and representational capacity, including LinUCB, history-augmented contextual bandits, observation-only DDPG, recurrent DDPG, and a proposed GRU-guided RL framework. A Gaussian-process surrogate trained on experimental multi-fuel engine data provides a controlled and reproducible evaluation environment. Results show that myopic and fixed-history bandit methods degrade under CN variation, observation-only RL suffers from latent-state aliasing, and generic recurrence is insufficient when CN evolves rapidly. The proposed framework learns a compact GRU-based representation of fuel reactivity from combustion history and conditions both actor and critic on this estimated signal rather than oracle CN. By training the policy on the same imperfect fuel-reactivity information available at deployment, the controller avoids train-deploy inconsistency in conventional online estimate-then-control pipelines. Across unseen CN trajectories, the policy achieves stable CA50 regulation with mean absolute tracking error below 0.25{\deg} CA at the training setpoint, while producing smooth, physically consistent SOI and glow-plug-power actuation. These results show that combustion control under latent, continuously evolving fuel dynamics requires more than standalone estimation or generic recurrence. By aligning fuel-reactivity inference with control policy learning, the proposed framework enables reactivity-aware decision-making using the same estimated state available during deployment.

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

Embedded Machine Learning for Microcontroller-Class Edge Devices: Data, Feature, Evaluation, and Deployment Pipelines

arXiv:2606.18122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embedded machine learning moves inference from cloud services to resource-constrained devices that must acquire data, preprocess signals, run a model, and act within tight limits on memory, energy, and latency. This paper presents a systems-oriented synthesis of an embedded machine-learning workflow for microcontroller-class platforms. The emphasis is placed on engineering decisions that are often hidden in generic machine-learning introductions: sampling and buffering, feature extraction as dimensionality reduction, validation under class imbalance, model/runtime co-design, and streaming deployment. Two representative signal families are used throughout the paper. The first is inertial motion recognition, where a two-second, three-axis accelerometer window is transformed from raw samples into root-mean-square and spectral features before classification. The second is keyword spotting, where audio is sampled, anti-aliased, transformed into mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, and processed by a compact one-dimensional convolutional network. The paper concludes with practical design rules for robust on-device inference, including data curation, quantization, thresholding, scheduling, and field monitoring.

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

Entity Binding Failures in Speech LLM Reasoning: Diagnosis and Chain-of-Thought Intervention

Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) underperform their text counterparts on complex reasoning. We reveal that this gap is not a uniform cognitive deficit. Evaluating two architecturally diverse SLLMs, we show speech-to-text (S2T) matches or exceeds text-to-text (T2T) on spatial, syntactic, and factual tasks. Yet on logical tasks requiring entity tracking, S2T accuracy collapses to chance. We diagnose this as an entity binding failure: continuous speech features blur precise entity-property associations during implicit reasoning. To validate this diagnosis, we introduce Entity-Aware Chain-of-Thought (EA-CoT), a lightweight inference-time intervention forcing SLLMs to enumerate entities and bind them to claims before reasoning. EA-CoT bridges the gap, even when spoken names are misrecognized, yielding up to a 24.4 percentage-point accuracy gain. Ablations confirm the gains stem from explicit semantic binding, reframing the gap as an elicitation failure rather than a missing capability.

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

Identifiability Without Gaussianity: Symbolic World Models and Near-Infinite Temporal Consistency

Klindt, LeCun, and Balestriero (arXiv:2605.26379) proved that Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) achieve linear identifiability, the linear recovery of the world's true latent variables, if and only if the world's latent dynamics follow a Gaussian, stationary process. This Gaussian boundary implies a fundamental limit on temporal consistency: for any non-Gaussian physical system, the representation error of a statistical World Model grows monotonically with time. We prove that this limit is an artifact of the statistical alignment mechanism, not a property of World Models in general. We introduce the Physics-Grounded Symbolic Architecture (PGSA) and prove three results: (1) a PGSA achieves exact linear identifiability for all physical regimes, regardless of the latent distribution; (2) the per-step error of a PGSA is bounded by numerical precision alone; and (3) as a direct consequence, a PGSA maintains temporal consistency for an unbounded number of transitions, a property we term near-infinite temporal consistency. We further prove that statistical World Models cannot achieve this property for any non-Gaussian system, regardless of model capacity or the volume of training data. The algebraic cores of four of the theorems are formalized in Lean 4 with Mathlib4 v4.31.0 (zero sorry placeholders); the Klindt et al. converse is taken as an external premise. The contrast establishes that symbolic grounding in the causal generator of the world's dynamics is the sufficient condition and, in non-Gaussian regimes, the only condition for near-infinite temporal consistency.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Determinants of non-utilization of insecticide-treated nets among children under five in Rwanda: analyses of the 2024 Rwanda malaria indicator survey

Background Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are effective for preventing malaria among children under five years, who bear a disproportionate burden of malaria. This study assessed the prevalence and determinants of ITN non-utilization among children under five in Rwanda using data from the 2024 Rwanda Malaria Indicator Survey (RMIS).Methodology This cross-sectional study utilized nationally representative data from the 2024 RMIS. Analyses were restricted to children under five residing in households that owned at least one ITN. The outcome was non-utilization of ITN, defined as not sleeping under an ITN the night preceding the survey. Survey-weighted descriptive statistics were used to estimate the prevalence of ITN non-utilization. Factors associated with non-utilization were identified using a survey-weighted Poisson regression model. Adjusted prevalence ratios (aPRs), 95% confidence intervals and p-values were reported.Results A total of 1,979 children were included in the study. The weighted prevalence of ITN non-utilization among children under five years was 20.11% (95% CI: 17.81 - 22.63). After adjusting for other factors, children aged 2 - 3 years were associated with an 83% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those aged [&le;]1 year (aPR = 1.83, 95% CI: 1.423 - 2.352, p < 0.001). Compared with households that owned only one ITN, children in households with three or more ITNs were associated with a 76% lower prevalence of ITN non-utilization (aPR = 0.24, 95% CI: 0.171 - 0.332, p < 0.001). Children living in households with 5 - 7 members were associated with an 87% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those in households with 1 - 4 members (aPR = 1.87, 95% CI: 1.476 - 2.358, p < 0.001).Conclusion The findings suggest that ITN utilization among children is influenced not only by household access to nets but also by household composition and dynamics that shape the allocation and use of available preventive resources.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal learning of quantum channels in diamond distance

arXiv:2512.10214v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum process tomography, the task of estimating an unknown quantum channel, is a central problem in quantum information theory. A long-standing open question is how many uses of an unknown channel are required to learn it in diamond distance, the standard metric for distinguishing quantum processes. While quantum state tomography is well understood, for general channels the problem remained open beyond the unitary case. Here we establish the query complexity of channel tomography with optimal dependence on the dimension parameters, at any fixed constant accuracy. We design an algorithm showing that any channel with input/output dimensions $d_{\mathrm{in}},d_{\mathrm{out}}$ and Kraus rank at most $k$ can be learned to accuracy $\varepsilon$ using $O(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k/\varepsilon^{2})$ channel uses. Conversely, we prove that $\Omega(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k)$ uses are necessary at constant accuracy and that, for non-minimal Kraus rank, a separate $\Omega(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ contribution is unavoidable. Since channels subsume states, unitaries, isometries, and measurements as special cases, our protocol provides a unified framework for these tomography tasks, yielding new guarantees for isometry and measurement tomography while recovering known optimal scalings for state and unitary tomography. Our algorithm follows the natural strategy of performing optimal tomography on the Choi state. The main technical contribution is to show that this suffices to control the induced diamond-distance error, avoiding the dimension loss incurred by a naive conversion from Choi-state trace distance to channel diamond distance. The protocol uses the channel non-adaptively to prepare Choi-state copies, purifies them in parallel, and performs optimal pure-state tomography on the resulting purifications. Hence, we reduce channel tomography to pure-state tomography.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

OpenMedReason: Scientific Reasoning Supervision for Medical Vision-Language Models

High-stakes clinical use of large vision-language models (LVLMs) requires reasoning that is grounded in visual evidence and clinical knowledge, not just correct final answers. We introduce OpenMedReason, a large-scale, open multimodal medical reasoning corpus comprising approximately 450K image-question-answer instances whose reasoning traces are primarily derived from curated biomedical, human-authored scientific articles. OpenMedReason provides high-fidelity supervision beyond synthetic chains of thought, covering diverse medical domain vision modalities such as radiological scans, microscopic images, visible light photographs, charts, and others. We complement it with OpenMedReason-Bench, a held-out benchmark that allows fine-grained evaluation of LVLMs along three complementary axes of capability, including perception, medical knowledge, and rationale, enabling diagnostic evaluation beyond final-answer accuracy. OpenMedReason is a rich training resource that exhibits its effectiveness in both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement-based alignment. Training with OpenMedReason yields a 20% average improvement in VQA accuracy over the base model and achieves performance within 4.2% of the strongest comparable-scale medical LVLMs. Fine-grained performance analysis confirms that the gains are not concentrated in any single axis: OpenMedReason improves perception, medical knowledge, and rationale jointly, and its reasoning traces are preferred over those of the base model in 86.1% of pairwise comparisons. We release the code and dataset at huggingface.co/datasets/neginb/OpenMedReason.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Sexualised synthetic personas encode and amplify gendered power asymmetries through voice

This work examines sexualised AI-generated English-speaking voices offered by a popular commercial platform. New technologies may enable sexual empowerment and greater diversity in gender expression, yet toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, and the abuse of women and LGBTQ+ people remain pervasive online. Drawing on a Feminist HCI perspective, we examine how commercial voice AI systems reproduce and circulate particular performances of gender. We conducted a listening experiment with a diverse group of listeners, combining quantitative adjective selection, qualitative free-text responses, and acoustic analysis. Participants evaluated male- and female-coded voices presented with either sexualised scripts or neutral text. Results reveal a narrow range of gender expression, largely binary and heteronormative. Female-coded voices are more frequently described using sexualised and submissive terms, while male-coded voices are more often associated with dominance and positive traits.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Ultra-Low-Rate Information Reconciliation: Repetition Coding or Dedicated Codes?

arXiv:2606.23726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We compare repetition-based ultra-low-rate information reconciliation with dedicated ultra-low-rate codes for CV-QKD. Repetition coding offers a favorable performance-complexity trade-off, incurring only a moderate error-rate penalty while reducing decoding complexity by $2\times$, making it attractive for implementation-constrained systems.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Best Preprocessing Techniques for Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis in Twitter datasets is important because it enables monitoring public opinion on products and analysis of political and social movements. One critical step is preprocessing: the automated processing of text for machine learning algorithms. Preprocessing plays a critical role in reducing noise and improving efficiency. However, little research has systematically examined the order in which preprocessing techniques are implemented. We find that, when accounting for order, spelling correction is the least impactful preprocessing technique, whereas tokenisation is the most impactful. Stemming and stop-word removal are interchangeable, and it is better to remove stop words without removing negation. The best order for applying the preprocessing techniques was tokenisation, text cleaning, stemming, and then stopword removal. Our results provide a systematic approach for practitioners to deploy preprocessing to improve model output without the costly preprocessing exploratory phase.

21.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19

Efficient site-specific gene addition using R2 retrotransposons in tobacco and rice

作者:

Precise integration of multikilobase DNA fragments remains a major technical barrier in plants. Here we introduce non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) R2 retrotransposons as a versatile system for targeted gene integration in plants. We reconstituted R2 activity in Nicotiana benthamiana and benchmarked insertion efficiency and fidelity using a TMV-based episomal reporter system. We demonstrate site-specific integration of GFP (2.2 kb) and recombinase-compatible landing pads (0.6 kb) into 28S rDNA arrays, with intact cassette insertion frequencies up to 75% and 53%, respectively. To temporally constrain donor availability and avoid DNA intermediates, we combined in planta effector expression with recombinant RNA virus-mediated donor delivery. We apply R2 retrotransposons for targeted insertion of resistance cassettes within the rDNA of rice callus, achieving integration efficiencies up to 17%. These results position R2 retrotransposons as a double-strand break-free system for RNA-templated insertion of multikilobase gene cassettes at rDNA loci, for safe-harbor trait stacking in plants with potential applications in crop improvement and synthetic biology. Retrotransposons are applied in plants for safe-harbor transgene integration.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Folding the unfoldable 2: using AlphaFold and ESMFold to explore spurious proteins

Motivation: Spurious protein sequences, resulting from gene prediction errors, theoretically should not yield folded structures. AlphaFold2 was previously shown to predict short spurious sequences with high pLDDT scores and was therefore unlikely to distinguish between real proteins and spurious proteins which are usually short. We evaluate whether newer structure prediction methods (ESMFold and AlphaFold3) similarly predict short sequences with high pLDDT or if they better discriminate between spurious and real proteins. Results: All three structure prediction methods (ESMFold, AlphaFold2, and AlphaFold3) predict short spurious sequences from AntiFam with unexpectedly high pLDDT scores, however the discrimination between spurious and real proteins improves beyond 100 amino acids. By analysing sequences with disparate pTM and pLDDT scores, we identified two likely spurious shadow ORFs in Swiss-Prot and one potentially non-spurious AntiFam entry. Using the structure prediction scores, we developed a Gaussian Process Model and evaluated its performance on AlphaFold DB, identifying potential spurious proteins at scale. While limited on its own, this model can increase confidence in spurious protein identification when combined with other methods.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Revealing Hidden Vulnerabilities in Autoencoders through Gradient Signal Restoration

Adversarial robustness of deep autoencoders (AEs) has received less attention than that of discriminative models, although their compressed latent representations induce ill-conditioned mappings that can amplify small input perturbations and destabilize reconstructions. Existing white-box attacks for AEs, which optimize norm-bounded adversarial perturbations to maximize reconstruction damage, often converge to suboptimal perturbations, thereby potentially overstating AE robustness. We show that this limitation is linked to vanishing adversarial loss gradients during backpropagation through ill-conditioned layers, associated with near-zero singular values in their intermediate weight matrices. To address this, we propose GRILL (Gradient Signal Restoration in Ill-Conditioned Layers), a framework designed to mitigate gradient degradation and improve the reliability of adversarial robustness evaluation in encoder-decoder architectures. GRILL is designed to mitigate adversarial gradient degradation during optimization, enabling attacks to better approximate high-distortion perturbations under fixed norm constraints. Through extensive experiments across multiple AE architectures, under both sample-specific and universal attacks, as well as standard and adaptive attack settings, we show that GRILL significantly increases attack effectiveness, thereby exposing vulnerabilities hidden by existing attack limitations. Beyond AEs, we provide preliminary evidence that modern multimodal encoder-decoder architectures exhibit similar vulnerabilities.

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

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

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

Unifying Post-hoc Explanations of Knowledge Graph Completions

arXiv:2507.22951v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs organize information as entity-relation-entity triples, enabling machine learning models to predict plausible missing triples in a task known as Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC). Post-hoc explainability for KGC addresses the problem of identifying which triples most influence the predictions of machine learning models. Currently, the field lacks formalization and consistent evaluations, hindering reproducibility and cross-study comparisons. This paper argues for a unified taxonomy for post-hoc explainability in KGC. First, we propose a characterization of post-hoc explanations via multi-objective optimization that unifies existing post-hoc explainability algorithms in KGC and the explanations they produce, balancing explanation effectiveness and conciseness. Next, we examine improved evaluation protocols based on popular metrics, such as Mean Reciprocal Rank and Hits@k, through illustrative experiments. Finally, we stress the importance of interpretability as the ability of explanations to address queries meaningful to end users. By unifying methods and discussing evaluation standards, this work puts forward a case for more reproducible and impactful research in KGC explainability.