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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Dressed Floquet scars from protected zero modes in a Rydberg chain

arXiv:2606.15605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this Letter, we present an approximate analytic construction of two zero quasienergy quantum many-body scars in a periodically driven model of Rydberg atoms on a ring, which persist over a range of driving amplitudes and frequencies for finite sizes. An index theorem protects an exponentially large number (in system size) of exact zero energy modes of the Floquet Hamiltonian in this setting. Unlike most of these zero modes which continuously change with drive parameters, these two quantum many-body scars retain the memory of particular states. They can be expressed as {\it dressed versions} of two contrasting states, the Rydberg vacuum and a unitarily rotated variant of a volume-law scar [Ivanov and Motrunich, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 134}, 050403 (2025)], respectively. We provide an analytic understanding of their existence using a Floquet perturbation theory and show their resilience beyond the perturbative regime using exact diagonalization in finite systems. Our study provides insight into the structure of protected zero modes in interacting Floquet settings.

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

Neuron Level Analysis of Large Language Model in Legal Domain Reasoning

We presented a neuron-level analysis of legal-domain reasoning in LLMs, comparing it with other applied domain tasks across seven open-weight models. Using neuron attribution scores to rank and suppress influential neurons, we confirmed that suppressing the identified neurons collapses accuracy on the target task, whereas suppressing the same number of random neurons does not. We further found a small subset of neurons influential across all seven tasks; once these are removed, suppressing the remaining neurons degrades only the task they were identified from, revealing genuinely task-specific neurons in every model studied. Within the legal domain, the three benchmarks exhibit relatively high neuron overlap and tend to be affected jointly, suggesting of legal components neurons that span jurisdictions. The distribution of identified neurons in our experiments suggests that the hypothesis that influential neurons are concentrated in middle MLP layers may depend on the input format and content, rather than being a universal phenomenon.

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

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

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

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Sorries Are Not the Hard Part: An Expert-Review Case Study of a Semi-Autonomous Formalization

arXiv:2606.13925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can often close proof gaps in interactive theorem provers, but a verified theorem is not the same thing as a reusable library contribution. We study this distinction through a detailed case study: a semi-autonomous formalization of Grothendieck's vanishing theorem. The initial version compiles with no sorries, but an expert review found serious problems in definitions, theorem generality, file organization, and the API. We then ran a review-driven refactor and compression process and obtained a second expert review. The before-and-after comparison shows a sharp split: agents adapted well to local, mechanically checkable feedback, but remained weak at choosing definitions and designing APIs. We argue that autoformalization should be evaluated not only by closed sorries, but by whether the resulting formalization survives expert review.

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

MemNovo: Look Back at the Spectrum for Balanced De Novo Peptide Sequencing from Mass Spectrometry

arXiv:2606.11868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: De novo peptide sequencing from tandem mass spectrometry is pivotal in proteomics, enabling identification of novel peptides without reference databases. While recent Transformer-based encoder-decoder models have achieved remarkable performance, we uncover a critical pathology in their inference dynamics. Through comprehensive feature scaling experiments, we demonstrate that existing auto-regressive peptide decoders tend to over-rely on generated-sequence priors while progressively under-utilizing fine-grained physical evidence from the input mass spectrum. This phenomenon leads to suboptimal results, where generated peptide sequences are biologically plausible yet not faithful to the input spectrum. To rectify this, we propose MemNovo, a training-free and plug-and-play mechanism that re-balances peptide and spectral contributions at inference time. MemNovo alleviates the information bottleneck by establishing a persistent spectral memory bank and injecting retrieved features directly into the final decoding stage via an ultra-conservative residual connection. Theoretical analysis confirms that this mechanism restores the mutual information between the decoder state and the raw spectrum. Extensive experiments on the Nine Species benchmark with two representative baselines, Casanovo and InstaNovo, demonstrate that MemNovo consistently improves both amino acid precision and peptide precision, achieving up to 39.1% relative improvement in peptide precision for Casanovo and up to 3.9% for InstaNovo, with negligible computational overhead.

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

Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion and World Models with Temporal Cache Compression and Sparse Attention

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation, opening the door to long-form synthesis, video world models, and interactive neural game engines. However, their core attention layers become a major bottleneck at inference time: as generation progresses, the KV cache grows, causing both increasing latency and escalating GPU memory, which in turn restricts usable temporal context and harms long-range consistency. In this work, we study redundancy in autoregressive video diffusion and identify three persistent sources: near-duplicate cached keys across frames, slowly evolving (largely semantic) queries/keys that make many attention computations redundant, and cross-attention over long prompts where only a small subset of tokens matters per frame. Building on these observations, we propose a unified, training-free attention framework (FAST-AR) for FAST-AutoRegressive diffusion, consisting of three components: TempCache compresses the KV cache via temporal correspondence to bound cache growth; AnnCA accelerates cross-attention by selecting frame-relevant prompt tokens using fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) matching; and AnnSA sparsifies self-attention by restricting each query to semantically matched keys, also using a lightweight ANN. Together, these modules reduce attention, compute, and memory and are compatible with existing autoregressive diffusion backbones and world models. Experiments demonstrate up to x5 - x10 end-to-end speedups while preserving near-identical visual quality and, crucially, maintaining stable throughput and nearly constant peak GPU memory usage over long rollouts, where prior methods progressively slow down and suffer from increasing memory usage.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

uva-irlab-conv at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Multi-Turn RAG with Learned Sparse Retrieval and Listwise Reranking

This report describes our participation in SemEval-2026 Task 8 on multi-turn retrieval and question answering. The task evaluates conversational systems across four domains (finance, cloud documentation, government, Wikipedia), and includes unanswerable queries where the available collection does not contain sufficient evidence to produce a complete response. We propose a multi-turn retrieval-augmented generation pipeline that combines learned sparse retrieval with LLM-based reranking and generation. Using sparse retrieval as the primary retrieval method, we leverage its strong generalization across domains. In addition, we make use of the long-context capabilities of LLMs for conversational query rewriting, pointwise and listwise reranking, and generating the final response, each conditioned on the full conversational history. This multi-step design enables effective integration of conversational context throughout retrieval and generation, improving robustness across domains.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Reinforcement Learning to Disentangle Multiqubit Quantum States from Partial Observations

arXiv:2406.07884v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using partial knowledge of a quantum state to control multiqubit entanglement is a largely unexplored paradigm in the emerging field of quantum interactive dynamics with the potential to address outstanding challenges in quantum state preparation and compression, quantum control, and quantum complexity. We present a deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach using an actor-critic algorithm for constructing short disentangling circuits for states with up to 16 qubits. With access to only two-qubit reduced density matrices, our agent decides which pairs of qubits to apply two-qubit gates on; requiring only local information makes it directly applicable on modern NISQ devices, as we demonstrated experimentally on a trapped-ion quantum computer. Utilizing a permutation-equivariant transformer architecture, the agent can autonomously identify qubit permutations within the state, and adjusts the disentangling protocol accordingly. Once trained, it provides circuits from different initial states without further optimization. We demonstrate the agent's ability to identify and exploit the entanglement structure of multi-qubit states. We analyze the disentangling circuits constructed by the agent for 4- and 5-qubit Haar-random states, and observe strong correlations between consecutive gates and among the qubits involved. Through extensive benchmarking, we show the efficacy of the RL approach to find disentangling protocols with minimal gate resources. We explore the resilience of our trained agents to noise, highlighting their potential for real-world quantum computing applications. Analyzing optimal disentangling protocols, we report a general circuit to prepare an arbitrary 4-qubit state using at most 5 two-qubit (10 CNOT) gates.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fusing Stylometric and Embedding Systems to Estimate Authorship Likelihood Ratios in Japanese

The likelihood ratio framework is widely recognized as the logically and legally sound basis for evidential analysis across forensic sciences, and its importance is increasingly acknowledged in analyses of authorship in textual evidence. To date, however, its application has been confined to English-language texts. Meanwhile, authorship attribution has traditionally relied on a diverse array of stylometric features, even as the rise of pre-trained large language models enables new contextual-embedding approaches. Combining these diverse approaches through fusion promises enhanced performance, yet it has not been applied to integrate stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems within the likelihood ratio paradigm. This study is the first to apply likelihood ratio-based forensic text comparison to Japanese digital texts, using ~1,000-character excerpts from blogs, to 1) evaluate system performance and likelihood ratio magnitudes and 2) assess the impact of fusing stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems. The results demonstrate that the fused system maintains excellent calibration while 1) increasing consistent-with-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes; 2) decreasing contrary-to-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes and 3) improving overall discriminability. The best-performing fusion achieved a log-likelihood-ratio cost of 0.32484, illustrating both the feasibility of likelihood ratio framework for Japanese and the benefits of fusion across heterogeneous systems.

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

Accelerated Stochastic Min-Max Optimization Based on Bias-corrected Momentum

arXiv:2406.13041v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ sample complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary point. Some works indicate that this complexity can be improved to $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ when the stochastic loss gradient is Lipschitz continuous. The question of achieving enhanced convergence rates under distinct conditions, remains open. In this work, we address this question for optimization problems that are nonconvex in the minimization variable and strongly concave or Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) in the maximization variable. We introduce novel bias-corrected momentum algorithms utilizing efficient Hessian-vector products. We establish convergence conditions and demonstrate a lower iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ for the proposed algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through applications to robust logistic regression and robust adaptive cruise control.

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

DIRECT: When and Where Should You Allocate Test-Time Compute in Embodied Planners?

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for embodied agents, with an emerging strategy of scaling test-time compute to improve capability. However, we observe that doing so increases latency, token usage, and FLOPs while yielding uneven, often diminishing gains in downstream success, limiting where embodied agents can be deployed. We argue that choosing when and where to spend test-time compute is central to bringing frontier performance to the real world. We introduce DIRECT, a routing framework that uses multimodal scene context to allocate compute per prompt, improving the success–cost Pareto frontier over fixed model selection. Across three dominant scaling axes, namely chain-of-thought depth, model size, and memory history, our experiments on VLABench and RoboMME show that test-time compute is not a uniform lever: different axes yield qualitatively distinct capability gains. We validate these insights on a physical Franka arm in a DROID setup spanning zero-shot manipulation and long-horizon chaining, where our router matches or exceeds a stronger model's success rate at up to 65% lower average latency. Ultimately, our results show that naively scaling test-time compute is wasteful, and that DIRECT can provide frontier-level embodied planning in robotic systems at a fraction of the cost. Project page can be found at jadee-dao.github.io/direct/.

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

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Caring Without Feeling: Affective Dynamics as the Control Layer of Human-AI Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606.18259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents that plan, retain memory across sessions, invoke external tools and act with partial autonomy are transforming human–AI collaboration. Research on affective computing, simulated empathy in large language models, trust in automation and AI safety has illuminated important design principles, yet these literatures remain fragmented. No integrated account explains how affective cues operate within agentic collaboration – settings in which humans delegate, monitor and correct consequential tasks. This Review synthesises computational and interactional mechanisms of affective dynamics: the processes through which affective cues, emotion-like behaviour and perceived agent affect shape trust calibration, delegation decisions, error correction, dependence and governance. We trace how model-generated affective signals enter interaction loops that govern reliance, repair and oversight, and propose a framework that treats affect not as an internal property of AI but as a coordination layer through which humans and agents negotiate capability, uncertainty and responsibility. The framework provides a foundation for calibrated measurement, purposeful design and informed governance.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

How Does the Pretraining Distribution Shape In-Context Learning? A Fundamental Trade-Off

arXiv:2510.01163v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The factors driving the performance of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remain poorly understood despite ICL's surprising effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples. To clarify and improve these capabilities, we characterize how the statistical properties of the pretraining distribution (e.g., tail behavior, coverage) shape ICL. We develop a theoretical framework that encompasses generalization and task selection and show how distributional properties govern sample efficiency, task retrieval, and robustness. To this end, we generalize existing concentration results to heavy-tailed priors and dependent sequences, better reflecting the structure of LLM pretraining data. Our framework reveals a fundamental design trade-off: heavy-tailed pretraining distributions facilitate robust task selection under distribution shifts but are detrimental to generalization, especially in low-data regimes. We then empirically evaluate our predictions by studying how ICL performance varies with the pretraining distribution on challenging tasks such as stochastic differential equations and stochastic processes with memory. Together, these findings suggest that controlling key statistical properties of the pretraining distribution is essential for building ICL-capable and reliable LLMs.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

LatentLens: Revealing Highly Interpretable Visual Tokens in LLMs

Transforming a large language model (LLM) into a vision-language model (VLM) can be achieved by mapping the visual tokens from a vision encoder into the embedding space of an LLM. Intriguingly, this mapping can be as simple as a shallow MLP transformation. To understand why LLMs can so readily process visual tokens, we need interpretability methods that reveal what is encoded in the visual token representations at every layer of LLM processing. In this work, we introduce LatentLens, a novel approach for mapping latent representations to descriptions in natural language. LatentLens encodes a large text corpus and stores contextualized token representations for each token in that corpus. Visual token representations are then compared to these contextualized representations and the top-nearest neighbor representations serve as descriptions of the visual token. We evaluate this method on 15 different VLMs, showing that commonly used methods, such as LogitLens, substantially underestimate the interpretability of visual tokens. With LatentLens instead, the majority of visual tokens are interpretable across all studied models and all layers. Qualitatively, we show that the descriptions produced by LatentLens are semantically meaningful and provide more fine-grained interpretations for humans compared to individual tokens. More broadly, our findings contribute new evidence on the alignment between vision and language representations and open up new directions for analyzing the latent representations of LLMs.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

EM-NeSy: Expectation Maximization for Neurosymbolic Learning

arXiv:2606.14463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic (NeSy) models integrate neural networks and symbolic reasoning for robust and interpretable AI. State-of-the-art NeSy models require that the symbolic component is expressed in a differentiable way, often complicating the use of approximate inference. We propose EM-NeSy which casts probabilistic NeSy learning as an instance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the expectation step, we compute the posterior over the neurally predicted symbols conditioned on the label via probabilistic inference. In the maximization step, we update the neural parameters based on this posterior using gradient descent only through the neural component. This formulation unlocks the full potential of the EM algorithm for NeSy learning. It allows NeSy to extend naturally to approximate reasoning without any additional modifications or differentiability requirements of the symbolic component. Furthermore, it recovers the standard end-to-end gradient-based NeSy setting under exact inference. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability and computational efficiency of EM-NeSy.

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

Which Sections of a Research Paper Best Reveal Its Research Methods? Evidence from Library and Information Science

Research methods are essential carriers of knowledge contribution in academic papers. Automatic multi-label classification of research methods can support knowledge services such as method retrieval, review generation, and research intelligence analysis. While existing studies primarily rely on titles and abstracts, abstracts often provide only limited methodological information, whereas utilizing full-text content faces challenges related to excessive length and information redundancy. Therefore, this paper proposes a segment combination strategy by partitioning the full-text content according to its physical postion. Using an annotated corpus of 1,954 full-text articles from three representative journals in Library and Information Science (JASIST, LISR, and JDoc), we evaluate the classification performance of various segments and their combinations across multiple models. Experimental results indicate that methodological information is distributed unevenly within the full-text content, with the middle-to-late and final segments exhibiting greater discriminative power. Furthermore, integrating bibliographic metadata with cross-segment combination strategies effectively enhances classification performance.

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

M4-SAR: A Multi-Resolution, Multi-Polarization, Multi-Scene, Multi-Source Dataset and Benchmark for optical-SAR Object Detection

Single-source remote sensing object detection using optical or SAR images struggles in complex environments. Optical images offer rich textural details but are often affected by low-light, cloud-obscured, or low-resolution conditions, reducing the detection performance. SAR images are robust to weather, but suffer from speckle noise and limited semantic expressiveness. Optical and SAR images provide complementary advantages, and fusing them can significantly improve the detection accuracy. However, progress in this field is hindered by the lack of large-scale, standardized datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a new comprehensive dataset for optical-SAR fusion object detection, named Multi-resolution, Multi-polarization, Multi-scene, Multi-source SAR dataset (M4-SAR). It contains 112,174 instance-level aligned image pairs and nearly one million labeled instances with arbitrary orientations, spanning six key categories. To enable standardized evaluation, we develop a unified benchmarking toolkit that integrates six state-of-the-art multi-source fusion methods. Additionally, we propose E2E-OSDet, a novel end-to-end multi-source fusion detection framework that mitigates cross-domain discrepancies and establishes a robust baseline for future studies. Extensive experiments on M4-SAR demonstrate that fusing optical and SAR data can improve mAP by 5.7\% over single-source inputs, with particularly significant gains in complex environments. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/wchao0601/M4-SAR.

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

TIGER: Inverting Transformer Gradients via Embedding-Subspace Distance Optimization

arXiv:2606.18312v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated learning allows multiple clients to jointly train a shared model by sending gradient updates to a central server while keeping raw inputs local. However, prior gradient inversion attacks show that these updates can reveal enough information to reconstruct client inputs. Existing attacks on transformers either optimize dummy inputs to match the true client updates, which is costly and unstable for modern models, or exploit the low rank of attention gradients to identify a subspace containing the true layer embeddings, followed by a discrete membership test for candidate tokens. However, this token test is brittle under numerical noise, i.e., from quantization or Differential Privacy (DP), and scales poorly for encoder models with non-causal attention. We introduce TIGER, a continuous gradient inversion attack that turns this subspace signal into a differentiable objective. Instead of searching over tokens or matching full gradients, TIGER directly optimizes token embeddings to minimize their distance to the subspace. Our experiments demonstrate that on encoder-only models, TIGER substantially improves both reconstruction quality and runtime over existing attacks, while on decoder models, TIGER is more robust than prior subspace-based attacks, enabling the first successful reconstructions in DP-defended federated learning settings.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Thinking Outside the [Chat]Box: Bridging Computer Science and Industrial Design for Cognitive-Inclusive Generative AI

arXiv:2606.14306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Generative AI (GenAI) interfaces remain largely constrained to chatbox interaction, which can impose high cognitive demands on users and create substantial barriers for people with intellectual disabilities (ID), including prompt formulation difficulties, response overload, and limited mechanisms to assess information reliability. To explore alternative interaction models for cognitive accessibility, we conducted a cross-disciplinary co-design challenge in which two student cohorts (Computer Science and Industrial Design) developed interface concepts from the same set of functional requirements (e.g., prompt scaffolding, structured output, GUI-based refinement, transparency, and personalization). Comparing the resulting proposals reveals both convergence on foundational requirements (notably initial calibration, proactive prompting, and direct manipulation of response fragments) and complementary contributions that outline a multi-layered support system. Computer Science teams primarily produced structural scaffolding, emphasizing predictability, navigability, and trust through mechanisms such as reliability indicators, explicit sources, and context management for long conversations. Industrial Design teams emphasized experiential scaffolding, focusing on pacing, attention guidance, multimodality, and proactive agency, including step-by-step response flows, focus modes, and assistant-like integrations. We synthesize these findings into a dual-layer scaffolding framework that expands the design space for cognitively accessible GenAI interaction beyond chat-centric models and motivates future work on expert refinement, technical feasibility, and empirical validation with users with ID.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

APOSM: Pairwise preference learning improves generative small-molecule design

Small-molecule lead refinement is constrained by the cost of synthesizing and assaying candidates, making the surrogate models that prioritize compounds for experimental testing central to the design process. The reliability of such surrogates is limited by the noise and sparsity of screening measurements. We show that training the surrogate on pairwise comparisons between candidate molecules, rather than on absolute predicted scores, yields a substantially more reliable signal for active candidate selection in this regime. We develop APOSM, an active-learning algorithm that combines a fragment-based generator, a pairwise message-passing graph neural network surrogate, and probabilistic ranking inside a batched acquisition loop. On the Practical Molecular Optimization benchmark and a GPCR ligand rediscovery task, APOSM improves target attainment and sampling efficiency over unguided fragment-based optimization, the Graph-GA genetic algorithm, and a pointwise-regression ablation, with the largest gains on tasks where absolute scores are hardest to calibrate.

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

SkillVetBench: LLM-as-Judge for Multi-Dimensional Security Risk Evaluation in Open-Source LLM Agent Skills

arXiv:2606.15899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLM agent ecosystems are growing rapidly, yet the security of community-contributed skills - modular tool definitions that extend agent capabilities - remains largely unvetted. The gap we fill: existing scanners operate at the code layer and are structurally blind to instruction-layer and multi-agent risk - natural-language directives that hijack an agent, exfiltrate data through encoded side channels, or chain harm across pipelines - so what is needed is a semantic, multi-dimensional vetting system rather than another signature matcher. We present SKILLVETBENCH, a live public leaderboard on Hugging Face that uses an LLM-as-Judge to vet agent skills. What is new: SARS (Skill Agentic Risk Score), a five-dimensional agentic-risk metric with a principled weighted formula for instruction-following systems. What is integrated: full CVSS v4.0 vector decomposition and a ClawHub dual-view that places our LLM-generated review beside the official marketplace verdict. What is demonstrated: drawing on our companion benchmark paper [ 1], the LLM-as-Judge stage achieves zero false negatives across 78 confirmed-malicious skills and zero false positives across 22 benign controls, while the best static baseline (SKILLSIEVE) still misses 15%; for instruction-layer categories such as Prompt Injection and Memory Poisoning, conventional tools miss between 89% and 100% of threats (e.g., CODEBERT detects none of nine memory-poisoning skills). Detection rates vary from 35% to 95% across four LLM evaluators, motivating ensemble scoring in production deployments.

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

Revisiting Vehicle Color Recognition in Long-Tailed Surveillance Scenarios

Vehicle color recognition is an important cue for vehicle identification in surveillance systems, especially when license plates are illegible due to low resolution, occlusion, motion blur, or poor illumination. However, real-world vehicle color distributions are highly imbalanced, making overall accuracy insufficient to assess performance on rare but operationally relevant colors. This paper presents a comprehensive study of vehicle color recognition under severe class imbalance using UFPR-VeSV, a challenging real-world surveillance dataset. We investigate synthetic minority-class augmentation through two off-the-shelf generative strategies: text-conditioned image generation with RunDiffusion/JuggernautXL and image-conditioned color editing with Gemini 2.0 Flash. The curated synthetic data are combined with modern visual representations, loss reweighting, learning-rate scheduling, color-safe augmentation, foreground-aware preprocessing, and ensemble fusion. The bestperforming approach achieves 94.6% micro accuracy and 79.7% macro accuracy, improving macro accuracy by 8.2 percentage points over recent literature. A manual error analysis further shows that many remaining failures are visually ambiguous even for human annotators, highlighting the practical limits of color-based vehicle identification in unconstrained surveillance imagery. The generated images and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/viniciusorru/vcr-synthetic

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

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

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