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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

DeepSWIP: Quotient-WMC Counterfactuals for Neural Probabilistic Logic Programs

arXiv:2606.20526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic systems such as DeepProbLog combine neural perception with probabilistic logic, but standard inference is associational. Counterfactual reasoning additionally requires a causal semantics for interventions and evidence. We introduce DeepSWIP, a single-world counterfactual semantics for DeepProbLog programs. Using neural materialization, we reduce fixed-context neural predicates to ordinary ProbLog choices, apply Single World Intervention Programs (SWIPs), and compute counterfactuals by weighted model counting (WMC) over a single transformed program. Under finite grounding and unique-supported-model assumptions, DeepSWIP is exact relative to the learned materialized FCM. The standard quotient-WMC form of ProbLog conditionals identifies active neural probabilities and explains intervention cleaning, calibration sensitivity, and rare-evidence instability. Experiments on MPI3D confirm the transformation against a DeepTwin construction against 12,000 queries, as predicted and a 2.14$\times$ inference speedup from avoiding the Twin's endogenous duplication. A SUMO HOV experiment shows that neural calibration degradation biases plug-in estimates, while a correctly scoped randomized-policy AIPW estimator removes most first-order bias for population mean and ATE estimands. Code is at https://github.com/saibib/deep_SWIP.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NAMESAKES: Probing Identity Memorization in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) models generate realistic likenesses of some individuals when prompted with their names, raising privacy concerns. However, distinguishing whether a generated face is memorized or fabricated currently requires ground-truth photos, access to training data, or white-box access to model internals, limiting applicability. We introduce a fully black-box behavioral probe that distinguishes between these regimes while requiring no reference photos or prior knowledge of training data. To benchmark this task, we present the NAMESAKES dataset of over one thousand names and faces of public figures spanning a wide range of fame levels, along with perturbed, less famous names. Experiments on state-of-the-art T2I models show that our probe substantially predicts identity memorization and separates memorized from unrecognized names, with further insights into differences across model families.

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

Beer-Lambert Guided Representation Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Sub-THz Food Inspection Images

Food manufacturing requires reliable inspection systems to detect foreign material contamination and maintain product safety. Sub-THz transmission imaging provides material-dependent attenuation characteristics that are useful for detecting low-density contaminants in food products. However, existing unsupervised anomaly detection methods mainly rely on RGB-pretrained visual representations, which may not adequately capture the transmission behavior of Sub-THz images. This paper proposes a Beer-Lambert guided representation learning framework for unsupervised anomaly detection in Sub-THz food inspection images. The proposed method introduces an attenuation decomposition module as an auxiliary regularization module that constrains student representations through attenuation reconstruction during training. In addition to the conventional one-class setting, we introduce a Leave-One-Food-Out protocol to evaluate generalization capability under unseen food categories. Experimental results on the Inline-Food-Inspection-THz dataset show that the proposed method improves overall anomaly detection performance over the baseline method.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Phase Transitions in Attention: A Bayesian Theory of Copy Head Emergence

arXiv:2606.12058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention is the key mechanism underlying in-context learning in transformers, and attention patterns have been observed empirically to emerge abruptly during training. We present a Bayesian theory of feature learning in attention; we then focus on how the copy subcircuit in the first layer of an induction head is learned by analyzing a single-layer softmax attention network trained on a copy task. We derive a closed-form posterior over the attention matrix and reduce it to a low-dimensional order parameter space. This reduction reveals a phase transition in the amount of training data, which we verify using both Bayesian sampling and standard training with Adam. We contrast our results with linear attention and find that softmax attention exhibits a first-order phase transition while in linear attention an initial second-order phase transition is followed by a smooth, continuous evolution toward the structured attention pattern (crossover). Our work provides a first-principles theoretical account of the abrupt emergence of the copy subcircuit, reminiscent of the one observed in training large language models.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MortarBench: Evaluating Mortgage Loan Origination Agents

arXiv:2606.19416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Loan origination is the process by which a lender creates a new loan, from application and underwriting through approval and funding. This process serves a critical role in evaluating the eligibility and level of risk posed by an applicant. Recently, firms have begun using mortgage loan agents to augment human loan officers, despite a lack of any public benchmark. To fill this gap, we present MortarBench, a loan origination agent benchmark. MortarBench uses a financial data synthesis and mutation pipeline to generate examples with broad edge case coverage that match real-world distributions and questions. We find that state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) perform poorly, with closed-source models achieving at most 77.1\% exact match accuracy. We also discover systematic biases in LLM perception of foreignness related to non-English names. Noting these weaknesses, we introduce CRIT, a confidence calibration framework. Our method increases accuracy to 80.5\% while improving risk management steering and reducing bias.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

A Poisson Process Life Expectancy framework for optimising patient lifetime during chemotherapy

Cancer therapy balances between two competing objectives - treatment efficacy against the tumour and the risk of treatment related severe adverse events, including patient death. Most existing optimal control theory (OCT) formulations rely on optimising heuristic cost functionals that lack direct clinical interpretability. In clinical practice treatment efficacy and patient tolerability are primarily assessed through survival metrics and adverse event rates. Here we introduce the Continuous Lifetime Payoff (CLP), a novel OCT objective functional that directly links treatment decisions to patient survival. It explicitly incorporates tumour dynamics, tumour eradication, and patient mortality from tumour progression, drug-related toxicity and age. We fit age-related mortality from life tables and infer parameters from simulated survival data. The CLP provides a clinically grounded framework for optimising chemotherapy regimens.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

LLMs as ASP Programmers: Self-Correction Enables Task-Agnostic Nonmonotonic Reasoning

arXiv:2604.27960v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning milestones but continue to struggle with high computational costs, logical inconsistencies, and sharp performance degradation on high-complexity problems. While neuro-symbolic methods attempt to mitigate these issues by coupling LLMs with symbolic reasoners, existing approaches typically rely on monotonic logics (e.g., SMT) that cannot represent defeasible reasoning – essential components of human cognition. We present "LLM+ASP," a framework that translates natural language into Answer Set Programming (ASP), a nonmonotonic formalism based on stable model semantics. Unlike prior "LLM+ASP" approaches that require manually authored knowledge modules, domain-specific prompts, or evaluation restricted to single problem classes, our framework operates without any per-task engineering and applies uniformly across diverse reasoning tasks. Our system utilizes an automated self-correction loop where structured feedback from the ASP solver enables iterative refinement. Evaluating across six diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that: (1) stable model semantics allow LLMs to naturally express default rules and exceptions, outperforming SMT-based alternatives by significant margins on nonmonotonic tasks; (2) iterative self-correction is the primary driver of performance, effectively replacing the need for handcrafted domain knowledge; (3) compact in-context reference guides substantially outperform verbose documentation, revealing a "context rot" phenomenon where excessive context hinders constraint adherence.

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

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Cascade Classification of Dermoscopic Images of Skin Neoplasms with Controllable Sensitivity and External Clinical Validation

Purpose. To compare deep learning architectures and classification schemes for dermoscopic images of skin neoplasms and assess their generalization on transfer from open international datasets to independent clinical datasets of Russian practice. Methods. Four architectures (ViT-B/16, Swin-S, ConvNeXt-S, EfficientNetV2-S) were compared in three schemes: binary (malignant/benign), single-stage four-class (benign, MEL, SCC, BCC), and a two-stage cascade (binary triage, then three-class differentiation MEL/SCC/BCC). All models used ImageNet-pretrained weights and a single augmentation protocol on aggregated open ISIC Archive data, and were evaluated on an internal held-out sample and two clinical datasets (Melanoscope AI mobile system; Sechenov University). Results. Internally the binary stage attains ROC-AUC 0.952-0.966; on Sechenov University it drops to 0.797-0.893, sensitivity to 0.53-0.67, and ECE rises from 0.02 to 0.27-0.39 with underestimation of malignancy, quantifying a generalization gap in ranking and calibration. Paired tests confirm one inter-architecture result on clinical data: the deficit of ViT-B/16 at the binary stage (p

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent representations

Single-cell transcriptomics is typically modeled in low-dimensional latent representations that improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the data. Such representations underpin data integration, cell state discovery, and perturbation prediction, with applications ranging from large-scale organ atlases to latent trajectory modeling. Recent virtual cell approaches further leverage these representations to predict cellular responses as distributional shifts in latent space. Each of these applications ultimately requires faithful gene expression reconstruction from latent spaces for biological interpretation, enabling gene-level analysis of predicted perturbed or batch-corrected cells. Yet representation choice is typically treated as an implementation detail rather than a primary modeling decision, with no systematic evaluation of how well latent representations support gene expression reconstruction. Here, we introduce ReconEval, a benchmark for evaluating gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent spaces. We benchmark two classes of latent representations: end-to-end trained models such as PCA, autoencoders, and variational autoencoders, and pretrained single-cell foundation model embeddings coupled to newly trained decoders. Reconstruction is evaluated both directly and after latent-space perturbation prediction. Across perturbational and observational datasets totaling over 100 million cells, our metric suite quantifies statistical fidelity; biological signal preservation, including differential expression, coexpression, cell-cycle structure, cytokine response and pathway activity; and perturbation-specific effects. We find that autoencoders achieve the strongest stand-alone reconstruction at low dimensionality, while variational regularization does not improve generalization in reconstruction. Frozen foundation model embeddings retain recoverable gene-level information, with reconstruction quality depending strongly on decoder architecture and pretraining objective. In latent perturbation modeling, high-dimensional PCA matches foundation model embeddings, while low-dimensional AE embeddings are optimal for flow-based generative models. Overall, reconstruction depends critically on the interplay between representation and downstream model, and simpler representations can outperform complex alternatives given appropriate capacity. Our benchmark establishes reconstruction as a critical evaluation axis for single-cell foundation models. We envision it improving the biological interpretability of latent-space modeling, a prerequisite for future virtual cell models to be validated by domain experts and grounded in biology.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Integrated expectile-based measures of inequality

arXiv:2606.12333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expectiles provide a class of asymmetric location functionals that incorporate the magnitude of deviations and admit a natural geometric interpretation. Building on their structural consistency with the convex stochastic order, this paper introduces a family of integrated expectile functionals for measuring risk, dispersion, and inequality. The proposed functionals admit analytical representations as integrals of expectiles across asymmetry levels. For a distinguished subclass of these constructions, a geometric representation is available: the resulting quantities can be expressed as weighted areas of star-shaped sets encoding the distributional asymmetry of a random variable. This approach yields a new class of expectile-based inequality indices, constituting a natural counterpart to classical Gini-type measures while preserving desirable monotonicity and consistency properties. Empirical counterparts are derived in closed form and admit explicit decompositions over finite samples. The framework extends naturally to multivariate settings through directional expectile constructions, leading to measures capable of capturing genuinely joint forms of multivariate dispersion and inequality.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Cluster-Aware Dual-Level Test Specification Generation for Large-Scale Automotive Software Requirements

arXiv:2606.17197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generating test specifications that satisfy Automotive SPICE SWE.6 requirements becomes increasingly challenging and time-consuming as projects scale to thousands of requirements. Because this manual process often consumes weeks of engineering effort, automation becomes a critical necessity. However, standard Large Language Model (LLM) approaches struggle at scale: processing requirements individually discards vital inter-requirement dependencies, while feeding entire corpora at once exceeds context-window limits, leading to incomplete integration coverage and redundant test cases. This paper presents a novel "Cluster-then-Summarize" pipeline that addresses these limitations through three-stages. Requirements are embedded using sentence transformers and grouped using UMAP dimensionality reduction followed by HDBSCAN density-based clustering. This grouping utilizes an automatic minimum cluster size selection driven by a quality criterion combining normalized Silhouette and Calinski-Harabasz scores. A multi-level map-reduce summarization algorithm then distills each cluster into concise, domain-conformant descriptions while preserving quantitative thresholds and safety integrity levels. The pipeline exploits the derived cluster topology to generate test specifications at two levels: individual requirement verification and cluster-level integration tests that verify cross-requirement feature behavior. A nearby-cluster context mechanism provides bounded cross-feature awareness during each LLM call, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation grounds all outputs in ISO 26262 and ASPICE standards. Evaluation on automotive requirement datasets of varying scale demonstrates that the cluster-aware approach improves integration test coverage and maintains summarization fidelity compared to baseline methods while scaling efficiently to thousands of requirements.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Hospital staff views on the visibility, role and impact of Acute Learning Disability Liaison Services in Wales: a service evaluation

People with a learning disability experience marked health inequalities. In Wales, Acute Learning Disability Liaison Services (ALDLS) are delivered by specialised learning disability services, and all roles within them are undertaken by Learning Disability Liaison Nurses (LDLN). These services aim to enable access to, and delivery of, secondary care by supporting reasonable adjustments, facilitating communication, and coordinating care for people with learning disability during hospital encounters. However, independent evidence of the impact of ALDLS on patient care remains limited. This evaluation tries to address this evidence gap by examining hospital staff perceptions of the visibility, role, and impact of ALDLS across Welsh Health Boards, with the aim of informing service design and development and improving secondary care access and care for people with learning disability. The service evaluation used a qualitative approach involving interviews and a focus group with hospital staff across the seven Welsh Health Boards who had experience working with or interacting with ALDLS staff to care for patients with learning disability. Findings cover six key areas including i) visibility and delivery of ALDLS, ii) Barriers and challenges to effective ALDLS delivery, iii) Enablers of effective ALDLS delivery, iv) Positive impacts for patients with learning disability, v) Negative impacts and unintended consequences when the service is absent or limited, and vi) Participants recommendations for future improvements of ALDLS. To synthesise the findings, we developed an overview diagram, which illustrates how ALDLS may influence care quality in acute hospitals. The overview places the liaison service at the centre, showing how organisational enablers and barriers shape its delivery, and how its core functions support improvements in safety, timeliness, effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and patient-centred care. From the findings we have identified recommendations for practice and policy. These include that ALDLS should be recognised as a core, safety-critical component of acute hospital care for people with a learning disability, rather than an optional add-on. In practice, services should be more visibly embedded within routine pathways, with consistent site-based presence, clear referral criteria, early identification through electronic flagging and notification systems, and routine involvement in multidisciplinary planning for complex admissions and procedures. At policy level, ALDLS provision should be recognised within equality and patient safety frameworks as an essential service requiring sustained investment, national minimum configuration standards, adequate staffing, and better-integrated digital systems to support continuity, equitable access, and person-centred care.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Handling Feature Heterogeneity with Learnable Graph Patches

arXiv:2606.17667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, the rapid development of foundation models and graph pre-training technologies has spurred increasing interest in constructing a universal pre-trained graph model or Graph Foundation Model (GFM). However, a significant challenge is that existing models are unable to address feature heterogeneity in graph data without textual information, which hinders the transferability of graph models across different datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose the concept of learnable graph patches, which we regard as the smallest semantic units of any graph data. We decompose the graph into learnable graph patches by unfolding the node features and constructing corresponding patch structures separately. We then design a framework that mines transferable information from graph data across domains. Specifically, after extracting graph patches, we propose a patch encoder to extract knowledge from each unit and a patch aggregator to learn how the units are combined into a whole. Due to its domain-agnostic nature, the model can be applied to downstream data across different domains. Furthermore, we analyze the connection between our method and existing graph models, as well as the transferability of the node embeddings it generates. Empirically, our method not only achieves the capability to use multi-domain graphs for pre-training, but also shows enhanced performance across various downstream datasets and tasks. Moreover, we observe consistent improvement in downstream performance as the volume of pre-training data increases.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PiDA: Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation for Robust Vietnamese Speech Translation

Cascaded speech translation (ST) systems suffer from error propagation when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs incorrect transcripts. We present the first systematic categorization of ASR errors for Vietnamese ST, classifying substitution errors by phonetic cause and quantifying their impact on downstream Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performance using Linear Mixed-Effects Modelling. We confirm that most ASR substitution errors arise from phonetic confusions rather than random noise, and that these phonetic errors significantly degrade ST quality. Motivated by this finding, we propose Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation (PiDA), which generates ASR-like corruptions by substituting words with phonetically similar alternatives using phonetic word embeddings. Fine-tuning on a PiDA-augmented version of FLEURS Vietnamese-English improves translation of erroneous ASR outputs (up to +2.04 BLEU over standard fine-tuning) while also slightly improving clean-text performance.

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

Deja Vu at Scale: Paraphrase-Robust Detection of Duplicate Gherkin Steps in Behaviour-Driven Software Testing with Sentence-Transformer Embeddings and a 1.1M-Step Open Benchmark

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) suites in Gherkin accumulate step-text duplication with documented maintenance cost. Prior detectors either require runnable tests or are single-organisation, leaving a gap: a static, paraphrase-robust, step-level detector and a public benchmark to calibrate it. Objective. We release (i) the largest cross-organisational BDD step corpus to date, (ii) a labelled pair-level calibration benchmark, and (iii) a four-strategy detector with a consolidation-savings model linking clusters to ISO/IEC 25010 maintainability sub-characteristics. Method. The corpus contains 347 public GitHub repositories, 23,667 .feature files, and 1,113,616 Gherkin steps, SPDX-tagged. The detector layers exact hashing, normalised Levenshtein, sentence-transformer cosine, and a Levenshtein-banded hybrid. Calibration uses 1,020 manually labelled step pairs under a released rubric (60-pair overlap, Fleiss kappa = 0.84). We report precision, recall, and F1 with bootstrap 95% CIs under the primary rubric and a score-free relabelling, and benchmark against SourcererCC-style and NiCad-style lexical baselines. Results. Step-weighted exact-duplicate rate is 80.2%; median-repository rate is 58.6% (Spearman rho = 0.51). The top hybrid cluster has 20,737 occurrences across 2,245 files. Near-exact reaches F1 = 0.822 on score-free labels; semantic F1 = 0.906 under the primary rubric reflects a disclosed stratification artefact. Lexical baselines reach F1 = 0.761 and 0.799. The savings model estimates 893,357 corpus-wide eliminable step occurrences; on the median repository 62.5% of step lines are eliminable.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Finite free perpetuities

arXiv:2606.19115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce and study finite free perpetuities, defined as monic polynomial solutions of degree $n$ to the affine fixed-point equation \[ p(z) = \mathbb{E}\!\left[ A^{n}\,p\!\left(\frac{z-B}{A}\right)\mathbf{1}_{\{A\neq0\}} \right] + \mathbb{E}\!\left[ (z-B)^n\mathbf{1}_{\{A=0\}} \right], \] where $A$ and $B$ are complex-valued random variables with finite moments up to order $n$. Equivalently, if $p(z)=\mathbb{E}[(z-X)^n]$, then $p$ encodes a truncated moment version of the classical perpetuity equation $X\stackrel{d}{=}AX+B$ with $X$ and $(A,B)$ independent. This places finite free perpetuities between classical perpetuities and free-probabilistic fixed-point laws. We prove existence and uniqueness under weak conditions, and we identify a broad class of admissible pairs $(A,B)$ for which the resulting polynomial has only real, nonnegative zeros. Our approach uses finite free additive and multiplicative convolutions together with a probabilistic representation via the $U$-transform. As a motivating example, we exhibit an explicit family of finite free perpetuities expressed in terms of Jacobi polynomials and show that their empirical root distributions converge to a free-beta-prime law. More generally, for admissible sequences of parameters, we prove weak convergence of the empirical root distributions of finite free perpetuities to the law of a free perpetuity characterized by the corresponding free fixed-point equation. This yields a finite-degree polynomial model approximating free perpetuities and clarifies the connection between classical affine recursions, finite free convolutions, and free probability.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

A Unified Spatial AI Framework for Cross-Domain Tissue-State Analysis in Trauma, Oral, and Cardiovascular Pathology

作者:

Objective: To develop a cross-domain spatial AI framework for identifying conserved tissue-state organisation across trauma, oral disease, and cardiovascular tissue using spatial transcriptomic data. Methods: Four public spatial transcriptomic datasets spanning wound healing, periodontitis, oral squamous cell carcinoma, and cardiac tissue were integrated using recurrence modelling, graph-based spatial learning, fuzzy tissue-state analysis, and tensor decomposition. Cross-domain coupling, spatial fragmentation, recurrence structure, and permutation-based topological validation were evaluated. Results: Six conserved fuzzy tissue states were identified, dominated by extracellular matrix remodelling, fibroblast/stromal activation, endothelial signalling, and inflammatory pathways. Latent embedding analysis demonstrated strong overlap between trauma and oral domains, while cardiovascular tissue exhibited more compact spatial organisation. Oral inflammatory tissue showed the highest fragmentation, whereas cardiovascular tissue demonstrated greater recurrence coherence. Tensor decomposition identified conserved stromal-remodelling programmes across domains. Permutation testing confirmed significantly elevated graph modularity and reduced spatial entropy relative to null distributions. Conclusion: The proposed framework identified conserved spatial tissue-state architecture linking wound healing, oral pathology, and cardiovascular tissue despite differences in tissue origin, pathology, and acquisition technology. Significance: These findings demonstrate the potential of spatial AI for investigating conserved stromal and inflammatory microenvironmental organisation across clinically related disease systems and may support spatial biology research in trauma–oral–systemic health.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

HK-LegiCoST: Leveraging Non-Verbatim Transcripts for Speech Translation

We introduce HK-LegiCoST, a new three-way parallel corpus of Cantonese-English translations, containing 600+ hours of Cantonese audio, its standard traditional Chinese transcript, and English translation, segmented and aligned at the sentence level. We describe the notable challenges in corpus preparation: segmentation, alignment of long audio recordings, and sentence-level alignment with non-verbatim transcripts. Such transcripts make the corpus suitable for speech translation research when there are significant differences between the spoken and written forms of the source language. Due to its large size, we are able to demonstrate competitive speech translation baselines on HK-LegiCoST and extend them to promising cross-corpus results on the FLEURS Cantonese subset. These results deliver insights into speech recognition and translation research in languages for which non-verbatim or ``noisy'' transcription is common due to various factors, including vernacular and dialectal speech.

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

Soft-Prompt Tuning for Fair and Efficient LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.g., on the model's ability to follow specific formatting requirements. This especially penalizes base models that may know the correct answers but lack the ability – typically introduced in post-training – to structure them as instructed. To overcome this, we propose soft-prompt tuning, an efficient, fair, and architecture-agnostic model evaluation. By optimizing only 10 soft-prompt vectors (roughly 0.0006% parameters for a 7B model) over a short tuning period, we adapt models to specific benchmark formats, closing gaps in format-following and ensuring that underlying knowledge is accurately reflected in benchmark scores. This allows one to fairly compare different base models – trained with various pre-training recipes – on benchmarks without the need for full post-training. We evaluated soft-prompt tuning across 7 models and 7 datasets. The results show that (a) soft-prompt tuning saturates format-following within 80 steps (~640 samples) making it highly efficient, (b) soft-prompt tuning significantly outperforms zero- and few-shot prompting, surfacing base model knowledge that standard prompting misses, that (c) even post-trained models can benefit from soft-prompts to maximize format compliance, and that (d) soft-prompted base model performance predicts post-trained model rankings more reliably than zero- and few-shot baselines, offering a low-cost proxy for downstream model quality. Our contributions include (1) metrics which disentangle format-following and knowledge accuracy, (2) a fairer benchmarking protocol of LLM knowledge, and (3) a cost- and memory-effective recipe to identify optimal pre-training strategies early in LLM development.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DNA-binding specificity recognition from predicted homologous protein-DNA structures

Predicting protein DNA-binding specificity is essential for understanding gene regulation and disease mechanisms. Existing deep learning methods typically infer specificity from a single protein-DNA complex structure, which limits their ability to capture the diverse geometric patterns underlying protein-DNA recognition. Homologous protein-DNA interfaces provide complementary structural evidence and richer geometric features related to interatomic interactions. To address the limited diversity and coverage of experimentally determined complexes, we constructed a large-scale library of predicted homologous protein-DNA complex structures. Building on this resource, we propose HomoDSP, a template-retrieval-based framework for accurate DNA-binding specificity prediction. Benchmark evaluations and validation on newly released JASPAR 2026 samples indicate that HomoDSP outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and generalization, with particularly substantial gains on high-error samples. Moreover, this performance is largely retained when AlphaFold3-predicted complex structures are used as input. Template- and residue-level interpretability analyses suggest that HomoDSP improves prediction by focusing on DNA-affinity residues across multiple homologous templates. Finally, universal Protein Binding Microarrays evaluations on AI-designed DNA-binding proteins show that HomoDSP rescues a baseline failure mode in which the baseline method produces incorrect predictions because of training-set bias. Together, these results support the use of homologous template interfaces as informative structural priors for decoding protein DNA-binding specificity.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LabVLA: Grounding Vision-Language-Action Models in Scientific Laboratories

Scientific laboratories increasingly rely on AI systems to reason about experiments, but the physical act of doing science remains largely outside their reach. AI can help read literature, generate hypotheses, and plan protocols, yet the execution of those protocols at the bench still requires a human operator. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide one possible interface between written protocols and robot execution, but existing policies are trained mostly on household and tabletop demonstrations and rarely encounter the instruments, transparent liquids, or fixed protocol workflows found in scientific laboratories. Closing this gap requires both laboratory-specific supervision and a unified learning framework that can accommodate the diverse robot embodiments used to execute experimental protocols. We therefore identify data and embodiment as central bottlenecks alongside model design. To address the data side, we build RoboGenesis, a simulation-based workflow and data engine that composes configured laboratory workflows from atomic skills, validates and filters rollouts, and exports structured demonstrations across supported robot profiles. On the policy side, we present LabVLA, trained with a two-stage recipe: FAST action token pretraining first makes the Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct backbone action aware before any continuous control is learned, and flow matching posttraining then attaches a DiT action expert under knowledge insulation. On the LabUtopia benchmark, LabVLA achieves the highest average success rate among all evaluated baselines under both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings.

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

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

作者:

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Experimental Tabletop Petz recovery of a photonic qubit

arXiv:2606.12020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum information lost in open evolutions cannot be fully recovered, but partial recovery is possible. The Petz recovery map guarantees almost optimal recovery, notably if the chosen reference state is close to the real one. This map has been widely used in theoretical studies, but has been the object of only a handful of experimental realisations, typically under a single fixed noise model. In this work, we describe and implement the Petz recovery map for a versatile class of qubit channels with tunable decoherence and dissipation. The setup we realize is also the first experimental example of ``tabletop reversibility'': for a good range of choices of the reference state, the Petz recovery map can be implemented with the same devices as the forward dissipative evolution, whose effect it is partially undoing. Our results demonstrate that the Petz recovery map can be resource-efficiently realized without requiring complex ancillary resources, providing a feasible pathway for mitigating information loss in quantum systems.