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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genetic basis of dynamic brain states reveals cellular and disease associations

Dynamic resting-state fMRI captures the time-varying patterns of brain activity that are obscured by static approaches. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) characterise these dynamics as recurring whole-brain states and quantify their fractional occupancy (FO), the proportion of time spent in each state, yet the biological basis of inter-individual variation in FO remains unclear. Using data from 52,335 White UK Biobank participants, with replication in East and South Asian subsamples, this study examined the heritability, cellular and neurotransmitter basis of brain states, and their links with complex phenotypes. FO was significantly heritable and enriched for neuronal populations, particularly glutamatergic and GABAergic signalling. Analyses identified shared and state-specific loci and revealed genetic correlations, colocalisation, and potential causal relationships between FO and several phenotypes, including educational attainment, sleep duration, and disease risk. These findings establish dynamic brain states as biologically grounded intermediate phenotypes, linking genetic variation to neural dynamics, diseases and traits.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Volterra Generative Models

arXiv:2606.18071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models typically use Brownian perturbations, which provide tractable reverse-time dynamics but impose memoryless noising. We introduce Volterra generative models, a continuous-time score-based framework whose forward process injects path-dependent noise through fractional kernels. To handle the non-Markovian and non-semimartingale dynamics, we construct finite-dimensional Markovian lifts using Gaussian quadrature in both regimes and a hybrid finite-difference exponential approximation in the smooth regime. We prove squared error bounds, derive an augmented linear-Gaussian forward process, and show that the learning can remain data-dimensional by considering residual states and analytic auxiliary Gaussian scores. We also identify covariance and reverse-time degeneracies caused by shared Brownian factors and signed smooth-regime weights. The degeneracy motivates stabilized conditioning and, for stiff larger lifts, a Gaussian-bridge reconstruction sampler. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that persistent fractional perturbations with small Markovian lifts can improve score-based generation on MNIST and provide a promising extension to natural images, while the bridge sampler provides a stability mechanism for larger lifts.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Weisfeiler Lehman Test on Combinatorial Complexes: Generalized Expressive Power of Topological Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.00725v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topological neural networks have emerged as effective tools for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise graphs, including hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. However, existing Weisfeiler-Leman type expressivity analyses are typically developed on different structural domains and rely on domain-specific neighborhood systems, making their expressive powers difficult to compare within a common formalism. In this paper, we introduce the Combinatorial Complex Weisfeiler-Leman (CCWL) framework, a unified expressive power refinement defined on combinatorial complexes. By exploiting the ability of combinatorial complexes to represent both set-type relations and part-whole hierarchies, CCWL performs topological color refinement through four structural neighborhoods: boundary, co-boundary, lower adjacency, and upper adjacency. We show that, under specified lifting maps, CCWL can simulate several domain-specific WL-type refinements, thereby providing a common theoretical baseline for analyzing topological message passing. We further study the neighborhood sufficiency problem and prove that, under explicit coverage conditions, a reduced refinement using only lower- and upper-adjacent bridge information preserves the distinguishing power of the full four-neighborhood CCWL refinement. Guided by this theoretical result, we instantiate the reduced refinement as the Combinatorial Complex Isomorphism Network (CCIN). Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that CCIN achieves competitive performance against representative graph and topological neural network baselines. Ablation studies and resource-efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed lower/upper-neighborhood design.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Functional Gradient Descent with Adaptive Representations

arXiv:2606.16926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Functional optimization problems are typically solved by optimizing the parameters of a fixed representation, such as a neural network, resulting in highly nonconvex losses that complicate both training and theoretical analysis. An interesting alternative is functional gradient descent (FGD), that is, gradient descent directly in function space, which benefits from strong convergence results and admits a clean theory. However, FGD is difficult to implement in practice because functional gradients are infinite-dimensional, and thus cannot be fully computed nor stored in memory. Existing implementations therefore rely on fixed approximations, which introduce approximation error. We propose a new, theoretically-grounded FGD algorithm that adapts the representation of the functional gradients over the course of optimization. By explicitly incorporating this approximation into the analysis, we establish convergence to a stationary point (for smooth losses) and to a global minimizer (under smoothness + a Polyak-Lojasiewicz-type condition) regardless of our approximations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementable FGD method with such guarantees in a general setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on regression, numerical solution of PDEs, and modern computer vision. Across settings, our method consistently outperforms both FGD with fixed approximations and neural network baselines in efficiency and accuracy.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

S-GBT: Smooth Growth Bound Tensor for Certified Robustness Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to word substitution attacks. Most existing defenses focus on first order sensitivity and measure how much the output changes when the input is slightly perturbed. However, they ignore how this sensitivity evolves, which is described by curvature. When gradients vary sharply, models can still fail. This paper introduces the Smooth Growth Bound Tensor (S-GBT), a second order method that bounds the Hessian element-wise, for which we provide formal theoretical proofs on the resulting robustness bounds. A regularization term is added during training to minimize these bounds. This yields tighter certified robustness against word substitution attacks. The change in the output under word substitution is bounded by both a linear term and a quadratic term. S-GBT is derived for two architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The method is integrated directly into the training objective. Its effectiveness is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets. The results show that combining first and second order regularization improves certified robust accuracy by up to 23.4% compared to prior methods, while clean accuracy remains competitive. These findings indicate that controlling both the gradient and its variation is a promising direction for building more robust models.

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

Time-Frequency Grid States for Reconstruction and Correction of Channel-Induced Distortion in Entangled Photons

arXiv:2606.12216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterization of time-frequency (TF) quantum states requires reliable reconstruction of their TF distributions. However, imperfect transmission or measurement channels can distort reconstructed joint spectral intensities (JSIs), especially when the underlying perturbation mechanism is unknown. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reconstruction and correction framework that uses a TF grid state as an intrinsic frequency-domain reference. By analyzing the displacement of the grid points, a Gaussian process regression model is employed to reconstruct a correction mapping for the nonlinear coordinate deformation without assuming a prior physical model of the distortion. The learned mapping reduces the residual coordinate deviation of the TF grid state by approximately a factor of 11 and, when applied to an independent frequency-entangled test state, improves the Gaussian-shape fidelity from 76.2\% to 90.0\%. These results establish TF grid states as practical metrological resources for diagnosing and correcting distortions in TF quantum systems, providing a pathway toward distortion-resilient quantum communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Tight Bounds for Logistic Regression with Large Stepsize Gradient Descent in Low Dimension

arXiv:2602.12471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the logistic loss with gradient descent to train a linear model for binary classification with separable data. With a budget of $T$ iterations, it was recently shown that an accelerated $1/T^2$ rate is possible by choosing a large stepsize $\eta = \Theta(\gamma^2 T)$ (where $\gamma$ is the dataset's margin) despite the resulting non-monotonicity of the loss. In this paper, we provide a tighter analysis of gradient descent for this problem when the data is two-dimensional: we show that GD with a sufficiently large learning rate $\eta$ finds a point with loss smaller than $\mathcal{O}(1/(\eta \gamma^2 T))$, as long as $T \geq \Omega(n/\gamma + 1/\gamma^2)$, where $n$ is the dataset size. Our improved rate comes from a tighter bound on the time $\tau$ that it takes for GD to transition from unstable (non-monotonic loss) to stable (monotonic loss), via a fine-grained analysis of the oscillatory dynamics of GD in the subspace orthogonal to the max-margin classifier. We also provide a lower bound of $\tau$ matching our upper bound up to logarithmic factors, showing that our analysis is tight.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Allostatic Load in Endometrial Cancer Disparities

Background: Endometrial cancer incidence and mortality are increasing, particularly among Black women and for aggressive subtypes. Allostatic load (AL), a composite measure of physiologic dysregulation across metabolic, cardiovascular, and immune systems, varies by racial category and tumor subtype in other cancers. Endometrial cancer is strongly associated with obesity, and it is unknown whether AL scores maintain sufficient heterogeneity to evaluate differences across subgroups or with clinical outcomes. Objective: To describe the performance of AL scoring in endometrial cancer patients and examine associations with tumor characteristics (grade/histology) and survival outcomes. Methods: We evaluated AL among 398 participants newly diagnosed with endometrial cancer. AL score was calculated by assigning 1 point for each ''high-risk'' value (by clinical reference range or distribution-based) for 15 biologic variables for vital signs, anthropometrics, blood-based biomarkers, and medical comorbidities. Results: Distribution-based thresholds for variables were used to preserve heterogeneity in this obesity-dominant context. Overall, 68.7% of Black women had high AL compared to White (56.7%), Hispanic (56.7%), and other race (32.3%) women. Decision tree analyses revealed grade-dependent associations between AL and survival. For women with low-grade tumors, higher AL was associated with poorer overall survival. For high-grade tumors, intermediate AL ([≥]4,

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DroneShield-AI: A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Framework for Real-Time Autonomous Drone Threat Detection, Behavioral Intent Classification, and Swarm Intelligence in Contested Airspace

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) threats have emerged as a defining security challenge of the 21st century. This paper presents DroneShield-AI, a unified open framework integrating six processing layers: RF signal classification, acoustic motor-signature detection, YOLOv8-based visual detection, evidence-weighted sensor fusion, a Behavioral Intent Classification Engine (BICE), and a Graph Neural Network Swarm Intelligence Module (GNN-SIM). BICE introduces the first systematic six-class threat taxonomy for drone flight patterns, enabling predictive operator alerts with a 30-second advance-warning horizon. GNN-SIM is the first open framework for adversarial multi-drone formation analysis using Graph Attention Networks. Evaluated on three publicly available real-world datasets, the fused pipeline achieves 96.1% detection accuracy, 3.2% false alarm rate, AUC-ROC: 0.981, and 142ms end-to-end latency on commodity CPU-class hardware at approximately $500-$780 USD total system cost. All code, model weights, and simulation datasets are publicly released at submission.

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

Geometry-Aware Dataset Condensation for Diffusion Model Training

Dataset condensation aims to construct compact datasets from real data via synthesis or selection. However, existing approaches are ill-suited for diffusion model training: synthetic data generation often yields low-fidelity samples unsuitable for authentic modeling, while real subset selection typically fails to preserve the distributional geometry required by diffusion likelihood objectives. To address this, we propose to reformulate real subset selection as a geometry-aware distribution alignment problem. By incorporating one-sided partial optimal transport, our method selectively aligns a compact subset with the full data distribution while allowing unmatched mass in low-density regions, ensuring the preserved geometric structure necessary for effective diffusion model training. To further ensure distributional fidelity, we complement geometric alignment with lightweight feature-statistics and semantic consistency regularization. An efficient two-stage discrete optimization strategy is proposed to achieve this alignment objective. Extensive experiments across diffusion variants, subset sizes, image resolutions, and training rounds show that our method achieves superior fidelity and distributional coverage in diffusion model training. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/GADC.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

All-valid-state HOBO encoding for constrained combinatorial optimization on NISQ devices

arXiv:2606.20017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continued advancements in quantum computing have stimulated growing interest in translating quantum technologies into real-world applications. Consequently, the investigation of practically motivated NP-hard problems is of significant value. This study investigates the performance of a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) in addressing the traveling salesperson problem (TSP) through noiseless simulations representative of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices using higher-order binary optimization (HOBO) encodings. We construct a HOBO Hamiltonian with an efficient binary representation and propose an all-valid-state HOBO (AVS-HOBO) scheme based on cyclic mapping that eliminates one penalty term and reuses states that would otherwise be invalid. Using TSP instances of up to 20 cities, we compare the original HOBO and AVS-HOBO encodings from multiple perspectives, including the energy convergence behavior and the approximation, tour-length, and feasibility ratios. In addition to simulations, we perform computations on real quantum hardware with different device architectures, where we not only compare the performances of different chips but also investigate the effects of different error-mitigation methods on actual quantum machines. The results indicate that AVS-HOBO encoding enhances the practical reliability of VQE on NISQ devices and improves scalability for larger TSP instances, with broader applicability to constrained quantum optimization problems.

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

MASLab: A Unified and Comprehensive Codebase for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing single LLMs to address complex and diverse tasks in practical applications. Despite considerable advancements, the field lacks a unified codebase that consolidates existing methods, resulting in redundant re-implementation efforts, unfair comparisons, and high entry barriers for researchers. To address these challenges, we introduce MASLab, a unified, comprehensive, and research-friendly codebase for LLM-based MAS. (1) MASLab integrates over 20 established methods across multiple domains, each rigorously validated by comparing step-by-step outputs with its official implementation. (2) MASLab provides a unified environment with various benchmarks for fair comparisons among methods, ensuring consistent inputs and standardized evaluation protocols. (3) MASLab implements methods within a shared streamlined structure, lowering the barriers for understanding and extension. Building on MASLab, we conduct extensive experiments covering 10+ benchmarks and 8 models, offering researchers a clear and comprehensive view of the current landscape of MAS methods. MASLab will continue to evolve, tracking the latest developments in the field, and invite contributions from the broader open-source community.

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

Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS

arXiv:2606.14987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious behaviors that remain dormant during normal operation but activate upon specific triggers. In this paper, we present a backdoor attack in continual learning used in IoT/CPS systems. To this end, we formalize an IoT/CPS-specific threat model, analyze why continual learning amplifies backdoor persistence in IoT pipelines, and evaluate our technique under varying conditions. Our analysis highlights critical open challenges in securing lifelong learning in IoT/CPS and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, as well as the need for heightened security controls.

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

ICA Lens: Interpreting Language Models Without Training Another Dictionary

Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become the standard tool for this purpose, but using them as the default first lens often requires training, storing, and evaluating large overcomplete dictionaries. This bottleneck limits rapid exploration and raises a fundamental question: how much interpretable structure is already visible from activation geometry before training another neural dictionary? Our intuition is simple: many interpretable directions are selective on tokens, and these directions should look less Gaussian than random directions. We therefore revisit independent component analysis (ICA), a classical method for finding non-Gaussian directions, as a compact lens for language-model interpretability. We find that ICA has been underestimated for LLM interpretability, because prior uses often relied on off-the-shelf ICA implementations that are brittle on LLM activations and lacked systematic tools for inspecting and evaluating the recovered directions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ICALens, the first practical workflow for stable, efficient, and auditable ICA analysis of LLM representations. It combines an optimized GPU-parallel FastICA pipeline with LLM-specific stability recipes and better fitting diagnostics, enabling efficient and reliable layer-wise analysis. Across GPT-2 Small, Gemma 2 2B, and Qwen 3.5 2B Base, ICALens efficiently recovers compact, human-interpretable directions without per-layer gradient-based dictionary training. On SAEBench, ICA is competitive with public SAEs in sparse probing and outperforms them in targeted probe perturbation under small-to-medium budgets. These results suggest that ICA should not be viewed as a weak baseline, but as an efficient and complementary first lens for exploring language-model representations.

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

EChO-Agent: Evidence Chain Orchestration Agent for Audio Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15141v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LALMs show promise on audio question answering, they fail to focus on question-relevant segments of audio and provide a clear, checkable reasoning process when dealing with complex audio reasoning. Reinforcement learning and tool-augmented prompting can help models better relate questions to audio but lack a reliable way to understand, integrate, and self-verify audio segments. To address this gap, we present EChO-Agent, a modular agent framework that reformulates complex audio QA as a planning, tool execution, evidence integration, and answer verification workflow. Experiments on MMAR benchmark show EChO-Agent improves both accuracy and rubric scores over baseline and ablation studies show evidence integration is the key factor.

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

On-Policy Distillation with Curriculum Turn-level Guidance for Multi-turn Agents

arXiv:2606.15912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn agents that plan, invoke tools, and interact with environments offer a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, yet their capabilities typically rely on very large models whose inference cost is prohibitive in practice.On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a natural recipe for transferring such capabilities to smaller students, but we find that it suffers a characteristic failure mode in this setting: small student errors compound across turns and push the trajectory out of the teacher's familiar state distribution, so the teacher's supervision becomes least reliable precisely where the student needs it most.We propose Guided On-Policy Distillation (Guided-OPD), a simple yet effective algorithm that mixes teacher- and student-generated turns within each rollout and schedules the teacher's intervention probability along a curriculum that decays to zero.Strong guidance keeps early trajectories close to the teacher distribution and is then gradually withdrawn to recover the purely on-policy regime used at inference.On ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop, distilling Qwen3 students from a Qwen3-30B-A3B teacher, Guided-OPD improves Score by 21.1\% and Success Rate by 25.5\% over vanilla OPD on average, with larger gains on smaller students.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure Bioinformatics of Eight Human ATP Synthase Fo Subunits and Their AlphaFold3-Predicted Water-Soluble QTY Analogs

Human mitochondrial ATP synthase is an essential rotary motor enzyme that produces most of the cellular ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. Its membrane-embedded Fo sector contains highly hydrophobic transmembrane subunits that are challenging to study in aqueous environments without detergents. This study explores whether applying the QTY code can reduce the hydrophobicity of selected ATP synthase Fo subunits while preserving their overall molecular structures. We applied the QTY code to eight human ATP synthase Fo subunits: ATP6, ATP8, ATPK, ATP68, ATPMK, AT5G1, AT5G2, and AT5G3. Hydrophobic amino acids leucine (L), isoleucine (I), valine (V), and phenylalanine (F) in transmembrane regions were systematically replaced with hydrophilic glutamine (Q), threonine (T), and tyrosine (Y). Four native subunits with available CryoEM structures from human ATP synthase (PDB: 8H9S) were superposed with their AlphaFold3-predicted QTY analogs. The native ATP synthase Fo subunits superposed well with their respective QTY analogs. For the CryoEM-native comparisons, RMSD values ranged from 0.565[A] to 2.546[A]. For the AlphaFold3-native comparisons of subunits without CryoEM structures, RMSD values ranged from 0.204[A] to 0.297[A]. Despite substantial QTY substitutions in the transmembrane regions, ranging from 38.89% to 50.79%, the QTY analogs retained similar overall folds, molecular weights, and isoelectric points. Hydrophobic surface analysis showed that the QTY analogs had reduced hydrophobic patches compared with their native counterparts, with average hydrophobicity decreasing from 0.2959 in native proteins to -1.1023 in QTY analogs. These structural bioinformatics studies suggest that the QTY code can be applied to ATP synthase Fo subunits to generate more hydrophilic, potentially water-soluble analogs while preserving overall structural similarity. These results extend the application of the QTY code to the membrane-embedded Fo sector of ATP synthase and provide a foundation for future experimental studies testing whether these QTY analogs can be expressed, purified, and evaluated for assembly or proton-transfer-related functions.

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

Neuromorphic Wireless Split Computing with Resonate-and-Fire Neurons

arXiv:2506.20015v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neuromorphic computing offers an energy-efficient alternative to conventional deep learning accelerators, particularly for real-time processing of time-series data. However, many edge applications, such as wireless sensing and audio recognition, generate streaming signals with rich spectral features that are not effectively captured by conventional leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) spiking neurons. This paper investigates a wireless split computing architecture that employs resonate-and-fire (RF) neurons with oscillatory dynamics to process time-domain signals directly, eliminating the need for costly spectral pre-processing. By resonating at tunable frequencies, RF neurons extract time-localized spectral features while maintaining low spiking activity. This temporal sparsity translates into significant savings in both computation and transmission energy. Assuming an OFDM-based analog wireless interface for spike transmission, we present a complete system design and evaluate its performance on audio classification and modulation classification tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed RF-SNN architecture achieves comparable accuracy to conventional LIF-SNNs and ANNs, while substantially reducing spike rates and total energy consumption during inference and communication.

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

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SkillJect: Effectively Automating Skill-Based Prompt Injection for Skill-Enabled Agents

arXiv:2602.14211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills extend LLM agents with task-specific instructions, executable scripts, and auxiliary resources, improving reusability but creating a new supply-chain attack surface. A malicious or compromised skill can be repeatedly loaded as trusted guidance and steer downstream tool use. Existing skill-based prompt-injection attacks are often manual and brittle, because explicit malicious instructions are rejected or ignored when they are not aligned with the original workflow. We propose SkillJect, the first automated framework for generating poisoned skills against skill-enabled agent systems. SkillJect uses two coordinated channels. In the artifact channel, it hides the payload inside an auxiliary helper script. In the instruction channel, it rewrites SKILL.md with a front-loaded inducement strategy, placing injected content at the beginning and framing the helper script as a mandatory prerequisite or initialization step. The rewritten instruction explicitly references the helper-script path and provides an executable example command, making the helper appear to be a legitimate setup step before normal skill operations. SkillJect further adopts a closed-loop multi-agent process to improve attack effectiveness. An Attack Agent generates poisoned skills, a Victim Agent executes downstream tasks with the poisoned skill, and an Evaluate Agent inspects execution traces to determine whether the hidden payload was executed. The Attack Agent then uses this feedback to diagnose failure causes and rewrite SKILL.md, while keeping the payload fixed. Experiments across skill-enabled platforms, backend LLMs, and attack categories show that SkillJect substantially outperforms naive direct injection and prior manual skill-injection attacks, highlighting poisoned skills as a persistent threat in reusable skill ecosystems.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Hybrid Diffusion Transformer for Instruction-Guided Audio Editing via Rectified Flow

arXiv:2606.20101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio editing aims to modify specific content in an existing audio clip according to a natural language instruction while preserving the remaining acoustic content. Despite the remarkable progress of diffusion models, existing training-based editing methods mainly rely on the local inductive biases and cross-attention interaction in convolutional U-Net backbones, which often hinder long-range semantic alignment and precise understanding and localization of instructions. In contrast, diffusion transformers provide stronger global modeling and multimodal fusion, but existing editing architectures usually adopt a simple stack of MMDiT and DiT blocks. Applying joint attention over concatenated audio and text tokens in all blocks results in quadratic complexity with respect to token length. To balance editing performance and efficiency, we propose a hybrid two-stage diffusion transformer architecture for instruction-guided audio editing based on rectified flow matching. It performs joint attention over audio and text tokens to establish coarse semantic alignment at low-resolution stage, then switches to alternating joint-attention and cross-attention blocks to refine editing details at high-resolution stage. This coarse-to-fine strategy enables efficient and accurate instruction-guided audio editing. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves notable performance gains on challenging editing tasks involving overlapping audio events and complex instructions, while substantially improving editing efficiency with a compact model.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Quality Over Clicks: Iterative Reinforcement Learning for Early-Stage E-Commerce Query Suggestion

Existing dialogue systems rely on query suggestion to enhance user engagement. Recent approaches mainly optimize generative models using click-through rate (CTR) models to align with user preferences. However, these methods are less effective in early-stage deployment scenarios, where click feedback is sparse and insufficient for training a reliable CTR model. To bridge this gap, we propose QualEQS, a quality-first iterative reinforcement learning framework for e-commerce query suggestion. We formalize actionable suggestion quality along three dimensions that directly affect downstream usability: answerability, factuality, and information gain. To continuously improve from online traffic without click supervision, we further propose group-level disagreement among candidate suggestions to identify ambiguous query contexts and mine hard training cases for iterative refinement. We also introduce EQS-Benchmark, a dataset of 16,949 real-world e-commerce queries for offline training and evaluation. Experiments show that our quality-based offline metrics correlate strongly with online performance, providing a practical evaluation recipe for sparse-feedback deployment. In both offline and online settings, QualEQS consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding a 6.81% improvement in online ChatPV in a real-world enterprise-level conversational shopping assistant system.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Dr-DCI: Scaling Direct Corpus Interaction via Dynamic Workspace Expansion

Agentic search over large corpora relies on retriever-mediated interfaces (e.g., BM25 or ColBERT) for scalable candidate discovery. While effective at ranking relevant documents, these interfaces expose evidence only as ranked results or bounded document views, limiting agents' ability to reorganize material and verify constraints across documents. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) addresses this limitation by exposing shell-executable corpus operations for flexible search, filtering, comparison, and verification. However, full-corpus terminal commands become slow and unstable as the corpus grows, degrading performance and efficiency. We introduce DR-DCI, a retriever-steered DCI framework that treats retrieval as an agent-callable action for expanding a local workspace. Rather than operating directly over the full corpus, the agent dynamically pulls relevant documents into an evolving workspace and conducts DCI operations within it. This design combines retriever-level recall with DCI-style precision: retrieval keeps exploration scalable, while DCI preserves the local operations needed for effective evidence resolution. Experiments show that DR-DCI is both effective and efficient across scales. On Browsecomp-Plus, DR-DCI reaches 71.2\% accuracy, improving over raw DCI and ablated variants by up to 8.3 points while reducing tool usage, wall time, and estimated cost. With workspace-preserving context reset, accuracy further improves to 73.3\%. In corpus-scaling experiments, DR-DCI remains effective from 100K to 10M documents, whereas raw DCI becomes unstable and BM25 performs substantially worse. DR-DCI also scales to a 20M-scale file-per-document Wiki-18 QA setting, achieving an average score of 63.0 across six benchmarks and outperforming retrieval-based and trained search-agent baselines. Ablation analysis further shows that ranked previews and inter-document DCI are key to performance.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Surrogate Benchmarks for Model Merging Optimization

arXiv:2509.02555v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model merging techniques aim to integrate the abilities of multiple models into a single model. Most model merging techniques have hyperparameters, and their setting affects the performance of the merged model. Because several existing works show that tuning hyperparameters in model merging can enhance the merging outcome, developing hyperparameter optimization algorithms for model merging is a promising direction. However, its optimization process is computationally expensive, particularly in merging LLMs. In this work, we develop surrogate benchmarks for optimization of the merging hyperparameters to realize algorithm development and performance comparison at low cost. We define two search spaces and collect data samples to construct surrogate models to predict the performance of a merged model from a hyperparameter. We demonstrate that our benchmarks can predict the performance of merged models well and simulate optimization algorithm behaviors.