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

The Almost Intelligent Revolution: Options for Scaling Up Deliberation and Empowering People with AI

The increasing prominence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in public discourse presents both opportunities and challenges for democratic deliberation. While red teaming strategies help mitigate specific risks, broader concerns persist regarding linguistic constraints, biases, and the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs. This chapter explores how LLMs can be used to significantly scale up and democratise deliberation, particularly in fostering inclusivity and empowering traditionally marginalised groups. Drawing on concepts from Systemic-Functional Linguistics, the chapter examines how variations across language users (for example, with respect to socio-demographic groups) and across language use (for example, with respect to communicative functions) shape participation in AI-supported deliberation. The chapter presents AI-driven deliberation studies and assesses their potential to scaffold argumentation, enhance access, and reduce the influence of exclusionary linguistic norms and biases which are embedded in prestigious registers. At the same time, the chapter cautions against both overclaiming, which leads to unrealistic expectations, and underclaiming, which risks missed opportunities for AI-assisted engagement. The chapter concludes by identifying future research directions to maximise the democratic potential of AI-assisted participation while embedding ethical safeguards to counteract the reproduction of linguistic inequalities.

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

TimeProVe: Propose, then Verify for Efficient Long Video Temporal Reasoning in Activities of Daily Living

Long Video Question Answering (LVQA) requires identifying sparse, query-relevant evidence within hours-long untrimmed videos. Existing approaches either process videos densely with large vision-language models (VLMs), incurring prohibitive computational cost, or rely on sparse caption-based reasoning, which often misses temporally localized and motion-centric evidence. We introduce TimeProVe, a cost-efficient hybrid framework for temporally grounded reasoning in long videos. TimeProVe first employs lightweight modules to generate action-grounded answer–evidence hypotheses and subsequently invokes an expensive VLM only for targeted verification. The core of our framework lies in the Action-based Candidate Evidence (ACE) module, which converts temporally localized actions into query-conditioned candidate answers and supporting evidence windows through lightweight LLM reasoning. We further introduce OpenTSUBench (OTB), an open-ended benchmark designed to evaluate temporally grounded reasoning in real-world Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scenarios. Experiments show that TimeProVe outperforms the strongest baseline on OTB by 7.3%, while reducing VLM calls by 75% and inference cost by 93%. Furthermore, without explicit temporal grounding training, TimeProVe achieves competitive performance on Charades-STA, and reaches state-of-the-art results when enhanced with grounding VLMs.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision

arXiv:2606.18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness. Automatic utterance-level assessment of dysarthric speech can support scalable speech monitoring and therapy-related analysis. Yet training such systems is bottlenecked by the scarcity of clinically annotated dysarthric speech. This work proposes to augment dysarthric speech assessment using data from speech synthesis evaluations, specifically human-annotated utterances with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) labels from the QualiSpeech corpus. Experiments show that fine-tuning on speech synthesis assessment data consistently improves performance on both intelligibility and naturalness prediction, while joint training yields gains primarily on naturalness. These results suggest that synthesis artifacts and dysarthric speech share perceptual commonalities, and speech synthesis evaluation corpora offer a practical augmentation source that reduces reliance on scarce clinical annotations.

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

NRITYAM: Language Models Meet Art and Heritage of Dance

Language models have become essential tools in shaping modern workflows. However, their global effectiveness hinges on a nuanced understanding of local socio-cultural contexts. To address this gap, we present NRITYAM, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the cultural comprehension capabilities of language models in the context of global dance traditions. NRITYAM comprises 9,260 carefully curated question-answer pairs spanning 12 languages, making it the largest dataset dedicated to evaluating cultural knowledge in dance. The dataset has been developed from the ground up through close collaboration with native dance artists and native speakers of the languages, who authored and validated culturally relevant questions specific to their regions. We evaluate a broad set of models, including large language models, small language models, multimodal large language models, and small multimodal language models. As a multilingual and multicultural benchmark, NRITYAM sets a new standard for evaluating the ability of AI systems to understand and reason about traditional performing arts. Detailed dataset samples are available at~\url{https://github.com/niladrighosh03/NRITYAM}.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Agentomics: Economic Foundations for the Valuation, Attribution, and Pricing of AI Agents in Human-AI Workflows

作者:

arXiv:2606.14769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly being deployed as productive resources in organizational workflows, yet existing evaluation methods primarily measure isolated technical performance rather than economic contribution. This paper introduces Agentomics, a workflow-based framework for valuing, attributing, and pricing human and artificial agents. The framework models a workflow as a configuration of heterogeneous agents whose collective performance determines gross value, deployment cost, reliability, and expected failure loss. Workflow value is treated as a team-level quantity that may include complementarities, substitution effects, bottlenecks, and nonlinear production; additive stage-level value is only a special case. Building on this workflow model, the paper formulates AI deployment as a coalition-formation problem and defines coalition value as the incremental net surplus generated relative to a benchmark human workflow. The Shapley value is then used to attribute economic surplus among participating AI agents, yielding a principled connection among valuation, accountability, and market pricing. The resulting Shapley pricing equilibrium provides a normative benchmark for assessing whether agent prices reflect expected marginal contribution. A security-operations case study illustrates how the framework accounts for productivity gains, deployment costs, reliability losses, and coalition-level complementarities in hybrid human–AI workflows.

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

Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attacks

The widespread adoption of face recognition (FR) technologies raises serious privacy concerns, as facial data can be exploited without consent. To address this challenge, we propose Adv-TGD, a generative adversarial attack framework that synthesizes photorealistic faces capable of impersonating target identities and deceiving face recognition systems. Built upon Stable Diffusion, Adv-TGD performs per-sample LoRA fine-tuning conditioned on concise textual prompts to generate natural yet adversarially manipulated identities. Unlike conventional identity-attack approaches, our method optimizes lightweight cross-attention adapters for each source-target pair within a single-step denoising process. Latent blending is constrained by a face-local heatmap mask to ensure spatially precise identity manipulation while preserving non-sensitive regions. We introduce a composite objective that integrates masked epsilon-MSE reconstruction, thresholded identity divergence in FR embedding space, directional feature alignment, and source-similarity suppression to balance adversarial attack and visual realism. Optionally, LLaVA-generated attribute prompts enhance fine-grained semantic details without reintroducing identity cues. Under the black-box evaluation protocol, Adv-TGD attains an average attack success rate (ASR) of 85.90% across IR152, IRSE50, MobileFace, and FaceNet, surpassing the semantic SOTA baseline Adv-CPG by +6.25 points, diffusion-based makeup method DiffAIM by +3 points, and noise-based P3-Mask by +16 points. Despite its strong attack efficacy, Adv-TGD preserves high visual fidelity (PSNR = 27.15 dB, SSIM = 0.981). Furthermore, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by successfully extending it to in-the-wild datasets (LADN), general object classification (ImageNet), and transformer-based diffusion models (FLUX.1).

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning Problems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms sample multiple n>1 solution attempts for each problem and reward them independently. This optimizes for pass@1 performance and prioritizes the strength of isolated samples at the expense of the diversity and collective utility of sets of samples. This under-utilizes the sampling capacity, limiting exploration and eventual improvement on harder examples. As a fix, we propose Pass-at-k Policy Optimization (PKPO), a transformation on the final rewards which leads to direct optimization of pass@k performance, thus optimizing for sets of samples that maximize reward when considered jointly. Our contribution is to derive novel low variance unbiased estimators for pass@k and its gradient, in both the binary and continuous reward settings. We show optimization with our estimators reduces to standard RL with rewards that have been jointly transformed by a stable and efficient transformation function. While previous efforts are restricted to k=n, ours is the first to enable robust optimization of pass@k for any arbitrary k

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

ParseFixer: An Agentic Framework for Document Parsing via Selective Multimodal Correction

In this report, we present our third-place solution for the DataMFM Challenge Track 1: Document Parsing. This track requires models to recover structured Markdown documents from document page images while preserving textual content and document structure. To address the complementary requirements of accurate content recovery and faithful structure reconstruction, we propose ParseFixer, an agentic framework for backbone parsing and selective correction. ParseFixer consists of two key modules: Full-Page Backbone Parsing (FBP) and Agentic Selective Correction (ASC). FBP produces stable initial Markdown outputs with MinerU2.5 Pro, while ASC detects high-value parsing failures and repairs them through a verify-and-rollback correction process. By placing selective multimodal correction after open-source backbone parsing, ParseFixer improves the recovery of key document elements without rewriting reliable backbone predictions. On the test set, our final system achieves an overall score of 61.78 and ranks third in Track 1, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate document parsing. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ParseFixer.

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

Auditing Demographic Bias in Facial Landmark Detection for Fair Human-Robot Interaction

Fairness in human-robot interaction critically depends on the reliability of the perceptual models that enable robots to interpret human behavior. While demographic biases have been widely studied in high-level facial analysis tasks, their presence in facial landmark detection remains unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic audit of demographic bias in this task, analyzing the age, gender, and race biases. To this end, we introduce a controlled statistical methodology to disentangle demographic effects from confounding visual factors. Our analysis demonstrates that visual confounders, particularly head pose and face resolution, heavily outweigh the impact of demographic attributes. Notably, after accounting for these confounders, performance disparities across gender and race vanish. However, we identify a statistically significant age-related bias, with higher localization errors for older individuals. This shows that fairness issues can emerge even in low-level vision components and can propagate through the HRI pipeline. We argue that auditing and correcting such biases is a necessary step toward trustworthy and equitable robot perception systems.

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

Diversity-Driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization via Nested Pareto Set Learning

arXiv:2606.15115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives. In many practical scenarios, function evaluations are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, necessitating optimization solely based on a fixed offline dataset. In this setting, known as offline MOO, the goal is to find out the Pareto set without access to the true objective functions. This setting suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, where the surrogate model is not accurate for unseen designs. Due to the OOD issue, surrogate errors may cause the optimizer to select solutions that do not lie on the true Pareto front and are biased toward its extremes. To address this, this paper proposes Diversity-driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization (DOMOO), which aims to find out a diverse and high-quality set of solutions. First, DOMOO incorporates an accumulative risk control module that estimates the potential risk of candidate solutions and alleviates the OOD issue between the training data and the generated solutions. In addition, a nested Pareto set learning (PSL) strategy is proposed to jointly learn preference and PSL parameters, then optimize them, enabling adaptation to diverse Pareto front geometries. To further enhance solution quality, we design a diversity-driven selection strategy that extracts a representative and well-distributed set of final solutions. To achieve this diversity-driven selection strategy, we propose $IGD_offline$, a tailored indicator for the offline setting that considers both diversity and convergence, and avoids the bias of hypervolume indicator. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DOMOO achieves the best average rank across tasks in both convergence and diversity among the compared methods.

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

MetaPlate: Counterfactual-Guided RAG-LLM Tool for Personalized Food Recommendation and Hyperglycemia Prevention

arXiv:2606.10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Hospital-Level Variation in Antenatal Corticosteroids for Late Preterm Births

Objective: To determine whether and to what extent hospitals across the United States vary in their use of late-preterm steroids using a novel data set in which the timing of steroid administration relative to delivery can be observed. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of singleton births with known gestational ages identified in the Premier Healthcare Database from 2015 to 2022. The primary variable of interest was hospital-level adoption of antenatal corticosteroids for late-preterm singleton deliveries, calculated as the proportion of late-preterm singleton births (34-36 completed weeks of gestation) with any betamethasone exposure during the same late-preterm period. Hospital adoption was defined as the weighted average rate of ALPS administration among late-preterm infants across the entire post-period. Hospitals were ranked by their late-preterm steroid adoption rates and categorized by quartile based on the empirical distribution. Temporal trends were assessed using annual hospital-level adoption rates and visualized using time-series plots and distributional plots. A logistic regression model was constructed to determine hospital characteristics associated with being a highest-quartile adopting hospital. Results: The analysis cohort included 728 hospitals and 5,452,791 births, of which 361,006 (6.6%) were singleton late preterm births. Hospital steroid exposure rates ranged from 0 to 82% and were categorized into quartiles based on overall exposure rate, with cutoffs at 20.6%, 29.8%, and 40.1%. Median exposure rates increased progressively across quartiles from 14.1% (IQR 9.3-17.4%) in the lowest adopting hospitals (Q1) to 47.6% (IQR 43.7-53.2%) in the highest adopting hospitals (Q4), with substantial within-quartile variation. In the multivariable model, urban location was a strong predictor of high adoption after adjustment (aOR 2.05; 95% CI 1.11-3.83, p=0.02). Compared to Midwest hospitals, Southern hospitals had significantly lower odds of being high adopters (aOR 0.37; 95% CI 0.20-0.69, p

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Mask-Morph Graph U-Net: A Generalisable Mesh-Based Surrogate for Crashworthiness Field Prediction under Large Geometric Variation

arXiv:2605.15231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlinear finite element crash simulations are accurate but computationally expensive, limiting their use in iterative design optimisation. Machine-learning surrogate models based on graph neural networks (GNNs) offer a faster alternative. Message-passing GNNs are widely used for mesh simulation, and their shared node and edge update functions are relatively generalisable across varying graph structures. By contrast, non-shareable edge-specific aggregation layers can capture nonlinear relationships more accurately but usually require fixed graph connectivity, which limits generalisability. This paper presents Mask-Morph Graph U-Net (MMGUNet), a practical approach to addressing the limitation of hierarchical Graph U-Net architectures that use edge-specific downsampling and upsampling layers. Fixed coarse graph connectivity is required for edge-specific layers. To retain this while improving spatial correspondence, the proposed method morphs the coarsened graph hierarchy to each input mesh using feature-aligned barycentric parameterisation before constructing cross-graph edges. It further applies node masking during supervised pretraining, followed by parameter-efficient fine-tuning in which high-parameter edge-specific layers are frozen. The proposed approach is evaluated in in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and cross-component transfer settings using mean Euclidean distance and maximum intrusion percentage error. Results show that coarse-graph morphing improves test accuracy relative to a fixed-coarse-graph baseline, while masked supervised pretraining reduces the train-test discrepancy and improves data efficiency during transfer. The proposed model also achieves lower prediction error compared with external baselines. These results demonstrate a practical route toward reusable, data-efficient mesh-based surrogate modelling for crashworthiness design exploration.

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

Beyond the Current Observation: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Controllable Non-Markov Games

Deploying multimodal foundation models as closed-loop policies increasingly requires conditioning actions on observations that are no longer visible. However, existing benchmarks either expose the full state, conflate hidden-state reconstruction with other agent skills, or test recall only after an episode has ended. We introduce RNG-Bench (Reconstructive Non-Markov Games), a benchmark suite designed to isolate a base model's ability to reconstruct past observations and act on them during multi-step interaction. RNG-Bench includes two complementary games: Matching Pairs, where card identities briefly revealed at specific locations must later be recalled, and 3D Maze, where egocentric views must be integrated into a spatial map. Both games are evaluated under a unified harness with three controlled difficulty axes: grid size, visual pattern, and observation modality. The benchmark further introduces a head-to-head duel protocol to control for instance-level variance and a Memory Gap metric that disentangles forgetting from poor action selection. The hardest configurations require contexts of roughly 128K tokens and 350 image inputs per episode, and remain far from saturated by frontier MLLMs. Memory Gap analysis shows that most residual errors stem from forgetting earlier observations rather than from suboptimal decision making. Finally, fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on optimal-policy rollouts and filtered model demonstrations improves performance on RNG-Bench and transfers to existing benchmarks without degrading general multimodal capability.

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

Conditioning Matters: Stabilizing Inversion and Attention in Diffusion Image Editing

Inversion-based image editing offers flexible and training-free control but still struggles with inversion accuracy and the trade-off between editing fidelity and background preservation. While recent methods improve inversion formulations or attention interactions, the role of textual conditioning in shaping diffusion dynamics and editing behavior remains underexplored. We show both empirically and theoretically that the precision of textual conditioning influences inversion stability by modulating the geometry of the diffusion velocity field, while also affecting the consistency of cross-branch attention during editing. These effects directly impact background preservation and semantic fidelity. Building on this analysis, we propose SimEdit, a conditioning-aware framework with two complementary components: (a) conditioning refinement, which constructs conditioning signals with improved semantic precision and structural alignment to facilitate stable inversion and consistent attention manipulation, and (b) token-wise cross-branch attention control, which separates edit-relevant and structure-preserving components and modulates them asymmetrically during attention manipulation. Extensive experiments on PIE-Bench demonstrate that SimEdit consistently improves both inversion reconstruction quality and editing performance over previous attention-manipulation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/SimEdit.

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

Discontinuous strong-to-weak symmetry breaking transition from thermal pure states

arXiv:2606.15062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking in many-body quantum systems undergoing decoherence from thermal pure states. For generic initial pure states with volume-law entanglement entropy, we show that the system undergoes a discontinuous dynamical phase transition at a critical time. This transition is accompanied by a singularity in the entropy of the system, which saturates to its maximum value at the same critical time. Through numerical simulations of the dephasing Ising and hard-core boson models, we establish the universality of this transition across different symmetries. Our results reveal that the dynamical emergence of a decohered mixed state from a highly entangled state is not a gradual asymptotic relaxation, but rather a sharp phase transition driven by a sudden collapse of global coherence.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

The BD-LSC Dataset: Facilitating the Benchmarking of Models for Lexical Semantic Change Detection in Slang and Standard Usage

Automatic semantic change detection aims to identify how word meanings shift over time, offering insights into both linguistic and societal change. Despite recent progress in computational lexical semantic change (LSC), existing benchmarks and methods struggle to capture bi-directional semantic change, particularly cases where words simultaneously gain and lose senses. This problem is especially challenging for words that have both slang and standard meanings. To address these gaps, we introduce two complementary benchmark datasets. The Bi-Directional Lexical Semantic Change (BD-LSC) dataset captures sense gain, sense loss, and stability across three time periods, enabling the study of complex semantic trajectories. The SlangTrack Word Sense Disambiguation (ST-WSD) dataset provides fine-grained, instance-level sense annotations for words combining slang and standard usages, supporting systematic benchmarking of WSD and semantic change detection models. Using these benchmarks, we systematically evaluate models across different methodological families: unsupervised clustering using contextualised embeddings, supervised machine learning, transformer-based models, and state-of-the-art large language models. Among the evaluated systems, the few-shot GPT-4o model achieved the strongest aggregate performance on Exact Sense Match (ESM) and multi-label accuracy; however, Macro-F1 scores near 0.5 across all systems show that rare slang senses remain difficult, which we identify as the central open challenge.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Approximating optimal decoding of quantum LDPC codes with narrow frontiers

arXiv:2606.20513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Frontier decoder, a pruned dynamic-programming decoder for sparse quantum decoding problems. Frontier processes error variables in a chosen order, merges prefixes with the same residual syndrome and logical label, and approximates logical-coset posterior masses by retaining only a narrow scored frontier. Without pruning, the recursion is exact ordered inference with exponential complexity. In the code-capacity setting, the decoder reaches thresholds close to optimal for the surface code and the color code. In the circuit-level noise model, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small average retained list size: less than 100 for the gross code $[[144,12,12]]$ at a physical error rate of $0.001$. When the list size is constant, the decoder has linear complexity, suggesting the possibility of low-latency implementations.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

JGRA: Jacobian Geometry Robustness Assessment in NISQ Noise-Aware Quantum Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.09964v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The NISQ era places stringent constraints on quantum computation, where noise and decoherence fundamentally limit performance. In classical deep learning, model robustness and resilience to perturbations are well studied: deep neural networks (DNNs) maintain high performance despite pruning, noise injection, and structural perturbations due to inherent redundancy in their representations. A central challenge in quantum machine learning is to transfer this notion of robustness to quantum neural networks (QNNs) under realistic NISQ noise. While classical deep learning exhibits robustness through structural redundancy, analogous principles for QNNs remain underdeveloped. We propose JGRA: a framework for assessing robustness in noise-aware QNNs via Jacobian geometry, capturing model sensitivity to parameter perturbations induced by noise. Our method includes entropy-matched noise calibration, noise-aware training, and noise-conditioned Jacobian extraction, yielding geometric descriptors that link clean-regime structure to noisy inference behaviour. We also empirically demonstrate that these descriptors encode predictive information about robustness under unseen noise.

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

RUB: Evaluating Residual Knowledge in Unlearned Models

Machine Unlearning (MUL) has emerged as a key mechanism for privacy protection and content regulation, yet current techniques often fail to guarantee the complete removal of sensitive information. While most existing works focus on verifying the execution of unlearning, they overlook the critical question of whether models remain robust against adversarial attempts to recover forgotten knowledge. In this work, we advocate for the principle of Robust Unlearning, which requires models to be both indistinguishable from retrained counterparts and resilient against diverse adversarial threats. To instantiate this principle, we propose a unified benchmark, RUB (Robust Unlearning Benchmark), that systematically evaluates the robustness of unlearning algorithms across classification, image-to-image reconstruction, and text-to-image synthesis. Within this framework, we introduce the Unlearning Mapping Attack (UMA) as a generalizable method to detect residual information, and demonstrate how existing attack strategies can be adapted into this framework as long as they conform to the generic UMA framework. Our experiments across discriminative and generative tasks reveal that state-of-the-art unlearning methods remain vulnerable under these evaluations, even when passing standard verification metrics. By positioning robustness as the central criterion and providing a benchmark for adversarial evaluation, we hope RUB paves the way toward more reliable and secure unlearning practices. The codebase and model checkpoints in RUB will be published.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Generator Replay Degrades: Projected Rehearsal Orchestration for Heterogeneous Federated Class-Incremental Learning

arXiv:2606.15695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated class-incremental learning (FCIL) becomes substantially harder when clients observe different label subsets, progress through tasks at different stages, and provide uneven supervision for the same semantic concepts. Existing FCIL methods often preserve old knowledge through input-space synthesis, but they can be fragile under heterogeneous task streams and difficult to transfer across modalities. To alleviate such issues, we propose PRO, a framework that replaces synthetic input replay with projected rehearsal orchestration. To remove external pretraining, we evaluate all methods under the same warmup. After this, PRO maintains compact class-level projected memories on the server and allows clients perform balanced pseudo multi-task training over current examples and old projected memories. To handle stronger representation drift, we further introduce PRO-MAX, which augments PRO with neighborhood-weighted memory alignment while preserving the same server-light principle that the server only aggregates model updates and memory statistics. Across image, text, and graph benchmarks, PRO and PRO-MAX improve retention and final utility under heterogeneous streams while remaining competitive in homogeneous FCIL. Even when baselines are given expanded replay budgets, they degrade under supervision imbalance and stage misalignment, indicating that replay quantity alone does not resolve replay-quality failures. Additional weak-task diagnostics further show that larger replay mismatch is associated with larger downstream degradation, while our method keeps projected memories better aligned with the evolving representation.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Frequency upconversion of infrared signals via molecular cavity optomechanical systems with gain

arXiv:2606.17877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular cavity optomechanical systems have recently emerged as a promising platform for enhancing infrared detection sensitivity, owing to their ability to up-convert low-frequency infrared (IR) photons to visible frequency range. Generally, under red-detuned pumping in such systems, the ideal conversion efficiency of the IR signal approaches 1. To overcome this efficiency constraint, we propose a scheme that incorporates gain into the infrared cavity of a molecular cavity optomechanical system comprising two cavities and an ensemble of N molecules. The upconversion process, which relies on IR absorption and Raman scattering associated with specific vibrational modes, is significantly amplified by the incorporation of gain under the red-detuned conditions. Moreover, our analysis demonstrates that the added noise is maintained near 0.5.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

QALM: Escaping Local Minima via Interleaved Exploration and Exploitation in Quantum Circuit Optimization

arXiv:2606.16221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum circuit optimizers face a fundamental limitation in how they tolerate temporary cost increases. At one extreme, greedy rule-based optimizers immediately apply any cost-reducing transformation, achieving high efficiency but quickly becoming trapped in local minima. At the other extreme, search-based optimizers accept cost-increasing moves to explore the circuit space and escape such minima. However, because search-based optimizers cannot determine within a reasonable time budget whether a given point is promising, that is, whether its neighborhood contains a deeper local minimum, they must blindly explore higher-cost regions. As a result, escaping the current basin to reach a promising point takes exponentially many steps. In this work, we show that this limitation can be overcome with a hybrid framework that interleaves the exhaustive exploration capabilities of search algorithms with the efficiency of rule-based optimization. We implement this framework as QALM, a novel optimizer designed to escape local minima without incurring the runtime penalties of pure search. Crucially, our results demonstrate that QALM does not merely strike a balance; it outperforms existing rule-based and search-based optimizers in circuit reduction rates while operating with the computational efficiency of rule-based systems. In a comprehensive evaluation across 248 circuits, QALM matches or exceeds the fidelity of the strongest baseline on 83.9% of these circuits, given the same time budget.

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

Intelligence as Managed Autonomy: Failure, Escalation, and Governance for Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2605.27628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As autonomous and agentic AI systems scale in robotic and human-machine environments, managing hallucination and persistent but unjustified action remains an open challenge. Rather than attributing these failures solely to model or alignment limitations, this paper explores the architectural vulnerability of unbounded autonomy - the presumption that an agent should continue operating regardless of rising uncertainty. It introduces a theory of managed autonomy that defines intelligent behavior through the formal capacity to detect epistemic drift, suspend reasoning, attempt recovery, and ultimately surrender control when reliability diminishes. We instantiate this theory via the SMARt (Self-Managing Multi-tier Autonomous Reasoning with Regulated/Revoked transitions) model, a four-layer framework featuring Stable, Meta-cognitive, Assisted, and Regulated states. By developing a timed, guarded Petri net formulation, we establish theoretically bounded properties for the system, demonstrating how architecture can formally mandate escalation, constrain invalid outputs, and ensure governance reachability under specified conditions. We further analyze how incorporating domain-specific trigger sets across varied operational settings (e.g., healthcare, robotics, etc.) can systematically preserve safety, assuming completeness and soundness criteria are met. Because these triggers are designed to be adaptive, the SMARt model accommodates the safe, controlled expansion of an agent's operational scope over time. We conclude that formalizing failure management within the autonomy lifecycle is a crucial step toward realizing reliable and governed artificial intelligence.

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

Pix2Fact: When Vision Is Not Enough – Benchmarking Fine-Grained VQA with Web Verification on High-Resolution Real-World Scenes

Despite progress on general tasks, vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with challenges that demand both fine-grained visual grounding and external knowledge, a synergy overlooked by existing benchmarks that evaluate these abilities in isolation. To fill this void, we introduce Pix2Fact, a visual question-answering benchmark designed to assess expert-level visual perception and knowledge search. Pix2Fact comprises 1,000 high-resolution (4K+) images spanning eight scenarios. Its questions and answers are meticulously crafted by PhD-holding annotators from top global universities across diverse disciplines. Each question requires detailed visual grounding and the integration of external knowledge. Evaluating ten state-of-the-art VLMs, including proprietary models such as Gemini-3.1-Pro and GPT-5.4, we find that Pix2Fact poses a formidable challenge: the most advanced model (Gemini-3.1-Pro) achieves only 51.7% average accuracy, even with access to visual ground truth and search tools. Our analysis attributes this low accuracy to three factors, frequent visual grounding errors even with visual ground truth, shallow search harnessing, and VLM's inability to retrieve long-tail, unstructured local information. This striking gap exposes the limitations of current models in assisting humans with real-world scenarios that demand overwhelming visual comprehension. We believe Pix2Fact will serve as a critical benchmark to drive the next generation of language-vision agents that seamlessly integrate fine-grained perception with robust knowledge search.