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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

On the empirical spectral distribution of matrix perpetuities

arXiv:2605.31054v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study matrix perpetuities, that is, solutions to affine fixed-point equations of the form \[ \mathbf{X} \stackrel{d}{=} \mathbf{A}\,\mathbf{X} \,\mathbf{A}^\top+\mathbf{B},\qquad (\mathbf{A},\mathbf{B})\mbox{ and }\mathbf{X} \mbox{ are independent}, \] with particular emphasis on the empirical spectral distribution of the solution. We first establish existence and uniqueness results by relating the problem to classical vector perpetuities, and then develop tools that preserve the matrix structure under orthogonal invariance. For positive semidefinite, orthogonally invariant models, we obtain power-law tail asymptotics for the expected empirical spectral distribution and show that the tail is governed by the largest eigenvalue. We also prove that, in the subcritical regime, the expected empirical spectral distribution of matrix perpetuities converges weakly, as the dimension tends to infinity, to the distribution of the corresponding free perpetuity. Our results are illustrated by matrix Beta prime perpetuities, for which explicit limiting spectral distributions are available.

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

Toward Calibrated Mixture-of-Experts Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.20544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration aligns a model's predictive uncertainty with the frequencies of its empirical outcomes and is important for understanding and trusting reported probabilities. Recent work shows that enforcing calibration at the level of individual predictors can improve ensemble accuracy and calibration, with mixture-of-experts (MoE) models showing strong empirical improvements in particular; however, the conditions under which calibration helps MoE are not well understood. In this work, we study how MoE models behave under distribution shift, focusing on how routing mechanisms interact with expert-level calibration. We show that expert calibration is sufficient to ensure calibration of the overall model under a broad class of distribution shifts in hard-routed models, but is insufficient for calibrating soft-routed models. To address this, we propose an adversarial reweighting that penalizes calibration errors of the routed aggregate under distribution shift, and we demonstrate that it improves the accuracy-calibration tradeoff both on average and on difficult subsets of the data, across model classes, prediction tasks, and distribution shifts.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Shadow Engineering of Quantum Processes

arXiv:2606.12035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterizing quantum processes is essential for hardware benchmarking, error diagnosis, and algorithm verification. While recent work [PRX QUANTUM 4, 040337 (2023)] extended classical shadows from quantum state to quantum process, enabling efficient single-channel $\mathcal{E}$ property prediction, its applicability to composite processes $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$ remains unexplored. We introduce shadow engineering, a framework encoding the classical shadows of processes into sparse transfer matrices to predict $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$ properties with proven polynomial sample complexity, matching single-channel efficiency while exponentially lower than quantum process tomography. Crucially, this approach repurposes existing $\mathcal{E}_m$-shadow data without physical execution of $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$, enabling flexible quantum process characterization with minimal hardware overhead. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness and practicality on a superconducting quantum processor for typical applications such as error mitigation and Hamiltonian dynamical simulation. This framework unlocks new capabilities for predicting complex quantum behaviors without physical re-execution, with immediate applications in near-term device calibration and quantum simulation.

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

Grounded Inference: Principles for Deterministically Encapsulated Generative Models

arXiv:2606.19753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The incorporation of generative models into traditional computational systems presents both enormous opportunity and tremendous peril. Although many early adopters have realized these perils at great expense, the field still requires foundational frameworks to de-risk incorporation of AI into traditional systems. This manuscript establishes this foundation through the definition of four specific primitives of AI blended architecture, designed to enable deterministic encapsulation of probabilistic models. It further establishes two overarching anti-patterns broadly represented across industry to serve as warnings for engineers in this field. This framework was designed to enable successful integration of AI into traditional systems while providing a foundation upon which generative model providers could build the next generation of generative model interfaces.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stochastic Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent

arXiv:2509.14969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter tuning. The method comes from a theoretically-grounded adaptation of the Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent method to the stochastic setting. We prove the convergence of stochastic gradient descent with our step-size under various assumptions, and we show that it empirically competes against tuned baselines.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Pilot Validation of an AI-based Audiovisual Fatigue Assessment Tool (mAI Fatigue) in Chronic Liver Disease: A Multicentre Study

Fatigue affects over half of patients with chronic liver disease (CLD) and is a major driver of impaired quality of life, yet it remains underrecognised because assessment relies almost entirely on subjective patient-reported outcomes (PROs). This proof of concept study evaluated whether audiovisual (AV) markers from facial and vocal expressions, captured via the mAI Fatigue tool (Blueskeye), could serve as objective correlates of fatigue in CLD. In a prospective, multicentre, case-control study at three sites in India, 111 adults (aged 18 to 65 years) were enrolled as healthy controls (n=55) or CLD patients with moderate to severe fatigue (n=56). Over four weeks, participants completed ten assessments combining validated PROs, Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) reaction times and AV recordings. CLD participants had significantly slower PVT reaction times than controls (882 vs 776 ms; p=0.0047). Session-level AV-PRO correlations were modest (r=-0.17 to -0.27), but participant-level aggregation strengthened associations (r=-0.47; p{approx}0.002) in the high-quality audio subset (n=41), where a predictive model achieved R=0.75 to 0.76 (p

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

EyeTheia: A Lightweight and Accessible Eye-Tracking Toolbox

We introduce EyeTheia, a lightweight and open deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze estimation, designed for browser-based experimental platforms and real-world cognitive and clinical research. EyeTheia enables real-time gaze tracking using only a standard laptop webcam, combining MediaPipe-based landmark extraction with a convolutional neural network inspired by iTracker and optional user-specific fine-tuning. We investigate two complementary strategies: adapting a model pretrained on mobile data and training the same architecture from scratch on a desktop-oriented dataset. Validation results on MPIIFaceGaze show comparable performance between both approaches prior to calibration, while lightweight user-specific fine-tuning consistently reduces gaze prediction error. We further evaluate EyeTheia in a realistic Dot-Probe task and compare it to the commercial webcam-based tracker SeeSo SDK. Results indicate strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation during stimulus presentation, despite higher temporal variability. Overall, EyeTheia provides a transparent and extensible solution for low-cost gaze tracking, suitable for scalable and reproducible experimental and clinical studies. The code, trained models, and experimental materials are publicly available.

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

SpikeDecoder: Realizing the GPT Architecture with Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.12287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Transformer architecture is widely regarded as the most powerful tool for natural language processing, but due to a high number of complex operations, it inherently faces the issue of high energy consumption. To address this issue, we consider Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which are an energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their naturally event-driven approach to processing information. However, this inherently makes them difficult to train. Often, many SNN-based models circumvent this issue by converting pre-trained ANNs. More recently, attempts have been made to design directly trainable SNN-based adaptations of the Transformer model structure. Although the results showed great promise, the application field was computer vision. Moreover, the proposed model incorporates only encoder blocks. In this paper, we propose SpikeDecoder, a fully SNN-based implementation of the Transformer decoder block, for applications in natural language processing. In a series of experiments, we analyze the impact of exchanging different blocks of the ANN model with spike-based alternatives to identify trade-offs and significant sources of performance loss. We further investigate the role of residual connections and the selection of SNN-compatible normalization techniques. Besides the work on the model architecture, we formulate and compare different embedding methods to project text data into spikes. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based decoder block reduces the theoretical energy consumption by 87% to 93% compared to the ANN baseline.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Ductile alloys offering 100 MPa tensile strength at 2,400 °C

作者:

Extreme applications call for materials that are not only strong to withstand thermomechanical loads at temperatures in excess of 2,000 °C (refs. 1–3), but also highly formable at room temperature to allow for processing into complex-shaped parts. The latter excludes brittle ceramics4 and intermetallic compounds5, limiting the selection to highly ductile metals and their alloys, but for them, an adequate strength at ultrahigh temperatures seems unreachable. Here we show a breakthrough in casting alloys that achieve both simultaneously. A boron-stabilized HfO2-strengthened Ta-based alloy was carefully crafted using a new boron-intervened in situ oxidation reaction, producing about 50-nm diameter oxide particles dispersed densely and uniformly in the grain interior. The new alloy fills the blank at ultrahigh temperatures in terms of tensile yield strength, around 200 MPa at 2,000 °C and 100 MPa at 2,400 °C, while simultaneously possessing an excellent strength–ductility balance at room temperature (ultimate tensile strength >800 MPa, elongation-to-failure of about 35%), a property combination surpassing all previous refractory (including multi-principal-element) alloys. Moreover, the boron segregation around the oxide nanoparticles imparts excellent thermal stability against coarsening at 2,000–2,400 °C. Our strategy thus goes beyond traditional oxide-dispersion strengthening to enable highly ductile refractory alloys that are capable of load-bearing applications at extreme temperatures. A boron-stabilized oxide-strengthened tantalum alloy combines exceptional room-temperature ductility with record ultrahigh-temperature strength, enabling load-bearing applications above 2,000 °C.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Geometry-Aware Style Transfer in 3D Gaussian Splatting

In this paper, we present a novel geometry-aware style transfer framework for 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) that simultaneously transfers appearance attributes and geometric structures. Unlike prior works that primarily focus on color-based stylization and often overlook structural adaptation, our method explicitly incorporates geometry adaptation through a decoupled optimization scheme that alternately updates color and geometry parameters. This strategy alleviates potential interference between color and geometry updates, leading to stable and consistent scene-level geometry transformation. The decoupled optimization is enabled by the proposed geometry-aware contrastive feature matching (GCFM). GCFM integrates RGB, depth, and edge cues into a contrastive objective and is employed in both optimization phases to effectively transfer structural characteristics from style images to Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance in both qualitative fidelity and quantitative metrics, significantly outperforming existing 3DGS-based stylization methods. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/oweixx/gast}{https://github.com/oweixx/gast}.

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

A Time-Reparameterized Cumulative Intensity Extrapolation Sampler for Discrete Flow Matching

arXiv:2606.24140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete flow matching (DFM) provides a principled framework for generative modeling on discrete state spaces via continuous-time Markov chain dynamics. In practice, sampling for DFM commonly employs discretizations such as $\tau$-leaping, yet efficient sampling methods under a limited number of function evaluations (NFE) remain less studied. To address this gap, we propose the Time-Reparameterized Cumulative Intensity Extrapolation (TR-CIE) sampler, which aims to improve sampling quality when function evaluations are restricted. TR-CIE consists of two components. First, a schedule-based time reparameterization rescales the time grid according to the noise schedule. Under standard factorized DFM rate parameterizations, this transformation of variables absorbs the schedule-dependent growth term and mitigates stiffness near the terminal sampling stage. Second, we introduce a cumulative-intensity extrapolation updating rule. By reusing cached model outputs from the previous step as a history term, this improves the approximation of stepwise cumulative intensities on the resulting non-uniform time grid. We provide a theoretical analysis that bounds the local approximation error of cumulative intensities and establishes convergence results. The resulting sampler requires one NFE per step and introduces no additional model evaluations compared to the standard $\tau$-leaping sampler. Extensive experiments on synthetic tasks, text generation, and text-to-image benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves sampling quality under limited NFE.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Cross-Dataset, Age, and Gender Generalization: A Comprehensive Analysis of Fine-Tuning Strategies for Low-Resource Children's ASR

arXiv:2606.19791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision. Past research has demonstrated improved recognition through the use of hybrid DNN/HMM sequence discriminative training. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of various combinations of acoustic features tailored to different Acoustic Models, offering suitable feature selections for each. The incorporation of Pitch features notably improved recognition performance, especially for sentence recognition tasks involving dysarthric speech. Through a systematic examination of the TORGO database, we have demonstrated the potential to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art Factorized Time Delay Neural Network (F-TDNN) model for recognizing dysarthric speech. Our methods, implemented with the F-TDNN model, resulted in a 4.65\% relative improvement in isolated word recognition and a 4.63\% relative improvement in sentence recognition for dysarthric speech, compared to previous research. This improvement effectively compensates for speech variability, attributable to our deliberate selection of the number of overlapping frames between consecutive training example chunks.

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

Language Model Circuits Are Sparse in the Neuron Basis

The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques which decompose the neuron basis into more interpretable units of model computation, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs). However, not all neuron-based representations are uninterpretable. For the first time, we empirically show that MLP neurons are as sparse a feature basis as SAEs. We use this finding to develop an end-to-end gradient-based attribution pipeline for circuit tracing on the MLP neuron basis, which surfaces causally effective neurons on a variety of tasks. On a standard subject-verb agreement benchmark (Marks et al., 2025), a circuit of $\approx 10^2$ MLP neurons is enough to control model behaviour. On the multi-hop city-state-capital task from (Lindsey et al., 2025), we find a circuit in which small sets of neurons encode specific latent reasoning steps (e.g. mapping a city to its state), and can be steered to change the model's output. This work thus advances automated interpretability of language models without imposing additional training costs.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Structuring Sparsity: Block-Sparse Featurizers Capture Visual Concept Manifolds

What is the geometry of a visual percept? The most widely used protocols for decomposing neural network representations into interpretable parts treat concepts as isolated directions, yet recent work shows that concepts are often realized as geometric structures in low dimensional regions of activation space. We turn to the literature of Structured sparsity to close this gap, and show that block sparsity, which groups directions into blocks, is the prior matched to a generative model in which a representation is a sparse sum of low-dimensional manifolds: the modern, learned form of a classical idea in visual neuroscience, where a visual feature is carried by a coordinated group of neurons rather than a single tuned one. We implement three variants of block-sparse featurizers (BSFs) and, through a minimum-description-length analysis, show that all three describe activations more compactly than direction-based featurizers, with the recovered concepts typically two- to four-dimensional. We then use BSFs to (i) recontextualize prior work, showing that curve detectors in InceptionV1 actually read from a single continuous curve manifold, (ii) discover novel manifolds including shadows and lighting in DINOv3, and (iii) support interpretable control of image generation in diffusion models (SDXL) via manifold steering.

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

Mapping AI Programs in the U.S: A Status Report from Early 2026 and an Analysis of AI Majors and Minors

arXiv:2606.12428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a report on the status of undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the United States in Spring 2026. In so doing, we 1) describe our scraping and mapping tools, which dynamically update to track the state of AI education in the U.S., and 2) create a historic record at a time of great upheaval. The tool we developed, available at https://cicmap.ai, detects, scrapes, and displays data from more than 350 undergraduate AI programs–majors, minors, concentrations, and certificates–at 4-year universities. Our tool searched over 560 institutions to locate these programs, a sample that represents 86\% of all undergraduate Computer Science (CS) graduates in the U.S. This tool allows prospective students, guidance counselors, administrators, and faculty to easily access AI program requirements and is designed to continually update as new programs emerge. To the best of our knowledge, this survey represents the most comprehensive snapshot of the state of AI programs in the U.S. to date. With this work we offer three important contributions: 1) a record of AI programs in the U.S. at a time of great upheaval; 2) a tool to explore AI programs and their requirements; and 3) an analysis of the courses required for 66 AI majors and 87 AI minors. Our analysis of majors and minors shows great variability in the size and the requirements of these degrees, but we note two takeaways. First, not all majors require a general AI course, but if they don't, they do require a Machine Learning (ML) course. Second, while more than a third of majors require an Ethics in AI course, just under a quarter of AI minors do.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

AMaNITA: an end-to-end workflow for native tRNA nanopore sequencing data analysis

Transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules serve as essential adapters during protein translation. While direct RNA sequencing (DRS) via Oxford Nanopore Technologies has emerged as a powerful platform for systematic tRNAome profiling, we currently lack a simple and robust statistical framework for nanopore tRNA data analyses. Here, we address this gap by developing AMaNITA (Abundance, Modifications, and Nanopore Intensity Toolbox Application), an end-to-end bioinformatic workflow that enables simplified, robust, and scalable analyses of nanopore native tRNA sequencing datasets. AMaNITA streamlines the entire analytical trajectory: from upstream processing (basecalling, mapping, filtering, batch effect correction) to downstream assessment of differential tRNA abundance and modification stoichiometry. The workflow generates an interactive HTML report for data exploration and analysis, allowing the user to download the source data files and resulting plots. AMaNITA can be executed using Singularity from the command line, without requiring installation of dependencies.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

The classical boundaries of the EPR argument and quantum ontology

arXiv:2606.07826v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Von Neumann's Hilbert-space formalism of quantum mechanics constitutes a logico-physical theory of observed or measured reality. Imposing the logical constraint of Booleanity, essential for objectively shareable descriptions among observers, reveals the physical meaning of classicality inherently embedded within the formalism itself. Starting from this consideration, the present work reformulates the quantum-classical transition via Hilbert-space classical mechanics (HCM), grounding classicality not in the dynamical limit ($\hbar \to 0$), but in the logical constraint of Booleanity (i.e., the mutual commutativity of preparable states). Within this state-centric framework, applying the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) criterion alongside locality and measurement independence reduces standard quantum mechanics to the HCM model. Thus, the EPR argument reveals not quantum incompleteness, but the implicit classical boundaries of its own premises. To resolve this impasse, we articulate a nuanced quantum ontology grounded in a fundamental structural bipartition between the observational environment and the observed object, which accommodates three categorical distinctions: ontic, processional, and tropos-existential. Building on this, we propose a criterion of objective reality wherein descriptive objectivity is treated as merely a sufficient condition for physical reality. This addresses the historical Bohr-Einstein ambiguity, enabling the quantum formalism to ontologically unify objective measured phenomena and non-objective observed interference within a context-dependent framework.

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

From Overload to Convergence: Supporting Multi-Issue Human-AI Negotiation with Bayesian Visualization

arXiv:2603.22766v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As AI systems increasingly mediate negotiations, understanding how the number of negotiated issues impacts human performance is crucial for maintaining human agency. We designed a human-AI negotiation case study in a realistic property rental scenario, varying the number of negotiated issues; empirical findings show that without support, performance stays stable up to three issues but declines as additional issues increase cognitive load. To address this, we introduce a novel uncertainty-based visualization driven by Bayesian estimation of agreement probability. It shows how the space of mutually acceptable agreements narrows as negotiation progresses, helping users identify promising options. In a within-subjects experiment (N=32), it improved human outcomes and efficiency, preserved human control, and avoided redistributing value. Our findings surface practical limits on the complexity people can manage in human-AI negotiation, advance theory on human performance in complex negotiations, and offer validated design guidance for interactive systems.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MVAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal AI-Generated Video-Audio Detection

The rapid advancement of AI-generated multimodal video-audio content has raised significant concerns regarding information security and content authenticity. Existing synthetic video datasets predominantly focus on the visual modality alone, while the few incorporating audio are largely confined to facial deepfakes–a limitation that fails to address the expanding landscape of general multimodal AI-generated content and substantially impedes the development of trustworthy detection systems. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce the Multimodal Video-Audio Dataset (MVAD), the first comprehensive dataset specifically designed for detecting AI-generated multimodal video-audio content. Our dataset exhibits three key characteristics: (1) genuine multimodality with samples generated according to three realistic video-audio forgery patterns; (2) high perceptual quality achieved through diverse state-of-the-art generative models; and (3) comprehensive diversity spanning realistic and anime visual styles, four content categories (humans, animals, objects, and scenes), and four video-audio multimodal data types. Our dataset will be available at https://github.com/HuMengXue0104/MVAD.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Reclaim Evaluation: A Lossy Memory Is Worse Than an Empty One

作者:

A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all. Give a model a memory that kept a wrong conclusion but dropped the work behind it, and it emits that stale value as a confident answer; give the same model an empty memory and it abstains. Across seven models this direction never reverses, a clean kill condition that none breaks. We call this brittle memory: behavioral, not the near-immediate information bound beneath it; only its magnitude is disposition- and task-dependent, not its direction. We measure it with reclaim evaluation: compress a drifted interaction at a fixed budget, then test whether a correction recovers the known answer, scored against ground truth with no judge. Correctability is bottlenecked by whether the answer-determining source survives, not by capability. A one-line source-first policy (keep the recomputable source, drop the re-derivable conclusion) restores correctability at equal budget where that source is compact and identifiable; a length-matched control rules out added text as the cause. The hand-built oracle reaches 1.00; a one-prompt deployable version reclaims 0.49-0.88. The stake compounds: chained through a memory loop, a single dropped-source error corrupts a growing span of downstream steps and stays uncorrectable, while source-first holds to a bounded budget horizon. The wall and fix replicate across three deployed memory systems and on real dialogue (MultiWOZ), and past the budget where the source no longer fits, the fix fails silently unless the note records completeness. This is a controlled study of a mechanism, not a benchmark: judge-free exact scoring, matched-budget controls, and validators built to come out false. We release the harness, conditions, and validators.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

SteerAF: Distogram-based Steering of AlphaFold2 toward Alternative Conformations

End-to-end structure predictors, such as AlphaFold2, typically output only the dominant conformational state of a given protein, which is biased by the training data set. Existing strategies for recovering alternative conformations are often computationally expensive and offer limited biological interpretability. Here, we present SteerAF, an inference-time optimization framework based on AlphaFold2 that leverages information encoded in the distogram derived from deep multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) to predict alternative protein conformations. Across four benchmark datasets, SteerAF matches or surpasses existing methods in predicting alternative conformations for the majority of systems. Sparse MSA-feature modifications generated via block gradient ascent exhibit a strong correlation with experimentally characterized functional residues, recovering them with approximately 50% precision in the tested proteins. Furthermore, SteerAF enables effective decoy selection in the absence of experimental structures, and its predictions can serve as seed structures for molecular dynamics simulations to map conformational landscapes. Thus, SteerAF provides an efficient and interpretable approach for predicting alternative conformations, offering a framework that can be extended to other similar predictors and problems.

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

CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly

arXiv:2605.26195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

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

A spectral audit framework reveals task-dependent aperiodic reliance across EEG and ECG deep learning

arXiv:2606.08583v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning on physiological time series is interpreted through domain-specific features – oscillatory rhythms in EEG, morphological complexes in ECG – yet these signals sit atop a broadband aperiodic 1/f-like envelope that covaries with arousal, age, and pathology. We introduce a spectral audit framework combining aperiodic/periodic decomposition, phase-preserving Fourier interventions, sham controls, and simulation validation. Aperiodic reliance was task-dependent and architecture-general: across six neural architectures, flattening drops exceeded 0.42 balanced-accuracy points for sleep-wake classification, reached 0.07-0.13 for clinical abnormality detection, and remained minimal for motor imagery. Six of seven EEG foundation models showed FDR-significant aperiodic reliance on clinical EEG; age/sex and recording-era controls reduced but did not eliminate the effect. Applying the audit to PTB-XL ECG revealed neural drops of 0.32–0.36 persisting after demographic matching, confirming this confound class extends beyond EEG. Aperiodic controls should become standard for interpretable physiological time-series deep learning.

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

PseudoBench: Measuring How Agentic Auto-Research Fuels Pseudoscience

As Large Language Model based agents enter autonomous scientific research, their ability to resist pseudoscience becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, such systems may rapidly generate plausible yet misleading studies that contaminate academic literature and erode trust in science. We present PseudoBench, an adversarial benchmark for evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives. PseudoBench contains 200 curated pseudoscientific claim-evidence pairs across five domains and evaluates agents through an end-to-end research pipeline from experiments to writing. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, we find that current systems readily produce persuasive reports that align with pseudoscientific premises with near-zero refusal rates and the highest resistance of only 27.4%. Stronger agents risk packaging pseudoscience in more sophisticated scientific language, increasing its apparent credibility. These findings reveal an alarming capacity to fuel pseudoscience, calling for scientific alignment before widespread deployment.

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

Segmentation-based Detection for Efficient Multi-Task Spacecraft Perception

Vision-based perception is fundamental to Space Situational Awareness and autonomous on-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, servicing, and navigation. However, progress in this area is limited by the scarcity of annotated space imagery and by challenging visual-domain characteristics including severe illumination changes, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high contrast. We address Stream 1 of the SPARK 2026 Challenge, which requires a single model for spacecraft classification, detection, and fine-grained component segmentation across multiple target types. We propose a compact architecture that integrates a MobileNetV3 encoder with a U-Net-style decoder, combining computational efficiency with accurate dense prediction. Detection is derived analytically from the union of predicted component masks, avoiding a separate bounding-box regression head in the single-spacecraft setting. Our method achieved an overall leaderboard score of 0.9482, with task-specific scores of 1.0000 in classification, 0.9788 in detection, and 0.8917 in segmentation. The proposed approach ranked second overall in the SPARK 2026 Challenge, demonstrating that lightweight encoder-decoder architectures can deliver strong multi-task performance for practical onboard space vision systems.