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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On multidimensional infinite dihedral group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps

arXiv:2601.08961v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We obtain a local central limit theorem for cocycles associated with a class of non abelian and non compact group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps. This class consists of multidimensional infinite dihedral groups. Unlike in the set up of the random walks on groups, we cannot use the convolution of measures on the group and instead we resort to an approach based on irreducible representations. Depending on the dimension of the group, we obtain either mixing, and thus ergodicity, or dissipativity. Also, we obtain the asymptotics of the first return time of the group extension to the origin.

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

Task-Instructed Causal Routing of Vision Foundation Models for Multi-Task Learning

Vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated strong robustness and transferability across a wide range of visual tasks. However, each model typically encodes strong inductive biases shaped by its pre-training objective and data domain, resulting in fragmented yet complementary visual knowledge. As a result, a single model often struggles to capture the diverse visual representations required across multiple dense prediction tasks. To address this limitation, we propose TIGER (Task-Instruction-Guided Expert Routing), a framework that coordinates multiple heterogeneous VFMs for multi-task dense prediction. Instead of naively aggregating expert features, TIGER leverages natural-language task instructions to guide a routing network that assigns token-level expert weights conditioned on task semantics, enabling adaptive integration of complementary expert features. TIGER further introduces a counterfactual loss that aligns routing decisions with each expert's causal contribution by measuring prediction changes when experts are excluded, encouraging more reliable and interpretable routing. We evaluate TIGER on two multi-task dense prediction benchmarks, NYUD-v2 and Pascal Context, where it consistently outperforms recent multi-task learning baselines while keeping all VFMs frozen. These results demonstrate that combining instruction-guided expert routing with counterfactual causal alignment enables effective coordination of heterogeneous vision foundation models.

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

Graph Instance Landscapes: When Structural Similarity Does (Not) Reflect Shortest-Path Performance

arXiv:2606.18267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking shortest-path algorithms is commonly based on aggregate performance over heterogeneous graph sets, which limits insight into how different search paradigms react to instance structure. We adopt an instance-landscape view of graph benchmarking by embedding graphs into a low-cost structural feature space and clustering them into regions of similar structure. Three benchmark suites are studied: weighted Erdős–Rényi graphs, random geometric (wireless) graphs, and real-world road networks. We evaluate four representative shortest-path solvers spanning uninformed exact search (Dijkstra), bidirectional exact search (bidirectional Dijkstra), heuristic-guided exact search (A$^{*}$), and deque-based strategies (DEQ). Clustering robustness is analyzed under multiple feature-selection schemes, and runtime distributions are compared across landscape regions using non-parametric tests. While generator parameters induce stable structural regions, we find that feature-space similarity does not necessarily imply performance similarity: significant runtime shifts are frequently observed even within the same landscape region. A merged-suite analysis further shows that different benchmark families occupy largely disjoint regions. These results highlight both the potential and the limits of structural landscapes for the structure-aware benchmarking of shortest-path algorithms.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Continuous-time Optimal Stopping through Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation based solvers for optimal stopping problems must discretize the stopping decision. Under classical dynamic programming, a coarse exercise grid with only a few stopping opportunities can materially undervalue the optimal expected reward, whereas on a very fine grid, approximation errors accumulate through the backward recursion. To remove this limitation, we develop a new reinforcement-learning inspired algorithm that enables us to learn the exercise rule at arbitrarily fine time resolution. Our CARLOS (Continuous-time Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Stopping) algorithm utilizes an aggregate deep neural network (ADNN) to learn a joint space-time decision boundary. Starting from a coarse time grid, we progressively increase the frequency of stopping opportunities, while in parallel training the ADNN to refine its timing-value estimates. We moreover design an adaptive sampling strategy that gradually concentrates training effort near the stopping boundary. Benchmarked results show that CARLOS delivers higher prices than existing Bermudan solvers, approaching the American upper bound, and achieves high computational efficiency relative to non-RL comparators.

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

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

arXiv:2606.18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation. Yet these distributions are learned from broad unlabeled corpora and are not naturally conditioned on task-specific biological contexts such as interaction partners, cellular environments, or therapeutic interventions. Existing contextual matching methods often distort this interface through pooled embeddings, contrastive latent spaces, or task-specific prediction heads. We introduce LOGICA (Logit-space Contrastive Alignment), a framework for context-conditioned prediction that performs contrastive learning directly in output-logit space. Using gated cross-modal adapters compatible with each model's native token head, LOGICA preserves the pretrained likelihood interface and converts contextualized token log-likelihoods into matching scores. Alignment is defined through context-sensitive token probabilities rather than proximity in a shared embedding space, enabling learning from sparse paired data across models with distinct vocabularies, without a shared tokenizer or decoder. LOGICA is particularly effective for mutation-local variant ranking, where comparisons reduce to context-conditioned likelihoods of mutant tokens at perturbed sites. Across protein–ligand binding, TCR–peptide activity, and drug-conditioned resistance prediction, LOGICA improves over prior state-of-the-art methods, including matched latent-contrastive and conditional MLM baselines, while retaining a token-level interface for interpretation and generation. On held-out-gene single-mutation drug-resistance prediction, LOGICA improves AUC from near-random latent-space baselines of $\sim$0.55 to $\sim$0.65.

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

Active Sampling for Ultra-Low-Bit-Rate Video Compression via Conditional Controlled Diffusion

Diffusion models provide a powerful generative prior for perceptual reconstruction at ultra-low bitrates, but effective video compression requires controlling the generative process using highly compact conditioning signals. In this work, we present ActDiff-VC, a diffusion-based video compression framework for the ultra-low-bitrate regime. Our method partitions videos into variable-length segments, transmits keyframes only when needed, and summarizes temporal dynamics using a compact set of tracked point trajectories. Conditioned on these sparse signals, a conditional diffusion decoder synthesizes the remaining frames, enabling perceptually realistic reconstruction under severe rate constraints. To support this design, we introduce two mechanisms: content-adaptive keyframe selection and budget-aware sparse trajectory selection, which together enable compact yet effective conditioning for generative reconstruction. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that ActDiff-VC achieves up to 64.6\% bitrate reduction at matched NIQE, improves KID by up to 64.6\% and FID by up to 37.7\% at comparable bitrates against strong learned codecs, and delivers favorable perceptual rate–distortion trade-offs relative to learned and diffusion-based baselines in the ultra-low-bitrate regime.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data

arXiv:2606.18485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.

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

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Trainable Photonic Measurement for Physics-Informed PDE Learning

arXiv:2606.18713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photonic quantum machine learning offers a route to trainable physical representations built from phase, interference and measurement. However, its role in scientific machine learning remains largely unexplored. Physics-informed neural fields provide a natural setting, because differential equations require trial spaces that preserve phase, frequency and derivative structure. Here we introduce a photonic quantum neural field in which coordinates become trainable optical phases, are mixed by multi-photon Fock-space interference and are decoded from photon-number measurements. The photonic circuit is optimized as the neural-field representation itself, not as a fixed feature map or hardware accelerator. Photonic measurement is therefore a trainable representation on which the physics-informed residual is minimized. Across seven elliptic, wave, nonlinear dispersive and inverse PDE benchmarks, we observe a phase-complexity transition: classical coordinate and Fourier-feature networks suffice in smooth regimes, whereas the photonic field is most accurate when residual derivatives amplify phase mismatch. In the hardest regimes it gives the lowest errors, with margins reaching an order of magnitude and about one quarter of the trainable parameters of classical baselines. Frozen and shuffled controls, together with noise stress tests, attribute this gain to learned interference and stable Fock-probability readout under compound perturbations. These results identify photonic quantum measurement as a representation-learning principle for scientific machine learning.

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

Domain-Guided Prompting of the Segment Anything Model for Seismic Interpretation: The Role of Attributes, Visualization, and Hybrid Prompts

The advent of large pretrained foundation models for computer vision has significantly improved the efficiency of visual data interpretation. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), in particular, offers powerful zero shot segmentation capabilities through prompt based interaction, thus making it a promising tool for seismic interpretation. However, most existing applications of SAM rely on fine tuning for specific geological targets, which requires extensive labeled data, incurs high computational cost, and often compromises the model's generalization capability. In this study, we introduce a principled framework for zero shot adaptation of foundation models to seismic data. The framework is built on two key components: (1) aligning seismic attributes and visualization choices (e.g., colormaps) with the geological target of interest, and (2) employing a hybrid prompting strategy that combines sparse user defined point prompts with dense mask prompts derived from SAM's internal feature activations. We systematically evaluate this framework across multiple geological targets, datasets, prompt configurations, and seismic attribute representations. Our results demonstrate that geologic target aware selection of seismic attributes and colormaps, combined with hybrid prompting, enhances the separability of geological features and improves boundary delineation and segmentation accuracy relative to point based prompting alone. Our findings show that, when these components are jointly applied, SAM can achieve competitive segmentation performance in a fully zero shot setting, thereby eliminating the need to retrain SAM for each geologic feature. This work establishes a practical and scalable pathway to leverage foundation models in seismic interpretation, reducing reliance on labeled data while preserving model generality.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quasi-local Edge Mode in XXX Spin Chain/Circuit with Interaction Boundary Defect

arXiv:2603.17835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the Heisenberg spin-1/2 model on a semi-infinite chain - or, equivalently, a trotterized unitary SU(2) symmetric six-vertex quantum circuit - with a boundary defect where the interaction between the two spins nearest the edge differs from that in the bulk. For sufficiently strong boundary interaction we explicitly construct a conserved operator quasi-localized near the boundary using a matrix-product ansatz. This quasi-local edge mode leads to non-decaying boundary correlation functions, corresponding to a nonzero boundary Drude weight. The correlation length of the edge mode diverges at a finite critical value of the boundary interaction, signaling a transition to ergodic boundary dynamics for subcritical interactions.

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

AI-Driven Test Case Generation from Natural Language Requirements: A Survey of Techniques and Research Gaps

arXiv:2606.06563v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Software testing is critical for verifying that systems meet specified requirements, yet remains among the most time-consuming and expensive activities in development. Requirements-based test generation allows test cases to be derived early from requirements artifacts, but generating them directly from natural language is challenging due to inherent ambiguity and imprecision. Recent advances in AI, natural language processing (NLP), and large language models (LLMs) have made automating this pipeline increasingly feasible, while introducing new risks including hallucination, reduced traceability, and inconsistent evaluation. This survey addresses four research questions: what AI and NLP techniques have been proposed for generating test cases from natural language requirements; what tools and frameworks support these approaches; how generated test cases are evaluated; and what research gaps remain. Following Kitchenham and Charters' systematic review guidelines, we searched major scholarly databases spanning 2000-2025 and, after applying strict inclusion criteria, identified 21 primary studies. The literature is organized into three evolutionary eras, revealing that no existing approach simultaneously satisfies six key quality dimensions: automation, ambiguity handling, domain applicability, traceability, evaluation thoroughness, and hallucination control. The survey makes three main contributions: a three-era evolutionary synthesis of AI-based test generation; a six-criteria gap analysis showing no current approach fully addresses all quality dimensions; and four actionable research guidelines targeting hallucination, traceability, complexity sensitivity, and compliance.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Targeting Cancer-Specific Mutations with RNA-Triggered Chromatin Shredding

作者:

Genetic mutations that drive cancer often occur in tumor suppressor proteins, including the p53 transcription factor which is altered in ~40-50% of cases1,2. However, current therapies fail to target most such mutations because the mutant proteins typically lack defined drug-binding pockets, and restoring the endogenous function has proven challenging. Here, we programmed CRISPR-Cas12a2, an RNA-guided nuclease with trans-nucleolytic cleavage activities3,4, to selectively kill cancer cells by targeting cancer-specific transcripts. This approach limits cell growth by inducing trans shredding of chromatin, triggering DNA damage responses and cell death. Unlike existing methods, RNA-guided Cas12a2 senses cellular RNA signatures, enabling precise targeting of undruggable mutations. Transcript-activated chromatin shredding provides a new approach to precision disease treatments for undruggable targets.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Multiple Topological Haldane Phases for Symmetry-Protected Quantum Information Processing

arXiv:2606.12685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetry-protected topological phases have attracted significant interest at the fundamental level and as a potential platform for quantum information processing, owing to their protected edge states and resilience to perturbations. Applying these features for practical and efficient quantum computation is highly desirable, but remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate the partitioning into multiple independent Haldane phase subsystems of a single spin-1/2 ladder system and propose this as a scalable architecture for gate-based quantum computation, which takes advantage of the symmetry-protected topological order. We encode qubits in the two topological states of the $S^{z}=0$ sector of each subsystem. Finite-size effects, typically viewed as detrimental, instead provide a controllable energy splitting that enables single-qubit rotations using only local magnetic fields. An Ising-type interaction between neighboring subsystem edges generates entangling gates, enabling universal quantum computation driven by two control parameters that are easily accessible experimentally. Our results demonstrate how symmetry-protected topological phases can be directly harnessed for circuit-model quantum computation in realistic systems.

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

Conservation Laws for Modern Neural Architectures

arXiv:2606.17816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding gradient descent dynamics is key to explaining the success of over-parameterized models, where implicit bias manifests through conservation laws in gradient flow. While such laws are well understood for linear and ReLU networks, they remain largely unexplored for modern architectures. This work develops a unified framework to characterize conservation laws for contemporary models, including feedforward networks with GELU, SiLU, and SwiGLU activations, multihead attention with sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings, and Mixture-of-Experts architectures under diverse gating designs. Our theoretical findings are supported by experiments that validate the predicted invariants.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Traits Run Deeper: Trait-Specific Asymmetric Fusion for Personality Assessment

Personality assessment aims to infer stable personality traits from dynamic behaviors across language, voice, and facial cues. Since different personality dimensions are revealed through distinct behavioral perspectives, modeling trait-specific evidence is challenging. However, most existing approaches adopt a uniform multimodal fusion strategy across all dimensions, assuming identical modality contributions. This overlooks trait-specific modality preferences and introduces cross-modal interference. To address this issue, we propose a novel personality assessment framework called Traits Run Deeper, which consists of three components. Specifically, the Multimodal Foundation Representation (MFR) module constructs personality-oriented multimodal inputs and leverages psychology-informed semantic templates as anchors, enabling foundation models to capture trait-relevant information. Building upon MFR, the Trait-Specific Modality Fusion (TSMF) module acts as an asymmetric fusion mechanism, allowing each dimension to selectively exploit different modality pathways from modality-specific modeling to complementary fusion. Thus, TSMF captures heterogeneous modality preferences while reducing cross-modal contamination. Furthermore, the Distribution-Calibrated Personality Regression (DCPR) module mitigates label imbalance and central tendency bias through target distribution calibration, improving robustness and stability. Experimental results on the AVI Challenge 2026 validation set demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, reducing mean squared error (MSE) by approximately 25% compared with the baseline. Consistent improvements are observed on the official test set, where our method achieves the best performance and ranks first in the Personality Assessment Track. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/MSA-LMC/AVI2026.

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

Understanding helpfulness and harmless tension in reward models

Reward models are a key component of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning language models toward both helpful and harmless behaviour. However, the internal mechanisms underlying these objectives and their conflicts remain poorly understood. We study alignment tension in reward models trained under helpfulness-only, harmlessness-only, and mixed-objective settings. We find that mixed-objective models often underperform single-objective models, indicating interference between objectives. Using activation-based methods, we identify neurons associated with each objective and study their functional roles via targeted ablations. We find that these neurons causally support their corresponding objectives while often negatively affecting the opposing one. We find that a substantial proportion of neurons are shared between helpfulness and harmlessness, and that these shared neurons exert a disproportionate influence on model behaviour, contributing to alignment tension. Additionally, our results provide insights and mechanistic interpretation into how alignment objectives are represented in reward models and why multi-objective alignment remains challenging, motivating future work on disentangled and controllable alignment methods.

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

RouteJudge: An Open Platform for Reproducible and Preference-Aware LLM Routing

arXiv:2606.18774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present RouteJudge, an online pairwise preference evaluation framework for LLM routing systems, with a public platform available at https://routejudge.cn. Different from model-level response evaluation, RouteJudge focuses on router-level decision quality. For each user query, multiple routing strategies independently recommend candidate models under the same model pool and budget constraints. The selected model responses are then presented to users through anonymous pairwise comparisons, and the resulting user preferences are attributed back to the routing strategies behind the compared responses. Each evaluation record stores the query, routing decisions, model responses, preference labels, cost, latency, and task metadata, enabling preference-aware, cost-aware, and task-conditioned analysis of LLM routers. To support the continuous expansion of routing methods in RouteJudge, we further release ORBIT (Optimal Routing and Budgeted Inference Toolbox), a modular and extensible toolbox that standardizes the end-to-end workflow of LLM routing. ORBIT provides unified interfaces for benchmark loading, query representation, router implementation, budget-aware evaluation, and method comparison, allowing researchers to develop and evaluate routing algorithms under consistent protocols. It also serves as the submission and integration layer for RouteJudge: researchers can implement routing methods within ORBIT, validate them on existing routing benchmarks, and submit compatible routers for online preference-based evaluation. The code of ORBIT is available at https://github.com/AIGNLAI/LAMDA-ORBIT.

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

Predicting Mergeability of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Updates

arXiv:2606.19549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) makes it cheap to train many domain- and task-specific language model adapters, but whether two adapters can be merged is usually discovered only after both have been fully trained and evaluated. This late feedback is costly: adapters that are strong in isolation can interfere destructively once their updates are combined. We ask whether this outcome can be anticipated. We formalize adapter mergeability as the degree to which an adapter preserves its single-task utility after merging, and show that it can be forecast from signals measured in the first few percent of training – chiefly how the low-rank updates and their gradients align across tasks and how much they disturb shared representations. We package these signals into MergeProbe, a lightweight predictor that estimates pairwise and set-level retention and turns the estimate into a concrete decision: merge directly, reweight, prune, or route. On MERGE-PEFT, a five-domain benchmark spanning math, code, science, instruction following, and safety, MergeProbe attains the best average and worst-case retention among strong interference-aware merge baselines while adding far less deployment overhead than full task routing. This turns LoRA merging from a post-hoc engineering step into an anticipatory measurement problem.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum gates with parametrically driven multi-qubit couplers

arXiv:2606.14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting quantum processors could significantly profit from enhanced connectivity together with precise control of interactions and gates between qubits. Here we investigate plaquettes of four qubits that are coupled via a central tunable coupling circuit, so that not only gates between qubits connected by an edge of the plaquette can be executed but also between qubits across the diagonal. By numerically and analytically analyzing parametrically driven processes, we explore $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates between any pair of qubits, also across the diagonal, as well as three-qubit interactions and gates. For experimentally available circuit parameters, we for example find $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates with a gate time of 50 ns and 99.9\% fidelity, which is decreased to 99.4\% if two such gates are executed in parallel on disjoint qubit pairs in the plaquette. For three-qubit gates we find fidelities of 95\% fidelity at a gate time of 200 ns.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Neural Tree Reconstruction for the Open Forest Observatory

The Open Forest Observatory (OFO) is a collaboration across universities and other partners to make low-cost forest mapping accessible to ecologists, land managers, and the general public. The OFO is building both a database of geospatial forest data as well as open-source methods and tools for forest mapping by uncrewed aerial vehicle. Such data are useful for a variety of climate applications including prioritizing reforestation efforts, informing wildfire hazard reduction, and monitoring carbon sequestration. In the current iteration of the OFO's forest map database, 3D tree maps are created using classical structure-from-motion techniques. This approach is prone to artifacts, lacks detail, and has particular difficulty on the forest floor where the input data (overhead imagery) has limited visibility. These reconstruction errors can potentially propagate to the downstream scientific tasks (e.g. a wildfire simulation.) Advances in 3D reconstruction, including methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), produce higher quality results that are more robust to sparse views and support data-driven priors. We explore ways to incorporate NeRFs into the OFO dataset, outline future work to support even more state-of-the-art 3D vision models, and describe the importance of high-quality 3D reconstructions for forestry applications.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Trajectory Geometry of Transformer Representations Across Layers

arXiv:2606.09287v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how transformer representations evolve across layers, not merely what they encode, remains an open problem in mechanistic interpretability. We recast the transformer forward pass as a discrete population trajectory through a high-dimensional representation manifold, drawing on geometric tools from computational neuroscience. Rather than probing for pre-specified features, we characterize trajectory geometry using five metrics computed directly in the ambient space: trajectory length, curvature, a semantic convergence index, layerwise cosine similarity, and representational stability. Across three model families (GPT-2, TinyLlama, Qwen2.5) and five controlled prompt families, we report four findings. First, semantically related prompts converge significantly in middle-to-late layers (peak CI 0.41–0.58, p

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

A Tanaka-Type Formula for Compact Sets and Equilibrium Measures of L\'{e}vy Processes

arXiv:2606.17472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tanaka's formula is a classical identity for Brownian motion, and Tsukada (2018) extended it to L\'{e}vy processes not necessarily symmetric. From a potential-theoretic point of view, this formula shows that the invariant function for the process killed upon hitting a singleton can be decomposed into the sum of a martingale part and a local time. In this paper, we generalize this singleton setting and derive a Tanaka-type formula for a compact set $B$. To this end, we introduce the equilibrium measure, defined as the rescaled limit of the $q$-capacity measures, and show that the invariant function for the process killed upon hitting $B$ can be represented as the integral, with respect to the equilibrium measure, of the invariant functions associated with processes killed upon hitting singletons, up to an additive constant called the Robin constant. Moreover, when $B$ is an interval, we obtain explicit representations of the equilibrium measure, the Robin constant, and the martingale part for recurrent stable processes as well as for recurrent spectrally negative L\'{e}vy processes. Finally, we discuss how an analogous Tanaka-type formula can also be established for transient L\'{e}vy processes.

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

Noise-Driven Exploration and Transient Freezing Select Flat Minima in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2601.10962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium mechanism that governs solution selection during training. Numerical experiments reveal a transient exploratory phase in which SGD trajectories repeatedly escape sharp valleys and migrate toward flatter regions of the loss landscape before becoming confined to a final basin. Using a tractable physical model, we show that SGD noise reshapes the loss landscape into an effective potential that preferentially stabilizes flat solutions. We further uncover a transient freezing mechanism: as training progresses, the flattening landscape suppresses transitions between competing valleys. Stronger SGD noise delays this freezing transition, prolonging the exploratory phase and thereby increasing the probability of convergence to flatter minima. Together, these results provide a unified physical framework connecting learning dynamics, loss-landscape geometry, and generalization, and suggest guiding principles for the design of more effective optimization algorithms.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Are Frontier LLMs Ready for Cybersecurity? Evidence for Vertical Foundation Models from Dual-Mode Vulnerability Benchmarks

arXiv:2605.23243v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We evaluate whether frontier LLMs are ready for cybersecurity through a dual-mode benchmark: white-box function-level vulnerability detection (VulnLLM-R, across C/Java/Python) and black-box web application security testing (five production-style applications with 118 ground-truth vulnerabilities across 20+ CWE families, which we will open-source). We test six frontier models (GPT-5.4, Codex~5.3, Claude Opus~4.6, Sonnet~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro and Gemini~3~Flash) and two domain-specialized models across four testing paradigms. Our findings are sobering: (1)~every frontier model produces 10-50% false positive rates in white-box detection, systematically over-predicting vulnerabilities; (2)~in black-box testing, frontier models achieve only 4-8% ground-truth coverage, improving to just 10-19% even with external security tools (Playwright MCP, Burp Suite MCP); (3)~structured penetration-testing methodology encoded in domain-specialized agents raises per-family detection above 50%, demonstrating that methodology, not scale, is the primary lever; and (4)~a domain-specialized defense model achieves the highest precision (0.904) and lowest false positive rate (9.7%) among all models, on a single GPU. We identify the absence of structured security testing traces end-to-end request/response sequences, failure-heavy data, and multi-step attack chains as the fundamental training data bottleneck, and propose self-play security testing as a data generation strategy. Our results make the case for vertical foundation models purpose-built for cybersecurity.