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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Local-GS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Tile-Local Warp Coherence

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has significantly advanced real-time novel view synthesis by representing scenes as dense collections of anisotropic 3D Gaussian primitives. However, the irregular spatial distribution of Gaussians often leads to poor GPU utilization, as warp divergence and redundant computation degrade rendering performance. To address this, we present Local-GS, a warp-coherent rendering paradigm that, organizes Gaussian primitives with respect to SIMT (Single Instruction, Multiple Threads) execution boundaries rather than scene geometry. Specifically, we propose three warp-coherent stages: a hoisting stage that precomputes shared parameters at tile level, a culling stage that discards warps with no contribution, and a blending stage that replaces per-pixel branching with a uniform instruction stream. Across extensive benchmarks on multiple datasets, Local-GS improves efficiency without compromising quality. As a plug-and-play optimization, it provides additional performance gains to all tested baselines, culminating in a $7.76\times$ speedup on Deep Blending scenes.

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

Multi-Turn Reflective Masking Elicits Reasoning in Mask Diffusion Models

While reasoning on autoregressive (AR) models is often performed by chain-of-thought reasoning and reflection, their refinement of previous outputs still relies on fully sequential generation, even when only local edits are needed. In contrast, the masking mechanism in Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) naturally supports explicit local edits on previous outputs, allowing selective refinement without discarding previous answers and generating another from scratch. While this property more closely aligns with how humans correct mistakes by iterative local refinement, existing MDMs do not support multi-turn masking and denoising. We propose Reflective Masking (RM), which elicits such an intrinsic reasoning capability in MDMs via lightweight post-training. RM provides a native test-time scaling, where an MDM iteratively revisits and revises its prior outputs based on evolving context. To exploit insights from previous turns like AR reasoning, we further introduce History Reference, a parameter-free mechanism that leverages intermediate denoising states during revision. Our approach requires no architectural changes and is easily applicable to existing MDMs. Across diverse tasks and modalities, including text generation, Sudoku, and image editing, Reflective Masking consistently outperforms standard masking-based baselines and demonstrates strong generality, positioning RM as a fundamental primitive for reasoning on MDMs.

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

HawkesNest: A Multi-Axis Synthetic Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Pattern Complexity

arXiv:2606.16863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation of spatiotemporal point process (STPP) models relies heavily on opaque real-world datasets, where latent generative structure is unknown and model failures are difficult to attribute. We introduce HawkesNest, a generator-aligned benchmark for controlled spatiotemporal pattern complexity built on a multivariate Hawkes backbone. HawkesNest defines four complexity axes: space–time entanglement, background heterogeneity, cross-type interaction, and domain topology. Each axis is associated with a deterministic index computed from the latent data-generating mechanism. By varying these axes while holding global rate, stability, and simulation budget fixed, HawkesNest enables diagnostic stress tests of STPP models under known structural difficulty. We verify that the indices are monotone and nearly orthogonal under controlled sweeps. We illustrate its use by showing that Hawkes-family baselines degrade under joint heterogeneity–entanglement complexity, even though they are structurally aligned with the Hawkes data-generating backbone. We further show that HawkesNest exposes neural-model sensitivity: AutoSTPP remains vulnerable under isolated increases in space–time entanglement. Code. Available at https://github.com/YahyaAalaila/HawkesNest

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Variational Framework for LLM Generator-Regulator Games

作者:

arXiv:2606.18424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a variational framework for regulated language generation. Starting from autoregressive token sampling, we derive the induced distribution over complete messages and relate it to an entropy-regularized Gibbs law. Regulation is modeled as an optimal discriminator whose convex-dual value is an f-divergence, and the generator-regulator interaction is formulated as a saddle-point problem. The framework applies to moderation, censorship, AI deception detection, compliance auditing, phishing defense, and manipulation control, where regulation concerns a distribution over possible messages rather than a single output. The equilibrium clarifies the tradeoff among utility, entropy, regulatory alignment, and finite-length detectability. Two finite-vocabulary case studies, censorship filtering and phishing defense, illustrate how the theory can be evaluated through utility, entropy, divergence, receiver-side scores, and detection probability.

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

P3B3: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Measuring European and Brazilian Portuguese Variety Bias in LLMs

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become embedded in everyday communication, capturing regional linguistic variation is essential for reliable and equitable language use. In Portuguese, European (pt-PT) and Brazilian (pt-BR) varieties remain unevenly represented, with pt-BR dominating in data quantity, while LLM preference for Portuguese variants remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce P3B3, an expert-curated language variety agnostic benchmark of conversational prompts, along with an evaluation framework for measuring variety bias and controllability. Experiments on several models show that most LLMs exhibit a strong bias toward pt-BR, with variation in controllability across models. These results highlight the need for more balanced multilingual representation across language varieties.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A2D2: Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding

arXiv:2606.13565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion models offer a simple and stable likelihood-based framework for sequence generation, recently extended to any-length settings via token insertion. Principled reward-guided fine-tuning for any-length discrete diffusion, however, remains largely unexplored. We introduce Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding (A2D2), a unified framework for reward-guided fine-tuning of any-length discrete diffusion models via joint optimization of the insertion and unmasking policies together with a quality-based inference schedule. We derive the Radon-Nikodym derivative for the joint insertion-unmasking path measures, enabling theoretically guaranteed convergence to the intractable reward-tilted sequence distribution without requiring target samples. Building on this, we establish unmasking and insertion quality as tractable approaches for minimizing decoding error and introduce the Adaptive Joint Decoding (AJD) loss, which provably yields the optimal path measure that generates the reward-tilted distribution. Empirically, A2D2 improves reward optimization while enhancing generation flexibility and accuracy over prior fixed-length fine-tuning and inference-time guidance methods.

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

Toward Vibe Medicine: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Framework for Clinical Decision Support

arXiv:2606.15504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the advances of large language models and autonomous agents have revolutionized the healthcare field, facilitating diagnosis and improving treatment results. However, most existing AI systems rely on pre-trained knowledge and predefined pipelines, which struggle to learn dynamically from the interactive chat session history that contains patient outcomes and past failures. To address this limitation, we propose VIBEMed, a multi-agent framework with a built-in self-evolution mechanism and architecture-level safety sandbox for robust clinical decision support. The system integrates three specialized agents, including a Clinical Diagnostic Agent (CDA) for hypothesis generation, a Therapeutic Execution Agent (TEA) for treatment planning, and a Clinical Evolution Manager Agent (CEMA) that distills longitudinal clinical feedback into reusable knowledge, transforming multimodal patient information into personalized medical decisions. Through self-evolution mechanism, the framework enables iterative updates across memory, model behavior, and decision strategies, allowing the system to improve over time. Experimental results show that VIBEMed demonstrates superior performance through its evolving mechanism in complex clinical cases, particularly in tasks that require integrated decision-making and longitudinal planning. The framework also supports reliable end-to-end decisions in challenging scenarios such as oncology treatment planning, highlighting its feasibility in real-world clinical contexts. Overall, VIBEMed provides a practical path beyond static AI systems toward adaptive, experience-driven clinical decision support, demonstrating the value of combining multi-agent collaboration with continuous evolution for advancing precision medicine.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DRFLOW: A Deep Research Benchmark for Personalized Workflow Prediction

arXiv:2606.18191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research (DR) systems are increasingly used for complex information-seeking tasks, but existing works mainly focus on generating reports and summaries. In contrast, many enterprise tasks instead require an agent to identify concrete workflows which is a sequence of action-steps. For example, rather than summarizing budgeting policies, an agent should be able to determine the steps needed to answer a question such as: "How do I request new headcount given a fixed budget?". Therefore, we introduce DRFLOW, a benchmark for evaluating personalized workflows predicted by agents from heterogeneous sources. Each task requires the agent to identify relevant evidence from scattered sources, then use that evidence to predict the correct action-step sequence for the user's task. DRFLOW contains 100 tasks across five domains, with 1,246 reference workflow steps grounded in more than 3,900 sources. We define seven diagnostic metrics covering factual grounding, step recovery, structural ordering, condition resolution, and personalization. We further present DRFLOW-Agent (DRFA), a workflow-oriented reference agent to predict personalized workflow. We show that although DRFA improves over strong baseline agents (upto 10.02% average F1 score), there is substantial room for improvement remains across these workflow metrics, indicating that predicting complete and correct personalized workflows remains a challenging frontier for deep research.

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

Breaking Entropy Bounds: Accelerating RL Training via MTP with Rejection Sampling

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key component in modern large language models, yet the rollout stage remains the key bottleneck in RL training pipelines. Although Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) offers a natural solution to accelerate rollouts through speculative decoding, many studies have observed that MTP acceptance rates degrade significantly during RL training, leading to limited speedup performance. To address this bottleneck, we present Bebop, a systematic study of MTP in LLM post-training, and offer practical recipes to integrate MTP into large-scale RL pipelines. First, we reveal that the MTP acceptance rate is fundamentally bounded by the fluctuation of model entropy, which demonstrates a clear negative linear relationship with the rise of entropy in the RL stage. Second, we show that probabilistic rejection sampling largely alleviates the disturbance introduced by entropy in RL compared to greedy draft sampling. We further identify that the conventional MTP training objectives (cross-entropy or KL) are suboptimal in such settings, and therefore we propose a novel end-to-end TV loss that directly optimizes multi-step rejection sampling acceptance rate, yielding ~10% acceptance rate improvements, achieving up to 95% acceptance rates and up to 25% extra inference throughput gains across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and agentic tasks. Third, we test various online MTP training strategies during RL and show that pre-RL MTP training with e2e TV loss and rejection sampling achieves a consistent acceptance rate and speedup throughout the entire RL, eliminating the need for costly online MTP updating. We provide extensive experiments and analysis that validate our findings. Experimental results show our method achieves up to 1.8x end-to-end acceleration in async RL training of Qwen3.5, Qwen3.6, and Qwen3.7 models.

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

TS-Memory: Plug-and-Play Memory for Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2602.11550v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) achieve strong zero-shot forecasting through large-scale pre-training, but adapting them to downstream domains under distribution shift remains challenging. Existing solutions face a trade-off: Parametric Adaptation can cause catastrophic forgetting and requires costly multi-domain maintenance, while Non-Parametric Retrieval improves forecasts but incurs high inference latency due to datastore search. We propose Parametric Memory Distillation and implement it as TS-Memory, a lightweight memory adapter that augments frozen TSFMs. TS-Memory is trained in two stages. First, we construct an offline, retrieval-leakage-safe kNN teacher that synthesizes confidence-aware quantile targets from retrieved futures. Second, we distill this retrieval-induced distributional correction into a lightweight memory adapter via confidence-gated supervision. During inference, TS-Memory fuses memory and backbone predictions with constant-time overhead, enabling retrieval-free deployment. Experiments across diverse TSFMs and benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both point and probabilistic forecasting over representative adaptation methods, with efficiency comparable to the frozen backbone. Code: https://github.com/sisuolv/TS-Memory.

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

PHASE: Pauli Hierarchical Assembly on Subdivided Elements for Quantum-Compatible Operator Synthesis

arXiv:2606.11478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficiently decomposing finite element stiffness matrices into the Pauli basis is challenging due to the exponential growth of Pauli strings with problem size. A naive Pauli expansion requires $\Theta(8^{\lceil \log_2 N \rceil})$ operations, where $N$ denotes the number of degrees of freedom, rendering direct decomposition infeasible for large systems. Existing approaches exploit algebraic sparsity or operator structure but do not incorporate the geometric organization intrinsic to finite element discretizations, and consequently exhibit poor scaling for stiffness matrices. To address this problem, we introduce PHASE, a hierarchical, geometry-aware Pauli decomposition algorithm that leverages recursive mesh partitioning to organize element contributions across multiple spatial scales. PHASE employs a hybrid strategy that combines full- and reduced-space Tensorized Pauli Decomposition with Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform-based aggregation to assemble global Pauli coefficients efficiently. We show that this approach yields a dimension-dependent reduction in the exponential scaling exponent of Pauli assembly asymptotic complexity relative to existing methods, reducing the cost from $2^{2{\lceil \log_2 N \rceil}}$ to $2^{\gamma_d{\lceil \log_2 N \rceil}}$ with $\gamma_d < 2$ under standard mesh regularity and balanced partition assumptions. These results substantially improve the feasibility of quantum-compatible operator synthesis for large-scale finite element models.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Attention as Frustrated Synchronization

A network of oscillators that synchronizes perfectly computes nothing further, so an attention architecture built from synchronization must locate its computation in structured departures from agreement. We introduce the Frustrated Synchronization Network (FSN), whose token states are phases on a torus and whose entire value pathway is one learned complex coupling kernel over harmonics and a one-step delay. Each component of the kernel is a frustration in the sense of the synchronization literature. The complex phases are static Kuramoto-Sakaguchi frustration angles, the signed harmonics are repulsive Daido components, and the delay term, which couples each token to the successors of the tokens it attends to, is algebraically identical to Kuramoto-Sakaguchi coupling whose frustration angle is the data's own transition, so next-token prediction is implemented as synchronization frustrated by the data. At matched one-million-parameter and training budgets on character-level text and code, the FSN's validation loss is below a tuned RoPE-SwiGLU transformer's at every epoch measured, and the comparison survives training the baseline to convergence: every thirty-epoch enwik8 seed finishes below the transformer's converged fifty-epoch loss of 1.611, and the FSN's completed fifty-epoch runs converge to 1.5953 +/- 0.0014. A variant with every feed-forward block replaced by mean-field coupling to learned collective modes, leaving no multilayer perceptron in the stack, tracks the transformer. On natural text the unfrustrated base layer falls behind the converged transformer at every copy depth, worst on long-range copy events; the kernel reverses the deficit at every depth of four and beyond. Headline comparisons are at the one-million-parameter scale; a scale ladder is complete through four million parameters with the advantage persisting, and remaining arms are marked as in progress.

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

DeFrame: Debiasing Large Language Models Against Framing Effects

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their fair responses across demographics has become crucial. Despite many efforts, an ongoing challenge is hidden bias: LLMs appear fair under standard evaluations, but can produce biased responses outside those evaluation settings. In this paper, we identify framing – differences in how semantically equivalent prompts are expressed (e.g., "A is better than B" vs. "B is worse than A") – as an underexplored contributor to this gap. We first introduce the concept of "framing disparity" to quantify the impact of framing on fairness evaluation. By augmenting fairness evaluation benchmarks with alternative framings, we find that (1) fairness scores vary significantly with framing and (2) existing debiasing methods improve overall (i.e., frame-averaged) fairness, but often fail to reduce framing-induced disparities. To address this, we propose a framing-aware debiasing method that encourages LLMs to be more consistent across framings. Experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces overall bias and improves robustness against framing disparities, enabling LLMs to produce fairer and more consistent responses.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Adaptive $k$NN graph model

arXiv:2601.16509v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The $k$-nearest neighbors ($k$NN) algorithm is a cornerstone of non-parametric classification in artificial intelligence, yet its deployment in large-scale applications is persistently constrained by the computational trade-off between inference speed and accuracy. Existing approximate nearest neighbor solutions accelerate retrieval but often degrade classification precision and lack adaptability in selecting the optimal neighborhood size ($k$). Here, we present an adaptive graph model that decouples inference latency from computational complexity. By integrating a Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graph with a pre-computed voting mechanism, our framework completely transfers the computational burden of neighbor selection and weighting to the training phase. Within this topological structure, higher graph layers enable rapid navigation, while lower layers encode precise, node-specific decision boundaries with adaptive neighbor counts. Benchmarking against eight state-of-the-art baselines across six diverse datasets, we demonstrate that this architecture significantly accelerates inference speeds, achieving real-time performance, without compromising classification accuracy. These findings offer a scalable, robust solution to the inherent inference bottleneck of $k$NN, laying an adaptive structural foundation for graph-based nonparametric learning.

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

Small LLMs: Pruning vs. Training from Scratch

Pruning promises a shortcut to strong small language models. In this work, we examine this promise by pruning Llama-3.1-8B at pruning ratios of 0.5–0.8 with six methods spanning depth, width, and sparse granularities, under two controlled token-matched settings. (1) With the same training token budget, pruned initialization consistently outperforms random initialization. This shows that the parent model provides a strong starting point, although the advantage narrows as the training token budget grows and as the pruning ratio rises, nearly vanishing at the highest pruning ratio we study. (2) When training from scratch is instead given the full token budget consumed by the whole pipeline, pruning at finer granularities still retains an advantage, while coarser structured pruning can be matched or surpassed. This suggests that the parent model transfers knowledge that additional training tokens alone cannot fully recover, but only at fine granularity. Taken together, our results yield a clear recommendation: with a large pretrained model in hand and a limited training token budget, pruning is better than training from scratch; when the training budget is not limited, training from scratch can be competitive for coarser pruning, so a large pretrained parent is not always necessary.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Rigidity of infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian marginals

arXiv:2606.18654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian one-dimensional marginals. We formulate the conjecture that joint Gaussianity of a single pair of coordinates forces the entire sequence to be a Gaussian process. Although this conjecture remains open, we prove that joint Gaussianity of the first four coordinates is sufficient. We also establish the corresponding two-point criterion under the additional assumption that the directing measure is almost surely infinitely divisible.

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

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2605.26595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in a Dephased Photonic Quantum Walk

arXiv:2606.15935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamical phase transitions in open quantum systems govern how non-equilibrium states relax toward a stationary state. We study these transitions experimentally using a discrete-time photonic quantum walk on a three-node graph. A tunable synthetic gauge flux and calibrated dephasing allow us to control time-reversal symmetry and the detailed balance properties of the effective Markovian dynamics. With detailed balance, we observe a first-order dynamical phase transition marked by a crossing of real Liouvillian eigenvalues. When detailed balance is broken, we observe a second-order dynamical phase transition at an exceptional point where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce. By progressively reducing the dephasing strength, we track the crossover toward the quantum-coherent regime and determine that the transitions persist down to a finite threshold. Our results link Liouvillian spectral topology to relaxation criticality and demonstrate a controllable platform for engineered dissipative dynamics.

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

Contrast-Informed Augmentation and Domain-Adversarial Training for Adult-to-Neonatal MR Reconstruction Generalization

Purpose: To investigate whether contrast-informed data augmentation and domain-adversarial training improve the adult-to-neonatal generalization of the E2E-VarNet. Methods: Three training regimes were investigated: (1) adult-only training with unaugmented adult data, (2) mixed training with paired unaugmented and neonatal-informed augmented adult data, and (3) mixed training with a domain-adversarial objective. Models were trained on retrospectively undersampled multi-coil adult T2-weighted brain MR data and evaluated on neonatal and adult test data at acceleration factors $R=4$ and $R=8$ using quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluation. Feature analyses assessed whether domain-adversarial training altered the latent representations of unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test samples. Results: Mixed training (Mixed) and mixed domain-adversarial training (Mixed-DAT) outperformed unaugmented adult-only training (Unaug-Only) when evaluated on neonatal data. At R=4, Mixed-DAT achieved the best performance (SSIM = 0.924 +/- 0.027, PSNR = 33.98 +/- 1.15 dB). At R=8, Mixed-DAT performed best when measured using SSIM (0.848 +/- 0.031 vs. 0.766 +/- 0.037 for Unaug-Only and 0.814 +/- 0.035 for Mixed) and Mixed performed best when measured using PSNR (29.56 +/- 0.83 dB vs. 26.26 +/- 0.78 dB for Unaug-Only and 29.43 +/- 0.83 dB for Mixed-DAT). Qualitative assessment of t-SNE plots suggested that Mixed-DAT increased the overlap among the latent representations of the unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test data. Conclusion: Contrast-informed augmentation and domain-adversarial training improved adult-to-neonatal generalization of deep learning-based MR reconstruction. These findings suggest that contrast-informed data augmentation combined with adversarial training may improve robustness to domain shift in undersampled neonatal MR reconstruction.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Microwave-free vector magnetometry and crystal orientation determination with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers using Bayesian inference

arXiv:2512.13835v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond provide a solid-state platform for quantum sensing. While optically detected magnetic resonance techniques offer high sensitivity, their reliance on microwaves introduces heating and stray electromagnetic fields that can perturb nearby samples. Optical approaches based on cross-relaxation between differently oriented NV centers remove this constraint but have so far required stringent alignment of the external field with crystallographic axes, restricting their practicality. Here we introduce a general framework for microwave-free vector magnetometry at near-zero field that leverages Bayesian inference to extract both the magnetic field vector and the NV orientation directly from photoluminescence maps. An analytical model of cross-relaxation resonances enables efficient inference under arbitrary field and orientation configurations, while naturally incorporating the discrete degeneracies of the NV symmetry. We experimentally demonstrate robust orientation determination and vector-field reconstruction, establishing a general route toward compact and alignment-free NV magnetometers for practical sensing applications.

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

The Art of Mixology: Mixup-based Obfuscation for Privacy-Preserving Split Learning in Large Language Models

Split learning provides a practical paradigm for resource-constrained users to train Large Language Models (LLMs) by offloading computation-intensive layers to a server while keeping raw data local. However, existing privacy-preserving split learning methods still face a difficult trade-off among utility, privacy, efficiency, and stability. Specifically, these methods often suffer from substantial utility degradation, remain vulnerable to advanced data reconstruction attacks, incur prohibitive computational and communication overhead, or exhibit unstable performance across different tasks. In this paper, we propose MIXGUARD, a novel mixup-based privacy-preserving split learning framework for LLMs. MIXGUARD introduces token-level obfuscation, representation-level obfuscation, and adaptive gradient perturbation mechanisms, which operate jointly to preserve useful learning signals while preventing privacy leakage to the server. Technically, MIXGUARD first constructs a lightweight calibration model on a public dataset to refine the approximated target representation, and then applies this model during privacy-preserving fine-tuning on private data. We conduct extensive experiments on four classification tasks and four text generation tasks across multiple LLM families, model sizes, architectures, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that MIXGUARD preserves model utility comparable to non-split training baselines, consistently achieves stronger privacy protection than existing split learning defense methods against state-of-the-art data reconstruction attacks, and remains robust under adaptive attack settings.

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

Softmax as Linear Attention in the Large-Prompt Regime: a Measure-based Perspective

arXiv:2512.11784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis. We develop a unified, measure-based framework for studying single-layer softmax attention under both finite and infinite prompts. For i.i.d. Gaussian inputs, we lean on the fact that the softmax operator converges in the infinite-prompt limit to a linear operator acting on the underlying input-token measure. Building on this insight, we establish non-asymptotic concentration bounds for the output and gradient of softmax attention, quantifying how rapidly the finite-prompt model approaches its infinite-prompt counterpart, and prove that this concentration remains stable along the entire training trajectory in general in-context learning settings with sub-Gaussian tokens. In the case of in-context linear regression, we use the tractable infinite-prompt dynamics to analyze training at finite prompt length. Our results allow optimization analyses developed for linear attention to transfer directly to softmax attention when prompts are sufficiently long, showing that large-prompt softmax attention inherits the analytical structure of its linear counterpart. This, in turn, provides a principled and broadly applicable toolkit for studying the training dynamics and statistical behavior of softmax attention layers in large prompt regimes.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Loss Landscape Poisoning: Targeted Extraction of Unseen Training Data from LLMs

arXiv:2606.17110v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly trained on proprietary or sensitive data, from private healthcare and financial records to user conversations containing secrets. Ensuring the privacy of such data against extraction attacks has become a central concern. In this paper, we ask whether an attacker who can poison a portion of the training data can facilitate the leakage of a separate target record they have no access to. We answer in the affirmative and show that such leakage can be induced by a poisoning mechanism that reshapes the model's local loss landscape around the target completion. Our key insight is that poisoning to create a sharp loss minimum at the target, surrounded by elevated loss on nearby alternatives, forces the model to memorize the target as the unique low-loss solution in its neighborhood. The attack requires no architectural changes, and generalizes across centralized and federated learning settings. We demonstrate that the attack amplifies privacy leakage across language (up to 100% successful extraction), and vision-language models (up 90% successful extraction). We show that the attack is thwarted when the model is trained to be differentially private. However, we introduce a new attack that directly probes the loss landscape bypassing even differential privacy defenses.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CSWinUNETR: Segmentation of Thin Anatomical Structures in Medical Images

arXiv:2606.19824v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate segmentation of thin, tortuous anatomical structures, such as retinal vessels, cerebral vasculature, and facial wrinkles, remains challenging due to low contrast, frequent discontinuities, and severe class imbalance. Although recent convolutional and Transformer-based models have improved performance, they often yield fragmented predictions and fail to recover fine branches. We propose CSWinUNETR, a general-purpose backbone for 2D and 3D thin-structure segmentation. It employs cross-shaped stripe self-attention to model long-range principal-axis context and incorporates cyclic shifts to enhance information exchange across stripes. To better preserve fine-grained details, we further introduce a detail-enhanced multi-scale self-attention module that aggregates contextual features from multi-resolution representations. In addition, we propose sparse-control dynamic snake convolution, which reconstructs reliable dense curvilinear kernels from sparsely predicted control points to better follow tortuous geometry. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks across ophthalmology, neurovascular imaging, and dermatology demonstrate that CSWinUNETR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods without task-specific post-processing or topology-aware losses. The code is available at https://github.com/labhai/CSWinUNETR.

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

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.