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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Steady-State Noise Signatures of Lindbladian Exceptional Points

arXiv:2606.13377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points (EPs) are non-Hermitian degeneracies at which two or more eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenvectors coalesce. In open quantum systems, exceptional points can arise in the Lindbladian governing the dissipative dynamics. Their signatures have so far been mainly identified in finite-time observables, such as transient currents, while steady-state average currents generally provide no direct evidence of the underlying exceptional-point structure. In this work, we demonstrate that signatures of Lindbladian EPs can nevertheless be accessed in the steady-state regime through current noise. We derive general expressions for current correlation functions within a Lindblad master-equation framework and show, in particular, how exceptional points affect their behaviour as a function of the time delay. We illustrate these results with the paradigmatic example of two interacting qubits coupled to two reservoirs, where the steady-state noise clearly distinguishes overdamped, underdamped, and critical regimes. Our results establish current correlation functions as a steady-state probe of Lindbladian EPs in open quantum systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents

Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations. We propose ModeratorLM, a role-playing voice agent that conditions turn-taking behavior on an explicitly assigned role in multi-party settings. The system is built on a speech large language model operating in chunk-wise streaming manner. We further introduce a reasoning-augmented variant that incorporates chain-of-thought reasoning over conversational context and the assigned role. We construct RolePlayConv, a large-scale synthetic dataset of spoken multi-party conversations with diverse assistant roles. Experiments on real-world meeting data and RolePlayConv show improved turn-taking precision by over 40% and recall by more than 70%, while substantially reducing false-positive interruptions compared to non-role-conditioned baselines.

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

Why Tree-Style Branching Matters for Thought Advantage Estimation in GRPO

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains Chain-of-Thought reasoning with verifiable rewards, but estimating thought-level advantages without value functions often suffers from high variance. Although tree-style branching is used in practice to reduce variance, it lacks a theoretical explanation of why it works and whether it is important or potentially necessary. We study thought-level advantage estimation in GRPO from a variance perspective under a minimal tree-style setting where multiple continuations are sampled for each thought. Using the multivariate delta method, we reveal a sampling-dimension asymmetry. Increasing sampled thoughts ($K$) leaves a strictly positive estimation-variance floor, whereas increasing continuations per thought ($M$) drives the leading-order estimation variance to zero at rate $1/M$. This implies that, within the fixed-temperature GRPO-style estimator without value models studied here, accurate thought-level advantage estimation cannot be achieved by scaling thought sampling alone, making continuation-level branching a principled and potentially necessary mechanism rather than a heuristic. Experiments further provide empirical evidence for its effectiveness and potential necessity, demonstrating improved optimization stability, training efficiency, and final performance not only in math but also across vision domains and under different model architectures and sizes.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing Wigner Negativity in Scattering Processes Using Energetic Cost Functions

arXiv:2606.15101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wigner negativities (WNs) are key signatures of non-Gaussian bosonic states and essential resources for quantum technologies. We study their generation in the scattering of coherent pulses by a two-level atom coupled to a one-dimensional reservoir, a unitary and energy-preserving platform. Optimization in this multimode setting is hindered by the complexity of evaluating Wigner functions. We overcome this challenge by introducing energetic cost functions that identify output modes most likely to host large negativities. First using incoherent energy and then isolating a genuinely non-Gaussian contribution, we demonstrate a strong correlation between these quantities and WNs. This correlation extends beyond short, intense pulses to encompass pulses of finite energy, where photons are scattered while the two-level atom is driven. Focusing on the energy-efficiency of the process, we show that maximally efficient generation takes place for one input photon, on average, spectrally mode-matched with the atom.

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

LLM-as-Code Agentic Programming for Agent Harness

arXiv:2606.15874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every major LLM agent framework gives the LLM the role of orchestrator; the model decides what to do next, when to call tools, and when to stop. We argue that token explosion, control-flow hallucination, and unreliable completion are not implementation bugs but architectural consequences of assigning the deterministic work of looping, branching, and sequencing to a probabilistic system. A better prompt or a stronger model cannot guarantee the reliability of the LLM agent. We therefore propose Agentic Programming, in which the program governs all control flow, and the LLM is itself part of it, an adaptive component we call LLM-as-Code and invoke only where a task calls for reasoning or generation. Within each call the model keeps full flexibility, but it cannot alter the program's execution path. With control in the program, the LLM's context is built from the execution history's call tree and forms a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Each call's context length is then determined by its call depth rather than by accumulation over steps. A case study of computer-use agents shows that the design is practical, not just a theoretical stance, substantially improving the stability of long visual operation sequences.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Towards Direct Latent-Space Synthesis for Parallel Branches in LLM-Agent Workflows

Large language models increasingly serve as execution engines for agentic systems, yet they still consume context through a sequential text interface. This creates a mismatch with modern structured agent workflows, in which independent branches explore subtasks, retrieve evidence, or generate candidate solutions before a final synthesis step. Existing systems typically merge these branches by concatenating their textual outputs, which discards the parallel structure and incurs redundant prefill computation. In this work, we introduce Parallel-Synthesis, a plug-and-play framework that enables a synthesizer to directly consume the KV caches produced by parallel worker agents. Parallel-Synthesis combines a cache mapper that calibrates independently generated branch caches with a fine-tuned synthesizer adapter that enables generation from this non-sequential cache interface. We train Parallel-Synthesis using data that exposes the synthesizer to parallel cache contexts, teaches aggregation across cached branches, and distills reasoning behavior from standard text-concatenation-based synthesis. Across nine downstream datasets spanning math, science QA, code generation, GAIA, and multi-agent database diagnosis, Parallel-Synthesis matches or outperforms text-based synthesis on seven datasets and remains close on the other two. It also reduces time-to-first-token by 2.5x-11x, suggesting that direct cache-based synthesis is a promising interface for more native and efficient synthesis over parallel agent branches.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs

arXiv:2606.20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E}

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Graph Diffusion Residuals for Control-Function Instrumental Variables

arXiv:2606.14636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Control-function instrumental variable estimators need a first-stage residual, not merely a first-stage prediction. High-capacity first stages can interpolate treatment and leave too little residual information for the outcome equation. We study Adaptive Anisotropic Instrumental Heat Flow (A-IHF), a deterministic graph-diffusion residual extractor for flexible control functions. A-IHF treats treatment as a signal on a graph of first-stage features, uses pilot diffusion to detect large treatment jumps, attenuates conductance across those jumps, and computes the generated control with a sparse graph resolvent. Its observational selection rule uses only $(Z,X)$, combining graph generalized cross-validation, roughness, residualized-treatment relevance, and graph-admissibility filtering. The analysis decomposes error into structural leakage, residual attenuation, and residualized treatment variation, yielding finite-sample bounds, graph-admissibility rates under latent piecewise-smooth geometry, and finite-path selection calibration. Across 54 synthetic benchmark cells with tuned graph, kernel, tree, boosting, series, and neural control-function baselines, guarded observational A-IHF has the lowest average structural-response MSE; the A-IHF family beats the best non-A-IHF baseline in 32 cells. Performance is strongest when the graph captures piecewise-smooth first-stage structure.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Bulk-Calibrated Credal Ambiguity Sets: Fast, Tractable Decision Making under Out-of-Sample Contamination

arXiv:2601.21324v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributionally robust optimisation (DRO) minimises the worst-case expected loss over an ambiguity set that can capture distributional shifts in out-of-sample environments. While Huber (linear-vacuous) contamination is a classical minimal-assumption model for an $\varepsilon$-fraction of arbitrary perturbations, including it in an ambiguity set can make the worst-case risk infinite and the DRO objective vacuous unless one imposes strong boundedness or support assumptions. We address these challenges by introducing bulk-calibrated credal ambiguity sets: we learn a high-mass bulk set from data while considering contamination inside the bulk and bounding the remaining tail contribution separately. This leads to a closed-form, finite $\mathrm{mean}+\sup$ robust objective and tractable linear or second-order cone programs for common losses and bulk geometries. Through this framework, we highlight and exploit the equivalence between the imprecise probability (IP) notion of upper expectation and the worst-case risk, demonstrating how IP credal sets translate into DRO objectives with interpretable tolerance levels. Experiments on heavy-tailed inventory control, geographically shifted house-price regression, and demographically shifted text classification show competitive robustness-accuracy trade-offs and efficient optimisation times, using Bayesian, frequentist, or empirical reference distributions.

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

Non-invertible symmetries out of equilibrium: Eigenstate order and Floquet physics

arXiv:2508.14213v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Through the study of the Rep($D_8$) non-invertible symmetry, we show how non-invertible symmetries manifest in dynamics. Results are presented for dynamics generated by Hamiltonians as well as Floquet unitaries. For both examples, the role of the non-invertible symmetry is studied through the appearance of non-invertible symmetry protected edge modes. In addition, the role of the non-invertible symmetry for the Hamiltonian is studied through eigenstate order. In particular, by considering the effect of symmetry preserving disorder, the non-invertible symmetry is shown to give rise to degeneracies in the spectra of the Hamiltonian that can only be completely lifted at orders of perturbation that scale with system size. The eigenstates of disordered Hamiltonians, whose ground state correspond to non-trivial symmetry protected topological (SPT) states, are shown to have either trivial or non-trivial SPT order that are detected as non-zero expectation value of string order-parameters. In contrast, non-trivial SPT order is absent in the eigenstates of trivial SPT Hamiltonians with disorder. The interface between two different SPT phases host edge modes whose dynamics is studied numerically and analytically. The edge mode is shown to oscillate at frequencies related to different effective chain lengths that are weighted by the temperature, becoming an exact zero mode in the limit of zero temperature. A Floquet model with the non-invertible symmetry is constructed whose edge mode is shown to exhibit period-doubled dynamics at low effective-temperatures. The zero and period-doubled edge modes differ from those in conventional SPTs by being symmetric under the invertible symmetry, while being charged under the non-invertible symmetry.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Robust integration of weakly anchored spatial multi-omics

Spatial multi-omics holds great promise for dissecting complex biological processes, though inherent technical constraints continue to limit its widespread adoption. Currently, most studies therefore measure distinct omics features on separate tissue sections, necessitating spatial diagonal integration. An emerging practical solution is to leverage hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) images as an integration anchor, given their ubiquity, low cost, and compatibility across tissue preparations. However, this anchor is frequently compromised in real-world settings by variations in H&E staining style, absence of reliable histological landmarks, and mismatches in spatial resolutions across omics modalities. To address this, we introduce SpaWeaver, a computational framework that couples a pathology foundation model with a graph Transformer and a latent feature aligner module, providing a highly robust solution for weakly anchored spatial omics data diagonal integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpaWeaver exhibits superior robustness against isolated or synergistic weak-anchoring factors. The spatial multi-omics profiles generated by SpaWeaver link molecular features originally separated on two sections, unlocking diverse downstream analyses once exclusive to co-assayed spatial multi-omics data, including niche-aware cell-cell communication inference and multi-omics resolved cell state. In this study, it unveils tumor-distance-dependent fibroblast-CD4+ T-cell signaling in human colon adenocarcinoma and identifies a hypoxic glycolytic tumor state with pyknotic nuclei in human ovarian cancer. Overall, our approach bridges readily accessible single-omics measurements across weakly anchored tissue sections, enabling unified spatial multi-omics characterization and system-level tissue analysis.

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

It's About Time: Temporal References in Emergent Communication

Emergent communication enables agents to develop bespoke languages that improve communication efficiency. Despite the known importance of temporal structure in natural language, there is no existing evidence of temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential factors for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. A minimal change in agent architecture, using a different batching method, allows the emergence of temporal references. This modified design is compared with the standard architecture in a temporal referential games environment, which emphasises temporal relationships. The analysis shows that over 95% of the agents with the modified batching method develop temporal references, without changes to their loss function. We consider temporal referencing necessary for future improvements to the agents' communication efficiency, enabling future agents to use a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. These insights provide the basis for incorporation of temporal references into other emergent communication settings, and investigation of other aspects of language.

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

Beyond Domains: Reusing Web Skills via Transferable Interaction Patterns

Large language model (LLM) web agents are usually deployed as tool callers: each turn, the model reads a fresh page observation and emits one structured tool action. When every action is a low-level primitive, horizons grow quickly and so do policy-facing LLM completions, dominating latency and cost on benchmarks such as Mind2Web and WebArena. Recent systems therefore wrap repeated interaction fragments as web skills: callable tools built from successful trajectories or induced programs, so one call can replace several primitives. However, prior skill libraries are still triggered mainly by instruction similarity or coarse site metadata, which yields low skill reuse on held-out sites and leaves much of the potential step and token reduction on the table. We present SkillMigrator, an agent that learns reusable web skills and transfers them across sites by matching layout structure rather than specific element references. Each induced skill is stored as a transferable interaction pattern (TIP): the skill paired with a structural sketch of the snapshot at induction time. At test time, SkillMigrator retrieves TIPs by layout similarity and grounds their references on the live page. The rest of the stack is standard: accessibility-snapshot observations with stable references, and fixed tool calling over primitives plus skill invocations. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, SkillMigrator reduces the average LLM-action count on successful trajectories by 8-10% across both WebArena and Mind2Web at matched success rate.

16.
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.

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

Exploding and vanishing gradients in deep neural networks: the effect of residual connections

arXiv:2606.17013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The well known phenomenon of exploding and vanishing gradients in deep neural networks is analyzed using multiplicative ergodic theory. The effect of adding a residual connection is explained in this context. Specifically, a characterization of Liapunov exponents due to Furstenberg and Kifer is exploited in order to make a precise statement about the Liapunov spectrum and the effect of residual connections on it.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Artificial Intelligence-Based Detection of Airway Mucus Plugs on CT and Associations With Clinical Outcomes in COPDGene

RATIONALE: Airway mucus plugging is a clinically relevant manifestation of airway pathology in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is associated with increased mortality even in early disease; however, visual computed tomography (CT) assessment is subjective and labor intensive. OBJECTIVES: To develop an AI-based quantitative CT method for automated detection of airway mucus plugging and evaluate associations with physiologic impairment and clinical outcomes. METHODS: Inspiratory CT scans from 8,971 COPDGene Phase 1 (GOLD 0-4 and PRISm) participants were analyzed. An AI-based framework combining 3D airway segmentation discontinuities and convolutional neural network classification identified mucus plug obstructions, yielding mucus plug burden (total plug count). Associations with outcomes were evaluated using covariate-adjusted models. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS : Higher mucus plug burden was associated with lower post-bronchodilator FEV % predicted ({rho} = -0.41; P < 0.001), greater air trapping (LAA < -856 HU; {rho} = 0.33; P < 0.001), worse health status (SGRQ; {rho} = 0.31; P < 0.001), and shorter 6-minute walk distance ({rho} = -0.26; P < 0.001). Among GOLD 1-4 participants, mucus plug presence was independently associated with increased all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.28; P < 0.005) and exacerbation frequency (adjusted incidence rate ratio, 1.32; P < 0.005). Plug presence was also associated with increased respiratory mortality across GOLD categories and cardiovascular mortality in GOLD 1-2. CONCLUSIONS: AI-based quantitative CT assessment of airway mucus plugging provides a scalable, reproducible measure associated with physiologic impairment and adverse outcomes in COPD, supporting its role in risk stratification and future therapeutic studies.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Complete entanglement detection using polynomial invariants

arXiv:2606.16712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Stable, bidirectional electro-optic transduction in thin film lithium tantalate

arXiv:2606.12726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient and stable microwave-optical transduction is a key enabling technology for distributed superconducting quantum computing and heterogeneous quantum networks. Electro-optic transducers based on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) have shown strong promise, but demonstrations to date have been limited by various factors such as low frequency bias drift, low efficiency, fabrication complexity, and scalability. Here we demonstrate the first integrated electro-optic microwave-optical transducers realized in thin-film lithium tantalate (TFLT), a material platform offering Pockels nonlinearity comparable to TFLN together with improved bias stability and high-power handling. We fabricate superconducting microwave resonators coupled to tunable photonic-molecule optical resonators using wafer-scale deep ultraviolet lithography, offering high-throughput production of hundreds of devices per wafer. Across six devices we observe coherent bidirectional conversion between C-band optical photons and 4.9-5.5 GHz microwave photons, with measured on-chip efficiencies and inferred single-photon coupling rates g_0/2{\pi} ~ 1 kHz consistent with theory. Continuous operation over multiple days is achieved using a static bias field with minimal feedback, demonstrating a major operational advantage. We further characterize optical loss statistics, microwave resonator performance, and optically induced added noise under pulsed pumping, finding less than one added photon for 100 microsecond pulses at the highest measured efficiencies. These results establish TFLT as a scalable and robust electro-optic platform for future quantum interconnects and modular quantum processors.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning from almost nothing: How neural networks survive heavy input corruption

arXiv:2606.11319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from imperfect data is a central theme in machine learning, connecting practical questions of robustness to fundamental questions of learnability. Here we examine attribute noise: learning from corrupted inputs while keeping the labels intact, a setting that has received considerably less analytical attention than its label-noise counterpart. We consider two types of corruption models: additive noise and replacement noise. Through experiments with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on corrupted classification datasets, we find that neural networks remain robust, maintaining well-above-chance accuracy even when inputs are >90% corrupted – far beyond human recognition. To understand this robustness, we analyze infinite-width networks in the heavy-corruption regime using a mean-field-inspired approach and derive a leading-order decision rule for the classification outcome: the network implements a prototype rule, the nearest-class-mean, assigning each test point to the class whose training-set average it most closely resembles. This leading-order decision rule is universal across a broad range of MLP architectures, holding for any depth, as well as a wide class of activation functions and noise distributions. The same centroid mechanism closely matches finite-width network behavior in our experiments and provides an interpretable and analytically tractable account of why learning can succeed even when individual training examples carry almost no signal.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Red-Teaming Agent Execution Contexts: Open-World Security Evaluation on OpenClaw

arXiv:2605.11047v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic language-model systems increasingly rely on mutable execution contexts, including files, memory, tools, skills, and auxiliary artifacts, creating security risks beyond explicit user prompts. This paper presents DeepTrap, an automated framework for discovering contextual vulnerabilities in OpenClaw. DeepTrap formulates adversarial context manipulation as a black-box trajectory-level optimization problem that balances risk realization, benign-task preservation, and stealth. It combines risk-conditioned evaluation, multi-objective trajectory scoring, reward-guided beam search, and reflection-based deep probing to identify high-value compromised contexts. We construct a 42-case benchmark spanning six vulnerability classes and seven operational scenarios, and evaluate nine target models using attack and utility grading scores. Results show that contextual compromise can induce substantial unsafe behavior while preserving user-facing task completion, demonstrating that final-response evaluation is insufficient. The findings highlight the need for execution-centric security evaluation of agentic AI systems. Our code is released at: https://github.com/ZJUICSR/DeepTrap

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Squeeze-Release: Iterative Pruning with Exact Structural Minimization

arXiv:2606.14346v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unstructured pruning produces sparse weight tensors, but the standard implementation keeps tensor shapes unchanged so the deployed model is no smaller than before pruning. We present an exact structural rewrite, which we call minimization, that converts a masked network into a smaller dense network with the same forward function up to floating-point rounding. The Squeeze-Release cycle iterates pruning and minimization with an intermediate release step that re-enables the exact-zero positions inside the compacted tensors as small calibrated noise, turning otherwise wasted capacity back into trainable parameters. Successive cycles use that capacity to find structural redundancy a single pass cannot reach. We additionally introduce CompensatedLayerNorm, a function-preserving replacement for LayerNorm that extends minimization to channel reduction across LayerNorm-equipped residual streams. Squeeze-Release compresses the deployable network to 39x smaller than the unpruned model on a fully-connected model network and 14.8x smaller on modern CNN (ConvNeXt-Tiny), at comparable accuracy. In addition we prove that the rewrite can be extended to transformer architectures.

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

X-Tokenizer: A Multimodal Action Tokenizer for Vision-Language-Action Pretraining

Modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models must bridge pretrained vision-language reasoning and precise continuous robot control. Existing action tokenizers discretize actions primarily for reconstruction, producing codes that preserve motion geometry but provide only weak semantic supervision to the backbone. We therefore formulate action tokenization not as mere compression, but as semantic interface learning between multimodal reasoning and executable control. To this end, we introduce X-Tokenizer, a lightweight encoder-Semantic Residual Quantization (SRQ)-decoder architecture that provides a shared action interface across diverse robotic arm embodiments. Its key component, SRQ, imposes an asymmetric structure on residual vector quantization: the first level is trained with Masked Action Modeling (MAM) to form a discrete action language that captures coarse motion intent, while deeper levels remain reconstruction-oriented residuals that preserve fine-grained details. To further align action tokens with multimodal semantics, X-Tokenizer is pretrained with contrastive alignment to the representation space of a pretrained foundation model and with next-frame vision-language feature prediction. Pretrained on 2.4M trajectories (2.0B action frames), a single frozen X-Tokenizer plugs into a mixed discrete-continuous VLA as a representation-shaping supervision signal. X-Tokenizer achieves top real-world aggregate and strong RoboTwin 2.0 simulation results. Outperforming FAST in multimodal grounding (+13.5%) and long-horizon tasks (+8.25), it shows that action tokenizers serve as semantic interfaces for VLA pretraining beyond mere action compression.

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

The Road to Artificial SuperIntelligence: A Comprehensive Survey of Superalignment

arXiv:2412.16468v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked discussion on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence. Although ASI remains hypothetical and far beyond current AI capabilities, discussing its potential and exploring its feasibility and potential risks is critical for the development of future AI systems. The idea of superalignment originates from scalable oversight, which studies how to supervise increasingly capable AI systems when direct human supervision becomes insufficient. In this paper, we focus on the superalignment problem: "The process of supervising, controlling, and governing artificial superintelligence." We first review scalable oversight paradigms-Sandwiching, Self-Enhancement, and Weak-to-Strong Generalization – then analyze the limitations of current paradigms through the lens of possibility and impossibility, discuss key challenges, and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of future AI systems.