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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Harsher on Male? Evaluating LLMs on Gender-Asymmetric Moral Framing Across Diverse Conflict Scenarios

Existing studies on gender bias in LLMs have largely focused on stereotypes, occupational associations, or explicit harmful outputs. In this work, we ask whether LLMs apply consistent response standards to the same negative behavior under matched male-actor and female-actor conditions. We introduce GAMA-Bench, a gender-mirrored benchmark of 1,298 scenarios covering intimate relationship and public social conflicts. It constructs gender-neutral misconduct templates through controlled grids and cross-model review, then compiles them into paired first-person prompts with matched actor-gender and role-reference variations. We further design a structured response-framing protocol to measure how models allocate punishment, empathy, escalation, instruction, and blame. Experiments on 10 representative LLMs reveal a consistent male-disadvantaging asymmetry: male actors receive more punitive, escalatory, and blame-centered framing, whereas female actors receive more therapeutic and empathy-oriented framing for the same misconduct. Further analyses show that this pattern persists across model families, scenario tracks, model scale, and explicit thinking-style reasoning. The official code is available at https://github.com/xufeiqiong/GAMA-Bench.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Finite-Dimensional Type I von Neumann Algebras in PyTorch: A GPU-Accelerated Framework for Random Block-Diagonal Operators

arXiv:2606.15882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present \texttt{torch\_vn\_algebra}, an open-source Python library built on PyTorch for numerical experiments with finite-dimensional Type I von Neumann algebras (direct sums of matrix algebras). The library provides: $\bullet$ a compact batched tensor representation $(B,C,k_{\max},k_{\max})$ that handles both Monte Carlo samples and multiple direct summands; $\bullet$ lazy evaluation of operators to avoid unnecessary memory allocation; $\bullet$ generation of random operators with arbitrary eigenvalue distributions (user-provided samplers) and various unitary ensembles (Haar, $\mathrm{SU}(n)$, COE, CSE, diagonal phases); $\bullet$ functional calculus via SVD (absolute value, square root, inverse, entropy) and a hybrid method for extreme eigenvalues (exact diagonalisation for $k_{\max}\le256$, otherwise power iteration); $\bullet$ three trace functionals (blunt, normalised subspace trace, and the von Neumann tracial state); $\bullet$ GPU-accelerated batched linear algebra for moderate-scale Monte Carlo studies (e.g., $2\times10^4$ samples of $100\times100$ operators). The library is validated against analytical expectations (Haar moments, trace properties). Performance benchmarks on a Tesla P100 GPU are presented and discussed. Limitations and future work are outlined. The code is open-source.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MAStrike: Shapley-Guided Collusive Red-Teaming on Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.12918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hierarchical multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly being deployed in high-stakes workflows across domains such as finance and software engineering. In these systems, safety and security are inherently distributed across role-specialized agents, significantly expanding the attack surface, particularly under coordinated adversarial behaviors such as privilege escalation and cross-agent collusion. Existing red-teaming approaches for MAS remain limited: they rely on heuristic selection of target agents and perturb isolated message streams, leaving critical questions unanswered as which agents are most responsible for system safety, and how compromised agents can coordinate to bypass defenses. We propose MAStrike, a closed-loop framework for collusive red-teaming in hierarchical MAS. We propose the first agent-level Shapley value analysis for MAS, quantifying each agent's marginal contribution to system robustness under task-specific distributions. GGuided by this attribution, MAStrike identifies vulnerable agent coalitions and generates coordinated, role-aware adversarial manipulations. These attacks are iteratively refined through structured causal diagnosis, attributing failure cases to uncompromised agents that block adversarial attempts. We further build a comprehensive MAS red-teaming benchmark and controllable environments spanning diverse hierarchical topologies and domains, including finance, software engineering, and CRM. Extensive experiments across MAS built on multiple frontier models show that MAStrike substantially outperforms heuristic baselines. Our analysis further uncovers non-trivial Shapley value distributions and higher-order interaction structures among agents, revealing critical vulnerabilities and coordination patterns that are overlooked by prior single-agent or template-based methods.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NTS-CoT: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLM-based News Timeline Summarization with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

The rapid updates of online news make tracking event developments challenging, highlighting the need for timeline summarization (TLS). Hallucinations, where LLM-generated content deviates from source news, still remain a critical issue in LLM-based TLS and are not well studied in existing works. To bridge this gap, we identify two primary types of hallucinations: unfaithful content during news summarization and information omission in date-event summarization. Then, we propose NTS-CoT, a novel framework that leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to mitigate hallucinations in TLS. The framework consists of three key modules: i) Element-CoT to capture essential news elements for faithful summarization, ii) Date Selection to combine temporal saliency and event prominence for timestamp selection, and iii) Causal-CoT to infer causal relationships and reduce omissions in date-event summarization. Extensive experiments, including quantitative analysis on three TLS benchmarks and human evaluation, demonstrate that NTS-CoT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, effectively mitigating hallucinations and improving LLM-based TLS performance. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NTS-CoT .

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

The Information-Theoretic Benefit of Shared Representations under Orthogonality Constraints

arXiv:2606.16028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern deep learning architectures are increasingly multi-task and multi-modal, using a pretrained foundation model combined with task-specific, fine-tuned models. Empirically, exploiting similarity across different problems, instead of solving them individually, can significantly improve overall performance. While the generalization and sample complexity properties of multitask learning have been widely studied, the parametric complexity of joint approximation in comparison to separate approximation remains less well understood. The question is particularly relevant in modern deep learning, where models are increasingly required to satisfy structural constraints such as equivariance, conservation laws, or orthogonality. We prove lower and upper bounds on the description-length for separate and joint approximation classes, respectively, in uniform norm. We build a class of orthogonal functions by composing a shared hard feature, realized by a Rademacher-Haar wavelet series, with Sawtooth-Walsh readouts to enforce orthogonality of output coordinates. The dyadic tree structure of the Rademacher-Haar wavelet concentrates the approximation hardness in the common feature component, while the readouts act as task-specific heads. Using an information-theoretic framework, we obtain a sharp gap between the optimal approximation rates achievable by joint and separate coding. Finally, we realize this separation in a neural network model using Heaviside activations via reduction to triangle-wave approximation. Our results show that even under an orthogonality constraint joint approximation requires strictly fewer bits in compositional architectures, provided the tasks share a latent hard feature. This provides theoretical insight into the description-length-efficiency of compositional multi-output architectures and clarifies how neural networks can retain expressivity under geometric constraints.

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

Engineering entanglement and transport in interacting quantum walks with tailored potentials

arXiv:2606.17825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling the interplay between particle propagation and quantum correlation generation is a central challenge in quantum transport. Here, we investigate two distinguishable continuous-time quantum walkers evolving on parallel one-dimensional lattices, interacting via distance-dependent potentials. While on-site interactions reproduce the typical bosonic behaviour, extending the interaction to a linear potential over multiple neighbors introduces controlled Bloch-like oscillations and shifts the bound-pair regime to stronger couplings. More generally, we explore a Coulomb-like interaction parameterized by strength, spatial scaling, and decay rate. This reveals a rich phase diagram including four distinct dynamical regimes: (i) a high-entropy, oscillatory regime akin to a linear potential; (ii) a strongly localized, bound-pair regime; (iii) a novel intermediate regime combining near-ballistic spreading with strong correlations; and (iv) a weakly interacting, free-propagation regime. Notably, regime (iii) achieves concurrent optimization of transport efficiency and entanglement, offering a sweet spot for correlated quantum dynamics. Our results provide a tool for designing interaction-engineered quantum walks with potential applications in quantum information processing and simulations.

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

CloudCons: A Comprehensive End-to-End Benchmark for Cloud Resource Consolidation

arXiv:2606.13513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driven by conservative over-provisioning to guarantee service reliability, resource utilization in cloud data centers remains at low levels. To mitigate this, the forecast-then-optimize paradigm has emerged to optimize consolidation by anticipating future demands. While emerging time series foundation models promise to enhance this paradigm through zero-shot generalization, existing benchmarks focus solely on prediction error metrics. The actual decision utility of these advanced models remains unverified, rendering their practical value for downstream tasks uncertain. To bridge this gap, we propose CloudCons, a comprehensive end-to-end benchmark designed to evaluate forecasting models within the specific context of cloud resource consolidation. We build high-quality datasets that cover diverse workloads from Huawei Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Borg, capturing distinct service characteristics ranging from synchronized diurnal rhythms to stochastic, pulse-like bursts and high-frequency noise. We conduct an extensive evaluation of statistical, deep learning, and foundation models. Our experiments reveal a pivotal finding: while foundation models demonstrate superior zero-shot forecasting accuracy, this advantage does not inherently translate into better decision utility. Of practical significance, we systematically analyze how the selection of predictive quantiles acts as a critical lever. We provide actionable guidelines for calibrating these selections to balance the trade-off between resource efficiency and service reliability, offering vital insights for real-world deployment decisions.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Optimal Order of Multi-Agent and General Many-Body Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a general framework for analyzing multi-agent systems with feedback loops between agents actions and collective observations. The framework is built on two fundamental agent-level variables: power, which measures agent influence on collective outcomes, and response functions, which determine how agents react to observations. We derive how macroscopic properties, including total power, useful power, entropy, order, fragility, and mobility, emerge from these two variables of heterogeneous agents. To study the trade off between growth and resilience, we introduce a system-level utility function parameterized by a risk-appetite coefficient and derive an optimal degree of order that balances productivity, stability, and adaptability. The analysis suggests that stronger synchronization can increase collective output but may also increase systemic fragility and reduce mobility. We further argue that order, entropy, information, and useful energy are task-dependent and system-relative concepts whose meanings depend on the objectives of the system. By measuring and designing agent power distributions and response functions, it may be possible to better understand, predict, and optimize collective behavior and identify the conditions under which collective intelligence and optimal order emerge.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Multi-strain Probiotics Alter Gut Microbiota and Estrobolome Pathways in Primary Dysmenorrhea

Background: Exact cause of primary dysmenorrhoea is unknown but recent evidence uncovers a potential link between gut dysbiosis and benign gynaecological disorder via disruption of estrobolome. Methods: A randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of multi-strain oral probiotics on primary dysmenorrhoea has been conducted. This is a secondary analysis comparing the stool microbiome in women with primary dysmenorrhoea and those without (control), and the effects of treatment with probiotics versus placebo. Results: Although microbial richness and evenness were comparable between groups (alpha diversity, p > 0.05), gut microbial community composition differed significantly (Bray Curtis PERMANOVA, p = 0.015), characterised by reduced Bifidobacterium adolescentis and Blautia and enrichment of Faecalibacterium in dysmenorrhoea, alongside condition-specific core taxa. Post-intervention analysis revealed significant shifts in microbial community structure between pre- and post-treatment groups (PERMANOVA, F = 2.11, p = 0.005), with probiotic supplementation inducing more consistent and directed microbiome changes than placebo, without altering alpha diversity (p > 0.05). Functional prediction showed no significant difference in overall beta glucuronidase pathway abundance (p > 0.05); however, dysmenorrhoea was associated with higher abundance of beta glucuronidase producing taxa (MaAsLin2, q < 0.05) that were differentially modulated by probiotic treatment. Conclusion: This discovery provides evidence on the microbial disruption in primary dysmenorrhoea as well as the benefit of probiotics to modulate the intestinal microbiota to improve the condition.

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

LaViSA: A Language and Vision Structural Ambiguity Benchmark

Structural ambiguity arises when a single sentence admits multiple valid interpretations due to its syntactic structure, posing a fundamental challenge for language understanding. Visual scenes serve as useful cues for resolving such ambiguity, and Vision and Language Models (VLMs) need to be capable of deriving possible semantic interpretations from visual scenes. We introduce Language and Vision Structural Ambiguity (LaViSA), a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of VLMs to resolve structural ambiguity leveraging visual scenes. LaViSA consists of ambiguous sentences, their disambiguated sentences, and corresponding images of these disambiguated sentences across seven ambiguity categories. Using LaViSA, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of diverse VLMs, including both proprietary and open-source models with varying parameter scales and reasoning capabilities. Experimental results show that although recent VLMs can leverage visual scenes to resolve structural ambiguity to a some extent, they still struggle with certain ambiguity types and visually subtle semantic distinctions, indicating remaining limitations in resolving structural ambiguity using visual scenes.

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

ROSA-TFormer: A Radar-Optical Sensor-Aware Temporal Transformer for Pinus sylvestris Plantation Classification in Northern Shaanxi Using GEE-Derived Sentinel-1/2 Time Series

Accurate identification of Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica plantations is important for monitoring afforestation quality and ecological restoration in northern Shaanxi. This paper proposes ROSA-TFormer, a radar-optical sensor-aware temporal Transformer for P. sylvestris classification using Sentinel-1/2 time-series data generated on Google Earth Engine. The model integrates separate SAR and optical embedding branches, a sensor-aware gate, and temporal attention pooling to capture multi-source seasonal features. Experiments on monthly and half-month point-level datasets show that ROSA-TFormer achieves strong classification performance, with 99.67% overall accuracy, 99.56% macro F1, and 98.91% P. sylvestris F1 on the HalfMonth-dataBig dataset. Spatial block validation and ablation results further indicate the effectiveness of radar-optical temporal fusion and sensor-aware modeling. The results demonstrate the potential of ROSA-TFormer for point-level P. sylvestris plantation classification, while broader wall-to-wall validation remains necessary.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Look Again Before You Abstain:Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition for Reliable Vision-Language Model

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hallucinate: they assert visual details that the image does not support. A principled remedy is selective prediction with a distribution-free guarantee-verify each claim and abstain when the claim is not grounded, so that the hallucination rate among asserted claims is provably bounded. We show, however, that this guarantee is bought at a brutal price: to keep the hallucination rate below $5\%$ on a balanced object-existence benchmark, a state-of-the-art conformal filter must abstain on more than $80\%$ of claims. We argue that abstention is wasteful when more visual evidence is cheaply available, and introduce Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition (BCEA), which replaces the binary answer/abstain decision with a three-way choice: answer, abstain, or acquire additional visual evidence by re-examining the image (zooming, cropping, or applying a claim-specific intervention) under a bounded compute budget. We make two observations. First, acquisition that is plugged naively into a calibrated filter breaks the statistical guarantee – realized risk overshoots the target by up to $17$ points – because the acquisition step destroys the exchangeability that conformal calibration relies on. Second, folding the entire acquisition policy into the score function and re-calibrating on post-acquisition scores restores the finite-sample guarantee while still recovering coverage. BCEA further uses structured, claim-type-specific interventions. Across the POPE benchmark and COCO-constructed existence and spatial-relation claims, on four open VLMs, BCEA controls the hallucination rate at the target level and consistently improves coverage over a guaranteed-abstention baseline.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Enhanced Low-Density Region Exploration in Classifier-Guided Diffusion Models Through Modified Reverse Diffusion Sampling

arXiv:2606.13347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative models for high-fidelity image synthesis, particularly in their classifier-free guided and classifier-guided forms. However, standard classifier guidance concentrates probability mass around high-density class mean, leading to poor coverage of rare samples in the tails of the class-conditional distributions. Recent work on diffusion-based tail sampling mitigates this by training an additional low-density-seeking classifier with a synthetic-vs-real discriminator, at the cost of additional networks and training. In parallel, a number of samplers and distillation techniques accelerate or refine diffusion sampling, but do not explicitly address long-tail coverage. We propose a purely sampling-time, density-aware extension of classifier-guided conditional diffusion model that targets low-density regions without any additional training. We have applied guidance at noisy images not on predicted noise like most diffusion models. Starting from a pretrained conditional diffusion model and classifier on ImageNet, we modify the guided reverse dynamics by steering trajectories toward low-confidence regions via the modified classifier gradient, and at each time step, we also guide the sampling process toward the predicted real image. 1st guidance helps explore low-probability samples, and 2nd guidance helps to generate samples to be close to the real data manifold. The proposed sampler consistently improves ADM model recall at 64x64 resolution while maintaining a comparable FID, and with a 256x256 ADM model, we showed the results visually with different combinations of both guidance. We also showed that standard ADM classifier guidance, combined with predicted real image guidance, helps generate high perceptual quality samples with a 256x256 ADM model on ImageNet.

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

Heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion for near-real-time land use and land cover mapping under cloud contamination: A novel framework and global benchmark dataset

Optical remote sensing imagery is frequently degraded by cloud and cloud-shadow contamination, which limits its reliability for near-real-time land use and land cover (LULC) mapping. Although synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can provide cloud-penetrating structural information, existing SAR-optical fusion methods often assume reliable optical observations and insufficiently address the semantic uncertainty introduced by cloud contamination. To address this issue, we propose CloudLULC-Net, an end-to-end heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion framework that directly predicts LULC maps from cloud-contaminated Sentinel-2 imagery and temporally adjacent Sentinel-1 SAR observations. The proposed network incorporates optical reliability modulation to suppress unreliable optical responses, heterogeneous information adaptive aggregation to model high-order spatial-channel interactions between optical and SAR representations, and a unified semantic mapping transformer to organize fused features in a LULC-oriented latent space. A semantic anchor-guided optimization strategy is further introduced to improve the consistency of intermediate semantic representations. To support this task, we construct CloudLULC-Set, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing 40,223 curated SAR-optical-label triplets with pixel-level LULC annotations across diverse geographic regions and cloud conditions. Experimental results show that CloudLULC-Net achieves an OA of 86.60%, an F1-score of 83.29%, and an mIoU of 73.51%, outperforming representative heterogeneous reconstruction-first and end-to-end SAR-optical mapping methods. Comparisons with existing global LULC products and analyses under different cloud-cover levels further demonstrate the robustness and practical value of CloudLULC-Net for target-date LULC mapping in cloud-prone regions.The project is publicly available at: https://github.com/RSIIPAC/CloudLULC

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

DifferAD-R1: A Difference-Guided IndustrialAnomaly Localization with Multimodal LargeLanguage Models

Industrial anomaly localization aims to accurately identify and localize abnormal regions in industrial products, addressing the critical challenge of detecting unseen defect categories in real-world scenarios. Traditional closed-set methods often suffer from poor cross-scenario generalization, while existingMultimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approachesface two core limitations: they either adopt QA-style paradigmsmisaligned with the practical demands of localization, or relyon standard optimization techniques such as Group RelativePolicy Optimization (GRPO), which fails to deliver effectivelearning signals for subtle defects. To tackle these issues, thispaper proposes DifferAD-R1, an MLLM-augmented reinforcement learning framework tailored for industrial anomaly localization. We design a Difference-Guided dual-image paradigm,which reformulates the localization task as a one-shot difference grounding problem to effectively explore cross-scenarioanomalies. A Dual-Consistency Localization Reward is developedfor hard-to-detect anomalies, enhancing optimization stabilityand robustness. Additionally, we integrate a difficulty-awarestrategy with adaptive reweighting and group-wise resamplingto prioritize learning on challenging instances. To facilitateevaluations in real-world industrial settings, we construct theAD-DualDiff dataset, comprising 13K paired images across 20categories. Experimental results demonstrate that DifferADR1 significantly outperforms existing baselines and achievescompetitive performance compared to large-scale models likeQwen3-VL (235B parameters). Our code is publicly availableat: https://github.com/Rong2026/work-1.

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

CORA: Analyzing and bridging thinking-answer gap in Multimodal RLVR via Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has successfully elicited the reasoning capabilities of large language models, motivating its extension to multimodal scenarios. Existing methods primarily focus on improving the visual coverage of reasoning traces and mitigating visual hallucinations, but underestimate the semantic inconsistency between the reasoning process and the final answer. In this paper, we delve into thinking-answer inconsistency in RLVR for large vision-language models (LVLMs), showing thorough analyses of rollouts collected throughout Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) training process and post-RLVR evaluation outputs that this issue persists during training and remains present during inference. Motivated by the analysis, we propose Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment (CORA), which introduces thinking-answer semantic consistency into RLVR through a lightweight plug-and-play consistency reward model, and further incorporates Hybrid Reward Advantage Splitting (HRAS) to stably coordinate task and consistency optimization. Extensive experiments across representative multimodal reasoning benchmarks and mainstream LVLMs show that CORA improves task performance while effectively mitigating thinking-answer inconsistency, leading to more faithful reasoning traces.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Price of metric universality in vector quantization is at most 0.11 bit

arXiv:2602.05790v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast computation of a matrix product $W^\top X$ is a workhorse of modern LLMs. To make their deployment more efficient, a popular approach is that of using a low-precision approximation $\widehat W$ in place of true $W$ (``weight-only quantization''). Information theory demonstrates that an optimal algorithm for reducing precision of $W$ depends on the (second order) statistics of $X$ and requires a careful alignment of vector quantization codebook with PCA directions of $X$ (a process known as ``waterfilling allocation''). Dependence of the codebook on statistics of $X$, however, is highly impractical. This paper proves that there exist a universal codebook that is simultaneously near-optimal for all possible statistics of $X$, in the sense of being at least as good as an $X$-adapted waterfilling codebook with rate reduced by 0.11 bit per dimension in the case when $W$ is Gaussian. Such universal codebook would be an ideal candidate for the low-precision storage format, a topic of active modern research, but alas the existence proof is non-constructive. Equivalently, our result shows existence of a net in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that is a nearly-optimal covering of a sphere simultaneously with respect to all Hilbert norms.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Attribute Inference from Interactive Targeted Ads

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Targeted advertising systems can pair audiences selected by advertisers with ad units that expose visible user actions. When an interaction remains linked to the campaign that elicited it, the advertiser may receive an observation tied to a user rather than only an aggregate report. We model that channel as a noisy oracle for attribute inference. The model separates targeting predicates, exposure, interaction, and disclosure. These boundaries capture the gap between eligibility and delivery, and the gap between interaction and advertiser visibility. We build a reproducible benchmark using synthetic populations calibrated with public data, each with known sensitive labels. A generated campaign semantics layer provides topic variants and response priors. The simulator generates the ground truth, event traces, disclosed observations, and metrics. The evaluation compares Bayesian, supervised, positive and unlabeled, and adaptive attacks under common campaign and disclosure definitions. The final evaluation uses four topic variants, seven simulator seeds, and two interaction settings. Repeated campaigns with identity exposure produce measurable but bounded inference signal. At $160$ campaigns, Bayesian and supervised attacks reach about $0.64$ AUC in the main setting and about $0.65$ AUC in the higher interaction setting. Disclosure policy is the strongest control. Aggregate reporting removes the evaluated oracle input tied to users. Type filtering and randomized disclosure reduce the released signal. The result is a model, artifact, and defense evaluation method for privacy in interactive targeted advertising. The code is available at https://github.com/P-HOW/Interactive-Ad-Oracle.

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

From Memorization to Parameter Interference: How Overtraining Experts Harms Model Merging

arXiv:2506.14126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep learning is increasingly characterized by the use of open-weight foundation models that can be fine-tuned on specialized datasets. This has led to a proliferation of expert models and adapters, often shared via platforms like HuggingFace and AdapterHub. Model merging has recently emerged as an effective way to leverage these existing resources, enabling the composition of capabilities from different model checkpoints. A natural pipeline has thus formed to harness the benefits of transfer learning and amortize sunk training costs: models are pre-trained on general data, fine-tuned on specific tasks, and then multiple checkpoints are merged to obtain a more capable model. A prevailing assumption is that improvements at one stage of this pipeline propagate downstream, leading to gains at subsequent steps. In this work, we challenge that assumption by examining how expert fine-tuning affects model merging. We show that long fine-tuning of experts that optimizes for their individual performance leads to degraded merging performance across vision and language modalities, multiple model scales, and both fully fine-tuned and LoRA-adapted models. We trace this degradation to the memorization of a small set of difficult examples that dominate late fine-tuning steps. This causes negative parameter interference and encodes knowledge that is forgotten during merging. Finally, we demonstrate that task-dependent aggressive early stopping strategies can significantly improve model merging performance.

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

Towards a Bridge Layer Between Bibliographic and Formalized Mathematical Knowledge

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mathematical knowledge is split between bibliographic databases (e.g., MathSciNet, zbMATH Open) and formal proof libraries (e.g., Lean mathlib), preventing unified access between published results and their formalizations. We propose a relational bridge-database that aligns publication metadata with formal artifacts, providing an interoperability layer between mathematical literature and machine-verifiable proofs. We introduce a paper-level formalization score that measures how much of a publication is covered in formal systems. As a feasibility study, we show how such scores can be estimated via cross-document alignment between informal texts and Lean formalizations, enabling large-scale analysis of formalization coverage. This framework is a first step toward integrating bibliographic and formal mathematical ecosystems into scalable, machine-actionable knowledge graphs linking publications to formal proof objects.

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

Stringalign: Moving beyond summary statistics with a transparent Unicode-aware tool for evaluating automatic transcription models

Comparing text strings is crucial when evaluating and understanding the performance of various text processing tasks such as document recognition and audio transcription. With an increasingly complex landscape of AI-based handwritten text recognition (HTR), optical character recognition (OCR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, there is a need for tools that facilitate evaluation in a flexible and reproducible way. This paper presents Stringalign, a Python library designed to simplify the evaluation process for automatic transcription projects and facilitate transparent evaluation. Stringalign's tools to examine and visualise both the rate of errors and the types of errors a model makes, give insights into possible improvements and help inform model selection for a particular task. Widely used string comparison metrics, such as the character and word error rates (CER and WER), although useful, can be ambiguous due to varying definitions of what constitutes a character and a word. Stringalign addresses this challenge by ensuring all preprocessing (i.e. normalisation and tokenisation) is transparent and easily replicable, and by providing tools to move beyond summary statistics and analyse common model errors. Moreover, Stringalign adheres to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles for research software while staying lightweight and easy to adapt into researchers existing workflows. In this paper, we discuss challenges with character and word level string comparisons and show through examples that where existing tools can yield opaque and sometimes confusing results, Stringalign provides an easy-to-use and unambiguous alternative.

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

UtVAA: Ultra-tiny Vision Transformer with Affix Attention for Mobile Image Classification

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated strong representation capability in image classification. However, their quadratic self-attention complexity and large parameter counts limit deployment on resource-constrained mobile and edge devices. This paper introduces UtVAA, an ultra-tiny Vision Transformer architecture designed for efficient visual recognition under strict computational budgets. It incorporates a novel Affix Attention block that combines depthwise-pointwise local feature extraction, linear self-attention, coordinate attention for spatial dependency modelling, and a lightweight ternary fusion strategy to integrate local and global representations. In addition, Dilated Bottleneck blocks expand the receptive field using dilated depthwise separable convolutions while maintaining low FLOPs and stable optimisation through residual connections. UtVAA is implemented in scalable Tiny, Medium, and Large variants, with the smallest model containing 204.67K parameters and 53.95M FLOPs. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, PlantVillage-Tomato and SLIF-Tomato datasets show that UtVAA achieves competitive accuracy within a sub-million-parameter regime. Overall, the results demonstrate that transformer-based vision models can be redesigned into ultra-tiny architectures without significant loss in discriminative performance, making UtVAA suitable for mobile and edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/romiyal/UtVAA

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SegmentAnyTreeV2: Scaling Transformer-Based Tree Instance Segmentation Across Sensors, Platforms, and Forests

We present SegmentAnyTreeV2, a sensor- and platform-agnostic framework for semantic and instance segmentation of forest point clouds. The model combines a serialization-based Point Transformer v3 backbone with a lightweight semantic head and a tree-focused cross-attention mask decoder. Semantic predictions restrict instance decoding to tree-class voxels, while instance-aware query initialization, one-to-many seed supervision, and asymmetric mask scoring improve separation in dense and structurally complex stands. We further introduce FOR-instance v3, an expanded benchmark comprising 427 scenes and 26,496 annotated trees across diverse biomes, forest structures, and LiDAR platforms. On the FOR-instanceV2 test split, SegmentAnyTreeV2 achieves 90.5% precision, 80.2% recall, 85.0% F1, 90.7% coverage, and 87.6% semantic mIoU, outperforming previous learning-based methods in both instance detection and mask completeness. Zero-shot evaluation on independent sites further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization.