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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Planted-Solution Pauli Hamiltonians as a Quantum Benchmarking Primitive

arXiv:2606.11455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a construction of Pauli Hamiltonians with exactly known ground-state energies, intended as reference instances for ground-state energy estimation algorithms. The construction embeds a planted block-product state as the simultaneous ground state of a sum of frustration-free local clauses on overlapping supports, exposes the resulting model only as a polynomial-size linear combination of Pauli operators, and admits optional Clifford conjugation that preserves the spectrum. The framework subsumes classical planted constraint-satisfaction problems as a diagonal special case, providing a direct embedding channel through which classical hardness properties can be inherited. Open-source software, certification keys, and example instances are made publicly available.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Online Learning for Supervisory Switching Control

arXiv:2603.14762v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study supervisory switching control for partially-observed linear dynamical systems. The objective is to identify and deploy a suitable controller for the unknown system by periodically selecting among a collection of $N$ candidate controllers, some of which may destabilize the underlying system. While classical estimator-based supervisory control guarantees asymptotic stability, it lacks quantitative finite-time performance bounds. Conversely, current non-asymptotic methods in both online learning and system identification require restrictive assumptions that are incompatible in a control setting, such as system stability, which preclude testing potentially unstable controllers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel, non-asymptotic analysis of supervisory control that adapts multi-armed bandit algorithms to a control-theoretic setting. The proposed data-driven algorithm evaluates candidate controllers via scoring criteria that leverage system observability to isolate the effects of state history, enabling both detection of destabilizing controllers and accurate system identification. We present two algorithmic variants with dimension-free, finite-time guarantees, where each identifies the matching controller in $O(N \log^2 N)$ steps, while simultaneously achieving finite $L_2$-gain with respect to system disturbances.

04.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Blood signatures of cell type-specific aging forecast disease risk and resilience

作者: 未知作者

By measuring thousands of proteins in blood samples from over 60,000 people, we built molecular ‘clocks’ to estimate how fast cells age. Our analyses show that cell types age at different rates within the same person. Accelerated aging of specific cell types is associated with increased disease risk, whereas slower aging of others is linked to protection and improved survival.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Cross-Dataset Bloom Question Classification: Supervised Models and Prompted LLMs

Automatic Bloom's taxonomy classification of assessment questions can substantially reduce instructor workload, but labeling is subjective and teacher-dependent. Prior machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches reported strong within-dataset results, yet were rarely evaluated in cross-dataset settings, leaving real-world generalizability unclear; meanwhile, LLM effectiveness for Bloom question classification has not been systematically studied. We evaluated the cross-dataset generalization of existing ML/DL methods and assessed LLMs with multiple prompting strategies on five datasets; the best prompting strategy combined in-context examples with course-specific action verbs. Supervised ML/DL models degraded substantially on unseen datasets, whereas LLMs were more stable, suggesting a robust alternative across diverse educational contexts. Based on the best prompting strategy, we also presented a lightweight UI that supports instructors in automatically classifying large question banks; a usability study indicated low workload and high usability.

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

Inference-time Policy Steering via Vision and Touch

arXiv:2606.14981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution. While prior methods typically perform this verification only with visual observations, vision alone is often insufficient for contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on both global task progress and subtle local interactions such as contact force. We introduce ViTaL, a visuo-tactile inference-time steering framework that formulates multimodal guidance as a bi-level optimization problem. At the high level, visual sampling-and-verification performs long-horizon mode selection, deciding what behavior the robot should execute. At the low level, tactile-guided diffusion editing refines the selected action sequence over a shorter horizon to satisfy local contact requirements. To support outcome-based steering, ViTaL learns a visuo-tactile latent world model and employs semantically aligned visual and tactile verifiers, including a novel text-conditioned tactile reward that scores predicted tactile futures directly in latent space. Across three real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ViTaL improves overall success by 51% over the base policy, outperforms unimodal steering by at least 33%, and exceeds naive multimodal fusion by at least 20%. Website: https://yilin-wu98.github.io/vital_website.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.07082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used to improve large language model reasoning, but its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize the trajectory of OPD updates in parameter space and compare it with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). A suite of parameter-space diagnostics consistently places OPD in a relaxed off-principal regime: compared with SFT, its updates affect fewer weights and avoid principal directions more strongly, while compared with RLVR, they remain less tightly constrained. Beyond this static localization, OPD exhibits subspace locking: its cumulative updates rapidly enter a narrow low-dimensional channel. Constraining training to the update subspace formed early in training preserves OPD performance but substantially degrades SFT, indicating that the locked subspace is functionally sufficient for OPD. Control experiments further show that sparsifying the update tokens and shifting rollout generation off-policy preserve the rank dynamics, whereas mixing the OPD objective with RLVR changes them. Overall, these results suggest that OPD is not merely an intermediate point between SFT and RLVR, but induces its own update geometry in parameter space.

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

Echoes of the Prior: A Computational Phenomenology of Forgetting

Memory is not merely the storage of data; it is the scaffolding of reality. When biological memory fades, the world does not simply turn black; it regresses into an unrecognizable chaos. Echoes of the Prior is an interactive installation that attempts to visualize this subjective phenomenology of forgetting. By inducing controlled synaptic decay within a Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction model, we create an artistic analogy for the erosion of the brain's predictive priors. We position the Neural Network not as a tool for engineering, but as a cognitive proxy - a silicon brain whose structural degeneration evokes the disorienting, poetic, and terrifying experience of losing one's grip on the world. Ultimately, we offer this framework as a catalyst, inviting the wider community to explore the uncharted potential of neuromorphic aesthetics in visualizing the fragility of intelligence. Interactive demo see https://decart-4d.github.io/.

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

LedgerAgent: Structured State for Policy-Adherent Tool-Calling Agents

Policy-adherent tool-calling agents in customer-service domains must maintain task states across turns while calling tools and obeying domain policies. Task states consist of relevant facts, identifiers, constraints, and conditions observed through user interaction and tool calls. In standard agents, task states are not represented separately. Observations, tool returns, and policy instructions are placed in the prompt, leaving agents to reconstruct the relevant states from the prompt each time they decide what to do next. This design makes state management implicit, creating two common failure modes. An agent may retrieve the right facts but later ground its decision in stale, missing, or incorrect information; and a syntactically valid tool call may still violate a domain policy that depends on the current task state. We introduce \textsc{LedgerAgent}, an inference-time method for tool-calling agents that maintains observed task states in a separate ledger and renders the states into the prompt. The ledger is also used to check state-dependent policy constraints before environment-changing tool calls are executed, blocking policy violations. Across four customer-service domains and a mixed panel of open- and closed-weight models, \textsc{LedgerAgent} improves average pass\textasciicircum{}k over a standard prompt-based tool-calling approach, with the largest gains under stricter multi-trial consistency metrics.

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

OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with effective skills is crucial for solving complex tasks in real-world systems like OpenClaw. In this work, we aim to develop a framework that automatically constructs such reusable skills to enhance LLMs in tool use, multi-step reasoning, and dynamic environment interaction. To this end, we propose Collective Skill Tree Search (CSTS), a novel tree-search-based skill construction framework that constructs structured, diverse and generalizable tree of skills. The core idea of CSTS is to leverage collective intelligence to jointly search, identify and compose effective skills via two iterative phases: Collective Skill Node Generation (CSN-Gen) and Collective Skill Node Assessment (CSN-Assess). CSN-Gen exploits collective knowledge from multiple models to explore diverse candidate skills for each subtask, enabling comprehensive skill exploration. CSN-Assess employs multiple models as judges to evaluate and select skill nodes with two scoring mechanisms: (1) collective quality scoring that aggregates independent evaluations to produce a robust estimate of skill effectiveness, and (2) collective transferability scoring that explicitly verifies whether a skill generalizes well across different models. With CSTS, we construct a set of comprehensive tree of skills along with skill-augmented training data, enabling models to effectively learn and utilize skills. Besides, we introduce Collective Skill Reinforcement Learning, which actively selects multiple relevant skills from the tree to broaden solution-space exploration, avoid being trapped by a single skill and its resulting homogeneous or suboptimal solutions. As a result, our trained model, OpenClaw-Skill, exhibits outstanding agentic capabilities in long-horizon planning, tool use and generalization over challenging benchmarks.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL): Benchmarking Weakly Supervised Learning for Aerial Wildlife Surveys

Automated aerial wildlife surveys increasingly rely on deep learning, yet standard object detectors require bounding-box annotations, reported to be up to seven times slower and three times more expensive to produce than point-level labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL), a weakly supervised density-estimation framework with three variants: OWL-C, a fully convolutional model for high-throughput screening; OWL-T, a Swin-augmented hybrid for heterogeneous, cluttered scenes; and OWL-D, built on a frozen DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 encoder with a DPT-style fusion decoder. We benchmark all three against POLO, YOLOv11n, and YOLOv11l across five public aerial datasets, from sparse fixed-wing savanna surveys to dense UAV paddock imagery, and against the published HerdNet baseline on its native Delplanque split. OWL-D sets a new state of the art on Delplanque (0.934 AP vs. HerdNet's 0.840) and records the highest AP on four of the five datasets. Performance is regime-dependent: on the extreme-density SheepCounter UAV dataset the hybrid OWL-T leads (0.978 AP) and the convolutional variants attain the lowest counting error, whereas the foundation-based OWL-D degrades, indicating which variant suits which survey type. We further validate operational readiness on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's 2022 Central Arctic Caribou census: under cross-herd and cross-temporal transfer, OWL-C fine-tuned on the 2017 Porcupine Caribou Herd split attains F1 = 0.965 on a held-out patch test set, with a signed count error of +3.1% aggregated across the released test patches. We release the OWL code, model weights, and the annotated Porcupine Caribou Herd 2017 (PCH) and Central Arctic Herd 2022 (CAH) patches, the first open patch-level datasets for large-scale caribou aerial surveys, at https://github.com/microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead.

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

Possible or Definite? A Benchmark for Evaluating Diagnostic Uncertainty Preservation in Clinical Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical text tasks such as summarization and revision. While most studies evaluate the fluency and coherence of LLM-generated text, whether LLMs correctly preserve diagnostic uncertainty remains underexplored. In clinical practice, phrases such as ``possible pneumonia'' communicate the strength of available evidence and directly guide decisions about follow-up testing and treatment. Altering these uncertainty expressions can change the clinical meaning entirely. In this paper, we systematically evaluated this problem in two steps. First, we constructed a benchmark of 1,200 clinical documents with 9,184 uncertainty annotations across five levels. Second, we evaluated three LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show that (1) LLMs preserve the original uncertainty cues poorly, often less than half the time; (2) LLMs struggle with nuanced distinctions between adjacent levels. This work reveals a failure mode not captured by standard evaluation metrics and provides implications for the safe deployment of LLMs in clinical workflows.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Beyond Independent Genes: Learning Module-Inductive Representations for Single-Cell Gene Perturbation Prediction

arXiv:2602.04901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in functional genomics. In practice, perturbation responses are rarely gene-independent but instead manifest as coordinated, program-level transcriptional changes among functionally related genes. However, most existing methods do not explicitly model such coordination, due to gene-wise modeling paradigms and reliance on static biological priors that cannot capture dynamic program reorganization. To address these limitations, we propose scBIG, a module-inductive perturbation prediction framework that explicitly models coordinated gene programs. scBIG induces coherent gene programs from data via Gene-Relation Clustering, captures inter-program interactions through a Gene-Cluster-Aware Encoder, and preserves modular coordination using structure-aware alignment objectives. These structured representations are then modeled using conditional flow matching to enable flexible and generalizable perturbation prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple single-cell perturbation benchmarks show that scBIG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly on unseen and combinatorial perturbation settings, achieving an average improvement of 6.7% over the strongest baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ttruan2426-dot/scBIG.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Multi-Fidelity SINDy: Sparse Discovery of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems with Fidelity-Weighted Measurements

arXiv:2606.15690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data from simulations and experiments are rarely noise-free and often exhibit heterogeneous levels of fidelity. Measurement uncertainty may vary across repeated observations, sensing devices, or even within a single experiment. This work addresses the problem of discovering nonlinear dynamical systems from such inhomogeneous data. We extend the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (SINDy) framework to account for variable noise levels by combining Ensemble SINDy and Weak SINDy within a weighted regression formulation derived from generalized least squares. A statistical justification for the weighting strategy is also provided. The methodology is validated on several benchmark systems, including ordinary and partial differential equations. In addition, we show the benefit of multi-fidelity integration for forecasting the dynamics of a double pendulum system. The results confirm that the proposed approach mitigates the adverse effects of heteroscedastic noise and that repeated, low-cost, low-quality measurements can improve model recovery, in some cases matching or outperforming reconstructions obtained using only high-fidelity data.

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

DreamReasoner-8B: Block-Size Curriculum Learning for Diffusion Reasoning Models

Block diffusion language models accelerate decoding through parallel block-wise denoising, yet whether they can be reliably scaled for long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning remains unresolved. To this end, we develop DreamReasoner-8B, an open-source block diffusion reasoning model, and conduct a systematic study of how training and inference block sizes affect long-CoT reasoning. Our analysis reveals a stark performance disparity: training with large block sizes yields remarkably poor reasoning, whereas small block sizes preserve effective reasoning. To bridge this granularity gap, we propose block-size curriculum learning, which gradually transitions training from fine-grained to coarse-grained block sizes, thereby overcoming this limitation and enabling strong reasoning performance that generalizes across diverse inference block sizes. On mathematical and code reasoning benchmarks, DreamReasoner-8B achieves results competitive with leading open autoregressive models such as Qwen3-8B. This work establishes a practical foundation for efficient, reasoning-capable diffusion language models. We release our model at https://github.com/DreamLM/DreamReasoner.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Characterization of Gaussian Universality Breakdown in High-Dimensional Empirical Risk Minimization

arXiv:2604.03146v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study high-dimensional convex empirical risk minimization (ERM) under general non-Gaussian data designs. By heuristically extending the Convex Gaussian Min-Max Theorem (CGMT) to non-Gaussian settings, we derive an asymptotic min-max characterization of key statistics, enabling approximation of the mean $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}$ and covariance $C_{\hat{\theta}}$ of the ERM estimator $\hat{\theta}$. Specifically, under a concentration assumption on the data matrix and standard regularity conditions on the loss and regularizer, we show that for a test covariate $x$ independent of the training data, the projection $\hat{\theta}^\top x$ approximately follows the convolution of the generally non-Gaussian distribution of $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}^\top x$ with an independent centered Gaussian variable of variance $\mathrm{tr}(C_{\hat{\theta}} \mathbb{E}[xx^\top])$. This result clarifies the scope and limits of Gaussian universality for ERMs. Additionally, we prove that any $\mathcal{C}^2$ regularizer is asymptotically equivalent to a quadratic form determined solely by its Hessian at zero and gradient at $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}$. Numerical simulations across diverse losses and models are provided to validate our theoretical predictions and qualitative insights.

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

The Reward Was in Your Data All Along: Correcting Flow Matching with Discriminator-Guided RL

Score- and flow-matching models often rely on preference-based reinforcement learning for two purposes: aligning with subjective preferences and, surprisingly, recovering properties such as visual realism and coherent object structure that matching-based training is intended to learn from the data itself. We argue that this reflects a structural mismatch. Matching losses measure $\ell_2$ regression error on the velocity or score field under training-time marginals, a proxy poorly aligned with the visual and semantic properties that determine sample quality at inference. Given a reward aligned with these properties, RL sidesteps the mismatch by evaluating the model on its own samples and following the reward landscape directly. The challenge is to obtain such a reward without relying on human preferences, which are expensive and conflate data realism with annotator inclinations. We propose Discriminator-Guided RL (DRL). DRL trains a discriminator to separate data from base-model samples in a pretrained representation space and uses its logit as the reward in KL-regularized RL. The pretrained space restricts the discriminator to perceptually meaningful directions, and the logit estimates the log-likelihood ratio between data and model, which is the optimal reward for targeting the data distribution. Across SiT, JiT, REPA, and RAE, DRL reduces guidance-free FID (e.g., $9.38 \to 2.62$ on SiT) and semantic-space FD (e.g., $88.2 \to 19.3$ on DINOv3 for SiT), with consistent gains across all backbones, and improves human-preference rewards without training on them. It also yields a better Pareto frontier between preference reward and image fidelity under subsequent preference-based post-training, increasing alignment while reducing low-level artifacts such as oversaturation and excessive brightness.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Convex Quasilinearization Method for Solving Nonlinear PDEs with Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a numerical method for the forward solution of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) in which Bellman-Kalaba quasilinearization reduces the nonlinear problem to a sequence of linear subproblems, each discretized by collocation onto a trial space that is linear in its parameters and solved by a single direct linear least-squares QR factorization. The trial space, which we term Linear-in-Learnables (LiL), comprises representations whose trainable parameters enter linearly, including random-feature extreme learning machines, spectral polynomial bases, and trigonometric expansions, each implemented as a physics-informed neural network. The method thus replaces the nonconvex gradient-based training that limits standard PINNs with a convex per-step solve. We establish local Newton-Kantorovich convergence of the outer iteration to a residual-limited neighborhood under an explicit smallness condition, with the limiting accuracy governed by the best-approximation residual of the trial space rather than by an optimization tolerance. The method, denoted LiL-Q, is assessed on seven benchmarks spanning scalar nonlinear PDEs (Bratu, viscous Burgers, Buckley-Leverett), coupled systems (plane-strain elasticity and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in two and three spatial dimensions), and steady-state Darcy flow with heterogeneous permeability. Across these problems, LiL-Q converges in single-digit outer iterations in most cases, even at the coarsest basis sizes and independent of the parameter count. When the exact solution lies in the span of the trial space, the method recovers it to machine precision in a single solve. On the Navier-Stokes benchmarks, it matches or exceeds published PINN solvers with up to two orders of magnitude fewer trainable parameters, without gradient-based optimization.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Large-scale semantic mapping of learner agency and autonomy reveals what measurement and generative AI research overlook

arXiv:2606.10881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learner agency and autonomy are foundational to personal development, yet a pervasive "jingle-jangle" fallacy (i.e. identical terms denoting different constructs, distinct terms denoting identical ones) has substantially hindered cumulative knowledge. Treating meaning as a phenomenon constituted through use in linguistic practice, we extracted 8,954 definitions and 2,700 scale items from over 14,000 publications, to investigate how researchers actually used learner agency and autonomy with a semantic analysis pipeline. The definitional landscape of two constructs resolves into three dimensions: regulation and control of learning (task), intrinsic motivation and internal decision-making (person), and social-relational action (sociocultural), thereby empirically quantifying the jingle-jangle fallacy. Existing scales, however, systematically underrepresent the sociocultural dimension. Critically, current generative AI research in education concentrates on learning regulation and control, narrowing the behavioral repertoire that AI-mediated learning environments are designed to cultivate. Beyond conceptual clarification, this work carries direct implications for conceptualization, measurement, and practice towards supporting the multidimensional learner agency and autonomy.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MixSD: Mixed Contextual Self-Distillation for Knowledge Injection

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to inject new knowledge into language models, but it often degrades pretrained capabilities such as reasoning and general-domain performance. We argue this forgetting arises because fine-tuning targets from humans or external systems diverge from the model's autoregressive distribution, forcing the optimizer to imitate low-probability token sequences. To address this problem, we propose MixSD, a simple external-teacher-free method for distribution-aligned knowledge injection. Instead of training on fixed targets, MixSD constructs supervision dynamically by mixing tokens from two conditionals of the base model itself: an expert conditional that observes the injected fact in context, and a naive conditional that reflects the model's original prior. The resulting supervision sequences preserve the factual learning signal while remaining substantially closer to the base model's distribution. We evaluate MixSD on two synthetic corpora that we construct to study factual recall and arithmetic function acquisition in a controlled setting, together with established benchmarks for open-domain factual question answering and knowledge editing. Across multiple model scales and settings, MixSD consistently achieves a better memorization-retention trade-off compared to SFT and on-policy self distillation baselines, retaining up to 100% of the base model's held-out capability while maintaining near-perfect training accuracy, whereas standard SFT retains as little as 1%. We further show that MixSD produces substantially lower-NLL supervision targets under the base model and reduces harmful movement along Fisher-sensitive parameter directions. These results suggest that aligning supervision with the model's native generation distribution is a simple and effective principle for knowledge injection that mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GetNetUPAM: Ecologically Informed Nested Cross-Validation and Noise-Robust Attention for Marine Bioacoustic Monitoring

Deploying reliable bioacoustic monitoring systems requires models that generalize under high-noise, low-SNR conditions and evaluation protocols that expose deployment-relevant failure modes, gaps largely unaddressed in current UPAM practice. Intrinsic noise, variable propagation, and mixed biological and anthropogenic sources induce distribution shifts that conventional models and single-split evaluations obscure, inflating performance and masking instability. We introduce GetNetUPAM, a hierarchical nested cross-validation framework that uses the nested stage to quantify model stability rather than tune for inflated hold-out scores. By partitioning data into site-year blocks, GetNetUPAM preserves ecological heterogeneity and forces each outer fold to represent a distinct environmental regime, preventing overfitting to localized noise or sensor artifacts. Inner stratified folds measure generalization across the full UPAM signal distribution, enforcing strict separation between model development and the outer held-out deployment condition. Using GetNetUPAM, we evaluate the Adaptive Resolution Pooling and Attention Network (ARPA-N), a CNN architecture for irregular spectrogram dimensions. ARPA-N integrates CBAM spatial attention as a learned noise suppressor, producing attention maps that localize true call structure and avoid the global, non-biological cues exploited by standard CNNs on long-window data. Under GetNetUPAM, ARPA-N generalizes robustly across diverse environmental regimes. In the zero-training support Balleny Islands region, it reduces false positives per hour by over an order of magnitude (approximately 10x) at fixed 90 percent recall, yielding consistently improved metrics across folds. These advances provide a reproducible benchmark and move UPAM toward scalable, deployment-reliable ecological monitoring.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Scalable Batch Bayesian Optimization Via Subspace Acquisition Functions

arXiv:2411.16206v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Extending Bayesian optimization to batch evaluation can enable the designer to make the most use of parallel computing technology. However, most of current batch approaches do not scale well with the batch size. That is, their optimization efficiencies often deteriorate as the batch size increases. To address this issue, we propose a simple and efficient approach to extend Bayesian optimization to large-scale batch evaluation in this work. Different from existing batch approaches, the idea of the new approach is to draw a batch of axis-aligned subspaces of the original problem and select one point from each subspace using existing acquisition functions. Numerical experiments show that our proposed approach speedups the convergence significantly when compared with the sequential Bayesian optimization algorithm, and performs very competitively when compared with ten batch Bayesian optimization algorithms. The implementation of our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/zhandawei/SubSpace_Acquisition_Functions.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Trusted Uncertainty in Large Language Models: A Unified Framework for Confidence Calibration and Risk-Controlled Refusal

Deployed language models must decide not only what to answer but also when not to answer. We present UniCR, a unified framework that turns heterogeneous uncertainty evidence including sequence likelihoods, self-consistency dispersion, retrieval compatibility, and tool or verifier feedback into a calibrated probability of correctness and then enforces a user-specified error budget via principled refusal. UniCR learns a lightweight calibration head with temperature scaling and proper scoring, supports API-only models through black-box features, and offers distribution-free guarantees using conformal risk control. For long-form generation, we align confidence with semantic fidelity by supervising on atomic factuality scores derived from retrieved evidence, reducing confident hallucinations while preserving coverage. Experiments on short-form QA, code generation with execution tests, and retrieval-augmented long-form QA show consistent improvements in calibration metrics, lower area under the risk-coverage curve, and higher coverage at fixed risk compared to entropy or logit thresholds, post-hoc calibrators, and end-to-end selective baselines. Analyses reveal that evidence contradiction, semantic dispersion, and tool inconsistency are the dominant drivers of abstention, yielding informative user-facing refusal messages. The result is a portable recipe of evidence fusion to calibrated probability to risk-controlled decision that improves trustworthiness without fine-tuning the base model and remains valid under distribution shift.