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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Deep-Unfolded Coordination

arXiv:2606.19920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed optimization is a highly scalable and structurally transparent technique to solve multi-agent robotics problems; however, such methods often suffer from the need for highly-specialized, problem-specific hyperparameter tunings. In this work, we propose Deep Coordinator, a deep-unfolding framework that learns to dynamically adjust the hyperparameters of ADMM-DDP, a popular distributed solver for robotics tasks, at solve-time in response to optimizer performance. Our architecture consists of unrolling a fixed number of ADMM-DDP iterations into a neural network with learnable functions between layers mapping the optimizer state to the next hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, Deep Coordinator is the first deep-unfolding framework to adapt the penalty parameters of a non-convex optimizer at solve-time; we show that the mainstream supervised approach can yield degenerate solutions when training such models, and propose an unsupervised learning scheme. On simulations with fleets of cars and quadrotors, Deep Coordinator produces trajectories of comparable quality 6.18-9.44x faster than conventional solvers. Furthermore, Deep Coordinator retains its performance benefits when deployed to systems up to 8x larger than trained on.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

KG-SoftMAP: Soft Knowledge-Graph Priors for Bayesian Network Structure Learning from Sparse Discrete Data

arXiv:2606.10358v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning Bayesian network (BN) structure from sparse discrete data is hard: when each instance records only a few variables, most variable pairs lack the joint observations needed for reliable scoring, and data-only methods recover little structure. However, imperfect domain knowledge, expressible as a weighted directed knowledge graph (KG), is often available. We propose KG-SoftMAP, which encodes such a KG as a finite-strength, confidence-weighted edge prior and maximizes a MAP objective combining the BDeu score with a logit-form prior; the KG may be expert-curated or LLM-extracted. On synthetic benchmarks with known DAGs, KG-SoftMAP reaches Directed-F1 (DF1) $0.19$–$0.32$ at observation rate $\rho=0.05$ and DF1 $0.44$–$0.97$ at $\rho\geq0.2$, while every data-only learner tested stays near zero under the same sparse masks. Recovery tracks KG quality: controlled corruption degrades it smoothly, a zero-signal KG yields DF1 $0.00$, and a blindly LLM-extracted KG with imperfect precision and recall still drives substantial recovery. On three real sparse educational datasets, the learned BN acts as a concept-level posterior model: on SAF it matches logistic regression (LR) within $0.03$ F1_FAIL while providing an inspectable concept graph, calibrated Fail probabilities, and tractable posterior queries from partial observations.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

MetaResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Self-Reflective Reinforcement Learning in Adversarial Virtual Environments

arXiv:2606.19893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in autonomous information gathering and synthesis, yet their training remains constrained by the static nature of simulated environments, the limits of fact-retrieval-only task designs, and the inefficiency of outcome-based reinforcement learning. In this work, we propose MetaResearcher, a novel framework that scales deep research agent training across four synergistic dimensions. First, we introduce an Evolving Virtual World that injects temporal dynamics and adversarial misinformation into the training environment, forcing agents to develop source credibility assessment and temporal conflict resolution skills. Second, we design Discovery-Oriented Tasks – including hypothesis generation and contradiction resolution – that transcend simple fact retrieval and push agents toward genuine research behaviors. Third, we propose a Self-Reflective Meta-Reward mechanism within the GRPO framework that jointly optimizes for answer correctness, search path efficiency, reflection depth, and tool call diversity, directly addressing the repetitive action loop problem observed in prior work. Fourth, we introduce a Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Swarm architecture comprising specialized Scout, Filter, and Synthesizer models that learn collaborative research strategies through coordinated reinforcement learning. Built upon the LiteResearcher infrastructure, MetaResearcher requires zero marginal API cost for training while targeting substantial improvements in both benchmark performance (GAIA, Xbench-DS) and epistemic robustness under adversarial conditions. We present the complete framework design, training methodology, and planned experimental validation.

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

Keep Policy Gradient in Charge: Sibling-Guided Credit Distillation for Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents

Long-horizon tool-use reinforcement learning can learn from outcome verification, but its trajectory-level advantage is broadcast across many reasoning, API, and answer tokens. Self-distillation promises a denser signal by reusing a policy's own rollouts or a privileged teacher. We show, however, that direct token-level self-distillation can silently destroy tool use: it rehearses teacher behavior without knowing which actions the verifier rewards, so useful skills and harmful shortcuts are amplified together. We introduce Sibling-Guided Credit Distillation (SGCD), which uses distillation for credit assignment rather than as a competing actor loss. Dynamic sampling produces mixed successful and failed sibling rollouts; an external LLM summarizes their contrast into a training-only stepwise credit reference; dense teacher/student divergence drives credit reassignment; and bounded detached credit weights reshape GRPO token advantages. The deployed student sees no external LLM, sibling evidence, or oracle. Across AppWorld and $\tau^3$-airline, SGCD improves over matched GRPO comparators: AppWorld TGC $42.9 \to 45.6$ on test_normal and $24.7 \to 27.0$ on test_challenge, and $\tau^3$-airline pass@1 $0.583 \to 0.602$.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

InfantFace: Detecting infant faces in neonatal clinical environments

Reliable localisation of the neonatal face is the first step for several video-camera based non-contact assessments such as pain and distress related facial expression analysis, pain scoring, cardiorespiratory signal extraction and cessation of breathing alerts. However, major challenges persist in neonatal clinical environments. Cluttered backgrounds, illumination changes and poor lighting conditions can reduce the accuracy of face detection models. Clinical interventions, monitoring equipment and, in some cases, medical devices can obstruct the face, making visual assessment difficult. We propose a one-stage YOLOv11m-based model tailored for face detection of infants in neonatal clinical environments. We combined multiple publicly available datasets (VGGFace2, CelebA, FDDB, WIDER FACE) to train and evaluate our proposed model. We then fine-tuned our model on a neonatal research dataset involving 228 videos from 114 recording sessions of 113 independent infants. Before fine-tuning, our model achieved an AP50 of 0.87, surpassing the performance of three state-of-the-art general face detectors. Performance improved further to an AP50 of 0.96 after clinical-domain adaptation. Evaluating face detection performance across different datasets remains a challenge due to the lack of publicly available neonatal datasets. Prioritising the creation of such datasets, while upholding appropriate privacy safeguards and ethical standards in their creation and use, would greatly support further progress in this field.

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

VisDom: Sparse Novel View Synthesis with Visible Domain Constraint

Sparse novel view synthesis (NVS) remains challenging due to the ambiguity of recovering 3D geometry from few input views. While NeRF- and Gaussian Splatting (GS)-based methods perform well with dense supervision, they often overfit in sparse settings, producing floating artifacts and inconsistent geometry. Silhouette consistency is commonly used as a regularizer, but it remains insufficient, as silhouette-consistent regions can extend beyond the true object geometry. We introduce VisDom, a learning-free geometric constraint that augments classical carving-based visual hull reconstruction by enforcing a minimum multi-view visibility requirement. Specifically, we define a visible domain as the subset of 3D space observed by at least $K$ views and use it as an additional filtering criterion on top of standard silhouette-based reconstruction. This provides a stronger spatial prior in sparse-view settings. We integrate VisDom into both implicit (NeRF) and explicit (GS) pipelines by restricting volumetric sampling and guiding Gaussian placement during optimization. Experiments on three challenging datasets show consistent improvements in sparse-view NVS, enabling high-quality object-centric reconstruction from as few as four input images. Our method is domain-agnostic, requires only silhouettes, and introduces no learned parameters, making it a simple complement to existing approaches. Applying VisDom on top of GaussianObject further improves performance on Omni3D and MipNeRF360, while matching or surpassing it at 22 $\times$ lower training cost.

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

Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Radial Basis Functions for PDEs with Dirac Delta Sources

arXiv:2606.12735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a machine learning method for solving forward and inverse Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). When applied to PDEs with Dirac delta functions in the forcing terms, boundary conditions, or initial conditions, PINNs require approximating them with smooth surrogate functions, a practice that can introduce significant modeling errors. In this work, we exploit the interpretation of PINNs as Residual Least Squares (RLS) methods and show that this perspective enables direct treatment of Dirac delta terms by integrating the weak-form equation. Among RLS formulations other than PINN, we focus on the Radial Basis Function (RBF) expansion (also known as a single-layer RBF Network). We show that while integrating out the Dirac delta in PINNs causes residuals to fail to converge to zero, RBF-RLS consistently provides good forward and inverse solutions to transport problems. We explain this finding using the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory. We test both approaches on linear PDEs that represent groundwater flow and transport in porous media and rivers. We solve inverse problems to fit synthetic data, noisy synthetic data, and real-world measurements.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Guiding World Models with Non-Curated Data

arXiv:2502.19544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Leveraging offline data is a promising way to improve the sample efficiency of online reinforcement learning (RL). This paper expands the pool of usable data for offline-to-online RL by leveraging abundant non-curated data that is reward-free, of mixed quality, and collected across multiple embodiments. Although learning a world model appears promising for utilizing such data, we find that naive fine-tuning fails to accelerate RL training on many tasks. Through careful investigation, we attribute this failure to the distributional shift between offline and online data during fine-tuning. To address this issue and effectively use the offline data, we propose two techniques: i) experience rehearsal and ii) execution guidance. With these modifications, the non-curated offline data substantially improves RL's sample efficiency. Under limited sample budgets, our method achieves nearly twice the aggregate score of learning-from-scratch baselines across 72 visuomotor tasks spanning 6 embodiments. On challenging tasks such as locomotion and robotic manipulation, it outperforms prior methods that utilize offline data by a decent margin.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

NVMOS: Non-Verbal Vocalization Quality Assessment in Speech

arXiv:2606.15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent. Existing speech quality assessment methods typically focus on overall naturalness, while non-verbal TTS evaluations mainly examine whether a target NV appears with the correct type and position. However, the perceptual quality of NV events themselves remains underexplored. To address this gap, we construct an NV-MOS dataset containing outputs from multiple NV-TTS systems and naturally occurring NV samples, with ratings collected from three acoustic experts on a perceptual quality scale. We further analyze audio-capable multimodal large language models such as Gemini and find clear inconsistencies between their scores and expert ratings. These results suggest that general-purpose multimodal models cannot reliably replace human judgments for NV quality assessment. We then propose NVMOS, to our knowledge the first model that can reliably predict the perceptual quality of NV events in speech. Experimental results show that, with a local NV-event focusing module, NVMOS reaches expert-level or stronger agreement with human MOS.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Rethinking Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

Concept erasure aims to selectively unlearning undesirable content in diffusion models (DMs) to reduce the risk of sensitive content generation. As a novel paradigm in concept erasure, most existing methods employ adversarial training to identify and suppress target concepts, thus reducing the likelihood of sensitive outputs. However, these methods often neglect the specificity of adversarial training in DMs, resulting in only partial mitigation. In this work, we investigate and quantify this specificity from the perspective of concept space, i.e., can adversarial samples truly fit the target concept space? We observe that existing methods neglect the role of conceptual semantics when generating adversarial samples, resulting in ineffective fitting of concept spaces. This oversight leads to the following issues: 1) when there are few adversarial samples, they fail to comprehensively cover the object concept; 2) conversely, they will disrupt other target concept spaces. Motivated by the analysis of these findings, we introduce S-GRACE (Semantics-Guided Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure), which grace leveraging semantic guidance within the concept space to generate adversarial samples and perform erasure training. Experiments conducted with seven state-of-the-art methods and three adversarial prompt generation strategies across various DM unlearning scenarios demonstrate that S-GRACE significantly improves erasure performance 26%, better preserves non-target concepts, and reduces training time by 90%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qhong-522/S-GRACE.

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

Mean-Field Parallel Decoding for Discrete Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.15805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models enable parallel token generation, offering a pathway to low-latency decoding. However, selecting tokens independently by marginal confidence limits effective parallelism: tokens that appear reliable in isolation can form incompatible configurations when several positions are updated at once. We introduce a training-free decoding framework that coordinates these parallel updates. At each forward pass, the method assigns a commit score to each masked position and refines these scores using pairwise interactions derived from the model's predictive distributions. A variational relaxation yields a simple fixed-point update that suppresses conflicting simultaneous commitments within a single forward pass. This mechanism allows the decoder to commit more tokens in parallel while maintaining competitive generation quality. The method is lightweight, requires no auxiliary model or retraining, and drops into existing diffusion decoding pipelines without modification. Experiments on reasoning and code-generation benchmarks show consistent improvements in the quality-latency trade-off.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

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

Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning

This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation. We present proof-of-concept implementations of the CoD framework, including a GRPO-style RL algorithm with fine-grained credit assignment, as well as tasks and environments tailored to the targeted meta-capability (rather than domain-specific LLM capabilities or standard task-by-task RL). Empirical results validate the efficacy of end-to-end RL training in the CoD setting, and demonstrate the potential for out-of-distribution generalization – within the training domains, across different domains, and from CoD to Ralph-loop settings – of the elicited meta-capability. Our investigation of CoD connects several lines of prior works, and opens up new opportunities for advancing LLMs and AI agents. To facilitate further research and applications, we release our implementations at \url{https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/research/cod/examples/research_cod}.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

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

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

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

QALM: Escaping Local Minima via Interleaved Exploration and Exploitation in Quantum Circuit Optimization

arXiv:2606.16221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum circuit optimizers face a fundamental limitation in how they tolerate temporary cost increases. At one extreme, greedy rule-based optimizers immediately apply any cost-reducing transformation, achieving high efficiency but quickly becoming trapped in local minima. At the other extreme, search-based optimizers accept cost-increasing moves to explore the circuit space and escape such minima. However, because search-based optimizers cannot determine within a reasonable time budget whether a given point is promising, that is, whether its neighborhood contains a deeper local minimum, they must blindly explore higher-cost regions. As a result, escaping the current basin to reach a promising point takes exponentially many steps. In this work, we show that this limitation can be overcome with a hybrid framework that interleaves the exhaustive exploration capabilities of search algorithms with the efficiency of rule-based optimization. We implement this framework as QALM, a novel optimizer designed to escape local minima without incurring the runtime penalties of pure search. Crucially, our results demonstrate that QALM does not merely strike a balance; it outperforms existing rule-based and search-based optimizers in circuit reduction rates while operating with the computational efficiency of rule-based systems. In a comprehensive evaluation across 248 circuits, QALM matches or exceeds the fidelity of the strongest baseline on 83.9% of these circuits, given the same time budget.

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

Beyond a Single Explanation of the Adam–SGD Gap

arXiv:2606.14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties. Yet these explanations are often studied in isolation, leaving their relative importance unclear. In this work, we revisit these hypotheses through a controlled empirical study across vision, language, genomics, and graph tasks, spanning modern and classical architectures, and carefully designed training setups. Our results suggest that no single factor consistently explains the Adam–SGD gap. For instance, the Adam advantage can (1) persist under a uniform vocabulary distribution yet nearly disappear under a heavy-tailed one; (2) reverse in favor of SGD in softmax-attention models; and (3) become larger under soft architectural modifications, e.g., when ReLU is replaced by a GeLU nonlinearity. This suggests that the gap arises from nontrivial data and architecture interactions, rather than from a single common factor. Yet, we observe a pattern across our settings: a crossover batch size at which the relative advantage shifts from SGD to Adam as the batch size scales. These empirical results are captured by our theoretical gap model, which predicts this batch-size-dependent crossover. Our perspective helps reconcile several existing hypotheses while offering practical insights across domains.

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

Learned Image Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly rely on high-frequency multi-camera observations, making visual communication a major bottleneck for real-time robotic control in bandwidth-constrained or distributed deployment settings. Existing image and video codecs, however, are designed to preserve generic visual fidelity rather than the control performance of downstream VLA policies. In this work, we introduce SPARC (SPatially Adaptive Rate Control), a learned image compression framework tailored for VLA-driven robots. Our key observation is that the importance of visual information varies substantially across both camera views and spatial regions within an image. Based on this observation, SPARC employs a lightweight temporal mask selector that adaptively allocates bitrate over latent representations according to task relevance while leveraging temporal context. We further introduce a tilted rate loss that stabilizes training by reducing the tendency of entropy-based objectives to over-suppress rare yet task-critical visual patterns. Experiments on diverse robotic benchmarks, including RoboCasa365, VLABench, and LIBERO, show that SPARC consistently achieves stronger control performance than conventional image/video codecs and recent learned compression methods under the same bitrate budget. We additionally demonstrate real-world deployment benefits in remote-control settings, where our method substantially improves the bitrate-success tradeoff.

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

LLM-based Embeddings: Attention Values Encode Sentence Semantics Better Than Hidden States

Sentence representations are foundational to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. While recent methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive sentence representations, most rely on final-layer hidden states, which are optimized for next-token prediction and thus often fail to capture global, sentence-level semantics. This paper introduces a novel perspective, demonstrating that attention value vectors capture sentence semantics more effectively than hidden states. We propose Value Aggregation (VA), a simple method that pools token values across multiple layers and token indices. In a training-free setting, VA outperforms other LLM-based embeddings, even matches or surpasses the ensemble-based MetaEOL. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when paired with suitable prompts, the layer attention outputs can be interpreted as aligned weighted value vectors. Specifically, the attention scores of the last token function as the weights, while the output projection matrix ($W_O$) aligns these weighted value vectors with the common space of the LLM residual stream. This refined method, termed Aligned Weighted VA (AlignedWVA), achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free LLM-based embeddings, outperforming the high-cost MetaEOL by a substantial margin. Finally, we highlight the potential of obtaining strong LLM embedding models through fine-tuning Value Aggregation.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

A lactylation- and autophagy-associated prognostic signature reveals LSEC-derived CLEC3B as a novel mediator of hepatocellular carcinoma suppression

作者:

by Youai Song, Yinkuan Ning, Meihui Li, Jianwei Lan, Liangchen Lei, Yufei Han, Zhuo Meng, Binjie Li, Pengpeng Liu, Quanyan Liu The crosstalk between lactylation and autophagy within the hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) microenvironment is a burgeoning field with profound implications. By integrating multi-omics data from public cohorts, we delineated two molecular subtypes of HCC with divergent clinical outcomes and established a lactylation-autophagy-related prognostic signature. This signature highlighted CLEC3B as a pivotal gene. Subsequent single-cell RNA sequencing and experimental validation unequivocally pinpointed liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) as the principal cellular source of CLEC3B, which was significantly downregulated in HCC tissues. Functionally, conditioned media derived from CLEC3B-overexpressing LSECs potently inhibited HCC cell proliferation. Mechanistic investigations revealed that this tumor-suppressive effect was orchestrated through the concurrent suppression of autophagy and diminution of lactylation levels. Our findings position LSEC-secreted CLEC3B as a novel metabolic mediator in HCC, bridging two key pathways in tumor suppression, and endorse its clinical value both as a prognostic indicator and a promising therapeutic target.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

LongSpike: Fractional Order Spiking State Space Models for Efficient Long Sequence Learning

arXiv:2606.12895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are well-regarded for their biological plausibility and energy efficiency in processing sequential data. However, dominant SNN architectures typically rely on first-order Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) to govern neuronal state transitions. This first-order assumption imposes a "memoryless" bottleneck, limiting the model's capacity to capture the complex, long-range dependencies inherent in long-sequence tasks. In this work, we propose LongSpike, a novel SNN framework that integrates fractional-order State-Space Modeling, or f-SSM, from control theory into the spiking domain. By extending traditional integer-order SSMs to the fractional-calculus regime, LongSpike enables the hierarchical integration of neuronal dynamics with long-memory kernels. To mitigate the computational overhead and parallelization challenges typically associated with fractional operators, we leverage a state-space formulation that supports efficient, parallel training. Empirical evaluations on challenging benchmarks, including Long Range Arena (LRA), large-scale WikiText-103, and Speech Commands, demonstrate that LongSpike outperforms state-of-the-art SNNs in accuracy while preserving sparse synaptic computation. The code is available at https://github.com/xinruihe389-commits/LongSpike.

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

Honeypot Protocol

作者:

arXiv:2604.13301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Trusted monitoring, the standard defense in AI control, is vulnerable to adaptive attacks, collusion, and strategic attack selection. All of these exploit the fact that monitoring is passive: it observes model behavior but never probes whether the model would behave differently under different perceived conditions. We introduce the honeypot protocol, which tests for context-dependent behavior by varying only the system prompt across three conditions (evaluation, synthetic deployment, explicit no-monitoring) while holding the task, environment, and scoring identical. We evaluate Claude Opus 4.6 in BashArena across all three conditions in both honest and attack modes. The model achieved 100% main task success and triggered zero side tasks uniformly across conditions, providing a baseline for future comparisons with stronger attack policies and additional models.

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

FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents

Training deep search agents requires verifiable questions whose answers remain unavailable until sufficient evidence has been acquired through search. Existing synthesis methods often increase apparent difficulty by enriching graph structures, but structural complexity alone does not guarantee realized search difficulty: the intended search process can collapse through a cheaper identifying route. We formalize this gap with a shortcut-aware difficulty framework and identify four actionable shortcut risks: evidence co-coverage, single-clue selectivity, exposed constants, and prior-knowledge binding. To diagnose their realized effects, we use trajectory signatures including solving cost, answer hit time, and prior-shortcut rate. Guided by this framework, we introduce FORT, a Framework of Shortcut-Resistant Training-Data Synthesis. FORT constructs shortcut-resistant training data by controlling shortcut risks across entity selection, evidence graph construction, question formulation, and adversarial refinement. Experiments show that FORT induces longer pre-answer search and fewer shortcut patterns than existing open-source deep search datasets. Using the resulting trajectories, we train FORT-Searcher with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) only, and it achieves the best overall performance among comparable-size open-source search agents on challenging deep search benchmarks. Relevant resources will be made available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/FORT-Searcher.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Capital Asset Pricing Model with Size Factor and Normalizing by Volatility Index

arXiv:2411.19444v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) relates a well-diversified stock portfolio to a benchmark portfolio. We insert size effect in CAPM, capturing the observation that small stocks have higher risk and return than large stocks, on average. For some size-based stock portfolios, dividing their returns by the Volatility Index makes them closer to independent and normal. In this article, we combine these ideas to create a new discrete-time model, which includes volatility, relative size, and CAPM. We fit this model using real-world data, prove the long-term stability, and connect this research to Stochastic Portfolio Theory. We fill important gaps in our previous article on CAPM with the size factor.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PCS-UQ: Uncertainty Quantification via the Predictability-Computability-Stability Framework

arXiv:2505.08784v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As machine learning (ML) enters high-stakes domains, trustworthy uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for safety. In this paper we introduce PCS-UQ, a framework based on the Predictability, Computability, and Stability (PCS) principles for veridical data science. Starting with a candidate set of models or algorithms, PCS-UQ integrates a rigorous prediction-check to screen out unsuitable models in the set and utilizes bootstrap samples, in order to capture both inter-sample variability and algorithmic instability for the prediction-checked algorithms. We then introduce a novel multiplicative calibration scheme to enhance local adaptivity, which basically corresponds to a new score in conformal prediction. Moreover, we produce a compilation of 17 real-world regression datasets with manually-constructed subgroups. On this benchmark, PCS-UQ maintains the target coverage while outperforming or matching conformal methods equipped with oracle-selected algorithms in interval width. PCS-UQ achieves consistent subgroup coverage, outperforming these oracle-selected conformal methods. Notably, PCS-UQ stands out in achieving both competitive interval widths and consistent subgroup coverage.Across 6 classification datasets, PCS-UQ reduces prediction set sizes by 20\%. To scale the framework for deep learning, we propose computationally efficient variants that bypass expensive retraining. On three computer vision benchmarks, these variants reduce prediction set sizes by 20\% over conformal baselines. Finally, we provide theoretical proof that a modified PCS-UQ algorithm preserves valid coverage under exchangeability as a form of split conformal inference.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Understanding Truncated Positional Encodings for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) enhance the power of graph neural networks (GNNs), both theoretically and empirically. Two of the most popular families of PEs - spectral (e.g., Laplacian eigenspaces, effective resistance) and walk-based (polynomials of the adjacency matrix) - are theoretically equivalent in expressive power, with expressivity between the 1-WL and 3-WL tests. However, this equivalence assumes the GNN uses the "complete" version of these PEs, which requires $O(n^3)$ time and space complexity. Instead, practitioners commonly use truncated variants of these encodings, such as the first $k$ eigenspaces or powers of the adjacency matrix. However, the theoretical properties of these truncated PEs are unknown. In this work, we initiate the study of these truncated PEs. Theoretically, we show that, under truncation, several families of PEs are fundamentally different in expressive power. As a corollary, we show that truncated spectral PEs are no longer stronger than the 1-WL test. We also study a family of spectral PEs, the $k$-harmonic distances, to highlight the differences in expressive power of even closely related truncated PEs. Finally, we experimentally show that a mix of truncated PEs is preferable to any single family on real-world datasets.