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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum geometrical description of hole spin qubits far away from the $\Gamma$-point

Authors:
Zolt\'an Gy\"orgy↗Dmitry Miserev↗Jelena Klinovaja↗Daniel Loss↗

arXiv:2606.14683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hole spin qubits provide one of the leading platforms for spin-based quantum computing due to their large intrinsic spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which enables fast electrical manipulation. The SOI of planar quantum dots has mostly been investigated in theoretical studies by examining the SOI already present in the two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG). Here, we study the SOI created by the in-plane confinement by deriving non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians numerically for hole spin qubits. We find that the quantum geometry of the 2DHG naturally emerges, leading to a meaningful non-perturbative definition of pseudospin valid far away from the $\Gamma$-point. The SOI of the 2DHG and of the in-plane confinement have different forms; therefore, they cannot be turned off simultaneously, ruining the perfect spin-orbit switch functionality of spin qubits. We construct effective Hamiltonians using the symmetry approach for various low-dimensional hole systems: (i) a heavy-hole confined in a SiGe/Ge/SiGe heterostructure, (ii) a light-hole confined in SnGe/Ge, (iii) a gate-defined nanowire in SiGe/Ge/SiGe, and (iv) a hole confined in a Ge/Si core/shell nanowire. The non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians provide results with excellent agreement with the full Hamiltonians.

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

Quantile-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Graph Neural Networks

Authors:
Soyoung park↗Hwanjun Song↗Sungsu Lim↗

arXiv:2605.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice, and achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stochastic Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent

Authors:
Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Aujol↗J\'er\'emie Bigot↗Camille Castera↗

arXiv:2509.14969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter tuning. The method comes from a theoretically-grounded adaptation of the Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent method to the stochastic setting. We prove the convergence of stochastic gradient descent with our step-size under various assumptions, and we show that it empirically competes against tuned baselines.

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

Black Hole–Entropy Container or Creator

Authors:
William G Unruh↗

arXiv:2603.18374v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Do black holes possess entropy or do they create it? The dominant assumption is that they possess entropy, and a they evaporate that entropy is emitted and decreases. In this paper I use a model of a linear amplifier, in which I argue that the amplifier has not entropy and yet it emits entropy in the process of it operation. This model is closely related to behaviour of black holes, resulting in answer the question of that title that black holes do not have entropy, but nevertheless them create and emit entropy with the total entropy emitted being the same as the usual expression proportional to the square of the mass of the black hole.

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05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

DAQplugin: Deep Learning based Real-time Model Evaluation Plugin for ChimeraX

Authors:
Terashi↗Zhu↗Kihara↗

Although an increasing number of protein structures are determined by cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), protein structure modeling frequently suffers from residue misassignments and sequence register shifts, particularly in regions with ambiguous density. Here, we present DAQplugin, a ChimeraX plugin that performs real-time evaluation of protein models against cryo-EM density maps using the deep-learning-based residue-wise model quality (DAQ) score. Unlike existing validation tools that are typically applied after model construction, DAQplugin enables real-time deep-learning-based validation during model building and refinement. To our knowledge, DAQplugin is the first tool that provides real-time deep-learning based validation of protein models for cryo-EM map within an interactive modeling environment. In addition to identifying potential modeling errors, DAQplugin also provides guidance for correcting sequence register shifts by suggesting alternative residue placements along the backbone. The computation in this plugin is designed to run efficiently on general CPUs without requiring GPU hardware. Using DAQplugin, users can perform deep-learning-based validation on standard laptops during interactive model building, model-map fitting, and refinement. DAQplugin is able to facilitate more accurate interpretation of cryo-EM density maps and improve the reliability assessment of protein structure models.

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

LOCUS: Local Visual Cue Search for Enhancing Fine-Grained Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:
Zhou Tao↗Fang Zhang↗Zewen Ding↗Shida Wang↗Xiaokun Sun↗YongXiang Hua↗Haoyu Cao↗Linli Xu↗

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on fine-grained visual perception, even when high-resolution inputs preserve the necessary local details. We identify this limitation as visual context rot: decisive evidence may exist in the full image, yet fail to be reliably selected and used amid redundant visual context. We propose LOCUS (LOcal visual CUe Search), a training framework that teaches MLLMs to internalize local evidence search through a verifiable proxy task. During training, LOCUS provides a local crop as a visual cue and optimizes the model to recover its spatial support in the full image using an IoU-based reward. The visual cue is used only during training, leaving the standard image-question inference interface unchanged. Experiments across fine-grained perception, hallucination, general understanding, and reasoning benchmarks show that LOCUS improves localization-sensitive visual understanding while preserving broad capabilities. Attention analyses further indicate stronger focus on task-relevant evidence regions, suggesting that training-time visual cue search provides an effective route to internalized fine-grained evidence selection.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

EgoCS-400K: An Egocentric Gameplay Dataset for World Models

Authors:
Rongjin Guo↗Dong Liang↗Yuhao Liu↗Fang Liu↗Tianyu Huang↗Gerhard P. Hancke↗Rynson W. H. Lau↗

The shift from video generation to interactive world modeling places new demands on data: beyond captioned videos, world models require temporally aligned video-action-language trajectories grounded in the actions, camera motion, states, and events that drive future scene changes. However, such data is difficult to obtain at scale. Web video datasets offer broad visual coverage but lack executable actions and reliable states; robotic datasets provide action and state supervision but are costly and limited in scene diversity; and existing simulators often lack large-scale human-driven interaction trajectories. In this paper, we introduce EgoCS-400K, a large-scale replay-grounded egocentric Counter-Strike dataset for world models, built from public professional CS and CS2 match demos that preserve human gameplay trajectories and enable parsing, replaying, rendering, and temporal alignment. We extract player states, view directions, movements, keyboard/button inputs, view-angle changes, weapon usage, game events, and round-level context, and render clean first-person videos from the same trajectories. EgoCS-400K contains over 400,000 first-person videos and 10,000 hours of gameplay from more than 1,000 matches and 40,000 rounds, covering 13 maps and 10 player viewpoints per round. It supports a range of interactive visual modeling tasks, including action-conditioned future prediction, state- and event-aware scene rollout, replay-grounded captioning, and agent egocentric action understanding. By connecting visual observations with human actions, camera motion, game states, and events at scale, EgoCS-400K serves as a practical bridge between passive web videos, controllable game simulation, and costly real-world embodied data.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models

Authors:
Wancong Zhang↗Basile Terver↗Artem Zholus↗Soham Chitnis↗Harsh Sutaria↗Mido Assran↗Randall Balestriero↗Amir Bar↗Adrien Bardes↗Yann LeCun↗Nicolas Ballas↗

arXiv:2604.03208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models are a promising path to zero-shot embodied control through planning. However, existing world model planners struggle on long-horizon, multi-stage tasks: prediction errors compound and naive search is exponential in the planning horizon. Hierarchy mitigates both by decomposing tasks into shorter, tractable subproblems; yet prior hierarchical approaches either amortize control into task-specific policies (hierarchical RL) or assume low-dimensional states and known dynamics (classical hierarchical MPC). We present Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models (HWM), an architecture and planning paradigm for hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) directly on visual world models trained solely via next-latent prediction. HWM learns world models at multiple temporal scales within a shared latent space, so predictions from the long-horizon model serve as subgoals for the short-horizon model via latent matching, without task-specific rewards, skill learning, or hierarchical policies. To keep long-horizon search tractable, HWM learns an action encoder that compresses primitive action chunks into latent macro-actions. On real-world Franka manipulation, HWM solves pick-and-place from a single goal image at 70% success vs. 0% for single-level planning. Across simulated push manipulation and maze navigation, HWM consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks while requiring up to 3x less planning compute.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Reduced nighttime smartphone use among cohabiting partners: a longitudinal study under the lens of social control of health behaviors theory

Authors:
Klasson↗T. A↗Rod↗N. H↗Zucco↗A. G↗

Objective: We examined the link between cohabitation with a partner and nighttime smartphone use through the social control of health behavior theory. Background: Nighttime smartphone use is a behavioral risk factor for sleep problems. While previous research has predominantly focused on individual-level risks of sleep disturbances, the role of social context remains underexplored. Theoretical frameworks, specifically the Social Control of Health Behavior, suggest that social relationships regulate health-related behaviors; however, it is unclear how far this regulation extends to modern digital behaviors among couples. Method: We analyzed survey data from three waves of the SmartSleep Study (2018, 2020, and 2023; total N = 25,028), including a longitudinal follow-up subset (N = 1,003). We tested multivariate associations between living with a partner, changes in cohabitation status and frequent nighttime smartphone use by fitting generalized linear mixed-effects models. Additionally, we mapped the complex interplay between indicators of social integration, social support, smartphone use, and sleep quality using hierarchical clustering of non-linear correlations. Results: Cohabiting participants had lower odds of frequent nighttime smartphone use compared to those living alone (OR = 0.66; 95% CI: 0.61, 0.72). This lower risk was driven primarily by cohabitation with a partner (OR = 0.49; 95% CI: 0.36, 0.66). Longitudinal analysis supported these findings, showing that sustained cohabitation was associated with less frequent nighttime use (OR = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.38, 0.82). Clustering analysis revealed that indicators of social integration and support clustered with favorable sleep quality. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the health-protective effects of cohabitation with a partner extend to digital behaviors. Consistent with social control of health behavior theory, the presence of a partner appears to reduce frequent nighttime smartphone use, highlighting the critical importance of considering social context when addressing digital health hygiene and promoting sleep.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

Authors:
Apoorva Kulkarni↗Kaousheik Jayakumar↗Sreyan Ghosh↗Sarah Wiegreffe↗Dinesh Manocha↗Ramani Duraiswami↗

arXiv:2606.17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception. Understanding the causes of these failures remains challenging as existing benchmarks report performance gaps without probing underlying mechanisms. To address this, we introduce a benchmark with 1,657 questions across three foundational tasks designed specifically for mechanistic analysis. Examining model outputs across varying input settings (behavioral analysis) reveals that models often under-utilize audio when textual cues are available. We also provide the first causal mechanistic analysis of temporal reasoning failures in LALMs. Comparing attention upweighting against scaling, we find that redistributing attention across audio tokens is more effective than increasing audio attention. Targeting task-relevant tokens yields further gains. These findings suggest that modality imbalance alone cannot explain failures. Attention scaling at bottleneck layers improves accuracy from 55.9% to 59.1% without fine-tuning, demonstrating a promising direction for future work.

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

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

Authors:
Sasha Behrouzi↗Lichao Wu↗Mohamadreza Rostami↗Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi↗

arXiv:2602.16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full fine-tuning incurs substantial computational and storage overhead, while parameter-efficient methods, e.g., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trade efficiency for inconsistent safety gains and sensitivity to design choices. Safety intervention mechanisms reduce unsafe outputs without modifying model weights, but do not directly shape or preserve the internal representations that govern safety behavior. We present NeST, a Neuron-Selective Tuning framework for efficient post-hoc safety alignment. NeST identifies safety-relevant feed-forward neurons via activation probing on vanilla harmful and benign prompts, clusters neurons with similar activation profiles, and trains shared cluster-level updates while freezing the rest of the model. Importantly, NeST is trained only on vanilla malicious prompts, without using jailbreak-specific attack data, yet generalizes robustly to diverse jailbreaks. The learned updates are then folded into the original weights, incurring no inference-time overhead. Evaluated on 14 open-weight language and multimodal models, NeST outperforms lightweight baselines and approaches full fine-tuning robustness with significantly fewer trainable parameters. On text-only models, NeST reduces average jailbreak attack success rate from 44.5% to 1.1% while training only 0.4M parameters on average. Across multimodal settings, it reduces ASR from 55.3% to 1.1%, and for downstream fine-tuned variants, it restores safety by reducing ASR from 53.8% to 0.8%. These results show that robust, maintainable safety alignment can be achieved by concentrating adaptation on localized, functionally coherent safety structures.

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

Olmo Hybrid: From Theory to Practice and Back

Authors:
William Merrill↗Yanhong Li↗Tyler Romero↗Anej Svete↗Caia Costello↗Pradeep Dasigi↗Dirk Groeneveld↗David Heineman↗Bailey Kuehl↗Nathan Lambert↗Chuan Li↗Kyle Lo↗…

Recent work has demonstrated the potential of non-transformer language models, especially linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and hybrid models that mix recurrence and attention. Yet there is no consensus on whether the potential benefits of these new architectures justify the risk and effort of scaling them up. To address this, we provide evidence for the advantages of hybrid models over pure transformers on several fronts. First, theoretically, we show that hybrid models do not merely inherit the expressivity of transformers and linear RNNs, but can express tasks beyond both, such as code execution. Putting this theory to practice, we train Olmo Hybrid, a 7B-parameter model largely comparable to Olmo 3 7B but with the sliding window layers replaced by Gated DeltaNet layers. We show that Olmo Hybrid outperforms Olmo 3 across standard pretraining and mid-training evaluations, demonstrating the benefit of hybrid models in a controlled, large-scale setting. We find that the hybrid model scales significantly more efficiently than the transformer, explaining its higher performance. However, its unclear why greater expressivity on specific formal problems should result in better scaling or superior performance on downstream tasks unrelated to those problems. To explain this apparent gap, we return to theory and argue why increased expressivity should translate to better scaling efficiency, completing the loop. Overall, our results suggest that hybrid models mixing attention and recurrent layers are a powerful extension to the language modeling paradigm: not merely to reduce memory during inference, but as a fundamental way to obtain more expressive models that scale better during pretraining.

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

V2P-Manip: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Monocular Human Videos

Authors:
Kaihan Chen↗Yanming Shao↗Haifeng Ji↗Xiaokang Yang↗Yao Mu↗

Achieving autonomous robotic dexterous manipulation requires precise, human-like action sequences at scale. As a scalable supplement to costly teleoperation data, extracting trajectories with both visual fidelity and physical plausibility from monocular videos represents a promising frontier in embodied AI. To this end, we introduce V2P-Manip, an efficient framework designed to learn dexterous manipulation policies directly from human demonstration videos. We establish an efficient, integrated pipeline encompassing 3D asset acquisition, trajectory estimation, and dexterous policy learning. To bridge the gap between visual perception and physical constraints, we introduce a two-stage refinement process to enforce spatial alignment and physical consistency. Evaluations on the TACO and OakInk benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods in pose accuracy, adaptability to unstructured environments, and training efficiency. Ultimately, experimental results confirm an average success rate of over 75% across multiple synthetic manipulation tasks and validate the adaptability of the extracted manipulation priors across diverse dexterous hand embodiments.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization

Authors:
Federica Filippini↗

arXiv:2606.20236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many decision-making problems in computing and networking systems can be naturally formulated as cost-minimization problems under performance constraints. In dynamic environments, reinforcement learning (RL) is often used to solve such problems at runtime by embedding both costs and constraint violations into a single scalar reward through weighted penalty terms, following a Lagrangian-inspired formulation. However, in this context the behavior of the learned policy critically depends on the choice of these weights, which are typically selected manually. This makes it difficult to identify an appropriate trade-off between optimizing the primary objective and effectively avoiding constraint violations, particularly in non-stationary environments where their relative importance may change. This paper presents MAMO (Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization), an approach to tackle this balancing problem through multi-agent RL. MAMO decouples task execution from objective design by formulating the selection of reward weights as a learning problem, providing a !rst step towards more autonomous and robust RL-based solutions for constrained optimization problems in dynamic environments.

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16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the structure of the sandpile identity element on Sierpinski gasket graphs

Authors:
Robin Kaiser↗Ecaterina Sava-Huss↗Julia \"Uberbacher↗

arXiv:2603.12006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the identity of the abelian sandpile group of finite approximation graphs of the Sierpinski gasket, and we show that the second-order term in the scaling limit converges to the path distance to the nearest corner on the Sierpinski gasket. The proof relies on a decomposition of the identity of the sandpile group into the sum of a constant function and the Laplacian of the graph distance on the approximating graphs.

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

No Accidental Software Agent First Canonical Code for Human Code Entropy Reduction and 30 to 500 times Lower Frontier Model Requirements

Authors:
Jepson Taylor↗

arXiv:2606.14357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier coding models may spend substantial capacity learning not only program behavior, but also accidental entropy in human repositories. Such repositories contain valuable signals: tests, incidents, migrations, edge cases, product judgment, and operational history. These signals are entangled with framework churn, naming drift, generated-source ambiguity, dependency rituals, CI dialects, weak proof routes, and human-oriented review customs. We propose agent-first canonical code, a proof-carrying substrate that rewrites routine product software into canonical behavior profiles, typed change algebra, proof lanes, constrained edit grammars, semantic patch cells, runtime negative memory, and proof-carrying change objects. The core hypothesis is that quotienting software by behavior equivalence under a declared oracle can collapse equivalent encodings into governed representatives with explicit evidence and proof obligations. The endpoint is amortized cost per verified correct change, including source, context, reasoning, tools, verification, security, provenance, review, failed loops, defects, and foundry cost under a common oracle. Reported reduction bands are hypotheses, not measured frontier results. The proposed limit is a No-Accident Horizon: removable accident decreases until residual novelty, evidence, governance, risk, and future optionality dominate. For supported routine-product distributions, this gives a defensible planning target near 100-fold all-in cost reduction, not a guarantee for all software. Preliminary QLoRA experiments on Qwen2.5-Coder-14B show that 64,088 canonical trajectories are learnable and suppress tested forbidden-language markers, but do not establish behavior preservation, scaling economics, or verified-change cost. The contribution is a falsifiable program centered on minimum functional description length and verified-change cost.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

On-Chip Quantum Randomness Amplification

Authors:
Lang Li↗Yutian Wu↗Giulio Chiribella↗Ravishankar Ramanathan↗

arXiv:2606.12173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Randomness amplification, the task of extracting uniform private bits from biased seeds that may be partly known by a malicious third party, is of central importance in cryptography. The highest security in this task is provided by a class of quantum protocols known as device-independent, which however are challenging to integrate into scalable devices. Semi-device-independent (SDI) protocols are a promising alternative that guarantees security under few natural assumptions, such as bounds on the amount of energy used by the devices. Here, we provide the first demonstration of SDI randomness amplification on an integrated silicon photonic chip, achieving a throughput rate of 20 Mbps suitable for practical applications. This rate is achieved through a novel technique for SDI entropy certification, which delivers strictly tighter von Neumann entropy bounds compared to existing methods and remains valid even if the preparation and measurement devices share quantum correlations. Overall, the methods developed in this work enable the integration of SDI technology into portable telecom devices, opening up a new generation of quantum cryptographic hardware.

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

Rethinking Shrinkage Bias in LLM FP4 Pretraining: Geometric Origin, Systemic Impact, and UFP4 Recipe

Authors:
Qian Zhao↗Kunlong Chen↗Changxin Tian↗Zhonghui Jiang↗Haitao Zhang↗Chaofan Yu↗Peijie Jiang↗Mingliang Gong↗Jia Liu↗Ziqi Liu↗Zhiqiang Zhang↗Jun Zhou↗…

arXiv:2606.20381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial reductions in memory and computation cost for LLM pretraining, yet current FP4 hardware paths and recipes, including NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin-class systems and AMD MI350-series GPUs, remain centered on E2M1 data elements. In this study, we identify a fundamental limitation of that choice: non-uniform formats such as E2M1 inherently suffer from Shrinkage Bias, a systematic negative rounding error caused by the geometric asymmetry of their representable bins. We show that this bias accumulates multiplicatively across layers and is amplified by the Random Hadamard Transform (RHT), providing a unified explanation for the training instability observed in existing E2M1-based FP4 recipes. In contrast, uniform grids (E1M2/INT4) bypass this grid-geometry error and better convert the improved bucket utilization from RHT into higher quantization quality. Based on this finding, we propose UFP4, a uniform 4-bit training recipe that applies RHT to all three training GEMMs while restricting stochastic rounding to dY alone. On Dense 1.5B, MoE 7.9B, and MoE 124B long-run pretraining, UFP4 consistently achieves lower BF16-relative loss degradation than strong E2M1-based baselines, supported by scaling-law analysis and ablation studies. Our results suggest that future accelerators should support E1M2/INT4-style uniform 4-bit grids as first-class training primitives alongside E2M1.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Hidden Ghost Hand: Unveiling Backdoor Vulnerabilities in MLLM-Powered Mobile GUI Agents

Authors:
Pengzhou Cheng↗Haowen Hu↗Zheng Wu↗Zongru Wu↗Tianjie Ju↗Zhuosheng Zhang↗Gongshen Liu↗

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown greater promise for human-interaction. However, due to the high fine-tuning cost, users often rely on open-source GUI agents or APIs offered by AI providers, which introduces a critical but underexplored supply chain threat: backdoor attacks. In this work, we first unveil that MLLM-powered GUI agents naturally expose multiple interaction-level triggers, such as historical steps, environment states, and task progress. Based on this observation, we introduce AgentGhost, an effective and stealthy framework for red-teaming backdoor attacks. Specifically, we first construct composite triggers by combining goal and interaction levels, allowing GUI agents to unintentionally activate backdoors while ensuring task utility. Then, we formulate backdoor injection as a Min-Max optimization problem that uses supervised contrastive learning to maximize the feature difference across sample classes at the representation space, improving flexibility of the backdoor. Meanwhile, it adopts supervised fine-tuning to minimize the discrepancy between backdoor and clean behavior generation, enhancing effectiveness and utility. Extensive evaluations of various agent models in two established mobile benchmarks show that AgentGhost is effective and generic, with attack accuracy that reaches 99.7\% on three attack objectives, and shows stealthiness with only 1\% utility degradation. Furthermore, we tailor a defense method against AgentGhost that reduces the attack accuracy to 22.1\%. Our code is available at \texttt{anonymous}.

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

Risk Under Pressure: Compute-Aware Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness in Language Models

Authors:
Malikeh Ehghaghi↗Bogl\'arka Ecsedi↗Marsha Chechik↗Colin Raffel↗

arXiv:2606.11409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally costly. In practice, the computational expense of different attack strategies can vary by orders of magnitude. Consequently, ASR at a fixed budget can obscure the true effort required to jailbreak a model, thereby making it hard to determine whether an attack's cost justifies its payoff to the attacker. We propose a compute-aware evaluation framework based on computational pressure, measured in cumulative floating-point operations (FLOPs), as a proxy for adversarial effort. We introduce risk-compute curves, which map compute budgets to attack risk, and derive two metrics that summarize the average pressure required for a given attack to succeed. Across ten models spanning three families and four different stages in language model training and alignment, evaluated with three attack strategies (gradient-based, iterative refinement, and template-based) on two jailbreak robustness benchmarks, we find: (1) alignment training has non-monotonic effects on compute-space robustness; (2) scaling model size reduces gradient-based attack effectiveness but has limited impact on cheaper template-based attacks; (3) gradient-based attacks optimized on a surrogate model can transfer to a separate target model, providing a way to reduce attacker costs; (4) compute cost varies by up to ${\approx}5{\times}$ across harm categories within a single model; and (5) safety-aligned RL increases aggregate cost while leaving some categories disproportionately accessible. We release our framework to enable compute-aware risk assessment and evaluation.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Effect of tenofovir on the outcomes of COVID-19 in persons with chronic hepatitis B: a nationwide cohort study in Sweden.

Authors:
Jakobsson↗F. F↗Eriksson↗Kalucza↗S. F↗Fors Connolly↗A.-M↗

Background: Patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) may have an increased risk of severe COVID-19. Tenofovir has been hypothesized to confer protection against severe disease, but evidence is inconclusive. We evaluated the risk of severe COVID-19 among CHB patients treated with tenofovir compared with other nucleos(t)ide analogues (NAs). Methods and findings: In this nationwide, registry-based cohort study, we included all adults with CHB and laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Sweden between February 2020 and July 2022. Data from national health and socioeconomic registers were linked using unique personal identification numbers (PINs). Patients with HIV, hepatitis C, or hepatitis D coinfection were excluded. Exposure was defined as tenofovir versus other NA therapy. The primary outcome was severe COVID-19, defined as hospitalization >2 days or death within 30 days of diagnosis. Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), controlling for age, sex, comorbidities, vaccination, socioeconomic status, and region of birth. Among 5,877 CHB patients with COVID-19, 672 were receiving NA therapy (437 tenofovir, 235 other NAs). Severe COVID-19 occurred in 8.0% of tenofovir-treated patients and 14.5% of those receiving other NAs (unadjusted OR 0.52; 95% CI, 0.31-0.85). After adjustment, the association was attenuated and no longer significant (aOR 0.72; 95% CI, 0.39-1.31). Older age, comorbidities, and unvaccinated status were strongly associated with severe disease. Conclusions: The apparent protective effect of tenofovir against severe COVID-19 in unadjusted analyses was largely explained by confounding factors. The risk of severe disease was primarily driven by age, comorbidities, and vaccination status. Prevention of severe COVID-19 in patients with CHB should instead focus on vaccination and management of comorbidities.

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

Experimental Analysis of Neural Network-Based Image Classification on the CIFAR-10 Dataset

Authors:
Necati Kagan Erkek↗Emre Balci↗Berkin Halay↗

An experimental investigation of neural image classification on the CIFAR-10 benchmark is presented through fully connected and convolutional network formulations. The analysis emphasizes the complete learning pipeline: image vectorization, normalization, one-hot class encoding, supervised loss minimization, learning-rate selection, mini-batch training, convolutional feature extraction, max-pooling, and validation-based generalization assessment. A convolutional architecture with six convolutional layers and three max-pooling stages is evaluated for ten training epochs using a batch size of 128 and an Adam optimizer with a learning rate of 0.001. The validation accuracy reaches approximately 74.77%, while the validation loss begins to increase after the middle of training despite continued reduction in training loss. The resulting behavior illustrates the practical difference between representation learning and memorization, and it provides a compact experimental baseline for future studies on regularization, data augmentation, deeper architectures, and reproducible image-classification education.

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25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Somatic variant detection in normal tissues from single-cell sequencing data

Authors:
Luo↗Wang↗Dou↗Bhamidipati↗S. V↗Kalra↗Grochowski↗C. M↗Doddapaneni↗H. V↗Gibbs↗R. A↗…

A crucial advantage of single-cell sequencing (SCS) is its ability to identify somatic variants in individual cells, enabling phylogenetic analysis of cellular populations within bulk tissues. While identifying somatic variants in tumor tissues via SCS has become a common practice, doing so in normal tissues remains challenging due to the rarity of somatic variants in normal cells. To evaluate the feasibility of somatic variant calling from widely available single-nucleus RNA-seq (snRNA-seq) and single-nucleus ATAC-seq (snATAC-seq) data, we profiled a Cell-line mix of six HapMap samples prepared by the SMaHT consortium using 10x Genomics 5' snRNA-seq (12k cells with 36k mean reads per cell) and snATAC-seq (11k cells with 14k median high-quality fragments per cell) for variant calling. PacBio long-read whole genome sequencing (WGS) data (109x) generated from individual cell lines were used as ground truth. Two computational tools, Monopogen and SComatic, were used for somatic variant calling from the SCS data. Monopogen achieved single nucleotide variant (SNV) detection accuracies of 93.30% in the snRNA-seq and 99.64% in the snATAC-seq data, both of which outperformed SComatic (74.35% and 94.29%, respectively). Monopogen also consistently detected somatic SNVs at cellular fractions as low as 0.5% (2.54% in snRNA and 0.81% in snATAC) in individual samples. Notably, snATAC-seq exhibited higher genomic coverage breadth and larger number of variants detected than snRNA-seq. While the SCS data have lower overall genome coverage than that of the bulk WGS, the single-cell level variant resolution allows Monopogen to assign variants to their cells of origin with over 80% accuracy in both RNA and ATAC modalities, thereby facilitating studies of clonal evolution and cell-type-specific mutagenesis. Other benchmarking methods were also evaluated (DeepVariant, Cellsnp-lite and Mutect2) for comparison. In conclusion, our study demonstrated the feasibility of performing reliable single-cell somatic mutation calling in a cell-line mixture and discussed the strengths and limitations of current computational methods when applied to normal tissues.

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