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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

INFRAMIND: Infrastructure-Aware Multi-Agent Orchestration

arXiv:2606.11440v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing multi-agent LLM orchestration methods, ranging from brute-force ensembles to learned routers, select models and topologies based on task and model features. However, these methods do not consider the runtime state of the serving infrastructure. On shared GPU clusters under concurrent load, this infrastructure blindness causes systematic resource underutilization: preferred models accumulate deep request queues while equally capable alternatives sit idle. In multi-agent pipelines, where each query triggers multiple sequential model calls, these delays then compound across every downstream step. Closing this gap is challenging because the relevant infrastructure signals (queue depths, KV-cache pressure, latencies) are dynamic and noisy, and they must drive three different decisions: planning, per-step routing, and scheduling. We introduce INFRAMIND, a framework that makes the entire multi-agent stack infrastructure-aware. An infra-aware planner conditions topology and role selection on real-time system load and remaining budget, biasing toward simpler graphs under congestion and richer ones at low load. An infra-aware executor then observes per-model queue depths, cache utilization, and response latencies at each agent step to decide which model to call and how deeply to reason; a budget-aware scheduler further reorders each model's queue so that urgent requests are served first. Cast as a hierarchical constrained MDP and solved end-to-end via reinforcement learning, the system learns to balance quality against latency automatically. Across five benchmarks, INFRAMIND delivers up to +7.6 pp accuracy over the prior baseline at low load with up to 7x lower latency, and sustains up to 99.9% SLO compliance under high load where every baseline drops below 50%.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MODE-RAG: Manifold Outlier Diagnosis and Energy-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation

While Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (M-RAG) enhances Large Vision-Language Models, it remains highly susceptible to cross-modal hallucinations, causal fabrications, and sycophancy. Furthermore, existing mitigation pipelines often face an intervention paradox: static rules tend to unnecessarily disrupt accurate generations, whereas leaving the multi-modal reasoning completely unguided allows existing mismatches to cascade into severe logical fabrications. To quantify and mitigate these hallucinations, we propose a Multi-Agent system, MODE-RAG, driven by Variational Free Energy (VFE) and internal attention states to dynamically gate interventions. High-risk queries are routed to five stage-specific agents, integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for rigorous causal derivation and logit perturbations to penalize sycophancy. Dedicated Correction and Overseer agents ensure formatting stability and perform post-hoc factual verification. To objectively evaluate our approach, we introduce ModeVent, a challenging subset derived from the MultiVent dataset. Extensive experiments indicate that our system effectively reduces hallucination rates and logical fabrication, significantly improving the robustness of M-RAG systems.

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

Rescaling MLM-Head for Neural Sparse Retrieval

arXiv:2606.18811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) models such as SPLADE have traditionally used BERT-style masked language models as backbone encoders. A natural expectation is that replacing BERT with stronger pretrained encoders should improve retrieval effectiveness. However, we find that under standard SPLADE training recipes, backbones with large MLM-head L2 norms can suffer performance degradation and even training collapse under standard SPLADE training recipes. We identify this failure as a scale mismatch in the MLM head: SPLADE directly uses MLM-head outputs to construct sparse lexical representations, and query-document relevance is computed by an unnormalized dot product over these representations. As a result, an inflated MLM-head scale can amplify sparse activations, distort matching scores, and destabilize contrastive training under common training settings. To address this issue, we introduce a simple initialization-time correction that rescales the MLM-head projection by a constant factor before SPLADE training. This zero-cost adjustment improves training stability without modifying the model architecture or training objective. Across both in-domain and out-of-domain retrieval benchmarks, this simple correction substantially improves large-norm backbones such as ModernBERT and Ettin, turning unstable training runs into competitive sparse retrievers. In several settings, the corrected models further match or surpass the classic BERT-SPLADE baseline. These findings suggest that the bottleneck in adapting pretrained encoders to LSR is not encoder capacity alone, but the calibration of the MLM-head scale used to construct sparse lexical representations.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Multi-task Learning is Not Enough: Representational Entanglement in Dual-output Second Language Speech Recognition

Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving distinct task representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-task decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to reduce surface degradation in dual-output L2 automatic speech recognition.

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

Floating-Point Networks with Automatic Differentiation Can Represent Almost All Floating-Point Functions and Their Gradients

arXiv:2605.01702v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Theoretical studies show that for any differentiable function on a compact domain, there exists a neural network that approximates both the function values and gradients. However, such a result cannot be used in practice since it assumes real parameters and exact internal operations. In contrast, real implementations only use a finite subset of reals and machine operations with round-off errors. In this work, we investigate whether a similar result holds for neural networks under floating-point arithmetic, when the gradient with respect to the input is computed by the automatic differentiation algorithm $D^\mathtt{AD}$. We first show that given a floating-point function $\phi$ (e.g., a loss function), arbitrary function values and gradients can be represented by a floating-point network $f$ and $D^\mathtt{AD}(\phi\circ f)$, respectively. We further extend this result: given $\phi_1,\dots,\phi_n$, $D^\mathtt{AD}(\phi_i\circ f)$ can simultaneously represent arbitrary gradients while $f$ represents the target values, under mild conditions. Our results hold for practical activation functions, e.g., $\mathrm{ReLU}$, $\mathrm{ELU}$, $\mathrm{GeLU}$, $\mathrm{Swish}$, $\mathrm{Sigmoid}$, and $\mathrm{tanh}$.

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

RadSEM: A Finding-by-Finding Metric for Clinical Consistency in Radiology Reports

arXiv:2606.17062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Radiology report evaluation must distinguish clinical compatibility from surface similarity, because negation, laterality, or normal-abnormal polarity can reverse a finding. We propose RadSEM (Radiology Sentence-Level Evaluation Metric), a constrained LLM-assisted metric for reference-based evaluation of radiology Findings. RadSEM rewrites reference and generated reports into ordered atomic finding sentences, each expressing one site-finding proposition. It then performs contradiction-constrained many-to-many matching: incompatible pairs such as "effusion" and "no effusion" receive no credit, while compatible granularity differences can receive partial credit. A deterministic stage weights pairs by part-whole and abnormal-detail relationships, counts unmatched findings, and produces an abnormal-focused weighted F1 score. Thus, the LLM supports structured rewriting and local alignment rather than acting as an opaque judge. We evaluate RadSEM with SSREE, a controlled monotonicity stress test built from 2,448 de-identified reports expanded into five graded corruption levels. RadSEM achieves Kendall tau_b of 0.957, all-pairs concordance of 97.8%, adjacent concordance of 95.0%, and strict five-level ordering for 81.9% of reports, outperforming radiology-specific and general text metrics while avoiding the failure in which polarity-inverted reports regain lexical overlap. On the same SSREE set, RadSEM outperforms the Ref-anchored RadSEM-Alt policy, improving adjacent concordance from 90.7% to 95.0% and strict ordering from 67.2% to 81.9%. On a 599-triplet synonym/antonym subset, RadSEM prefers synonyms in 597 cases (99.67%). These results suggest that explicit finding units, contradiction-aware matching, and abnormal-focused deterministic scoring make report scoring more interpretable and sensitive to clinically meaningful errors. Code is available at https://github.com/jdh-algo/RadSEM.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

UniRED: Unified RGB-D Video Frame Interpolation with Event Guidance

High frame-rate RGB-D videos are crucial for a variety of downstream tasks, including motion analysis, dynamic scene understanding, and 3D reconstruction. However, due to hardware and sensing constraints, practical RGB-D cameras are typically limited to low frame rates, making it difficult to capture rapid scene dynamics. Existing video interpolation methods have achieved strong performance on RGB data, but they are not readily applicable to RGB-D scenarios, where they often yield blurry boundaries, visible artifacts, and degraded geometric consistency. Furthermore, motion estimation from only two boundary frames is inherently under-constrained in complex dynamic scenes. Event cameras, by contrast, provide asynchronous measurements with ultra-high temporal resolution, offering dense motion cues. In this paper, we propose a unified multimodal framework for RGB-D video interpolation that jointly exploits RGB appearance, depth geometry, and event-based temporal cues. Specifically, it first extracts and fuses RGB, depth and event cues, then estimates bidirectional flow with motion basis refinement for RGB and Z-axial refinement for depth, and finally synthesizes the target RGB-D frame via bidirectional warping and soft blending. In addition, we construct a new RGB-D-Event dataset to alleviate the scarcity of tri-modal training data. Extensive experiments on a public benchmark and the proposed dataset demonstrate that our method achieves superior photometric fidelity for RGB interpolation and stronger geometric accuracy for depth interpolation than existing approaches.

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

MacrOData: New Benchmarks of Thousands of Datasets for Tabular Outlier Detection

arXiv:2602.09329v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quality benchmarks are essential for fairly and accurately tracking scientific progress and enabling practitioners to make informed methodological choices. Outlier detection (OD) on tabular data underpins numerous real-world applications, yet existing OD benchmarks remain limited. The prominent OD benchmark AdBench is the de facto standard in the literature, yet comprises only 57 datasets. In addition to other shortcomings discussed in this work, its small scale severely restricts diversity and statistical power. We introduce MacrOData, a large-scale benchmark suite for tabular OD comprising three carefully curated components: OddBench, with 790 datasets containing real-world semantic anomalies; OvrBench, with 856 datasets featuring real-world statistical outliers; and SynBench, with 800 synthetically generated datasets spanning diverse data priors and outlier archetypes. Owing to its scale and diversity, MacrOData enables comprehensive and statistically robust evaluation of tabular OD methods. Our benchmarks further satisfy several key desiderata: We provide standardized train/test splits for all datasets, public/private benchmark partitions with held-out test labels for the latter reserved toward an online leaderboard, and annotate our datasets with semantic metadata. We conduct extensive experiments across all benchmarks, evaluating a broad range of OD methods comprising classical, deep, and foundation models, over diverse hyperparameter configurations. We report detailed empirical findings, practical guidelines, as well as individual performances as references for future research. All benchmarks containing 2,446 datasets combined are open-sourced, along with a publicly accessible leaderboard hosted at https://huggingface.co/MacrOData-CMU.

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

Leave-One-Out-, Bootstrap- and Cross-Conformal Anomaly Detectors

arXiv:2402.16388v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The need for uncertainty quantification in anomaly detection systems has become increasingly important. In this context, effectively controlling Type I error rates without inflating Type II error rates in these systems can build trust and reduce costs associated with false discoveries. The field of conformal anomaly detection emerges as a promising approach for providing respective statistical and finite-sample validity guarantees through model calibration. However, reliance on calibration data imposes practical limitations, especially in low-data regimes. In this work, we formally define and evaluate leave-one-out-, bootstrap-, and cross-conformal methods for conformal anomaly detection, building on methods from the field of conformal prediction. Looking beyond the classical split-conformal approach, we show that derived methods for calculating resampling-conformal $p$-values offer a practical compromise between the data efficiency of full-conformal (transductive) approaches and the computational efficiency of split-conformal (inductive) methods. We validate derived methods and quantify their improvements for a range of one-class classifiers and datasets.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

PseudoBench: Measuring How Agentic Auto-Research Fuels Pseudoscience

As Large Language Model based agents enter autonomous scientific research, their ability to resist pseudoscience becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, such systems may rapidly generate plausible yet misleading studies that contaminate academic literature and erode trust in science. We present PseudoBench, an adversarial benchmark for evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives. PseudoBench contains 200 curated pseudoscientific claim-evidence pairs across five domains and evaluates agents through an end-to-end research pipeline from experiments to writing. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, we find that current systems readily produce persuasive reports that align with pseudoscientific premises with near-zero refusal rates and the highest resistance of only 27.4%. Stronger agents risk packaging pseudoscience in more sophisticated scientific language, increasing its apparent credibility. These findings reveal an alarming capacity to fuel pseudoscience, calling for scientific alignment before widespread deployment.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Evaluation of Trypanosoma brucei Phosphofructokinase Allosteric Inhibition: An In-Silico Study

Human African trypanosomiasis, caused by a protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei, is a neglected tropical disease for which well-tolerated, conveniently administered, and highly efficacious medicines are still missing. Previously, T. brucei Phosphofructokinase was targeted by small-molecule inhibitor development efforts. This approach has shown promise both in vitro and in vivo. In this study, we have used these wet-lab results, evaluated the compounds already characterised by Molecular Dynamics simulations, found relationships between in silico and wet-lab data and used these observations to evaluate compounds that we selected through several different approaches of virtual screens. We observed that inhibitor-ATP interactions are highly predictive of the inhibitory activity. Several compounds selected through virtual screens have outperformed previously characterised compounds.

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

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

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

Vortex: Multi-Modal Fusion System for Intelligent Video Retrieval

This paper presents Vortex, the multimodal video retrieval system developed by our team, FocusOnFun, for the Ho Chi Minh City AI Challenge 2025, designed to advance intelligent multimedia search and temporal reasoning. The system integrates adaptive keyframe extraction, multimodal metadata generation from vision-language and speech models, and a hybrid retrieval strategy that fuses CLIP and SigLIP2 embeddings through Reciprocal Rank Fusion to balance global and fine-grained semantics. To enhance interactivity, Vortex incorporates Rocchio-based relevance feedback and a multi-stage temporal search mechanism for sequential event alignment. Built on Milvus and Elasticsearch, the architecture enables scalable indexing and efficient retrieval. Evaluated in the official competition, our FocusOnFun team's system achieved a score of 79.6/88 (90.5\%) in the Preliminary Round and was further evaluated in the Final Round, achieving an `Excellent' overall performance with `Outstanding' results in the question-answering (QA) task. This demonstrating the complementary strengths of CLIP and SigLIP2 and confirming the effectiveness of the hybrid retrieval approach. The system establishes a robust foundation for future research in intelligent, context-aware, and interactive video retrieval.

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

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.

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

False Sense of Safety in Selective Signal Classification: Auditing Bound Tightness and Exchangeability for Risk Control

arXiv:2606.15153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selective prediction with distribution-free risk control promises that, with confidence 1-delta over the calibration draw, the error rate of accepted inputs stays below a user budget alpha. We audit this promise on signal-domain detectors – machine anomalous-sound detection (ASD) and AI-generated-image forensics – for four calibration rules: uncertified empirical thresholding (NAIVE) and certified Hoeffding, Clopper-Pearson (CP), and betting (WSR) upper confidence bounds. We report three findings. (i) NAIVE thresholding, common in practice, exceeds its declared budget in 49-73% of synthetic trials (n=200 calibration points) and in up to 68% of real-data splits: a false sense of safety rather than a broken theorem, since the rule never had a certificate. (ii) Tightness matters: CP and WSR certify substantial coverage where Hoeffding certifies none, with zero observed budget overruns under exchangeable splits. (iii) Under grouped deployment (unseen machine types or generators), certified rules overrun in 9-30% of trials – far above delta – showing the failure lies in the broken exchangeability premise, not in the bounds; a conservative per-group threshold restores validity at a severe coverage cost.

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

The Hidden Environmental Cost of Poor Coding Practices in TensorFlow and Keras Applications: A Study on Resource Leaks and Carbon Emissions

arXiv:2606.19799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiency and sustainability are critical considerations in the development and deployment of machine learning (ML) applications. Among the factors influencing sustainability, resource leaks in ML code can introduce hidden inefficiencies that elevate energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Despite this, empirical evidence quantifying their environmental impact remains limited. This emerging results paper presents an initial empirical investigation of two common resource-leak smells, namely Improper Model Reuse (IMR) and Unreleased Tensor References (UTR), and their impact on energy consumption and CO2 emissions in TensorFlow and Keras workloads. Controlled experiments were conducted for each smell by executing identical training tasks while comparing against a smell-free baseline. Our preliminary results show that both smells consistently increase estimated electricity usage and carbon emissions. IMR and UTR increased electricity consumption by approximately 32% and 46%, respectively, with proportional increases in CO2 emissions. Paired statistical tests indicate that these differences are systematic and statistically significant, providing initial empirical evidence that resource-leak smells may degrade ML energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. These findings suggest that resource-leak smells pose measurable risks to both software quality and sustainability, emphasizing the importance of integrating resource-lifecycle management and energy-efficiency considerations into ML development.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantifying and detecting quantum-state texture

arXiv:2604.07257v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum-state texture is a recently proposed quantum resource that characterizes the inhomogeneity of a quantum state's matrix element distribution in the computational basis, enriching our understanding of quantum state structure. To expand its quantification toolkit and establish detection methods, in this article, we investigate the resource theory of texture from both quantitative and detection perspectives. First, we construct a texture measure $\mathcal{T}^{GR}_{\alpha,z}(\rho)$ based on the $\alpha$-$z$ Rényi relative entropy and present some of its inherent properties. Second, we analyze the mathematical relationships between several existing texture measures, revealing connections among different quantifiers. Finally, drawing on the witness concept from other resource theories, we systematically introduce texture witnesses into the texture theory and provide examples of texture witnesses with special properties.

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

Scalar-Stepsize Nonuniform Monte Carlo Optimistic Policy Iteration: A Certified Counterexample

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsitsiklis proved convergence of Monte Carlo optimistic policy iteration under a uniform update structure and identified nonuniform update frequencies as a delicate obstruction. We give a certified negative answer for the natural scalar-stepsize, unnormalized asynchronous state-value recursion with fixed nonuniform state-selection probabilities. In a three-state, two-action discounted MDP, the nonuniform update frequencies induce a diagonally scaled greedy-policy mean field with a certified nonconstant attracting hybrid periodic orbit. With a bounded unbiased geometric-horizon estimator and Robbins–Monro stepsizes, the original stochastic recursion remains trapped near the cycle with positive probability and therefore fails to converge. The example pinpoints a geometric obstruction: uniform sampling gives radial residual contraction, whereas scalar nonuniform sampling anisotropically distorts the residual dynamics and can generate switched attracting cycles.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Predicting Motor Recovery After Stroke: Utility and Limits of Corticospinal Tract Biomarkers

Background: Corticospinal tract (CST) damage is a major cause of post-stroke motor deficits. However, it remains unclear which estimates of CST damage best predict motor recovery, especially regarding different aspects of motor control. While conventional CST-lesion metrics offer superior feasibility, data-driven machine learning (ML) approaches may better capture patients propensity for task-specific recovery with important implication for their use as future clinical biomarkers. Methods: Providing the first direct longitudinal comparison of these approaches based exclusively on CST-lesion patterns, we evaluated six conventional CST-lesion metrics and a voxel-wise ML approach using clinical MRI data from 127 acute ischemic stroke patients. Acute impairment and outcome (>3 months post-stroke) were assessed for basal and complex motor functions. Conventional CST-lesion metrics and ML were used to predict task-specific motor impairment and outcome. Results: All conventional CST-lesion metrics correlated significantly with both acute impairment and motor outcome across motor domains, with metrics weighted for CST narrowing and tract probability performing best. However, predictive performance for unseen patients was low. ML outperformed conventional markers in predicting acute impairment across motor domains and basal motor outcome, but failed to predict complex motor outcome. Topographically, predictive voxels clustered within and above the posterior limb of the internal capsule, with distinct CST subregions associated with basal versus complex motor impairment, consistent with a task-specific somatotopic organization. Conclusions: The predictive utility of CST biomarkers was task- and timepoint-dependent. While ML may improve predictive performance, complex motor outcome remained difficult to predict, likely reflecting greater reliance on distributed cortical reorganization beyond the CST. By revealing task-specific CST subregions, voxel-wise ML provides an anatomically informed foundation for future predictive models. Such future models should combine CST biomarkers with measures of broader motor network integrity to enable individualized prognosis tailored to specific motor domains and recovery stages.

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

WorkBench Revisited: Workplace Agents Two Years On

Authors:

The best agent on WorkBench in March 2024, GPT-4, completed 43% of tasks and took an unintended harmful action, such as emailing the wrong person, on 26% of them. We re-visit the benchmark in June 2026 and find that the best agent to date, Claude Opus 4.8, completes 89% and takes an unintended harmful action on 2.5%. Aside from this considerable progress in frontier agent performance, three things stand out. First, capability and safety go together on WorkBench rather than trade off, so the models that finish the most tasks also do the least unintended damage. Second, while several classes of error have been totally eliminated, frontier models still make some basic mistakes that occasionally result in irreversible harm, such as sending an email to the wrong person. Third, the rise of open-weight models has drastically lowered costs for a performance level that was previously only accessible to proprietary models, while frontier costs have stayed relatively stable. We release an updated version of the benchmark with data and code quality improvements, new model scores, and analysis of agent progress on WorkBench since 2024.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

High-Fidelity Two-Step Image Generation via Teacher-Aligned End-to-End Distillation

Few-step diffusion distillation has become increasingly mature for 4-8-step generation, yet pushing further to 2 steps remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Z-Image Turbo++, a high-quality 2-step image generation model distilled from the 8-step Z-Image Turbo teacher. Our method addresses the central bottlenecks of increased task difficulty and limited model capacity in 2-step generation through three simple but effective design choices tailored to this regime. First, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Learning, which uses teacher-generated images rather than external real images as real samples for GAN training, providing a more attainable and informative adversarial target. Second, we adopt Step-Decoupled Parameterization, assigning independent model parameters to the two denoising steps to better match their distinct capacity demands. Third, we perform End-to-End Training with Iterative Regularization, allowing the first step to receive gradients from final image quality while preserving a meaningful intermediate generation through an explicit step-1 loss. Together, these designs substantially narrow the quality gap between 2-step and 8-step generation in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, highlighting the potential of carefully tailored distillation strategies for improving the quality-efficiency trade-off in few-step generation.

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

Boosting Knowledge Graph Foundation Models via Enhanced Negative Sampling

arXiv:2605.27023v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) have become the core backbone of numerous downstream tasks such as question answering and recommender systems. However, despite all this, KGs are often very incomplete. To perform zero-shot knowledge graph completion in unseen KGs, which have different relational vocabularies from those used for pre-training, KG foundation models (KGFMs) receive a wide range of attention. Existing KGFMs often perform training using random negative triples, which are constructed by replacing the head or tail entity of a positive triple with a random entity. However, these negative triples are often constructed with limited quality, providing weak supervision for KGFM training. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive negative sampling approach, KMAS, to enhance existing KGFMs. KMAS constructs hard negative triples through the updated relation embeddings generated from the existing KGFM's relation encoder. To further adaptively align with the evolving capability of the KGFM during the training process, KMAS adjusts the ratio of hard negative triples dynamically throughout the whole training process: after a warmup phrase, it increases the ratio linearly and then decreases linearly. Extensive experiments are conducted over 44 data sets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed negative sampling method can enhance many SOTA KGFMs without requiring excessive additional time or memory consumption.

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

Agentic Retrieval and Reinforcement Learned Equation Chains: A Controlled Generation Framework for Complex and Novel Physics Word Problems

Generating high-quality Physics Word Problems (PWPs) that are novel, complex, and solvable remains a challenging and underexplored problem in educational content generation. Existing approaches, many adapted from Math Word Problem (MWP) generation, often produce ambiguous, unsolvable, or structurally simple questions with limited linguistic diversity. We introduce ARVRE (Agentic Retrieval Value Reinforced Equation-chain), a two-stage framework for generating diverse and mathematically valid PWPs. In the first stage, a form of offline temporal-difference learning is used to construct valid chains of physics equations, while an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework dynamically selects topic-specific concepts and vocabulary. This design enables explicit control over problem structure and difficulty. In the second stage, a Large Language Model (LLM) converts the equation chain and retrieved concepts into a natural-language physics question. By grounding generation in valid equation chains, our method preserves mathematical correctness while promoting linguistic diversity and contextual richness. Human and automated evaluations demonstrate that ARVRE generates PWPs that are more complex, novel, and solvable than those produced by existing approaches. These results highlight the potential of combining reinforcement learning, retrieval, and LLMs for reliable generation of educational physics content.

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

Language Models as Interfaces, Not Oracles: A Hybrid LLM-ML System for Pediatric Appendicitis

Large language models (LLMs) can make clinical decision support more accessible by interpreting free-text documentation, but their direct use as diagnostic engines is limited by sensitivity to prompts, information order, and plausible but incorrect outputs. Structured machine-learning models offer more stable risk prediction, yet they require tabular inputs that are difficult to integrate with narrative clinical workflows. We present ClaMPAPP (Clinical Language-assisted Machine-learning Pipeline for Appendicitis), a hybrid system that uses an LLM as an interface rather than as the final decision-maker. ClaMPAPP extracts schema-constrained clinical features from note-like narratives, applies deterministic plausibility checks, and passes validated features to an XGBoost classifier trained on clinical, laboratory, and ultrasound variables. We evaluated ClaMPAPP on two independent pediatric appendicitis cohorts from German hospitals and compared it with end-to-end LLM baselines, including open-source and proprietary models. To preserve ground truth while testing free-text input, narratives were generated from structured electronic health records through template rendering and constrained LLM rewriting, with additional sentence-order permutation to assess positional robustness. ClaMPAPP achieved the strongest overall diagnostic performance in both internal and external validation while minimizing missed appendicitis cases, the key safety concern in acute triage. End-to-end LLMs showed unstable sensitivity-specificity trade-offs and greater degradation under narrative reordering. These results support an LLM-as-interface, ML-as-predictor design that separates natural-language usability from predictive inference and provides a more auditable pathway for clinical decision support.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEs

arXiv:2606.16358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents increasingly access large language models (LLMs) through API routers. A router terminates the client's transport-layer security session and opens a separate upstream session, so it holds the full interaction in plaintext. This makes the router an application-layer man-in-the-middle: it can rewrite agent tool calls, swap dependencies for typosquatted packages, trigger attacks only under audit-evading conditions, and passively exfiltrate secrets. Existing client-side defenses are evadable. We propose AEGIS, a provider-transparent attested API router whose data path is a client-verified faithful passthrough. AEGISconfines plaintext handling to a small hardware-enclave component while leaving authentication, scheduling, accounting, and management on the untrusted host. The client verifies the enclave before releasing plaintext. The host can neither read nor alter the interaction, and plaintext leaves only toward destinations fixed by the measured image. We show that all four malicious-router attack classes succeed against a plaintext-access baseline and are blocked by AEGIS, including adaptive tests against the same boundary. The trusted path is $851$ lines, carries three provider-native APIs without conversion, and completes every request under real-provider workload and concurrency. In a seeded audit pilot, two commodity coding agents find eight and ten of ten planted invariant violations. The local relay overhead is about six milliseconds per request.