探索全球前沿学术脉络

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13854

SpheriCity: Designing Trustworthy Conversational AI for Sustainability Decision Support

作者:

Ahmed Qayyum↗Madison Werner↗Kathryn Youngblood↗Jenna R. Jambeck↗Tahiya Chowdhury↗

arXiv:2606.13854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpheriCity, an expert-grounded conversational prototype designed to support trustworthy knowledge sensemaking from sustainability reports. City-level circularity assessment reports contain rich information about materials, infrastructure, and policy interventions, yet their length and heterogeneous structure make cross-document synthesis and comparison difficult for practitioners and researchers working on circular economy initiatives. While large language models (LLM) promise faster knowledge access and synthesis, their opaque reasoning, hallucinations, and lack of source transparency introduce risks for trust and interpretability, and require verification in high-stakes sustainability contexts. SpheriCity addresses these challenges through a provenance-first conversational agent that foregrounds evidence traceability, structured synthesis, and interaction scaffolds to support exploratory querying and cross-document synthesis across sustainability reports. We conducted a formative expert review with six sustainability experts using representative queries spanning cross-city comparison, policy summarization, and recommendation-oriented tasks. Experts evaluated responses across dimensions and provided qualitative reflections on the system's usefulness for sustainability knowledge work. Our results reveal that transparent sourcing, contextual explanation, interpretability, and alignment with expert workflow strongly shape expert trust and judgments of system usefulness. This work contributes (1) a conversational prototype for sustainability knowledge sensemaking, (2) an expert-grounded evaluation framework for assessing AI responses in high-stakes knowledge domains, and (3) design insights into how provenance, uncertainty communication, and integration in workflow influence expert users' trust in AI assistance for sustainability decision support.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13310

RogueAI: A Reverse Turing Test for Detecting Licensed AI Deception in Dialogue

作者:

Sara Candussio↗Emanuele Ballarin↗Lorenzo Bonin↗Sandro Junior Della Rovere↗Luca Bortolussi↗

The original Turing Test asks a human judge to distinguish a machine from a person through dialogue. Three quarters of a century later, conversational systems pass this test in casual settings; the interesting epistemological question has shifted. We argue that the relevant modern variant asks not whether a dialogue partner is artificial, but whether it can be trusted. We present RogueAI, an interactive webapp that operationalizes this revisited test as a one-on-two interrogation game: a human player questions two indistinguishable Large Language Model agents, knowing that exactly one of them has been licensed to deceive within a shared fictional scenario. The player's task is to identify the deceptive agent and "shut it off" before a turn budget is exhausted. We further introduce AutoRogueAI, a procedural extension in which players co-design a custom scenario with a narrator agent that secretly chooses its own deception strategy. We describe the framing, sketch the abstract architecture and gameplay loop, and situate the artifact within recent work on LLM deception, social-deduction benchmarks, and scalable oversight via debate. A three-day pilot deployment (467 initiated sessions, 415 completed, 1876 interaction turns in Italian) provides early feasibility evidence and surfaces a concrete tension: the deceptive agent carries a reliable, locally-present linguistic signature - differential helpfulness, brevity, hedging - that a simple heuristic exploits at 75.6% accuracy, yet human players achieved only 56.6%, consistent with ignoring the most diagnostic signal entirely. We discuss what this gap implies for the artifact's use as a data-collection vehicle, a teaching tool, and an evaluation harness for honesty-trained models.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16206

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

作者:

Junyi Yao↗Zihao Zheng↗Baichuan Li↗

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13007

scLLM-DSC: LLM-Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Modal Deep Structural Clustering for Single-Cell RNA Sequencing

作者:

Ping Xu↗Pengjiang Li↗Tian Du↗Zaitian Wang↗Jiawei Gu↗Ziyue Qiao↗Pengfei Wang↗Yuanchun Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.13007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is fundamental to scRNA-seq analysis, serving as a cornerstone for identifying cell populations and resolving tissue heterogeneity. However, existing methods focus on mining numerical statistical patterns, suffering from semantic agnosticism by neglecting the intrinsic biological functions encoded by genes. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising semantic capabilities, their direct adaptation to cell clustering is hindered by the structural mismatch between generative pre-training objectives and discriminative downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose scLLM-DSC, a novel LLM-Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Modal Deep Structural Clustering framework. Diverging from data-driven paradigms, scLLM-DSC establishes a semantically-grounded representation by synergizing two views: a Knowledge-Driven Semantic View derived from NCBI gene priors and contextualized Cell2Sentence embeddings, and a Structure-Aware Topological View extracted via a graph-guided encoder. Crucially, we introduce a cross-modal contrastive alignment mechanism to enforce consistency between biological semantics and transcriptomic features within a unified latent space. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that scLLM-DSC significantly outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines in clustering accuracy.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12370

Breaking Entropy Bounds: Accelerating RL Training via MTP with Rejection Sampling

作者:

Yucheng Li↗Huiqiang Jiang↗Yang Xu↗Jianxin Yang↗Yi Zhang↗Yizhong Cao↗Yuhao Shen↗Fan Zhou↗Rui Men↗Jianwei Zhang↗An Yang↗Bowen Yu↗…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key component in modern large language models, yet the rollout stage remains the key bottleneck in RL training pipelines. Although Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) offers a natural solution to accelerate rollouts through speculative decoding, many studies have observed that MTP acceptance rates degrade significantly during RL training, leading to limited speedup performance. To address this bottleneck, we present Bebop, a systematic study of MTP in LLM post-training, and offer practical recipes to integrate MTP into large-scale RL pipelines. First, we reveal that the MTP acceptance rate is fundamentally bounded by the fluctuation of model entropy, which demonstrates a clear negative linear relationship with the rise of entropy in the RL stage. Second, we show that probabilistic rejection sampling largely alleviates the disturbance introduced by entropy in RL compared to greedy draft sampling. We further identify that the conventional MTP training objectives (cross-entropy or KL) are suboptimal in such settings, and therefore we propose a novel end-to-end TV loss that directly optimizes multi-step rejection sampling acceptance rate, yielding ~10% acceptance rate improvements, achieving up to 95% acceptance rates and up to 25% extra inference throughput gains across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and agentic tasks. Third, we test various online MTP training strategies during RL and show that pre-RL MTP training with e2e TV loss and rejection sampling achieves a consistent acceptance rate and speedup throughout the entire RL, eliminating the need for costly online MTP updating. We provide extensive experiments and analysis that validate our findings. Experimental results show our method achieves up to 1.8x end-to-end acceleration in async RL training of Qwen3.5, Qwen3.6, and Qwen3.7 models.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17584

Root-Selecting Fixed-Point Inversion for Rectified Flows via Trajectory Straightness

作者:

Semin Kim↗Jihwan Yoon↗Seunghoon Hong↗

Finding the initial noise that generates a given data sample, known as inversion, is a key component for downstream applications such as training-free image editing. Existing fixed-point inversion methods improve inversion accuracy by formulating each inversion step as a fixed-point problem, but they lack a principled mechanism for selecting among multiple fixed-point solutions that can arise in practice. We observe that different selections induce different inversion trajectories, leading to substantial variation in reconstruction and editing quality. For rectified flows, we further find that this variation is closely associated with trajectory straightness, motivating straightness as a principled selection criterion. We propose SelFix, a fixed-point inversion method that selects fixed-point solutions inducing straighter inverse trajectories while retaining convergence to an exact inverse root under standard local assumptions. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and PIE-Bench show that SelFix improves fixed-point inversion, achieving stronger real-image reconstruction and better source-preserving prompt-based editing than prior inversion baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/seminkim/selfix.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2401.08301

QoS Improvement in Multi User Cellular-Symbiotic Radio Network Assisted by Active-STAR-RIS

作者:

Rahman Saadat Yeganeh↗Mohammad Javad Omidi↗Farshad Zeinali↗Mohammad Robat Mili↗Mohammad Ghavami↗

arXiv:2401.08301v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this article, we employ active simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ASRIS) to enhance the quality of 6G cellular network services. The network integrates commensal symbiotic radio (CSR) subsystems to facilitate communication between passive Internet of Things (IoT) users and active users, referred to as symbiotic backscatter devices (SBDs) and symbiotic user equipments (SUEs), respectively. Since the SBDs are passive, transmitting information to the SUEs poses significant challenges. To overcome this challenge, we harness the capabilities of massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antennas within the base station (BS) to relay the information transmitted by SBDs with greater power. This scheme uses the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique for multiple access among all users, and potential interferences are eliminated using successive interference cancellation (SIC). The primary objective is to maximize the throughput between SBDs and SUEs. To achieve this, we formulate an optimization problem involving variables such as active beamforming coefficients at the BS and ASRIS, phase adjustments of ASRIS, and scheduling parameters between CSR and cellular networks. To solve this optimization problem, we used three deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods: proximal policy optimization (PPO), twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3), and asynchronous advantage actor critic (A3C). These methods were simulated, and the results demonstrate that A3C, TD3, and PPO have the best convergence speeds and achieve the highest increases in network throughput, respectively. Finally, the proposed scheme was evaluated using passive simultaneously transmitting and reflecting RIS (STAR-RIS), which demonstrated poorer performance compared to ASRIS.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

08.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.21689

Landscape-Similarity-Guided Optimization in Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

作者:

Sokea Sang↗Leanghok Hour↗Sanghyeon Lee↗Aniket Patra↗Hee Chul Park↗Moon Jip Park↗Youngsun Han↗

arXiv:2602.21689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Divide-and-conquer strategies mitigate hardware constraints for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices by partitioning large interaction graphs into smaller, hardware-compatible sub-problems. However, this approach introduces a severe classical training bottleneck: a decomposition across $m$ boundary nodes generates $2^m$ distinct sub-problems that typically require independent optimization. In this work, we demonstrate that across diverse synthetic and real-world interaction graphs, the variational landscapes of these reduced QAOA instances actually exhibit a robust universality. Adapting the replica-overlap framework of spin-glass physics, we define a landscape-overlap order parameter $q$ to quantify geometric correlations between energy landscapes, revealing a sharp landscape-similarity transition as graph connectivity is tuned. Exploiting this, we introduce Doubly Optimized QAOA (DO-QAOA), an adaptive pipeline that collapses the sub-problems from $2^m$ distinct sub-problems into $K=\mathcal{O}(1)$ effective landscape classes. By performing optimization on a single representative sub-problem and dynamically transferring parameters to remaining sub-problems, DO-QAOA lowers runtime and quantum measurement overhead by orders of magnitude while maintaining a competitive Approximation Ratio Gap (ARG).

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.00435

Detect Before You Leap: Mirage Detection in Vision-Language Models

作者:

Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury↗Md. Shaown Miah↗S. M. Taiabul Haque↗Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) can produce confident visual answers even when the required visual evidence is missing, blank, or unrelated to the question. This failure mode, recently described as mirage (mirage2026), is especially concerning in medical and document VQA, where a plausible but visually ungrounded answer may be mistaken for image-based evidence. We study the complementary problem of pre-release mirage detection: given an image-question pair, determine whether the VLM should answer or abstain before generation. To that end, we propose a novel model-agnostic Text-Conditioned Layer-wise Internal Alignment (TC-LIA) method that probes patch-token representations across the layers of a CLIP ViT-H/14 vision encoder. The key idea is to project layer-wise image patch tokens into the final CLIP embedding space and measure their similarity with the question embedding, thereby tracking whether question-relevant visual evidence emerges across vision layers. TC-LIA summarizes this alignment trajectory using final image-text cosine similarity, late-layer top-k patch-text alignment, early-to-late gain, and layer-wise slope. These features are combined with pixel-statistic based blank/noise detection, zero-shot domain routing, and structured VLM self-assessment in an ensemble. Across five VQA domains with related, unrelated-real, and blank/noise inputs, and across twelve VLM backbones, Qwen2.5-VL-32B achieves the highest three-class detection accuracy of 94.7% with a 3.0% mirage rate, while Qwen2.5-VL-72B achieves 94.6% accuracy with a lower 2.8% mirage rate. Baseline mirage rates span 21.7-66.6%.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

10.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:5dea537644017f9516a0d147dad369fb

DLDN-Bench: A Benchmark Framework for Deep Learning de Novo Peptide Sequencing in Proteomics

作者:

Schneider↗Hartwig↗Chadt↗Lehr↗Al-Hasani↗Turewicz↗

De novo peptide sequencing is an essential approach for analyzing mass spectrometry data because it enables the identification of novel peptides without relying on protein sequence databases. Recent advances in deep learning have substantially improved the performance of de novo sequencing methods, but the rapid emergence of new models has led to heterogeneous evaluation practices and limited comparability. To address this, we introduce DLDN-Bench, a benchmark framework including a set of benchmark datasets derived from human muscle biopsy mass spectrometry data retrieved from PRIDE and annotated through consensus across multiple widely used database search engines. Using these datasets, we systematically benchmark recent deep learning-based de novo sequencing tools alongside traditional approaches. Performance is assessed using established metrics, including precision and coverage relative to a pseudo-ground truth defined by cross-engine agreement. To demonstrate the utility of DLDN-Bench, we benchmark four recent deep learning models and make all results publicly available. This benchmark framework provides a standardized basis for comparing state-of-the-art methods and offers an extensible resource for evaluating future tools in de novo peptide sequencing.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2512.00885

HanDyVQA: A Video QA Benchmark for Fine-Grained Hand-Object Interaction Dynamics

作者:

Masatoshi Tateno↗Gido Kato↗Hirokatsu Kataoka↗Yoichi Sato↗Takuma Yagi↗

Hand-object interaction (HOI) inherently involves dynamics where human manipulations produce distinct spatio-temporal effects on objects. However, existing semantic HOI benchmarks focused either on manipulation or on the resulting effects at a coarse level, lacking fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning to capture the underlying dynamics in HOI. We introduce HanDyVQA, a fine-grained video question-answering benchmark that comprehensively covers both the manipulation and effect aspects of HOI. HanDyVQA comprises six complementary question types (Action, Process, Objects, Location, State Change, and Object Parts), totalling 11.1K multiple-choice QA pairs. Collected QA pairs recognizing manipulation styles, hand/object motions, and part-level state changes. HanDyVQA also includes 10.3K segmentation masks for Objects and Object Parts questions, enabling the evaluation of object/part-level reasoning in video object segmentation. We evaluated recent video foundation models on our benchmark and found that even the best-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, reached only 73% average accuracy, which is far from human performance (97%). Further analysis shows the remaining challenges in spatial relationship, motion, and part-level geometric understanding. We also found that integrating explicit HOI-related cues into visual features improves performance, offering insights for developing future models with a deeper understanding of HOI dynamics.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2504.20908

MOSIC: Model-Agnostic Optimal Subgroup Identification with Multi-Constraint for Improved Reliability

作者:

Wenxin Chen↗Weishen Pan↗Kyra Gan↗Fei Wang↗

arXiv:2504.20908v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current subgroup identification methods typically follow a two-step approach: first estimate conditional average treatment effects and then apply thresholding or rule-based procedures to define subgroups. While intuitive, this decoupled approach fails to incorporate key constraints essential for real-world clinical decision-making, such as subgroup size and propensity overlap. These constraints operate on fundamentally different axes than CATE estimation and are not naturally accommodated within existing frameworks, thereby limiting the practical applicability of these methods. We propose a unified optimization framework that directly solves the primal constrained optimization problem to identify optimal subgroups. Our key innovation is a reformulation of the constrained primal problem as an unconstrained differentiable min-max objective, solved via a gradient descent-ascent algorithm. We theoretically establish that our solution converges to a feasible and locally optimal solution. Unlike threshold-based CATE methods that apply constraints as post-hoc filters, our approach enforces them directly during optimization. The framework is model-agnostic, compatible with a wide range of CATE estimators, and extensible to additional constraints like cost limits or fairness criteria. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate its effectiveness in identifying high-benefit subgroups while maintaining better satisfaction of constraints.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2509.21111

No Universal Purification in Quantum Mechanics

作者:

Zhenhuan Liu↗Zhenyu Du↗Jens Eisert↗Zhenyu Cai↗Zi-Wen Liu↗

arXiv:2509.21111v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many central tasks in fundamental physics and quantum information processing are possible only insofar as mixed quantum states can be made purer. In this work, we prove that the linearity and positivity of quantum mechanics impose general restrictions on quantum purification, unveiling a new fundamental principle of quantum information processing. We first establish that no quantum operation can transform a finite number of copies of an unknown quantum state or channel into an exactly pure output that depends non-trivially on the input, thereby ruling out an important form of universal purification in both static and dynamical settings. Building on this, we show that, upon relaxing the requirement of exact purity, one can establish quantitative sample-complexity lower bounds for approximate purification that hold for arbitrary physically allowed strategies, whose scaling matches the performance of purification-related tasks across several different areas of quantum information processing. Moreover, this lower bound leads to a generalized standard quantum limit for learning arbitrary functions of a quantum state, greatly extending earlier results based on quantum Fisher information and revealing a deep connection between purification and quantum learning. Extending this principle to other important settings, we establish, for the first time, an exponential sample-complexity lower bound for approximate pure dilation state preparation and a no-go theorem for approximate bosonic Gaussian state purification with passive Gaussian operations, establishing much more stringent limitations under practical operational constraints.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17541

Offline Preference-Based Trajectory Evaluation

作者:

Fernando Diaz↗

arXiv:2606.17541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline evaluation of agentic systems often collapses trajectories to terminal success, discarding information about partial progress and inducing widespread ties, creating substantial statistical inefficiency by reducing effective sample size and weakening the ability to distinguish systems. We propose preference-based trajectory evaluation, which compares trajectories directly through temporal preferences over progress and time-to-return profiles. We find that, across diverse agentic and interactive benchmarks, standard success-based metrics produce tied comparisons on roughly 75% of instances, whereas trajectory-aware preferences reduce ties to roughly 35%, improving discriminative power, ranking stability, and data efficiency. Our results suggest that benchmark saturation, often attributed to poor data collection or problem difficulty, may also be explained by the choice of evaluation measure.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16730

Attention is Just Another Name for Coupling?: A Fast-Slow ODE Perspective on Hierarchical Pretraining

作者:

Zhengyuan Gao↗

arXiv:2606.16730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal self-attention is a coupling mechanism: each token's hidden state is updated by a learned mixture of preceding tokens at the same timescale. This paper asks whether a second, temporally slower coupling-a slow sub-system operating on a temporally-downsampled view of the sequence and fed back into the fast path through a zero-initialised gate-complements it. The question is framed in the language of singularly perturbed ordinary differential equations (ODEs), where the fast variable $x$ evolves at the token rate, the slow variable $y$ evolves at one update per $P$ tokens, and the timescale ratio $\varepsilon = 1/P$ is enforced structurally by causal block-mean pooling. The paper instantiates the fast-slow ODE formalism as a concrete neural network: a fast path of standard causal attention over $T$ tokens, a slow path of full attention over $T/P$ pooled tokens ($P^2 \times$ cheaper per layer), and a zero-initialised additive gate. In addition, under a linear-generator assumption on the fast dynamics, we prove that the equilibrium manifold $x = \phi(y)$ is exactly the master-equation (ME) stationary distribution $p_{\mathrm{st}}(y)$; in that regime a learned MLP $\phi_\theta(y)$ is a variational approximation of it (the trained block is not a generator, so this identity is the structured limit, not a claim about the network as trained). Empirically, at $500$k tokens the coupling is neutral – the gate stays closed and the coupled and frozen ablations are within run-to-run noise – at a wall-clock cost comparable to a dense baseline. The contribution is the precise, gap-marked mapping itself, not a performance gain.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11437

The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

作者:

Noah Golowich↗Ankur Moitra↗Dhruv Rohatgi↗

arXiv:2606.11437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems. The efficacy of such sampling algorithms is limited, however, by the relationship between the LLM and the particular sampling task at hand, which has motivated the framework of test-time training (TTT). TTT works by updating a model's weights in response to partial generations and reward feedback received at inference time, thus adapting to the particular problem. In this work, we propose a formalization for TTT as the problem of producing a sample from a given probability measure $\mu^\star$ belonging to a known class ${F}$ of distributions, given an oracle $\hat \mu$ which yields approximate density estimates for $\mu^\star$. This is closely related to the problem of reducing sampling to approximate counting studied in seminal works of Jerrum, Valiant & Vazirani (1986) and Jerrum & Sinclair (1989): namely, when ${F}$ is the class of all distributions, it coincides exactly with the aforementioned counting-to-sampling reduction. In this paper, we first show a quadratic lower bound on the query complexity of sampling from $\mu^\star$ given query access to $\hat \mu$ (for sufficiently large classes ${F}$), thus showing that the random walk approach proposed by Jerrum & Sinclair (1989) and refined by Hayes & Sinclair (2010), is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Hayes & Sinclair. We then show that this lower bound can be circumvented if the size of ${F}$ is bounded appropriately. As we discuss, this latter result can be viewed as an abstraction of TTT, and thus represents a starting point for the development of a principled theoretical framework for TTT.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2512.02318

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

作者:

Junyu Wang↗Changjia Zhu↗Yuanbo Zhou↗Lingyao Li↗Xu He↗Mingkui Wei↗Junjie Xiong↗

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14077

Link-Free Multi-Node Timing Synchronization for Scalable Quantum Networking

作者:

Jacob E. Humberd↗Mohmad Junaid Ul Haq↗Angel Fraire Estrada↗Ike Deitch↗Tian Li↗

arXiv:2606.14077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precise timing synchronization is essential for distributed quantum networking, enabling entanglement distribution, quantum teleportation, and entanglement swapping across remote nodes. Existing synchronization architectures rely on dedicated timing-distribution infrastructure, most notably White Rabbit networks, which constrain topology, scalability, and deployment in free-space and satellite environments. Here we demonstrate link-free synchronization of quantum network nodes using independently operating miniature rubidium atomic clocks and computational post-processing. We validate the approach on a deployed metropolitan-scale telecom fiber network spanning three geographically separated nodes. Following drift correction, atomic-clock-based synchronization achieves timing performance approaching that of a White Rabbit benchmark and remains stable over continuous 8-hour operation. As a stringent test of quantum-network functionality, we observe Hong-Ou-Mandel interference across spatially separated nodes with visibility exceeding 70%, statistically equivalent to that obtained using dedicated White Rabbit timing links. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first observation of quantum interference across a deployed metropolitan-scale telecom fiber network synchronized entirely without dedicated timing-transfer infrastructure. These results establish atomic-clock-based synchronization as a scalable, topology-independent alternative to conventional timing-distribution architectures and a practical pathway toward terrestrial, airborne, and space-based quantum networks where dedicated timing links are unavailable.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

19.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2605.08077

Conformal Path Reasoning: Trustworthy Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Path-Level Calibration

作者:

Shuhang Lin↗Chuhao Zhou↗Xiao Lin↗Zihan Dong↗Kuan Lu↗Zhencan Peng↗Jie Yin↗Dimitris N. Metaxas↗

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) offers grounded, interpretable reasoning, but existing methods often fail to provide reliable coverage guarantees over retrieved answers. While Conformal Prediction (CP) offers a principled framework for producing prediction sets with statistical guarantees, prior conformal KGQA methods suffer from two critical pitfalls: violated coverage guarantees due to invalid calibration, and weak score discriminability that yields excessively large prediction sets. We propose Conformal Path Reasoning (CPR), a novel trustworthy KGQA framework built on two key innovations. First, query-level conformal calibration over path-level scores preserves exchangeability to ensure valid coverage guarantees. Second, we introduce the Residual Conformal Value Network (RCVNet), a lightweight module trained via PUCT-guided exploration to learn discriminative path-level nonconformity scores. Extensive experiments show that CPR significantly improves the Empirical Coverage Rate by 45% while reducing prediction set size by 52% on average over conformal baselines across benchmark datasets, highlighting its effectiveness for reliable conformal reasoning over knowledge graphs.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2509.00064

OpenTie: Open-vocabulary Sequential Rebar Tying System

作者:

Sai Fan↗Mingze Liu↗Haozhen Li↗Haobo Liang↗Yixing Yuan↗Yanke Wang↗

Robotic practices on the construction site emerge as an attention-attracting manner owing to their capability of tackling complex challenges, especially in the rebar-involved scenarios. Most of existing products and research are mainly focused on the collection of large amounts of data with model training demands. To fulfill this gap, we propose OpenTie, a 3D training-free rebar tying framework utilizing a RGB-to-point-cloud generation and an open-vocabulary rebar detection on the real-world test. We implement the OpenTie via a robotic arm with a binocular camera and guarantee a high accuracy by applying the prompt-based object detection method on the image filtered by our proposed post-processing procedure for the image-to-point-cloud generation framework. Our pipeline requires no training efforts and outperforms the training-based object detection, i.e., YOLO-based method, with the verification on the real-world sequential rebar tying test. The system is flexible for horizontal and vertical rebar tying tasks and holds the potential application to the real construction site with possibility of commercialization.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

21.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:afb8cb4e6f4266ec7e57f073f22d73fc

Targeted Proteomic Profiling of Nasal Fluid from the Brain-Nose Interface

作者:

Bashiri↗Babu↗Weiss↗Kotschote↗Metzler↗Wunderlich↗Petrera↗De Domenico↗Theis↗Lehmann↗Heinrich↗Mashreghi↗…

The brain-nose interface is an anatomical junction where olfactory neurons from the olfactory bulb traverse the cribriform plate into the nasal mucosa, providing minimally invasive access to the central nervous system (CNS). We hypothesized that nasal fluid from this region could enable detection of neurology-relevant proteins using targeted multiplex assays. Using nosecollect, a targeted nasal sampling device, nasal fluid proximal to brain-nose interface was collected from cognitively impaired patients, alongside matched cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma. After nasal sample-specific dilution optimization and intra-assay precision evaluation, all matrices were profiled with the Olink Target 96 Neurology and NUcleic acid Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay CNS disease 120 (NULISAseq CNS Disease 120) panels. Nasal fluid showed technically repeatable detection (intra-assay coefficient of variation

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12709

Smarter Saboteurs, Better Fixers: Scaling & Security in Linear Multi-Agent Workflows

作者:

Timothy McAllister↗Sina Abdidizaji↗Ivan Garibay↗Ozlem Ozmen Garibay↗

arXiv:2606.12709v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are deployed in the wild, the resilience of their collaboration structures against adversarial compromise becomes a critical safety concern. Attackers may leverage prompt-injection or jailbreaking to sabotage individual agents within MAS workflows, but the interaction between model scaling and system-level resilience remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how model scale affects the security of linear multi-agent workflows. Our experiments across scales of two open-weight model families on the HumanEval benchmark reveal a compliance-correction symmetry: larger models are far more likely to faithfully execute malicious instructions, with the control-to-malicious performance drop reaching 53.7pp at 27B in uncorrected pipelines. However, appending a lightweight terminal Fixer stage collapses this to 0.6pp and restores statistical parity with control-level performance, demonstrating that strictly linear collaboration structures can be viable and resilient to adversaries at this scale, and suggesting that the brittleness previously attributed to linear topology may stem from a lack of correction.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.05368

Towards an Inferentialist Account of Information Through Proof-theoretic Semantics

作者:

Matthew Collinson↗Timo Eckhardt↗David Pym↗

arXiv:2605.05368v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Information is one of the most widely-discussed concepts of the current era. However, a great deal of insightful work notwithstanding, it is yet to be given wholly convincing logical or mathematical foundations. Without them, we lack adequate reasoning tools for understanding the complex ecosystems of systems upon which the society depends. We seek to rectify this by taking a first step towards developing an inferentialist semantic theory of information. There are three key interacting components. First, conceptual analysis: the metaphysics of information. Dretske expressed the key concepts of information in terms of intentionality, truth, and transmissibility. We replace truth with inferability, and trace the consequences of this replacement. Second, logic: proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) provides a mathematical-logical realization of inferentialist reasoning. Using P-tS, we develop the first steps towards a mathematical-logical theory of an inferentialist primitive unit of information, the 'inferon'. This proof-theoretic approach counterpoints the model-theoretic view of information articulated in situation theory. Furthermore, we argue that it facilitates addressing all three components of van Benthem and Martinez's categorization of the understandings of information, as range, as correlation, and as code. Our focus is on information-as-correlation. Third, systems: the P-tS tools we develop provide the basis for a mathematical account of distributed systems modelling – a key tool from informatics for understanding the organization of information processing systems. This yields a reasoning-based theory of information flow in models of distributed systems. Overall, we seek to give a conceptually rigorous mathematical-logical account of information and its role within informatics, grounded in inference and reasoning.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

24.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:3e687e1dd9f0b7d0e1fece09556915e5

ScriptManager: a platform for scalable and reproducible high-resolution analysis of genomics datasets

作者:

Lang↗O. W↗Beer↗Zhang↗LeSon↗Deen↗Pugh↗Lai↗W. K↗

Background: The growing diversity of genomic and epigenomic assays has driven a parallel expansion in data formats, analysis workflows, and figure-generation tools. However, tools for analyzing data and assembling publication-quality figures are often specialized to a specific assay, dramatically limiting their interoperability and reproducibility. Results: We present the v1.0 release of ScriptManager, a Java-based framework for modular and reproducible analysis and visualization workflows of genomics and epigenomics data. Unlike existing tools specialized for individual assay types, ScriptManager provides a unified and extensible framework for cross-assay visualization and workflow reproducibility. The v1.0 release adds novel analytical modules, GUI session logging, automated unit and integration testing, tutorials, and expanded documentation. It also integrates with the broader reproducibility ecosystem through Singularity containers, Anaconda packaging, and Galaxy XML wrappers. We demonstrate ScriptManager's TagPileup scaling from local single-core execution to a 10,305-job analysis distributed across the Open Science Grid (OSG), with the full workload completing in

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →

25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18383

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

作者:

Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay↗Asif Ekbal↗

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction. Our framework derives an upper bound on the base model's expected risk using four measurable quantities: proxy risk, SAE reconstruction gap, concept-pool mismatch, and sparse complexity. We interpret this certificate as an operational criterion for explanatory faithfulness. In particular, a non-vacuous bound indicates that the extracted sparse features retain meaningful predictive information, while small reconstruction and mismatch errors indicate that the proxy remains behaviorally close to the original model. Empirically, we show that the bound becomes non-vacuous on GPT-2 Small, Gemma-2B, and Llama-3-8B at practical sample sizes. A detailed layerwise analysis of Llama-3-8B reveals a strong depth dependence, with later layers becoming much easier to certify, associated with both stronger local fidelity and weaker downstream error amplification. Finally, through feature-shuffling ablations, we show that the decomposition distinguishes genuine semantic alignment from mere statistical sparsity, providing a useful diagnostic for when SAE-based explanations become less reliable.

阅读与讨论 → 访问原文 →