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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols. We introduce findsylls, a modular, language-agnostic toolkit that unifies classical syllable detectors and end-to-end syllabifiers under a common interface for syllable segmentation, embedding extraction, and multi-granular evaluation. The toolkit implements and standardizes widely used methods (e.g., Sylber, VG-HuBERT) and allows their components to be recombined, enabling controlled comparisons of representations, algorithms, and token rates. We demonstrate findsylls on English and Spanish corpora and on new hand-annotated data from Kono, an underdocumented Central Mande language, illustrating how a single framework can support reproducible syllable-level experiments across both high-resource and under-resourced settings.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Intrinsic preservation of plasticity in continual quantum learning

arXiv:2511.17228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments requires the capacity for continual learning. However, standard deep learning suffers from a fundamental issue: loss of plasticity, in which networks gradually lose their ability to learn from new data. Here we show that quantum learning models naturally overcome this limitation, preserving plasticity over long timescales. We demonstrate this advantage systematically across a broad spectrum of tasks from multiple learning paradigms, including supervised learning and reinforcement learning, and diverse data modalities, from classical high-dimensional images to quantum-native datasets. Although classical models exhibit performance degradation correlated with unbounded weight and gradient growth, quantum neural networks maintain consistent learning capabilities regardless of the data or task. We identify the origin of the advantage as the intrinsic physical constraints of quantum models. Unlike classical networks where unbounded weight growth leads to landscape ruggedness or saturation, the unitary constraints confine the optimization to a compact manifold. Our results suggest that the utility of quantum computing in machine learning extends beyond potential speedups, offering a robust pathway for building adaptive artificial intelligence and lifelong learners.

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

Physics-Informed Neural Network with Squeeze-Excitation-like Attention

arXiv:2606.19853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce SEA-PINN, a novel architecture that incorporates a Squeeze-Excitation-like attention mechanism into physics-informed neural networks to dynamically recalibrate the importance of neurons across layers. A key feature of SEA-PINN is its highly stable initialization. On 17 out of 20 benchmark problems, SEA-PINN exhibit nearly negligible variance and significantly reduced initial loss, establishing a quasi-deterministic and favorable starting point for optimization. Notably, without employing Fourier feature embeddings or periodic activation functions, SEA-PINN attained competitive accuracy (83\% vs. 90\% improvement relative to FNN-PINN on the high-frequency case 7) as compared with TSA-PINN-a model specifically engineered for high-frequency problems via learnable frequencies in sinusoidal activations. Furthermore, integrating SEA-PINN into TSA-PINN boosted performance by 42.49\%. These results underscore SEA-PINN as a lightweight plug-in module that enhances nonlinear representation power, promotes more robust and efficient convergence, and strengthens the overall reliability of physics-informed learning.

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

Which Models Are Our Models Built On? Auditing Invisible Dependencies in Modern LLMs

Modern LLM training pipelines increasingly rely on other models to generate data, filter corpora, judge outputs, and guide development decisions. These dependencies are recursive: a model may depend on an upstream artifact whose own dependencies are documented only in separate releases and artifacts. As a result, the full dependency structure is fragmented across heterogeneous public artifacts, with complexity and recursive depth far outpacing humans' ability to trace. We introduce ModSleuth, an agentic system that recursively reconstructs LLM dependency graphs from public artifacts with source-grounded evidence. We find that the primary challenge is no longer information extraction, but defining what constitutes a dependency and reconciling artifact references across inconsistent documentation. We address these challenges through a formalization that distinguishes direct and indirect dependencies, represents heterogeneous pipeline roles through operation-centered relationships, and resolves artifact identities across names, versions, and repositories. Applying ModSleuth to four public-artifact-rich LLM releases, we recover 1,060 source-verified dependencies and construct large-scale dependency graphs of modern LLM development. These graphs reveal multi-hop license obligations, train-evaluation coupling, discrepancies between released and training-time artifacts, and documentation inconsistencies that would otherwise be difficult to uncover. We release ModSleuth and the resulting dependency graphs to support transparent analysis of the increasingly complex ecosystems underlying modern LLMs.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimal Shadow Estimation with Minimal Measurement Settings

arXiv:2606.20003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shadow estimation is a powerful framework for predicting quantum properties from randomized measurements. While $3$-design protocols achieve optimal worst-case performance, the minimal number of measurement bases required for such optimality has remained open. Here we prove that $\Theta(d^2)$ measurement bases are both necessary and sufficient for worst-case optimal shadow estimation and construct an explicit basis family. In stark contrast, any state $2$-design already suffices for average-case optimality: the mean squared shadow norm of normalized observables is bounded by a universal constant, and we prove strong concentration for Haar-random states, yielding constant sample complexity for generic pure-state fidelity estimation. Easily implementable $2$-designs – from mutually unbiased bases, cyclic measurements, or shallow $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$-depth circuits – enable optimal average-case protocols with remarkably simple measurement strategies. Our results establish a fundamental complexity separation: worst-case estimation requires $\Theta(d^2)$ bases, whereas average-case performance requires only $\Theta(d)$ bases, with broad implications for quantum information theory and near-term experiments.

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

Toward Calibrated Mixture-of-Experts Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.20544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration aligns a model's predictive uncertainty with the frequencies of its empirical outcomes and is important for understanding and trusting reported probabilities. Recent work shows that enforcing calibration at the level of individual predictors can improve ensemble accuracy and calibration, with mixture-of-experts (MoE) models showing strong empirical improvements in particular; however, the conditions under which calibration helps MoE are not well understood. In this work, we study how MoE models behave under distribution shift, focusing on how routing mechanisms interact with expert-level calibration. We show that expert calibration is sufficient to ensure calibration of the overall model under a broad class of distribution shifts in hard-routed models, but is insufficient for calibrating soft-routed models. To address this, we propose an adversarial reweighting that penalizes calibration errors of the routed aggregate under distribution shift, and we demonstrate that it improves the accuracy-calibration tradeoff both on average and on difficult subsets of the data, across model classes, prediction tasks, and distribution shifts.

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

Offline Preference-Based Trajectory Evaluation

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.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ProMUSE: Progressive Multi-modal Uncertainty-guided Staged Evidential Alzheimer Disease Classification

arXiv:2606.19371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a fatal disorder that destroys memory and cognitive skills in the elderly population. Most treatments for AD are effective in the early stage, leading to an increasing demand for early AD diagnosis. AD diagnosis increasingly relies on multimodal data such as clinical assessments, structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging. However, MRI and PET acquisition remain costly and not universally accessible, making full-modality inference impractical in real-world clinical workflows. We propose ProMUSE, a Progressive Multi-modal Uncertainty Guided Staged Evidential Network that adaptively determines when additional modalities are necessary, helping reduce the overall cost of data acquisition while maintaining accuracy. ProMUSE first performs evidential classification using low-cost clinical data and quantifies uncertainty via a Dirichlet-based subjective logic model. When uncertainty exceeds a learned threshold, ProMUSE progressively incorporates MRI or PET features, fusing modality-wise belief and uncertainty through Dempster-Shafer theory to obtain a calibrated multimodal prediction. This staged acquisition strategy enables accurate diagnosis while minimizing reliance on expensive imaging. Experiments on ADNI, AIBL, and OASIS across CN-AD, CN-MCI, and MCI-AD tasks demonstrate that ProMUSE achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to full-modality baselines while reducing MRI/PET usage by 50-90%, yielding substantial cost savings. These results highlight ProMUSE as a practical, uncertainty-aware, and resource-efficient solution for real-world AD screening.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hand-4DGS: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for 4D Hand Reconstruction from Egocentric Videos

Dynamic 3D hand reconstruction from egocentric videos is essential for next-generation computing platforms such as AR/VR and AI glasses. Despite its importance, most prior works focus either on multi-view 3D hand reconstruction or on 4D human body reconstruction. Egocentric 4D hand reconstruction remains challenging due to fast head motion, rapid hand dynamics, severe occlusions, and inherent ambiguity from single-view observations. To address these challenges, we introduce Hand-4DGS, the first feed-forward framework for reconstructing dynamic 4D hands directly from egocentric videos, enabling both fast (~60 FPS) inference and strong generalization. Our approach incorporates a mesh-guided representation for structural priors and temporal convolutions to model dynamic motion. We evaluate our framework on two challenging egocentric datasets, H2O and ARCTIC, and demonstrate significant improvements over baselines. Our method benefits from the generalization capability of feed-forward networks and effective 2D image supervision through Gaussian splatting, without requiring expensive 3D hand pose ground-truth annotations.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Superspace Concentration and Adversarial Robustness in Quantum Algorithms

arXiv:2606.11580v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study superspace concentration as a quantum resource, formalized through the focus measure F(\r{ho}) = {\lambda}_max(\r{ho}_super) - the largest eigenvalue of the reduced superspace state - which quantifies the capacity of a quantum system to concentrate informational weight into a preferred subspace of an extended degree-of-freedom space. We develop a complete resource-theoretic framework around this measure and validate its properties through GPU-accelerated numerical simulation. Analytic decoherence predictions are confirmed to machine precision (1.11 x 10^{-16}) for superspace dimensions dS in {2,4,8,16,32}. Focus monotonicity holds across 10,000 random states with zero violations under four focus-non-generating channels across six system configurations. Focused quantum states resist coherent unitary attacks with significantly greater resilience than standard fidelity predicts, with focus remaining above 0.9 at attack strength {\epsilon} = 0.302 versus {\epsilon} = 0.174 for fidelity. We further demonstrate that the focus measure and the U(dS)-asymmetry measure are operationally distinct: asymmetry remains near zero and provides no robustness signal under coherent and targeted attacks while focus tracks spectral concentration and remains robust until {\epsilon} > 0.3. The connection between Grover's algorithm and superspace concentration is made explicit via the identity F(|{\psi}_k>

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

Code Correctness Signals in LLM Hidden States: Pre-Generation Probing and Repair Geometry

arXiv:2606.14530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models encode rich information in their hidden states. This work asks whether code correctness is legible in the hidden states of Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, before it generates and as it repairs a failed attempt, studied on 444 LiveCodeBench tasks. It reports two findings connected by a single confound-control tool: residualization. First, the correctness of the model's first-attempt code is linearly decodable from the prompt-final hidden state, with a leakage-free held-out AUC of 0.931 +/- 0.008 across 50 outer splits. After the linear effect of prompt length is removed from each hidden state dimension, the probe still reaches 0.911 +/- 0.010, well above a prompt-length baseline of 0.754 +/- 0.014. Second, on 236 cleaned cases where the model attempts to repair a failed first attempt, the hidden state shift from the failing attempt to its repair carries a statistically detectable contrastive direction, significant on both a magnitude and a split-half test against label-shuffled nulls. This direction does not survive a conditional residualization against repair-context covariates that differ between successful and failed repairs, marking it as a correlate of repair success driven by the repair context rather than an isolated repair-comprehension feature. The probe layer is selected by nested cross-validation, and the same residualization approach that upholds the pre-generation correctness result overturns the repair-direction interpretation. The contribution is as much methodological as empirical: a diagnostic honest enough to report a negative result alongside a positive one.

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

Coping in Crisis: Computational Modeling of Coping Styles in Digital Crisis Discourse During the 2023 Turkiye Earthquake

How do people cope when disaster strikes and can we detect it at scale, in real time, from what they write? This study addresses that question using over one million Turkish-language tweets posted in the aftermath of the February 6, 2023 earthquake in Turkiye, which unfolded in a deeply polarized political context just months before a national election. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) coping theory, we develop a multi-label BERTurk classifier to detect three coping styles (problem-focused, emotion-focused, and meaning-making) across four theoretically motivated crisis phases. BERTurk achieves a macro F1 of 0.693, substantially outperforming a zero-shot mDeBERTa baseline (macro F1 = 0.324). Applied to the full corpus, the classifier reveals a clear temporal trajectory: problem-focused coping dominates the urgency phase and declines sharply, emotion-focused coping rises and stabilizes, and meaning-making increases monotonically. Anger correlates most strongly with meaning-making (Spearman r = 0.387), suggesting it functions as a mobilizing force toward blame attribution rather than practical action. These findings demonstrate that coping theory can be reliably operationalized in real-world digital crisis data and that doing so can help humanitarian organizations tailor their responses to where a population actually is.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Deep Learning in Seismic Interpretation: Federated Advances in Salt Dome Segmentation

Salt-dome delineation is a critical, high-impact task in subsurface geological interpretation, driving decisions in hydrocarbon exploration, reservoir modeling, and drilling safety. While convolutional encoder-decoder architectures have delivered significant improvements in automated salt segmentation, their widespread application is severely limited by data sovereignty concerns, dataset bias, and the scarcity of labeled seismic volumes. This paper introduces FedSaltNet, a Federated Learning (FL) framework explicitly engineered for robust, generalizable, and privacy preserving salt-dome segmentation. We couple a lightweight Small U-Net backbone, chosen for its efficiency and regularization properties with a novel Foreground-Weighted (FG-WEIGHTED) aggregation strategy designed to tackle domain-specific class imbalance. Through an extensive comparative study emulating non-IID conditions across four diverse seismic datasets (TGS, SEAM, F3, GBS), we demonstrate two critical findings: The FG-WEIGHTED algorithm effectively mitigates data heterogeneity, yielding a 4.0% relative improvement in Intersection over Union (IoU) over the best conventional FL method. The simple U-Net architecture proved essential, outperforming the higher capacity ResNet-18 U-Net variant by 166% in average IoU, underscoring the necessity of architectural simplicity in data-constrained federated environments. FedSaltNet provides a validated, high-performance solution that establishes the viability of federated deep learning for collaborative, next-generation subsurface interpretation.

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

Semantic search for 100M+ galaxy images using AI-generated captions

Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search for over 100 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches, including the identification of 36 new extragalactic stellar stream candidates. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search

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

Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation

Vision sensors provide a lightweight solution for spacecraft proximity operations, but monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under illumination variation, specular reflection, shadowing, weak texture, and background interference. These factors make local visual evidence spatially unreliable and can destabilize pose regression. This article proposes a Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer (PAID-ViT) for robust spacecraft pose estimation.The proposed model separates pose-relevant structure tokens from illumination-sensitive appearance tokens, estimates patch reliability before pose aggregation, and uses foreground mask supervision to preserve silhouette cues. A parameter-free geometric recovery module converts normalized crop coordinates, log-depth, and a continuous 6D rotation representation into camera-frame rotation and translation. Experiments on SPEED+ V2, the SPEED+ validation/lightbox/sunlamp evaluation configuration used in this study, suggest that PAID-ViT reduces translation error and improves robustness in the challenging sunlamp domain, while ablation studies support the complementary roles of illumination disentanglement, reliability-aware token aggregation, mask supervision, and training-side regularization.

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

CAP: Towards PPG Universal Representation Learning with Patient-level Supervision

arXiv:2606.15284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Photoplethysmography (PPG) plays a central role in wearable health monitoring and clinical decision support. Yet existing approaches to universal PPG representation learning largely focus on signal-level objectives and often overlook patient-level health context, which limits generalization to complex clinical tasks and heterogeneous cohorts. To address this gap, we construct a large-scale paired PPG-EHR multimodal dataset by distilling fragmented medical histories and clinical records into cohesive, patient-level electronic health records (EHR). Building on this resource, we propose Clinical Anchored Pretraining for PPG (CAP). During pretraining, CAP performs cross-modal contrastive alignment that anchors PPG representations to patient-level clinical semantics, guiding the encoder beyond waveform fitting toward modeling consistency in a patient's overall physiological state. During downstream adaptation, the pretrained PPG encoder provides clinically grounded representations that strengthen inductive bias and improve robustness and transferability. Experiments demonstrate that CAP consistently outperforms strong baselines on four diverse downstream tasks. CAP achieves a particularly large gain on respiratory rate prediction (up to +87.6% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art baseline) and delivers an average relative +26.7% across all tasks. We further enhance the interpretability of our approach through comprehensive analyses, including ablations and multiple complementary visualizations of the learned representations. The code for our experiments is available at: https://github.com/gody123gody/CAP .

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

Efficient Online 3D Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking and Pose Estimation

This paper proposes a fast and online method for jointly performing 3D multi-object tracking and pose estimation using multiple monocular cameras. Our algorithm requires only 2D bounding box and pose detections, eliminating the need for costly 3D training data or computationally expensive deep learning models. Our solution is an efficient implementation of a Bayes-optimal multi-object tracking filter, enhancing computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy. We demonstrate that our algorithm is significantly faster than state-of-the-art methods without compromising accuracy, using only publicly available pre-trained 2D detection models. We also illustrate the robust performance of our algorithm in scenarios where multiple cameras are intermittently disconnected or reconnected during operation.

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

User as Code: Executable Memory for Personalized Agents

作者:

arXiv:2606.16707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A personalized AI agent needs a user memory: a persistent model of who the user is, built across many conversations and consulted on each new one. Today this memory is almost always stored as unstructured text, a knowledge graph, or a flat store of facts, and consulted by retrieval – fetching the entries most similar to the current request. Such "bag-of-facts" memory recalls individual facts well, but because storing a fact and acting on it are separate steps, it struggles to resolve contradictions, aggregate over many records, or enforce rules. We argue that user memory should instead be executable. We introduce User as Code (UaC), a paradigm in which an agent's model of a user is a living software project: typed Python objects hold the user's state and ordinary Python functions encode the rules that govern it, so representing and reasoning about the user happen in one medium an interpreter can run. The enabling mechanism is a two-phase pipeline: an append-only log that never discards a fact, periodically checkpointed into typed code. This changes what memory can do. On standard long-term conversation benchmarks, UaC matches both a full-context upper bound and the strongest prior memory systems on recall (78.8% on LOCOMO). Its advantage emerges where representation matters most. On aggregate questions over a user's history – "how many international trips did I take last year?" – retrieval-based memory collapses (6-43%) while UaC stays near-perfect (99%), because the answer is a one-line computation over typed state rather than a search over text. And because its rules execute deterministically whenever the state changes, UaC can surface unsolicited, safety-critical alerts – such as a newly prescribed drug that conflicts with an allergy recorded months earlier – a capability query-driven memory cannot provide.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Waning protection of long-acting RSV monoclonal antibodies in infants: a Bayesian analysis of clesrovimab and nirsevimab trial data

Clesrovimab and nirsevimab are long-acting monoclonal antibodies used to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease in infants, but waning protection in the first year of life is incompletely characterised. We applied a published Bayesian inference framework to clesrovimab and pooled nirsevimab trial data to estimate time-varying efficacy against medically attended RSV lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) and RSV-associated hospitalisation, accounting for differences in placebo-arm event timing between trials. Estimated clesrovimab efficacy declined from 60.7% (95% CrI: 46.3-72.6) shortly after dosing to 38.3% (8.6-52.9) at six months against medically attended RSV LRTI, and from 87.1% (71.2-96.2) to 49.6% (10.4-70.7) against RSV-associated hospitalisation. For nirsevimab, corresponding estimates declined from 86.9% (75.4-95.0) to 53.8% (27.4-69.7) against LRTI, and from 77.5% (52.6-91.8) to 49.7% (15.7-68.3) against hospitalisation. After accounting for differences in RSV exposure timing and LRTI endpoint definitions between trials, we found no evidence of a difference in efficacy or waning between clesrovimab and nirsevimab.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Merged amplitude encoding for Chebyshev quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks: trading qubits for circuit executions

arXiv:2603.02818v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks based on Chebyshev polynomials (CCQKAN) evaluate each edge activation function as a quantum inner product, creating a trade-off between qubit count and the number of circuit executions per forward pass. We introduce merged amplitude encoding, a technique that packs the element-wise products of all $n$ input-edge vectors for a given output node into a single amplitude state, reducing circuit executions by a factor of $n$ at a cost of only 1–2 additional qubits relative to the sequential baseline. The merged and original circuits compute the same mathematical quantity exactly; the open question is whether they remain equally trainable within a gradient-based optimization loop. We address this question through numerical experiments on 10 network configurations under ideal, finite-shot, and noisy simulation conditions, comparing original, parameter-transferred, and independently initialized merged circuits over 16 random seeds. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests show no significant difference between the independently initialized merged circuit and the original ($p > 0.05$ in 28 of 30 comparisons), while parameter transfer yields significantly lower loss under ideal conditions ($p < 0.001$ in 9 of 10 configurations). On 10-class digit classification with the $8\times8$ MNIST dataset using a one-vs-all strategy, original and merged circuits achieve comparable test accuracies of 53–78\% with no significant difference in any configuration. These results provide empirical evidence that merged amplitude encoding preserves trainability under the simulation conditions tested.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

S$^2$COPE: Self-Supervised Concept Discovery via Preference Learning

Current representation learning paradigms force a fundamental compromise: self-supervised methods scale to massive datasets but yield opaque features, whereas interpretable models remain bottlenecked by the need for dense human annotation. We introduce Self-Supervised Concept discOvery via Preference lEarning (\model), a label-free framework that resolves this dilemma. Instead of treating Vision-Large-Language Models (VLLMs) as static feature extractors, \model leverages them as active participants in a self-supervised preference optimization loop. By autonomously hypothesizing, validating, and reinforcing candidate visual attributes directly from raw imagery, our framework discovers novel, structured concepts without a single label. Extensive experiments across natural, medical, and physics domains demonstrate that \model successfully extracts domain-specific concepts where standard VLLMs often fail to generate. By amortizing concept discovery directly into the VLLM backbone through our self-supervised preference objective – rather than relying on static generation and disjoint filtering – we achieve up to a 24-point absolute improvement in downstream top-1 classification accuracy on unseen data. Our work suggest that interpretability can emerge through a model's autonomous interaction with incidental visual structures, without any human supervision.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Analyzing Defensive Misdirection Against Model-Guided Automated Attacks on Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.20470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks more consequential, especially as attackers adopt model-guided automation to scale probing, prompt refinement, and response evaluation. This work analyzes the resulting attack-defense setting through a probabilistic model of a target system, its defense mechanism, and the attacker's automated judge. Our analysis shows that conventional detect-and-block defenses can allow attacker success rate (ASR) to approach one as the query budget grows, since predictable refusals provide useful feedback to automated search. We then examine detect-and-misdirect, where detected malicious interactions receive controlled, non-operational responses designed to induce false-positive errors in the attacker's judge. This strategy reduces the positive predictive value of attacker-selected candidates and yields a bounded asymptotic ASR. We evaluate a proof-of-concept realization of this strategy through Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), a lightweight conversational misdirection method designed to replace predictable refusal text with safe but strategically misleading responses in automated jailbreak settings. On jailbreak benchmarks, CMPE reduces estimated ASR upper bounds by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in end-to-end PAIR and GPTFuzz attack runs.

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

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

arXiv:2606.14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Pulling The REINS: Training-Free Safety Alignment of Video Diffusion Models via Representation Steering

Open-weight video diffusion models can generate photorealistic unsafe content, from violence to misinformation, yet existing defenses either require expensive safety fine-tuning that degrades general capability, or apply external filters that are trivially bypassed by adversarial prompts. We present REINS (REpresentation-space INference-time Safety steering), a training-free method that aligns video diffusion models at inference time by steering their internal representations toward safe generation. Our key finding is that safety-relevant structure is linearly encoded in the hidden-state activations of video diffusion transformers, and a single direction, discovered via Supervised PCA on binary safety labels, suffices to separate safe from unsafe generation trajectories. At inference, adding this direction to hidden states at an intermediate transformer layer redirects generation from harmful content to semantically related safe alternatives, with no weight updates, no concept enumeration, and negligible computational overhead. Through mechanistic analysis, we reveal that while safety information accumulates monotonically with transformer depth, steering effectiveness peaks at intermediate layers (~50% depth), exposing a fundamental tradeoff between information availability and downstream propagation capacity. We evaluate REINS across 9 video diffusion models, multiple parameter scales (1.3B-5B), and both text-to-video and image-to-video generation, to our knowledge, the broadest safety evaluation suite in the video generation literature.

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

MUZZLE: Adaptive Agentic Red-Teaming of Web Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks

arXiv:2602.09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf. While these agents offer powerful capabilities, their design exposes them to indirect prompt injection attacks embedded in untrusted web content, enabling adversaries to hijack agent behavior and violate user intent. Despite growing awareness of this threat, existing evaluations rely on fixed attack templates, manually selected injection surfaces, or narrowly scoped scenarios, limiting their ability to capture realistic, adaptive attacks encountered in practice. We present MUZZLE, an automated agentic framework for evaluating the security of web agents against indirect prompt injection attacks. MUZZLE utilizes the agent's trajectories to automatically identify high-salience injection surfaces, and adaptively generate context-aware malicious instructions that target violations of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Unlike prior approaches, MUZZLE adapts its attack strategy based on the agent's observed execution trajectory and iteratively refines attacks using feedback from failed executions. We evaluate MUZZLE across diverse web applications, user tasks, and agent configurations, demonstrating its ability to automatically and adaptively assess the security of web agents with minimal human intervention. Our results show that MUZZLE effectively discovers 44 new attacks on 4 web applications with 10 adversarial objectives that violate confidentiality, availability, or privacy properties across different LLMs and agent scaffolds. MUZZLE also identifies novel attack strategies, including 3 cross-application prompt injection attacks and an agent-tailored phishing scenario.