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

Securing Multi-Agent GIS Systems: Risk Evaluation and Prompt Hardening Optimization

Agentic systems are increasingly integrated with geographic information systems (GIS), where multi-agent coordination enables complex conversational and spatial analysis but introduces security risks. This work presents a security-oriented framework for risk identification, evaluation, and mitigation in a multi-agent GIS system while maintaining adaptability to broader agentic architectures. We test the agentic system of a commercial geospatial partner while developing a modular state-machine-based orchestration framework that abstracts agent behavior into reusable components. We evaluate robustness using a red-teaming framework with an adaptive attacker LLM and a deterministic judge that produces binary outcomes with supporting rationales across multi-turn attacks. We further improve resilience with a prompt optimization framework that treats prompts as structured signatures and injects adversarial demonstrations, enabling systematic security improvements without degrading task performance.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SGFormer++: Semantic Graph Transformer for Incremental 3D Scene Graph Generation

In this paper, we propose SGFormer++, a novel Semantic Graph Transformer for 3D scene graph generation (SGG), which aims to parse point cloud scenes into semantic structural graphs, where nodes denote detected object instances and edges encode their pairwise relationships, with the core challenge lying in modeling complex global scene structure. While existing graph convolutional network (GCN)-based methods suffer from over-smoothing and limited receptive fields, SGFormer++ leverages Transformer layers as its backbone to enable global message passing. Specifically, we introduce two key components tailored for 3D SGG: (1) a Graph Embedding Layer++ that efficiently integrates edge-aware global context with linear computational complexity, and (2) a Semantic Injection Layer++ that enriches visual features with linguistic priors from large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), boosting semantic representation without introducing extra trainable parameters. To further address the practical challenge of incremental SGG (I-SGG), where new relationship categories arrive sequentially, we equip SGFormer++ with a novel Spatial-guided Feature Adapter, which calibrates predicate features using subject-object spatial geometry to counter scale variation, and a Cascaded Binary Prediction Head that mitigates catastrophic forgetting via task-incremental classifier expansion and logit distillation. Extensive experiments on the 3DSSG benchmark demonstrate that SGFormer++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both standard and incremental settings: it yields a significant 4.49% absolute improvement in Predicate A@1 under the incremental setting. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Andy20178/SGFormer.

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

Structured vs. Unstructured Pruning: An Exponential Gap

arXiv:2603.02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient. Pruning methods are typically classified as unstructured, where individual weights can be removed from the network, and structured, where parameters are removed according to specific patterns, as in neuron pruning. Existing theoretical results supporting the SLTH rely almost exclusively on unstructured pruning, showing that logarithmic overparameterization suffices to approximate simple target networks. In contrast, neuron pruning has received limited theoretical attention, despite its practical appeal for direct hardware speedups. In this work, we consider the problem of approximating a single bias-free ReLU neuron by pruning hidden units of a randomly initialized two-layer ReLU network, effectively isolating the intrinsic limitations of neuron pruning. We show that achieving an $\varepsilon$-approximation requires a starting network size of $\Omega(1/\varepsilon)$ for neuron pruning, whereas weight pruning succeeds with only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ hidden units, revealing an exponential separation between the two approaches.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

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

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

arXiv:2504.09762v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} – implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous – it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Expanding gene regulatory networks from transcriptome data through graphical modeling with heterogeneous priors

Gene regulatory network inference is widely used to reconstruct large-scale networks and identify functional genes from transcriptome data. Meanwhile, in many biological fields, core regulatory genes have been extensively studied, leading to the establishment of small-scale gene regulatory networks, and novel genes connected to these networks remain to be identified. However, methods for expanding existing gene networks by identifying novel regulatory interactions, rather than reconstructing the entire network, are not well established. Here, we propose a method for gene network expansion that incorporates known regulatory relationships and evaluates each candidate gene individually to infer its regulatory connections to the existing network. Using simulated datasets from the DREAM4 benchmark and the PRECISE-1K experimental dataset, our method outperformed conventional methods by incorporating prior knowledge. In particular, it improved the ability to distinguish true regulatory interactions from indirect associations arising from strong correlations among genes in the existing network. The method also showed strong performance for interactions involving genes with high outdegree or centrality. Furthermore, it maintained stable performance as the size of the existing network increased and was robust to noise in prior information. These results demonstrate that our method provides an effective framework for expanding existing gene regulatory networks by leveraging prior knowledge.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Non-invasive Detection of Fasciculation Using Surface EMG with a Wavelet-Based Analytical Method (DEWCS)

Objective: Needle electromyography (nEMG) is essential for diagnosing neuromuscular disorders but is invasive and often painful. We employed single-channel bipolar surface EMG (sEMG) analyzed with a novel wavelet-based analytical approach, Detecting and Extracting Elemental Wave Components based on a Wavelet Coefficient Set (DEWCS) and investigated whether fasciculation-related activity could be identified. Methods: In this prospective study, 28 patients undergoing nEMG for suspected neuromuscular disorders and 13 healthy controls were included. Resting-state sEMG was recorded from selected muscles using single-channel bipolar active electrodes at a high sampling rate. DEWCS was used to extract indices reflecting fast- and slow-type motor unit (MU)-related activity. These standardized indices were evaluated against nEMG-detected fasciculation potentials using generalized estimating equation logistic regression to account for within-subject clustering. Diagnostic performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: A total of 67 muscles from 38 participants were analyzed. Indices of fast- and slow-type MU-related activity were significantly associated with fasciculation potentials (slow: OR 5.10, p = 0.0041; fast: OR 2.38, p = 0.0162). The combined model showed excellent discrimination (area under the curve = 0.97), outperforming either index alone. Muscle region had no significant effect. Conclusions: A single-channel bipolar sEMG setup combined with DEWCS detected fasciculation-related activity with promising accuracy. This method may serve as a non-invasive surrogate marker of lower motor neuron involvement. Further validation in larger cohorts is warranted. Significance: This non-invasive sEMG approach may help detect fasciculation-related activity and complement nEMG in neuromuscular diagnostics.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Fast Human Attention Prediction for Fixation-guided Active Perception in Autonomous Navigation

Human visual attention relies on structured scanpaths to efficiently process scenes, yet instilling this behavior into robot autonomy is in its infancy and hindered by the high,computational costs of existing predictive models. To address this, we introduce GazeLNN, a computationally lightweight,scanpath prediction model that leverages Liquid Neural Networks as its recurrent engine and employs MobileNetV3 for feature extraction. Operating auto-regressively, the architecture predicts sequential fixation heatmaps conditioned on the current visual stimulus and fixation history. Despite requiring only 0.61 GFLOPs, GazeLNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Low Resolution dataset achieving 0.47 ScanMatch score. It outperforms existing recurrent baselines across diverse evaluation metrics, while reducing computational costs by 99.40% and accelerating inference by up to six times. To investigate the role of human attention modeling in robot autonomy and demonstrate the practical utility of this highly efficient architecture, we integrate GazeLNN into an active camera-robot control policy trained via Reinforcement Learning. This integration enables human-fixation-guided perception during autonomous navigation, validated through successful real-world deployments on an aerial robot.

10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active conformational transition of NLRP3 monomer

作者:

by Jin Peng, Wenjian Li, Hao Wang, Xiaohui Chen, Manjie Zhang, Bin Sun The NLRP3 inflammasome is a multiprotein complex that primes cytokine production in the innate immune system. The inflammasome activation involves the cage-to-disk transition of NLRP3 oligomers, facilitated by the co-factor NEK7 protein. While NEK7’s role in promoting cage disassembly has been reported, its involvement in the large conformational changes of the NLRP3 monomer during activation remains elusive. Here, by using multi-scale simulations, we uncovered a stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active transition. In the early stage, NEK7 reshapes the dynamics of the highly unstable inactive NLRP3 monomer to resemble active state, priming the conformational transition. In the middle stage, NEK7 impedes progression by populating an intermediate state farther from the active conformation than the NEK7-free counterpart, and structures in this state exhibit reduced allosteric potential toward activation. In the late stage, NEK7 has negligible impact, as the active conformation remains inherently isolated by a high energy barrier regardless of NEK7 presence. This highlights the critical role of oligomeric assembly in enabling monomeric NLRP3 to complete its conformational transition, in agreement with experiment observations. Our work suggests a multilayered activation mechanism where oligomer-level assembly and monomeric conformational changes are coupled, providing new mechanistic insights into this physiologically essential macromolecular process.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Computational regimes in matrix-product-state-based quantum trajectory simulations

arXiv:2606.13779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient simulation of open quantum systems is central to modeling noisy quantum hardware and many-body dynamics. In trajectory-based tensor network methods, cost is often associated with trajectory-level quantities such as entanglement growth or bond dimension. However, the total cost of a fixed-accuracy simulation also depends on statistical sampling, and the interplay between per-trajectory complexity and sampling effort remains poorly understood. Here we introduce a cost-resolved framework for matrix product state (MPS)-based quantum trajectory simulations that decomposes total cost into memory per trajectory, runtime per trajectory, and sampling effort. We show that physically equivalent stochastic unravelings of the same Lindblad dynamics do not necessarily reduce total cost, but instead redistribute cost between trajectory complexity and statistical convergence. This trade-off is quantified by two dimensionless inflation factors: a bond dimension inflation $\alpha$ and a sampling inflation $\kappa$, which together determine the preferred unraveling under hardware-dependent memory and parallelism constraints. We provide a practical protocol for extracting $(\alpha,\kappa)$ from modest pilot simulations and demonstrate it using benchmarks across multiple noise channels. The resulting decision maps show that the computationally favorable unraveling can change with noise strength, time-step resolution, system size, and available parallelism. These results establish unraveling choice as a hardware-aware simulation design problem rather than an intrinsic optimization of trajectory entanglement alone.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Program Evaluation with Remotely Sensed Outcomes

arXiv:2411.10959v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study causal inference in experiments and quasi-experiments, where the economic outcome is imperfectly measured by a remotely sensed variable. The remotely sensed variable is low-cost, scalable, and predictive of the economic outcome in observational data; examples include satellite imagery and mobile phone activity. We model the remotely sensed variable as post-outcome: variation in the economic outcome causes variation in the remotely sensed variable. For example, changes in environmental quality cause changes in satellite imagery, not vice versa. Under this assumption, we propose a formula to nonparametrically identify the causal parameter by combining experimental and observational data. We develop a method for n^{-1/2} inference that is robust to misspecification and that does not restrict the algorithms used to process remotely sensed variables.

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

On the Memorization Behavior of LLMs in Generative Recommendation: Observations, Implications, and Training Strategies

arXiv:2606.17276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising direction for recommender systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for GR, as their rich pretrained knowledge is expected to help them generalize beyond common user behavior patterns that traditional memorization-oriented baselines can capture. However, existing LLM-based GR works largely ignore LLMs' well-known tendency to memorize, which, if present in LLMs fine-tuned for GR, would restrict their utilization of pretrained knowledge. In this work, we investigate this concern by examining one-hop memorization, where a model recommends items that are direct successors of items in the training data. We show that LLMs do this more than non-LLM-based GR models-in fact, the vast majority of their gains over GR baselines are actually on users whose target items can be predicted through one-hop memorization. We intuit that improving performance on the remaining users requires LLMs to learn richer item-item relations beyond one-hop transitions. To achieve this, we propose IIRG, a novel training strategy that teaches LLMs to capture: (1) collaborative relations derived from item co-occurrences across multiple hops in user sequences, and (2) semantic relations among items with similar themes, both of which can serve as useful recommendation signals. We show that IIRG significantly improves over LLMs trained solely with standard next-item prediction, with especially large gains for users whose test items are not covered by train-time one-hop transitions.

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

UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling

Unified models can handle both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet they typically operate in a single pass without iteratively refining their outputs. Many multimodal tasks, especially those involving complex spatial compositions, multiple interacting objects, or evolving instructions, require decomposing instructions, verifying intermediate results, and making iterative corrections. While test-time scaling (TTS) has demonstrated that allocating additional inference compute for iterative reasoning substantially improves language model performance, extending this paradigm to unified multimodal models remains an open challenge. We introduce UniT, a framework for multimodal chain-of-thought test-time scaling that enables a single unified model to reason, verify, and refine across multiple rounds. UniT combines agentic data synthesis, unified model training, and flexible test-time inference to elicit cognitive behaviors including verification, subgoal decomposition, and content memory. Our key findings are: (1) unified models trained on short reasoning trajectories generalize to longer inference chains at test time; (2) sequential chain-of-thought reasoning provides a more scalable and compute-efficient TTS strategy than parallel sampling; (3) training on generation and editing trajectories improves out-of-distribution visual reasoning. These results establish multimodal test-time scaling as an effective paradigm for advancing both generation and understanding in unified models.

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

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

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

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

CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly

arXiv:2605.26195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

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

Repeated Bilateral Trade: The Quest for Fairness

arXiv:2606.15369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study repeated bilateral trade from a fairness perspective. At each round, a fresh seller-buyer pair arrives, and the platform posts a price before observing the traders' valuations. Trade occurs only if both agents accept the price. Rather than maximizing only the gain from trade, we consider platforms that seek balanced divisions of the generated surplus. We show that natural fairness desiderata lead to a one-parameter Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, obtained by aggregating the seller's and buyer's net gains through nonpositive Hölder means. Unlike the standard gain-from-trade objective and the Rawlsian fair-gain objective studied in prior work, our proposed objectives induce a new statistical structure in which expected rewards are recovered from threshold feedback through a two-dimensional singular-kernel integral identity. This leads to a nonstandard pure-exploration problem whose natural estimators are rectangular double sums with row-column dependence and singular weights. Assuming independent i.i.d. seller and buyer valuation sequences with arbitrary unknown marginals, we characterize the optimal learning rates for the whole Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, giving matching fixed-confidence sample-complexity and regret bounds up to polylogarithmic factors.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CRUMB: Efficient Prior Fitted Network Inference via Distributionally Matched Context Batching

arXiv:2606.11473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior-fitted networks (PFNs) are a promising class of tabular foundation models that perform in-context learning, whereby the entire labelled training set is supplied as context, and predictions for test queries are produced in a single forward pass. However, the quadratically scaling self-attention mechanism in many PFN architectures makes inference prohibitive for very large training datasets. We propose CRUMB (Clustered Retrieval Using Minimised-MMD Batching), a three-stage inference wrapper that (i) clusters the test queries, (ii) selects a small, distributionally matched training subset for each cluster by greedily minimising the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), and (iii) runs exact PFN inference on each reduced-context batch. CRUMB is architecture-agnostic and requires no retraining. On the 51-dataset TabArena benchmark, evaluated across three PFN architectures (TabPFNv2, TabICLv1, TabICLv2), we show that CRUMB outperforms similar state-of-the-art context selection strategies. We also show that CRUMB is resilient to covariate drift, as the MMD-minimisation step naturally helps align the training context distribution to match the current test batch distributions.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RTSGameBench: An RTS Benchmark for Strategic Reasoning by Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.18950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with strategic reasoning, i.e., anticipating and influencing other agents' actions, under uncertainty in competitive and cooperative settings. Real-time strategy (RTS) games can be a natural testbed for diagnosing this limitation, as they demand coordination with allies, adaptation to opponents' strategy, and long-horizon planning under partial observability. However, existing RTS benchmarks offer limited evaluation scope, lack systematic competency diagnosis, and remain fixed in the pre-designed scenario coverage. To address these limitations, we present RTSGameBench, which is built on Beyond All Reason, a large-scale RTS game with an expanded battlefield that demands broader strategy diversity than the existing testbeds. The proposed benchmark provides evaluations through diverse gameplay across various matchup structures, diagnostic assessment via mini-games, each targeting an individual strategic competency, and extensible coverage via a self-evolving generation framework that converts free-form queries into new mini-games, improving over successive cycles. Additionally, for VLMs to operate in large-scale RTS games, we provide RTSGameAgent that manages units by an FSM with agentic memory. We empirically validate that multiple state-of-the-art VLMs do not perform well when matchups demand tighter coordination, multiagent coordination and when task scale increases.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Lignin to adipic acid in a high-yield chemical and biological redox process

Viable manufacturing pathways to produce bio-based chemicals from renewable feedstocks, such as lignin derived from plant biomass, are needed to decarbonize the chemicals manufacturing sector. Converting the recalcitrant lignin polymer to valuable bioproducts remains a longstanding challenge in biorefining, with the highest reported single-product yield from lignin currently around 20 wt% (refs. 1–4). Most existing lignin depolymerization strategies target aryl–ether bond cleavage, which can produce aromatic monomers in yields of only about 30 wt%, and still as complex mixtures with C–C-linked dimers and oligomers5,6. The recalcitrance of these C–C linkages between aromatic moieties fundamentally limits single-product yields from lignin, prompting the development of strategies to efficiently cleave these C–C bonds3,7–9. Here we show how reductive processing of lignin from poplar accesses a hydrocarbon mixture of alkyl-aromatic monomers and oligomers that is privileged for oxidative conversion to monomeric aromatic carboxylic acids, comprising mostly benzoic acid and phthalic acid isomers in up to 73 wt% monomer yields, using a Co/Mn/Br catalyst. The soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida KT2440 was engineered to convert this mixture of aromatic carboxylic acids to muconolactone, a precursor to bio-based nylons, enabling final adipic acid yields up to 26 wt% (gram adipic acid per gram lignin) with a maximum theoretical yield of 57 wt%. This pairing of reductive and oxidative steps with lignin resembles processes in petrochemical refining and shows how lignin may be converted into a single, valuable bioproduct in high yields. A chemical and biological redox process that resembles processes in petrochemical refining is used to convert lignin from poplar into a single, valuable bioproduct, adipic acid, in high yields.

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

FragFuse: Bypassing Access Control of Large Language Model Agents via Memory-Based Query Fragmentation and Fusion

arXiv:2606.15609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on long-term memory to support complex task execution, user personalization, and domain adaptation. Meanwhile, emerging access-control mechanisms for LLM agents are being explored to block policy-violating requests and prevent misuse. We reveal a novel attack surface arising from agent memory operations: prohibited content that would trigger access control can be fragmented across interactions, stored in long-term memory in benign-appearing form, and later reconstructed through memory retrieval without appearing explicitly in the final user query. We propose FragFuse, the first attack that enables unprivileged users to bypass agent access control by exploiting this temporal channel introduced by long-term memory. FragFuse operates in three stages: (1) identifying rejection-responsive fragments via black-box adaptive querying with fragment masking; (2) injecting these fragments into memory using marker carrier queries; and (3) retrieving and fusing the stored fragments through a follow-up attack query. Although FragFuse can be instantiated manually for individual agents, we further develop a surrogate-based optimization scheme that tunes fusion instructions and marker designs, enabling automated attack generation without violating the attacker's threat-model assumptions. We evaluate FragFuse across four representative agent settings and task domains, covering three state-of-the-art agent access-control mechanisms. FragFuse achieves an average bypass success rate of 86.3% and an average end-to-end harmful task success rate of 41.1% across all settings, with only 4.4% average task-success degradation compared with configurations without access control. We also show that alternative defenses, including state-of-the-art prompt-injection detectors and perplexity detectors, do not effectively address this attack.

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

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Shortened blastocyst vitrification achieves live birth rates comparable to standard protocols: an analysis of 3168 cryotransfers

Study question Do shortened blastocyst vitrification and warming protocols provide comparable live birth rates (LBR) and obstetrical and perinatal outcomes to traditional vitrification and warming protocols? Summary answer Shortened vitrification and warming protocols provide comparable LBR, obstetric and perinatal outcomes to traditional protocols. Shortened vitrification coupled with traditional multi step warming benefitted women >35yrs. What is known already Embryo viability following cryopreservation is dependent on blastomere survival and functional integrity, both impacted by ice crystal formation and osmotic gradients. Recent innovations in cryopreservation challenge the need for stepwise dehydration and rehydration protocols. While one step ''fast'' blastocyst warming protocols seem to provide equivalent clinical outcomes to traditional ''slow'' protocols, fewer studies investigate whether blastocyst dehydration rates can be similarly increased. A thorough safety and effectiveness evaluation remains necessary for both treatment success and offspring health. Study design, size, duration Three clinics within a network participated in this retrospective consecutive cohort study, with cycle data collected for 3603 warmed blastocysts resulting in 3168 frozen blastocyst transfers in 2170 patients between 2023 and 2025. We modelled the relationship between ''fast'' versus ''slow'' protocols and outcomes with Generalized Additive Models, and linear and logistic regressions where appropriate. Two tailed chi square with Yates correction was used to examine pregnancy loss and obstetrical and perinatal outcomes; p0.05). Importantly, women 35yrs or older at vitrification (n=1715 transfers) profited from a F/S strategy, which provided a significant increase in live birth rates (OR:1.42 [1.02-1.98] p=0.038) compared to S/S. The same improved live birth following a F/S strategy were also seen in embryos of lower quality (OR:1.78 [1.12-2.83] p=0.015), suggesting of a protective effect of this cryopreservation strategy on the developmental competence of impaired germplasm. Limitations, reasons for caution Factors affecting the results may be unaccounted for by the study retrospective nature. Wider implication of the findings Overall, shortened, ''faster'' vitrification and warming protocols provide comparable reproductive outcomes to traditional ones. The combination of shorter exposure to cryoprotectant (CPA) during vitrification and stepwise osmotic gradient during warming provided significant clinical benefits specifically to patients >35 and lower quality embryos, pointing to the possibility of adapting vitrification protocols to specific patients populations and optimizing their clinical outcomes.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Scalable quantum circuit knitting using a weak-coupling approximation

arXiv:2606.19035v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a method for performing distributed quantum computing with controlled approximations. Exact distributed quantum computing requires exponential classical information to reconstruct the quantum process. However, we show how the classical cost is reduced to polynomial if the quantum procedure can be partitioned between a qubit that is weakly coupled the other qubits. We demonstrate our method for a layered circuit based on the circuits used for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm.