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

RankVR: Low-Rank Structure Perception and Value Recalibration for Robust Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) constitutes a pivotal paradigm requiring models to perform joint reasoning on reference images and modification texts. However, the prevalence of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) in large-scale datasets severely constrains model performance. Existing denoising methods either target binary mismatches or rely on scalar-based point-wise estimation, neglecting rich global structural correlations among sample populations and dynamic value variations during training, thereby yielding suboptimal results. This paper identifies two critical unresolved challenges: Global Structural Inconsistency of Semantic Correlations and Hard Sample Discrimination Uncertainty. To address these, we propose RankVR, a framework designed to construct a robust CIR model via global structure consistency and dynamic value perception. Specifically, we introduce the Global Structure Consistency Perception (GSCP) module, which utilizes the Effective Rank of the Correlation Matrix to decouple clean samples from structural noise. By measuring rank difference, GSCP identifies samples disrupting macroscopic semantic symmetry. Furthermore, we develop the Adaptive Semantic Value Calibration (ASVC) module to distinguish high-value hard clean samples. By integrating training potential and reliability, it dynamically quantifies the semantic value of each triplet, ensuring effective utilization of hard samples while suppressing noise characterized by logical conflicts. Extensive experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR benchmark datasets demonstrate that RankVR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior robustness in noisy environments.

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

Exact Posterior Score Estimation for Solving Linear Inverse Problems

Diffusion and flow-based models learn powerful data priors by training a denoiser to reverse Gaussian corruption. To use this prior to solve a linear inverse problem, one needs to sample from the posterior, but the score that the prior provides is the unconditional score, not the posterior score. Existing methods either steer a fixed pretrained denoiser with approximate measurement-matching corrections, or train a conditional restoration model that abandons the denoising structure of the prior. We derive the exact posterior score in closed form for linear Gaussian inverse problems under general Gaussian interpolants, and show that posterior sampling reduces to a denoising problem at an operator-dependent shifted pivot under an anisotropic noise covariance. We turn this identity into Exact Posterior Score (EPS), a denoising training objective that preserves the input/output structure of standard pretraining and can therefore be trained from scratch or fine-tuned from a pretrained denoiser. At inference, EPS uses the same sampler as the underlying backbone, with no likelihood gradients or projections. We evaluate EPS on five linear inverse problems across FFHQ and ImageNet, where it outperforms training-free and training-based baselines on fidelity, perceptual, and distributional metrics, while using roughly an order of magnitude fewer denoiser evaluations than gradient-based posterior samplers.

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

Essential Subspace Merging for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2606.19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mathematical Basis for Analyzing Superconducting Phase Transitions Using Catastrophe Theory

arXiv:2606.11810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish a rigorous mathematical bridge from quantum many-body path integrals to the cusp catastrophe model by Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction, which provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing superconducting phase transition using the catastrophe theory. First, it is proved that, near the critical point the infinite-dimensional effective action is diffeomorphic to a finite-dimensional catastrophe. Secondly, starting from Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional, the Euler-Lagrange partial differential equation can be reduced to the cusp catastrophe model. Thirdly, the fermionic imaginary-time path integral to the cusp catastrophe is derived through the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation, Matsubara frequency expansion, and Grassmann algebra. Furthermore, we connect this framework with the adsorption potential theory we proposed, elucidating the catastrophic topological nature of the electron pairing mechanism in high-temperature superconductivity. The precise microscopic derivation of the adsorption potential from first-principles electronic structure calculations would strengthen the predictive power of the theory.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Diabetes is associated with increased nocturnal respiratory rate

Background and Objective: Diabetes mellitus (DM) causes autonomic neuropathy, which may alter nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR). To test the association between DM and NRR, we analyzed elective polysomnograms of four large observational cohorts. Research Design and Methods: We performed cross-sectional analysis of over 25,000 individuals with polysomnograms (PSGs) from the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS), Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL), Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), and Wisconsin Sleep Cohort (WSC). Patient-level NRRs were derived from inductance plethysmography waveforms. DM status was determined by self-report, physician diagnosis, medication use, or laboratory values, depending on the cohort. We related DM and NRR (continuous and dichotomized) using logistic regression models and adjusted for potential confounders. Cohort-specific results were combined using random-effects meta-analysis. Results: Meta-analysis of unadjusted models showed a pooled odds ratio (OR) of 1.10 (95% CI:1.04-1.17) for each breath-per-minute (brpm) increase in NRR. This association remained significant after multivariable adjustment (OR:1.06, 95% CI:1.02-1.11). Dichotomized analyses similarly showed higher odds of DM across dichotomization thresholds ranging from 15 to 21 brpm. At a threshold of 18 brpm, the unadjusted pooled OR was 1.77 (95% CI:1.23-2.55, P=0.0022), and the adjusted OR was 1.49 (95% CI:1.10-2.02, P=0.0098). Conclusions: Clinically stable outpatients with elevated NRR have an increased prevalence of DM. Additional studies are needed to investigate whether the mechanism is autonomic neuropathy and whether monitoring NRR can detect early complications of DM.

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

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Entrainment of cortical gamma oscillations predicts improved bradykinesia and dyskinesia in Parkinson's disease

Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is hypothesized to improve motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD) by suppressing pathologically elevated beta activity and promoting "prokinetic" gamma activity in the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop. Advances in bidirectional DBS devices have revealed that stimulation can modify gamma oscillations via subharmonic entrainment, though entrainment's therapeutic role remains unclear. Objectives: To identify stimulation parameters that entrain motor cortical and STN gamma oscillations in PD at rest and during movement, and examine their association with motor function. Methods: Sensorimotor cortex and STN field potentials were collected using a bidirectional DBS system in four subjects with PD over a range of stimulation amplitudes and frequencies. Entrainment amplitude at half the stimulation frequency was quantified at rest and during a finger-tapping task in the ON-medication state. The presence or absence of entrainment was studied as a physiomarker of motor symptom severity. Results: The amplitude of stimulation-entrained gamma oscillations was non-linearly related to stimulation intensity and frequency and varied by stimulation contact choice. Entrainment amplitude was highest in precentral gyrus and increased with movement. In the ON-medication state, precentral gyrus gamma entrainment was associated with reduced bradykinesia, dyskinesia, and dystonia. Subthalamic gamma entrainment predicted improved dystonia but was a less significant marker for motor benefit than cortical entrainment. Conclusions: Stimulation-entrained gamma oscillations in the motor network are a physiomarker for optimal DBS response in PD, and could have a role in physiology-guided DBS programming, complementing existing strategies based on suppression of basal ganglia beta activity.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

作者:

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Trajectory-Level Redirection Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies bring natural language into closed-loop robot control, enabling robots to execute manipulation tasks directly from text instructions. The same interface gives text a recurring role in control because the prompt is reused at every replanning step, and each prompt-conditioned action changes the future observations on which the policy acts. Existing VLA attacks study adversarial prompts that elicit targeted low-level actions or make such actions persist across changing images. We identify a stronger trajectory-level failure mode: a prompt that still $appears$ to specify the intended task but redirects the final physical outcome. We mathematically formalize this setting as $command-preserving trajectory redirection$, a prompt-only threat model in which the attacker chooses one prompt before the episode, all policy and environment components remain fixed, and the prompt must stay close to the benign instruction while omitting target words and correction language. To find such prompts, we introduce an on-policy prompt search method that uses rollouts to discover perturbations whose closed-loop behavior tracks a target task while satisfying the command-preserving constraints. Experiments in simulation and on hardware show that near-benign prompt perturbations can redirect VLA rollouts to attacker-specified targets. These results expose a trajectory-level vulnerability in VLA instruction grounding: text that appears to preserve the intended command can still give an adversary control over the robot's final physical outcome. Project website: https://vla-redirection-attack.github.io/

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Distilling Examples into Task Instructions: Enhanced In-Context Learning for Real-World B2B Conversations

In-context learning (ICL) is the standard method for low-resource classification, yet its efficacy in specialized domains remains largely unexplored. We address the challenge of classifying semantically complex, multi-party B2B conversations, where traditional ICL encounters significant limitations, especially as context length increases due to the concatenation of multiple few-shot examples. We introduce the \texttt{Call Playbook} dataset, featuring five classification tasks derived from real-world B2B conversations targeting core sales concepts. To bridge the gap between performance and practical utility, we propose novel knowledge extraction methods that distill verbose examples into compact, interpretable representations of structured classification criteria and precise task descriptions. Our approach achieves a 99\% reduction in token usage and improves macro-averaged AUC by up to 7\% over traditional ICL. Notably, it remains robust as context grows, unlike advanced token compression baselines which degrade by over 9 F1 points. Importantly, our framework enables direct refinement of classification logic, addressing critical needs for transparency, efficiency, and user interaction in real-world NLP applications.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Locally Acting Grover Mixers for Constraint-Preserving QAOA

arXiv:2606.11530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Grover mixer quantum alternating operator ansatz (GM-QAOA) employs the Grover mixer to confine the quantum evolution to the feasible subspace defined by the problem. Its mixing unitary, however, requires a global multi-controlled phase-shift gate acting on all qubits, resulting in substantial circuit overhead on near-term quantum devices. In this work, we propose locally acting Grover mixers tailored to initial states that admit a product structure over disjoint qubit subsystems, which may be obtained by encoding only a subset of problem constraints into the initial state preparation. The proposed method preserves the search space defined by the initial state while significantly lowering implementation cost, as the global multi-controlled phase-shift gate is replaced with local operations on disjoint subsystems. Numerical simulations on the exact-cover problem and the traveling salesman problem (TSP) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves convergence behavior comparable to that of the original GM-QAOA, while using shallower circuits with fewer gates. We further compare two constraint encoding strategies for the TSP, encoding only a subset of constraints versus all constraints into the initial state preparation, and show that the former combined with the proposed mixer yields markedly more compact circuits at the point where comparable solution quality is achieved.

13.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-09

Adjuvanted inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus vaccine in healthy adults: a phase 1 trial

Lassa fever causes substantial morbidity and mortality in West Africa, and no licensed vaccine is available. We evaluated LASSARAB, an inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus (Josiah strain) glycoprotein complex vaccine. We conducted a randomized, controlled, dose-escalation phase 1 trial. Participants (total n = 54) received two intramuscular doses of LASSARAB containing 700 (n = 15), 1,400 (n = 15) or 2,800 (n = 14) relative units of antigen formulated with the TLR-4 agonist 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE adjuvant, or licensed rabies vaccine control (n = 10), administered 28 days apart. This protocol-defined interim analysis reports the primary safety evaluation and secondary immunogenicity assessments through day 61. There were no prespecified hypotheses or formal power calculations. All primary safety end points demonstrated an acceptable safety profile. After dose 1, local solicited adverse events occurred in 86.7–100.0% of LASSARAB groups and 80% of controls; systemic events in 33.3–71.4% and 60.0% of controls. After dose 2, local solicited adverse events occurred in 66.7–86.7% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls; systemic events in 53.3–71.4% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls. Events were predominantly mild and self-limited. Unsolicited adverse events occurred in 28.6–60.0% of LASSARAB groups and 20.0% of controls. No serious adverse event, immune-mediated condition or sensorineural hearing loss occurred. Safety laboratory abnormalities occurred in 13.3–66.7% of LASSARAB groups and 30.0% of controls (14 mild, 6 moderate and none severe). After two doses, Lassa virus GPC IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) was achieved in 100.0% (44 of 44) of LASSARAB recipients and 0.0% (0 of 10) of controls. Rabies glycoprotein IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) and neutralizing antibody by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT) seroprotection (≥0.5 IU ml−1) were also 100% across all groups, including controls. LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl phosphorylated hexaacyl disaccharide (PHAD)-SE demonstrated a favorable safety profile and immunogenicity against Lassa and rabies viruses. The per-protocol final study report will include safety and durability through day 394. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT06546709 . An interim report of a first-in-human phase 1 trial found an adjuvanted, combination inactivated rabies-vectored, Lassa fever vaccine (LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE) to be safe and induced immunogenicity to both Lassa and rabies viruses in healthy participants.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Deja Vu at Scale: Paraphrase-Robust Detection of Duplicate Gherkin Steps in Behaviour-Driven Software Testing with Sentence-Transformer Embeddings and a 1.1M-Step Open Benchmark

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) suites in Gherkin accumulate step-text duplication with documented maintenance cost. Prior detectors either require runnable tests or are single-organisation, leaving a gap: a static, paraphrase-robust, step-level detector and a public benchmark to calibrate it. Objective. We release (i) the largest cross-organisational BDD step corpus to date, (ii) a labelled pair-level calibration benchmark, and (iii) a four-strategy detector with a consolidation-savings model linking clusters to ISO/IEC 25010 maintainability sub-characteristics. Method. The corpus contains 347 public GitHub repositories, 23,667 .feature files, and 1,113,616 Gherkin steps, SPDX-tagged. The detector layers exact hashing, normalised Levenshtein, sentence-transformer cosine, and a Levenshtein-banded hybrid. Calibration uses 1,020 manually labelled step pairs under a released rubric (60-pair overlap, Fleiss kappa = 0.84). We report precision, recall, and F1 with bootstrap 95% CIs under the primary rubric and a score-free relabelling, and benchmark against SourcererCC-style and NiCad-style lexical baselines. Results. Step-weighted exact-duplicate rate is 80.2%; median-repository rate is 58.6% (Spearman rho = 0.51). The top hybrid cluster has 20,737 occurrences across 2,245 files. Near-exact reaches F1 = 0.822 on score-free labels; semantic F1 = 0.906 under the primary rubric reflects a disclosed stratification artefact. Lexical baselines reach F1 = 0.761 and 0.799. The savings model estimates 893,357 corpus-wide eliminable step occurrences; on the median repository 62.5% of step lines are eliminable.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Robust discovery of mutational signatures using power posteriors

by Catherine Xue, Jeffrey W. Miller, Scott L. Carter, Jonathan H. Huggins Mutational processes, such as the molecular effects of carcinogenic agents or defective DNA repair mechanisms, produce different mutation types with characteristic frequency profiles, known as mutational signatures. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has been successfully used to discover many mutational signatures, yielding novel insights into cancer etiology and informing targeted therapies. However, the NMF model is only a rough approximation to reality, and even small departures from this assumed model can have large negative effects on the accuracy and reliability of the results. We propose BayesPowerNMF, a Bayesian NMF method that provides nonparametric robustness to model misspecification, principled automated selection of the number of latent processes, and uncertainty quantification of model parameters. In extensive simulation studies, we find that our proposed approach recovers more true signatures with greater accuracy than current leading methods. On whole-genome sequencing data for six cancer types from the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium, we find that our method is able to accurately recover more signatures than the current state-of-the-art.

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

Hybrid Diffusion Transformer for Instruction-Guided Audio Editing via Rectified Flow

arXiv:2606.20101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio editing aims to modify specific content in an existing audio clip according to a natural language instruction while preserving the remaining acoustic content. Despite the remarkable progress of diffusion models, existing training-based editing methods mainly rely on the local inductive biases and cross-attention interaction in convolutional U-Net backbones, which often hinder long-range semantic alignment and precise understanding and localization of instructions. In contrast, diffusion transformers provide stronger global modeling and multimodal fusion, but existing editing architectures usually adopt a simple stack of MMDiT and DiT blocks. Applying joint attention over concatenated audio and text tokens in all blocks results in quadratic complexity with respect to token length. To balance editing performance and efficiency, we propose a hybrid two-stage diffusion transformer architecture for instruction-guided audio editing based on rectified flow matching. It performs joint attention over audio and text tokens to establish coarse semantic alignment at low-resolution stage, then switches to alternating joint-attention and cross-attention blocks to refine editing details at high-resolution stage. This coarse-to-fine strategy enables efficient and accurate instruction-guided audio editing. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves notable performance gains on challenging editing tasks involving overlapping audio events and complex instructions, while substantially improving editing efficiency with a compact model.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VideoMDM: Towards 3D Human Motion Generation From 2D Supervision

We introduce VideoMDM, a diffusion-based framework that trains 3D human motion priors directly from accurate 2D poses extracted from monocular videos, without any 3D ground truth. A pretrained 2D-to-3D lifter provides approximate 3D pose sequences that serve as a noisy teacher: these are diffused, denoised by the model in 3D, and supervised in 2D by reprojecting the prediction and comparing against accurate keypoints. We show that, under mild assumptions, a depth-weighted 2D reprojection loss is equivalent in expectation to direct 3D supervision, and we adapt standard 3D motion regularizers - velocity consistency and over-parameterized representation alignment - to this 2D setting. Unlike methods that lift 2D to 3D only at inference, VideoMDM learns a coherent 3D motion manifold during training. On HumanML3D it nearly closes the gap to fully 3D-supervised MDM (FID 0.88 vs 0.54); On real video datasets Fit3D and NBA the method learns to generate motions consistently preferred by humans, with strong quantitative results.

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

Discovery and inference beyond linearity for epidemiological data by integrating Bayesian regression, tree ensembles and Shapley values

arXiv:2505.00571v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) is gaining popularity in epidemiology and healthcare studies for hypothesis-free discovery of risk and protective factors. ML is strong at discovering nonlinearities and interactions, but this power is compromised by a lack of reliable inference. Although Shapley values provide local measures of features' effects, valid uncertainty quantification for these effects is typically lacking, thus precluding statistical inference. We propose RuleSHAP, a framework that addresses this limitation by combining a dedicated Bayesian sparse regression model with an improved tree-based rule generator and Shapley value attribution. RuleSHAP provides detection of nonlinear and interaction effects, with uncertainty quantification at the individual level as a key contribution. We derive an efficient formula for computing marginal Shapley values within this framework. We apply RuleSHAP to data from an epidemiological cohort to detect and infer several effects for high cholesterol and blood pressure, such as nonlinear interaction effects between features like age, sex, ethnicity, BMI and glucose level. To conclude, we demonstrate the validity of our framework on simulated data.

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

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

OpenAnt: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Discovery Through Code Decomposition, Adversarial Verification, and Dynamic Testing

arXiv:2606.19149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated vulnerability discovery in large codebases remains challenging: traditional static analysis produces high false-positive rates, while dynamic approaches such as fuzzing require substantial infrastructure and often target narrow classes of bugs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable semantic reasoning about program behavior, but applying LLMs to repository-scale security analysis introduces challenges related to context management, cost, and verification. We present OpenAnt, an open-source vulnerability discovery system that integrates static program analysis with LLM-based reasoning in a multi-stage pipeline. OpenAnt introduces three key techniques. First, codebases are decomposed into self-contained analysis units filtered by reachability from external entry points, reducing the analysis surface by up to 97% while preserving attack-relevant code. Second, candidate vulnerabilities undergo adversarial verification through constrained attacker simulation, where the model evaluates exploitability under realistic attacker capabilities. Third, findings are validated through dynamic verification, in which exploit environments are generated automatically, executed in sandboxed containers, and discarded after use. Evaluation on widely used open-source projects including OpenSSL, WordPress, and Flowise shows that this architecture can identify previously unknown vulnerabilities while maintaining manageable analysis cost and substantially reducing false positives. Our results suggest that closed-loop vulnerability discovery pipelines, combining semantic reasoning with exploit validation, provide a practical path toward scalable automated security analysis. OpenAnt is released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/knostic/OpenAnt.

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

LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies

arXiv:2606.15768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for semantic robot control, but often lack explicit foresight into how robot actions change the scene. World-Action Models (WAMs) address this limitation by conditioning policies on predicted futures, yet existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive video generation with substantial pixel-level redundancy. We present LaWAM, a Latent World Action Model that exposes predictive dynamics to robot policies through compact latent visual subgoals instead of reconstructed future video. At the core of LaWAM is a latent-action-conditioned Latent World Model (LaWM). We obtain LaWM by training a latent action model in the latent space of a pretrained vision foundation model and repurposing its forward decoder to predict future observation features for scene evolution. LaWAM then conditions action generation on these predicted latent visual subgoals to enable dynamics-aware robot control. LaWAM achieves state-of-the-art or competitive success rates (SRs) across LIBERO (98.6% SR), RoboTwin (91.22% SR), and real-world manipulation tasks while retaining low-latency inference. LaWAM runs in 187 ms per action-chunk prediction and achieves up to 24x lower wall-clock latency than pixel-space WAMs.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Shared Polygenic Architecture Across Arteriopathies: An Integrative Cross-Trait Analysis

Background: Non-monogenic arteriopathies are often classified as distinct entities according to the arterial territory involved, yet they share clinical features and may co-occur in the same individual. This pattern suggests shared susceptibility across anatomically distinct arteriopathies, potentially driven by common biological and genetic mechanisms. Methods: We investigated the shared genetic architecture of five arteriopathies (cervical artery dissection (CeAD), intracranial aneurysm (IA), spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), aortic aneurysm and dissection (AAD), and fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD)) using LD score regression, Association analysis based on SubSETs (ASSET), pairwise Multi-Trait Analysis of Genome-wide association summary statistics (MTAG), pleiotropy mapping and Mendelian randomization (MR) to identify shared loci and prioritise candidate causal genes. Results: LD score regression identified significant positive genetic correlations between CeAD-SCAD (rg = 0.64), IA-AAD (rg = 0.33), IA-SCAD (rg = 0.37), CeAD-AAD (rg = 0.56) and SCAD-AAD (rg = 0.20). ASSET identified 37 shared independent loci, and in MTAG analyses, one novel locus was identified for CeAD and SCAD (SLC39A8) and one for IA (FGF5). 13 loci showed strong cross-trait colocalization, including PHACTR1, LRP1, and CDKN2B-AS1. Using the Genotype-Phenotype Map, we found that arteriopathy-associated variants colocalized with blood pressure- and migraine-related traits, while many showed effect directions opposite to those observed for coronary artery disease. Proteome-wide MR identified 67 circulating proteins associated with at least one trait, including ECM1 and SHISA5 for CeAD and FGF5 for IA, with 17 supported by colocalization. Transcriptome-wide MR identified 204 colocalized tissue?specific signals, of which, 14 were shared across multiple traits. Enrichment analyses implicated pathways related to vascular development, smooth muscle cell function, extracellular matrix organization, and TGF-? signaling. Conclusions: These findings support shared genetic architecture across anatomically distinct arteriopathies, implicating pathways involved in vascular structure and prioritising therapeutic targets for future mechanistic investigation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Planning with Unified Multimodal Models

With the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), many recent works have explored using them for decision-making. However, most of these approaches rely solely on language-based reasoning, which limits their ability to reason and make informed decisions. Recently, a promising new direction has emerged with unified multimodal models (UMMs), which support both multimodal inputs and outputs. We believe such models have greater potential for decision-making by enabling reasoning through generated visual content. To this end, we propose Uni-Plan, a planning framework built on UMMs. Within this framework, a single model simultaneously serves as the policy, dynamics model, and value function. In addition, to avoid hallucinations in dynamics predictions, we present a novel approach self-discriminated filtering, where the generative model serves as a self-discriminator to filter out invalid dynamics predictions. Experiments on embodied decision-making tasks show that Uni-Plan substantially improves success rates compared to VLM-based methods, while also showing strong data scalability, requiring no expert demonstrations and achieving better performance under the same training-data size. This work lays a foundation for future research in reasoning and decision-making with UMMs.

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

LLM-Powered Virtual Population for Demand Simulation and Pricing

We develop an LLM-powered virtual population model that simulates demand for pricing decisions, in settings where products are described by rich unstructured information, such as text descriptions and images, and where decision makers need not only mean-demand predictions but also uncertainty estimates for counterfactual prices. Our model represents exposed customers as draws from a finite mixture of customer personas. For each persona, product, and candidate price, an LLM elicits a persona-level purchase probability using both structured persona information and unstructured product information. These probabilities are aggregated through calibrated mixture weights to form a predictive distribution of aggregate demand. The resulting simulator can evaluate counterfactual prices under various pricing objectives, including expected revenue and risk-aware criteria such as conditional value at risk. We test the framework on an online H&M fashion dataset with product descriptions and images. The calibrated LLM-based simulator achieves the best overall predictive performance among the models considered, and supports sample-efficient pricing decisions. Our framework provides a practical way to use LLMs as demand simulators for products with limited historical demand data but rich product information. By producing a full predictive demand distribution rather than only a point forecast, it enables managers to compare candidate prices, quantify demand uncertainty, and choose prices that target either average-case revenue or risk-aware objectives.