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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Allostatic Load in Endometrial Cancer Disparities

Background: Endometrial cancer incidence and mortality are increasing, particularly among Black women and for aggressive subtypes. Allostatic load (AL), a composite measure of physiologic dysregulation across metabolic, cardiovascular, and immune systems, varies by racial category and tumor subtype in other cancers. Endometrial cancer is strongly associated with obesity, and it is unknown whether AL scores maintain sufficient heterogeneity to evaluate differences across subgroups or with clinical outcomes. Objective: To describe the performance of AL scoring in endometrial cancer patients and examine associations with tumor characteristics (grade/histology) and survival outcomes. Methods: We evaluated AL among 398 participants newly diagnosed with endometrial cancer. AL score was calculated by assigning 1 point for each ''high-risk'' value (by clinical reference range or distribution-based) for 15 biologic variables for vital signs, anthropometrics, blood-based biomarkers, and medical comorbidities. Results: Distribution-based thresholds for variables were used to preserve heterogeneity in this obesity-dominant context. Overall, 68.7% of Black women had high AL compared to White (56.7%), Hispanic (56.7%), and other race (32.3%) women. Decision tree analyses revealed grade-dependent associations between AL and survival. For women with low-grade tumors, higher AL was associated with poorer overall survival. For high-grade tumors, intermediate AL ([≥]4,

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603.14867v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions. In many situations, a fundamental challenge arises when the leader cannot intervene in the follower's optimization process; it can only observe the optimization outcome. We address this decentralized setting by deriving the hypergradient of the leader's objective, i.e., the gradient of the leader's strategy that accounts for changes in the follower's optimal policy. Unlike prior hypergradient-based methods that require extensive data for repeated state visits or rely on gradient estimators whose complexity can increase substantially with the high-dimensional leader's decision space, we leverage the Boltzmann covariance trick to derive an alternative hypergradient formulation. This enables efficient hypergradient estimation solely from interaction samples, even when the leader's decision space is high-dimensional. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first method that enables hypergradient-based optimization for 2-player Markov games in decentralized settings. Experiments highlight the impact of hypergradient updates and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in both discrete and continuous state tasks.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Parameters to Feature Space: Task Arithmetic for Backdoor Mitigation in Model Merging

arXiv:2606.12498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging (MM) has gained significant attention as a cost-effective approach to integrate multiple task-specific models into a unified model. However, recent work reveals that MM is highly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Existing defenses based on task arithmetic often fail to eliminate backdoors without substantially degrading clean-task performance, owing to their reliance on direct parameter-space editing. To address this gap, we propose Linear Feature Path Minimization (LFPM), a backdoor mitigation framework for model merging, which introduces an anti-backdoor task vector into the backdoored merged model. Unlike prior approaches, LFPM formulates the backdoor robustness of the merged model from a unified feature-space perspective under the Cross-Task Linearity (CTL) framework, which leverages the approximate linearity of features across tasks. This perspective guides the optimization of the anti-backdoor task to suppress backdoors while preserving clean-task performance. Furthermore, we introduce an effective optimization mechanism based on gradient accumulation and loss path-integral, ensuring robust backdoor suppression along the interpolation path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LFPM consistently exhibits strong robustness against backdoor attacks in both full fine-tuning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Examining the Limits of Word2Vec with Toki Pona

Word2Vec's effectiveness at generating semantic embeddings has been widely validated, yet it has been tested almost exclusively on languages with large vocabulary inventories. This study examines whether Word2Vec can successfully capture semantic relationships within an extremely reduced vocabulary using data from Toki Pona, a constructed language with approximately 130 words. We sourced 1.4 million sentences (7.95 million tokens) from the Toki Pona community for training. Approximately 23% of sentences in the corpus contain non-Toki Pona tokens such as named entities, loanwords, and neologisms. To investigate whether this linguistic noise enhances or hinders performance – a topic rarely addressed in word embedding literature – we trained two distinct models: one retaining these incidental tokens and another filtering them out completely. Evaluation was conducted using quantitative methods measuring word proximity to semantic category centroids, automated silhouette scores via agglomerative clustering, and qualitative analysis utilizing representational similarity matrices compared against English. The results indicate that while sparse, non-core tokens do not affect the relative structure of the learned embeddings, they actually draw similar words closer together in the vector space. Importantly, Word2Vec's effectiveness depends more on distributional patterns than lexicon size even at this extreme lower bound.

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

Mixing Makes Markovian Contexts Cheap for Linear Bandits

arXiv:2603.12530v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap'' perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses and leverages mature techniques from the linear bandit literature, such as those for misspecification and adversarial corruption. However, this reduction crucially relies on the independence of contexts and does not extend to settings with temporally correlated (e.g., Markovian) contexts, which arise frequently in practice. Motivated by applications with temporally correlated availability, we extend this perspective to linear bandits with Markovian context processes, where the action set evolves via an exogenous Markov chain. Our main contribution is a reduction that applies under uniform geometric ergodicity. We construct a stationary surrogate action set to solve the problem using a standard linear bandit oracle, employing a delayed-update scheme to control the bias induced by the nonstationary conditional context distributions. We further provide a phased algorithm for unknown stationary distributions that learns the surrogate mapping online. In both settings, we obtain a high-probability worst-case regret bound matching that of the underlying linear bandit oracle in sufficiently fast mixing regimes. We then validate our results on a real-world instance, where we show practical gains over a LinUCB baseline.

07.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-11

Large-scale, spatially resolved panoramic CRISPR screening in native tissue environments using Perturb-DBiT

作者:

Spatially resolved CRISPR screening in vivo has been limited to small perturbation panels and subsets of protein-coding RNAs. We present Perturb-DBiT, a method for co-sequencing of spatial total RNA whole transcriptomes and single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) on the same tissue section in situ. In a human cancer metastatic colonization model, we applied large (80,000+) sgRNA panels across tumor colonies in multiple consecutive tissue sections alongside their corresponding total RNA transcriptomes. We linked perturbations affecting long noncoding RNA covariation, microRNA–mRNA interactions and distinct amino acid-specific tRNA alterations to tumor migration and growth. By integrating transcriptional pseudotime trajectories, we further observed the impact of perturbations on clonal dynamics and cooperation. In an immune-competent syngeneic mouse model, investigation of the tumor immune microenvironment indicated distinct, synergistic effects on immune infiltration and suppression. Perturb-DBiT provides a spatially resolved comprehensive view of perturbation responses in complex tissues, including small and large RNA regulation, tumor proliferation, migration, metastasis and immune interactions. In vivo CRISPR genetic perturbations are spatially mapped at scale.

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

The Initial Exploration Problem in Knowledge Graph Exploration

arXiv:2602.21066v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) enable the integration and representation of complex information across domains, but their semantic richness and structural complexity create substantial barriers for lay users without expertise in semantic web technologies. When encountering an unfamiliar KG, such users face a distinct orientation challenge: they do not know what questions are possible, how the knowledge is structured, or how to begin exploration. This paper identifies and theorises this phenomenon as the Initial Exploration Problem (IEP). Drawing on theories from information behaviour and human-computer interaction, including ASK, exploratory search, information foraging, and cognitive load theory, we develop a conceptual framing of the IEP characterised by three interdependent barriers: scope uncertainty, ontology opacity, and query incapacity. We argue that these barriers converge at the moment of first contact, distinguishing the IEP from related concepts that presuppose an existing starting point or information goal. Analysing KG exploration interfaces at the level of interaction primitives, we suggest that many systems rely on epistemic assumptions that do not hold at first contact. This reveals a structural gap in the design space: the absence of interaction primitives for scope revelation, mechanisms that communicate what a KG contains without requiring users to formulate queries or interpret ontological structures. In articulating the IEP, this paper provides a theoretical lens for evaluating KG interfaces and for designing entry-point scaffolding that supports initial exploration.

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

Definitional alignment before capability alignment: a Design-Science framework for adjudicating claims about AGI

arXiv:2606.12713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Claims that artificial general intelligence has already arrived and claims that it remains decades away are often defended from overlapping evidence. "AGI" lacks a single shared and stable referent and competing operationalizations can return different verdicts on the same system. This article treats that under-specification as a design and governance problem. Following Design Science Research Methodology, it develops DAF-AGI, a second-order conceptual artifact with two coupled components: five ordinal criteria for assessing the adjudicative fitness of candidate definitions and a structured governance audit of authorship, interest, certification, external verification and revision authority. The artifact is demonstrated on five prominent measurement families and one deflationary boundary position in a documented corpus and then stress-tested against a stylized strong arrival claim: that current generative systems constitute AGI because they outperform a well-educated adult on many cognitive tasks. On evidence from the cited 2024-2025 sources, the claim was certifiable only under a performance-based operationalization; capability-ontology, psychometric and skill-acquisition approaches did not certify it, the economic family remains indeterminate and the deflationary position refuses binary adjudication. The contribution is a novel integration and operationalization, not an empirical validation: independent application, inter-rater testing and author-external cases remain necessary. The paper further proposes definitional sovereignty as an enabling component of algorithmic sovereignty: the institutional capacity to contest, certify and revise imported technological categories under public accountability.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

The Risk Shadow of Principal Component Analysis: When 99.9999% Variance Preservation Causes Catastrophic Decision Errors

arXiv:2606.14533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) preserves variance, not the information needed to detect rare catastrophic events. This paper proves the existence of a {\it Risk Shadow}: PCA can retain over 99.9999 percent of total variance while completely erasing all signal about rare, high-impact failures. When this happens, even the best possible classifier operating on the PCA representation reduces to a constant predictor. The root cause is a fundamental mismatch between variance maximization and tail risk awareness. To break the shadow, we introduce Expectile PCA (ExPCA) and Tail-Preserving PCA (TP-PCA), two methods that reweight the data covariance toward high-impact events. We prove theoretically that ExPCA strictly outperforms PCA in retaining rare-event information, and we validate our claims on synthetic data and a real-world credit card fraud detection benchmark. Our results call for a fundamental rethinking of variance-based dimensionality reduction in high-stakes decisions.

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

Does the Question Really Matter? Training-Free Data Selection for Vision-Language SFT

arXiv:2603.09715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual instruction tuning is crucial for improving vision-language large models (VLLMs). However, many samples can be solved via linguistic patterns or common-sense shortcuts, without genuine cross-modal reasoning, limiting the effectiveness of multimodal learning. Prior data selection methods often rely on costly proxy model training and focus on difficulty or diversity, failing to capture a sample's true contribution to vision-language joint reasoning. In this paper, we propose CVS, a training-free data selection method based on the insight that, for high-quality multimodal samples, introducing the question should substantially alter the model's assessment of answer validity given an image. CVS leverages a frozen VLLM as an evaluator and measures the discrepancy in answer validity with and without conditioning on the question, enabling the identification of samples that require vision-language joint reasoning while filtering semantic-conflict noise. Experiments on Vision-Flan and The Cauldron show that CVS achieves solid performance across datasets. On Vision-Flan, CVS outperforms full-data training by 3.5% and 4.8% using only 10% and 15% of the data, respectively, and remains robust on the highly heterogeneous Cauldron dataset. Moreover, CVS reduces computational cost by 17.3% and 44.4% compared to COINCIDE and XMAS.

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

RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2506.17639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8 times memory reduction and 2.3 times inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment. Project website: https://rlrc-vla.github.io

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Maternal BMI and Placental Transcriptomic Changes: A Meta-Analysis of Gene Expression at the Maternal-Fetal Interface

Objective: Maternal body mass index (BMI) is often used as a measure of metabolic status and increased or decreased maternal BMI is associated with a heightened risk of cardiometabolic diseases across generations. The placenta mediates these maternal metabolic cues; however, its genome wide transcriptional adaptations in response to maternal BMI remain incompletely defined. Methods: To delineate placental genes, pathways, and interaction clusters whose transcript abundance varies with maternal prepregnancy BMI through a genome wide meta analysis of human placental RNA sequencing datasets. Placental RNA seq reads from four publicly available cohorts (n=146) were mapped to the GRCh38 reference genome and differentially expressed genes were identified. An independent microarray cohort (n=19) was reanalysed separately to facilitate cross platform comparison. Functional enrichment employed GO, KEGG, and STRING protein interaction resources. Results: Meta-analysis of 146 RNA seq samples identified eight genes with genome-wide significance in placentae from underweight pregnancies including inflammatory signaling gene MAP4K1 and metabolic enzyme PSPH, while overweight and obese categories revealed nominally significant differential expression. KEGG analysis demonstrated significant downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation with increasing maternal BMI, and protein-protein interaction networks revealed inflammatory mediators as central nodes in overweight and obese groups. Independent microarray validation corroborated key findings, including consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation in obesity. Conclusion: Maternal BMI is associated with placental transcriptomic signatures involving inflammatory, metabolic, and hormonal pathways, with consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation across platforms. This genome-wide meta-analysis provides a reproducible catalogue of BMI-responsive placental transcripts that may contribute to developmental programming of offspring health.

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

LiFT: Local Search via Linear Programming for Overfitting-Controlled Transformers

This paper proposes a Linear Programming (LP)-based local search framework for fine-tuning pretrained transformer models with explicit control against overfitting. The approach formulates transformer fine-tuning as a bilevel optimization-based regularization problem, in which model parameters and regularization hyperparameters are jointly updated. Information collected during initial warm-up iterations, including validation gradients and training Hessian information, is used to construct a local descent direction by solving an LP that minimizes a scaled directional derivative while preserving training optimality. This validation-aware descent direction enables focused local updates of both parameters and regularization hyperparameters, reducing overfitting without requiring repeated full retraining cycles. The resulting method, termed Linear Programming-based Fine-Tuning (LiFT) for transformers, differs from conventional fine-tuning by systematically identifying task-specific updates rather than relying on heuristic or grid-based hyperparameter selection. Experiments on GPT-2 Small fine-tuned on WikiText-2 demonstrate that LiFT enables effective adaptation through selective tuning of transformer blocks and regularization parameters, yielding consistent improvements in test perplexity across multiple layer configurations and regularization settings, with particularly pronounced gains in overfitting-prone scenarios. Beyond empirical performance, LiFT establishes a principled connection between transformer fine-tuning, bilevel optimization, local search, and regularization theory.

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

Bridging Modality Disconnect in Self-Reflection via Closed-Loop Visually Grounded Verification

In the era of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enhancing multimodal reasoning capabilities remains a critical challenge, particularly in handling ambiguous or complex visual inputs, where initial inferences often lead to hallucinations or logic errors. Existing VLMs often produce plausible yet ungrounded answers, and even when prompted to "reflect", their corrections may remain detached from the image evidence. To address this, we propose the MIRROR framework for Multimodal Iterative Reasoning via Reflection On visual Regions. By embedding visual reflection as a core mechanism, MIRROR is formulated as a closed-loop process comprising draft, critique, region-based verification, and revision, which are repeated until the output is visually grounded. To facilitate training of this model, we construct **ReflectV**, a visual reflective dataset for multi-turn supervision that explicitly contains reflection triggers, region-based verification actions, and answer revision grounded in visual evidence. Experiments on both general vision-language benchmarks and representative vision-language reasoning benchmarks show that MIRROR improves correctness and reduces visual hallucinations, demonstrating the value of training reflection as an evidence-seeking, region-aware verification process rather than a purely textual revision step.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models

Latent reasoning models (LRMs) replace explicit chain-of-thought with continuous thoughts. Recent work treats observable latent-state patterns, such as BFS-like frontiers and decodable arithmetic computation, as evidence for internal reasoning mechanisms. Evaluating two LRMs (Coconut and CODI) against controls lacking the proposed recurrence or curriculum, we find these patterns also appear in the controls and do not always causally affect behavior. Causal interventions reveal that latent-thought utilization is not binary but graded, scaling with a thought's causal effect on model behavior. Geometric analyses reveal this effect concentrates in low-rank directions whose step-to-step geometry grows more structured as their behavioral influence increases. Latent thoughts should therefore be treated as hidden computation, not hidden explanation: decodability, attention, or static structure alone cannot establish mechanism. LRM interpretability thus requires matched controls and causal tests.

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

When Language Representations Interact: Separability and Cross-Lingual Effects in LLMs

arXiv:2606.14347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, however, their internal representations are difficult to interpret. Understanding these interactions is important for ensuring reliable behavior in multilingual systems. Recent work has shown that causal-geometric structure can explain how certain concepts are encoded as approximately linear and separable directions, but whether this framework extends to multilingual models, where language identity is correlated and hierarchical, is underexplored. We apply causal-geometric analysis to multilingual LLMs, studying 28 bilingual contrasts across three models, allowing us to analyze when languages behave as approximately independent factors and when structured dependencies persist. We find evidence that language concepts admit stable linear representations that are largely separable under a covariance-adjusted (causal) inner product, with structured deviations reflecting linguistic similarity. Moreover, languages within the same family (such as Germanic or Romance) exhibit a simplex-like geometric structure, suggesting hierarchical organization. These results extend causal-geometric interpretability to multilingual settings and provide insight into how separability and similarity may exist in multilingual LLM representations, motivating interpretability analyses that diagnose when and how structured dependencies between concepts can be anticipated. This has implications for trustworthy deployment, as residual structure between languages may lead to unintended cross-lingual effects when models are monitored or intervened upon.

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

CogCanvas: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Subject Reference-Based Image Generation

Multi-subject reference-based image generation requires jointly preserving multiple human identities, binding per-person objects and fashion items, and respecting a specified background scene, a regime where current diffusion models remain brittle. Existing benchmarks evaluate only one axis at a time and none jointly captures multi-identity composition with human-object interaction, background grounding, and spatial plausibility. We introduce CogCanvas, a benchmark of 1,952 curated reference images spanning 100 celebrity identities, 115 distinctive objects and fashion items, and 29 real-world background scenes including landmarks, from which we construct 1,361 compositional prompts covering 2-5 person group sizes. The curation pipeline combines DINOv2-based deduplication, two-stage aesthetic filtering, and automated derivation of structured interaction and position graphs that serve as ground-truth supervision. CogCanvas supports three tasks, reference-based multi-human-object generation (primary), text-to-image compositional generation, and reference retrieval, under a unified six-axis evaluation protocol. We introduce two metrics tailored to the multi-reference setting: BG-Sim, which scores background fidelity on SAM 3-masked regions via DINOv3 feature similarity, and Attr-VQA, which uses a multimodal LLM to verify per-subject attribute binding and inter-person interactions against the structured graphs. Benchmarking five SOTA methods reveals that every model degrades substantially as group size grows from 2 to 5, with near-complete failure on object/fashion binding beyond three subjects.

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

Adaptive and Explicit safe: Triggering Latent Safety Awareness in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries. To address this vulnerability, prior works depend heavily on external manual data annotation for safety alignment. However, we observe that LRMs can inherently identify safety risks when being re-presented with original queries alongside their own reasoning trajectories – a capability we term Latent Safety Awareness. To leverage this safety awareness, we first employ Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to explicitly induce safe tags to trigger safety analysis and guidance following the initial reasoning content for unsafe queries, while preserving standard responses for general queries to ensure adaptive triggering. Subsequently, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to further enhance the correctness and stability of the safety analysis and guidance. Notably, responses required for both training stages are entirely generated by models being optimized. With (Safe Trigger) SFT and DPO, experimental results demonstrate significant safety enhancement. For example, the Attack Success Rate (ASR) of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, on average, drops 24.65% and 36.72% on harmful and jailbreak benchmarks, respectively. Finally, our Safe Trigger method exerts almost no negative impact on general performance or user experience.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

General-purpose large language models can achieve physician-level accuracy in complex medical data extraction

Background: Unstructured data represent about 80% of total electronic health records (EHR) data. Structuring this free text is essential for advancing clinical research, including cohort selection for trials, retrospective studies, and the development of disease registries. While manual chart review (MCR) remains the gold standard for extracting this clinical data, the process is inherently slow, resource-intensive, and susceptible to errors from human fatigue. We evaluated the extraction accuracy, safety, and efficiency of the HeLIX (Hepatology Logic-Integrated Extraction) framework, a Large Language Model (LLM) protocol using Google Gemini 3 Pro, compared to a gold-standard Manual Chart Review (MCR). Methods: A prospective validation study was conducted using 50 high-complexity, simulated hepatology discharge summaries designed to replicate the real-world heterogeneity of EHRs. The HeLIX framework employed a Zero-Shot, Structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting strategy enforced by a three-layer architecture: Clinical Reasoning Trace, Schema Enforcement, and Evidence Verification. The model extracted 45 distinct clinical variables. Performance was benchmarked against a consensus MCR. Results: Across 2,250 evaluated data points, the model achieved an overall Extraction Accuracy of 99.24% (95% CI: 98.8%-99.5%), with perfect concordance in 35/45 (77.8%) variables. For binary diagnostic variables, the model demonstrated an overall F1-score of 0.98, Recall of 0.99 and substantial inter-rater reliability (Cohens {kappa} = 0.97). Hallucinations were exceptionally rare (2/2250; 0.08%). Critical errors affecting clinical management occurred in only 2 instances (

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

Benchmarking Instance-Dependent Label Noise with Controlled Corruptions

arXiv:2606.14965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic instance-dependent label noise (IDN) benchmarks are widely used to evaluate noisy-label learning methods, yet existing approaches typically generate noise through imperfect annotators or classifier raters, leaving the source of ambiguity implicit. We introduce CILN, a benchmark generation framework that creates IDN through controlled input corruptions. A diverse voter pool labels corrupted instances, producing benchmark datasets in which both the source and severity of ambiguity are explicit and controllable. Using CIFAR10, MNIST, and Adult, we construct 90 benchmark settings spanning multiple corruption families and severity levels. Our experiments show that the resulting benchmarks exhibit genuine instance-dependent noise, provide diverse confusion structures, and, on CIFAR-10, can produce label distributions that are closer to human uncertainty than an existing synthetic IDN benchmark. We further demonstrate that corruption-mediated IDN can expose failure modes of popular noisy-label learning methods, including Co-Teaching and DivideMix, that are not observed under comparable levels of rater-fallibility noise. These findings suggest that noise structure, not only noise rate, plays an important role in benchmark difficulty and algorithm behavior. By making ambiguity generation explicit and controllable, CILN provides a complementary benchmarking framework for studying noisy-label learning under diverse sources of instance difficulty.

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

AI Engram: In Search of Memory Traces in Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.14997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory formation is fundamental to intelligence, yet whether deep neural networks preserve identifiable memory traces analogous to biological memory units remains an open question. This work introduces a geometric framework to identify such "AI engrams" by formalizing the neuroscientific criteria of specificity, reactivation, sufficiency, and necessity into a constrained inverse problem. We derive a closed-form estimator that isolates individual memory traces from globally entangled parameters, and show that this biologically-derived solution corresponds to a natural gradient update on the parameter manifold. AI engrams enable surgical manipulation of learned knowledge: any subset of memories can be composed or erased through linear arithmetic, without iterative optimization. Experiments ranging from simple MLPs to LLMs demonstrate the causal validity and substantial scalability of AI engrams. Together, these results bridge theories of biological memory and artificial representation learning and offer geometric insight into how deep networks simultaneously support functional specificity within distributed storage.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Learning-Augmented Approximation for Unrelated-Machines Makespan Scheduling

arXiv:2606.13133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recently, Antoniadis et al. (ICLR 2025) proposed a framework for incorporating predictions to approximate NP-hard selection problems. Despite its simplicity, this approach tightly matches theoretical lower bounds, making its generalization highly compelling. We address an open question raised in the work of Antoniadis et al., concerning the extension of this approach to other important problems outside the class of selection problems, such as scheduling. We develop a learning-augmented algorithm for the makespan minimization problem on unrelated machines, denoted by $R\|C_{\max}$. By using predictions of heavy job assignments, we achieve a polynomial-time $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation for accurate predictions that smoothly degrades to a worst-case 2-approximation as the error increases. We conclude our work with an empirical analysis of our method.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Stronger Entanglement Dies Faster: Quantum Mpemba Effect in Dissipative Qubits

arXiv:2605.23197v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classical thermodynamics, the Mpemba effect refers to the counterintuitive observation that hot water can freeze faster than cold water, manifesting as an anomalous crossing of dynamical trajectories. While analogues of this phenomenon have been explored in open quantum systems and spin-chain entanglement asymmetry, its connection to the finite-time decoupling of quantum correlations remains elusive. In this work, we report a distinct Mpemba effect for quantum entanglement in a dissipative quantum system associated with entanglement sudden death (ESD). By analyzing two qubits interacting with local amplitude damping reservoirs, we demonstrate that a more strongly entangled initial state can experience a faster collapse into a separable state than a more weakly entangled state. This anomalous decay stems from the competition between initial coherence and excited-state population, where the latter acts as a catalyst for ESD. We provide exact analytical derivations for the trajectory crossover and ESD time, and map the phase diagram to precisely identify the parameter regime where the effect occurs. Our results offer a new strategy for controlling the lifetime of quantum resources in dissipative environments.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Every Eval Ever: A Unifying Schema and Community Repository for AI Evaluation Results

AI evaluations are widely used for testing and understanding progress. However, the diverse evaluators bring with them inconsistencies that challenge analysis and comparison. First, results are saved in incompatible formats, scattered across leaderboards, papers, blog posts, evaluation harness logs, and custom repositories. Second, results are created by different evaluation frameworks, which produce divergent scores for nominally identical evaluations and record metadata inconsistently, hindering comparison, cross-community evaluation science, cost reduction, and reuse. We introduce Every Eval Ever, the first shared schema and community-crowdsourced repository for AI evaluation results. The schema standardizes how evaluations are represented in a unified, single JSON document. It is source-agnostic by design, ingesting results from evaluation harnesses and papers alike, and optionally stores per-instance outputs for fine-grained analysis. We contribute: (i) a community-governed metadata schema with a companion instance-level schema, the first standardization effort of its kind; (ii) automatic converters from popular formats, evaluation harnesses, and leaderboards to the unified schema; and (iii) a crowdsourced community database hosted on Hugging Face, currently spanning to date 22,235 models, 2,273 unique benchmarks, and 31 evaluation formats.