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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

FlowObject: Flow Steering for Bridging Generative Priors and Reconstruction Fidelity

Recovering complete 3D representations of objects from few casual image captures remains a significant challenge. Recent 3D generative models, particularly those based on Flow-Matching (FM), can synthesize high-quality textured assets; however, they often suffer from ''synthetic bias'' where learned priors override observational evidence, alongside a lack of alignment with the observed instance. Conversely, optimization-based methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provide high fidelity on visible surfaces but fail to reason about unobserved geometry. In this paper, we present FlowObject, a framework that reformulates sparse-view 3D reconstruction as a training-free, guided inverse problem. Our approach applies a dual-space guidance strategy to steer the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) trajectory of a flow-matching model, enabling the completion of unseen regions through learned generative priors while enforcing strict consistency with real-world observations. By integrating a 3DGS refinement stage, FlowObject further bridges the gap between ''synthetic-looking'' generative outputs and photorealistic reconstructions. Comprehensive benchmarks on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods often struggle to achieve geometric completeness and observational consistency simultaneously, especially under severe occlusions. In contrast, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models and optimization-based frameworks in both geometric completeness and view-dependent appearance fidelity.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient Simulation of Szegedy Quantum Walk Formulations and Algorithms

arXiv:2606.14226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum walks provide a versatile framework for quantum algorithms across a wide range of applications. We develop efficient classical simulation methods for Szegedy quantum walks that avoid explicit construction of the full unitary evolution operator. Unlike previous approaches restricted to a particular walk formulation, our framework is built from fundamental update and reflection operators, enabling the simulation of a broader class of Szegedy walk formulations. We further extend these methods to phase-estimation-based algorithms coupled to the walk, including implementations suitable for large sparse graphs. The resulting methods achieve optimal $O(N^2)$ complexity for dense graphs with $N$ nodes. For sparse graphs, the computational cost scales linearly with the number of edges, which is $O(N)$ in many cases. We implement the framework in the Python package SQWLib and illustrate its capabilities through simulations of representative algorithms, including quantum simulated annealing and quantum search on graphs. These results provide a practical tool for studying Szegedy-walk-based algorithms numerically beyond purely analytical treatments.

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

DN-Hypo-Pipeline: An AI-Driven Workflow for Hypothesis Generation via Large Language Models and Scientific Explanations

arXiv:2606.08532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A scientific hypothesis is the first step in research and undergoes experimental validation, yet it also reflects a deep understanding of and reasoning about scientific phenomena. We introduce DN-Hypo-Pipeline, an AI-powered workflow based on large language models, designed to support structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation by leveraging scientific explanations as prior knowledge. This pipeline assists researchers in deriving novel hypotheses from existing literature. Given the explanandum (i.e., the conclusion) of a research paper, it identifies underlying laws, theories, and principles, and reconstructs a new, yet-to-be-verified explanation for the observed phenomenon. We evaluated DN-Hypo-Pipeline in the field of data science modeling using three highly cited papers. Statistical inference, supported by both LLM-as-judge assessment and human expert evaluation, demonstrates that our pipeline is more effective than direct generation methods. Additionally, we validated the two highest-scoring generated hypotheses by developing corresponding novel algorithms, which outperformed the baseline models presented in the original papers. Beyond application in data science, DN-Hypo-Pipeline provides a theoretical framework that not only encompasses theory-guided data science modeling methods but also reveals a more fundamental structure of the modeling process. Moreover, this approach is essentially a generalization of theory-guided modeling, offering potential for extension to other domains and across a broader range of scientific disciplines.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

GradPower: Powering Gradients for Faster Language Model Pre-Training

arXiv:2505.24275v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose GradPower, a lightweight gradient-transformation technique for accelerating language model pre-training. Given a gradient vector $g=(g_i)_i$, GradPower first applies the elementwise sign-power transformation: $\varphi_p(g)=(sign(g_i)|g_i|^p)_{i}$ for a fixed $p>0$, and then feeds the transformed gradient into a base optimizer. Notably, GradPower requires only a single-line code change and no modifications to the base optimizer's internal logic, including the hyperparameters. When applied to Adam (termed AdamPower), GradPower consistently achieves lower terminal loss across diverse architectures (LLaMA, Qwen2MoE), parameter scales (66M to 2B), datasets (C4, OpenWebText), and learning-rate schedules (cosine, warmup-stable-decay). The most pronounced gains are observed when training modern mixture-of-experts models with warmup-stable-decay schedules. GradPower also integrates seamlessly with other state-of-the-art optimizers, such as Muon, yielding further improvements. Finally, we provide theoretical analyses that reveal the underlying mechanism of GradPower and highlight the influence of gradient noise.

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

Evaluation of AutoML Frameworks for IDS under Imbalanced Data Conditions of the NSL-KDD Dataset

arXiv:2606.12611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work investigates the impact of severe class imbalance on the performance of automated machine learning (AutoML) frameworks for multiclass network intrusion detection using the NSL-KDD dataset. Unlike previous studies that simplify the problem through binary classification or minority-class removal, we preserve the original five-class distribution, including highly underrepresented attacks such as R2L and U2R, enabling a realistic evaluation of imbalance-sensitive learning behavior. Nine open-source AutoML frameworks were analyzed under a unified and reproducible experimental protocol, considering differences in architectural design, ensemble strategies, validation procedures, hyperparameter optimization, and imbalance-handling mechanisms. The results demonstrate that frameworks incorporating ensemble learning and imbalance-aware optimization achieve better minority-class discrimination. PyCaret obtained the best overall performance, reaching 66\% macro-F1, followed by AutoGluon with 55\%, whereas frameworks lacking native balancing support exhibited significant degradation in minority-class detection capability. The analysis further shows that accuracy-oriented optimization alone is insufficient for highly imbalanced IDS scenarios, since high-weighted metrics may coexist with poor generalization on rare attack categories. As a contribution, this work establishes a standardized benchmark for AutoML-based intrusion detection under severe multiclass imbalance, highlighting current architectural limitations and the need for native integration of imbalance-aware optimization, resampling, and stratified evaluation strategies into automated learning pipelines. The source code is publicly available.

06.
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.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

The Wrong Kind of Right: Quantifying and Localizing Misfired Alignment in LLMs

Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment. Instead, this paper highlights the need for principled approaches to more advanced alignment. Alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave safely and reliably, including by avoiding unsafe inferences. However, we show that such safety-oriented behaviors can misfire: models may reject warranted conclusions even when they are explicitly supported by context. We call this failure mode misfired alignment, where alignment-induced changes cause LLMs to override explicit evidence. To quantify this phenomenon, specifically on stereotype-related alignment, we introduce VETO, a benchmark consisting of 2,032 BBQ-derived contrastive pairs, and define a new metric, Misfired Alignment Rate (MAR), which measures on a 0 to 100 scale how often a model fails on a stereotype-related question but succeeds on its contrastive counterpart. We benchmark 25 LLMs on VETO, and show that all LLMs, including the most recent ones, exhibit non-trivial (4.7 to 18.9%) MARs while all human participants achieve 0.0% MAR. Controlled priming experiments further show that alignment-induced cues can substantially amplify MAR across LLMs, indicating that these failures are not merely artifacts of individual examples but can be induced by safety-related framing. Mechanistic analyses on open-weight LLMs reveal late-layer suppression of evidence-supported answers, and comparisons between instruct and base LLMs suggest that this suppression emerges after instruction training. These findings show that current alignment methods can overgeneralize surface-level safety cues, to the point of overriding objective evidence, motivating more work on alignment objectives that better preserve contextual grounding.

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

RASST: Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech translation produces target text incrementally from partial speech input. Recent speech large language models have markedly improved SST quality but still struggle with rare and domain-specific terminology. Retrieval augmentation has helped in automatic speech recognition and neural machine translation, but extending it to SST is non-trivial: retrieval must be fast and accurate under partial speech, and the model must decide whether and when to apply retrieved terms during incremental generation. We propose Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation (RASST), which addresses both challenges. For accurate cross-modal retrieval under partial input, RASST trains a lightweight speech-text retriever that produces chunkwise terminology hints for the Speech LLM via multi-scale retrieval. To use these hints correctly, we synthesize training data that teaches the Speech LLM to decide whether and when to apply each retrieved term. Experiments on ACL 60/60 dev set and the ESO test set show that RASST improves terminology accuracy by nearly 40% and overall translation quality by up to 3 BLEU points, with negligible computational overhead.

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

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.

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

InfoNCE Induces Gaussian Distribution

arXiv:2602.24012v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contrastive learning has become a cornerstone of modern representation learning, allowing training with massive unlabeled data for both task-specific and general (foundation) models. A prototypical loss in contrastive training is InfoNCE and its variants. In this work, we show that the InfoNCE objective induces Gaussian structure in representations that emerge from contrastive training. We establish this result in two complementary regimes. First, we show that under certain alignment and concentration assumptions, projections of the high-dimensional representation asymptotically approach a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Next, under less strict assumptions, we show that adding a small asymptotically vanishing regularization term that promotes low feature norm and high feature entropy leads to similar asymptotic results. We support our analysis with experiments on synthetic and CIFAR-10 datasets across multiple encoder architectures and sizes, demonstrating consistent Gaussian behavior. This perspective provides a principled explanation for commonly observed Gaussianity in contrastive representations. The resulting Gaussian model enables principled analytical treatment of learned representations and is expected to support a wide range of applications in contrastive learning.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Batteries as Work Sources for Phase-Locked Parametric Amplification

arXiv:2606.20306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum batteries have been proposed as locally precharged work sources for superconducting quantum technologies, suggesting a route to reduce continuously supplied microwave drives. Here we ask whether the pump tone of a quantum-limited parametric amplifier can be replaced, or strongly duty-cycled, by a finite bosonic quantum battery. Quantizing the pump of a nondegenerate parametric amplifier exposes a resource distinction hidden in the classical description: stored pump energy can generate signal-idler photons, but pump phase coherence is required to generate a phase-locked amplifier field. In a closed trilinear model, coherent and phase-randomized coherent pumps with the same photon-number distribution produce comparable pair numbers, yet only the coherent pump produces anomalous two-mode coherence and an EPR-squeezed interference dip. Including leakage, we collect the emitted fields into cascaded temporal modes. At matched collector bandwidth, the coherent pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=0.553\), whereas the phase-randomized pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=1.94\) at nearly identical collected energy. Weak amplitude squeezing slightly improves the dip by reducing finite-pump number fluctuations while preserving the coherent displacement. Thus battery-powered parametric amplification requires phase-coherent stored energy, possibly assisted by number-noise reduction, rather than stored energy alone.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey

Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising methods in automatic story generation and understanding tasks. Our survey examines how natural language processing (NLP) research uses LLM methods to engage with diverse concepts from narrative studies. We use established distinctions from narratology to categorise ongoing efforts and discover the following: \redtext{(a) narrative texts come from diverse sources beyond just literature, (b) theoretical synthesis and validation are potential outcomes, (c) generation tasks lag behind understanding in several ways: theoretical application, post-training methods, exploring non-fiction narratives and addressing narrative levels beyond fabula and discourse.} For future directions, instead of the pursuit of a single, generalised benchmark for `narrative quality', we believe that progress can benefit from efforts that focus on the following: defining and improving theory-based metrics for individual narrative attributes; continue conducting large-scale, theory-driven literary/social/cultural analysis; generating narratives in situated contexts; and continuing experiments where outputs can be used to validate or refine narrative theories. This work provides a contextual foundation for more systematic and theoretically informed narrative research in NLP by providing an overview to ongoing research efforts and the broader narrative studies landscape.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Your Mouse and Eyes Secretly Leak Your Preference: LLM Alignment using Implicit Feedback from Users

To align a Large Language Model (LLM), most existing methods collect explicit human feedback and train a reward model to predict the human preference based on the response text. These existing methods have two key limitations. First, the users rarely provide explicit feedback for LLM responses, which makes the high-quality preference annotation expensive to collect. Second, the methods do not leverage implicit human feedback, which has proven vital to the economic moats of Internet giants. To quantify the value of implicit feedback, we build a new dataset called IFLLM, which collects 1336 multi-turn questions from the 59 Mechanical Turk workers, their mouse trajectories, and eye gazing points to the LLMs' responses from their webcams. IFLLM shows that the users have very diverse types of gazing behavior and mouse trajectories. Our reward model based on the implicit user feedback boosts the accuracy of the text-based reward model from 55% to 64% and nearly triples the relative response quality improvements after applying the DPO to eight LLMs, demonstrating the value of implicit feedback in the wild. Our data collection website, dataset, and codes can be found at https://github.com/themehulpatwari/llm-implicit-feedback/.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Identifying the risk profile of anemia subtypes and hemodynamic obstetric complications in relation to peripartum cardiomyopathy

Background: Peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) is a leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, with worse outcomes associated with African Ancestry and delayed presentation. However, the mechanisms underlying PPCM are incompletely understood. Objective: Use a large, nationwide cohort to explore associations between PPCM and underexplored perinatal risk factors and complications of childbirth. Methods: Public hospital discharge data were obtained from eleven U.S. states between 2003-2019. Delivery hospitalizations, patient characteristics and obstetric complications were identified using ICD-9 and -10 CM codes. Only cases with unique patient identifiers enabling readmission analysis were included. The primary outcome was incident PPCM coded between 30 days antepartum and 150 days postpartum. Results: Of 7,424,916 delivering patients, 5,488 patients were diagnosed with PPCM. Patients with PPCM had higher rates of anemia, anemia of chronic disease (ACD), iron deficiency anemia (IDA), sickle cell disease (SCD), sickle cell trait (SCT), red blood cell (RBC) transfusion, and postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) (p

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

ProGRank: Probe-Gradient Reranking to Defend Dense-Retriever RAG from Corpus Poisoning

arXiv:2603.22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface. In this setting, an adversary injects or edits passages so that they enter the Top-$K$ results for target queries and influence downstream generation. Existing defences often rely on content filtering, auxiliary models, or generator-side reasoning, which complicates deployment. We propose ProGRank, a post hoc, training-free retriever-side defence for dense-retriever RAG. ProGRank stress-tests each query–passage pair under mild randomized perturbations, extracts probe gradients from a small fixed parameter subset, and derives two instability signals: representational consistency and dispersion risk. It then combines these signals with a score gate for reranking. ProGRank preserves the original passage content, requires no retraining, and supports a surrogate-based variant when the deployed retriever is unavailable. Experiments across datasets, retrievers, attacks, and retrieval-stage and end-to-end settings show that ProGRank improves robustness and maintains a favorable robustness–utility trade-off, including under adaptive evasive attacks.

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

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

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

Anytime-Valid Confirmation of Label-Shift Corrections

arXiv:2606.14028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In small-batch scientific deployments, labeled target outcomes may be too scarce for reliable shift estimation even when unlabeled target inputs are available. We address the complementary setting where the practitioner has a pre-specified label-shift correction from domain knowledge and asks whether incoming labeled outcomes support it. We show that the per-observation likelihood ratio between a label-shift-corrected predictive and the source predictive is a conditional e-value, so its running product is a nonnegative martingale and Ville's inequality yields an anytime-valid confirmation rule. The log martingale equals the cumulative negative log-predictive density (NLPD) gap between the source and the corrected predictive, converting routine model monitoring into a formal sequential test. Rejection means the incoming data support the posited correction relative to the source predictive, but it is not a precise estimate of the degree of shift. Closed forms are available for GP sources with Gaussian label-shift ratios. GP regression simulations validate Type I control, finite-sample power, miscalibration sensitivity, and the small-batch advantage of a reliable prior over label-based re-estimation.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MVAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal AI-Generated Video-Audio Detection

The rapid advancement of AI-generated multimodal video-audio content has raised significant concerns regarding information security and content authenticity. Existing synthetic video datasets predominantly focus on the visual modality alone, while the few incorporating audio are largely confined to facial deepfakes–a limitation that fails to address the expanding landscape of general multimodal AI-generated content and substantially impedes the development of trustworthy detection systems. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce the Multimodal Video-Audio Dataset (MVAD), the first comprehensive dataset specifically designed for detecting AI-generated multimodal video-audio content. Our dataset exhibits three key characteristics: (1) genuine multimodality with samples generated according to three realistic video-audio forgery patterns; (2) high perceptual quality achieved through diverse state-of-the-art generative models; and (3) comprehensive diversity spanning realistic and anime visual styles, four content categories (humans, animals, objects, and scenes), and four video-audio multimodal data types. Our dataset will be available at https://github.com/HuMengXue0104/MVAD.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mirror Descent Beyond Euclidean Stability: An Exponential Separation in Initialization Sensitivity

arXiv:2606.11431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror Descent (MD) extends Gradient Descent (GD) beyond Euclidean geometry and has recently reappeared as a lens for KL-regularized policy optimization in reinforcement learning and LLM post-training. This raises a basic robustness question, crucial to reproducibility and reliability: how sensitive are MD dynamics to their inputs? We focus on initialization, often itself a pretrained or previously aligned model. Quadratic-regularized MD, including GD and Mahalanobis geometries, is well-known to be stable for convex smooth objectives. We show a sharp contrast: once the regularizer is non-quadratic, MD can be exponentially more sensitive to initialization than GD, even with a well-conditioned regularizer in Euclidean norm. We give a three-dimensional construction with a convex, smooth objective and a strongly convex, smooth, well-conditioned regularizer where an initial $\varepsilon$ perturbation is quickly amplified to $\min\{polylog^{-1}(1/\varepsilon), \varepsilon e^{\Omega(\eta T)}\}$ after $T$ iterations of MD with step size $\eta$. For canonical KL-regularized MD on the simplex, we show that even linear objectives can amplify an initial $\varepsilon$ perturbation exponentially fast in high-dimensional or near-boundary regimes. Finally, we show that adding a Bregman regularization term toward an anchor point can stabilize the dynamics while largely preserving the optimization guarantees, and that the choice of anchor is crucial: anchoring at the initialization only partially mitigates the instability, whereas anchoring at a fixed point yields a more stable mechanism.

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

Multi-agent Framework for Time-Sensitive Complementary Collaboration in Minecraft

arXiv:2606.15684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present TickingCollabBench, a Minecraft-based multi-agent benchmark for a novel class of time-sensitive complementary collaboration tasks. Our benchmark reflects four core characteristics of real-world collaboration: agent heterogeneity, mandatory collaboration, dynamic environments, and strict real-time constraints with failure risks. To enable this, we develop the TickingCollab framework, which supports the generation of diverse dynamic environments and abstracts Minecraft's primitive APIs to enable declarative YAML task specifications for composing these events. Building on this, we design a feasibility-aware automated benchmark generation pipeline, where an LLM drafts structurally diverse task configurations and feasibility verifier filters out invalid ones using approximate constraints. Evaluations demonstrate that lang latency and inherent difficulty of coordinating under partial observability and agent heterogeneity cause LLMs to frequently fail under dynamic environments and fall significantly short of a global-knowledge oracle.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Neural-Parameterized Cellular Automata for Wildfire Spread

arXiv:2606.11676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional wildfire models rely on rigid, low-dimensional parameters and static fuel maps, frequently underpredicting fire spread. To address this weakness, we introduce a hybrid deep-learning parameterized Probabilistic Cellular Automata (CA) framework implemented in JAX. Our approach employs a Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network to dynamically generate spatially varying parameters that govern fire-spread probability, wind alignment, and slope influence. This hybrid design captures complex, nonlinear environmental interactions while preserving the physical interpretability of the underlying three-state CA. The JAX implementation enables hardware acceleration and gradient-based parameter calibration. Evaluated on six large-scale wildfires in the western United States, the model maintains IoU > 0.6 over 72-hour forecast horizons after a 10-day data assimilation window during which the model is fitted incrementally to observed perimeters; the resulting forecast is a conditional projection of fire growth under the suppression regime already ncoded in those observations.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Safe Data: Pretraining-Stage Alignment with Regular Safety Reflection

arXiv:2606.19168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To achieve deeper safety alignment for large language models (LLMs), recent efforts have studied how to push safety interventions earlier into the pretraining stage, primarily by filtering unsafe data or rewriting it into safer forms. We argue that pretraining-stage alignment should go beyond making the data safe: LLMs may compose seemingly benign knowledge and capabilities into unsafe behaviors. To this end, we propose Safety Reflection Pretraining, a pretraining-stage alignment method which regularly inserts short safety reflections into pretraining corpora to integrate self-monitoring directly into language modeling, establishing a foundational capability that is subsequently reinforced by compatible post-training. Our experiments with 1.7B models pretrained on FineWeb-Edu show that Safety Reflection Pretraining improves safety classification accuracy and substantially reduces the success rates of inference-stage and finetuning attacks. Complementary to our real-world experiments, we also introduce a fully controlled synthetic environment, MedSafetyWorld, with a clear definition of safety and a reasoning structure under which models can easily generalize unsafe behaviors from safe data. Ablations in MedSafetyWorld further demonstrate a clear advantage of Safety Reflection Pretraining in preventing models from acting on unsafe behaviors generalized from safe data, compared with data filtering and rewriting. Taken together, our findings suggest that pretraining alignment should not only make the training data safe, but also shape the behaviors that models are likely to acquire from safe data.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

When a language model processes a hallucinated response, its attention routing tends to fail in one of two shapes: over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal. We study these shapes as a diagnostic characterization, computed from attention matrices under forced scoring of benchmark-labeled responses rather than during live generation. A widely used family of spectral methods analyzes the symmetric component of the degree-normalized attention operator, which governs transport capacity; we prove that every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic of this operator is structurally orientation-blind (it cannot distinguish an operator from its transpose, and therefore cannot detect information-flow direction), with a converse to the blindness theorem bounding any Lipschitz diagnostic's transpose sensitivity by the asymmetry coefficient $G$. Pairing this with a closed-form bipartite-Cheeger landscape for canonical causal architectures, we show that uniform causal attention satisfies an $n$-independent floor $\phi \ge 1/5$, while window attention pierces the floor as $O(w/n)$; failure modes are shape-different, not just value-different. This floor is an idealized-architecture benchmark, not an empirical attractor: the fraction of real attention heads that pierce it is itself an architectural signature. The resulting two-axis diagnostic ($\phi$ for capacity, $G$ for direction) yields a falsifiable polarity prediction: bottleneck- and diffuse-dominated benchmarks should exhibit opposite polarity. Under length-controlled evaluation, transport features retain interpretable signal (0.62-0.84 LC-AUROC) across the tested decoder-only, encoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, with polarity reversing as predicted between HaluEval and MedHallu.