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01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19924

The Tao of Agency: Autotelic AI, Embedded Agency and Dissolution of the Self

作者:

Aritra Sarkar↗

arXiv:2606.19924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most artificial intelligence systems are built on the assumption that goals are exogenous and specified by the designer. Exploring what happens when an agent begins generating its own goals opens the field of autotelic AI. Agents are expected not merely to pursue objectives but to discover them. In this article, we trace its consequences through intrinsic motivation, resource-driven priors, causal-interventional learning, homeostasis, and embeddedness; the last of which is found to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for autotelic agency. Embeddedness individuates the agent at the cost of revealing that the individuation is non-unique, such that the same dynamics admit many valid partitions, each defining a different candidate self. The deepest problem with autotelic AI is therefore not how the agent generates goals, but how it generates and relativizes the self to which the goals are assigned. The agent must believe in its own boundary in order to act, and see through that boundary in order to understand. We consolidate these developments into a single framework and extend it along three directions: a quantum formulation in which the agent-environment cut becomes physical, a philosophical reading against non-dual contemplative traditions, and a concrete LLM-based agentic instantiation.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11219

Afrispeech Semantics: Evaluating Audio Semantic Reasoning in Spoken Language Models Across Domains and Accents

作者:

Chibuzor Okocha↗Christan Grant↗

Audio language models (ALMs) are increasingly used for speech-based understanding, yet their ability to perform semantic reasoning beyond transcription, Text-to-Audio Retrieval, Captioning, and Question-Answering accuracy remains insufficiently benchmarked. In particular, the effects of accent variation, domain shift, and semantic over-inference on audio reasoning are poorly understood. We evaluate audio language models across five semantic and paralinguistic reasoning tasks: entailment, consistency, plausibility, accent drift, and accent restraint. Collectively, these tasks assess a model's ability to reason over spoken audio as the primary evidence source, including whether a textual hypothesis can be inferred, contradicted, or left undetermined by the audio, whether statements align or conflict with spoken content, whether claims are plausible given the discourse, and whether model predictions remain stable or appropriately constrained across accent variation. These findings highlight critical limitations in current audio reasoning evaluations and hope to provide guidance for more robust and equitable ALM design and assessment

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2605.26921

Similarity-based representation factorization for revealing interpretable dimensions in representational data

作者:

Florian P. Mahner↗Ka Chun Lam↗Francisco Pereira↗Martin N. Hebart↗

The study of representations is widespread across fields, including neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. While representations are often studied and compared through similarities between stimuli, current methods provide only limited access to the dimensions that shape these representations and are often limited in interpretability. To overcome these challenges, here we introduce Similarity-Based Representation Factorization (SRF), a general computational method for recovering low-dimensional, non-negative, interpretable embeddings from similarity matrices derived from measured data. Across simulations and many neural, behavioral, and computational datasets, SRF recovers interpretable dimensions from diverse forms of representational data, even for very sparsely sampled, incomplete data. The dimensions derived from these datasets match those obtained by task-specific models, predict independent behavioral properties, improve exploratory analysis, and offer higher power for confirmatory hypothesis testing than comparing similarity matrices. Together, these results establish SRF as a general-purpose method with broad applications for uncovering, understanding, and using the dimensions underlying representations.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19220

Machine Unlearning for the XGBoost Model with Network Intrusion Datasets

作者:

Diana Magalh\~aes↗Eva Maia↗Jo\~ao Vitorino↗Isabel Pra\c{c}a↗

arXiv:2606.19220v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine Unlearning (MU) has emerged as an important technique for removing specific data points from trained models without requiring full retraining. However, most existing MU research focuses on deep learning and image data, leaving a gap in the domain of network intrusion detection, which relies heavily on tabular data. This work introduces XGBoost-Forget, an unlearning approach for the XGBoost model, to address this gap. The approach is evaluated on two tabular Network Intrusion (NI) datasets, IoT-23 and GeNIS, using multiple metrics to assess model performance, unlearning efficiency, and forgetting quality. The results show that XGBoost-Forget maintains predictive performance close to the original model while providing significantly faster unlearning, demonstrating its potential for MU in tabular NI settings.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.11171

Indexed Bellman Information Complexity

作者:

Yunbei Xu↗

arXiv:2606.11171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop indexed Bellman information complexity, a representation-level theory of interactive decision making centered on information indices and reference histories. The representation strips away problem-specific syntax and retains only the ingredients needed for dynamic programming and information accounting, thereby unifying the earlier framework of indexed algorithmic information ratios (AIR). On the upper-bound side, regret is controlled by Bellman supersolutions or potential identities whose gradient bracket is paid for by indexed information. Upper-confidence-bound (UCB), estimation-to-decision/decision-estimation-coefficient (E2D/DEC), and adaptive-minimax-sampling or exploration-by-optimization (AMS/EBO) methods appear as three relaxations of this same identity. On the lower-bound side, the posterior-reference trajectory supplies both the information telescope and the ghost quantile of small-regret trajectories. The resulting critical radius in the lower bound is an effective-dimension-scale quantity, as in Fano and local-prior-mass lower bounds, rather than the constant radius of a two-point Le Cam argument. The examples show that DEC is best viewed as a one-step relaxation of indexed Bellman information complexity, not as a universally tight conversion mechanism. We illustrate the framework through several applications, with particular emphasis on kernel bandits. In this setting, the active action marginal provides a concrete basis for comparing UCB, E2D, and AMS/EBO.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19881

REDACT: A Systematically Controlled Multilingual Benchmark for Personal Information Detection

作者:

Guneesh Vats↗Anubha Agrawal↗Shikha Singhal↗Ajita Dash↗Praison Selvaraj↗Vidhan Jhawar↗Ranga Prasad Chenna↗Bharadwaj Y M G↗

Benchmark infrastructure for personally identifiable information (PII) detection remains limited: existing corpora cover few entity types, use ad hoc generation conditions, and do not show which surface conditions cause detector failures. We present REDACT, a systematically controlled multilingual PII benchmark with 13,427 records, 324,078 entity annotations, 51 entity types, 4,127 surface-form patterns, and 25 languages across 9 scripts. A strength-2 covering-array sampler controls nine generation axes: domain, format, difficulty, length, density, code-switching, language, adjacency, and co-occurrence. Three entity-level metadata fields (disclosure status, disclosure form, and a GDPR-aligned sensitivity tier) enable stratified evaluation beyond aggregate or per-type F1. From the full benchmark, we evaluate five detectors (Presidio, GLiNER, the OpenAI Privacy Filter, GPT-4.1, and Claude Sonnet 4.6) on a locked, language-stratified sample of 1,000 records. Aggregate F1 masks an architecture-dependent failure structure: the rule-based detector performs poorly on the highest-stakes data, including HIGH-sensitivity categories (recall 0.07) and non-verbatim disclosure forms, while the LLM detectors remain more robust, with the HIGH tier as their strongest sensitivity slice. A three-model reference-free LLM-as-judge assessment corroborates that sensitivity-tier assignment is the task's hardest axis. We release the benchmark, schema, prompts, and stratified evaluation harness.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.02343

Haiku to Opus in Just 10 bits: LLMs Unlock Large Compression Gains

作者:

Roy Rinberg↗Annabelle Michael Carrell↗Simon Henniger↗Nicholas Carlini↗Keri Warr↗

arXiv:2604.02343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the compression of LLM-generated text across lossless and lossy regimes, characterizing a compression-compute frontier where more compression is possible at the cost of more compute. For lossless compression, domain-adapted LoRA adapters can improve LLM-based arithmetic coding by 2x over compression with the base LLM alone. For lossy compression, prompting a model for a succinct rewrite then applying arithmetic coding can achieve compression ratios of approximately 0.03, a 2x improvement over compressing the original response. We further introduce Question-Asking compression (QA), an interactive lossy protocol inspired by the game 'Twenty Questions'. A small model iteratively refines its response by asking yes/no questions to a stronger model, transferring exactly one bit per answer. On 8 benchmarks spanning math, science, and code, 10 binary questions recover 23% to 72% of the capability gap between a small and large model on standard benchmarks and 7% to 38% on harder benchmarks, achieving compression ratios of 0.0006 to 0.004. This is over 100x smaller than prior LLM-based compression (Deletang et al., 2024), suggesting that interactive protocols can transfer knowledge far more efficiently than transmitting full responses.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.04935

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

作者:

Wouter W. L. Nuijten↗Mykola Lukashchuk↗Thijs van de Laar↗Bert de Vries↗

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23763

Listening makes Vision Clear for VLMs

作者:

Yiyang Chen↗Yixin Tan↗Binrui Shen↗

arXiv:2606.23763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work typically assesses vision–language consistency using attention distributions of answer-side tokens. However, we observe that highest attention regions are not always consistent with the intended semantic token. This probably stems from decoding drift, where language priors from previously generated answer tokens accumulate and mismatch with visual attention. Besides the priors from previous answer tokens, we find that structural tokens, e.g., modality boundary markers, may encompass the entire context and generate high attention to areas unrelated to the target. To avoid these distortions and provide consistency evaluation for large VLMs, we adopt prompt-side semantics and propose Prompt-Vision Token Activation Map (PV-TAM). PV-TAM further incorporates a filter to remove systematic bias induced by modality boundary markers. Unlike traditional methods that evaluate overlap solely through masks while ignoring activation intensity, our metrics leverage the peak distribution of attention to measure the alignment between prompts and visual regions. In experiments, PV-TAM consistently improves both attention-based and IoU-style localization metrics over answer-side baselines on various datasets.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17406

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

作者:

Marina Chagas Bulach Gapski↗Vinicius Atsushi Sato Kawai↗Gustavo Rosseto Leticio↗Lucas Pascotti Valem↗Daniel Carlos Guimar\~aes Pedronette↗Mohand Said Allili↗

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2604.16450

Evaluating Intersectional Fairness across Clinical Machine Learning Use Cases using Fairlogue and the All of Us Research Program

作者:

Nick Souligne↗Vignesh Subbian↗

arXiv:2604.16450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Intersectional biases in healthcare data can produce compound disparities in clinical machine learning models, yet most fairness evaluations assess demographic attributes independently. FairLogue, a toolkit for intersectional fairness auditing, was applied across multiple clinical prediction tasks to evaluate disparities across combined demographic groups. Using the All of Us dataset, two published models were selected for replication and evaluation: (A) prediction of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor associated bleeding events and (B) two-year stroke risk in patients with atrial fibrillation. Observational fairness metrics were computed across race, gender, and intersectional subgroups, followed by counterfactual analysis to evaluate whether disparities were attributable to group membership. Intersectional evaluation revealed larger disparities than single-axis analyses; however, counterfactual diagnostics indicated that most observed disparities were comparable to those expected under randomized group membership. These results highlight the importance of intersectional fairness auditing and demonstrate how FairLogue provides deeper insight into bias in clinical machine learning systems.

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12.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:8e5207761f742b313a5b124308162cf5

PCRAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Transforming Noisy clinical conversations into Structured Pre-Consultation Medical Records and Reusable Clinical Data Resources

作者:

Zhang↗Zhao↗Tang↗Xing↗Li↗Qiu↗

In primary care and outpatient settings, clinically important patient information is often embedded in fragmented, ambiguous, repetitive, and noisy communication between physicians and patients. This limits physicians ability to obtain a clear preconsultation overview of symptoms, history of present illness, and visit intent, while also preventing real world clinical dialogues from being reused in hospital information systems and medical artificial intelligence applications. To address this challenge, we developed PCRAgent, a centrally coordinated multi agent framework for preconsultation clinical information organization. Guided by physician inquiry logic, PCRAgent identifies, extracts, corrects, and standardizes patient-reported information from noisy consultations. Its coordinated modules including error detection, semantic editing, output control, contextual memory, and intent recognition enable robust parallel handling of spelling errors, repetitions, grammatical inconsistencies, medical ambiguities, and non-medical interference. A traceable edit list records intermediate corrections and context, allowing iterative refinement without redundant modifications. PCRAgent generates two complementary outputs. One is a PreConsultation Clinical Report for rapid physician review. The other is a Structured Clinical Conversation Dataset for hospital data construction and downstream AI applications. In evaluations using 220000 strongly perturbed consultations, PCRAgent maintained high robustness, achieving a clinical information accuracy of 4.99 out of 5 and key element completeness of 5 out of 5, outperforming GPT4o. Expert review of Chinese and English dialogues confirmed high clinical accuracy of 4.85 out of 5 and high safety of 4.79 out of 5. Multicenter validation in real-world outpatient workflows further demonstrated practical utility. These findings indicate that PCRAgent can efficiently transform noisy and unstructured consultations into physician ready reports and AI ready structured data, improving outpatient efficiency, reducing cognitive burden, ensuring information completeness, supporting precise decision-making, and enabling high-quality reuse of clinical data.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.30931

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

作者:

Tianjie Ju↗Yueqing Sun↗Zheng Wu↗Wei Zhang↗Yaqi Huo↗Xi Su↗Qi Gu↗Xunliang Cai↗Gongshen Liu↗Zhuosheng Zhang↗

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17122

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

作者:

Rutger Hendrix↗Leonardo G. Russo↗Concetto Spampinato↗Matteo Pennisi↗Giovanni Bellitto↗

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13971

Prompt2Effect: Training-Free Image-to-Video Model Specialization via LoRA Generation

作者:

Xiaomeng Yang↗Yanyu Li↗Gordon Guocheng Qian↗Ivan Skorokhodov↗Viacheslav Ivanov↗Avalon Vinella↗Xuan Zhang↗Yanzhi Wang↗Sergey Tulyakov↗Anil Kag↗

Personalizing Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion models with specific visual effects is increasingly demanded for high-end video generation. Current practice requires training a separate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for each effect, incurring substantial data curation and iterative optimization costs that hinder interactive control. We present Prompt2Effect, a weight-driven hypernetwork that amortizes per-effect training by directly synthesizing effect-specific LoRA weights in a single forward pass. Unlike prior hypernetworks that regress adapter weights purely from semantics, Prompt2Effect is explicitly conditioned on the frozen base model weights, grounding weight prediction in the structural geometry of each layer. Furthermore, instead of predicting raw LoRA matrices, we introduce an SVD-canonicalized parameterization that resolves factorization ambiguity and stabilizes large-scale weight synthesis. Together, these design principles enable accurate and scalable LoRA prediction for high-dimensional I2V diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Prompt2Effect achieves on-par or superior video quality and effect alignment compared to conventional LoRA fine-tuning, while reducing the computational cost from 56 GPU training hours to 3.3 seconds of hypernetwork inference. When used as initialization for subsequent fine-tuning, our predicted weights further improve final performance and accelerate optimization by approximately 10x.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13221

From Uncertain Judgments to Calibrated Rankings: Conformal Elo Estimation for LLM Evaluation

作者:

Bora Kargi↗David Salinas↗

arXiv:2606.13221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale. LLM-as-a-judge offers a cheaper alternative, but judge scores carry systematic errors - such as position bias, self-preference, or intransitivity - that can strongly miscalibrate the resulting rankings. We quantify the resulting judge-human disagreement at two complementary levels. At the local level, we estimate per-battle uncertainty from the judge's own score differences by propagating calibrated win probabilities rather than hard labels into the Bradley-Terry procedure. This alone provides a drastic improvement to Elo estimation accuracy, bringing LLM-derived ratings within 17.9 Elo MAE of human-derived ones when averaged over 55 held-out models on LMArena. At the global level, we apply split conformal prediction to the residual gap between LLM-derived and human-derived Elo ratings across held-out models, producing prediction intervals with distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees that account for irreducible LLM-human disagreement. Together, these two layers yield a low-cost evaluation tool that provides developers with calibrated Elo estimates and honest uncertainty bounds, without access to large-scale human annotations.To facilitate reproducibility, we release our code at https://github.com/kargibora/SoftElo .

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19255

SCAN: Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Neighborhood-Centered Clustering

作者:

Xingze Zheng↗Hanyin Cheng↗Siyuan Wang↗Yiting Hao↗Peng Chen↗Yuan Jun↗Yang Shu↗

arXiv:2606.19255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19266

Trade-offs in Medical LLM Adaptation: An Empirical Study in French QA

作者:

Ikram Belmadani↗Oumaima El Khettari↗Carlos Ramisch↗Frederic Bechet↗Richard Dufour↗Benoit Favre↗

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12818

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

作者:

Hillary N. Owusu↗Sarah Wiegreffe↗Naomi H. Feldman↗

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2603.11863

CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

作者:

Zi-Han Wang↗Lam Nguyen↗Zhengyang Zhao↗Mengyue Yang↗Chengwei Qin↗Yujiu Yang↗Linyi Yang↗

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets – CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore – the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.21585

The Cost Geometry of Belief: finite-resource inference under noisy observation

作者:

Laurent Caraffa↗

arXiv:2606.21585v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A finite machine's digital twin of a system observes the territory through finite, noisy sensors; we model its coherent output as a belief, a probability density over states, the Bayes posterior, never a point. Certainty, the perfect twin, is denied twice, by observation and by physics, both read off the Fisher information. To make this finiteness geometric, we model what it costs to change a belief: a belief-cost geometry, optimal transport in Wasserstein space reweighted conformally by Fisher information. The framework rests on two posed commitments: that revision cost is a scalar price on transport (the arena), and that the price is honest: one nat costs the same length everywhere. Honesty selects the Fisher reweighting because transport demotes the Fisher information from the metric ruler of distinguishability to the slope of entropy, the move that sets transport apart from Fisher-Rao. From these two postulates, three results follow on the conformal class (essentially location-scale), all invariants of one change of cost unit. A wall: a well-posed inference rejects certainty to infinite distance as soon as the cost dominates the Fisher information (necessity conjectured beyond power laws). An honest family: the eikonal price where each nat the same length everywhere, is equivalent to proportionality U=cJ, the Fisher family. A rigidity: these geometries are hyperbolic, and the Stam bound crowns the Gaussian, the most hyperbolic location-scale belief; -1/4 is one image of a relativity of cost. The cost of reaching a given precision then has a geometric cost floor diverging at certainty. Thermodynamics fixes the cost unit and motivates the framework; the results are geometric, in nats.

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22.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13504

A refined thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations

作者:

Mohamed Boubakour↗Talia Szikman↗Cyril Elouard↗

arXiv:2606.13504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations. We consider master equations resulting either from the partial secular and the geometric-arithmetic approximations, two approximations ensuring the positivity of the system's dynamics when some of its transition frequencies are too small to enable the full secular approximation. Both cause the system to relax towards a steady state which is not the Gibbs state of its bare Hamiltonian. Nonetheless, we build a unified, consistent thermodynamic framework for those dynamics. Starting from a microscopic expression of the second law based on system-environment correlations, we employ a systematic perturbation theory to preserve the positivity of the second law despite the approximations done on the dynamics. We show that, in spite of the weak system-bath coupling, the system-bath interaction energy participates to the energy balance, as well as the Lamb-shift. Those extra contributions give rise to work performed by the system on the bath when the former is out of equilibrium. We compare this microscopic entropy production with the definition based on the contractivity of the reduced system dynamics (Spohn inequality). We show that, unlike for secular master equations, the two entropy production rates differ because of the presence of non-vanishing stationary coherences in the energy eigenbasis. However, in the case of a single thermal bath, the difference is purely transient, and no work can be cyclically extracted from the steady-state despite its non-Gibbs form. Finally, we illustrate our results with a simple example, clarifying and completing the thermodynamic picture of Markovian dynamics in the quantum regime.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16759

Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Mean-Field Games with Average Reward

作者:

\c{S}evket Kaan Alk{\i}r↗Naci Sald{\i}↗Berkay Anahtarc{\i}↗Can Deha Kar{\i}ks{\i}z↗

arXiv:2606.16759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study inverse reinforcement learning for discrete-time, infinite-horizon mean-field games (MFGs) under an average-reward criterion. Expert demonstrations are assumed to arise from a stationary mean-field equilibrium under an unknown reward, and the goal is to recover a policy explaining the observed behaviour via the maximum causal entropy principle. We formulate the inverse problem by enforcing consistency with the expert mean-field term and long-run feature expectations, treating two reward classes within a unified occupation-measure framework. For finite-dimensional linear rewards, we give a convex dual reformulation with an explicit log-partition objective, and prove smoothness and curvature properties justifying constant-step-size gradient descent. For infinite-dimensional RKHS rewards, we develop a Lagrangian relaxation whose inner-maximising policy is characterised by a soft Bellman equation. The main obstacle is the absence of a discount-factor contraction. We resolve this by introducing a minorisation-based sub-stochastic kernel that yields a strict contraction of the soft Bellman operator. We establish Fréchet differentiability and Lipschitz smoothness of the log-likelihood score, leading to a gradient ascent algorithm with convergence guarantees. Two numerical examples, a malware-spread MFG and an RKHS-based consumer-choice model, show that the recovered policies closely match expert behaviour.

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24.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2512.13853

Dropout Neural Network Training Viewed from a Percolation Perspective

作者:

Finley Devlin↗Jaron Sanders↗

arXiv:2512.13853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the existence and effect of percolation in training deep Neural Networks (NNs) with dropout. Dropout methods are regularisation techniques for training NNs, first introduced by G. Hinton et al. (2012). These methods temporarily remove connections in the NN, randomly at each stage of training, and update the remaining subnetwork with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The process of removing connections from a network at random is similar to percolation, a paradigm model of statistical physics. If dropout were to remove enough connections such that there is no path between the input and output of the NN, then the NN could not make predictions informed by the data. We study new percolation models that mimic dropout in NNs and characterise the relationship between network topology and this path problem. The theory shows the existence of a percolative effect in dropout. We also show that this percolative effect can cause a breakdown when training NNs without biases with dropout; and we argue heuristically that this breakdown extends to NNs with biases.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18961

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

作者:

Lanqing Li↗Shentong Mo↗Yang Yu↗Pheng-Ann Heng↗

arXiv:2606.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels. Our key insight is that task-agnostic rewards, which combine intrinsic model uncertainty with extrinsic semantic consistency informed by protein representation models, exhibit strong correlation with controllability measures across base models and temperature regimes. Building upon this discovery, we propose two offline algorithms: Soft Reward Optimization (SRO) and Binarized Reward Optimization (BRO), which effectively maximize the classical RLHF objective induced by these proxy rewards. Extensive experiments on compositional out-of-distribution prompts demonstrate that both methods significantly outperform competitive baselines (DPO, KTO), while approaching oracle performance across multiple sampling temperatures, model scales and protein families. Moreover, PLMs fine-tuned with unsupervised rewards can achieve consistently higher coverage compared to their base model in pass@k evaluations. By enabling self-improvement of PLMs through their own generated experience, our framework provides a scalable pathway toward controllable biomolecular design in settings where labeled preferences or experimental feedback are scarce or unavailable.

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