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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Continuous stochastic flows driven by white noise and their duals

作者:

arXiv:2606.12143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a class of continuous stochastic flows driven by a space-time white noise and characterize their dual flows by explicit stochastic differential equations. A key ingredient of the proof is the convergence of solutions under coefficient approximations. As an application, we derive the dual flows in two illustrative examples, the squared Bessel flow and the Jacobi flow. We also introduce a new model of polynomially self-repelling (PSR) flow and show that it enjoys a self-duality property.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Ultrafast On-chip Online Learning via Spline Locality in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

arXiv:2602.02056v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ultrafast online learning is essential for high-frequency systems, such as controls for quantum computing and nuclear fusion, where adaptation must occur on sub-microsecond timescales. Meeting these requirements demands low-latency, fixed-precision computation under strict memory constraints, a regime in which conventional Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are both inefficient and numerically unstable. We identify key properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) that align with these constraints. Specifically, we show that: (i) KAN updates exploiting B-spline locality are sparse, enabling superior on-chip resource scaling, and (ii) KANs are inherently robust to fixed-point quantization. By implementing fixed-point online training on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a representative platform for on-chip computation, we demonstrate that KAN-based online learners are significantly more efficient and expressive than MLPs across a range of low-latency and resource-constrained tasks. To our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate model-free online learning at sub-microsecond latencies.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Light slows down carbon nanotubes in water

Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’. Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’.

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

Multiple cyclicity and Wavelet Decomposition with Channel Correlation for Long-term Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.17996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cyclicity and trend are important components of time series data and many studies based on cyclicity and trend have achieved good results in long-term time series forecasting. However, we believe that current work neglects the influence of real-world inter-channel correlations in time series data which leads to suboptimal predictions. Furthermore, these models rely on complex designs to capture diverse information so that resulting in low computational efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose McWC, a long-term time series forecasting model that separately models the cyclicity, trend, and inter-channel correlations. Specifically, McWC first decouples cyclical information from data using a multi-layer cyclicity construction module. Then, it extracts inter-channel correlations using multi-layer perceptron. Next, it models and fuses the multi-layer high-frequency and low-frequency information from data using a multi-level wavelet decomposition module. Finally, it aggregates the results of different components to obtain the output. Simultaneously, we decouple intra-channel autocorrelations by calculating a loss function in the frequency domain. Experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that McWC achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting excellent computational efficiency and historical information extraction capabilities.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Magneto-Optical Trapping of a Metal Hydride Molecule

arXiv:2512.22350v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We demonstrate a three-dimensional magneto-optical trap (MOT) of a metal hydride molecule, CaH. We are able to scatter $\sim$$10^{4}$ photons with vibrational loss covered up to vibrational quantum number $\nu=2$. This allows us to laser slow the molecular beam near zero velocity with a "white-light" technique and subsequently load it into a radio-frequency MOT. The MOT contains $230(40)$ molecules, limited by beam source characteristics and predissociative loss of CaH. The temperature of the MOT is below one millikelvin. The predissociative loss mechanism could, in turn, facilitate controlled dissociation of the molecule, offering a possible route to optical trapping of hydrogen atoms for precision spectroscopy.

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

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

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

Seed-Guided Semi-Supervised Clustering by A-Contrario Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.18833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces a semi-supervised clustering framework grounded in the statistical duality between grouping principles and anomaly detection. We address the challenge of robust cluster definition in noisy environments – a task where partitioning algorithms often over-assign outliers and density-based methods remain sensitive to heuristic global parameters. Drawing on a-contrario statistical reasoning and Gestalt proximity principles, we define a cluster as a maximal subset of data points containing no anomalies relative to a null hypothesis of uniform randomness. Central to this approach is the Perception algorithm, which utilises a principled expectation-based threshold ($\mathbb{E} < 1$) to identify outliers without manual parameter tuning. By treating clustering as the dual of anomaly detection, we employ an iterative ``clustering-by-exclusion'' mechanism. The algorithm is seed-guided, leveraging minimal user-provided labels to initialise robust cluster medians and form initial groups, which are subsequently expanded by admitting non-anomalous points. This approach naturally isolates fringe points, isolated noise, and emerging unknown clusters. We evaluate the method on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, including image and text datasets represented through raw, linear-reduced, and neighbourhood-preserving embeddings. Results demonstrate that with as few as 10–30 seeds per cluster, the proposed method achieves competitive and often very strong performance under a practical low-tuning benchmarking protocol, while maintaining linear scalability with respect to both observations and dimensionality for a fixed number of seeded clusters and iterations.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Unintended Effects of Geographic Conditioning in Large Language Models

Modern conversational AI systems frequently rely on user metadata to localize responses, yet the unintended regional biases introduced by this hidden context remain poorly understood. In this work, we evaluate location leakage: the phenomenon where a model generates geographic references despite receiving a geographically neutral user prompt. Across both creative writing and open-ended Q&A prompts, even state-of-the-art LLMs systematically favor region-specific outputs when exposed to location metadata, with leakage spiking by up to 793 times above baseline (e.g., from 0.04% to 31.7% for Llama 3.1-8B, and 21.3% and 8.8% for Qwen3-8B and Claude Sonnet 4.6, respectively). Our analysis further shows a novel structural conditioning effect: replacing the injected location with the placeholder "Unknown" still elevates leakage by up to 72 times above baseline, demonstrating that the user profile frame itself, independent of any geographic content, acts as a generative conditioning signal.

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

Mitigating Scoring Errors and Compensating for Nonverbal Subtests in Speech-Based Dementia Assessment

Early detection of cognitive impairment relies on neuropsychological tests to minimize subjectivity by assessing multiple cognitive domains. Speech-based evaluation can support diagnostics and improve accessibility, but transcription errors and the omission of nonverbal subtests (e.g., motor skills) limit accuracy. Beyond conventional test scores, speech-derived features can provide additional insights into cognitive status. This study investigates the speech-based evaluation of the German "Syndrom-Kurz-Test," a standardized dementia screening test comprising verbal and motor subtests. We train models that integrate transcript-derived scores and Whisper embeddings per verbal subtest to reduce scoring errors. To compensate for missing motor subtests, we then leverage these fused representations to approximate expert overall ratings. Despite omitting subtests, our models strongly correlate with expert ratings and efficiently and accurately discriminate between cognitive status groups.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Critical parameters of germ-monotone families of branching random walks

arXiv:2602.21062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a broad class of families of branching random walks on a countable set $X$, which we refer to as germ-monotone branching random walks (GMBRWs). The processes in each family are parametrized by a positive parameter $\lambda>0$, which controls the overall reproductive speed, and they are monotonically increasing in $\lambda$ with respect to the germ order, a notion that extends classical stochastic domination. This framework encompasses a wide range of models, including classical continuous-time branching random walks, as well as discrete-time counterparts of certain non-Markovian processes such as ageing branching random walks. We define a general notion of critical parameter $\lambda(A)$ associated with each subset $A \subseteq X$, which serves as a threshold separating almost sure extinction in $A$ from positive probability of survival in $A$. This unifies and extends the classical global and local critical parameters $\lambda_w$ and $\lambda_s$, which can be recovered as special cases. We then investigate how modifications of the reproduction laws, either on a finite set or on a more general subset of $X$, affect these critical parameters. Our results extend earlier contributions in the literature.

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

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

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

Thermodynamic assessment of machine learning models for solid-state synthesis prediction

arXiv:2602.04075v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning models have recently emerged to predict whether hypothetical solid-state materials can be synthesized. These models aim to circumvent direct first-principles modeling of solid-state phase transformations, instead learning from large databases of successfully synthesized materials. Here, we assess the alignment of several recently introduced synthesis prediction models with material and reaction thermodynamics, quantified by the energy with respect to the convex hull and a metric accounting for thermodynamic selectivity of enumerated synthesis reactions. A dataset of successful synthesis recipes was used to determine the likely bounds on both quantities beyond which materials can be deemed unlikely to be synthesized. With these bounds as context, thermodynamic quantities were computed using the CHGNet foundation potential for thousands of new hypothetical materials generated using the Chemeleon generative model. Four recently published machine learning models for synthesizability prediction were applied to this same dataset, and the resultant predictions were considered against computed thermodynamics. We find these models generally overpredict the likelihood of synthesis, but some model scores do trend with thermodynamic heuristics, assigning lower scores to materials that are less stable or do not have an available synthesis recipe that is calculated to be thermodynamically selective. In total, this work identifies existing gaps in machine learning models for materials synthesis and introduces a new approach to assess their quality in the absence of extensive negative examples (failed syntheses).

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Time-multiplexed layer reuse for physical neural networks

arXiv:2511.00044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physical neural networks (PNNs) are promising candidates for next-generation computing, but existing demonstrations remain several orders of magnitude smaller than modern digital neural networks, whose recent advances have been driven by rapid growth in trainable parameters. This situation resembles the constraints of early digital neural networks, which led to ideas around parameter reuse. We investigate what similarly efficient hardware architectures may look like, focusing specifically on the common bottleneck of slow re-adjustment of the weights in PNNs. We propose the Time-Indexed Deep Alternating Layers Network (TIDAL-Net), which occupies an intermediate regime between recurrent and deep neural networks, specifically aimed at the scales and restrictions of common PNN prototypes. TIDAL-Net leverages the timescale separation found in many PNNs between fast forward dynamics and slowly trainable weights and biases, using layer-by-layer time multiplexing to increase effective depth while limiting implementation cost. Numerical experiments on image classification and natural language processing tasks show that TIDAL-Net improves performance with only minor modifications to conventional PNNs.

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

Quantized Evolution Strategies: High-precision Fine-tuning of Quantized LLMs at Low-precision Cost

arXiv:2602.03120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), fundamentally rely on backpropagation and continuous weights to compute gradients. Thus they cannot be used on quantized models, where the parameter space is discrete and non-differentiable. While Evolution Strategies (ES) offer a backpropagation-free alternative, optimization of the quantized parameters can still fail due to vanishing or inaccurate gradient estimation. This paper introduces Quantized Evolution Strategies (QES), an optimization paradigm that performs full-parameter fine-tuning directly in the quantized space. QES is based on two innovations: (1) it integrates accumulated error feedback to preserve high-precision weight updating signals, and (2) it utilizes a stateless seed replay to reduce memory usage to low-precision inference levels. QES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zeroth-order fine-tuning methods on a variety of tasks, making direct fine-tuning for quantized models possible. It therefore opens up the possibility for scaling up LLMs entirely in the quantized space. The source code is available at https://github.com/dibbla/Quantized-Evolution-Strategies .

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

Brep2Shape: Boundary and Shape Representation Alignment via Self-Supervised Transformers

arXiv:2602.07429v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Boundary representation (B-rep) is the industry standard for computer-aided design (CAD). While deep learning shows promise in processing B-rep models, existing methods suffer from a representation gap: continuous approaches offer analytical precision but are visually abstract, whereas discrete methods provide intuitive clarity at the expense of geometric precision. To bridge this gap, we introduce Brep2Shape, a novel self-supervised pre-training method designed to align abstract boundary representations with intuitive shape representations. Our method employs a geometry-aware task where the model learns to predict dense spatial points from parametric Bézier control points, enabling the network to better understand physical manifolds derived from abstract coefficients. To enhance this alignment, we propose a Dual Transformer backbone with parallel streams that independently encode surface and curve tokens to capture their distinct geometric properties. Moreover, the topology attention is integrated to model the interdependencies between surfaces and curves, thereby maintaining topological consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that Brep2Shape offers significant scalability, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and faster convergence across various downstream tasks.Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Brep2Shape.

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

A Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization with Application to Copy Number Analysis in Cancer

arXiv:2606.17491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary data factorization is common, but real-valued methods ignore discreteness and yield hard-to-interpret factors. Boolean Matrix Factorization (BooMF) instead decomposes a binary matrix into two lower-rank binary matrices via logical AND and OR, expressing the data as a Boolean disjunction of interpretable patterns. In cancer genomics, BooMF can reveal coordinated feature changes that may drive tumor evolution, unlike rotational or additive decompositions. Most existing BooMF methods are heuristic, greedy, sensitive to initialization, prone to local optima, and do not support principled model selection or uncertainty quantification. We introduce Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization (BBMF), a fully conjugate generative model with sparsity-inducing priors. It enforces Boolean constraints, yields interpretable latent factors with coherent uncertainty quantification, and admits Gibbs sampling with closed-form full conditionals. Because cancer evolution often involves widespread, near-simultaneous chromosome-number changes (e.g., whole-genome duplication followed by instability and selection), Boolean factorizations capture these patterns more naturally than additive models. Applied to arm-level copy-number alteration data in multiple myeloma, where entries indicate presence/absence of chromosomal-arm amplifications, BBMF finds a small set of interpretable bicliques linking patient subsets to recurrently co-altered chromosomal arms, providing a compact, biologically meaningful summary of tumor heterogeneity and demonstrating BBMF's utility for uncovering discrete latent structure in complex binary data.

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

Drivers, Receivers, and Dynamic Linkages: The Directed Structure of SDG Interdependence, 2000–2024

arXiv:2601.20875v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Governments with limited fiscal and administrative capacity need to know which Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) propagate progress through the goal system and how quickly. We map the directed interdependence structure of all seventeen goals using a balanced panel of 114 countries observed annually from 2000 to 2024. The goal series are persistent, trending, and cross-sectionally dependent, so we apply two estimators matched to this regime: a Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel Granger non-causality test, run on first-differenced series, to recover the directed interaction network, and panel local projections with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors to measure the dynamic magnitude of 31 theory-derived indicator linkages. Of 272 directed goal pairs, 84 linkages survive false-discovery control (40 synergies, 44 trade-offs; network density 0.31). Synergies and trade-offs occur at comparable strength, so no single goal behaves as a universal accelerator, and the goal-level hierarchy itself is fragile. Driver-receiver rankings correlate weakly across lag orders and centrality metrics, and under a country bootstrap only two roles are distinguishable from zero: peace and strong institutions as the clearest net receiver, and poverty reduction as the most probable effect-size-weighted driver. The supported linkages are dynamic, accruing over four to five years: sanitation and poverty improvements are the strongest predictors of lower child mortality, and the education-child-health association is corroborated in independent World Development Indicators data across 183 countries. These results caution against rankings-based accelerator policy and support adaptive portfolios built on supported, time-lagged linkages monitored through constituent indicators.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning a Maximum Entropy Model for Visual Textures using Diffusion

Visual textures – spatially homogeneous image regions containing repeated elements (e.g. a field of grass, the bark of a tree) – are ubiquitous in visual scenes and provide important cues for recognizing and analyzing materials and objects. A number of existing texture models extract essential statistics from a single texture image, and can then generate high-quality samples that are visually similar to the original by matching these statistics. However, their statistics are either hand-designed or based on a network pretrained for another purpose (e.g., object recognition). Here, we develop the first principled method for unsupervised learning of a set of statistics that are used to constrain a maximum entropy probability model. We leverage methods developed for generative diffusion models to derive training and sampling procedures, and compare these to the traditional method of sampling via matching the statistics. Despite the compactness of our trained model (512 statistics), it generates texture images whose quality is as good as or better than the current state-of-the-art model (~177k statistics). A more direct comparison of the two models, obtained by synthesizing images that are indistinguishable for one model but maximally different for the other, reveals their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we show that unlike previous statistical texture models, a straight trajectory in the representation space of our model generates homogeneous texture samples that interpolate smoothly between the features of the two end points.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Effect of tenofovir on the outcomes of COVID-19 in persons with chronic hepatitis B: a nationwide cohort study in Sweden.

Background: Patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) may have an increased risk of severe COVID-19. Tenofovir has been hypothesized to confer protection against severe disease, but evidence is inconclusive. We evaluated the risk of severe COVID-19 among CHB patients treated with tenofovir compared with other nucleos(t)ide analogues (NAs). Methods and findings: In this nationwide, registry-based cohort study, we included all adults with CHB and laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Sweden between February 2020 and July 2022. Data from national health and socioeconomic registers were linked using unique personal identification numbers (PINs). Patients with HIV, hepatitis C, or hepatitis D coinfection were excluded. Exposure was defined as tenofovir versus other NA therapy. The primary outcome was severe COVID-19, defined as hospitalization >2 days or death within 30 days of diagnosis. Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), controlling for age, sex, comorbidities, vaccination, socioeconomic status, and region of birth. Among 5,877 CHB patients with COVID-19, 672 were receiving NA therapy (437 tenofovir, 235 other NAs). Severe COVID-19 occurred in 8.0% of tenofovir-treated patients and 14.5% of those receiving other NAs (unadjusted OR 0.52; 95% CI, 0.31-0.85). After adjustment, the association was attenuated and no longer significant (aOR 0.72; 95% CI, 0.39-1.31). Older age, comorbidities, and unvaccinated status were strongly associated with severe disease. Conclusions: The apparent protective effect of tenofovir against severe COVID-19 in unadjusted analyses was largely explained by confounding factors. The risk of severe disease was primarily driven by age, comorbidities, and vaccination status. Prevention of severe COVID-19 in patients with CHB should instead focus on vaccination and management of comorbidities.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PlaceRep: Geospatial Place Representation Learning from Large-Scale Point-of-Interest Data

arXiv:2507.02921v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning effective representations of urban environments requires capturing spatial structure beyond fixed administrative boundaries. Existing geospatial representation learning approaches typically aggregate Points of Interest (POIs) into pre-defined administrative regions such as census units or ZIP code areas, assigning a single embedding to each region. However, POIs often form semantically meaningful groups that extend across, within, or beyond these boundaries, defining places that better reflect human activity and urban function. To address this limitation, we propose PlaceRep, a geospatial representation learning method that constructs place-level representations by clustering spatially and semantically related POIs. PlaceRep summarizes large-scale POI graphs from U.S. Foursquare data to produce general-purpose urban region embeddings while automatically identifying places across multiple spatial scales. By eliminating model pre-training, PlaceRep provides a scalable and efficient solution for multi-granular geospatial analysis. Experiments using the tasks of population density estimation and housing price prediction as downstream tasks show that PlaceRep outperforms most state-of-the-art graph-based geospatial representation learning methods and achieves up to a x100 speedup in generating region-level representations on large-scale POI graphs. The implementation of PlaceRep is available at https://github.com/mohammadhashemii/PlaceRep.

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

When Do Data-Driven Systems Exhibit the Capability to Infer?

arXiv:2606.11769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The European AI Act is the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), setting out extensive obligations, particularly for so-called high-risk and general-purpose AI systems. A key distinguishing feature of AI systems under the AI Act is the capability to infer. Since the AI Act does not clearly define what inference is, there is a gray area for certain data-driven systems. A specific example is credit scoring systems, which are listed by Annex III of the AI Act. At the same time, however, these are often implemented using statistical models for which it is unclear whether they have the capability to infer and thus fall under the AI definition of the AI Act at all. Motivated by statistical learning theory, this work develops a framework for grading different levels of the capability to infer. Based on the AI Act and the Commission Guidelines on the definition of an artificial intelligence system, we analyze which levels constitute sufficient capability to infer within the meaning of the AI Act and where further regulatory clarity is needed. We illustrate the framework by creating two realistic credit scoring workflows and show whether and where inference occurs in them. Our analysis illustrates that not only individual models but the entire data processing workflow must be considered. It also shows that the involvement of human experts during development can have significant influence on the capability to infer. Code can be found at https://github.com/fraunhofer-iais/inference-framework-creditscorecards.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Enhanced Low-Density Region Exploration in Classifier-Guided Diffusion Models Through Modified Reverse Diffusion Sampling

arXiv:2606.13347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative models for high-fidelity image synthesis, particularly in their classifier-free guided and classifier-guided forms. However, standard classifier guidance concentrates probability mass around high-density class mean, leading to poor coverage of rare samples in the tails of the class-conditional distributions. Recent work on diffusion-based tail sampling mitigates this by training an additional low-density-seeking classifier with a synthetic-vs-real discriminator, at the cost of additional networks and training. In parallel, a number of samplers and distillation techniques accelerate or refine diffusion sampling, but do not explicitly address long-tail coverage. We propose a purely sampling-time, density-aware extension of classifier-guided conditional diffusion model that targets low-density regions without any additional training. We have applied guidance at noisy images not on predicted noise like most diffusion models. Starting from a pretrained conditional diffusion model and classifier on ImageNet, we modify the guided reverse dynamics by steering trajectories toward low-confidence regions via the modified classifier gradient, and at each time step, we also guide the sampling process toward the predicted real image. 1st guidance helps explore low-probability samples, and 2nd guidance helps to generate samples to be close to the real data manifold. The proposed sampler consistently improves ADM model recall at 64x64 resolution while maintaining a comparable FID, and with a 256x256 ADM model, we showed the results visually with different combinations of both guidance. We also showed that standard ADM classifier guidance, combined with predicted real image guidance, helps generate high perceptual quality samples with a 256x256 ADM model on ImageNet.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

On Surjectivity of Neural Networks: Can you elicit any behavior from your model?

arXiv:2508.19445v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given a trained neural network, can any specified output be generated by some input? Equivalently, does the network correspond to a function that is surjective? In generative models, surjectivity implies that any output, including harmful or undesirable content, can in principle be generated by the networks, raising concerns about model safety and jailbreak vulnerabilities. In this paper, we prove that many fundamental building blocks of modern neural architectures, such as networks with pre-layer normalization and linear-attention modules, are almost always surjective. As corollaries, widely used generative frameworks, including GPT-style transformers and diffusion models with deterministic ODE solvers, admit inverse mappings for arbitrary outputs. By studying surjectivity of these modern and commonly used neural architectures, we contribute a formalism that sheds light on their unavoidable vulnerability to a broad class of adversarial attacks.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NEST: Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding

Recent progress in vision-language models has enabled the processing of increasingly long video sequences, but the ability to handle extended token streams does not translate to understanding of narrative structure in long videos. Existing long video benchmarks focus on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval rather than evaluating how low-level actions form events, how events interact across time, and how narratives progress, for example, whether a model can connect an early setback, such as a job loss to a later relationship breakup, despite long gaps, intervening scenes, or flashbacks that reframe what occurred. We introduce NEST (Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding), a dataset of 1005 full-length movies (avg. 98 minutes), each annotated with 102 multimodal narrative events grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio. NEST captures multimodal narrative events with structured annotations grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio, and links them through relations that reflect narrative structure, including temporal ordering, hierarchical composition, and long-range dependencies. We introduce baselines for event trigger detection (ETD), event localization (EL), event argument extraction (EAE), and event relation extraction (ERE). The benchmark is highly challenging for grounded event discovery, with ETD below 8%, EL under 6%, and EAE below 11%. In contrast, ERE is more tractable once events are given, reaching 35.45% F1 zero-shot and 44.42% F1 after fine-tuning.