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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Decidable By Construction: Design-Time Verification for Trustworthy AI

arXiv:2603.25414v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A prevailing assumption in machine learning is that model correctness must be enforced after the fact. We observe that the properties determining whether an AI model is numerically stable, computationally correct, or consistent with a physical domain do not necessarily demand post hoc enforcement. They can be verified at design time, before training begins, at marginal computational cost, with particular relevance to models deployed in high-leverage decision support and scientifically constrained settings. These properties share a specific algebraic structure: they are expressible as constraints over finitely generated abelian groups $\mathbb{Z}^n$, where inference is decidable in polynomial time and the principal type is unique. A framework built on this observation composes three prior results (arXiv:2603.16437, arXiv:2603.17627, arXiv:2603.18104): a dimensional type system carrying arbitrary annotations as persistent codata through model elaboration; a program hypergraph that infers Clifford algebra grade and derives geometric product sparsity from type signatures alone; and an adaptive domain model architecture preserving both invariants through training via forward-mode coeffect analysis and exact posit accumulation. We believe this composition yields a novel information-theoretic result: Hindley-Milner unification over abelian groups computes the maximum a posteriori hypothesis under a computable restriction of Solomonoff's universal prior, placing the framework's type inference on the same formal ground as universal induction. We compare four contemporary approaches to AI reliability and show that each imposes overhead that can compound across deployments, layers, and inference requests. This framework eliminates that overhead by construction.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently been extended to CLIP as a lightweight solution, leading to a rapidly growing body of TTA4CLIP methods. However, empirical progress in this area has largely outpaced our understanding of what truly drives adaptation, where their gains originate, and under which shifts they remain reliable. In this paper, we take a step back from the pursuit of state-of-the-art accuracy and conduct a systematic controlled study of TTA4CLIP. We first organize existing methods into three unified paradigms according to what is updated at test time. We then introduce TTABC, an open-source TTA Benchmark for CLIP, which standardizes evaluation protocols and integrates more than 20 representative methods. Our controlled empirical analysis focuses on three key areas. First, we determine the driving factors in parameter-based methods, revealing that adaptation gains are primarily driven by test-time evidence and reliable proxies rather than heavy optimization. Second, we explore evidence utilization beyond heavy parameter tuning, showing that competitive and efficient performance can be achieved through cross- or current-sample evidence and lightweight prototype updates. Finally, we demonstrate that there is no silver bullet for TTA: no single adaptation paradigm is universally optimal, and the preferred paradigm depends on the nature of shift. We hope our benchmark and study provide a clearer understanding of the current TTA4CLIP landscape and establish a foundation for further research.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

''Circumstantial Determinants'': An Efficient Approach to Reaching People in Need of HIV Prevention?

HIV prevention and testing programmes primarily reach people who self-refer or attend routine health services. Higher-risk individuals are missed if they are healthy, under-estimate their risk of infection or under-report sexual risk-behaviours. We assess a new approach to address limitations in existing programmes by targeting HIV services on ''Circumstantial Determinants'' (CDs) of HIV risk - the social circumstances, settings, and norms associated with behaviours that increase risk of HIV acquisition. Data on potential CDs and sexual behaviour were collected in a population survey in Zimbabwe in 2018/19 (N=9141). HIV-negative individuals reporting [≥] 1 sexual risk-behaviours were defined as the 'priority population' for HIV prevention. For each sex, six circumstantial determinants were associated with being in the priority population (aOR [≥] 1.30; p [≤] 0.01). Reach and efficiency of CDs (and combinations) were calculated; ROC curve algorithms evaluated their ability to identify priority population membership; and HIV prevention condom cascades were compared between CD-defined priority population subgroups. Example findings include that targeting men at bars and beerhalls could reach 48.5% of the priority population and 25.1% of lower-risk men. These percentages increase to 77.1% and 53.7% if men with poor mental health, no religious affiliation, negative social capital, or living on agricultural estates are also targeted. Targeting women with poor mental health could reach 32.0% of the priority population and 21.3% of lower-risk women. Targeting additional circumstantial determinants increases these percentages to 54.1% and 37.5%, respectively. Cascade barriers to condom use differed between CD-defined subgroups. The Circumstantial Determinants approach demonstrates proof-of-concept potential to strengthen HIV prevention services.

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

TuneAhead: Predicting Fine-tuning Performance Before Full Training Begins

arXiv:2606.17660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is compute-intensive and error-prone: model performance depends sensitively on data quality and hyperparameter choices, and naïve runs can even degrade model performance. This raises a practical question:can we predict fine-tuning performance before committing to a full training run? We present TUNEAHEAD, a lightweight framework for pre-hoc prediction of fine-tuning performance. TUNEAHEAD encodes each candidate run as a meta-feature vector that combines static dataset descriptors with dynamic probe features from a short standardized probe. A predictor maps these features to performance estimates, while SHAP-based attributions provide interpretable diagnostics that reveal which specific features drive the prediction. Across 1,300+ fine-tuning runs on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TUNEAHEAD consistently outperforms strong baselines such as Early-Stop Extrapolation and ProxyLM. On a held-out test set of 370 runs, TUNEAHEAD achieves an RMSE of 1.47 percentage points and places 95.1% of predictions within +3/-3 percentage points of the true score. These accurate continuous predictions support practical go/no-go screening policies that can reduce unnecessary full fine-tuning while retaining most promising runs.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Computer Vision Scoring of Figure Copy and Recall

Objective. Figure copy and recall tests are sensitive measures of visuoconstruction and visual episodic memory, but their clinical is constrained by labor-intensive manual scoring. We developed and validated an automated, element-level scoring pipeline using Vertex AI object detection for the tablet-based figure copy and recall tasks in the California Cognitive Assessment Battery (CCAB). The automated scoring pipeline duplicated the scoring procedures used by expert manual raters. Methods. A normative sample of 2,011 community-dwelling adults aged 18-90 completed figure copy and delayed recall trials at baseline, with subsamples retested at 1 day and at 6, 18, and 30 months. Participants completed the drawings with their index finger on a tablet computer with finger position digitized to analyze the speed and timing of individual drawing strokes A convolutional object-detection model trained on the Vertex AI AutoML Vision platform identified each of twelve canonical figure elements in rendered drawings. Separate element presence and location scores were computed after homographically warping drawings onto a canonical template to produce trial-level Element, Location, and Total scores. To compare Vertex and human scores, Vertex AI and expert human raters independently scored 1500 randomly selected drawings to evaluate inter-rater agreement, including a common subset of 100 drawings scored by Vertex AI and all raters. Results. Total scores were virtually indistinguishable (r = 0.966) from human-human agreement (mean r = 0.971) as were Element presence scores (mean r = 0.959 vs. r = 0.963). Location-score agreement (r = 0.951) was slightly below the human-human mean (r = 0.972) due to pixel-level analysis by Vertex AI that was impossible for human raters. The Vertex pipeline showed no preferential advantage for the single expert rater who categorized Elements during training. Automated scores showed strong demographic gradients, age effects on Recall (r = -0.32) were approximately twice those in Copy conditions (r = -0.16). A Memory Cost score (Recall - Copy) showed a monotonic age-related decline from +0.40 z in the youngest subjects to -0.54 z in the oldest. Kinetic analysis revealed that drawing speed and efficiency showed significant age-related changes. Overnight test-retest reliability was high (Recall r = 0.72) and the Recall trial showed a large overnight learning effect ({Delta} = +1.18) that continued with repeated tests up to 30 months ({Delta} = +0.75).

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

AutoZyme: An Autonomous Agentic Framework to Optimize Bioinformatics Software

Performance bottlenecks in widely used genomics and bioinformatics software present a substantial and growing burden as biological datasets continue to increase in size and number. Relieving these bottlenecks relies largely on expert manual optimization and therefore remains difficult to scale. Here we present AutoZyme, an agentic framework for scientific software optimization. Given a target function, AutoZyme builds benchmarks, identifies bottlenecks, and iteratively tests code changes, retaining only those that improve runtime while preserving output. We evaluated AutoZyme on 45 functions, improving runtime without substantial memory increases in over 95% of cases considered. Across 38 functions from Seurat, Scanpy and related packages in genomics and bioinformatics, AutoZyme reduced runtime by a median of 8.52-fold, with the largest reductions exceeding 676-fold. The optimized functions are distributed through AutoZyme-Library as drop-in replacements for existing analysis pipelines. We also release AutoZyme as a reusable framework for optimizing additional user-specified packages and functions.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Scribby: A Multi-Level LLM Framework for Semantic Video Analysis

As video content continues to expand across educational platforms, recorded lectures, and live-streamed entertainment, the need for efficient and structured analysis of long-form footage has increased [1]. Although many existing AI programs provide high-level video summaries based on AI-generated transcripts [2,3,4,5], these approaches are often limited to coarse overviews and lack detailed analysis of a video's structure, thematic progression, and semantic relationships, all of which are required for comprehensive video analysis. This paper proposes an LLM-based video summarization framework that balances macro-level comprehension with micro-level semantic analysis [6,12,13]. The first stage of the process indexes the video at a micro level by (1) analyzing the full transcript, (2) analyzing individual transcript sentences, and (3) grouping these sentences by semantic similarity using an LLM as a judge [6,13]. Contextual continuity is retained during sentence-level processing by incorporating both the global transcript analysis and adjacent sentence information into each evaluation prompt. This framework establishes a foundation for video analysis tools that visualize semantic chunking and semantic matching through relevance-based heatmaps. Limitations and future expansions of the framework are also discussed.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Ordinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Severity Using Structural MRI and Clinical Data

arXiv:2606.11794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) require accurate and scalable tools for assessing disease severity, yet current clinical staging remains time-intensive and prone to variability. We propose an attention-enhanced multimodal machine learning framework with ordinal regression for automated and interpretable AD severity staging. The framework integrates T1-weighted MRI with demographic and genetic variables and compares unimodal and multimodal architectures using ordinal and non-ordinal prediction heads. Models were trained and validated using cohort-stratified splits derived from the ADNI, AIBL, and NIFD datasets. A strictly held-out test set was constructed using subjects excluded from all training, validation, preprocessing, and hyperparameter tuning procedures, with subject-level splitting employed throughout to prevent data leakage. Among unimodal approaches, the T1-weighted MRI model achieved slightly higher adjacent-stage accuracy (0.963) and agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.444) than the tabular model (QWK 0.433). Integrating imaging, demographic, and genetic information improved overall performance. The multimodal non-ordinal baseline achieved the lowest prediction error (MAE 0.340), whereas the ordinal multimodal model achieved the highest adjacent-stage accuracy (0.970) and strongest agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.549). These findings indicate that ordinal formulations better capture the ordered structure of the CDR scale and yield predictions more consistent with clinical staging. Explainability analyses using Grad CAM++ and SHAP demonstrated anatomically and clinically plausible model behavior, supporting transparent decision-making. Overall, attention-based multimodal learning with ordinal regression represents a robust, interpretable, and scalable approach for automated AD severity staging and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Graphical conditional generative modeling for digital twin modeling

arXiv:2606.16219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digital twin modeling, including control and data assimilation under model uncertainty, often faces an open-ended fidelity problem: adding variables, data streams, and time scales can indefinitely increase model complexity, ultimately producing systems that are difficult to maintain, validate, interpret, and use for stress or safety testing. As an alternative, one can seek parsimonious stochastic surrogate models built only on the variables needed to describe the relevant quantities of interest. We introduce a framework for discovering such variables from observational data by identifying which candidate inputs influence the full conditional law of a target quantity, rather than only its conditional mean. This distinction is essential in stochastic, coarse-grained, or partially observed systems, where dependencies may appear through changes in variability, tail behavior, multimodality, or uncertainty rather than through deterministic functional relationships. The framework couples conditional generative modeling, which learns the conditional distribution of the target given candidate inputs, with Gaussian-process-based analysis of variance (through kernel mode decomposition), which enables iterative pruning of non-influential inputs and interpretable structure discovery. In control settings, the resulting surrogate can be interpreted as a learned Markov decision process: the method identifies not only a transition model, but also the state, action, and memory variables needed to make the learned dynamics effectively Markovian. Across examples involving stochastic dynamical systems, missing variables, PDE control, reinforcement learning, and economic data, the discovered structures yield interpretable stochastic surrogates whose downstream performance is comparable to models trained on the full variable set.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Rare Coding Variants Reveal Distinct Genetic Architectures Across Multidimensional Sleep Phenotypes

Sleep and circadian traits have been widely studied using common variants, but the contribution of rare coding variation remains unclear. We analyzed rare coding variants in 397,065 whole-exome sequenced UK Biobank participants across 36 sleep phenotypes from self-report, diagnoses, sleep medication use and accelerometry, and meta-analyzed results with 171,536 whole-genome sequenced All of Us participants of diverse ancestries, with replication in the Mass General Brigham Biobank (N = 31,275). We identified 260 genes associated with sleep phenotypes, including novel associations with sleep medication use in 29 genes and 24 out of 29 have not previously been reported with any sleep phenotypes. We observed modest but significant rare variant heritability and strong genetic correlations between sleep medication use, insomnia and fatigue. Temporal gene expression trajectory analyses indicate that genes associated with self-reported sleep traits show constant high prenatal expression, whereas genes linked to sleep medication phenotypes exhibit peak expression in the late prenatal period. These findings highlight distinct biological mechanisms captured by different measurement sources of sleep phenotypes and reveal rare-variant-informed targets for therapeutic discovery.

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

ProfiLLM: Utility-Aligned Agentic User Profiling for Industrial Ride-Hailing Dispatch

arXiv:2606.18803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bringing Large Language Models (LLMs) into industrial ride-hailing dispatch as semantic feature extractors over platform-scale behavioral logs is a compelling but under-explored data systems problem. Production matching pipelines remain dominated by structured numerical features, yet decisive behavioral signals (e.g., a driver's habitual aversion to certain regions) are inherently contextual and naturally expressible as LLM-generated user profiles. However, scaling such profiling to a live, millisecond-latency dispatcher faces three intertwined constraints rarely addressed together: on a platform with millions of daily orders, logs exceed any LLM's context window by orders of magnitude; most users are long-tail, with too few interactions for per-user profiling; and surface-fluent profiles do not necessarily improve downstream prediction utility. We present ProfiLLM, an agentic LLM data pipeline that operationalizes utility-aligned user profiling for production matching systems through two modules. (1) Tool-Augmented Global Knowledge Mining equips an LLM agent with 27 analytical tools to mine platform-scale data, producing reusable global knowledge, adaptive user clustering rules, and region-level supply-demand priors. (2) Utility-Aligned Profile Exploration generates multiple candidate profiles per cluster, evaluates them via a lightweight downstream utility proxy, iteratively refines the best candidates and constructs preference pairs for DPO fine-tuning. Deployed on DiDi's production dispatcher, ProfiLLM achieves up to +6.14% relative AUC improvement in outcome prediction, up to +4.35% GMV gain in dispatching simulation, and consistent improvements in a 14-day online A/B test including +0.47% GMV, +0.33% Completion Rate, and -0.82% Cancel-Before-Accept rate.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum geometrical description of hole spin qubits far away from the $\Gamma$-point

arXiv:2606.14683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hole spin qubits provide one of the leading platforms for spin-based quantum computing due to their large intrinsic spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which enables fast electrical manipulation. The SOI of planar quantum dots has mostly been investigated in theoretical studies by examining the SOI already present in the two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG). Here, we study the SOI created by the in-plane confinement by deriving non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians numerically for hole spin qubits. We find that the quantum geometry of the 2DHG naturally emerges, leading to a meaningful non-perturbative definition of pseudospin valid far away from the $\Gamma$-point. The SOI of the 2DHG and of the in-plane confinement have different forms; therefore, they cannot be turned off simultaneously, ruining the perfect spin-orbit switch functionality of spin qubits. We construct effective Hamiltonians using the symmetry approach for various low-dimensional hole systems: (i) a heavy-hole confined in a SiGe/Ge/SiGe heterostructure, (ii) a light-hole confined in SnGe/Ge, (iii) a gate-defined nanowire in SiGe/Ge/SiGe, and (iv) a hole confined in a Ge/Si core/shell nanowire. The non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians provide results with excellent agreement with the full Hamiltonians.

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

Pitch Spelling Jazz Lead Sheets, Solo Transcriptions, Classical Piano and Monophonic Scores

We present an algorithm for pitch spelling and key estimation. Given an input in MIDI-like format, containing information on note pitches (expressed in semitones relative to the lowest reference note) and bar boundaries, it estimates the appropriate note names, a global Key Signature, and a local scale for each bar. This related information elements are evaluated jointly during two stages of optimisation. During an initial 'modal' stage, a probable scale is proposed for each bar, minimising the number of accidentals to be printed in the printed score with a shortest-path search. Then, during a second stage called 'tonal', these local scales are used to estimate the Key Signature and note names that would result in the best musical notation for the entire piece. We present evaluations conducted on datasets comprising a variety of digital musical scores: jazz lead sheets taken from the Real Book, transcriptions of recordings of jazz soli and bass lines, traditional tunes, as well as classical scores for piano and monophonic instruments. Our procedure was originally designed for use in music transcription, specifically for building digital collections of jazz solos transcribed from audio recordings, for the purposes of music analysis, teaching and the preservation of cultural heritage. This method should also prove useful for other tasks related to the processing of musical notation. Furthermore, to this end, we have defined new distances between various common jazz scales, which may be of some interest to musicological studies.

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

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

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

Beyond Benchmarks: Continuous Edge Inference for Fine-Grained Roadside Perception

Continuous AI inference on resource-constrained edge hardware introduces deployment effects that are largely invisible to conventional benchmark evaluation, including temporal instability in streaming video, thermal throttling under sustained load, and workload-dependent performance variability. We present Edge-TSR, a deployment-oriented continuous edge inference system for sustained roadside perception on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Edge-TSR integrates detection, tracking, fine-grained classification, and a lightweight track-aware temporal stabilization mechanism that improves streaming inference consistency with negligible computational overhead. Our central finding is that benchmark-centric evaluation systematically overstates deployed edge inference performance. Across three state-of-the-art baselines, we observe consistent 20-30% relative degradation when transitioning from static-image evaluation to real-world streaming deployment. Edge-TSR addresses this gap through temporal inference stabilization, recovering up to 10.16% classification accuracy over per-frame inference baselines while maintaining sustained real-time performance under continuous operation. We evaluate the complete system under diverse real-world deployment conditions, jointly characterizing inference quality, latency, throughput, and thermal behavior during long-duration operation. A 55-minute vehicular deployment over a 26 km route demonstrates sustained operation at 16.18 FPS within safe thermal limits on a single embedded device without cloud offload. Our findings show that deployment-aware evaluation and temporal inference stabilization are necessary components of continuously operating edge AI systems intended for real-world sensing deployments. We release a sample annotated streaming video evaluation dataset and full system implementation to support reproducible deployment-centric evaluation.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Abstracting Cross-Domain Action Sequences into Interpretable Workflows

Sequential or time-stamped interaction logs provide objective records of digital application usage, yet their granularity and noise often obscure meaningful insights into people's work. Such insights are essential for improving digital products in ways grounded in real-world user interactions. Prior research has applied deep learning models to cluster user actions into high-level activities, but these approaches are highly sensitive to noise and struggle to generalize across applications. To address this limitation, we introduce WorkflowView, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to abstract low-level action sequences into high-level activities. We establish the effectiveness and generality of our approach across three distinct, challenging sequential tasks and diverse domains: (a) zero-shot task description reconstruction from browser logs (achieving high semantic similarity, $\mu_{sim} = 0.91$), (b) few-shot student dropout prediction using MOOC interaction logs (reaching weighted $F_1 = 0.90$ with only five few-shot examples), and (c) anonymized, privacy-preserving analysis of AI tool integration within document workflows in Microsoft Word. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based abstraction is a robust and efficient path forward for transforming low-level behavioral data into high-level, interpretable, and actionable insights. We also discuss practical considerations for deploying LLM-based inferences within logging infrastructures, including computational efficiency and user privacy.

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

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

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

The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems

arXiv:2606.13079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.

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

Architectural Wisdom: A Framework for Governing Optimization in AI Systems

arXiv:2606.16319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AI systems exhibit structural failures that capability scaling alone does not reliably fix: they optimize under-specified objectives with no architectural mechanism to question whether the objective should be optimized at all. Engagement maximization can amplify harmful pathways; tool-using agents can commit irreversible actions; preference-trained language models can become sycophantic. We argue that this failure is a wisdom problem, not an intelligence problem. We use "wisdom" in a deliberately architectural sense, not as a claim about virtue, consciousness, or moral omniscience. Intelligence accepts a goal and optimizes within it; wisdom interrogates whether the goal should be optimized at all. The two are separable architectural properties. We propose architectural wisdom as a corrigible objective-governance layer above the optimization substrate. The layer makes three structural commitments explicit and nondegenerate before any action: temporal horizon, relational boundary, and irreversibility. It is realized by four components (Structural Utility Transform, Moral Admissibility Interface, Arbitration and Escalation Controller, Value Revision Channel) that compute a six-coordinate wisdom tuple over horizon, relational coverage, irreversibility, admissibility, value revision, and auditability. We motivate the architecture by eight cases drawn from contemporary AI failures, secular wisdom traditions, and hard ethical situations, and defend the distinction against the intelligence-completeness thesis using goal-questioning over goal-taking, Bostrom's orthogonality, structural separation in our exemplar cases, and persistent failure modes despite capability scaling. The framework is the conceptual contract for a larger architecture whose formal specifications and empirical validation are developed in subsequent work.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Mucosal and Systemic Antibodies Associated with Clinical Protection in a Pertussis Controlled Human Infection Model

Background The engagement of mucosal and systemic immunity in preventing Bordetella pertussis colonization and infection in humans, the impact of prior vaccination on host immunity and protective outcomes, and the dynamics of the host response following exposure remain poorly understood. Methods Healthy adults were challenged with increasing colony-forming units (CFUs) doses, 106-108, of B. pertussis D420 intranasally (NCT05136599). Shedding (PCR and culturing) and symptom development were monitored up to 21 days post-challenge. Serum and nasal wash IgA and IgG were measured before challenge (baseline) and up to 6 months post-challenge. Findings Antibodies increased post-challenge only in infected individuals, primarily nasal IgA. Participants who remained uninfected had higher baseline levels of filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA)- specific mucosal IgA and IgG, and higher serum IgA against fimbriae 2/3 (FIM). FHA was negatively associated with bacterial load and was a key discriminator between shedders and non-shedders, up to one week post-challenge. By day 14 post-challenge, pertussis toxin (PT) IgG and FIM IgA in both serum and mucosal samples were negatively associated with bacterial colonization. The majority (96.7%) of acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine recipients (n=23, median age 2.0 years) became infected, compared to 69.4% of those who received whole-cell pertussis vaccine (n=36; median age 32.0 years), and their antibody responses remained distinct following infection. Interpretation Nasal FHA antibodies emerged as early predictors of protection against pertussis infection, while PT IgG and FIM IgA antibodies may reflect clearance after infection. aP-primed individuals were more susceptible to infection, despite their younger age and more recent vaccination. Funding CDC Contract #75D30122C15467 and CDC IPA Agreement #24IPA2417512 Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US Department of Health and Human Services.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mechanical Conscience: A Mathematical Framework for Dependability of Machine Intelligenc

arXiv:2605.03847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributed collaborative intelligence (DCI), encompassing edge-to-edge architectures, federated learning, transfer learning, and swarm systems, creates environments in which emergent risk is structurally unavoidable: locally correct decisions by individual agents compose into globally unacceptable behavioral trajectories under uncertainty. Existing approaches such as constrained optimization, safe reinforcement learning, and runtime assurance evaluate acceptability at the level of individual actions rather than across behavioral trajectories, and none addresses the multi-participant, uncertainty-laden nature of DCI deployments. This paper introduces mechanical conscience (MC), a novel concept and simplified mathematical framework that operationalizes trajectory-level normative regulation for both single-agent and distributed intelligent systems. Mechanical conscience is defined as a supervisory filter that minimally corrects a baseline policy's actions to reduce cumulative deviation from a normatively admissible region, while accounting for epistemic uncertainty. We introduce associated constructs, conscience score, mechanical guilt, and resonant dependability, that provide an interpretable vocabulary and computable governance signals for this emerging field. Core theoretical properties are established: admissibility equivalence, existence of optimal regulation, and monotonic deviation reduction. Illustrative results demonstrate that MC-regulated agents maintain trajectory-level normative acceptability where conventional controllers drift outside admissible bounds, and that the framework naturally extends to suppress interaction-induced emergent risk in multi-agent DCI settings.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Efficient time-series prediction on NISQ devices via time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine

arXiv:2602.21544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We proposed a time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine (TD-QELM) for efficient time-series prediction on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. By encoding multiple past inputs simultaneously, TD-QELM achieves shallow circuit depth independent of sequence length, thereby, mitigating noise accumulation and reducing computational complexity. Experiments using the NARMA benchmark on both noiseless simulations and IBM's 127-qubit processor demonstrate that TD-QELM consistently outperforms conventional quantum reservoir computing in prediction accuracy and noise robustness. These results highlight TD-QELM as a practical and scalable framework for time-series learning on current NISQ hardware.

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

Knowledge Manifold: A Riemannian Geometric Framework for Semantic Mapping and Geodesic Analysis of Scientific Literature

arXiv:2606.05907v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the knowledge manifold: a Riemannian geometric space in which a corpus of documents is arranged according to semantic positional relationships derived from character n-gram TF-IDF representations. The framework proceeds in five tightly coupled stages. First, each document is converted to a character-level n-gram TF-IDF vector (4-7 grams, up to 250,000 features, L2-normalized) and embedded in a two-dimensional knowledge map via constrained stress minimization with repulsion, variance, and centering regularizers. Second, knowledge at an arbitrary query point is estimated through Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) interpolation using a cubic-spline kernel, yielding an interpolated TF-IDF feature vector that can be linguistically characterized. Third, directional knowledge gradients at 0, 45, and 90 degrees are computed from the SPH interpolation map, and pairwise directional similarity is quantified via inner product and cosine similarity. Fourth, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model, with a Constant x RBF + White kernel fitted on a 10-dimensional SVD projection, provides a Bayesian posterior mean, uncertainty estimate, and per-document contribution rate at the query point. Fifth, geodesics in the knowledge space are obtained by minimizing a discrete Riemannian path energy derived from the SPH-induced metric tensor, using L-BFGS-B with seven deterministic initial-path candidates. We apply the formulation to a corpus of 20 papers in fiber-reinforced composite materials and aerospace structural mechanics, showing that the semantic map recovers meaningful research clusters, geodesic paths reveal natural conceptual bridges between distant topics, and SPH/GPR interpolation enables the generation of virtual knowledge: hypothetical paper abstracts describing unstudied but geometrically predicted research directions.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Efficacy of a Gamified Digital Platform for Substance Use Education and Overdose Prevention Among College Students: a Pilot and Feasibility Study

Background: For US young adults aged 18-25 in the 2018-2024 period, fentanyl was involved in 78.2% of the 44,020 unintentional or undetermined-intent overdose deaths, most often co-involving stimulants and other non-opioid substances. While fatal overdose rates in this age group have fallen to their lowest recorded level, emergency medical services-attended non-fatal overdose events have reached record highs, shifting the decisive variable toward bystander recognition and response. College students report near-universal alcohol education but minimal education on the substances actually driving overdose mortality. Methods: We conducted a single-group pre-post evaluation of the DopaGE Portal, a gamified, mastery-based digital platform covering cocaine, MDMA, benzodiazepines, and opioid overdose response, deployed at a public university (UNL) and a multi-campus volunteer network (TACO). Paired pre/post surveys (N=42) measured self-efficacy (7 items; primary), behavioral intentions, risk perception, and knowledge/attitudes on 5-point scales, plus four factual knowledge questions. Paired t-tests, exact McNemar tests, and Benjamini-Hochberg correction across eight primary tests were applied. Institutional naloxone distribution at UNL was tracked as an ecological behavioral outcome. A mandated high-school cohort (N=94) provided supplementary acceptability data. Results: Self-efficacy increased from 2.82 to 4.46 (d=2.00, 95% CI 1.46-2.55; adjusted p

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

Bridging Day and Night: Unsupervised Cross-Domain Re-Identification with Synergistic Prompt and Prototype Learning

Cross-domain day-night re-identification (ReID) is fundamentally challenged by the substantial visual appearance discrepancies between daytime and nighttime scenes. Existing fully supervised methods rely heavily on labor-intensive annotations, which are costly and exhibit limited generalization across domains. In this work, we investigate unsupervised day-night ReID and propose a novel framework that synergistically combines prompt learning and prototype-based representation learning to associate identities across domains without requiring manual labels. Our approach follows a progressive two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, we exploit the vision-language model to generate instance-specific textual prompts in an annotation-free manner. We employ an instance-level alignment mechanism to embed visual features and textual prompts into a unified semantic space, aligning unlabeled day/night images with learnable prompts via instance-aware dynamic-bias adaptation. In the second stage, we construct domain-specific prototype memory banks and introduce two complementary modules: i) an intra-domain identity association module to enhance feature discriminability within each domain, and ii) a cross-domain prototype matching module to reliably identify positive and negative prototype pairs, thereby establishing robust identity correspondences across day and night. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method. Under the unsupervised setting, our framework attains Rank-1 accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art fully supervised methods.