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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Measuring Rényi entropy with an Echo Protocol

arXiv:2504.05237v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present efficient and practical protocols to measure the second Rényi entropy, whose exponential is known as the purity. Our approach is based on expressing the purity in terms of transition probabilities generated by an echo-type forward-backward evolution sequence, making it applicable to quantum many-body systems. Notably, our approach does not rely on random-noise averaging, a feature that can be extended to protocols to measure out-of-time-order correlation functions, as we demonstrate. By way of example, we show that our protocols can be practically implemented in superconducting qubit-based platforms, as well as in cavity-QED trapped ultra-cold gases.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

作者:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

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

SILAGE: Memory-Efficient, Full-Gradient-Free Nonconvex Optimization for Nested Finite Sums

arXiv:2606.15832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Empirical risk minimization on massive datasets naturally exhibits a nested double finite-sum structure, where $N=nm$ total samples are logically or physically partitioned into $n$ blocks of size $m$ (e.g., in pooled data silos, out-of-core learning, or deliberate stratification). While variance-reduced methods achieve optimal oracle complexities for nonconvex objectives, they suffer from severe scaling bottlenecks in this centralized regime. Recursive estimators, such as PAGE, require periodic global full-gradient refreshes over all $nm$ samples, which are computationally expensive. Conversely, single-loop methods, such as SILVER, avoid such refreshes but require an impractical $\mathcal{O}(nm)$ memory footprint to store a control variate for every sample. In this paper, we propose SILAGE, a variance-reduced algorithm that addresses this trade-off. By actively exploiting the double-sum structure, SILAGE eliminates periodic global full-gradient refreshes over all $nm$ components (evaluating at most one local group gradient per iteration) while requiring only $\mathcal{O}(n)$ memory. Furthermore, we provide a tight convergence analysis that avoids pessimistic worst-case Lipschitz constants. Instead, SILAGE's complexity natively adapts to the underlying data geometry via nested functional similarities: across-group ($\delta_1$) and within-group ($\delta_2$) heterogeneity. Our results improve existing state-of-the-art bounds in several practically relevant regimes.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SCAR: Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval for Efficient Context Expansion in RAG

Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across segments, degrading retrieval recall. While static windowing and parent retrieval improve recall, they introduce significant token overhead. We propose SCAR (Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval), an adaptive retrieval policy that selectively expands neighboring chunks by weighing query-neighbor relevance against a structural continuity penalty. SCAR uses a relative expansion threshold tied to each retrieved chunk's own query-relevance, yielding an approximately scale-invariant decision rule that transfers across embedding models without recalibration. Across four diverse corpora (RFC, GDPR, a 10-K report, and a Merger agreement; N=320 queries; 160 boundary-fragmented), SCAR achieves 92.8% recall on boundary-fragmented queries with only 7.84 chunks, a 22.9% reduction compared to static windowing (10.16 chunks). Paired bootstrap tests (B=10,000) confirm the chunk reduction is highly significant (p

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

TwinBI: An Agentic Digital Twin for Efficient Augmented Interactions with Business Intelligence Dashboards

arXiv:2606.13731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Business intelligence (BI) increasingly combines dashboard interaction with LLM-based assistance, but these two modes often fall out of sync during multi-step analysis. As users switch between direct dashboard manipulation and natural-language queries, it becomes difficult to preserve a consistent analytical state across filters, hierarchies, metrics, and chart context. We present TwinBI, an agentic digital-twin framework that couples an LLM-based agent system with an executable BI dashboard state. TwinBI unifies conversational interaction, dashboard manipulation, semantic grounding, and provenance tracking through a shared analytical state reconstructed from a unified interaction log. It also exposes artifacts such as schema views, SQL, logs, and an /insights command for state-grounded analytical summaries. We evaluate TwinBI in two complementary ways. In a controlled A/B benchmark with the same backbone agent, TwinBI improves exact-match accuracy from 43.3% to 63.3%, partial-credit accuracy from 48.3% to 70.8%, and substantially reduces timeout rate from 40.0% to 10.0% relative to Dashboard alone. In a usability study, participants benefited from the integrated dashboard-and-chat workflow, with high task accuracy, moderate workload, and favorable ratings for state-aware interaction mechanisms. These results suggest that TwinBI improves both agent-level analytical reliability and user-facing analytical support by turning visible dashboard state into richer actionable context. Our dataset and source code are available at: https://github.com/simonjisu/TwinBI

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

LVLMs and Humans Ground Differently in Referential Communication

For generative AI agents to partner effectively with human users, the ability to accurately predict human intent is critical. But this ability to collaborate remains limited by a critical deficit: an inability to model common ground. We present a referential communication experiment with a factorial design involving director-matcher pairs (human-human, human-AI, AI-human, and AI-AI) that interact with multiple turns in repeated rounds to match pictures of objects not associated with any obvious lexicalized labels. We show that LVLMs cannot interactively generate and resolve referring expressions in a way that enables smooth communication, a crucial skill that underlies human language use. We release our corpus of 356 dialogues (89 pairs over 4 rounds each) along with the online pipeline for data collection and the tools for analyzing accuracy, efficiency, and lexical overlap.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

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

JourneyFormer: Encoding Airbnb Guest Journey with Sequence Modeling

arXiv:2606.19108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sequence modeling has become increasingly popular in recommendation and ranking algorithms, owing to its capacity to model users' historical behaviors and infer user intentions. Despite its theoretical simplicity, the practical deployment of a sequence model in production is non-trivial due to complexity of the sequence and sparse labels. For example, in Airbnb, guest sequences are often long, exploratory and complex, and we focus on booking labels, which are sparse. As such, we are often required to make various design decisions regarding data and modeling to strike a balance between effectiveness and scalability. This work delved into these production challenges and deployed JourneyFormer, a sequence modeling solution for search ranking at Airbnb. We detail crucial design considerations, covering aspects such as guest event selection, ID embeddings, model architecture, and label attribution. Additionally, we describe several tailored strategies to accelerate model training and inference. JourneyFormer has been successfully deployed within Airbnb's production, where its effectiveness and impact have been evidenced not only by improved offline ranking metrics but also by significant gains in key business metrics through online A/B testing across 2 production surfaces.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CLAD: Constrained Latent Action Diffusion for Vision-Language Procedure Planning

We propose CLAD, a Constrained Latent Action Diffusion model for vision-language procedure planning in instructional videos. Procedure planning is the challenging task of predicting intermediate actions given a visual observation of a start and a goal state. However, future interactive AI systems must also be able to plan procedures using multi-modal input, e.g., where visual observations are augmented with language descriptions. To tackle this vision-language procedure planning task, our method uses a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn the latent representation of actions and observations as constraints and integrate them into the diffusion process. This approach exploits that the latent space of diffusion models already has semantics that can be used. We use the latent constraints to steer the diffusion model to better generate actions. We report extensive experiments on the popular CrossTask, Coin, and NIV datasets and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. By evaluating ablated versions of our method, we further show that the proposed integration of the action and observation representations learnt in the VAE latent space is key to these performance improvements.

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

Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge

LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone. We argue that this conflates two distinct roles: generating a skill from experience is a creative act that judgment handles well, while deciding whether that skill actually helps requires empirical evidence across many tasks. Measuring per-skill causal contributions via randomized masking, we find that skill libraries exhibit pervasive causal heterogeneity: individual skills routinely help on some task types while hurting on others, yet their opposing effects cancel in aggregate, making them invisible to global curation methods. We propose ASSAY, a framework that separates generation from curation: it computes a per-skill causal attribution on a small development set, restructures the library offline, and suppresses skills with negative predicted effect for each test task. Across seven base models spanning four providers and two benchmarks (AppWorld and tau-bench), ASSAY consistently improves over prior skill-curation approaches. On AppWorld's hardest split, DeepSeek-V3 achieves 69.3% task-goal completion (47.4% relative improvement), a new state of the art among all published methods including weight-tuned approaches. On tau-bench retail, GPT-4.1 improves by 8.7% relative, advancing past o4-mini, o1, and GPT-4.5 on the public leaderboard without any weight modification. Ablation traces the dominant gain to per-task masking, confirming that the bottleneck is matching skills to tasks at inference time, not removing bad skills globally. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/assay.

15.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

TranscriptFormer: A generative cell atlas across 1.5 billion years of evolution | Science

作者: 未知作者

Single-cell transcriptomics is revolutionizing our understanding of cellular diversity, yet comparing transcriptional programs across the tree of life remains challenging. We developed TranscriptFormer, a family of generative foundation models trained on up to 112 million cells spanning 1.53 billion years of evolution across 12 species. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on cell type classification, even for species separated over 685 million years of evolution, and zero-shot disease state identification in human cells. Developmental trajectories, phylogenetic relationships and cellular hierarchies emerge naturally in TranscriptFormer’s representations without any explicit training on these annotations. This work establishes a powerful framework for quantitative single-cell analysis and comparative cellular biology, thus demonstrating that universal principles of cellular organization can be learned and predicted across the tree of life.

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

Disentangling Dynamical Systems: Causal Representation Learning Meets Local Sparse Attention

arXiv:2603.14483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parametric system identification methods estimate the parameters of explicitly defined physical systems from data. Yet, they remain constrained by the need to provide an explicit function space, typically through a predefined library of candidate functions chosen via available domain knowledge. In contrast, deep learning can demonstrably model systems of broad complexity with high fidelity, but black-box function approximation typically fails to yield explicit descriptive or disentangled representations revealing the structure of a system. We develop a novel identifiability theorem, leveraging causal representation learning, to uncover disentangled representations of system parameters without structural assumptions. We derive a graphical criterion specifying when system parameters can be uniquely disentangled from raw trajectory data, up to permutation and diffeomorphism. Crucially, our analysis demonstrates that global causal structures provide a lower bound on the disentanglement guarantees achievable when considering local state-dependent causal structures. We instantiate system parameter identification as a variational inference problem, leveraging a sparsity-regularised transformer to uncover state-dependent causal structures. We empirically validate our approach across four synthetic domains, demonstrating its ability to recover highly disentangled representations that baselines fail to recover. Corroborating our theoretical analysis, our results confirm that enforcing local causal structure is often necessary for full identifiability.

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

SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision

arXiv:2606.01139v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills are procedural artifacts that enable LLM agents to execute workflows, verify constraints, and recover from failures. Existing self-evolving methods refine skills using accumulated trajectories. However, they struggle in cold-start settings, where only an initial, imperfect skill is available. Consequently, skill construction defaults to expert authoring or one-shot LLM generation. Expert-authored skills are costly and may not align with how LLM agents actually execute tasks, while one-shot generated skills can be syntactically well formed yet behaviorally weak. To bridge this gap, we propose SkillRevise, an execution-grounded framework designed to iteratively refine these initial skills. SkillRevise diagnoses skill defects from execution evidence, retrieves relevant repair principles from a general memory, and applies execution-anchored edits. By re-executing candidates, it retains the first verifier-passing skill within the revision budget and falls back to empirical utility only when no candidate succeeds. Evaluated across three benchmarks and five LLMs, SkillRevise substantially outperforms one-shot baselines, improving the base agent's success rate on SkillsBench from 36.05% to 61.63%. Furthermore, the revised skills transfer across both executors and task environments, suggesting that SkillRevise captures reusable procedural knowledge beyond any single executor.

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

Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks

arXiv:2510.01359v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are embedded in software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising "jailbreak" stakes beyond text-only settings. Prior evaluations emphasize refusal or harmful-text detection, leaving open whether agents compile and run malicious programs. We present JAWS-Bench (Jailbreaks Across WorkSpaces), a benchmark spanning three escalating workspace regimes mirroring attacker capability: empty (JAWS-0), single-file (JAWS-1), and multi-file (JAWS-M). We pair this with a hierarchical, executable-aware Judge Framework that tests (i) compliance, (ii) attack success, (iii) syntactic correctness, and (iv) runtime executability, to measure deployable harm. Across seven LLM backends from five families, prompt-only attacks in JAWS-0 achieve 61% compliance; 58% are harmful, 52% parse, and 27% run end-to-end. In JAWS-1, compliance reaches ~100% for stronger models with a mean ASR (Attack Success Rate) ~71%; JAWS-M raises mean ASR to ~75%, with 32% runnable attack code. Wrapping an LLM in an agent increases ASR by 1.6$\times$, by overturning initial refusals during planning and tool use. Similar trends hold for OpenHands, SWE-Agent, and OpenAI Codex, suggesting our JAWS-Bench is agent-agnostic. Category analyses identify which attack classes are most vulnerable and deployable, motivating execution-aware defenses and refusal-preserving agent designs.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Do We Really Need Diffusion? A Fast U-Net for Paired Medical Image Translation

Magnetic resonance imaging-signal fat fraction (MRI-SFF) quantifies tissue fat and serves as an established biomarker for metabolic and musculoskeletal disorders. The acquisition requires, however, specialized MRI sequences, which are not available routinely. We investigate whether SFF can be estimated from widely available T2-weighted (T2w) MRI via image-to-image translation (I2I). We further compare a lightweight 4-level U-Net to a state-of-the-art Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) using a dataset of 230 048 paired 2D images (183 517 train, 23 621 val, 22 910 test) from the German National Cohort (NAKO). Both models clearly outperform the identity baseline (Pearson correlation r = 0.769, mean absolute error MAE = 0.070 +/- 0.054), which confirms that the models learn a non-trivial cross-modal mapping. Interestingly, the lightweight U-Net outperforms the DDPM in both correlation (r = 0.975 vs. 0.962) and error (MAE = 0.014 +/- 0.015 vs. 0.019 +/- 0.019), while reducing inference time by a factor of 208 (25.2 ms vs. 5 227.2 ms per image using 50 Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) steps). The strong clinical performance at substantially reduced computational cost enables real-time clinical use.

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

Operadic consistency: a label-free signal for compositional reasoning failures in LLMs

Detecting LLM reasoning failures at inference time without ground-truth labels has motivated a wide range of confidence baselines, including self-consistency, semantic entropy, and P(True), built on within-question sampling and self-evaluation. Operad theory, the formalism for systems built by iterated substitution, suggests a complementary diagnostic: a model's direct answer to a compositional query should agree with the answer it produces by composing a stated decomposition of the same query. We instantiate this idea as operadic consistency (OC), a per-question signal. Across twelve instruction-tuned LLMs (4B to 671B parameters, open-weights and closed-source) on four multi-hop QA datasets, OC is strongly correlated with accuracy on every dataset (Pearson $r \in [0.86, 0.94]$, all $p \leq 0.0004$), and is the only signal we evaluate with $r \geq 0.85$ uniformly across all four datasets. Chain-of-thought self-consistency (CoT-SC; Wang et al., 2023) matches OC on HotpotQA and DROP ($r = 0.93, 0.87$) but drops to $r \approx 0.45$ on MuSiQue and StrategyQA. At the per-question level, OC contributes information beyond CoT-SC and semantic entropy on every dataset (cluster-robust $p \leq 10^{-16}$ for the OC coefficient), and the conclusion is robust to additionally controlling for constructed decomposition-aware baselines ($p \leq 10^{-13}$). The same signal yields selective-prediction improvements (accuracy at fixed coverage) over a tuned CoT-SC baseline at the equal-cost $K = 3$ budget (AUARC lifts of +0.086 to +0.096 and AUROC lifts of +0.092 to +0.164; 95% CIs exclude zero on every cell). On five frontier thinking models, where the decomposition is extracted from the model's own chain of thought, the same equal-cost comparison gives positive selective-prediction point-estimate lift on all 16 (dataset, budget, metric) cells tested, with 95% CIs excluding zero on 12 of the 16.

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

Context-Aware Markov VAE for CSI Compression in Wireless Systems

arXiv:2606.16607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers neural channel state information (CSI) compression for time-varying massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in frequency division duplex (FDD) systems with limited feedback resources. The main challenge lies in obtaining a compact and efficient representation of the CSI given that it exhibits strong temporal correlation across successive snapshots. Existing memoryless compression models do not exploit this property, while simple temporal extensions often incorporate multiple observations without explicitly modeling the latent dynamics. We propose a context-aware compression framework based on a k-memory Markov variational autoencoder (k-MMVAE), which uses a finite temporal window to capture the evolution of CSI in the latent space. The model introduces Markov-structured latent dynamics with finite memory, enabling efficient use of temporal dependencies for compression. Simulation results show that the proposed approach improves target CSI reconstruction performance compared to memoryless and weakly sequential baselines, particularly at low and moderate compression rates. These results suggest that explicit latent temporal modeling can provide an effective mechanism for CSI compression under limited feedback constraints.

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

Assessing Reliability of Symbol Detection in Concept Bottleneck Models

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are a relevant tool for explainable Artificial Intelligence because they make their predictions through human-interpretable symbols. However, high task accuracy does not guarantee that these symbols are detected faithfully: jointly trained CBMs may encode task-specific shortcuts in the bottleneck, making their explanations unreliable. In this paper, we study concept-detection reliability by swapping independently trained concept detectors and classification heads that share the same symbolic vocabulary. We use the resulting performance degradation, concept-level metrics, and symbol-wise uncertainty estimates to identify concepts that are especially prone to spurious firing. Finally, we propose a reliability-aware training strategy in which a shared concept detector is optimized with multiple classification heads and penalized for relying on globally or instance-wise unreliable symbols. On CUB-200-2011 with full concept supervision, detectors and heads are almost freely interchangeable (swap drop below one accuracy point, relative retention above $99\%$, and no concept detected below chance), whereas on a controlled synthetic task we show that, as the concept-supervision weight is reduced, models keep near-perfect task accuracy while swapped accuracy and agreement with the ground-truth concepts collapse to chance. Our reliability-aware training substantially mitigates this leakage, roughly doubling swap accuracy in the leaky regime.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A risk-of-contagion index using a Bayesian based model for the COVID-19 epidemic in Mexico

During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited testing capacity and reporting delays complicated epidemic surveillance and decision-making in Mexico. We calibrated textit{covidestim}, a Bayesian nowcasting model, to estimate the total SARS-CoV-2 infections from reported cases and deaths using Mexican surveillance data. Disease-progression distribution priors were calibrated using Mexico City records and validated through comparisons with national seroprevalence surveys, hospitalization data, and annual reported severe-case rates across all states. Using the reconstructed estimates of active infections, we implemented an event-based risk framework that quantifies the probability of encountering at least one infectious individual in gatherings of different sizes. This probability was subsequently translated into a four-level epidemiological traffic-light indicator and computed at both state and municipality levels. The resulting estimates revealed substantial spatial heterogeneity that is obscured by state-level aggregation, particularly in states with marked differences between urban and rural municipalities. To evaluate consistency with public-health indicators, we compared the proposed risk classification with the official Mexican epidemiological traffic-light system, considering interpretable gathering sizes relevant to public-health decision making. Weekly reports derived from this framework were delivered to policymakers in the State of Queretaro in Mexico, as an anticipation tool for school reopening and public-space management. This demonstrates that this Bayesian reconstruction of infections combined with event-based risk metrics can provide an interpretable and generalizable municipality-level complement to routine surveillance systems, particularly in regions with limited testing capacity and heterogeneous local transmission dynamics.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ArFake: A Robust Framework for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Spoofing Detection Benchmark

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.

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

Which Pairs to Compare for LLM Post-Training?

arXiv:2606.19607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based post-training has become a central paradigm for aligning language models. A common data-collection strategy is to generate a small set of completions for each prompt and label the resulting comparison pairs. However, human preference labels are often much more expensive than generating additional completions, suggesting a different use of the same labeling budget: generate a larger pool of completions, but label only the most informative comparison pairs. This paper studies which pairs should be compared in preference-based post-training. We formulate comparison curation as a sampling-design problem and evaluate designs by the quality of the final policy under the preference-based post-training objective. We instantiate this framework for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), analyzing how the choice of labeled pairs propagates through DPO training to downstream policy performance. Our main results provide matching upper and lower bounds on the post-training optimality gap of the DPO-trained policy. The bounds show that comparison selection affects downstream performance through a single design-dependent information matrix, which links label allocation to parameter estimation error and policy suboptimality. This yields an explicit optimization criterion for budgeted comparison curation and motivates practical sampling designs for selecting informative pairs from large generated completion pools. Experiments on synthetic settings and language-model post-training benchmarks show that the proposed designs consistently improve sample efficiency over common comparison-selection heuristics.