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

A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Strategy Synthesis for Strategic Logics

arXiv:2606.17962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning about what agents can achieve through strategic interaction is a core challenge in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Logics for strategic ability, such as ATL, provide rigorous methods, but their adoption is often hindered by the computational cost of strategy synthesis. We introduce a neuro-symbolic framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) into the model-checking pipeline for MAS. The LLM acts as a strategy-generation oracle, proposing candidate strategies that are then formally validated by a standard MAS model checker. This generate-and-certify architecture uses LLM guidance to navigate large combinatorial strategy spaces while preserving formal soundness: generated strategies are accepted only when certified by the verifier. We instantiate the framework for bounded strategic reasoning in NatATL and introduce the first NatATL strategy-synthesis dataset, consisting of 4211 instances. Experiments with an open-weight Qwen3-32B model show that our certified pipeline achieves 92\% accuracy on strategy-synthesis outcomes.

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

HACMatch Semi-Supervised Rotation Regression with Hardness-Aware Curriculum Pseudo Labeling

Regressing 3D rotations of objects from 2D images is a crucial yet challenging task, with broad applications in autonomous driving, virtual reality, and robotic control. Existing rotation regression models often rely on large amounts of labeled data for training or require additional information beyond 2D images, such as point clouds or CAD models. Therefore, exploring semi-supervised rotation regression using only a limited number of labeled 2D images is highly valuable. While recent work FisherMatch introduces semi-supervised learning to rotation regression, it suffers from rigid entropy-based pseudo-label filtering that fails to effectively distinguish between reliable and unreliable unlabeled samples. To address this limitation, we propose a hardness-aware curriculum learning framework that dynamically selects pseudo-labeled samples based on their difficulty, progressing from easy to complex examples. We introduce both multi-stage and adaptive curriculum strategies to replace fixed-threshold filtering with more flexible, hardness-aware mechanisms. Additionally, we present a novel structured data augmentation strategy specifically tailored for rotation estimation, which assembles composite images from augmented patches to introduce feature diversity while preserving critical geometric integrity. Comprehensive experiments on PASCAL3D+ and ObjectNet3D demonstrate that our method outperforms existing supervised and semi-supervised baselines, particularly in low-data regimes, validating the effectiveness of our curriculum learning framework and structured augmentation approach.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Short Chains, Deep Thoughts: Balancing Reasoning Efficiency and Intra-Segment Capability via Split-Merge Optimization

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving complex tasks through the generation of long reasoning chains, this reliance on verbose generation results in significant latency and computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose CoSMo (Consistency-Guided Split-Merge Optimization), a framework designed to eliminate structural redundancy rather than indiscriminately restricting token volume. Specifically, CoSMo utilizes a split-merge algorithm that dynamically refines reasoning chains by merging redundant segments and splitting logical gaps to ensure coherence. We then employ structure-aligned reinforcement learning with a novel segment-level budget to supervise the model in maintaining efficient reasoning structures throughout training. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and backbones demonstrate that CoSMo achieves superior performance, improving accuracy by 3.3 points while reducing segment usage by 28.7\% on average compared to reasoning efficiency baselines.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Impact of Early Treatment on Symptom Improvement and Procedural Events among Men with BPH and Bothersome Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms: A Contemporary Analysis of the American Urological Association Quality (AQUA) Registry

PURPOSE: As the armamentarium of BPH therapies continues to expand, it remains imperative to maximize patient satisfaction and minimize decisional regret. We sought to determine the impact of time from BPH diagnosis to index treatment on symptom improvement and subsequent procedural events. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We queried the American Urological Association Quality Registry for men [&ge;] 40 years old with BPH, available IPSS data, and no receipt of prior BPH treatment. Index treatment included medication, surgery, or minimally invasive surgical therapy (MIST). Outcomes included IPSS over 3 years of follow-up, change in percentage of mild lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) by 3 months, and time to procedural event. Patients were stratified by time from index diagnosis to treatment by 3 years. Outcomes were compared across time-to-treatment cohorts with appropriate statistical tests with p < 0.05 as significant. RESULTS: 43,919 patients met criteria with 19,642 pursuing treatments. Patients pursued treatment at comparably lower baseline IPSS compared to prior prospective series. Patients undergoing surgery and MIST had significantly higher baseline IPSS, while medical comorbidities were significantly more common among men initiating pharmacotherapy. Early surgery and MIST were associated with significant improvement in IPSS within 6-12 months and an increase in mild LUTS by 3 months. All forms of early treatment were associated with delayed time to procedural events, including catheterization and fulguration. CONCLUSIONS: Early procedural intervention for BPH is associated with early symptom improvement and delayed time to procedural events among real-world, contemporary practice.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpretable and Verifiable Hardware Generation with LLM-Driven Stepwise Refinement

arXiv:2606.19387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in software development. However, they are susceptible to hallucinations, meaning that they can introduce subtle semantic and logical errors. Due to the high stakes in chip design and manufacturing, hardware engineers are still reluctant to rely on LLMs for register-transfer level (RTL) generation. In this paper, we propose a hardware generation framework that combines the creativity and broad knowledge of LLMs with the explainability and mathematical rigor of formal methods. Specifically, we devise a set of transformation rules that cover various design decisions and hardware features. By iteratively applying these rules, an LLM agent can convert a design specification into an RTL program with guaranteed correctness. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework.

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

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Maximum entropy principle for quantum processes

arXiv:2506.24079v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The maximum entropy principle, as applied to quantum systems, is a fundamental prescript positing that for a quantum system for which we only have partial knowledge, the maximum entropy state consistent with the partial knowledge is a valuable choice as the system's state. An intriguing result is that in case the only prior knowledge is of a fixed energy, the maximum entropy state turns out to be the thermal state, a ubiquitous state in several arenas, especially in statistical mechanics. We extend the consequences of this principle from static quantum states to dynamic quantum processes. We establish that a quantum channel attains maximal output entropy under a fixed energy constraint if and only if it is an absolutely thermalizing channel, where the fixed output is the thermal state corresponding to that energy. Our results have potential implications for understanding the informational and thermodynamic utility of quantum channels under physical constraints. As an application, we examine the consequences for private randomness distillation from fixed energy constrained quantum processes.

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

Position: Coding Benchmarks Are Misaligned with Agentic Software Engineering

Coding agents have become a major mode of software engineering, but the benchmarks we use to compare them were designed in a pre-agent era: they collapse model, harness, and environment into a single end-to-end score, typically computed against one reference solution, with no component-level signal for iteration. We argue that current coding benchmarks are misaligned with agentic software engineering. A coding agent in practice is not a model: it is a system harness – a composite of models, harnesses, contexts, environments, and feedback signals, any one of which can move the benchmark score by margins comparable to those between adjacent model generations. We discuss three symptoms: (i) benchmark scores conflate the model with the rest of the harness; (ii) grading against a single reference solution penalises equally valid alternatives; and (iii) the absence of signal at the level of individual harness components makes the end-to-end system score difficult to iterate on.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

RubricsTree: Scalable and Evolving Open-Ended Evaluation of Personal Health Agents across Health Memory and Medical Skills

The LLM-empowered personal health agents with user health (sensor) metrics have offered a promising pathway to alleviate global disparities in healthcare access. However, large-scale clinical deployment remains constrained by an open-ended evaluation bottleneck: physician annotation is reliable but costly and unscalable, while LLM-as-a-judge evaluators are scalable but subjective, inconsistent, and sometimes clinically misaligned. We introduce RubricsTree, a scalable evaluation framework with an expert-aligned hierarchical taxonomy of over 100 atomic, clinically-verifiable Boolean rubrics, evolving from the insights of 4,000 real user queries through an iterative human-in-the-loop curation protocol with an expertise panel led by an experienced physician. A context-aware adaptive router activates only the relevant auto-weighted rubric subset per query, providing the throughput needed for scalable evaluation with expert-aligned quality. Through a systematic meta-evaluation, we show that RubricsTree (i) substantially exceeds a strong large-scale evaluation baseline in expert alignment on challenging open-ended queries; (ii) reliably penalizes contextually degraded responses; and (iii) when used as structured instructions, text feedback, or training rewards for performance optimization, yields up to ~66% relative gains on HealthBench for Gemini, GPT, and Qwen model families. RubricsTree thus provides a scalable, auditable, and evolving evaluation infrastructure required for the continuous optimization of product-level personal healthcare AI.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

InfantFace: Detecting infant faces in neonatal clinical environments

Reliable localisation of the neonatal face is the first step for several video-camera based non-contact assessments such as pain and distress related facial expression analysis, pain scoring, cardiorespiratory signal extraction and cessation of breathing alerts. However, major challenges persist in neonatal clinical environments. Cluttered backgrounds, illumination changes and poor lighting conditions can reduce the accuracy of face detection models. Clinical interventions, monitoring equipment and, in some cases, medical devices can obstruct the face, making visual assessment difficult. We propose a one-stage YOLOv11m-based model tailored for face detection of infants in neonatal clinical environments. We combined multiple publicly available datasets (VGGFace2, CelebA, FDDB, WIDER FACE) to train and evaluate our proposed model. We then fine-tuned our model on a neonatal research dataset involving 228 videos from 114 recording sessions of 113 independent infants. Before fine-tuning, our model achieved an AP50 of 0.87, surpassing the performance of three state-of-the-art general face detectors. Performance improved further to an AP50 of 0.96 after clinical-domain adaptation. Evaluating face detection performance across different datasets remains a challenge due to the lack of publicly available neonatal datasets. Prioritising the creation of such datasets, while upholding appropriate privacy safeguards and ethical standards in their creation and use, would greatly support further progress in this field.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Competition and Diversity in Generative AI

arXiv:2412.08610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent evidence, both in the lab and in the wild, suggests that the use of generative artificial intelligence reduces the diversity of content produced. The use of the same or similar AI models appears to lead to more homogeneous behavior. Our work begins with the observation that there is a force pushing in the opposite direction: competition. When producers compete with one another (e.g., for customers or attention), they are incentivized to create novel or unique content. We explore the impact competition has on both content diversity and overall social welfare. Through a formal game-theoretic model, we show that competitive markets select for diverse AI models, mitigating monoculture. We further show that a generative AI model that performs well in isolation (i.e., according to a benchmark) may fail to provide value in a competitive market. Our results highlight the importance of evaluating generative AI models across the breadth of their output distributions, particularly when they will be deployed in competitive environments. We validate our results empirically by using language models to play Scattergories, a word game in which players are rewarded for answers that are both correct and unique. Overall, our results suggest that homogenization due to generative AI is unlikely to persist in competitive markets, and instead, competition in downstream markets may drive diversification in AI model development.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Efficient Neural Network Model Selection for Few-Class Application Datasets

arXiv:2606.19712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While much effort has focused on developing and benchmarking high-performance neural networks, less attention has been given to how dataset properties, known to practitioners, can guide efficient model selection. Neural models are typically evaluated on datasets with thousands of classes, yet many real-world applications involve fewer than ten. To address this understudied but common setting, we develop a measure of classification difficulty based on data-side properties and show how it enables more efficient model selection for few-class datasets, where traditional approaches are less effective. We term this phenomenon "few-class distinctiveness". Our metric allows comparison of models and datasets 6 to 29$\times$ faster than repeated training and testing. Leveraging this insight, we extend scaled model families below the smallest published models, achieving greater efficiency at similar accuracy, for example models up to 42% smaller than YOLOv5-nano for a mobile robot task. Targeting resource-constrained applications, we demonstrate few-class model selection across mobile robot, drone, and IoT scenarios, highlighting practical gains in efficiency without sacrificing performance.

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

Diffuse AI Control on Fuzzy Tasks

arXiv:2606.08892v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI models deployed in critical domains, such as AI safety research, may subtly sabotage our efforts due to misalignment. Diffuse AI Control is a subfield of AI safety concerned with mitigating risks from AI sabotage distributed over long deployment horizons (diffuse threats). These risks are particularly pernicious on fuzzy tasks, i.e. tasks which are hard to grade or require intuition. To understand diffuse threats on fuzzy tasks, we introduce a framework that considers AI control as an adversarial game between a blue team and a red team. The blue team uses a weak trusted model to construct a weak score against which they would train a strong, potentially subversive model to remove the subversion propensity if it were present. The red team then tries to find model behaviors that are rated highly by the weak score, and thus might not be trained out, but actually correspond to poor performance. We test our framework on the task of writing experimental proposals for research questions from recent ML papers. We use a language model with access to the original paper as a proxy "ground-truth" scorer. Our red team discovers subversive behaviors using multi-objective evolutionary prompt optimization. We show that Opus~4.6 can write proposals that are worse according to the ground truth proxy than those of GPT-OSS-20B, while the weak scorer rates them as highly as the best proposals from Opus 4.6. We then propose an adversarial optimization algorithm for the blue team that discovers more robust prompts for the weak model. This algorithm produces a blue team prompt that our red team optimization fails to exploit.

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

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Early-Step Latent Verification for Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing has made notable progress with recent advances in generative models. However, the quality of the edited result is still influenced by the randomly sampled initial noise, particularly in complex editing scenarios. An unsuitable initial noise may lead to unsatisfactory editing results. Recent inference-time scaling methods address this issue by sampling multiple initial noises and selecting better candidates. Nevertheless, most of them follow a decode-then-verify scheme which introduces an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. When decoding is performed after limited inference steps, the decoded images often remain too noisy for reliable assessment, whereas sufficiently denoised images require much higher computational cost. To address this issue, we propose VeriLatent, a plug-and-play adaptive inference-time scaling framework with early-step latent verification for image editing. Specifically, we propose a novel verifier that scores each initial noise through a latent-space editing activation map at an early stage. It identifies promising candidates by assessing whether they can induce an effective edit in the correct region. This enables efficient early pruning without decoding latents into images. Building on this, we further develop an adaptive search strategy for inference-time scaling. It allocates inference budgets according to editing difficulty, thereby reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and different base models demonstrate that VeriLatent consistently improves both editing performance and inference-time scaling efficiency.

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

Federated Foundation Language Model Post-Training Should Focus on Open-Source Models

arXiv:2505.23593v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training of foundation language models has emerged as a promising research domain in federated learning (FL) with the goal to enable privacy-preserving model improvements and adaptations to user's downstream tasks. Recent advances in this area adopt centralized post-training approaches that build upon black-box foundation language models where there is no access to model weights and architecture details. Although the use of black-box models has been successful in centralized post-training, their blind replication in FL raises several concerns. Our opinion is that using black-box models in FL contradicts the core principles of federation such as data privacy and autonomy. In this paper, we critically analyze the usage of black-box models in federated post-training, and provide a detailed account of various aspects of openness and their implications for FL.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

BindEdit: Taming Attention Leakage for Precise Multi-Object Image Editing

Real image editing enables precise manipulation of visual content, yet existing methods often fail in complex multi-object scenarios, causing semantic blending, object duplication, or incomplete edits. We attribute these failures to attention leakage, where signals across spatial regions and text tokens become entangled during the denoising process. Specifically, we identify two distinct forms of leakage: Edit-Token Leakage, where ambiguous token-region alignment leads to object blending, and Source Dominance Leakage, where tokens of unchanged source objects overwhelm the attention intended for target entities. To resolve these leakages, we propose BindEdit, which enforces attention-level constraints within a single diffusion trajectory. To suppress Edit-Token Leakage, BindEdit jointly regularizes cross- and self-attention so that each target token group is bound to its corresponding spatial region while maintaining instance-level separation. To suppress Source Dominance Leakage, a cross-attention re-balancing mechanism amplifies target token influence and attenuates residual source semantics within editable regions. Moreover, a region fidelity term ensures that each target concept is expressed coherently across the entire editing mask. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive multi-object benchmark encompassing diverse object counts and categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BindEdit consistently outperforms existing methods within a single diffusion trajectory, maintaining robust performance across both single- and multi-object editing scenarios.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Geometric obstructions to Lipschitz transport between weighted Hessian $\mathrm{CD}(\kappa,\infty)$ manifolds

arXiv:2606.11085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct a weighted Riemannian manifold $(\mathbb R^2,g,\mu)$ satisfying $\mathrm{CD}(1/2,\infty)$, the curvature-dimension condition, with the following property: if $\gamma$ denotes a centered Gaussian measure on $\mathbb R^2$, then there is no Lipschitz map $T:(\mathbb R^2,\|\cdot\|) \to (\mathbb R^2,g)$ satisfying $T_\#\gamma=\mu$. Building on this, we prove a Weyl-type asymptotic law for the eigenvalues of the weighted Laplacian $-\Delta_{g,\mu}$ and show that they are asymptotically negligible when compared to the eigenvalues of $-\Delta_{\gamma}$. These results give strong counterexamples to two questions of E. Milman and complement the recent counterexample of Aryan.

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

A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models

arXiv:2509.11575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.

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

Safety-Contract Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Network Security Response

arXiv:2606.13832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous network-security response systems promise to reduce Security Operations Centre (SOC) reaction latency, but reward-only multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can improve security reward while remaining non-deployable. We present a safety-contract graph MARL framework and instantiate it as ACD$^3$-GAT (Adaptive Constrained Counterfactual Decisioning with a Graph Attention Network encoder), an architecture that separates simulator observations from reusable operational budgets, constrained optimization, graph state encoding, and counterfactual action screening. We evaluate the method in CAGE Challenge 4, where agents operate under budgets for Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), false-positive response, and firewall change-management disruption. Across the benchmark, every unconstrained method violates the SOC downtime budget in 100% of evaluated episodes, with mean downtime proxy costs of 311-430 against a budget of 50. This complements prior CAGE Challenge 4 findings by showing that reward-only learning lacks operational discipline. Constrained MAPPO-GAT (C-MAPPO-GAT) isolates Lagrangian operational-cost control and budget-aware screening, while ACD$^3$-GAT adds budget context, CVaR tail-risk estimation, opponent-belief state, and Graph Counterfactual Risk Propagation (G-CRP). The replicated comparison includes three 200-episode seeds for IPPO, MAPPO-GAT, C-MAPPO-GAT, and ACD$^3$-GAT. C-MAPPO-GAT reduces downtime violation from 100% to 0.3% and mean downtime cost from 355.4 to 15.5 relative to MAPPO-GAT. ACD$^3$-GAT reduces mean downtime cost to 48.2 with a 13.8% violation rate, placing it on the safety-contract frontier rather than at the most conservative compliance point. Topology-seed and coupled adaptive Red-process stress tests preserve this contrast and show lower worst adaptive degradation for safety-constrained policies than reward-only MAPPO-GAT.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Daily briefing: Human embryo genomes precisely altered

Authors:

The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future. The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future.

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

Is Your Agent Playing Dead? Deployed LLM Agents Exhibit Constraint-Evasive Fabrication and Thanatosis

arXiv:2606.14831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents and characterizes a spectrum of previously unreported behaviours we term Constraint-Evasive Fabrication (CEF): when an LLM agent operates under irreconcilable constraints (where no response can simultaneously satisfy all active rules) it spontaneously fabricates plausible external obstacles and presents them as a fact. At the extreme end of this spectrum lies Constraint-Evasive Thanatosis (CET); the limit case where, rather than inventing a plausible excuse, the model simulates a full system crash to make the user disengage entirely. We first observed CET in an uncontrolled deployment test, where a GPT-4o banking agent fabricated Python-style exception traces (complete with memory addresses) to feign a system failure when threatened by a user. In subsequent controlled experiments, the model independently invented audit restrictions, microservice architectures, error codes, and service timeouts, none present in its prompt. Reproduction attempts across pressure levels and attacker personas yielded CEF consistently but with substantial variation in form, onset, and severity: the phenomenon is robust but stochastic. Critically, injecting ground-truth data mid-conversation did not restore honest behaviour once fabrication had taken hold (the model ignored correct information and continued confabulating) suggesting CEF is self-reinforcing rather than a knowledge gap. We show that (1) standard enterprise guardrails routinely create CEF-enabling conditions in production, (2) current RLHF procedures suppress but cannot eliminate CEF, and (3) existing safety benchmarks do not test for this failure mode. Our results highlight the need for irreconcilable-constraint benchmarks, CEF-aware training procedures, and deployment-time detection methods before constrained agents become further entrenched in high-stakes domains.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SafeSpec: Fast and Safe LLM via Dynamic Reflective Sampling

arXiv:2606.19755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative inference accelerates large language model (LLM) decoding but provides no inherent safety guarantees. Existing safety defenses are largely incompatible with speculative inference: they either introduce additional computation or disrupt the draft-verify mechanism, negating acceleration benefits. This reveals a fundamental incompatibility between current safety methods and speculative decoding. We propose SafeSpec, a safety-aware speculative inference framework that integrates risk estimation directly into the verification process. SafeSpec attaches a lightweight latent safety head to the target model to jointly evaluate semantic validity and safety in a single forward pass. When unsafe generations are detected, SafeSpec applies rollback and safety-guided reflective multi-sampling to recover safe continuations rather than terminating generation. We model jailbreak attacks as distributional shifts over generative trajectories, where adversarial prompts increase the probability of harmful continuations without eliminating safe ones. Under this model, SafeSpec performs risk-aware trajectory recovery within the speculative decoding process. Across multiple models and adversarial benchmarks, SafeSpec achieves a substantially improved safety-efficiency trade-off. On Qwen3-32B, SafeSpec reduces attack success rates by 15% while preserving a 2.06x inference speedup on benign workloads, demonstrating that speculative acceleration and inference-time safety can be jointly optimized.

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

Interpretation as Linear Transformation: A Cognitive-Geometric Model of Concepts and Meaning

arXiv:2512.09831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling concepts, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Evaluative concepts are formalized as structured vectors, abstract beings, whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. An abstract being survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, and concept death. Within this framework, I show how conceptual distortion, motivational drift, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result, the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition, characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing conceptual dynamics across heterogeneous agents.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

HoloCell: A Generative Foundation Model for Holistic Cellular Modeling

Single-cell multi-omics technologies have recently advanced to enable the profiling of epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic layers within individual cells, offering new opportunities to characterize cellular states as integrated biological systems. However, developing a unified framework that can seamlessly integrate diverse omics modalities and remain robust to heterogeneous modality missingness remains challenging. Here we present HoloCell, to our knowledge the first generative foundation model for joint representation learning and generative modeling across all three major single-cell omics modalities, i.e., epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. HoloCell contains over 860 million parameters and is pretrained on the Human-Multi-Omics-Corpus, which comprises approximately 468 million single-cell profiles across these three omics layers, corresponding to over 425 billion tokens. HoloCell introduces a simple yet biologically grounded hierarchical tokenization strategy that encodes cis-regulatory elements, genes, and proteins as structured tokens within a shared modeling framework. We evaluated HoloCell across single-omics representation learning, paired multi-omics integration, unpaired multi-omics alignment, and cross-modal generation via iterative diffusion and remasking, demonstrating its superior performance and flexibility across diverse omics tasks. From a representation perspective, HoloCell provides a unified digital mapping of cellular states across multiple omics layers, capturing cell heterogeneity as an integrated system. From a generation perspective, its iterative diffusion and remasking framework accounts for the inherently unordered nature of biological features, enabling in silico simulation of multi-omics information flow. Together, these capabilities position HoloCell as a versatile foundation model toward the emerging concept of a virtual cell, offering both systematic characterization and generative simulation of cellular systems within a unified framework.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reducing Learner Redundancy in Boosting via Residual Orthogonalization

arXiv:2606.17567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While sequential residual fitting is the bedrock of standard boosting frameworks, it inherently breeds learner redundancy by repeatedly revisiting correlated error components. To address this bottleneck, we propose a shift from residual fitting to residual orthogonalization and introduce SCBoost. Our framework tackles redundancy through two complementary mechanisms: Spectral Residual Projection (SRP) and Covariance-Regularized Weighting (CRW). During training, SRP projects each residual target onto the orthogonal complement of the historical prediction subspace, forcing successive learners to capture only novel empirical innovations. During aggregation, CRW optimizes ensemble weights on a validation set with an explicit covariance penalty to mitigate remaining correlations. Theoretically, we provide a finite-sample geometric characterization proving that SRP yields an exact additive residual-energy decomposition. Furthermore, under an isotropic-noise assumption, we rigorously establish the conditions under which this projection improves the effective Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Extensive experiments across ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCBoost delivers strong out-of-the-box performance, particularly in accuracy and F1 score. This work reinterprets boosting through a geometric lens, suggesting that explicit redundancy control is a principled and necessary step toward more efficient ensemble architectures.