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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ALIGNBEAM : Inference-Time Alignment Transfer via Cross-Vocabulary Logit Mixing

Domain fine-tuning degrades the safety of large language models: fine-tuned specialists readily comply with harmful prompts framed in domain language. Existing inference-time defenses that mix logits from a safe anchor model require both models to share a vocabulary, which rules them out for the cross-family specialists where safety is most degraded. We present ALIGNBEAM, a training-free method that lifts this restriction by translating anchor logits into the target model's vocabulary token-by-token at each decoding step; a small LLM judge then selects the safest among K candidate continuations. No weights are changed, and the safety-utility trade-off can be tuned at deployment without retraining. Across both cross-vocabulary and same-vocabulary evaluation pairs, ALIGNBEAM substantially raises refusal on adversarial benchmarks while keeping task accuracy and inference overhead within practical bounds. The results show that safety alignment can be transferred between model families at inference time, without touching either model's weights.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Deep Residual Injection for Full-Spectrum Forensic Signal Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been increasingly adopted in forensics for their robust semantic understanding. As AI-generated images become realistic, semantic-level inconsistencies alone are often insufficient for reliable detection. This motivates a critical question: whether MLLMs can achieve full-spectrum forensic signal perception, i.e., capturing low-level generator artifacts without sacrificing pre-trained semantic knowledge. We further perform a layer-wise analysis of forensic signal perception in MLLMs, showing that semantic information is primarily formed in the early-to-middle layers, whereas direct fine-tuning for artifact learning disrupts these semantic representations. Based on this insight, we propose Deep Visual Residual MLLM (Deep-VRM) to preserve early semantic processing while injecting artifact-specific visual signals as a residual path into an intermediate layer, where they are fused with semantic token representations and propagated through subsequent trainable layers. This enables later layers to jointly model semantic reasoning and signal-level forensic cues, and surprisingly, the model learns to adaptively leverage different levels of forensic signals depending on the input, achieving robust and generalizable detection performance. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art across most benchmarks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/KQL11/Deep-VRM.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Inference-Time Decision Calibration for Temporal Classification

arXiv:2606.16034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Temporal classification errors are often treated as representation failures, but they can also arise from how available evidence is converted into decisions. This paper proposes a representation–calibration decomposition for temporal classification. We keep a trained native classifier frozen and separate two inference-time interventions: a conservative residual multi-scale branch that adds auxiliary logits to the native prediction, and a post-hoc branch-aware calibrator that recombines native and residual evidence at decision time. This design distinguishes missing temporal evidence from underused decision-level evidence without retraining the backbone. Across FI-2010, PTB-XL, UCI-HAR, MHEALTH, and HARTH, we find that gains are strongly regime-dependent. Residual multi-scale evidence is most useful in noisy or representation-limited settings, especially short-horizon FI-2010 and weaker recurrent backbones, while branch-aware calibration helps when native and auxiliary logits contain complementary evidence not fully exploited by the raw decision rule. Near-saturated settings show limited gains from either intervention. These results suggest that temporal classification should be understood not only as representation learning, but also as the problem of trusting, combining, and calibrating evidence from multiple views.

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

From ASR to ASP: Evaluating Prompt Attack Vulnerabilities Against Open-Source LLMs

Recent studies demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate harmful or sensitive outputs. As open-source LLMs are increasingly adopted in high-impact applications such as finance, law, and healthcare, systematically investigating their security risks is becoming increasingly important towards trustworthy LLM era. This paper comprehensively studies effective prompt injection attacks against 14 widely used open-source and three closed-source LLMs on five attack benchmarks. Moreover, existing evaluation metrics mostly only consider the attack success rate, overlooking uncertainty in model responses. Our proposed Attack Success Probability (ASP) additionally captures uncertain behaviors for evaluation, where the model may initially refuse a harmful request but subsequently provide harmful guidance or vice versa, reflecting inconsistency and ambiguity in attack feasibility. By systematically analyzing the effectiveness of prompt injection attacks, we propose a straightforward and effective hypnotism attack; results show that this attack causes aligned language models, including Stablelm2, Mistral, Openchat, and Vicuna, to generate objectionable behaviors, achieving around 90% ASP. They also indicate that ignore prefix attacks can break all 14 open-source LLMs, achieving over 60% ASP on a multi-categorical dataset. We find that moderately well-known LLMs exhibit higher vulnerability to prompt injection attacks, highlighting the need to raise public awareness and prioritize efficient mitigation strategies.

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

The MAMA-MIA Challenge: Advancing Generalizability and Fairness in Breast MRI Tumor Segmentation and Treatment Response Prediction

arXiv:2603.01250v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are typically developed and evaluated using heterogeneous datasets, study populations, and assessment protocols, making direct comparison difficult and limiting understanding of model robustness across institutions and clinically relevant patient subgroups. The MAMA-MIA Challenge was designed to address these challenges by providing a standardized benchmark for the joint evaluation of primary tumor segmentation and prediction of pathologic complete response using pre-treatment magnetic resonance imaging only. The training cohort comprised 1,506 patients from multiple institutions in the United States, while evaluation was conducted on an external test set of 574 patients from three independent European centers to assess cross-continental and cross-institutional generalization. A unified scoring framework combined predictive performance with subgroup consistency across age, menopausal status, and breast density. Twenty-six international teams participated in the final evaluation phase. Results demonstrate substantial performance variability under a common external evaluation framework and reveal trade-offs between overall accuracy and subgroup fairness. The challenge provides standardized datasets, evaluation protocols, and public resources to promote the development of robust and equitable artificial intelligence systems for breast cancer imaging.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Navigating the Safety-Fidelity Trade-off: Massive-Variate Time Series Forecasting for Power Systems via Probabilistic Scenarios

arXiv:2606.13338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Probabilistic forecasting models are increasingly deployed on multivariate systems with distinct channel physics and operational constraints, but existing benchmarks evaluate neither property at scale. Public canonical multivariate benchmarks cap out at 2,000 channels, while power-system benchmarks either lack temporal structure or probabilistic evaluation. We introduce PowerPhase, a probabilistic forecasting benchmark built on six transmission grids ranging from 2,000 to 36,964 jointly forecasted channels, more than an order of magnitude beyond popular canonical multivariate benchmarks. Each target trajectory is the output of an AC power-flow solve, and PowerPhase ships with constraint-aware metrics, including Safety_mBrier, NECV, and CVaR-alpha, that complement CRPS and Distortion. Across eight baselines and three seeds, distributional accuracy and constraint satisfaction rank models differently, a trade-off we term safety-fidelity. We further propose PowerForge, a scenario-based quantile forecaster with type-specific decoding heads and a causal bridge between variable groups, which achieves the best average rank on every grid.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents

arXiv:2603.19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental capability-alignment paradox: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while failing to prevent sophisticated attacks. Evaluating defended models against undefended baselines across 97 agent tasks and 1,000 adversarial prompts, we uncover three systematic biases unique to multi-step agents. Agent incompetence bias manifests as immediate tool execution breakdown, with models refusing or generating invalid actions on benign tasks before observing any external content. Cascade amplification bias causes early failures to propagate through retry loops, pushing defended models to timeout on 99\% of tasks compared to 13\% for baselines. Trigger bias leads to paradoxical security degradation where defended models perform worse than undefended baselines while straightforward attacks bypass defenses at high rates. Root cause analysis reveals these biases stem from shortcut learning: models overfit to surface attack patterns rather than semantic threat understanding, evidenced by extreme variance in defense effectiveness across attack categories. Our findings demonstrate that current defense paradigms optimize for single-turn refusal benchmarks while rendering multi-step agents fundamentally unreliable, necessitating new approaches that preserve tool execution competence under adversarial conditions.

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

Evolutionary Bilevel Reward Shaping for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation when deployed in environments that differ from those encountered during training. Existing techniques such as domain randomization (DR) mitigate this, but require access to diverse training environments and full trajectory observability, assumptions that fail in privacy-preserving or restricted scenarios where only scalar performance metrics are available. We propose Generalization via Evolutionary Reward Shaping (GERS), a bilevel optimization approach to improve generalization on unseen test environments using only scalar feedback from validation environments. At the lower level, an RL agent guided via a reward function shaped by the upper level learns a policy on a limited set of training environments with accessible trajectory data; at the upper level, CMA-ES optimizes the reward shaping parameters to maximize the cumulative unshaped reward on separate validation environments for which trajectory access is unavailable. Results on continuous control tasks indicate that GERS outperforms the standard RL baseline on unseen test environments. GERS performance is comparable to DR, despite DR treating the combined set of training and validation environments of GERS as a single training set that requires trajectory access, whereas GERS cannot access validation trajectories. These results confirm that GERS effectively enhances generalization under restricted data access constraints.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DySink: Dynamic Frame Sinks for Autoregressive Long Video Generation

Autoregressive long video generation often adopts bounded-memory streaming for efficiency, typically combining local windows for short-term continuity with static early-frame sinks as long-range anchors. However, this fixed allocation keeps early frames cached even when the current visual state has substantially diverged from them, while discarding potentially more relevant intermediate history. As a result, the retained long-range context may become less adaptive and bias generation toward outdated cues; in severe cases, RoPE-induced phase re-alignment can homogenize inter-head attention and cause sink collapse, where content regresses toward sink frames. We propose DySink, a retrieval-based framework that maintains a compact memory bank and selects visually relevant historical frames as dynamic frame sinks. DySink couples adaptive retrieval with a sink anomaly gate, which detects excessive inter-head consensus over retrieved context and suppresses collapse-prone context. Experiments on minute-long videos show that DySink consistently improves dynamic degree over strong baselines while also achieving higher temporal quality. The code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/yebo0216best/DySink.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

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

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

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

LifeSentence: Language models can encode human life course trajectories from longitudinal panel data

Forecasting human life outcomes is important to gain insights into how individuals attain long and healthy lives. Conventional statistical approaches yield limited accuracy, potentially due to discarding the sequential structure of the life course. Modern methods such as transformer architectures require large scale training data that most longitudinal panel studies lack. Here we introduce LifeSentence, a model for life-course reasoning that bridges large language models with longitudinal panel data. By representing each life event as a structured natural-language record and instruction-tuning a pretrained 24-billion-parameter language model across an 18-task evaluation taxonomy spanning prediction, robustness and reasoning, LifeSentence supplements panel data with distributional knowledge already encoded during pretraining. Trained on approximately 65,000 individuals from the German Socio-Economic Panel - roughly 45 times fewer than prior transformer-based approaches - LifeSentence outperforms classical and deep learning baselines across all task families, achieving a threefold improvement in joint event-and-timing prediction from best baselines and 91.2% Kendall's tau when reconstructing chronological order from timestamp-stripped event sets. Without explicit supervision, the model recovers documented patterns of social stratification, including the education premium, the gender wage gap and the motherhood penalty, from discrete event sequences alone. A natural-language interface further enables qualitatively new research queries, such as connecting an early-life history to a specified late-life endpoint, establishing LifeSentence as both a predictive tool and a probe for counterfactual exploration of human biographies.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Stimulus Motion Perception Studies Imply Specific Neural Computations in Human Visual Stabilization

Even during fixation the human eye is constantly in low amplitude motion, jittering over small angles in random directions at up to 100Hz. This motion results in all features of the image on the retina constantly traversing a number of cones, yet objects which are stable in the world are perceived to be stable, and any object which is moving in the world is perceived to be moving. A series of experiments carried out over a dozen years revealed the psychophysics of visual stabilization to be more nuanced than might be assumed, say, from the mechanics of stabilization of camera images, or what might be assumed to be the simplest solution from an evolutionary perspective. The psychophysics revealed by the experiments strongly implies a specific set of operations on retinal signals resulting in the observed stabilization behavior. The presentation is in two levels. First is a functional description of the action of the mechanism that is very likely responsible for the experimentally observed behavior. Second is a more speculative proposal of circuit-level neural elements that might implement the functional behavior.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying Quantum Smoothing Theories with Extended Retrodiction

arXiv:2510.08447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating the state of an open quantum system monitored over time requires incorporating information from past measurements (filtering) and, for improved accuracy, also from future measurements (smoothing). While classical smoothing is well understood within a Bayesian framework, its quantum generalization has been challenging, leading to distinct and seemingly incompatible approaches. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum state smoothing hinges on a uniquely quantum feature: the fundamental dependence of retrodiction on prior correlations. We introduce auxiliary systems into the prior belief to capture correlations formed during preparation and evolution and develop a comprehensive framework for quantum state smoothing based on extended Bayesian retrodiction. This framework identifies all previous approaches as different choices of the extended prior, and naturally extends it to other choices that have not been considered before. We also give an information-theoretic characterization of the choices of prior, in terms of the average entropy of the smoothed states. Our results establish quantum state smoothing as a fundamentally retrodictive process just like classical smoothing, with proper quantum features clearly identified.

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

Future Dynamic 3D Reconstruction: A 3D World Model with Disentangled Ego-Motion

Forecasting the evolution of dynamic environments is crucial for autonomous agents. While generative world models have recently achieved high photorealism in 2D video synthesis by mixing ego-motion and environmental dynamics within the image plane, they exhibit physical inconsistencies, such as morphing or vanishing objects, especially over long time horizons. In this paper, we propose FR3D, a world model that predicts a persistent 3D latent representation for future dynamic 3D reconstruction. Unlike prior works that treat the world as a sequence of image-based features, FR3D explicitly decouples the 3D evolution of the scene from the agent's trajectory, treating the inferred ego-motion as a latent proxy for action. This disentanglement resolves the ambiguities between self-motion and world-motion, ensuring geometric consistency into the future. Furthermore, we introduce a teacher-student distillation strategy that leverages the spatial "common sense" of off-the-shelf foundation models, leading to robust zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate FR3D's strong performance for future dynamic 3D reconstruction from monocular observations across multiple datasets, even 2 seconds into the future. Project page: https://fr3d-wm.github.io.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Calculation of sequence space coverage in a mutagenesis library

Directed evolution requires screening of large mutagenesis libraries, but accurate calculation of library sizes needed to discover functional variants remains challenging. Existing models provide baseline estimates, yet current computational approaches for finding the best variants scale poorly with library complexity. Here, we introduce a scalable algorithmic framework to compute exact discovery probabilities in saturation mutagenesis libraries with no requirement for explicit sequence enumeration. By aggregating variants into a composition log–sum distribution and applying log-space convolution across randomisation blocks, it is possible to extend this to massive sequence spaces and mixed codon schemes. By inverting these calculations, absolute mathematical ceilings for experimental design are established. Ultimately, this framework provides a rapid, quantitative tool to balance the statistical coverage-diversity trade-off within the limitations of laboratory screening. Finally, this is implemented as an open-source web application (SSCC) that allows researchers to construct heterogeneous library designs and compute required sampling depths, coverage probabilities, and absolute randomisation limits.

17.
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

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

ANCHOR: Error-Controlled Adaptive Numerical Correction for Neural Operator Time Marching

arXiv:2512.19643v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Numerical simulation of time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) is central to scientific and engineering applications, but high-fidelity solvers are often prohibitively expensive for long-horizon or time-critical settings. Neural operator (NO) surrogates offer fast inference across parametric and functional inputs; however, most autoregressive NO frameworks remain vulnerable to compounding errors, and ensemble-averaged metrics provide limited guarantees for individual inference trajectories. In practice, error accumulation can become unacceptable beyond the training horizon, and existing methods lack mechanisms for online monitoring or correction. To address this gap, we propose ANCHOR (Adaptive Numerical Correction for High-fidelity Operator Rollouts), an online, instance-aware hybrid inference framework for stable long-horizon prediction of nonlinear, time-dependent PDEs. ANCHOR treats a pretrained NO as the primary inference engine and adaptively couples it with a classical numerical solver using a physics-informed, residual-based error estimator. Inspired by adaptive time-stepping in numerical analysis, ANCHOR monitors an exponential moving average (EMA) of the normalized PDE residual to detect accumulating error and trigger corrective solver interventions without requiring access to ground-truth solutions. We show that the EMA-based estimator correlates strongly with the true relative L2 error, enabling data-free, instance-aware error control during inference. Evaluations on six canonical PDEs: 1D and 2D Burgers', 2D Allen-Cahn, 2D Cahn-Hilliard, 2D Navier-Stokes, and 3D heat conduction, demonstrate that ANCHOR reliably bounds long-horizon error growth, stabilizes extrapolative rollouts, and significantly improves robustness over standalone neural operators, while remaining substantially more efficient than high-fidelity numerical solvers.

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

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

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

Authority, Truth, and Citation Bias: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Benchmark for Studying Epistemic Susceptibility in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in citation-augmented settings, yet the effect of citation presence on model behavior independent of factual content remains poorly understood. We introduce AuthorityBench, a 220,564-prompt multi-domain benchmark that isolates how citation-based authority signals influence epistemic behavior in LLMs. The benchmark uses a fully balanced 2x2 factorial design crossing claim veracity with citation veracity, the first to do so, across four domains (general knowledge, science, law, and medicine), with controlled variation over 40 prompt templates, four venue prestige tiers, and a country-coded author name dataset. Evaluating seven models on 12 structured research questions, we find that citation presence, whether real or fabricated, consistently increases hallucination rates relative to a no-citation baseline. The effect is strongest when fabricated citations accompany true claims, raising hallucination rates by 3 to 22 percentage points and reaching 35 to 77% in the general knowledge domain, while legal claims are comparatively robust and venue prestige and author demographics show negligible impact. All datasets and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/floating-reeds/AuthorityBench

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Optimal scenario design for climate emulation

arXiv:2606.19302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As deep learning for physical systems continues to grow in popularity, efforts to improve generalizability have primarily focused on designing architectures that embed physical constraints. However, for machine-learning surrogate climate models (emulators), we show that the low structural diversity in existing scenarios commonly used to generate training data places a ceiling on predictive skill. Here, we examine whether training datasets themselves can be optimized to improve generalization. We introduce a method to create datasets that produce emulators capable of generalizing to new, structurally different scenarios absent from the training data. We use a differentiable Simple Climate Model (SCM) to calculate the sensitivity of emulator loss to perturbations in the training data, iteratively updating the training data to maximize emulator skill. For an SCM, training on one scenario optimized in this fashion outperforms an emulator trained on six standard ScenarioMIP pathways. We achieve this higher predictive skill despite training on a smaller dataset, finding that our emulator successfully isolates distinct physical behaviors of different climate forcing agents (e.g., greenhouse gases vs. aerosols) without single-forcing runs. We then demonstrate that scenarios optimized using an SCM, when used to drive an intermediate-complexity climate model, produce a training dataset that yields a more skillful emulator than training on ScenarioMIP outputs. Our results suggest that, in the compute-constrained environment of running full-scale climate models, generating a small number of dynamically rich scenarios provides greater marginal value for emulation and characterizing system responses than expanding the suite of traditional emissions pathways.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Association between depressive symptoms and physical function among participants with heart disease in the Reasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study.

Background: Depression and heart disease frequently co-occur in the aging population and are associated with functional decline and poor health outcomes. Understanding how depressive symptoms relate to different aspects of physical function among adults with heart disease may help identify high-risk subgroups. Objective: To examine the association of depressive symptoms with self-reported and observed physical function measures among participants with heart disease in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study and assess whether associations differ by sex and race?sex groups. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis using data from REGARDS study second in-home visit (2013?2016). Depressive symptoms were measured with the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES D 10), considering scores ?10 as clinically significant. Physical function measures were instrumental activities of daily living (IADL), activities of daily living (ADL), chair stand time (5 repetitions), and gait speed. Linear regression models estimated associations of depressive symptoms with function, adjusting for sociodemographic, health behavior, antidepressant medications, body mass index, and social support. Effect modification by sex and race?sex group was evaluated. Results: Among 3,055 participants, 11.7% had CES D 10 ?10. Compared to CES-D-10 scores

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Improving Visual Token Reduction via Rectifying Distortions for Efficient Multimodal LLM Inference

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in vision-language tasks, yet the quadratic computational complexity arising from the vast number of visual tokens incurs significant memory and latency bottlenecks. While visual token reduction (VTR) strategies have been explored to mitigate this burden, existing methods overlook the positional and attentional consistency between the full and reduced sequences, resulting in a distorted representation. To this end, we propose RESTORE, a novel VTR framework that rectifies the positional and attentional distortions while maintaining efficiency. Specifically, we present a simple yet effective calibration method that restores lost visual attention by augmenting attention weights based on relative distances. We also introduce a distinctive anchor selection for token merging to mitigate information loss during feature averaging. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently improves the accuracy of various reduction methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Project page is available at https://cvlab.yonsei.ac.kr/projects/RESTORE

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

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Reinforcement Learning for Accelerated Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation

arXiv:2507.17786v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive optimization algorithm for aerodynamic shape optimization focused on dimensionality reduction. The form in which RL is applied here is that of a surrogate-based, actor-critic policy evaluation MCMC approach allowing for temporal 'freezing' of some of the parameters to be optimized. The goals are to minimize computational effort, and to use the observed optimization results for interpretation of the discovered extrema in terms of their role in achieving the desired flow-field. By a sequence of local optimized parameter changes around intermediate CFD simulations acting as ground truth, it is possible to speed up the global optimization if (a) the local neighbourhoods of the parameters in which the changed parameters must reside are sufficiently large to compete with the grid-sized steps and its large number of simulations, and (b) the estimates of the rewards and costs on these neighbourhoods necessary for a good step-wise parameter adaption are sufficiently accurate. We give an example of a simple fluid-dynamical problem on which the method allows interpretation in the sense of a feature importance scoring.