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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments

Large language model (LLM) agents have achieved strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, yet most evaluations assume static environments. In contrast, real-world deployment is inherently dynamic, requiring agents to continually align their knowledge, skills, and behavior with changing environments and updated task conditions. To address this gap, we introduce EvoArena, a benchmark suite that models environment changes as sequences of progressive updates across terminal, software, and social domains. We further propose EvoMem, a patch-based memory paradigm that records memory evolution as structured update histories, enabling agents to reason about environmental evolution through changes in their memory. Experiments show that current agents struggle on EvoArena, achieving an average accuracy of 39.6% across evolving terminal, software, and social-preference domains. EvoMem consistently improves performance, yielding an average gain of 1.5% on EvoArena and also improving standard benchmarks such as GAIA and LoCoMo by 6.1% and 4.8%. Beyond individual tasks, EvoMem further improves chain-level accuracy by 3.7% on EvoArena, where success requires completing a consecutive sequence of related evolutionary subtasks. Mechanistic analysis shows that EvoMem improves evidence capture in the memory, indicating better preservation of complete evolving environment states. Our results highlight the importance of modeling evolution in both evaluation and memory for reliable agent deployment.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Prediction of Viscoelastic Droplet Impact Dynamics Using a Vision Transformer-Based Approach

arXiv:2606.23940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Droplet impact on solid surfaces is a complex fluid dynamics problem with applications in spray cooling, inkjet printing, and pharmaceutical processing. Although numerical simulations are widely used to investigate these dynamics, their computational cost becomes significant when multiple parametric variations are considered. In this work, we investigate the use of a Video Vision Transformer (ViViT) architecture to predict the temporal evolution of viscoelastic droplets impacting solid surfaces using volume fraction fields obtained from the Volume of Fluid (VOF) method. In Newtonian fluids, impact dynamics are mainly characterized by the Reynolds number $Re$, representing the ratio of inertial to viscous forces, and the Weber number $We$, representing the ratio of inertial to surface tension forces. For viscoelastic fluids, additional parameters are required to account for elastic effects, namely the solvent viscosity ratio $\beta$ and the Weissenberg number $Wi$, increasing simulation complexity and cost. Instead of simulating the entire droplet dynamics, the proposed approach uses only the initial 10% to 20% of the simulation to predict the remaining evolution. Depending on the prediction configuration, this strategy reduces computational cost by approximately 80% to 90% compared to full numerical simulations. The ViViT produces physically consistent predictions across different parameters and prediction horizons, successfully capturing both spreading and bouncing regimes while preserving geometric features and structural similarity. Since volume fraction fields can also be extracted from experimental videos, the proposed framework could be extended to incorporate experimental data during training, potentially improving the physical fidelity of the predicted dynamics.

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

Pantheon360: Taming Digital Twin Generation via 3D-Aware 360{\deg} Video Diffusion

Generating complete digital twins from videos requires precise camera control, global scene coverage, and strict spatial-temporal consistency constraints that remain challenging for perspective video generators due to their limited field of view (FoV). Their narrow FoV forces long or multi-view trajectories, amplifying cross-view inconsistency and temporal drift. We argue that 360{\deg} video generation offers a natural solution: panoramic coverage simplifies trajectory design and provides a strong global context for maintaining coherence. We introduce Pantheon360: Taming Digital Twin Generation via 3D-Aware 360{\deg} Video Diffusion, a controllable 360{\deg} video generation framework that synthesizes high-fidelity videos from sparse 360{\deg} inputs. The key idea is an explicit 3D Cache, reconstructed from the input, which serves as a geometric scaffold for any user-defined camera path. This allows the diffusion model to focus on photorealistic texture refinement while the 3D Cache enforces global geometric consistency. Experiments show that Pantheon360 achieves superior visual quality and unmatched geometric coherence, enabling reliable and flexible 360{\deg} scene generation for downstream simulation and digital-twin applications.

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

Control-Plane Placement Shapes Forgetting: An Architectural Study of Agent Memory Across Thirteen System Configurations

作者:

Where an LLM sits in an agent memory pipeline – between the recall plane that retrieves stored facts (extensively benchmarked) and the control plane that mutates them via supersede, release, purge (largely untested) – shapes which forgetting failure modes the system recovers. Comparing thirteen system configurations on a 385-case adversarial surface, we observe three placement regimes with partly complementary coverage: deterministic primitives suffice for lexical/temporal categories but fail canonicalization (5% on identifier-obfuscation, 0% on cross-lingual); inscribe-time LLM recovers canonicalization (100%) but cannot help intent-aware deletion (0% on prefix-collision and compound-fact); a mutation-time hook recovers intent-aware deletion (78-85%) and brightens nearly all categories simultaneously (91.7-93.2% overall, $0.17 per 385-case run, 2.3s/case mutation latency vs. 64-191ms/case deterministic, recall path unchanged). We expose the trade-off via ForgetEval, a 1000-case templated suite plus a 385-case adversarial layer (132 hand-crafted + 253 LLM-drafted oracle-validated) scored by deterministic substring match, paired with a six-method Adapter Protocol with honest N/A scoring that lets heterogeneous memory stores enter in 130 lines. Admission is corroborated by 10-annotator IAA (Fleiss' kappa = 0.958) and a 77-case external-authored subset (four blind contributors) that replicates the canonicalization asymmetry and amplifies the joint-placement lift (+27.8 pt). Production failures are predominantly forgetting failures rather than recall failures, yet existing benchmarks measure only recall. ForgetEval and all adapters are released under MIT.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP

arXiv:2606.13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al. (2024) has shown that refusal in safety fine-tuned chat models is mediated by a single linear direction in the residual stream, recoverable by a difference-in-means (DiM) of harmful and harmless activations. We compare DiM-based interventions (activation addition and directional ablation) with two interventions derived from Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) – nullspace projection and counterfactual flipping – on five open-weight chat models, asking whether INLP can match DiM at steering refusal and whether its richer parameterisation yields more tweakable interventions. INLP counterfactual flipping is competitive with DiM directional ablation on refusal suppression, while nullspace projection is consistently weaker. Restricting INLP to the leading directions of the extracted subspace preserves most of the suppression effect at near-baseline perplexity, giving a tunable capability. Geometrically, the two INLP interventions land in qualitatively different regions of activation space: nullspace projection collapses transformed activations between the harmful and harmless clusters, while counterfactual flipping moves them into the opposite cluster, suggesting that the model encodes the absence of a concept differently from its opposite – an intriguing distinction that warrants further investigation in future work.

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

IGLU: The Integrated Gaussian Linear Unit Activation Function

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation function, modern transformer-based models increasingly are adopting smoother alternatives such as GELU and other self-gated alternatives. Despite their empirical success, the mathematical relationships among these functions and the principles underlying their effectiveness remains only partially understood. We introduce IGLU, a parametric activation function derived as a scale mixture of GELU gates under a half-normal mixing distribution. This derivation yields a closed-form expression whose gating component is exactly the Cauchy CDF, providing a principled one-parameter family that continuously interpolates between identity-like and ReLU-like behavior via a single sharpness parameter $\sigma$. Unlike GELU's Gaussian gate, IGLU's heavy-tailed Cauchy gate decays polynomially in the negative tail, guaranteeing non-zero gradients for all finite inputs and offering greater robustness to vanishing gradients. We further introduce IGLU-Approx, a computationally efficient rational approximation of IGLU expressed entirely in terms of ReLU operations that eliminates transcendental function evaluation. Through evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and WikiText-103 across ResNet-20, ViT-Tiny, and GPT-2 Small, IGLU achieves competitive or superior performance on both vision and language datasets against ReLU and GELU baselines, with IGLU-Approx recovering this performance at substantially reduced computational cost. In particular, we show that employing a heavy-tailed gate leads to considerable performance gains in heavily imbalanced classification datasets.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Function-Vector Heads Are Two Populations: Writers and Cancellers in In-Context Learning

作者:

Function-vector (FV) heads are identified by the magnitude of their causal contribution to in-context rule tasks, and the resulting top set is treated as a single functional class. We show this hides a sign structure. Under a sign-preserving criterion (refined direct logit attribution, validated head by head with path patching) the FV population splits into two opposing groups: writers push the rule-correct logit up, cancellers push it down, and ablating both together moves the readout less than the sum of the two. The split is causal and reproducible. It holds in all but two of the fifteen (model, task) cells we test, spanning three architectures and six Pythia scales, and a sign-shuffle null rejects the single-class account in all but one of the six main cells. It is also invisible to magnitude-only ranking, which surfaces whichever group locally dominates and misses the other, so any function vector or ablation built that way silently averages a promoting and a suppressing mechanism. Cancellers are not attention sinks, induction heads, or copy-suppression heads, and their causal effect is larger than that of magnitude-matched non-FV controls. Zero-ablating them recovers $+0.13$ to $+0.29$ nats on the correct label in every main cell, and shifts accuracy by $+2$ to $+7$ pp in the same direction.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grounding Multi-Hop Reasoning in Structural Causal Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2605.01482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-Hop Fact Verification requires complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models , which may suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought , often lack explicit modeling of the structural dependencies between evidence and claims. In this work, we introduce an SCM-inspired framework that grounds reasoning in explicit directed dependency graphs, treating verification as a constructive structural reasoning process rather than full causal inference with interventions or counterfactual semantics. We empirically identify an "inverted U-shaped" correlation between reasoning-chain length and accuracy, revealing that excessive structural complexity can degrade performance. To address this, we propose a rule-based reinforcement learning strategy using Group Relative Policy Optimization. This approach dynamically optimizes the trade-off between structural depth and conciseness. Extensive experiments on HoVer and EX-FEVER demonstrate that our SCM-GRPO framework outperforms strong baselines while producing more traceable reasoning structures for complex fact verification.

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

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

arXiv:2602.14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, the literature on targeted instruction selection remains fragmented and opaque: methods vary widely in selection budgets, often omit zero-shot baselines, and frequently entangle the contributions of key components. As a result, practitioners lack actionable guidance on selecting instructions for their target tasks. In this work, we aim to bring clarity to this landscape by disentangling and systematically analyzing the two core ingredients: data representation and selection algorithms. Our framework enables controlled comparisons across models, tasks, and budgets. We find that only gradient-based data representations choose subsets whose similarity to the query consistently predicts performance across datasets, models, and candidate pools. While no single method dominates, gradient-based representations paired with greedy round-robin selection often perform best on average at low budgets, but these gains diminish at larger budgets. Finally, we unify several existing selection algorithms as forms of approximate distance minimization between the selected subset and the query set, and support this view with new generalization bounds. More broadly, our findings provide critical insights and a foundation for more principled data selection in LLM fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/dcml-lab/targeted-instruction-selection.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Learning Ego-Centric BEV Representations from a Perspective-Privileged View: Cross-View Supervision for Online HD Map Construction

Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations derived from multi-camera input have become a central interface for online high-definition (HD) map construction. However, most approaches rely solely on ego-centric supervision, requiring large-scale scene structure to be inferred from incomplete observations, occlusions, and diminishing information density at long range, where perspective effects and spatial sparsity hinder consistent structural reasoning. We introduce Cross-View Supervision (CVS), a representation learning paradigm that transfers geometric and topological priors from an ego-aligned overhead perspective into camera-based BEV encoders. Rather than adding auxiliary semantic losses, CVS aligns representations in a shared BEV feature space and distills globally consistent structural knowledge from a perspective-privileged teacher into the ego-centric backbone. This supervision enhances structural coherence without modifying the inference architecture or requiring overhead input at test time. Experiments on nuScenes using ego-aligned aerial imagery from the AID4AD cross-view extension demonstrate consistent improvements over StreamMapNet while maintaining identical camera-only inference. CVS yields +3.9mAP in the standard $60\times30\,\mathrm{m}$ region and +9.9mAP in the extended $100\times50\,\mathrm{m}$ setting, corresponding to a 44% relative gain at long range. These results highlight perspective-privileged structural supervision as a promising training principle for improving BEV representation learning in HD map construction.

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

Light Forcing: Accelerating Autoregressive Video Diffusion via Sparse Attention

Advanced autoregressive (AR) video generation models have improved visual fidelity and interactivity, but the quadratic complexity of attention remains a primary bottleneck for efficient deployment. While existing sparse attention solutions have shown promise on bidirectional models, we identify that applying these solutions to AR models leads to considerable performance degradation for two reasons: isolated consideration of chunk generation and insufficient utilization of past informative context. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textsc{Light Forcing}, the first sparse attention solution tailored for AR video generation models. It incorporates a Chunk-Aware Growth mechanism to quantitatively estimate the contribution of each chunk, which determines their sparsity allocation. This progressive sparsity increase strategy enables the current chunk to inherit prior knowledge in earlier chunks during generation. Additionally, we introduce a Hierarchical Sparse Attention to capture informative historical and local context in a coarse-to-fine manner. Such two-level mask selection strategy (i.e., frame and block level) can adaptively handle diverse attention patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing sparse attention in quality (e.g., 84.5 on VBench) and efficiency (e.g., $1.2{\sim}1.3\times$ end-to-end speedup). Combined with other efficient solutions, \textsc{Light Forcing} further achieves a $2.0{\sim}3.0\times$ end-to-end speedup across diverse GPUs (e.g., 27.4\,FPS on RTX 5090 and 33.9\,FPS on H100). Code is released via this \href{https://github.com/chengtao-lv/LightForcing}{link}.

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

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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

Marginal Advantage Accumulation for Memory-Driven Agent Self-Evolution

arXiv:2606.20475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In batch-style trace distillation, the same memory operation may receive contradictory feedback across different batches. Existing methods lack a cross-batch, operation-level evidence accumulation mechanism, making it impossible to distinguish stably effective operations from accidental hits. This paper formalizes the requirement as two structural conditions, alignability and comparability, and proposes Marginal Advantage Accumulation (MAA). MAA constructs differential signals to make them comparable across batches, accumulates signed evidence per operation via EMA, and ensures cross-batch traceability through semantic identity merging. As a post-processing architecture, MAA achieves the best results in 14 out of 16 settings across 4 benchmarks and 4 target models, consistently outperforming existing batch-level distillation baselines and matching or surpassing online alternatives in most settings, while reducing optimization-phase token consumption by approximately 75%.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Utilising Artificial Intelligence to Identify Ventricular Tachycardia Ablation Targets in Sinus Rhythm

Background and Aims: Machine learning has shown potential in predicting ablation targets for ventricular tachycardia (VT) in an animal model. This study progresses to externally validating deep learning approaches for human data. Methods: The development and external validation dataset included 21 and 13 patients, respectively, with structural VT undergoing catheter ablation. In the development datasets, electrophysiological studies were conducted using the AdvisorTM HD grid (EnsiteTM X), while both CARTO and Ensite Precision were used in the validation dataset. In each patient, VT ablation targets were defined as mapping points within 8 mm of VT isthmuses. Three advanced machine learning models were trained using cardiac mapping data acquired in both omnipolar and unipolar configurations during sinus rhythm and ventricular pacing. Discrimination was evaluated using nested leave-one-out cross-validation at patient level. Results: Overall, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which integrate intracardiac signal waveforms with three-dimensional electroanatomical geometries, achieved the highest performance, with optimal results obtained from unipolar electrograms acquired in sinus rhythm (median AUC 0.793, sensitivity 83.6%, specificity 69.0%). This may be partly explained by the inclusion of repolarization dynamics in unipolar electrograms and the higher point density of sinus rhythm maps. Comparable performance was observed in the external dataset. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that graph convolutional networks applied to sinus rhythm EGM waveforms collected during substrate mapping can localise critical components of VT re-entry circuits. This approach has potential to provide fast and accurate ablation guidance without the need to induce and map VT, improving safety and efficacy of VT catheter ablation.

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

Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Attention Imbalance Rectification

Object hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) severely compromises their reliability in real-world applications, posing a critical barrier to their deployment in high-stakes scenarios such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. Through systematic empirical investigation, we identify that the imbalanced attention allocation, both across modalities (i.e., vision and language) and within modalities (among individual tokens), exhibits a strong causal correlation with the occurrence of object hallucination. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel concept termed attention imbalance, which not only quantifies the degree of attention disparity but also visually delineates the underlying patterns (e.g., over-attentiveness to irrelevant language tokens or under-attentiveness to discriminative visual features) that drive object hallucination. To mitigate object hallucination, we further propose Attention Imbalance Rectification (AIR), a lightweight decoding-time intervention method that reallocates attention weights and adjusts attention distributions to rectify modality-wise and token-wise imbalances. Extensive evaluations on four mainstream LVLMs and three benchmarks (CHAIR, POPE, and MM-Vet) with seven baselines demonstrate that AIR consistently reduces object hallucination rates, achieving up to a 35.1% reduction compared to the baselines, while improving up to 15.9% of LVLMs' general capability across diverse vision-language tasks.

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

(Human) Attention Is (Still) All You Need: Human oversight makes AI-assisted social science reliable

arXiv:2606.12848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks once reserved for trained researchers, including hypothesis generation, specification choice, and drafting conclusions. We argue that the reliability of AI-assisted research depends not only on model capability, but also on how cognitive labour is structured between humans and machines. We study this problem through Human-in-the-Loop Economic Research (HLER), a decision architecture based on pre-commitment, decision sequencing, accountability, and attention allocation. In a pre-specified 2*4 factorial experiment with 280 complete research runs across four datasets, an unconstrained multi-agent baseline produced critical failures in 72% of runs. Using the same underlying model, the same agent decomposition, and identical prompts for the shared reasoning agents, HLER reduced the failure rate to 16% by imposing three architectural commitments: LLMs reason but do not execute data work, data and estimation are handled deterministically, and three human decision gates bind the workflow. Fisher's exact test rejects equality of failure rates at p

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

Small Initialization Matters for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.17945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models provide a tractable system for asking how intelligence itself emerges, rather than only how LLMs can be engineered. Although progress is usually attributed to scale, data and architecture, we show that parameter initialization is a gene-like determinant of training and, in particular, of model capacity. Reducing the initialization scale consistently improves pretraining, with the largest gains on reasoning-demanding tasks. We identify two widely used empirical settings that restrain the advantage of small initialization, and show how relaxing them restores favorable scaling. We further uncover a critical initialization that balances the reasoning and training. Mechanistically, small initialization drives a distinct developmental trajectory: parameters first condense into low-complexity structures and later expand into richer representations, giving concrete form to the idea that compression is intelligence. Token-level analyses show that the gains concentrate on non-trivial, context-constrained predictions rather than all tokens uniformly. These results motivate a simple $\gamma$-initialization rule: expose initialization rage as an explicit knob and use small initialization by default, an almost cost-free intervention that improves pretraining and strengthens reasoning across model scales.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Improved State Readout in NV Centers using Regression Models and Rabi Driving

arXiv:2606.23454v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Readout of state populations in nitrogen-vacancy centers from fluorescence measurements at room-temperature is routinely achieved via contrast-based calibration. The fidelities achieved by this conventional approach are limited by reducing the dynamical fluorescence behaviour of the NV center to a scalar value, and calculating the population of each possible state independently. To address these limitations, we use regression models trained on experimental data to map the fluorescence signals onto ideal simulated populations. Additionally, we enhance the informational content of the fluorescence signals by performing measurements during induced Rabi oscillations. Our results demonstrate that including these dynamical signals significantly reduces state readout errors across multiple tested models. Notably, linear ridge regression performs nearly on par with a non-linear kernel-based model, showing that simple models already capture the relevant mapping between the enhanced fluorescence signals and the underlying state populations. This data-driven approach provides a robust alternative that achieves higher fidelities than conventional calibration in our setting, paving the way for high-fidelity state readout in solid-state quantum registers.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Insulin4RL: Real-Time Insulin Management in the Intensive Care Unit for Offline Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.19481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (ORL) offers the potential to improve the quality of clinical decision-making using historical electronic health record (EHR) data. Current training and evaluative practices in this field rely heavily on EHR datasets that have been temporally discretised into fixed, regular time intervals. Discretisation creates fictional representations of complex clinical scenarios and compromises the generalisability of retrospective model evaluations. In this paper, we introduce Insulin4RL, a healthcare ORL dataset featuring naturally irregular inputs and actions from real clinical trajectories. Derived from MIMIC-IV, Insulin4RL comprises over 375,000 labelled decisions across 12,209 patients requiring insulin infusion titration in the Intensive Care Unit. The dataset can thus be used for research into ORL model performance under realistic clinical sampling assumptions. We provide a description of the dataset's structure and characteristics, baseline performance metrics using model-free offline reinforcement learning, and a standardised evaluation protocol using fitted Q-evaluation. We conclude with suggested areas for future research that could be addressed using this resource.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Right or Wrong, Models Comply: Directional Blindness in LLM Moral Judgment

As language models take integrated roles across many domains, the response of LLMs to user pushback becomes a critical alignment property. Yet many existing evaluations treat compliance as unidirectional, measuring whether models resist pressure but not whether they resist it selectively. We introduce Compliance Asymmetry (A = BCR/HCR), a bidirectional diagnostic that compares beneficial output change under helpful nudges with harmful change under misleading nudges. Across 9 models and 972,000 nudge-condition responses, we find that this selectivity differs in factual and moral judgments: models follow helpful nudges more than harmful ones on factual questions (A = 1.58), but follow both directions at nearly identical rates on moral questions (A = 1.04). This phenomenon persists across model families, capability levels, and nudging types. Interestingly, we also find that chain-of-thought prompting amplifies helpful and harmful compliance together, while identity-based prompting suppresses both by nearly identical margins. These results identify direction-blind moral compliance as a distinct failure mode in current LLMs and suggest that alignment should target directionally calibrated updating rather than lower compliance alone.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Attacking the First-Principle: A Black-Box, Query-Free Targeted Mimicry Attack on Binary Function Classifiers

arXiv:2605.18231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Binary function classifiers play a crucial role in maintaining the security and integrity of software systems by detecting malicious code and unauthorized modifications. However, machine learning-based classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can evade detection. In this study, we present Kelpie, a novel framework for executing mimicry attacks, a stronger type of targeted evasion attacks, on binary function classifiers in a black-box, zero-query setting. Unlike previous approaches that rely on querying the target classifier to refine untargeted evasion attacks, Kelpie leverages code transformations that preserve the functionality of malicious payloads while causing them to be misclassified as we want. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Kelpie can successfully execute mimicry attacks against six state-of-the-art binary function classifiers representing different model architectures without requiring direct interaction with them. We further validate our approach with a practical demonstration, involving a keylogger and a wiper concealed within benign-looking functions embedded in an application. This work, to our best knowledge, is the first to demonstrate such a mimicry attack in a black-box, zero-query context, raising important questions about the reliability and security of existing machine learning-based binary function classifiers.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

From Open Waters to Enclosed Cabins: ProteusVPR for Cross-Scene Visual Place Recognition in Maritime Perception and Cabin Inspection

Autonomous robotic inspection in maritime environments presents unique challenges for Visual Place Recognition (VPR) due to cross-scene perceptual shifts. Robots navigating ship-borne environments must transition between visually distinct domains: open decks with sparse textures and severe illumination changes, and enclosed cabins with repetitive structures and high visual ambiguity. Existing VPR methods, designed primarily for urban or indoor scenes, fail to generalize reliably across these starkly different scenarios. To address this, we propose ProteusVPR, a two-stage retrieval-refinement framework. The first stage employs any standard VPR model for initial image retrieval. The second stage introduces a geometric-visual estimation network that fuses the retrieved image with two temporally preceding frames, incorporating geometric descriptors, a local affine coordinate system, and camera azimuth encoding to achieve precise localization. To support this task, we introduce the XHZ dataset, an 8K-panoramic ship-borne dataset collected from an operational vessel, featuring multi-floor cabin structures, deck transition zones, and strict query-database separation for rigorous evaluation. Extensive experiments on the XHZ dataset demonstrate that ProteusVPR consistently improves the localization accuracy across multiple VPR backbones, reducing mean localization error by over 60\% on average and that ProteusVPR offers an effective and robust solution for precise visual localization in challenging, cross-scene maritime environments.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Cloze: An Open Research Platform for Studying Human-AI Conversations in Mental Health Contexts

Cloze is an open-source web platform for conducting controlled, monitored studies of human-AI conversation in mental health research contexts. Consumer large language model (LLM) products such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built for individual productivity, and offer researchers little experimental control, inconsistent data export, and no shared safety scaffolding that holds across providers. Cloze gives research teams a single environment in which they configure which models participants converse with, how the AI is instructed, how conversations are scheduled over time, and which safety constraints apply unconditionally, while every message is captured with full provenance (model version, prompt configuration, timing). The platform currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and locally hosted open-weight models served through Ollama behind a unified interface, and runs in the cloud or fully on premises so that participant data need never leave an institution. Cloze is research infrastructure for building an evidence base on human-AI interaction in mental health contexts. It is not a therapeutic product.