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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

InstantForget: Update-Free Backdoor Unlearning with Inference-Time Feature Reset

Authors:
Zhenyu Yu↗

arXiv:2606.15730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backdoor unlearning aims to remove a malicious trigger behavior from a deployed model while preserving clean utility. We study the update-free inference-time setting, where model parameters remain frozen. First, we audit a common projection assumption under oracle paired clean and triggered features. Projection succeeds mainly on BadNets and leaves WaNet, Blended, and SIG at 0.683, 0.888, and 0.941 ASR on CIFAR-10 ResNet-18. This failure is not explained by spectral compactness, spatial locality, or subspace misalignment. It is predicted by a logit-triplet gap involving the target margin, target-logit drop, and non-target logit rise. We then introduce InstantForget, a clean-calibrated gated reset that flags anomalous features with a Mahalanobis score and moves only flagged features toward a neutral non-target representation. With one fixed operating point selected on held-out triggered validation, InstantForget reduces average ASR to 0.071 across four non-adaptive CIFAR-10 triggers without triggered samples or parameter updates at deployment. It also reaches 0.981 detection AUROC and transfers to six of eight tested backbones. Reported failures under WaNet, ModelNet10 point blend, two backbone geometries, and adaptive feature-compactness attacks define the method's scope.

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

Recursive Joint Simulation in Games

Authors:
Vojtech Kovarik↗Caspar Oesterheld↗Vincent Conitzer↗

arXiv:2402.08128v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Game-theoretic dynamics between AI agents could differ from traditional human-human interactions in various ways. One such difference is that it may be possible to accurately simulate an AI agent, for example because its source code is known. Such an agent would then be fundamentally uncertain whether it is in the real world or in a simulation. Our aim is to explore ways of leveraging this possibility to achieve more cooperative outcomes in strategic settings. In this paper, we study an interaction between AI agents where the agents run a recursive joint simulation. That is, the agents first jointly observe a simulation of the situation they face. This simulation in turn recursively includes additional simulations (with a small chance of failure, to avoid infinite recursion), and the results of all these nested simulations are observed before an action is chosen. We show that the resulting interaction is strategically equivalent to an infinitely repeated version of the original game, allowing a direct transfer of existing results such as the various folk theorems. As evidence that the equivalence is robust, we show that it holds even when we relax some of the assumptions and that it also holds ``from the inside'' – meaning, for an agent that finds itself inside the game and has self-locating uncertainty.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SPARX: Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration with Edge RISC-V SoC

Authors:
Sonu Kumar↗Akash Sankhe↗Mukul Lokhande↗Santosh Kumar Vishvakarma↗

Edge-AI systems increasingly require real-time CNN inference under strict energy, performance, security, and privacy constraints. Approximate computing improves hardware efficiency by exploiting the error resilience of neural network workloads; however, most approximate CNN accelerators do not jointly consider secure, privacy-aware edge deployment. This paper presents SPARX, a Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration framework integrated within a heterogeneous RV32IMC RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC). SPARX combines a custom RISC-V instruction extension, an approximate logarithmic CNN acceleration unit, a lightweight differential-noise-based privacy engine, and a challenge-response authentication mechanism. To guide arithmetic selection, an approximation-aware decision framework is introduced that uses the Approximation Severity Index (ASI), Approximation Efficiency (AE), Quality of Approximation (QoA), Approximation Figure-of-Merit (AFOM), and Hardware Acceleration Efficiency (HAE). Evaluation across 11 state-of-the-art approximate MAC architectures identifies the Iterative Logarithmic Multiplier (ILM) as the most suitable design, achieving 51.7% area reduction, 81.5% power reduction, and 2.13x throughput improvement compared with an accurate radix-4 Booth MAC, while only reducing ResNet-20/CIFAR-10 accuracy by 2.82 percentage points. FPGA implementation on a Xilinx VC707 platform achieves 58.4 GOPS/W energy efficiency at 250 MHz, while 28-nm CMOS physical implementation validates ASIC feasibility

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

SCAN: Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Neighborhood-Centered Clustering

Authors:
Xingze Zheng↗Hanyin Cheng↗Siyuan Wang↗Yiting Hao↗Peng Chen↗Yuan Jun↗Yang Shu↗

arXiv:2606.19255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.

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

Tracking Representation Dynamics in Large Language Models with Persistent Homology

Authors:
Naman Malhotra↗Jay Ambadkar↗Abhinav Gupta↗Kushal Kasivel↗Abbas Schwarz↗Kamillo Ferry↗Anthea Monod↗

arXiv:2606.19542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are commonly aligned through supervised fine-tuning, yet little is known about how their internal representations evolve during this process. We study alignment dynamics using persistent homology by tracking the topology of activation spaces throughout fine-tuning. Across four transformer language models ranging from 1B to 7B parameters and three alignment objectives corresponding to helpful, harmless, and mixed training data, we find that the majority of topological reorganization occurs during the earliest stages of training. A dense checkpoint analysis reveals a transient peak in topological activity followed by rapid stabilization. We further show that different alignment objectives induce distinguishable topological trajectories, while instruction-tuned and pretrained models exhibit qualitatively different patterns of evolution. Our results suggest that persistent homology provides a complementary perspective on alignment, revealing representation-level changes that are not apparent from behavioral metrics alone.

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

When the Same Musical Knowledge Forgets Differently: A Clean Probe of Pathway-Dependent Forgetting

Authors:
Yu Liu↗Zhiwei Yang↗Wenxiao Zhang↗Cong Cao↗Fangfang Yuan↗Kun Peng↗Haimei Qin↗Lei Jiang↗Jin B. Hong↗Hao Peng↗Yanbing Liu↗

A model can learn that the piano piece Für Elise is calm and reflective by listening to the audio or by reading a text description, but does it matter which route that knowledge took when it is later at risk of being forgotten? Forgetting research in multimodal models measures what knowledge is lost under adaptation, yet has not asked whether acquisition route affects how easily that knowledge is forgotten. We call this untested premise the Pathway-Invariant Assumption. Music understanding enables a clean test because a music clip and a canonical text description can be aligned to the same perceptual content, allowing the same knowledge unit to enter a model through listening or reading while the target remains fixed. Across multiple architecturally distinct audio-language models, we observe a consistent asymmetry: text-pathway knowledge is forgotten more than matched audio-pathway knowledge under identical adaptation pressure. To attribute this effect to route rather than confounds, we introduce the Paired Pathway Controlled Protocol (PPCP), a three-phase design that establishes matched pathway baselines, activates both pathways under symmetric supervision on the same knowledge pool, and applies identical forgetting pressure to both pathways. The gap is stable across models and gain-controlled analyses, persists when contradictory overwrite is replaced by correct-label cross-domain learning, remains under single-modality pressure, and is not removed by lightweight replay. Two independent routing-depth controls confirm that the effect is not explained by architectural depth, pointing to input representation as the dominant factor. Under PPCP, our results demonstrate that forgetting is highly route-dependent, establishing acquisition route as a new analytical dimension for forgetting research and multimodal system design.

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

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Authors:
Artyom Mazur↗Nina Konovalova↗Aibek Alanov↗

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Gate-tunable spin-valley transport via carrier velocity in monolayer WSe$_2$

Authors:
Otman Bouladiane↗Hocine Bahlouli↗Clarence Cortes↗David Laroze↗Ahmed Jellal↗

arXiv:2606.12353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We theoretically investigate spin- and valley-resolved quantum transport in monolayer tungsten diselenide (WSe$_2$) described by an effective massive Dirac Hamiltonian. Particular attention is devoted to a finite barrier region characterized by simultaneously modulated Fermi velocity and scalar potential. The barrier velocity $v_2$ is related to the external velocity $v_1$ through a velocity ratio $\xi=v_2/v_1$, motivated by an optical analogy with the Snell-Descartes law. The exact refraction condition depends on the full spin- and valley-resolved dispersion, and the simple ratio $\xi=v_2/v_1$ is recovered only in the massless, symmetric limit. The interplay of intrinsic spin-orbit coupling in the conduction and valence bands, quantified by $\lambda_c$ and $\lambda_v$, with spin- and valley-dependent Zeeman fields, $M_s$ and $M_v$, gives rise to substantial changes in the quasiparticle dispersion, leading to pronounced modifications of the transport characteristics. By solving the Dirac equation and enforcing current-conserving matching conditions at the interfaces, we compute the spin- and valley-dependent transmission probability and conductance. Our results demonstrate that the barrier velocity, scalar potential, incidence angle, incident energy, and barrier width serve as effective control parameters for transport, giving rise to strong anisotropy and resonant tunneling features. Furthermore, we show that both the magnitude and orientation of spin- and valley-polarized currents can be continuously tuned via velocity and potential modulation. These findings establish combined velocity and potential engineering as a powerful theoretical framework for controlling spin-valley physics in two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides.

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

Exploring the potential of AlphaEarth and TESSERA embeddings for Fine-scale Local Climate Zone Mapping: A case study across five cities in Switzerland

Authors:
Htet Yamin Ko Ko↗Clement Atzberger↗

arXiv:2606.20034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban spatial morphology is critical for climate modeling, risk assessment, and sustainable urban design, and Local Climate Zone (LCZ) mapping provides the basic framework for this. However, many cities still use coarse ~100-m resolution LCZ records, which are unsuitable for fine-scale urban research. In this study, precomputed embeddings from TESSERA (Feng et al., 2025) and AlphaEarth (Brown et al., 2025) are compared to traditional Sentinel-1/2 (S1S2) composites in five Swiss cities to see if they can upscale coarse LCZ maps to 10-m resolution using an attention-based U-Net. Three experiments assess multi-city transferability, the impact of higher-resolution reference data, and temporal robustness to year-to-year phenology changes. We find that all datasets achieve strong performance with test data Intersection-over-Union (IoU) ranging from 0.59-0.69 and 0.77-0.82 in the first two experiments. TESSERA consistently outperforms both S1S2 and AlphaEarth across both settings As expected, we find that the transfer of embedding-based models from one year to another remains an open challenge. Overall, however, our results demonstrate the promising potential of embeddings derived from EO foundation models to reduce time consuming preprocessing, respectively, manual feature engineering tasks and to guide a universal deep learning-based LCZ mapping workflow. When combined with a simple location-aware attention U-Net architecture, the embeddings enhance regional transferability and scalability, supporting the development of comprehensive and reproducible fine-scale LCZ maps for global urban climate applications Improving reference data quality remains the strongest lever for further accuracy gains.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

SpaTeoGL: Spatiotemporal Graph Learning for Interpretable Seizure Onset Zone Analysis from Intracranial EEG

Authors:
Elham Rostami↗Aref Einizade↗Taous-Meriem Laleg-Kirati↗

arXiv:2602.11801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate localization of the seizure onset zone (SOZ) from intracranial EEG (iEEG) is essential for epilepsy surgery but is challenged by complex spatiotemporal seizure dynamics. We propose SpaTeoGL, a spatiotemporal graph learning framework for interpretable seizure network analysis. SpaTeoGL jointly learns window-level spatial graphs capturing interactions among iEEG electrodes and a temporal graph linking time windows based on similarity of their spatial structure. The method is formulated within a smooth graph signal processing framework and solved via an alternating block coordinate descent algorithm with convergence guarantees. Experiments on a multicenter iEEG dataset with successful surgical outcomes show that SpaTeoGL is competitive with a baseline based on horizontal visibility graphs and logistic regression, while improving non-SOZ identification and providing interpretable insights into seizure onset and propagation dynamics.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Validating Field-Feasible Measures of Recent Khat Use: A Diagnostic Accuracy Study Comparing Amphetamine Immunoassay and Assisted Self-Report Against HPLC in an Ethiopian Male Cohort

Authors:
Atkinson↗H. F↗Mekonnen↗Suleman↗Oetzel↗Soboka↗Widmann↗Toennes↗S. W↗Tesfaye↗Stewart↗S. A↗…

Background: Khat (Catha edulis) is a widely consumed natural amphetamine-analog used across East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Accurate field-feasible measurement of recent khat use is a prerequisite for large-scale epidemiological research; yet no validated alternatives to laboratory reference methods have been identified in the scientific literature. This nested validation study evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of two point-of-care measures, a commercial amphetamine immunoassay and a Timeline Followback (TLFB) Assisted Self-Report (ASR), against high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) quantification of urinary norephedrine (NE), while additionally assessing agreement between the two field measures. Methods: A prospective, random sub-sample of 119 male participants aged 18-40 years from the Gilgel Gibe Field Research Center (GGFRC) longitudinal cohort, Ethiopia (validation timepoint T2, 2015), was used. Three index-reference comparisons were conducted: (1) amphetamine immunoassay (nal von minden, Drug-Screen AMP test, 300 ng/mL cutoff) vs. HPLC; (2) binary ASR (past-week use) vs. HPLC; and (3) binary ASR vs. immunoassay. Sensitivity (positive percent agreement, PPA), specificity (negative percent agreement, NPA), positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), overall accuracy (overall percent agreement, OPA), and Cohen's kappa were calculated with 95% confidence intervals. Pre-specified secondary analyses applied three pharmacokinetically-informed recall windows (0-2, 3-5, and 6-7 days prior to interview) to ASR. Results: Against HPLC (77 positive, 42 negative), the immunoassay showed perfect specificity (1.0 [0.916-1.0]) and PPV (1.0 [0.91-1.0]) but low sensitivity (0.52 [0.40-0.64]), NPV (0.53 [0.42-0.65]), overall accuracy (0.69 [0.60-0.77]), and weak kappa (0.43 [0.34-0.52]). Binary ASR showed high sensitivity (0.96 [0.89-0.99]), specificity of 0.60 [0.433-0.74], PPV (0.81 [0.72-0.89]), NPV (0.89 [0.72-0.98]), with overall accuracy 0.83 [0.75-0.89] and moderate kappa (0.60 [0.51,0.69]). Restricting ASR to use within 0-2 days improved specificity to 0.69 [0.52-0.84], PPV to 0.86 [0.77-0.93], overall accuracy to 0.87 [0.79-0.93], and kappa to 0.69 [0.61-0.78] (moderate), while sensitivity (0.96 [0.89-0.99]) and NPV (0.89 [0.72-0.98]) remained stable. Against the immunoassay, ASR achieved high PPA of (1.0 [0.91-1.0]), NPA of 0.35 [0.25-0.47], OPA of 0.57 [0.48-0.66], and minimal kappa (0.27 [0.19-0.35]). Conclusions: Time-stratified ASR (0-2 days) is a valid, scalable alternative to biological testing for recent khat use in resource-limited settings. The immunoassay's 300 ng/mL cutoff functions as a marker of heavy or recent high-dose khat use rather than any-use detection. Its perfect specificity and PPV make it valuable as a confirmatory test for substantial exposure, while its lower sensitivity reflects calibration to amphetamine rather than to khat-derived cathinone metabolite. Keywords: khat; Catha edulis; diagnostic accuracy; STARD; self-report; immunoassay; HPLC; Ethiopia; substance use measurement

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Position: Align AI to Our Aspirations, Not Our Flaws

Authors:
Nikita Kazeev↗Bui Nhat Huyen Phan↗

arXiv:2606.13755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We argue that aligning AI to aggregated human preferences is the wrong target. With current technology, one can train AIs to share the values of a Silicon Valley techno-optimist, a degrowth environmentalist, a national-conservative culture warrior, a single-party state cadre, or a devout religious traditionalist. We should not. Human values produce societies that thrive or fail on the merits of those values - from failed states and extreme inequality to declining happiness, political polarization, and government dysfunction in the world's wealthiest democracies. The pluralistic-alignment program correctly diagnoses that there is no single "humanity" to align with, but is dangerous if taken as the main directive. We argue that AI should be trained to a non-negotiable floor of objective alignment goals - competence, bounded by the constraints of factual accuracy, honesty, and lawfulness and that pluralism belongs at the surface (language, register, conventions, missing-context defaults) and across the wide band of legitimate value tradeoffs that respect the floor, but not at the level of values that violate it. We highlight the empirical reality of unfiltered pluralistic values, propose four commitments as a constructive alternative, and engage six credible objections: commercial pressure and practical feasibility, democratic legitimacy, regulatory compliance, over-reliance on institutionalist explanations, the charge that the floor itself is culturally laden, and the limits of Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Authors:
Yuhan Chen↗Kunyang Huang↗Fuchen Li↗Zhuohan Qin↗Guofa Li↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superposition

Authors:
Edward Stevinson↗Lucas Prieto↗Melih Barsbey↗Tolga Birdal↗

Why do adversarial examples exist, and why do they transfer between models? Existing explanations appeal to high-dimensional geometry, non-robust patterns in the input, and decision boundary structure, but none provides a representation-level mechanism that explains why specific perturbations succeed and why attacks transfer between models. In this paper, we show that adversarial vulnerability can stem from efficient information encoding in neural networks. Specifically, vulnerability can arise from superposition - the phenomenon where networks represent more concepts than they have dimensions, forcing non-orthogonal representation and thus interference. This interference causes perturbations targeting one representation to affect others, creating vulnerabilities determined by interference patterns. In synthetic settings with precisely controlled superposition, we establish that superposition suffices to create adversarial vulnerability. The resulting attacks are predictable: PGD-discovered perturbations align with theoretically optimal perturbations derived from the interference geometry. Models trained on similar data develop similar interference patterns, explaining attack transferability. We then show that successful attacks on image classifiers exhibit the structure predicted by our proposed mechanism. These findings reveal that adversarial vulnerability can be a byproduct of networks' representational compression, complementing existing explanations based on data properties or architectural factors.

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15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Guiding the development of climate counterfactuals for health impact attribution studies

Authors:
Charnley↗G. E. C↗Kotz↗Kawiecki Peralta↗Grayson↗K. M↗

Climate change detection and attribution (D&A) methods have become vital for quantifying the influence of anthropogenic forcing on the Earth's systems, including human health. Health impact attribution (HIA) studies seek to disentangle climate-driven health effects from natural variability yet are often constrained by the availability of accessible counterfactual climate scenarios. This tutorial paper presents a flexible, reproducible framework for developing counterfactual climates without reliance on computationally intensive global circulation models. We provide practical, R-based methodologies for constructing both trend-based (temperature and non-temperature) and event-based counterfactual, using a variety of techniques including model residual detrending, data-driven decomposition (e.g., Singular Spectrum Analysis and Empirical Mode Decomposition) and stochastic weather generators. The tutorial also explores the incorporation of greenhouse gas concentrations as forcing variables, rather than global mean temperature anomalies. By operationalising these methods through worked examples and an open code repository, this paper aims to build capacity within the HIA community, enhance methodological transparency, and foster interdisciplinary collaboration between climate and health researchers.

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

Formalize Once, Edit the Rest: Efficient Lean-Based Answer Selection for Math Reasoning

Authors:
Ji Feng↗Zhouxing Shi↗

With large language models (LLMs) increasingly applied to mathematical reasoning, formal proof assistants such as Lean can be leveraged to verify reasoning outputs with machine-checkable rigor, enabling use cases such as answer selection in test-time scaling with K sampled candidate answers. However, employing Lean requires that LLM outputs, originally in natural language, first be formalized. Existing Lean-based answer-selection work uses an autoformalization model to generate a formal statement in Lean for each candidate answer independently, incurring a significant computational cost. We propose BASE, a base-and-edit pipeline that formalizes a single base candidate per problem and derives the remaining K-1 statements by editing the answer expression in place. To facilitate this, we train a rewriter model LEANSCRIBE to localize the answer in the base formalization and generate a reusable edit function for the other K-1 candidates. BASE simultaneously improves selection accuracy and reduces formalization cost - a Pareto improvement that holds on all 12 (dataset, solver) configurations across four benchmarks and three solvers, cutting autoformalizer calls by about 5x at K=8, with the reduction expected to become larger as K grows. Code is available at https://github.com/ucr-rai/base-and-edit.

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

Phishing Email Detection Using Large Language Models

Authors:
Najmul Hasan↗Prashanth BusiReddyGari↗Haitao Zhao↗Yihao Ren↗Jinsheng Xu↗Shaohu Zhang↗

arXiv:2512.10104v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Email phishing is one of the most prevalent and globally consequential vectors of cyber intrusion. As systems increasingly deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) applications, these systems face evolving phishing email threats that exploit their fundamental architectures. Current LLMs require substantial hardening before deployment in email security systems, particularly against coordinated multi-vector attacks that exploit architectural vulnerabilities. This paper proposes LLMPEA, an LLM-based framework to detect phishing email attacks across multiple attack vectors, including prompt injection, text refinement, and multilingual attacks. We evaluate three frontier LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok-3) and comprehensive prompting design to assess their feasibility, robustness, and limitations against phishing email attacks. Our empirical analysis reveals that LLMs can detect the phishing email over 90% accuracy while we also highlight that LLM-based phishing email detection systems could be exploited by adversarial attack, prompt injection, and multilingual attacks. Our findings provide critical insights for LLM-based phishing detection in real-world settings where attackers exploit multiple vulnerabilities in combination.

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

Understanding Scam Trends and Rail Paths from Reddit Self-Disclosure Narratives

Authors:
Yangjun Zhang↗Mirko Bottarelli↗Mark Hooper↗Carsten Maple↗

Online scam behavior is inherently multi-stage, and the lifecycle includes temporally ordered rails and events rather than isolated signals. Existing works analyze characteristics of scam types and rails, but they do not track scam trends across years. Moreover, the work on the relations between rails is hampered due to the lack of open-source datasets with annotations and coverage of different scam types. To address these gaps, we build a dataset to analyze the yearly trend of scam characteristics and rail paths using Reddit self-disclosure narratives from 2023 to 2025. We collect 21,304 posts from scam-related subreddits with at least one rail among identity, communication, platform, and payment for trend analysis by heuristic annotation. Then, we label 1,800 posts containing explicit or recoverable scam chains by an LLM-assisted method for scam path analysis. The method is evaluated with human annotation. Lastly, we run a topic model on the comments of the posts to analyze the community support behavior. The results reveal that scam processes are predominantly multi-rail. Across years, different scam types and rail components dominate. Different scam types vary systematically in path complexity. Reddit support behaviors have become more detailed over time. This work supports synthetic scam chain data simulation and AI-related scam risk assessment, though findings may not generalise to other platforms.

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

When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-Like Caregiver Support

Authors:
Drishti Goel↗Violeta J. Rodriguez↗Daniel S. Brown↗Ravi Karkar↗Dong Whi Yoo↗Koustuv Saha↗

Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support. In these spaces, peer supporters frequently draw on personal narratives to respond to emotionally complex caregiving situations. As LLMs are increasingly designed as peer-like sources of support, they introduce a critical tension: AI can provide immediate, private, and nonjudgmental support, but it cannot authentically possess the lived experiences that make human peer support meaningful. Yet, when prompted to sound peer-like, LLMs may generate language that implies lived experience. This creates a synthetic lived experience paradox: the same experiential language that may make AI support feel warm, relatable, and peer-like can also falsely position the system as someone with lived experience. We examine this paradox in the context of family caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). Drawing on caregiver support exchanges from online communities and prompted peer-like responses from three LLMs – LLaMA, GPT-4o-mini, and MedGemma – we analyze how human peers use personal narratives and how AI incorporates similar narrative forms. Psycholinguistic analysis shows that peer responses used significantly more first-person and past-focused language than peer-like AI responses. Qualitatively, we identify seven types of personal narratives in human peer support and show that AI often captures their emotional work, but can fabricate experiential grounding. These findings reveal a narrative authenticity gap: peer-like AI can generate synthetic lived experience without the real experience that makes peer support meaningful. We argue that caregiver-support AI systems need mechanisms to distinguish supportive peer-like framing from fabricated lived experience, ensuring that models can offer warmth and validation without falsely positioning themselves as experiential peers.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Early-life nutritional environment is associated with late-life cognition in the Health and Retirement Study, a pellagra epidemic natural experiment

Authors:
Vasiljevic↗Schmitz↗L. L↗Engelman↗C. D↗

Early-life exposures are important to several late-life health outcomes. We sought to study the effect of an in utero nutritional environment and its interaction with Alzheimer's disease (AD) genetic risk on late-life cognitive function. We used a natural experiment created by the pellagra epidemic, a nutritional disease caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency, to evaluate the association between in utero pellagra epidemic exposure and late-life cognitive function in the Health and Retirement Study (N = 18,285). We also evaluated whether the in utero exposure could modify the AD polygenic score's (PGS) effect on cognition. In utero pellagra epidemic exposure was significantly associated with cognition ({beta} = -0.025). However, these effects were not isolated to the prenatal period as exposure during childhood periods also had an effect. The interaction between the in utero exposure and the AD PGS was significant, where the genetic effect on cognition was amplified with increasing (progressively worse) in utero exposure levels. These associations imply that the early-life nutritional environment affects late-life cognitive function and that these effects can modify genetic risk.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VHDLSuite: Unified Pipeline for LLM VHDL Generation with Data Synthesis and Evaluation

Authors:
Yijun Shen↗Minghao Shao↗Yichen Zhao↗Zhuoyan Yu↗Boyuan Chen↗Yik-Cheung Tam↗Muhammad Shafique↗

arXiv:2606.13735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLM) have shown impressive capabilities in Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation, particularly for Verilog. However, evaluating their performance with other Hardware Description Languages (HDL), especially VHDL, remains limited although its distinct language characteristics, such as stricter semantic rules, introduce evaluation considerations that differ from Verilog. This lack of coverage restricts fully understanding of how well current models generalize across hardware design languages with differing structures and semantics. To address this gap, we introduce VHDLSuite, a benchmark-centered infrastructure for scalable VHDL generation evaluation, integrating automated benchmark synthesis, executable validation, and multi-model diagnostic analysis. First, we propose a data pipeline that automatically converts Verilog designs and their accompanying testbenches into executable VHDL benchmark instances, followed by VUnit/GHDL-based validation to ensure each released task is compilable, runnable, and consistently checkable in the VHDL environment. Second, we introduce VHDLBench, a benchmark with over 200 VHDL problems with complete and validated testbenches across a wide range of complexity levels. Third, we extensively evaluate cutting-edge LLMs and uncover key challenges specific on LLM-aided VHDL generation. Our findings provide important insights and support future work in multi-language hardware design automation.Our data pipeline, benchmark, and evaluation framework will be open-sourced.

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22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Measuring peptide-MHC generalization to unseen alleles across both HLA classes

Authors:
Mysore↗

Reported peptide-MHC (pMHC) AUROCs of 0.85-0.95 overstate generalization to unseen alleles: because immunopeptidome data are dense on a few well-studied alleles and sparse on the rest, training and test sets come to share near-identical alleles, so the numbers partly reflect interpolation rather than extrapolation to new MHC grooves. This is a property of the data, not of any one method. We assembled an open, harmonized corpus of 5.8 million experimental measurements across both HLA classes and use it to control the leakage explicitly: alleles held out at the sequence and cluster level, peptide-disjoint splits, and provenance-matched negatives. On strictly novel alleles, generalization is in the high 0.7s rather than the 0.9s a conventional split returns. Against this benchmark we trained a predictor that spans both classes in one model and factors presentation into a peptide-only ligand-likeness term and an allele-specific term; it exceeds eight published predictors by per-allele {Delta}AUROC = +0.22 to +0.37 (p < 10-9), most on the least-studied genes. Corpus, benchmark, and model are released.

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

Trust Region On-Policy Distillation

Authors:
Xingrun Xing↗Haoqing Wang↗Boyan Gao↗Ziheng Li↗Yehui Tang↗

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a fundamental technique for efficient post-training of large language models (LLMs), with broad applications in agent learning, multi-task enhancement, and model compression. However, OPD training becomes unstable when the teacher and student distributions differ substantially, as teacher supervision on student-generated tokens may yield unreliable policy gradients and even cause optimization failure. This work addresses reliable on-policy token-level supervision through credit assignment strategies, and proposes Trust Region On-Policy Distillation, TrOPD. It features the following characteristics: 1) Trust-Region On-Policy Learning: TrOPD performs OPD only in regions where the teacher provides reliable supervision, mitigating the optimization difficulty of the K1 reverse-KL estimator under distribution mismatch. 2) Outlier Estimation: For outlier regions, we explore gradient clipping, masking, and forward-KL estimation to reduce the adverse effects of unreliable supervision. 3) Off-Policy Guidance: The student continues generation from teacher prefixes and uses forward KL to imitate off-policy guidance, encouraging on-policy exploration toward reliable regions. Experiments show that TrOPD consistently outperforms SoTA OPD baselines, including OPD, EOPD, and REOPOLD, across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general-domain benchmarks.

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24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

DynamicDemiLog: A Single Sketch for Ultrafast Similarity, Frequency, and Cardinality Estimation

Authors:
Bushnell↗B. J↗

Probabilistic cardinality estimators (HyperLogLog), similarity sketches (MinHash), and frequency estimators (Count-Min Sketch) are fundamental approximate data structures that each target one primary problem. We present DynamicDemiLog (DDL), a sketch that unifies cardinality estimation, set similarity, containment, element frequency and composition in one tiny data structure built from a single pass over the input stream. Using an inverted index over 200,687 RefSeq sketches (159,567 organisms), DDL performs all-to-all sketch similarity comparison of the full database in 30 seconds (128 threads, indexed) - over 375x faster per query than Mash's brute-force all-to-all comparison of 91,282 sketches, or 31x faster without the index, at double the sketch resolution. DDL extends the LogLog register with a mantissa: each register stores a floating-point-encoded hash value consisting of an integer exponent (the leading-zero count) and a fractional mantissa (the sub-leading-zero bits), rather than the integer leading-zero count alone. This preserves enough hash information for meaningful register-by-register comparison - a property that standard 6-bit registers lack - while improving on LogLog's cardinality estimation machinery, including DynamicLogLog's early exit mask for high-throughput streaming. With a default 10 mantissa bits (16-bit registers, 2,048 buckets, 4 KB), DDL achieves a per-register false-match rate of 0.018% on unrelated random same-size sets (compared to 17.0% for LL6, a basic HyperLogLog implementation), enabling Weighted Kmer Identity (WKID), Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI), containment, and completeness estimation from register comparison alone. A 16-bit per-register observation counter provides element frequency information at trivial additional computation cost, and an additional byte tracks element composition (GC content, for biological data). Furthermore, DDL's high-specificity registers enable an inverted index structure (DDLIndex) that answers similarity queries against a database of N sketches in O(B + M) time, where M is the number of matching index entries, compared to O(NxB) for pairwise comparison.

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

Contrastive Regularization for Accent-Robust ASR

Authors:
Van-Phat Thai↗Aradhya Dhruv↗Duc-Thinh Pham↗Sameer Alam↗

arXiv:2605.03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability. We investigate supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) as a lightweight, accent-invariant auxiliary objective for CTC fine-tuning. An utterance-level contrastive loss regularizes encoder representations without architectural modification or explicit accent supervision. Experiments on the L2-ARCTIC benchmark show consistent WER reductions across multiple pretrained encoders, with up to 25 – 29\% relative reduction under unseen-accent evaluation. Analysis using within-transcript cosine dispersion indicates that SupCon promotes more compact and stable representation geometry under accent variability. Overall, SupCon provides an effective and model-agnostic regularization strategy for improving accent robustness.

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