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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Semiclassical limit of Polyakov-Liouville measure and Q-Curvature Uniformization on evev-dimensional manifolds

arXiv:2606.14443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the semiclassical limit of the Polyakov-Liouville measure $\boldsymbol{\nu}_\gamma$, which is a non-Gaussian measure on $H^{-\eps}(M)$ that has recently been extended from Riemann surfaces to general Riemannian manifolds $(M,g)$ of even dimension. We show that under an appropriate rescaling in the semiclassical limit as $\gamma\to0$, the normalized Polyakov-Liouville measure $\Q_\gamma$ concentrates on the unique smooth weight $u$ for which the conformal metric $e^{2u}g$ on $M$ has constant $Q$-curvature.

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

WaveDINO: Learning-Based Atmospheric Correction of Unwrapped InSAR Interferograms Validated by GNSS: Results at Laguna del Maule and Campi Flegrei Volcanoes

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) enables effective monitoring of volcanic deformation; however, the observed signals are often corrupted by atmospheric phase delays, seasonal surface changes, and decorrelation effects. Existing atmospheric correction methods, such as numerical weather model-based methods, can reduce these effects but do not consistently remove atmospheric artefacts and may introduce residual biases. To address these limitations, we propose a novel learning-based method for denoising unwrapped InSAR interferograms, using a hybrid training strategy that combines physically motivated synthetic deformation with real atmospheric noise. Specifically, we introduce WaveDINO, a wavelet-based multi-scale denoising framework conditioned on frozen DINOv3 foundation-model features and terrain information. Training uses synthetic magma-source deformation superimposed on short-term interferograms to expose the network to realistic atmospheric statistics while retaining known ground truth. Performance is evaluated on both controlled synthetic data and long-term real interferograms from Laguna del Maule (Chile) and Campi Flegrei (Italy), with independent GNSS measurements used for validation. WaveDINO consistently outperforms competing models, improving agreement with GNSS measurements, and reducing mean GNSS misfit by approximately 3% and 19% at two sites, respectively, while surpassing weather-model-based corrections.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

The Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset: Reconstructing U.S. Corporate and Financial Disclosures into Layout-Faithful and Token-Efficient Pretraining Data

arXiv:2606.18192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As high-quality public web corpora become increasingly exhausted, clean long-context documents have become a scarce and expensive source of training data for large language models (LLMs). Existing long-context corpora are often proprietary and costly to acquire, synthetically generated, or concentrated in narrow domains such as programming. We introduce the Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset (SEFD), an open reconstruction of SEC filings into layout-faithful MultiMarkdown for financial language modeling and evaluation. SEFD makes audited financial statements, risk disclosures, ownership reports, accounting notes, and market-moving event filings usable as long-context pretraining data and as a basis for financial reasoning, forecasting, compliance, and document understanding. The resulting corpus is token-efficient, model-ready, and has less than 0.1% overlap with Common Crawl-derived corpora. We release SEFD-v1, a 152B-token initial public snapshot, and provide corpus-level analyses of a larger 18.5M-filing archive estimated at 550B tokens. We further introduce two SEFD-derived benchmarks: EDGAR-Forecast, which evaluates filing-grounded numerical forecasting after model knowledge cutoffs, and EDGAR-OCR, which evaluates transcription of complex financial tables.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Making Models Unmergeable via Scaling-Sensitive Loss Landscape

arXiv:2601.21898v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rise of model hubs has made it easier to access reusable model components, making model merging a practical tool for combining capabilities. Yet, this modularity also creates a governance gap: downstream users can recompose released weights into unauthorized mixtures that bypass safety alignment or licensing terms. Because existing defenses are largely post-hoc and architecture-specific, they provide inconsistent protection across diverse architectures and release formats in practice. To close this gap, we propose Trap$^2$, an architecture-agnostic protection framework that encodes protection into updates during fine-tuning, regardless of whether they are released as adapters or full models. Instead of relying on architecture-dependent approaches, Trap$^2$ uses weight re-scaling as a simple proxy for the merging process. It keeps released weights effective in standalone use, but degrades them under re-scaling that often arises in merging, undermining unauthorized recomposition.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

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

Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods in computational pathology rely on a multi-stage paradigm: class activation map (CAM) generation, offline pseudo-mask refinement, and fully supervised retraining. While established, this decoupled approach presents fundamental limitations. The multi-stage process not only incurs high computational training costs but also suffers from error propagation: local texture biases in shallow CNN layers generate false-positive artifacts that subsequent refinement steps often fail to correct. To address these persistent challenges through a simple yet highly effective approach, we propose the Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification (SSHR) framework. Rather than passively refining CAMs post-hoc, our method proactively purifies intermediate feature representations during the forward pass. We introduce a Hierarchical Feature Rectification Module (HFRM) that utilizes deep global semantic context to filter out local anomalies in shallow layers. This mechanism generates high-fidelity activation maps directly within a single training loop. Experiments on the LUAD-HistoSeg and BCSS datasets demonstrate that SSHR outperforms state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Furthermore, SSHR reduces training duration by 2 to 5 times. This efficiency minimizes computational overhead and accelerates clinical translation for large-scale histopathology workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/trongduc-nguyen/SSHR

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

From Concept-Aligned Tokens to Vulnerable Features: Mechanistic Localization of Jailbreaks

Jailbreak attacks expose a persistent failure mode in safety-aligned LLMs: models can be pushed into harmful behavior, but the internal representations enabling this shift remain poorly localized. Recent mechanistic safety studies often explain such behavior through broad representational objects, including global refusal directions, activation steering vectors, and refusal-related SAE features. We instead ask whether jailbreak vulnerability can be traced to finer-grained, prompt-conditioned SAE feature subgroups. We introduce a token-driven mechanistic pipeline that decomposes the residual stream of Gemma-2-2B into Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features and identifies feature subgroups associated with unsafe behavior. Using single-category unsafe examples from BeaverTails to reduce cross-category interference, we extract harmful concepts from adversarial responses and align them with concept-relevant prompt tokens through subspace similarity. We then apply three feature-grouping strategies: cluster-based, hierarchical-linkage, and single-token-driven, to identify SAE feature subgroups across all 26 layers. Finally, we amplify the top features in each subgroup and evaluate the resulting generations with a standardized harmfulness judge. Single-token-driven grouping achieves harmfulness comparable to full cluster-based grouping, showing that individual harmful prompt tokens are sufficient to localize vulnerability-relevant SAE feature subgroups without relying on broader cluster-level aggregation. These subgroups appear across early and mid-to-late layers, with stronger concentration in mid-to-late layers, where targeted steering exposes specific model vulnerabilities. Overall, our results suggest that jailbreak susceptibility can be traced to sparse, token-localized SAE feature subgroups, complementing prior accounts based on broad adversarial, refusal, or steering directions.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Bacterial-Selective Membrane-Active Compounds Reveals Mechanistic Bias in Antibiotic Training Datasets

The rise of antibiotic resistance necessitates the discovery of antibacterial compounds with novel mechanisms of action (MoAs). Recent machine learning approaches have shown promise in antibacterial compound discovery, but often identify derivatives of known antibiotic classes rather than mechanistically novel compounds. Previous approaches applied Tanimoto similarity filters at the end of screening pipelines, but this method has substantial drawbacks: Tanimoto similarity can be misleading in chemical space, and post-hoc filtering does not influence what activity models learn to prioritize. Here, we present a machine learning pipeline that addresses chemical novelty upfront by employing an XGBoost-based MoA classifier to explicitly prioritize compounds predicted to have mechanisms distinct from known antibiotic classes, combined with graph neural networks for antibacterial activity and toxicity prediction. Applied to the Zinc20 database, our approach successfully identified non-toxic antibacterial compounds structurally distinct from known antibiotics. Notably, the majority of these hits exhibited membrane-targeting activity with selectivity for bacterial cells over mammalian cells, suggesting potential for next-generation membrane-active antibiotics. However, we did not identify compounds with novel protein targets. Systematic analysis revealed that this limitation stems from mechanistic bias in training data rather than model architecture. Specifically, our activity model learned to preferentially score compounds similar to specific groups in the training data, thus overrepresenting certain MoA classes including membrane-active compounds. Even substantial model architecture and training data enhancements did not overcome this constraint. Our findings demonstrate that the primary bottleneck for discovering mechanistically novel antibiotics is the scarcity of diverse, mechanistically-annotated training data. This work provides both a methodological framework for mechanism-aware screening and critical insights into data requirements for genuinely novel antibiotic discovery.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Harsher on Male? Evaluating LLMs on Gender-Asymmetric Moral Framing Across Diverse Conflict Scenarios

Existing studies on gender bias in LLMs have largely focused on stereotypes, occupational associations, or explicit harmful outputs. In this work, we ask whether LLMs apply consistent response standards to the same negative behavior under matched male-actor and female-actor conditions. We introduce GAMA-Bench, a gender-mirrored benchmark of 1,298 scenarios covering intimate relationship and public social conflicts. It constructs gender-neutral misconduct templates through controlled grids and cross-model review, then compiles them into paired first-person prompts with matched actor-gender and role-reference variations. We further design a structured response-framing protocol to measure how models allocate punishment, empathy, escalation, instruction, and blame. Experiments on 10 representative LLMs reveal a consistent male-disadvantaging asymmetry: male actors receive more punitive, escalatory, and blame-centered framing, whereas female actors receive more therapeutic and empathy-oriented framing for the same misconduct. Further analyses show that this pattern persists across model families, scenario tracks, model scale, and explicit thinking-style reasoning. The official code is available at https://github.com/xufeiqiong/GAMA-Bench.

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

Utility-Aware DRL-Based TXOP Adaptation for NR-U and Wi-Fi Coexistence Networks

arXiv:2605.00457v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The coexistence of NR-U and Wi-Fi in the unlicensed spectrum introduces a challenging resource management problem, where heterogeneous channel access mechanisms can lead to unbalanced spectrum utilization and severe Wi-Fi performance degradation. To address this issue, this paper proposes a utility-aware deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for adaptive transmission opportunity (TXOP) control in NR-U/Wi-Fi coexistence networks. The coexistence process is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP), in which the NR-U TXOP duration is treated as a controllable variable for regulating post-access channel occupancy. A deep Q-network (DQN) is then employed to learn adaptive TXOP control policies through online interaction with the coexistence environment. A key feature of the proposed framework is the integration of a configurable reward and criterion design, which enables explicit control of the fairness-efficiency-utility tradeoff. Three operating policies are developed, namely absolute fairness, moderate fairness, and utility-oriented moderate fairness, to characterize different coexistence operating points. Simulation results show that the proposed framework achieves a Jain fairness index above 0.9 under strict fairness control. Compared with the absolute fairness policy, the moderate fairness policy improves aggregate throughput by 68.22%, while the utility-oriented policy achieves a 177.6% improvement under the adopted utility evaluation metric. These results demonstrate that the proposed utility-aware DRL framework provides an effective and flexible solution for adaptive TXOP control and tradeoff management in heterogeneous unlicensed coexistence networks.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Unintended Effects of Geographic Conditioning in Large Language Models

Modern conversational AI systems frequently rely on user metadata to localize responses, yet the unintended regional biases introduced by this hidden context remain poorly understood. In this work, we evaluate location leakage: the phenomenon where a model generates geographic references despite receiving a geographically neutral user prompt. Across both creative writing and open-ended Q&A prompts, even state-of-the-art LLMs systematically favor region-specific outputs when exposed to location metadata, with leakage spiking by up to 793 times above baseline (e.g., from 0.04% to 31.7% for Llama 3.1-8B, and 21.3% and 8.8% for Qwen3-8B and Claude Sonnet 4.6, respectively). Our analysis further shows a novel structural conditioning effect: replacing the injected location with the placeholder "Unknown" still elevates leakage by up to 72 times above baseline, demonstrating that the user profile frame itself, independent of any geographic content, acts as a generative conditioning signal.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Isotropic random walks and Brownian diffusion on complex projective space

arXiv:2606.11438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that isotropic random walks on the complex projective space provide a canonical and analytically tractable stochastic-geometric framework for the exploration of quantum-state space. The approach combines harmonic analysis on compact rank-one symmetric spaces with stochastic pure-state evolution and yields explicit analytical expressions for transition kernels, fidelity statistics, and geometric observables associated with the Fubini–Study metric. In particular, the framework provides a solvable reference model for isotropic depolarization and Haar equilibration, reproducing Haar-random fidelity statistics and the invariant measure on projective Hilbert space without specifying a microscopic Lindblad generator. In the short-time regime, the stochastic evolution converges to Brownian diffusion generated by the Fubini–Study Laplace–Beltrami operator, while the long-time limit exhibits concentration-of-measure behaviour characteristic of high-dimensional random quantum states. We further derive analytical and asymptotic results for the first-passage-time problem, including closed-form expressions in the Brownian limit for the mean first passage time and the long-time tail of the first-passage-time distribution. For high-fidelity target states, the mean first passage time exhibits a strong dimension-dependent divergence originating from the concentration properties of the Fubini–Study geometry.

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

ProvenanceGuard: Source-Aware Factuality Verification for MCP-Based LLM Agents

Tool-using LLM agents increasingly use the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to answer from heterogeneous evidence sources, including search, APIs, databases, clinical records, and formulary tools. Standard factuality metrics usually test whether an answer is supported by pooled evidence, missing a provenance-sensitive failure mode: a claim may be supported somewhere while being attributed to the wrong source. We call this cross-source conflation. We introduce ProvenanceGuard, a source-aware verifier for MCP-grounded answers. It consumes captured MCP traces with stable tool IDs, source IDs, and raw outputs; decomposes answers into atomic claims; routes claims to source-specific evidence; checks support with NLI and a token-alignment proxy; compares stated attribution with the routed source; and returns per-claim verdicts plus an answer-level allow/block decision. Blocked answers can be repaired with retrieval-augmented answer revision and re-verified. We evaluate on 281 medical-domain MCP-agent traces. A 266-trace adjudicated subset yields 2,325 LLM-assisted claim labels split by trace; 361 held-out labels are human-verified. On the 40-trace held-out split, ProvenanceGuard achieves block F1 0.802 and source accuracy 0.858 over 260 source-eligible claims, outperforming source-blind baselines that do not emit claim-to-source IDs. On a harder multi-source benchmark it reaches block F1 0.846, while source-plus-relation accuracy drops to 0.229, showing that exact source ownership remains difficult with semantically close sources. Repair-and-reverify resolves all blocked answers in the full trace set, often via conservative fallback. In 50 controlled clinical conflation probes, ProvenanceGuard detects all injected attribution swaps with no retained wrong attribution. These results show that source attribution is an independent axis for factuality verification in MCP-based agents.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Poker Arena: Multi-Axis Profiling of Strategic Reasoning and Memory in LLMs

Strategic reasoning under uncertainty underpins consequential decisions in negotiation, finance, and policy, but prevailing game-play benchmarks collapse heterogeneous reasoning dimensions into a single scalar, leaving the capability structure of frontier LLMs unexamined. We introduce Poker Arena, a no-limit Texas Hold'em tournament platform that couples a three-layer memory architecture (within-hand, session, and cross-session) with a nine-axis cognitive profile decomposing strategic reasoning into interpretable dimensions such as bet-sizing calibration and positional awareness. We evaluate seven frontier models across 50 sessions of 1,000 hands and a controlled memory ablation; tournament chips and aggregate axis score order the field differently: Claude Opus 4.6 wins +$15,730 chips with 14 first-place finishes, yet ranks only fifth of seven on mean axis score, while persistent memory helps some models and hurts others. These findings show that multi-axis evaluation surfaces capability structure that scalar leaderboards systematically misrank, with cross-dimensional consistency outweighing peak performance on any single axis.

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

How Far Can Chord-Symbol Time-Series Adaptation Carry Genre Identity? Capabilities and Boundaries in Multi-Genre Chord-Symbol Modeling

作者:

arXiv:2606.07334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This report treats chord-symbol sequences as an interpretable, controllable time series for genre-local harmonic modeling. The frozen Music Transformer base - released as a pop-jazz fine-tune endpoint but verified in this revision weight-identical to the pop-only Phase-0 baseline, so all gains are measured over a pure-pop prior (see Changes in v2) - is extended to eleven target genres: blues, bossa nova, Bach chorales, country, electronic, folk, funk, gospel, hip-hop, R&B/soul, and rock. The main evaluation compares LoRA, IA3, BitFit, prefix tuning, and full fine-tuning over 11 genres and 3 seeds, a complete 165-cell grid. All five methods improve over the frozen base on held-out chord prediction (macro gains +2.89 to +3.61 percentage points); LoRA and IA3 score highest, but pairwise Wilcoxon tests with Holm and Benjamini-Hochberg correction do not support a decisive winner. A matched-data-size control sharpens this: at a common corpus size IA3 stays on top while LoRA drops to last, so the small method gaps are partly data-driven rather than representational. A control-token baseline is also strong, and wrong-genre adapters often beat the frozen base, suggesting the adaptation effect is largely lightweight conditioning over a reusable harmonic base rather than genre-specific adapter memory. Further diagnostics (rank sweeps, wrong-genre rotation, a base-checkpoint ablation that v2 reinterprets as a same-weights control, chord-only genre classification, output-distribution statistics, real-song evaluation, duplicate analysis) support a bounded conclusion: chord-symbol adaptation reliably improves genre-local harmonic prediction, but chord symbols alone do not carry complete genre identity. Perceived genre authenticity and musical quality are left to controlled listener evaluation.

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

Select and Improve: Understanding the Mechanics of Post-Training for Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has rapidly emerged as a key component in the training of reasoning and coding models, yet it remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. We study how and through what underlying processes capabilities are acquired or enhanced via reinforcement learning post-training. Our analysis, based on controlled math reasoning experiments with Qwen-2.5-1.5B, reveals two core mechanisms: strategy selection and strategy improvement. Our results highlight the role of SFT data and reinforcement learning data in activating these mechanisms, in particular showing how supervising the model on diverse reasoning strategies can enable strategy selection and how increasing difficulty in reinforcement learning data can enable strategy improvement. Taken together, our results provide mechanistic insight into RL training and suggest practical interventions to continue scaling reasoning capabilities.

17.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

U = U for all: Advancing equity in HIV prevention

by Thiago S. Torres, Paula M. Luz Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U). However, U = U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. Equitable and accurate awareness of U = U requires culturally tailored interventions, improved provider education, and supportive policy environments beyond biomedical evidence alone. Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U). However, U=U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. In this Perspective, Thiago Torres and Paula Luz outline what is needed to improve equity and accuracy in global awareness and education of U=U.

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

Factions Within, Uncertain Across: Within-Document Reader Sub-Groups in Social Highlighting

When many people highlight the same document, is the crowd a single consensus, or is it internally structured into reader sub-groups that mark different things – and is that structure a stable property of a reader or of the document? Building on prior work showing an individual's within-document highlighting signal is a whisper while individuality lives in selection, we ask the group-level question on a co-readership platform using a margin-preserving curveball null. Experiment 1: within a document, readers form strong sub-groups – pairs agree far beyond what shared salience, mark density, and sentence popularity predict (nearest-neighbour agreement z=+6.3, significant in 88% of documents). Under an eight-block region-preserving null, shared engagement with the same coarse regions of the document accounts for about 40% of this excess; the majority survives as finer reader-specific agreement (z=+3.6, 77% significant). So the within-document crowd is, in a descriptive sense, factional. Experiment 2: is that grouping a stable reader trait? Here we are honest about power. The cross-document split-half reproducibility of a pair's agreement is near zero pooled (+0.078 and 0.000 in two separately drawn samples), and a power calibration shows the test is informative only for pairs that co-read many documents. In the only informative high-overlap subset (k>=4), point estimates are positive but small-sample, imprecise across the separately drawn samples, never significant, and attenuate under the region-preserving null. We therefore leave cross-document stability unresolved: the data is consistent with anything from situational grouping to a weak-to-moderate stable reader trait. The crowd is factional within a document; whether its factions follow the reader across documents is, honestly, beyond our reach.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SAGE: Stochastic Prompt Optimization via Agent-Guided Exploration

Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search. We introduce SPO (Stochastic Prompt Optimization), a framework for stochastic search over prompt space, and compare three strategies of increasing sophistication: error-informed random search, a genetic algorithm with evolutionary operators, and SAGE (SPO via Agent-Guided Exploration), a multi-agent pipeline with diagnostic code execution. Across three benchmarks, no single strategy dominates; effectiveness depends on the interaction of landscape structure with error type. We further deploy SAGE on a mental-health chatbot under a continuous optimization paradigm, where it compounds eight cycles of individually-noisy A/B tests into a statistically robust gain in next-day retention. We argue that coupling qualitative diagnosis with quantitative validation is what makes agentic optimization effective for open-ended task-oriented dialogue.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Scalable Circuit Learning for Interpreting Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.16939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensionality makes existing intervention-based circuit learning methods computationally prohibitive. We propose CircuitLasso, a scalable circuit-learning approach based on sparse linear regression. CircuitLasso recovers circuits whose structural accuracy matches that of state-of-the-art intervention-based methods on the benchmark data, at a fraction of the computational cost. For interpretability, CircuitLasso efficiently uncovers relationships among SAE features, showing how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through the model and influence its predictions. Finally, we validate the utility of our learned circuits by leveraging their insights to achieve comparable performance at substantially lower cost on a domain-generalization task.

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

SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translation

Sign Language Translation (SLT) is typically evaluated with surface-form metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE, which reward lexical overlap but do not directly measure whether a translation preserves the meaning of the source sign sequence. This is in contrast with the final objective of integrating SLT in assistive technology. In this work, we shift the focus from Sign Language Translation (SLT) to Sign Language Understanding (SLU), with particular emphasis on semantic understanding. Specifically, we evaluate systems based on their ability to correctly recover, from the input video, key semantic aspects of the original sentence, such as actions taking place and facts about people and objects. To enable this evaluation systematically, we propose SLU-2K, a dataset of 2,350 closed-ended video question-answer pairs based on the popular PHOENIX-2014T and CSL-Daily datasets. To obtain SLU-2K, we propose and extensively evaluate an automated data generation pipeline which produces questions across 7 categories, namely actions, locations, numbers, objects, people, time, and weather conditions. We show the potential of SLU-2K by evaluating popular Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and two representative state-of-the-art systems, MMSTL and SpaMo. Our results show that MLLMs reach near-random performance, highlighting the need for a more systematic integration of SLU in current AI systems. Furthermore, state-of-the-art translation systems carefully fine-tuned on in-domain data still exhibit a substantial semantic gap, with results ranging from 56.7% to 75.2%. These findings suggest that current SLT evaluation protocols overestimate true understanding and that future progress should be measured not only by fluency and n-gram overlap, but also by semantic correctness. Code, prompts, and benchmark files are available at https://github.com/ZenoTsT/SLU-2K

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Why SWAVE May Not Be All You Need:A Concept-Evolution Retrospective on Complex-Valued Recurrent Language Models

arXiv:2606.18324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SWave is a complex-valued recurrent language model (169.26M parameters, D=384, L=16, T=2048) trained on FineWeb-Edu using 2xH100 NVL. It was designed around three founding premises: that representing language as complex waves rather than real-valued numbers enables richer information encoding; that a Cayley-parameterised unitary transition provides a mathematical guarantee against state decay or explosion; and that a hidden state which rotates rather than shrinks preserves signal integrity over arbitrarily long contexts. The core of SWave evolved substantially across three development phases. The Resonance Head was found to structurally admit imaginary-channel collapse as a global loss minimum (a failure mode we term cos-domination collapse) and was superseded by an untied head with independent real and imaginary embedding tables from the Phase-Associative Memory (PAM) architecture. This resolved the degenerate minimum and enabled stable 200,000-step training (best-step PPL 22.0 at step 89,861). ComplexNorm and the Wave Propagation Scan proved load-bearing throughout all three phases and were retained to the final architecture. ProtectGatedScan was reframed as a structural prior rather than a learned behaviour. The four multi-scale retention concepts showed no measurable improvement under controlled evaluation and were found non-load-bearing. The ComplexGatedUnit was superseded by a real-valued squared-ReLU channel mixer with fewer parameters. The auxiliary training objectives showed no benefit once structural constraints were resolved. The investigation yields a formal characterisation of cos-domination collapse, a parallel scan with a log-space backward pass for numerical stability, six transferable engineering principles for complex-valued recurrent training, and a plan-to-code traceability methodology for catching structural divergences that conventional test suites miss.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Residual Context Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a "remasking" mechanism that decodes only the most confident tokens and discards the rest, effectively wasting computation. We demonstrate that recycling computation from the discarded tokens is beneficial, as these tokens retain contextual information useful for subsequent decoding iterations. In light of this, we propose Residual Context Diffusion (RCD), a module that converts these discarded token representations into contextual residuals and injects them back for the next denoising step. RCD uses a decoupled two-stage training pipeline to bypass the memory bottlenecks associated with backpropagation. We validate our method on both long CoT reasoning (SDAR) and short CoT instruction following (LLaDA) models. We demonstrate that a standard dLLM can be efficiently converted to the RCD paradigm with merely ~300 million tokens. RCD consistently improves frontier dLLMs by 4-11 percentage points in accuracy with minimal extra computation overhead across a wide range of benchmarks. Notably, on the most challenging AIME tasks, RCD nearly doubles baseline accuracy and attains up to 4-5x fewer denoising steps at baseline's peak accuracy.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

TSAssistant: A Human-in-the-Loop Agentic Framework for Automated Target Safety Assessment

Target Safety Assessment (TSA) requires systematic integration of genetic, transcriptomic, target homology, pharmacological, and clinical data to evaluate potential safety liabilities of therapeutic targets. This process is labor-intensive and expert-dependent, posing challenges in scalability and reproducibility. We present TSAssistant, a human-in-the-loop multi-agent framework that decomposes TSA report generation into a workflow of specialized subagents: Research Subagents that each ground and cite a single TSA domain, and Synthesis Subagents that integrate findings across domains. Subagents retrieve and synthesize evidence from curated biomedical sources through standardized tool interfaces and produce individually citable, evidence-grounded sections, with behavior shaped by a hierarchical instruction architecture that separates coordination logic from domain expertise and user intent. To complement these soft constraints, programmatic execution hooks and persistent memory stores enforce hard constraints across the workflow, while an interactive refinement loop allows experts to review and revise individual sections with full conversational context preserved across iterations. Rather than a single holistic comparison, we decompose report quality into reproducibility, evidential grounding, task-level accuracy, and controllability under expert oversight, finding high reproducibility and grounding, substantial agreement with the human reference, and net-positive expert-driven refinement.

25.
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