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

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Dimensionality Controls When Modularity Helps in Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.17889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compositional learning systems must balance plasticity, the ability to acquire new knowledge, with stability, the preservation of previously learned components, especially when tasks share structure and risk interference. We study how modular architecture, task similarity, and representational dimensionality jointly shape compositional continual learning in a sequential A-B-A paradigm, comparing a task-partitioned recurrent network to a single-network baseline while inducing high- and low-dimensional regimes via weight-scale manipulations. In a high-dimensional "lazy" regime, both architectures achieve similar performance and internal geometry, suggesting that explicit modular structure has little impact when representations are weakly constrained. In a lower-dimensional "rich" regime, modularity becomes decisive: the modular network develops graded task-specific subspaces that overlap for similar tasks, partially align for moderately dissimilar tasks, and separate for dissimilar tasks, yielding a more compositional and interpretable organization than the single network. These findings identify the representational regime induced by initialization scale, which co-varies with representational dimensionality, as a key factor governing when compositional, modular structure is functionally beneficial in continual learning, and support viewing safety and robustness as problems of adaptive allocation of representational subspaces rather than fixed separation versus sharing.

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

JE-IRT: A Geometric Lens on LLM Abilities through Joint Embedding Item Response Theory

Standard LLM evaluation practices compress diverse abilities into single scores, obscuring their inherently multidimensional nature. We present JE-IRT, a geometric item-response framework that embeds both LLMs and questions in a shared space. For question embeddings, the direction encodes semantics and the norm encodes difficulty, while correctness on each question is determined by the geometric interaction between the model and question embeddings. This geometry replaces a global ranking of LLMs with topical specialization and enables smooth variation across related questions. Building on this framework, our experimental results reveal that out-of-distribution behavior can be explained through directional alignment, and that larger norms consistently indicate harder questions. Moreover, JE-IRT naturally supports generalization: once the space is learned, new LLMs are added by fitting a single embedding. The learned space further reveals an LLM-internal taxonomy that only partially aligns with human-defined subject categories. We also show that simple linear probes of the embedding space recover cross-subject ability directions, such as an arithmetic axis that highlights quantitatively demanding questions in seemingly distant subjects like virology and global facts. JE-IRT thus establishes a unified and interpretable geometric lens that connects LLM abilities with the structure of questions, offering a distinctive perspective on model evaluation and generalization.

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

Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging

Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

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

Variable-Length Tokenization via Learnable Global Merging for Diffusion Transformers

arXiv:2606.20076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have become dominant in visual synthesis, but their quality-compute trade-off is largely constrained by the tokenizer's fixed compression ratio. Variable-length tokenizers (VLTs) promise adaptive compression by varying token counts, allowing diffusion models to flexibly balance quality and compute. However, conventional VLTs modulate length by truncating ordered token sequences, which makes token semantics depend on token position and breaks representational alignment across lengths. This leads to a cross-length shift in the latent distribution that hinders a single variable-length diffusion model from operating effectively. To address this, we propose a novel variable-length tokenizer that modulates length by merging tokens. We show that encouraging similar tokens to merge enables direct cross-length representation alignment when the diffusion transformer operates according to the merging pattern. Since conventional merging methods are data-dependent, making the merging pattern inaccessible during generation, we introduce learnable global merging, which is data-independent, to ensure compatibility with diffusion transformers. On ImageNet 256$\times$256 generation, our merging-based variable-length tokenizer integrated with a diffusion transformer achieves a superior gFID-compute trade-off compared to prior VLT methods. Code is available at [this https URL](https://github.com/movinghoon/lgm)

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

Diagnosing and Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry

arXiv:2606.17093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-based single-shot fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has been studied mostly at close range. The long-range regime (standoff beyond 1 m) remains largely unaddressed: inverse-square intensity falloff lowers fringe signal-to-noise ratio and degrades physical ground truth, the single-shot problem is ill-posed because fringe-order information is absent from one image, and these architectures have not been studied mechanistically. We present a diagnose-repair-verify study using mechanistic interpretability (MI) and conformal uncertainty quantification (UQ) as convergent diagnostics: they agree on one physical failure locus, driving and verifying an architectural repair. On a photorealistic synthetic benchmark (15,600 fringe images, 50 objects at 1.5-2.1 m), a best UNet baseline reaches 14.54 mm object mean absolute error (MAE). Three probes (linear probing, Grad-CAM, flat-plane out-of-distribution test) converge: the baseline solves the task via object-boundary shape priors rather than fringe-phase decoding. We repair this with PhiCalNet, which outputs wrapped phase rather than depth and applies a fixed differentiable calibration layer mapping phase to depth, removing the shape-prior solution from the hypothesis space architecturally rather than by a loss penalty. A physics-informed loss that enforces the same physics as a soft penalty on a depth-regressing network yields no measurable gain, isolating the architecture as the operative factor. PhiCalNet reduces object MAE 3.3x to 4.46 mm; the residual is carried by 0.103% of pixels at the +/-pi wrap discontinuity. Pixel-wise conformal UQ confirms the diagnosis: rejecting the top 5% of object pixels by snapshot disagreement cuts PhiCalNet RMSE by 64% (20.6->7.4 mm) versus 3.5% for the baseline. MI and UQ converge on the same failure locus.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weight-level importance values for the corresponding projection matrices. Unlike magnitude-only or activation-based criteria, CAP's interventional measurement directly captures each head's functional contribution, yielding relative accuracy gains of up to 61% over Wanda on ARC-Challenge at 20% sparsity. We evaluate CAP on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge using Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct at 10%, 20%, and 50% sparsity. At moderate sparsity (10-20%), CAP improves over Wanda in most model-benchmark configurations. with especially large gains on ARC-Challenge for Llama-3. Our results suggest that attention-head-level causal attribution can better preserve reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks than correlational pruning criteria at equivalent sparsity, while remaining limited by coarse MLP attribution at 50% sparsity.

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

A saturation-absorption rubidium magnetometer with multilevel optical Bloch-equation modeling for intermediate-to-high fields

arXiv:2601.09115v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SASHMAG (Saturated Absorption Spectroscopy High-field MAGnetometer), an atomic sensor designed for precision magnetic-field measurements in the intermediate-to-high field regime ($>0.2\,T$) using Rubidium-87 ($^{87}Rb$). The sensor operates in the hyperfine Paschen-Back regime, where the hyperfine and Zeeman interactions decouple, and utilizes counter-propagating pump-probe configuration in Faraday geometry to resolve isolated, Doppler-free Zeeman transitions. To interpret the resulting spectra in this strongly field-dependent regime, we developed a comprehensive multilevel optical Bloch-equation model solved explicitly in the uncoupled $\ket{m_I, m_J}$ basis, capturing state mixing and nonlinear saturation dynamics. This model reproduces measured spectra at sub-Doppler resolution and is consistent with analytical expectations for power broadening and thermal Doppler scaling. Magnetic field estimation is performed using a physics-constrained optimization routine that infers the magnetic field by minimizing the residual between experimentally extracted line centers and calculated transition frequencies from the field-dependent Hamiltonian. We demonstrate magnetic field retrieval from $0.2\,T$ to $0.4\,T$ with a precision of $\pm 0.0017 \,T$). Furthermore, the validated simulation establishes a foundation for generating synthetic training datasets, paving the way for autonomous, Machine Learning-enhanced magnetometry in applications ranging from MRI to fusion reactors.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards an Inferentialist Account of Information Through Proof-theoretic Semantics

arXiv:2605.05368v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Information is one of the most widely-discussed concepts of the current era. However, a great deal of insightful work notwithstanding, it is yet to be given wholly convincing logical or mathematical foundations. Without them, we lack adequate reasoning tools for understanding the complex ecosystems of systems upon which the society depends. We seek to rectify this by taking a first step towards developing an inferentialist semantic theory of information. There are three key interacting components. First, conceptual analysis: the metaphysics of information. Dretske expressed the key concepts of information in terms of intentionality, truth, and transmissibility. We replace truth with inferability, and trace the consequences of this replacement. Second, logic: proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) provides a mathematical-logical realization of inferentialist reasoning. Using P-tS, we develop the first steps towards a mathematical-logical theory of an inferentialist primitive unit of information, the 'inferon'. This proof-theoretic approach counterpoints the model-theoretic view of information articulated in situation theory. Furthermore, we argue that it facilitates addressing all three components of van Benthem and Martinez's categorization of the understandings of information, as range, as correlation, and as code. Our focus is on information-as-correlation. Third, systems: the P-tS tools we develop provide the basis for a mathematical account of distributed systems modelling – a key tool from informatics for understanding the organization of information processing systems. This yields a reasoning-based theory of information flow in models of distributed systems. Overall, we seek to give a conceptually rigorous mathematical-logical account of information and its role within informatics, grounded in inference and reasoning.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

HD-Prot: A Protein Language Model for Joint Sequence-Structure Modeling with Continuous Structure Tokens

arXiv:2512.15133v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Proteins inherently possess a consistent sequence-structure duality. The abundance of protein sequence data, which can be readily represented as discrete tokens, has driven fruitful developments in protein language models (pLMs). A key remaining challenge, however, is how to effectively integrate continuous structural knowledge into pLMs. Current methods often discretize protein structures to accommodate the language modeling framework, which inevitably results in the loss of fine-grained information and limits the performance potential of multimodal pLMs. In this paper, we argue that such concerns can be circumvented: a sequence-based pLM can be extended to incorporate the structure modality through continuous tokens, i.e., high-fidelity protein structure latents that avoid vector quantization. Specifically, we propose a hybrid diffusion protein language model, HD-Prot, which embeds a continuous-valued diffusion head atop a discrete pLM, enabling seamless operation with both discrete and continuous tokens for joint sequence-structure modeling. It captures inter-token dependencies across modalities through a unified absorbing diffusion process, and estimates per-token distributions via categorical prediction for sequences and continuous diffusion for structures. Extensive results demonstrate that HD-Prot achieves competitive performance in unconditional sequence-structure co-generation, motif-scaffolding, protein structure prediction, and inverse folding tasks. Furthermore, our method can perform on par with state-of-the-art multimodal pLMs, despite being developed under limited computational resources (i.e., less than one-tenth the budget for modality extension fine-tuning). It highlights the viability of simultaneously estimating categorical and continuous distributions within a unified language model architecture, offering a promising alternative direction for multimodal pLMs.

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

GLACIER: A Multimodal Student-Teacher Foundation Model for Molecular Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning models facilitate the discovery of molecules with tailored properties among billions of candidate compounds. However, the computational burden to develop and deploy state-of-the-art models continuously increases, limiting their scalability. Most large-scale models are unimodal in nature and overlook the potential to leverage complementary molecular data modalities. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces the Graph-Language Alignment for Chemical Inference and Exploration using Representations (GLACIER) model, a student-teacher framework that integrates molecular graphs, SMILES strings, and physicochemical descriptors to learn rich molecular embeddings. Our framework consists of three stages: (1) we pretrain three student encoders on 100,000 drug-like molecules: a message-passing neural network for molecular graphs, a transformer-based encoder for SMILES strings, and a multilayer perceptron for physicochemical descriptors, (2) we fuse these student modalities using a novel Finsler geometry-aware module, and (3) distill complementary knowledge from large teacher models, including MiniMol and MolFormer, into a single lightweight model via contrastive learning. We demonstrate that GLACIER is a robust framework that delivers high predictive performance and computational efficiency in complex molecular property prediction tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/eemokey/glacier.

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

HSQ-VLM: A Novel Spatially-Constrained Quadrant Segmentation VLM Model for Explainability in Diabetic Retinopathy

Authors:

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is an aggressive retinal disease and a leading cause of global blindness, yet its clinical management is currently hindered by the black-box nature of diagnostic AI. While deep learning models achieve high classification accuracy, there is a critical lack of explainability methods capable of detailing the exact anatomical landmarks and lesion distributions that lead to a clinical decision for DR. Therefore, we propose HSQ-VLM, a novel quadrant segmentation pipeline on fundus images that utilizes a Landmark-Anchored Cartesian Cross-Attention mechanism to unify visual feature extraction with structured clinical reasoning. Unlike traditional methods that rely on arbitrary image partitioning, our pipeline implements 4-quadrant Topological Latent Partitioning (TLP) to dynamically align retinal features with a fovea-centered coordinate system. This allows the Vision-Language Model to generate natural language reports that quantify pathology with anatomical precision. On a dataset of 3,500 high-resolution fundus images, this innovative methodology achieved a lesion detection sensitivity of 99.6% for hemorrhages and 96.4% for microaneurysms, while demonstrating a significant reduction in boundary-ambiguity errors compared to standard segmentation baselines.

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

Mordal: Automated Pretrained Model Selection for Vision Language Models

Incorporating multiple modalities into large language models (LLMs) is a powerful way to enhance their understanding of non-textual data, enabling them to perform multimodal tasks. Vision language models (VLMs) form the fastest growing category of multimodal models because of their many practical use cases, including in healthcare, robotics, and accessibility. Unfortunately, even though different VLMs in the literature demonstrate impressive visual capabilities in different benchmarks, they are handcrafted by human experts; there is no automated framework to create task-specific multimodal models. We introduce Mordal, an automated multimodal model search framework that efficiently finds the best VLM for a user-defined task without manual intervention. Mordal achieves this both by reducing the number of candidates to consider during the search process and by minimizing the time required to evaluate each remaining candidate. Our evaluation shows that Mordal can find the best VLM for a given problem using $8.9\times$–$11.6\times$ lower GPU hours than grid search. We have also discovered that Mordal achieves about 69\% higher weighted Kendall's $\tau$ on average than the state-of-the-art model selection method across diverse tasks.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When is Your LLM Steerable?

Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration. Finding the regime and boundaries of successful steering typically requires expensive grid searches and post-hoc evaluation of full autoregressive rollouts. In this work, we investigate whether steerability can be predicted from the model's internal states at the beginning of the generation process, e.g., after generating the first few tokens, and how to leverage such a predictor to improve steering success rate. To this end, we first introduce ASTEER, a testbed including 1.4M steered generations, spanning 150 concepts with each steering success/failure labeled. Leveraging this testbed, we analyze the model's early decoding dynamics by extracting features that compare hidden states before and after steering across layers and initial decoding steps. These features help us understand how steering's effects propagate along layers and token positions, which provide key information for steerability prediction. We then train a Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT) classifier on these features to predict whether an intervention will under-steer, succeed, or over-steer without requiring full rollout. Our predictor achieves around 0.7 macro-F1 score on unseen concepts, demonstrating that early hidden states encode substantial, structured information about eventual steering efficacy. We further leverage this steerability predictor as guidance for steering strength searching, achieving near-optimal performance with a small fraction of decoding cost.

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

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

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

Clustering Node Attributed Networks with Graph Neural Networks and Self Learning

arXiv:2606.13444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph clustering - partitioning the node set of a graph into disjoint subsets that reflect some latent information - is a fundamental problem as it finds applications in a myriad of different scenarios. While this classic problem has been tackled for decades by different communities, a recent variation of the problem driven by real data considers the scenario where nodes have attributes that are also informative. This has triggered novel methods that simultaneously leverage network information (edges) and node information (attributed) in the design of novel clustering algorithms. This work proposes a novel framework that builds on prior works that have applied graph neural networks (GNN) to graph clustering. The proposed framework operates in rounds of self learning in a fully unsupervised setting. In each round, a GNN generates representations for nodes that are used to cluster the nodes. This clustering influences the graph used to generate the node representation in the next round. Moreover, a context graph built in each round using the original graph is used to generate the node representations. Empirical results show that the proposed methodology extracts information from both network edges and node attributes in synthetic data, outperforming algorithms focused solely on the network or attributes when neither are very informative. Multiple rounds of learning also improve the performance and always outperforms a long single round of training (i.e., classic GNN graph clustering). When considering real datasets, empirical results indicate that the proposed methodology is competitive to state-of-the-art methods when cluster sizes are balanced.

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

Target-Side Paraphrase Augmentation for Sign Language Translation with Large Language Models

Sign language translation (SLT) remains constrained by the limited availability of paired sign-video/text corpora and by the heavy-tailed vocabularies typical of real-world datasets. We study a target-side augmentation strategy in which a large language model (LLM) generates controlled paraphrase variants of the reference spoken-language sentence while the sign input remains unchanged. Concretely, we use GPT-4o to produce semantically faithful variants of the training targets and train a Signformer-style pose-based Transformer under a two-stage schedule: pre-training on the augmented corpus followed by fine-tuning on the original references. We evaluate this strategy on three datasets that span complementary challenges: PHOENIX14T (German Sign Language), a real-world corpus with moderate lexical diversity; the Greek Sign Language Dataset with highly controlled, repetitive recordings; and LSA-T (Argentinian Sign Language), a naturalistic corpus with a large vocabulary and severe long-tail sparsity. This range allows us to characterize precisely when and why target-side augmentation is beneficial. On PHOENIX14T, augmentation improves BLEU-4 from 9.56 to 10.33, demonstrating that paraphrastic exposure helps the decoder generalize beyond memorized reference phrasing. The near-saturated GSL baseline and the extremely sparse LSA-T setting reveal the limits of the approach: in both cases, single-reference lexical overlap metrics are insufficient to capture the full picture, motivating a complementary semantic evaluation. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine LLM-generated target-side paraphrases as an augmentation mechanism for SLT, and the first to apply an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation protocol to SLT. This complementary evaluation reveals gains in semantic fidelity that lexical overlap metrics understate.

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

AdaMame: A Training Recipe for Adaptive Multilingual Reasoning

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) show strong performance in English, they often fail to reason in the language of the query, a phenomenon known as language collapse. Existing RL-based fixes typically add a binary language fidelity reward to the accuracy objective, yet still incur trade-off in accuracy, mid-trace code-switching, and excessive token usage. In this work, we propose AdaMame, a two-stage training recipe for multilingual mathematical reasoning that addresses these limitations by adaptively aligning the reasoning language to the query language without compromising accuracy. The first SFT stage fine-tunes on naturally occurring reasoning traces across five languages to establish multilingual reasoning capability. In the subsequent RL stage, we introduce AdaMame-GRPO, an adaptation of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in which a query-conditioned alignment factor grows progressively during training, guiding the model to first explore diverse reasoning languages before exploiting reasoning in the query language. Evaluated across two benchmarks, two LRMs, and 12 languages, AdaMame-GRPO achieves Pareto-optimal performance across reasoning accuracy, language fidelity, and token efficiency over all baselines, with the strongest gains on out-of-domain, lower-resource languages.

19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

On the evolution of the company we keep: Implications for infectious disease modeling

Authors:

by Joël Mossong Whom we meet shapes how infections spread. Where earlier focus of mathematical epidemiology was on incorporating age, more recent work has begun to reveal the importance of socioeconomic aspects for understanding and managing future epidemics. In this Perspective, Joël Mossong discusses the importance of understanding social contacts and how they have evolved for infectious disease modeling, and the need to factor in additional considerations such as ethic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Mathematical perspective on genetic algorithms with optimization guided operators

arXiv:2606.12279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work in ML applies genetic algorithms at inference time to iteratively improve solutions to optimization problems. The basic mutation and recombination operators involved are qualitatively different from those studied classically. Mutations are no longer random; an ML algorithm mutates a solution with the goal of improving an objective. Similarly, recombination is not based on random collages of parent solutions. Instead, it is an ML optimization-based operator whose goal is to synthesize improved solutions from its inputs. Thus, these mutation and recombination operators are more likely to improve the objective, but their computational cost is much higher. We introduce a general model of genetic algorithms and formulating optimization in this model as a query-complexity problem, using the language of reinforcement learning. We then study specialized models. We show that some optimization problems require generation, mutation, and recombination to be solved. We then obtain qualitatively tight algorithms for a family of problems within this framework that captures the nontrivial role of diversity in the solution pool, a key feature of practical ML genetic algorithms.

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

DADP: Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy

arXiv:2602.04037v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning domain adaptive policies that can generalize to unseen transition dynamics, remains a fundamental challenge in learning-based control. Substantial progress has been made through domain representation learning to capture domain-specific information, thus enabling domain-aware decision making. We analyze the process of learning domain representations through dynamical prediction and find that selecting contexts adjacent to the current step causes the learned representations to entangle static domain information with varying dynamical properties. Such mixture can confuse the conditioned policy, thereby constraining zero-shot adaptation. To tackle the challenge, we propose DADP (Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy), which achieves robust adaptation through unsupervised disentanglement and domain-aware diffusion injection. First, we introduce Lagged Context Dynamical Prediction, a strategy that conditions future state estimation on a historical offset context; by increasing this temporal gap, we unsupervisedly disentangle static domain representations by filtering out transient properties. Second, we integrate the learned domain representations directly into the generative process by biasing the prior distribution and reformulating the diffusion target. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks across locomotion and manipulation demonstrate the superior performance, and the generalizability of DADP over prior methods. More visualization results are available on the https://outsider86.github.io/DomainAdaptiveDiffusionPolicy/.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Unbiased Derivative Estimation for Stationary Mean of Parameterized Markov chains

arXiv:2606.11487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a new approach to unbiased estimation of the gradients of the stationary means associated with parametrized families of Markov chains. Our estimators are particularly efficient when the Markov chains have slow mixing rate. Our approach does not require a specific parametrization except for an oracle to evaluate the transition density and its gradient at a given data point without any additional knowledge about the density function itself. It makes our estimator suitable for parametrizations associated with neural networks. The estimator can potentially achieve large improvement in terms of efficiency. Numerical experiments confirm the good performance predicted by the theory.

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

Data-Centric Benchmarking of Exploit Generation in LLMs: Understanding the Impact of Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606.15123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the task of CVE-conditioned exploit generation, where a model drafts proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits given software vulnerability context. We adopt a data-centric approach, constructing a high-quality dataset via multi-stage preprocessing and introducing a scalable evaluation framework with LLM-as-judge and fine-grained rubrics. Under this unified setup, we benchmark 17 large language models across 8 evaluation criteria, providing systematic insights into their zero-shot capabilities. We further show that a compact 8B open-weight model, when fine-tuned on curated data, achieves over 42.5% improvement in exploit quality and rivals some proprietary models when combined with simple test-time rejection strategies. Our results highlight the importance of data quality, structured supervision, and evaluation design for reliable exploit generation, suggesting that these factors can be as critical as model scale in adapting LLMs to cybersecurity tasks.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Generalized Kerr-Cat Qubit Codes

arXiv:2606.14901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic study of Schrödinger cat codes constructed from Kerr-type coherent states, including displaced Kerr coherent states and Barut–Girardello Kerr coherent states, each admitting two distinct families determined by the sign of the Kerr nonlinearity. By tuning the Kerr parameter and coherent-state amplitude, these states interpolate between $\mathfrak{su}(2)$, $\mathfrak{su}(1,1)$ coherent states, providing a unified and versatile foundation for this type of bosonic quantum error correction. Unlike standard two-component Schrödinger cat codes, where a single photon-loss event induces an uncorrectable bit-flip, the nonlinear phase-space structure of Kerr cat states enables simultaneous detection and correction of both photon-loss and dephasing errors within a unified recovery framework, with optimal recovery operations determined via convex optimization. We demonstrate that Kerr cat encodings significantly outperform conventional cat codes under combined loss and dephasing noise, and that judicious parameter optimization can suppress both error channels to a level that reduces the overhead of additional error correction layers. We further show that Kerr-deformed coherent-state manifolds under engineered two-photon driving emerge as effective steady states of driven-dissipative dynamics, with single-photon decoherence strongly suppressed and leakage outside the protected manifold appearing only as higher-order corrections in the deformation strength. Our extended formalism identifies generalized Kerr Schrödinger cat codes as promising candidates for fault-tolerant bosonic quantum computation in experimental platforms such as nonlinear photonics.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Automated reproducibility assessments in the social and behavioral sciences using large language models

arXiv:2606.13670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reproducibility in the social and behavioral sciences is typically evaluated by independent researchers who reanalyze the original data to assess whether the published findings can be recovered. However, such approaches are resource-intensive and difficult to scale. Here, we show that large language models (LLMs) can automate reproducibility assessments. Using N=76 published studies with predefined claims from the behavioral and social sciences, we compare LLM-generated analysis with the original findings and human reanalysis. For 7 studies, the LLM could not produce a viable effect size estimate. For the remaining studies, our LLM pipeline recovered the original effect sizes in 41% of studies using a +/-0.05 tolerance in Cohen's d. Further, our LLM pipeline reached the same qualitative conclusion as the original study in 96% of cases, where conclusions indicate whether the reanalysis supports the original claim. For comparison, human reanalysts recovered the original effect sizes in 34% of studies and reached the same qualitative conclusion in 74% of cases. Together, these results show that LLMs can serve as a scalable tool for automated reproducibility assessment and provide a foundation for systematic auditing of empirical results in the social and behavioral sciences.