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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Extreme Learning based on Gaussian Boson Sampling

arXiv:2606.15230v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir models offer a hardware-efficient learning paradigm for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices by exploiting untrained quantum dynamics as a fixed feature map and restricting optimization to a simple classical readout layer. We propose a quantum extreme learning machine implemented using gaussian boson sampling and an encoding strategy that achieves high classification accuracy while reducing optical resource requirements. Classical inputs are jointly encoded in the squeezing parameters and in the interferometer unitary, enabling sampling-based, highly nonlinear feature maps while leveraging large-scale GBS output statistics, which are conjectured to be classically intractable. We systematically compare multiple families of quantum features accessible in the same setup and find that photon-number sampling probabilities provide the best performance, consistent with their higher effective feature dimensionality. Finally, we benchmark against classical nonlinear baselines and analyse robustness under noisy scenarios, showing competitive performance with fewer trainable parameters and indicating practical promise for near-term photonic implementations.

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

Self-Supervised Learning as Discrete Communication

Most self-supervised learning (SSL) methods learn continuous visual representations by aligning different views of the same input, offering limited control over how information is structured across representation dimensions. In this work, we frame visual self-supervised learning as a discrete communication process between a teacher and a student network, where semantic information is transmitted through a fixed-capacity binary channel. Rather than aligning continuous features, the student predicts multi-label binary messages produced by the teacher. Discrete agreement is enforced through an element-wise binary cross-entropy objective, while a coding-rate regularization term encourages effective utilization of the constrained channel, promoting structured representations. We further show that periodically reinitializing the projection head strengthens this effect by encouraging embeddings that remain predictive across multiple discrete encodings. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over continuous agreement baselines on image classification, retrieval, and dense visual prediction tasks, as well as under domain shift through self-supervised adaptation. Beyond backbone representations, we analyze the learned binary codes and show that they form a compact and informative discrete language, capturing semantic factors reusable across classes.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

inquiSTR: a toolkit for accurate and efficient population-scale tandem repeat genotyping and analysis

Tandem repeats are highly mutable genomic elements linked to human traits and diseases. Profiling large catalogs of tandem repeats from population-scale long-read sequencing data requires accurate and efficient tools. We introduce inquiSTR, a command-line toolkit for fast genome-wide tandem repeat length genotyping. inquiSTR, with efficient parallel processing and low-memory streaming algorithms, genotypes a genome-wide repeat catalog of 1.78 million loci in less than two minutes. Benchmarking shows high accuracy and significantly faster performance compared to existing tools and truth sets. inquiSTR also provides methods for downstream analyses such as population structure inference, association testing, and outlier detection.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution. The standard remedy is to collect multi-view teleoperation data for every failure case, but this scales poorly in both cost and time. We introduce Pose6DAug, a failure-driven data augmentation framework that turns a policy's own successful episodes into targeted demonstrations for its failure modes, without any new data collection. Our key insight is that each successful episode already encodes a physically valid action trajectory together with calibrated multi-view observations. By swapping only the manipulated object while preserving this trajectory, we obtain new and physically grounded demonstrations. However, naive 2D video editing breaks multi-view consistency and physical plausibility, particularly under heavy occlusion and egocentric viewpoints. Our method instead operates directly in 3D, anchoring the target object with an explicit mesh driven by a temporally coherent 6D pose trajectory, ensuring geometrically consistent renderings across all camera views. Fine-tuning a VLA on data augmented by our method improves success rates by 16.5% relative to the state-of-the-art baseline on novel objects, while preserving in-distribution performance. These results show that multi-view and physically consistent augmentation is a practical path to scalable VLA generalization.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SAMA: Semantic Anchor-aligned Augmentation for Unified Low-Resource Multimodal Information Extraction

Multimodal Information Extraction (MIE)-covering tasks such as Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER), Relation Extraction (MRE), and Event Extraction (MEE)-is essential for understanding multimedia content but remains constrained by severe data scarcity. Although data augmentation is a promising remedy, existing approaches are impeded by coarse cross-modal alignment and fragmented, task-specific designs that fail to exploit shared semantic knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Semantic Anchor-aligned Multimodal Augmentation (SAMA), a unified framework for generating high-fidelity, task-aware synthetic data. SAMA constructs structured semantic anchors from ground-truth labels to guide a Collaborative Multi-Experts Multimodal Large Language Model (CME-MLLM), which integrates a Universal Adapter for shared semantics with Task-Specific Adapters to produce diverse yet constraint-compliant textual samples. For image synthesis, SAMA employs an Anchor-Preserving Diffusion mechanism that uses anchor-weighted prompts and latent conditioning to maintain critical semantic anchors while diversifying visual contexts. To eliminate the need for manual verification, SAMA further introduces a Dual-Constraint Filtering module that selects synthetic samples based on both cross-modal consistency and anchor fidelity. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets for MNER, MRE, and MEE demonstrate that SAMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under both fully supervised and low-resource settings, underscoring its versatility, robustness, and effectiveness.

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

FlowR2A: Learning Reward-to-Action Distribution for Multimodal Driving Planning

arXiv:2606.24231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal driving planning faces a long-standing tension between two paradigms: scoring-based methods benefit from dense reward supervision but are confined to a fixed action vocabulary, while anchor-based methods generate proposals dynamically yet suffer from sparse supervision constrained to a single ground-truth trajectory. In this work, we propose FlowR2A, which resolves this tension by reframing simulation-based rewards from discriminative targets into generative conditions. By learning the reward-conditioned action distribution from dense trajectory-reward pairs with a flow-matching decoder, FlowR2A unifies the dense supervision of scoring-based methods with the proposal generation of anchor-based methods in a single generative model, forcing the model to internalize the correlation between an action and its outcomes in safety, progress, comfort, and rule compliance. To balance hard safety constraints against soft progress objectives, we introduce fine-grained per-timestep reward conditioning and reward noise augmentation. The generative formulation naturally supports controllable test-time sampling via reward guidance and anchored sampling, producing high-quality proposals. FlowR2A achieves state-of-the-art results on the NAVSIM v1 and v2 benchmarks, with multimodal proposals of substantially higher quality than prior methods.

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

The Warrant Gap: Claim-Conditioned Re-scoring for Fact-Checking

Fact-checking systems built on LLMs achieve high verdict accuracy on standard benchmarks, yet routinely output Supports labels whose cited evidence does not license the claim. Structured decomposition is the natural way to inspect those warrants, but rigid extraction protocols strip the full-claim context that facets need. We introduce SIFT – claim-conditioned re-scoring of extracted evidence spans against the full claim – paired with WSP (Warranted Supports Proportion), an automatic NLI check that the cited warrant entails the claim. We evaluate on FEVER, SciFact, 5PILS, and DP across four open-source backbones. SIFT recovers accuracy on cells where naive decomposition costs up to 27.6 points, while raising WSP above direct prompting; WSP itself calibrates against human gold evidence at AUC 0.92 and precision 0.98.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Absolute continuity, supports and idempotent splitting in categorical probability

arXiv:2308.00651v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Markov categories have recently turned out to be a powerful high-level framework for probability and statistics. They accommodate purely categorical definitions of notions like conditional probability and almost sure equality, as well as proofs of fundamental results such as the Hewitt–Savage 0/1 Law, the de Finetti Theorem and the Ergodic Decomposition Theorem. In this work, we develop additional relevant notions from probability theory in the setting of Markov categories. This comprises improved versions of previously introduced definitions of absolute continuity and supports, as well as a detailed study of idempotents and idempotent splitting in Markov categories. Our main result on idempotent splitting is that every idempotent measurable Markov kernel between standard Borel spaces splits across another standard Borel space, and we derive this as an instance of a general categorical criterion for idempotent splitting in Markov categories.

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

Toward the Whole Picture: Accumulative Fingerprint Mapping and Reconstruction for Small-Area Mobile Sensors

Small-area fingerprint sensing on mobile devices creates a fundamental mismatch between acquisition and recognition: each touch captures only a tiny, pose-varying local patch, while reliable biometric matching ultimately requires a stable and sufficiently complete fingerprint representation. Existing pipelines largely cope with this mismatch by treating repeated touches as independent partial templates, which leads to repeated registration, repeated matching, and no guarantee of adequate global coverage. In this paper, we advocate a different formulation, namely accumulative fingerprint mapping and reconstruction for small-area mobile sensing. Rather than matching every partial patch separately, the proposed perspective converts a sequence of local observations into a unified fingerprint state that is progressively refined as new touches arrive and can be matched only once after consolidation. As a concrete baseline, we present a classical pipeline that performs patch-wise structural feature extraction, feature-level registration and fusion, fingerprint map construction, and phase-based ridge reconstruction. More importantly, we position this baseline within a broader mobile fingerprint framework that integrates structured token learning, two-stage pose reasoning, and diffusion-based generative reconstruction. This viewpoint reframes mobile fingerprint recognition from multi-capture multi-match processing to accumulative map building, state refinement, and one-shot matching, offering a principled route toward efficient, pose-robust, and deployment-friendly biometrics for small-area mobile platforms. The baseline implementation has been publicly released at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/FpReconstruction.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

THE SILENT STRUGGLE: EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWNS IN HEALTHCARE DELIVERY IN THE NORTHERN REGION OF GHANA

Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centred care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing Semi-Structured interviews with purposively sampled twenty patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted Content Analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinderer patient openness and the quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact on treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environment and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers. Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centered care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing semi-structured interviews with twenty purposively sampled patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted content analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinder patient openness and quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environments and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Re-evaluating the Cross-Sectional Prevalence of Severe Age-Related Hearing Loss Using Extreme Value Statistics

作者:

Standard demographic models of age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) predominantly utilize symmetric functions, such as log-normal distributions for age-binned thresholds and 4-parameter logistic curves for prevalence estimates. While these models capture early-to-moderate degradation effectively, they structurally struggle to characterize the heavy tails associated with severe clinical impairment. In this study, we present a statistical critique using a secondary analysis of the historical Medical Research Council (MRC) National Study of Hearing (1980-1986) dataset. By applying Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution theory, we demonstrate that as severity increases, the underlying statistical geometry of hearing loss shifts. The asymmetric, heavy-tailed GEV distribution provides a parsimonious description of severe impairment, requiring fewer parameters than standard symmetric models. However, we explicitly acknowledge that utilizing static population data to infer progression introduces an ecological fallacy. Furthermore, the dataset's historical nature embeds unquantified generational cohort effects. We conclude that while extreme value statistics offer a compelling mathematical framework for modeling the variance of severe presbycusis, true longitudinal datasets are required to isolate physiological degradation from historical cohort variance.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

We present an automated approach to distinguish between ply instances in semantic segmentation masks of high-resolution carbon-fiber reinforced polymer micrographs. Interpreting the segmentation mask as a graph with pixels as vertices, enables us to use a shortest-path algorithm yielding the ply-separating paths. Thereby, we bridge the gap between semantic segmentation and ply instance segmentation using global information. We successfully apply our approach on high-resolution micrographs featuring a broad range of characteristics like artificially added gaps in single or multiple plies, different stacking sequences and ply traversing cracks. Assigning each fiber pixel to a ply based on the calculated paths, allows for a comprehensive, quantitative ply analysis with respect to its microstructural properties like the local fiber volume fraction as well as locally resolved ply and interleaf layer thickness. These insights help to reveal manufacturing-induced inhomogeneities, draw conclusions on manufacturing parameters and link mechanical properties to underlying microstructural imperfections.

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

Integrating Multi-Label Classification and Generative AI for Scalable Analysis of User Feedback

arXiv:2601.23018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In highly competitive software markets, user experience (UX) evaluation is crucial for ensuring software quality and fostering long-term product success. Such UX evaluations typically combine quantitative metrics from standardized questionnaires with qualitative feedback collected through open-ended questions. While open-ended feedback offers valuable insights for improvement and helps explain quantitative results, analyzing large volumes of user comments is challenging and time-consuming. In this paper, we present techniques developed during a long-term UX measurement project at a major software company to efficiently process and interpret extensive volumes of user comments. To provide a high-level overview of the collected comments, we employ a supervised machine learning approach that assigns meaningful, pre-defined topic labels to each comment. Additionally, we demonstrate how generative AI (GenAI) can be leveraged to create concise and informative summaries of user feedback, facilitating effective communication of findings to the organization and especially upper management. Finally, we investigate whether the sentiment expressed in user comments can serve as an indicator for overall product satisfaction. Our results show that sentiment analysis alone does not reliably reflect user satisfaction. Instead, product satisfaction needs to be assessed explicitly in surveys to measure the user's perception of the product.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Reinforcement Learning with Action-Triggered Observations

arXiv:2510.02149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Action-Triggered Sporadically Traceable Markov Decision Processes (ATST-MDPs), a reinforcement learning framework for partial observability in which full state observations occur stochastically at each step, with probability determined by the chosen action. We derive Bellman equations tailored to this setting and establish the existence of an optimal policy. Exploiting the fact that sporadic observations reveal the full state, we provide an equivalent formulation in which agents commit to action-sequences between consecutive observations. Under the linear MDP assumption, we show that the value function over such action-sequences admits a linear representation in a finite-dimensional feature map, enabling standard regression-based methods. As an application, we derive ATST-LSVI-UCB, an optimistic algorithm achieving regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{Kd^3(1-\gamma)^{-3}})$ for episodic learning with geometrically distributed horizons, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $d$ the feature dimension, and $\gamma$ the discount factor (episode continuation probability), matching the known rate for linear MDPs with full observability.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grad Detect: Gradient-Based Hallucination Detection in LLMs

arXiv:2606.24790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet they remain prone to generating hallucinations. Detecting these hallucinations is critical for deploying LLMs reliably in high-stakes applications. We present Grad Detect, a gradient-based approach for predicting hallucinations by analyzing layer-wise gradient patterns from a single forward-backward pass during inference. Our method shows that the internal gradient structure of a model carries rich information about the correctness of its output. This information is not accessible through output-level signals alone. We evaluate Grad Detect on several Q&A benchmarks across both hallucination detection and model abstention prediction, where it consistently outperforms confidence-based and sampling-based baselines. Through comprehensive layer ablation studies across all eleven models from four architectural families, we find that the final five layers concentrate over 97% of the discriminative gradient signal, enabling efficient deployment with minimal performance loss. Grad Detect provides a unified framework for predicting multiple dimensions of LLM reliability, offering strong predictive performance alongside interpretable insights into where and how model failures originate.

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

Parallel Test-Time Scaling with Multi-Sequence Verifiers

arXiv:2603.03417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling, which generates multiple candidate solutions for a single problem, is a powerful technique for improving large language model performance. However, it is hindered by two key bottlenecks: accurately selecting the correct solution from the candidate pool, and the high inference latency from generating many full solutions. We argue that both challenges are fundamentally linked to verifier calibration, as a well-calibrated verifier improves answer selection and enables early-stopping strategies to reduce latency. However, existing non-generative verifiers are limited as they score each candidate in isolation, overlooking rich contextual information across the set of candidates. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Sequence Verifier (MSV), a lightweight verifier that predicts each candidate's correctness conditioned on the full sampled set. MSV achieves improved calibration, which directly enhances best-of-N selection performance and empowers a novel early-stopping framework. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, MSV improves best-of-64 accuracy by up to 6\% relative to strong baselines, and in the early-stopping setting reaches the same accuracy as baselines with less than half the latency.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Text Recognition Dataset from Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts

In this work, we target Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in low-resource scenarios, which arise from underrepresented languages, rare scripts, and degraded visual conditions typical of historical documents. We introduce SCAM (Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts), a new line-level dataset built from digitized ancient manuscripts written in the extinct Sahidic Coptic dialect. The dataset reflects a realistic and challenging setting, as it combines heterogeneous acquisition conditions across libraries with typical manuscript degradations such as ink fading, bleed-through, and material deterioration. In addition to visual complexity, SCAM poses significant linguistic challenges due to the scarcity of resources for Sahidic Coptic, its uncommon alphabet, and dialect-specific diacritics. To support research in low-resource HTR, we benchmark several state-of-the-art approaches based on different paradigms, highlighting their limitations and strengths in this setting. Our results underline the gap between current HTR performance on well-resourced modern scripts and historically grounded, low-resource scenarios, thus providing a reference point for future developments.

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

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

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

PreUnlearn: Auditing Collateral Knowledge Damage Before Large Language Model Unlearning

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove specified knowledge while preserving the rest of the model's capabilities. However, the boundary between knowledge to forget and knowledge to retain is often unclear, since related and even distant information may be entangled in the model. In this paper, we study LLM unlearning from a data-centric perspective and measure how unlearning effects propagate from the forget set to same-domain and distant-domain knowledge. We find a consistent decay pattern: collateral damage is strongest near the forget set, weakens with semantic distance, but does not disappear at domain boundaries. We further ask whether such damage can be audited before unlearning is executed. We formulate forget-set auditing as a pre-unlearning prediction task and analyze which data features are most predictive of downstream damage. Our results show that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set provide the strongest signals, suggesting that collateral damage is partly reflected in data geometry before model updates occur. These findings position forget-set auditing as an early warning tool for identifying risky unlearning runs and designing more reliable unlearning procedures.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Where Does Social Reasoning Come From? Capability Provenance in Language Models

We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B. Training-data attribution measures how strongly each training document influences a model's predictions on a benchmark, but document-level scores are too noisy to identify which corpus regions support which capabilities, and prior work has emphasized factual knowledge rather than reasoning. We compute gradient-based attribution (TrackStar via Bergson) over a working set drawn from the de-duplicated Dolma3 mix, aggregate influence across WebOrganizer's 24-format x 24-topic taxonomy (576 bins), and contrast benchmark pairs in a 2x2 design that varies domain (social vs. STEM) and capability type (reasoning vs. knowledge): SocialIQA and MMLU Social Sciences against ARC-Challenge and MMLU STEM. Social and STEM reasoning draw on qualitatively distinct corpus regions, and the contrast is sharper at the reasoning level than at the knowledge level. Targeted machine unlearning provides partial causal validation: forgetting high-attribution topic bins (e.g., Literature for SocialIQA) degrades the aligned benchmark more than within-bin random baselines, and we open-source all code, sampling manifests, the bin-level influence matrix, and unlearning checkpoints.

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

Running the Gauntlet: Re-evaluating the Capabilities of Agents Beyond Familiar Environments

arXiv:2606.14397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agentic systems continue to evolve and are widely deployed in real-world scenarios, there is a growing demand to faithfully evaluate their capabilities. However, current benchmarks are typically built on popular applications with relatively simple tasks and focus on a narrow set of capabilities while overlooking broader dimensions, resulting in saturated performance on modern agents and failing to probe their limitations. To this end, we introduce GauntletBench, a web-based benchmark for evaluating agent generalisation in challenging scenarios, focusing on three underexplored capabilities (temporal perception, graphical understanding, and 3D reasoning), across five less-covered professional applications (Video Editor, Workflow Builder, 3D Modeller, Flight Analyser, and Circuit Designer), each with 20 vision-intensive tasks (100 in total). Our benchmark provides a modular pipeline that comprises an environment compatible with both open- and closed-source agent frameworks, a controlled web-based application, a well-structured task suite, and an automated evaluation engine with diverse metrics. Contrary to widespread expectations, our empirical results reveal that frontier agentic systems remain far from achieving human-level performance. Even the state-of-the-art agent achieves only a 19.1% success rate on our GauntletBench, highlighting the limitations in these overlooked capabilities and generalisation. By comparison, non-expert human annotators achieve over 80% success on our challenging yet feasible tasks, revealing the substantial gap between current agent capabilities and those required for complex real-world scenarios.

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

Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness

arXiv:2603.21396v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept – a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying this capability in open-weights models. First, we find that it is behaviorally robust: models detect injected steering vectors at moderate rates with 0% false positives across diverse prompts and dialogue formats. Notably, this capability emerges specifically from post-training; we show that preference optimization algorithms like DPO can elicit it, but standard supervised finetuning does not. We provide evidence that detection cannot be explained by simple linear association between certain steering vectors and directions promoting affirmative responses. We trace the detection mechanism to a two-stage circuit in which "evidence carrier" features in early post-injection layers detect perturbations monotonically along diverse directions, suppressing downstream "gate" features that implement a default negative response. This circuit is absent in base models and robust to refusal ablation. Identification of injected concepts relies on largely distinct later-layer mechanisms that only weakly overlap with those involved in detection. Finally, we show that introspective capability is substantially underelicited: ablating refusal directions improves detection by +53%, and a trained bias vector improves it by +75% on held-out concepts, both without meaningfully increasing false positives. Our results suggest that this introspective awareness of injected concepts is robust and mechanistically nontrivial, and could be substantially amplified in future models. Code: https://github.com/safety-research/introspection-mechanisms.

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

NetCause: Counterfactual Learning for Root Cause Analysis in Large-Scale Networks

arXiv:2606.13543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a learned model capture how faults propagate through a large-scale network and use this knowledge to causally attribute customer impact to its underlying root cause? Existing root cause analysis techniques often rely on static rules, correlation heuristics, or topology-local reasoning, which struggle to generalize in dynamic environments where faults propagate across complex physical and logical dependencies. We present NetCause, a self-supervised learning-based framework that models network incidents as graph-temporal processes and uses counterfactual simulation to rank candidate root causes. This approach produces an interpretable ranking of root cause hypotheses and integrates naturally with operator-defined mitigation and remediation actions. We train the model on over 1,500 incidents collected over six months from a leading cloud provider's production network and evaluate it on 31 expert-labeled incidents. NetCause consistently improves root cause ranking quality in the regime most relevant to operational decision-making, achieving a 16.1% accuracy improvement over a rule-based heuristic baseline. While training is computationally intensive, inference is lightweight, requiring only seconds of GPU runtime per incident (well below typical telemetry collection latencies).