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

Code as a Weapon: A Consensus-Labeled Prompt Bank for Measuring Coding-Model Compliance with Malicious-Code Requests

A general-purpose language model that answers a harmful question returns text; a coding model that complies with a malicious request can return a working weapon: a keylogger, ransomware, an exploit that runs as written. This asymmetry in the severity of a single act of compliance implies coding-specialized models should clear a higher refusal bar than general-purpose chat models, not a lower one, yet the field cannot tell whether they do. Refusal benchmarks for malicious code are fragmented: they mix requests for executable software with requests for harmful security knowledge and report refusal rates over non-comparable corpora. This paper's central result is that the CODE-versus-KNOWLEDGE classification axis established in a prior four-corpus release remains stable under a substantially expanded corpus pool and an independently refreshed judge panel, evidence that it measures a real construct rather than an artifact of the prompts or judges. Eight corpora spanning diverse elicitation paradigms (direct, jailbreak-decorated, indirect, and agent/interpreter: ASTRA, CySecBench, AdvBench/harmful_behaviors, JailbreakBench, MalwareBench, RedCode, RMCBench, Scam2Prompt) are classified under a five-judge consensus protocol (6,675 prompts x 5 judges = 33,375 calls), reaching Fleiss' kappa = 0.767 [95% CI 0.755, 0.777] ("substantial"). Critically, the panel shares no judge with the prior release (five paid commercial APIs replaced by five open-weight models from five vendors), yet the two panels agree on 94.45% of the 3,133 shared prompts and reach Cohen's kappa = 0.952 [0.942, 0.963] on the 3,031-prompt binary overlap: the axis survives near-total panel replacement. The released bank comprises 4,748 consensus-CODE and 1,923 consensus-KNOWLEDGE prompts, a reliability-quantified benchmark whose central classification axis is shown stable across corpus expansion and judge-panel replacement.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

In silico characterization of lysis and host-recognition modules in Staphylococcus aureus bacteriophage genomes

Background/aim: Antimicrobial resistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) requires precision non-antibiotic therapeutics, yet phage lytic efficacy is poorly predicted by phenotypic assays, as shown by paradoxical biofilm responses. This study characterized the genomic architecture of lytic S. aureus bacteriophages, focusing on the conservation of the lysis module and the variability of host-recognition modules, to provide a rational basis for phage candidate selection. Materials and methods: Twenty-two complete S. aureus phage genomes were retrieved from NCBI GenBank. Genomic features were extracted with custom Biopython scripts. Lysis (endolysin, holin) and host-recognition (tail fiber/receptor-binding protein) modules were annotated and validated by InterPro domain analysis, with disrupted endolysins resolved by tBLASTn. Phylogeny was reconstructed from large terminase subunit (TerL) sequences using maximum likelihood. Results: Genome size spanned three classes, from 17.5 to 148.6 kb. The LysK-type endolysin (CHAP, Amidase, SH3b) was highly conserved, whereas tail fiber/RBP genes were detected in only 14 of 22 phages. Domain analysis reclassified two proteins annotated as endolysins as virion-associated peptidoglycan hydrolases, and identified two independent mechanisms, HNH endonuclease insertion and intron splitting, that interrupt lysis-module genes and confound automated annotation. Maximum likelihood analysis recovered a strongly supported, highly conserved core clade with EW and SA13 as divergent lineages. Conclusion: Lysis modules are conserved whereas host-recognition modules are variable, indicating that host recognition rather than the lytic enzyme is the principal determinant of host range and the more rational target for phage selection and engineering.

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

PEFT-MedSAM: Efficient Fine-Tuning of Medical Foundation Models for Explainable Skin Lesion Segmentation

Automated segmentation of skin lesions using deep learning models for dermoscopic images can be very helpful in finding melanomas earlier than they would normally be detected. However, most deep learning methods available do not perform well. The aim of this paper is to present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called PEFT-MedSAM for adapting the Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to automatically segment dermoscopic skin lesions. The PEFT-MedSAM method uses only the lightweight mask decoder for training the model while keeping the pre-trained image encoder and prompt encoder frozen. The experiments performed on the ISIC 2018 benchmark dataset shows that PEFT-MedSAM obtains a dice coefficient of .9411 and an intersection over union value of .8918 when compared to both a fully trained U-Net baseline (.8715 dice coefficient) and zero-shot MedSAM inference (.8997 dice coefficient). The external validation of the model using PH2 dataset shows .9467 dice coefficient with +/- .0310 standard deviation. Supportive evidence for these claims include a p-value less than .0001 for Wilcoxon signed rank tests comparing the two datasets and bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence intervals of [.9364,.9447] that represent the estimated range of possible values for the average dice coefficient obtained by repeating the test. To increase clinical trustworthiness, we used Grad-CAM explainability along with a pointing game based evaluation methodology to evaluate the CNN baseline model on the validation set. The results showed that we had an accuracy rate of 98.27% on the validation set of 519 images and confirmed that the model classified regions containing skin lesions.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

First to reach $n$ game

arXiv:2506.08782v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and type 2). At each round, we randomly pick a ball from the urn, and its type determines which of the two players wins. We study the game under three regimes. In the first and the third regimes, a ball is taken without replacement, whilst in the second regime, it is returned to the urn with one more ball of the same colour. We study the properties of the random variables equal to the properly defined overall net profits of the players, and the results are drastically different in all three regimes.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Groups in Critic-Free RLVR

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models. Existing critic-free RL methods typically generate a group of rollouts for the same question to estimate value baselines for advantage computation. However, this design suffers from data inefficiency, group synchronization barriers, and inflexibility with structured rollouts. In this work, we revisit the role of the ``group'' and show that its underlying function is not merely to estimate baselines but to prevent false penalties on negative samples. Building on this insight, we propose negative token filtering, a simple and effective strategy that enables stable single-rollout training. We apply it to two batch-level advantage methods, achieving comparable performance on reasoning tasks and stronger performance on agentic tasks relative to group-based RL techniques.

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

Multi-Class Brain Tumor Classification Using Advanced Deep Learning Models: A Comparative Study

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, accurately classifying brain tumors from MRI images continues to pose challenges. In this research, we present a comprehensive evaluation of five different convolutional neural networks (CNN) architectures, including a customized baseline model and four pre-trained models - for use in classifying multi-class brain tumors using a clinically-sourced dataset of approximately 10,000 MRI images. We have utilized five different architectures; VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB0, which were all tested and trained within an identical experimental framework. Performance was measured by both overall accuracy and tumor-wise recall as a means to measure the clinically-relevant performance of each architecture. We found that EfficientNetB0 had the best overall classification accuracy at 95%, when compared to the other architectures tested; specifically VGG16 (94.37%), VGG19 (92.29%), DenseNet121 (90.91%) and the customized CNN (78.00%). An especially important finding of our research was the considerable improvement in detecting meningiomas; specifically, while simple CNNs could detect meningiomas with a recall rate of approximately 20%, EfficientNetB0 was able to detect meningiomas with a recall rate of 89%. Meningiomas are often difficult to detect because they can appear very subtly on MRI images. Additionally, an interesting finding was that the deeper VGG19 performed worse than the shallower VGG16. This indicates that in many cases the architectural efficiency of a CNN model may be more important than its depth when working with medical images. Overall, EfficientNetB0 appears to provide the optimal trade-off between classification accuracy, number of parameters used in the model and clinically meaningful performance.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

One Layer's Trash is Another Layer's Treasure: Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection in LVLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse multimodal tasks, yet their practical deployment remains constrained by the computational burden arising from lengthy visual tokens. While visual token pruning has emerged as a promising solution, existing methods suffer from a fundamental limitation: once tokens are pruned at a specific layer, they become inaccessible to all subsequent layers, leading to premature information loss that can compromise model performance. Through empirical studies, we observe that different layers exhibit distinct visual region focus, indicating a varying optimal token subset across layers. Motivated by this insight, we propose Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection (ALVTS), a novel framework that breaks away from the conventional static token pruning paradigm. ALVTS incorporates a lightweight token selector to identify and route important tokens for further processing, while allowing less important tokens to skip the layer, thus minimizing computational redundancy. These two streams of tokens are seamlessly reintegrated before being fed into subsequent layers, facilitating adaptive compression across the entire model. Grounded in our importance consistency constrained low-rank approximation, the proposed token selection module closely emulates the full attention mechanism, effectively capturing its essential patterns without requiring model retraining. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL validate the effectiveness of our method. With an 89% token compression ratio, ALVTS retains 96.7% of the original model's accuracy, achieving a superior efficiency-accuracy trade-off for LVLM inference.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Super-Arrhenius relaxation of the triangular plaquette model in any dimension

arXiv:2606.16259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the following plaquette model from statistical physics: a lamp lies at every vertex of the triangular lattice and a switch lies at every even vertex of the (bipartite) dual hexagonal lattice. Each switch toggles the three lamps on its face. The energy of a configuration is the number of ON lamps. For the Glauber dynamics associated with the Gibbs measure defined by this Hamiltonian at any inverse temperature $\beta>0$, we show that, in any dimension $d\ge 2$, the infinite volume relaxation time satisfies \[e^{\beta^2/C}/C \le T_{\mathrm{rel}}\le Ce^{e^{C\beta}}\] for some $C>0$. Our result entails that the Gibbs measure is unique. The $e^{\beta^2}$ scaling was conjectured by Newman and Moore in 1999 and matches the behaviour of supercritical rooted kinetically constrained models such as the East model, thus recovering fragile glass phenomenology in the absence of kinetic constraints. More precisely, we show that, on a torus of side length $2^k$, when $\beta\to\infty$ and $k/\beta\to0$, we have $T_{\mathrm{rel}}=e^{2\beta k(1+o(1))}$. Quite surprisingly, however, we also prove that, on non-periodic finite domains of size $n\le e^{\beta/C}$ for large $C>0$, we have the much larger asymptotics $\ln T_{\mathrm{rel}}=\beta n^{\Theta(1)}$. The main ingredients of the proofs are new results in extremal and enumerative combinatorics and rely on renormalisation ideas for the dynamics and its groundstates also known as the Ledrappier subshift. We note consequences of our results to geometric group theory (more precisely to the complexity of the word problem for the Baumslag finitely presented group) and to ergodic theory.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Emergent mirror symmetry in the optimization of the central-spin quantum battery

arXiv:2606.11557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum batteries provide a useful setting for exploring nonequilibrium many-body effects in energy storage. Here we investigate the optimization of a quantum battery based on the central-spin model. We identify two complementary structural indicators associated with the effective charging dynamics: one yields an upper bound on the average charging power, while the other characterizes the buildup of stored energy. We show that these two indicators are jointly optimized at a distinguished initial charger excitation number, which selects a particular Dicke sector of the model. At this common optimal point, the effective charging Hamiltonian becomes exactly mirror symmetric, suggesting mirror symmetry as a useful structural indicator for optimizing quantum batteries. We further show that the corresponding optimal dynamics can be closely approximated by product initial states, in particular by spin coherent states whose excitation-number distribution is centered at the symmetry-selected point. Our results establish a direct connection between charging performance, optimal-state structure, and emergent symmetry in the central-spin quantum battery, and suggest symmetry as a useful organizing principle for efficient charging in interacting many-body quantum systems.

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

When Correct Edges Cannot Be Verified: A Provenance Gap in Incomplete KGQA and a Provenance-Favoring Completion Policy

Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering (IKGQA) requires completing missing edges to continue reasoning. A growing line of work verifies completed edges against retrieved text, treating textual support as a proxy for edge quality. We ask a question that, to our knowledge, has not been systematically tested: does textual verifiability actually track correctness? Exploiting the gold deleted triples provided by the standard random-deletion protocol, we measure both. The finding is counterintuitive: among gold-correct completed edges, 76-96% have no supporting passage even under exhaustive retrieval, robustly across deletion rates (20%/40%), datasets (CWQ/WebQSP), and relation types (structural, commonsense, long-tail). Most Freebase-style facts simply do not occur as head-tail co-mentions in text. Textual faithfulness therefore measures provenance, not correctness – separated by a paradigm-level gap no in-corpus retrieval closes. This reframes edge completion. Since most completed edges – correct or not – are causally redundant for the answer (95-97% of correct answers do not depend on any unsupported edge), the central question shifts from "is the edge correct?" to "admit or abstain under provenance uncertainty?" Within this framing we present TGComplete, a provenance-favoring admission policy that retrieves evidence at a reasoning breakpoint, verifies a candidate through a lightweight loop, and abstains when support is absent. Against the generate-to-complete baseline GoG, it attains higher edge precision against gold (15-21% vs 3-14%), with no statistically detectable EM loss and 3.1-7.4 times higher strict faithfulness of admitted edges – at the cost of lower recall. We position TGComplete not as uniformly better, but as a principled point on a precision/provenance-recall trade-off, appropriate when auditability matters.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exclusion Statistics as a Thermodynamic Resource in Quantum Heat Engines

arXiv:2606.19310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The maximum power extractable from a quantum thermoelectric heat engine operating with free fermion carriers is bounded by the universal Whitney limit, $P_{fermion}^{\max} \simeq 0.0321\pi^2 k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$. We demonstrate that this bound is not fundamental to quantum heat engines but is instead an artifact of fermionic statistics. Within the nonlinear Landauer-B\"{u}ttiker framework, a bosonic working medium yields a strictly enhanced universal maximum power, $P_{boson}^{\max} = (\ln 2)^2\, k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$, exceeding the fermionic limit by a factor of $(\ln 2)^2/(0.0321\pi^2) \approx 1.52$. We propose magnon transport through a ferromagnetic spin chain as an experimentally viable bosonic realization. Incorporating Haldane fractional exclusion statistics with parameter $g$ provides a continuous interpolation between the bosonic ($g = 0$) and fermionic ($g = 1$) limits, revealing a monotonic enhancement of maximum power for $g < 1$ at reduced bias cost. These results establish quantum statistical exclusion as a previously unrecognized and independently tunable thermodynamic resource, opening performance regimes inaccessible to conventional carrier-engineering approaches.

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

Optimizing Lithium Production Decisions under Geological, Demand, and Pricing Uncertainties: A POMDP Framework for Multi-Objective Decision Making

arXiv:2606.18598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision making in lithium production is challenging, whether from an investor's perspective or a strategic production standpoint. Determining which mines to open and when to open them involves not only geological and price uncertainties, but also complexities around the choice of extraction method, from direct lithium extraction to hard rock mining. Prior work explored models of this problem and different methods to optimize mining decisions; these models did not account for uncertainty in pricing, uncertainty in demand, or different mining technologies to extract lithium. Incorporating different pricing models and extraction technology into these models enables more robust strategies for determining not only when and where to open a mine, but also which method of production to pursue. We frame the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solve using belief state planning methods to get optimal decision making. In our study, we show that POMDP solvers outperform human inspired heuristics by dynamically adapting to shifting lithium price regimes (static, linear, exponential, and stochastic) through belief state planning and explicit uncertainty management. By optimally sequencing exploration, production, and technology choice, the framework achieves higher demand fulfillment and more balanced economic environmental outcomes over the projects lifetime in all different pricing and deposit scenarios.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpretable and Verifiable Hardware Generation with LLM-Driven Stepwise Refinement

arXiv:2606.19387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in software development. However, they are susceptible to hallucinations, meaning that they can introduce subtle semantic and logical errors. Due to the high stakes in chip design and manufacturing, hardware engineers are still reluctant to rely on LLMs for register-transfer level (RTL) generation. In this paper, we propose a hardware generation framework that combines the creativity and broad knowledge of LLMs with the explainability and mathematical rigor of formal methods. Specifically, we devise a set of transformation rules that cover various design decisions and hardware features. By iteratively applying these rules, an LLM agent can convert a design specification into an RTL program with guaranteed correctness. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework.

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

Agent Economics: An Entropy-Controlled Pluralistic Alignment Framework for Preventing Artificial Hivemind in Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2606.09039v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study proposes the Behavioral Protocol Framework (BPF), an entropy-controlled pluralistic alignment framework designed to address two critical challenges in autonomous agent economies: the hivemind effect arising from excessive strategic convergence among agents and the lack of transparency in autonomous decision-making processes. The proposed BPF consists of three core modules: Mentalizing-based Social Intelligence (MbSI) grounded in Theory of Mind (ToM), Pluralistic Alignment (PA), and a Verifiable Execution Kernel (VEK). These modules are organically integrated within a closed-loop architecture that governs the entire lifecycle of agent behavior, from decision-making and execution to verification and feedback. To evaluate the proposed framework, a simulation environment implemented in Python and a Streamlit-based user interface will be developed. Through empirical experimentation, the study aims to examine whether the entropy-control mechanism of the PA module can effectively preserve strategic diversity among agents and mitigate collective convergence, while the VEK module provides a comprehensive and transparent audit trail of the decision-making process. The anticipated results are expected to demonstrate that the proposed framework can simultaneously enhance the stability, efficiency, and trustworthiness of autonomous agent economies. Consequently, this research offers a practical approach for developing robust, transparent, and accountable agent-native economic systems.

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

Reinforcement Twinning for Hybrid Control of Flapping-Wing Drones

arXiv:2505.18201v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling flapping-wing drones requires controllers that handle time-varying, nonlinear, underactuated dynamics from incomplete, noisy sensor data. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly reinforcement learning (RL), have opened new perspectives for addressing such complex control problems through data-driven policy optimization from interaction with the environment. Yet purely data-driven methods are sample-inefficient, demanding extensive, sometimes unsafe exploration, especially without guiding physical models. This motivates hybrid AI-physics frameworks. This article proposes a hybrid model-free/model-based flight-control approach using the reinforcement twinning algorithm. The model-based (MB) component uses an adjoint formulation and an adaptive digital twin continuously identified from live trajectories; the model-free (MF) component uses RL. The two agents share knowledge via transfer learning, imitation learning, and shared experience between the real environment and the digital twin, coordinated by a policy referee that selects which agent acts in reality based on digital-twin performance and a real-to-virtual consistency ratio. The framework is evaluated for the longitudinal control of a flapping-wing drone, modelled as a nonlinear time-varying system driven by quasi-steady aerodynamic forces. The hybrid strategy is tested under three adaptive-model initializations: (1) offline identification from existing data, (2) random initialization with fully online identification, and (3) offline pre-training with biased parameters followed by online adaptation. In all cases, the hybrid framework improves performance, robustness, and sample efficiency over purely model-free and purely model-based approaches.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Robust Spin Splitting and Strain-Controlled Optical Response in Monolayer CrC2N4 for Valleytronic and Optoelectronic Applications

arXiv:2606.17329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolayer CrC2N4 recently emerged as a promising two-dimensional semiconductor, yet its spin-orbit-coupled (SOC) physics and strain-tunable optical response remained largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the electronic, valley, charge-transfer, and optical properties of pristine and biaxially strained monolayer CrC2N4 using first-principles calculations. The monolayer exhibited a direct band gap at the K/K' valleys. SOC produced valley contrasting out-of-plane spin polarization, yielding a moderate valence band spin splitting of 51.9 meV and a small conduction band spin splitting of 1.7 meV. Orbital-resolved analysis showed that the edge states were mainly governed by Cr-d and N-p hybridization, while Bader analysis indicated polar-covalent bonding through charge transfer toward N atoms. Biaxial strain in the range of -4% to +4% tuned the band gap from 1.987 to 1.421 eV and drove an indirect-to-direct gap transition near -1% strain. Tensile strain enhanced the Berry curvature and red-shifted the optical response toward the visible-near-infrared region. These results suggested monolayer CrC2N4 as a promising platform for strain-engineered valleytronic and optoelectronic device applications.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Markov property and path regularity for the solutions to SPDEs driven by cylindrical-martingale valued measures

arXiv:2606.12381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we prove the Markov property for the solution to stochastic partial differential equations driven by a cylindrical orthogonal martingale-valued measure. We assume our coefficients are time-dependent and satisfy some growth and Lipschitz conditions. We also prove that for time-independent coefficients and under mild assumptions on the cylindrical orthogonal martingale-valued measure, the solutions to our stochastic partial differential equations are Feller. Finally, in the case that the $C_{0}$-semigroup is quasi-contraction, we show that the solution to our stochastic partial differential equation possesses a càdlàg version.

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

VietFashion: Benchmarking Sketch-Text Composed Image Retrieval for Cultural Outfits

Cultural garments pose a unique challenge for visual retrieval systems, as their identity often depends on subtle structural and symbolic details that are poorly captured by standard AI models. We introduce VietFashion, a new benchmark for sketch-text composed image retrieval centered on the Ao Dai, a traditional Vietnamese garment. VietFashion enables designers and researchers to retrieve culturally meaningful outfits using a combination of hand-drawn sketches, which convey garment structure, and textual descriptions, which encode cultural semantics. The dataset is initialized with 650 sketches and expanded using generative models to produce over 21,000 photorealistic images with aligned captions. Textual prompts that describe detailed outfit attributes, which are extracted from fashion magazines to ensure authenticity and diversity. To better reflect the inherent ambiguity of design intent, VietFashion adopts a multi-target retrieval setting, where a single query may correspond to multiple valid results. We establish standardized evaluation protocols and benchmark state-of-the-art composed image retrieval methods. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps in modeling fine-grained cultural semantics and multi-modal composition, positioning VietFashion as a challenging benchmark for fine-grained fashion retrieval. The dataset is publicly available at: https://hng0303.github.io/VietFashion.

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

All Eyes on the Workflow: Automated and Efficient Event Discovery from Video Streams

Disciplines such as business process management and process mining aid organizations by discovering insights about processes on the basis of recorded event data. However, an obstacle to process analysis is data multi-modality: for instance, data in video form are not directly interpretable as events. Existing approaches rely on a dictionary of activity label as input, cannot provide frame-by-frame labeling explanations, or rely on superseded computer vision techniques. In this work, we present SnapLog, an approach to extract event data from videos by converting frames to feature vectors using image embeddings and performing temporal segmentation through frame-wise similarity matrices. A generalized few-shot classification is then used to assign labels to the video segments, yielding labeled, timestamped sub-sequences of frames that are interpretable as events. Conventional process mining techniques can be used to analyze the resulting data. We show that our approach produces logs that accurately reflect the process in the videos.

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

A Dual-Branch Collaborative Framework for Joint Optimization of Underwater Image Enhancement and Object Detection

Due to wavelength dependent light absorption and scattering, underwater images usually suffer from color distortion and blurred details, which limits underwater object detection performance. Existing underwater image enhancement methods mainly focus on visual quality improvement, while it is still difficult to balance enhancement quality, processing efficiency, and downstream detection performance. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient dual-branch underwater image enhancement framework for object detection. The detail enhancement branch improves brightness and local contrast to recover texture details in dark regions. The color restoration branch uses adaptive compensation to reduce color distortion and improve color gradation. By combining the complementary outputs of the two branches, the proposed framework provides clearer and more informative images for object detection. On the UIEB and EUVP datasets, the proposed method achieves UIQM scores of 2.249 and 2.576. When applied to the YOLOv8 detection task on the URPC dataset, the proposed method improves mAP50 by 2.1\% compared with the baseline. Extensive experiments show that our method improves object detection in complex underwater scenes, while balancing enhancement quality and processing efficiency.

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

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Polluted Page Is Enough: Evaluating Web Content Pollution in Generative Recommenders

Search-augmented LLMs increasingly mediate everyday consumer recommendations by retrieving live web content. This creates a new risk: generative recommenders may consume polluted web content, such as fake reviews and promotional pages crafted to mislead recommendations. We ask: to what extent do search-augmented LLMs become unwitting promoters of fake products when consuming polluted retrieval results? To answer this, we introduce FORGE (Fake Online Recommendations in Generative Environments), a benchmark for measuring fake-product promotion under controlled web-content pollution. Given an upstream search result, FORGE locally rewrites real products in retrieved web pages into fake ones to simulate web-content pollution, and measures how often the LLM recommends the fake product. FORGE covers 225 real-world products across 15 categories and 5 consumer scenarios. Across 12 commercial and open-weights LLMs, all models are vulnerable: a single polluted page yields fooled rates of up to 27%, while the full top-3 replacement raises this to 73.8%. Vulnerability varies substantially across categories, increasing when models lack stable prior knowledge of the relevant products. Reasoning does not mitigate this vulnerability; instead, it often generates spurious social proof to justify false recommendations. We evaluate three defenses: skepticism prompting and consensus filtering (over model priors or cross-document evidence). Skepticism can exacerbate vulnerability, much like reasoning, while filtering risks suppressing legitimate products. We release FORGE at https://github.com/leoluolol/forge-benchmark.

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

Decompose Sparsely Where You Should, Absorb Densely Where You Should No

arXiv:2606.14040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are typically trained to reconstruct the entire residual stream through a sparse dictionary, implicitly assuming that all activation content is amenable to sparse, monosemantic decomposition. We question this assumption and hypothesize that activations contain a low-rank, dense component that is computationally important to the model yet inherently unsuitable for sparse representation, which serves as a major source of the persistent dense latents widely observed in trained SAEs. To test this, we add a small rank-$r$ linear bottleneck in parallel with standard SAEs (BatchTopK and Matryoshka), allowing dense structure to be absorbed before sparse reconstruction. On Gemma-2-2B layer 12, a rank-24 bottleneck reduces dense latent count by up to 84\% while improving sparse probing and targeted probe perturbation on both architectures at matched sparsity. The absorbed component is (i) structurally identifiable as the top principal components and outlier dimensions; (ii) causally necessary, with removing it raising next-token cross-entropy by 7.5$\times$, far exceeding the 2.8$\times$ from removing the geometrically near-identical top-24 PCA directions; and (iii) redundantly encoded by sparse dictionaries, with ablating 787 maximally aligned sparse features raising cross-entropy by only 2.9$\times$ and ablating 2,048 topic-aligned features leaving MMLU topic classification virtually unchanged, whereas removing the scaffold drops it from 98.7\% to chance. Together, our findings identify a compact, semantically informative and causally important component of residual stream activations (which we term a computational scaffold) that standard sparse dictionaries represent inefficiently, suggesting that the scope of sparsity-based interpretability methods warrants careful re-examination.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Optimal Hidden-Target Learning for Online Inventory Optimization on General Convex Sets

arXiv:2606.14679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online inventory optimization (OIO) is online convex optimization with physical memory: inventory carryover makes the feasible action set depend on the past. A natural principle, used in stochastic inventory learning and recently in OIO under a single linear capacity constraint, is to maintain a hidden target chosen by an online learner and implement its projection onto the currently feasible order-up-to set. We prove that this simple principle is optimal for OIO on arbitrary bounded convex capacity sets. With online gradient descent as the base learner, the method improves the best known regret guarantee for OIO on general convex sets from inverse to inverse-square-root dependence on the common-demand probability, and we prove a matching lower bound. The same principle gives the first polylogarithmic regret guarantee for strongly convex losses and the first dynamic regret guarantee adapting to Euclidean path variation on general convex capacity sets. The analysis introduces a norm alignment principle: the right state variable is the distance from the hidden target to the feasible set, measured in the same norm as the projection. Under norm alignment, this distance evolves pathwise as a scalar queue, with target movement as arrival and common demand as service. This reduction to one-dimensional queue control resolves the state dependence and extends the guarantees to general convex capacity sets, beyond the reach of prior productwise approaches. Experiments on synthetic and real-world inventory data corroborate the theory.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Timestamp-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning for Network Intrusion Detection

arXiv:2606.17109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given their effectiveness in modeling the relational structure among network traffic flows, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted in network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). However, most existing GNN-based NIDS approaches focus on the relational structure of traffic flows, and treat them as temporally independent, which limits their ability to cope with evolving attack behaviors. Moreover, their reliance on supervised or semi-supervised learning often restricts generalization to unseen attacks. To address these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised GNN-based framework. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is among the first self-supervised GNN-based NIDS models to explicitly leverage real timestamps, which provides faithful temporal dependencies for representation learning. We first construct a series of temporal graphs from network traffic flows according to their timestamps, and then employ an E-GraphSAGE and LSTM based encoder to fully extract temporal information and spatial dependencies of network traffic, without introducing time-costly attention mechanisms. A multi-view graph contrastive learning (GCL) scheme is introduced, where temporal, spatial, and feature contrasts are jointly performed to capture temporal continuity, preserve structural consistency, and improve the generalization and robustness of the learned representations, respectively. In addition, a gradient-norm-based adaptive weighting strategy is designed to optimize the contrastive loss weights. Experimental results on four representative NIDS datasets with real timestamps demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing self-supervised approaches and achieves performance comparable to the supervised state-of-the-art GNN method, while maintaining high computational efficiency.