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

Structural Energy Guidance for View-Consistent Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to improve multi-view consistency. SEGS constructs a structural energy in the PCA subspace of U-Net features and injects its gradient into the denoising process. It can be easily integrated into SDS/VSD pipelines without retraining. Experiments show that SEGS reduces the Janus Rate by about 10% on average and improves View-CS scores across multiple baselines, including DreamFusion, Magic3D, and LucidDreamer. This method effectively alleviates viewpoint artifacts while preserving appearance fidelity, providing a flexible solution for high-quality text-to-3D content generation.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

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

KATANA: A Fast, Low-Power Mapping of Kalman Filters onto Edge NPUs for Real-Time Tracking

arXiv:2606.14992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State estimation is the closed-loop core of every real-time tracking system, from radar surveillance and counter-UAV defense to autonomous driving and robotics. These deployments run on edge platforms, where defense systems mount on vehicles and drones, and civilian pipelines live on cars and handheld devices. Here, every additional watt of compute erodes mission duration or operational range. Two hard constraints follow: each new measurement must be fused before the next control cycle, and the total compute must fit within a strict battery and thermal power envelope. The Linear and Extended Kalman Filters (LKF, EKF) are dominant estimators on these systems, but today they execute almost exclusively on CPUs, which serialize multi-object tracking (MOT) updates, or on custom FPGA/ASIC accelerators that lengthen design cycles. Contemporary AI-PC SoCs, like the Intel Core Ultra Series 1 and 2, integrate a low-power, data-parallel Neural Processing Unit (NPU). We therefore ask whether the Kalman filter can be mapped onto this existing matrix engine to meet real-time and low-power budgets simultaneously, avoiding a dedicated accelerator and keeping the CPU and GPU free for primary workloads. We present KATANA, an NPU-aware optimization framework delivering the first end-to-end mapping of the LKF and EKF onto a commercial NPU, alongside a cross-platform characterization on shipping AI-PC silicon. KATANA applies three algebraic graph rewrites: subtract-to-add reformulation via a precomputed negative-projection matrix H_neg, static-shape tensor fusion, and block-diagonal batched parallelization, ensuring 100% of operations execute on the DPU matrix engine. On the Series 2, the optimized batched EKF reaches 223.35 FPS at 13.43 W active power, and the LKF reaches 408.73 FPS at 14.05 W, delivering up to a 97.9% reduction in dynamic energy versus the CPU implementation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Phase locking nuclear spins in silicon with spin-orbit coupling

arXiv:2606.20340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Because they have such long coherence times, nuclear spins have extraordinary potential for use in quantum information processing devices. However, coherent nuclear spin control generally requires external phase references, such as microwave control fields. Here, we phase-lock a $^{29}$Si nuclear spin ensemble in a silicon quantum dot using only the internal electronic spin-orbit coupling as a phase reference. When driven with the quantum-dot electrons, the nuclear spins align themselves to a phase determined by the electronic spin-orbit coupling and the timing of the drive protocol. This enables us to measure the coherent precession and inhomogeneous dephasing of the nuclear spins. We corroborate our results with detailed numerical simulations of the many-body electron nuclear system. Our work opens new routes for coherently controlling solid-state nuclear spin ensembles.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Computational Design of Optimal Sequences for Targeted Hypermutagenesis Using Recombination-Coupled Diversity-Generating Retroelements

Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) are natural systems that accelerate evolution via targeted hypermutation at adenines. We previously developed DGRec, a system combining DGRs and recombineering for programmable mutagenesis in Escherichia coli. We here address two important issues with DGRec: the dependence of mutagenesis efficiency on the dgrRNA secondary structure and the variability of the reverse-transcription biases with sequence context and position. First, we introduce and validate a method to recode non-functional templates, i.e. with low mutagenesis efficiency, into highly functional ones through synonymous mutations. Second, we develop a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to predict DGRec mutational profiles for any given template sequence. By integrating this LSTM model with our recoding method, we establish a comprehensive workflow for customized directed evolution, enabling researchers to precisely fine-tune DGRec in vivo mutagenesis to their engineering needs.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Certifying Nonclassical Proper-Time Histories with a Quantum Clock

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum clocks can acquire relativistic phases from motional or gravitational proper-time differences, but reduced clock dephasing alone does not certify nonclassical proper-time histories. We formulate this distinction as a channel-certification problem. First, we show that any two-level single-time dephasing signal, including one generated by an effective quantum proper-time label, admits a classical random proper-time representation. We then define the convex set of classical mixtures of experimentally specified proper-time histories and prove a Choi-rank separation criterion for conditioned coherent history recombination. A two-branch Ramsey protocol gives explicit bright- and dark-port population witnesses outside this classical set. The certification is operational and relative to the specified history set: it rules out classical mixtures of the same implemented proper-time histories, not arbitrary classical protocols with different histories or controls.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Context-Aware Prediction of Student Quiz Performance with Multimodal Textbook Features

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Educational platforms often predict student performance from prior interactions, but the assessment content itself also varies in linguistic and visual complexity. This paper studies whether lightweight content features extracted from CourseKata chapter-review questions improve prediction of end-of-chapter quiz scores beyond a student's average prior exercise performance. The study combines 2023 CourseKata student response data with chapter-level text features from review-question wording and image features from textbook visuals. Across 4,742 student-chapter observations from 562 class-student IDs, adding content features improves student-grouped five-fold quiz prediction performance by 9.1% relative to a prior-performance baseline. In leave-chapter-out validation, text features reduce prediction error relative to the baseline, while image-containing models have higher error. This paper suggests that a context-aware model adds useful signal about the text and visual features of questions to better predict student quiz performance compared with using past student performance alone.

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

Bernstein-Schur Kernels: Random Features by Sketched Modulation and Radial Randomization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bernstein–Schur kernels are products of a finite-feature kernel (one with an explicit finite-dimensional feature map) and a completely monotone shift-invariant kernel: nonstationary kernels that fall between the shift-invariant and dot-product templates random features usually exploit, so in general neither Bochner sampling nor polynomial sketching applies to the full kernel directly. We give one random-feature construction for the whole class that randomizes both factors: it sketches the finite modulation and randomizes the completely monotone radial factor, sampling the latter's one-dimensional Bernstein–Widder scale and then applying Gaussian random Fourier features (whose frequency is still $d$-dimensional). The feature dimension is then $Dm$, set by the sketch size $m$ and the radial-draw count $D$, free of the $O(d^2)$ size of the exact modulation feature. Keeping the modulation \emph{exact is the analyzable limit ($m\to\infty$): there we prove unbiasedness, an exact variance for the recommended flat estimator, an expected matrix-Bernstein operator-norm bound (with a matching high-probability tail) controlled by the top eigenvalues of the kernel and modulation Gram matrices together with an intrinsic dimension rather than the crude $N\max_{ij}$ entrywise route, and a deterministic relative-spectral kernel-ridge stability result. By conditioning on the sketch, the doubly-randomized estimator inherits the same intrinsic-dimension operator-norm guarantee plus a single additive sketch term, tunable by $m$ independently of $D$. The motivating instance is the biased $yat$-kernel $k_{yat,b}(w,x)=(w^\top x+b)^2/(\|w-x\|^2+\varepsilon)$, $b\ge0$, whose family span contains the inverse-multiquadric kernel by finite differences in $b$; for it the radial mixture is the IMQ spectral sampler, and one frequency per scale is variance-optimal at a fixed radial-feature budget.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

PertDiffBench: Benchmarking Diffusion Models for Single-Cell Perturbation Response Prediction

Diffusion models are increasingly used to predict transcriptional responses to perturbations, but whether they improve on simpler generative and representation-based baselines remains unclear. Existing evaluations often do not separate the effects of model architecture, input representation, biological context and metric choice, making it difficult to determine where diffusion-based methods are useful. Here we introduce PertDiffBench, a standardized benchmark for diffusion-based transcriptomic perturbation prediction across single-cell and bulk RNA-seq datasets. PertDiffBench evaluates diffusion-based models across three complementary evaluation settings: standard prediction in known single-cell contexts and bulk perturbation conditions, generalization to unseen cell types, species, drugs and intermediate time points, and stress tests of feature dimensionality, input representation, noise type and gene ordering. Across these settings, diffusion models did not show a consistent advantage. scGen remained a strong baseline in common prediction tasks, whereas scDiffusion was the most competitive diffusion-based method in several generalization settings. Temporal imputation showed a different pattern, with a simple DDPM operating directly in expression space outperforming more specialized models. Stress tests showed that performance was model dependent and sensitive to feature dimensionality, encoder choice, noise type and gene ordering. Pretrained encoders did not consistently improve performance, with the classical scVI representation slightly exceeding STATE in seen-condition and unseen-cell-type settings. These results indicate that diffusion-model performance in perturbation response prediction depends strongly on task design and representation choice. PertDiffBench provides a practical framework for evaluating these models under biologically varied and stress-tested conditions.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Modelling the public-health impact of indoor air quality interventions on respiratory virus transmission

Respiratory virus transmission occurs in indoor settings where ventilation, occupancy, and dwell time determine exposure levels. Improving indoor air quality (IAQ) therefore could help reduce disease burden associated with respiratory viruses, yet its population-level impact remains poorly quantified. Here, we develop an individual-based transmission modelling framework that links within-location airborne dynamics to individual infection risk and population-level spread, whilst explicitly incorporating heterogeneity in ventilation and baseline indoor air quality across locations. We use this modelling approach to evaluate IAQ-improving interventions (air-quality interventions or AQIs), using hypothetical endemic and pandemic pathogen archetypes with properties similar to SARS-CoV-2 and influenza, and evaluate how effects on key epidemiological metrics (such as annualized incidence and epidemic final size) depend on AQI coverage, efficacy and allocation strategy. At 20% AQI intervention coverage and 80% efficacy, annualized incidence was reduced by approximately 7.2% for an endemic 'SARS-CoV-2-like' respiratory virus, and 17.0% for an endemic 'influenza-like' virus; at 60% coverage (80% efficacy) the reductions were 26.3% and 56.4%, respectively. Targeting AQI installation to the highest-risk locations outperformed random allocation: for SARS-CoV-2-like transmission, 20% coverage at 80% efficacy cut absolute incidence by 10.8% when targeted versus 7.2% when random; for influenza-like transmission, this comparison was 28.9% versus 17.0%. In epidemic scenarios, random installation at 40% coverage and 60% efficacy reduced final size by 23.7% (influenza-like) versus 6.3% (SARS-CoV-2-like). These results support treating clean indoor air as core public-health infrastructure and prioritising risk-based deployment of IAQ-improving interventions to maximise population-level benefit within budgetary and operational constraints.

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

Electric Field Distortions in Surface Ion Traps with Integrated Nanophotonics

arXiv:2503.20387v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The integration of photonic components into surface ion traps provides a scalable approach for trapped-ion quantum computing, sensing, and metrology, enabling compact systems with enhanced stability and precision. However, the introduction of optical apertures in the trap electrodes can distort the trapping electric field. This can lead to excess micromotion (EMM) and ion displacement which degrade the performance of quantum logic operations and optical clocks. In this work, we systematically investigate the electric field distortion in a surface ion trap with integrated waveguides and grating couplers using Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations. We analyze methods to reduce these distortions by exploiting symmetries and transparent conductive oxide materials.

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

MMD-SLAM: Structure-Enhanced Multi-Meta Gaussian Distribution-Guided Visual SLAM

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has significantly boosted novel view synthesis and high-fidelity scene reconstruction, expanding the potential of 3DGS-based Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods. However, most existing systems fail to fully exploit the underlying structural information, which limits rendering quality and often leads to inconsistent maps. To address these limitations, we propose MMD-SLAM, a structure-enhanced Visual SLAM framework that leverages the Atlanta World (AW) assumption to guide a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation for photorealistic mapping. First, we introduce a point-line fusion strategy for pose optimization, where 3D line segments are incorporated to improve tracking robustness and provide additional constraints for mapping. Second, we design a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation with dominant directions, explicitly encoding structural priors from the AW hypothesis. Finally, we propose a Gaussian evolution strategy that adapts to scene geometry and incorporates structural cues into global optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that these innovations enable MMD-SLAM to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both tracking accuracy and mapping quality. e.g., our method achieves a 48.56% reduction in ATE RMSE on ScanNet and a 5.71% improvement in PSNR on Replica, compared with MonoGS.

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

VisualClaw: A Real-Time, Personalized Agent for the Physical World

Vision language models are serving as general-purpose interfaces for complex multimodal tasks. However, deployment still faces three gaps: VLMs typically incur high latency and cost when processing dense video frames and long prompts, the agent scaffold remains static after deployment, and standard video-QA benchmarks do not test whether agents can use visual evidence inside tool-using workspaces. We present VisualClaw, a self-evolving multimodal agent built around two principles. First, hybrid encoding reduces deployment cost by filtering less informative streaming frames with a cascaded gate and compressing the text skill bank through hot/cold top-k injection. Second, skill evolution lets the agent learn from failures: retrieved memories condition an evolver as direct concatenated context or as guided evidence, producing skill-bank updates that help future questions. Across 4 video-QA benchmarks with 2 VLMs, VisualClaw cuts per-question API cost by an average -98% versus full-frame upload and by -25.9% over the offline uniform 8 frame baseline, while boosting accuracy in most settings, e.g., an average +3.85% and a peak +15.80% on EgoSchema with Gemini 3 Flash. To address the gap, we curate VisualClawArena, a 200-scenario multimodal agentic benchmark built through a strict five-stage pipeline; models must use video evidence, documents, dynamic updates, and executable checks inside a workspace. On VisualClawArena, the same framework with computer-use agent backends improves macro accuracy by +2.9% for Codex (GPT-5.5) and +3.2% for Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6) over no-evolution baselines, with a -9.5% cost reduction compared to the uniform-sampled baseline. These properties make VisualClaw a natural fit for edge applications, where the cascade reduces a 1-hour streaming session from ~3,600 API uploads down to only 5-20 calls and the self-evolution makes it a perfect personalized assistant.

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

Trustworthy Image Authentication using Forensic Knowledge Graphs

Advances in generative AI have made image falsification highly realistic, demanding trustworthy authentication systems. Existing forensic detectors can target certain forgery types but lack interpretability, while vision-language models (VLMs) provide explanations but cannot exploit forensic traces for reliable detection. We propose Forensic Knowledge Graphs (FKGs), a unified framework that integrates forensic evidence extraction, structured reasoning, and human-interpretable explanation. Our FKG structure encodes forensic traces along with their causal dependencies and links to scene content. To generate accurate FKGs, we introduce a novel forensic authentication network and an Iterative Context Refinement strategy that guides VLMs to produce faithful, grounded explanations. We also present FKG-50K, a dataset of 50,000 realistic forgeries with ground-truth FKGs. Experiments demonstrate that FKG outperforms both forensic detectors and VLMs in detection, forgery identification and localization, and forensic justification.

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

User as Code: Executable Memory for Personalized Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A personalized AI agent needs a user memory: a persistent model of who the user is, built across many conversations and consulted on each new one. Today this memory is almost always stored as unstructured text, a knowledge graph, or a flat store of facts, and consulted by retrieval – fetching the entries most similar to the current request. Such "bag-of-facts" memory recalls individual facts well, but because storing a fact and acting on it are separate steps, it struggles to resolve contradictions, aggregate over many records, or enforce rules. We argue that user memory should instead be executable. We introduce User as Code (UaC), a paradigm in which an agent's model of a user is a living software project: typed Python objects hold the user's state and ordinary Python functions encode the rules that govern it, so representing and reasoning about the user happen in one medium an interpreter can run. The enabling mechanism is a two-phase pipeline: an append-only log that never discards a fact, periodically checkpointed into typed code. This changes what memory can do. On standard long-term conversation benchmarks, UaC matches both a full-context upper bound and the strongest prior memory systems on recall (78.8% on LOCOMO). Its advantage emerges where representation matters most. On aggregate questions over a user's history – "how many international trips did I take last year?" – retrieval-based memory collapses (6-43%) while UaC stays near-perfect (99%), because the answer is a one-line computation over typed state rather than a search over text. And because its rules execute deterministically whenever the state changes, UaC can surface unsolicited, safety-critical alerts – such as a newly prescribed drug that conflicts with an allergy recorded months earlier – a capability query-driven memory cannot provide.

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

Auditing Machine Unlearning: A Systematic Research on Whether Models Truly Forget

arXiv:2606.16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge. The lack of reliable and practical auditing mechanisms can lead to critical privacy risks, such as residual information leakage. This paper initiates a systematic investigation into whether existing unlearning algorithms can truly forget the designated data. We propose the first practical and general-purpose auditing framework for machine unlearning, inspired by the concept of proof of ignorance. Our framework addresses the key practicality limitations of existing methods by eliminating the need for retraining-from-scratch baselines, avoiding the training of large numbers of shadow models, and requiring no intrusive intervention in the original training process. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we first conduct validation experiments to verify its soundness and completeness. We then perform comprehensive experiments across six datasets and ten representative unlearning methods. The results demonstrate that our framework reliably distinguishes between successful and failed unlearning. In particular, we observe that retraining-based and fine-tuning-based methods can achieve effective unlearning, even when the target data remain in the original dataset. In contrast, de-optimization-based methods fail to achieve true unlearning and instead degrade the model's performance. Fisher/Hessian-based methods also fail to unlearn requested data, even formal certification is provided. Moreover, we show that our framework is robust against fake unlearning attempts and generalizes well to large language models.

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

BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction

Existing information extraction (IE) tasks increasingly adopt in-context learning (ICL) with large language models. However, current approaches either show inconsistent performance across model scales or lack systematic optimization and generalizability. Building on this, we propose BCL (Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction), the first optimization framework that uses particle filtering with Bayesian updates to systematically refine label representations across IE tasks. Through four steps initialization, observation, weight update, and resampling, BCL generalizes to both sequence labeling and relation classification paradigms. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial and consistent improvements over existing approaches.

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

Simulation-Augmented Multi-Step Split Conformal Prediction for Aggregated Forecasts

arXiv:2606.16356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study uncertainty quantification for aggregated forecasting tasks such as annual totals and year-over-year growth rates. We propose SA-MSCP, a simulation-augmented multi-step split conformal method that generates future paths from cross-validated residuals using a block bootstrap and constructs prediction intervals from empirical quantiles. Experiments show that SA-MSCP improves empirical coverage over a simulated-path baseline for aggregated and growth-rate targets. Our results demonstrate that simulation-enhanced conformal calibration is an effective and general framework for uncertainty quantification in aggregated time-series forecasting.

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

AgentLeak: A Benchmark for Internal-Channel Privacy Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

arXiv:2602.11510v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems create privacy risks that current output-only benchmarks cannot measure. When agents coordinate on tasks, sensitive data may pass through inter-agent messages, shared memory, and tool arguments, all pathways that final-output audits typically do not inspect. We introduce AgentLeak, a benchmark for evaluating internal-channel privacy leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. AgentLeak instruments seven privacy-relevant communication pathways and provides a large-scale empirical evaluation focused on final outputs, inter-agent messages, and shared memory. Across 1,000 scenarios spanning healthcare, finance, legal, and corporate domains, five production LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Mistral Large, and Llama 3.3 70B), and 4,979 validated execution traces, we find that multi-agent configurations reduce final-output leakage (C1: 27.2% vs 43.2% in single-agent mode) compared with single-agent baselines but introduce internal channels that raise total system exposure to 68.9% (aggregated across C1, C2, C5). Inter-agent messages (C2) leak at 68.8%, compared with 27.2% for final outputs (C1), meaning that output-only audits miss 41.7% of violations. Across all five models and four domains, the pattern C2 $\geq$ C1 holds consistently. These results suggest, within the evaluated coordinator-worker setting, that privacy risk in multi-agent systems is strongly shaped by architectural coordination channels rather than final-output behavior alone: it arises from internal channels that remain invisible to standard output-level defenses.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

An Algebraic Matrix Spencer Theorem

arXiv:2606.16005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop an algebraic approach to matrix discrepancy based on the representation theory of finite-dimensional C$^*$-algebras. As an application, we resolve a substantial structured special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture. In particular, we show that for every family of contractions $A_1,\ldots,A_n$ that are contained in a finite-dimensional $C^*$-algebra $\mathcal A$ with $dim_{\mathbb C} (\mathcal A) \lesssim n$, there exists signs $x\in\{\pm1\}^n$ such that $\|\sum_{i=1}^n x_i A_i\| \le O(\sqrt n)$. As a noteworthy special case, our main result also resolves the Group Spencer conjecture of (Bandeira'24). We furthermore prove that Matrix Spencer continues to hold for low-rank perturbations of matrix families coming from an $C^*$-algebra of small dimension.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On the Singular Control of a Diffusion and its Running Infimum or Supremum

arXiv:2501.17577v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a class of singular stochastic control problems for a one-dimensional diffusion $X$ in which the performance criterion to be optimised depends explicitly on the running infimum $I$ (or supremum $S$) of the controlled process. We introduce two novel integral operators that are consistent with the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation for the resulting two-dimensional singular control problems. The first operator involves integrals where the integrator is the control process of the two-dimensional process $(X,I)$ or $(X,S)$; the second operator concerns integrals where the integrator is the running infimum or supremum process itself. Using these definitions, we prove a general verification theorem for problems involving two-dimensional state-dependent running costs, costs of controlling the process, costs of increasing the running infimum (or supremum) and exit times. Finally, we apply our results to explicitly solve an optimal dividend problem in which the manager's time-preferences depend on the company's historical worst performance.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mirror Descent Beyond Euclidean Stability: An Exponential Separation in Initialization Sensitivity

arXiv:2606.11431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror Descent (MD) extends Gradient Descent (GD) beyond Euclidean geometry and has recently reappeared as a lens for KL-regularized policy optimization in reinforcement learning and LLM post-training. This raises a basic robustness question, crucial to reproducibility and reliability: how sensitive are MD dynamics to their inputs? We focus on initialization, often itself a pretrained or previously aligned model. Quadratic-regularized MD, including GD and Mahalanobis geometries, is well-known to be stable for convex smooth objectives. We show a sharp contrast: once the regularizer is non-quadratic, MD can be exponentially more sensitive to initialization than GD, even with a well-conditioned regularizer in Euclidean norm. We give a three-dimensional construction with a convex, smooth objective and a strongly convex, smooth, well-conditioned regularizer where an initial $\varepsilon$ perturbation is quickly amplified to $\min\{polylog^{-1}(1/\varepsilon), \varepsilon e^{\Omega(\eta T)}\}$ after $T$ iterations of MD with step size $\eta$. For canonical KL-regularized MD on the simplex, we show that even linear objectives can amplify an initial $\varepsilon$ perturbation exponentially fast in high-dimensional or near-boundary regimes. Finally, we show that adding a Bregman regularization term toward an anchor point can stabilize the dynamics while largely preserving the optimization guarantees, and that the choice of anchor is crucial: anchoring at the initialization only partially mitigates the instability, whereas anchoring at a fixed point yields a more stable mechanism.

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

Multi-Agent Reasoning with Adaptive Worker Allocation for Stance Detection

Stance detection requires identifying an author's position toward a target, often from short-form texts where stance is implicit, indirect, or rhetorically framed. Although large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on this task, single-pass prompting can be brittle when multiple interpretations are plausible. Existing aggregation strategies, such as majority voting or self-consistency, improve robustness by combining labels, but they discard the intermediate reasoning needed to resolve conflicting interpretations. We introduce a multi-agent reasoning framework with adaptive worker allocation for stance detection that shifts aggregation from label-level voting to reasoning-level synthesis. The framework employs a Manager-Worker architecture in which a Manager adaptively allocates a variable number of Worker agents based on input complexity. Each Worker analyzes the input from a distinct perspective and produces a reasoning-only explanation without emitting a stance label; the Manager then synthesizes these explanations to produce the final prediction. We evaluate the proposed framework on SemEval-2016, P-Stance, and COVID-19 Stance using Llama, Mistral, and Gemini. Results show that the framework yields the largest gains on implicit and context-dependent stance cases, achieving 86.07 Macro-F1 on COVID-19 and 82.90 on SemEval-2016, while remaining competitive on more explicit stance datasets such as P-Stance. These findings suggest that adaptive reasoning-level aggregation is most beneficial when stance cannot be reliably inferred from surface cues alone.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Exploring Feature Extraction Technique Parameters for Acoustic Gunshot Classification

arXiv:2606.19568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Acoustic gunshot detection is a problem with applications across civilian public safety, military operations, and wildlife conservation, yet the field lacks a rigorous exploration of feature extraction techniques with a focus on generalization to realistic data. The mixed effectiveness of commercial gunshot detection and classification systems indicates an open problem that is not adequately addressed by the current literature. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation of common feature extraction techniques using a dataset of 23,000 gunshot recordings across 85 firearms and 21 calibers. We benchmark three feature extraction techniques with 12 total unique parameter sets using ResNet-18. Our results demonstrate that using the correct feature extraction technique can improve top-1 accuracy by up to 20%, and utilizing the correct parameters for a given feature extraction technique can improve that value by up to 4.7%.