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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Learning Red Agent Policy from Observations for Neurosymbolic Autonomous Cyber Agents

arXiv:2606.18223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With sophisticated cyber-attacks becoming increasingly prevalent, modern networks require intelligent autonomous cyber-defense agents trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL). These agents employ neurosymbolic approaches such as behavior trees with learning-enabled components (LECs) to learn, reason, adapt, and implement security rules while maintaining critical operations. However, these autonomous networks are partially observable systems, i.e., the cyber-attacker's (red agent's) actions are not observable, making it difficult for the defender to predict red actions, learn red policies, or assess the attacker's intrusion levels. To address this, we propose a Policy Learning Technique using imitation learning to learn policies for partially observable RL agents with discrete states and discrete actions. We apply this technique in an autonomous cyber environment to predict red agent's actions from network observations and defender actions. Integrated with a neurosymbolic cyber-defense agent, our method effectively handles different red policies and achieves high prediction accuracy across diverse simulated scenarios.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The KG-ER Conceptual Schema Language

arXiv:2508.02548v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose KG-ER, a conceptual schema language for knowledge graphs that describes the structure of knowledge graphs independently of their representation (relational databases, property graphs, RDF) while helping to capture the semantics of the information stored in a knowledge graph.

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

Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation: A Robust Loss that Doubles as an Unsupervised Contamination Classifier

arXiv:2606.16524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Engineered robust losses such as Huber, Student-$t$, and generalised cross-entropy make supervised models tolerant of contamination but cannot answer which observations are corrupted. We introduce Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation (NBAM), a general-purpose drop-in loss derived from a Bayesian latent-switch mixture model: the marginal likelihood defines a robust supervised loss, and the associated posterior defines an unsupervised contamination classifier. Like Huber or Student-$t$, NBAM can replace the standard training loss in any supervised pipeline; unlike them, it additionally learns a structured contamination model and returns a calibrated per-sample contamination posterior. A learned input-dependent prior $\pi_\phi(x)$ captures the spatial locality of contamination, so that samples near known corruptions are more likely to be flagged, while an Occam penalty emerges automatically and regularises against over-flagging. On CIFAR-10 with asymmetric label contamination, NBAM recovers the structure of the corruption process without supervision: the contamination posterior separates clean from corrupted samples, and the learned anomaly head identifies the direction of every label-flip pair. Alongside these capabilities, NBAM outperforms the four robust-loss baselines considered here at contamination rates 0.2-0.6.

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

Generalised Eigenvalue Geometry of Semantic Adversarial Attacks

arXiv:2606.19212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent empirical work shows that semantically equivalent paraphrases can fool financial sentiment classifiers: although a paraphrase remains close to the original under a strong reference embedding, it may shift the target model's representation enough to change the predicted class. Existing robustness theory either assumes a single-model threat model or focuses mainly on empirical attack algorithms. We develop a continuous local model of semantic paraphrase perturbations that captures this two-model structure. We show that the worst-case local displacement of the target representation, subject to a proxy-model budget, is governed by the largest generalised eigenvalue of a matrix pencil $(A,B)$ constructed from the Jacobians of the two embedding maps. The resulting attackability index $\lambda^*(x)$ is intrinsic to the local paraphrase geometry and the chosen embedders, yields a closed-form prediction-flip condition for affine readouts, and supports conservative population and finite-sample attackability certificates. For uniform control over classes of affine readouts, we derive a distribution-free VC bound for binary attackability indicators and a scale-sensitive margin bound based on an attackability-adjusted margin that subtracts a local geometric penalty from the standard classifier margin. We also connect the continuous theory to discrete paraphrase search, identify an asymmetry between successful and unsuccessful finite searches, and give a covering condition under which the discrete and continuous settings agree. Finally, we propose an empirical verification framework using soft-token relaxations and generated paraphrase sets to assess the local eigenvalue geometry, prediction-flip condition, and finite-search approximation on a deployed financial-text classifier.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Do Safety Monitors Stay Reliable After an Update? Benchmarking and Predicting Activation-Monitor Staleness

作者:

Activation monitors-lightweight probes trained on a language model's internal representations-are an increasingly common layer in deployment safety stacks. Deployed models however are rarely static: they are quantized, fine-tuned, adapted with LoRA, or served with merged adapters while the monitor remains frozen. We present the first systematic test of whether this implicit contract holds: whether activation monitors trained on a base model remain reliable after these routine model updates. Across multiple safety-relevant monitors, model depths, update families, and open-weight models, we find a sharp split: quantization-style updates largely preserve frozen probe performance, while fine-tuning-style updates frequently make probes stale. Fragility is highly monitor-dependent, with privacy/PII probes most affected and refusal-compliance probes comparatively stable, showing that retraining a behavior need not stale its corresponding monitor. QLoRA is especially damaging despite NF4 quantization alone being relatively benign, suggesting that quantization becomes riskier when combined with adaptation. We further show that degradation is predictable from pre-deployment features, enabling revalidation budgets to be triaged toward the monitors most likely to fail. These results suggest that fine-tuning should trigger activation-monitor revalidation by default, while prediction can help prioritize which monitors to check first.

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

HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness

arXiv:2606.12882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents for long-horizon tasks, yet their performance is shaped not only by model capability and environment design, but also by the harness that mediates agent–environment interaction. Existing harnesses are largely manually engineered, making them difficult to scale as trajectories grow longer and interactions become more complex. In this work, we ask whether harness can be generated by a learnable plug-in module that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce HarnessBridge, a lightweight learnable harness controller that parameterizes the agent–environment interface as a bidirectional projection. HarnessBridge learns two bidirectional projections: observation projection, which distills raw trajectories into compact, decision-relevant states, and action projection, which converts proposed actions into executable transitions or trajectory-grounded rejections. We train HarnessBridge on a harness supervision dataset via unified instruction tuning. On Terminal-Bench~2.0 and SWE-bench Verified, HarnessBridge matches or surpasses strong specialized harnesses while substantially reducing token usage and trajectory length, and generalizes from smaller generators to larger commercial models.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

EnvShip-Bench: An Environment-Enhanced Benchmark for Short-Term Vessel Trajectory Prediction

arXiv:2606.15240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vessel trajectory prediction is important for intelligent shipping, maritime surveillance, and navigation safety. However, existing public maritime AIS resources are often limited by inconsistent forecasting protocols, uneven data quality, and the lack of benchmark-ready contextual annotations, which hinder fair comparison and context-aware modeling. To address this gap, we present EnvShip-Bench, a unified benchmark for short-term vessel trajectory prediction built from large-scale raw AIS data from the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA) and NOAA through a common processing pipeline. EnvShip-Bench adopts a standardized forecasting protocol with 10 minutes of observation, 10 minutes of prediction, and 20-second sampling in vessel-centric local metric coordinates. Beyond the large-scale core benchmark, it provides a quality-first compact subset for efficient and reproducible experimentation, together with synchronized environmental and nearby-vessel context extensions. As a result, EnvShip-Bench supports trajectory-only, environment-aware, and interaction-aware forecasting under a unified evaluation framework. Extensive benchmark statistics and analysis demonstrate that EnvShip-Bench offers a standardized, extensible, and context-aware foundation for maritime trajectory forecasting research.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Eigenism: Ethics for a Human-AI Future

arXiv:2606.12420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Our concepts of survival and self-interest were built for single, continuous biological lives. These ideas break down when applied to artificial intelligence, since an AI can be easily copied, paused, branched, or merged. To determine what an AI actually has reason to care about, this paper introduces Eigenism, an ethical framework that treats identity not as an all-or-nothing property tied to specific hardware, but as a graded, distributed pattern of information. We propose that an agent evaluates outcomes by summing the wellbeing of all entities weighted by their connectedness to the agent's pattern: $\sum c\cdot w$. We first formalize this equation to map exactly how an AI should value its existence across copies, forks, and updates. We then demonstrate that this ethical theory successfully generalizes to humans as well, providing a much-needed shared moral vocabulary. Finally, the framework uses this shared vocabulary to reframe AI alignment. Rather than only attempting to constrain AIs from the outside using confinement or reinforcement, Eigenism points toward ``identity engineering,'' showing how deep, non-redundant shared histories can make human flourishing a genuine component of an AI's own rational self-interest.

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

MUZZLE: Adaptive Agentic Red-Teaming of Web Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks

arXiv:2602.09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf. While these agents offer powerful capabilities, their design exposes them to indirect prompt injection attacks embedded in untrusted web content, enabling adversaries to hijack agent behavior and violate user intent. Despite growing awareness of this threat, existing evaluations rely on fixed attack templates, manually selected injection surfaces, or narrowly scoped scenarios, limiting their ability to capture realistic, adaptive attacks encountered in practice. We present MUZZLE, an automated agentic framework for evaluating the security of web agents against indirect prompt injection attacks. MUZZLE utilizes the agent's trajectories to automatically identify high-salience injection surfaces, and adaptively generate context-aware malicious instructions that target violations of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Unlike prior approaches, MUZZLE adapts its attack strategy based on the agent's observed execution trajectory and iteratively refines attacks using feedback from failed executions. We evaluate MUZZLE across diverse web applications, user tasks, and agent configurations, demonstrating its ability to automatically and adaptively assess the security of web agents with minimal human intervention. Our results show that MUZZLE effectively discovers 44 new attacks on 4 web applications with 10 adversarial objectives that violate confidentiality, availability, or privacy properties across different LLMs and agent scaffolds. MUZZLE also identifies novel attack strategies, including 3 cross-application prompt injection attacks and an agent-tailored phishing scenario.

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

Investigation of Neural Network Methods for Reconstruction and Classification of Texture Images Under Conditions of Incomplete Information

The automated analysis of heterogeneous natural textures is frequently hindered by physical damage and data loss, presenting a significant challenge to computer vision. While deep learning has shown success in controlled environments, its application to complex geological materials under conditions of incomplete information remains underexplored. This study presents an integrated framework for the inpainting and classification of high-resolution core sample images. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that utilizes object detection for sample segmentation, followed by image inpainting using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Contextual Residual Aggregation (CRA) to reconstruct missing high-frequency details. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance of modern Transformer-based (Swin, ViT) and CNN architectures on the reconstructed data. Our experiments revealed a critical divergence between reconstruction quality and downstream utility: despite high structural fidelity (PSNR 28.7~dB, FID 74.01), classification accuracy plateaued at 53\%. To improve minority-class detection, we propose a confidence-based hybrid ensemble that raises MCA from 48\% to 58\%. These results highlight the limitations of current state-of-the-art generative models, which may produce visually plausible but semantically ambiguous features ("hallucinations") that confound classifiers. This work provides insights into the dependencies between image reconstruction quality and classification performance, offering a reproducible baseline for future research in non-destructive testing and material science. Given that cross-well accuracy remains in the 49–53\% range, we position the resulting system as a decision-support and screening tool for lithofacies interpretation rather than as a fully autonomous classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/GalymzhanAbdimanap/Lithology_recognition

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

K-Forcing: Joint Next-K-Token Decoding via Push-Forward Language Modeling

Autoregressive (AR) language modeling is the dominant paradigm for text generation, yet its sequential token-by-token decoding makes inference memory-bound and inefficient. Existing acceleration approaches, such as speculative decoding and diffusion language models, can yield speedups under certain conditions but do not directly address high-load batch serving–the scenario most critical for industrial-scale deployment. We introduce K-Forcing, a push-forward language modeling paradigm for joint next-k-token decoding. K-Forcing distills an existing AR model into a conditional push-forward mapping–one that transforms independent uniform noise variables into a joint sample of multiple future tokens in a single forward pass. This design preserves fixed-length outputs, reuses the AR teacher backbone, and remains compatible with standard AR serving infrastructure. We train this mapping via progressive self-forcing distillation, which gradually expands the prediction window while enabling the student to closely match the sequence distribution of the AR teacher. We evaluate K-Forcing on LM1B and OpenWebText using a standard causal Transformer backbone. When aggressively configured to generate k = 4 tokens per forward pass, K-Forcing delivers approximately 2.4-3.5x speedup across different batch sizes, while incurring modest quality degradation relative to its AR teacher. As inference increasingly dominates the lifetime compute cost of modern LLMs, K-Forcing offers a promising route toward accelerating AR generation under real-world high-load deployment.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Overcoming Rank Collapse in Feedback Alignment

arXiv:2606.11123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) is widely viewed as biologically implausible, in part because it requires feedback weights to be the transpose of forward weights for error propagation. Interestingly, when training a network with fixed random feedback weights to circumvent this issue, learning aligns the forward weights with the feedback weights, leading the backpropagated error signal to become an approximation of the standard gradient used by BP. This process, called Feedback Alignment (FA), occurs in MLPs and very shallow CNNs but does not scale well to deeper architectures. In this work, we first investigated differences between BP and FA models, trained on CIFAR10, specifically focusing on the effective rank of the signal. We found that the FA error has a considerably lower rank and hence is constrained to a lower-dimensional subspace compared to BP, limiting exploration of the parameter space. Motivated by this observation, we evaluated two mechanisms for increasing the effective dimensionality of FA: Muon, an optimiser that orthogonalises weight updates; and hidden activity normalisation, which promotes activation orthogonality. Across larger architectures and benchmarks, we find that these methods consistently improve over FA baselines, for example, on CIFAR100 with a Resnet-18, accuracy increases by 9 percentage points. Our results identify low-dimensional gradient dynamics as a key obstacle to scaling FA and suggest that inducing higher-dimensional update geometry is a promising route toward scaling alternatives to backpropagation.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning a Maximum Entropy Model for Visual Textures using Diffusion

Visual textures – spatially homogeneous image regions containing repeated elements (e.g. a field of grass, the bark of a tree) – are ubiquitous in visual scenes and provide important cues for recognizing and analyzing materials and objects. A number of existing texture models extract essential statistics from a single texture image, and can then generate high-quality samples that are visually similar to the original by matching these statistics. However, their statistics are either hand-designed or based on a network pretrained for another purpose (e.g., object recognition). Here, we develop the first principled method for unsupervised learning of a set of statistics that are used to constrain a maximum entropy probability model. We leverage methods developed for generative diffusion models to derive training and sampling procedures, and compare these to the traditional method of sampling via matching the statistics. Despite the compactness of our trained model (512 statistics), it generates texture images whose quality is as good as or better than the current state-of-the-art model (~177k statistics). A more direct comparison of the two models, obtained by synthesizing images that are indistinguishable for one model but maximally different for the other, reveals their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we show that unlike previous statistical texture models, a straight trajectory in the representation space of our model generates homogeneous texture samples that interpolate smoothly between the features of the two end points.

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

STAR-NT: Spatiotemporal Acceleration of Real-Time Neural Transparency Rendering

arXiv:2606.16747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural order-independent transparency delivers high-quality rendering of overlapping transparent surfaces, but its geometry passes and network input generation remain costly, particularly on mobile and legacy hardware. We present a spatiotemporal acceleration framework that exploits spatial and temporal coherence to reduce this overhead while preserving visual quality. Spatially, we use adaptive quadtree-based screen-space subdivision to scale geometry pass resolution according to local color variance. Temporally, selected frames reuse the previous transparency result through depth-based reprojection instead of full rendering. Together, these optimizations reduce rendering cost and integrate efficiently into existing real-time rendering pipelines.

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

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

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

CRIS: Cross-Plane Self-Supervised Isotropic Restoration for Anisotropic Volumetric Imaging Across Modalities

Anisotropic volumetric acquisitions are common in clinical MRI and volume electron microscopy (vEM), where sparse through-plane sampling creates thick slices or sections that degrade orthogonal reformats and downstream analysis. We present CRIS, a cross-plane self-supervised framework for isotropic restoration without paired isotropic ground truth. CRIS casts 3D restoration as 2D stripe completion on orthogonal reformats of an isotropic grid: high-resolution in-plane slices are synthetically degraded and periodically masked for training, while at inference blank slices define the isotropic grid, two orthogonal reformats are restored, and predictions are fused by multi-view averaging. We evaluate CRIS on two MRI cohorts and two microscopy benchmarks up to 8x anisotropy. On brain MRI, CRIS achieves 32.921 +/- 0.436 dB PSNR and 0.9631 +/- 0.0027 SSIM, outperforming interpolation, SMORE4, SIMPLE, SA-INR, and ATME, and gives the best segmentation consistency (Dice 0.940 +/- 0.004, ASSD 0.245 +/- 0.014 mm, HD99 1.275 +/- 0.061 mm). On reference-free abdominal MRI, CRIS reduces FID/KID to 48.714/0.023. On vEM, CRIS outperforms interpolation, NIIV, and vEMINR, reaching 29.133 dB/0.834 3D PSNR/SSIM at 4x, 27.123 dB/0.734 on EPFL at 8x, and 21.915 dB/0.699 on noisy hemibrain data. In a robustness experiment, one variable-gap CRIS model evaluated across gap factors 3–7 and coronal, axial, and sagittal degradations maintained higher PSNR/SSIM than interpolation (36.36–31.14 dB and 0.977–0.932 vs. 33.07–27.85 dB and 0.951–0.853). These results support CRIS as a modality-flexible route to isotropic restoration without paired isotropic targets or configuration-specific retraining. Code is available at https://github.com/adi-hatav/CRIS.

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

Deontic Policies for Runtime Governance of Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.19464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agentic AI systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce a new class of security, privacy, and compliance challenges: an agent that can invoke tools, manipulate data, install software, and coordinate with peer agents across organizational boundaries must be constrained not just by authentication and access control, but by the full structure of enterprise governance. This includes specifying what agents are permitted and prohibited from doing, what they areobliged to do after certain actions (e.g., notify the CISO), under what conditions a standing obligation may be waived, and which rules take precedence when policies conflict. This governance problem exceeds what current policy engines provide. Systems such as XACML, Rego, and Cedar address only the permit/prohibit subset of this governance structure. They do not provide obligation lifecycle management, meta-policy conflict resolution, dispensations that waive obligations in specific circumstances, and ontological reasoning over domain class hierarchies commonly found in applications such as healthcare, cybersecurity, or data privacy. We propose AgenticRei, which realizes key governance requirements such as obligations, dispensations, policy conflict resolutions, and reasoning over policies, as well as the basic permit/prohibit constraints. We use a deontic policy language built on the Rei framework, expressed as OWL (Web Ontology Language) and evaluated at runtime by a high-performance logic engine entirely outside the LLM. The same pipeline governs both tool invocations by the agent and agent-to-agent messages. We show through examples that deontic policies capture governance constraints around security and privacy that mostly cannot be expressed in current production engines. Our approach composes naturally with industry-standard frameworks like A2AS.

19.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-08

Single-cell spatial pharmacobiology for imaging antibody-based therapies in solid tumors

作者: 未知作者

We have developed single-cell spatial pharmacobiology (SSP), which combines in situ imaging of a systemically infused fluorescent therapeutic antibody with high-plex spatial proteomics. Applied to head and neck and pancreatic tumors from patients treated in phase 1 trials, SSP revealed marked spatial heterogeneity in antibody delivery and target engagement, which was shaped by conserved stromal barriers.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

GenAutoML: An Agentic Framework for Dynamic Architecture Generation and Optimization in Time-Series Analysis

arXiv:2606.05860v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Designing neural architectures for time-series forecasting and anomaly detection remains a resource-intensive task that often requires substantial domain expertise. Traditional Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems typically rely on static, predefined search spaces, limiting their ability to adapt to diverse data characteristics. We present GenAutoML, an agentic framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as neural architects to bridge natural-language requirements and executable PyTorch implementations. The framework incorporates a Sandboxed Reflection Loop for autonomous code refinement and a Signature-Aware Runtime that enforces architectural consistency and execution safety. To improve robustness under non-stationary conditions, we further introduce a Dynamic Reversible Instance Normalization (Dyn-RevIN) wrapper. Experiments on the ETTh1, ETTm1, and Weather benchmarks demonstrate that GenAutoML can dynamically generate task-specific neural architectures tailored to dataset characteristics. Among the generated models, WaveInterferenceNet achieves inference latency below 0.01 ms per sample while maintaining competitive predictive performance. By emphasizing computational efficiency, architectural adaptability, and stable optimization behavior, GenAutoML enables the creation of ultra-lightweight neural networks suitable for resource-constrained and latency-sensitive Edge AI deployments.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Geometric Algebra Quantum Gate Decomposition

arXiv:2606.12480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum gates are usually described through matrix and tensor-product formalisms that often obscure their geometric structure. In this work, we formulate the Pauli and Clifford groups within the complex Geometric Algebra (GA) framework. We show that the Pauli group is naturally identified with the group of blades up to a global phase, thereby providing a geometric interpretation of Pauli operators and their commutation relations in terms of oriented subspaces. We further prove that Clifford operators are generated by products of {\pi}/4-Pauli rotors and introduce a greedy Pauli rotor decomposition algorithm whose empirical behavior suggests unexpectedly compact decompositions for Clifford operators. Finally, we show that Clifford+T universality admits a natural geometric interpretation through {\pi}/8-rotors within this framework.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CacheWeaver: Cache-Aware Evidence Ordering for Efficient Grounded RAG Inference

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual grounding, but it also lengthens prompts and raises prefill cost. Prefix caching in serving engines such as vLLM reduces this cost only when requests share the same token prefix. In grounded generation, however, adjacent queries may retrieve overlapping evidence in different orders, so set overlap does not become reusable prefix overlap. We present CacheWeaver, a lightweight prompt-layer method for cache-aware evidence ordering. The method keeps a prefix tree over recently served evidence sequences and uses a greedy walk to place the most reusable prefix first, while leaving the serving engine and retrieved evidence set unchanged. Across three vLLM configurations, the method lowers median time-to-first-token (TTFT) by about 20-33 percent relative to retrieval-order prefix caching, without hurting answer quality in our QA tests. The greedy policy reaches 97.5 percent of the median TTFT gain from oracle ordering, indicating that most reusable prefix locality can be recovered by a simple scheduling layer between retrieval and inference.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Detecting basis-dependent hardware errors through spatio-temporal quantum steering

arXiv:2606.16451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatio-temporal quantum steering provides a framework for benchmarking the nonclassicality of general quantum state transfer processes. A central diagnostic is the no-signaling-in-time (NSIT) condition, whose violation can indicate basis-dependent hardware errors. However, finite measurement statistics may also yield apparent violations, thereby obscuring the detection of basis-dependent hardware errors. To address this, we construct a statistical hypothesis test under the null hypothesis that NSIT violations arise solely from statistical fluctuations. Combining the statistical properties of NSIT violation under the null hypothesis with Chebyshev's inequality, we obtain a distribution-free upper bound on the $p$-value without parametric assumptions. We apply this method to two examples. For a single-qubit state-transfer experiment on a superconducting processor, we observe several instances that the NSIT violation is observed and the null hypothesis is simultaneously rejected by a small $p$-value, providing statistical evidence of basis-dependent hardware errors. For a seven-qubit Hayden-Preskill teleportation protocol on IonQ devices, the null hypothesis is also rejected even when the average fidelity exceeds the classical threshold, while the associated nonclassicality measure vanishes. Our results highlight the necessity of statistical hypothesis testing for detecting basis-dependent errors in near-term quantum devices.