Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

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

AoiZora: Topology-Aware Auto-Parallel Optimization for Inference of Diffusion Transformers

arXiv:2606.17566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video diffusion has quickly grown into a key generative serving workload, yet producing each clip demands many denoising iterations over large spatio-temporal latents, which puts low-latency inference out of reach on a single device. A denoising step is therefore typically distributed across multiple accelerators, and TPU sub-slices have become an attractive and practical fabric for doing so. Current auto-parallel systems, however, search almost exclusively over logical device meshes and disregard how a chosen sharding is actually laid out on the physical TPU interconnect – an oversight that leaves large, topology-dependent performance on the table. We address this gap with AoiZora, a compiler-mediated topology planner built for low-latency video diffusion inference on TPU sub-slices. Its guiding principle is to reconnect logical sharding with physical placement by drawing on different points in the compilation flow: AoiZora first eliminates weak sharding candidates from inexpensive pre-compilation IRs, then compiles only the ones that survive and orders their physical placements using compiled HLO together with a topology-aware communication model. The winning plan is realized along the ordinary compiler path, leaving model code, compiler lowering, collective kernels, and network routing entirely intact. On TPU v5e sub-slices, AoiZora reduces Wan 2.1 one-step denoising latency by as much as 1.42x relative to existing solutions.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Safe Data: Pretraining-Stage Alignment with Regular Safety Reflection

arXiv:2606.19168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To achieve deeper safety alignment for large language models (LLMs), recent efforts have studied how to push safety interventions earlier into the pretraining stage, primarily by filtering unsafe data or rewriting it into safer forms. We argue that pretraining-stage alignment should go beyond making the data safe: LLMs may compose seemingly benign knowledge and capabilities into unsafe behaviors. To this end, we propose Safety Reflection Pretraining, a pretraining-stage alignment method which regularly inserts short safety reflections into pretraining corpora to integrate self-monitoring directly into language modeling, establishing a foundational capability that is subsequently reinforced by compatible post-training. Our experiments with 1.7B models pretrained on FineWeb-Edu show that Safety Reflection Pretraining improves safety classification accuracy and substantially reduces the success rates of inference-stage and finetuning attacks. Complementary to our real-world experiments, we also introduce a fully controlled synthetic environment, MedSafetyWorld, with a clear definition of safety and a reasoning structure under which models can easily generalize unsafe behaviors from safe data. Ablations in MedSafetyWorld further demonstrate a clear advantage of Safety Reflection Pretraining in preventing models from acting on unsafe behaviors generalized from safe data, compared with data filtering and rewriting. Taken together, our findings suggest that pretraining alignment should not only make the training data safe, but also shape the behaviors that models are likely to acquire from safe data.

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

Leadership as Coordination Control: Behavioral Signatures and the Recovery-Advantage Boundary in Multi-Agent LLM Teams

作者:

Team science holds that leadership is contingent: it helps only under specific conditions, and capable, autonomous teams may need none at all. We ask the analogous question for multi-agent LLM teams: under what measurable conditions does process-level coordination control add value, and do those conditions match what team science predicts? We use behavioral signatures (majority lock-in, exploration, recovery from an incorrect round-0 consensus) and per-action ablations, clean because each controller is an explicit action set, not a monolithic prompt. We operationalize three classical leadership styles (transactional, transformational, situational) as controllers over a shared action vocabulary (explore, revise, accept, synthesize). A matched controller with the same actions but an arbitrary rule recovers no better than majority voting, so the theory-derived rule, not the vocabulary, does the work. Across four task regimes and three open-weight model families, no controller dominates by accuracy, as the contingency view predicts: transactional control matches a shared round-0 vote on all 12 (model, regime) combinations to within 1.3pp, and gains appear only on the one combination where the round-0 majority is unreliable (llama-4-scout social; situational +8pp over flat). A recovery-advantage account, tested with four boundary probes, says a controller beats plain interaction only where the round-0 majority is unreliable, the task is recoverable, and undirected interaction does not already repair it. These regions map onto contingency theory (leadership substitutes, path-goal redundancy, the situational readiness gap), so a largely null accuracy result is what the theory predicts, not a failure of the controllers. We read process-level coordination control as a contingency to be measured and theory-mapped, not a leaderboard to be topped.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

Pretrained video generators are promising visual world models that exhibit emergent task-solving abilities; however, their reliance on detailed textual descriptions limits their direct use for planning and decision-making. Existing approaches either outsource this reasoning to language or vision-language models, or rely on supervised fine-tuning with paired task-execution videos, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We propose a scalable framework that elicits task-solving ability in such models by combining self-distillation with reinforcement learning. Given an unlabeled scene image, a vision-language model generates a candidate task and a detailed step-by-step solution. The solution conditions a pretrained video diffusion model, the Demonstrator; we distill its behavior into an Executor conditioned only on the image and a short task prompt. This transfers execution knowledge from caption-guided generation to instruction-conditioned task solving without curated task-video supervision. We further improve the Executor with reinforcement learning from VLM feedback, exploiting the asymmetry between judging whether a sampled video satisfies a task and generating the solution. Experiments on our proposed WorldTasks-Benchmark and the DreamGen robotics benchmark show that the Executor surpasses the Demonstrator under our VLM-based evaluation protocol and transfers competitively to robotic tasks.

05.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

TranscriptFormer: A generative cell atlas across 1.5 billion years of evolution | Science

作者: 未知作者

Single-cell transcriptomics is revolutionizing our understanding of cellular diversity, yet comparing transcriptional programs across the tree of life remains challenging. We developed TranscriptFormer, a family of generative foundation models trained on up to 112 million cells spanning 1.53 billion years of evolution across 12 species. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on cell type classification, even for species separated over 685 million years of evolution, and zero-shot disease state identification in human cells. Developmental trajectories, phylogenetic relationships and cellular hierarchies emerge naturally in TranscriptFormer’s representations without any explicit training on these annotations. This work establishes a powerful framework for quantitative single-cell analysis and comparative cellular biology, thus demonstrating that universal principles of cellular organization can be learned and predicted across the tree of life.

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

GridVQA-X: A Framework for Evaluating Multimodal Explainability Methods

With the increasing development of Vision-Language Models, it becomes imperative that their predictions are readily explainable to relevant stakeholders. However, the field of explainability has not kept pace with the multimodal surge. While recent Multimodal Explainable AI (MxAI) methods generate explanations to attribute the interaction between different modalities, current evaluation protocols lack the ground truth required to distinguish between true cross-modal reasoning (e.g., spatial composition) and shallow cross-modal shortcuts (e.g., Bag-of-Words attribute matching). It remains unknown whether MxAI methods faithfully capture synergistic interactions or merely hallucinate reasoning on models acting as simple feature detectors. In this paper, we introduce GridVQA-X, the first diagnostic framework specifically designed to evaluate cross-modal explainability. Unlike natural datasets, GridVQA-X leverages a closed-world synthesis logic to generate unique, mathematically guaranteed explanations. We utilize this controlled environment to train paired ground-truth models on identical architectures: $M_{pure}$, which learns robust spatial-relational reasoning and $M_{spur}$, which is structurally forced to rely on cross-modal shortcuts. This behavioral divergence creates a rigorous testbed: a faithful explainer must report distinct reasoning pathways for each model. Our findings reveal that widely used methods fail to distinguish between models relying on genuine spatial-relational reasoning and those exploiting cross-modal shortcuts, highlighting a critical gap in capturing true cross-modal synergy and misrepresenting how multimodal models actually make decisions.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolyFlow: Safe and Efficient Polytope-Constrained Flow Matching with Constraint Embedding and Projection-free Update

arXiv:2606.13400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While flow-based generative models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of domains, deploying them in safety-critical physical systems remains challenging due to strict constraint requirements. Existing approaches typically enforce safety through post-hoc corrections, which incur substantial computational overhead and may distort the learned distribution. We propose PolyFlow, a polytope-constrained flow matching framework that embeds constraints directly into the model and flow dynamics. PolyFlow introduces a discrete-time flow formulation and a projection-free architecture, which eliminate the discretization error and guarantee strict satisfaction of arbitrary polyhedral constraints, without the need for expensive iterative solvers. Experimental results show that PolyFlow achieves zero constraint violation while maintaining high distributional fidelity across a range of planning and control tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art constrained generation baselines, PolyFlow significantly reduces inference latency and demonstrates a favorable trade-off between safety, efficiency, and generative quality. Code is available on https://github.com/MJianM/PolyFlow.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Longitudinal multi-omics characterization of the malignant evolution in multirelapsing glioblastoma

Linking glioblastoma (GBM) evolution to clinical progression is challenged by multiple factors, including tumor location for repeated sample collection, and short patient survival. In a single individual, we collected and analysed samples from 11 operations distributed across 31 months of multi-relapsing and multifocal GBM, including terminal leptomeningeal progression. All samples shared genomic ancestry of the retinoblastoma protein 1 (RB1) and neurofibromin 1 (NF1) mutations while advanced progression and extracranial metastases featured mutations of tuberous sclerosis complex 2 (TSC2), PBRM1, CD22 and Fanconi anemia supplementation group I (FANCI), correlated with clinical resistance to immunotherapies and DNA-damaging agents. Single-cell analytics revealed distinct yet reversible shifts in response to the precision medicine arsenal. GBM parenchymal dissemination and extracranial progression were associated with strengthening of neuron-like cell phenotypes. Our multidimensional study describes GBM evolution over a rarely reported time scale, and provides a valuable resource linking genetic, molecular, cellular and clinical progressions.

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

CACR:Reinforcing Temporal Answer Grounding in Instructional Video via Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning

The task of temporal answer grounding in instructional video (TAGV), which aims to locate precise video segments that respond to natural language queries, is increasingly important for direct video answer retrieval. This task remains challenging due to the need to comprehend semantically complex questions and to address the significant length mismatch between untrimmed videos and short target moments. Existing methods often suffer from sensitivity to irrelevant content or insufficient visual reasoning capabilities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning (CACR) framework. Our approach first employs a Visual-Language Pre-training based Candidate Selection (VBCS) algorithm to efficiently generate K candidate segments, then applies a temporal logic reasoning module enhanced by a rejection reward mechanism and optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for robust inference. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), providing a new perspective for reasoning-based retrieval in long videos.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Dual-Agent Framework for Cross-Model Verified Translation of Natural-Language Protocols into Robotic Laboratory Platform

arXiv:2606.20120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biological experiment protocols are written in natural language, whereas automation systems rely on predefined control commands, creating a semantic gap that limits autonomous execution. Microplate-based automatic experiments are particularly challenging due to the need to simultaneously control well mapping, sample-reagent combinations, replicate placement, and parallel dispensing. This study proposes an agent-based protocol translation framework that converts natural-language microplate-based protocols into executable control commands for a robotic laboratory platform. A Parser Agent formalizes the natural-language protocol into a structured representation, and a rule-based mapping engine deterministically incorporates the operational constraints of the robotic laboratory platform to generate device-level control commands. A heterogeneous LLM Validation Agent verifies completeness, parameter accuracy, and execution order, and triggers a self-correction loop with structured feedback when errors are detected. A sweep involving 7 Parsers and 3 Validators on randomly selected ELISA protocols evaluates how model scale and Validator type affect translation accuracy and pass rates under cross-model verification. The accuracy-latency trade-off is further verified by comparing the rule-based mapping of the proposed framework with LLM end-to-end direct mapping. Finally, Bradford assay-based protein quantification using a microplate was demonstrated on a robotic laboratory platform, validating end-to-end autonomous execution from natural-language protocols to real-world experiments. The proposed framework provides a flexible approach to narrowing the semantic gap between natural-language protocols and microplate-based self-driving laboratories.

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

Metacognitive Myopia in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally embedded stereotypes, influence moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups. We propose metacognitive myopia as a cognitive-ecological framework accounting for a conglomerate of established and emerging LLM biases. Our theoretical framework posits that biased samples in the information environment cause five symptoms of metacognitive myopia in LLMs: integration of invalid embeddings, susceptibility to redundant information, neglect of base rates in conditional computation, decision rules based on frequency, and inappropriate higher-order statistical inference for nested data structures. Moreover, it posits that the two main components of metacognition, monitoring and control, could account for these five symptoms. Accordingly, we further outline how monitoring and control could be approximated technically, for instance, through hidden parallel reasoning histories that allow interactive LLMs to evaluate risks of myopic inference before generating overt responses. Our theoretical framework provides a novel perspective on flawed human-machine interactions and agentic AI and raises significant ethical concerns regarding the implementation of LLMs in organizational structures and high-stakes decisions.

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

Attention by Synchronization in Coupled Oscillator Networks

arXiv:2606.12059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We address transformer attention on energy-constrained physical substrates. Softmax attention requires exponentiation and global reduction, operations with high energy cost on von Neumann hardware and no natural physical analog. We show that Kuramoto synchronization dynamics (which arise in electrical, mechanical, superconducting, and charge-density-wave oscillator arrays, among other physical systems) implement a well-defined attention operation without either. The resulting mechanism, fixed-query oscillator attention, replaces softmax's arithmetic with the equilibration of a gradient flow on the sphere: queries are learned anchors fixed on the sphere, and free oscillators evolve under Kuramoto-Lohe dynamics until they settle at positions encoding attention weights via cosine similarity. Because the computation is equilibration, it requires no exponentiation; the only global operation is an affine normalization at readout. The fixed point is provably unique and globally attractive from almost every initial condition, a guarantee that holds across every physical realization. Empirically, at the minimal hardware configuration (oscillator dimension $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2), oscillator attention outperforms softmax on keyword spotting (+1.00 pp) and on subject-verb agreement (+5.27 pp on hard sentences, with zero training failures versus one in five for softmax). On causal language modeling, where softmax retains an advantage, oscillator attention closes the gap as $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ grows: from +11.09 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +2.98 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on WikiText-2, and from +2.39 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +0.57 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on TinyStories. The main objective of this work is not to replace softmax in software but to provide a mathematically grounded blueprint for accurate attention on physical substrates.

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

Beyond Layer Importance in Layer-wise Sparsity: An Inter-Layer Perturbation-Absorption Perspective

The considerable layer-wise redundancy in large language models (LLMs) has established non-uniform sparsity allocation across layers as the standard pruning approach for efficient compression. Existing layer-wise allocation methods that estimate allocation strategy from local signals such as activation outliers or weight spectra mainly derive from local layer importance, whereas the final post-pruning performance is also influenced by the network's subsequent compensatory capacity. In this paper, we directly characterize this property through controlled perturbation experiments. We make the following empirical findings. First, layers exhibit highly heterogeneous responses to pruning-scale perturbations. In most cases, early layers amplify perturbations, while middle and late layers actively absorb them, with relative L2 drift decreasing monotonically across depth and direction realigning toward the unperturbed hidden-state trajectory. Second, absorption is a large-perturbation phenomenon. Under small perturbations the network exhibits amplification across all layers, and the transition to absorption occurs smoothly as perturbation magnitude grows to pruning scale. This enriches the linearized accumulation theory underlying related works. Building on these findings, we define an absorption coefficient per layer and propose absorption-aware correction, an orthogonal augmentation that improves OWL and AlphaPruning by reducing perplexity by 7.13% and boosting zero-shot accuracy by 1.02% across multiple model families at 70% sparsity.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

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

EfficientRollout: System-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding for RL Rollouts

arXiv:2606.18967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a representative post-training paradigm for LLMs, enabling strong reasoning and agentic capabilities. However, rollout generation remains a dominant latency bottleneck because autoregressive sampling decodes responses sequentially and a small number of long-tailed generations often determine completion time. Speculative decoding (SD) offers a natural way to address this bottleneck, as it is a well-established technique for serving fixed LLMs that reduces latency by rapidly drafting tokens and accepting them through parallel verification while preserving the target-model distribution. However, its practical speedups do not directly carry over to RL rollouts: (i) the evolving target policy makes any fixed drafter increasingly mismatched with the policy's output distribution; and (ii) active batch sizes shrink throughout rollout decoding, shifting decoding from compute-bound to memory-bound regimes where parallel verification can exploit underutilized compute. Therefore, accelerating RL rollouts requires both a drafter that remains effective under long, high-temperature generations from an evolving policy and system-aware use of SD that avoids compute-bound regimes. We present EfficientRollout, a system-aware self-SD framework designed to address this gap for RL rollouts. EfficientRollout induces a quantized drafter from the target model (i.e. self-speculative decoding), keeping it coupled to the evolving policy without separate drafter pretraining or online adaptation. It further coordinates a system-aware SD toggle policy with acceptance-aware draft-length adaptation, enabling speculation only in beneficial regimes while matching the drafting budget to evolving drafter quality. EfficientRollout reduces rollout and end-to-end latency by up to 19.6% and 12.7%, respectively, over an accelerated AR rollout baseline, while preserving final model quality.

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

Finsler Geometry, Graph Neural Networks, and You

arXiv:2606.17185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural network architectures based on the graph Laplacian approximate the Laplace-Beltrami operator, thus limiting their application to isotropic operators. As a nonlinear alternative to the Laplace-Beltrami operator, we consider estimates of the Finsler Laplacian on point clouds sampled from a manifold. We prove that these discrete estimates converge to the true operator on the manifold as the number of point samples grows. Moreover, we show that this operator can be expressed as a graph neural network layer, which we use to define a family of Finslerian graph neural networks constrained to express Finsler geometry. We show that Finslerian graph neural networks recover the geometry underlying nonlinear diffusion equations in practice.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Stronger Entanglement Dies Faster: Quantum Mpemba Effect in Dissipative Qubits

arXiv:2605.23197v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classical thermodynamics, the Mpemba effect refers to the counterintuitive observation that hot water can freeze faster than cold water, manifesting as an anomalous crossing of dynamical trajectories. While analogues of this phenomenon have been explored in open quantum systems and spin-chain entanglement asymmetry, its connection to the finite-time decoupling of quantum correlations remains elusive. In this work, we report a distinct Mpemba effect for quantum entanglement in a dissipative quantum system associated with entanglement sudden death (ESD). By analyzing two qubits interacting with local amplitude damping reservoirs, we demonstrate that a more strongly entangled initial state can experience a faster collapse into a separable state than a more weakly entangled state. This anomalous decay stems from the competition between initial coherence and excited-state population, where the latter acts as a catalyst for ESD. We provide exact analytical derivations for the trajectory crossover and ESD time, and map the phase diagram to precisely identify the parameter regime where the effect occurs. Our results offer a new strategy for controlling the lifetime of quantum resources in dissipative environments.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Agents-K1: Towards Agent-native Knowledge Orchestration

arXiv:2606.13669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM-based research agents have advanced through agent orchestration, yet largely overlook scientific knowledge orchestration. Existing works often reduce papers to abstracts, surface mentions, and flat \texttt{cites} edges, omitting key entities, claims, evidence, mechanisms, and method lineages essential for scientific reasoning. To this end, we introduce Agents-K1, an end-to-end knowledge orchestration pipeline that converts raw documents into agent-native scientific knowledge graphs. Agents-K1 integrates three components under a unifying theoretical foundation: a multimodal parser whose five-module schema captures entities, multimodal evidence, citations, and typed inter-entity relations across the full paper rather than abstracts alone; a 4B information-extraction backbone trained with GRPO under a rule-based reward; and a graphanything CLI, a tri-source agent interface that unifies web search, multimodal graph retrieval, and cross-document traversal. On top of this, we process 2.46 million scientific papers across six subjects to produce Scholar-KG, of which we release a one-million-paper subset, and the full Scholar-KG is accessible via the SCP link below. The same pipeline can be extended to general-domain corpora and to schema-conformant data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agents-K1 achieves superior performance in scientific information extraction, knowledge graph construction, and multi-hop scientific reasoning.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods in computational pathology rely on a multi-stage paradigm: class activation map (CAM) generation, offline pseudo-mask refinement, and fully supervised retraining. While established, this decoupled approach presents fundamental limitations. The multi-stage process not only incurs high computational training costs but also suffers from error propagation: local texture biases in shallow CNN layers generate false-positive artifacts that subsequent refinement steps often fail to correct. To address these persistent challenges through a simple yet highly effective approach, we propose the Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification (SSHR) framework. Rather than passively refining CAMs post-hoc, our method proactively purifies intermediate feature representations during the forward pass. We introduce a Hierarchical Feature Rectification Module (HFRM) that utilizes deep global semantic context to filter out local anomalies in shallow layers. This mechanism generates high-fidelity activation maps directly within a single training loop. Experiments on the LUAD-HistoSeg and BCSS datasets demonstrate that SSHR outperforms state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Furthermore, SSHR reduces training duration by 2 to 5 times. This efficiency minimizes computational overhead and accelerates clinical translation for large-scale histopathology workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/trongduc-nguyen/SSHR

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

Sequential Kernel-based Conditional Independence Testing via Adaptive Betting

arXiv:2606.18993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Testing conditional independence is fundamental yet intrinsically difficult: without additional assumptions, Type I error control is impossible in general. The "Model-X'' paradigm addresses this difficulty by assuming exact knowledge of a relevant conditional distribution. While small deviations from this assumption can sometimes be tolerated in classical one-shot testing, existing sequential conditional independence tests typically require the Model-X conditional to be known exactly, making them fragile when it must instead be estimated. We propose a new approach that is substantially more robust to such estimation error. Our method applies testing-by-betting to an adaptively optimized Kernel Conditional Independence statistic, together with a normalization scheme and a truncate-and-shift calibration strategy. These modifications greatly reduce Type I error inflation while preserving high power across high-dimensional synthetic benchmarks and real-world fairness tasks, outperforming existing sequential Model-X approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/he-zh/SKCI.

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

Prefill Awareness in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs. If AI models can recognize and act on the fact their prior assistant messages have been inserted or edited, the effectiveness and validity of these methods could be compromised. We investigate whether frontier language models can distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context, a capability we call prefill awareness. To do so, we construct a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filtering for cases where models show consistent stances. We find that frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations later also show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. We also examine more realistic agentic settings such as misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories, where frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and hidden formatting artifacts. Our results indicate that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for some prefill-based methods. We recommend that model developers track this capability in frontier systems.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do Time Series Foundation Model Benchmarks Hide Regime-Dependent Failures? Evidence from Traffic Speed Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Measurement-Calibrated Multi-Camera Fusion for Vision-Based Indoor Localization

Indoor vision-based localization systems are affected by detection noise, occlusions, and limited camera coverage, leading to uncertainty at multiple stages of the pipeline. While multi-camera data fusion is widely used to mitigate these issues, it is typically treated as a black-box component and evaluated solely end-to-end, obscuring its mechanistic contributions. To address this gap, this work investigates whether explicitly characterizing single-camera localization errors can be leveraged to calibrate and optimize multi-camera data fusion. We introduce a measurement-calibrated fusion approach that integrates component-wise error quantification, specifically isolating homography calibration, human detection, and motion tracking. A component-wise evaluation is conducted to quantify error contributions from homography calibration, human detection, and motion tracking. Experimental results show that data fusion improves localization accuracy compared to single-camera baselines. While measurement-calibrated fusion provides only limited improvement in absolute accuracy over standard fusion, it substantially reduces trajectory variance and improves motion smoothness, which are critical for applications requiring stable and continuous motion estimates. These results highlight the value of explicit error characterization when designing data fusion strategies for vision-based indoor positioning systems.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Importance of Phase in Neural Representations: An Internal Oppenheim-Lim Test of Image Classifiers

Oppenheim and Lim (1981) showed that natural images stay recognizable when reconstructed from their Fourier phase alone, while the magnitude carries little of their identity. We ask whether trained image classifiers reproduce this asymmetry inside their hidden layers, and we test it causally: given two images, we transplant the phase of one onto the magnitude of the other at a chosen layer and record which image the prediction follows. In PRISM2D, GFNet, and ViT-B/16 the prediction follows the phase or sign donor, and deleting all image-specific magnitude barely moves accuracy, so identity rides on phase while image-specific magnitude is largely dispensable to the readout. ResNet-50 at first seems to break the pattern, because transplanting sign after its ReLUs does nothing; a fair intervention before the ReLU reveals a strong latent sign code in the late blocks, and a DC-only control shows the readout consumes a channel-wise spatial average. Controls rule out the trivial case in which magnitude simply stops depending on the image. The architectures therefore share a phase/sign identity code but expose it in different bases, set by rectification and readout geometry, which gives a mechanistic account of the texture–shape gap between CNNs and attention models.