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

Resilient Consensus in Agentic AI

arXiv:2606.15024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems where they must coordinate and agree on shared decisions. We ask whether classical resilient consensus theory, developed for deterministic agents, transfers to LLM agents that may behave adversarially. Framing LLM agreement as a Byzantine consensus game, we run controlled experiments on complete and general communication graphs. We find that prompted LLM agents fail to reach agreement that is achievable in principle: consensus can fail even in settings where classical theory guarantees that a convergent algorithm exists, and this failure persists across temperatures and horizons. At the same time, wrapping the agents with classical resilient consensus filters improves agreement. The benefit of filtering depends on how much robustness the underlying topology already provides. Our results suggest that classical resilient consensus theory is a useful lens for the safety of agentic AI.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ParaScale: Scale-Calibrated Camera-Motion Transfer via a Gauge-Invariant Parallax Number

作者:

arXiv:2606.19805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transferring the camera motion of a reference video to a freshly generated one lets creators reuse cinematic moves. Yet reference and target often live at incompatible scales – a sweep across a galaxy versus a nudge across a desk – and naively reusing the recovered trajectory yields either imperceptible or violently exaggerated motion. We trace this to a geometric fact: translation-induced image motion scales as ||T||/Z, so a monocular trajectory is meaningful only up to a depth-scale gauge. We distill this into the Parallax Number Pi = ||Delta T|| / Zbar, a dimensionless, gauge-invariant descriptor of how strongly a camera move is felt, and prove that it – not the raw trajectory – is the quantity that scale-faithful transfer must preserve. ParaScale is a plug-and-play module that reads Pi off any reference video and re-realizes it against the target scene's own depth, per frame, leaving rotation untouched. Sitting between pose extraction and pose injection, it requires no retraining and drops into any pose-conditioned generator. We further introduce the Parallax Consistency Error (PCE), a scale-symmetric metric that – unlike the similarity-aligned TransErr – exposes scene-scale mismatch. Across scale regimes spanning four orders of magnitude and multiple backbones, ParaScale keeps the realized parallax on the identity line and cuts PCE by more than 3x over uncalibrated transfer with no loss of visual fidelity.

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

DecNefSimulator: A Modular, Interpretable Framework for Decoded Neurofeedback Simulation Using Generative Models

arXiv:2511.14555v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Decoded Neurofeedback (DecNef) is a promising non-invasive approach to brain modulation with wide-ranging applications in neuromedicine and cognitive neuroscience. However, progress in DecNef research remains constrained by subject-dependent learning variability, reliance on indirect measures to quantify progress, and the high cost and time demands of experimentation. We present DecNefSimulator, a modular and interpretable simulation framework that formalizes DecNef as a machine learning problem. Beyond providing a virtual laboratory, DecNefSimulator enables researchers to model, analyze and understand neurofeedback dynamics. Using latent variable generative models as simulated participants, DecNefSimulator allows direct observation of internal cognitive states and systematic evaluation of how different protocol designs and subject characteristics influence learning. We demonstrate how this approach can (i) reproduce empirical phenomena of DecNef learning, (ii) identify conditions under which DecNef feedback fails to induce learning, and (iii) guide the design of more robust and reliable DecNef protocols in silico before human implementation. In summary, DecNefSimulator bridges computational modeling and cognitive neuroscience, offering a principled foundation for methodological innovation, robust protocol design, and ultimately, a deeper understanding of DecNef-based brain modulation.

04.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-10

Dual-target gene therapy in Parkinson’s disease: a multicenter phase 1 trial

作者:

Restoring striatal dopamine synthesis is a promising gene therapy strategy for Parkinson’s disease. Previous adeno-associated virus-mediated aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) monotherapies remain dependent on exogenous levodopa, whereas multigene delivery is constrained by strict adeno-associated virus packaging limits. A ‘dual approach’ targeting the two rate-limiting enzymes, tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and AADC, offers the potential for autonomous dopamine synthesis. We report the 12-month primary safety and tolerability outcomes of a multicenter, open-label, dose-escalation, phase 1 trial evaluating BBM-P002, a new adeno-associated virus vector—AAVT42—codelivering constitutively active TH and AADC. Ten participants with moderate-to-advanced Parkinson’s disease were enrolled and received bilateral intraputaminal infusions across doses of 4.0 × 1011 vg (Cohort 1; n = 1), 6.0 × 1011 vg (Cohort 2; n = 2), 1.0 × 1012 vg (Cohort 3; n = 2) and 1.2 × 1012 vg (Cohort 4; n = 5). The trial achieved its primary outcome, as BBM-P002 demonstrated a favorable safety and tolerability profile within 12 months post-treatment. No dose-limiting toxicities or drug-related serious adverse events occurred. A total of 23 adverse events were reported, all judged unrelated to BBM-P002 and primarily mild and transient. Systemic toxicity and clinically meaningful immunogenicity were absent. In conclusion, intraputaminal delivery of BBM-P002 was safe and well tolerated in this phase 1 trial, supporting continued clinical development. ClinicalTrials.gov registration: NCT05822739 . Phase 1 results reveal that BBM-P002, a dual-target gene therapy co-delivering TH and DDC, is safe and well tolerated in Parkinson’s disease, with 12-month motor improvements signaling therapeutic potential.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

3D-CBM: A Framework for Concept-Based Interpretability in Generative 3D Modeling

This research introduces a framework for incorporating Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) into 3D generative architectures to address the inherent 'semantic gap' in deep geometric learning. As deep models become central to 3D content creation, explainability shifts from a peripheral feature to a fundamental requirement for trust and accountability in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and manufacturing. CBMs provide an intrinsic interpretability solution by constraining latent representations to align with human-defined concepts, yet their application to unstructured 3D data remains largely unexplored. We design, implement, and validate a formal 3D-CBM architecture that maps raw geometric inputs, including point clouds and meshes, into a multi-tiered taxonomy of interpretable primitives and functional attributes. The framework further identifies strategic datasets, such as PartNet and ShapeNet, specialized for concept-based supervision. Experimental results from a 3D part-manipulation proof-of-concept experiment demonstrate the framework's efficacy, achieving a concept prediction accuracy of 88.8\% and a Chamfer Distance of 0.0115. Critically, the model enables precise test-time intervention, allowing for the interactive correction of structural errors. This work establishes a foundation for semantically-steerable 3D generation and invites further exploration into collaborative human-in-the-loop design systems.

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

Double-Helix Vision (DH-V2): A Geometry-Based Visual Sampler for Bandwidth-Constrained Perception

作者:

We present Double-Helix Vision (DH), a geometry-based visual sampler that compresses 2D images into compact 1D signals using paired golden-ratio-inspired spiral trajectories. Rather than processing every pixel uniformly, DH employs two phase-shifted helices (Alpha and Beta, offset by 180 degrees) to sample the image with biologically-inspired foveation: high density at the center, sparse coverage at the periphery. At 4K resolution, DH achieves a 1,433x compression ratio (99.93% reduction) while preserving the geometric structure of the scene. The full perception pipeline – including spatial mapping, temporal collision detection, and intra-frame structural disparity estimation – runs in 0.52 ms at 1080p on CPU-only hardware, with no neural network dependencies. On CIFAR-10 at extreme sampling budgets (K=128 points per helix), DH achieves a +6.03% accuracy gain over uniform random sampling. A JSON-serializable Robotics API is provided, delivering sub-millisecond spatial perception reports in 2.7 KB packets. Code and benchmarks are available under the MIT License.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

The Critical Role of Model Selection in Causal Inference: A Comparative Analysis of Classification Models within the InferBERT Framework for Pharmacovigilance

Distinguishing causal adverse drug events (ADEs) from spurious correlations remains a central challenge in pharmacovigilance. The InferBERT framework integrates transformer models with Do-calculus, but its success hinges on the underlying classification model. This study evaluates the impact of model choice in InferBERT, assessing whether simpler models suffice, if domain-specific pre-training helps, whether scaling to LLMs improves causal detection, and the effect of post-hoc calibration. We performed a comparative study on two benchmarks: Analgesics-induced Acute Liver Failure (AILF) and Tramadol-related Mortalities (TRAM). Four models were evaluated-XGBoost (baseline), ALBERT (original InferBERT), BioBERT (biomedical transformer), and Med-LLaMA (medical LLM)-using 5-fold cross-validation repeated over 20 runs. We measured accuracy, Expected Calibration Error (ECE) pre- and post-isotonic regression, and Jaccard concordance of causal terms with PRR, ROR, and EBGM; significance was tested with paired t-tests. BioBERT achieved the highest accuracy on both datasets, while Med-LLaMA underperformed despite its size and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Domain-specific pre-training was decisive. Calibration improved ECE but had mixed effects on accuracy and causal discovery. BioBERT's superiority also yielded the strongest concordance with traditional pharmacovigilance signals. These results show that domain-specific pre-training provides a clear advantage over simpler baselines and larger LLMs. Investing in manageable, domain-aware models is more effective for computational pharmacovigilance than simply scaling model size.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Large-Scale OD Matrix Estimation with A Deep Learning Method

arXiv:2310.05753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The estimation of origin-destination (OD) matrices is a crucial aspect of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). It involves adjusting an initial OD matrix by regressing the current observations like traffic counts of road sections (e.g., using least squares). However, the OD estimation problem lacks sufficient constraints and is mathematically underdetermined. To alleviate this problem, some researchers incorporate a prior OD matrix as a target in the regression to provide more structural constraints. However, this approach is highly dependent on the existing prior matrix, which may be outdated. Others add structural constraints through sensor data, such as vehicle trajectory and speed, which can reflect more current structural constraints in real-time. Our proposed method integrates deep learning and numerical optimization algorithms to infer matrix structure and guide numerical optimization. This approach combines the advantages of both deep learning and numerical optimization algorithms. The neural network(NN) learns to infer structural constraints from probe traffic flows, eliminating dependence on prior information and providing real-time performance. Additionally, due to the generalization capability of NN, this method is economical in engineering. We conducted tests to demonstrate the good generalization performance of our method on a large-scale synthetic dataset. Subsequently, we verified the stability of our method on real traffic data. Our experiments provided confirmation of the benefits of combining NN and numerical optimization.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Fast When, Careful Who: Dual-Process Multiparty Turn-Taking with Diffusion Augmentation

Reliable turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems. However, most existing methods are designed for two-speaker interaction and struggle with realistic multiparty audio containing overlap and rapid speaker changes. We study multiparty turn-taking on the VoxConverse dataset and propose an audio-only two-stage pipeline that separates when to trigger a turn boundary from whether the floor is actually transferring. A fast trigger scans the audio and proposes candidate end-of-turn times, while a lightweight verifier runs only at those times to decide \textsc{Hold} or \textsc{Shift} and support next-speaker prediction. We report results in the full multiparty setting and a controlled dyadic top-2 projection for comparability. We also investigate diffusion-based, label-preserving background-audio mixing as a data augmentation strategy. Results show improved shift detection over a baseline, with further improvements from diffusion augmentation.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

A Brain-Aging Transcriptomic Signature Reclassifies WHO Glioma Grade and Predicts Survival Independently of IDH Status: A Multi-Cohort Study

Background Despite WHO grade and IDH status, significant survival differences remain in diffuse gliomas. We hypothesized that a brain-aging transcriptomic signature, reflecting neuroinflammation, myeloid infiltration, and synaptic loss, would independently predict survival and allow for molecular reclassification. Methods A neurodegeneration score was derived via PCA of brain MRI volumes from 1,057 OASIS-3 subjects and projected onto 888 TCGA-LGG/GBM (discovery) and 693 CGGA gliomas (validation). A 14-gene signature of glial/myeloid (GFAP, AQP4, TYROBP, TREM2, C1QA, CD68, ITGAM) and neuronal (SYP, DLG4, GRIN1, GRIA1, SNAP25, SYN1, RBFOX3) genes were computed. Elastic-net Cox regression identified a 3-gene panel (C1QA, CD68, GRIA1). Kaplan-Meier, multivariate Cox, decision curve, and single-cell RNA-seq analyses were performed. Results High brain-aging scores predicted poorer overall survival (p < 0.0001) and remained an independent prognostic factor after adjusting for WHO grade and IDH status (z = 4.72, p < 0.001); chronological age was non-significant (p = 0.231). In IDH-mutant gliomas, significance was confirmed in both cohorts (TCGA p = 0.027; CGGA p < 0.0001). Bidirectional reclassification showed high-risk Grade 2 tumors with Grade 3-like survival (p = 0.00089), and indolent Grade 3 tumors resembling Grade 2 by Ki-67. Single-cell RNA-seq confirmed macrophage localization of signature genes; DCA demonstrated net benefit over grade alone at 5-30% probability thresholds. Conclusions A brain-aging transcriptomic signature independently predicts glioma survival beyond WHO grade and IDH status, validated in an independent Chinese cohort, with clinical utility for identifying high-risk Grade 2 and sparing over-treatment of indolent Grade 3 tumors.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Generative design of antigen-specific T-cell receptor sequences with a conditional diffusion model

T cell receptor (TCR)-based immunotherapy holds immense potential for treating cancers and infectious diseases, where highly antigen-specific TCR recognition is crucial for adaptive immunity against tumors and pathogens. Engineering or de novo generation of the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) loops of TCRs using artificial intelligence offers a powerful alternative to designing reactive TCRs rather than laborious experimental screening. However, current in silico approaches are constrained by weak conditional guidance, limited flexibility, and a lack of rigorous functional validation. To address these limitations, we introduce TCRDiff, a generative diffusion framework for designing antigen-specific TCRs conditioned on peptide-MHC (pMHC) targets and germline-encoded variable genes. By leveraging pre-trained knowledge from massive T-cell repertoires and TCR-pMHC recognition data, TCRDiff generates CDR3{beta} sequences with state-of-the-art fidelity to native binding TCRs through a denoising diffusion process. Furthermore, incorporating the interface geometry features generated TCR-pMHC complexes with superior structural plausibility. As a proof of concept, we deployed TCRDiff in a systematic pipeline to design candidate TCRs for immunotherapy. In vitro activation assays validated that TCRDiff-generated TCRs specifically recognize the MAGE-A3 epitope with minimized off-target cross-reactivity. Together, TCRDiff establishes a powerful, validated computational paradigm to accelerate the development of TCR-based immunotherapies.

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

How Transparent is DiffusionGemma?

arXiv:2606.20560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM reasoning transparency is a critical affordance for understanding model decisions, mitigating misuse and misalignment, and debugging surprising model behaviors. However, DiffusionGemma performs a larger fraction of its computation in a continuous latent space; does this make its reasoning less transparent? We study this question by decomposing transparency into two components: variable transparency, whether we understand intermediate snapshots of a model's computational state; and algorithmic transparency, whether we can use these snapshots to reconstruct the process by which the model arrived at its outputs. Naively, DiffusionGemma has poor variable transparency: its opaque serial depth, the amount of serial computation that occurs in between interpretable model states, seems at first 28.6X higher than the corresponding autoregressive Gemma 4 model. However, we show that we can map the information flowing between denoising steps through an interpretable token bottleneck with no decrease in downstream performance. Treating these intermediate states as interpretable reduces the opaque serial depth to just 1.1X that of Gemma 4. Algorithmic transparency is harder for diffusion models than for autoregressive models because all token predictions in the canvas can change at every denoising step, giving the model the power to implement complicated distributed algorithms during the denoising process. To begin bridging this gap, we conduct a suite of interpretability case studies, uncovering initial evidence of novel diffusion-specific phenomena such as non-chronological reasoning, token and sequence smearing, and intermediate-context reasoning. Finally, we test monitorability, a key application of transparency that measures whether model outputs are useful for downstream tasks. We find that DiffusionGemma is similarly monitorable to Gemma 4.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

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

FraudSMSWalker: Benchmarking Agentic Large Language Models for SMS-to-Webpage Fraud Detection

SMS fraud is increasingly cross-channel: a message directs the user to a webpage, and the final risk depends on how the SMS claim aligns with the page content and requested user action. However, existing evaluations either focus on message-only smishing classification or expose URL and domain cues that allow models to rely on reputation shortcuts. To address this gap, we introduce FraudSMSWalker, a controlled benchmark for URL-masked SMS-to-webpage fraud judgment. FraudSMSWalker contains 699 bilingual chains, including 332 fraudulent and 367 benign cases, across ten service scenarios. The model-visible input consists of the SMS context and sanitized webpage evidence, while raw URLs, hosts, domains, IPs, redirects, and reputation metadata are withheld. The benchmark further includes hard benign cases whose pages contain login, payment, verification, or account-management elements that are plausible under the service context but also appear in scam flows. We evaluate nine web agents under masked browser-agent protocols and conduct URL-visibility ablations. The results show that current agents can detect suspicious cues, but struggle to preserve benign recall and often produce positive predictions that are weakly supported by the observed evidence. These findings position FraudSMSWalker as a benchmark for measuring whether web agents can make fraud judgments that remain both accurate and evidence-grounded when direct reputation shortcuts are suppressed. The associated code and dataset are accessible at the \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/w/FraudMessageWalker-Bench}{anonymous link}.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Optimism Stabilizes Thompson Sampling for Adaptive Inference

arXiv:2602.06014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used for stochastic multi-armed bandits, yet its inferential properties under adaptive data collection are subtle. Classical asymptotic theory for sample means can fail because arm-specific sample sizes are random and coupled with the rewards through the action-selection rule. We study adaptive inference for Thompson sampling with Gaussian randomized indices in $K$-armed stochastic bandits with independent sub-Gaussian reward noises, and identify optimism as a key mechanism for restoring stability, meaning that each arm's pull count concentrates around a deterministic scale. This stability yields asymptotically valid Wald inference despite adaptive sampling. First, we prove that variance-inflated TS is stable for any $K \ge 2$, including the challenging regime where multiple arms are optimal, with asymptotically uniform allocation over optimal arms and sharp logarithmic pull-count asymptotics for suboptimal arms. This resolves the $K$-armed extension question raised by \citet{halder2025stable}, using new winner-map and Lyapunov-drift techniques to control allocation among multiple optimal arms. Second, we analyze an alternative optimistic modification that keeps the Gaussian index variance unchanged but adds an explicit mean bonus to the index center, and establish a similar stability conclusion. In summary, suitably implemented optimism stabilizes Thompson sampling and enables asymptotically valid Wald inference in multi-armed bandits, while incurring only a mild additional regret cost.

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

Structure-Oriented Randomized Neural Networks for Poisson-Nernst-Planck and Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes Systems

arXiv:2606.19912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a structure-oriented randomized neural network framework, termed SO-RaNN, for the Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) system and the Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes (PNP-NS) system. The decoupled linearized subproblems are solved iteratively by randomized neural networks in a space-time framework. For the concentration variables, a pointwise cut-off is used to enforce positivity at the value level, and discrete mass-scaling factors are computed at selected correction instants and interpolated in time, so as to ensure exact mass matching at those instants and to promote approximate mass preservation between them. To introduce an auxiliary discrete dissipation mechanism, we further employ an SAV-type post-processing correction, which yields monotonicity of the SAV auxiliary variable under the ideal SAV update. For the PNP-NS system, a structure-preserving randomized neural network (SP-RaNN) is used for the velocity field, so that the velocity approximation satisfies the incompressibility constraint pointwise by construction. On the theoretical side, we derive residual-based estimates for the raw, uncorrected RaNN solvers of the linearized subproblems, formulate a conditional local-in-time convergence result for the raw outer Picard iteration of the PNP system, and analyze the value-level positivity correction together with the mass-correction and SAV post-processing steps. For the PNP-NS system, we establish an approximation result for the SP-RaNN space and provide a conditional error statement for the corresponding linearized Oseen-type problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate approximation accuracy in the source-driven manufactured tests and illustrate the intended value-level positivity correction, selected-time mass matching, computed free-energy curves based on the final gauge-fixed potential, and divergence-free approximation in benchmark tests.

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

CacheMuon: Using Temporal Preconditioning To Approximate Polar Factor

arXiv:2606.16371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an optimizer that computes updates using the polar factor of the momentum matrix and has shown strong empirical performance across a range of training settings. A key component of Muon is the Newton-Schulz iteration used to compute this polar factor. Although this avoids the cost of an exact singular value decomposition, it remains expensive in practice because it is applied at every optimization step. At the same time, the momentum matrix changes smoothly over training, suggesting strong temporal correlation in the corresponding polar factors. In this paper, we exploit this structure and propose CacheMuon, a temporal preconditioning method that reuses information from previous optimization steps to approximate the polar factor at the current step. This reduces redundant orthogonalization computation across iterations. We analyze CacheMuon as an inexact Muon update, with error controlled by fresh-solver error and cache staleness. Empirically, CacheMuon provides a controllable quality-efficiency frontier: conservative thresholds closely match fresh Muon on language-model and vision training while reducing orthogonalization FLOPs, whereas more aggressive thresholds yield larger arithmetic savings at the cost of modest validation-quality degradation.

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

Efficiently Linking Real Scenes with Synthetic Data Generation for AI-based Cognitive Robotics and Computer Vision Applications

AI vision models are a driving factor for the potential use case scenarios of cognitive robotics within in the industry and household applications. A large array of methods from semantic environment analysis towards 6D and grasping pose estimation have been proposed based on the latest AI achievements. However, such advancements require further strong and efficient methods w.r.t. training data and AI-architectures, which are capable in synergy to tackle current challenges, precision limits, and scalability beyond domain gaps. In this paper, we discuss these current limits and trends in the related state-of-the-art which are challenging those. Further we discuss our current work in progress on bridging the domain gap between simulations and real world applications by linking those in the training data generation.

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

Beyond Uniform Forgetting: A Study of Sequential Direct Preference Optimization Across Preference Settings

Aligning language models with human preferences often requires optimising multiple behavioural objectives. A practical approach is to apply these objectives sequentially using preference optimisation methods such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO), but it remains unclear whether later training uniformly degrades preferences learned earlier or whether the effect depends on the relationship between objectives. We study sequential DPO across four preference settings covering distributional conflict, multi-attribute interaction, strong safety signal, and compatible response-quality objectives. Using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with LoRA adapters, we evaluate all objectives after every stage with a fixed base-model reference. We find that sequential DPO does not produce a single forgetting pattern; preference change ranges from partial degradation to stability, pair-level redistribution, or positive transfer depending on objective relationship, signal strength, and training order. Pair-level analysis using length-normalised policy margins shows that aggregate metrics can mask heterogeneous changes across preference pairs, whereas quartile decomposition reveals that high-confidence pairs can either degrade or improve depending on the setting. Mechanistic diagnostics show that Stage~2 gradients and adapter updates are near-orthogonal to the previous objective across all settings, providing little evidence that direct gradient opposition is the primary driver. These findings suggest that future sequential alignment pipelines should account for objective compatibility and signal strength, rather than assuming that later objectives affect earlier preferences uniformly.

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

RetailBench: Benchmarking long horizon reasoning and coherent decision making of LLM agents in realistic retail environments

arXiv:2606.15862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

An AI Security Agent for Banking: Multi-Vector Fraud and AML Detection Across Retail and Corporate Accounts

arXiv:2606.17555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Banks simultaneously face signature-based fraud (card-not-present attacks, account takeover, ATM cloning) and behavioural financial crime (structuring, layering, mule networks, business email compromise) – two threat families with fundamentally different detection requirements. Static rule engines that reliably catch brute-force and high-velocity events are structurally blind to business-email-compromise (BEC) payment redirection, session hijacking, and money-laundering layering, which are engineered to appear indistinguishable from legitimate activity at the individual transaction or session level. This paper presents an AI security agent for retail and corporate banking that addresses this gap through a three-component fusion architecture operating on two parallel event streams: a transaction stream (card fraud, ACH/wire fraud, AML categories) and a session stream (account takeover, session hijacking, SIM-swap, insider abuse). Each stream combines an LSTM sequence model capturing per-account behavioural history, a statistical velocity/threshold monitor, and a graph/network module capturing account-counterparty relationship patterns (fan-in, fan-out, pass-through ratio) for money-laundering detection. Experiments on a synthetic event log of 237,669 transactions and 113,508 sessions across 13 threat categories and 3,470 simulated accounts demonstrate overall F1 of 0.787 (transaction stream) and 0.867 (session stream) for the proposed model, versus 0.562/0.733 for a rule-based baseline and 0.655/0.713 for an LSTM-only baseline. The agent includes a customer-facing transaction-verification chatbot (96.6% identity verification accuracy, 86.8% mass-reset attack detection) and an analyst case-summary assistant (99.3% action-recommendation F1), with Critical-tier automated response latency under 0.43 ms at the 95th percentile.

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

Model soups need only one ingredient

arXiv:2602.09689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on a target distribution often improves in-distribution (ID) accuracy, but at the cost of out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness as representations specialize to the fine-tuning data. Weight-space ensembling methods, such as Model Soups, mitigate this effect by averaging multiple checkpoints, but they are computationally prohibitive, requiring the training and storage of dozens of fine-tuned models. In this paper, we introduce MonoSoup, a simple, data-free, hyperparameter-free, post-hoc method that achieves a strong ID-OOD balance using only a single checkpoint. Our method applies Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to each layer's update and decomposes it into high-energy directions that capture task-specific adaptation and low-energy directions that introduce noise but may still encode residual signals useful for robustness. MonoSoup then uses entropy-based effective rank to automatically re-weigh these components with layer-wise coefficients that account for the spectral and geometric structure of the model. Experiments on CLIP models fine-tuned on ImageNet and evaluated under natural distribution shifts, as well as on Qwen language models tested on mathematical reasoning and multiple-choice benchmarks, show that this plug-and-play approach is a practical and effective alternative to multi-checkpoint methods, retaining much of their benefits without their computational overhead.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mathematical Basis for Analyzing Superconducting Phase Transitions Using Catastrophe Theory

arXiv:2606.11810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish a rigorous mathematical bridge from quantum many-body path integrals to the cusp catastrophe model by Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction, which provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing superconducting phase transition using the catastrophe theory. First, it is proved that, near the critical point the infinite-dimensional effective action is diffeomorphic to a finite-dimensional catastrophe. Secondly, starting from Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional, the Euler-Lagrange partial differential equation can be reduced to the cusp catastrophe model. Thirdly, the fermionic imaginary-time path integral to the cusp catastrophe is derived through the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation, Matsubara frequency expansion, and Grassmann algebra. Furthermore, we connect this framework with the adsorption potential theory we proposed, elucidating the catastrophic topological nature of the electron pairing mechanism in high-temperature superconductivity. The precise microscopic derivation of the adsorption potential from first-principles electronic structure calculations would strengthen the predictive power of the theory.

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

Amortized Probabilistic Retrieval of Atmospheric CO2 from OCO-2 Spectra Using Deep Learning with Laplace Approximations and Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2606.17413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Space-based monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is essential for constraining the global carbon budget. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) estimates column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO2 (XCO2) using high-resolution spectra. However, current operational retrieval algorithms are computationally expensive and do not properly quantify uncertainties. We present a novel deep learning framework that addresses these challenges. Due to the difficulties of ground-truth data for real satellite observations, we develop and validate our approach using a high-fidelity simulation dataset. This dataset, created to support OCO-2 uncertainty quantification (UQ), incorporates realistic forward model errors. Our architecture encodes spectral bands using a multi-branch neural network and estimates posteriors of the full CO2 column or desired summaries thereof using two scalable UQ methods: Laplace approximations and normalizing flows. Our approach has five key advantages relative to operational "full-physics" solvers: (1) Amortization: Inference is orders of magnitude faster, enabling real-time processing of massive data streams; (2) Model error robustness: By training on simulations that explicitly include model discrepancies, our method accounts for systematic errors often neglected by standard inversions; (3) Point estimate accuracy: We achieve superior predictive accuracy compared to baseline methods; (4) Improved UQ: The probabilistic outputs yield better-calibrated uncertainty estimates; and (5) Non-Gaussian posteriors: When utilizing normalizing flows, our framework successfully models complex, asymmetric posterior distributions, overcoming the limitations of the Gaussian assumption. These results suggest that simulation-based deep learning is a viable path toward next-generation operational processing systems.