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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TMR-GGNN: Credit Card Fraud Detection based on Time-Aware Multi-Relational Guided Graph Neural Network

arXiv:2606.18444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, credit card fraud detection has faced significant challenges due to highly imbalanced data, evolving fraud patterns, and complex relational structures among transaction entities. To address these issues, this research proposes a novel framework called Timeaware Multi Relational Guided Graph Neural Network (TMR GGNN). Particularly, the proposed TMR GGNN extends the encoder decoder Graph Neural Network GNN architecture by modeling heterogeneous interactions across customers, merchants, devices, and IPs over temporal windows. Subsequently, the proposed TMR GGNN approach constructs a dynamic, multi relational graph and incorporates a time aware relational attention mechanism within the encoder to adaptively weigh the transaction relevance based on temporal proximity and semantic context. Consequently, the decoder employs a contrastive learning module to distinguish between real and synthesized transaction patterns, while improving the models generalization of rare fraud cases. Additionally, to effectively manage severe class imbalances and emphasize discriminative learning, a composite loss function combining Information Noise Contrastive Estimation (InfoNCE) based contrastive loss with Focal Loss is introduced. This integration assists in improving fraud identification while mitigating false negatives.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Attention Imbalance Rectification

Object hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) severely compromises their reliability in real-world applications, posing a critical barrier to their deployment in high-stakes scenarios such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. Through systematic empirical investigation, we identify that the imbalanced attention allocation, both across modalities (i.e., vision and language) and within modalities (among individual tokens), exhibits a strong causal correlation with the occurrence of object hallucination. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel concept termed attention imbalance, which not only quantifies the degree of attention disparity but also visually delineates the underlying patterns (e.g., over-attentiveness to irrelevant language tokens or under-attentiveness to discriminative visual features) that drive object hallucination. To mitigate object hallucination, we further propose Attention Imbalance Rectification (AIR), a lightweight decoding-time intervention method that reallocates attention weights and adjusts attention distributions to rectify modality-wise and token-wise imbalances. Extensive evaluations on four mainstream LVLMs and three benchmarks (CHAIR, POPE, and MM-Vet) with seven baselines demonstrate that AIR consistently reduces object hallucination rates, achieving up to a 35.1% reduction compared to the baselines, while improving up to 15.9% of LVLMs' general capability across diverse vision-language tasks.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

MAPS: A Novel Multi-Axial Projective Sphere for Geometrically Visualizing Higher d-Valued Quantum State-Space of Qudits

arXiv:2606.15801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visualizing the d-valued quantum state-space of quantum systems serves as a foundational pillar for the scientific research and practical applications in quantum computing and information science, where d >= 2. The 2-valued quantum states of a qubit are elegantly visualized on the three-dimensional Bloch sphere. In contrast, expanding this geometrical paradigm to visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit (d >= 3), e.g., a qutrit (d=3), ququadit (d=4), and quintit (d=5), leads to severe structural and topological complexities. This paper introduces a new generalized three-dimensional framework to effectively visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit, in the aspects of ease of illustration, structural simplicity, and natural representation for researchers and engineers. We called this new framework the "multi-axial projective sphere (MAPS)", which consists of n projectional intersecting spatial axes, where d-1

04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Martingale Solutions to a Stochastic Keller-Segel System with nonlocal Source and Super-linear Noise

arXiv:2606.11774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global nonnegative martingale solutions are shown to exist for a stochastic Keller-Segel system with a nonlocal Fisher-KPP source and super-linear multiplicative noise. The result is obtained for nonnegative initial data with no smallness assumption, provided that the nonlocal source term is dominant. The main difficulty stems from the absence of a coercive structure and the super-linear nature of the noise. An additional cut-off with finite L^2 norm in the classical Galerkin method is added to establish a well-posed approximation problem. Moreover, due to the nonlocal Fisher-KPP structure, it is necessary to prove the positivity of the approximating solution in order to obtain uniform estimates. In the compactness arguments, the usual tightness argument in the framework of Hilbert spaces cannot be directly applied to the uniform estimates obtained in this paper. As a result, we develop a more general version of the compactness argument and tightness criterion, presented in the appendix, which will be applied throughout the paper. This allows for the global existence of nonnegative martingale solutions to be derived from Jakubowski's version of the Skorokhod Theorem, along with a thorough discussion of the convergence properties.

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

FORTIS: Benchmarking Over-Privilege in Agent Skills

arXiv:2605.09163v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly operate through an intermediate skill layer that mediates between user intent and concrete task execution. This layer is widely treated as an organizational abstraction, but we argue it is also a privilege boundary that current models routinely exceed. We present FORTIS, a benchmark that evaluates over-privilege in agent skills across two stages: whether a model selects the minimally sufficient skill from a large overlapping library, and whether it executes that skill without expanding into broader tools or actions than the skill permits. Across ten frontier models and three domains, we find that over-privileged behavior is the norm rather than the exception. Models consistently reach for higher-privilege skills and tools than the task requires, failing at both stages at rates that remain high even for the strongest available models. Failure is especially severe under the ordinary conditions of real user interaction: incomplete specification, convenience framing, and proximity to skill boundaries. None of these requires adversarial construction. The results indicate that the skill layer, far from containing agent behavior, is itself a primary source of privilege escalation in current systems.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Atom–photon Entanglement with a Single Trapped Cesium Atom

arXiv:2605.28968v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate atom–photon entanglement using a single cesium atom trapped in an optical tweezer. Entanglement is generated by resonant excitation and subsequent spontaneous decay, which entangles the atomic Zeeman state with photon polarization. The photon is collected with a high numerical aperture objective (NA = 0.55) and coupled into a single-mode fiber, enabling atom photon measurements and measurement of the Bell-state fidelity. We obtain raw entanglement fidelity of ${\mathcal F} = 0.942(16)$ and inferred fidelity of ${\mathcal F}_inf = 0.962(26)$ after correcting independently characterized atom measurement errors. Compared with related free-space experiments using $^{87}$Rb, the multilevel structure of the relevant excited state in $^{133}$Cs requires the use of a single short excitation pulse in each entanglement attempt in order to suppress unwanted re-excitation. These results establish a free-space Cs atom–photon interface and provide a step toward dual-species Rb–Cs quantum networking.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

AnalogFed: Privacy-Preserving Discovery of Analog Circuits at Scale with Federated Generative AI

arXiv:2507.15104v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative AI (GenAI) have shown transformative potential for modern hardware design. However, existing GenAI-driven approaches fall short of enabling large-scale electronic design automation (EDA) due to the proprietary and siloed nature of hardware datasets, which cannot be centralized for model training. Achieving at-scale GenAI-driven EDA, therefore, requires a novel privacy-preserving framework that can leverage distributed data without compromising confidentiality. This work introduces AnalogFed, the first privacy-preserving framework for large-scale analog circuit topology discovery using federated learning (FedL) and GenAI. AnalogFed establishes the feasibility of collaborative analog topology design while addressing key security challenges: it mitigates membership inference attacks (MIAs) through a novel input perturbation strategy based on dummy token injection, and defends against model inversion attacks with customized, efficient homomorphic encryption. Extensive experiments demonstrate AnalogFed's effectiveness and efficiency, achieving strong privacy protection without degrading model utility. This framework lays the foundation for scalable, multi-party collaboration in next-generation hardware design automation with GenAI.

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

SICI: A Semantic-Pragmatic Complexity Index Reveals Regime Shifts in LLM Stance Detection

Prompt-based LLMs are increasingly used for stance detection, but harder examples are not always repaired by clearer instructions, reasoning prompts, retrieval, or debate. We introduce SICI (Stance Inference Complexity Index), a seven-dimensional diagnostic measure of the semantic-pragmatic burden imposed by a target–text pair. Across SemEval-2016 and VAST, SICI predicts LLM accuracy better than surface proxies and shows substantial cross-scorer reliability ($\alpha=0.771$). More importantly, LLM errors change regime as SICI increases: low-complexity examples invite over-attribution, especially Against predictions; intermediate examples form an unstable boundary; and high-complexity examples rapidly concentrate on None. This phase-transition-like structure persists across GPT-3.5, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3, and GPT-4o, although stronger models move the boundaries. A 15-method intervention study further shows that prompting, retrieval, and debate often shift models along the attribution–abstention axis rather than removing the high-complexity bottleneck.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Practical Anonymous Two-Party Gradient Boosting Decision Tree

arXiv:2605.26903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured data is well handled by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), which are usually trained on vertically partitioned features across mutually distrustful parties. High speed and interpretability make GBDTs popular in finance and healthcare, where neural networks may fall short. Enabling secure computation for GBDTs poses unique challenges, requiring secure record alignment for comparison. Relying on private set intersection (PSI) is a de facto approach. Mistaking PSI for a safety measure actually exposes which record identifiers (IDs) are shared between the datasets. Although circuit-PSI could help, it is costly for generic uses. New ideas are needed to efficiently train in a "dark forest". Aiming to hide the IDs, we initiate the study of anonymous GBDT training on split data held by two parties. Dual circuit-PSI in our design lets the parties alternate as receiver to run pick-then-sum over local features. Via oblivious programmable pseudorandom functions, we propagate circuit-PSI outputs as shared state across runs. Avoiding universal alignment, we resolve the neglected dilemma that ID hiding incurs a cost that scales with domain size. Next, we halve the cost of ciphertext packing used to convert single-instruction multiple-data homomorphic encryption from (ring) learning with errors in prior secure GBDT (Usenix Security' 23) and related secure machine-learning computations. Comparative experiments show our protocol remains competitive with leaky approaches in efficiency. Enabling ID-hiding aggregation, our techniques can extend to other vertically partitioned analytics.

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

Probing Low Frame Rate Degradation in Neural Audio Codecs

arXiv:2606.16969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low frame rates in neural audio codecs are attractive for autoregressive speech synthesis, where the generation cost scales linearly with the sequence length. Recent work has demonstrated that codecs can operate at 12.5 Hz and below, but the mechanisms underlying low frame rate degradation remain insufficiently understood. We investigate these mechanisms through a controlled frame rate ablation. We reproduce a quality cliff at 6.25 Hz reported in previous works and evaluate candidate explanations: phonemic collisions and codebook saturation, neither of which shows evidence of a fundamental barrier. The cliff is instead caused by suboptimal training configuration: fixed clip duration during training yields too few tokens at low frame rates, starving the decoder of inter-token context. Once corrected, WER degrades smoothly with phonemic load down to 3.1 Hz and 1.6 Hz, suggesting the inference-time efficiency gains of low frame rate codecs are more accessible than previously assumed.

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

A Stationarity-and-Coupling Criterion for Training-Free Time-Lagged Spectral Embeddings of Multivariate Time Series

arXiv:2606.13823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study training-free fixed-length descriptors for multivariate time series and ask not merely whether such a descriptor performs well, but when it can be expected to work at all. Our object of study is $D(\tau)$, built from a time-lagged correlation matrix truncated at the Marchenko-Pastur edge so that only signal-bearing eigenvalues survive and classified by cosine similarity to class centroids with zero learned parameters. The central contribution is not the descriptor but a falsifiable applicability criterion for it. Working from a stationary Gaussian VAR(1) model, we argue that $D(\tau)$ separates two classes when the signals are approximately stationary and the class information lives in their cross-channel temporal coupling rather than in marginal per-channel power. We derive, semi-formally, three consequences: a distinguishability condition, why the static ($\tau=0$) covariance collapses to chance, and why a stationary but power-discriminated paradigm defeats the descriptor. The criterion is operational: a two-part pre-flight test – an augmented Dickey-Fuller stationarity check and a power-baseline saturation check – predicts applicability before any training. We validate both halves on a mixed assortment. On four paradigms that satisfy the criterion (Sleep-EDF, BCI-IV-2a, MIT-BIH, ESC-50) the descriptor is competitive with strong baselines at a fraction of their cost, reaching $88.5\pm4.5\%$ under 20-subject leave-one-subject-out on Sleep-EDF on a single CPU thread. On three that violate it – non-stationary ERPs, and financial-volatility and wearable-stress regimes that are power-discriminated – it fails exactly as the pre-flight predicts, and these negatives are the more informative half. We are explicit that $D(\tau)$ is not the most accurate representation; its value is a compact, training-free embedding whose domain of validity is known in advance.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Heat kernel estimates for Markov processes with blowing-up jump kernels

arXiv:2512.24807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we establish sharp two-sided heat kernel estimates for a large class of purely discontinuous symmetric Markov processes on closed subsets $F$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, whose jump kernels blow up on a Borel subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. We assume that $F\setminus \Sigma$ is a $\kappa$-fat set and is dense in $F$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work establishing sharp heat kernel estimates for jump processes whose jump kernels blow up on part of the state space. The jump kernels under consideration take the form $J(x,y)=|x-y|^{-d-\alpha}{\mathcal B}(x,y)$, where $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and the function ${\mathcal B}(x,y)$ blows up at a subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. A fundamental obstacle is that the tails of the jump measures are not uniformly bounded, and hence standard techniques in heat kernel analysis do not provide a priori off-diagonal estimates. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a new approach based on weighted integral estimates for the heat kernel that are sensitive to both the blow-up behavior of the jump kernel and the geometry of $F\setminus \Sigma$. Examples of processes falling within our general framework include traces of isotropic $\alpha$-stable processes in $C^{1,\rm Dini}$ sets, processes in Lipschitz sets arising in connection with the nonlocal Neumann problem, and a large class of resurrected self-similar processes in the closed upper half-space.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Non-invasive Detection of Fasciculation Using Surface EMG with a Wavelet-Based Analytical Method (DEWCS)

Objective: Needle electromyography (nEMG) is essential for diagnosing neuromuscular disorders but is invasive and often painful. We employed single-channel bipolar surface EMG (sEMG) analyzed with a novel wavelet-based analytical approach, Detecting and Extracting Elemental Wave Components based on a Wavelet Coefficient Set (DEWCS) and investigated whether fasciculation-related activity could be identified. Methods: In this prospective study, 28 patients undergoing nEMG for suspected neuromuscular disorders and 13 healthy controls were included. Resting-state sEMG was recorded from selected muscles using single-channel bipolar active electrodes at a high sampling rate. DEWCS was used to extract indices reflecting fast- and slow-type motor unit (MU)-related activity. These standardized indices were evaluated against nEMG-detected fasciculation potentials using generalized estimating equation logistic regression to account for within-subject clustering. Diagnostic performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: A total of 67 muscles from 38 participants were analyzed. Indices of fast- and slow-type MU-related activity were significantly associated with fasciculation potentials (slow: OR 5.10, p = 0.0041; fast: OR 2.38, p = 0.0162). The combined model showed excellent discrimination (area under the curve = 0.97), outperforming either index alone. Muscle region had no significant effect. Conclusions: A single-channel bipolar sEMG setup combined with DEWCS detected fasciculation-related activity with promising accuracy. This method may serve as a non-invasive surrogate marker of lower motor neuron involvement. Further validation in larger cohorts is warranted. Significance: This non-invasive sEMG approach may help detect fasciculation-related activity and complement nEMG in neuromuscular diagnostics.

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

Evidence of an Emergent "Self" in Continual Robot Learning

arXiv:2603.24350v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A key challenge to understanding self-awareness has been a principled way of quantifying whether an intelligent system has a concept of a "self", and if so how to differentiate the "self" from other cognitive structures. We propose that the "self" can be isolated by seeking the invariant portion of cognitive process that changes relatively little compared to more rapidly acquired cognitive skills - because our self is the most persistent aspect of our experiences. We used this principle to analyze the cognitive structure of robots under two conditions: One robot learns a constant task, while a second undergoes continual learning under variable tasks. We find that robots subjected to continual learning develop an invariant subnetwork that is significantly more stable (p < 0.001) compared to the control, and that this subnetwork is also functionally important: preserving it aids adaptation while damaging it impairs performance. We validate this pattern across three different robots spanning locomotion and manipulation.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The optimal sub-Gaussian normalisation for randomised monotone functions

arXiv:2312.01265v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $\mathcal{M}$ denote the class of randomised monotone functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with values in $[0,1]$, and let $U_{\mathcal{M}}\colon \mathbb{R}_+\to \mathbb{R}_+$ be the minimal function for which $$ \mathbb{P}\left\{ \sqrt{\eta_f}\, \sup_{t\in\mathbb{R}} \left| f_Z(t) - \Exf{f_Z(t)} \right| \ge \varepsilon\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(\eta_f)} \right\} \le 2\e^{-2\varepsilon^2} $$ holds for every member $f_Z$ of $\mathcal{M}$ with finite effective sample size $\eta_f$ and every positive $\varepsilon$. We prove that for every $x> 1$, $$ \left| \sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)} - \sqrt{\log_4 x} \right| \le 2 \min\!\left\{ 1,\, \frac{2 \ln(\e + \ln x)}{\sqrt{\ln x}} \right\}\,. $$ The optimal adjustment $\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)}$ matches $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\ln 2}}\sqrt{\ln x}$ for all $x>1$, with residuals bounded as above.

19.
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.

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

SceneConductor: 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image with Multi-Agent Orchestration

Generating complete 3D scenes from a single image requires inferring globally consistent geometry, object relationships, and environmental context from inherently ambiguous visual evidence. Despite recent progress in joint layout-and-mesh generation, existing methods often rely on holistic or weakly decomposed pipelines that entangle many factors at once and demand extensive scene-level supervision, limiting their generalization to complex real-world environments. We propose a multi-agent orchestration framework that decomposes single-image 3D scene generation into three structured stages: scene initialization, environment construction, and multi-agent refinement. The initialization stage extracts image-derived object masks, builds object-level 3D representations, and predicts an initial spatial layout to form a coarse 3D scene. The environment-construction stage then leverages this initialization together with point-map geometry to build an environmental scaffold of supporting surfaces, room boundaries, materials, and illumination. Finally, in the refinement stage, a planner agent identifies structural and visual inconsistencies, applies simple corrections directly, and dispatches specialist agents for complex localized revisions that are reintegrated into the global scene. To provide reliable structural initialization while reducing reliance on scene-level annotations, we further introduce a geometry-aware layout predictor supervised by sparse geometric priors derived from point maps. Unlike fully supervised layout generators, the predictor can be trained from segmentation-level data and generalizes robustly to diverse real-world scenes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches in geometric accuracy, spatial consistency, and perceptual realism.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mining Architectural Quality Under Agentic AI Adoption: A Causal Study of Java Repositories

arXiv:2606.13298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding tools are now used by a majority of developers, and agentic use of these tools has popularized the practice colloquially called "vibe coding". Yet causal evidence on their effect on software architecture is scarce. Prior causal work has measured code-level outcomes (complexity, static analysis warnings); whether such degradation propagates to architecture-level outcomes remains unknown. We mine 151 open-source Java repositories, 74 with detectable agentic AI adoption (identified via configuration files and Co-Authored-By commit trailers) and 77 propensity-matched controls, across a 13-month per-repository window yielding 1,811 monthly Arcan snapshots. We estimate the causal effect of adoption on architectural smell density (ASD) with a staggered difference-in-differences design and the Borusyak imputation estimator, applying a causal design recently used for code-level metrics to the architecture level. Total smell counts are essentially unchanged (+1.1%, p = 0.82) while lines of code grow +12.8% (p = 0.003); the resulting 6.7% ASD decline (p = 0.004) is therefore a denominator effect rather than an architectural improvement. Per-type estimates and robustness checks (wild cluster bootstrap, Lee bounds, stale-observation sensitivity) corroborate the pattern; pre-trends are flat (Wald p = 0.90), consistent with parallel trends. Density-normalized outcomes can mislead when treatment affects system size: raw counts and explicit decomposition are required for causal mining studies of AI tool adoption. The complete replication package, including the curated 151-repository monthly panel, is publicly available.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness

End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode. The pure suite (238 cases across 23 slices; 225 run in 2.39 s, ~10 ms/case) runs in CI on every change against a locked per-slice baseline. We validate by controlled regression injection, degrading one layer at a time across seven non-safety layers. The effect we did not design in is masking: the aggregate pass-rate barely moves (-1.7 to -5.9 pp for six local regressions), while the matching slice craters (-25 to -91 pp). A layer's slice reacting to its own fault is partly by construction; the measured results are (i) the aggregate masking and (ii) that damage stays off the other slices: the injected layer's slice is the single worst-hit in 5 of 7 cases and top-3 in 7 of 7 (mean rank 1.29 of 19). Localization replicates on a second, structurally different tenant (Starbucks SG): all seven matching slices crater, so it is not a single-catalog artifact. We position it as a concrete, deterministic instantiation of the component-level evaluation EDDOps prescribes but leaves unimplemented, with CheckList as ancestor and as the deterministic mirror image of whole-workflow stochastic mutation testing. Our contributions: (a) a fully decomposed, sub-second, no-LLM per-layer harness for a production agent, (b) a coverage-honesty test-adequacy criterion that refuses to score an unexercised layer, and (c) the regression-injection demonstration that per-slice baseline-locked gates localize regressions an aggregate metric masks.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ViPER: Vision-based Packing-Aware Encoder for Robust Malware Detection

Visualization-based malware detection maps raw binary bytes to grayscale images and applies learned visual classifiers, providing an evasion-resistant and disassembly-free alternative to conventional analysis pipelines. However, executable packing remains a critical failure mode: packed binaries produce high-entropy images that obscure the structural patterns these models rely on. Because packing is also prevalent in benign software (e.g., for compression or copy protection), packing state alone is not a reliable indicator of maliciousness, and existing approaches do not address this challenge within a unified supervised framework. We present ViPER, a Vision-based Packing-Aware Encoder for Robust malware detection. ViPER builds on a LoRA-adapted ViT-B/14 backbone with a dual-head architecture that jointly learns malware classification and packing detection. A packing-aware gating mechanism conditions malware predictions on the inferred packing state, enabling distinct decision boundaries for packed and unpacked inputs. To address packing label skew during training, we employ frequency-weighted losses with stratified sampling over joint class-packing strata. Evaluated on 200,000 Windows PE byteplot images, ViPER achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.8521, ROC-AUC of 0.9260, and AUPR of 0.9279, outperforming representative state-of-the-art baselines across all primary metrics, while attaining a packing detection AUC of 0.9949.

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

Neuro-Relational Programs: Unifying Queries and Neural Computation over Structured Data

arXiv:2606.11946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The conventional approach to deep learning over relational databases applies neural models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), to a graph representation of the database. Recent approaches instead operate on databases directly, associating tuples with embeddings and extending query mechanisms to jointly process embeddings and relational content. Inspired by these developments, we introduce Neuro-Relational Programs (NRPs), a declarative query language for relational databases whose facts carry numeric vector embeddings. NRPs extend Datalog-style rules with operations that combine, aggregate, and transform embeddings, thereby interleaving relational reasoning and learnable neural components within a single formalism. This yields a general approach to neural computation over relational data: an NRP can be read both as a query plan with trainable components and as a neural architecture with relational structure built in. Natural syntactic fragments of NRPs recover existing architectures and query formalisms. Zero-ary NRPs correspond to non-adaptive query algorithms; monadic NRPs generalize GNN-style message passing and precisely capture Deep Homomorphism Networks, a connection that we extend to frontier-guarded NRPs over databases with row-ids. We characterize the expressive power of unrestricted NRPs with ReLU-FFN transformations by FOCQ, an extension of first-order logic with counting interpreted over real-weighted structures, yielding a precise connection with uniform TC$^0$ over ordered databases. Together, these results establish NRPs as a broad declarative framework for querying and neural computation over relational data.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Plasma protein prioritisation in rheumatoid arthritis reveals druggable targets and shared biology with cardiovascular diseases

Abstract Background Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune inflammatory disease with complex and incompletely understood molecular mechanisms. Understanding circulating proteins associated with RA may improve understanding of disease biology and clarify its pathological links with cardiometabolic comorbidities. Methods A proteome-wide two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) drug target analysis was conducted using plasma proteins measured in 54,219 participants from the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project as exposures and RA and cardiometabolic diseases as the outcomes. Summary statistics for RA included 53,663 cases and 1,070,200 controls. Colocalisation analysis was performed to confirm shared single causal variants and prioritise RA proteins supported by both MR and colocalisation. The prioritised proteins were then evaluated in the Accelerating Medicines Partnership RA Phase II synovial single-cell dataset for cell-type expression patterns. Druggability was then assessed followed by analysis of genetic overlap between RA-associated proteins and cardiometabolic diseases. Results 37 plasma proteins had a causal effect on RA risk, supported by combined evidence from MR and conditional colocalisation. In synovial tissue, TPPP3, RARRES2, AKAP12, and GGT5 were predominantly expressed in stromal and endothelial cell clusters. Druggability assessment identified IFNGR2, IL6R, CD40, and FCGR2B as Tier 1 targets. However, several biologically relevant proteins, including RARRES2, AKAP12, TPPP3, and SNX2, had limited available druggability data. Genetic overlap analysis demonstrated shared protein signals between RA and cardiovascular diseases, including overlap of RARRES2 and TPPP3 with coronary artery disease (CAD) and FCGR2B with atrial fibrillation (AF). To approximate the therapeutic effect of target inhibition, the direction of effect estimates for proteins showing overlap between RA-CAD and RA-AF was reversed. Conclusion This study identified circulating proteins involved in RA pathogenesis and reveals shared mechanisms between RA and cardiovascular diseases. While some proteins showed clear translational potential targets, several prioritised proteins had limited available druggability information and could not be confidently classified. Addressing these gaps may help identify new targets relevant to RA management. Future work should also use phenome-wide MR studies to evaluate potential on-target adverse effects of protein inhibition across RA-CAD and RA-AF.