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

A Conservation Law for Equilibrium Propagation and Coupled Learning

arXiv:2606.15444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we show that the physical learning methods known as coupled learning (CL) and equilibrium propagation (EP) conserve a mass-like quantity in the trainable parameters in the continuous-time, small-nudging limit. We prove that this conservation holds in a broad range of physically relevant settings. We then show that the conservation law constrains the training dynamics in a way that makes convergence reliable in important settings for linear circuits. We conclude by discussing some practical implications of this conservation law.

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

GH-ESD: Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery for Instance-Level Vision Tasks

Systematic failures of vision models on semantically coherent subsets, known as error slices, reveal limitations in robustness and evaluation. Existing slice discovery approaches largely model slices as clusters in representation space or combinations of predefined attributes. While effective for image-level classification, such formulations are insufficient for instance-level tasks such as object detection and segmentation, where failures often arise from contextual relational and spatially grounded visual patterns. We propose GH-ESD (Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery), a generate and verify framework that reformulates slice discovery as grounded hypothesis generation and statistical verification. GH-ESD constructs relational failure hypotheses using LLM priors and grounded visual evidence, discovers hypothesis slices at the instance level via Vision Language Models, and verifies them through statistical trend analysis over instance-level errors. We also introduce GESD (Grounded Error Slice Dataset), a new benchmark for instance-level error slice discovery, providing expert-defined and spatially grounded slices derived from detection and segmentation failures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GH-ESD consistently outperforms baselines, improving Precision@10 by 0.10 (0.73 vs. 0.63) on the GESD benchmark for detection tasks, while also supporting segmentation scenarios. GH-ESD identifies interpretable slices that facilitate actionable model improvements. The GESD dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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

Scalable Graph Condensation with Evolving Capabilities

arXiv:2502.17614v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid growth of graph data creates significant scalability challenges as most graph algorithms scale quadratically with size. To mitigate these issues, Graph Condensation (GC) methods have been proposed to learn a small graph from a larger one, accelerating downstream tasks. However, existing approaches critically assume a static training set, which conflicts with the inherently dynamic and evolving nature of real-world graph data. This work introduces a novel framework for continual graph condensation, enabling efficient updates to the distilled graph that handle data streams without requiring costly retraining. This limitation leads to inefficiencies when condensing growing training sets. In this paper, we introduce GECC (\underline{G}raph \underline{E}volving \underline{C}lustering \underline{C}ondensation), a scalable graph condensation method designed to handle large-scale and evolving graph data. GECC employs a traceable and efficient approach by performing class-wise clustering on aggregated features. Furthermore, it can inherit previous condensation results as clustering centroids when the condensed graph expands, thereby attaining an evolving capability. This methodology is supported by robust theoretical foundations and demonstrates superior empirical performance. Comprehensive experiments including real world scenario show that GECC achieves better performance than most state-of-the-art graph condensation methods while delivering an around 1000$\times$ speedup on large datasets.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SingGuard: A Policy-Adaptive Multimodal LLM Guardrail with Dynamic Reasoning

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in consumer, medical, financial, and enterprise applications. This broad deployment expands the safety surface: risks can arise from multimodal question answering, assistant responses, and cross-modal composition, while moderation policies may vary across products, regions, and deployment stages. Most existing guardrails either rely on fixed taxonomies or target only a narrow set of interaction settings, which limits their adaptability when safety rules change at deployment time. We present SingGuard, a policy-adaptive multimodal guardrail model family for safety assessment in multimodal conversations. SingGuard treats the active policy as a runtime input: given natural-language rules, it checks the target content against the active policy rule by rule and predicts both the safety label and the triggered rule. To balance efficiency and interpretability, SingGuard supports fast, hybrid, and slow inference regimes along a fast-to-slow reasoning spectrum, ranging from direct safety judgments to policy-grounded deliberation. We further optimize this behavior with fast–slow decoupled reinforcement learning. We also introduce SingGuard-Bench, a multimodal guardrail benchmark with 56{,}340 examples spanning 80+ fine-grained risk types across multimodal QA, adversarial attack, and dynamic-rule evaluation settings, including cross-modal joint-risk cases where each modality is harmless in isolation but their composition implies unsafe intent. Across six benchmark families (35 datasets), SingGuard achieves state-of-the-art average F1 in every family. Dynamic-rule evaluation further shows improved policy-following accuracy from 0.6465 to 0.7415 under runtime policy shifts. Our code is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/Sing-Guard.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinician knowledge and self-efficacy in snakebite management: A cross-sectional assessment in Northern Uganda

Background: Snakebite envenomation (SBE) is a major public health crisis in rural Uganda, yet it remains a neglected tropical disease. Effective management is often compromised by systemic barriers and a lack of clinician training. This study assessed clinician self-efficacy and objective knowledge regarding SBE management in Northern Uganda. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted between February and July 2025 among 379 healthcare workers in Gulu, Omoro, and Pader districts. A validated questionnaire was used to collect data on socio-demographics, self-reported efficacy (scale 1-10), and objective knowledge. Knowledge scores [&ge;]70% were categorized as adequate. Multivariable logistic regression identified independent predictors of adequate knowledge, and Spearmans correlation ({rho}) assessed the relationship between knowledge and self-efficacy. Results: The participants had a mean age of 35.6 years (SD {+/-}7.3), were predominantly female (56.5%, 214/379), and most (83.6%, 317/379) practiced at Health Centre III level facilities. While 53.8% (204/379) reported prior training, 48.3% (183/379) of these had not received an update in over 10 years. Adequate knowledge was demonstrated by 51.5% (195/379) of participants. In the multivariable analysis, practicing in Omoro (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]: 0.3, 95% CI: 0.1-0.6, p < 0.001) or Pader (aOR: 0.2, 95% CI: 0.1-0.4, p < 0.001) was associated with lower odds of adequate knowledge compared to Gulu district. Prior training significantly increased the odds of adequate knowledge (aOR: 2.3, 95% CI: 1.3-4.2, p = 0.006). A moderate positive correlation was observed between self-efficacy and objective knowledge (Spearmans {rho} = 0.33, p < 0.0001). Conclusion: Approximately half of the frontline healthcare workers in Northern Uganda lack adequate knowledge on SBE management, with significant geographic differences and outdated training. The gap between clinician self-efficacy and objective knowledge poses a risk to patient safety. Regular, mandatory refresher training and targeted educational outreach to remote districts are required to reduce SBE-related morbidity and mortality.

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

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

arXiv:2606.04718v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains. Similarly, humanoid robots should be able to smoothly transition between walking and running while maintaining natural and stable locomotion. However, unifying gait transition and multi-terrain adaptation within a single policy remains challenging due to gradient interference between tasks and the distribution shift caused by terrain variations. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can mitigate multi-skill interference, direct joint training often fails to achieve clear expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe-MoE, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that decouples gait generation from terrain adaptation. In the first stage, a stable locomotion policy is learned to produce natural walking and running behaviors with smooth transitions. In the second stage, a terrain-aware MoE branch is introduced, and the gating network is trained with a contrastive objective to learn structured terrain representations and promote expert specialization. The final action is obtained through weighted fusion of the base gait policy and the terrain-aware branch, enabling the policy to preserve stable locomotion while adapting to complex terrains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate, locomotion stability, and multi-terrain adaptability. Furthermore, zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot validates the effectiveness of our framework, achieving robust walking and running across stairs, slopes, steps, obstacles, and unstructured outdoor terrains while maintaining accurate foothold control and dynamic stability.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Inference-Time Decision Calibration for Temporal Classification

arXiv:2606.16034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Temporal classification errors are often treated as representation failures, but they can also arise from how available evidence is converted into decisions. This paper proposes a representation–calibration decomposition for temporal classification. We keep a trained native classifier frozen and separate two inference-time interventions: a conservative residual multi-scale branch that adds auxiliary logits to the native prediction, and a post-hoc branch-aware calibrator that recombines native and residual evidence at decision time. This design distinguishes missing temporal evidence from underused decision-level evidence without retraining the backbone. Across FI-2010, PTB-XL, UCI-HAR, MHEALTH, and HARTH, we find that gains are strongly regime-dependent. Residual multi-scale evidence is most useful in noisy or representation-limited settings, especially short-horizon FI-2010 and weaker recurrent backbones, while branch-aware calibration helps when native and auxiliary logits contain complementary evidence not fully exploited by the raw decision rule. Near-saturated settings show limited gains from either intervention. These results suggest that temporal classification should be understood not only as representation learning, but also as the problem of trusting, combining, and calibrating evidence from multiple views.

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

Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars

Training psychotherapists in evidence-based interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) requires repeated practice with meaningful feedback, yet opportunities for safe, standardized training are limited by ethical, logistical, and resource constraints. We introduce a system designed to support ACT-oriented psychotherapy training through spoken dialogue with an embodied virtual patient. The system uses large language models to simulate patient behavior conditioned on profiles derived from real therapy sessions and configurable clinical scenarios, while a separate automated evaluator provides turn-by-turn feedback on therapist responses based on established ACT fidelity criteria. Rather than aiming to replace supervision, the system is intended to support deliberate practice by enabling experimentation, reflection, and immediate feedback in low-risk settings. Expert evaluation with practicing psychologists confirmed high realism in patient behavior and demonstrated that immediate turn-by-turn ACT feedback increased therapists' awareness of intervention choices and enabled effective experimentation with alternative responses. Quantitative evaluation across 49 therapy transcripts identified GPT-4o-mini as the optimal feedback model, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE = 6.12) in replicating human supervisor ACT fidelity ratings with statistically significant agreement. This work demonstrates the potential of fidelity-aware simulated patients as a scalable complement to psychotherapy training.

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

CLARITree: Cholesky and Lookahead Accelerations for Regression with Interpretable Piecewise Linear Trees

arXiv:2606.12840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Regression trees are among the most interpretable yet expressive model classes in machine learning. Historically, greedy induction has been the dominant approach for constructing well-performing regression trees. While optimal methods based on dynamic programming and branch-and-bound exist, they are computationally prohibitive for general linear regression trees, despite often achieving substantially better performance than greedy approaches. Recent work has shown that specialized lookahead strategies can dramatically improve runtime while maintaining near-optimal performance, primarily in classification settings. In this work, we develop a novel algorithm for near-optimal, sparse, piecewise linear regression trees that combines a lookahead-style search strategy with efficient rank-one Cholesky updates of the Gram matrix. We demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that our method achieves a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency, predictive accuracy, and sparsity, and scales significantly better than the current state of the art.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

THE SILENT STRUGGLE: EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWNS IN HEALTHCARE DELIVERY IN THE NORTHERN REGION OF GHANA

Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centred care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing Semi-Structured interviews with purposively sampled twenty patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted Content Analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinderer patient openness and the quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact on treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environment and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers. Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centered care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing semi-structured interviews with twenty purposively sampled patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted content analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinder patient openness and quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environments and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Do Vision-Language Models Understand 3D Scenes or Just Catalogue Objects?

arXiv:2605.20448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models reliably name objects in a scene, but do they represent the 3D layout those objects inhabit? We introduce a 3,034-sample human-curated benchmark targeting three components of spatial understanding: depth-ordered occlusion (probed via three independent counterfactual operationalisations), optical-geometry inference over visible reflections, and volumetric rearrangement planning. Six frontier and open-weight VLMs, scored by trained annotators on 18,204 responses with no LLM-as-judge, reveal a sharp dissociation: models that plan rearrangements over visible layouts at 53–97% accuracy and rarely violate collision constraints fall to 6–45% on occlusion and below 7% on reflections. An embodied-reasoning model reproduces the same profile. White-box analysis on Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking localises the failure to the visual-token merger: spatial information recoverable throughout the vision encoder becomes inaccessible after token compression and only stabilises again when clean post-merger activations are patched into the language decoder.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Characterizing Admissible Objective Functions for Hierarchical Clustering

arXiv:2604.23628v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis, but classical methods have long lacked a principled objective function. Dasgupta [STOC~2016] took an important step toward addressing this gap by proposing a well-motivated objective function for cluster trees. Cohen-Addad et al. [J. ACM 2019] subsequently introduced the notion of admissibility: an objective function is admissible if, whenever the input similarity matrix admits generating trees, its minimizers are precisely those generating trees.They also gave a necessary and sufficient condition for admissibility within a family of objective functions based on aggregate intercluster similarity. We refer to this family as sum-type objective functions. However, apart from Dasgupta's original objective function, no explicit admissible objective functions in this family were provided. In this paper, we study admissible objective functions for hierarchical clustering in two directions. For sum-type objective functions, we give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two, and we derive sufficient conditions for degree-three polynomials. We also show that the recursive sparsest cut algorithm achieves an O$(\phi)$-approximation ratio for the admissible objective functions covered by our characterization, where $\phi$ is the approximation factor of the sparsest cut subroutine. We then introduce max-type objective functions, where cluster interaction is measured by maximum, rather than aggregate, intercluster similarity. For this class, we characterize which objective functions are admissible for arbitrary symmetric scaling functions and give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A Controlled Study of Decoding-Time Truthfulness Methods on Instruction-Tuned LLMs

作者:

In this work, we introduce CHAIR (Classifier of Hallucination As ImproveR), a supervised framework for detecting hallucinations by analyzing internal logits from each layer of every token. Our method extracts a compact set of features such as maximum, minimum, mean, standard deviation, and slope-from the token logits across all layers, enabling effective hallucination detection without overfitting. Experiments on TruthfulQA and MMLU datasets demonstrate that CHAIR significantly improves detection accuracy, particularly in zero-shot scenarios, showcasing its robustness and generalizability. Beyond hallucination detection, CHAIR highlights the potential of using internal representations for designing advanced decoding strategies. By leveraging patterns in logits, we suggest that more sophisticated models and adaptive decoding methods could further reduce hallucinations and enhance text completion quality. CHAIR not only offers a practical solution for detecting hallucinations but also lays the groundwork for exploring richer representations in LLMs to improve their factuality and coherence.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

InnoEval: On Research Idea Evaluation as a Knowledge-Grounded, Multi-Perspective Reasoning Problem

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models has catalyzed a surge in scientific idea production, yet this leap has not been accompanied by a matching advance in idea evaluation. The fundamental nature of scientific evaluation needs knowledgeable grounding, collective deliberation, and multi-criteria decision-making. However, existing idea evaluation methods often suffer from narrow knowledge horizons, flattened evaluation dimensions, and the inherent bias in LLM-as-a-Judge. To address these, we regard idea evaluation as a knowledge-grounded, multi-perspective reasoning problem and introduce InnoEval, a deep innovation evaluation framework designed to emulate human-level idea assessment. We apply a heterogeneous deep knowledge search engine that retrieves and grounds dynamic evidence from diverse online sources. We further achieve review consensus with an innovation review board containing reviewers with distinct academic backgrounds, enabling a multi-dimensional decoupled evaluation across multiple metrics. We construct comprehensive datasets derived from authoritative peer-reviewed submissions to benchmark InnoEval. Experiments demonstrate that InnoEval can consistently outperform baselines in point-wise, pair-wise, and group-wise evaluation tasks, exhibiting judgment patterns and consensus highly aligned with human experts.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FlowMaps: Modeling Long-Term Multimodal Object Dynamics with Flow Matching

arXiv:2606.20209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint spatial and temporal understanding of 3D scenes is a crucial requirement for robots deployed in everyday household environments. Such agents must not only comprehend and navigate spatial layouts, but also reason about how these spaces evolve over time. In particular, humans interact with objects daily, causing them to change position throughout the environment and making it difficult for robots to reliably associate current observations with previously seen objects. However, these interactions are not random: human habits and routines induce spatio-temporally consistent patterns in object locations, which robotic agents can potentially learn and then exploit for downstream tasks such as navigation. To this end, we introduce FlowMaps, a latent flow matching model for estimating multimodal distributions over the future locations of dynamic objects in a continuous 3D space. By learning the implicit dependencies among objects and their temporal evolution, FlowMaps predicts likely changes in object locations conditioned on past human interactions, while supporting generalization across previously unseen environments that share similar object routines. To demonstrate the utility of this method, we deploy FlowMaps in a downstream dynamic Object Navigation task in both simulated and real-world environments. Across more than 600 episodes, FlowMaps outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, showing that modeling object dynamics through continuous, multimodal spatio-temporal distributions improves robotic search and navigation in changing household environments. Code and additional material is available at https://fra-tsuna.github.io/flowmaps/.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Temporal Conductance and Bounds on the Voter Model for Dynamic Networks

arXiv:2606.13374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The voter model is a classical stochastic process that models how opinions might spread through a network: at each step, every node lazily adopts the opinion of a random neighbour; eventually all nodes share the same opinion (consensus). Stronger connectivity should yield faster consensus. Berenbrink, Giakkoupis, Kermarrec, and Mallmann-Trenn (ICALP 2016) make this precise via the network's conductance: if the network has $m$ edges, minimum degree $d_{\min}$, and conductance at least $\phi$, then the voter model reaches consensus in expected $O(m/(d_{\min}\phi))$ steps. Their results extend to dynamic networks with fixed vertex degrees by considering the network's conductance at each time step. We introduce temporal conductance $\Phi$, a more general connectivity measure for dynamic networks. Unlike static conductance, which collapses to $0$ whenever some snapshot is disconnected, $\Phi$ captures connectivity through edges that appear at different times. We generalise the results of Berenbrink et al. from static conductance to temporal conductance, showing that the expected consensus time of the standard voter model is at most $O(m/(d_{\min}\Phi))$. Moreover, we prove that this bound is tight up to constant factors. We expect temporal conductance to be a useful primitive for analysing other dynamics on temporal networks, and potentially time-inhomogeneous Markov chains more generally.

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

DEEPRUBRIC: Evidence-Tree Rubric Supervision for Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Deep Research Agents

Deep research agents synthesize long-form reports by searching and reasoning over retrieved evidence. Reinforcement learning with rubric-based rewards improves these agents by optimizing them against checkable criteria that translate report quality into reward signals, but its efficiency depends on whether those criteria reliably capture the task scope and evidence needs. Most existing studies ask an LLM to generate rubrics for a given query, but when the model fails to infer the underlying information needs, the generated rubrics may be incomplete and reduce RL efficiency. To obtain more reliable query–rubric supervision, we introduce DeepRubric, a data construction framework that reverses this process: instead of inferring evaluation criteria for a given query, it first determines what an evidence-backed report should be evaluated on and then synthesizes aligned query–rubric pairs from those evaluation targets. Starting from a sampled seed topic, DeepRubric builds an evidence tree by recursively expanding evidence-backed sub-questions, whose leaves serve as atomic and verifiable evaluation targets. It then uses the evidence tree to synthesize the training query and rubrics, ensuring that the reward evaluates exactly the information requested by the query. Using DeepRubric, we construct 9K query–rubric supervision examples and train DeepRubric-8B with rubric-based GRPO, achieving comparable performance to prior open state-of-the-art deep research models across three benchmarks with roughly 13x fewer RL GPU-hours.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

PolicyTrim: Boosting Intrinsic Policy Efficiency of Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a unified paradigm for robotic manipulation, yet their real-world deployment is often bottlenecked by execution efficiency. While existing efforts predominantly focus on compute-centric efficiency to reduce per-step inference latency, the intrinsic policy efficiency of these models remains largely unexplored. Policy efficiency is fundamentally affected by two factors, namely the effective executable length of predicted action chunks and the total physical steps required to complete a task. These two factors jointly determine the total number of forward inference calls during execution. We observe that current VLA policies struggle with planning unreliability and action redundancy, suffering from severe prediction degradation at the tail of action chunks and tending to generate unnecessarily redundant physical steps. To address this, we propose PolicyTrim, a reinforcement learning-based post-training framework that extends the reliable action chunk length and reduces redundant physical steps. For reliable chunk extension, we employ a dynamic exploration strategy that explicitly rewards the successful completion of longer executable lengths, progressively pushing the trustworthy prediction horizon to its empirical limit. For step efficiency, we design a redundancy-aware reward that directly favors successful task completions with fewer steps while penalizing unreproducible shortcuts, effectively eliminating redundant physical actions. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks and three VLA models demonstrate that PolicyTrim improves action chunk utilization by 3$\times$ and reduces physical execution steps by 51.4\%. Ultimately, our framework delivers up to a 5.83$\times$ end-to-end deployment speedup without compromising task success rates.

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

Your Privacy My Cloak: Backdoor Attacks on Differentially Private Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.17035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior research suggests that differential privacy (DP) inherently enhances the robustness of federated learning (FL) against backdoor attacks. In this paper, we challenge this assumption. Through an empirical analysis of two baseline attack strategies, we uncover a fundamental tension in DP-FL: while bypassing DP allows state-of-the-art defenses to detect and filter malicious updates, complying with DP inadvertently masks their distinguishing statistical characteristics. Consequently, existing defenses become ineffective as DP reduces the raw backdoor signal. Building on this masking effect, we propose RING, a novel attack that explicitly exploits DP to conceal malicious contributions while maximizing attack impact. By collaboratively crafting adversarial perturbations, compromised clients reconstruct a strong backdoor signal during aggregation without triggering anomaly detection. RING operates as a perturbation layer that is agnostic to the underlying backdoor technique, making it broadly applicable and composable with existing attacks – a property that significantly amplifies the threat it poses to DP-FL. Extensive evaluations across four image and text datasets under non-iid distributions show that RING achieves an average attack success rate of 90.3% against six state-of-the-art defenses under a moderate privacy budget, an improvement of up to 26.08x over baseline strategies. Finally, we evaluate potential countermeasures and find that mitigating this threat incurs significant utility trade-offs, exposing a fundamental security gap in the deployment of differentially private FL.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Can Aggregate Invariants Accelerate Continuous Subgraph Matching? Limits, Laws, and a Dynamic Spectral Index

arXiv:2606.24421v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spectral filtering recently delivered substantial pruning for static subgraph matching: Laplacian interlacing rejects candidates whose neighborhoods cannot host the query. We study whether such aggregate structural tests can accelerate continuous subgraph matching (CSM) over dynamic graphs, and answer in three parts. First, lazily maintained spectral bounds are infeasible exactly where spectral pruning has value: we characterize the tightest safe rule over a formalized perturbation relaxation and show that even it loses essentially all pruning power within four touching updates. Second, exact maintenance is affordable when selective: pruning utility and recomputation cost are anti-correlated across vertices – hubs provably never prune – so recomputing small-neighborhood spectra on touch sustains exact local spectra at microseconds per update, complete by construction. Third, integrated into a decoupled CSM benchmark against an identical-minus-spectra control, the tests remove up to $51\%$ of candidates or safely skip up to $47\%$ of update enumerations, yet enumeration intermediates remain unchanged – beyond the gates' skipped first-level bindings, typically zero – across two engines, four real graphs, two stream types, and $77$ solved queries; a constructed radius-stratified workload confirms the instrument detects the exception when one exists ($-99.9\%$ intermediates, $748\times$ faster). Aggregate tests accelerate what scales with candidate sets – construction, list scans – never adjacency-guided exploration. We distill an intermediate-invariance methodology for evaluating CSM filters and release a reusable dynamic local-spectra index.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2602.17315v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice. We formalize these constraints through stochastically evolving graphs where actions are limited to local neighborhoods. This mobility-constrained structure imposes a dual challenge: the statistical requirement of information acquisition and the physical overhead of navigation. We analyze FMAB under i.i.d. Erdős–R'enyi and Edge-Markovian process, proposing a two-phase lazy random walk algorithm for robust exploration. We establish high-probability sublinear regret bounds and prove near-optimality via a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results characterize the intrinsic cost of learning under local-move constraints, complemented by a robotic disaster-response simulation.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Ricci flow for the Bures–Helstrom qubit metric

arXiv:2606.19493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Bures–Helstrom metric is the minimal monotone Riemannian metric on the state space of a qubit. With the quantum Fisher normalization used here, it identifies the Bloch ball with a geodesic hemisphere of the unit round three–sphere. We describe its Ricci flow explicitly. In a general rotationally symmetric gauge the flow is a coupled system for the radial lapse and warping factor; a single scalar equation appears only after a Hamilton–DeTurck gauge choice. In the corresponding moving DeTurck frame the squared warping function $\Psi=\Phi^2$ satisfies the linear forced heat equation \begin{equation*} D_t\Psi=\Psi_{ss}-2, \end{equation*} while the fixed-lapse coordinate form contains the associated transport term. Since the Bures–Helstrom metric is Einstein, the geometric flow itself is the homothetic shrinker \begin{equation*} g(t)=(1-4t)g_{\mathrm{BH}}, \end{equation*} with scalar curvature $6/(1-4t)$ and extinction time $T=1/4$. Thus the metric remains inside the monotone cone for all $t

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

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Bioacoustic Geolocation: Species Sounds as Geographic Signals

arXiv:2505.18726v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can we determine someone's geographic location solely from the sounds they hear? Are acoustic signals enough to localize within a country, state, or even city? In this work, we tackle the challenge of global-scale audio geolocation, with a particular focus on wildlife and natural sounds. We posit that bioacoustic signals contain informative geolocation cues because of well-defined geographic ranges of species. To test this hypothesis, we benchmark image geolocation and soundscape mapping methods, design oracles and species-centric baselines, and propose a hybrid approach that combines species range prediction with retrieval-based geolocation. We further ask whether geolocation improves with species-diverse recordings and spatiotemporal aggregation across neighboring samples. Finally, we extend our study to multimodal geolocation with case studies from movies that combine both audio and visual content. Our results highlight the potential of incorporating bioacoustic signals into geospatial tasks, motivating future work on species recognition and audio geolocation.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Prediction-Powered Causal Inference by Automatic Debiased Machine Learning and Semi-Supervised Riesz Regression

arXiv:2606.12892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates semiparametric efficient estimation of causal and structural parameters in a semi-supervised setting. In our setting, unlabeled auxiliary regressors are available in addition to labeled observations consisting of outcomes and regressors. Our goal is to construct estimators of causal and structural parameters whose asymptotic variances are smaller than those of estimators constructed using only labeled data. We refer to this framework as prediction-powered causal inference (PPCI). We first derive the efficient influence function and the efficiency bound, which imply that the use of auxiliary regressors can attain a smaller asymptotic variance than the efficiency bound attainable from labeled observations alone. Then, by combining the efficient influence function with the debiased machine learning (DML) framework, we propose methods that we call DML-PPCI. If we construct an estimating-equation estimator, we refer to the method as EE-DML-PPCI; if we construct a targeted-learning estimator, we refer to the method as TMLE-DML-PPCI. The asymptotic variances of both estimators match our derived efficiency bound. In the construction of the estimators, estimation of the efficient influence function plays an important role. In our study, the efficient influence function is also a Neyman orthogonal score, which depends on the Riesz representer and the regression function. For Riesz representer estimation, we develop semi-supervised generalized Riesz regression with convergence rate guarantees.