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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Tasks

General-purpose agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly used as autonomous tool users, but their coding ability is difficult to measure under SWE-bench: a generic agent does not by itself satisfy the clean Docker workspace, patch, and prediction contract required for scoring. We introduce Claw-SWE-Bench, a multilingual SWE-bench-style benchmark and adapter protocol that makes heterogeneous agent harnesses, or claws, comparable under fair settings including a fixed prompt, runtime budget, workspace contract, patch extraction procedure, and evaluator. The full benchmark contains 350 GitHub issue-resolution instances across 8 languages and 43 repositories, drawn from SWE-bench-Multilingual and SWE-bench-Verified-Mini after future-commit cleanup. We also release Claw-SWE-Bench Lite for faster validation, which is an 80-instance subset selected by a cost-aware, rank-aware procedure over 17 calibration columns. On the full benchmark, OpenClaw with a minimal direct-diff adapter scores only $19.1\%$ Pass@1, whereas the full adapter reaches $73.4\%$ with the same GLM 5.1 backbone, showing that adapter design is essential for enabling OpenClaw-style harnesses to perform coding tasks effectively. Across an OpenClaw $\times$ nine-model sweep and a five-claw $\times$ two-model sweep, model choice changes Pass@1 by $29.4$ pp and harness choice by $27.4$ pp under fixed models; systems with similar accuracy can differ substantially in total API cost. Claw-SWE-Bench therefore treats harness and cost accounting as first-class axes of SWE-style coding-agent evaluation, providing both a full benchmark and a low-cost reference set for reproducible comparison. The data is available at https://github.com/opensquilla/claw-swe-bench and https://huggingface.co/datasets/TokenRhythm/Claw-SWE-Bench.

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

pFedUL: Layer-Aware Federated Unlearning for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.16304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) enables the removal of specific data contributions from federated learning (FL) models to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, most existing FU methods are designed for the FedAvg paradigm, where all clients share a single global model. In practice, personalized federated learning (pFL) methods such as FedPer, FedRep, Ditto, and FedBN have become widely adopted due to their superior handling of non-IID data. These methods decompose the model into shared global layers and client-specific personalized layers, fundamentally altering the semantics of unlearning, yet this setting has received little attention. We formalize FU under the pFL paradigm, identifying a tension between unlearning completeness on shared layers and personalization preservation for remaining clients. We then propose pFedUL, a layer-aware selective unlearning framework comprising three components: (1) gradient-based layer-wise contribution attribution that separately quantifies the target client's influence on shared and personalized parameters, (2) adaptive selective unlearning that applies differentiated forgetting strategies across layer types, and (3) a lightweight recalibration protocol enabling remaining clients to restore personalization with minimal overhead. We further introduce two new metrics, Personalization Preservation Score (PPS) and Cross-client Fairness Index (CFI), to evaluate pFL-specific unlearning quality. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and FEMNIST under varying non-IID settings indicate that pFedUL achieves unlearning effectiveness comparable to full retraining while maintaining an average of 97.3\% personalized accuracy for remaining clients. Compared with six state-of-the-art FU methods adapted to the pFL setting, pFedUL consistently achieves superior personalization preservation.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Large-scale proteomics and timing of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

Background: Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) may first be diagnosed antepartum, during labor, or postpartum. We utilized untargeted large-scale proteomics to identify pathways associated with HDP based on timing of onset. Methods: We performed a nested case-control study comparing differential protein expression, from the SomaScan 7K platform, based on timing of onset of HDP versus controls (referent) using first-trimester samples from the NuMoM2b-Heart Health Study, a multi-site cohort that followed nulliparous individuals from the first trimester. Associations of proteins with timing of onset of HDP, adjusted for co-variates, were assessed using logistic regression q value-based false discovery rates and pathway enrichment and differential expression analysis were conducted. Results: Of 1628 individuals included, 678 had HDP, of which 67% manifested antepartum (AP), 29% intrapartum (IP), and 3% postpartum (PP). After adjusting for co-variates, compared to controls, 698 proteins, 39 proteins, and 144 proteins were differentially expressed in those with HDP according to AP, IP, PP onset, respectively. There was little overlap in individual protein expression based on timing of HDP. Pathway enrichment and graphical summary analyses suggested distinct processes. Specifically, there was downregulation of angiogenic proteins in AP HDP, downregulation of immune-related proteins in IP HDP, and upregulation of complement activation promoting fibrotic changes leading to cardiac dysfunction in PP HDP. Conclusion: There are differences in first-trimester protein expression based on whether HDP first manifests AP, IP or PP. This raises the possibility that there may be distinct mechanistic phenotypes that could uniquely inform diagnostic and therapeutic targets for HDP.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum correlations in QBism's reconstruction program

arXiv:2606.07485v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: QBism recasts quantum theory as a normative framework for an agent's probability assignments, with the Born rule taking the form of a consistency condition known as the Urgleichung. Motivated by this perspective, qplex theories provide a broader class of probabilistic models in which the sets of valid states and measurements are constrained by QBist-inspired geometric conditions. While qplexes have been extensively studied for single systems, their implications for bipartite correlations remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate bipartite correlations in qplex theories by expressing joint expectation values as inner products between suitably defined $C$-vectors. This geometric formulation allows Bell-type inequalities to be studied as optimization problems over qplex-compatible probability assignments. We first analyze the CHSH scenario and show that the shared inner-product structure of the $C$-vectors restricts the maximal value to the Tsirelson bound $2\sqrt{2}$. We then turn to the three-outcome CGLMP inequality $I_{2233}$ and find that the same qplex-derived norm and inner-product constraints allow a violation of up to $\leq 2+2\sqrt(3)/3 \approx 3.1547$ versus the quantum maximum of $\approx 2.8729$, thereby exhibiting super-quantum correlations. These results show that qplex geometry captures enough structure to reproduce an important quantum bound in the two-outcome case, but not enough to recover the full set of quantum correlation constraints. The analysis therefore suggests that additional principles are needed to complete the QBist reconstruction of quantum theory.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Point-Wise Geometry-Aware Transformer for Partial-to-Full Point Cloud Registration in Computer-Assisted Surgery

Partial-to-full registration remains challenging due to varying overlap ratios, fluctuating point densities, and the presence of noise. While transformers have shown strong potential for point cloud processing, prior methods typically confine them to global context aggregation, overlooking fine-grained local geometry crucial for accurate correspondence. We propose GAPR-Net, a learning-based point cloud registration framework with a coarse-to-fine architecture that combines convolution and transformer modules, in which local and global information is fused between the partial and full point clouds using a cross-attention mechanism. To achieve this, a transformation-invariant point-wise geometric feature representation is proposed, which can robustly capture relative geometric features for individual points with respect to their neighboring points. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted on four geometrically distinct bones, including the tibia, femur, pelvis, and thoracic cartilage. The overall registration recall reaches 94.2\%, the method results in a low RMSE of 1.992 mm and $R^2$ values of 0.908 and 0.974 for rotation and translation, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the partial-to-full point cloud registration problem. The proposed method enables highly accurate 3D point cloud registration using partial observation, providing a critical foundation for precise surgical navigation and robotic interventions in computer-assisted surgery. The code will be accessed after the double-blind review process.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Elucidating the Design Space of Generative Models for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction

Next-token prediction has produced predictable scaling in language, but the recipe presumes a sequence of tokens with a meaningful order. Single-cell RNA-seq counts have no natural gene ordering, so applying the recipe directly to raw expression fails under an ill-suited left-to-right bias. We instead ask whether a learned latent can supply the structure the recipe needs. We introduce texttt{ExpressionVAE} (eVAE), a discrete-latent perturbation model that compresses each cell into a short sequence of discrete codes through a finite-scalar-quantization (FSQ) bottleneck and trains a perturbation-conditioned discrete prior over those codes. On Replogle and Parse~1M, eVAE sets a new state of the art on every distributional metric and leads on most cell-eval perturbation metrics, with Fr'echet distance and $mathrm{MMD}^2$ roughly $3$ to $20times$ lower than the strongest continuous-latent baseline. Swapping the prior between autoregressive and masked discrete diffusion leaves performance near-identical, isolating the gain to the discrete latent itself rather than the prior family. A decoder-head ablation then exposes a single design axis, the richness of the predictive distribution at inference, that splits the standard metrics into two groups, variance-sensitive and mean-sensitive, which move in opposite directions along the axis. Finally, on a held-out CRISPRi reversion benchmark of $1{,}732$ perturbations under inflammatory cytokine stress, the frozen eVAE encoder outperforms UMAP and differential expression and matches scGPT on perturbation ranking at a fraction of the data.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Embodied-BenchClaw: An Autonomous Multi-Agent System for Embodied Spatial Intelligence Benchmark Construction

arXiv:2606.11909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks are essential for evaluating embodied spatial intelligence, yet their construction is labor-intensive, hard to reuse, and difficult to maintain. Existing embodied benchmarks are often static and may quickly become saturated as models improve, limiting their ability to distinguish new capabilities. We propose Embodied-BenchClaw, an autonomous agentic system for constructing embodied spatial intelligence benchmarks. Given a user-specified evaluation intent, Embodied-BenchClaw automatically produces a complete and continually updatable benchmark package through a five-stage pipeline: intent blueprinting, data collection, structuring and cleaning, benchmark synthesis, and evaluation reporting. The pipeline is coordinated by three agents for planning, construction, and evaluation. To improve reusability and reliability, Embodied-BenchClaw introduces an extensible Skill Library and process quality control, enabling benchmark construction to be composable, verifiable, and repairable. We instantiate multiple benchmarks covering indoor spatial reasoning, outdoor spatial reasoning, robotic manipulation, quadruped robot navigation, UAV/aerial-view understanding, and static benchmark enhancement. These benchmarks span diverse embodied carriers, data sources, and spatial capabilities. Experiments with human evaluation, judge-based assessment, consistency checks, cost analysis, and ablations show that Embodied-BenchClaw can construct verifiable, executable, maintainable, and diagnostically useful embodied spatial benchmarks with reduced manual effort.

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

Evaluating Large Language Models Abilities for Addressee, Turn-change, and Next Speaker Prediction in Meetings

We investigate turn-taking in multimodal multi-party conversations using large language models (LLMs). We construct an evaluation framework for three tasks: addressee detection, turn-change prediction, and next speaker prediction. We compare supervised models trained for these tasks, text-based LLMs, multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs), and human subjects. Experiments on the AMI corpus showed that LLMs outperformed supervised models and humans in next speaker prediction, despite not being trained on the target domain and without access to audio or visual information. An MM-LLM performed better than text-based LLMs on addressee detection and turn-change prediction but remained below human performance, indicating difficulty leveraging raw audio-visual signals. Ablation analyses revealed that conversational context was critical, particularly for next speaker prediction. We observed that human and LLM prediction patterns were similar, and intervals with frequent turn changes were difficult for both.

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

DIMOS: Disentangling Instance-level Moving Object Segmentation

Moving instance segmentation (MIS) attracts increasing attention due to its broad applications in traffic surveillance, autonomous driving, and animal tracking. Event cameras record asynchronous brightness changes, providing high temporal resolution and dynamic range, which makes them highly sensitive to motion information. By fusing event and image features, motion cues from events can complement spatial details from images, enhancing the performance of MIS. However, current multimodal MIS methods still struggle to segment small moving instances, as event cameras often yield sparse features under limited resolution. Moreover, event features entangle appearance attributes with motion cues, which further restricts effective cross-modal fusion. To address these challenges, we first propose a dual-disentangling feature extraction framework that separates and extracts appearance and motion information within both image and event modalities, thereby improving feature density. Subsequently, a multi-granularity cross-modal alignment is introduced to align distributionally and semantically consistent features across modalities, enabling more effective fusion with rich spatial and temporal details. The experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal MIS, especially for small instances under challenging conditions such as fast motion and low-light settings.

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

JE-IRT: A Geometric Lens on LLM Abilities through Joint Embedding Item Response Theory

Standard LLM evaluation practices compress diverse abilities into single scores, obscuring their inherently multidimensional nature. We present JE-IRT, a geometric item-response framework that embeds both LLMs and questions in a shared space. For question embeddings, the direction encodes semantics and the norm encodes difficulty, while correctness on each question is determined by the geometric interaction between the model and question embeddings. This geometry replaces a global ranking of LLMs with topical specialization and enables smooth variation across related questions. Building on this framework, our experimental results reveal that out-of-distribution behavior can be explained through directional alignment, and that larger norms consistently indicate harder questions. Moreover, JE-IRT naturally supports generalization: once the space is learned, new LLMs are added by fitting a single embedding. The learned space further reveals an LLM-internal taxonomy that only partially aligns with human-defined subject categories. We also show that simple linear probes of the embedding space recover cross-subject ability directions, such as an arithmetic axis that highlights quantitatively demanding questions in seemingly distant subjects like virology and global facts. JE-IRT thus establishes a unified and interpretable geometric lens that connects LLM abilities with the structure of questions, offering a distinctive perspective on model evaluation and generalization.

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

Mem-World: Memory-Augmented Action-Conditioned World Models for Persistent Robot Manipulation

Action-conditioned world models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot learning, offering a scalable alternative to costly real-world experimentation by generating action-consistent video rollouts. However, persistent world modeling remains challenging in manipulation: frequent end-effector occlusions and rapid wrist-camera motion make the current observation insufficient for predicting future views, causing models to forget or hallucinate scene details seen in earlier frames. Existing memory retrieval strategies often fail to identify informative history in dynamic manipulation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose Mem-World, a memory-augmented multi-view action-conditioned world model. At its core, we present W-VMem, a 4D wrist-view-centered surfel-indexed memory that anchors historical observations to temporally evolving surface elements. By explicitly modeling when and where scene elements are observed, W-VMem enables geometry-aware retrieval of relevant history frames conditioned on future actions. During generation, relevant history frames are selected via surfel-based rendering and scoring, providing informative and non-redundant context for prediction. Extensive experiments show that Mem-World generates persistent rollouts in complex manipulation scenarios, enables more reliable policy evaluation than Ctrl-World, improving the Pearson correlation with real-world performance by 14.5\%, and supports effective policy improvement through synthetic data generation, increasing success rates from 58\% to 72\% on long-horizon tasks.

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

Timage: A Generative Text-in-Image Paradigm for Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often lose track of the right image regions during fine-grained spatial reasoning, because a textual query rarely carries any explicit geometric anchor into the pixel domain. Prevailing remedies either rewire the model's weights or pad the prompt with verbose instructions, yet neither reliably pins the language to the correct visual coordinates without eroding the backbone's general competence. We introduce Timage, a paradigm that recasts multimodal understanding as an alignment problem solved at the input: the query is drawn, as a typeset overlay, onto the image itself. The placement and appearance of this overlay are produced by a Constrained Schrödinger Bridge (cSB), an entropic optimal-transport sampler that factorizes layout synthesis into two coupled stochastic stages. The first stage, Region Search, transports noise toward query-aligned image zones while obeying a hard occlusion barrier that protects salient foreground content; the second stage, Appearance Shaping, sizes the glyphs through an ``ink-budget'' regularizer so that the rendered text stays legible and visually balanced. The resulting overlay behaves as an explicit attention beacon that channels the model's focus along spatial semantics. On the VMCBench suite, Timage paired with a modest 7B backbone clearly overtakes far larger proprietary systems as well as parameter-tuned baselines. The study positions deliberate input reconstruction as a powerful, architecture-neutral lever for strengthening multimodal reasoning.

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

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

Authors:

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

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

Debiasing Without Protected Attributes: Latent Concept Erasure from Textual Profiles

Most fairness research in NLP assumes direct access to protected attributes such as gender, race, or nationality. In practice, however, such information is often unavailable due to privacy constraints, missing metadata, or legal restrictions, even though models may infer it from indirect textual cues. This raises a key question: can debiasing succeed without direct access to sensitive attributes? We propose H-SAL, which performs post-hoc concept and attribute erasure using self-description text as an implicit debiasing signal. To support this setting, we introduce a multi-domain Stack Exchange-based fairness benchmark for helpfulness prediction that includes both explicit and implicit signals, enabling comparison between standard debiasing with protected labels and debiasing without access to sensitive information. Across encoder and decoder-only language models, we find that implicit self-description often matches or outperforms explicit-label-based debiasing. Our results broaden representation-level fairness research and provide a new benchmark for studying debiasing under realistic data constraints.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Budget-Constrained Step-Level Diffusion Caching

Step-level caching accelerates diffusion models by exploiting temporal redundancy across denoising steps. Existing methods make per-step cache decisions using threshold-based heuristics, without directly optimizing for final output quality. As a result, their inference latency varies across inputs and is difficult to control at deployment. In this work, we propose BudCache, which inverts this formulation: rather than letting per-step error thresholds dictate the runtime cost, we fix the compute budget in advance and search for the cache policy that best preserves the final output. To tackle the combinatorial complexity of step selection, we combine Simulated Annealing with deterministic Hill Climbing. This offline search identifies high-quality cache policies within minutes and introduces no online search or thresholding overhead during inference. When the compute budget is very tight, we further introduce cache-aware schedule alignment, which adapts the time discretization to the selected cache policy to reduce cache-induced trajectory mismatch. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and Wan2.1 show that BudCache achieves better generation quality than heuristic caching baselines under the same inference budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AGI-Lab/BudCache

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

CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets – CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore – the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

YOLO-AMC: An Improved YOLO Architecture with Attention Mechanisms for Building Crack Detection

Crack detection plays an important role in infrastructure inspection and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). However, cracks typically appear as thin, low-contrast structures and are easily affected by background noise, posing challenges for existing object detection models. This study proposes an improved YOLO-based architecture with integrated attention mechanisms, termed YOLO-AMC (YOLO with Attention Mechanisms for Crack Detection), to enhance automated crack detection performance. Based on YOLOv11, the original C2PSA module is removed, and multiple attention mechanisms, including Global Attention Mechanism (GAM), Residual Convolutional Block Attention Module (Res-CBAM), and Shuffle Attention (SA), are introduced into the multi-scale feature fusion layers of the Neck to strengthen cross-scale feature integration. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLO-AMC consistently outperforms baseline models YOLOv11n and YOLOv8n across multiple evaluation metrics. Among the evaluated attention modules, GAM achieves the best detection performance, obtaining mAP@0.5 = 0.9917 and mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.9506 on the test dataset, which are higher than those of YOLOv11 (0.9833 / 0.9112) and YOLOv8 (0.9707 / 0.8921). Furthermore, while maintaining a computational complexity of 7.6 GFLOPs, the proposed model achieves 110.95 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 platform and approximately 5 FPS on a Raspberry Pi 5 edge device, demonstrating a favorable trade-off between accuracy and deployment efficiency. The implementation code for this study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/CY-Tsai24/YOLO-AMC.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Smooth time-dependent control of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

arXiv:2606.20507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider protocols for control of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates where the critical role is played by the long-range anisotropic interatomic magnetic dipole-dipole interaction. The phase diagram of such a condensate has been explored theoretically and experimentally with certain values of the interatomic scattering length corresponding to superfluid and supersolid phases, where supersolidity appears as a modulation in the ground state density. Preparation of this modulated ground state is challenging, since excitations appear as a result of a finite-time evolution required to produce qualitative changes in the wavefunction density. To solve this problem we consider the time-dependent control of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate using shortcuts to adiabaticity techniques, concentrating on design of the time-dependent scattering length, a parameter of the system easily tunable by contemporary experiments. The first technique is the variational approach based on the Euler-Lagrange equations for a separable ansatz describing the evolution of the superfluid state. Secondly, we study the transition from superfluid to supersolid using a direct optimization protocol. We discuss the fidelity of the developed protocols in terms of the evolution time.

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

Where Do Backdoors Live? A Component-Level Analysis of Backdoor Propagation in Speech Language Models

Speech language models (SLMs) are systems of systems: independent components that unite to achieve a common goal. Despite their heterogeneous nature, SLMs are often studied end-to-end; how information flows through the pipeline remains obscure. We investigate this question through the lens of backdoor attacks. We first establish that backdoors can propagate through the SLM, leaving all tasks highly vulnerable. From this, we design a component analysis to discover the role each component takes in backdoor learning. We find that backdoor persistence or erasure is highly dependent on the targeted component. Beyond propagation, we examine how backdoors are encoded in shared multitask embeddings, showing that poisoned samples are not directly separable from benign ones, challenging a common separability assumption used in filtering defenses. Our findings emphasize the need to treat multimodal pipelines as intricate systems with unique vulnerabilities, not solely extensions of unimodal ones.

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

RIDGECUT: Learning Graph Partitioning with Rings and Wedges

arXiv:2505.13986v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs by learning heuristics that generalize across instances. However, effectively incorporating domain knowledge into RL frameworks for graph partitioning remains challenging, as existing approaches typically rely on unconstrained node-level actions that lead to large action spaces and inefficient exploration. In this paper, we propose RidgeCut, an RL framework that constrains the action space to enforce structure-aware partitioning in the Normalized Cut problem. Using transportation networks as a motivating example, we introduce a novel concept that leverages domain knowledge about urban road topology – where natural partitions often take the form of concentric rings and radial wedges. By transforming the graph into linear or circular representations, our method enables the use of transformer-based policies and efficient learning via Proximal Policy Optimization. The resulting partitions from RidgeCut are not only aligned with expected spatial layouts but also achieve lower normalized cuts compared to existing methods. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world traffic graphs demonstrate that RidgeCut consistently outperforms existing methods while exhibiting strong inductive generalization across graph sizes. Although motivated by road networks, RidgeCut provides a general mechanism for embedding structural priors into RL frameworks for graph partitioning.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Abstracting Cross-Domain Action Sequences into Interpretable Workflows

Sequential or time-stamped interaction logs provide objective records of digital application usage, yet their granularity and noise often obscure meaningful insights into people's work. Such insights are essential for improving digital products in ways grounded in real-world user interactions. Prior research has applied deep learning models to cluster user actions into high-level activities, but these approaches are highly sensitive to noise and struggle to generalize across applications. To address this limitation, we introduce WorkflowView, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to abstract low-level action sequences into high-level activities. We establish the effectiveness and generality of our approach across three distinct, challenging sequential tasks and diverse domains: (a) zero-shot task description reconstruction from browser logs (achieving high semantic similarity, $\mu_{sim} = 0.91$), (b) few-shot student dropout prediction using MOOC interaction logs (reaching weighted $F_1 = 0.90$ with only five few-shot examples), and (c) anonymized, privacy-preserving analysis of AI tool integration within document workflows in Microsoft Word. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based abstraction is a robust and efficient path forward for transforming low-level behavioral data into high-level, interpretable, and actionable insights. We also discuss practical considerations for deploying LLM-based inferences within logging infrastructures, including computational efficiency and user privacy.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

AgentArmor: A Framework, Evaluation, \& Mitigation of Coding Agent Failures

arXiv:2606.19380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering and deployment are increasingly being delegated to AI coding agents. The scale of their adoption is surfacing rare, but highly destructive, failure modes. In this paper, we study these failure modes as stemming from three distinct mechanisms: underspecification, where default model behavior is unsafe; capability errors, where the safe action is available but the model does not adhere to it due to bias or capability limitations; and agent harness errors, where the model fails to execute the safe action through the harness. We evaluate these across 8 different evaluations, each inspired by real-life deployment failures, totaling 20 coding environments and 59 synthetic transcript templates. Based on this evaluation, we propose AgentArmor, an agent harness modification, to mitigate these errors. By adding an extended system prompt, a separate command classifier, a ``3 strikes'' policy, deterministic guardrails, and tools for the agent to edit its own context, we show that AgentArmor is safer across a statistically significant number of samples. Thus, we suggest concrete mitigations for current coding agents and a design philosophy for future agent harness features.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Auto-exploration for online reinforcement learning

arXiv:2512.06244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient exploration over both state and action spaces. However, this yields non-implementable algorithms and sub-optimal performance. To resolve these limitations, we introduce a new class of methods with auto-exploration, or methods that automatically explore both state and action spaces. Auto-exploration can be applied in both the tabular and linear function approximation setting. Under algorithm-independent assumptions on the existence of an exploring optimal policy, both settings attain $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ sample complexity to solve to $\epsilon$ error. These complexities are novel since they avoid algorithm-dependent parameters seen in prior works, which may be arbitrarily large. The methods are also simple to implement because they are parameter-free. We achieve these results by integrating auto-exploration into policy mirror descent to avoid the (unknown) stationary distribution seen in prior art. In the tabular setting, we introduce a dynamic exploration time with a data-driven stopping time, while for linear function approximation we propose a new sampling distribution based on the discounted visitation distribution that covers a more general class of Markov chains.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Upper Lower Value Envelopes to Shape Online RL: A Principled Approach

arXiv:2510.19528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding. Our study centers on how to learn and apply value envelopes within this context. To this end, we introduce a principled two-stage framework: the first stage uses offline data to derive upper and lower bounds on value functions, while the second incorporates these learned bounds into online algorithms. Our method extends prior work by decoupling the upper and lower bounds, enabling more flexible and tighter approximations. In contrast to approaches that rely on fixed shaping functions, our envelopes are data-driven and explicitly modeled as random variables, with a filtration argument ensuring independence across phases. The analysis establishes high-probability regret bounds determined by two interpretable quantities, thereby providing a formal bridge between offline pre-training and online fine-tuning. Empirical results on tabular MDPs demonstrate substantial regret reductions compared with both UCBVI and prior methods while remaining competitive with related approaches.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Associations between hematologic dynamics during pregnancy and obstetric complications: A retrospective observational study

by Veronica Tozzo, Rachel Petherbridge, Kaitlyn James, Sarah Hsu, Deepti Pant, Chloe Michalopoulos, Brody H. Foy, Tanayott Thaweethai, Christopher Mow, Jacqueline Maya, Carolina Batlle Camero, Lydia Shook, Kathryn J. Gray, Logan Mauney, John M. Higgins, Camille E. Powe Background Pregnancy alters hematologic state as measured by complete blood count (CBC), but the longitudinal changes in CBC indices that define healthy pregnancies are not well established. In a large cohort based at an academic health system in the United States, we aimed to define reference intervals and typical longitudinal changes in CBC indices during pregnancy. We then tested for associations between extreme CBC values for gestational age or extreme longitudinal changes in CBC indices and obstetric complications. Methods and findings We studied nine CBC indices in individuals with singleton pregnancies who delivered after 30 weeks’ gestation and presented for prenatal care prior to 20 weeks. The electronic health record (EHR)-based Maternal Health Cohort (Massachusetts General Hospital; 1998–2016) formed our discovery cohort of 45,992 pregnancies, 18% of which had relevant complications. We developed a validation cohort of 48,868, 27% with complications from EHR data in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. In pregnancies without complications in the discovery cohort, we derived gestational-age-specific reference intervals (2.5th–97.5th percentile) and established typical intra-pregnancy longitudinal changes. In the validation cohort, we then tested CBC values outside of the 26–29 weeks’ gestation reference interval and CBC rare changes (uncommon changes in magnitude and direction) between 7–14 and 26–29 weeks’ gestation for association with a composite outcome (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, small for gestational age birthweight, preterm birth) and its individual components using generalized estimating equations. Derived reference intervals differed from those in the literature for mean red cell volume, mean red cell hemoglobin, red cell count, and mean red cell hemoglobin concentration; reference intervals for other indices were similar to those previously published. In validation, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and red cell count values above their gestational-age specific reference intervals were associated with increased risk of the composite obstetric outcome: odds ratios (ORs) of 1.4 (95% CI [1.2, 1.5] p