Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14456

QCI Connect: A Modular Full-Stack Quantum Computing Platform

Authors:

Eric Bertok↗Hannes Busche↗Florian Drinkler↗David Emmanuel-Costa↗Daniel Herr↗Steffen Hien↗Thomas Keitzl↗Elisabeth Lobe↗Alexandru Paler↗Johannes Renkl↗Martin Rymarz↗Gary Schmiedinghoff↗…

arXiv:2606.14456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In a world of various competing quantum computing architectures, hardware-agnostic, full-stack platforms are necessary to bring the full power of quantum computing hardware to domain experts via the cloud. QCI Connect and its Software Development Kit provide a reference architecture for a full-stack platform with a modular design and open-source interface definitions, built to facilitate a community-driven application ecosystem. Here, we present its overall design and features, central interfaces, and lessons learned, both for users of the platform and as a reference guide for future developments.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11425

JailbreakOPT: Tool-Assisted Iterative Jailbreak Prompt Optimization

Authors:

Ge Shi↗Jun Yin↗Donglin Xie↗Fangyi Liu↗Yucan Li↗Menglin Liu↗

arXiv:2606.11425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks expose persistent safety weaknesses in large language models (LLMs), but existing stateless single-turn methods face a trade-off: hand-crafted prompts are expressive but static, while iterative prompt optimization can adapt but often relies on low-level mutations that require many target queries. We propose JailbreakOPT, a tool-assisted framework for improving iterative single-turn jailbreak prompt optimization. JailbreakOPT organizes diverse atomic jailbreak prompts into an attack tool library and composes them through a unified intra-episode optimization abstraction to generate stronger standalone attack prompts. To reuse experience across attack episodes, JailbreakOPT further frames tool selection as a contextual bandit problem and applies contextual Thompson sampling to guide exploration and exploitation based on past outcomes. Experiments across multiple target LLMs and attack goals show that JailbreakOPT improves attack success rate (ASR) while reducing the number of attacks until success (No.A) compared with atomic single-turn attacks and existing iterative optimization baselines. This paper may contain offensive or harmful content.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2605.12227

A Recipe for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models via On-Policy Optimization and Distillation

Authors:

Miguel Moura Ramos↗Duarte M. Alves↗Andr\'e F. T. Martins↗

Existing approaches to post-train models for long-context tasks face complementary limitations: (i) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides stable supervision but suffers from exposure bias; (ii) reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) train on model-generated trajectories but struggle with long-horizon credit assignment and sparse rewards; and (iii) on-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense token-level guidance but does not directly optimize task rewards. We study these complementary strategies for long-context alignment and derive a recipe that combines GRPO with OPD-style teacher guidance: the student learns from its own rollouts using outcome-level rewards, while a stronger teacher provides dense token-level regularization in place of the standard reference policy. This is especially useful when process-level supervision is difficult to obtain. To support this study, we introduce LongBlocks, a synthetic multilingual dataset spanning multi-hop reasoning, contextual grounding, and long-form generation. Through controlled ablations, we isolate the roles of cold-start initialization, teacher anchoring, and data mixing, showing that our recipe yields a more stable and effective path to long-context reasoning than GRPO or OPD while preserving short-context capabilities.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17489

Online LLM Selection via Constrained Bandits with Time-Varying Demand

Authors:

Yin Huang↗Qingsong Liu↗Jie Xu↗

arXiv:2606.17489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud inference systems to handle diverse user tasks with heterogeneous accuracy, latency, and cost profiles. Selecting the appropriate LLM for each incoming task is critical for ensuring service quality and efficient resource utilization. However, model heterogeneity, stochastic and unknown performance characteristics, and time-varying task demands make static selection strategies inadequate. Real-world deployments often impose hard resource budgets such as monetary expenditure limits, along with soft service-level requirements such as latency guarantees. These constraints introduce additional challenges for online decision-making. We formulate this problem as a constrained stochastic bandit learning task, where the learner sequentially selects models under both packing-type (hard) and covering-type (soft) constraints, while adapting to time-varying task demand. The learner operates without access to the underlying reward, cost, or latency distributions and must rely on partial feedback. We develop a novel online learning algorithm that leverages confidence-bound estimates and demand predictions to balance reward maximization with long-term constraint satisfaction. We provide theoretical guarantees showing sublinear regret and sublinear covering constraint violations compared to an offline benchmark with full information. Experimental results on synthetic workloads demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in dynamic, resource-constrained environments.

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05.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:bf310c3f460aeb79ea689a3c4e4a1a35

UKBAnalytica: an integrated R package for scalable phenotyping and reproducible epidemiological analysis within the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform

Authors:

He↗Mo↗Yu↗

UK Biobank provides longitudinal health-related data for approximately 500,000 participants, and its Research Analysis Platform (RAP) has shifted large-scale analyses toward secure cloud-based computation. However, many existing tools address only specific steps of the analytical workflow, leaving a need for an integrated framework that connects multi-source disease phenotyping, survival-ready cohort construction, and downstream analysis on the RAP. Here, we present UKBAnalytica, an extensible R package for scalable phenotyping and integrated analysis of UK Biobank data within the RAP environment. It currently includes 52 predefined baseline variables and a built-in library of 331 curated disease definitions. These definitions are based on multiple UK Biobank data sources, including ICD-10, ICD-9, self-reported conditions, death registry records, algorithmically defined outcomes, and OPCS-4 procedure codes. UKBAnalytica distinguishes prevalent and incident cases, constructs follow-up time, generates analysis-ready survival datasets, and summarizes participant flow. Beyond phenotype construction, UKBAnalytica provides integrated modules for epidemiological analysis, omics analysis, and machine-learning-based modeling and interpretation. By linking endpoint definition with downstream modeling under a consistent data structure, UKBAnalytica reduces repetitive scripting and improves analytical transparency. Furthermore, we demonstrate the package's practical utility through a case study on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) proteomics. The findings align closely with previously reported conclusions, underscoring the robustness and reliability of our analytical framework. This phenotype-centered framework complements existing UK Biobank tools and facilitates reproducible RAP-based biomedical research. UKBAnalytica is freely available at https://github.com/Hinna0818/UKBAnalytica.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20306

Quantum Batteries as Work Sources for Phase-Locked Parametric Amplification

Authors:

Borhan Ahmadi↗

arXiv:2606.20306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum batteries have been proposed as locally precharged work sources for superconducting quantum technologies, suggesting a route to reduce continuously supplied microwave drives. Here we ask whether the pump tone of a quantum-limited parametric amplifier can be replaced, or strongly duty-cycled, by a finite bosonic quantum battery. Quantizing the pump of a nondegenerate parametric amplifier exposes a resource distinction hidden in the classical description: stored pump energy can generate signal-idler photons, but pump phase coherence is required to generate a phase-locked amplifier field. In a closed trilinear model, coherent and phase-randomized coherent pumps with the same photon-number distribution produce comparable pair numbers, yet only the coherent pump produces anomalous two-mode coherence and an EPR-squeezed interference dip. Including leakage, we collect the emitted fields into cascaded temporal modes. At matched collector bandwidth, the coherent pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=0.553\), whereas the phase-randomized pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=1.94\) at nearly identical collected energy. Weak amplitude squeezing slightly improves the dip by reducing finite-pump number fluctuations while preserving the coherent displacement. Thus battery-powered parametric amplification requires phase-coherent stored energy, possibly assisted by number-noise reduction, rather than stored energy alone.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14353

Can Deep Neural Networks Improve Compression of Very Large Scientific Data?

Authors:

Muhannad Alhumaidi↗Guozhong Li↗Spiros Skiadopoulos↗Panos Kalnis↗

arXiv:2606.14353v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Error-bounded lossy compression is a fundamental technique for managing the rapidly growing volumes of scientific data produced by modern simulations and observational instruments. Most state-of-the-art-compressors follow a prediction-residual paradigm, where compression effectiveness depends on the quality of the predictor: more accurate predictions generate smaller residuals that are easier to compress. This observation raises a question: can modern machine learning models serve as superior predictors for scientific data compression? Answering this question directly is challenging because developing compression-specific ML predictors requires substantial resources. Instead, we leverage the climate domain where highly accurate pretrained weather forecasting foundation models already exist, making them an ideal testbed. We present a framework that integrates spatial and temporal deep learning models into a conventional error-bounded compression pipeline. The framework supports auto-regressive forecasting models and avoids error accumulation. Using ERA5 climate data as a representative large-scale scientific dataset, we evaluate three distinct ML predictors: a VAEformer-based codec (CRA5), a graph neural network forecaster (GraphCast), and a vision-transformer forecaster (Aurora), against the state-of-the-art compressor SZ3.1 under identical quantization and entropy-coding backends. Our evaluation over approximately 1.7 TB of data reveals a surprising result: although ML predictors generate more accurate predictions and can improve reconstruction quality by up to 91% while achieving up to 9.6x higher compression ratios for highly predictable variables, they do not improve overall dataset-level compression ratio. We show that prediction accuracy alone is insufficient: the spatial structure of the resulting residuals plays a decisive role in entropy coding efficiency.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2604.23874

Deep Learning of Solver-Aware Turbulence Closures from Nudged LES Dynamics

Authors:

Ashwin Suriyanarayanan↗Dibyajyoti Chakraborty↗Romit Maulik↗

arXiv:2604.23874v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The differentiable physics paradigm may be leveraged as an a-posteriori approach for discovering turbulence closure models by embedding a neural network parameterization directly inside the solver and optimizing it given potentially sparse target data. This addresses a key limitation of a-priori learning where direct numerical simulation (DNS) data is used to approximate the subgrid stress with the assumption of a low-pass filter. Closures trained in this a-priori manner frequently lead to unstable deployments due to the mismatch between the assumed filter and the effect of numerical discretizations and coarse-graining. In comparison, while typically stable during deployment, a-posteriori learning incurs high computational costs due to the need to backpropagate through a large eddy simulation (LES) solver. Furthermore, a-posteriori methods are challenging to apply broadly since they require significant modification of existing solvers. Finally, both approaches are limited when generalization is desired across different numerical schemes with their implicit filtering characteristics. In this work, we present a deep-learning approach for turbulence closure modeling built on the continuous data assimilation framework. Our approach enables the a-priori training of closures using sparsely observed DNS data without modifying or differentiating through the LES solver, while preserving stability during deployment for the recovery of invariant statistics. We focus on the model's ability to adapt to different discretizations by explicitly conditioning it on the numerical scheme. We use two- and three-dimensional canonical cases to test our framework and show that the learned correction systematically tracks the discretization error of the coarse solver.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2604.27960

LLMs as ASP Programmers: Self-Correction Enables Task-Agnostic Nonmonotonic Reasoning

Authors:

Adam Ishay↗Joohyung Lee↗

arXiv:2604.27960v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning milestones but continue to struggle with high computational costs, logical inconsistencies, and sharp performance degradation on high-complexity problems. While neuro-symbolic methods attempt to mitigate these issues by coupling LLMs with symbolic reasoners, existing approaches typically rely on monotonic logics (e.g., SMT) that cannot represent defeasible reasoning – essential components of human cognition. We present "LLM+ASP," a framework that translates natural language into Answer Set Programming (ASP), a nonmonotonic formalism based on stable model semantics. Unlike prior "LLM+ASP" approaches that require manually authored knowledge modules, domain-specific prompts, or evaluation restricted to single problem classes, our framework operates without any per-task engineering and applies uniformly across diverse reasoning tasks. Our system utilizes an automated self-correction loop where structured feedback from the ASP solver enables iterative refinement. Evaluating across six diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that: (1) stable model semantics allow LLMs to naturally express default rules and exceptions, outperforming SMT-based alternatives by significant margins on nonmonotonic tasks; (2) iterative self-correction is the primary driver of performance, effectively replacing the need for handcrafted domain knowledge; (3) compact in-context reference guides substantially outperform verbose documentation, revealing a "context rot" phenomenon where excessive context hinders constraint adherence.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13081

Emotional regulation improves deep learning-based image classification

Authors:

Riccardo Emanuele Landi↗Jo\~ao M. F. Rodrigues↗Marta Chinnici↗

arXiv:2606.13081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion significantly influences cognition, enhancing memory and learning under certain conditions. Drawing on this principle, emotion-augmented deep learning investigates how affective states can improve neural network architectures and learning paradigms, achieving better generalization than non-emotional models. However, existing methods often rely solely on objective neurophysiological factors, neglecting the role of subjectivity in emotion. To bridge this gap, the present study introduces Emotional Regulation, a novel framework for modeling emotion in deep learning through artificial subjective experience. The method employs pre-training based on affective stimuli, balancing non-emotional and emotionally-influenced responses in downstream task optimization. Extensive experimentation was conducted in image classification, pre-training ResNet and ViT architectures on four emotional datasets, using CIFAR-10 and -100 as target benchmarks. Results reveal improvements over the aforementioned backbones, providing evidence of Emotional Regulation as a promising method for defining emotion-augmented deep learning through artificial subjective experience. Furthermore, the proposed approach overcomes the related work in image classification based on CIFAR, revealing Emotional Regulation as the new state-of-the-art in emotion-augmented deep learning for large-scale vision datasets. The study also enforces evidence of the impact of affective states in improving machine learning tasks' optimization, encouraging further investigation on emotion-inspired architectures.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14727

FairGen: Preference-Aligned Diffusion for Demographically Equitable Medical Image Synthesis

Authors:

Zhimin Li↗Ruichen Zhang↗Zhen Tan↗Howard J Aizenstein↗Jingtong Hu↗Tianlong Chen↗

Medical imaging is central to modern diagnostics, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used to support image-based analysis by improving efficiency, accuracy, and access to care. However, inequities in healthcare access and differential disease prevalence create severe demographic imbalances in clinical image data. Such imbalances are compounded by the fact that diseases can manifest with distinct features across demographic groups, rendering certain phenotypic presentations naturally rare. AI models trained on such imbalanced data risk perpetuating diagnostic bias and widening healthcare disparities. Here we introduce FairGen, a fairness-aware diffusion framework that synthesizes demographically balanced medical images while preserving pathology-relevant visual features. By embedding physician-aligned preferences into the generation process, FairGen improves subgroup coverage during synthesis and downstream classification. Applied to dermatology, radiology, and neuroimaging benchmark tasks, FairGen achieves fairness improvements of 95.9% for skin images, 80.0% for chest radiography, and 35.2% for brain MRI, while maintaining competitive diagnostic accuracy relative to models trained on original clinical data. Clinician-facing expert review and external validation on independent cohorts further support that these gains extend beyond standard fidelity metrics and are not confined to the original in-distribution datasets.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2509.07605

Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques

Authors:

Ali Nawaz↗Amir Ahmad↗Shehroz S. Khan↗

arXiv:2509.07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15633

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

Authors:

Donald Loveland↗Puja Trivedi↗Ari Weinstein↗Edward W Huang↗Danai Koutra↗

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11529

XPR: An Extensible Cross-Platform Point-Based Differentiable Renderer

Authors:

Steve Rhyner↗Sankeerth Durvasula↗Aleksandr Kovalev↗Hansel Jia↗Adrian Zhao↗Mrutunjayya Mrutunjayya↗Nilesh Ahuja↗Selvakumar Panneer↗Christina Giannoula↗Nandita Vijaykumar↗

Point-based differentiable rendering underpins modern 3D reconstruction, novel-view synthesis, and learning-based graphics pipelines, but developing new rendering methods often requires extensive low-level implementation, hardware-specific kernels, and manually written backward passes. This limits rapid prototyping, reproducibility, exploration, and deployment, especially across diverse hardware platforms. This paper presents XPR, an extensible cross-platform framework for point-based differentiable rendering. XPR introduces a high-level programming interface that separates method-specific logic from the shared rendering pipeline, allowing users to implement new methods in a few lines of code. Its pipeline decomposes rendering into modular, statically shaped parallel operations that can be lowered by a cross-platform compiler to GPUs, TPUs, CPUs, and other ML accelerators. We demonstrate implementations of 3DGS, 3DGUT, and LinPrim, with only a few 100s lines of Python code, each of which can be compiled to a range of hardware platforms with the XLA compiler. These results show that XPR enables fast experimentation and portable execution for emerging point-based differentiable rendering systems.

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15.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.13848

Testing For Distribution Shifts with Conditional Conformal Test Martingales

Authors:

Shalev Shaer↗Yarin Bar↗Drew Prinster↗Yaniv Romano↗

arXiv:2602.13848v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a sequential test for detecting arbitrary distribution shifts that allows conformal test martingales (CTMs) to work under a fixed, reference-conditional setting. Existing CTM detectors construct test martingales by continually growing a reference set with each incoming sample, using it to assess how atypical the new sample is relative to past observations. While this design yields anytime-valid type-I error control, it suffers from test-time contamination: after a change, post-shift observations enter the reference set and dilute the evidence for distribution shift, increasing detection delay and reducing power. In contrast, our method avoids contamination by design by comparing each new sample to a fixed null reference dataset. Our main technical contribution is a robust martingale construction that remains valid conditional on the null reference data, achieved by explicitly accounting for the estimation error in the reference distribution induced by the finite reference set. This yields anytime-valid type-I error control together with guarantees of asymptotic power one and bounded expected detection delay. Empirically, our method detects shifts faster than standard CTMs, providing a powerful and reliable distribution-shift detector.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12282

PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context

Authors:

Dmitrii Gavrilev↗

arXiv:2606.12282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive performance rendering (EPR) aims to generate realistic performances constrained on sequences of notes. However, flow matching audio editing models manipulate only synchronized music samples of the same duration, limiting their understanding of expressive timing. We introduce PianoKontext, a flow matching rendering model for classical piano music that generates variable-length performances in the latent space of a pretrained Music2Latent model. We synthesize MIDI scores into deadpan audio and employ Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in the latent space to construct paired data for training. The aligned embeddings are concatenated in DiT blocks, allowing for a simple and effective learning of the dependencies between the score and performances. Audio samples are available at our demo page: https://realfolkcode.github.io/pianokontext_demo/.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15943

Graphical-Probabilistic Modeling of Generative Flows in LLM-Native Software Systems

Authors:

V\'ictor A. Braberman↗Flavia Bonomo-Braberman↗

arXiv:2606.15943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering LLM-native software remains a challenging and immature field. Current practice is largely exploratory, relying on experimentation and heuristic techniques such as prompting and context engineering. These, however, are low-level and lack the principled structure needed to support design-level reasoning or analysis. In contrast, traditional software engineering leverages modularity and abstraction to communicate and analyze system behavior. To bring similar rigor to LLM-native development, we propose methods for documenting generative flows and for stating properties of LLM-based software designs. Such methods must account for the stochastic, prompt-dependent behavior of large language models while remaining expressive enough to capture emergent phenomena. Our initial approach is based on graphical probabilistic models, tailored to capture phenomena characteristic of LLM-native systems. This framework – what we term Generation Networks – aims to provide a foundation for principled reasoning about generative interactions and system-level properties in LLM-centric software architectures.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.16592

Human Cognition in Machines: A Unified Perspective of World Models

Authors:

Timothy Rupprecht↗Pu Zhao↗Amir Taherin↗Arash Akbari↗Arman Akbari↗Yumei He↗Tooba Imtiaz↗Sean Duffy↗Juyi Lin↗Yixiao Chen↗Rahul Chowdhury↗Enfu Nan↗…

This report of world models distinguishes prior works by the cognitive functions they innovate. Many works claim an almost human-like cognitive capability in their world models. To evaluate these claims requires a proper grounding in first principles from human and machine cognition theory. In moving towards human-like world models we present a conceptual unified framework for world models that fully incorporates all the cognitive functions (i.e., memory, perception, language, reasoning, imagining, motivation, and metacognition) and identify gaps in existing research as a guide for future states of the art. In particular, we find that motivation (especially intrinsic motivation) and metacognition remain drastically under-researched, and we propose concrete directions to address these gaps informed by active inference and global workspace theory. We also introduce epistemic world models, a new category encompassing agent frameworks for scientific discovery that operate over structured knowledge. Our taxonomy, applied to video, embodied, and epistemic world models, suggests research directions where prior taxonomies have not.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12924

Iterating Toward Better Search: A Two-Agent Simulation Framework for Evaluating Agentic Search Architectures in E-Commerce

Authors:

Jetlir Duraj↗Jayanth Yetukuri↗Shuang Zhou↗Dhruv Varma↗Rui Kong↗Ishita Khan↗Qunzhi Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.12924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a modular two-agent simulation framework for evaluating conversational shopping assistant architectures. An independent buyer agent, configured with personas, missions, and patience levels, is paired with an interchangeable responder that integrates with a real e-commerce search API. Holding the buyer constant across experiments enables controlled comparison of responder designs on identical scenarios. Using 2011 conversations across 14 persona buckets, we establish four empirical findings. First, rolling-window memory outperforms intent-extraction memory on all quality metrics while being 35% faster per query. Second, illustrating rapid evidence-driven iteration, a systematic failure analysis of a responder version enables targeted fixes that reduce failure and near-failure rates by 62% across the full dataset. Third, swapping the responder LLM backbone from Gemini~2.5 to Llama~3.3~70B costs 0.16–0.45 points despite identical architecture. Finally, we document systematic philosophical disagreement between frontier LLM judges: Gemini rewards process correctness while Claude demands concrete outcomes, despite using the same evaluation prompt.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2601.18699

Mechanistic Analysis of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning

Authors:

Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Fredriksson Lundstrom-Imanov↗

Sequential fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) adaptation to target tasks often triggers catastrophic forgetting, where the acquisition of novel target skills degrades ancestral capabilities. This paper presents a systematic comparative study of catastrophic forgetting across twenty premier models representing the state-of-the-art in mid-2026. We categorize our investigation into two primary research lines: (i) a behavioral and semantic output drift analysis of ten leading closed-source models (including Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.5 High, and Gemini 3.5 Flash), and (ii) a deep mechanistic interpretation of ten prominent open-weight architectures (such as DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Llama 4 Maverick, and Qwen 3.6-27B). Through weight-space trajectory tracking, Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA), and routing gate drift calculations in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers, we localize the neural circuits highly susceptible to parameter overwriting. Our findings indicate that early-layer attention heads exhibit systemic entropic dispersion, while mid-to-deep feed-forward networks (or sparse expert blocks) suffer localized representation collapse. Informed by these insights, we introduce Low-Rank Circuit Projection (LRCP), a subspace-regularized training intervention. Empirical evaluations show that LRCP successfully mitigates up to 94.2% of ancestral capabilities in open-weight configurations and matches the adaptation velocity of standard PEFT baselines.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14699

Instruct-Particulate: Scaling Feed-Forward 3D Object Articulation with Kinematic Control

Authors:

Ruining Li↗Yuxin Yao↗Matt Zhou↗Chuanxia Zheng↗Christian Rupprecht↗Joan Lasenby↗Shangzhe Wu↗Andrea Vedaldi↗

Reconstructing articulated 3D objects is important for animation, gaming, and robotic simulations. Recent neural networks can estimate the articulated structure of 3D objects, but their generalization remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data for this task. To address this gap, we introduce Instruct-Particulate, a model that takes a 3D mesh together with a target kinematic specification, including part descriptions, connectivity, joint types, and optional point prompts, and predicts the corresponding kinematic part segmentation and joint motion parameters. The kinematic specification disambiguates the task and allows the model to target annotations of different granularity, thereby making it possible to use more abundant heterogeneous training data. At test time, the kinematic specification can be obtained automatically from large-scale vision-language models, so the model can be applied to any input mesh. To train our model at scale, we construct a heterogeneous dataset of more than 150,000 articulated 3D objects, extending existing publicly available collections with data obtained by partially labelling other 3D models (monolithic or already decomposed into parts) with kinematic labels by means of vision-language models. Experiments show that our model generalizes better across categories and to AI-generated meshes, enabling articulated asset reconstruction from real-world images via image-to-3D models.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2505.21954

Revisiting Active Speaker Detection: An In-the-Wild Benchmark for Generalization and Robustness

Authors:

Le Thien Phuc Nguyen↗Zhuoran Yu↗Khoa Quang Nhat Cao↗Yuwei Guo↗Tu Ho Manh Pham↗Tuan Tai Nguyen↗Toan Ngo Duc Vo↗Lucas Poon↗Tuan Khai Nguyen↗Soochahn Lee↗Yong Jae Lee↗

We present UniTalk, a novel dataset emphasizing challenging scenarios to enhance model generalization for the task of active speaker detection (ASD). Previously established benchmarks such as AVA predominantly comprise old movies and thus exhibit significant domain gaps with real-world video. In contrast, UniTalk covers diverse video types reflecting challenging real-world conditions, including underrepresented languages, noisy backgrounds, and crowded scenes, while being on par with AVA in scale. Extensive evaluations reveal that ASD remains unsolved under realistic conditions: state-of-the-art models near-perfect on AVA fail to reach saturation on UniTalk. Conversely, models trained on UniTalk generalize better to modern in-the-wild datasets including Talkies and ASW. UniTalk thus establishes a new benchmark for ASD, providing researchers with a valuable resource for developing and evaluating versatile and resilient models.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14790

XFlow: An Executable Protocol Programming System for Reliable Multi-Agent Workflows

Authors:

Hanqi Li↗Jing Peng↗Zijian Wang↗Lu Chen↗Kai Yu↗

arXiv:2606.14790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems increasingly coordinate planning, reasoning, tool use, and human interaction, yet their reliability remains limited. A central source of this limitation is the underspecified prompt–harness boundary. Current systems lack a principled way to decide which workflow commitments should remain in prompts and which should become harness structure. We present XFlow, an executable protocol programming system for reliable multi-agent workflows, and XPF (XFlow Protocol Format), its domain-specific protocol programming language. XFlow occupies a middle position between prompt-only orchestration and markup-like workflow descriptions. XPF remains readable as a literate protocol, but it is compiled and executed as a program. Its design keeps informal semantic work inside actors while moving selected commitments into harness structure that can be checked, preserved, and enforced. At runtime, XFlow stages uncertainty through lifecycle-governed symbols, which are typed state cells with validation and commit states. Actor outputs are mediated before they become shared state, instead of spreading through prompts, transcripts, or implicit memory. Our experiments cover Constrained Interaction, Long-Context Reasoning, and Agentic Software Engineering. They show that XFlow improves reliability by making constraints, evidence handling, and process requirements explicit and enforceable.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15007

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

Authors:

NVIDIA↗Aaron Blakeman↗Aaron Thomas↗Aastha Jhunjhunwala↗Abhibha Gupta↗Abhinav Khattar↗Adam Rajfer↗Adi Renduchintala↗Adil Asif↗Aditya Vavre↗Adriana Flores Miranda↗Ahmad Bilal↗…

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.03745

Predicting the Neutrino Mass Ordering Using Neural Networks

Authors:

T. J. C. Bezerra↗L. Asquith↗E. Bannister↗W. Shorrock↗

arXiv:2606.03745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Determining the neutrino mass ordering remains a central open problem in particle physics. While next-generation long-baseline experiments are expected to resolve this question, current data provide limited sensitivity because the spectral differences between normal and inverted ordering are subtle and entangled with parameter degeneracies. We investigate a machine-learning strategy for mass-ordering determination using a feed-forward neural-network classifier trained on synthetic long-baseline datasets generated with three-flavour oscillation probabilities, matter effects, and statistical fluctuations. We evaluate the classifier against standard $\chi^2$ and $\log\mathcal{L}$ approaches using common discrimination metrics, including receiver-operating-characteristic curves, to quantify sensitivity and to illustrate how operating points can be selected to prioritise purity or efficiency. We find that the neural network achieves performance comparable to conventional fits for the scenarios studied, providing a flexible, independent cross-check of established analyses. The framework can be extended to incorporate systematic uncertainties and to explore joint inference of oscillation parameters, and it may also serve as a pedagogical tool for introducing machine-learning methods in neutrino physics.

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