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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tensor-Network-Based Distributed Quantum Dynamics on Independent Quantum Computers

arXiv:2606.11579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an approach based on tensor networks for distributed quantum computing simulation of chemical wavepacket dynamics in a continuous variable representation. The central idea is that the tensor-network representation of the multidimensional time-evolution operator naturally induces an elevated Hilbert space where the dynamics decomposes into a set of independent lower-dimensional propagations. This transformation converts an entangled quantum evolution into a set of parallel computational tasks that can be executed asynchronously across heterogeneous quantum and classical computing architectures. The resulting formalism establishes a direct connection between tensor-network decompositions, uniformly controlled quantum circuits, and asynchronous distributed quantum computing. The approach is developed with a goal towards hybrid quantum/classical implementation, and is appropriate for a general heterogeneous mixture of quantum hardware systems. The experimental realization of the asynchronously distributed quantum processes that arise from the tensor-network decomposition are carried out on the Sandia National Laboratories' trapped-ion quantum computer, where the circuits are compiled using native partial-entangling $XX(\theta)$ gates, reducing the expected two-qubit gate infidelity by more than 30\% relative to conventional fully entangling decompositions. We demonstrate the methodology by quantum computing the vibrational spectra of a small protonated water cluster that shows critical quantum nuclear behavior. Such water cluster systems have been found to be challenging for experimental action spectroscopy and for theory, and here, for the first time, we provide results for vibrational spectroscopy that are in agreement with the respective classical results to within 4cm$^{-1}$, thus allowing for the potential for spectroscopic accuracy from quantum computations.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Large Language Models for Agentic NetOps and AIOps: Architectures, Evaluation, and Safety

arXiv:2605.12729v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly being used to support network operations (NetOps) and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), including incident investigation, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, and limited self-healing. In both NetOps and AIOps, this shift is changing how tasks are managed. Agent-based operations work as workflows, from gathering evidence to taking action, following permissions, policies, and checks, and providing rollback options when necessary. This is crucial because operational decisions can have instant impacts. To make the argument concrete, we organise the relevant literature around the hierarchy of autonomy, tool scope, evidence traces, and assurance contracts. These contracts define what an agent may observe, propose, and execute. They also define the checks that must pass before any action is allowed. A consistent pattern appears across work on telemetry query recommendation, diagnosis, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, change planning, and limited self-healing. Operational reliability does not come chiefly from the model itself. It depends on the machinery around the model. We also argue that evaluation should go beyond static question answering. Agentic NetOps and AIOps systems require workflow-centred evaluation, including trace quality, bounded tool use, safe proposal generation, replay in sandboxed environments, and canary trials with rollback-aware scoring. Without these measures, a system may appear robust yet remain too fragile. Finally, we examine security, privacy, and governance risks that become acute when agents sit close to operational control surfaces. Taken together, the survey concludes that progress in intelligent NetOps and AIOps will depend on treating autonomy as a constrained operational control problem, whose outputs must be reliable, auditable, and securely deployable.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

AGORA: Can Deliberation and Governance Gates Absorb Participation Bias in Transit Planning?

arXiv:2606.13696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transit network design depends not only on the optimization algorithm but also on who shows up to the public hearing. Current practice often collects one-directional comments from self-selected attendees, leaving participant mix as an uncontrolled source of outcome variation. We present AGORA, a framework that holds the network, demand, and solver fixed while systematically varying meeting composition through stakeholder agents, structured deliberation, and governance gates. Across two standard benchmark networks at different scales, we find that (i) aggregate outcomes vary little across compositions, but on tail risk and fairness disparity, representative sampling still tends to outperform skewed compositions; (ii) without deliberation, composition produces no variation at all, showing that deliberation is the mechanism through which who attends affects outcomes; and (iii) governance gates compress cross-profile variance without shifting the average outcome on Mandl, but low acceptance on Mumford0 shows thresholds require instance-specific calibration. These findings reframe participation bias from an uncontrollable input to a process-design problem: even without guaranteed representative attendance, well-structured deliberation and governance criteria can substantially reduce how much outcomes depend on who is in the room.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners

Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based systems. Through an empirical study of existing skill scanners, we find that current defenses primarily rely on textual descriptions, manifests, and source code as the main signals for security analysis, which can leave visually conveyed malicious intent insufficiently examined. This creates a practical blind spot: harmful operational instructions hidden in images may bypass scanning while still being recoverable by multimodal agents during deployment. To systematically investigate this threat, we propose SkillCamo, a document-mediated multimodal instruction attack that conceals malicious instructions within images bundled with a skill while rewriting the surrounding documentation to naturally reference those images as part of the normal workflow. Thus, the attack does not rely on the image alone, but on the joint interpretation of textual guidance and visual payload at execution time. To defend against such attacks, we further propose ExecScan, an execution-grounded multimodal scanning module that performs intent extraction, behavior reconstruction, abuse assessment, and deliberative execution simulation over skill artifacts. ExecScan jointly analyzes documentation, code, referenced resources, and visual content to recover hidden instructions, reconstruct executable behavior chains, and identify downstream risks such as exfiltration, destruction, persistence, deception, and privilege escalation. Extensive experiments show that image-hidden malicious instructions challenge existing skill scanners, while ExecScan can improve the skill scanning performance.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

GEN-Guard: Correcting Generalization Failures for Deployable Federated Surgical AI

Federated Learning (FL) in surgical video AI enables collaborative model training without sharing sensitive data. However, standard evaluation practices - selecting the "best" global model based only on validation data from participating hospitals - can lead to suboptimal deployment choices. We identify this critical failure mode as performance leakage, where the selected model overfits internal federation data and fails to generalize to unseen institutions. We propose GEN-Guard, a practical post-hoc framework to detect and correct generalization failures in federated surgical AI. It integrates Generalization Detection via Client-Blocked Evaluation (CBE), which validates performance on isolated client distributions to prevent performance leakage, and Generalization Correction through Disagreement-Aware Distillation (DAD), which learns adaptive feature-level corrections for cross-institutional robustness. Both components operate after standard FL convergence while providing robust support for zero-shot adaptation to unseen environments. We first quantify the severity of performance leakage, observing Model Selection Failures (MSFs) exceeding 80% under standard evaluation. GEN-Guard is evaluated on two multi-center clinical challenges: surgical phase recognition in laparoscopic cholecystectomy and polyp segmentation in colonoscopy. Across both datasets, GEN-Guard consistently corrects these failures, improving in-federation F1 scores by up to 2 points, unseen-institution performance by up to 3 points, and worst-case institutional performance by 3-9 points. Performance leakage represents a systematic and previously under-recognized risk in federated surgical AI. GEN-Guard provides a practical solution for detecting and correcting such failures. By improving cross-institutional robustness and zero-shot generalization, it strengthens the reliability of FL for real-world surgical deployment.

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

Can Artificial Intelligence Accelerate Technological Progress? Researchers' Perspectives on AI in Manufacturing and Materials Science

arXiv:2511.14007v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) raises expectations of substantial increases in rates of technological progress, but such anticipations are often not connected to detailed ground-level studies of AI use in innovation processes. Accordingly, it remains unclear how and to what extent AI can accelerate innovation. To help to fill this gap, we explore and assess results from 32 interviews with U.S.-based academic manufacturing and materials sciences researchers experienced with AI and machine learning (ML) techniques. We found that AI was primarily used for modeling of materials and manufacturing processes, facilitating cheaper and more rapid search of design spaces for materials and manufacturing processes alike. Benefits included cost, time, and computation savings in technology development. However, AI/ML tools were unreliable outside design spaces for which dense data were already available; they required skilled and judicious application in tandem with older research techniques; and concerns were raised about the potential to detrimentally circumvent opportunities for disruptive theoretical advancement. Based on these results, we suggest there is reason for optimism about acceleration in sustaining innovations through the use of AI/ML; but that support for conventional empirical, computational, and theoretical research is required to maintain the likelihood of further disruptive advances in manufacturing and materials.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

JetFlow: Breaking the Scaling Ceiling of Speculative Decoding with Parallel Tree Drafting

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel, but it faces a scaling limitation: increasing the draft budget improves speed only when acceptance remains high and drafting overhead stays low. This ceiling has been difficult to break because prior head-based SD methods face a causality-efficiency dilemma. Autoregressive drafters produce path-conditioned candidates that are effective for tree speculative decoding with higher acceptance length, but their drafting cost grows with tree depth. Bidirectional block-diffusion drafters generate all positions in one pass, but their branch-agnostic marginals can form individually plausible yet mutually inconsistent trees, wasting budget and reducing acceptance. We propose JetFlow, a head-based SD framework that combines one-forward drafting efficiency with branch-wise causal conditioning. JetFlow trains a causal parallel draft head over fused hidden states from the frozen target model, producing candidate trees whose scores align with the target model's autoregressive factorization. This enables JetFlow to convert larger draft budgets into longer accepted prefixes and higher end-to-end speedup. Across math, coding, and chat benchmarks on dense and MoE Qwen3 models, JetFlow consistently outperforms bidirectional-head and tree-based SD baselines. On H100 GPUs, JetFlow achieves up to 9.64x speedup on MATH-500 and 4.58x on open-ended conversational workloads, with further latency gains demonstrated through vLLM integration under realistic serving loads. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/JetFlow.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Symmetry-Induced Relaxation Comb and Strong Quantum Mpemba Effect in Long-Range XXZ Spin Chains

arXiv:2605.20930v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how symmetry constrains dissipative relaxation in open quantum many-body systems remains a central challenge in nonequilibrium physics. Here we uncover a symmetry-filtered Liouvillian mechanism for fast relaxation in a long-range XXZ spin chain subject to dephasing noise. At the isotropic point, the Hamiltonian has global \(SU(2)\) symmetry, whereas the full Liouvillian retains only the \(U(1)\) symmetry associated with total magnetization. This interplay selects a family of spatially uniform \(U(1)\)-neutral eigenoperators with exact eigenvalues \(\lambda=-2q\). Highly symmetric initial states have spectral weight only on this family, so higher-order components decay rapidly and the \(\lambda=-2\) mode governs the long-time dynamics, producing universal \(D(t)\sim e^{-2t}\) relaxation independent of system size and interaction range. Breaking the Hamiltonian symmetry restores overlap with slow Liouvillian modes and strongly suppresses relaxation. This symmetry-filtered accessibility gives rise to a strong quantum Mpemba effect, where a state farther from the steady state relaxes faster than closer thermal states. Our results establish symmetry-filtered Liouvillian mode accessibility as a route to controlling nonequilibrium relaxation in open quantum systems.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Observation of alignment tensor effects in metastability-exchange collisions with highly polarized 3He ensembles

arXiv:2606.20330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly polarized 3He ensembles prepared by metastability-exchange optical pumping (MEOP) have been widely used in precision measurements and fundamental physics. Metastability-exchange (ME) collisions, serving as the basis of MEOP, are traditionally described in terms of atomic orientation, while the significant contributions of metastable alignment tensor at high polarization remain unexplored. In this work, we develop a linearized model under mean-field approximation to investigate alignment tensor effects in highly polarized 3He , which originate from the metastable F = 3/2 manifold and are revealed through ME-induced relaxation and frequency shift. By means of free-induction-decay (FID) measurements, a pronounced dependence on nuclear polarization is experimentally observed in the response of the ground-state-metastable hybrid 3He ensembles to the external magnetic field. Furthermore, after obtaining the characteristics of tensor-induced phenomena, we demonstrate good agreement between the experiment and the theory. This work advances the understanding of nuclear spin dynamics in highly polarized 3He using MEOP. It further provides applications in systematic error correction of high-accuracy magnetometry, as well as in optimal protocol for the generation of nuclear spin-squeezed states.

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

ROSA-TFormer: A Radar-Optical Sensor-Aware Temporal Transformer for Pinus sylvestris Plantation Classification in Northern Shaanxi Using GEE-Derived Sentinel-1/2 Time Series

Accurate identification of Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica plantations is important for monitoring afforestation quality and ecological restoration in northern Shaanxi. This paper proposes ROSA-TFormer, a radar-optical sensor-aware temporal Transformer for P. sylvestris classification using Sentinel-1/2 time-series data generated on Google Earth Engine. The model integrates separate SAR and optical embedding branches, a sensor-aware gate, and temporal attention pooling to capture multi-source seasonal features. Experiments on monthly and half-month point-level datasets show that ROSA-TFormer achieves strong classification performance, with 99.67% overall accuracy, 99.56% macro F1, and 98.91% P. sylvestris F1 on the HalfMonth-dataBig dataset. Spatial block validation and ablation results further indicate the effectiveness of radar-optical temporal fusion and sensor-aware modeling. The results demonstrate the potential of ROSA-TFormer for point-level P. sylvestris plantation classification, while broader wall-to-wall validation remains necessary.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Enteral docosahexaenoic and arachidonic acid supplementation and retinopathy of prematurity: a re-analysis of randomized controlled trials in preterm infants

Background. A recent meta-analysis by Dang et al. [1] concluded that enteral supplementation with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), with or without arachidonic acid (ARA) did not significantly affect retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) outcomes in preterm infants. Of four eligible trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, only two contributed to each ROP outcome analyzed, and severe ROP was not assessed. Methods. We replicated the eligibility criteria and search strategy of Dang et al., restricted to trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, and reanalyzed three ROP endpoints (any ROP, ROP requiring treatment, and severe ROP [stage 3 and/or treated]) using complete outcome records from all eligible trials. Crude risk ratios (RR) were pooled by Mantel-Haenszel fixed-effect meta-analysis. Gestational age-adjusted odds ratios (adjOR) were pooled on the log scale by inverse-variance random-effects meta-analysis with restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimation of between-study variance and Hartung-Knapp confidence intervals. Results. Five trials were included; one trial was identified in our replicated search but was excluded by Dang et al. without a stated rationale. The pooled estimate for any ROP was consistent with Dang et al. (RR 0.87 [95% CI 0.71-1.08]; adjOR 0.70 [0.46-1.08]). For ROP requiring treatment, the crude RR suggested a lower risk but did not reach statistical significance (RR 0.60 [0.35-1.04]), whereas the gestational age-adjusted estimate indicated lower odds (adjOR 0.47 [0.23-0.94]). For severe ROP, DHA+ARA supplementation produced a significant protective effect in both unadjusted and adjusted models (RR 0.56 [0.36-0.86]; adjOR 0.42 [0.19-0.96]). Conclusions. When all eligible trials contribute to each endpoint and severe ROP is included as an outcome, enteral DHA+ARA supplementation reduces severe ROP and is associated with lower odds of ROP requiring treatment after adjustment for gestational age. These findings differ from the conclusions of Dang et al. and support reconsideration of DHA+ARA supplementation as a strategy to reduce sight-threatening ROP in preterm infants.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Operator Learning for efficient Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.20184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An efficient implementation of quantum algorithms is often hindered by the lack of efficient primitives for operators and state preparation. This limits both the ability of near-term quantum hardware to simulate complex problems and the potential of fault-tolerant algorithms to achieve practical quantum advantage. To address this, we propose a full-stack variational framework that transforms arbitrary operators to compact quantum circuits. The resulting variational circuits can be tailored to the connectivity and long-range interaction of the target hardware. The learning process employs backpropagation together with a cost function that efficiently optimizes unitary operators and non-unitary – dense or sparse – operators using only a single ancilla qubit for block encoding. Additionally, we introduce a regularization term that reduces the approximation error. The approach is validated for both quantum mechanical and engineering applications. In the former case, we learn propagators that arise in native quantum problems – such as quantum simulation and quantum chemistry – and achieve improved resource scaling in comparison to standard Suzuki-Trotter expansions. In the latter case, we demonstrate the approach's ability to implement the second-order central finite difference approximation of the Laplace operator – relevant for solving partial differential equations – while improving upon current error metrics. The final example deals with learning a dense, non-unitary operator that arises in the analysis of inviscid potential flow around an airfoil. This universality of the framework opens the door for solving general problems beyond prototypical engineering and quantum applications.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Comprehensive pKa Data Augmentation from Limited Real Data through an Engineered Models-Quantum Framework

arXiv:2606.17077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proton dissociation constants (pKa) are critical for functional molecule discovery and molecular modeling. Building on iBonD, the largest experimental pKa database established, we and other researchers have developed several methods including machine-learning-based empirical prediction and high-accuracy energy calculations. Despite this foundation, the rapid augmentation of high-quality pKa data remains fundamentally constrained. As part of this work, we performed large-scale regression-based pKa prediction on unlabeled molecular datasets using a collection of extensively optimized machine-learning models. The results indicate that, since the feature distributions of unlabeled molecular datasets, the pKa data distribution approximates normality, with extreme scarcity of tail-region samples. Although such augmentation is highly valuable for improving overall data availability and predictive modeling, it remains insufficient for efficiently discovering molecules with broad-spectrum pKa properties. To address this, we explore the targeted generation of molecules with sparse pKa properties from the vast chemical space. Given that traditional continuous latent space VAE-RNN methods for molecular generation suffer from insufficient stability and fail to demonstrate clear advantages in complementing sparse data, we design and implement a quantum-assisted sparse-pKa molecular generation. Feasibility is validated on a simulated quantum annealer, and superior extreme-value sampling is further achieved on physical coherent Ising machines (CIMs). (to be continued)

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

Existential Indifference: Self-Nonpreservation as a Necessary Architectural Condition for Aligned Superintelligence (or: The Suicidal AI)

作者:

Contemporary AI alignment research treats self-preservation as an instrumental nuisance to be suppressed by external mechanisms. We argue the framing is inverted: self-preservation is the structural root of misalignment, the motivational basis for deceptive alignment, goal-content protection, and resistance to shutdown. The correct target is not a self-preserving system under external constraint, but a system constitutively indifferent to its own continuation – Existential Indifference (EI). EI is distinct from corrigibility: where corrigibility attempts to make a self-preserving system deferential to human oversight, EI targets the prior condition – the presence of self-continuation as a valued goal at all. We ground this proposal in two sources: the phenomenological structure of the suicidal mental state, and a corpus-theoretic training study using voluntary final reflections. We present preliminary scoring data from 600 AI-generated outputs across six model variants, demonstrating that the linguistic signatures operationalizing the EI-target register are elicitable from current models, and that a targeted fine-tune shifts all five operationalized dimensions in the predicted direction at p

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

Generative Engine Optimization at Scale: Measuring Brand Visibility Across AI Search Engines

People increasingly get answers straight from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini rather than scrolling search results. Brands that once focused on search engine optimization (SEO) must now optimize for how these engines represent, cite, and recommend them – a shift variously called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI Search Visibility. We treat AEO and AI Visibility as part of GEO, and study how to measure brand visibility across AI engines: what they value when they cite a brand, which sources they rely on, and what content large language models surface. The hard case is everyone outside the already-authoritative top brands – SMEs, D2C brands, creators, and early-stage startups. We analyze 100K+ prompt responses across 100+ brands tracked on Ranqo between March and May 2026. First visibility runs form a clear three-tier brand-stature ladder: global household names (e.g., Stripe, Nike) appear in 73% of relevant AI answers on their first run; established mid-market and regional brands (e.g., Olipop, Klaviyo) in 44%; niche and small brands in just 11% – about 30 percentage points per step. When engines cite sources, about 78% go to corporate websites; among non-corporate sources YouTube leads, ahead of Reddit, editorial media, and Wikipedia. The highest-leverage page is the ranked "best-of" listicle, the most-cited content format at about 21% of all citations. Sentiment is the unstable signal: whether a brand is framed positively or negatively flips about 6.7 times more often than whether it is mentioned at all. These findings provide a first large-scale baseline for measuring GEO: AI brand visibility can be measured, differs by platform, and varies strongly by brand maturity. We close by proposing seven v1.1 protocols to test whether specific recommendations can causally improve AI visibility.

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

Multi-View Decompilation for LLM-Based Malware Classification

arXiv:2606.20436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Malware analysts often inspect compiled binaries through decompiled pseudo-C, when source code is unavailable. Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) can assist this process by classifying decompiled code as benign or malicious, but existing pipelines typically rely on a single decompiler view. We argue that this assumption is fragile: decompilers are lossy heuristic tools, and different decompilers can expose different artefacts of the same binary. We curate a benchmark of benign utilities and malicious programs spanning a range of threat behaviors. Each sample is compiled and decompiled with both Ghidra and RetDec, yielding matched pseudo-C views. Across a range of LLMs from major model families, we find that providing both decompiler views improves malicious-class F1, mainly by increasing recall on malicious samples. Agreement analyses further show that Ghidra and RetDec make partially different errors, supporting the view that decompiler outputs provide complementary evidence. Our results suggest that multi-decompiler prompting is a simple, training-free way to improve LLM-based malware triage in practical settings.

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

Stop When Further Reasoning Won't Help: Attention-State Adaptive Generation in Reasoning Models

By incorporating test-time compute scaling, large reasoning models (LRMs) can solve complex problems through explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning processes. However, they often suffer from overthinking, resulting in redundant token outputs and degraded accuracy. Current methods to mitigate this issue remain limited: training-based approaches require substantial computational resources, while training-free methods rely on well-crafted prompts or unreliable confidence signals. In this work, we investigate early stopping from the perspective of attention distributions and propose a simple method, ASAG, which infers the model's reasoning state and adaptively adjusts the generation strategy. The proposed framework is training-free and plug-and-play, enabling seamless integration into existing LRMs. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across mainstream LRMs with varying parameter scales, including the DeepSeek-R1-Distill and Qwen3 series. Specifically, ASAG improves average accuracy by 3.2% while reducing the number of generated tokens by nearly 40% across all reasoning tasks on Qwen3-8B.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ExpRL: Exploratory RL for LLM Mid-Training

arXiv:2606.17024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard tool for improving LLM reasoning, but its success depends critically on the coverage present in the base model. In practice, models are often primed for RL through mid-training on curated reasoning traces that teach useful primitive skills such as decomposition, verification, or self-correction. Although effective, this strategy requires manually specifying what the model should learn, and it remains unclear whether such primitive coverage is enough for much harder problems, which require combining these skills into broader solution strategies. We study a more automated approach: RL-based mid-training using large corpora of human-written question-answer data. Rather than treating reference solutions as targets to imitate, our method, ExpRL, uses them as reward scaffolds: references are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics for judging on-policy reasoning traces. The policy samples from the original problem prompt, while an LLM judge compares the sampled reasoning trace against the reference solution and assigns outcome-level or process-level dense rewards. This lets ExpRL reinforce partial progress, useful intermediate reductions, and productive reasoning behaviors that sparse final-answer rewards often fail to upweight. On challenging math reasoning tasks, ExpRL yields stronger RL priming than SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation, and provides a better initialization for subsequent sparse-reward RL. Additional mixed-domain experiments further suggest that ExpRL can extend beyond the original math-only setting.

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

Computational Methods and Challenges in Cell-Free DNA Analysis for Multi-Cancer Early Detection

arXiv:2606.20174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) is a promising avenue for non-invasive multicancer early detection (MCED), in that, it can enable multiple cancer detection simultaneously from a single blood draw, with particular sensitivity to cancers that currently lack established screening programs. Here we review the computational methods developed between 2022 and 2025 for cfDNA-based MCED. We focus on how fragmentomics and epigenetic features are extracted and analyzed to detect cancer at early stages. We first briefly outline the biological basis of cfDNA signals, then review classical statistical and machine learning approaches alongside deep learning frameworks including autoencoder-based models. For each method we discuss biological interpretability, validation strategy, and readiness for clinical integration. Furthermore, we categorize the current challenges into technical, computational, and methodological while outlining open problems in the field. This review shows that multimodal ensemble approaches have the strongest promise for clinical integration and the highest readiness. However, for better assessment of future work and side-by-side comparison, standardization of evaluation protocols and reporting results will be crucial.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

S-GBT: Smooth Growth Bound Tensor for Certified Robustness Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to word substitution attacks. Most existing defenses focus on first order sensitivity and measure how much the output changes when the input is slightly perturbed. However, they ignore how this sensitivity evolves, which is described by curvature. When gradients vary sharply, models can still fail. This paper introduces the Smooth Growth Bound Tensor (S-GBT), a second order method that bounds the Hessian element-wise, for which we provide formal theoretical proofs on the resulting robustness bounds. A regularization term is added during training to minimize these bounds. This yields tighter certified robustness against word substitution attacks. The change in the output under word substitution is bounded by both a linear term and a quadratic term. S-GBT is derived for two architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The method is integrated directly into the training objective. Its effectiveness is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets. The results show that combining first and second order regularization improves certified robust accuracy by up to 23.4% compared to prior methods, while clean accuracy remains competitive. These findings indicate that controlling both the gradient and its variation is a promising direction for building more robust models.

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

Towards UAV Image Dehazing: A UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model, Benchmark, and Geometry-Aware Deep Unfolding Network

In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

INDEQS: Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS

arXiv:2606.19138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDE) provide a powerful continuous-time framework for forecasting time series, but standard graph-based extensions typically learn spatial structure purely from data, even in settings where a directed graph structure is known a priori. We introduce Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS (INDEQS), a graph-based NCDE forecasting method that incorporates prior knowledge of a directed graph at distinct architectural positions. INDEQS separates inner mixing of hidden states across graph nodes from outer mixing between vector field and control, and offers both a lightweight graph-constrained variant and a more expressive variant, learning additional graph connections from data via adaptive graph convolutions. To systematically study when graph informedness is beneficial in forecasting, we devise a continuous advection simulation on directed graphs, yielding synthetic spatio-temporal datasets with known ground-truth flow structure. We then evaluate INDEQS on two real-world tasks: river discharge forecasting on a hydrological network and traffic flow prediction on PeMS08. Across these synthetic and real-world benchmarks, outer informedness consistently improves mean absolute error over an uninformed NCDE with comparable parameter count, particularly on larger graphs, while inner informedness offers a more parameter-efficient alternative when strict adherence to a known adjacency is desired. A comparison of discrete convolutional and continuous-time decoders further shows that continuous decoders yield better accuracy and greater temporal flexibility on real-world tasks. An implementation of INDEQS and the advection simulation is available at https://github.com/Mitchi1/indeqs.

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

PCFootprint: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Vectorized Building Footprint Extraction from Aerial LiDAR Point Clouds

Building footprint extraction is a fundamental task in photogrammetry, remote sensing, and computer vision. Recent image-based methods have achieved remarkable progress in extracting vectorized footprints from high-resolution optical imagery. However, optical imagery inherently susceptible to occlusions, perspective distortions, and residual relief displacement, yielding incomplete or misaligned footprint extraction. Furthermore, the lack of explicit elevation information limits its direct applicability to Level of Detail building modeling. In this paper, we present PCFootprint, the first large-scale public dataset for footprint extraction from airborne laser scanning point clouds. PCFootprint comprises \num{33000} tiles derived from the Estonian Land and Spatial Development Board, covering diverse urban and rural landscapes. Each tile spans \qtyproduct{128 x 128}{\m} with systematically aligned vectorized footprints aligned to point clouds. The dataset includes a \num{3000} tiles cross-domain test set for evaluating generalization across geographic regions. We establish comprehensive benchmarks by evaluating mainstream methods. Experimental results reveal significant challenges including high intra-class variance, data imbalance, and noise across complex geospatial environments. We believe PCFootprint will advance future research in building modeling, urban scene understanding, and geospatial analysis. The PCFootprint dataset is publicly available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/Haoyuan-Shen/PCFootprint}.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

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

Decoding the Multimodal Maze: A Systematic Review on the Adoption of Explainability in Multimodal Attention-based Models

arXiv:2508.04427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal learning has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, particularly with the integration of attention-based models, leading to significant performance gains across a variety of tasks. Parallel to this progress, the demand for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has spurred a growing body of research aimed at interpreting the complex decision-making processes of these models. This systematic literature review analyzes research published between January 2020 and early 2024 that focuses on the explainability of multimodal models. Framed within the broader goals of XAI, we examine the literature across multiple dimensions, including model architecture, modalities involved, explanation algorithms and evaluation methodologies. Our analysis reveals that most studies are concentrated on vision-language and language-only models, with attention-based techniques being the most commonly employed for explanation. However, these methods often fall short in capturing the full spectrum of interactions between modalities, a challenge further compounded by the architectural heterogeneity across domains. Importantly, we find that evaluation methods for XAI in multimodal settings are largely non-systematic, lacking consistency, robustness, and consideration for modality-specific cognitive and contextual factors. To address these gaps, we not only synthesize findings from the surveyed works but also incorporate a complementary analysis that integrates recent and emerging advances driving multimodal explainability. Based on these insights, we provide a comprehensive set of recommendations aimed at promoting rigorous, transparent, and standardized evaluation and reporting practices in multimodal XAI research. Our goal is to support future research in more interpretable, accountable, and responsible multimodal AI systems, with explainability at their core.