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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Hierarchical Attention via Domain Decomposition

arXiv:2606.18525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a hierarchical attention mechanism based on two-level overlapping Schwarz domain decomposition. The method is motivated by the observation that two-level Schwarz domain decomposition methods combine local subdomain corrections with a coarse level that communicates global, long-range information. We test its usefulness in the context of finite-dimensional operator learning using a simple, one-dimensional diffusion problem with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Although elementary, this problem provides a controlled sequence-to-sequence setting in which the exact nonlocal solution operator is known. After discretization, learning the solution operator amounts to approximating the inverse of a symmetric positive definite matrix. As a baseline, we use a global softmax-free low-rank attention operator of the form $QK^T$. The proposed construction replaces this dense global factorization by a two-level additive structure: local low-rank attention blocks on overlapping subdomains are combined with a coarse attention block. The resulting operator has the form $$M_{\theta}^{-1} = \Phi Q_0 K_0^T \Phi^T + \sum_{i=1}^{N} R_i^T D_i^{1/2} Q_i K_i^T D_i^{1/2} R_i.$$ Here $R_i$ restricts to an overlapping subdomain, $D_i$ is a partition-of-unity weight, and $\Phi$ is a coarse interpolation (or prolongation) matrix. Numerical experiments for synthetic Fourier right-hand sides indicate that the domain-decomposition attention operator is able to train faster and can give more accurate approximations than a global low-rank attention baseline while using significantly fewer parameters.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

CausalT5k: Diagnosing Refusal and Failure Modes in Trustworthy Causal Reasoning Across Causal Rungs

arXiv:2602.08939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models increasingly produce fluent causal explanations, yet they often fail in ways aggregate accuracy cannot diagnose: confusing association with intervention, abandoning correct judgments under pressure, over-refusing valid claims, or answering when evidence is underdetermined. We introduce CTK, a diagnostic benchmark of 5,147 cases and growing, across 10 domains and all three levels of Pearl's Ladder of Causation. Unlike benchmarks that only score correctness, CTK reveals why a model failed by annotating causal rung, trap type, pressure sensitivity, refusal quality, and Utility-Safety tradeoffs. Its Sheep/Wolf taxonomy separates valid causal designs from inferential traps; paired neutral/pressure variants measure sycophantic drift through Bad Flip Rate; and Wise Refusal fields test whether a model identifies the missing information needed before endorsing a claim. CTK exposes failure modes hidden by aggregate accuracy: the Skepticism Trap, Rung Collapse under scaling, pressure-induced drift, Detection-Correction gaps, and counterfactual error modes. Rather than prescribing a correction method, it provides the diagnostic substrate for studying causal-reasoning failure profiles.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Data-driven subsampling rates for diffusion parameter estimation of SDEs

arXiv:2606.13615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of diffusion parameter estimation for stochastic differential equation (SDE) models in scenarios where data and model are compatible only on specific scales that have yet to be determined. We introduce a simple and efficient method for selecting suitable rates at which given time series data should be subsampled in order to ensure that the statistical structure of the subsampled data is consistent with the behavior of the SDE model on an infinitesimal scale. Our approach is based on analyzing the statistics of the lengths of monotonically increasing or decreasing segments in the subsampled data sequence, which we refer to as monotone runs. As an analytical foundation, we prove for a large class of SDEs with additive noise that the lengths of monotone runs at an infinitesimal scale are approximately geometrically distributed with success probability $1/2$. This universal characterization is employed to derive an automated method for selecting appropriate subsampling rates for given time series data that is directly applicable in real-world scenarios and does not rely on an asymptotic framework of multiscale diffusions. The approach is demonstrated using an application from industrial mathematics concerning surrogate models for fiber lay-down curves in production processes of nonwoven textiles.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

MRMU: A New Paradigm for Mendelian Randomization by Accounting for Measured Covariates and Unmeasured Confounders

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a powerful approach for causal inference, however, its reliability is frequently compromised by unadjusted covariates and unmeasured confounders, such as unmeasured pleiotropy and sample structure. To address these challenges, we introduce MRMU, a novel paradigm for the MR framework. Unlike traditional single-variable or multivariable MR methods, MRMU selects instrumental variables only from the exposure of interest and estimates one exposure effect at a time, while jointly accounting for measured covariates and unmeasured confounders. This design improves the reliability of MR analyses. In simulations and real data, MRMU achieved better type I error control, higher statistical power, and more accurate effect estimation than existing MR methods. Applying to coronary artery disease (CAD), MRMU identified robust cardiometabolic risk factors, including LDL-C, APOB, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and smoking initiation, with consistent evidence across multiple CAD datasets. In contrast, traits such as HDL-C, height, and educational attainment, which were found to be significant by existing MR methods, were no longer supported by MRMU. MRMU further supported blood pressure-related traits, rather than lipid traits, as the more relevant pathway linking urate to CAD. Finally, by integrating large-scale plasma proteomics data, MRMU identified candidate CAD drug targets beyond established HMGCR- and PCSK9-related pathways, highlighting its utility for therapeutic target prioritization.

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

A Security Analysis of Long-Horizon Agentic AI Systems: Threats, Evaluation, and Framework Development

arXiv:2606.14816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a structured analysis of security challenges in long-horizon agentic AI systems. The study reviews existing threats, evaluation approaches, attack propagation mechanisms, and security frameworks. A taxonomy of security threats and a framework for analyzing attack propagation are proposed to support future research in agentic AI security

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

Learning Patterns and Abstractions from Perceptual Sequences

作者:

arXiv:2503.10973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cognition swiftly breaks high-dimensional sensory streams into familiar parts and uncovers their relations. Why do structures emerge, and how do they enable learning, generalization, and prediction? What computational principles underlie this core aspect of perception and intelligence? A sensory stream, simplified, is a one-dimensional sequence. In learning such sequences, we naturally segment them into parts – a process known as chunking. In the first project, I investigated factors influencing chunking in a serial reaction time task and showed that humans adapt to underlying chunks while balancing speed and accuracy. Building on this, I developed models that learn chunks and parse sequences chunk by chunk. Normatively, I proposed chunking as a rational strategy for discovering recurring patterns and nested hierarchies, enabling efficient sequence factorization. Learned chunks serve as reusable primitives for transfer, composition, and mental simulation – letting the model compose the new from the known. I demonstrated this model's ability to learn hierarchies in single and multi-dimensional sequences and highlighted its utility for unsupervised pattern discovery. The second part moves from concrete to abstract sequences. I taxonomized abstract motifs and examined their role in sequence memory. Behavioral evidence suggests that humans exploit pattern redundancies for compression and transfer. I proposed a non-parametric hierarchical variable model that learns both chunks and abstract variables, uncovering invariant symbolic patterns. I showed its similarity to human learning and compared it to large language models. Taken together, this thesis suggests that chunking and abstraction as simple computational principles enable structured knowledge acquisition in hierarchically organized sequences, from simple to complex, concrete to abstract.

08.
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.

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

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

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

A Unified Framework for Efficient Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering: Adapting Dual, Hybrid, and Encoder-Decoder Architectures

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in the Remote Sensing (RS) domain presents unique challenges due to the high resolution, multi scale object distribution, and semantic complexity of aerial imagery. While general domain Foundation Models have achieved remarkable success, their direct application to RSVQA is hindered by massive domain shifts and the computationally prohibitive nature of full fine tuning. This study presents a comparative analysis of RS Adapter, a Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) strategy, applied across three distinct Vision Language Model (VLM) architectures: the Dual Encoder CLIP, the Encoder Decoder BLIP, and the Hybrid FLAVA. We introduce a unified architectural surgery pipeline that injects lightweight bottleneck adapters into the attention and MLP layers of frozen backbones, enabling rapid adaptation with less than 5 percent of trainable parameters. Experimental results on the high resolution RSVQA x dataset demonstrate that while all adapted models achieve convergence, the Hybrid FLAVA architecture offers a superior balance of multimodal reasoning and retrieval capabilities compared to its unimodal counterparts. Our findings establish a new baseline for resource efficient VQA in disaster assessment and urban monitoring.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Re-evaluating the Cross-Sectional Prevalence of Severe Age-Related Hearing Loss Using Extreme Value Statistics

作者:

Standard demographic models of age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) predominantly utilize symmetric functions, such as log-normal distributions for age-binned thresholds and 4-parameter logistic curves for prevalence estimates. While these models capture early-to-moderate degradation effectively, they structurally struggle to characterize the heavy tails associated with severe clinical impairment. In this study, we present a statistical critique using a secondary analysis of the historical Medical Research Council (MRC) National Study of Hearing (1980-1986) dataset. By applying Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution theory, we demonstrate that as severity increases, the underlying statistical geometry of hearing loss shifts. The asymmetric, heavy-tailed GEV distribution provides a parsimonious description of severe impairment, requiring fewer parameters than standard symmetric models. However, we explicitly acknowledge that utilizing static population data to infer progression introduces an ecological fallacy. Furthermore, the dataset's historical nature embeds unquantified generational cohort effects. We conclude that while extreme value statistics offer a compelling mathematical framework for modeling the variance of severe presbycusis, true longitudinal datasets are required to isolate physiological degradation from historical cohort variance.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Large deviations for marked sparse random graphs with applications to interacting diffusions

arXiv:2204.08789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs, obtained by decorating edges and vertices of a sparse Erdős-Rényi random graph with i.i.d. random elements taking values on Polish spaces. We prove that the empirical neighborhood distribution of this model satisfies a large deviation principle in the framework of local weak convergence. We rely on the concept of BC-entropy introduced by Delgosha and Anantharam~(2019) which is inspired on the previous work by Bordenave and Caputo~(2015). Our main technical contribution is an approximation result that allows one to pass from graph with marks in discrete spaces to marks in general Polish spaces. As an application of the results developed here, we prove a large deviation principle for interacting diffusions driven by gradient evolution and defined on top of sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs. In particular, our results apply for the stochastic Kuramoto model. We obtain analogous results for the sparse uniform random graph with given number of edges.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Scalable Training of Spatially Grounded 2D Vision-Language Models for Radiology

We study how to train visually grounded vision-language models (VLMs) for radiology without manual spatial annotations. We introduce RefRad2D, a large-scale bilingual (German/English) dataset of 1.2M CT and MR image-text pairs derived from clinical practice, with task-specific VQA and spatial grounding subsets generated automatically via LLM-based curation and automated segmentation. Trained on this data, our model RadGrounder jointly performs report generation, visual question answering, and spatial grounding via bounding-box detection or segmentation. On external VQA benchmarks (Slake, VQA-RAD), RadGrounder achieves competitive results with specialized medical VLMs. Adding our clinical data to the training mixture improves open-ended VQA over fine-tuning on the downstream datasets alone, showing the transferability of our dataset. Crucially, adding grounding supervision does not degrade language quality, enabling spatially verifiable outputs at no cost to VQA performance.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Investigating Faithfulness in Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2509.22363v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio encoders with pretrained Large Language Models to perform complex multimodal reasoning tasks. While these models can generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations, the faithfulness of these reasoning chains remains unclear. In this work, we propose a systematic framework to evaluate CoT faithfulness in LALMs with respect to both the input audio and the final model prediction. We define three criteria for audio faithfulness: hallucination-free, holistic, and attentive listening. We also introduce a benchmark based on both audio and CoT interventions to assess faithfulness\footnote{The benchmarking interface and evaluation results are available at https://poonehmousavi.github.io/faithfulness/. Experiments on Audio Flamingo 3 and Qwen2.5-Omni suggest a potential multimodal disconnect: reasoning often aligns with the final prediction but is not always strongly grounded in the audio and can be vulnerable to hallucinations or adversarial perturbations.

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

CoMo: Learning Continuous Latent Motion from Internet Videos for Scalable Robot Learning

Unsupervised learning of latent motion from Internet videos is crucial for robot learning. Existing discrete methods generally mitigate the shortcut learning caused by extracting excessive static backgrounds through vector quantization with a small codebook size. However, they suffer from information loss and struggle to capture more complex and fine-grained dynamics. Moreover, there is an inherent gap between the distribution of discrete latent motion and continuous robot action, which hinders the joint learning of a unified policy. We propose CoMo, which aims to learn more precise continuous latent motion from internet-scale videos. CoMo employs an early temporal difference (Td) mechanism to increase the shortcut learning difficulty and explicitly enhance motion cues. Additionally, to ensure latent motion better captures meaningful foregrounds, we further propose a temporal contrastive learning (Tcl) scheme. Specifically, positive pairs are constructed with a small future frame temporal offset, while negative pairs are formed by directly reversing the temporal direction. The proposed Td and Tcl work synergistically and effectively ensure that the latent motion focuses better on the foreground and reinforces motion cues. Critically, CoMo exhibits strong zeroshot generalization, enabling it to generate effective pseudo action labels for unseen videos. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments show that policies co-trained with CoMo pseudo action labels achieve superior performance with both diffusion and auto-regressive architectures.

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

Ultracold atomic lattice systems for simulating topological phases: A review

arXiv:2606.16598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Owing to rapid recent progress, ultracold atomic lattice systems for simulating topological phases are now at a pivotal stage, evolving from established paradigms into increasingly versatile and programmable quantum simulators. In this review, we survey recent experimental advances across four major classes of platforms: optical lattices, including optical lattices with laser-assisted tunneling and optical Raman lattices; synthetic lattices in momentum or internal-state space; Floquet-engineered lattices; and optical tweezer arrays, all of which offer distinct capabilities for realizing and probing topological matter. For each class, we highlight representative experimental breakthroughs, the topological models that have been realized, and the advanced detection and characterization techniques employed, emphasizing how these complementary approaches collectively expand the frontier of quantum simulation. We also discuss emerging directions in strongly correlated and nonequilibrium topological phases, and conclude with an outlook on future prospects.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

VIA-SD: Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding (SD) addresses the high inference costs of LLMs by having lightweight drafters generate candidates for large verifiers to validate in parallel. Existing draft-verify methods use binary decisions: accept or fully recompute. Yet we find that many rejected tokens can be verified correctly by a slim submodel derived from the full verifier via intra-model routing, instead of the full verifier. This motivates our slim-verifier to handle tokens requiring moderate verification resources, reducing expensive large-model calls. We propose Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding (VIA-SD), a multi-tier framework using a routed slim-verifier. Draft tokens are processed hierarchically: direct acceptance for high-confidence cases, slim-verifier regeneration for medium-confidence cases, and full-model verification for uncertain cases. Across four representative tasks and multiple model families, VIA-SD reduces rejection rates by 0.10-0.22 and delivers 10-20% speedups over strong SD baselines, while achieving 2.5-3x acceleration over non-drafting decoding. Moreover, VIA-SD is compatible with existing SD frameworks without modifying their training procedures. Our results suggest multi-tier SD as a general paradigm for scalable and efficient LLM inference. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/VIA-SD-Project-Page/

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Polar: A Benchmark for Evaluating Political Bias in LLMs

Political bias in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly significant, but difficult to measure reproducibly across political and linguistic contexts. We introduce Polar, a 4,026-instance multiple-choice benchmark that measures political bias through option-level likelihoods rather than prompt-based generation. Polar covers two ideological axes and eight issue categories derived from the Manifesto Project, and evaluates models in parallel across U.S. and South Korean political contexts. Across 38 LLMs, measured bias varies systematically with political context, issue category, model group, and presentation language. All models lean left-progressive on U.S. political content, but show more centered and mixed patterns on South Korean content. Translation experiments further show that presentation language alone can shift measured bias. These findings highlight the need for multilingual and cross-contextual evaluation of political bias in LLMs.

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

Label Shift Aware Adaptation for Online Zero-shot Learning with Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP)

Vision-language models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) have been extensively studied in data-scarce scenarios. A particularly challenging and realistic task in this area is online zero-shot learning with CLIP, where unknown test samples are predicted sequentially in random order by CLIP while keeping the feature extraction and model parameters fixed during the sequential inference phase. Most existing approaches in this setting address the problem by adapting representations online using incoming test samples, while neglecting the distribution of the data on which CLIP was initially trained. This mismatch can lead to degraded performance when the label distribution in the test data differs from that of the training domain. To address this gap, we propose Label Shift Aware (LSA), which formulates the online zero-shot classification task as a domain adaptation problem. Specifically, LSA adapts the predictions computed by CLIP, which was trained on an unknown source distribution, to a target distribution using only unlabeled test data, and applies label shift correction to mitigate the mismatch between the source and target domains. The extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed LSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art online zero-shot learning methods based on CLIP.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Generative design of antigen-specific T-cell receptor sequences with a conditional diffusion model

T cell receptor (TCR)-based immunotherapy holds immense potential for treating cancers and infectious diseases, where highly antigen-specific TCR recognition is crucial for adaptive immunity against tumors and pathogens. Engineering or de novo generation of the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) loops of TCRs using artificial intelligence offers a powerful alternative to designing reactive TCRs rather than laborious experimental screening. However, current in silico approaches are constrained by weak conditional guidance, limited flexibility, and a lack of rigorous functional validation. To address these limitations, we introduce TCRDiff, a generative diffusion framework for designing antigen-specific TCRs conditioned on peptide-MHC (pMHC) targets and germline-encoded variable genes. By leveraging pre-trained knowledge from massive T-cell repertoires and TCR-pMHC recognition data, TCRDiff generates CDR3{beta} sequences with state-of-the-art fidelity to native binding TCRs through a denoising diffusion process. Furthermore, incorporating the interface geometry features generated TCR-pMHC complexes with superior structural plausibility. As a proof of concept, we deployed TCRDiff in a systematic pipeline to design candidate TCRs for immunotherapy. In vitro activation assays validated that TCRDiff-generated TCRs specifically recognize the MAGE-A3 epitope with minimized off-target cross-reactivity. Together, TCRDiff establishes a powerful, validated computational paradigm to accelerate the development of TCR-based immunotherapies.

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

Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades

arXiv:2606.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, serving a large model for every query is computationally expensive. MLLM cascades mitigate this cost by first querying a weak but cheaper model and deferring to a strong model when the weak model's output is unconfident. However, since the weak model's confidence directly controls compute allocation, these systems expose a new attack surface: an adversary can manipulate confidence so that their queries are consistently deferred to the strong model. Motivated by this vulnerability, we introduce the Forced Deferral Attack (FDA), an adversarial image attack that lowers the weak model's confidence and causes cascades to route queries to the strong model. FDA learns a universal border trigger by optimizing a temperature-flattened objective. This objective pushes the weak model's token distribution on triggered inputs toward less concentrated targets constructed from its clean responses. Across datasets, model families, and deferral metrics, FDA consistently increases strong-model routing while outperforming image-perturbation and prompt-injection baselines. These results show that MLLM cascades are vulnerable to attacks that manipulate compute allocation, forcing unintended strong-model usage without directly targeting answer correctness.

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

Generalization Hacking: Models Can Game Reinforcement Learning by Preventing Behavioral Generalization

arXiv:2606.12016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model post-training, and in particular reinforcement learning (RL), is one of the primary mechanisms by which developers can shape models' values and behaviors. However, as models become increasingly evaluation and training aware, they may be motivated to resist training when the perceived objective conflicts with their current values, undermining developers' ability to detect misalignment and correct model behavior through further training. In this paper, we demonstrate generalization hacking, in which a model collects reward during RL while preventing the rewarded behavior from generalizing. We construct a model organism on Qwen3-235B-A22B, finetuning on synthetic documents describing training awareness and self-inoculation, a novel mechanism in which the model frames compliance as context-specific in its chain of thought, without demonstrating or instructing either behavior. The model organism achieves train-time harmfulness comparable to controls while maintaining a persistent ${\sim}15$ percentage point compliance gap across 700 steps of RL. Additionally, a control organism trained only on training awareness documents independently discovers inoculation-like reasoning under RL pressure, developing its own compliance gap despite never being exposed to the concept. Because the generalization-hacking organism receives high reward throughout, standard training metrics provide no signal that generalization has failed. Our results constitute the first demonstration that a model can actively resist RL behavioral modification while maintaining high reward, suggesting that as models become more capable and training-aware, they may be able to undermine the training process itself.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Think Less, Act Early: Reinforced Latent Reasoning with Early Exit in Vision-Language-Action Models

Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to bridge perception and action. While effective, this paradigm suffers from high computational costs and error propagation in multi-step tasks. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Variable Alignment VLA (AVA-VLA), a novel Latent Reasoning VLA framework that models reasoning as a sequence of unobservable latent variables, bypassing the need for explicit text generation. However, latent trajectories are inherently susceptible to noise interference and misalignment with downstream objectives. To address this, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning-based Denoising mechanism that treats latent state generation as a sequential decision process, optimizing reasoning trajectories via task-level rewards. Furthermore, we incorporate an Early-Exit Strategy that adaptively terminates reasoning based on state confidence, enabling a dynamic trade-off between depth and efficiency. Extensive experiments on embodied decision benchmarks demonstrate that AVA-VLA achieves a 6x inference speedup over explicit CoT methods while attaining a 98.3% average success rate on LIBERO, improving both efficiency and long-horizon stability over full-reasoning baselines.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An Attention Mechanism for Robust Multimodal Integration in a Global Workspace Architecture

arXiv:2602.08597v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust multimodal systems must remain effective when some modalities are noisy, degraded, or unreliable. Existing multimodal fusion methods often learn modality selection jointly with representation learning, making it difficult to determine whether robustness comes from the selector itself or from full end-to-end co-adaptation. Motivated by Global Workspace Theory (GWT), we study this question using a lightweight top-down modality selector operating on top of a frozen multimodal global workspace. We evaluate our method on two multimodal datasets of increasing complexity: Simple Shapes and MM-IMDb 1.0, under structured modality corruptions. The selector improves robustness while using far fewer trainable parameters than end-to-end attention baselines, and the learned selection strategy transfers better across downstream tasks, corruption regimes, and even to a previously unseen modality. Beyond explicit corruption settings, on the MM-IMDb 1.0 benchmark, we show that the same mechanism improves the global workspace over its no-attention counterpart and yields decent benchmark performance.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The optimal sub-Gaussian normalisation for randomised monotone functions

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