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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PEC-Home: Interpretation of Progressively Elliptical Commands in Smart Homes

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered home assistants with natural language interaction capabilities. However, current assistants overlook the progressive omission that occurs in human dialogue as shared context accumulates, leading to more elliptical expressions for efficient communication. Thus, current assistants still struggle to interpret such elliptical expressions accurately, which limits their effectiveness in real-world applications. In practical smart home scenarios, assistants face two major challenges caused by elliptical commands: (1) referential ambiguity caused by different environmental expectations among multiple users; and (2) intention ambiguity resulting from user preferences that evolve over time or change with the environment. To address these challenges, we introduce PEC-Home, the first simulated home dataset specifically designed for interpreting progressively elliptical commands in smart homes. Extensive experiments on various LLMs, including GPT-4o, show that existing home assistants struggle to execute user-intended operations based solely on elliptical commands. Even when equipped with tools for storing and retrieving user dialogue history, execution accuracy remains below that achieved with complete commands.}.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

arXiv:2606.12500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.

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

Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks with AI: A Survey

arXiv:2503.17867v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed Denial of Service attacks represent an active cybersecurity research problem. Recent research shifted from static rule-based defenses towards AI-based detection and mitigation. This comprehensive survey covers several key topics. Preeminently, state-of-the-art AI detection methods are discussed. An in-depth taxonomy based on manual expert hierarchies and an AI-generated dendrogram are provided, thus settling DDoS categorization ambiguities. An important discussion on available datasets follows, covering data format options and their role in training AI detection methods together with adversarial training and examples augmentation. Beyond detection, AI based mitigation techniques are surveyed as well. Finally, multiple open research directions are proposed.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Classical Explanations in (and of) General Probabilistic Theories

arXiv:2603.05627v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a notion of the ``explanation" of one (generalized) probabilistic model by another as particular kind of span in the category $\Prob$ of probabilistic models and morphisms. We show that explanations compose under a standard pullback construction (notwithstanding that $\Prob$ does not support arbitrary pullbacks). We then show that every locally-finite probabilistic model has a canonical, sharp classical explanation. The construction is functorial, so every locally-finite probabilistic theory has a canonical, sharp classical (though of course, usually non-local) representation.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Stable and Steerable Sparse Autoencoders with Weight Regularization

arXiv:2603.04198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices. To improve stability, we studied weight regularization by adding L1 or L2 penalties on encoder and decoder weights, and evaluate how regularization interacts with common SAE training defaults. On MNIST, we observe that L2 weight regularization produces a core of highly aligned features and, when combined with tied initialization and unit-norm decoder constraints, it dramatically increases cross-seed feature consistency. For TopK SAEs trained on language model activations (Pythia-70M-deduped), adding a small L2 weight penalty increased the fraction of features shared across three random seeds and roughly doubles steering success rates, while leaving the mean of automated interpretability scores essentially unchanged. Finally, in the regularized setting, activation steering success becomes better predicted by auto-interpretability scores, suggesting that regularization can align text-based feature explanations with functional controllability.

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

Where Black-box Drug-Target Interaction Prediction Models Look: Cross-Method Explainability

arXiv:2606.14245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug-target interaction (DTI) and affinity (DTA) predictors increasingly achieve strong benchmark scores, yet their internal use of sequence, fingerprint, and graph features often remains opaque. We present an interpretability audit of BridgeDPI architecture on three different datasets including Gao, Human, and C.elegans. This study combines gradient-based attributions – integrated gradients, saliency, layer-wise relevance propagation, SmoothGrad, and SmoothGrad-IG – with feature-wise occlusion ablation and strict intersection consensus across methods to reduce single-explainer bias. We summarize sensitivity and signed effects at raw inputs, at the bridge similarity scaffold, and through the graph convolution, including edge-level sensitivities and targeted edge removals. The results show that explainability is most informative when treated as model criticism: it reveals modality dominance, padding and special-token artifacts, dataset-dependent cooperative versus suppressive effects across layers, and chemistry-consistent fragment and composition motifs where methods agree. These analyses do not substitute for structural or experimental ground truth, yet they can provide testable hypotheses for downstream validation in computational drug discovery pipelines. More broadly, applying modern XAI to contemporary DTI/DTA models is still an early pass over the rich structure implicit in trained weights and data – yet even this first layer of scrutiny already helps researchers relate predictions to drug- and target-side representations and to prioritize external validation.

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

DynFS-MoE: Dynamic Functional-Structural Mixture-of-Experts for Post-Traumatic Epilepsy Diagnosis

Post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE) is a severe complication of traumatic brain injury (TBI), yet early identification remains challenging due to the complex structural and functional alterations it induces in the brain. To address this, we propose a dynamic multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that integrates functional and structural MRI through time-aware functional-structural encoding and class-conditioned expert routing. Within this framework, modality-specific and cross-modal experts learn complementary representations, while a Modality-Class MoE (MCoE) module dynamically dispatches expert weights according to each classification objective. Experimental results across three binary classification tasks demonstrate that the framework consistently outperforms static fusion baselines, and high-interpretability analyses further reveal meaningful region-of-interest (ROI) interactions. This dynamic multimodal expert framework effectively captures class-dependent brain interaction patterns and provides an interpretable approach for PTE diagnosis and risk stratification.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Biomazon: A Multimodal Dataset for 3D Forest Structure and Biomass Modeling in the Amazon Basin

Accurate, spatially explicit characterization of tropical forest structure is essential for carbon accounting and ecosystem monitoring, yet most ML pipelines predict canopy-top height proxies (e.g., RH95/RH98) or AGBD as separate scalar targets, rather than learning the forest vertical structure as an ordered profile. The community lacks a ML-ready multimodal benchmark for predicting the entire GEDI RH profile jointly with AGBD, or for evaluating methods that enforce physically consistent ordering across RH percentiles. We address this with Biomazon, a 20 m multimodal benchmark dataset over the Amazon Basin that pairs GEDI RH and AGBD targets with multi-sensor predictors (Sentinel-1/2, ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, Copernicus DEM, Dynamic World LULC, and AlphaEarth embeddings) under standardized spatial splits and evaluation protocols. Using a shared encoder-decoder with task-specific heads as a baseline framework, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study of (i) backbone/model scale, (ii) modality contributions, and (iii) the use of auxiliary embeddings under standalone and fusion settings, and we report both single-target and joint-target results to quantify tradeoffs under a unified training protocol. Finally, we contextualize baseline performance through regionally aligned comparisons against existing gridded products, including GEDI L4D RH10-RH98 and AGBD, at matching temporal scale. Biomazon, together with the accompanying protocols and baseline results, establishes a reference benchmark for future work on structurally consistent RH-profile prediction and structure-biomass modeling in tropical forests.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bootstrapped Monitoring: Leveraging Transparent Reasoning to Oversee Stronger AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trusted monitoring is a cornerstone of AI control. However, as frontier models grow more capable, the increasing capabilities gap between trusted and untrusted models may render trusted models unreliable monitors. We introduce bootstrapped monitoring, a protocol that addresses this by inserting a stronger, intermediate untrusted model with transparent chain-of-thought reasoning into the oversight chain. The untrusted monitor ($U_m$) evaluates the agent's actions, while a weaker trusted model ($T$) oversees $U_m$'s reasoning to detect collusion. We evaluate bootstrapped monitoring on multi-turn software engineering tasks (BashArena) across multiple agents and monitors. Bootstrapped monitoring substantially improves catch rates over trusted-only monitoring, even when the untrusted monitor actively colludes with the agent, provided we have access to its raw chain-of-thought. Our results suggest that bootstrapped monitoring can extend the useful lifetime of trusted models in control as AI capabilities advance.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Calibrating Generative Models to Feature Distributions with MMD Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models can produce individually plausible samples while deviating substantially from a target set in the distribution of key features. For example, a model pretrained on broad drug-like chemical space may generate molecules whose molecular features differ from those of a therapeutic class of interest, such as known antibiotics. Correcting such distributional miscalibration is challenging: direct finetuning on the target set can overfit and does not control which features are matched. To fill this gap, we introduce kernel Calibrating Generative Models (kCGM). kCGM minimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) between generated and target feature distributions using an unbiased score-function estimator, with KL regularization to remain close to the pretrained model. On a target set of 174 antibiotics, direct finetuning sacrifices chemical validity for feature-distribution matching, whereas kCGM improves target feature matching while increasing validity. We further demonstrate kCGM in protein and DNA generation tasks, showing it can adapt autoregressive, continuous-space diffusion, and discrete diffusion models using only feature-level supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/smithhenryd/cgm.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Immunologically Optimized Zmp1 Peptides Reveal a Translational Serological Biomarker Platform for Tuberculosis Diagnosis Across Disease Manifestations

Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis remains challenging, particularly for extrapulmonary TB (EPTB), where invasive sampling, low bacillary burden, and suboptimal sensitivity of nucleic acid-based tests in peripheral specimens hinder timely detection. Here, we report an immunology-driven strategy for biomarker discovery and development of a peptide-based serological assay targeting Mycobacterium tuberculosis zinc metalloprotease-1 (Zmp1). Leveraging fundamental principles of adaptive immunity that antigenic regions containing overlapping B-cell and CD4 T-helper cell epitopes would preferentially generate high antibody titers through linked recognition and cognate T-cell help, we used an immunoinformatics pipeline to identify two nested immunodominant peptide regions within Zmp1 (Mtb-Zp-NT and Mtb-Zp-CT) enriched for overlapping B- and T-cell epitopes. The diagnostic potential of these peptides was evaluated through ELISA-based serological assays. A blinded pilot study (N=137) demonstrated a clear discrimination between active TB and TB-recovered individuals. The assay was subsequently validated in an expanded cohort (N=875) by screening 6,086 individuals, which identified 457 TB-positive cases. The cohort included pulmonary TB (PTB), EPTB, TB-recovered individuals, household contacts, non-specific infections, and healthy controls. Receiver operating characteristic analyses, supported by DeLong and bootstrap comparisons, revealed superior diagnostic performance of the peptide-based assays relative to full-length Zmp1. Mtb-Zp-CT exhibited the highest accuracy (AUC=0.93; specificity >90%), while Mtb-Zp-NT also demonstrated strong discriminatory power (AUC{approx}0.89). These findings establish that the immunologically optimized Zmp1 peptides are highly promising serological biomarkers for TB and EPTB. More broadly, they demonstrate how mechanistically informed epitope selection can accelerate translation of pathogen-specific immune signatures into sensitive, minimally invasive, and potentially point-of-care diagnostic platforms for resource-limited settings.

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

GIST-CMTF: Goal-State Inference for Causal Minimal Tool Filtering in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented LLM agents rely on runtime filtering to decide which tools should be visible at each step. Causal Minimal Tool Filtering (CMTF) reduces tool-choice confusion by exposing only the next causally necessary tool frontier, but it assumes that the user request has already been mapped to a symbolic goal state. In practice, requests such as "handle my appointment" or "take care of this email" may correspond to multiple possible goals. This creates wrong-goal execution, where an agent follows a valid causal tool path for an unintended objective. We introduce GIST-CMTF, a goal-state inference layer that predicts candidate symbolic goals over the same state-transition vocabulary used by CMTF, estimates ambiguity, and either applies CMTF or exposes clarification as a causal action that produces missing goal or state variables. We evaluate GIST-CMTF across seven model backends, six filtering methods, and 120 controlled tool-use tasks. GIST-CMTF achieves 97.0% task success, compared with 80.1% for top-goal CMTF and 82.9% for semantic-goal CMTF. It reduces wrong-goal execution from 19.4% under top-goal CMTF to 2.5%, while preserving the one-tool exposure of causal filtering and using substantially fewer tokens than all-tools exposure. These results suggest that reliable tool-augmented agents should validate goal state, not only tool relevance, before exposing external actions.

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

Code Correctness Signals in LLM Hidden States: Pre-Generation Probing and Repair Geometry

arXiv:2606.14530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models encode rich information in their hidden states. This work asks whether code correctness is legible in the hidden states of Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, before it generates and as it repairs a failed attempt, studied on 444 LiveCodeBench tasks. It reports two findings connected by a single confound-control tool: residualization. First, the correctness of the model's first-attempt code is linearly decodable from the prompt-final hidden state, with a leakage-free held-out AUC of 0.931 +/- 0.008 across 50 outer splits. After the linear effect of prompt length is removed from each hidden state dimension, the probe still reaches 0.911 +/- 0.010, well above a prompt-length baseline of 0.754 +/- 0.014. Second, on 236 cleaned cases where the model attempts to repair a failed first attempt, the hidden state shift from the failing attempt to its repair carries a statistically detectable contrastive direction, significant on both a magnitude and a split-half test against label-shuffled nulls. This direction does not survive a conditional residualization against repair-context covariates that differ between successful and failed repairs, marking it as a correlate of repair success driven by the repair context rather than an isolated repair-comprehension feature. The probe layer is selected by nested cross-validation, and the same residualization approach that upholds the pre-generation correctness result overturns the repair-direction interpretation. The contribution is as much methodological as empirical: a diagnostic honest enough to report a negative result alongside a positive one.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

LLMs Infer Cultural Context but Fail to Apply It When Responding

Recent work has shown that LLMs overrepresent dominant cultures, particularly Western ones, while marginalizing others. We investigate whether this affects models' ability to generate culturally adapted responses by evaluating their use of local measurement units based on the user's perceived cultural background. We introduce Cultural and Pragmatic Response Inference (CAPRI), a dataset of conversations with varying levels of cultural cues. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs show that models can infer cultural background and recall relevant conventions, but often fail to utilize the information to adapt their answers to the relevant cultural conventions, unless explicitly prompted to perform the tasks sequentially. We further evaluate adaptation to the interpretation of time and quantity expressions, two subjective language grounding dimensions that are affected by culture. We find that models increasingly adapt their answers as cultural cues accumulate, but their priors are not culture-neutral, sometimes aligning with the model's country of origin. Overall, CAPRI provides a resource for future research aimed at narrowing the gap between cultural knowledge and culturally adaptive language generation.

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

Rethinking Global Average Pooling: Your Classifier Is Secretly a Multi-Instance Learner

作者:

Modern image classifiers widely adopt global average pooling (GAP) followed by a linear classification head. This linearity ensures that the image-level logits equal the average of logits obtained by applying the classification head pointwise to the feature grid prior to GAP. Consequently, standard classifiers may inherently retain spatial class evidence that remains recoverable even when the image-level prediction is incorrect. This structure naturally suggests a multiple-instance learning (MIL) interpretation, where an image is viewed as a bag of spatial instances. Within this formulation, we demonstrate that standard classifiers trained with a single label per image can still learn the intended classification task in multi-object scenes. We further exploit this property to decompose image-level logits into a prediction grid, providing a post-hoc diagnostic to extract spatial class evidence that GAP otherwise obscures. Our systematic evaluation reveals that off-the-shelf models consistently recover the ground-truth class within foreground regions. The MIL interpretation further suggests that common classifier failures reflect known limitations of mean aggregation.

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

Hierarchical Multi-Modal Retrieval for Knowledge-Grounded News Image Captioning

Traditional image captioning methods often struggle to generate comprehensive, context-rich descriptions, especially for details not directly observable from visual cues. To overcome this, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented image captioning framework that generates captions with deeper insights, such as object attributes, event context, and underlying significance, by leveraging external knowledge. Our approach features a hierarchical multi-modal article retrieval mechanism that moves beyond monolithic text entities. This retrieval considers article structure-aware features, including weighted textual components (e.g., headlines, body sections) and visual placement patterns, alongside multi-faceted similarity computations (content–visual, visual–visual, and discourse positioning). A subsequent contextual relevance refinement stage further enhances the retrieved information. The retrieved articles then serve as the knowledge base for caption generation: first, a VLM generates a concise image description; second, we segment relevant information from the retrieved articles based on this description; and finally, an LLM utilizes both the description and extracted knowledge to generate a comprehensive, contextually detailed caption. We participated in the ACM Multimedia EVENTA 2025 Challenge and achieved 5th place with an overall score of 0.2824 on the private test set of the OpenEvent-V1 dataset. Source code is publicly released at https://github.com/mf0212/EVENTA-Challange.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Beyond Scalar Scores: Exploring LLM-based Metrics for Clinical Significance Evaluation in Radiology Reports

Reliable evaluation of generated radiology reports requires strict clinical accuracy, as omitted critical findings or mischaracterized radiographic observations can directly affect patient care. Existing metrics obscure this requirement by reducing report quality to a medically ungrounded scalar. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich medical knowledge, they likewise struggle to draw a reliable boundary between clinically significant errors and harmless variation. We study this boundary using ReEvalMed benchmark as testbed and evaluate metric-level clinical significance from detecting true clinical errors ("Discrimination") and tolerating insignificant variations ("Robustness"). Across 8 LLM evaluators under one-pass and two-pass settings, we identify a widespread discrimination bias: models effectively detect errors but also over-penalize harmless rephrasings. To mitigate this, we synthesize 4k report pairs and train lightweight interpretable metrics on Qwen3-8B and MedGemma-4B. Our trained metric sharpens the clinical significance boundary, surpassing 32B-scale medical LLMs and remaining competitive with proprietary models. Crucially, the more costly two-pass setting fails to consistently improve overall performance and mainly trades discrimination for robustness. These findings suggest one-pass trained metrics as the practical choice for cost-sensitive deployment, with two-pass inference reserved for settings where D-R balance is critical. We will release the dataset and metric.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Optimizing Rank for High-Fidelity Implicit Neural Representations

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) based on vanilla Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are widely believed to be incapable of representing high-frequency content. This has directed research efforts towards architectural interventions, such as coordinate embeddings or specialized activation functions, to represent high-frequency signals. In this paper, we challenge the notion that the low-frequency bias of vanilla MLPs is an intrinsic, architectural limitation to learn high-frequency content, but instead a symptom of stable rank degradation during training. We empirically demonstrate that regulating the network's rank during training substantially improves the fidelity of the learned signal, rendering even simple MLP architectures expressive. Extensive experiments show that using optimizers like Muon, with high-rank, near-orthogonal updates, consistently enhances INR architectures even beyond simple ReLU MLPs. These substantial improvements hold across a diverse range of domains, including natural and medical images and novel view synthesis, with up to +9 dB PSNR over the same architecture. Code is available at (https://rank-inrs.github.io).

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

Null-Space Diffusion Distillation Unlocks Speed, Fidelity and Realism in Lensless Imaging

Lensless imaging reconstructs scenes from highly multiplexed measurements, resulting in a severely ill-posed inverse problem. In this work, we identify a fundamental trade-off between measurement consistency, perceptual quality, and inference speed across lensless reconstruction paradigms. Traditional methods favor consistency but produce perceptually degraded results, supervised approaches achieve high-quality reconstructions with fast inference but may violate physical constraints, and diffusion-prior methods achieve high perceptual quality and consistency–particularly when structured constraints such as range-null decomposition are used–but remain slow due to iterative sampling. Motivated by this observation, we propose Null-Space Diffusion Distillation (NSDD), a single-pass reconstruction model that distills structured diffusion-prior inference into an efficient feed-forward network. NSDD learns to produce high-quality reconstructions that preserve measurement consistency while avoiding costly iterative sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that NSDD achieves perceptual quality and consistency competitive with diffusion-prior methods, while providing significantly faster inference and offering a favorable balance across all three objectives. Furthermore, ablation experiments show that distilling the range–null decomposition improves reconstruction quality and robustness over unstructured full-reconstruction distillation, including on unseen real scenes. These results highlight the potential of structure-aware distillation for efficient lensless imaging. Code is available at github.com/JRCSAVSN/NullSpaceDiffusionDistillation.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Fisher-Geometric Sharpness and the Implicit Bias of SGD toward Flat Minima

arXiv:2606.20469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A widely held intuition in deep learning is that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) implicitly favors flat minima and that flat minima generalize better, but standard Euclidean measures of flatness such as the trace or maximum eigenvalue of the loss Hessian are not invariant under reparametrizations that preserve the network function, which undermines the theoretical foundations of this narrative. In this study we resolve this issue by grounding flatness in the Riemannian geometry of the statistical manifold induced by the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM). We define Riemannian sharpness mathematically and prove that it is invariant under smooth, function-preserving reparametrizations, which directly addresses the critique of Dinh et al. in the paper ``Sharp minima can generalize for deep nets''.We note that this invariance is a property of the true FIM; the diagonal empirical estimator used in practice (and in all experiments below) inherits invariance only approximately, and exact invariance under arbitrary reparametrizations would require structured estimators such as K-FAC. We formalize the gradient noise of mini-batch SGD as having a covariance structure proportional to the FIM, derive the stationary distribution of the resulting stochastic differential equation, and then show that the probability mass is exponentially concentrated at Riemannian-flat minima. A PAC-Bayes generalization bound controlled explicitly by SR formally links this geometric bias to test performance. Our experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 confirm that SR reliably tracks generalization in ways that Euclidean sharpness does not, and that its scaling with $\eta/B$ matches the theoretical predictions. Together these results provide a rigorous, reparametrization-invariant account of why flat minima generalize.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

AnchorKV: Safety-Aware KV Cache Compression via Soft Penalty with a Refusal Anchor

arXiv:2606.17872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) outperform earlier architectures on generative inference and long-context tasks, but their large size introduces significant challenges in memory usage, energy cost, and on-device deployment. Since scaling pre-trained language models improves downstream capability [zhao2023survey], the key-value (KV) cache becomes a dominant inference bottleneck. Recent KV cache compression methods [jo2025fastkv,li2024snapkv,zhou2024dynamickv] reduce this cost by retaining only a subset of attention-relevant tokens. However, while these approaches preserve accuracy on benign workloads, their compression policies either fail to defend against jailbreak attacks [jiang2024robustkv] or degrade safety alignment under aggressive eviction. We propose AnchorKV, a drop-in modification to KV cache compression that biases token retention scores away from directions in key space associated with harmful prompts. AnchorKV constructs an offline safety anchor by adapting a difference-of-means representation engineering approach [arditi2024refusal,zou2023representation] to the layer-specific key projection space used in KV caching. Based on this anchor, a soft penalty token selection rule trades a small amount of utility for substantially improved safety alignment, while reducing to the original compressor when the penalty is zero.

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

LARE: Low-Attention Region Encoding for Text-Image Retrieval

Image retrieval in crowded scenes is particularly challenging due to the salience bias of conventional visual encoders, which tend to focus on dominant objects while neglecting low-attention regions that are often crucial for fine-grained retrieval. We propose LARE (Low-Attention Region Encoding), a framework that explicitly models these overlooked regions. LARE adopts a dual-encoding strategy that encodes low-attention regions of an image and the full image in parallel, leading to more diverse and informative image embeddings. To evaluate image retrieval performance in challenging crowded scenes, we introduce Dense-Set, a challenging subset derived from COCO and Flickr30K. In this subset, images are re-captioned to provide richer descriptions of low-attention or previously overlooked regions. This dataset highlights the limitations of existing retrieval models and enables a more rigorous evaluation under densely crowded scene conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves retrieval performance by preserving subtle, non-dominant visual cues within the shared latent space.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Formalizing Numerical Analysis: An Agent Pipeline and Quality Audit Beyond Kernel Acceptance

arXiv:2606.14000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated that coding agents can formalize entire advanced mathematics textbooks in Lean 4, yet existing efforts concentrate on branches of mathematics already well-represented in mathlib and measure success solely through kernel acceptance. We address both limitations by applying a coding agent to formalize Numerical Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations, a textbook in numerical analysis that is largely absent from mathlib, stressing the agent's capacity to develop new theory from scratch. We further introduce a systematic, reproducible three-dimensional framework for evaluating the quality of agent-produced formalizations beyond compilation: semantic correctness, Mathlib reuse, and cross-file reuse via LLM-as-judge methods. Applying this framework to our own formalization and to the released outputs of RepoProver and M2F, we uncover recurring unfaithful formalization patterns, including incomplete multi-part statements, added weakening hypotheses, and parameter restrictions, that kernel acceptance entirely obscures. Our results suggest that compilation-based metrics substantially overstate formalization quality, and we provide a reproducible audit methodology to support more rigorous evaluation of future autoformalization systems.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Dialogue SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Dialogue-Driven Coding Agents

AI coding agents have rapidly transformed software engineering, powering widely used interactive coding assistants. Despite their interactive real-world use, existing benchmarks evaluate them as fully-autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce Dialogue SWE-Bench, an automatic benchmark dataset for evaluating the ability of coding agents to resolve real-world software engineering problems through dialogue with a user. We design a novel, persona-grounded user simulator to support our task evaluation, and augment our task evaluation with automatic evaluations of dialogue quality. We also propose a new schema-guided agent, aimed at improving the dialogue capabilities of off-the-shelf coding agents, which improves over strong baselines by 3-14%. Our results indicate that better coding models do not always correspond to better dialogue models, suggesting that dialogue capability is a distinct and currently understudied dimension of coding agent performance.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Preregistration for Experiments with AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents has given rise to a rapidly growing methodological paradigm: "in silico" behavioral experiments. Originally conceived as a way to use AI agents as proxies for human participants in studies of cognition, decision-making, and social dynamics, this approach has taken on new significance – as AI agents increasingly negotiate, transact, and make consequential decisions on behalf of people and organizations, understanding their behavior has become a research priority in its own right. While these experiments with AI agents offer unprecedented advantages in terms of scalability, cost efficiency, and experimental control, they also inherit, and in some cases amplify, methodological vulnerabilities that have long plagued human subjects research. To address these issues, this paper argues that preregistration practices – central to improving the credibility of human subjects experiments – should now be extended to experiments with AI agents. We systematically catalog the researcher degrees of freedom that experiments with AI agents introduce – model selection, prompt wording, settings, and outcome-contingent redesign, for example – and show how the low cost of iteration and lack of reporting norms make these choices both easy to exploit and difficult to detect. We propose a preregistration template tailored to experiments with AI agents and call on conferences, journals, and funding agencies to make preregistration standard practice for this emerging research paradigm.