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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

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

Discovering Symmetry Groups with Flow Matching

arXiv:2512.20043v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Symmetry is fundamental to understanding physical systems and can improve performance and sample efficiency in machine learning. Both pursuits require knowledge of the underlying symmetries in data, yet discovering these symmetries automatically is challenging. We propose LieFlow, a novel framework that reframes symmetry discovery as a distribution learning problem on Lie groups. Instead of searching for the symmetry generators, our approach operates directly in group space, modeling a symmetry distribution over a large hypothesis group $G$. The support of the learned distribution reveals the underlying symmetry group $H \subseteq G$. Unlike previous works, LieFlow can discover both continuous and discrete symmetries within a unified framework, without assuming a fixed Lie algebra basis or a specific distribution over the group elements. Experiments on synthetic 2D and 3D point clouds, ModelNet10 and a real-world MI-Motion dataset show that LieFlow accurately discovers continuous and discrete subgroups, significantly outperforming a state-of-the-art baseline, LieGAN, in identifying discrete symmetries.

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

Deja Vu at Scale: Paraphrase-Robust Detection of Duplicate Gherkin Steps in Behaviour-Driven Software Testing with Sentence-Transformer Embeddings and a 1.1M-Step Open Benchmark

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) suites in Gherkin accumulate step-text duplication with documented maintenance cost. Prior detectors either require runnable tests or are single-organisation, leaving a gap: a static, paraphrase-robust, step-level detector and a public benchmark to calibrate it. Objective. We release (i) the largest cross-organisational BDD step corpus to date, (ii) a labelled pair-level calibration benchmark, and (iii) a four-strategy detector with a consolidation-savings model linking clusters to ISO/IEC 25010 maintainability sub-characteristics. Method. The corpus contains 347 public GitHub repositories, 23,667 .feature files, and 1,113,616 Gherkin steps, SPDX-tagged. The detector layers exact hashing, normalised Levenshtein, sentence-transformer cosine, and a Levenshtein-banded hybrid. Calibration uses 1,020 manually labelled step pairs under a released rubric (60-pair overlap, Fleiss kappa = 0.84). We report precision, recall, and F1 with bootstrap 95% CIs under the primary rubric and a score-free relabelling, and benchmark against SourcererCC-style and NiCad-style lexical baselines. Results. Step-weighted exact-duplicate rate is 80.2%; median-repository rate is 58.6% (Spearman rho = 0.51). The top hybrid cluster has 20,737 occurrences across 2,245 files. Near-exact reaches F1 = 0.822 on score-free labels; semantic F1 = 0.906 under the primary rubric reflects a disclosed stratification artefact. Lexical baselines reach F1 = 0.761 and 0.799. The savings model estimates 893,357 corpus-wide eliminable step occurrences; on the median repository 62.5% of step lines are eliminable.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gene ancestries reveal diverse microbial associations during eukaryogenesis

The origin of eukaryotes remains a central enigma in biology1. Continuing debates agree on the pivotal role of a symbiosis between an alphaproteobacterium and an Asgard archaeon2,3. However, the nature, timing and contributions of other potential bacterial partners4–6 and the role of interactions with viruses7–9 remain contentious. To address these questions, we used advanced phylogenomic approaches and comprehensive datasets spanning the known diversity of cellular life and viruses. Our analysis provided a revised reconstruction of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) proteome, in which we traced the phylogenetic origin of each protein family. We found compelling evidence for multiple waves of horizontal gene transfer from diverse bacterial donors, with some likely to have preceded mitochondrial endosymbiosis. We inferred plausible traits of the major donors and their functional contributions to the LECA. Our findings support a contribution of horizontal gene transfers to shaping the proteomes of pre-LECA ancestors and suggest a facilitating role of Nucleocytoviricota viruses. Taken together, our results suggest that ancient eukaryotes may have originated within complex microbial ecosystems through a succession of diverse associations that left a footprint of horizontally transferred genes. Phylogenomic reconstruction of the proteome of the last eukaryotic common ancestor sheds light on the origin of eukaryotes, indicating an important role of horizontal transfer of genes from diverse bacterial and viral donors.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Approximate Structured Diffusion for Sequence Labelling

Sequence labelling, a core task of Natural Language Processing (NLP), consists in assigning each token of an input sentence a label. From a Machine Learning point of view, sequence labelling is often cast as a Linear-Chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) parametrised by a neural network. While this approach gives good empirical results, CRFs assume a finite decision span (eg label bigrams) which can limit their expressivity and hurt performance when long-range dependencies are required. We show we can leverage diffusion to train a CRF conditioned on an entire label sequence, with the caveat that the condition is on a noisy version of labels. We show experimentally that this method, in conjunction with approximate CRF inference, improves label accuracy with a 16.5% error reduction for POS-tagging.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Impulse Decoding of Quantum LDPC Codes: Equivalence of Degeneracy and Code-Shortening

arXiv:2606.18240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error correction is essential for building scalable quantum computers. Within the stabilizer formalism, the Calderbank-Shor-Steane framework constructs quantum codes from pairs of classical linear codes. A distinctive feature in this setting is degeneracy, where multiple equivalent error estimates exist-a phenomenon that has no classical counterpart, and the lack of a meaningful classical coding-theoretic interpretation of which has remained a gap in the literature. In this paper, we demonstrate that degeneracy is closely related to the classical operation of shortening of a linear block code. Interestingly, the shortening here takes place at the decoder rather than at the encoder. Leveraging this insight, we present a parallel decoding scheme for quantum low-density parity-check codes, which we term impulse decoding, that significantly outperforms belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding, as well as several other existing techniques, under both code-capacity and circuit-level noise, with significantly lesser complexity. We then present another algorithm based on decoding of residual errors, which when combined with impulse decoding achieves further performance improvement under circuit-level noise.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Real-order moments, tail representations, and logarithmic means

arXiv:2606.14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a unified framework for the study of real-order moments of arbitrary random variables. General integral representations are established in terms of cumulative distribution functions and survival functions, covering continuous, discrete, and mixed distributions supported on the whole real line. These formulas extend the classical tail-integral identities for nonnegative random variables and provide a common treatment of positive, fractional, and negative moments. For discrete distributions, explicit series representations are derived in terms of cumulative probabilities, yielding simple criteria for the existence of moments. Applications are presented for the zeta and Skellam distributions, illustrating how tail behavior determines moment finiteness and how moments can be represented geometrically through cumulative distribution functions. In addition, a representation for logarithmic moments is obtained, linking logarithmic means, Laplace transforms, and the classical Frullani identity. The results provide a unified perspective on moment representations and establish useful connections between tail probabilities, distribution functions, Laplace transforms, and moment existence.

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

Manifold GCN: Diffusion-based Convolutional Neural Network for Manifold-valued Graphs

arXiv:2401.14381v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose two graph neural network layers for graphs with features in a Riemannian manifold. First, based on a manifold-valued graph diffusion equation, we construct a diffusion layer that can be applied to an arbitrary number of nodes and graph connectivity patterns. Second, we model a tangent multilayer perceptron by transferring ideas from the vector neuron framework to our general setting. Both layers are equivariant under node permutations and the feature manifold's isometries. These properties have led to a beneficial inductive bias in many deep-learning tasks. Furthermore, they enable novel, more flexible feature designs. Numerical examples on synthetic data and an Alzheimer's classification application on triangle meshes of the right hippocampus demonstrate the usefulness of our new layers: While they apply to a much broader class of problems, they outperform task-specific state-of-the-art networks.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Distributed Detectability Band Against Marginal-Preserving Attacks

arXiv:2606.10456v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-control monitors score individual agent actions to detect misbehavior, but real harm can be distributed across many benign-looking steps, each individually below any per-step alarm. We construct a marginal-preserving, correlation-encoded distributed-sabotage attack using a Gaussian-copula AR(1) construction: the per-step monitor-score marginal is held exactly equal to benign, so mean, max, top-k tail, and threshold monitors (Monitor A) are defeated by construction, while harm is encoded in the temporal correlation structure. We sequence the paper around three reviewer-mandated gates. (1) Realizability gate: the stealthy attack achieves KS-distance to benign of 0.013 (effectively zero) at all tested harm levels up to 3.0, confirming that harm is fully decoupled from the per-step marginal and realizability is not harm-limited. (2) Monitor-A-vs-B reconciliation: we show formally that the attack, built against Monitor A's score marginal, remains marginal-preserving under a different-score Monitor B (the correlation/sequence family: CUSUM, SPRT, HMM-LR, runs test, autocorrelation, windowed logistic), and scope worst-case claims to score functions that admit a temporal signature. (3) Non-empty detectability band: Monitor A achieves AUC 0.52 (chance); Monitor B spans AUC 0.79-0.97 at the same 1% FPR target, and as harm is amortized over more steps Monitor A collapses to chance while Monitor B holds at AUC ~0.95. These results demonstrate a non-empty detectability band and characterize the sub-threshold sabotage frontier: distribution-shape monitors fail by construction; temporal-correlation monitors can detect but are not trivially optimal.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Nonadiabatic Self-Healing of Trotter Errors in Digitized Counterdiabatic Dynamics

arXiv:2512.22636v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trotter errors in digitized quantum dynamics arise from approximating time-ordered evolution under noncommuting Hamiltonian terms with a product formula. In the adiabatic regime, such errors are known to exhibit long-time self-healing [Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 060602 (2023)], where discretization effects are effectively suppressed. Here we show that self-healing persists at finite evolution times once nonadiabatic errors induced by finite-speed ramps are compensated. Using counterdiabatic driving to cancel diabatic transitions and isolate discretization effects, we study both noninteracting and interacting spin models and characterize the finite-time scaling with the Trotter steps and the total evolution time. In the instantaneous eigenbasis of the driven Hamiltonian, the leading digital error maps to an effective harmonic perturbation whose dominant Fourier component yields an analytic upper bound on the finite-time Trotter error and reveals the phase-cancellation mechanism underlying self-healing. Our results establish finite-time self-healing as a generic feature of digitized counterdiabatic protocols, clarify its mechanism beyond the long-time adiabatic limit, and provide practical guidance for high-fidelity state preparation on gate-based quantum processors.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Conformal calibration and look-elsewhere effect in anomaly detection for new-physics searches

arXiv:2606.13780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learned anomaly detection is reshaping searches for new physics, but it has outrun the statistics used to interpret it. A raw anomaly score has no calibrated meaning, a model that scans many regions inflates the look-elsewhere effect, and the asymptotic significances the field relies on are blind to the background mismodelling that anomaly detectors are especially prone to. We propose a calibration layer, built on conformal prediction, that turns any anomaly score into a defensible significance with distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees. Conformal prediction converts scores into valid local p-values, weighted and Mondrian variants repair the sideband-to-signal-region exchangeability failures that resonant searches suffer, and a Gross-Vitells step carries the result through to a look-elsewhere-aware global significance. The layer does two things at once. It exposes miscalibration that the standard pipeline cannot see, and it corrects it without retraining the detector. On public LHC Olympics data, a classifier develops a substructure-mass correlation that makes sideband-calibrated background p-values anti-conservative. Taken at face value, this manufactures a $\sim 46\sigma$ excess from background sculpting alone, which the label-free weighted correction removes, restoring an honest null. When run as a blind wide-mass bump hunt, the standard asymptotic and unweighted procedures fabricate $\gtrsim10\sigma$ excesses and $\approx5\sigma$ excesses even in signal-free windows, while the conformal layer raises no false alarms and its global false-positive rate is verified on background-only pseudoexperiments. The result is an auditable, detector-agnostic path from an uncalibrated score to a trials-factor-aware significance, ready to be folded into experimental anomaly searches.

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

Revealing Hidden Vulnerabilities in Autoencoders through Gradient Signal Restoration

Adversarial robustness of deep autoencoders (AEs) has received less attention than that of discriminative models, although their compressed latent representations induce ill-conditioned mappings that can amplify small input perturbations and destabilize reconstructions. Existing white-box attacks for AEs, which optimize norm-bounded adversarial perturbations to maximize reconstruction damage, often converge to suboptimal perturbations, thereby potentially overstating AE robustness. We show that this limitation is linked to vanishing adversarial loss gradients during backpropagation through ill-conditioned layers, associated with near-zero singular values in their intermediate weight matrices. To address this, we propose GRILL (Gradient Signal Restoration in Ill-Conditioned Layers), a framework designed to mitigate gradient degradation and improve the reliability of adversarial robustness evaluation in encoder-decoder architectures. GRILL is designed to mitigate adversarial gradient degradation during optimization, enabling attacks to better approximate high-distortion perturbations under fixed norm constraints. Through extensive experiments across multiple AE architectures, under both sample-specific and universal attacks, as well as standard and adaptive attack settings, we show that GRILL significantly increases attack effectiveness, thereby exposing vulnerabilities hidden by existing attack limitations. Beyond AEs, we provide preliminary evidence that modern multimodal encoder-decoder architectures exhibit similar vulnerabilities.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

OmniLoc: A Geometry-Aware Foundation Model for Anchor-Free UE Localization Across Diverse Indoor Environments

arXiv:2606.11490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indoor localization from wireless measurements remains challenging in large-scale deployments due to substantial variation in building geometry, the set of detectable access points (APs), and the heterogeneity of received signals. Existing learning-based methods often perform well only in limited settings and degrade under environmental shifts, making robust anchor-free localization across diverse indoor environments notoriously difficult. In this paper, we present OmniLoc, an environment-interactive foundation model for anchor-free user equipment localization across diverse indoor environments. To the best of our knowledge, OmniLoc is the first foundation-model-based approach built directly on wireless measurements for this task. OmniLoc is built on three key designs. First, a unified input tokenization module converts heterogeneous wireless measurements into a common representation that is more amenable to learning. Second, a geometry-aware Transformer performs AP-aware feature extraction by emphasizing dominant APs while aggregating complementary evidence from supporting APs. Third, a geometry-aware location estimation module conditions regression on geometric embeddings to produce geometrically consistent location predictions. We evaluate OmniLoc on both a large-scale in-house dataset and a public benchmark dataset. Results show that OmniLoc significantly outperforms existing methods, consistently improves existing backbones when its design components are integrated, and demonstrates strong generalization in cross-environment evaluations.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Initial Exploration Problem in Knowledge Graph Exploration

arXiv:2602.21066v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) enable the integration and representation of complex information across domains, but their semantic richness and structural complexity create substantial barriers for lay users without expertise in semantic web technologies. When encountering an unfamiliar KG, such users face a distinct orientation challenge: they do not know what questions are possible, how the knowledge is structured, or how to begin exploration. This paper identifies and theorises this phenomenon as the Initial Exploration Problem (IEP). Drawing on theories from information behaviour and human-computer interaction, including ASK, exploratory search, information foraging, and cognitive load theory, we develop a conceptual framing of the IEP characterised by three interdependent barriers: scope uncertainty, ontology opacity, and query incapacity. We argue that these barriers converge at the moment of first contact, distinguishing the IEP from related concepts that presuppose an existing starting point or information goal. Analysing KG exploration interfaces at the level of interaction primitives, we suggest that many systems rely on epistemic assumptions that do not hold at first contact. This reveals a structural gap in the design space: the absence of interaction primitives for scope revelation, mechanisms that communicate what a KG contains without requiring users to formulate queries or interpret ontological structures. In articulating the IEP, this paper provides a theoretical lens for evaluating KG interfaces and for designing entry-point scaffolding that supports initial exploration.

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

Composed Object Retrieval: Object-level Retrieval via Composed Expressions

Retrieving fine-grained visual content based on user intent remains a challenge in multimodal systems. Although current Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) methods combine reference images with retrieval texts, they are constrained to image-level matching and cannot localize specific objects. To this end, we propose Composed Object Retrieval (COR), a new object-level retrieval task that retrieves target object(s) from candidate objects in a target image and grounds the retrieved result with pixel-level masks. Given a reference object, its mask, a target image, and a retrieval text describing the desired modification, COR requires models to perform composed visual-textual reasoning rather than relying on explicit category names. This setting introduces several challenges, including fine-grained compositional matching, negative-object filtering under visually similar distractors, and flexible single- or multi-object retrieval. We construct COR125K, the first large-scale COR benchmark, containing 125,541 retrieval triplets across 408 categories with base/novel splits for evaluating category-level generalization. We also present CORE, a unified end-to-end model that integrates reference region encoding, adaptive vision-text interaction, and region-level contrastive learning to align composed representations with target objects while suppressing background and distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORE significantly outperforms existing CIR-based pipelines and strong baselines in both base and novel categories, establishing a simple and effective foundation for fine-grained object-level multimodal retrieval. Code will be released publicly at https://github.com/wangtong627/COR.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

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

Redirecting the Flow: Image Customization through Attention Distribution Shift

Subject-driven image customization aims to generate images that not only follow textual instructions but also preserve the identity of a given reference subject. Existing approaches, including test-time fine-tuning, encoder-based methods, and token competition in shared attention spaces, suffer from limited efficiency, misalignment between extracted reference features and the generative process, and interference from irrelevant information. To address these limitations, we formulate the customization task as a distribution shift induced by incorporating reference images into text-to-image generation, and derive a Conditional Attention Distribution Shift formulation grounded in maximum entropy theory. Building on this formulation, we propose CustomShift, a dual-branch architecture based on Stable Diffusion 3. The Reference-Alignment Branch leverages self-attention between reference images and subject names to achieve layer-wise alignment with latent representations, while the Cross-Guidance Branch integrates textual and reference cues to guide generation. Experiments on the DreamBooth and Custom101 benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a better balance between semantic fidelity and subject consistency.

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

JailbreakOPT: Tool-Assisted Iterative Jailbreak Prompt Optimization

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

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

Gradient boosting for extremes: sampling theory and application to insurance

arXiv:2606.14268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a statistical learning theory for gradient boosting applied to the estimation of covariate-dependent Generalized Pareto (GP) distributions in the context of Peaks-over-Threshold modeling. After an orthogonal reparametrization of the GP likelihood that diagonalizes its Fisher information matrix, we cast the estimation problem within the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) framework and derive non-asymptotic error bounds for the boosting estimator. Our analysis accounts for three distinct sources of error in the process: statistical fluctuations, the approximation bias inherent to the asymptotic nature of the GP model-controlled under second-order regular variation-and the approximation error associated with the finite number of boosting iterates, making explicit the resulting bias-variance trade-off. We illustrate the practical benefits of the reparametrization through simulations, showing that it significantly reduces gradient correlation during training and improves convergence stability. The methodology is applied to a medical malpractice insurance dataset from the Texas Department of Insurance, comprising over 18 000 closed claims. The gradient boosting approach yields a good fit for the tail of settlement cost distributions and reveals that the number of days to settlement is the dominant predictor of tail heaviness, consistent with earlier findings in the reserving literature.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

QIAS 2026: Overview of the Shared Task on Islamic Inheritance Reasoning

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the QIAS 2026 shared task, organized as part of the OSACT7 Workshop and co-located with LREC 2026. The shared task was designed to evaluate the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning in the religious and legal domain of Islamic inheritance. Unlike conventional question-answering benchmarks, QIAS 2026 focuses on end-to-end reasoning from natural language cases, requiring systems to perform the full inheritance calculation process, from identifying the eligible heirs to assigning the correct share to each beneficiary. To support this evaluation, the task was based on the MAWARITH benchmark, a dataset of $12{,}500$ Arabic inheritance cases annotated with intermediate reasoning steps and final answers. System submissions were evaluated using MIR-E, a multi-step metric that measures performance across the main stages of inheritance reasoning. A total of $16$ teams participated in the shared task, investigating a range of approaches, including prompting-based methods, retrieval-augmented generation, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that Islamic inheritance remains a highly challenging benchmark for current language models, especially in stages that require precise legal interpretation and structured numerical reasoning. This overview summarizes the task design, dataset, evaluation framework, participating systems, and main results.

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

ToolMenuBench: Benchmarking Tool-Menu Filtering Strategies for Reliable and Efficient LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.15508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented large language model agents increasingly operate over large tool libraries, but existing evaluations often focus on whether a model can call a tool correctly rather than how the visible tool menu shapes reliability, efficiency, and safety-relevant risk exposure. We introduce ToolMenuBench, a benchmark for evaluating tool-menu construction in multi-step LLM agents. ToolMenuBench varies tool-menu size, distractor type, state-dependent task structure, and risk exposure, and reports both filter-level and downstream agent metrics, including visible-tool count, risky-tool exposure, task success, wrong-tool calls, premature actions, and token usage. In a controlled evaluation across seven model backends, three tool-menu sizes, six filtering methods, and seven evaluation settings, CMTF improves task success from 32.1% under all-tools exposure to 85.7%, while reducing average token usage by roughly 98%. Causal minimal tool filtering achieves the strongest overall tradeoff, reducing visible tools, wrong-tool calls, premature actions, and risky-tool exposure relative to unfiltered exposure, lexical filtering, state-aware filtering, and broader causal-path baselines. ToolMenuBench provides a reusable evaluation framework for studying the agent-interface problem: which tools should be visible, when they should be visible, and under what cost or risk constraints.

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

Multimodal Ordinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Severity Using Structural MRI and Clinical Data

arXiv:2606.11794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) require accurate and scalable tools for assessing disease severity, yet current clinical staging remains time-intensive and prone to variability. We propose an attention-enhanced multimodal machine learning framework with ordinal regression for automated and interpretable AD severity staging. The framework integrates T1-weighted MRI with demographic and genetic variables and compares unimodal and multimodal architectures using ordinal and non-ordinal prediction heads. Models were trained and validated using cohort-stratified splits derived from the ADNI, AIBL, and NIFD datasets. A strictly held-out test set was constructed using subjects excluded from all training, validation, preprocessing, and hyperparameter tuning procedures, with subject-level splitting employed throughout to prevent data leakage. Among unimodal approaches, the T1-weighted MRI model achieved slightly higher adjacent-stage accuracy (0.963) and agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.444) than the tabular model (QWK 0.433). Integrating imaging, demographic, and genetic information improved overall performance. The multimodal non-ordinal baseline achieved the lowest prediction error (MAE 0.340), whereas the ordinal multimodal model achieved the highest adjacent-stage accuracy (0.970) and strongest agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.549). These findings indicate that ordinal formulations better capture the ordered structure of the CDR scale and yield predictions more consistent with clinical staging. Explainability analyses using Grad CAM++ and SHAP demonstrated anatomically and clinically plausible model behavior, supporting transparent decision-making. Overall, attention-based multimodal learning with ordinal regression represents a robust, interpretable, and scalable approach for automated AD severity staging and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

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

Training-Free Metrics for Synthetic Object Detection Data: A Proxy for Detector Performance

With the recent advent of image generative models, synthetic data are increasingly being used to supplement limited real datasets for training computer vision models. However, not all synthetic datasets improve performance equally, and their effectiveness can only be assessed by training a downstream model, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This problem is pronounced in the task of object detection, where the required annotations are much more dense due to bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a pre-computable metric family, dubbed Conditional-Composition Domain Match (CCDM), which serves as a proxy for the relative utility of candidate synthetic training sets for downstream detection. Experiments on the VisDrone-DET dataset show that the CCDM metric families achieve a Spearman correlation of 1.0 with the downstream performance of YOLOv8, clearly outperforming existing metrics for synthetic image evaluation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PreUnlearn: Auditing Collateral Knowledge Damage Before Large Language Model Unlearning

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove specified knowledge while preserving the rest of the model's capabilities. However, the boundary between knowledge to forget and knowledge to retain is often unclear, since related and even distant information may be entangled in the model. In this paper, we study LLM unlearning from a data-centric perspective and measure how unlearning effects propagate from the forget set to same-domain and distant-domain knowledge. We find a consistent decay pattern: collateral damage is strongest near the forget set, weakens with semantic distance, but does not disappear at domain boundaries. We further ask whether such damage can be audited before unlearning is executed. We formulate forget-set auditing as a pre-unlearning prediction task and analyze which data features are most predictive of downstream damage. Our results show that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set provide the strongest signals, suggesting that collateral damage is partly reflected in data geometry before model updates occur. These findings position forget-set auditing as an early warning tool for identifying risky unlearning runs and designing more reliable unlearning procedures.

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

Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

When a language model processes a hallucinated response, its attention routing tends to fail in one of two shapes: over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal. We study these shapes as a diagnostic characterization, computed from attention matrices under forced scoring of benchmark-labeled responses rather than during live generation. A widely used family of spectral methods analyzes the symmetric component of the degree-normalized attention operator, which governs transport capacity; we prove that every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic of this operator is structurally orientation-blind (it cannot distinguish an operator from its transpose, and therefore cannot detect information-flow direction), with a converse to the blindness theorem bounding any Lipschitz diagnostic's transpose sensitivity by the asymmetry coefficient $G$. Pairing this with a closed-form bipartite-Cheeger landscape for canonical causal architectures, we show that uniform causal attention satisfies an $n$-independent floor $\phi \ge 1/5$, while window attention pierces the floor as $O(w/n)$; failure modes are shape-different, not just value-different. This floor is an idealized-architecture benchmark, not an empirical attractor: the fraction of real attention heads that pierce it is itself an architectural signature. The resulting two-axis diagnostic ($\phi$ for capacity, $G$ for direction) yields a falsifiable polarity prediction: bottleneck- and diffuse-dominated benchmarks should exhibit opposite polarity. Under length-controlled evaluation, transport features retain interpretable signal (0.62-0.84 LC-AUROC) across the tested decoder-only, encoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, with polarity reversing as predicted between HaluEval and MedHallu.