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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Local Stabilizer Codes in Three Dimensions without String or Self-Similar Fractal Logical Operators

作者:

arXiv:2606.19873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error-correcting codes (QECs) are essential components quantum computation and have deep connections to quantum phases of matter. A key obstruction to passive self-correcting QECs is the presence of string logical operators, which can generate logical errors through constant-energy-barrier processes. Haah's Codes (fracton codes) showed that three-dimensional stabilizer codes can forbid such string logical operators, but their translation-invariant structure supports self-similar fractal logical operators with a logarithmic energy barrier. We introduce the qutrit random cubic codes, a family of local qutrit Calderbank-Shor-Steane stabilizer Hamiltonians with similar cube-check structure as Haah's Code 1 but built from spatially varying stabilizers. We prove that these models retain the no-string property and numerically observe that they have properties distinct from translation-invariant fracton codes: the smallest ground-state degeneracy exponent is $k=2$ for odd $L$ and $k=4$ for even $L$; noncontractible plane-logical operators span the entire logical space; and charge-push diagnostics show that the self-similar fractal operators are absent. These results demonstrate that constrained randomness can fundamentally change the nature of stabilizer codes and improve their self-correction properties. They further point to broader families of quantum error-correcting codes and quantum phases beyond canonical topological and fracton orders.

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

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A Deep Hypergraph Learning Model for Predicting Antimicrobial Combination Effects Across Bacterial Targets

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) creates an urgent need for efficient strategies to identify effective antibacterial combinations. Combination therapy, including antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) paired with conventional antibiotics, is a promising approach, but exhaustive experimental screening across drug pairs and bacterial targets is impractical. This study introduces a hybrid GCN-based hypergraph neural network (HGNN) for predicting antimicrobial-agent combination outcomes against bacterial targets. Each antimicrobial-agent-antimicrobial-agent-bacterium triplet is represented as a ternary hyperedge, enabling the model to learn context-dependent interaction patterns. The framework integrates SMILES-derived molecular graph embeddings for antimicrobial agents, including conventional antibiotics and AMPs, with taxonomy-derived bacterial representations. The prediction task was formulated as a three-class classification problem: synergy, antagonism, and non-interaction. The non-interaction class included experimentally verified indifferent records and synthetic presumed non-interaction triplets generated by negative sampling. Model development used drug-pair-grouped splitting, five-fold grouped cross-validation within the training/validation partition, and final evaluation on a held-out test set. On the held-out three-class test set, the selected GCN-based HGNN achieved an accuracy of 0.83, weighted F1-score of 0.84, macro F1-score of 0.80, and ROC-AUC of 0.95. Per-class evaluation showed accuracies of 0.80 for synergy, 0.92 for antagonism, and 0.85 for non-interaction. Pair-type analysis showed strong performance across AMP-AMP, AMP-conventional antibiotic, and conventional antibiotic-conventional antibiotic combinations. These findings suggest that hypergraph-based representation learning can support computational prioritization of antimicrobial combinations for experimental follow-up. Further studies will be needed to improve model interpretability and to perform prospective validation of predicted synergistic combinations.

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

Conflict-Aware Retriever Editing for Knowledge Injection Attacks on LLM-Based RAG Systems

arXiv:2606.18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting malicious knowledge into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can manipulate retrieved evidence and mislead downstream generation, posing a serious security threat for AI applications. Existing RAG injection attacks mainly rely on manipulating external knowledge bases, such as crafting malicious corpus. However, the synthetic text crafted by such data-centric methods could be detectable, leading to the failure of attacks. Beyond corpus manipulation, open-source retrievers are increasingly exposing RAG systems to model-centric attacks. In this paper, we propose conflict-aware retriever editing, i.e., CAREATTACK, a model-centric retriever attack framework for malicious knowledge injection in RAG. Specifically, CAREATTACK consists two stages of conflict-aware retriever editing and attack-preserving anchor repair. Conflict-aware retriever editing adapts efficient closed-form parameter editing to the dense retrieval model, promoting malicious knowledge above benign competing passages and resolving potential parameter conflicts through graph-based conflict detection and parameter editing projection. Then, attack-preserving anchor repair performs lightweight calibration on the edited retriever to further eliminate the impact on non-target prompts while preserving the attack effectiveness for target prompts. We instantiate CAREATTACK on Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and BGE-M3, and conduct evaluation on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method substantially promote malicious passages into the retrieved knowledge of RAG systems and can perform attacks for batches of target prompts and passages, given the access of retrieval model parameters. Since most RAG systems are built upon open-source retrieval models, this work reveals a practical attack surface in RAG systems. Codes are public accessible at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CareAttack-3F1C.

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

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

arXiv:2504.09762v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} – implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous – it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.

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

A Model-Free Universal AI

arXiv:2602.23242v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In general reinforcement learning, all established optimal agents, including AIXI, are model-based, explicitly maintaining and using environment models. This paper introduces Universal AI with Q-Induction (AIQI), the first model-free agent proven to be asymptotically $\varepsilon$-optimal in general RL. AIQI performs universal induction over distributional action-value functions, instead of policies or environments like previous works. Under a grain of truth condition, we prove that AIQI is strong asymptotically $\varepsilon$-optimal and asymptotically $\varepsilon$-Bayes-optimal. We also apply our novel proof techniques to show asymptotic $\varepsilon$-optimality of Self-AIXI without any ad-hoc assumptions. Our results significantly expand the diversity of known universal agents.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting

Object counting models often degrade under cross-domain deployment because density composition varies across domains and is itself task-relevant. Standard feature alignment methods tend to suppress such variation by encouraging global domain invariance, which can be harmful when source and target domains contain different proportions of background, sparse foreground, and dense foreground. We propose Conditional Feature Alignment (CFA), a cross-domain counting framework that aligns representations within label-induced conditions rather than across full marginal feature distributions. Given density annotations or pseudo-density predictions, CFA constructs foreground/background or density-level conditions and aligns only features belonging to matching conditions. We formalise this idea through a conditional divergence perspective, showing that conditional alignment removes within-condition discrepancy while preserving condition-marginal density shift. For unsupervised domain adaptation, CFA estimates source conditions from annotations and target conditions from detached pseudo-density maps, then performs condition-wise adversarial alignment with full-image consistency regularisation. For source-domain generalisation, we instantiate the same principle with MPCount by enforcing condition-wise memory-consistency between generated source-domain views. Experiments on crowd and cell counting benchmarks show competitive or improved performance across diverse UDA and DG settings. For example, on JHU-CROWD++ FH$\rightarrow$SN, CFA-DG reduces MAE/RMSE from MPCount's 216.3/421.4 to 90.5/169.9, indicating that condition-wise alignment is especially effective under large weather- and density-induced shifts. These results suggest that condition-wise alignment is a promising design principle for domain-adaptive counting.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Intermediate State Formation of Topologically Associated Chromatin Domains using Quantum Annealing

arXiv:2505.23289v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topologically Associating Chromatin Domains are spatially distinct chromatin regions that regulate transcription by segregating active and inactive genomic elements. Empirical studies show that their formation correlates with local patterns of epigenetic markers, yet the precise mechanisms linking 1D epigenetic landscapes to 3D chromatin folding remain unclear. Recent models represent chromatin as a spin system, where nucleosomes are treated as discrete-state variables coupled by interaction strengths derived from genomic and epigenetic data. Classical samplers struggle with these models due to high frustration and dense couplings. Here, we present a quantum annealing (QA) approach to efficiently sample chromatin states, embedding an epigenetic Ising model into the topology of D-Wave quantum processors. Rather than reconstructing exact TAD size distributions or insulation scores, our method reproduces statistical features, such as mean marker incidences and intra-/inter-nucleosome correlations, while generating configurations that exhibit TAD-like structural motifs. These results demonstrate QA as an alternative to explore the chromatin architecture and provide a foundation in epigenetic modeling.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

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

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

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

From Bounding Boxes to Visual Reasoning: An On-Policy Data Annotation Tool for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly advancing toward sophisticated grounded structured visual reasoning. Training models for such advanced capabilities demands a new genre of data that seamlessly unifies spatial coordinates, open-vocabulary descriptions, structured attributes, and topological relationships into a singular representation. However, existing data annotation tools fundamentally fail to meet these intricate demands, suffering from three systematic bottlenecks: limited expressiveness, severe annotation-training decoupling, and poor data reusability. To bridge this infrastructure gap, we introduce an open-source annotation tool, ScreenAnnotator. First, we define a unified annotation atom schema that binds spatial, semantic, and structural primitives into a single unit. Second, we implement an on-policy annotation loop embedded with a Bayesian Annotation Verifier (BAV). Finally, we design a template-driven multi-task data synthesis process dynamically transforms static atoms into diverse multi-dimensional reasoning tasks, eliminating redundant re-annotation. The on-policy loop drives the annotation accept rate to nearly 100% on flowcharts and 77% on GUI screenshots, while steadily reducing per-image annotation time as labeled data accumulate. In the flowchart scenario, fine-tuning a VLM yields 76.1% average accuracy, which is a 35.1% point absolute gain. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WnQinm/Annotator.

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

Chroma-gated, differentiable OKLCH interpolation: Continuous Oklab fallback for color-cast reduction

OKLCH – the cylindrical (lightness, chroma, hue) form of Ottosson's Oklab color space – is the interpolation space recommended by CSS Color 4 for gradients and color-mix(), and it is now broadly deployed. Its polar parameterization, however, casts color near the neutral axis in two ways: (1) an inter-hue detour between two chromatic endpoints that sweeps through an unintended hue (blue to yellow visibly passing through green), and (2) an off-line bow when one endpoint is achromatic. Existing remedies are uniformly two-valued – a threshold switch that fires only at an achromatic endpoint – so they address only (2); on chromatic pairs every one of them reduces to raw OKLCH, leaving the (1) inter-hue cast untreated. We introduce Continuous Oklab fallback (COFb), a one-parameter, differentiable chroma gate $w(C)=C^n/(C^n+\sigma^n)$ that continuously blends the OKLCH path toward the linear Oklab path as chroma falls. A single gate reduces the (1) cast that the two-valued family leaves untreated and unifies the handling of (1) and (2) without any endpoint test. We characterize a cast-hue trade-off frontier, adopt a default ($n=1$, the rational Michaelis-Menten form; $\sigma\approx0.19$ for a typical sRGB palette, from a normalization-independent cast-half criterion), and verify the gate's properties symbolically. At the default, COFb halves the inter-hue path detour (mean lateral deviation -49.5%, chroma-weighted hue excursion -35.5%). We also state the method's limits: on (2) alone the two-valued switch remains better, and like any Cartesian blend COFb does not preserve chroma. In deployment, COFb runs entirely in plain Oklab (a,b) to sRGB, so it serves as a fallback that delivers the same cast-reduced gradients where modern CSS color interpolation (color-mix(in oklch) and the like) is unavailable – older engines, image and video pipelines, or GPU shaders.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Spatial Priors via Space Filling Curves for Small and Limited Data Vision Transformers

Though Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become the dominant backbone in many computer vision tasks, due to permutation equivariance, their attention mechanism lacks explicit spatial inductive biases. This become particularly important in two settings: when model capacity is small or training data is limited. Inspired by the attention masking strategies in Linear Transformers and the scanning patterns of Vision SSMs, we introduce VIOLIN, a lightweight masked attention mechanism that encodes spatial structure within attention via Space Filling Curves (SFCs) with less than 0.0015% extra parameters and negligible computational overhead. VIOLIN scans the image using multiple SFCs to construct curve-specific decay masks, which are then combined and multiplied with the attention matrix. Across a wide range of evaluations, VIOLIN consistently improves performance. In limited data regimes such as fine-tuning on VTAB-1K, it boosts accuracy across all task groups and by up to 8.7% on the tasks where spatial information is essential. It can be combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA to further increase the performance. Beyond fine-tuning, VIOLIN improves various small scale ViT architectures (e.g., DeiT, DINO) during pretraining on ImageNet-1K. Additionally, on pixel-level CIFAR-100 training, a task that is highly dependent on location information, VIOLIN increases accuracy by up to 7.2%. Overall, VIOLIN provides a computationally efficient yet effective way to inject spatial inductive bias into ViTs, especially benefiting small models and limited data settings.

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

SirenFNO: Efficient and Full Frequency Learning of Fourier Neural Operators

arXiv:2606.11518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fourier neural operators (FNOs) are effective and efficient surrogates for approximating solutions of PDEs and generalize across discretizations. However, owing to the reliance on frequency truncation to maintain learning efficiency of FNOs, empirical studies suggest that FNOs exhibit spectral bias toward low-frequency information, which may hinder the learning capability especially for certain PDEs with strong high-frequency oscillations. To address this limitation, we propose SirenFNO, a novel framework that leverages sinusoidal representation networks (SIRENs) to learn implicit neural representations and performs mode-wise kernel parameterization. Our SIREN parameterization learns a full-grid spectrum with a constant and discretization-independent parameter count, thereby eliminating the need for frequency truncation. We further extend SirenFNO with functional tensor decompositions to enhance parameter and learning efficiency. Empirical results show that our SirenFNO consistently outperforms FNO with approximately $4$ to $15$ times parameter reductions with preserved discretization invariance, and our functional decomposition variants obtain performance improvements with a maximum of $73$ times fewer parameters across multiple PDE benchmarks.

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

Investigating Inductive Biases for Machine Learning Emulation of Sudden Stratospheric Warmings in Idealised Isca Simulations

arXiv:2606.18857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning emulators are increasingly used for weather prediction and have the potential to extend skill on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales by learning dynamically important sources of predictability. A key challenge is whether the models can exploit predictability anchors, such as stratospheric variability, that influence tropospheric circulation beyond short lead times. We test how architectural inductive bias affects emulation of sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) dynamics using paired idealised Isca simulations that differ only in an imposed wave-2 heating perturbation. Across convolutional, transformer, and graph-based architectures trained for one-step prediction, model differences are modest when the stratosphere is dynamically quiet but widen substantially when SSW-like variability is active. Our results identify explicit three-dimensional vertical coupling as a key inductive bias for machine-learning emulation of stratospheric dynamics. However, Eliassen-Palm flux diagnostics show that low forecast error does not guarantee physically faithful wave-mean-flow interaction, with coherent errors remaining in stratospheric wave-driving structure.

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

PermaVid: Consistent Video Generation Across Edits via Disentangled Context Memory

Consistent video generation under editing operations requires persistence: when edits modify scene appearance or layout, subsequent generations should remain coherent across time and viewpoints. However, existing memory designs struggle to maintain long-term consistency after such modifications, as stored contexts may become outdated or invalid. To address this, we propose PermaVid, a novel framework built upon a multi-modal context memory that disentangles spatial context into semantic appearance and geometric structure, together with an edit-aware memory update and retrieval strategy that keeps memory evolution aligned with subsequent observations. Specifically, we develop two complementary memory banks: an RGB context memory that captures appearance-aware observations while implicitly encoding geometry, and a depth context memory that preserves geometry-only structure disentangled from semantics. Building on this design, we introduce a memory-guided video generation model that performs multi-modal feature fusion under reference conditions drawn from mixed-modality memory contexts. Experiments demonstrate that our method maintains strong long-term semantic and structural consistency after edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

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

K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model

Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical decision-making, yet existing models remain fragmented. They are usually trained on single knowledge sources and specific to individual tasks, modalities, or organs. This fragmentation contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where experts seamlessly integrate diverse knowledge: anatomical priors from training, exemplar-based reasoning from reference cases, and iterative refinement through real-time interaction. We present $K-Prism$, a unified segmentation framework that mirrors this clinical flexibility by systematically integrating three knowledge paradigms: (i) $semantic priors$ learned from annotated datasets, (ii) $in-context knowledge$ from few-shot reference examples, and (iii) $interactive feedback$ from user inputs like clicks or scribbles. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous knowledge sources can be encoded into a dual-prompt representation: 1-D sparse prompts defining $what$ to segment and 2-D dense prompts indicating $where$ to attend, which are then dynamically routed through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder. This design enables flexible switching between paradigms and joint training across diverse tasks without architectural modifications. Comprehensive experiments on 18 public datasets spanning diverse modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray, pathology, ultrasound, etc.) demonstrate that K-Prism achieves state-of-the-art performance across semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation settings.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Planted-Solution Pauli Hamiltonians as a Quantum Benchmarking Primitive

arXiv:2606.11455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a construction of Pauli Hamiltonians with exactly known ground-state energies, intended as reference instances for ground-state energy estimation algorithms. The construction embeds a planted block-product state as the simultaneous ground state of a sum of frustration-free local clauses on overlapping supports, exposes the resulting model only as a polynomial-size linear combination of Pauli operators, and admits optional Clifford conjugation that preserves the spectrum. The framework subsumes classical planted constraint-satisfaction problems as a diagonal special case, providing a direct embedding channel through which classical hardness properties can be inherited. Open-source software, certification keys, and example instances are made publicly available.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Distribution Postulate in Algorithmic Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2606.16165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In order to make the right empirical predictions Bohmian mechanics requires a special statistical boundary condition – the distribution postulate – but it is unclear how best to understand this condition. We show how one might use the theory of algorithmic randomness to formulate the distribution postulate as an objective constraining law. The framework requires us to say something about admissible quantum-mechanical states and measurements. In return, algorithmic Bohmian mechanics (aBM) guarantees the standard Born statistics for a collection of canonical quantum experiments in the limit, not just with high probability. The algorithmic distribution postulate provides a sharp typicality condition, clarifies the status of quantum probabilities in the deterministic theory, and provides a concrete example of how notions provided by the theory of algorithmic randomness can aid in specifying the content of a physical law.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception. Understanding the causes of these failures remains challenging as existing benchmarks report performance gaps without probing underlying mechanisms. To address this, we introduce a benchmark with 1,657 questions across three foundational tasks designed specifically for mechanistic analysis. Examining model outputs across varying input settings (behavioral analysis) reveals that models often under-utilize audio when textual cues are available. We also provide the first causal mechanistic analysis of temporal reasoning failures in LALMs. Comparing attention upweighting against scaling, we find that redistributing attention across audio tokens is more effective than increasing audio attention. Targeting task-relevant tokens yields further gains. These findings suggest that modality imbalance alone cannot explain failures. Attention scaling at bottleneck layers improves accuracy from 55.9% to 59.1% without fine-tuning, demonstrating a promising direction for future work.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Anatomy of Post-Training: Using Interpretability to Characterize Data and Shape the Learning Signal

arXiv:2606.12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy. To address this problem, we ask: can we inspect a preference dataset before optimization and decide, at the level of concepts, which behaviors a model should be allowed to learn? Motivated by this, we introduce a data-centric post-training pipeline that uses interpretability protocols to develop statistical hypotheses for the latent concepts separating preferred from dispreferred generations, making them explicit for fine-grained user feedback. Building on this view, we unify several interpretability-based training protocols as ways of shaping rewards via feature or data interventions. Empirically, we show that our pipeline diagnoses undesirable signals in existing preference data, mitigates off-target learning, and can also help amplify or shape desired properties such as safeguards and model personality. More broadly, our results suggest that interpretability can turn post-training from optimizing opaque proxy rewards into a process of auditing and sculpting the learning signal itself.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

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

Heteroskedastic Signals in Budgeted LLM Verification: Structural Heterogeneity Limits Optimization Gains

作者:

arXiv:2606.15841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly use uncertainty signals to allocate limited computation across verification, test-time scaling, tool execution, and other selective-compute decisions. Such policies rely on a global signal comparability assumption: equal scores should carry comparable decision value across inputs. Using budgeted verification as a controlled diagnostic setting, we identify a failure mode of this assumption: uncertainty quality is heteroskedastic across cost strata, with some regions exhibiting near-random discriminability despite concentrating many errors. Under an explicit local model, we characterize the resulting distortion of global allocation and show that its upper bound scales with cross-stratum signal-quality dispersion. We separate weak signals, optimization instability, and structural heterogeneity through a controlled intervention hierarchy: Threshold, MP-Adapt, MP-Strat, and a deliberately simple cost-stratified thresholding intervention (CST). Across MBPP and MATH using Qwen3-8B, LLaMA3-8B, and GPT-4o-mini, global online adaptation yields inconsistent gains over static thresholding; MP-Strat partially recovers performance, while CST improves hit rate by up to 17 percentage points in strongly heterogeneous settings without gradient updates. These results identify structural heterogeneity, rather than optimizer weakness alone, as the primary bottleneck in the observed settings. More broadly, misaligned feedback structure cannot always be repaired by stronger optimization.

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

FLaRA: Predicting Future Latent Representations for Accident Anticipation

Anticipating traffic accidents from dashcam videos is a critical challenge in intelligent transportation systems. Existing methods typically map visual context directly to a collision probability without explicitly modeling the future evolution of the driving scene. In this paper we propose FLaRA (Predicting Future Latent Representations for Accident Anticipation), a novel predictive architecture that shifts this paradigm by forecasting future latent representations for accident anticipation. Building upon the Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA2), our model conditions a predictor network on observed context frames to predict the forthcoming latent features of the scene. A classifier then operates on these predicted future representations rather than only on past observations. To ensure these forecasts remain grounded in realistic future dynamics, we introduce a joint training objective that simultaneously optimizes an auxiliary feature-level reconstruction loss and a cross-entropy classification loss. Extensive evaluations on the Nexar dataset, alongside cross-domain validations on the DAD, DADA-2000, and DoTA benchmarks, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining realistic early warning capabilities.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

FLiP: Towards understanding and interpreting multimodal multilingual sentence embeddings

This paper presents factorized linear projection (FLiP) models for understanding pretrained sentence embedding spaces. We train FLiP models to recover the lexical content from multilingual (LaBSE), multimodal (SONAR) and API-based (Gemini) sentence embedding spaces in several high- and mid-resource languages. We show that FLiP can recall more than 75% of lexical content from the embeddings, significantly outperforming existing non-factorized baselines. Using this as a diagnostic tool, we uncover the modality and language biases across the selected sentence encoders and provide practitioners with intrinsic insights about the encoders without relying on conventional downstream evaluation tasks. Our implementation is public https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/FLiP.