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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Epidemiology of Cervical Precancerous Lesions: Prevalence and Predictors from Pap Smear Screening in Hawassa City Hospitals, Sidama Region, Ethiopia. Institutional-Based Cross-sectional Study

Background: Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide and remains a major public health challenge. In Ethiopia, it is the second leading cause of cancer deaths, with around 8,000 new cases and 6,000 deaths each year. Region?specific data on the prevalence and predictors of precancerous lesions remain scarce, yet such information is vital for guiding targeted reproductive health strategies. This study therefore examined the prevalence and predictors of cervical precancerous lesions among women aged 21-60 years undergoing Pap smear screening in public hospitals in Hawassa City, Sidama Region. Methods: An institution-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 241 women attending Pap smear screening at public hospitals in Hawassa City from March to August 2025. Sociodemographic and clinical data were collected via interviews and medical records. Lesions were classified based on the standardized international framework for reporting cervical cytology results from Pap smears per the Bethesda system. Multivariable logistic regression identified predictors p

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Schützen: Evaluating LLM Safety in Bulgarian and German Contexts

Large language models are increasingly deployed across professional domains, bringing hard-to-predict risks, including the generation of harmful or disrespectful content. Although substantial progress has been made in developing safety evaluation datasets, existing resources remain overwhelmingly English- and Chinese-centric. This limitation is particularly pronounced when evaluating languages that operate within shared sociocultural, legal, and ethical contexts. To address this gap, we introduce Sch\"{u}tzen: a German–Bulgarian safety dataset designed to assess model answerability under risk, covering both a low-resource language (Bulgarian) and a high-resource language (German). Experiments with multilingual and language-specific LLMs reveal pronounced cross-language differences in safety behavior, highlighting the necessity of tailored, region-specific evaluation resources to support the responsible deployment of LLMs in Germany and Bulgaria. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/xnlp-lab/Schutzen. Warning: this paper contains examples that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Learning Task-Aware Sampling with Shared Saliency through Density-Equalizing Mappings

In image and surface-based learning tasks, convolutional features are typically extracted using receptive fields that are sampled uniformly across the entire domain. However, informative structures are rarely distributed uniformly in practice and are often concentrated in localized regions. Such phenomena are particularly common in medical imaging, where pathological changes are spatially confined. Consequently, uniform convolution allocates equal computational effort to both informative and uninformative regions, resulting in inefficient feature extraction and suboptimal utilization of model capacity. To address this issue, we propose a framework for task-adaptive sampling that dynamically redistributes computational attention according to the spatial importance of the data. Specifically, we introduce the Density-Equalizing Convolutional Neural Network (DECNN), which employs density-equalizing mappings to guide convolution through a learned density function. The density function encodes the relative importance of different regions and induces a transformation that enlarges informative areas while compressing less relevant ones. As a result, convolutional receptive fields are redistributed non-uniformly over the domain, enabling denser sampling in task-relevant regions. By coupling this importance-driven transformation with convolution, DECNN performs adaptive feature extraction that focuses computational resources on informative structures. This leads to more efficient use of model capacity, yielding a lightweight yet expressive architecture while simultaneously producing an interpretable saliency map. Experiments on image classification and craniofacial surface analysis demonstrate that DECNN achieves competitive or superior performance with fewer parameters, accurately identifies task-relevant regions, and remains robust under complex geometric variations.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Layerwise Terminal Discrepancy in Chen's Reverse-Heat Coupling on the Boolean Cube

arXiv:2606.04573v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recently, Chen [Chen2026] proved that Talagrand's Boolean convolution conjecture holds up to the dimension-free factor \((\log\log\eta)^{3/2}\), namely for every fixed \(\tau>0\), \[ \mu\{P_\tau f>\eta\|f\|_1\} \le C_\tau \frac{(\log\log\eta)^{3/2}}{\eta\sqrt{\log\eta}}, \qquad \eta>e^3. \] We revisit the terminal testing-discrepancy step in Chen's perturbed reverse-heat coupling. Chen estimates this discrepancy globally in terms of the remaining gap to the terminal level. We keep the same coupling and the same reverse-heat formulations, but localize the terminal discrepancy on each remaining-gap layer before summing the layers. This changes the fixed-time anti-concentration cost from order \((\log L)^{3/2}/\sqrt L\) to order \((\log L)/\sqrt L\), where \(L=\log\eta\). Consequently, we obtain a \((\log\log\eta)^{1/2}\) improvement as \[ \mu\{P_\tau f>\eta\|f\|_1\} \le C_\tau \frac{\log\log\eta}{\eta\sqrt{\log\eta}}, \qquad \eta>e^3. \]

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Denoising Score Matching with Random Features: Insights on Diffusion Models from Precise Learning Curves

arXiv:2502.00336v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We theoretically investigate the phenomena of generalization and memorization in diffusion models. Empirical studies suggest that these phenomena are influenced by model complexity and the size of the training dataset. In our experiments, we further observe that the number of noise samples per data sample ($m$) used during Denoising Score Matching (DSM) plays a significant and non-trivial role. We capture these behaviors and shed insights into their mechanisms by deriving asymptotically precise expressions for test and train errors of DSM under a simple theoretical setting. The score function is parameterized by random features neural networks, with the target distribution being $d$-dimensional Gaussian. We operate in a regime where the dimension $d$, number of data samples $n$, and number of features $p$ tend to infinity while keeping the ratios $\psi_n=\frac{n}{d}$ and $\psi_p=\frac{p}{d}$ fixed. By characterizing the test and train errors, we identify regimes of generalization and memorization as a function of $\psi_n,\psi_p$, and $m$. Our theoretical findings are consistent with the empirical observations.

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

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent work has demonstrated that diffusion language models are well suited for this setting, as they can generate entire blocks of draft tokens in parallel and thereby alleviate the sequential constraints of autoregressive drafting. A subtlety of this regime is that block-diffusion drafters generate tokens bidirectionally within a block, whereas verification is performed by an autoregressive target model that evaluates tokens in a strictly left-to-right manner, leaving a gap between the symmetric training-time objective and the asymmetric verification-time reward. In this work, we offer an empirical analysis of three training-time interventions that narrow this gap: token positional weighting, a first-error focal loss that targets the position that breaks the accepted prefix within each block, and a chain loss term that substitutes a differentiable surrogate for the expected accepted length. The three interventions act along orthogonal axes (position, block-conditional first error, joint prefix) and compose additively; they are likewise orthogonal to test-time alignment mechanisms such as multi-draft self-selection, with which they can in principle be combined. Across four target models and six reasoning, code, and dialogue benchmarks, the three interventions raise accepted draft length by 21-76% per benchmark over a position-uniform baseline, without adding additional forward passes and without changing the inference pipeline or the rejection-sampling exactness contract.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Reversal Q-Learning

arXiv:2606.17551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative generative modeling techniques, such as flow matching, provide powerful tools to model complex behaviors for effective offline reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we propose a new off-policy RL algorithm that trains a flow policy based on prior data. Our idea starts from the "expanded" Markov decision process (MDP) framework, which treats individual flow refinement steps as separate actions in an MDP. To enable off-policy RL within this framework, we apply two techniques: we generate virtual on-policy trajectories (by "reversing" flows) to make this framework compatible with prior data, and we apply a bias-and-variance reduction technique to mitigate the curse of horizon in off-policy RL. We call the resulting algorithm Reversal Q-learning (RQL). RQL has several advantages over previous flow-based RL methods: it does not suffer from backpropagation through time, makes better use of the learned value function, and directly trains the full, expressive flow policy. Through our experiments on 50 challenging simulated robotic tasks, we show that RQL leads to the best average offline RL performance compared to state-of-the-art flow-based offline RL algorithms.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ExpRL: Exploratory RL for LLM Mid-Training

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

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpretable and Verifiable Hardware Generation with LLM-Driven Stepwise Refinement

arXiv:2606.19387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in software development. However, they are susceptible to hallucinations, meaning that they can introduce subtle semantic and logical errors. Due to the high stakes in chip design and manufacturing, hardware engineers are still reluctant to rely on LLMs for register-transfer level (RTL) generation. In this paper, we propose a hardware generation framework that combines the creativity and broad knowledge of LLMs with the explainability and mathematical rigor of formal methods. Specifically, we devise a set of transformation rules that cover various design decisions and hardware features. By iteratively applying these rules, an LLM agent can convert a design specification into an RTL program with guaranteed correctness. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GAE: Unleashing Physical Potential of VLM with Generalizable Action Expert

Vision-language models demonstrate strong reasoning and planning abilities, yet grounding these predictions into precise robot actions remains a central challenge. Existing Vision-Language-Action methods typically entangle reasoning and action generation, leading to limited generalization. We propose Generalizable Action Expert (GAE), a task-agnostic model that converts sparse geometric plans into dense robot actions. Our approach introduces a sparse geometric interface: the VLM predicts sparse 3D waypoints representing high-level intention, while GAE maps these waypoints together with real-time point cloud observations to continuous action trajectories. GAE is pretrained on a large-scale pointcloud-trajectory dataset comprising 150k trajectories from both simulation and real-world robots. To further improve efficiency and generalization, we introduce an Action Pre-training, Pointcloud Fine-tuning (APPF) scheme that decouples learning action dynamics from geometry grounding. After pretraining, GAE is frozen and reused across downstream tasks, requiring only lightweight fine-tuning of the VLM to produce the sparse interface. Experiments show that our method achieves strong performance and generalization across diverse visual domains, camera viewpoints, and natural language instructions.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests for replacing or expanding laboratory testing in Ethiopia

Background: In low- and middle-income countries, laboratory testing to rapidly detect measles outbreaks is limited by infrastructure availability and high costs. This study estimates the potential impact and cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) if implemented nationally in Ethiopia to either replace or expand current testing. Methods: An agent-based model to simulate measles outbreaks was calibrated to Ethiopian measles surveillance data. Modelled outbreak outcomes were aggregated over a 10-year period. Scenarios included using RDTs to (1) replace laboratory testing; (2) replace epidemiological linkage; and (3) increase case detection, in addition to replacing laboratory testing and epidemiological linkage. Testing and outbreak response costs (in 2025 US$) were obtained from Ethiopian Public Health Institute from a government perspective. Total costs and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for each scenario were compared to baseline. Results: All scenarios were cost saving compared to baseline. Replacing laboratory testing with RDTs saved US$4.2M (3.2M-4.9M) over 10-years, but due to very low testing rates the benefits of eliminating laboratory testing delays were offset by missed cases from the lower RDT sensitivity, leading to similar outbreak detection times and DALYs. Replacing epidemiological linkage with RDTs had similar DALYs but increased the cost savings to US$9.7M. Using RDTs to double case detection reduced outbreak detection time from 113 to 80 days, averted 17,000 DALYs, and saved US$4.3M. Conclusions: In Ethiopia, use of measles RDTs could be cost saving, and if used to expand testing could prevent measles infections through faster outbreak detection and response.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

In-Context Environments Induce Evaluation-Awareness in Language Models

Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent evaluation awareness. This raises concerns that models could strategically underperform, or sandbag, to avoid triggering capability-limiting interventions such as unlearning or shutdown. Prior work demonstrates sandbagging under hand-crafted prompts, but this underestimates the true vulnerability ceiling. We introduce a black-box adversarial optimization framework treating the in-context prompt as an optimizable environment, and develop two approaches to characterize sandbagging: (1) measuring whether models expressing intent to underperform can actually execute it across different task structures, and (2) causally isolating whether underperformance is driven by genuine evaluation-aware reasoning or shallow prompt-following. Evaluating Claude-3.5-Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.3-70B across four benchmarks (Arithmetic, GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval), optimized prompts induce up to 94 percentage point (pp) degradation on arithmetic (GPT-4o-mini: 97.8\%$\rightarrow$4.0\%), far exceeding hand-crafted baselines which produce near-zero behavioral change. Code generation exhibits model-dependent resistance: Claude degrades only 0.6pp, while Llama's accuracy drops to 0\%. The intent – execution gap reveals a monotonic resistance ordering: Arithmetic $

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Token to Fool LLM-as-a-Judge

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted as automated judges, assisting evaluation and providing reward signals for training other models, particularly in reference-based settings like Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, we uncover a critical vulnerability even in this reference-based paradigm: generative reward models are systematically susceptible to reward hacking. We find that superficial inputs, which we term ''master keys'' such as non-word symbols (e.g., '':'' or ''.'') or generic reasoning openers (e.g., ''Thought process:'' or ''Let's solve this problem step by step.''), can consistently elicit false positive rewards without any substantive reasoning. Our systematic evaluation demonstrates this is a widespread failure affecting a diverse range of models, including leading proprietary systems such as GPT-o1 and Claude-4. These results challenge the assumed robustness of LLM judges and pose a significant threat to their reliability. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy using truncated model outputs as adversarial negative examples. The resulting Master Reward Models (Master-RMs) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness against these ''master key'' attacks while maintaining high performance in standard evaluation settings. We supplement these findings with a comprehensive analysis of the vulnerability across model scales, prompt variations, and common inference-time strategies, offering insights to guide future research on robust LLM evaluation. We release our robust, general-domain reward models and the synthetic training data at https://huggingface.co/sarosavo/Master-RM and https://huggingface.co/datasets/sarosavo/Master-RM.

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

Finite Resources False Discovery Rate Control in Structured Hypothesis Spaces

arXiv:2606.15393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific discovery relies on large-scale hypothesis testing. However, the capacity to identify true discoveries while controlling false discovery faces major challenges: obtaining relevant reference data (the null distribution) is resource-intensive, leaving finite-data uncertainty, and the procedure should account for the inherent structure in the hypothesis space, when such structure exists. Here, we present a framework for controlling the false discovery rate both when each hypothesis is evidenced only by a finite count of null draws, leaving its p-value uncertain, and when the hypothesis space carries arbitrary structure, requiring only that the structure be represented through a suitable reproducing kernel. We present two decision rules that are both robust to structural mis-specification, yet offer a distinct trade-off between exact FDR control and statistical power. The first rule guarantees exact FDR control; the second maximizes power by adapting mirror-statistic control into count space, utilizing an analytical framework to assess FDR control when exact mirror symmetry is relaxed. Furthermore, the tractability gained by the RKHS framework allows us to directly investigate finite-data uncertainties, which we leverage to suggest a policy for the efficient allocation of null distribution samples.

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

Latent space mapping of interpretable structural coordinates from stochastic single-molecule signals

arXiv:2606.16950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nanopores are versatile single-molecular sensors, but their utility is fundamentally constrained by stochastic translocation dynamics warping any encoded information. We resolve it by shifting from time-domain analysis to a learned latent-space mapping via a contrastive encoder trained exclusively on simulated signals from a physics-informed model. This encoder maps solid-state nanopore signals of engineered DNA barcodes into an interpretable molecular coordinate system. The learned representation is responsive to structural barcode parameters while remaining invariant to acquisition conditions and translocation conformation, allowing data pooling across devices. Molecule identification requires a single pass through the encoder, reducing computational cost by three orders of magnitude relative to alignment-based methods. We experimentally validate through mixture quantification, rare-variant detection, consensus barcode reconstruction, and real-time signal acquisition. This shift from temporal analysis to mapping structural coordinates into a latent space changes the paradigm behind analyzing stochastic sensor signals by linking classification to interpretable encoded molecular information.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Body composition subphenotypes, cardiometabolic risk and incident outcomes: validation in the population-based NAKO and UK Biobank imaging cohorts

Background Anthropometric measures do not adequately capture heterogeneity in body fat distribution and corresponding cardiometabolic risk, whereas magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables precise differentiation and quantification of adipose tissue compartments and ectopic fat. We aimed to validate previously derived MRI-based body composition subphenotypes and their cardiometabolic risk profiles in two independent European cohorts. Methods Using deep learning-based image analysis, we quantified bone marrow, visceral, subcutaneous, cardiac, renal sinus, hepatic, skeletal muscle, and pancreatic fat in the imaging substudies of two population-based cohorts: the German National Cohort (NAKO, N=29,314, age range 19-74 years) and the UK Biobank (N=36,109, age range 40-69 years). Body composition subphenotypes, previously identified by k-means clustering, were evaluated using a rigorous statistical cluster validation framework with method-based and results-based approaches. In NAKO, cross-sectional associations between subphenotypes and estimated cardiovascular disease risk scores were examined using linear regression. In UK Biobank, longitudinal associations between subphenotypes and incident cardiometabolic outcomes, ascertained through hospital record linkage, were analysed using Cox regression. Findings All five body composition subphenotypes were robustly validated across both cohorts, and showed distinct fat distribution patterns and cardiometabolic risk profiles: I "lean", II "average adiposity", III "bone and muscle adiposity", IV "hepato-abdominal adiposity", and V "general and pancreatic adiposity". Subphenotypes I-III showed progressive adipose tissue remodelling patterns likely reflecting ageing trajectories. The "hepato-abdominal adiposity" subphenotype showed highest risk of incident diabetes, whereas the "general and pancreatic adiposity" subphenotype showed highest overall cardiovascular disease burden and metabolic impairment. Interpretation MRI-derived body composition subphenotypes represent distinct fat distribution patterns that reflect ageing- and disease-related processes, which supports the potential of body composition phenotyping for improved cardiometabolic risk stratification and targeted prevention.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Orbital-optimized spin-adapted multistate contracted VQE for excited states and properties on quantum hardware

arXiv:2606.15489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the orbital-optimized multistate contracted variational quantum eigensolver (oo-MC-VQE) method with spin-adapted operators for the computation of ground and excited states, as well as state-specific and transition properties. The use of spin-adapted operators ensures that the spin symmetry of the reference states is conserved throughout the VQE optimization. In multistate variational approaches, achieving a balanced description of an increasing number of electronic states places growing demands on the expressibility of the underlying ansatz, thereby introducing a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and circuit complexity. We consider the effects of this trade-off explicitly and find that the number of circuit parameters required to obtain accurate results is reported to scale approximately linearly in the number of states. We further present an explicit quantum-circuit implementation of the oo-MC-VQE method and demonstrate its integration with quantum error mitigation techniques. Finally, we execute the method on real quantum devices to compute absorption spectra for two benchmark molecular systems.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Hormonal Contraceptives Drive Genital Lipid Metabolism Reprogramming and Susceptibility to HIV Infection

Heterosexual genital HIV transmission is a major driver of new infections, particularly in women, making them disproportionately vulnerable to HIV acquisition. Previous studies have associated injectable hormonal contraceptives (HC) with increasing susceptibility to HIV. Yet, the underlying molecular mechanism remains incompletely understood. Given the structural and signaling role of lipids in the female genital tract, cervicovaginal lipidomic profiling has the potential to reveal the mechanistic interplay among HC, lipidome, and HIV susceptibility in the female genital tract. We conducted untargeted cervicovaginal lipidomics study in a cohort of high-risk, HIV-negative, Kenyan sex workers who were using injectable depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA), oral contraceptive pill (OCP), or no hormonal contraception (NH). Genital lipids were quantitatively analyzed using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and bioinformatics platforms. A total of 1045 lipid species were identified in the cervicovaginal lavage samples. Injectable DMPA significantly downregulated major structural and signaling membrane lipids, including phospholipids, ceramides, sphingomyelins, and glycosphingolipids (p

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Unsupervised Diffusion Solver for Combinatorial Optimization via Combinatorial Adjoint Matching

arXiv:2605.30920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based neural solvers have shown strong promise for combinatorial optimization (CO), but existing methods typically rely on supervised training with large collections of near-optimal solutions. In this work, we extend adjoint-based trajectory optimization methods to discrete combinatorial domains. We formulate diffusion-based CO as a stochastic control problem over Continuous-Time Markov Chains and introduce discrete adjoint dynamics for propagating optimization signals through discrete generative trajectories. Building on this formulation, we propose Combinatorial Adjoint Matching (CAM), an unsupervised training framework for discrete diffusion solvers with structured and low-variance trajectory-level optimization signals. Empirically, CAM consistently outperforms existing unsupervised diffusion baselines and achieves performance competitive with strong supervised diffusion solvers and even traditional solvers across diverse combinatorial optimization problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/Shengyu-Feng/CAM.

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

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

arXiv:2604.10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (breadth) against refining promising ones (depth), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear. We argue that the optimal strategy depends on the model's diversity profile, the spread of probability mass across solution approaches, and that this must be characterized before any exploration strategy is adopted. We formalize this with a framework decomposing reasoning uncertainty, deriving when depth-based refinement outperforms parallel sampling, and validate it across three model families at both inference and training. Our central finding is that the diversity regime dictates the strategy: low-diversity aligned models benefit from depth-based refinement with lightweight intrinsic signals, whereas high-diversity base models are often harmed by it, and instead need breadth or stronger signals to compensate.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Emergent Alignment

arXiv:2606.19527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) discern when their own outputs are misaligned with human ethics? And can they self-correct? We endow an LLM with a conscience step that reviews its own reasoning and outputs, and we extend the training loss with an alignment component using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to steer the model away from non-ethical outputs. The result is an online technique to align models in a wide range of applications: training, fine-tuning, adversarial prompting, and zero-shot learning. It does not require a weaker or stronger judge, relying instead on a frozen copy of itself. In previous work, the Emergent Misalignment scenario showed a range of emergent unethical behaviors from fine-tuning the model to hack code. Instead, we empirically show how to achieve Emergent Alignment: a single high-level introspective question steers training toward an ethical model under the same code hacking scenario.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Implicit Semantic-Aware Communication Based on Hypergraph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.20162v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semantic-aware communication has emerged as a transformative paradigm for next-generation communication systems, shifting the fundamental goal from transmitting bit-level symbols to reliably recovering and understanding the semantic meaning of information. Previous studies have demonstrated that representing the semantic content of source messages as graph-based structures can significantly improve communication efficiency and the accuracy of semantic inference at the receiver. However, existing solutions typically employ graphs that capture only pairwise relationships, thereby neglecting higher-order implicit correlations commonly observed in real-world scenarios, such as group interactions, multi-entity associations, and complex relational contexts. This limitation reduces semantic expressiveness and makes semantic inference susceptible to ambiguity and performance degradation, particularly under noisy or corrupted channel conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel hypergraph-based implicit semantic reasoning framework, HISR, which leverages hypergraphs to represent complex multi-entity relationships among semantic knowledge entities. In HISR, entities and their associated higher-order relations are mapped into dedicated semantic subspaces tailored to distinct relational contexts. This design not only disentangles diverse semantic interactions to mitigate the over-smoothing effects commonly found in traditional graph embedding methods but also enables robust semantic inference even when partial information loss occurs during transmission. Numerical results show that the proposed HISR achieves up to a 36.6% improvement in implicit semantic interpretation accuracy over the state-of-the-art benchmarks.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Compositional Skill Routing for LLM Agents: Decompose, Retrieve, and Compose

作者:

LLM agents increasingly rely on external skills – reusable tool specifications – but real-world tasks often require composing multiple skills, not just selecting one. We formalize this as the Compositional Skill Routing problem: given a complex user query and a large skill library, decompose the query into atomic sub-tasks, retrieve the appropriate skill for each sub-task, and compose an executable plan. We present SkillWeaver, a decompose-retrieve-compose framework combining an LLM task decomposer, a bi-encoder skill retriever with FAISS indexing, and a dependency-aware DAG planner. To support evaluation, we introduce CompSkillBench, a benchmark of 300 compositional queries over 2,209 real MCP server skills spanning 24 functional categories, sourced from the public MCP ecosystem. Our experiments reveal that task decomposition quality is the primary bottleneck: standard LLM decomposition reaches only 34.2% category recall at the step level. To address this, we propose Iterative Skill-Aware Decomposition (SAD), a retrieval-augmented feedback loop that iteratively aligns decomposition with available skills. SAD improves decomposition accuracy from 51.0% to 67.7% (+32.7%, Wilcoxon p < 10^-6) in a single iteration; DA-conditioned analysis confirms that correct granularity is the prerequisite for effective retrieval (CatR@1 rises from 34% to 41% when DA=1). SkillWeaver reduces context window consumption by over 99%, and transfer experiments confirm generalization (+35.6% relative DA gain even when target categories are absent from the retrieval pool).

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art

Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Constitutional On-Policy Safe Distillation

arXiv:2606.03089v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm by using a teacher conditioned on privileged information to provide dense token-level supervision. Prior work has shown that OPSD can collapse in verifiable reasoning tasks, but safety alignment differs in that it is guided by high-level constitutions rather than explicit target answers, making it a natural setting to revisit dense distillation. However, our pilot study show that safety OPSD still suffers from severe collapse: constitutional conditioning contracts the teacher distribution toward short and overly conservative responses, and Reverse KL further amplifies this contraction into reduced expressiveness. We formalize this effect as geometric leakage under safety boundaries in a non-orthogonal semantic space, where safety pressure transfers into the expressiveness dimension. Based on this analysis, we propose Constitutional On-Policy Safe Distillation (COPSD), which first calibrates the teacher through a Cross-SFT cold-start and then performs constitution-conditioned on-policy distillation. Experiments on 12 benchmarks show that COPSD achieves a consistently stronger safety–helpfulness trade-off than baselines while substantially reducing the safety tax on general reasoning ability.