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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FlowEdit: Associative Memory for Lifelong Pronunciation Adaptation in Flow-Matching TTS

arXiv:2606.20518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching text-to-speech systems achieve remarkable zero-shot quality but remain static after deployment: pronunciation errors on out-of-vocabulary proper nouns persist unless the model is retrained. We introduce FlowEdit, a life-long adaptation framework for frozen flow-matching TTS that learns pronunciation corrections as latent conditioning edits rather than weight updates. When corrective feedback is provided, FlowEdit optimizes a token-level perturbation in the text embedding space, then stores the correction in a Modern Hopfield Network serving as content-addressable episodic memory. At inference, corrections are retrieved via soft attention with a similarity gate, enabling fuzzy morphological matching. On our curated benchmark of 312 multilingual proper nouns across 18 language families, FlowEdit reduces target-word Phoneme Error Rate by 92.7% relative to the zero-shot baseline while maintaining identical general-speech quality. Corrections complete in approximately 15 seconds on a single GPU.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Characterizing Nash Equilibria in Zero-Sum Games: A Physics-Inspired, Parallelizable Approach with a Linear Number of Gradient Queries

arXiv:2507.11366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study online optimization methods for zero-sum games, a fundamental problem in adversarial learning in machine learning, economics, and many other domains. Traditional methods approximate Nash equilibria (NE) using either regret-based methods (time-average convergence) or contraction-map-based methods (last-iterate convergence). We propose a new method based on Hamiltonian dynamics in physics and prove that it can characterize the set of NE in a finite (linear) number of iterations of alternating gradient descent in the unbounded setting, modulo degeneracy, a first in online optimization. Unlike standard methods for computing NE, our proposed approach can be parallelized and works with arbitrary learning rates, both firsts in algorithmic game theory. Experimentally, we support our results by showing our approach drastically outperforms standard methods.

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

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning from Delayed Marketplace Feedback for Objective-Weight Adaptation in Three-Sided Dispatch

arXiv:2606.13604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dispatch in three-sided marketplaces provides a natural setting for reinforcement learning from world feedback: decisions are evaluated by delayed operational outcomes such as delivery speed, courier utilization, and merchant congestion. We present a deployed reinforcement learning system at DoorDash that adapts dispatch objective weights in a large-scale food-delivery marketplace using delayed signals. Rather than replacing the combinatorial assignment optimizer, a store-level policy learned from logged marketplace data selects a discrete multiplier that shifts the dispatch optimizer's tradeoff between delivery quality and batching efficiency. This interface enables offline policy learning under noisy, delayed, and coupled feedback while preserving production feasibility constraints and operational safeguards. We train a shared value function using centralized offline data and decentralized store-level execution, with Double Q-learning targets and a conservative regularizer to reduce out-of-distribution value overestimation. In a production switchback experiment, the offline-trained policy increases batching and reduces courier-side time costs without degrading customer-facing delivery quality. Results illustrate how world feedback from a live economic and logistics system can be used to safely adapt decision policies online.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

AIMER: Calibration-Free Task-Agnostic MoE Expert Pruning

arXiv:2603.18492v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token computation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead. Existing task-agnostic expert-pruning methods are typically calibration-dependent: they estimate expert importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, making pruning decisions sensitive to calibration-data variation while introducing substantial preprocessing cost. We propose AIMER (Absolute mean over root mean square IMportance for Expert Ranking), a simple calibration-free criterion that identifies more distinct experts by capturing the concentration pattern of expert weights, making it well suited for task-agnostic expert pruning. Across 7B to 47B MoE language models with distinct architectures and 16 diverse benchmarks, AIMER consistently delivers stronger capability balance across diverse tasks than existing calibration-free methods. Surprisingly, AIMER also achieves better balance than strong calibration-based expert-pruning baselines calibrated on the widely used task-agnostic C4 corpus, while requiring only 0.22–2.06 seconds to score all experts.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Pfaffian quantum Hall state of ultracold bosons

arXiv:2606.12409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fractional quantum Hall states are a cornerstone of topological physics, hosting fractionally charged quasiparticles with exotic statistics that promise to enable topologically protected quantum information processing. Among these, the Pfaffian state introduced by Moore and Read implements a p-wave pairing structure that supports excitations with non-Abelian exchange statistics. Despite extensive study in electronic systems, direct access to its pairing structure has remained limited. Here we realize a three-particle bosonic Pfaffian state of ultracold $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms in an optical lattice subject to a Floquet-engineered synthetic magnetic field. Using a Bayesian-optimized adiabatic protocol, we prepare a state exhibiting Pfaffian pairing correlations. Site-resolved measurements of multi-point density correlations reveal a pronounced suppression of short-range three-body coincidences, reflecting the underlying pairing structure. We further probe the state's transport response through Hall drift measurements. Our results establish a bottom-up approach to engineering non-Abelian topological order and lay the groundwork for future explorations of anyonic braiding in synthetic matter.

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

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Let's Ask Gauss: Improved One-Run Privacy Auditing

arXiv:2606.12733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privacy auditing provides an important safeguard by estimating the actual information leaked by a model, thus ensuring that theoretical privacy guarantees hold in practice. We study empirical privacy auditing for differentially private (DP) machine learning, focusing on efficient one-run methods for mechanisms such as DP-SGD. Prior one-run approaches threshold training examples or "canaries" into binary membership guesses, which discards useful information. We show that, in the white-box DP-SGD setting, canary-aligned signals naturally form a sequence of random variables whose normalized sum is asymptotically Gaussian. Leveraging this distributional perspective, we develop a DP-auditing framework that leads to tighter privacy lower bounds from a single training run.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SANA: What Matters for QA Agents over Massive Data Lakes?

Exploratory question answering (EQA) over data lakes requires an LLM agent to discover relevant sources, analyze retrieved data, and adapt its actions based on intermediate results. End-to-end accuracy alone cannot distinguish failures in search, planning, data analysis, or the agent's Action Policy: its decisions about what to do next and when to submit an answer. We present SANA (Search Agent Navigation Ablation framework), a diagnostic ablation framework that transforms EQA tasks into runtime profiles containing gold source sequence, sanitized subquestions, and execution records. SANA uses these profiles to construct idealized search, planning, and data-analysis tools, allowing each component to be ablated; the residual gap is diagnostic evidence for policy failures. To illustrate SANA as a reusable evaluation framework, we adapted two recent EQA benchmarks, LakeQA and KramaBench, and evaluated lightweight and mid-sized agents under fixed prompts, budgets, data lakes, and runtimes. Across both benchmarks, data analysis is a consistent bottleneck while planning is less so. Search is a major limitation in LakeQA's large data-lake setting, but less so for the smaller-scale KramaBench. SANA thus deconstructs end-to-end task accuracies into a diagnosis of where data-lake agents fail, and allows for systematic comparisons of progress in search, planning, data analysis, and agent design.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

GENATATORs: ab initio Gene Annotation With DNA Language Models

Inference of gene structure and location from genome sequences - known as de novo gene annotation - is a fundamental task in biological research. However, sequence grammar encoding gene structure is complex and poorly understood, often requiring costly transcriptomic data for accurate gene annotation. In this work, we benchmark current solutions and develop new methods of gene annotation. We show that pretrained DNA language model (DNA LM) embeddings do not capture the features necessary for precise gene segmentation, and that task-specific fine-tuning remains essential. We comprehensively evaluate the impact of model architecture, training strategy, receptive field size, dataset composition, and data augmentations on gene segmentation performance. We revisit standard evaluation protocols, showing that commonly used per-token and per-sequence metrics fail to capture the challenges of real-world gene annotation. We introduce and theoretically justify new biologically grounded metrics, along with benchmarking datasets that better capture annotation quality. We show that fine-tuned DNA LMs outperform existing annotation tools, generalizing across species separated by hundreds of millions of years from those seen during training, and providing segmentation of previously intractable non-coding transcripts and untranslated regions of protein-coding genes. Our results thus provide a foundation for new biological applications centered on accurate gene annotation.

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

Translating the Untranslatable: An Operationalizable Ontology for Untranslatability

Untranslatability, cases where meaning cannot be directly preserved across languages, is well-studied in linguistics but underexplored in NLP. As machine translation (MT) systems improve on standard benchmarks, their limitations increasingly concentrate in such cases, where translation cannot be reduced to one-to-one equivalence. We introduce a structured ontology of untranslatability along with a taxonomy of compensation strategies, which are specific techniques to convey meaning under these untranslatable circumstances. We operationalize this framework into a multilingual dataset of untranslatable sentences paired with strategy-based translations, enabling controlled analysis of translation behavior. Initial human preference studies suggest that translation quality depends on the strategy used, with consistent preferences for outputs that include explanatory context, known as the Annotation compensation strategy. Our framework and dataset provide a foundation for studying and modeling strategy-informed machine translation.

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

Robust and Interpretable Adaptation of Equivariant Materials Foundation Models via Sparsity-promoting Fine-tuning

arXiv:2606.18691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained materials foundation models, or machine learning interatomic potentials, leverage general physicochemical knowledge to effectively approximate potential energy surfaces. However, they often require domain-specific calibration due to physicochemical diversity as well as mismatches between practical computational settings and those used in constructing the pre-training data. To address this, we propose a sparsity-promoting fine-tuning method that selectively updates model parameters by exploiting the structural properties of E(3)-equivariant materials foundation models. On energy and force prediction tasks across molecular and crystalline benchmarks, our method matches or surpasses full fine-tuning and equivariant low-rank adaptation while updating only $\sim$3~\% of parameters, and in some cases as little as $\sim$0.5~\%. Beyond energy and force calibration, we further demonstrate task generalizability by applying our method to magnetic moment prediction and magnetism-aware total energy modeling. Finally, analysis of sparsity patterns reveals physically interpretable signatures, such as enhanced $d$-orbital contributions in transition metal systems. Overall, our results establish sparsity-promoting fine-tuning as a flexible and interpretable method for domain specialization of equivariant materials foundation models.

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

Graph Regularized Non-negative Reduced Biquaternion Matrix Factorization for Color Image Recognition

Non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (NRBMF) uses the product of reduced biquaternion (RB) matrices to incorporate the non-negativity constraints of color image pixels into the factorization process. However, NRBMF mainly focuses on reconstruction accuracy and does not explicitly exploit the local geometric structure of image data, which may limit the discriminative ability of the obtained low-dimensional coefficient representations. To address this issue, we propose a graph regularized non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (GNRBMF) model for color image recognition. The proposed model incorporates a graph Laplacian regularizer into the reduced biquaternion coefficient matrix, encouraging nearby samples in the original space to have similar coefficient representations. Meanwhile, GNRBMF retains the non-negativity property of NRBMF in the reduced biquaternion algebra. To solve the optimization problem, a component-wise alternating projected gradient algorithm is derived, and its convergence properties are analyzed. Experimental results on three color image datasets show that the proposed GNRBMF model achieves competitive or superior recognition performance compared with several methods in most tested settings.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Authors:

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

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

ChronoSurv: A Clinical Pathway-Guided Graph Framework for Multimodal Survival Analysis

arXiv:2606.19140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate survival prediction is essential for personalized treatment planning in head and neck cancer, yet remains challenging due to the heterogeneous and high-dimensional nature of multimodal clinical data. While deep survival models have improved predictive performance over classical statistical approaches, existing methods typically rely on static fusion strategies or temporally agnostic modeling, limiting their ability to capture structured clinical workflows. In this work, we propose ChronoSurv, a heterogeneous hierarchical directed graph framework for multimodal survival analysis. ChronoSurv represents patient care as a progression-aware clinical trajectory using directed graphs aligned with key diagnostic steps. A hierarchical topology incorporates fine-grained, coarse, and global representations, further supporting flexible adaptation to missing modalities, while heterogeneous message passing models complex and asymmetric relationships across modalities and clinical steps. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that ChronoSurv achieves state-of-the-art discriminative performance while maintaining statistically reliable calibration. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm the contribution of each architectural component, highlighting the potential of trajectory-aware graph modeling for multimodal survival prediction.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent representations

Single-cell transcriptomics is typically modeled in low-dimensional latent representations that improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the data. Such representations underpin data integration, cell state discovery, and perturbation prediction, with applications ranging from large-scale organ atlases to latent trajectory modeling. Recent virtual cell approaches further leverage these representations to predict cellular responses as distributional shifts in latent space. Each of these applications ultimately requires faithful gene expression reconstruction from latent spaces for biological interpretation, enabling gene-level analysis of predicted perturbed or batch-corrected cells. Yet representation choice is typically treated as an implementation detail rather than a primary modeling decision, with no systematic evaluation of how well latent representations support gene expression reconstruction. Here, we introduce ReconEval, a benchmark for evaluating gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent spaces. We benchmark two classes of latent representations: end-to-end trained models such as PCA, autoencoders, and variational autoencoders, and pretrained single-cell foundation model embeddings coupled to newly trained decoders. Reconstruction is evaluated both directly and after latent-space perturbation prediction. Across perturbational and observational datasets totaling over 100 million cells, our metric suite quantifies statistical fidelity; biological signal preservation, including differential expression, coexpression, cell-cycle structure, cytokine response and pathway activity; and perturbation-specific effects. We find that autoencoders achieve the strongest stand-alone reconstruction at low dimensionality, while variational regularization does not improve generalization in reconstruction. Frozen foundation model embeddings retain recoverable gene-level information, with reconstruction quality depending strongly on decoder architecture and pretraining objective. In latent perturbation modeling, high-dimensional PCA matches foundation model embeddings, while low-dimensional AE embeddings are optimal for flow-based generative models. Overall, reconstruction depends critically on the interplay between representation and downstream model, and simpler representations can outperform complex alternatives given appropriate capacity. Our benchmark establishes reconstruction as a critical evaluation axis for single-cell foundation models. We envision it improving the biological interpretability of latent-space modeling, a prerequisite for future virtual cell models to be validated by domain experts and grounded in biology.

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

How Much Memory Do We Need? Adaptive Memory Gate for Neural Operators

arXiv:2606.13443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operators have emerged as a powerful data-driven approach for solving time-dependent PDEs. Among recent advances, memory-augmented neural operators explicitly incorporate past states and have achieved remarkable performance under low-resolution observation settings. However, existing approaches apply a fixed memory weight regardless of observation conditions, such as resolution or physical parameters, limiting their adaptability. Our preliminary experiments reveal that optimal memory weight varies with resolution and viscosity, implying that a fixed memory weight cannot simultaneously optimize performance across diverse settings. We propose AMGFNO, which dynamically modulates memory weight through a learnable gate. On the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky and Burgers' equations, AMGFNO achieves 55-79% nRMSE reduction over at low resolution, with the learned gate value automatically decreasing from $\bar{g} \approx 0.7$ to near-zero as resolution increases.

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

Neuromorphic Wireless Split Computing with Resonate-and-Fire Neurons

arXiv:2506.20015v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neuromorphic computing offers an energy-efficient alternative to conventional deep learning accelerators, particularly for real-time processing of time-series data. However, many edge applications, such as wireless sensing and audio recognition, generate streaming signals with rich spectral features that are not effectively captured by conventional leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) spiking neurons. This paper investigates a wireless split computing architecture that employs resonate-and-fire (RF) neurons with oscillatory dynamics to process time-domain signals directly, eliminating the need for costly spectral pre-processing. By resonating at tunable frequencies, RF neurons extract time-localized spectral features while maintaining low spiking activity. This temporal sparsity translates into significant savings in both computation and transmission energy. Assuming an OFDM-based analog wireless interface for spike transmission, we present a complete system design and evaluate its performance on audio classification and modulation classification tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed RF-SNN architecture achieves comparable accuracy to conventional LIF-SNNs and ANNs, while substantially reducing spike rates and total energy consumption during inference and communication.

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

PiDR: Physics-Informed Inertial Dead Reckoning for Autonomous Platforms

arXiv:2601.03040v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A fundamental requirement for full autonomy is the ability to sustain accurate navigation in the absence of external data, such as GNSS signals or visual information. In these challenging environments, the platform must rely exclusively on inertial sensors, leading to pure inertial navigation. However, the inherent noise and other error terms of the inertial sensors in such real-world scenarios will cause the navigation solution to drift over time. Although conventional deep-learning models have emerged as a possible approach to inertial navigation, they are inherently black-box in nature. Furthermore, they struggle to learn effectively with limited supervised sensor data and often fail to preserve physical principles. To address these limitations, we propose PiDR, a physics-informed inertial dead-reckoning framework for autonomous platforms in situations of pure inertial navigation. PiDR offers transparency by explicitly integrating inertial navigation principles into the network training process through the physics-informed residual component. PiDR plays a crucial role in mitigating abrupt trajectory deviations even under limited or sparse supervision. We evaluated PiDR on real-world datasets collected by a mobile robot and an autonomous underwater vehicle. We obtained more than 29% positioning improvement in both datasets, demonstrating the ability of PiDR to generalize different platforms operating in various environments and dynamics. Thus, PiDR offers a robust, lightweight, yet effective architecture and can be deployed on resource-constrained platforms, enabling real-time pure inertial navigation in adverse scenarios.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Point-Wise Geometry-Aware Transformer for Partial-to-Full Point Cloud Registration in Computer-Assisted Surgery

Partial-to-full registration remains challenging due to varying overlap ratios, fluctuating point densities, and the presence of noise. While transformers have shown strong potential for point cloud processing, prior methods typically confine them to global context aggregation, overlooking fine-grained local geometry crucial for accurate correspondence. We propose GAPR-Net, a learning-based point cloud registration framework with a coarse-to-fine architecture that combines convolution and transformer modules, in which local and global information is fused between the partial and full point clouds using a cross-attention mechanism. To achieve this, a transformation-invariant point-wise geometric feature representation is proposed, which can robustly capture relative geometric features for individual points with respect to their neighboring points. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted on four geometrically distinct bones, including the tibia, femur, pelvis, and thoracic cartilage. The overall registration recall reaches 94.2\%, the method results in a low RMSE of 1.992 mm and $R^2$ values of 0.908 and 0.974 for rotation and translation, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the partial-to-full point cloud registration problem. The proposed method enables highly accurate 3D point cloud registration using partial observation, providing a critical foundation for precise surgical navigation and robotic interventions in computer-assisted surgery. The code will be accessed after the double-blind review process.

22.
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.

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

Tail-Shape Estimation in LLM Evaluation Is Fragile: A Protocol for Diagnosing False Positives

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work motivates moving large language model (LLM) evaluation from mean-based to tail-aware metrics, including conditional value-at-risk and tail-index estimates of reward-model error. We ask whether the canonical extreme-value-theory tail-index parameter, which isolates how heavy a tail is from how large the tail mass is, adds discriminative information beyond the mean and a standard tail-magnitude statistic in LLM evaluation. We pre-register a protocol covering admissibility, goodness-of-fit, threshold-stability, and effect-size requirements for any positive tail-shape claim. The protocol is the contribution of this paper; the empirical study below is a demonstration of what its gates catch. Applied to a standard LLM toxicity-evaluation setup under two structurally different scorer families, the protocol catches three distinct modes of false positives that a naive analysis would have published, and rejects the headline tail-shape claim on both scorers. We conclude that tail-shape estimation in the LLM toxicity-evaluation setups we examined is more fragile than the recent literature suggests, and recommend the protocol as a starting point for tail-index claims in similar setups.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SafeLLM: Extraction as a Hallucination-Resistant Alternative to Rewriting in Safety-Critical Settings

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to access organisational documentation, including standard operating procedures (SOPs), HR policies and institutional guidelines. However, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that rely on free-form rewriting can introduce hallucinations and unstable trade-offs between completeness and conciseness, particularly in safety- and compliance-critical settings. Objectives: To evaluate extraction as a hallucination-resistant alternative to rewriting-based RAG and compare strategies that balance precision, recall and safety across document types and model scales. Methods: We compare multiple prompting strategies, including line-number-based source selection, extraction of relevant guideline sentences with explicit safety annotations, and a multi-stage pipeline that refines draft answers using supporting evidence from source guidelines. Experiments are conducted on documents of varying length and structure, including local NHS acute care and oncology guidelines and UK-wide NICE guidelines, using both frontier-scale and locally deployable models. Performance is assessed using automatic metrics and human expert evaluation of relevance and completeness. Results: Line-number selection achieves the strongest results, outperforming direct copying and safety-focused strategies across both large and small models while maintaining high term recall (up to 95%) and close alignment with source text. Safety-oriented approaches improve precision but introduce systematic omissions, while multi-stage filtering further amplifies this trade-off. Performance varies with document structure: line-based extraction excels in protocol-like content, whereas alternative strategies perform better on more verbose documents (up to 97% term recall).

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

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.