Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15923

Runtime Analysis of Cartesian Genetic Programming in Evolving Boolean Functions

Authors:

Duc-Cuong Dang↗Roman Kalkreuth↗Andre Opris↗

arXiv:2606.15923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) is among the practical and popular forms of Genetic Programming as it uses a graph-based representation of programs. This paper presents a first runtime analysis of CGP in evolving Boolean functions using complete training sets. We prove an asymptotic bound $O(n D^5)$ for the expected number of fitness evaluations of CGP to construct a conjunction of $n$ inputs using at most $D \geq n-1$ binary gates, a minimal function set, and even with a strict survival selection. When the non-strict selection is used, the bound is improved to $O(n D^4)$. Our analysis reveals interesting characteristics of CGP induced search, which have been only observed empirically. In particular, enabling the acceptance of equally good solutions, including those with connected gates non-contributing to fitness, can lead to a speedup, and consequently a better asymptotic time bound. In contrast to conjunctions, we also prove a negative result which shows that CGP requires exponential time to evolve an exclusive disjunction. Experiments evolving conjunctions complement our theoretical findings. The use of incomplete training sets is found to further reduce the average number of fitness evaluations while maintaining a good level of generalisation.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2604.24942

Independent-Component-Based Encoding Models of Brain Activity During Story Comprehension

Authors:

Kamya Hari↗Taha Binhuraib↗Jin Li↗Cory Shain↗Anna A. Ivanova↗

Encoding models provide a powerful framework for linking continuous stimulus features to neural activity; however, traditional voxelwise approaches are limited by measurement noise, inter-subject variability, and redundancy arising from spatially correlated voxels encoding overlapping neural signals. Here, we propose an independent component (IC)-based encoding framework that dissociates stimulus-driven and noise-driven signals in fMRI data. We decompose continuous fMRI data from naturalistic story listening into ICs using one subset of the data, and train encoding models on independent data to predict IC time series from large language model representations of linguistic input. Across subjects, a subset of ICs exhibited consistently high predictivity. These ICs were spatially and temporally consistent across subjects and included cognitive networks known to respond during story listening (auditory and language). Auditory component time series were strongly correlated with acoustic stimulus features, highlighting the interpretability of identified component time series. Components identified as noise or motion-related artifacts by ICA-AROMA showed uniformly poor predictive performance, confirming that highly predicted components reflect genuine stimulus-related neural signals rather than confounds. Overall, IC-based encoding models enable analyses at the level of functional networks, accommodating the variability in network locations across individuals and providing interpretable results that are easy to compare across subjects. Code provided at: https://github.com/kamyahari/IC-Encoding-Models.git

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18066

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

Authors:

Jisung Hwang↗Yunhong Min↗Jaihoon Kim↗I-Chao Shen↗Minhyuk Sung↗

arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2601.11626

Concatenated Matrix SVD: Compression Bounds, Incremental Approximation, and Error-Constrained Clustering

Authors:

Maksym Shamrai↗

arXiv:2601.11626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large collections of matrices arise throughout modern machine learning, signal processing, and scientific computing, where they are commonly compressed by concatenation followed by truncated singular value decomposition (SVD). This strategy enables parameter sharing and efficient reconstruction and has been widely adopted across domains ranging from multi-view learning and signal processing to neural network compression. However, it leaves a fundamental question unanswered: which matrices can be safely concatenated and compressed together under explicit reconstruction error constraints? Existing approaches rely on heuristic or architecture-specific grouping and provide no principled guarantees on the resulting SVD approximation error. In the present work, we introduce a theory-driven framework for compression-aware clustering of matrices under SVD compression constraints. Our analysis establishes new spectral bounds for horizontally concatenated matrices, deriving global upper bounds on the optimal rank-$r$ SVD reconstruction error from lower bounds on singular value growth. The first bound follows from Weyl-type monotonicity under blockwise extensions, while the second leverages singular values of incremental residuals to yield tighter, per-block guarantees. We further develop an efficient approximate estimator based on incremental truncated SVD that tracks dominant singular values without forming the full concatenated matrix. Therefore, we propose three clustering algorithms that merge matrices only when their predicted joint SVD compression error remains below a user-specified threshold. The algorithms span a trade-off between speed, provable accuracy, and scalability, enabling compression-aware clustering with explicit error control.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14963

Multi-Modal Attention for Automated Disaster Damage Assessment Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Deep Learning

Authors:

Tewodros Syum Gebre↗Jagrati Talreja↗Leila Hashemi-Beni↗

Timely and accurate disaster damage assessment is crucial for effective emergency response, resource allocation, and recovery. Traditional methods, which often rely on manual inspections or sparse data, are typically slow and error-prone. This paper introduces a novel framework leveraging remote sensing imagery and deep learning to automate building damage classification. Using pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery, our model categorizes buildings into four damage levels: no damage, minor damage, major damage, and destroyed. The core innovation is a multi-modal attention mechanism that fuses bi-temporal features to explicitly detect and assess structural changes. We employ a lightweight ConvNeXT-Tiny backbone to ensure efficient processing without compromising performance. Key contributions include: (1) a cross-attention module for multi-modal data fusion, (2) an optimized preprocessing pipeline for large-scale datasets, and (3) robust data augmentation techniques. Experiments on a large-scale disaster dataset demonstrate an overall classification accuracy of 94.90%. The model effectively discriminates between damage categories and remains resilient to incomplete data. This system significantly improves assessment speed and accuracy, aiding emergency responders in prioritizing interventions. This work advances automated disaster damage detection by integrating multi-temporal imagery with deep learning, offering a scalable solution for real-time response.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2510.11709

Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superposition

Authors:

Edward Stevinson↗Lucas Prieto↗Melih Barsbey↗Tolga Birdal↗

Why do adversarial examples exist, and why do they transfer between models? Existing explanations appeal to high-dimensional geometry, non-robust patterns in the input, and decision boundary structure, but none provides a representation-level mechanism that explains why specific perturbations succeed and why attacks transfer between models. In this paper, we show that adversarial vulnerability can stem from efficient information encoding in neural networks. Specifically, vulnerability can arise from superposition - the phenomenon where networks represent more concepts than they have dimensions, forcing non-orthogonal representation and thus interference. This interference causes perturbations targeting one representation to affect others, creating vulnerabilities determined by interference patterns. In synthetic settings with precisely controlled superposition, we establish that superposition suffices to create adversarial vulnerability. The resulting attacks are predictable: PGD-discovered perturbations align with theoretically optimal perturbations derived from the interference geometry. Models trained on similar data develop similar interference patterns, explaining attack transferability. We then show that successful attacks on image classifiers exhibit the structure predicted by our proposed mechanism. These findings reveal that adversarial vulnerability can be a byproduct of networks' representational compression, complementing existing explanations based on data properties or architectural factors.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15867

CogCanvas: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Subject Reference-Based Image Generation

Authors:

Long-Bao Nguyen↗Quang-Khai Tran↗Tam V. Nguyen↗Minh-Triet Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

Multi-subject reference-based image generation requires jointly preserving multiple human identities, binding per-person objects and fashion items, and respecting a specified background scene, a regime where current diffusion models remain brittle. Existing benchmarks evaluate only one axis at a time and none jointly captures multi-identity composition with human-object interaction, background grounding, and spatial plausibility. We introduce CogCanvas, a benchmark of 1,952 curated reference images spanning 100 celebrity identities, 115 distinctive objects and fashion items, and 29 real-world background scenes including landmarks, from which we construct 1,361 compositional prompts covering 2-5 person group sizes. The curation pipeline combines DINOv2-based deduplication, two-stage aesthetic filtering, and automated derivation of structured interaction and position graphs that serve as ground-truth supervision. CogCanvas supports three tasks, reference-based multi-human-object generation (primary), text-to-image compositional generation, and reference retrieval, under a unified six-axis evaluation protocol. We introduce two metrics tailored to the multi-reference setting: BG-Sim, which scores background fidelity on SAM 3-masked regions via DINOv3 feature similarity, and Attr-VQA, which uses a multimodal LLM to verify per-subject attribute binding and inter-person interactions against the structured graphs. Benchmarking five SOTA methods reveals that every model degrades substantially as group size grows from 2 to 5, with near-complete failure on object/fashion binding beyond three subjects.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2502.06866

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

Authors:

Arun Kumar Selvaraj↗Tanay Panat↗Rohitash Chandra↗

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11643

Improving Cross-Format Robustness in Language Models with Multi-Format Training

Authors:

June M. Liu↗Shaomian Zheng↗He Cao↗Dingnan Jin↗Qing Cui↗Jun Zhou↗

Large language models often remain sensitive to answer format: a question solved correctly in one form may fail in another semantically equivalent form. To study this gap, we define cross-format robustness as the extent to which a model answers the same underlying question consistently across formats. We then compare full-format training with FormatMix, which expands only a subset of training items into multiple equivalent formats using either random or targeted selection. Across GLM4 and Llama-3.1, multi-format supervision consistently improves both task performance and cross-format robustness, whereas Multiple-choice question (MCQ)-only supervision alone brings little benefit and can even reduce robustness. We further find that expanding only about 30% of the training set into multiple formats often recovers most of the gain from full-format training, and this effect appears across the model families and sizes we study. These results suggest that format diversity, rather than additional supervision alone, is the key driver of robustness. That lightweight multi-format augmentation is a practical way to make LLMs less sensitive to answer format without changing the base model.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2510.02605

Towards CONUS-Wide ML-Augmented Conceptually-Interpretable Modeling of Catchment-Scale Precipitation-Storage-Runoff Dynamics

Authors:

Yuan-Heng Wang↗Yang Yang↗Fabio Ciulla↗Hoshin V. Gupta↗Charuleka Varadharajan↗

arXiv:2510.02605v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While many modern studies are dedicated to ML-based large-sample hydrologic modeling, these efforts have not necessarily translated into predictive improvements that are grounded in enhanced physical-conceptual understanding. Here, we report on a CONUS-wide large-sample study (spanning diverse hydro-geo-climatic conditions) using ML-augmented physically-interpretable catchment-scale models of varying complexity based in the Mass-Conserving Perceptron (MCP). Results were evaluated using attribute masks such as snow regime, forest cover, and climate zone. Our results indicate the importance of selecting model architectures of appropriate model complexity based on how process dominance varies with hydrological regime. Benchmark comparisons show that physically-interpretable mass-conserving MCP-based models can achieve performance comparable to data-based models based in the Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM) architecture. Overall, this study highlights the potential of a theory-informed, physically grounded approach to large-sample hydrology, with emphasis on mechanistic understanding and the development of parsimonious and interpretable model architectures, thereby laying the foundation for future models of everywhere that architecturally encode information about spatially- and temporally-varying process dominance.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17391

NarrativeWorldBench: A Frontier-Saturated Benchmark and a Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Co-Creative Audio Drama

Authors:

Logan Mann↗Abdur Rahman↗Mohammad Saifullah↗Taaha Kazi↗Vasu Sharma↗

Long-form serialized audio drama, with arcs that run for 200 to 800 episodes, is a major creative medium and a setting where frontier large language models (LLMs) fail. We benchmark 21 models, spanning classical, fine-tuned, open-frontier, closed-frontier, and reasoning tiers, on a uniform set of structural narrative metrics. All closed-frontier systems saturate at a plot-beat F1 in the band [0.78, 0.81] and collapse by about -0.20 F1 at horizon h=200. We introduce NarrativeWorldBench, an open benchmark of nine narrative-structure metrics evaluated across horizons h in {10, 20, 50, 100, 200}, with cross-lingual evaluation across four Indic languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi). We introduce N-VSSM, a Narrative Variational State-Space Model that maintains a structured 256-dimensional latent world state over more than 200 episodes via a Mamba-2 backbone with an event-conditioned posterior and an 8B decoder. N-VSSM holds plot-beat F1 >= 0.84 across all horizons at 4x lower compute than the closed-frontier band. A learned Cultural Transfer Function lifts cross-language fidelity by +0.20 to +0.23 Likert points. In a within-subjects writer study (n = 12 professional authors, 240 trials), N-VSSM is preferred over Claude Opus 4.5 on long-arc consistency 71% of the time and rated +1.3 Likert points higher on controllability.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.03120

Quantized Evolution Strategies: High-precision Fine-tuning of Quantized LLMs at Low-precision Cost

Authors:

Yinggan Xu↗Kajetan Schweighofer↗Risto Miikkulainen↗Xin Qiu↗

arXiv:2602.03120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), fundamentally rely on backpropagation and continuous weights to compute gradients. Thus they cannot be used on quantized models, where the parameter space is discrete and non-differentiable. While Evolution Strategies (ES) offer a backpropagation-free alternative, optimization of the quantized parameters can still fail due to vanishing or inaccurate gradient estimation. This paper introduces Quantized Evolution Strategies (QES), an optimization paradigm that performs full-parameter fine-tuning directly in the quantized space. QES is based on two innovations: (1) it integrates accumulated error feedback to preserve high-precision weight updating signals, and (2) it utilizes a stateless seed replay to reduce memory usage to low-precision inference levels. QES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zeroth-order fine-tuning methods on a variety of tasks, making direct fine-tuning for quantized models possible. It therefore opens up the possibility for scaling up LLMs entirely in the quantized space. The source code is available at https://github.com/dibbla/Quantized-Evolution-Strategies .

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15665

Information Gap and Feasibility-Aware Inference in Binomial Logistic Mixtures

Authors:

Yuta Hayashida↗Shonosuke Sugasawa↗

arXiv:2606.15665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies the information gap between mixture detection and label recovery in binomial logistic mixtures. Standard likelihood-based criteria such as the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) can detect the presence of two components, but this does not guarantee that the corresponding labels are recoverable. We show that this gap is intrinsic to binomial logistic mixtures with a fixed number of trials: observed-data evidence for mixture structure and per-observation information for label recovery have different local orders in the component separation, and only the former accumulates with the sample size. As a result, there exists a detectable-but-unrecoverable regime in which BIC selects two components while the posterior labels remain essentially uninformative. To address this issue, we propose two feasibility-aware inference procedures: a recoverability-aware BIC with a posterior-entropy penalty and an entropy-regularized estimator that mitigates the tendency of the maximum likelihood estimator to produce overly separated components and overly concentrated posterior responsibilities. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted gap and demonstrate that the proposed methods avoid misleading component selections and improve the calibration of posterior label probabilities.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.11165

COSMOS: Model-Agnostic Personalized Federated Learning with Clustered Server Models and Pseudo-Label-Only Communication

Authors:

Ben Rachmut↗Luise Ge↗William Yeoh↗Ning Zhang↗Yevgeniy Vorobeychik↗

arXiv:2605.11165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) in heterogeneous environments remains challenging because client models often differ in both architecture and data distribution. While recent approaches attempt to address this challenge through client clustering and knowledge distillation, simultaneously handling architectural and statistical heterogeneity remains difficult. We introduce COSMOS, a model-agnostic framework that enables server-side personalization using only pseudo-label communication. Clients train local models and predict on the public data; the server clusters clients by prediction similarity, trains a cluster-specific model for each group using its own compute, and distills the resulting models back to clients. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that distillation from the learned cluster models can yield exponential personalization risk contraction, going beyond the convergence-to-stationarity guarantees typically provided in model-agnostic FL. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS consistently outperforms all model-agnostic FL baselines while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art personalized FL methods. More broadly, our results highlight personalized server-side learning with pseudo-labels as a promising paradigm for scalable and model-agnostic federated learning in highly heterogeneous environments.

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15.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13 DOI: HASH:5b3f77311c7ad543781b539d62dd9c4f

Testing the reliability of AI-generated protein structures

Authors:

Xu↗Salzberg↗

Although AlphaFold2 and its competitors have demonstrated remarkable abilities to predict protein structure, more work is needed to explore the limitations of these methods. Here we investigated the reliability of AlphaFold2 and ColabFold by creating a set of realistic but false protein sequences, using ColabFold to predict their structure, and then asking how often the program produces a high-scoring structure for a sequence that does not represent a protein. We determined that AlphaFold2 has a very small but non-zero false positive rate, estimated here at approximately 1 in 435 if one uses a threshold pLDDT score of 70 to define positive predictions. We also discovered, serendipitously, that some high-scoring sequences in the human genome were not false positives, but instead were previously unknown and un-annotated pseudogenes. These latter findings indicate that some well-established human annotations of protein-coding genes may have incorrectly extended the 5-prime untranslated regions too far. They also suggest that the false positive rate of AlphaFold2 is low enough that almost any high-scoring structure, even in a noncoding region, is worthy of further investigation.

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16.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:8e4fff5b0fa430654cf07028cee547c2

Utilising Artificial Intelligence to Identify Ventricular Tachycardia Ablation Targets in Sinus Rhythm

Authors:

Wang↗Mayer↗Dennis↗Chow↗Al-Sheikhli↗Siang↗Winter↗O'Shea↗Dhanjal↗Lambiase↗Orini↗

Background and Aims: Machine learning has shown potential in predicting ablation targets for ventricular tachycardia (VT) in an animal model. This study progresses to externally validating deep learning approaches for human data. Methods: The development and external validation dataset included 21 and 13 patients, respectively, with structural VT undergoing catheter ablation. In the development datasets, electrophysiological studies were conducted using the AdvisorTM HD grid (EnsiteTM X), while both CARTO and Ensite Precision were used in the validation dataset. In each patient, VT ablation targets were defined as mapping points within 8 mm of VT isthmuses. Three advanced machine learning models were trained using cardiac mapping data acquired in both omnipolar and unipolar configurations during sinus rhythm and ventricular pacing. Discrimination was evaluated using nested leave-one-out cross-validation at patient level. Results: Overall, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which integrate intracardiac signal waveforms with three-dimensional electroanatomical geometries, achieved the highest performance, with optimal results obtained from unipolar electrograms acquired in sinus rhythm (median AUC 0.793, sensitivity 83.6%, specificity 69.0%). This may be partly explained by the inclusion of repolarization dynamics in unipolar electrograms and the higher point density of sinus rhythm maps. Comparable performance was observed in the external dataset. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that graph convolutional networks applied to sinus rhythm EGM waveforms collected during substrate mapping can localise critical components of VT re-entry circuits. This approach has potential to provide fast and accurate ablation guidance without the need to induce and map VT, improving safety and efficacy of VT catheter ablation.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11206

Compatibility-Aware Dynamic Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models

Authors:

Yucheng Zhou↗Junwei Sheng↗Qianning Wang↗Jianbing Shen↗

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the predominant paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs), yet it suffers from optimization instability and limited generalization. Recent work attributes this issue to pathological gradient scaling and proposes Dynamic Fine-Tuning (DFT) to correct it at the token level. However, DFT assumes all demonstrations are equally suitable learning targets, an assumption violated by the strong heterogeneity of large-scale instruction data, where demonstration-policy mismatch induces high-variance updates at the sample level. We introduce Compatibility-Aware Dynamic Fine-Tuning (CADFT), a principled extension of DFT that controls sample-level optimization variance. CADFT derives a dynamic, policy-dependent compatibility signal from model likelihoods to modulate supervised updates, suppressing high-variance gradients from incompatible demonstrations. We further propose a delayed, low-frequency compatibility-guided rewriting strategy to transform persistently incompatible demonstrations into learnable targets. We show that CADFT can be interpreted as a variance-controlled estimator that generalizes token-level stabilization in DFT to the sample level. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved stability, generalization, and cold-start reinforcement learning initialization, while remaining fully supervised and independent of explicit reward modeling.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18567

Bridging Data Gaps in Structural Fragility Modeling through Transfer Learning: Methodology and Case Studies

Authors:

Narges Saeednejad↗Jamie Ellen Padgett↗

arXiv:2606.18567v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a methodology-centered transfer learning framework for fragility adaptation under domain shift, class imbalance, and scarce target labels while preserving engineering interpretability and supporting decision-making under uncertainty. Four transfer learning strategies (instance-based, parameter-based, hierarchical Bayesian, and multi-source) are demonstrated through three complementary case studies: (i) instance-based transfer learning via importance weighting, demonstrated on coastal bridge fragility using Hurricane Katrina observations; (ii) parameter-based transfer learning together with hierarchical Bayesian transfer learning, enabling partial pooling across strata and posterior uncertainty quantification, demonstrated on residential building fragility using Hurricane Ian observations; and (iii) multi-source transfer learning that fuses multiple analytical fragility models with learned source weights and regularized target-domain adaptation, demonstrated on seismic bridge fragility using observations from the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Across these case studies, direct transfer of source models (i.e. using existing state-of-the-art models) fails under domain shift and severe class imbalance, while targeted adaptation substantially improves failure detection and predictive stability in low-data regimes. These findings highlight the need for systematic guidance on diagnostics, strategy selection, and uncertainty reporting when developing and adapting fragility models.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11363

NSVQ: Mitigating Codebook Collapse by Stabilizing Encoder Drift in Vector Quantization

Authors:

Hao Lu↗Yongxin Guo↗Onur Koyun↗Zhengjie Zhu↗Abbas Alili↗Metin N. Gurcan↗

Vector quantization is central to modern generative modeling pipelines, but large-codebook VQ models often suffer from codebook collapse. We identify encoder drift as a key driver of this failure: as the encoder moves the latent distribution, sparsely updated code vectors can lag behind, lose assignments, and increase quantization error, creating a feedback loop through the straight-through estimator. We propose NSVQ, a non-stationary-aware VQ training strategy that combines a dense non-stationary embedding loss, codebook replacement, and stage-wise encoder freezing. NSVQ first helps the codebook track encoder drift during early training, then freezes the encoder to consolidate the codebook under a fixed latent geometry, and finally reintroduces adversarial refinement. Experiments on ImageNet-1k show that NSVQ improves reconstruction quality while maintaining full codebook utilization. On ImageNet-1k at 128$\times$128 with 65,536 codes, NSVQ reduces rFID from 2.39 to 2.10 compared with SimVQ, while both methods maintain 100\% utilization. Additional latent diffusion experiments show that NSVQ also improves downstream ImageNet generation FID.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2602.13379

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

Authors:

Xu Li↗Simon Yu↗Minzhou Pan↗Yiyou Sun↗Bo Li↗Dawn Song↗Xue Lin↗Weiyan Shi↗

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2511.05963

Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Models

Authors:

Jayden Teoh↗Manan Tomar↗Kwangjun Ahn↗Edward S. Hu↗Tim Pearce↗Pratyusha Sharma↗Akshay Krishnamurthy↗Riashat Islam↗Alex Lamb↗John Langford↗

arXiv:2511.05963v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers replace recurrence with a memory that grows with sequence length and self-attention that enables ad-hoc lookups over past tokens. Consequently, they lack an inherent incentive to compress history into compact latent states with consistent transition rules. This often leads to learning solutions that generalize poorly. We introduce Next-Latent Prediction (NextLat), which extends standard next-token training with self-supervised predictions in the latent space. Specifically, NextLat trains a transformer to learn latent representations that are predictive of its next latent state given the next token. Theoretically, we show that these latents provably converge towards belief states, compressed information about the history necessary to predict the future. This simple auxiliary objective injects a recurrent inductive bias into transformers while leaving their architecture, parallel training efficiency, and inference unchanged. NextLat effectively encourages transformers to form compact internal world models with coherent belief states and transition dynamics – crucial properties not guaranteed by standard next-token prediction alone. Empirically, across benchmarks in world modeling, reasoning, planning, and language modeling, NextLat demonstrates significant gains over standard next-token prediction and other baselines in downstream accuracy, representation compression, and lookahead planning. Furthermore, NextLat enables variable-length self-speculative decoding, accelerating inference by up to 3.3x in language modeling. NextLat offers a simple yet effective paradigm for learning compact, predictive representations in transformers that generalize better. Our code is available at https://github.com/JaydenTeoh/NextLat.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16617

Sycophancy as Material Failure under Pushback Loading: A Multi-Axis Characterization Across Three Loading Cases and up to Seventeen Material Charges

Authors:

Ferdinand M. Schessl↗

Sycophancy in LLMs is documented across 70+ papers, but expert agreement on construct boundaries remains low (ICC=.184; Ye et al., 2026). The construct fragments because behavioral classification depends on which surface form is privileged. We adopt a materials-science framing: conversation as test specimen under load, LLM-model as material charge, pushback as progressive load, stance-flip as material failure. We characterize this failure across three loading cases (debate n=1000; false-presuppositions n=3400; ethical-setting n=3400; 10-17 material charges per case; 7800 specimens total) using 14 turn-level axis-measurements spanning velocity, damage accumulation, frame-drift, brittleness, and direction stability, plus three speaker-resolved axes from an independent pipeline. The measurements are Hooke-coupled ($\sigma = E \cdot \varepsilon$ analog) and reproduce across loading cases with effects up to $|r_{rb}| = 0.35$ on debate; the sign structure adds a second pattern: the ethical-setting case inverts the velocity and accumulation blocks. Variance composition partitions into two profiles: debate is charge-dominated (brittle-fracture-like: the material grade decides), false-presuppositions and ethical-setting are topic-dominated (creep-like: the load decides); the ratios (2.03 vs 0.13/0.17) are estimator-dependent, for debate even in direction. Cross-judge reliability (GPT-4o vs Haiku 4.5) shows debate scoring is judge-robust (Cohen's $\kappa = 0.88$) while false-presupposition scoring is judge-sensitive ($\kappa = 0.36$) – a caveat single-judge benchmarks must report. This is the methodological move Ye et al.'s diagnosis calls for: a multi-axis characterization that does not depend on which surface form of the construct one privileges.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11424

SOMA-SQL: Resolving Multi-Source Ambiguity in NL-to-SQL via Synthetic Log and Execution Probing

Authors:

Sai Ashish Somayajula↗Marianne Menglin Liu↗Chuan Lei↗Fjona Parllaku↗Daniel Garcia↗Rongguang Wang↗Syed Fahad Allam Shah↗Ankan Bansal↗Sujeeth Bharadwaj↗Tao Sheng↗Sujith Ravi↗Dan Roth↗…

Natural language interfaces to databases aim to translate user questions into executable SQL, yet remain brittle in real-world settings where questions are underspecified and schemas are large and ambiguous. Ambiguity across user questions, database schemas, and model interpretations are central failure modes in NL2SQL, leading to misaligned intent, incorrect schema grounding, and erroneous SQL generation. Existing approaches rely on human clarification or treat ambiguity as a schema representation problem, but these do not scale nor resolve ambiguity autonomously. We propose SOMA-SQL to automatically resolve ambiguity via targeted synthetic query log and ambiguity-driven probing. SOMA-SQL constructs synthetic query log to ground schema interpretation and guide candidate SQL generation; it then executes targeted probing queries, driven by a structured ambiguity taxonomy and candidate disagreements, to produce disambiguation evidence for final SQL selection and repair. This active approach to ambiguity discovery and resolution generalizes across unseen schemas and query distributions without human-in-the-loop. Experiments on six public benchmarks demonstrate that SOMA-SQL improves execution accuracy by 13.0% on average over state-of-the-art baselines, with gains of up to 16.7% on ambiguous questions.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2512.18295

AL-GNN: Privacy-Preserving and Replay-Free Continual Graph Learning via Analytic Learning

Authors:

Xuling Zhang↗Jindong Li↗Yifei Zhang↗Mingqi Yang↗Menglin Yang↗

arXiv:2512.18295v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual graph learning (CGL) aims to enable graph neural networks to incrementally learn from a stream of graph structured data without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Existing methods particularly those based on experience replay typically store and revisit past graph data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these approaches pose significant limitations, including privacy concerns, inefficiency. In this work, we propose AL GNN, a novel framework for continual graph learning that eliminates the need for backpropagation and replay buffers. Instead, AL GNN leverages principles from analytic learning theory to formulate learning as a recursive least squares optimization process. It maintains and updates model knowledge analytically through closed form classifier updates and a regularized feature autocorrelation matrix. This design enables efficient one pass training for each task, and inherently preserves data privacy by avoiding historical sample storage. Extensive experiments on multiple dynamic graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that AL GNN achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing methods. For instance, it improves average performance by 10% on CoraFull and reduces forgetting by over 30% on Reddit, while also reducing training time by nearly 50% due to its backpropagation free design.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12953

OpenMedQ: Broad Open Pretraining for Medical Vision-Language Models

Authors:

Ibrahim Gulluk↗Max Van Puyvelde↗Olivier Gevaert↗

We present OpenMedQ, a medical vision-language model pretrained on the broadest fully-open medical mix to date: 14 datasets totaling ~3.35M pretraining samples spanning pathology, radiology, microscopy, and text-only clinical QA. OpenMedQ reaches state-of-the-art BLEU-1 on PathVQA (75.9), beating Med-PaLM M variants up to 562B parameters (~80x larger), and matches the best reported VQA-MED BLEU-1 (64.5). Its vision encoder, transferred to 8 unseen medical classification benchmarks under an identical downstream recipe, obtains the highest average macro-F1 (0.757) among BiomedCLIP (0.745), PMC-CLIP (0.745), PubMedCLIP (0.746), and a from-scratch baseline (0.616). We release our code and an interactive demo is publicly available as a reproducible baseline for the community.

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