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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics<b> </b>

作者:

Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations. Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations.

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

Filtered ANN as a Phase Transition: When Selectivity-Estimation Error Causes Plan Regret

arXiv:2606.16341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A filtered approximate-nearest-neighbor (ANN) query returns the k nearest vectors among those satisfying an attribute predicate P of selectivity s. The best execution strategy – pre-filter, post-filter, or in-filter – changes with s, so a system must estimate s and choose. We model this as an argmax over a landscape with phases (regions where each strategy wins) separated by boundaries, and show that selectivity-estimation error produces plan regret – recall lost versus the oracle strategy – only in the critical regions around those boundaries. The regret is a wedge of log-width equal to the multiplicative estimation error epsilon and height equal to the local cliff |V'(s*)| epsilon; the flip-margin 1/|V'(s*)| is the condition number of a sibling cardinality-estimation study reappearing as the local boundary theory. The two phase boundaries follow from independent mathematics: order statistics place the post-filter cliff at s ~ k/K, and site percolation places the in-filter cliff at s_c ~ 0.83/M for graph degree M (corpus-size independent). Criticality exists only under a constrained budget B < sqrt(k n). Under pre-registered decision rules we confirm, on synthetic sweeps and real SIFT1M, that regret concentrates ~290x at the boundary and that the regret curves obey a finite-size scaling collapse onto one universal wedge across two decades of corpus size. A real approximate index does not mis-locate the boundary, but a biased cost model opens a persistent miscalibration band that estimation-error robustness cannot fix. The contribution is a characterization, not a new index. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Optimal classical shadow estimation of unitary channels at Heisenberg limit

arXiv:2606.13638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full tomography of an unknown quantum evolution is resource-intensive and often unnecessary when the goal is only to predict selected properties. This motivates the study of classical shadow estimation of unitary channels (CSEU), a task in which one queries an unknown $d$-dimensional unitary $U$ and stores classical data that can later be used to predict expectation values $\mathrm{tr}[O \cdot U\rho U^\dagger]$ up to additive error $\varepsilon$ for arbitrary input states $\rho$ and observables $O$. We propose a parallel, non-adaptive CSEU protocol using $\mathcal{O}(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ queries when the input states or observables have constant rank. This achieves Heisenberg scaling with respect to $\varepsilon$ and is query-optimal, as we prove a matching $\Omega(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ lower bound that remains valid even with stronger access to the unknown unitary. Our query-optimal CSEU protocol provides a versatile and powerful tool for quantum learning theory, pushing the performance limits of several fundamental learning tasks, including unitary channel tomography, Hamiltonian learning, boundary-regime quantum channel tomography, Pauli transfer matrix learning, inverse-free amplitude estimation, pure-state property estimation, and shallow-circuit learning. Remarkably, we show that optimal unitary channel tomography can be achieved using only parallel queries, closing the gap between the best achievable efficiency of parallel and sequential tomography protocols. Together, these applications establish our framework as a fundamental tool for learning properties of quantum processes, particularly for certain key tasks that require high precision.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Renewable Lasso without Batch-Number Constraints: A Gradient-Enhanced Approach

arXiv:2606.11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study online estimation for high-dimensional generalized linear models with streaming data. First, for the non-distributed setting, we propose a gradient-enhanced surrogate loss that approximates the cumulative loss using only historical summaries, which modifies and improves upon the existing renewable estimation approach for the same model in the high-dimensional setting, and removes the batch-number constraint in previous studies. We then extend the method to distributed streaming data under the master-client architecture, where batches are partitioned across sites and only summaries (gradient vectors) are exchanged. Instead of directing applying the popular method of Jordan et al. (2019) to the surrogate quadratic loss, our adjusted approach does not require the clients to compute the full surrogate loss. We derive non-asymptotic error bounds under the high-dimensional scaling, without the stringent constraint on the number of batches in the previous studies. Simulation results under linear and logistic models, together with a real-data application, show improved accuracy over existing renewable estimators.

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

Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training for Visuomotor Control

Existing vision encoders for robotics face a fundamental bottleneck: robotic datasets lack the scale necessary for large-scale pre-training. Prior work circumvents this data scarcity by turning to internet-scale image and language data or egocentric human video. While these models show promise, neither paradigm learns from paired vision and action data, which downstream visuomotor control policies require. However, robot trajectories, the most direct source of this paired signal, are not available at pre-training scale, motivating us to extract action signals from abundant human video instead. To this end, we introduce CAIP (Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training), a vision encoder that treats human hand poses from large-scale egocentric video as a proxy for end-effector actions. By extracting 3D hand keypoints, a representation that aligns naturally with downstream robot action spaces, CAIP learns a unified action-image representation through a contrastive objective. Leveraging 32,041 hours of egocentric human video and only 88 hours of robotic manipulation data, CAIP outperforms state-of-the-art vision encoders including DINOv2, SigLIP, MVP, and R3M. Evaluated on a challenging real-world dexterous manipulation setup using Dexmate Vega and Sharpa Wave hands, CAIP yields performance gains of more than 30% on tasks involving folding, pouring, and fine-grained manipulation. Our results show that our method of contrastive action-centric pre-training yields a scalable path to achieving robust visual representations better suited for physical interaction.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

REVES: REvision and VErification–Augmented Training for Test-Time Scaling

Test-time scaling via sequential revision has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. However, standard post-training methods primarily optimize single-shot objectives, creating a fundamental misalignment with multi-step inference dynamics. While recent work treats this as multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL), conventional approaches optimize over the multi-step trajectories directly, failing to further exploit the high-quality mistakes in intermediate steps that model can learn from correcting them. We propose a two-stage iterative framework that alternates between online data/prompt augmentation and policy optimization. By converting the intermediate steps (``near-miss'' answers) in the successful recovery trajectories into decoupled revision and verification prompts, our approach concentrates training on both effective answer transformation and error identification. This approach enables efficient off-policy data generation and reduces the computational overhead of long-horizon sampling compared to standard multi-turn RL. On LiveCodeBench, using publicly available test cases as feedback, we observe gains of +6.5 points over the RL baseline and +4.0 points over standard multi-turn training. Beyond coding, our approach matches the previously reported SOTA result on circle packing while using the smallest base model (4B) and far fewer rollouts than the much larger evolutionary search systems. Math results under ground-truth verification further confirm improved correction ability. It also generalizes to out-of-distribution constraint-satisfaction puzzles such as n\_queens and mini\_sudoku, where correctness is defined entirely by problem constraints. Code is available at https://github.com/yxliu02/REVES.git.

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

Fault Lines: Navigating Ethics and Responsible AI Where National Policy Meets Local Practice in Public Sector Transformation

arXiv:2606.13039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The UK government has adopted a pro-AI stance to help transform public service delivery in the face of severe financial pressures, but the path to translate this vision into responsible AI practice remains ill-defined. While UK policy is often set at the national level, local authorities are responsible for most public service delivery, and the rapid advance of AI-first narratives in the public sector is exposing fault lines in knowledge and practice at this national-local interface. This paper examines how responsible AI is interpreted and implemented at the interface between the UK's central government and local authorities, taking the high-stakes area of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) as a case study. We present a thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to identify barriers and enabling conditions for responsible AI where national policy meets local practice. We identify five interconnected challenges facing local authorities: shadow usage of AI and data privacy risks, market-government asymmetry in AI provision, insufficient workforce readiness, a lack of standardised definitions and measurements, and gaps in human accountability. For each, participants proposed actionable steps, from strengthening data protection frameworks and rebalancing the market-government relationship to enhancing workforce capacity. Our examination of SEND brings these challenges into sharper focus, showing how high-stakes decisions affecting vulnerable children and families intensify tensions around accountability, fairness, and human oversight, exposing the limits of a principle-based regulatory approach. We argue that responsible public sector AI requires both national policy adjustments and structural reforms to institutional capacity, values, and governance mechanisms at the local level.

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

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

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

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Analyzing Visual Aircraft Representations with Sparse Autoencoders

Vision models can achieve strong performance on classification tasks, but the internal representations supporting their predictions are often difficult to interpret. This work investigates whether sparse autoencoders can decompose intermediate representations of a vision model into interpretable features. We train a ConvNeXt classifier on the FGVC-Aircraft dataset, extract spatial activations from its final feature stage, and train a sparse autoencoder on these activations. The learned sparse features are analyzed using top-activating image patches, activation strength, and class selectivity. Qualitative visual inspection reveals that several features correspond to recognizable aircraft structures and visual patterns. We evaluate a subset of selected features using input-space and feature-space ablations, measuring how blurring image patches and suppressing sparse features affect class logits, classification margins, and prediction confidence. The results suggest that sparse autoencoders can reveal partially interpretable, class-relevant visual features associated with aircraft recognition, while also exposing limitations such as polysemanticity and coarse spatial localization.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Approximating optimal decoding of quantum LDPC codes with narrow frontiers

arXiv:2606.20513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Frontier decoder, a pruned dynamic-programming decoder for sparse quantum decoding problems. Frontier processes error variables in a chosen order, merges prefixes with the same residual syndrome and logical label, and approximates logical-coset posterior masses by retaining only a narrow scored frontier. Without pruning, the recursion is exact ordered inference with exponential complexity. In the code-capacity setting, the decoder reaches thresholds close to optimal for the surface code and the color code. In the circuit-level noise model, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small average retained list size: less than 100 for the gross code $[[144,12,12]]$ at a physical error rate of $0.001$. When the list size is constant, the decoder has linear complexity, suggesting the possibility of low-latency implementations.

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

FineVLA: Fine-Grained Instruction Alignment for Steerable Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2605.27284v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly expected to not only complete robot tasks, but also follow human instructions about how those tasks should be executed. However, existing robot datasets usually pair trajectories with coarse goal-level language, leaving execution-critical details such as active arm, approach direction, and contact region unspecified. This limits steerable policy learning and robotic video understanding. We introduce FineVLA, an open framework for action-aligned fine-grained VLA supervision. The framework includes: (1) a data construction tool that unifies 972,247 trajectories across 85K tasks from 10 open-source robot datasets and builds FineVLA-Data, a human-verified dataset of 47,159 fine-grained trajectories; (2) a held-out benchmark with 500 videos, 11,631 atomic facts, and 1,030 VQA questions; (3) a robotics-specialized VLM annotator for scalable fine-grained annotation; and (4) a steerable VLA policy trained with controlled mixtures of fine-grained and raw goal-level instructions. Our experiments yield three findings. First, fine-grained supervision does not sacrifice goal-level success: FG-only improves over Raw-only by +1.4 to +8.1 success-rate points across settings. Second, fine-grained and raw instructions are complementary, following a consistent inverted-U trend peaking at FG:Raw = 1:2 to 1:1. The best mixed setting reaches 86.8%/82.5% in RoboTwin simulation and 62.7/100 in real-world dual-arm manipulation (vs. 49.9 Raw-only). Third, fine-grained supervision improves steerable control: the largest real-world gains appear on pose (+23), color (+18), and approach direction (+18)–factors where goal-level instructions provide no guidance. Overall, fine-grained language should augment goal-level instructions: specifying how to execute alongside what to achieve. Project page: https://finevla.xlang.ai/

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

Amnesia: A Stealthy Replay Attack on Continual Learning Dreams

Continual learning (CL) models often use experience replay to reduce catastrophic forgetting, but their robustness to replay sampling interference remains underexplored. Existing CL attacks alter inputs or training pipelines (poisoning/backdoors) and rarely include explicit auditable constraints, limiting realism. Here, auditability means a monitor can verify compliance from sampler-visible telemetry - e.g., logged replay index/label statistics - by checking that the realized replay class histogram stays close to a nominal baseline and that replay rate is unchanged per batch and/or over a rolling window. We study a limited-privilege insider who controls only replay index selection, not pixels, labels, or model parameters, while staying within auditable limits such as queue priorities. We introduce Amnesia, a replay composition attack that maximizes degradation under two budgets: a visibility budget delta bounding the TV/KL divergence from a nominal class histogram p0, and a mass budget f fixing the replay rate. Amnesia has two steps: (i) compute lightweight class utilities, such as EMA loss or confidence, to tilt p0 toward harmful classes; and (ii) project the tilt back into the delta-ball using efficient KL (exponential tilt) or TV (balanced mass redistribution) optimizers. A windowed scheduler enforces rolling audits. Across challenging CL benchmarks and strong replay baselines, Amnesia consistently lowers final accuracy (ACC) and worsens backward transfer (-BWT). The KL variant delivers high impact while remaining largely undetected under multiple audit schemes, including per-batch and rolling-window checks. The TV variant is more damaging but easier to detect, especially under tight per-class constraints. These results expose index-only replay control as a practical, auditable threat surface in CL systems and establish a principled impact-visibility trade-off.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Group-Sparse Matrix Factorization for Transfer Learning of Word Embeddings

Unstructured text provides decision-makers with a rich data source in many domains, ranging from product reviews in retail to nursing notes in healthcare. To leverage this information, words are typically translated into word embeddings – vectors that encode the semantic relationships between words – through unsupervised learning algorithms such as matrix factorization. However, learning word embeddings from new domains with limited training data can be challenging, because the meaning/usage may be different in the new domain, e.g., the word ``positive'' typically has positive sentiment, but often has negative sentiment in medical notes since it may imply that a patient tested positive for a disease. In practice, we expect that only a small number of domain-specific words may have new meanings. We propose an intuitive two-stage estimator that exploits this structure via a group-sparse penalty to efficiently transfer learn domain-specific word embeddings by combining large-scale text corpora (such as Wikipedia) with limited domain-specific text data. We bound the generalization error of our transfer learning estimator, proving that it can achieve high accuracy with substantially less domain-specific data when only a small number of embeddings are altered between domains. Furthermore, we prove that all local minima identified by our nonconvex objective function are statistically indistinguishable from the global minimum under standard regularization conditions, implying that our estimator can be computed efficiently. Our results provide the first bounds on group-sparse matrix factorization, which may be of independent interest. We empirically evaluate our approach compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuning heuristics from natural language processing.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Ensemble RL through Classifier Models: Enhancing Risk-Return Trade-offs in Trading Strategies

作者:

arXiv:2502.17518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive study on the use of ensemble Reinforcement Learning (RL) models in financial trading strategies, leveraging classifier models to enhance performance. By combining RL algorithms such as A2C, PPO, and SAC with traditional classifiers like Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees, and Logistic Regression, we investigate how different classifier groups can be integrated to improve risk-return trade-offs. The study evaluates the effectiveness of various ensemble methods, comparing them with individual RL models across key financial metrics, including Cumulative Returns, Sharpe Ratios (SR), Calmar Ratios, and Maximum Drawdown (MDD). Our original experimental results demonstrate that ensemble methods often outperform base models in terms of risk-adjusted returns, providing better management of drawdowns and overall stability. However, both the original analysis and the additional reproduction reported in this version show that ensemble performance is sensitive to the choice of variance threshold \(\tau\), classifier group, RL-agent pair, and market universe. The reproduction evidence strengthens the conclusion that classifier-assisted ensemble selection can improve robustness, while also clarifying that the advantage is conditional rather than automatic across all datasets. This study emphasizes the value of combining RL with classifiers for adaptive decision-making, with implications for financial trading, robotics, and other dynamic environments.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ActionMap: Robot Policy Learning via Voxel Action Heatmap

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced rapidly across backbones, training recipes, and data scale, yet the action decoder, which converts the backbone's hidden state into a continuous control signal, has barely changed and remains a single-point predictor across the majority of current VLAs. Whether implemented via autoregressive token bins, L1 regression, or flow-matching denoising, the resulting decoder treats the action space as unstructured, leaving the geometric proximity of neighboring actions unexploited during training. To advance this, we introduce ActionMap, a voxel heatmap action head that drops into an existing VLA in place of its native action decoder. For each new action, the head predicts a voxel heatmap over the action space, where each voxel directly stores the probability of the corresponding action. Across LIBERO simulation and real-world Franka manipulation, our heatmap head surpasses two architecturally distinct backbones at matched training steps (e.g., +8.2% over OpenVLA-OFT's L1 regression head on the LIBERO four-suite average), converges at comparable or faster rates on both backbones, and remains markedly more data-efficient at low training data. The cross-backbone consistency indicates that action representation is a real lever for VLA performance, distinct from further backbone or recipe scaling. Project Page: https://showlab.github.io/ActionMap/.

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

Software Delegation Contracts: Measuring Reviewability in AI Coding-Agent Work

arXiv:2606.17099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents increasingly accept assigned software tasks, modify repositories under bounded authority, and return work packages for review. Prior work proposed the software delegation contract, covering the task, authority, returned work package, and acceptance context, as the unit of analysis for delegated coding work, but did not measure its effects. This paper reports a controlled pilot study of explicit delegation contracts for coding agents. We built a dependency-free TypeScript API task environment with seeded defects and documentation gaps, authored ten tasks across five families, and ran 64 agent executions across two model tiers under three conditions: a realistic issue-style prompt, an explicit delegation contract, and a contract with a required evidence bundle. Each run was scored with hidden acceptance tests, mutation checks, and scope analysis, then reviewed by three independent condition-blinded model-based reviewers using a fixed rubric, for 192 reviews. Explicit contracts did not improve objective task outcomes: all 64 runs passed hidden acceptance checks, with zero scope violations. They did improve reviewability. Evidence sufficiency improved in 22 of 30 paired comparisons and worsened in none (+0.83 on a 5-point scale, p < 0.0001, Cliff's delta = 0.66); reviewer ambiguity decreased (p = 0.035); changed-file lists, known-limitations sections, residual-risk sections, and reviewer checklists appeared mostly or only when demanded by the contract. Contracts cost +13% agent tokens and +38% wall-clock time, with larger effects for the weaker model tier. On these small tasks, delegation contracts bought reviewability rather than correctness.

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

Moving Beyond Diffusion: Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Autoregression for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction

Reconstructing visual stimuli from fMRI signals is a central challenge bridging machine learning and neuroscience. Recent diffusion-based methods typically map fMRI activity to a single neural embedding, using it as static guidance throughout the entire generation process. However, this fixed guidance collapses hierarchical neural information and is misaligned with the stage-dependent demands of image reconstruction. In response, we propose MindHier, a coarse-to-fine fMRI-to-image reconstruction framework built on scale-wise autoregressive modeling. MindHier introduces three components: a Hierarchical fMRI Encoder to extract multi-level neural embeddings, a Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Alignment scheme to enforce layer-wise correspondence with CLIP features, and a Scale-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Neural Guidance strategy to inject these embeddings into autoregression at matching scales. These designs make MindHier an efficient and cognitively aligned alternative to diffusion-based methods by enabling a hierarchical reconstruction process that synthesizes global semantics before refining local details, akin to human visual perception. Extensive experiments on the NSD dataset show that MindHier achieves superior semantic fidelity, 4.67$\times$ faster inference, and more deterministic results than the diffusion-based baselines.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

ProtAff: Protein Binding Affinity Prediction via LoRA-Finetuned ESM-2

Predicting the binding affinity of protein–protein interactions remains a central challenge in computational biology. Structure prediction models such as AlphaFold3 (AF3) and Boltz-2 can produce high-quality docking poses, and their confidence scores indicate structure quality, but these same scores fail to rank binding affinity among confirmed binders. Here we present ProtAff, a sequence-only affinity prediction model built on ESM-2 (650M parameters) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning and a cross-attention module. ProtAff is trained using a margin ranking loss on 362,567 affinity measurements spanning 20 heterogeneous data sources, and we removed all training samples whose target sequence exceeds 50% similarity to the test target EGFR. On the AdaptyvBio EGFR benchmark (N = 55), ProtAff achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient {rho} = 0.413, outperforming the best AF3 metric ({rho} = 0.054), the best Boltz-2 metric ({rho} = -0.046), and ML-based predictors MINT ({rho} = 0.242) and CrossAffinity ({rho} = 0.216). Applied to the AdaptyvBio Nipah virus binder design competition, a pipeline incorporating ProtAff for affinity ranking produced a design with KD = 0.132 nM (2 of 5 designs confirmed binding), a 2.8-fold improvement over the competition winner. On a cross-target discrimination benchmark of 91 VHH-antigen crystal structures, ProtAff underperforms structural methods for distinguishing cognate from non-cognate pairings, indicating that sequence-based affinity models are effective for within-target ranking but not for cross-target specificity.

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

CogniFold: Always-On Proactive Memory via Cognitive Folding

Existing agent memory remains predominantly reactive and retrieval-based, lacking the capacity to autonomously organize experience into persistent cognitive structure. Toward genuinely autonomous agents, we introduce CogniFold, a brain-inspired "always-on" agent memory designed for the next generation of proactive assistants. CogniFold continuously folds fragmented event streams into self-emerging cognitive structures, bootstrapping progressively higher-level cognition from incoming events and accumulated knowledge. We ground this by extending Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory from two layers (hippocampus, neocortex) to three, adding a prefrontal intent layer. Emulating the prefrontal cortex as the locus of intentional control and decision-making, CogniFold achieves this through graph-topology self-organization: cognitive structures proactively assemble under the stream, merge when semantically similar, decay when stale, relink through associative recall, and surface intents when concept-cluster density crosses a threshold. We evaluate structural formation using CogEval-Bench, demonstrating that CogniFold uniquely produces memory structures that match cognitive expectations and concept emergence. Furthermore, across eight downstream benchmarks – two probing long-term conversational memory (LoCoMo, LongMemEval) and six spanning other cognitive domains – we validate that CogniFold simultaneously performs robustly on conventional memory tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenNorve/CogniFold.

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

Why Sampling Is Not Choosing: Intentionality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionality is derived rather than intrinsic, and their outputs are neither owned as commitments nor guided by reasons. Variability introduced by stochastic sampling does not amount to choice or authorship. We address objections from the intentional stance, functionalism, compatibilism, and the presence of moral reasoning in model outputs, arguing that none suffice to establish genuine agency.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An Empirical Investigation of Pre-Trained Deep Learning Model Reuse in the Scientific Process

arXiv:2603.13584v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has achieved recognition for its impact within natural sciences, yet the prohibitive financial and technical cost of training models from scratch inhibit adoption. Following software engineering community guidance, natural scientists are reusing pre-trained deep learning models (PTMs) to amortize these costs. While prior works recommend PTM reuse patterns, we present the first empirical study of PTM reuse patterns in the natural sciences, quantifying the utilization and impact of PTM reuse within the scientific process across 17,718 peer reviewed, open access papers. Our results show that "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology" has outpaced other natural scientific fields in PTM reuse, "adaptation" reuse is the most prevalent PTM reuse pattern identified across all natural science fields, and the "testing" stage of the scientific process has been most impacted by PTM integration.

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

Agentic Retrieval and Reinforcement Learned Equation Chains: A Controlled Generation Framework for Complex and Novel Physics Word Problems

Generating high-quality Physics Word Problems (PWPs) that are novel, complex, and solvable remains a challenging and underexplored problem in educational content generation. Existing approaches, many adapted from Math Word Problem (MWP) generation, often produce ambiguous, unsolvable, or structurally simple questions with limited linguistic diversity. We introduce ARVRE (Agentic Retrieval Value Reinforced Equation-chain), a two-stage framework for generating diverse and mathematically valid PWPs. In the first stage, a form of offline temporal-difference learning is used to construct valid chains of physics equations, while an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework dynamically selects topic-specific concepts and vocabulary. This design enables explicit control over problem structure and difficulty. In the second stage, a Large Language Model (LLM) converts the equation chain and retrieved concepts into a natural-language physics question. By grounding generation in valid equation chains, our method preserves mathematical correctness while promoting linguistic diversity and contextual richness. Human and automated evaluations demonstrate that ARVRE generates PWPs that are more complex, novel, and solvable than those produced by existing approaches. These results highlight the potential of combining reinforcement learning, retrieval, and LLMs for reliable generation of educational physics content.

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

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.