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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Quantum Machine Learning for Industrial Applications

arXiv:2606.14822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Machine Learning have transformed numerous industrial sectors, yet classical paradigms face fundamental limitations: rapidly growing data volumes, rising computational costs, significant energy consumption, and the physical scaling limits of conventional hardware architectures. Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm to address these challenges, giving rise to the field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). In this thesis, the theoretical foundations of QML are investigated, with a focus on near-term and future practical applications. Three central challenges are addressed: the trainability of variational quantum circuits, their expressivity, and their resistance to efficient classical simulation. The trainability of Hamming-weight preserving variational quantum circuits is first studied, and theoretical guarantees are established that resolve an open conjecture on the absence of barren plateaus for this circuit family. Subspace-preserving QML algorithms are then introduced, including photonic circuits and quantum convolutional neural networks, and are designed to mimic classical ML subroutines while offering polynomial quantum advantage. Finally, variational quantum circuits are analyzed as quantum Fourier models, and a framework is derived to jointly characterize expressivity and trainability, from which conditions are obtained under which quantum models provably separate from their classical counterparts. These contributions are intended to advance the theoretical roadmap for harnessing near-term and future quantum technologies in real-world applications.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Continual Adaptation for Pacific Indigenous Speech Recognition

Speech foundation models struggle with low-resource Pacific Indigenous languages because of severe data scarcity. Furthermore, full fine-tuning risks catastrophic forgetting. To address this gap, we present an empirical study adapting models to real-world Pacific datasets. We investigate the impact of data volume, adaptation strategies, and representational drift on speech foundation models for various Pacific languages. Additionally, we analyze a continual learning framework for sequential language acquisition. Empirical results across three distinct Pacific Indigenous languages demonstrate that adapting to these linguistically distant languages induces severe internal representational drift. Consequently, these models face a strict plasticity and stability dilemma. While LoRA adapts well initially, it suffers from catastrophic forgetting during sequential learning. Ultimately, this study highlights the urgent need for robust adaptation strategies tailored to underrepresented languages.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets

arXiv:2606.17805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Deep-Learning-Based Pixelated Microwave Filter Design and Characterization using Electro-Optical Electric-Field Measurements

arXiv:2606.18402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional microwave filter design typically relies on iterative parameter tuning and predefined topologies, which limits design space and increases development time. This study uses a deep learning approach combining convolutional neural networks with genetic algorithms to automate pixelated microwave filter synthesis. To validate the approach experimentally, both S-parameter and spatial electric-field measurements were analyzed. The synthesized low-pass filter demonstrated excellent agreement between simulated and measured performance, achieving a 7 GHz passband with over 20 dB suppression beyond 9.5 GHz. Electro-optical measurements, for the first time, revealed electric field patterns that resemble coupled transmission-lines or stub structures, providing insight into the emergent characteristics of AI-generated designs.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Computer Vision Scoring of Figure Copy and Recall

Objective. Figure copy and recall tests are sensitive measures of visuoconstruction and visual episodic memory, but their clinical is constrained by labor-intensive manual scoring. We developed and validated an automated, element-level scoring pipeline using Vertex AI object detection for the tablet-based figure copy and recall tasks in the California Cognitive Assessment Battery (CCAB). The automated scoring pipeline duplicated the scoring procedures used by expert manual raters. Methods. A normative sample of 2,011 community-dwelling adults aged 18-90 completed figure copy and delayed recall trials at baseline, with subsamples retested at 1 day and at 6, 18, and 30 months. Participants completed the drawings with their index finger on a tablet computer with finger position digitized to analyze the speed and timing of individual drawing strokes A convolutional object-detection model trained on the Vertex AI AutoML Vision platform identified each of twelve canonical figure elements in rendered drawings. Separate element presence and location scores were computed after homographically warping drawings onto a canonical template to produce trial-level Element, Location, and Total scores. To compare Vertex and human scores, Vertex AI and expert human raters independently scored 1500 randomly selected drawings to evaluate inter-rater agreement, including a common subset of 100 drawings scored by Vertex AI and all raters. Results. Total scores were virtually indistinguishable (r = 0.966) from human-human agreement (mean r = 0.971) as were Element presence scores (mean r = 0.959 vs. r = 0.963). Location-score agreement (r = 0.951) was slightly below the human-human mean (r = 0.972) due to pixel-level analysis by Vertex AI that was impossible for human raters. The Vertex pipeline showed no preferential advantage for the single expert rater who categorized Elements during training. Automated scores showed strong demographic gradients, age effects on Recall (r = -0.32) were approximately twice those in Copy conditions (r = -0.16). A Memory Cost score (Recall - Copy) showed a monotonic age-related decline from +0.40 z in the youngest subjects to -0.54 z in the oldest. Kinetic analysis revealed that drawing speed and efficiency showed significant age-related changes. Overnight test-retest reliability was high (Recall r = 0.72) and the Recall trial showed a large overnight learning effect ({Delta} = +1.18) that continued with repeated tests up to 30 months ({Delta} = +0.75).

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

Gaussian Spatial Priors for Anatomy-Aware Object Detection in Surgical Videos

Detecting anatomical structures in surgical video is essential for intraoperative safety frameworks such as the Critical View of Myopectineal Orifice (CVMPO) in inguinal hernia repair. While prominent structures like the Cooper's Ligament and Triangle of Doom are reliably detected by standard methods, smaller structures such as the epigastric vessels remain challenging due to their visual ambiguity and intermittent visibility. We observe that the spatial relationship between structures is anatomically constrained, and propose a Gaussian Spatial Prior (GSP) module that encodes this relationship as a compact, parametric bias injected into the self-attention of a DAB-DETR decoder. The prior is computed offline from training annotations as a small set of frozen Gaussian parameters and recomputed at each decoder layer using the iteratively refined reference points. On a dataset of inguinal hernia repair videos with 5-fold cross-validation, GSP improves dependent class detection by $+33.5\%$ ($AP_{50}$) over DAB-DETR and $+53.9\%$ over YOLOv26, while also improving anchor detection by $+6.0\%$. These gains are statistically significant across all folds ($p=0.012$, paired $t-$test).

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

AVIS: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains. We view this cost through two coupled axes: Visual Context Scaling (VCS), which controls how much visual evidence is passed to the language model, and Visual Reasoning Scaling (VRS), which controls how much inference-time reasoning search is performed. Existing methods typically optimize one axis at a time, leaving the joint allocation of compute across these axes underexplored. We introduce Adaptive Visual Inference Scaling (AVIS), a lightweight policy that adapts both VCS and VRS per query. AVIS realizes VCS through Key Diversity Visual (KDV) pruning, a training-free $O(N)$ key-based rule for removing redundant visual tokens before prefilling, and realizes VRS through adaptive self-consistency, using a learned difficulty predictor to select the number of reasoning rollouts. AVIS is deployment-friendly and compatible with shared-prefill inference, where all rollouts reuse a single prefilling pass and KV cache. Across diverse image and video reasoning benchmarks, AVIS improves the accuracy–compute trade-off relative to VCS-only and VRS-only baselines, and remains effective on top of RL post-trained VLMs while keeping compute and latency low.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Is level-1 blob reconstruction under the network multispecies coalescent easy?

作者:

Hybridization is an important evolutionary process, commonly modeled by the network multispecies coalescent. Reconstructing evolutionary histories under this model is notoriously costly, even for level-1 networks where hybridization events are isolated from each other. The widely used methods that combine speed with statistical guarantees rely on quartet concordance factors computed for all subsets of four species, resulting in an o(n^4k) bottleneck that severely limits scalability to large numbers of species (n) and genes (k). Among quartet-based methods, NANUQ+ is notable because it decomposes the problem into two steps: first reconstructing a tree of blobs, which compresses each non-treelike part of the network, called a blob, into a single vertex, and second reconstructing the internal structure of each level-1 blob, specifically its circular order and hybrid vertex. Here, we investigate whether level-1 blob reconstruction is difficult once the tree of blobs is known. We present a fast and statistically consistent algorithm, called NetCS, based on two simple primitives: majority voting and merge sort, circumventing the bottleneck of computing all quartet concordance factors. In simulations, NetCS achieved comparable accuracy to NANUQ+ and was dramatically faster, enabling analyses of 200 taxa and 1000 genes in only a few minutes. Both methods attained near-perfect accuracy when given the true tree of blobs; however, their performance degraded in end-to-end pipelines due to errors in tree of blobs reconstruction. Strikingly, even methods that reconstruct level-1 networks directly struggled to accurately predict hybrid ancestry. Our results suggest that reconstructing level-1 blobs is unexpectedly easy once the tree of blobs is known, and that a major challenge for phylogenetic network inference lies in accurate tree of blobs reconstruction.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SAGE: Scalable AI Governance & Evaluation

arXiv:2602.07840v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating relevance in large-scale search systems is fundamentally constrained by the governance gap between nuanced, resource-constrained human oversight and the high-throughput requirements of production systems. While traditional approaches rely on engagement proxies or sparse manual review, these methods often fail to capture the full scope of high-impact relevance failures. We present SAGE (Scalable AI Governance \& Evaluation), a framework that operationalizes high-quality human product judgment as a scalable evaluation signal. At the core of SAGE is a bidirectional calibration loop where natural-language Policy, curated Precedent, and an LLM Surrogate Judge co-evolve. SAGE systematically resolves semantic ambiguities and misalignments, transforming subjective relevance judgment into an executable, multi-dimensional rubric with near human-level agreement. To bridge the gap between frontier model reasoning and industrial-scale inference, we apply teacher-student distillation to transfer high-fidelity judgments into compact student surrogates at 92$\times$ lower cost. Deployed within LinkedIn Search ecosystems, SAGE guided model iteration through simulation-driven development, distilling policy-aligned models for online serving and enabling rapid offline evaluation. In production, it powered policy oversight that measured ramped model variants and detected regressions invisible to engagement metrics. Collectively, these drove a 0.25\% lift in LinkedIn daily active users.

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

Sentinel: Decoding Context Utilization via Attention Probing for Efficient LLM Context Compression

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) often suffers from long and noisy retrieved contexts. Existing context compression methods typically rely on heuristic relevance estimation or supervised compression models rather than on how LLMs utilize retrieved context during inference. We propose Sentinel, a lightweight sentence-level compression framework that decodes inference-time contextual utilization behaviors from head-wise attention patterns of frozen LLMs. To ground supervision in retrieval-dependent answering behavior, Sentinel trains a lightweight probe using QA examples where the model succeeds only when retrieved context is available. Sentinel performs compression using only a single non-autoregressive forward pass without dedicated compression training or autoregressive scoring. Empirically, we find that effective contextual utilization signals remain accessible even in compact proxy models. On LongBench, Sentinel with a 0.5B proxy model achieves up to 5$\times$ compression while attaining question-answering performance competitive with compression methods built on 7B-scale models. Despite being trained only on English QA data, Sentinel also generalizes effectively to Chinese and out-of-domain settings.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Uncertain Judgments to Calibrated Rankings: Conformal Elo Estimation for LLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606.13221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale. LLM-as-a-judge offers a cheaper alternative, but judge scores carry systematic errors - such as position bias, self-preference, or intransitivity - that can strongly miscalibrate the resulting rankings. We quantify the resulting judge-human disagreement at two complementary levels. At the local level, we estimate per-battle uncertainty from the judge's own score differences by propagating calibrated win probabilities rather than hard labels into the Bradley-Terry procedure. This alone provides a drastic improvement to Elo estimation accuracy, bringing LLM-derived ratings within 17.9 Elo MAE of human-derived ones when averaged over 55 held-out models on LMArena. At the global level, we apply split conformal prediction to the residual gap between LLM-derived and human-derived Elo ratings across held-out models, producing prediction intervals with distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees that account for irreducible LLM-human disagreement. Together, these two layers yield a low-cost evaluation tool that provides developers with calibrated Elo estimates and honest uncertainty bounds, without access to large-scale human annotations.To facilitate reproducibility, we release our code at https://github.com/kargibora/SoftElo .

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Augmenting Game AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Therapeutic efficacy study on shoulder impingement syndrome in swimmers: a network meta-analysis

Shoulder impingement syndrome (SIS), including subacromial impingement and rotator cuff tendinitis, is commonly caused by repetitive swimming movements and associated shoulder joint dysfunction. Despite numerous available treatment options, no consensus exists on the most effective treatment option. Therefore, this systematic review and network meta-analysis aimed to investigate treatment methods for SIS in swimmers. Using a frequentist framework and Cochrane PICOS principles, we compared SIS treatments, constructed network evidence diagrams, and assessed heterogeneity. A total of 45 studies were included in the qualitative synthesis, and 42 contributed to the network meta-analysis, comprising 1752 participants, 9 treatment categories, and outcome measures. For pain outcomes, some adjunctive interventions combined with exercise showed favorable ranking probabilities, although several estimates were accompanied by wide confidence intervals. For shoulder range-of-motion outcomes, taping, acupuncture, manual therapy, and sport-specific training showed favorable effects in selected comparisons, particularly for external and internal rotation. According to surface under the cumulative ranking curve (SUCRA) rankings, exercise combined with medium-frequency therapy ranked highly for pain reduction, whereas exercise combined with acupuncture or extracorporeal shock wave therapy ranked highly for shoulder flexion. Exercise combined with taping ranked highly for external rotation, and exercise combined with manual therapy ranked highly for internal rotation. However, the interpretation of ranking results should remain cautious because uncertainty and inconsistency were present in some comparisons. Exercise-based rehabilitation appears to remain central to the management of SIS in swimmers. Several adjunctive interventions showed favorable findings for selected outcomes, especially pain relief and shoulder rotational function. However, the available evidence was affected by heterogeneity, inconsistency, and imprecision across some treatment comparisons. More rigorously designed swimmer-specific randomized controlled trials are needed before firm treatment hierarchies can be established. Trial registration: The protocol for this systematic review is registered with PROSPERO (www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO; registration number: CRD42024498851). The first submission of PROSPERO was on January 15, 2024, and it was revised and updated on March 25, 2026.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Conformal calibration and look-elsewhere effect in anomaly detection for new-physics searches

arXiv:2606.13780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learned anomaly detection is reshaping searches for new physics, but it has outrun the statistics used to interpret it. A raw anomaly score has no calibrated meaning, a model that scans many regions inflates the look-elsewhere effect, and the asymptotic significances the field relies on are blind to the background mismodelling that anomaly detectors are especially prone to. We propose a calibration layer, built on conformal prediction, that turns any anomaly score into a defensible significance with distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees. Conformal prediction converts scores into valid local p-values, weighted and Mondrian variants repair the sideband-to-signal-region exchangeability failures that resonant searches suffer, and a Gross-Vitells step carries the result through to a look-elsewhere-aware global significance. The layer does two things at once. It exposes miscalibration that the standard pipeline cannot see, and it corrects it without retraining the detector. On public LHC Olympics data, a classifier develops a substructure-mass correlation that makes sideband-calibrated background p-values anti-conservative. Taken at face value, this manufactures a $\sim 46\sigma$ excess from background sculpting alone, which the label-free weighted correction removes, restoring an honest null. When run as a blind wide-mass bump hunt, the standard asymptotic and unweighted procedures fabricate $\gtrsim10\sigma$ excesses and $\approx5\sigma$ excesses even in signal-free windows, while the conformal layer raises no false alarms and its global false-positive rate is verified on background-only pseudoexperiments. The result is an auditable, detector-agnostic path from an uncalibrated score to a trials-factor-aware significance, ready to be folded into experimental anomaly searches.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Towards Fully Automated Exam Grading: Fairness-Aware Recognition of Handwritten Answers with Foundation Models

Correcting handwritten exams by hand is time-consuming and error-prone, particularly for large cohorts, while fully digital exams tend to force a didactic narrowing towards closed question formats. A practical middle ground keeps paper-based, problem-oriented tasks but records the assessment-relevant answers as single capital letters in a table that a machine can read. The open question is whether this reading can be made accurate and, above all, fair enough for unsupervised grading. Earlier automated approaches reached only about 88%–91% recognition – too low – and failed on the cases that matter most: answers placed outside the cell, crossed out, or written in cursive. We show that general-purpose vision-language foundation models (VLMs), which interpret the page rather than match pixel templates, close this gap. On a benchmark of 61 anonymised exams (3141 answer positions) the best model reaches 98.4% accuracy, well above the previous baseline. Crucially, we centre the evaluation on fairness: we distinguish false negatives (a correct answer marked wrong, which disadvantages the student) from false positives, and a lightweight prompt that supplies the reference solution as context lowers the false-negative rate to 0.58%. Under an exemplary grading scheme only three of the 61 exams would be graded worse, all caught by a student self-review step. Fully automated, fairness-aware exam grading at scale is therefore defensible; we release the anonymised benchmark to support reproducibility.

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

Sensitivity Shaping for Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.14585v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative dynamics models enable planning in challenging robotic systems, but safe deployment requires reliably detecting policy-induced out-of-distribution (OOD) transitions. Existing methods typically treat the learned dynamics as fixed and attach post hoc support surrogates. We show that these surrogates can fail when the dynamics are locally insensitive to critical action choices: unsupported control actions may produce latent predictions that resemble demonstrated transitions, suppressing OOD signals despite large true predictive errors. To address this, we introduce support-conditioned control-sensitivity regularization, which promotes sensitive local response to control input changes in learned dynamics in high-support training regions. This preserves control-induced variation while limiting unstable extrapolation due to weak empirical support. Experiments in vision-based obstacle avoidance, manipulation, and real-robot navigation show improved OOD detection and safer closed-loop planning.

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

AnchorEdit: Maintaining Temporal Consistency in Multi-turn Image Editing via Causal Memory

Multi-turn image editing is essential for iterative design, yet current models often struggle with identity drift and error accumulation over successive steps. While existing research leverages video priors for consistency, their reliance on bidirectional attention is fundamentally misaligned with the causal, sequential nature of interactive editing. In this paper, we propose AnchorEdit, the first autoregressive (AR) diffusion-based framework designed specifically for high-resolution, long-term multi-turn editing. AnchorEdit bridges the gap between video priors and causal inference through a three-stage training curriculum: identity-preserving sing-turn pretraining, causal AR forcing fine-tuning with a novel self-rollout strategy to mitigate exposure bias, and consistency distillation for efficient 4-step generation. During inference, we introduce a memory mechanism to anchor the initial subject identity and ensure stable extrapolation across extended editing trajectories. To evaluate performance, we provide a new high-resolution multi-turn editing benchmark designed to stress-test long-horizon stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorEdit achieves state-of-the-art results, maintaining exceptional subject fidelity and instruction following even over 10+ interaction rounds.

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

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

arXiv:2606.12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $\alpha$ and the learning rate function differently, with $\alpha$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone. Through the synergy of extensive empirical analysis and a theoretical Signal-Drift framework, we uncover three findings into LoRA's scaling mechanism: First, LoRA's spectral suppression smooths the optimization landscape, rendering standard hyperparameters overly conservative and creating an optimization gap. Second, when leveraging this smoothness to accelerate convergence, $\alpha$ outperforms the learning rate by amplifying the task signal without increasing the drift ratio. Third, the optimal scaling factor follows a sublinear relationship with the rank, well characterized by a square-root law with an unexpectedly large coefficient, revealing the insufficient scaling of existing rank-tied heuristics. Based on these insights, we propose LoRA-$\alpha$, a minimalist framework that restores $\alpha$ to its principled regime, making LoRA compatible with standard small learning rates. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate that LoRA-$\alpha$ consistently improves performance while streamlining hyperparameter search, unleashing the learning potential of LoRA.

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

Hidden Ghost Hand: Unveiling Backdoor Vulnerabilities in MLLM-Powered Mobile GUI Agents

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown greater promise for human-interaction. However, due to the high fine-tuning cost, users often rely on open-source GUI agents or APIs offered by AI providers, which introduces a critical but underexplored supply chain threat: backdoor attacks. In this work, we first unveil that MLLM-powered GUI agents naturally expose multiple interaction-level triggers, such as historical steps, environment states, and task progress. Based on this observation, we introduce AgentGhost, an effective and stealthy framework for red-teaming backdoor attacks. Specifically, we first construct composite triggers by combining goal and interaction levels, allowing GUI agents to unintentionally activate backdoors while ensuring task utility. Then, we formulate backdoor injection as a Min-Max optimization problem that uses supervised contrastive learning to maximize the feature difference across sample classes at the representation space, improving flexibility of the backdoor. Meanwhile, it adopts supervised fine-tuning to minimize the discrepancy between backdoor and clean behavior generation, enhancing effectiveness and utility. Extensive evaluations of various agent models in two established mobile benchmarks show that AgentGhost is effective and generic, with attack accuracy that reaches 99.7\% on three attack objectives, and shows stealthiness with only 1\% utility degradation. Furthermore, we tailor a defense method against AgentGhost that reduces the attack accuracy to 22.1\%. Our code is available at \texttt{anonymous}.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Temporal Motif-aware Graph Test-time Adaptation for OOD Blockchain Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2605.29526v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ever-evolving transaction patterns have significantly hindered anomaly detection on emerging cryptocurrency blockchains due to the vast number of addresses and diverse anomalous behaviors. Recently, advanced Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) approaches applied to blockchains have faced two critical challenges: adversarial pattern evolution by malicious actors and the out-of-distribution (OOD) problem caused by varied transaction semantics on blockchains. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed TEmporal Motif-aware Graph Test-Time Adaptation (TEMG-TTA). First, we comprehensively capture the 3-node temporal motif distribution of each active address using an efficient computational mechanism, enabling downstream temporal motif-aware graph learning. Second, we design a simple yet effective test-time adaptation strategy to facilitate the sharing of common patterns between training and testing graphs. Extensive experiments on 5 real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed TEMG-TTA outperforms state-of-the-art GAD approaches by an average of 54.88\%. A further case study on interpretable motif patterns reveals that TEMG-TTA explicitly characterizes the complex transaction patterns of anomalous addresses, thereby verifying the effectiveness of our technical designs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/LuoXishuang0712/TEMG-TTA/.

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

Variable-Length Tokenization via Learnable Global Merging for Diffusion Transformers

arXiv:2606.20076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have become dominant in visual synthesis, but their quality-compute trade-off is largely constrained by the tokenizer's fixed compression ratio. Variable-length tokenizers (VLTs) promise adaptive compression by varying token counts, allowing diffusion models to flexibly balance quality and compute. However, conventional VLTs modulate length by truncating ordered token sequences, which makes token semantics depend on token position and breaks representational alignment across lengths. This leads to a cross-length shift in the latent distribution that hinders a single variable-length diffusion model from operating effectively. To address this, we propose a novel variable-length tokenizer that modulates length by merging tokens. We show that encouraging similar tokens to merge enables direct cross-length representation alignment when the diffusion transformer operates according to the merging pattern. Since conventional merging methods are data-dependent, making the merging pattern inaccessible during generation, we introduce learnable global merging, which is data-independent, to ensure compatibility with diffusion transformers. On ImageNet 256$\times$256 generation, our merging-based variable-length tokenizer integrated with a diffusion transformer achieves a superior gFID-compute trade-off compared to prior VLT methods. Code is available at [this https URL](https://github.com/movinghoon/lgm)

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Recruitment, Retention Approaches and Community Engagement in the THRIVE pilot Trial: Lessons Learned from a Food is Medicine Trial

Background: Recruitment of underrepresented populations, including Black and Hispanic populations, for Food is Medicine (FIM) and cardiovascular trials, may pose significant challenges. Methods: We implemented a multi-component recruitment approach for the THRIVE (AdapTive personalized dietitian coacHing and messaging with pRoduce prescrIptions to improVE healthy dietary behaviors) pilot trial to engage primarily Black and Hispanic adults in a Food is Medicine for hypertension intervention. The recruitment approaches included community engagement at approximately 40 community events (cultural festivals and neighborhood gatherings); partnerships with 8 community and faith-based service hubs and food distribution sites; recruitment through safety net primary care clinics, digital outreach via the study website, and social media campaigns; and direct recruitment at places of worship. We report lessons learned from the community engagement process, recruitment efficiency, representativeness, and retention outcomes. Results: Within 6 months, the enrollment target was exceeded by 40%, with an accrual index of 1.04. Over 1,000 individuals were reached through the direct-to-community engagement process, while faith-based partnerships engaged about 900 adults. There were 2,673 visits to the study webpage, and social media achieved 12,259 impressions with 399 clicks. About 95% of participants resided within 10 miles of the faith-based recruitment sites. Face-to-face engagement at the food distribution sites within faith-based organizations or community service hubs outperformed digital methods. Faith leader endorsements and follow-up in-person meetings (following unsuccessful email outreach) dramatically increased recruitment. Regarding retention, pre-randomization attrition was 6%, and 82% of participants completed the study. Conclusion: Culturally tailored, community-engaged recruitment grounded in faith-based and local community partnerships, was highly effective in engaging Black and Hispanic populations in this FIM cardiovascular trial. This provides a replicable model for implementing equitable and sustainable cardiovascular health interventions.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Maximum entropy principle for quantum processes

arXiv:2506.24079v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The maximum entropy principle, as applied to quantum systems, is a fundamental prescript positing that for a quantum system for which we only have partial knowledge, the maximum entropy state consistent with the partial knowledge is a valuable choice as the system's state. An intriguing result is that in case the only prior knowledge is of a fixed energy, the maximum entropy state turns out to be the thermal state, a ubiquitous state in several arenas, especially in statistical mechanics. We extend the consequences of this principle from static quantum states to dynamic quantum processes. We establish that a quantum channel attains maximal output entropy under a fixed energy constraint if and only if it is an absolutely thermalizing channel, where the fixed output is the thermal state corresponding to that energy. Our results have potential implications for understanding the informational and thermodynamic utility of quantum channels under physical constraints. As an application, we examine the consequences for private randomness distillation from fixed energy constrained quantum processes.