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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Sao Tome and Principe on the verge of eliminating lymphatic filariasis as a public health problem: evidence from IDA impact assessment surveys

Background Accelerated efforts to eliminate lymphatic filariasis (LF) as a public health problem have been supported by the introduction of the triple-drug regimen of ivermectin, diethylcarbamazine and albendazole (IDA) in endemic settings. In Sao Tome and Principe, nationwide mass drug administration (MDA) with diethylcarbamazine and albendazole was implemented in 2018, followed by IDA in 2019 and 2020. This study assesses progress towards elimination using post-MDA impact assessment surveys conducted after cessation of treatment. Methods Cross-sectional surveys were conducted among adults aged 20 years and older in 2022 and again between December 2024 and January 2025. Circulating filarial antigen (CFA) was detected using the filarial test strip (FTS). Individuals who tested positive were examined for microfilaremia using nocturnal calibrated thick blood smear microscopy. Additionally, programme data on MDA coverage and morbidity were obtained from national surveillance records. Results Three rounds of nationwide MDA achieved high epidemiological coverage (86.4% in 2018, 74.2% in 2019 and 80.0% in 2020). The impact assessment surveys conducted in 2022 evaluated 14 132 adults, with 21 individuals (0.15%) testing positive for CFA, while the follow-up survey conducted between December 2024 and January 2025 assessed 14 653 adults and detected seven positive cases (0.05%). No microfilariae were detected among the 28 antigen-positive individuals examined using nocturnal calibrated thick blood smears. National morbidity records documented 190 cases of lymphoedema and nine cases of hydrocoele. Conclusions Infection indicators remain well below WHO decision thresholds, suggesting that LF transmission is unlikely to be sustained. Sao Tome and Principe appears to be close to eliminating LF as a public health problem. However, strengthening morbidity management services will be essential to support the preparation of the national elimination dossier.

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

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Frequency-Aware Flow Matching for Continuous and Consistent Robotic Action Generation

arXiv:2606.20135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching has emerged as a standard paradigm for robotic manipulation owing to its strong expressive power for modelling complex, multimodal action distributions, alongside similar approaches like diffusion policy. However, existing methods rely on discretized action chunks, making them brittle to demonstrations collected at heterogeneous control frequencies and prone to temporally inconsistent actions that degrade control stability. In this paper, we propose Frequency-Aware Flow Matching (FAFM), which outputs continuous, temporally consistent actions. To handle heterogeneous frequency input, we transform discrete action sequences into the frequency domain with the discrete cosine transform (DCT), perform flow matching over the resulting coefficients, and reconstruct continuous actions via cosine basis expansion. To generate temporally consistent actions, we regularize the first-order temporal derivative to promote smooth actions. This corresponds to a Sobolev-type constraint that suppresses high-frequency errors and discourages abrupt action changes. Our FAFM is simple, introduces no additional network parameters and applies to standalone flow-matching policies and vision-language action models. Across synthetic toy benchmark, obstacle avoidance, LapGym, and LIBERO, FAFM improves success rates, multimodal expressivity, motion smoothness, convergence speed, robustness to mechanical bias and mixed-frequency input. These gains are consistent when deployed on a real-world Franka robot. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FAFM.

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

Structure Over Nonlinearity: Explicit Interaction Architectures for Dynamical Learning

arXiv:2606.19101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most learning architectures for dynamical systems rely on generic nonlinear function approximation, often requiring high model complexity to capture structured behaviors. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm in which modeling capability arises primarily from structure rather than from expressive nonlinearities. We introduce a class of explicit structured dynamical units based on wave-inspired interaction structures with internal state. Inspired by wave-based computational principles, the proposed units adopt a strictly causal organization that eliminates algebraic loops, yielding fully explicit models that can be evaluated without implicit solvers. Stacking such units produces layered dynamical architectures with emergent hierarchical behavior. Through experiments on a nonlinear system identification task, we show that depth improves both representation quality and generalization, even under limited parameter optimization. In particular, the proposed architectures produce informative internal representations even under readout-only fitting, indicating that useful dynamical structure emerges from the organization of interactions prior to substantial parameter optimization. These results suggest that structure-first design provides a viable and effective alternative to conventional black-box approaches for learning dynamical systems, highlighting the role of interaction structure as a primary source of model expressivity.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Small LLMs for Biomedical Claim Verification: Cost-Effective Fine-Tuning, Structural Dataset Shortcuts, and Cross-Domain Generalization

作者:

Large Language Models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5 achieve strong zero-shot performance on biomedical claim verification, but cost and opacity limit scalable use. We fine-tune three small LLMs: Phi-3-mini (3.8B), Qwen2.5-3B, and Mistral-7B, via QLoRA on SciFact and HealthVer, providing the first study of QLoRA models against GPT-4o and fine-tuned BioLinkBERT encoders. Mistral-7B QLoRA surpasses both GPT-4o and GPT-5 (up to 12% F1 gain) at a fractional cost using just 1,008 training examples. We conduct extensive in-domain and cross-domain evaluation: models trained on SciFact tested on HealthVer and vice versa, at matched sizes to isolate dataset structure from data quantity. We identify a previously unreported structural artifact in SciFact that inflates in-domain scores, and show through bidirectional out-of-domain evaluation that training on structurally sound data enables robust cross-domain transfer. We plan to release all code and adapter checkpoints.

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

LaQual: An Automated Framework for LLM App Quality Evaluation

arXiv:2508.18636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representing a new paradigm in software distribution, LLM app stores are rapidly emerging, offering users diverse choices for content generation, coding assistance, education, and more. However, current ranking and recommendation mechanisms in LLM app stores predominantly rely on static metrics, such as user interactions and favorites, making it challenging for users to efficiently identify high-quality apps. At the same time, current academic research focuses on specific vertical fields and lacks a general, automated evaluation framework applicable to the diverse LLM app ecosystem. To address the above challenges, we present LaQual, an automated framework for LLM app quality evaluation. LaQual integrates three key stages: (1) LLM app labeling and hierarchical classification for precise scenario mapping; (2) static indicator evaluation using time-weighted user engagement and functional capability indicators to filter low-quality apps; and (3) dynamic scenario-adapted evaluation, where an LLM generates scenario-specific evaluation metrics, scoring criteria, and tasks for comprehensive quality evaluation. Experiments on a mainstream LLM app store demonstrate the effectiveness of LaQual. Its automated scores show high consistency with human judgments. Through effective screening, LaQual can reduce the candidate LLM app pool by 66.7% to 81.3%. User studies further validate its significant outperformance over baseline systems, particularly in comparison efficiency (mean 5.45 vs. 3.30) and value of explanatory information (4.75 vs. 2.25). These results demonstrate that LaQual provides a scalable, objective, and user-centric solution for high-quality discovery and recommendation of LLM apps in real-world scenarios.

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

Towards Data-free and Training-free Compression for Speech Foundation Models Using Parameter Clustering

arXiv:2606.11836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a novel data-free and training-free compression approach for speech foundation models using channelwise clustering via k-means. More fine-grained, mixed sparsity pruning by layer-level varying number of parameter clusters is also explored. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech dataset suggest that when operating with pruning sparsity of 50% on HuBERT-large, consistent WER reductions of 27.73%/18.61% absolute (34.37%/21.91% relative) over the magnitude-based pruning were obtained on the test-clean and test-other subsets before fine-tuning and 0.19%/0.79% absolute (3.36%/4.62% relative) after fine-tuning with only 3 epochs. Similar WER reductions of 2.86%/5.02% absolute (59.21%/55.29% relative) were observed against magnitudebased pruning on Whisper-large-v3 at 10% sparsity, all with no significant WER increase relative to the uncompressed baseline.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Physically Motivated Ansatz for Open Fermionic Systems on Quantum Computer

arXiv:2606.16823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Determining non-equilibrium steady states (NESS) of open fermionic systems is a fundamental problem akin to finding ground states of closed systems. To address this, variational quantum algorithms can be used to solve the Lindblad master equation, much like the Schrödinger equation, yet ansatz design for NESS remains challenging. Existing approaches rely mostly on hardware-efficient ansätze (HEA), which suffer from the barren plateau problem. Here, we introduce a physically motivated ansatz named NE-UCC. Numerical simulations demonstrate that NE-UCC reliably converges to the steady state even in strongly correlated regimes far from equilibrium, reducing the infidelity by up to ten orders of magnitude compared to HEA. Furthermore, NE-UCC facilitates the exploration of excited eigenmodes with specific symmetries.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Parameters to Feature Space: Task Arithmetic for Backdoor Mitigation in Model Merging

arXiv:2606.12498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging (MM) has gained significant attention as a cost-effective approach to integrate multiple task-specific models into a unified model. However, recent work reveals that MM is highly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Existing defenses based on task arithmetic often fail to eliminate backdoors without substantially degrading clean-task performance, owing to their reliance on direct parameter-space editing. To address this gap, we propose Linear Feature Path Minimization (LFPM), a backdoor mitigation framework for model merging, which introduces an anti-backdoor task vector into the backdoored merged model. Unlike prior approaches, LFPM formulates the backdoor robustness of the merged model from a unified feature-space perspective under the Cross-Task Linearity (CTL) framework, which leverages the approximate linearity of features across tasks. This perspective guides the optimization of the anti-backdoor task to suppress backdoors while preserving clean-task performance. Furthermore, we introduce an effective optimization mechanism based on gradient accumulation and loss path-integral, ensuring robust backdoor suppression along the interpolation path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LFPM consistently exhibits strong robustness against backdoor attacks in both full fine-tuning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) settings.

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

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

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

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

作者:

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

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

HOLO-MPPI: Multi-Scenario Motion Planning via Hierarchical Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world must plan motions across diverse scenarios without per-scenario retuning. End-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) can generalize across scenarios but often becomes brittle under distribution shift, reward misspecification, and stochastic interactions. Model predictive path integral (MPPI) control enables strong real-time refinement without gradients, but its performance depends on a well-shaped sampling prior, while manually designing the priors does not scale to multi-scenario deployment. We present HOLO-MPPI (High-level Offline, Low-level Online MPPI), a multi-scenario motion planning framework that combines high-level policy learning with low-level stochastic optimal control. Offline, we learn a high-level policy that proposes scenario-robust plans in an abstract action space, with a learned world model for online rollout. Online, the policy serves as a data-driven prior generator that parameterizes MPPI's sampling distribution conditioned on the current observation and goal. MPPI then optimizes low-level control sequences around this prior in real time to adapt to local disturbances. We instantiate HOLO-MPPI in autonomous driving by designing an effective high-level action space and tailored model architectures. Our evaluation across diverse driving scenarios shows that HOLO-MPPI improves upon MPPI and end-to-end RL baselines while maintaining real-time control.

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

FundaPod: A Multi-Persona Agent Pod Platform with Knowledge Graph Memory for AI-Assisted Fundamental Investment Research

arXiv:2605.27864v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in finance, yet most existing work emphasizes trading signals or financial NLP tasks centered on prediction. Institutional fundamental research, by contrast, requires human analysts or AI agents to gather evidence, identify business drivers, compare competing viewpoints, and generate investment memos. Its broader goal is not merely to predict outcomes, but to produce investment plans that are transparent, reusable, and verifiable, while contributing to the cumulative development of investment knowledge. We present FundaPod, a multi-persona agent platform for AI-assisted fundamental investment research. We argue that fundamental research is a human-centric decision-support task that is qualitatively distinct from trading-signal generation, and is therefore better served by an independence-preserving architecture. In FundaPod, AI agents with different personas, such as value investors or macro strategists, conduct research independently under a shared provenance contract. Their disagreements are then surfaced post hoc for adjudication by the human portfolio manager (PM) through a knowledge-graph memory system. This paper contributes five design principles for human-AI hybrid systems supporting fundamental research, grounded in design-science practice and theories of cognitive isolation and human-machine coordination. It also describes four architectural mechanisms: a persona distillation pipeline that turns public investor materials into deployable agents; a declarative skill registry that lets the planner derive typed task graphs; a grounded evidence model that links memo claims to verifiable sources; and a knowledge-graph "second brain" that connects tickers, memos, analysts, and themes. We demonstrate the architecture through a complete case study and a persona-based memo comparison.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

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

EffGen: Enabling Small Language Models as Capable Autonomous Agents

Most existing language model agentic systems today are built and optimized for large language models (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini) via API calls; while powerful, this approach faces several limitations including high token costs and privacy concerns for sensitive applications. We introduce EffGen, an open-source agentic framework optimized for small language models (SLMs) that enables effective, efficient, and secure local deployment. EffGen makes four major contributions: (1) Enhanced tool-calling with prompt optimization that compresses input prompts by up to 70-80% (and 57% on average across our benchmarks) while preserving task semantics, (2) Intelligent task decomposition that breaks complex queries into parallel or sequential subtasks based on dependencies, (3) Complexity-based routing using five factors to make smart pre-execution decisions, and (4) Unified memory system combining short-term, long-term, and vector-based storage. Additionally, EffGen unifies multiple agent protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP) for cross-protocol communication. Results on 13 benchmarks show EffGen outperforms LangChain, AutoGen, and Smolagents with higher success rates, faster execution, and lower memory. Our results reveal that prompt optimization and complexity routing have complementary scaling behavior: optimization benefits SLMs more (11.2% gain at 1.5B vs 2.4% at 32B), while routing benefits large models more (3.6% at 1.5B vs 7.9% at 32B), providing consistent gains across all scales when combined. EffGen is released under the Apache 2.0 License, ensuring broad accessibility for research and commercial use, with the code available at https://github.com/ctrl-gaurav/effGen, the Python package at https://pypi.org/project/effgen/ (pip install effgen), and the project website and documentation at https://effgen.org/ and https://docs.effgen.org/.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Targeted Proteomic Profiling of Nasal Fluid from the Brain-Nose Interface

The brain-nose interface is an anatomical junction where olfactory neurons from the olfactory bulb traverse the cribriform plate into the nasal mucosa, providing minimally invasive access to the central nervous system (CNS). We hypothesized that nasal fluid from this region could enable detection of neurology-relevant proteins using targeted multiplex assays. Using nosecollect, a targeted nasal sampling device, nasal fluid proximal to brain-nose interface was collected from cognitively impaired patients, alongside matched cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma. After nasal sample-specific dilution optimization and intra-assay precision evaluation, all matrices were profiled with the Olink Target 96 Neurology and NUcleic acid Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay CNS disease 120 (NULISAseq CNS Disease 120) panels. Nasal fluid showed technically repeatable detection (intra-assay coefficient of variation

18.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

U = U for all: Advancing equity in HIV prevention

by Thiago S. Torres, Paula M. Luz Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U). However, U = U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. Equitable and accurate awareness of U = U requires culturally tailored interventions, improved provider education, and supportive policy environments beyond biomedical evidence alone. Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U). However, U=U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. In this Perspective, Thiago Torres and Paula Luz outline what is needed to improve equity and accuracy in global awareness and education of U=U.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Multi-task Learning is Not Enough: Representational Entanglement in Dual-output Second Language Speech Recognition

Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving distinct task representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-task decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to reduce surface degradation in dual-output L2 automatic speech recognition.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Visualizing LLM Latent Space Geometry Through Dimensionality Reduction

arXiv:2511.21594v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art results across many natural language tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain difficult to interpret. In this work, we extract, process, and visualize latent state geometries in Transformer-based language models through dimensionality reduction. We capture layerwise activations at multiple points within Transformer blocks and enable systematic analysis through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP). We demonstrate experiments on GPT-2 and LLaMa models, where we uncover interesting geometric patterns in latent space. Notably, we identify a clear separation between attention and MLP component outputs across intermediate layers, a pattern not documented in prior work to our knowledge. We also characterize the high norm of latent states at the initial sequence position and visualize the layerwise evolution of latent states. Additionally, we demonstrate the high-dimensional helical structure of GPT-2's positional embeddings and the sequence-wise geometric patterns in LLaMa. We make our code available at https://github.com/Vainateya/Feature_Geometry_Visualization. A better formatted blog-post with identical content is available at https://iclr-blogposts.github.io/2026/blog/2026/vis-llm-latent-geometry/.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Safety-Contract Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Network Security Response

arXiv:2606.13832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous network-security response systems promise to reduce Security Operations Centre (SOC) reaction latency, but reward-only multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can improve security reward while remaining non-deployable. We present a safety-contract graph MARL framework and instantiate it as ACD$^3$-GAT (Adaptive Constrained Counterfactual Decisioning with a Graph Attention Network encoder), an architecture that separates simulator observations from reusable operational budgets, constrained optimization, graph state encoding, and counterfactual action screening. We evaluate the method in CAGE Challenge 4, where agents operate under budgets for Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), false-positive response, and firewall change-management disruption. Across the benchmark, every unconstrained method violates the SOC downtime budget in 100% of evaluated episodes, with mean downtime proxy costs of 311-430 against a budget of 50. This complements prior CAGE Challenge 4 findings by showing that reward-only learning lacks operational discipline. Constrained MAPPO-GAT (C-MAPPO-GAT) isolates Lagrangian operational-cost control and budget-aware screening, while ACD$^3$-GAT adds budget context, CVaR tail-risk estimation, opponent-belief state, and Graph Counterfactual Risk Propagation (G-CRP). The replicated comparison includes three 200-episode seeds for IPPO, MAPPO-GAT, C-MAPPO-GAT, and ACD$^3$-GAT. C-MAPPO-GAT reduces downtime violation from 100% to 0.3% and mean downtime cost from 355.4 to 15.5 relative to MAPPO-GAT. ACD$^3$-GAT reduces mean downtime cost to 48.2 with a 13.8% violation rate, placing it on the safety-contract frontier rather than at the most conservative compliance point. Topology-seed and coupled adaptive Red-process stress tests preserve this contrast and show lower worst adaptive degradation for safety-constrained policies than reward-only MAPPO-GAT.

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

Retell, Reward, Repeat: Reinforcement Learning for Narrative Theory-Informed Story Retelling

Counterfactual story retelling exposes LLM shortcomings in constrained narrative solution spaces where they can no longer rely on recalling memorised training data. Ground-truth-based post-training, such as SFT, fails to teach LLMs how to generate logical and rational narrative events. In this paper, we introduce Retell, Reward, Repeat (RRR), an RL-based pipeline synthesising Structuralist Narratology with scalar narrativity to teach storytelling structure. We extend the TimeTravel dataset with human-annotated stages of narrative equilibrium to evaluate reward models. By using d-RLAIF, RRR derives training signals from the narrativity of textual features without the need for reference outputs. Evaluations demonstrate that RRR-trained LLMs outperform few-shot and SFT baselines in logic, rationality, and completeness, with output quality additionally validated by blind human preference. Relying on a small, query-only dataset, RRR provides a linguistically grounded, cost-effective post-training mechanism for storytelling–a domain currently lacking effective post-training methods. RRR highlights the continued relevance of integrating established linguistic theories into contemporary NLP.