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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer with all-to-all connectivity

Quantum computers require both high-fidelity operations and large qubit numbers to surpass classical capabilities1. Trapped-ion platforms have demonstrated the highest gate fidelities of any modality2–6 but scaling to larger qubit numbers while preserving performance has remained a central challenge. We report on Quantinuum Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture7. Helios features 137Ba+ hyperfine qubits8,9, all-to-all connectivity enabled by a rotatable ion storage ring connecting two quantum operation regions by a junction10,11, speed improvements from parallelized operations12 and a new software stack with real-time compilation of dynamic programs13. Averaged over all operational zones in the system, we achieve average infidelities of 2.5(1) × 10−5 for single-qubit (1Q) gates, 7.9(2) × 10−4 for two-qubit (2Q) gates and 3.3(5) × 10−4 for state preparation and measurement (SPAM), none of which are fundamentally limited and probably able to be improved. These component infidelities are predictive of system-level performance in both random Clifford circuits and random circuit sampling (RCS), the latter demonstrating that Helios operates well beyond the reach of classical simulation and establishes a new frontier of fidelity and complexity for quantum computers14. A new quantum computer, Quantinuum Helios, which is a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor built on the QCCD architecture, demonstrates performance well beyond classical capabilities and provides a path for scaling up quantum computing.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FreeStyle: Free Control of Style-Content Dual-Reference Generation from Community LoRA Mining

arXiv:2606.20506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Style-content dual-reference generation aims to synthesize an image that preserves the structure and semantics of a content reference while adopting the style of a separate style reference.Despite recent progress, this setting remains challenging because models must balance content fidelity, style alignment, and instruction following avoiding semantic leakage from the style reference.A key bottleneck is the lack of large-scale triplet data with clean content-style separation and broad long-tail style coverage.In this work, we propose FreeStyle, a scalable dual-reference generation framework based on community LoRA mining.We treat community LoRAs as compositional anchors for style and content, and design a rigorous generation and filtering pipeline to construct large-scale Style-Reference and Content-Reference triplets across multiple base models.To address content leakage, we adopt a two-stage curriculum with stage-specific disentanglement mechanisms: an attention-level enrichment constraint that suppresses style-reference leakage in the style-transfer stage, and a frequency-aware RoPE modulation strategy that targets positional-correspondence-based leakage in the harder dual-reference stage.We also introduce a benchmark covering both style-reference and dual-reference generation, with evaluations on style similarity, content preservation, aesthetics, instruction following, and leakage rejection. The benchmark incorporates a style-invariant Content Alignment Score (CAS) and introduces a calibrated VLM-based Rejection Score for evaluating generation reliability and leakage suppression.Extensive experiments show that our model achieves a strong balance among style alignment, content preservation, and leakage suppression.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AgentLeak: A Benchmark for Internal-Channel Privacy Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

arXiv:2602.11510v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems create privacy risks that current output-only benchmarks cannot measure. When agents coordinate on tasks, sensitive data may pass through inter-agent messages, shared memory, and tool arguments, all pathways that final-output audits typically do not inspect. We introduce AgentLeak, a benchmark for evaluating internal-channel privacy leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. AgentLeak instruments seven privacy-relevant communication pathways and provides a large-scale empirical evaluation focused on final outputs, inter-agent messages, and shared memory. Across 1,000 scenarios spanning healthcare, finance, legal, and corporate domains, five production LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Mistral Large, and Llama 3.3 70B), and 4,979 validated execution traces, we find that multi-agent configurations reduce final-output leakage (C1: 27.2% vs 43.2% in single-agent mode) compared with single-agent baselines but introduce internal channels that raise total system exposure to 68.9% (aggregated across C1, C2, C5). Inter-agent messages (C2) leak at 68.8%, compared with 27.2% for final outputs (C1), meaning that output-only audits miss 41.7% of violations. Across all five models and four domains, the pattern C2 $\geq$ C1 holds consistently. These results suggest, within the evaluated coordinator-worker setting, that privacy risk in multi-agent systems is strongly shaped by architectural coordination channels rather than final-output behavior alone: it arises from internal channels that remain invisible to standard output-level defenses.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Recovery thresholds for hidden weighted sparse graphs

arXiv:2606.14335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering structural information from noisy high-dimensional data is a fundamental task in statistical inference. We investigate the recovery thresholds for a graph hidden in a randomly weighted complete graph. Specifically, an unknown graph $H^* \in H_n$ is chosen uniformly at random, and hidden in a complete graph of $n$ vertices as follows: the weight of an edge $e \in H$ is distributed independently according to $P_n$; otherwise the weight is distributed independently according to $Q_n$. The goal is to recover almost all of $H$ from these edge weights. Assuming a local Lipschitzness of the Rényi divergence between distributions $P_n$ and $Q_n$, and a mild density condition for the graphs $H_n$, we give a unified characterization of the information-theoretic limit for recovering almost all of $H$ (also known as almost exact recovery). Our characterization connects the KL divergence between $P_n$ and $Q_n$ to the logarithm of the first moment threshold of $H$ in the Erdős-Rényi random graph model $G(n,p)$. Our lower bound also extends to the task of partial recovery, in which only a constant $\lambda$-fraction of $H$ needs to be recovered. Last but not least, for certain Bernoulli and Exponential regimes, and for Gaussian distributions, we are able to show an All-or-Nothing (AoN) threshold phenomenon at the exponential scale.

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

Stealthy World Model Manipulation via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2606.18697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based learning agents use learned world models to predict future states, plan actions, and adapt to new environments. However, the process of updating world models from collected experience creates a training-time attack surface: adversarially poisoned fine-tuning trajectories can manipulate the learned dynamics and thereby corrupt downstream planning. In this paper, we propose SWAAP, the first two-stage data poisoning framework for learned world models. In the first stage, SWAAP identifies a harmful target world model that induces low-return behavior under planning while remaining close to clean dynamics, using first-order bilevel optimization enabled by a transition-gradient theorem. In the second stage, SWAAP realizes this target through stealth-constrained gradient matching, modifying only a limited fraction of fine-tuning transition targets so that the induced training gradients steer the victim model toward the adversarial target, while a prediction-error regularizer encourages the poisoned targets to remain close to the world model's natural approximation error. To assess attack stealthiness, we evaluate defenses and detectability across three stages of the poisoning pipeline: pre-training detection of poisoned transitions, robust training during fine-tuning, and test-time monitoring of the resulting world model. Across diverse continuous-control tasks, SWAAP causes substantial performance degradation while keeping poisoned transitions close to clean data and evading the evaluated non-adaptive residual/CUSUM/TRIM-style defenses. These results reveal a practical vulnerability in world-model adaptation pipelines and highlight the need for robustness methods that protect both world-model training data and learned dynamics.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HypOProto: Hyperbolic Ordinal Prototypes for Left Ventricular Filling Pressure Classification

Echocardiography (echo) is a widely used imaging modality for assessing cardiac function, with Left Ventricular Filling Pressure (LVFP) serving as a critical physiological marker for conditions such as heart failure. Standard LVFP classification into normal vs elevated categories relies on the Doppler-derived $E/e'$ ratio, which is operator-dependent and often unavailable in resource-limited settings, motivating methods that infer LVFP directly from B-mode echo. Existing deep learning approaches achieve high performance but remain largely black-box, limiting clinical interpretability. We propose HypOProto, a hyperbolic, ordinal prototype-based framework for interpretable LVFP classification using a frozen, explainable foundation model backbone. HypOProto arranges prototypes along the physiological $E/e'$ scale, placing borderline cases near the hyperboloid root where small angular differences separate similar cases, while normal and elevated cases occupy outward positions reflecting increasing diagnostic certainty. This hyperbolic geometry encodes clinically meaningful ordinal relationships and improves interpretability. We also introduce a novel Hyperbolic Prototype Angular Separation (HyperPAS) loss, enforcing inter-class prototype separation in hyperbolic space. HypOProto achieves SOTA performance while maintaining transparency, and highlights clinically relevant regions in visualizations. This work represents the first prototype-based framework for LVFP classification in echo. Our code can be found at https://github.com/DeepRCL/HypOProto.

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

MinhwaNet: Faithful but Insufficient Object Grounding in Korean Folk Painting

Korean folk painting (minhwa) is built from a small vocabulary of auspicious symbols, a tiger for protection, a pair of birds for marital harmony, a peony for wealth, that recur across many of its painted genres. This suggests an obvious computational approach, identify which symbols appear in a painting and read the genre from the inventory. Working with a public corpus that pairs whole paintings, eight-field bilingual curatorial captions, and a separate set of expert object crops, we find that this approach does not work. A model given only a list of which symbols a painting contains predicts the genre far worse than a model that fuses the image with the curatorial text, and forcing the genre representation to be object-grounded actively hurts accuracy. The visual evidence on which the genre prediction rests is nonetheless localized and inspectable. A leakage-safe object evidence map projected from a part-level detector is spatially faithful to where curators isolated symbolic objects and to a patch-based surrogate's own gradient saliency. We name this configuration a faithful-but-insufficient dissociation. The part-level explanation is honest about what the part-level model sees, yet the genre target turns on how symbols are arranged rather than on which ones appear. The same lens separates a content label that survives transfer to held-out source institutions, genre, from a style label that does not, era, a prediction we confirm on two further labels in the corpus. We release the multimodal system, a worked-example reading of one painting's evidence map against its catalogue, and a set of evaluation cautions that recur in long-tailed heritage collections.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Privacy-Preserving Text Sanitization for Distributed Agents Collaboration via Disentangled Representations

When distributed agents exchange text across organizational boundaries, privacy leakage arises not only from explicit identifiers but also from distributional signatures such as formatting conventions, vocabulary choices, and syntactic patterns. We propose DiSan(Disentangled Sanitization), a privacy-preserving sanitization framework and a built-in component of Intern-Shannon for multi-agent collaboration. DiSan uses a two-stream encoder to factorize text into a source-invariant role subspace that preserves task semantics and a source-identifying style subspace that remains local. Federated proto-type alignment and adversarial regularization enable joint training without centralizing raw text. Experiments show that identifier-level masking is insufficient: masking 19.2% of tokens reduces TF-IDF stylometric attribution by only 18.6%. By contrast, DiSan reduces answer-level PII exposure by 20 times while maintaining 83% answer faithfulness on a distributed multi-agent RAG benchmark, and lowers Enron stylometric attribution by 73.2% under TF-IDF and 70.6% under a neural probe.

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

AIChilles: Automatically Uncovering Hidden Weaknesses in AI-Evolved Systems

arXiv:2606.15834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The computer systems community has recently seen growing interest in AI-driven system evolution, where AI agents iteratively rewrite systems. Frameworks such as AdaEvolve and Engram report 12-60% score improvements over human-designed algorithms. While these results are promising, there are practical concerns if these AI-evolved programs can perform worse on unseen workloads and exhibit scalability regressions. Given the speed and scale of AI-generated code, we need automated mechanisms to uncover such identify hidden weaknesses in AI-evolved systems programs. To this end, we develop AIChilles that takes as input a baseline program $P$ and an AI-evolved program $P'$, AIChilles searches for valid workloads where $P'$ regresses relative to $P$ in correctness, runtime, memory usage, or output quality. To tackle the diversity in system applications, weakness types and potential bugs, AIChilles combines deterministic workload-parameter extraction, agent-based constraint inference, differential oracles, and code-frequency coverage to discover diverse failures. Across five system applications and 30 AI-evolved programs, AIChilles finds 49 distinct hidden weaknesses. We also show that explicitly including AIChilles in the AI-driven development lifecycle can mitigate several of these weaknesses.

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

Beyond Correctness: Enhancing Architectural Reasoning in Code LLMs via Scalable Labeling with Agentic Judgment

arXiv:2606.14948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have substantially improved software engineering yet real-world development requires architectural understanding. Such understanding is prohibitively expensive to label manually and impossible to verify through tests alone. We propose an agentic judging pipeline using a strong LLM as a scalable proxy for expert architectural evaluation, comprising two judges: the Architecture Complexity Judge (ACJ), which estimates codebase-specific architectural understanding a task demands, and the Architecture Quality Judge (AQJ), which evaluates patch conformance to repository-specific architectural conventions via source-grounded rubrics. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B/14B/32B on 3,360 curated instances achieves resolved rates of up to 27.2% on SWE-bench Verified - up to 540% over the base model and 256% over unfiltered fine-tuning. Meanwhile, the trained models achieve strong cross-language generalization and consistent improvements in architectural patch quality.

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

Smol-GS: Compact Representations for Abstract 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present Smol-GS, a novel method for learning compact representations for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our approach learns highly efficient splat-wise features to model 3D space, which capture abstracted cues, including color, opacity, transformation, and material properties. We propose octree-derived positional encoding, which explicitly models spatial locality and enhances representation efficiency. We further apply entropy-based compression to exploit feature redundancy and compress splat coordinates using a recursive voxel hierarchy. This design enables orders-of-magnitude reduction in storage while preserving representation flexibility. Smol-GS achieves state-of-the-art compression performance on standard benchmarks with high-level rendering quality.

13.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Proteomic signatures of early retinal neurodegeneration in type 2 diabetes mellitus

作者:

by Huangdong Li, Ziyu Zhu, Shaopeng Yang, Weijing Cheng, Shaoying Tan, Zhuoyao Xin, Lei Zhang, Zhuoting Zhu, Shida Chen, Wenyong Huang, Wei Wang Background Retinal neurodegeneration is an early and independent feature of diabetic retinal disease and has been proposed as a window into the systemic neural consequences of diabetes, yet accessible molecular biomarkers and individualized prediction tools remain scarce. We aimed to identify circulating plasma protein signatures of diabetic retinal neurodegeneration (DRN) and to translate them into a clinically usable risk prediction system. Methods and findings In this multi-cohort prospective observational study, we integrated high-throughput plasma proteomics with longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) in two independent populations. The discovery cohort comprised 1,492 participants had baseline plasma proteomics and OCT, and 1,218 were followed with repeated OCT over 6 years in Guangzhou Diabetic Eye Study (GDES). DRN was quantified by the annualized OCT-derived retinal nerve fiber layer thinning rate. In multivariable analyses adjusted for age, sex, smoking, systolic blood pressure, HbA1c, and diabetes duration, we identified 71 plasma proteins associated with development and progression of DRN. These proteins mapped onto pathways governing inflammatory immune recruitment, extracellular matrix remodeling, and microvascular homeostasis, providing a plausible biological basis for DRN. We developed a proteomics-based DRN model (Pro-DRN) using eight machine learning (ML) algorithms, including XGBoost and LightGBM. In the independent test set, Pro-DRN achieved a C-index of 0.860, rising to 0.908 when integrated with clinical variables. Compared with six conventional models, Pro-DRN improved discrimination (ΔC-index 0.137 to 0.159; all P 

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Beyond Scalar Distances: Semantic Attribute Gradients from Frozen MLLMs for Visual Embeddings

Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched. A multimodal large language model (MLLM), shown the same pair, can articulate those attributes and use them to predict whether the images share a class. We propose SAGA, a framework that turns this language-grounded, attribute-aware perception into a training signal for the encoder itself. Specifically, we use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to reward the MLLM for correct predictions on the vision encoder's tokens. Since correct predictions require those tokens to expose the specific attributes that differ or match between the pair, the gradient pushes the encoder to encode them, replacing the uniform pair-level scalar with attribute-resolved supervision. An auxiliary attention-distillation loss anchors the encoder's embedding to tokens the MLLM attended to, and a standard metric-learning loss shapes the embedding geometry for nearest-neighbour retrieval. The MLLM is frozen throughout and discarded at inference, matching the deployment cost of a metric-learning baseline. SAGA improves Recall@1 by 3 to 6 points over state-of-the-art baselines on CUB-200-2011, Cars-196, FGVC-Aircraft, and iNaturalist Aves on zero-shot image retrieval.

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

An adaptive framework for the axisymmetric pulsar magnetosphere using physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks

arXiv:2606.10686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pulsar magnetosphere has only recently been addressed using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), by deploying a domain-decomposition approach and treating the separatrix and equatorial current sheet as infinitesimally thin discontinuities. However, this baseline requires extensive manual hyperparameter tuning, achieves limited final accuracy and demands several hours of training. We refine this framework by introducing domain-specific neural architectures based on Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, an automated adaptive training pipeline and a physics-based convergence criterion that eliminate the need for manual calibration. The proposed methodology delivers self-consistent axisymmetric magnetosphere solutions with mean squared errors of the PDE residuals at O(1e-6) in double precision - an improvement of two orders of magnitude over the baseline - while achieving convergence in under 20 minutes in single precision. Importantly, the method reliably resolves stellar radii reduced by up to 80% compared to the baseline, overcoming the severe spatial scale disparities that also challenge traditional solvers. Furthermore, by varying the flux that opens to infinity, we provide a correction to the equation that connects it to the equatorial T-point's position. The complete framework is released as the open-source library PulsarX.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Simple analytical flux-tuned iSWAP pulses for leakage suppression

arXiv:2606.13052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast, high-fidelity two-qubit gates are a key requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Tunable coupler architectures provide a flexible approach for implementing entangling gates through flux control with large on-off ratios, but fast flux modulation can induce diabatic transitions and population leakage to non-computational states, limiting gate performance. Here we present an analytical flux control method enabling derivative removal by adiabatic gate ($\Phi$-DRAG) for suppressing leakage in flux tunable two-qubit gates. We show that $\Phi$-DRAG differs fundamentally from conventional microwave implementations and derive modified flux modulation protocols that suppress leakage below $10^{-4}$ for fast entangling gates. The method remains effective across a range of asymmetry between qubit anharmonicities and different circuit parameters, enabling high-fidelity two-qubit gates within the fifteen nanosecond range.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Quantum Interferometry

arXiv:2606.19730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured light provides high-dimensional Hilbert spaces holding tremendous potential for fundamental quantum optics and quantum technologies. However, existing characterization methods, like Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, typically assume perfectly tuned conditions, overlooking the geometric physics governing spatial mode evolution. Here, we establish topological quantum interferometry driven by an interaction-based geometric phase, the exchange Berry phase (BPX). Our formalism generalizes $q$-plate state generation and characterization to arbitrary topological charges and (de)tuning conditions, demonstrating that BPX acts as a geometric marker governing spatial interference. We show BPX serves as a deterministic control parameter, decomposing two-photon spatial patterns into geometry-dictated fundamental modes. This mapping reveals topological invariants and phase singularities that function as a non-tomographic witness for state dimensionality estimation, circumventing full-state reconstruction. Being device-independent and highly scalable, this approach enables scalable high-dimensional characterization and topologically protected state selection, with direct applicability to quantum metrology and high-capacity quantum networks.

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

Motion Reinforces Appearance: RGB-Skeleton Gated Residual Fusion for Micro-Gesture Online Recognition

Micro-gesture analysis attracts increasing attention for inferring spontaneous emotion from subtle body movements. Micro-gesture online recognition, which localizes and classifies each gesture instance in untrimmed videos, is a core task in the 4th EI-MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. Compared with typical temporal action detection, MGR emphasizes the localization and classification of actions, requiring the model to output the start time, end time, and category of each micro-gesture. Moreover, since micro-gestures are highly spontaneous, relying solely on a single modality makes it difficult to capture the complete and accurate multi-modal cues. In this work, we propose DyFADet+, which extends DyFADet into a dual-stream RGB-skeleton framework. In our model, both modalities are projected into shared multi-scale temporal embeddings and fused through a gated residual module, which adaptively injects skeleton motion into the RGB representation rather than using naive concatenation. Finally, these fused features are decoded by a Dynamic TAD head for online classification and boundary regression. On the SMG dataset, our method achieves an F1 score of 40.88, ranking 2nd in the Micro-gesture Online Recognition track.

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

SAG: SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation with Query-Time Dynamic Hyperedges

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective approach for large language models to access external knowledge. However, existing methods rely on dense similarity retrieval and face inherent limitations in handling structured constraints and multi-hop reasoning. Incorporating knowledge graphs partially alleviates these issues, but at the cost of semantic fragmentation, high maintenance overhead, and difficult incremental updates. This paper introduces SAG (SQLRetrieval Augmented Generation), a structured architecture for retrieval and agent systems. Instead of pre-building a global static graph, SAG converts each chunk into one semantically complete event and a set of indexing entities, then uses SQL join queries to dynamically link events that share entities into local hyperedges,constructing, at query time, a dynamically instantiated local index structure. This design avoids the need for global graph rebuilding and ongoing maintenance; the system naturally supports incremental writes, concurrent processing, and continuous scaling through its reliance on standard database infrastructure. Across HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue, three standard multi-hop benchmarks,SAG achieves the best results on 8 out of 9 Recall@K metrics, reaching 80.0% Recall@5 on MuSiQue, the benchmark with the highest multi-hop reasoning demands.SAG has also been deployed at a production scale of hundreds of millions of data items, with online retrieval latency kept within seconds. Project site and code are available at https://github.com/Zleap-AI/SAG-Benchmark.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Causal Inference with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Application to Texts as Treatments

In this paper, we demonstrate how to enhance the validity of causal inference with unstructured high-dimensional treatments like texts, by leveraging the power of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Specifically, we propose to use a deep generative model such as large language models (LLMs) to efficiently generate treatments and use their internal representation for subsequent causal effect estimation. We show that the knowledge of this true internal representation helps disentangle the treatment features of interest, such as specific sentiments and certain topics, from other possibly unknown confounding features. Unlike existing methods, the proposed GenAI-Powered Inference (GPI) methodology eliminates the need to learn causal representation from the data, and hence produces more accurate and efficient estimates. We formally establish the conditions required for the nonparametric identification of the average treatment effect, propose an estimation strategy that avoids the violation of the overlap assumption, and derive the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator through the application of double machine learning. Finally, using an instrumental variables approach, we extend the proposed GPI methodology to the settings in which the treatment feature is based on human perception. The GPI is also applicable to text reuse where an LLM is used to regenerate existing texts. We conduct simulation and empirical studies, using the generated text data from an open-source LLM, Llama 3, to illustrate the advantages of our estimator over state-of-the-art causal representation learning algorithms.

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

Calibrating Decision Robustness via Inverse Conformal Risk Control

arXiv:2510.07750v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robust optimization safeguards decisions against uncertainty by optimizing against worst-case scenarios, yet their effectiveness hinges on a prespecified robustness level that is often chosen ad hoc, leading to either insufficient protection or overly conservative and costly solutions. Recent approaches using conformal prediction construct data-driven uncertainty sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees, but they still fix coverage targets a priori and offer little guidance for selecting robustness levels. We propose a new framework that provides distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees on both miscoverage and regret for any family of robust predict-then-optimize policies. Our method constructs valid estimators that trace out the miscoverage–regret Pareto frontier, enabling decision-makers to reliably evaluate and calibrate robustness levels according to their cost–risk preferences. The framework is simple to implement, broadly applicable across classical optimization formulations, and achieves sharper finite-sample performance. This paper offers a principled data-driven methodology for guiding robustness selection and empowers practitioners to balance robustness and conservativeness in high-stakes decision-making.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SalArt-VQA: Diagnosing Whether VLMs Understand Salient Artifacts in Generated Images

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Self-Driving Datasets: From 20 Million Papers to Nuanced Biomedical Knowledge at Scale

arXiv:2605.07022v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manually curated biomedical repositories – spanning bioactivity, genomics, and chemistry – are expensive to maintain, lag behind primary literature, and discard experimental context, obscuring nuances needed to assess data correctness and coverage. We show that PubMed itself can be autonomously and cost-effectively turned into structured datasets that are larger, more nuanced, and more accurate than the curated databases they replace. We present three coupled contributions: (1) an LLM-based entity-tagging pipeline, grounded in nine biomedical ontologies, that tags 4.5B entities across 19 categories in a 22.5M-paper, 2.5T-token PubMed corpus; (2) hybrid sparse-dense retrieval supporting entity-filtered semantic queries over the tagged corpus; and (3) Starling, a multi-agent deep research system that, given only a natural-language task description, designs precision- and recall-targeted retrieval filters, induces an extraction schema, and emits structured records with nuance-rich fields and supporting passages. Across six tasks – blood-brain barrier permeability, oral bioavailability, acute toxicity (LD50), gene-disease associations, protein subcellular localization, and chemical reactions – Starling produces ~6.3M records (91K-3M per task); several are, to our knowledge, the largest public datasets for their property. Frontier-model rejection of our extractions is 0.6-7.7% across tasks, far below error rates we measure on widely used curated counterparts (e.g., 16.5% on BBB_Martins, 7.3% on Bioavailability_Ma). Beyond scale and accuracy, the supporting passages carry nuance tabular databases discard – e.g., oral bioavailability may depend on fed vs. fasted state. Together, the corpus, retrieval, and agent establish a foundation for AI-driven therapeutic design. Code and datasets: https://github.com/starling-labs/starling.

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

ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation

Incremental Learning (IL) for Open-ended Image-to-Text Generation (OpenITG) enables models to continuously generate accurate, contextually relevant text for new images while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unlike prior studies, this paper addresses a more practical scenario in which the predominant category of visual data shifts over time as environments evolve. In this context, we introduce a new notion of continual alignment, which incrementally adapts the alignment module within pre-trained VLMs to preserve high-quality cross-modal representations. Based on this idea, we propose Efficient Continual Alignment (ECA), a novel exemplar-free IL approach for OpenITG. The key challenge is enabling the model to acquire new, task-specific features while minimizing interference with the established alignment without accessing raw data from previous tasks. To address this, ECA employs three core mechanisms: a Mixture of Query (MoQ) module that adapts task-specific query tokens, a Fisher Dynamic Expansion (FeDEx) that dynamically expands model structure based on a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based metric, and an embedding dictionary with Dictionary Replay (DR) to retain past knowledge. To evaluate ECA's performance, we construct four new IL OpenITG benchmarks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ECA significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and improves IL performance compared to baseline methods. Code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/Snowball0823/ECA.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Connections Between Pairs of Filters Improve the Accuracy of Convolutional Neural Networks

While researchers continue to find new and improved network structures for CNNs, most of the newly invented architectures still rely on the traditional pattern of stacking convolutional blocks and separating them with pointwise activation functions. However, there are drawbacks to a network purely building on pointwise nonlinearities. One alternative is to introduce a pairwise connection between two filters of a network. Typical connection functions use multiplications or the minimum operation to realize logical AND connections. In this paper, we go one step further by demonstrating that CNNs can benefit from more general connections, which include parameters that are learned. With such parameters, the network is able to implement different connections in different network layers and better adapt the connection function to the task at hand.