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

Stable Menus of Public Goods: AI-Enabled Progress

作者:

arXiv:2606.16989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using an open problem from the EC 2025 paper "Stable Menus of Public Goods" as a testbed, we conduct experiments to understand the effectiveness of different AI-for-EconCS research workflows. Specifically, we study three questions: Does providing human intuition in the prompt help? Does automated multi-turn interaction help? And, does an LLM outperform a first-year PhD student? Regarding the first two questions, we provide evidence for the following workflow suggestions: (1) prompting with human intuition can encourage the LLM to have better "taste", (2) multi-turn workflows help when the pipeline encourages "ambitious" steps. Regarding the third question, using an unpublished manuscript written by the paper's senior authors prior to collaborating with the first-year PhD student, we compare the effectiveness of the LLM with that of the first-year PhD student, and find that the LLM is slightly less effective.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Silent Failures in Federated Personalization of Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.00947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly personalized on decentralized private data through federated learning and are now deployed at scale under growing regulatory requirements for post-market monitoring. We argue that this convergence creates a distinct and under-recognized class of trustworthiness failures, which we term "Silent Failures." These include amplified bias, fairness collapse, and alignment erosion that may remain difficult to detect because federated learning's privacy constraints limit visibility into model behavior. A landscape analysis of existing benchmarks reveals a structural divide. Federated benchmarks evaluate system performance but provide limited insight into model behavior, whereas centralized trustworthiness benchmarks assess behavior but require model access incompatible with federated privacy. We introduce a taxonomy of six silent failure modes arising from the interaction of foundation model personalization, dataset shift, and core federated constraints. Our analysis shows that privacy-preserving training alone is insufficient for trustworthy deployment. We conclude with a research agenda for privacy-preserving behavioral evaluation and propose that silent failures become a standard diagnostic category for trustworthy federated artificial intelligence.

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

A Security Analysis of Long-Horizon Agentic AI Systems: Threats, Evaluation, and Framework Development

arXiv:2606.14816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a structured analysis of security challenges in long-horizon agentic AI systems. The study reviews existing threats, evaluation approaches, attack propagation mechanisms, and security frameworks. A taxonomy of security threats and a framework for analyzing attack propagation are proposed to support future research in agentic AI security

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Structured Testbench Generation for LLM-Driven HDL Design and Verification-Oriented Data Curation

arXiv:2606.12983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated testbench generation has become a critical bottleneck in large language model (LLM)-driven Register Transfer Level (RTL) workflows, where large numbers of candidate designs must be verified rapidly and reliably. Existing prompt-based approaches treat testbench generation as unconstrained code synthesis, yielding stochastic outputs with high token cost, low reproducibility, and insufficient coverage. To address this gap, we present STG, a Structured Testbench Generation framework that exploits the inherent structure of hardware designs to generate deterministic testbenches. As a direct verification tool, STG runs 720x faster than an iterative LLM-based testbench generation flow and higher rate of successful compilation, achieves higher coverage, and reduces false-pass verdicts on incorrect DUTs. STG also helps identify errors in RTL generation benchmarks by exposing faulty benchmark testbenches. As a data curation engine, it is 11x faster than LLM-based filtering on a single CPU core with 127x less energy, and the resulting distilled models provide state-of-the-art performance in our multi-benchmark evaluation. As a test-time scaling oracle, it reduces node count by 14-47\%. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/AS-SiliconMind/siliconmind-v12.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Towards Verifiable Agentic Data Science: Solving Irregular TSQA Via Tool-Grounded Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series data in real-world deployments is overwhelmingly irregular. Observations are asynchronous, missing values are informative rather than random, and sampling frequencies vary across sensors and operational windows. However, existing Time Series Question Answering (TSQA) benchmarks mostly assume regularly sampled inputs, leaving a fundamental gap in understanding how large language models (LLMs) and AI agents perform under irregular conditions. To bridge this gap, we introduce IRTS-ToolBench, a benchmark of 1,700 questions spanning 10 task types across 13 domains. IRTS-ToolBench is designed to be used independently by any researcher working on LLM-based irregular time series analysis, providing standardized inputs and a reproducible evaluation protocol. Code can be found in https://github.com/SanhornC/IRTS-ToolBench.

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

Adaptive Kernel Density Estimation with Pre-training

arXiv:2605.13092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Density estimation in high-dimensional settings is an important and challenging statistical problem.Traditional methods based on kernel smoothing are inefficient in high dimensions due to the difficulties in specifying appropriate location-adaptive kernels. In this work, we introduce pre-training, a key idea behind many cutting-edge AI technologies, to the context of non-parametric density estimation. By establishing a pre-trained neural network that can recommend an appropriate location-adaptive kernel for each sample point, efficient density estimation with adaptive kernels is achieved in high dimensions. A wide range of numerical experiments show that this strategy is highly effective for improving density-estimation accuracy, when the target distribution is close to the distribution family for pre-training. When the target distribution is substantially different from the pre-training distribution family, the benefit from the proposed pre-training strategy may be diluted, but can be reactivated by an additional fine-tuning procedure.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Global population frequencies of NAT2 star alleles observed in three large biobanks

NAT2 is an important pharmacogene which encodes the N-acetyltransferase 2 enzyme that is involved in the metabolism of multiple medications, and variants in this gene can affect patient response to these medications. CPIC has published a clinical guideline for prescribing hydralazine using NAT2 genotypes. Just prior to the guideline, updated NAT2 star allele numbering and definitions were released, differing somewhat from the historical nomenclature. Clinical pharmacogenomic testing panels often test for the most common star alleles, so knowledge of the most common updated NAT2 star alleles is critical for the implementation of the CPIC NAT2/hydralazine guideline. We first determine NAT2 diplotype frequencies from UK Biobank (UKBB) 200k phased genomes, then analyzed allele, diplotype, and phenotype population frequencies from the All of Us Research program, PennMedicine BioBank (PMBB) and UKBB 500k datasets. We found that analyzing NAT2 diplotypes from phased data provides critical information for algorithms designed to predict diplotypes from unphased data. We observed that NAT2*5, *6, and *4 were the most common star alleles in that order, and the top 11 most frequent NAT2 star alleles were the same across all biobanks. However, differences in star allele frequencies across biogeographical populations were observed. The largest difference led to a higher frequency of NAT2 poor metabolizer phenotypes as compared to rapid and intermediate metabolizer phenotypes in all global populations except in the EAS population, where NAT2 poor metabolizers were in the minority.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}

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

Evaluation Sovereignty in Metadata-Driven Classification: A Multi-Track Framework for Weakly Supervised Information Systems

arXiv:2606.13436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation in machine learning is typically treated as a neutral measurement process. However, in operational information systems, evaluation outcomes are often conditioned by the processes used to generate labels. This paper does not seek to improve classification performance. Instead, it examines the validity of performance measurement under differing label-authority regimes. This issue is particularly relevant in large-scale metadata-driven systems, where labels are often incomplete, inconsistent, or weakly supervised. We introduce evaluation sovereignty, defined as the degree to which performance metrics are independent of label authority and supervision regime, and propose a multi-track evaluation framework that systematically varies training and evaluation label sources. Using hierarchical multi-label classification on large-scale scientific metadata, we demonstrate that models exhibiting strong performance under operational ("silver") evaluation degrade substantially under independent ("gold") evaluation, particularly for fine-grained classification. For example, Micro-F1 decreases from approximately 0.54 to 0.03. Notably, ranking-based metrics remain above baseline, revealing a divergence between latent model signal and classification validity. These findings suggest that commonly reported performance metrics may reflect alignment with labeling processes rather than true predictive capability. We therefore reconceptualize evaluation validity as a system-level property shaped by label governance and provide a practical methodology for auditing intelligent systems operating under weak supervision.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

On the entanglement induced by the deformation of phase-space

arXiv:2606.17587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most quantum gravity theories propose that the fundamental concept of space-time is mostly compatible with quantum theory in noncommutative (NC) space. In the present paper, we revisit the notion of entanglement induced by NC deformations of phase space. The positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion for separability of bipartite Gaussian states is extended to a general class of Bopp's shift. In particular, we have considered both the position-position and momentum-momentum noncommutativity, with deformation parameters $\theta$ and $\eta$, respectively. It turns out that $\theta$ and $\eta$ induce the entanglement. We have directly applied the formalism for an anisotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator. Peres-Horodecki separability condition leads to a constraint equation for the parameter values of the oscillator in NC space. It turns out that the bipartite Gaussian state is almost always entangled in deformed space. To implement the theoretical idea, we provide an outline for a gedankenexperiment to identify the signature of phase-space noncommutativity, i.e., quantum gravity. In particular, the gedankenexperiment is devised to test the separability of supposedly separable Gaussian states in the usual commutative space, through the covariance matrix, which is constructed via measured output photocurrents after interaction of input Gaussian states and reference states. If the experiment shows that the supposedly separable states are actually entangled, then the entanglement is created through the intermediate background noncommutative space, which is a signature of the quantum nature of gravity.

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

Wasserstein Equilibrium Decoding for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering

Small vision-language models (2-8B) are well-suited for clinical deployment due to privacy constraints, limited connectivity, and low-latency requirements favouring on-device or on-premise inference. However, their limited capacity exacerbates the generation of plausible but incorrect outputs. We extend game-theoretic decoding, previously restricted to text-only, closed-ended NLP tasks, to vision-language models for open-ended Medical VQA. We introduce a semantically aware Wasserstein stopping criterion that replaces lexical order matching, enabling convergence based on semantic consensus among near-synonymous candidate answers and avoiding unnecessary iterations caused by clinically equivalent ranking swaps. On VQA-RAD and PathVQA, we obtain consistent, statistically significant improvements over greedy and discriminative baselines. On VQA-RAD, we improve Qwen3-VL-2B by +3.5 percentage points (p < 0.01), surpassing the greedy 4B model, with similar trends at larger scales. On PathVQA, Gemma-3-4B with BDG matches MedGemma-4B under greedy decoding despite no domain-specific fine-tuning. At accuracy parity with classic BDG, the Wasserstein criterion reduces average convergence iterations by approximately 20%, improving inference efficiency while preserving the game-theoretic equilibrium behaviour. Code is available at https://github.com/luca-hagen/ Wasserstein-BDG-medical-VQA.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

C-glycoside synthesis via radical cross-coupling of glycohydrazides

作者:

Carbohydrates are among the most abundant and structurally diverse biomolecules in nature, playing central roles in energy storage, molecular recognition, and cell signaling. Within this domain, C-glycosides1-3, in which the oxygen atom of the glycosidic bond in O-glycosides is replaced by carbon, have emerged as valuable motifs in medicinal chemistry due to their resistance to enzymatic hydrolysis2,4. Of particular importance are C-aryl glycosides, exemplified by the SGLT2 inhibitors dapagliflozin, canagliflozin, and empagliflozin, which are frontline therapies for type 2 diabetes5-7. However, scalable syntheses of C-aryl glycosides have traditionally relied on protected sugar derivatives, lengthy sequences, or conventional cross-couplings that often suffer from poor selectivity, limited scope, and extensive protecting-group manipulation6. Herein, we report a practical approach to C-aryl glycosides using glycosyl sulfonyl hydrazides as redox-neutral radical precursors for cross-coupling. Prepared directly from unprotected native sugars, these reagents generate glycosyl radicals under mild conditions and enable efficient access to diverse C-aryl glycosides, including all approved SGLT2 inhibitors, natural products such as salmochelins and neopetrosins, and medicinally relevant probes. Beyond anomeric functionalization, this platform enables C–C bond formation at multiple positions on carbohydrate scaffolds and supports stereoretentive radical coupling that can override inherent stereochemical biases, expanding practical access to carbohydrate-derived therapeutics and chemical tools.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The t-Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond Model

arXiv:2606.19507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work we consider an Aztec diamond model split into two unequal regions which are asymptotically fixed in size. Each region is weighted with a distinct two-periodic weighting. We refer to this model as the t-split two-periodic Aztec diamond, to signify its difference from the previous work title Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond, where the model was split into two equal regions. We derive an integral expression for the correlation kernel of the model and give a partial description of the scaling limit behavior, along with a conjecture for the remainder. We refer to the larger and smaller sides of the model as the dominant and non-dominant sides, and to the location of the weight change as the interface. The dominant side exhibits a limit shape that depends only on its own weighting and is identical to that of the two-periodic Aztec diamond, while the non-dominant side appears to have a novel limit shape that depends on both weightings and the location of the interface. Lastly, we consider the complete limit shape in the case where the dominant side two-periodic parameter goes to 0.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tungsten Germanide Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors with Saturated Internal Detection Efficiency at Wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m

arXiv:2511.20868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are among the most sensitive single-photon detectors available and have the potential to transform fields ranging from infrared astrophysics to molecular spectroscopy. However, extending their performance into the mid-infrared spectral region - crucial for applications such as exoplanet transit spectroscopy and vibrational fingerprinting of molecules - has remained a major challenge, primarily due to material limitations and scalability constraints. Here, we report on the development of SNSPDs based on tungsten germanide, a novel material system that combines high mid-infrared sensitivity with compatibility for large-scale fabrication. Our detectors exhibit saturated internal detection efficiency at wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m, while using 2.7x thicker films (8 nm vs 3 nm) and up to 4.5x wider nanowires (360 nm vs 80 nm) compared to mid-infrared-optimized SNSPDs fabricated from tungsten silicide. This advance will enable scalable, high-performance single-photon detection in a spectral region that was previously inaccessible, opening new frontiers in remote sensing, thermal imaging, environmental monitoring, molecular physics, and astronomy.

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

Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of attention in dLLMs and show that tokens attending more strongly to unmasked context exhibit greater generation stability and play a critical role in reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we propose AGDO, an attention-guided denoising and optimization framework that aligns both training and optimization with attention-derived dependencies. AGDO determines the denoising order based on attention structure and emphasizes attention-critical tokens during supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that AGDO consistently improves reasoning performance, outperforming state-of-the-art post-training methods for dLLMs.

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

Detecting Functional Memorization in Code Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate code at scale. Meanwhile, prior work has investigated whether training data may be recoverable from model outputs, by auditing the textual overlap between training examples and model generations. Code, however, can be functionally equivalent while textually dissimilar. In this work, we study functional memorization: extraction of functional logic beyond what verbatim metrics detect. We construct a counterfactual setup for Olmo-3-32B, comparing a midtrained model (exposed to target code) against a pretrained reference (not exposed). We prompt both models with Python function signatures and measure both textual and functional similarity (i.e., LLM-as-a-judge, execution-based). Our results show clear evidence of functional memorization, highlighting the need for auditing metrics that go beyond textual overlap.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Self-attention-based non-linear basis transformations for compact latent space modelling of dynamic optical fibre transmission matrices

arXiv:2406.07775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimode optical fibres are hair-thin strands of glass that efficiently transport light. They promise next-generation medical endoscopes that provide unprecedented sub-cellular image resolution deep inside the body. However, confining light to such fibres means that images are inherently scrambled in transit. Conventionally, this scrambling has been compensated by pre-calibrating how a specific fibre scrambles light and solving a stationary linear matrix equation that represents a physical model of the fibre. However, as the technology develops towards real-world deployment, the unscrambling process must account for dynamic changes in the matrix representing the fibre's effect on light, due to factors such as movement and temperature shifts, and non-linearities resulting from the inaccessibility of the fibre tip when inside the body. Such complex, dynamic and nonlinear behaviour is well-suited to approximation by neural networks, but most leading image reconstruction networks rely on convolutional layers, which assume strong correlations between adjacent pixels, a strong inductive bias that is inappropriate for fibre matrices which may be expressed in a range of arbitrary coordinate representations with long-range correlations. We introduce a new concept that uses self-attention layers to dynamically transform the coordinate representations of varying fibre matrices to a basis that admits compact, low-dimensional representations suitable for further processing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on diverse fibre matrix datasets. We show our models significantly improve the sparsity of fibre bases in their transformed bases with a participation ratio, p, as a measure of sparsity, of between 0.01 and 0.11. Further, we show that these transformed representations admit reconstruction of the original matrices with < 10% reconstruction error, demonstrating the invertibility.

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

Bernstein-Schur Kernels: Random Features by Sketched Modulation and Radial Randomization

arXiv:2606.11255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bernstein–Schur kernels are products of a finite-feature kernel (one with an explicit finite-dimensional feature map) and a completely monotone shift-invariant kernel: nonstationary kernels that fall between the shift-invariant and dot-product templates random features usually exploit, so in general neither Bochner sampling nor polynomial sketching applies to the full kernel directly. We give one random-feature construction for the whole class that randomizes both factors: it sketches the finite modulation and randomizes the completely monotone radial factor, sampling the latter's one-dimensional Bernstein–Widder scale and then applying Gaussian random Fourier features (whose frequency is still $d$-dimensional). The feature dimension is then $Dm$, set by the sketch size $m$ and the radial-draw count $D$, free of the $O(d^2)$ size of the exact modulation feature. Keeping the modulation \emph{exact is the analyzable limit ($m\to\infty$): there we prove unbiasedness, an exact variance for the recommended flat estimator, an expected matrix-Bernstein operator-norm bound (with a matching high-probability tail) controlled by the top eigenvalues of the kernel and modulation Gram matrices together with an intrinsic dimension rather than the crude $N\max_{ij}$ entrywise route, and a deterministic relative-spectral kernel-ridge stability result. By conditioning on the sketch, the doubly-randomized estimator inherits the same intrinsic-dimension operator-norm guarantee plus a single additive sketch term, tunable by $m$ independently of $D$. The motivating instance is the biased $yat$-kernel $k_{yat,b}(w,x)=(w^\top x+b)^2/(\|w-x\|^2+\varepsilon)$, $b\ge0$, whose family span contains the inverse-multiquadric kernel by finite differences in $b$; for it the radial mixture is the IMQ spectral sampler, and one frequency per scale is variance-optimal at a fixed radial-feature budget.

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

A Compositional Framework for Open-ended Intelligence

arXiv:2606.15386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended intelligence is the capacity to adapt to novel problems and environments that are substantially different from those in training. We formalize open-ended intelligence as the closure induced by a finite primitive set \(P\) and a set of composition operators \(C\). We characterize properties of the induced closure \(\mathcal{L}(P,C)\) that support unbounded compositional generation across families of tasks and worlds. A mathematics of open-ended intelligence requires two pillars: a minimal set of representational primitives (e.g., states, actions) and algorithmic primitives (e.g., nearest neighbor), together with composition motifs (e.g., recursion, sequencing) that reflect an acquired compositional grammar. The closure of these two pillars enables the generation of infinite adaptive responses across a wide range of settings. The mathematics supports complementary research agendas, including evaluation metrics for explanation and interpretability, as well as building architectures where compositional generalization is native. We propose next primitive prediction as a novel architectural objective, where the training objective encourages the acquisition of reusable algorithmic primitives and their compositional grammar, such that new solutions are generated through recombination. Curriculum learning and self-play enable lifelong learning and expansion of the closure by discovering reusable primitives and transition motifs across families of tasks and worlds. We ground the framework through case studies in physics, evolution, and neuroscience.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Structure preserving properties of higher order moment closures for TASEP

arXiv:2604.15925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) is a stochastic model for the unidirectional flow of interacting particles on a 1D-lattice that is much used in systems biology and statistical physics. Its master equation describes the evolution of the probability distribution on the configuration space. The size of the master equation grows exponentially with the length of the lattice. It is known that the complexity of the system may be reduced using mean-field approximations. We provide a rigorous definition of a family of such models using moments of any order and an extension to the pair approximation for obtaining closures for the system. The dimension of these models grows linearly with the lattice size and exponentially in the order of the approximation. Moreover, we show that the states of these models still have a probabilistic interpretation and that basic structural properties of the master equation are preserved. This extends known results on the Ribosome Flow Model which can be viewed as the first order approximation for TASEP.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

An innovative technology boosts image quality for protein structures

After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins. After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins.

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

Improved Knowledge Distillation for Land-Use Image Classification

In the present article, an improved Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework has been proposed for efficient compression of deep convolutional neural networks for land-use image classification task. Motivated by the need to achieve competitive classification accuracy while reducing computational complexity, a teacher-student learning paradigm is adopted in which a VGG16 network transfers knowledge to a lightweight MobileNetV2 model. The proposed framework integrates hard supervision from ground truth labels with a soft supervision strategy that combines Kullback-Leibler divergence and Cosine Similarity losses. Experiments conducted on three land-use datasets show that the proposed KD-based method yields improved performance, and achieves an accuracy of 99.04%, outperforming both baseline student training and single-loss distillation approaches, while retaining substantial model compression.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MPMWorlds: Material-Point-Method Simulations for Inferring and Extrapolating Physical Dynamics

To study the ability to infer physical dynamics from videos and extrapolate them forward in time, we assemble a dataset of 2D Material Point Method (MPM) physical simulations covering rich physical phenomena such as deformable objects, fluids, kinetic objects, and emitters. We study code generation and video diffusion approaches on this dataset, identifying their strengths and weaknesses by varying the amount of physically relevant side information. The code generation model, beyond giving a working demonstration of automatic synthesis of MPM simulations, reveals that such an approach struggles with inferring physical parameters from visual input, but relative to video diffusion, produces physically and temporally stable extrapolations forward in time, while the video diffusion model more strongly identifies geometric properties from visual input but produces physically implausible extrapolations.