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

Honeypot Protocol

作者:

arXiv:2604.13301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Trusted monitoring, the standard defense in AI control, is vulnerable to adaptive attacks, collusion, and strategic attack selection. All of these exploit the fact that monitoring is passive: it observes model behavior but never probes whether the model would behave differently under different perceived conditions. We introduce the honeypot protocol, which tests for context-dependent behavior by varying only the system prompt across three conditions (evaluation, synthetic deployment, explicit no-monitoring) while holding the task, environment, and scoring identical. We evaluate Claude Opus 4.6 in BashArena across all three conditions in both honest and attack modes. The model achieved 100% main task success and triggered zero side tasks uniformly across conditions, providing a baseline for future comparisons with stronger attack policies and additional models.

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

GRACE: Boosting Video MLLMs with Grounded Action-Centric Evidence for Viewer Sentiment Prediction

Viewer sentiment prediction in video advertisements aims to infer the latent affective response evoked in the audience. To bridge the gap between what is shown and what is felt, models must deduce hidden viewer emotions from explicit visual narratives, concrete character-object interactions, and visible textual cues. However, standard Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically rely on holistic frame representations, which leave these fine-grained, affect-relevant events implicit and complicate precise emotional reasoning. To address this, we propose a grounded action-centric evidence augmentation framework that enhances video MLLMs' clue extraction and comprehension by introducing explicit event structure and localized visual evidence. Our method extracts temporally ordered subject-verb-object (SVO) triplets and auxiliary visible textual cues from action-centric video descriptions, grounds subject and object entities as visual entity crops, and then enables the MLLM to perform clue-enhanced emotional reasoning based on these extracted structured clues. In this way, action triplets specify "what happens", while grounded visual entity crops anchor "who or what participates in each event" to concrete visual evidence. Experiments on the Pitts dataset show consistent improvements over Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL baselines. Ablation studies, cross-dataset evaluation on AdsQA, and transfer experiments on an emotion-focused TVQA subset further support the effectiveness and generalization of our approach.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Development and Initial Validation of the Quality of life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST) Assessment

Individuals with NF2-related schwannomatosis (NF2-SWN) experience a complex constellation of physical, emotional, and social symptoms that substantially impact quality of life (QoL). Although disease-specific patient-reported outcome measures are increasingly important for evaluating treatment benefit in clinical trials, existing NF2-SWN QoL measures have limitations in content coverage and sensitivity to change. This study describes the development and initial validation a new disease-specific QoL assessment – the Quality of Life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST). Using a three-phase, mixed-methods approach, items were generated through concept elicitation interviews with individuals with NF2-SWN and clinicians, prioritized via patient survey data, and refined through iterative cognitive debriefing procedures. The resulting 21-item QUEST assesses the extent to which NF2-SWN has negatively impacted a persons daily life over the past seven days. Initial psychometric evaluation was conducted in an international sample of 174 individuals with NF2-SWN aged 15 years and older (117 women (67%), 158 White individuals (89%)). Exploratory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure, and the total score demonstrated excellent internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability. Evidence of construct validity was demonstrated through hypothesized associations with disease-specific, generic, and domain-specific QoL measures, as well as known-groups validity based on self-reported disease severity and number of prior surgeries. Incremental validity analyses indicated that QUEST explained unique variance beyond existing measures. Together, findings support the QUEST as a reliable and valid disease-specific QoL measure with strong content validity and feasibility for use as a clinical trial endpoint in NF2-SWN.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Hey Chat, Can You Teach Me? Structuring Socratic Dialogue for Human Learning in the Wild

Large language models are now widely used for everyday learning, but the underlying interactions are typically unstructured chats rather than following a curriculum. Unlike formal online learning systems, these interactions carry no prior record of the student, so any estimate of what the student already knows must be inferred from the dialogue itself. We show that this gap is not closed by scaling models alone. Frontier and education-tuned LLMs perform poorly when asked to tutor a student over an extended session, because doing so requires three things at once. The tutor must sequence a curriculum, conduct Socratic dialogue, and infer the student's knowledge state from that dialogue. We propose separating these responsibilities. Given a student query, our system constructs a prerequisite knowledge graph in which subtopics are nodes and dependencies are edges, and frames tutoring as deciding which node to teach next and how many dialogue turns to spend on it before moving on. A lightweight PPO policy handles this sequencing decision, while an LLM conducts the Socratic exchange at the chosen node and returns a signal of student progress. Across held-out STEM and non-STEM topics, our PPO-paired tutor outperforms heuristic baselines, frontier general-purpose models, and a model specialised for Socratic dialogue: on both the rate at which students reach full curriculum mastery and the number of turns required. Explicit curriculum structure delivers gains that scaling the underlying model does not.

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

Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Radial Basis Functions for PDEs with Dirac Delta Sources

arXiv:2606.12735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a machine learning method for solving forward and inverse Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). When applied to PDEs with Dirac delta functions in the forcing terms, boundary conditions, or initial conditions, PINNs require approximating them with smooth surrogate functions, a practice that can introduce significant modeling errors. In this work, we exploit the interpretation of PINNs as Residual Least Squares (RLS) methods and show that this perspective enables direct treatment of Dirac delta terms by integrating the weak-form equation. Among RLS formulations other than PINN, we focus on the Radial Basis Function (RBF) expansion (also known as a single-layer RBF Network). We show that while integrating out the Dirac delta in PINNs causes residuals to fail to converge to zero, RBF-RLS consistently provides good forward and inverse solutions to transport problems. We explain this finding using the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory. We test both approaches on linear PDEs that represent groundwater flow and transport in porous media and rivers. We solve inverse problems to fit synthetic data, noisy synthetic data, and real-world measurements.

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

Decision-Driven Geosteering Under Uncertainty: A Unified Framework for Sequential Decision Optimization

arXiv:2606.17331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geosteering requires navigating a well trajectory through an unknown geological configuration, while sequentially updating decisions based on indirect measurements acquired during drilling. This work presents an uncertainty-aware geosteering framework that tightly integrates particle filtering for probabilistic subsurface interpretation with value-based reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making. Geological uncertainty ahead of the drill bit is represented explicitly through a particle filter (PF), enabling belief-informed control rather than deterministic trajectory correction. The framework couples PF belief updates with belief-informed decision policies and evaluates three decision-making options that operate under identical uncertainty representations: an interpretable Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) scheme, a Deep Q-learning baseline, and a Dual Deep Reinforcement Learning (Dual DRL) architecture trained with a target Q-network scheme for stability, using a dueling (value/advantage) decomposition for Q-value parameterization. Beyond final placement performance, we assess policy behavior using stability-oriented metrics that quantify steering smoothness over time, providing additional operational insight into how decision policies respond as uncertainty evolves. The framework is integrated with an API for validation within an industrial geosteering simulator under realistic measurement noise and drilling constraints. Using identical geological realizations, operational limits, and reward definitions across methods, the experiments provide a controlled and high-fidelity evaluation of how alternative decision policies behave throughout the drilling process, rather than evaluating performance solely from the final well trajectory.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NaturalFlow: Reducing Disruptive Pauses for Natural Speech Flow in Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech-to-speech translation aims to enable near-real-time communication by minimizing latency, offering a compelling, real-time alternative to the high latency of consecutive translation. However, the excessive pursuit of low latency often results in fragmented chunk-wise speech. Consequently, listeners are subjected to an unnatural acoustic flow punctuated by frequent pauses, which could increase their cognitive load. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fluency-aware optimization framework designed to discover the sweet spot between the low-latency benefits of simultaneous translation and the natural flow of consecutive translation. Our framework minimizes inter-chunk silences by leveraging model-internal signals, including linguistic diversity and induced temporal variability in speech durations. Experiments on short- and long-form benchmarks show that our framework produces natural speech flow while maintaining competitive latency and translation quality.

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

CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets – CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore – the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.

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

Multimodal Graph Negative Learning

arXiv:2606.12863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal attributed graphs (MAGs) integrate graph topology with heterogeneous modality attributes, such as text and images, thereby enabling richer modeling of complex relational systems. However, such expressiveness also makes learning on MAGs depend on multiple semantic sources, including structural topology, textual and visual attributes, each of which can be regarded as a branch for node representation. Node-level branch semantic imbalance arises when these branches differ across nodes in semantic informativeness and reliability: a branch that provides discriminative semantics for one node may mislead another due to bias in modality quality or structural context. Existing methods often mitigate such heterogeneity through cross-branch agreement or alignment, implicitly treating the dominant prediction as reliable supervision. When the dominant branch is biased, forced imitation may propagate its bias to other branches and suppress original semantics that are useful for classification. We propose GraphMNL, a graph-aware multimodal negative learning framework that addresses this issue by using Negative Learning as cross-branch guidance. Instead of forcing inferior branches to imitate a teacher prediction, the model teaches them which classes a node is unlikely to belong to. GraphMNL builds a branch library, identifies dominant and inferior branches via graph-aware reliability arbitration, gates unstable transfer, and applies target-preserving negative learning over non-target classes. This design decouples target supervision from branch guidance so that supervised losses learn the correct class, while Negative Learning suppresses unlikely alternatives when branch agreement is unreliable. Through the comprehensive experimental evaluation, GraphMNL achieves the best performance on Grocery datasets with 72.47% accuracy and 76.60 F1 score on Reddit M datasets.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

QMaxCal: Path-Space Regularization for Open Quantum Control via Girsanov's Theorem

arXiv:2606.19947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable quantum control in the presence of decoherence requires policies that combat the effect of environmental noise on the controlled dynamics. Open quantum systems under continuous monitoring generate classical measurement records whose drift depends on the noise experienced by the system; the records of two evolutions sharing the same decoherence channels differ only in this drift, so Girsanov's theorem yields a closed-form, differentiable estimator of the KL divergence between their trajectory distributions. We instantiate this estimator with two physically motivated reference measures, yielding two regularizers that both drive the system toward states where the effects of decoherence are minimal: the Wiener KL (KL_W), which is empirically more effective under certain conditions on the noise model, and the drift-variance regularizer (R_DV), which works for all noise models. Both are qualitatively distinct from existing penalties on control fluence or smoothness: they penalize the observable consequences of control on the decoherence channels rather than the control amplitude itself. The regularizers outperform unregularized gradient-based and reinforcement-learning baselines across a range of open quantum systems – including single- and multi-qubit benchmarks and a multi-qubit chain calibrated to a published snapshot of the IBM Kingston processor – along several axes of evaluation: final-state fidelity, robustness to mismatch in the assumed noise model (gains grow from +17 pp at training noise to +27 pp under 2.5x noise mismatch), and occupation of forbidden states. The regularizers reduce infidelity by up to 50%, with ~16% gains on the calibrated IBM Kingston chain.

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

Judging to Improve: A De-biased VLM-as-3D-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Generation

arXiv:2606.20364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A companion study established a de-biased, cross-model VLM-as-3D-judge that reliably ranks single-image-to-3D mesh quality where cheap geometry and CLIP proxies fall short. This paper asks: can that judge's preferences specialize a strong open generator, TRELLIS, on one asset class (furniture), cheaply and without human labels? Taking the judge from ranking to optimization is where the work lives. Pushing a VLM judge into the training and evaluation loop exposes failure modes ranking never triggered, so our contribution is an optimization-grade hardening of the judge: a training judge (Qwen2.5-VL-7B) held distinct from an evaluation judge (InternVL3-8B) to break circularity; position-bias correction; and fixes for three failure modes (image overload, geometry-hiding splat renders, and reference-free judging that rewards clean-but-wrong outputs), with calibration evidence (clear-gap win-rate 0.83-1.0; base-vs-base ~0.5). Using this protocol as an independent evaluator, and working only from public models and data with lightweight parameter-efficient adaptation, we find our methods match the strong base rather than exceed it. Independent base samples carry essentially no learnable preference (0.94 order-flip rate), so signal must be engineered by quality-contrastive construction. Across six adaptation methods, two input regimes, and a severity sweep, the most targeted - conditioner repair under severe degradation - reaches parity (0.50) with the base, while no method clears the >=65% win-rate target. The result is mechanistic: clean inputs saturate the judge, flow-DIT fine-tuning washes out through the sampler, and conditioning repair is the locus that moves geometry. Win-rates are directional at n=8 objects. Matching a strong public-data base with cheap adaptation is itself informative: exceeding it needs more than lightweight PEFT on public data, and the judge protocol is reusable.

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

Send a SCOUT First: Pre-hoc Reasoning for Adaptive Detector Allocation in Prompt-Injection Defense

arXiv:2605.30837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are heterogeneous: each is strong on a different slice of attacks, and none is always reliable. Yet existing systems still treat detection as a fixed single-detector pipeline, committing every request to one detector's blind spots. We reframe defense as detector allocation: given a heterogeneous pool, decide per request which detectors to run and whether to escalate to an LLM judge. Our framework SCOUT (Scalable and Controllable Outcome-prediction for Uncertainty-aware Triage) makes this decision dynamic by predicting each detector's per-sample reliability and latency from how it behaved on similar past inputs, and exposes a single safety-utility threshold to the operator (where utility bundles benign-pass rate and wall-clock). To evaluate this setting, we build SCOUT-450, a benchmark that captures the structurally complex, agent-facing injections that older prompt-injection sets under-represent. On SCOUT-450, a safety-oriented operating point reduces attack-success rate by 46% and total wall-clock by 40% relative to an always-on GPT-4o judge, at a 5.1-point benign-utility drop. SCOUT also transfers to three external benchmarks (BIPIA, IPI, and IHEval), improving the safety-utility frontier.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

New bounds on private simultaneous quantum message passing

arXiv:2606.12557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the private simultaneous message (PSM) setting, $k$ players obtain inputs $x_i\in\{0,1\}^n$ and then each send messages to a referee, who should learn $f(x_1,...,x_k)$ but no other information about $(x_1,...,x_k)$. The PSM setting was introduced as a minimal model for secure multiparty computation and has connections to Boolean function complexity. In the quantum setting, PSM has been related to non-local quantum computation (NLQC). The communication and correlation cost of implementing PSM remains poorly understood. Here, we give new upper and lower bounds on the (quantum) PSM model. For lower bounds, we show: 1) Nečiporuk's measure lower bounds the entanglement required for $k$-player quantum PSM with perfect correctness. This leads to quadratic lower bounds for explicit functions. 2) The rank of the communication matrix of $f(x_1,x_2)$ lower bounds 2-player quantum PSM with perfect privacy but imperfect correctness. This implies a previously unknown lower bound on classical PSM with imperfect correctness. When allowing quantum communication and shared entanglement, these are the first lower bounds on quantum PSM that make use of the privacy condition. For upper bounds, we show: 1) Letting $s$ be the size of a quantum circuit computing $f$, $d_f$ be the circuit depth, $k$ the number of players, $n$ the number of bits received by each player, and $\epsilon$ a correctness parameter, we obtain $\mathsf{PSM}_k^*(f) \leq (kn +s) \cdot \log^{O(d_f)}(s/\epsilon)$. 2) The square of the Fourier 1 norm of $f$, $\Vert \hat{f}\Vert_1^2$, upper bounds the classical PSM complexity, $\mathsf{PSM}(f)\leq O(\Vert \hat{f} \Vert^2_1)$. In proving the first upper bound, we generalize existing $T$-depth based techniques for NLQC from $2$ to $k\geq 2$ parties, and consider cases where the Clifford layers are restricted to having small light cones.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

APEX: Automated Prompt Engineering eXpert with Dynamic Data Selection

Large Language Models are highly sensitive to prompt formulation, necessitating automatic prompt optimization to unlock their full potential. While evolutionary algorithms have emerged as the dominant paradigm, they suffer from a critical bottleneck: data efficiency. Current methods treat the development dataset as a static benchmark, wasting significant compute budget on uninformative data. In this work, we introduce APEX (Automatic Prompt Engineering eXpert), a novel framework that optimizes the data usage alongside the prompt search. APEX dynamically stratifies the dataset into Easy, Hard, and Mixed tiers based on the optimization lineage. By prioritizing the Mixed tier, which identifies the data where the LLM has mixed performance, we identify two high-leverage subsets: the addressable frontier for generating informative mutations and the rank-sensitive frontier for distinguishing candidate quality. We evaluate APEX across three diverse benchmarks: IFBench, SimpleQA Verified, and FACTS Grounding. Under a fixed budget of 5,000 evaluation calls, due to its data efficiency, APEX outperforms the initial prompt by an average of 11.2% on Gemini 2.5 Flash and 6.8% on Gemma 3 27B, demonstrating that a data-centric approach is key to efficient and effective prompt optimization.

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

HeteRo-Select: Informativeness as the Participation Driver in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

arXiv:2508.06692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning systems typically allocate gradient compression by link speed. This is sensible when bandwidth and data informativeness align. However, under non-IID data, these signals often decorrelate or invert. A bandwidth-driven allocator then risks compressing the most informative gradients hardest. We propose HeteRo-Select, a framework that replaces bandwidth with a per-client informativeness score as the primary driver of compression. The score jointly governs three decisions per round: client selection, compression ratio, and server aggregation weight, with bandwidth retained only as a hard ceiling. Score-proportional selection provably reduces the effective heterogeneity of the chosen subset; score-proportional compression provably lowers aggregate top-$k$ error at fixed traffic. Under the exact FedCG simulation protocol, HeteRo-Select delivers a $1.78\times$ speedup and an $18.2\%$ reduction in traffic on CIFAR-10. The same configuration, unchanged, scales from a $7{,}850$-parameter logistic regression to an $11.27$M-parameter ResNet-18, hitting the accuracy target on three of four benchmarks. When bandwidth and informativeness are deliberately anti-correlated, the method still achieves the target accuracy with less traffic than the normal-bandwidth run.

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

Fusion of Pervasive RF Data with Spatial Images via Vision Transformers for Enhanced Mapping in Smart Cities

In this paper, we present a deep learning-based approach that integrates the DINOv2 architecture to improve building mapping by combining (possibly erroneous) maps from open-source platforms with pervasive radio frequency (RF) data collected from multiple wireless user equipments and base stations. Unlike prior methods, our approach leverages a vision transformer-based architecture to jointly process both RF and map modalities within a unified framework, effectively capturing spatial dependencies and structural priors for enhanced mapping accuracy. For the evaluation purposes, we employ a synthetic dataset co-produced by Huawei. To address the challenges associated with real-world data imperfections, we introduce controlled noise to its RF data so as to simulate real-world conditions. Additionally, we develop and train a model that leverages only aggregated path loss information to tackle the mapping problem. We measure the results according to three performance metrics: the Jaccard index (intersection over union, IoU), the Hausdorff distance, and the Chamfer distance. Our design achieves a macro IoU of 65.3%, significantly surpassing (i) the erroneous maps baseline, which yields 40.1%, (ii) an RF-only method from the literature, which yields 37.3%, and (iii) a non-AI fusion baseline that we designed which yields 42.2%. The comparative evaluation highlights the limitations of relying solely on RF data or on spatial data, as well as the effectiveness that AI can have on fusing data towards enhancing smart city mapping accuracy. We further validate our method on real-world data from the Oslo region, complementing the synthetic evaluation with a real deployment setting, where our best fusion model reaches 64.9% macro IoU. We additionally outline a strategy for deploying the model over larger areas by tiling the region with overlapping windows.

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

Verifiable Environments Are LEGO Bricks: Recursive Composition for Reasoning Generalization

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with verifiable environments has emerged as a powerful approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While prior research demonstrates that scaling environment quantity improves RL performance, existing manual or individual construction methods suffer from linear scaling limits, thereby hindering scalable reasoning generalization. This paper introduces RACES (Recursive Automated Composition for Environment Scaling), a framework that conceptualizes verifiable environments as composable building blocks that can be recursively assembled. The key insight is that when the codomain (output type) of one environment matches the domain (input type) of another, they can be automatically fused into a new verifiable environment, enabling recursive composition. RACES is implemented with 300 individual environments and defines a set of composition operators (\textsc{SEQUENTIAL}, \textsc{PARALLEL}, \textsc{SORT}, and \textsc{SELECT}) that induce diverse reasoning patterns. Extensive experiments show that RL training on these composite environments consistently enhances reasoning generalization. Specifically, RACES improves DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B by an average of 3.1 points (from 48.2 to 51.3) and boosts Qwen3-14B performance from 58.8 to 61.1 on six benchmarks, which are unseen during the construction of training environments. Moreover, RACES achieves performance comparable to training on 300 individual environments using only 50 base environments, demonstrating significant efficiency in environment utilization.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Misinformation Propagation in Benign Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems, in which multiple large language model agents solve problems through turn-based interaction, are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as medical diagnosis, legal analysis, and forensic decision-making. Their reliability can be at risk when single agents reason from incorrect or misleading context, e.g., from tool calls, since errors may propagate through agent interactions. This work studies this risk by injecting intent-based misinformation into benign single-agent and multi-agent systems across reasoning, knowledge, and alignment tasks. We find that misinformation can degrade single-agent performance and persists across multi-agent debate, with agents often retaining answers introduced by misinformed peers. Nevertheless, multi-agent debate reduces the resulting performance degradation compared to single-agent prompting, especially when most agents are not exposed to misinformation. Robustness depends on group composition and decision protocol. Consensus can be more stable than voting under peer pressure, while majorities can often steer misinformed agents back toward correct answers. Our results show that misinformation robustness in multi-agent systems depends on the underlying model and also on how agents exchange information and aggregate decisions.

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

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

arXiv:2606.14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.

20.
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.

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

Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents

arXiv:2606.12674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

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

LIBERO-Occ: Evaluating and Improving Vision-Language-Action Models under Scene-Induced Occlusion via Viewpoint Imagination

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, but most evaluations assume that task-relevant objects are fully visible. This assumption often fails in realistic settings, where occlusion makes manipulation partially observable. In this paper, we study scene-induced occlusion as a fundamental challenge for VLA models and introduce LIBERO-Occ, an occlusion-oriented extension of LIBERO. Experiments show that state-of-the-art VLAs suffer substantial performance degradation under occlusion. To address this issue, we propose Viewpoint Imagination (VIM), which generates a complementary view from an occluded primary observation and conditions action prediction on both observed and imagined evidence. VIM improves robustness across task suites, occlusion types, and severity levels without requiring additional cameras at deployment time, suggesting that viewpoint imagination is an promising mechanism for perception completion in partially observable manipulation. Our benchmark and corresponding code are available at: \href{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Entanglement generation between field modes mediated by a fluctuating conducting wall

arXiv:2606.12338v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider a movable conducting plate of finite mass, between two fixed ones, whose mechanical degrees of freedom are treated quantum-mechanically and bound to its equilibrium position by a harmonic potential. The movable wall is thus subjected to quantum fluctuations of its position. This creates a system of two sub-cavities separated by the movable fluctuating plate, and two massless one-dimensional scalar fields, one in each sub-cavity. This system is described by an appropriate generalization of the Law Hamiltonian. The presence of the movable wall yields an effective plate-fields interaction, as well as an effective interaction between the field modes. We obtain, at the second order in perturbation theory, the ground state of the interacting system and the reduced density operator of the fields in each sub-cavity by tracing out the wall's degrees of freedom. We calculate the entanglement between two field modes, one in each cavity, by evaluating analytically the negativity; we then evaluate numerically also the total multimode negativity. Our results show that in both cases the fields in the two sub-cavities are entangled, in contrast to the case in which the wall is fixed in space. We discuss the amount of the field entanglement present as a function of relevant physical parameters of the system such as the mass and oscillation frequency of the movable wall, its distance from the fixed walls and the frequencies of the field modes considered.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Cluster sizes in subcritical soft Boolean models

arXiv:2404.13730v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the soft Boolean model, a model that interpolates between the Boolean model and long-range percolation, where vertices are given via a stationary Poisson point process. Each vertex carries an independent Pareto-distributed radius and each pair of vertices is assigned another independent Pareto weight with a potentially different tail exponent. Two vertices are now connected if they are within distance of the larger radius multiplied by the edge weight. We determine the tail behaviour of the Euclidean diameter and the number of points of a typical maximally connected component in a subcritical percolation phase. For this, we present a sharp criterion in terms of the tail exponents of the edge-weight and radius distributions that distinguish a regime where the tail behaviour is controlled only by the edge exponent from a regime in which both exponents are relevant. Our proofs rely on fine path-counting arguments identifying the precise order of decay of the probability that far-away vertices are connected.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OneFocus: Enabling Real-World X-ray Security Screening with a Unified Vision-Language Model

X-ray contraband detection is critical for security in large-scale logistics and transportation, yet conventional detectors struggle to adapt to emerging contraband types and lack fundamental visual understanding. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong generalization but are hindered by the scarcity of high-quality X-ray image-caption data. To bridge this critical gap, we present MMXray, a meticulously curated benchmark of 52,124 image-caption pairs spanning 28 fine-grained classes of X-ray contraband. To enrich MMXray with realistic occlusion patterns, we further introduce CleanDET, a dedicated synthesis dataset containing clean foreground contraband images from 28 categories and background images with diverse density levels, together with AnyContraSyn, a controllable synthesis method designed to operate on CleanDET. We also develop OnePipe, an extensible pipeline for systematic data curation. Built on MMXray, we propose OneFocus, a unified VLM that supports four core tasks: visual question answering, contraband localization, classification, and image understanding. OneFocus achieves state-of-the-art performance in X-ray contraband understanding and demonstrates robust cross-domain generalization, establishing a strong vision-language baseline for security screening.