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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Macro Graph of Experts for Billion-Scale Multi-Task Recommendation

arXiv:2506.10520v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph-based multi-task learning at billion-scale presents a significant challenge, as different tasks correspond to distinct billion-scale graphs. Traditional multi-task learning methods often neglect these graph structures, relying solely on individual user and item embeddings. However, disregarding graph structures overlooks substantial potential for improving performance. In this paper, we introduce the Macro Graph of Experts (MGOE) framework, the first approach capable of leveraging macro graph embeddings to capture task-specific macro features while modeling the correlations between task-specific experts. Specifically, we propose the concept of a Macro Graph Bottom, which, for the first time, enables multi-task learning models to incorporate graph information effectively. We design the Macro Prediction Tower to dynamically integrate macro knowledge across tasks. MGOE has been deployed at scale, powering multi-task learning for a leading billion-scale recommender system, Alibaba. Extensive offline experiments conducted on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art multi-task learning methods, establishing MGOE as a breakthrough in multi-task graph-based recommendation. Furthermore, online A/B tests confirm the superiority of MGOE in billion-scale recommender systems.

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

Assessment of Personality Dimensions Across Situations in Dyadic Role-Play Scenarios

arXiv:2507.19137v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prior research indicates that users prefer assistive technologies whose personalities align with their own. This has sparked interest in automatic personality perception (APP), which aims to predict an individual's perceived personality traits. Previous studies in APP have treated personalities as static traits, independent of context. However, perceived personalities can vary by context and situation as shown in psychological research. In this study, we investigate the relationship between conversational speech and perceived personality for participants engaged in two work situations (a neutral interview and a stressful client interaction). Our key findings are: 1) perceived personalities differ significantly across interactions, 2) loudness, sound level, and spectral flux features are indicative of perceived extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness in neutral interactions, while neuroticism correlates with these features in stressful contexts, 3) handcrafted acoustic features and non-verbal features outperform speaker embeddings in inference of perceived personality, and 4) stressful interactions are more predictive of neuroticism, aligning with existing psychological research.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Nous: An Attempt to Extract and Inject the Cognition Behind Prediction-Market Behavior

作者:

arXiv:2606.13038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents proliferate in prediction markets and collective decision-making, they risk a cognitive monoculture: agents built on shared foundation models produce correlated forecasts, and recent measurement finds frontier-model errors correlated at r ~ 0.77. We ask whether human cognitive diversity can be recovered from behavior and transferred to LLM agents. Nous extracts a structured eight-dimension behavioral profile from real Polymarket trading activity and injects it into agents through prompts. Our central finding is a dissociation between the two halves of that pipeline. Extraction works, partially: across 100 wallets, 8 of 14 parameters are temporally stable (split-half ICC >= 0.5, bootstrap CI lower bound > 0.3; contrarian score reaches ICC ~ 0.9); wallets are identifiable from their profiles well above chance (top-1 retrieval 17-22% vs. 1% chance); and two of four pre-specified dimensions rank-correlate with future realized profit out-of-sample, though the correlations do not survive behavioral-confound controls. Prompt-level injection does not measurably transmit it: on a semantic embedding metric, structured injection shows no significant advantage over a length-matched control on any model, and the diversity it induces neither reduces ensemble error correlation nor improves Brier score – a null that persists across exploratory checks on sampling temperature, profile diversity, and question difficulty. Measuring the prompts themselves locates the compression before the model: the structure-to-narrative translator emits near-uniform prompts whose spread does not track profile spread. We position Nous as measuring the cognitive-monoculture problem and the limits of a prompt-level remedy, motivating deeper, below-the-prompt injection (fine-tuning, activation steering). Code, frozen profiles, prompts, and model outputs: https://github.com/WillChienT/nous-paper

04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Heterogeneous suppressive effect of <i>Wolbachia</i> incompatible insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique across time and historical <i>Ae. aegypti</i> abundance - using distributional synthetic controls

作者:

by Yichen Zhai, Chia-Chen Chang, Zhiyong Xi, Cheong Huat Tan, Lee Ching Ng, Jue Tao Lim Background Biological control tools such as Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique, are a promising class of interventions to modify and suppress Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to reduce risk of Aedes-borne diseases. Due to the spatial nature of the intervention, intervention effects can be spatio-temporally heterogeneous. Yet, most evaluations of field-based technologies rely on average treatment effects, which preclude characterization and understanding of treatment effect heterogeneities and the factors influencing it. Methods Here, we developed a causal inference framework using distributional synthetic controls to explicitly account for spatio-temporal trap-level mosquito abundance data to ascertain the entomological efficacy of Wolbachia in suppressing Ae. aegypti abundance. This method is able to construct counterfactual distributions of intervened areas, provide detailed comparisons to actual distributions and quantify treatment effects of the intervention on mosquito abundance over different quantiles. By employing our framework to trap-level mosquito abundance data from 57,990 unique mosquito traps routinely maintained and measured twice a week, and a large-scale field trial of Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique (IIT-SIT) in Singapore, we (1) quantified heterogeneous treatment effects for IIT-SIT across the time-since-intervention, over the traps’ historical mosquito abundance, over calendar time, (2) quantified whether elimination of wild-type Aedes aegypti was possible in intervention locations and (3) addressed if suppressive effects in spillover locations adjacent to directly intervened locations were heterogeneous. Results IIT-SIT interventions led to a strong suppressive effect on adult Aedes aegypti abundance. From the onset of intervention in directly treated locations, sector-specific intervention effectiveness (IE) ranged from 24.04% in the earliest treatment period, and reached 86.08% in the latest treatment period. Raw reductions in aegypti abundance were also found to increase over time as sectors were intervened over longer time periods. In spillover sectors, IE was lower in magnitude and more variable, but average IE reached a maximum of 78.08% in 2-years post-treatment. Wolbachia interventions also led to an increase in the percentage of traps recording no mosquitoes from 6.8% at the start of intervention to 33.01% 124-weeks post-intervention. We found that IE was higher in sectors with lower historical mosquito abundance. However, IE converged across sectors with different historical mosquito abundance as intervention time increased. Conclusion This study revealed spatial heterogeneities in suppressing wild-type female Ae. aegypti by IIT-SIT and provided strong evidence that IIT-SIT can drastically suppress wild-type Ae. aegypti populations despite heterogeneous treatment effects over time.

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

From ASR to ASP: Evaluating Prompt Attack Vulnerabilities Against Open-Source LLMs

Recent studies demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate harmful or sensitive outputs. As open-source LLMs are increasingly adopted in high-impact applications such as finance, law, and healthcare, systematically investigating their security risks is becoming increasingly important towards trustworthy LLM era. This paper comprehensively studies effective prompt injection attacks against 14 widely used open-source and three closed-source LLMs on five attack benchmarks. Moreover, existing evaluation metrics mostly only consider the attack success rate, overlooking uncertainty in model responses. Our proposed Attack Success Probability (ASP) additionally captures uncertain behaviors for evaluation, where the model may initially refuse a harmful request but subsequently provide harmful guidance or vice versa, reflecting inconsistency and ambiguity in attack feasibility. By systematically analyzing the effectiveness of prompt injection attacks, we propose a straightforward and effective hypnotism attack; results show that this attack causes aligned language models, including Stablelm2, Mistral, Openchat, and Vicuna, to generate objectionable behaviors, achieving around 90% ASP. They also indicate that ignore prefix attacks can break all 14 open-source LLMs, achieving over 60% ASP on a multi-categorical dataset. We find that moderately well-known LLMs exhibit higher vulnerability to prompt injection attacks, highlighting the need to raise public awareness and prioritize efficient mitigation strategies.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Teleportation-based quantum state tomography

arXiv:2511.18621v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We explicitly show that the quantum teleportation protocol can be employed to completely reconstruct arbitrary two- and three-qubit density matrices. We also extend the present analysis to n-qubit density matrices. The only quantum resources needed to implement the teleportation-based quantum state tomography protocol are the ability to make Bell measurements and the ability to prepare a few different single qubit states to be teleported from Alice to Bob.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Policy Regret for Embedding Model Routing: Contextual Bandits with Low-Rank Experts

arXiv:2606.14929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommendation systems increasingly rely on dynamically routing diverse queries to multiple embedding models. Despite its practical significance, this problem remains poorly understood under realistic conditions like adversarial queries, bandit feedback, and limited observability of models. We formalize embedding model routing as an adversarial contextual linear bandit with low-rank experts, where contexts are queries, actions are items, and experts are the embedding models working on low-rank latent representation spaces. We first establish that standard regret notions suffer from structural misspecification or statistical intractability, and we identify a log-quadratic policy class that is expressive enough to capture query-dependent model routing, yet structured enough to allow efficient online learning. Second, we propose a policy gradient algorithm called Hypentropy Policy Gradient (HPG). It provably adapts to the unknown low-rank structure under incomplete information and attains $\tilde{\mathcal O}(s\sqrt{M T})$ linearized policy regret – where $s, M$, and $T$ are the intrinsic rank of the experts, the number of models, and the number of rounds – thus avoiding a curse of dimensionality. Finally, we also provide an computationally efficient and parameter-free implementation of HPG.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR): Function-Preserving SVD Compression for LLMs

arXiv:2606.19993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR), an SVD-based LLM compression framework that guides each weight matrix's low-rank approximation with a backward-signal influence metric. Starting from the activation-aware optimum of SVD-LLM(W), AIR runs a single closed-form alternating least squares (ALS) sweep that integrates influence element-wise under a monotone-descent guarantee. AIR is layer-local and composes orthogonally with end-to-end methods: alone it exceeds ACIP, and AIR+LoRA outperforms it further. AIR improves perplexity over SVD-LLM(W) by >18% at

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

Anatomy of Post-Training: Using Interpretability to Characterize Data and Shape the Learning Signal

arXiv:2606.12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy. To address this problem, we ask: can we inspect a preference dataset before optimization and decide, at the level of concepts, which behaviors a model should be allowed to learn? Motivated by this, we introduce a data-centric post-training pipeline that uses interpretability protocols to develop statistical hypotheses for the latent concepts separating preferred from dispreferred generations, making them explicit for fine-grained user feedback. Building on this view, we unify several interpretability-based training protocols as ways of shaping rewards via feature or data interventions. Empirically, we show that our pipeline diagnoses undesirable signals in existing preference data, mitigates off-target learning, and can also help amplify or shape desired properties such as safeguards and model personality. More broadly, our results suggest that interpretability can turn post-training from optimizing opaque proxy rewards into a process of auditing and sculpting the learning signal itself.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Noise-Driven Escape from Metastable Phases explains Grokking in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit first order phase transitions under variations of the L2 regularization strength, with each transition marking the onset of a new learnable feature. Below a critical regularization strength, all features are in principle learnable, but coexisting metastable states, separated by energy barriers, can trap the network and impede convergence. A strength of DNNs is their ability to generalize. But many open questions remain, among them the origin of so called grokking: the abrupt, delayed onset of generalization after prolonged apparent overfitting. We show for linear DNNs that grokking is consistent with hysteresis in first-order L2 phase transitions: using L2 regularization to engineer deliberate trapping, we demonstrate that a model in a low-accuracy metastable state escapes only when SGD noise drives it across an energy barrier, with escape times following Arrhenius scaling. We reproduce grokking-like delayed convergence across two orders of magnitude in escape time by deliberately trapping models in metastable phases. Using sparse sub-sampling we also reproduce the canonical grokking curve where test error eventually approaches the final training error. Our work suggests that the number of metastable states equals the number of learnable features – one per singular value of the data covariance – the potential for hysteresis grows naturally with task complexity. We provide evidence that the same mechanism likely operates in general nonlinear DNNs. Our results provide routes toward more efficient learning schemes.

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

HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers

Holistic visual tokenizers are fundamental to unified multimodal models (UMMs) as they map diverse visual inputs into a unified representation space. In this paper, we present HYDRA-X, the first UMM that unifies image and video tokenization within a single Vision Transformer (ViT). Our design is driven by two core challenges: efficiently injecting spatiotemporal reconstruction capability into a native ViT, and embedding image- and video-level semantic awareness into the latent space. To address the first, comprehensive ablations reveal two key findings: (1) frame-level causal temporal attention suffices for visual reconstruction, whereas full spatiotemporal attention degrades it; and (2) hierarchical temporal compression substantially outperforms single-step alternatives. To tackle the second, we propose a lightweight decompressor that upsamples temporally compressed features under joint image-video teacher supervision, thereby enforcing complementary semantic structures within the compact latent space. Building on this holistic tokenizer, we further propose a principled improvement of the editing pipeline: source-target interaction should occur at the latent level inside the tokenizer rather than at the semantic level inside the LLM, substantially improving editing consistency and accelerating convergence. Instantiated at the 7B dense model, HYDRA-X achieves strong performance across image and video understanding and generation tasks, paving the way for future unified-tokenizer UMMs.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pathwise structure of the three-dimensional attractive one-point interaction diffusion

作者:

arXiv:2606.08008v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the pathwise behavior of the three-dimensional attractive one-point interaction diffusion whose law was constructed by Cranston, Koralov, Molchanov and Vainberg, corresponding to the singular Schrödinger Hamiltonian \[ \frac12\Delta+\frac{\beta}{2}\delta_0, \qquad \beta>0. \] We identify a local stochastic differential equation satisfied by the process away from the origin and use it to construct a natural submartingale whose increasing component in the Doob-Meyer decomposition is supported on the set of times at which the process visits the origin. In particular, we show that the process visits the origin with positive probability and that the law conditioned on avoiding the origin is three-dimensional Wiener measure.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Gaussian Phase Transition and Cascade of Instabilities in the Dissipative Quantum Rabi Model

arXiv:2507.07092v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The open quantum Rabi model describes a two-level system coupled to a harmonic oscillator. A Gaussian phase transition for the nonequilibrium steady states has been predicted when the bosonic mode is soft and subject to damping. We show that oscillator dephasing is a relevant perturbation, which leads to a non-Gaussian phase transition and an intriguing cascade of instabilities for $k$-th order bosonic operators, as well as a jump in the steady-state qubit polarization. For the soft-mode limit, the equations of motion form a closed hierarchy and spectral properties can be efficiently studied. To this purpose, we establish a fruitful connection to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. The results for the phase diagram, stability boundaries, and relevant observables are based on mean-field analysis, exact diagonalization, perturbation theory, and Keldysh field theory.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

A Global Health Quality Improvement Project: Enhancing Cervical Cancer Awareness and screening in Nigeria

Background Cervical cancer remains a significant global public health challenge, ranking as the fourth most common cancer among women worldwide. According to The World Health Organization (WHO) 604,000 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer globally in 2020, with over 342,000 deaths amongst this group [1]. Despite its high mortality, cervical cancer is largely preventable through early detection and vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes nearly all cases of cervical cancer [1,2] In Nigeria, it is the second most common cancer among women in Nigeria and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths, with low screening rates exacerbating late diagnoses and poor outcomes [1]. Despite global commitments to elimination with Pap smear screening and HPV vaccination, less than 10% of women in Nigeria have undergone screening due to misconceptions, stigma, and limited awareness. Educational interventions may improve awareness and promote screening behaviors. This global health quality improvement (QI) project aimed to enhance cervical cancer awareness and increase Pap smear uptake at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Clinic in Abuja, Nigeria. Methods In November 2024, we conducted a health education intervention at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through a structured educational session for male and female CBN staff members. The session focused on cervical cancer prevention, risk factors, and screening guidelines. Additionally, cervical cancer awareness was raised via email, social media, and electronic bulletin board. Participants completed pre and post-interventions surveys assessing cervical cancer knowledge across 10 key items and demographic characteristics. Pap smear uptake was assessed using the CBN clinic records for three months before and after the intervention. Institutional approval was obtained from CBN and external institutional review board approval was not required. Results 188 participants attended the health education session with 124 survey responses (70 pre-event, 54 post-event). Participants were mostly women aged 30-39. Post-intervention, eight of ten survey questions showed improved knowledge, with five demonstrating statistically significant gains: understanding Pap smear frequency (p

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond Prediction: Tail-Aware Scheduling for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.18431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM serving exhibits extreme length variability, making size-based scheduling difficult in practice. Recent LLM schedulers approximate SJF/SRPT using predicted decode lengths or ranks and primarily report mean-centric metrics such as TTFT and TBT. We show that these prediction-driven policies can be fragile under distribution shifts, bursty arrivals, and GPU memory pressure, while offering limited control over the tail latency (P90-P99) that dominates user experience, even with perfect decode-length knowledge. We introduce a distribution-aware, prediction-free scheduling framework that replaces explicit length prediction with soft priority boosting driven by lightweight statistical signals. Our design co-optimizes scheduling and cache-aware preemption to account for memory-coupled decode dynamics across workload mixes. Evaluated on production and open-source traces, our method reduces P99 TTLT by up to 35-50% relative to SRPT with perfect length knowledge and reduces TTFT by 34-47% across workloads, including reasoning-heavy and chat-heavy tasks. These results demonstrate a robust alternative for optimizing tail latency in online LLM serving.

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

An Empirical Analysis of Optimization Dynamics and Sparsity Boundaries in Large-Scale Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.

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

A matching decomposition algorithm for simulating quantum walk Hamiltonians

arXiv:2601.11418v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present a new algorithm for generating quantum circuits that efficiently implement continuous time quantum walks on arbitrary simple sparse graphs. The algorithm, called matching decomposition, works by decomposing a continuous-time quantum walk Hamiltonian into a collection of exactly implementable Hamiltonians corresponding to matchings in the underlying graph followed by a novel graph compression algorithm that merges edges in the graph. We develop a greedy matching heuristic and a compression-aware matching heuristic, both of which can be used in the quantum circuit algorithm. Lastly, we convert the walks to a circuit and Trotterize over these components. The dynamics of the walker on each edge in the matching can be implemented in the circuit model as sequences of CX and CRx gates. We do not use Pauli decomposition when implementing walks along each matching. Furthermore, we compare greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition to a standard Pauli-based simulation pipeline and find that greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition consistently yields substantial resource reductions, requiring up to 43$\%$ (70\%) fewer controlled gates and up to 54$\%$ (75\%) shallower circuits than Pauli decomposition across multiple graph families. Finally, we also present examples and theoretical results for when matching decomposition can exactly simulate a continuous-time quantum walk on a graph.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Hidden in Plain Sight: Benchmarking Agent Safety Against Decomposition Attacks with DECOMPBENCH

arXiv:2606.13994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based Agents are becoming increasingly capable and widely deployed, creating growing incentives for adversarial misuse in the real-world. A key emerging threat is Decomposition Attacks [glukhov2024breach, jones2024adversaries] in which a harmful task is broken into simpler, benign subtasks that evade safety mechanisms when executed separately but cumulatively fulfill the malicious intent. Although recent benchmarks assess agent safety in multi-turn and multi-tool-use settings, they do not explicitly capture this form of decompositional misuse and may not represent realistic adversarial execution flows. To this end, we introduce DeCompBench, a benchmark designed specifically to evaluate agentic safety under decomposition attacks. DeCompBench is created with a decomposition-by-design principle using a graphical framework and enables harmful task decomposition into individually benign and executable subtasks with realistic workflows. Our experiments using a custom decomposer show that state-of-the-art agents exhibit high refusal rates on monolithic harmful tasks, but significantly lower refusal rates on their decomposed variants, while often inadvertently fulfilling the adversarial objectives. These findings underscore the need for safety evaluations against decomposition attacks and corresponding defenses. Our dataset is publicly available and can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/decompositionbench/DeCompBench.

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

Learned Image Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly rely on high-frequency multi-camera observations, making visual communication a major bottleneck for real-time robotic control in bandwidth-constrained or distributed deployment settings. Existing image and video codecs, however, are designed to preserve generic visual fidelity rather than the control performance of downstream VLA policies. In this work, we introduce SPARC (SPatially Adaptive Rate Control), a learned image compression framework tailored for VLA-driven robots. Our key observation is that the importance of visual information varies substantially across both camera views and spatial regions within an image. Based on this observation, SPARC employs a lightweight temporal mask selector that adaptively allocates bitrate over latent representations according to task relevance while leveraging temporal context. We further introduce a tilted rate loss that stabilizes training by reducing the tendency of entropy-based objectives to over-suppress rare yet task-critical visual patterns. Experiments on diverse robotic benchmarks, including RoboCasa365, VLABench, and LIBERO, show that SPARC consistently achieves stronger control performance than conventional image/video codecs and recent learned compression methods under the same bitrate budget. We additionally demonstrate real-world deployment benefits in remote-control settings, where our method substantially improves the bitrate-success tradeoff.

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

FACTR 2: Learning External Force Sensing for Commodity Robot Arms Improves Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.12406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires force sensitivity, but many robot arms lack dedicated force sensors due to their high cost. We present Neural External Torque Estimation (NEXT), a data-driven method that estimates external joint torques without needing any dedicated force sensors. NEXT trains in 1 minute from only 10 minutes of free-motion data, yet achieves estimates comparable to dedicated joint-torque sensors. NEXT enables force-feedback teleoperation on low-cost arms and improves policy learning through Force-Informed Re-Sampling Training (FIRST), which up-samples pre-contact and contact segments during behavior cloning. Across five long-horizon tasks, FIRST outperforms prior force-aware policies by over 17% in task progress. Together, NEXT and FIRST bring force-aware teleoperation and policy learning to off-the-shelf robots without additional sensing hardware. Video results and code are available at https://jasonjzliu.com/factr2

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evidence of Layered Positional and Directional Constraints in the Voynich Manuscript: Implications for Cipher-Like Structure

The Voynich Manuscript (VMS) exhibits a script of uncertain origin whose grapheme sequences have resisted linguistic analysis. We present a systematic analysis of its grapheme sequences, revealing two complementary structural layers: a character-level right-to-left optimization in word-internal sequences and a left-to-right dependency at word boundaries, a directional dissociation not observed in any of our four comparison languages (English, French, Hebrew, Arabic). We further evaluate two classes of structured generator against a four-signature joint criterion: a parametric slot-based generator and a Cardan grille implementing Rugg's (2004) gibberish hypothesis. Across their full tested parameter spaces, neither class reproduces all four signatures simultaneously. While these results do not rule out generator classes we have not tested, they provide the first quantitative benchmarks against which any future generative or cryptanalytic model of the VMS can be evaluated, and they suggest that the VMS exhibits cipher-like structural constraints that are difficult to reproduce from simple positional or frequency-based mechanisms alone.

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

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

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

An interpretable unsupervised representation learning for high precision measurement in particle physics

arXiv:2511.22246v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised learning has been widely applied to various tasks in particle physics. However, existing models lack precise control over their learned representations, limiting physical interpretability and hindering their use for accurate measurements. We propose the Histogram AutoEncoder (HistoAE), an unsupervised representation learning network featuring a custom histogram-based loss that enforces a physically structured latent space. Applied to silicon microstrip detectors, HistoAE learns an interpretable two-dimensional latent space corresponding to the particle's charge and impact position. After simple post-processing, it achieves a charge resolution of $0.25\,e$ and a position resolution of $3\,\mu\mathrm{m}$ on beam-test data, comparable to the conventional approach. These results demonstrate that unsupervised deep learning models can enable physically meaningful and quantitatively precise measurements. Moreover, the generative capacity of HistoAE enables straightforward extensions to fast detector simulations.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Theory of Saddle Escape in Deep Nonlinear Networks

arXiv:2605.01288v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In deep networks with small initialization, training exhibits long plateaus separated by sharp feature-acquisition transitions. Whereas shallow nonlinear networks and deep linear networks are well studied, extending these analyses to deep nonlinear networks remains challenging. We derive an exact identity for the imbalance of Frobenius norms of layer weight matrices that holds for any smooth activation and any differentiable loss and use this to classify activation functions into four universality classes. On the permutation-symmetric submanifold, the identity combines with an approximate balance law to reduce the full matrix flow to a scalar ODE, giving a critical-depth escape time law $\tau_\star = \Theta(\varepsilon^{-(r-2)})$ governed by the number $r$ of layers at the bottleneck scale rather than the total depth $L$. We find that this same $r-2$ exponent is recovered under He-normal initialization with $r$ bottleneck layers rescaled by $\varepsilon$, where the symmetry manifold is preserved by the flow but not attracting. We find close agreement between our theory and numerical simulations.