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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SpecLoR: Spectral Lookahead Rectification for Motion-Coherent Text-to-Video Generation

Flow Matching has enabled robust text-to-video generation via latent ODE sampling. However, velocity approximation and numerical discretization errors inevitably accumulate, causing sampling trajectories to drift. Consequently, generated videos often suffer from severe spatiotemporal inconsistencies. Nevertheless, directly correcting these drifted, noisy latents is challenging: (i) timestep-dependent noise obscures reliable structural cues; (ii) spatial interventions risk disrupting intricate local geometry while incurring heavy computational costs. To address this, we propose Spectral Lookahead Rectification (SpecLoR), a plug-and-play inference method that bypasses noise via lookahead prediction, and circumvents spatiotemporal entanglement by shifting corrections to the frequency domain, where universal statistical priors of natural videos are readily available. First, during early sampling stages, SpecLoR looks ahead to estimate the clean latent $z_{t,0}$ and computes its 3D spatiotemporal spectrum. Next, SpecLoR rectifies the amplitude spectrum to match the prior, leaving the phase intact. Finally, the corrected state is re-noised to resume ODE integration. Experiments on Wan2.2 demonstrate that SpecLoR significantly reduces physical artifacts and enhances motion coherence across multiple benchmarks with minimal computational overhead (4 additional NFEs).

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Continuous stochastic flows driven by white noise and their duals

作者:

arXiv:2606.12143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a class of continuous stochastic flows driven by a space-time white noise and characterize their dual flows by explicit stochastic differential equations. A key ingredient of the proof is the convergence of solutions under coefficient approximations. As an application, we derive the dual flows in two illustrative examples, the squared Bessel flow and the Jacobi flow. We also introduce a new model of polynomially self-repelling (PSR) flow and show that it enjoys a self-duality property.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On Local Population-Risk Certificates

作者:

arXiv:2606.19147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops local certificates for population-risk increments around a current model. For a local candidate set \(\mathcal D\), the certificate is a two-sided confidence band for \(P({\ell_{\theta+v}-\ell_\theta})\) over \(v\in\mathcal D\). As an application, the upper endpoint of this band yields a risk-controlled update rule: an update is accepted only when its certified upper endpoint is nonpositive; otherwise the current model is retained.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SA-VIS: Sparse frame Annotations for training Video Instance Segmentation

Recent online video instance segmentation (VIS) methods have achieved impressive results, thus becoming the preferred approach to segment instances in videos. Despite the resurgence of impressive single image models, the online (or semi-online) VIS approaches outperform single-image models (e.g., based on SAM) by using long sequences of densely annotated frames during training. However,such a training setup of VIS is expensive in the sense of compute as well as dense annotations required. In order to solve these major flaws, we argue that the effective modeling of the instances and their evolution in videos do not require densely annotated frames. To that end, we propose a simple and effective module, called Past-frames Feature Propagation (PFP) which aggregates low-dimensional features from the image encoder of multiple frames. This simple low-compute module provides tremendous learning capability in using sparse video frame labels for end-to-end training. Combined with a light-weight frame-specific Instance Queries, our Sparse frame Annotation VIS (SA-VIS) significantly improves performance over its baseline. Most interestingly, our simple design that avoids complexities effectively bridges the gap in accuracy between training on sparsely and densely annotated video sequences. This translates to a mere 0.4% drop in performance of SA-VIS when using annotations for only 1/5 of the images in the dataset. Empirically, SA-VIS shows strong improvements over the baseline on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS) and an over 1% improvement in AP on the state-of-the-art in a limited annotations scenario.

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

Knowing When to Quit: A Principled Framework for Dynamic Abstention in LLM Reasoning

LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold outputs before or after generation, dynamic mid-generation abstention considers early termination of unpromising reasoning traces at each token position. Prior work has explored empirical variants of this idea, but principled guidance for the abstention rule remains lacking. We present a formal analysis of dynamic abstention for LLMs, modeling abstention as an explicit action within a regularized reinforcement learning framework. An abstention reward parameter controls the trade-off between compute and information. We show that abstaining when the value function falls below this reward strictly outperforms natural baselines under general conditions. We further derive a principled and efficient method to approximate the value function. Empirical results on mathematical reasoning and toxicity avoidance tasks support our theory and demonstrate improved selective accuracy over existing methods.

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

Let Them Steal: Trapping Large Language Model Extraction Attacks with Knowledge Honeypot

arXiv:2606.15810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models deployed as commercial APIs are vulnerable to model extraction attacks, while existing defenses either act too late or degrade utility for legitimate users. We propose Knowledge Trap, a defense that redirects extraction attacks toward low-transferability knowledge through a Honeypot Knowledge Graph (HKG) and breadcrumb-guided exploration. Instead of blocking queries or perturbing outputs, Knowledge Trap consumes the attacker's limited query budget on knowledge with negligible downstream utility while preserving benign-user performance. Experiments in medical and financial domains show that Knowledge Trap reduces surrogate Agreement by 6.2\% on average without degrading legitimate-user accuracy, outperforming existing defenses that impose measurable user impact. These results suggest that defending knowledge-space traversal is a practical direction for mitigating LLM extraction attacks.

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

Cascaded Sparse Autoencoders Learn Multi-Level Visual Concepts in Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on vision-language tasks, yet their internal visual representations remain difficult to interpret. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide a scalable way to decompose dense model activations into sparse, interpretable features. However, existing SAE architectures primarily recover flat feature dictionaries and are less suited for explicit multi-level concept organization. In this paper, we introduce cascaded sparse autoencoders (CSAEs) for learning hierarchical visual concepts in MLLMs. Rather than nesting or stacking SAE sparse activation codes, CSAEs train a second-level SAE directly on the decoder weights of the first-level SAE, treating learned low-level feature directions as inputs for higher-level abstraction. This design enables CSAEs to learn "concepts of concepts" while avoiding drawbacks from the shared-prefix coupling of nesting, Matryoshka-style hierarchies and the bottlenecks of naively stacked SAEs. Experiments across Qwen3-VL, Gemma-3, and LLaVA on multiple visual datasets show that CSAEs improve interpretability in terms of hierarchical concept coherence over state-of-the-art SAE baselines. Results on concept steering further demonstrate that the learned concept groups support effective group-level interventions in MLLM outputs.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Cross-modal Identity Mapping: Minimizing Information Loss in Modality Conversion via Reinforcement Learning

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often omit or misrepresent critical visual content in generated image captions. Minimizing such information loss will force LVLMs to focus on image details to generate precise descriptions. However, measuring information loss during modality conversion is inherently challenging due to the modal gap between visual content and text output. In this paper, we argue that the quality of an image caption is positively correlated with the similarity between images retrieved via text search using that caption. Based on this insight, we further propose Cross-modal Identity Mapping (CIM), a reinforcement learning framework that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Specifically, the method quantitatively evaluates the information loss from two perspectives: Gallery Representation Consistency and Query-gallery Image Relevance. Supervised under these metrics, LVLM minimizes information loss and aims to achieve identity mapping from images to captions. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method in image captioning, even when compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Particularly, on the COCO-LN500 benchmark, CIM achieves a 20% improvement in relation reasoning on Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Digital programming of spin correlations in a fermionic lattice quantum simulator

arXiv:2606.13772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analog quantum simulation provides a highly controlled platform to study diverse quantum many-body phenomena. However, current methods for state initialisation are limited to thermal ensembles or uncorrelated product states. Here we present a hybrid approach that complements analog preparation with a digital quantum-gate protocol. This approach enables the engineering of target states with specific, long-range spin-correlations from the same initial resource state. By applying collisional gates to adiabatically prepared and filtered four-fermion singlet chains, we program diverse spin-correlation patterns, including that of a Heisenberg chain. We measure the spin correlations using a sequence of quantum gates followed by singlet-pair measurements. Our method paves the way to the targeted preparation of strongly correlated states of matter.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Towards the implementation of a quantum classifier

arXiv:2606.10150v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the use of a quantum circuit as a binary classification model in the context of quantum machine learning. We call this model, binary quantum classifier. First, we describe fundamental concepts of quantum computing and introduce the computational tool used: Qibo, an open-source framework for efficient quantum simulations and quantum hardware control. Then, we describe how to design a binary quantum classifier for the classification of images and small arrays of variables by showing how to input data in the circuit, defining a quantum circuit model Ansatz with trainable parameters and a loss function, and implementing multiple minimizers. We test our quantum classifier with two data sets. The first one is the MNIST data set which is composed of handwritten digits (reduced to only handwritten zeros and handwritten ones for binary classification). We study the behavior of different minimizers by increasing the number of layers of the Ansatz. The second data set represents two different high energy collisions that can occur at colliders such as LHC (CERN). Due to in-time proton-proton interactions known as pile-up, we distinguish two different data sets: "without pile-up" and "with pile-up". These collisions can be represented by images of size 32x32 or by six high-level variables that we call features. By increasing the size of the training data set and the number of layers of the Ansatz, we search for the best minimizer. Splitting the data set in training set and test set, we compute: ROC curve, AUC score, confusion matrices and test set accuracy. For "with pile-up" images, we compare the results obtained with the quantum classifier with a small convolutional neural network. We conclude that is possible to build a binary quantum classifier with a quantum circuit and we highlight its performances and limitations in comparison with classical technologies.

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

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

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

Scalable Circuit Learning for Interpreting Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.16939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensionality makes existing intervention-based circuit learning methods computationally prohibitive. We propose CircuitLasso, a scalable circuit-learning approach based on sparse linear regression. CircuitLasso recovers circuits whose structural accuracy matches that of state-of-the-art intervention-based methods on the benchmark data, at a fraction of the computational cost. For interpretability, CircuitLasso efficiently uncovers relationships among SAE features, showing how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through the model and influence its predictions. Finally, we validate the utility of our learned circuits by leveraging their insights to achieve comparable performance at substantially lower cost on a domain-generalization task.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

AI Coding Agents Can Reproduce Social Science Findings

Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that AI coding agents can reproduce published findings when provided with original data and code; yet systematic evaluation across social sciences remains limited. Existing evaluation benchmarks are insufficient, either small or conflate agent performance with problems in the reproduction materials themselves, such as code that fails to execute correctly. Here we introduce SocSci-Repro-Bench, a benchmark of 221 tasks spanning four disciplines and 13 substantive domains, constructed from studies whose results are either fully reproducible with available materials or demonstrably non-reproducible due to missing data, allowing us to isolate agents' reproduction capacity. Evaluating two frontier coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, we find that both can reproduce a large share of social science findings, with Claude Code substantially outperforming Codex. These reproduction rates considerably exceed those previously reported for general-purpose LLM-based agents on comparable reproducibility benchmarks. Both agents also perform strongly on a reasoning task requiring identification of underlying research questions, and additional analyses suggest that results are not primarily driven by memorization. Providing the original paper PDF alongside replication materials modestly improves performance but introduces bias on tasks where reproduction is impossible. We also show that agents can be nudged toward confirmatory specification search through subtle prompt framing. Together, these findings suggest that at least some frontier coding agents can serve as reliable executors of computational workflows while underscoring the need for careful benchmarking and prompt design as AI systems assume larger roles in scientific production.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Revealing Hidden Vulnerabilities in Autoencoders through Gradient Signal Restoration

Adversarial robustness of deep autoencoders (AEs) has received less attention than that of discriminative models, although their compressed latent representations induce ill-conditioned mappings that can amplify small input perturbations and destabilize reconstructions. Existing white-box attacks for AEs, which optimize norm-bounded adversarial perturbations to maximize reconstruction damage, often converge to suboptimal perturbations, thereby potentially overstating AE robustness. We show that this limitation is linked to vanishing adversarial loss gradients during backpropagation through ill-conditioned layers, associated with near-zero singular values in their intermediate weight matrices. To address this, we propose GRILL (Gradient Signal Restoration in Ill-Conditioned Layers), a framework designed to mitigate gradient degradation and improve the reliability of adversarial robustness evaluation in encoder-decoder architectures. GRILL is designed to mitigate adversarial gradient degradation during optimization, enabling attacks to better approximate high-distortion perturbations under fixed norm constraints. Through extensive experiments across multiple AE architectures, under both sample-specific and universal attacks, as well as standard and adaptive attack settings, we show that GRILL significantly increases attack effectiveness, thereby exposing vulnerabilities hidden by existing attack limitations. Beyond AEs, we provide preliminary evidence that modern multimodal encoder-decoder architectures exhibit similar vulnerabilities.

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

Federated continual learning: A comprehensive survey on lifelong and privacy-preserving learning over distributed and non-stationary data

arXiv:2606.11272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative and privacy-preserving model training across distributed clients, but most existing FL systems implicitly assume data stationarity. In real-world settings-such as healthcare, industrial IoT (IIOT), cybersecurity, and smart cities-data streams are inherently non-stationary, leading classical FL methods to suffer from performance degradation, instability, and catastrophic forgetting. Continual Learning (CL) addresses learning under evolving data distributions but has been largely studied in centralized settings, overlooking key constraints of federated systems, including privacy, limited communication, and client heterogeneity. Federated Continual Learning (FCL) emerges at the intersection of FL and CL, aiming to support lifelong, adaptive, and privacy-aware learning over distributed and non-stationary data. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of FCL. We first present a formal definition of the FCL problem and clarify its distinctive characteristics. We then analyze the limitations of classical FL under non-stationary conditions, highlighting how CL principles support long-term adaptation. To organize the rapidly growing literature, we propose a multi-dimensional taxonomy of FCL approaches. Furthermore, we review representative application domains and data modalities, summarize commonly used evaluation metrics, and discuss experimental perspectives for assessing long-term performance and forgetting. Finally, we highlight key open challenges, including handling extreme heterogeneity under temporal drift, designing scalable and privacy-preserving memory mechanisms, and establishing standardized benchmarks. This survey aims to serve as a reference and a roadmap for advancing FCL toward robust and deployable real-world systems.

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

Efficient Stochastic Optimisation via Sequential Monte Carlo

arXiv:2601.22003v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arises in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation methods for this class of problems typically require inner sampling loops to obtain (biased) stochastic gradient estimates, which rapidly becomes computationally expensive. In this work, we develop sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers for optimisation of functions with intractable gradients. Our approach replaces expensive inner sampling methods with efficient SMC approximations, which can result in significant computational gains. We establish convergence results for the basic recursions defined by our methodology which SMC samplers approximate. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the reward-tuning of energy-based models within various settings.

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

The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs

When an AI assistant remembers that Sarah is a single mother working two jobs, does it interpret her stress differently than if she were a wealthy executive? As personalized AI systems increasingly incorporate long-term user memory, understanding how this memory shapes emotional reasoning is critical. We investigate how user memory affects emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) by evaluating 15 models on human-validated emotional intelligence tests. We find that identical scenarios paired with different user profiles produce systematically divergent emotional interpretations. Across validated user-independent emotional scenarios and diverse user profiles, systematic biases emerged in several high-performing LLMs where advantaged profiles received more accurate emotional interpretations. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate significant disparities across demographic factors in emotion reasoning and supportive recommendations tasks, indicating that personalization mechanisms can embed social hierarchies into models' emotional reasoning. These results highlight a key challenge for memory-enhanced AI: systems designed for personalization may reinforce social inequalities. To mitigate these disparities, we curate a general-purpose preference dataset designed to reduce demographic profiles' influence on emotional understanding.

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

LLM-as-Code Agentic Programming for Agent Harness

arXiv:2606.15874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every major LLM agent framework gives the LLM the role of orchestrator; the model decides what to do next, when to call tools, and when to stop. We argue that token explosion, control-flow hallucination, and unreliable completion are not implementation bugs but architectural consequences of assigning the deterministic work of looping, branching, and sequencing to a probabilistic system. A better prompt or a stronger model cannot guarantee the reliability of the LLM agent. We therefore propose Agentic Programming, in which the program governs all control flow, and the LLM is itself part of it, an adaptive component we call LLM-as-Code and invoke only where a task calls for reasoning or generation. Within each call the model keeps full flexibility, but it cannot alter the program's execution path. With control in the program, the LLM's context is built from the execution history's call tree and forms a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Each call's context length is then determined by its call depth rather than by accumulation over steps. A case study of computer-use agents shows that the design is practical, not just a theoretical stance, substantially improving the stability of long visual operation sequences.

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

ARTEMIS: Agent-guided Reliability-aware Temporal Mask Evolution for Imperfectly Supervised Video Polyp Segmentation

Imperfectly supervised video polyp segmentation (VPS) aims to learn dense, temporally consistent masks from inexpensive supervision, including weak annotations (points, scribbles) and semi-supervision with few densely labeled frames. This setting is clinically valuable but challenging due to weak contrast, ambiguous boundaries, motion blur, and specular highlights, compounded by sparse pixel-level guidance. While SAM2 can generate dense masks from sparse inputs, direct pseudo-labeling often yields geometry-degraded masks with boundary leakage, underutilizes temporal consistency, and ignores reliability. To address these issues, we propose ARTEMIS, a unified framework for imperfectly supervised VPS driven by agent-guided reliability-aware temporal mask evolution. ARTEMIS initializes coarse masks from available supervision: SAM2 converts points/scribbles, while dense labels serve as reliable anchors. A debate-and-judge vision-language agent selects reliable temporal anchors under weak supervision, which are propagated bidirectionally with SAM2 to refine unreliable or unlabeled frames. Finally, ARTEMIS trains the segmenter using temporal reliability-aware robust learning, incorporating reliability-guided reference selection, a Reference Prototype Transport Module, and reliability-aware robust loss. These components assess mask reliability, evolve anchors over time, transport target identity across frames, and down-weight noisy supervision instead of discarding difficult samples. Experiments on SUN-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB-612 under scribble, point, and limited-label settings demonstrate that ARTEMIS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/wangtong627/ARTEMIS.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

AerialClaw: An Open-Source Framework for LLM-Driven Autonomous Aerial Agents

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in inspection, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. However, most UAV applications still rely on pre-defined command sequences or task-specific pipelines, where developers manually connect perception, planning, flight control, simulation, logging, and safety modules. This limits the flexibility, reproducibility, and extensibility of autonomous aerial systems. This paper presents AerialClaw, an open-source software framework that enables UAVs to operate as decision-making aerial agents rather than merely command-following platforms. Given a natural-language mission, AerialClaw allows an LLM-based agent to understand the task, maintain context, invoke executable aerial skills, observe perception and runtime feedback, and iteratively update its decisions in a closed loop. The framework adopts a modular brain-skill-runtime architecture, combining hard skills for atomic UAV operations, Markdown-based soft skills for reusable task strategies, document-driven agent state and capability boundaries, memory-driven reflection, safety-oriented runtime validation, and platform-agnostic execution adapters. AerialClaw supports lightweight mock execution, PX4 SITL with Gazebo, and AirSim-based simulation, together with a web console, pluggable model backends, example missions, simulation assets, and staged deployment scripts. By combining standardized aerial skills, document-driven agent state, memory, and closed-loop LLM decision-making, AerialClaw provides a reproducible and extensible open-source framework for building UAV systems that can interpret missions, make decisions, execute skills, and adapt their behavior from feedback.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VISTA: View-Consistent Self-Verified Training for GUI Grounding

arXiv:2606.14579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When applying Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for GUI Grounding, rollouts are sampled from a single screenshot view; groups often become either all failures on difficult instances or all successes on easy ones, yielding no useful relative advantage. We propose VISTA (View-Consistent Self-Verified Training), a GRPO-based training framework that constructs each comparison group from multiple target-preserving views of the same GUI instance.Each view is generated by a crop that keeps the target element visible and remaps its box exactly, so model rollouts are compared across semantically equivalent but geometrically different inputs. To stabilize short coordinate generation without turning reinforcement learning into unconditional imitation, VISTA further adds a self-verified cross-view anchor: an oracle answer optimized with an advantage-weighted loss, excluded from the group baseline and activated only when the model has produced a maximum-reward rollout. Across five GUI-grounding benchmarks and multiple Qwen backbones, VISTA consistently improves grounding accuracy.On ScreenSpot-Pro, it raises Qwen3-VL 4B/8B/30B-A3B from 55.5/52.7/53.7 to 63.4/65.8/67.0. Robustness analyses further show higher worst-view accuracy and lower prediction flip rates.

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

Factions Within, Uncertain Across: Within-Document Reader Sub-Groups in Social Highlighting

When many people highlight the same document, is the crowd a single consensus, or is it internally structured into reader sub-groups that mark different things – and is that structure a stable property of a reader or of the document? Building on prior work showing an individual's within-document highlighting signal is a whisper while individuality lives in selection, we ask the group-level question on a co-readership platform using a margin-preserving curveball null. Experiment 1: within a document, readers form strong sub-groups – pairs agree far beyond what shared salience, mark density, and sentence popularity predict (nearest-neighbour agreement z=+6.3, significant in 88% of documents). Under an eight-block region-preserving null, shared engagement with the same coarse regions of the document accounts for about 40% of this excess; the majority survives as finer reader-specific agreement (z=+3.6, 77% significant). So the within-document crowd is, in a descriptive sense, factional. Experiment 2: is that grouping a stable reader trait? Here we are honest about power. The cross-document split-half reproducibility of a pair's agreement is near zero pooled (+0.078 and 0.000 in two separately drawn samples), and a power calibration shows the test is informative only for pairs that co-read many documents. In the only informative high-overlap subset (k>=4), point estimates are positive but small-sample, imprecise across the separately drawn samples, never significant, and attenuate under the region-preserving null. We therefore leave cross-document stability unresolved: the data is consistent with anything from situational grouping to a weak-to-moderate stable reader trait. The crowd is factional within a document; whether its factions follow the reader across documents is, honestly, beyond our reach.

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

AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languages

Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP. We aim to bridge this gap by introducing AfriSUD, the first large-scale collection of syntactically annotated treebanks for nine diverse African languages spanning major language families and regions across Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies (SUD) framework, our community-led effort provides high-quality, native-speaker verified data that capture typological key features such as agglutination and tone. We evaluate a range of models on AfriSUD for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing including non-transformer baselines, multilingual pretrained encoders, and LLMs. Our results reveal a significant syntax gap, where models still show clear limitations across the nine languages, suggesting that existing architectures may not fully capture the structural diversity of African-language syntax.

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

Large Language Model Agents Are Not Always Faithful Self-Evolvers

Self-evolving large language model (LLM) agents continually improve by accumulating and reusing past experience, yet it remains unclear whether they faithfully rely on that experience to guide their behavior. We present the first systematic investigation of experience faithfulness, the causal dependence of an agent's decisions on the experience it is given, in self-evolving LLM agents. Using controlled causal interventions on both raw and condensed forms of experience, we comprehensively evaluate four representative frameworks across 13 LLM backbones and 9 environments. Our analysis uncovers a striking asymmetry: while agents consistently depend on raw experience, they often disregard or misinterpret condensed experience, even when it is the only experience provided. This gap persists across single- and multi-agent configurations and across backbone scales. We trace its underlying causes to three factors: the semantic limitations of condensed content, internal processing biases that suppress experience, and task regimes where pretrained priors already suffice. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about self-evolving methods and underscore the need for more faithful and reliable approaches to experience integration.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.