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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Plan, Don't Pose: Long Composite Motion Generation with Text-Aligned BFM

arXiv:2605.29906v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text-to-motion (T2M) generation has broad applications in character animation, virtual avatars, and human-robot interaction. Existing methods typically generate pose trajectories or motion tokens directly from language, forcing a single model to handle semantic interpretation, long-horizon structure, and low-level physical realization. This coupling makes them costly and often unreliable for long, compositional, or semantically dense prompts. We propose Text2BFM, the first framework that aligns natural language with pretrained Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) for T2M generation without relying on heavy end-to-end motion generators. Text2BFM operates in the latent policy space of a frozen BFM, using it as an executable motion prior. A text-aligned variational behavioral bottleneck compresses BFM policy-latent sequences into compact motion representations that are compatible with language and preserve long-horizon behavioral structure. Generation is performed in this compact behavioral manifold with a lightweight conditional generator, and the resulting latent encoded behaviors are decoded into policy latents that drive the pretrained frozen BFM. By decoupling semantic planning from motion execution, Text2BFM achieves efficient, robust T2M generation and strong performance on long, compositional textual descriptions.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Differential Privacy of Gaussian Process Posterior Sampling

arXiv:2606.17995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the privacy of releasing posterior sample paths from a Gaussian process (GP) when the entire training set including covariates and responses is private. Unlike standard differential-privacy (DP) mechanisms that add external noise, posterior sampling is random by construction. We show that this intrinsic randomness yields DP guarantees by deriving explicit Rényi-DP bounds for GP posterior sample-path release. The bounds separate posterior-mean leakage from data-dependent posterior-covariance leakage showing that meaningful privacy depends sharply on effective ridge regularisation. We apply membership-inference attacks to show that empirical leakage follows the predicted dependence on regularisation, posterior variance and the number of released posterior sample-paths. Utility experiments on downstream posterior-sampling tasks identify noisy-observation regimes where privacy-compatible regularisation preserves useful decisions with modest utility loss. When stronger privacy is needed, the intrinsic guarantee can be sharpened by adding calibrated GP noise, providing an explicit additional privacy knob.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Small LLMs: Pruning vs. Training from Scratch

Pruning promises a shortcut to strong small language models. In this work, we examine this promise by pruning Llama-3.1-8B at pruning ratios of 0.5–0.8 with six methods spanning depth, width, and sparse granularities, under two controlled token-matched settings. (1) With the same training token budget, pruned initialization consistently outperforms random initialization. This shows that the parent model provides a strong starting point, although the advantage narrows as the training token budget grows and as the pruning ratio rises, nearly vanishing at the highest pruning ratio we study. (2) When training from scratch is instead given the full token budget consumed by the whole pipeline, pruning at finer granularities still retains an advantage, while coarser structured pruning can be matched or surpassed. This suggests that the parent model transfers knowledge that additional training tokens alone cannot fully recover, but only at fine granularity. Taken together, our results yield a clear recommendation: with a large pretrained model in hand and a limited training token budget, pruning is better than training from scratch; when the training budget is not limited, training from scratch can be competitive for coarser pruning, so a large pretrained parent is not always necessary.

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

AfroScope: A Framework for Studying the Linguistic Landscape of Africa

Language Identification (LID), the task of determining the language of a given text, is a fundamental preprocessing step that shapes the reliability of downstream NLP applications. While recent work has expanded African LID, existing systems remain limited in both language coverage and fine-grained discrimination among closely related languages and varieties. We introduce AfroScope, a unified framework for African LID that includes AfroScope-Data, a dataset covering 640 languages, and AfroScope-Models, a suite of strong LID models with broad African language coverage. To address persistent confusions among closely related languages, we propose a hierarchical classification approach that leverages AfroScope-Mirror, a specialized embedding model for targeted disambiguation, improving macro-F1 by 1.57 points on the confusable subset compared to our best base model. We further analyze cross-lingual transfer and domain effects, showing how language-family structure, script compatibility, and domain coverage shape LID performance. We position African LID as an enabling technology for large-scale measurement of Africa's linguistic landscape in digital text, and release AfroScope-Data and AfroScope-Models online.

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

Resource-Aware LLM Reasoning for Mobile Edge General Intelligence

arXiv:2509.23248v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled an emergence of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) with powerful reasoning and autonomous decision-making capabilities. This integration with edge computing has led to the development of Mobile Edge General Intelligence (MEGI), which brings real-time, privacy-preserving reasoning to the network edge. However, deploying LLM-based agentic AI reasoning in MEGI environments poses significant challenges due to the high computational demands of reasoning and the limited resources of edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose a joint optimization framework for efficient LLM reasoning deployment in MEGI. First, we systematically review enhancement methods to identify mechanisms suitable for edge adaptation. Subsequently, we present a distributed framework that synergizes reasoning enhancement via adaptive CoT prompting with scalable deployment through a distributed MoE architecture. An important innovation of this approach involves modeling reasoning depth as a dynamic network resource variable, which is optimized jointly with expert activation and transmission power. This mechanism allows the system to dynamically regulate expert networks and reasoning complexity according to task requirements and device capabilities. Experimental evaluations in mobile edge environments demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively balances reasoning quality and resource efficiency. The results show that with less than one second of additional inference time, both accuracy and latency satisfaction rate can reach 90\%, validating the practical viability of deploying sophisticated LLM reasoning in resource-constrained MEGI systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.44% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.

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

TRACE: Learning to Compute on Circuit Graphs

arXiv:2509.21886v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning to compute, the ability to model the functional behavior of a circuit graph, is a fundamental challenge for graph representation learning. Yet, the dominant paradigm is architecturally mismatched for this task. This flawed assumption, central to mainstream message passing neural networks (MPNNs) and their conventional Transformer-based counterparts, prevents models from capturing the position-aware, hierarchical nature of computation. To resolve this, we introduce TRACE, a new paradigm built on an architecturally sound backbone and a principled learning objective. First, TRACE employs a Hierarchical Transformer that mirrors the step-by-step flow of computation, providing a faithful architectural backbone that replaces the flawed permutation-invariant aggregation. Second, we introduce function shift learning, a novel objective that decouples the learning problem. Instead of predicting the complex global function directly, our model is trained to predict only the function shift, the discrepancy between the true global function and a simple local approximation that assumes input independence. We validate this paradigm on various circuits modalities, including Register Transfer Level graphs, And-Inverter Graphs and post-mapping netlists. Across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, TRACE substantially outperforms all prior architectures. These results demonstrate that our architecturally-aligned backbone and decoupled learning objective form a more robust paradigm for the fundamental challenge of learning the functional behavior of a circuit graph.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SuperThoughts: Reasoning Tokens in Superposition

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves LLM problem-solving but is computationally expensive due to sequential token generation. While recent works explore reasoning in continuous latent spaces to bypass discrete token generation, they often struggle with training stability and fail to scale to complex, long-horizon tasks due to lack of supervision signal. We propose SuperThoughts, which compresses pairs of consecutive CoT tokens into single latent representations and decodes two tokens per step via a lightweight Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) module. This preserves discrete token supervision at training time while doubling throughput at inference time. We finetune Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-14B-Instruct, and evaluate on MATH500, AMC, OlympiadBench, and GPQA-Diamond. With a confidence-based adaptive mechanism that falls back to standard decoding when uncertain, SuperThoughts achieves $\sim$20–30\% CoT length reduction while maintaining accuracy with minimal degradation (1-2 points accuracy drop on most tasks).

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stochastic Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent

arXiv:2509.14969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter tuning. The method comes from a theoretically-grounded adaptation of the Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent method to the stochastic setting. We prove the convergence of stochastic gradient descent with our step-size under various assumptions, and we show that it empirically competes against tuned baselines.

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

KANEL\'E: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Efficient LUT-based Evaluation

arXiv:2512.12850v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Low-latency, resource-efficient neural network inference on FPGAs is essential for applications demanding real-time capability and low power. Lookup table (LUT)-based neural networks are a common solution, combining strong representational power with efficient FPGA implementation. In this work, we introduce KANEL\'E, a framework that exploits the unique properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for FPGA deployment. Unlike traditional multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), KANs employ learnable one-dimensional splines with fixed domains as edge activations, a structure naturally suited to discretization and efficient LUT mapping. We present the first systematic design flow for implementing KANs on FPGAs, co-optimizing training with quantization and pruning to enable compact, high-throughput, and low-latency KAN architectures. Our results demonstrate up to a 2700x speedup and orders of magnitude resource savings compared to prior KAN-on-FPGA approaches. Moreover, KANEL\'E matches or surpasses other LUT-based architectures on widely used benchmarks, particularly for tasks involving symbolic or physical formulas, while balancing resource usage across FPGA hardware. Finally, we showcase the versatility of the framework by extending it to real-time, power-efficient control systems.

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

Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Mean-Field Games with Average Reward

arXiv:2606.16759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study inverse reinforcement learning for discrete-time, infinite-horizon mean-field games (MFGs) under an average-reward criterion. Expert demonstrations are assumed to arise from a stationary mean-field equilibrium under an unknown reward, and the goal is to recover a policy explaining the observed behaviour via the maximum causal entropy principle. We formulate the inverse problem by enforcing consistency with the expert mean-field term and long-run feature expectations, treating two reward classes within a unified occupation-measure framework. For finite-dimensional linear rewards, we give a convex dual reformulation with an explicit log-partition objective, and prove smoothness and curvature properties justifying constant-step-size gradient descent. For infinite-dimensional RKHS rewards, we develop a Lagrangian relaxation whose inner-maximising policy is characterised by a soft Bellman equation. The main obstacle is the absence of a discount-factor contraction. We resolve this by introducing a minorisation-based sub-stochastic kernel that yields a strict contraction of the soft Bellman operator. We establish Fréchet differentiability and Lipschitz smoothness of the log-likelihood score, leading to a gradient ascent algorithm with convergence guarantees. Two numerical examples, a malware-spread MFG and an RKHS-based consumer-choice model, show that the recovered policies closely match expert behaviour.

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

Achieving double-logarithmic precision dependence in optimization-based quantum unstructured search

arXiv:2603.26039v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Grover's algorithm is a fundamental quantum algorithm that achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search problems of size $N$. Recent studies have reformulated this task as a maximization problem on the unitary manifold and solved it via linearly convergent Riemannian gradient ascent (RGA) methods, resulting in a complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}\log (1/\varepsilon))$, where $M$ denotes the number of target items and $\varepsilon$ denotes the success probability error. In this work, we adopt the Riemannian modified Newton (RMN) method to solve the quantum search problem, under the assumption that the ratio $ M/N$ is known. We show that, in this setting, the Riemannian Newton direction is collinear with the Riemannian gradient in the sense that the Riemannian gradient is always an eigenvector of the corresponding Riemannian Hessian. This structure removes the overhead of Hessian inversion and allows the proposed RMN method to retain the local quadratic convergence in terms of the error $\varepsilon$. More precisely, we rigorously prove an overall complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}+\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$. Furthermore, our approach remains Grover-compatible, namely, it relies exclusively on the standard Grover diffusion and oracle operators to ensure algorithmic implementability, and its parameter update process can be efficiently precomputed on classical computers.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Multi-entropy in random tensor networks

arXiv:2606.04470v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the evaluation of Rényi multi-entropies $S^{(q)}_n$ in Random Tensor Network (RTN) states in the large bond-dimension limit. For the case of Rényi index $n=2$ and arbitrary number of parties $q$, we prove that that multi-entropies are determined by minimal multiway cuts through the network. When the minimal multiway cut is degenerate, we characterize the full minimizer set via compatible families of minimal cuts and give a criterion for all minimizers to come from ordinary cut partitions. For $n=2$, this gives a natural generalization of the minimal cut description of bipartite entanglement to multipartite systems with arbitrarily many parties. For the case of integer $n>2$, we show that the minimal multiway cut conjecture is in general not true by providing explicit counter examples for both the single random tensor and for the network built from isometric tilings. We discuss the implication for our results on the multipartite entanglement structures in RTN and holography.

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

Evaluating Universal Machine Learning Force Fields Against Experimental Measurements

arXiv:2508.05762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Universal machine learning force fields (UMLFFs) promise to revolutionize materials science by enabling rapid atomistic simulations across the periodic table. However, their evaluation has been limited to computational benchmarks that may not reflect real-world performance. We introduce UniFFBench, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring the MinX dataset – a diverse collection of 1,500+ mineral systems spanning 85 elements, extreme thermodynamic conditions (0–5000 K, 0–1000 GPa), and structural complexity, including partial occupancy and disorder. This diversity, combined with experimental reference values for validation, enables assessment of UMLFF generalization across chemical space and conditions substantially beyond typical training scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art UMLFFs reveals a substantial ``reality gap'': models achieving impressive performance on computational benchmarks often fail when confronted with experimental complexity. Even the best-performing models exhibit higher density prediction error than the threshold required for practical applications. We observe disconnects between simulation stability and mechanical property accuracy, with prediction errors correlating with training data representation rather than the modeling method.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Regional Service-System Conditions Associated with Facility-Linked Home-Based Specialist Care in Japan: A Claims-Based Ecological Study of Home Dialysis

Background Complex chronic care is increasingly delivered in patients' homes while remaining linked to specialist facilities for training, monitoring, and backup care. Home dialysis provides a useful case because peritoneal dialysis (PD) and home hemodialysis (HHD) share a home-facility delivery structure but differ in technical and operational requirements. This study examined regional service-system conditions associated with the presence and scale of PD and HHD in Japan. Methods This ecological study used publicly available claims, administrative, census, and geospatial data harmonized to 334 Secondary Medical Areas. Regional indicators were organized into four domains: dialysis service delivery, implementation support for home-based care, hospital backup capacity, and living and sociodemographic context. Diffusion was examined using claims-based indicators of regional presence and post-presence scale, analyzed separately for PD and HHD with Firth penalized logistic regression and zero-truncated negative binomial regression, respectively. Results PD was observed in 271 regions and HHD in 109. Patterns of associated regional conditions differed by modality and stage. PD was associated mainly with existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was associated with broader regional supports, including home-care delivery, living infrastructure, transition support, and hospital-system indicators. Conditions associated with presence differed from those associated with scale. Cross-modality associations suggested that shared regional factors may shape the distribution of both modalities. Conclusions Regional conditions for home dialysis diffusion in Japan differed by modality and stage. PD was linked mainly to existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was linked to multi-domain regional support for technically demanding home treatment. Under standardized reimbursement, local service-system capacity may remain important for modality- and stage-specific diffusion of home dialysis.

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

MMRINet: Efficient Mamba-Based Segmentation with Dual-Path Refinement for Low-Resource MRI Analysis

Automated brain tumor segmentation in multi-parametric MRI remains a critical yet underserved challenge in resource-constrained clinical settings, where deep 3D networks requiring high-end GPUs are not viable. This is particularly acute across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where low-field scanners, heterogeneous patient demographics, and severe data scarcity compound the difficulty of applying standard deep learning pipelines. We present MMRINet, a lightweight segmentation architecture purpose-built for these constraints. At its core, MMRINet replaces quadratic-complexity self-attention with linear-complexity Mamba state-space models, enabling efficient long-range volumetric context modeling without the computational overhead of Transformer-based approaches. We combine two lightweight refinement components:Dual-Path Feature Refinement (DPFR), which extracts complementary detail and contextual representations to improve feature diversity under limited data, and Progressive Feature Aggregation (PFA), which hierarchically fuses multi-scale decoder outputs for sharper segmentation boundaries. Evaluated on the BraTS-Lighthouse SSA 2025 challenge dataset, comprising 3D MRI scans from Nigerian clinical sites, MMRINet achieves an average Dice score of 0.752 and an average HD95 of 12.23 mm with only ~2.5M parameters, outperforming all evaluated baselines, including UNETR, Swin-UNETR, SegMamba, and SegResNet3D. These results indicate that strong validation-set segmentation performance can be achieved with substantially reduced computation, offering a practical step toward AI-assisted neuro-oncology in low-resource clinical environments. Our GitHub repository can be accessed here: BioMedIA-MBZUAI/MMRINet.

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

Imbalanced Classification under Capacity Constraints

arXiv:2605.03289v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detecting observations from a minority class under severe class imbalance is a central challenge in applications such as fraud detection, medical screening, and industrial quality control. In these settings, each positive prediction triggers a costly follow-up action, an MRI scan, a transaction audit, whose execution is subject to real operational constraints. This paper proposes a formal classification framework under capacity constraints: given a user-defined bound limit $b$ on the proportion of observations that can be labeled as belonging to the minority class, the goal is to find the classifier that maximizes sensitivity on that class. We characterize the optimal classifier under this constraint and establish its equivalence with the classical Bayes classifier under a reweighting of the prior probabilities. We also introduce a capacity-adjusted performance metric $M$ that accounts for the effective detection rate when the capacity constraint is binding. The framework is implemented on top of standard learning methods, k-NN, SVM, random forests, and neural networks, and statistical consistency is established for each. We further show that these methods reduce to post-hoc thresholding when no hyperparameters are oriented toward the capacity-constrained objective, and introduce a capacity-aware support vector machine that exploits the constraint during training and achieves the strongest empirical performance. Experiments on the Taiwanese credit card default dataset confirm that capacity-constrained classifiers substantially outperform both classical approaches and SMOTE under high imbalance regimes. The framework extends naturally to multiclass settings and online environments.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics reveal nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response signatures in critical illness

Background: Plasma proteomics may identify host-response signatures in sepsis, but it is unclear whether extracellular vesicle (EV)-enriched plasma provides distinct or redundant information compared with plasma. We compared paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomes in critically ill patients with sepsis and critically ill non-sepsis controls (CINS). Methods: In this prospective observational study, paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma samples were analyzed from 56 critically ill adults, including 40 patients with sepsis and 16 CINS patients. Protein abundance was quantified using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Analyses compared proteomic depth, protein overlap, global concordance between compartments, and differential protein abundance between CINS and sepsis. Exploratory Gene Ontology enrichment was performed as a supplementary analysis. Results: EV-enriched plasma expanded proteomic detection, identifying 2,476 filtered proteins compared with 506 in plasma. Only 386 proteins were detected in both compartments, while 2,090 were unique to EV-enriched plasma and 120 were unique to plasma. Among shared proteins, plasma and EV-enriched plasma showed modest global concordance across critically ill patients (Spearman coeff = 0.322, p = 9.19 x 10^-11), with similar findings in sepsis alone. Differential abundance analysis identified 11 sepsis-associated proteins in plasma and 22 in EV-enriched plasma. Only SAA1, SAA2, and IGFBP6 were significant in both compartments. Exploratory pathway analysis supported acute-phase and inflammatory enrichment in plasma sepsis-associated proteins, while EV-enriched signals were directionally plausible but did not meet prespecified FDR thresholds. Conclusion: Plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics capture related but nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response information in critically ill patients.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of an automated, imaging-based preoperative screening model for early identification of malnutrition in an abdominal surgery cohort

Background: Clinical malnutrition affects one in five abdominal surgery patients and increases postoperative complications and mortality. Current screening occurs after admission, closing the window for preoperative nutritional intervention. No objective, scalable preoperative screening tool exists. Objective: To determine whether automated volumetric CT-based body composition analysis improves preoperative identification of surgical patients at risk for clinical malnutrition compared to clinical variables or single slice imaging alone. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of adults undergoing elective abdominal surgery at a quaternary academic medical center (2018 to 2021) with a preoperative CT scan within 90 days and complete nutrition assessment. Clinical malnutrition was diagnosed by a registered dietitian using ASPEN/AND criteria. Three sex stratified Elastic Net models were compared: (1) base clinical variables; (2) base plus L3 single slice skeletal muscle index and attenuation; and (3) base plus comprehensive 3D volumetric quantification of five muscle groups and two fat depots. Discrimination (AUROC), calibration (Brier score), and clinical utility (decision curve analysis) were assessed via 10-fold cross-validation. Results: Among 1,143 patients (52.4% female; mean age 60.5 years), 231 (20.2%) were diagnosed with malnutrition. Malnourished patients had significantly higher complication rates (36.4% vs. 15.4%, p

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

Learning to Inject: Automated Prompt Injection via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.05746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt injection is a critical vulnerability in LLM agents, yet the strongest methods still rely on human red-teamers and hand-crafted prompts. Adapting automated jailbreak optimizers does not close this gap: jailbreaks shape models toward generic compliance, while prompt injection requires emitting specific tool calls with correct parameters. The success signal is binary, and randomly sampled suffixes almost never trigger it, so standard optimizers have no gradient to follow. We present AutoInject, a black-box reinforcement learning (RL) framework that learns adversarial suffixes for prompt injection. A learned comparison-based reward scores each candidate against the best suffix seen so far, turning the binary signal into a dense reward suitable for RL optimization. The framework supports both online query-based attacks and offline-trained transferable suffixes that need no utility access at deployment, and incorporates a utility objective when task-completion feedback is available. On AgentDojo, AutoInject outperforms template attacks, GCG, TAP, and adaptive attack across production models, with statistically significant improvements under McNemar's test with p

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

LabVLA: Grounding Vision-Language-Action Models in Scientific Laboratories

Scientific laboratories increasingly rely on AI systems to reason about experiments, but the physical act of doing science remains largely outside their reach. AI can help read literature, generate hypotheses, and plan protocols, yet the execution of those protocols at the bench still requires a human operator. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide one possible interface between written protocols and robot execution, but existing policies are trained mostly on household and tabletop demonstrations and rarely encounter the instruments, transparent liquids, or fixed protocol workflows found in scientific laboratories. Closing this gap requires both laboratory-specific supervision and a unified learning framework that can accommodate the diverse robot embodiments used to execute experimental protocols. We therefore identify data and embodiment as central bottlenecks alongside model design. To address the data side, we build RoboGenesis, a simulation-based workflow and data engine that composes configured laboratory workflows from atomic skills, validates and filters rollouts, and exports structured demonstrations across supported robot profiles. On the policy side, we present LabVLA, trained with a two-stage recipe: FAST action token pretraining first makes the Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct backbone action aware before any continuous control is learned, and flow matching posttraining then attaches a DiT action expert under knowledge insulation. On the LabUtopia benchmark, LabVLA achieves the highest average success rate among all evaluated baselines under both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

arXiv:2602.16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full fine-tuning incurs substantial computational and storage overhead, while parameter-efficient methods, e.g., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trade efficiency for inconsistent safety gains and sensitivity to design choices. Safety intervention mechanisms reduce unsafe outputs without modifying model weights, but do not directly shape or preserve the internal representations that govern safety behavior. We present NeST, a Neuron-Selective Tuning framework for efficient post-hoc safety alignment. NeST identifies safety-relevant feed-forward neurons via activation probing on vanilla harmful and benign prompts, clusters neurons with similar activation profiles, and trains shared cluster-level updates while freezing the rest of the model. Importantly, NeST is trained only on vanilla malicious prompts, without using jailbreak-specific attack data, yet generalizes robustly to diverse jailbreaks. The learned updates are then folded into the original weights, incurring no inference-time overhead. Evaluated on 14 open-weight language and multimodal models, NeST outperforms lightweight baselines and approaches full fine-tuning robustness with significantly fewer trainable parameters. On text-only models, NeST reduces average jailbreak attack success rate from 44.5% to 1.1% while training only 0.4M parameters on average. Across multimodal settings, it reduces ASR from 55.3% to 1.1%, and for downstream fine-tuned variants, it restores safety by reducing ASR from 53.8% to 0.8%. These results show that robust, maintainable safety alignment can be achieved by concentrating adaptation on localized, functionally coherent safety structures.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Does the Question Really Matter? Training-Free Data Selection for Vision-Language SFT

arXiv:2603.09715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual instruction tuning is crucial for improving vision-language large models (VLLMs). However, many samples can be solved via linguistic patterns or common-sense shortcuts, without genuine cross-modal reasoning, limiting the effectiveness of multimodal learning. Prior data selection methods often rely on costly proxy model training and focus on difficulty or diversity, failing to capture a sample's true contribution to vision-language joint reasoning. In this paper, we propose CVS, a training-free data selection method based on the insight that, for high-quality multimodal samples, introducing the question should substantially alter the model's assessment of answer validity given an image. CVS leverages a frozen VLLM as an evaluator and measures the discrepancy in answer validity with and without conditioning on the question, enabling the identification of samples that require vision-language joint reasoning while filtering semantic-conflict noise. Experiments on Vision-Flan and The Cauldron show that CVS achieves solid performance across datasets. On Vision-Flan, CVS outperforms full-data training by 3.5% and 4.8% using only 10% and 15% of the data, respectively, and remains robust on the highly heterogeneous Cauldron dataset. Moreover, CVS reduces computational cost by 17.3% and 44.4% compared to COINCIDE and XMAS.

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

CacheMuon: Using Temporal Preconditioning To Approximate Polar Factor

arXiv:2606.16371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an optimizer that computes updates using the polar factor of the momentum matrix and has shown strong empirical performance across a range of training settings. A key component of Muon is the Newton-Schulz iteration used to compute this polar factor. Although this avoids the cost of an exact singular value decomposition, it remains expensive in practice because it is applied at every optimization step. At the same time, the momentum matrix changes smoothly over training, suggesting strong temporal correlation in the corresponding polar factors. In this paper, we exploit this structure and propose CacheMuon, a temporal preconditioning method that reuses information from previous optimization steps to approximate the polar factor at the current step. This reduces redundant orthogonalization computation across iterations. We analyze CacheMuon as an inexact Muon update, with error controlled by fresh-solver error and cache staleness. Empirically, CacheMuon provides a controllable quality-efficiency frontier: conservative thresholds closely match fresh Muon on language-model and vision training while reducing orthogonalization FLOPs, whereas more aggressive thresholds yield larger arithmetic savings at the cost of modest validation-quality degradation.