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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Note on the local calculation of decoherence of quantum superposition in the static black holes

Authors:
Ran Li↗Zhong-Xiao Man↗Jin Wang↗

arXiv:2606.14178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the decoherence of a quantum spatial superposition of a static particle in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes. By treating the particle as a localized classical source coupled to a quantum scalar field, we reformulate the decoherence process in the Danielson-Satishchandran-Wald (DSW) gedankenexperiment through coherent state generation and derive the local expression for the decoherence functional in terms of the Wightman function. In the long-time limit, the decoherence rate is shown to be characterized by the low-frequency behavior of the Wightman function. We then employ the asymptotic matching method to calculate the analytical expressions of the Wightman functions in the Boulware, Unruh, and Hartle-Hawking vacua. We show that the decoherence behavior depends on the quantum state of the environmental field. While the Boulware vacuum gives vanishing decoherence for a static superposition, the thermal effects associated with Hawking radiation in the Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacua can induce nonvanishing decoherence.

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

Trustworthy Self-Composable Big-Data-as-a-Service: An LLM-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Data Engineering, AutoML, MLOps Deployment, and Drift-Aware Lifecycle Optimization

Authors:
Aueaphum Aueawatthanaphisut↗Badri Raj Lamichhane↗

arXiv:2606.17915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) platforms require re liable automation across data ingestion, cleaning, feature engi neering, model development, deployment, and post-deployment monitoring. However, existing LLM-based data science agents and AutoML systems mainly focus on isolated workflow stages, leaving limited support for lifecycle-level orchestration, artifact governance, human oversight, and drift-aware adaptation. This paper proposes a trustworthy self-composable BDaaS frame work based on LLM-orchestrated multi-agent collaboration. The proposed architecture decomposes the BDaaS lifecycle into specialized agents for data ingestion, data cleaning, feature engineering, AutoML training, model evaluation, MLOps de ployment, monitoring, and drift detection. A central LLM or chestration layer coordinates agent execution, validates interme diate outputs, manages workflow context, and enables dynamic workflow composition. The framework also incorporates shared artifact governance, reproducibility support, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and drift-aware feedback loops. A prototype-based evaluation is conducted using controlled tabular benchmark datasets with missing values, categorical variables, outliers, class imbalance, and simulated covariate drift. Compared with manual ML, AutoML-only, and single-agent LLM baselines, the pro posed multi-agent BDaaS pipeline achieves competitive predictive performance while improving lifecycle-level reliability, including workflow completion, artifact traceability, deployment readiness, reproducibility, and drift recovery. The results suggest that LLM-orchestrated multi-agent systems can extend conventional AutoML toward trustworthy, adaptive, and production-oriented BDaaS lifecycle automation.

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

From Awareness to Action: Understanding and Overcoming the Research-Practice Gap in Algorithmic Fairness for Public Health

Authors:
Sara Altamirano↗Tijs Portegies↗Sennay Ghebreab↗

arXiv:2606.11214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Algorithmic fairness is essential for responsible ML-driven public health research, yet its practical implementation remains limited. To investigate this awareness-action gap, we conducted a sequential mixed-methods study comprising expert interviews, an online survey, and systematic mapping. The expert interviews informed the design of the survey, which in turn revealed fragmented definitions of fairness, limited training and guidance, reliance on external sources, and rare use of formal assessment, mitigation, or monitoring. These findings were subsequently mapped onto three established research-practice gap lenses: the Knowledge-Practice Gap, the Knowledge-to-Action Cycle, and the Knowing-Doing Gap, each offering complementary perspectives. Building on this synthesis, we introduce the Fairness-to-Action framework, which integrates methodological, organizational, and systemic dimensions to identify where translation of algorithmic fairness knowledge stalls. Our analysis shows that fairness remains weakly institutionalized, translation mechanisms are externally driven, and system-level priorities continue to emphasize accuracy over fairness. These insights suggest critical leverage points for advancing safe, fair, and ethical ML-driven public health research practice.

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

How Controlling the Variance can Improve Training Stability of Sparsely Activated DNNs and CNNs

Authors:
Emily Dent↗Jared Tanner↗

arXiv:2602.05779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge-of-Chaos (EoC) theory developed for the random initialization of deep networks allows more efficient training by both preserving information in the initial outputs of the network and minimising exploding or vanishing gradients through characterisation of the intermediate layers as Gaussian processes. This EoC theory provides formulae for the choice of the initialisation distribution variances of the weights and biases. For activations which are approximately linear around the origin, the EoC theory typically encourages the Gaussian process variance to converge towards zero with increasing depth. Here we consider the less studied setting of highly sparsity inducing activations where a large region of values near the origin are set to zero. In this setting we prove a new phenomenon whereby initialisations leading to larger fixed Gaussian processes are beneficial to training stability. This theory informs a new, yet simple, initialisation strategy that allows training DNNs and CNNs with as large as 90\% sparsity in the hidden layers.

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06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

Authors:
Frederik vom Ende↗

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Agentic Electronic Design Automation: A Handoff Perspective

Authors:
Jiawei Liu↗Peiyi Han↗Yuntao Lu↗Su Zheng↗Fengyu Yan↗Bei Yu↗

arXiv:2606.19795v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electronic design automation (EDA) is inherently multi-stage and handoff-heavy. Design artifacts, flow scripts, and engineering decisions cross tool, session, and organizational boundaries before final implementation, signoff, or release. Each transfer carries explicit and implicit requirements that may not be fully captured by stage-local checks. LLM-based agents now invoke EDA tools directly, embed retrieved knowledge in executable scripts, and hand off state across sessions and stages. Once their outputs condition downstream engineering decisions, the transferred object must satisfy a handoff contract and meet the assumptions of its next consumer. This survey introduces handoff validity as its organizing principle. A handoff is valid when the transferred object satisfies the consumer's acceptance conditions and carries sufficient context, evidence, and provenance for downstream use. We review 82 systems and classify them into three boundary classes. Stage-Bound systems establish validity within a single EDA stage or bounded verification task. Flow-Bound systems preserve coherent workflow state across tools, invocations, and sessions. Organization-Bound systems maintain source grounding, provenance, scope, and admissibility across knowledge and authority boundaries. For each class, we analyze handoff contracts, handoff objects, coordination mechanisms, and open questions. These analyses motivate a five-layer EDA agent communication protocol (EACP), covering the agent discovery, agent message, tool invocation, workflow orchestration, and security and IP protocols. We aim to provide a common vocabulary and research agenda for trustworthy agentic EDA.

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

Q-Learning with Fine-Grained Gap-Dependent Regret

Authors:
Haochen Zhang↗Zhong Zheng↗Lingzhou Xue↗

arXiv:2510.06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain coarse and fail to fully capture the structure of suboptimality gaps. We address this limitation by establishing fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for both UCB-based and non-UCB-based algorithms. In the UCB-based setting, we develop a novel analytical framework that explicitly separates the analysis of optimal and suboptimal state-action pairs, yielding the first fine-grained regret upper bound for UCB-Hoeffding (Jin et al., 2018). To highlight the generality of this framework, we introduce ULCB-Hoeffding, a new UCB-based algorithm inspired by AMB (Xu et al.,2021) but with a simplified structure, which enjoys fine-grained regret guarantees and empirically outperforms AMB. In the non-UCB-based setting, we revisit the only known algorithm AMB, and identify two key issues in its algorithm design and analysis: improper truncation in the $Q$-updates and violation of the martingale difference condition in its concentration argument. We propose a refined version of AMB that addresses these issues, establishing the first rigorous fine-grained gap-dependent regret for a non-UCB-based method, with experiments demonstrating improved performance over AMB.

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

Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee

Authors:
Zihan Zhu↗Shayan Kiyani↗George Pappas↗Hamed Hassani↗

arXiv:2606.05551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies – yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Adversarial Concept Search: Predicting Compositional Errors From Feature Geometry

Authors:
Jennifer Meng Lu↗Ruochen Zhang↗Isabelle Lee↗David Alvarez-Melis↗Ellie Pavlick↗Naomi Saphra↗

arXiv:2606.13934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans cannot always intuit what scenarios are most challenging to LLMs. Hoping to capture challenging edge cases, developers either design problems to be difficult for humans or curate extensive benchmarks. What if we could instead anticipate which scenarios a model will fail on? In this paper, we use an LLM's representational geometry to predict which concept combinations it will fail on. We attribute this compositional failure to interference between salient features. In tasks that require systematic composition - toy programmatic settings, multihop reasoning, multilingual factual recall - we find that when a pair of concepts is encoded near-orthogonally, the model reliably composes them. When their linear encodings are close, producing interference, the model fails to compose them. Our method reliably anticipates failure modes across different compositional tasks, without evaluating specific inputs. These results lay the groundwork to use representational geometry to identify high-risk examples, construct targeted stress tests, and provide a scalable foundation for active learning in real-world deployment.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Authors:
Ngo↗T. P↗Dunham↗A. E↗Santos↗G.-M↗

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [≥]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Reward Was in Your Data All Along: Correcting Flow Matching with Discriminator-Guided RL

Authors:
Nicolas Beltran-Velez↗Felix Friedrich↗Zhang Xiaofeng↗Reyhane Askari-Hemmat↗Xiaochuang Han↗Adriana Romero-Soriano↗Michal Drozdzal↗

Score- and flow-matching models often rely on preference-based reinforcement learning for two purposes: aligning with subjective preferences and, surprisingly, recovering properties such as visual realism and coherent object structure that matching-based training is intended to learn from the data itself. We argue that this reflects a structural mismatch. Matching losses measure $\ell_2$ regression error on the velocity or score field under training-time marginals, a proxy poorly aligned with the visual and semantic properties that determine sample quality at inference. Given a reward aligned with these properties, RL sidesteps the mismatch by evaluating the model on its own samples and following the reward landscape directly. The challenge is to obtain such a reward without relying on human preferences, which are expensive and conflate data realism with annotator inclinations. We propose Discriminator-Guided RL (DRL). DRL trains a discriminator to separate data from base-model samples in a pretrained representation space and uses its logit as the reward in KL-regularized RL. The pretrained space restricts the discriminator to perceptually meaningful directions, and the logit estimates the log-likelihood ratio between data and model, which is the optimal reward for targeting the data distribution. Across SiT, JiT, REPA, and RAE, DRL reduces guidance-free FID (e.g., $9.38 \to 2.62$ on SiT) and semantic-space FD (e.g., $88.2 \to 19.3$ on DINOv3 for SiT), with consistent gains across all backbones, and improves human-preference rewards without training on them. It also yields a better Pareto frontier between preference reward and image fidelity under subsequent preference-based post-training, increasing alignment while reducing low-level artifacts such as oversaturation and excessive brightness.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Beyond Reward Engineering: A Data Recipe for Long-Context Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Xiaoyue Xu↗Sikui Zhang↗Xiaorong Wang↗Xu Han↗Chaojun Xiao↗

Long-context reasoning is an essential capability for large language models, particularly when they are deployed as autonomous agents that must reason over lengthy trajectories. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a dominant paradigm for improving this ability, yet existing work largely focuses on reward engineering while diverse training data remains scarce. We revisit this problem from a data-centric perspective and show that a simple yet effective data recipe alone, paired with a minimal outcome-based GRPO setup, suffices to substantially improve long-context reasoning. Our recipe targets three complementary task families – retrieval, multi-evidence synthesis, and reasoning – for which we construct and curate eight datasets totaling ~14K examples. Experiments on three models (Qwen3-4B/8B/30B-A3B) yield average gains of +7.2/+3.2/+6.4 points across seven long-context benchmarks, surpassing prior RL training sets. We further demonstrate that these gains transfer to agentic tasks, where continuing RL training on an agent-tuned model with our data recipe improves GAIA by +4.8 and BrowseComp by +7.0 points. We will release our datasets to facilitate future research.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Blind Recovery of Latent Domains via Unsupervised Symmetry Discovery

Authors:
Onur Efe↗Arkadas Ozakin↗

arXiv:2606.17782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Primary motivation in blind inverse problems is to recover signals of interest from corrupted observations without knowing the obfuscating mechanism. Blind deconvolution is a prominent approach when the corruption is convolutional, but it is not applicable when general linear transformations obfuscate the domain structure. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework for recovering latent domains and signals by discovering symmetries of the data distribution. Our framework models observations as linear measurements of signals sampled from a latent random field, and optimizes a shallow group-convolutional network by imposing stationarity and locality regularization at the model output. The model learns a latent symmetry action and an appropriate filter, thereby mapping unstructured observations to a symmetry-based representation that reveals latent signals. Experiments on stochastic processes, Ising models, shuffled and bit-scrambled images, and neural recordings show that the method recovers latent domains and signals from unstructured observations, suggesting symmetry discovery as a new direction for unsupervised structure learning and blind inverse problems.

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

HeRo-Q: A General Framework for Stable Low Bit Quantization via Hessian Conditioning

Authors:
Jinhao Zhang↗Yunquan Zhang↗Zicheng yan↗Boyang Zhang↗Jun Sun↗Daning Cheng↗

arXiv:2601.21626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post Training Quantization (PTQ), a mainstream model compression technique, often leads to the paradoxical 'low error, high loss' phenomenon because it focuses solely on minimizing quantization error. The root cause lies in the Hessian matrix of the LLM loss landscape: a few high curvature directions are extremely sensitive to perturbations. To address this, we propose the Hessian Robust Quantization (HeRo Q) algorithm, which applies a lightweight, learnable rotation-compression matrix to the weight space prior to quantization. This joint framework reshapes the loss landscape by reducing the largest Hessian eigenvalue and reducing its max eigenvalue, thereby significantly enhancing robustness to quantization noise. HeRo-Q requires no architectural modifications, incurs negligible computational overhead, and integrates seamlessly into existing PTQ pipelines. Experiments on Llama and Qwen models show that HeRo Q consistently outperforms state of the art methods including GPTQ, AWQ, and SpinQuant not only achieving superior performance under standard W4A8 settings, but also excelling in the highly challenging W3A16 ultra low bit regime, where it boosts GSM8K accuracy on Llama3 8B to 70.15\% and effectively avoids the logical collapse commonly seen in aggressive quantization.

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

Density estimation for Hellinger via minimum-distance estimators: mixtures of Gaussians, log-concave, and more

Authors:
Spencer Compton↗Jerry Li↗

arXiv:2606.11469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the task of density estimation, where we hope to accurately estimate a probability density from $n$ samples. A textbook method for density estimation in total variation distance is the minimum-distance estimator approach, where we conclude both the algorithm and the analysis merely from bounding the VC dimension of a particular concept class (the so-called Yatracos class). While this technique has originally yielded sharp guarantees primarily for total variation distance, in this work we extend the minimum-distance estimator approach for learning within Hellinger distance. Our main observation is that we may produce an analogous recipe for Hellinger (where we only require bounding the VC dimension of a related concept class) by drawing connections to recent results yielding reverse data processing inequalities. This recipe is flexible enough to accommodate fast algorithms originally designed for total variation distance; by modifying the approach of Acharya et al. (2017) we conclude the first near-linear time algorithm for learning classes including univariate mixtures of log-concave densities and mixtures of Gaussians (with arbitrary variances), with near-optimal sample complexity.

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

Rethinking Groups in Critic-Free RLVR

Authors:
Yihong Wu↗Liheng Ma↗Lingfeng Xiao↗Muzhi Li↗Xinyu Wang↗Yingxue Zhang↗Jian-Yun Nie↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models. Existing critic-free RL methods typically generate a group of rollouts for the same question to estimate value baselines for advantage computation. However, this design suffers from data inefficiency, group synchronization barriers, and inflexibility with structured rollouts. In this work, we revisit the role of the ``group'' and show that its underlying function is not merely to estimate baselines but to prevent false penalties on negative samples. Building on this insight, we propose negative token filtering, a simple and effective strategy that enables stable single-rollout training. We apply it to two batch-level advantage methods, achieving comparable performance on reasoning tasks and stronger performance on agentic tasks relative to group-based RL techniques.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Scaling-optimal purification of noisy qubit unitary channels

Authors:
Ryotaro Niwa↗Satoshi Yoshida↗Koki Ono↗Takeru Utsumi↗Zhaoyi Li↗Yuxiang Yang↗Ryuji Takagi↗Mio Murao↗

arXiv:2606.12394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of purifying noisy qubit unitary channels. Given the ability to apply an unknown qubit unitary channel followed by depolarizing noise, we aim to construct a superchannel that purifies the noisy unitary back to the original unknown unitary. We first provide numerical evidence that sequential strategies can strictly outperform parallel strategies when the number of channel uses is finite, highlighting the fundamental distinction from state purification. We then provide a concrete $\mathrm{U}(2)$-covariant parallel protocol based on a novel entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting code that suppresses the first-order noise strength as $O(1/n)$ with $n$ channel uses and show this scaling is asymptotically optimal in the low-noise regime, even when sequential strategies are allowed.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Decompose Sparsely Where You Should, Absorb Densely Where You Should No

Authors:
Ruixuan Deng↗Zehao Jin↗Zekun Wang↗Zihan Dong↗

arXiv:2606.14040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are typically trained to reconstruct the entire residual stream through a sparse dictionary, implicitly assuming that all activation content is amenable to sparse, monosemantic decomposition. We question this assumption and hypothesize that activations contain a low-rank, dense component that is computationally important to the model yet inherently unsuitable for sparse representation, which serves as a major source of the persistent dense latents widely observed in trained SAEs. To test this, we add a small rank-$r$ linear bottleneck in parallel with standard SAEs (BatchTopK and Matryoshka), allowing dense structure to be absorbed before sparse reconstruction. On Gemma-2-2B layer 12, a rank-24 bottleneck reduces dense latent count by up to 84\% while improving sparse probing and targeted probe perturbation on both architectures at matched sparsity. The absorbed component is (i) structurally identifiable as the top principal components and outlier dimensions; (ii) causally necessary, with removing it raising next-token cross-entropy by 7.5$\times$, far exceeding the 2.8$\times$ from removing the geometrically near-identical top-24 PCA directions; and (iii) redundantly encoded by sparse dictionaries, with ablating 787 maximally aligned sparse features raising cross-entropy by only 2.9$\times$ and ablating 2,048 topic-aligned features leaving MMLU topic classification virtually unchanged, whereas removing the scaffold drops it from 98.7\% to chance. Together, our findings identify a compact, semantically informative and causally important component of residual stream activations (which we term a computational scaffold) that standard sparse dictionaries represent inefficiently, suggesting that the scope of sparsity-based interpretability methods warrants careful re-examination.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Budget-Aware Adaptive Adversarial Patches for Black-Box Object Detection

Authors:
Pedram MohajerAnsari↗Amir Salarpour↗David Fernandez↗Mert D. Pes\'e↗

Adversarial patches pose a practical threat to modern object detectors. Prior work shows vulnerability, but three gaps limit actionable insight: (i) few score-based black-box attacks jointly optimize patch location, texture, and size under tight query budgets; (ii) success is rarely tied to the patch's visual footprint; and (iii) evaluations often conflate EOT robustness with plain-view suppression. We present \method{}, a query-efficient, budget-adaptive black-box attack that couples a lightweight Contextual Thompson-Sampling placer with NES-style pixel updates, growing the patch only when progress stalls. Reporting is anchored by a strict plain-image suppression test; EOT is audited but never used as a substitute for success, and optional appearance/printability weights expose strength–visibility trade-offs. Across YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, and YOLOS, \method{} achieves strong suppression on CNN-based detectors and substantial suppression on the transformer-based detector, using compact patches and exposing clear query–footprint trade-offs relative to fixed-size and heuristic baselines. A print–capture pilot further shows transfer across unseen physical objects and viewpoints.

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

Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

Authors:
Maheed H. Ahmed↗Mahsa Ghasemi↗

arXiv:2605.01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$\epsilon$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.

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23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A vast whale necropolis has been found

Authors:
Stephen J. Godfrey↗

In the Indian Ocean, a deep-sea area roughly 1,200 kilometres long and 7 kilometres deep was found to harbour an ecological landmark site of whale remains. In the Indian Ocean, a deep-sea area roughly 1,200 kilometres long and 7 kilometres deep was found to harbour an ecological landmark site of whale remains.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SoK: AI-Augmented Binary Reversing

Authors:
Yujeong Kwon↗Yiyue Zhang↗Shakhzod Yuldoshkhujaev↗Kexin Pei↗Dokyung Song↗Hyungjoon Koo↗

arXiv:2606.17398v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary reversing is fundamental to software understanding, vulnerability discovery, malware investigation, and firmware auditing. However, it remains inherently challenging due to the irreversible loss of semantic information during compilation. Recent advances in machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI systems have accelerated the adoption of AI-augmented binary reversing. Yet, the resulting body of work has become increasingly fragmented across reversing domains, artifact representations, learning approaches, and evaluation practices. This paper presents the first comprehensive systematization of knowledge on AI-augmented binary reversing. We analyze 144 research papers published since 2015, and organize them into 22 binary reversing domains according to the inference tasks. We further introduce a unified taxonomy spanning conventional and AI-augmented reversing pipelines. Our taxonomy connects traditional analysis techniques, binary-derived artifacts, representation strategies, learning paradigms, and downstream inference tasks, while clarifying the emerging roles of LLMs and agentic AI systems. By establishing a common vocabulary and structured framework, we provide a holistic view of the field's evolution over the past decade. Our study reveals common structures underlying seemingly disparate approaches, highlights persistent technical challenges and evaluation gaps, and identifies promising opportunities for future research. Collectively, these insights clarify the current state of the field and provide a foundation for the next generation of reliable and scalable AI-augmented binary reversing systems.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OmniOPD: Logit-Free On-Policy Distillation via Speculative Verification

Authors:
Yuhang Zhou↗Lizhu Zhang↗Yifan Wu↗Mingyi Wang↗Bo Peng↗Jiayi Liu↗Xiangjun Fan↗Zhuokai Zhao↗

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own generative trajectories under dense token-level feedback from a stronger teacher, mitigating both the off-policy distribution shift of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and the sparse credit assignment of Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, standard OPD faces two coupled limitations. First, it requires direct access to the teacher's token-level logits, excluding a broad class of capable proprietary models from serving as teachers. Second, the token-level logit signal itself is brittle, depending on a narrow overlap of plausible next tokens between teacher and student, and prone to amplifying degenerate patterns such as repetition loops. In this paper, we introduce OmniOPD, a novel framework that addresses both limitations through a logit-free, chunk-level supervision signal. OmniOPD replaces deterministic logit matching with Monte Carlo rollouts that approximate the teacher's local preferences through a continuous semantic similarity metric over multi-token chunks, and concentrates this supervision via a peak-entropy scheduler that audits the student only at its high-uncertainty reasoning forks. A Dirichlet-Multinomial Bayesian prior and a base-model KL anchor further bound the variance of discrete sampling and prevent policy collapse across unaudited tokens. Across competitive benchmarks, OmniOPD surpasses the standard OPD approach by up to +28.64% on math, confirming that chunk-level semantic verification extracts a more reliable learning signal than token-level logit matching, whose high information density is offset by significant noise and brittleness. Furthermore, when paired with stronger black-box teachers such as Claude-4.5-Haiku and Gemini-2.5-Flash, OmniOPD achieves an additional +9.54% relative on math over its open-weight teacher counterpart, advancing the student past the performance of self-exploratory RL.

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