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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Accelerated Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency quantum memory via shortcuts to adiabaticity

arXiv:2603.18399v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) enables coherent light-matter storage, forming the basis of photonic quantum memories that are essential for scalable quantum networks and distributed quantum computing. However, accelerating the storage process violates the adiabatic condition, resulting in the excitation of the lossy intermediate state and a reduction in writing efficiency. We propose and numerically investigate a high-speed, high-fidelity quantum storage scheme by incorporating a shortcut-to-adiabaticity (STA) technique based on counter-diabatic (CD) driving. By introducing a precisely engineered auxiliary field into a conventional EIT system, our protocol significantly shortens the writing time beyond the conventional adiabatic limit while effectively suppressing the transient population of the lossy intermediate state. Furthermore, our scheme demonstrates strong flexibility in pulse design, remaining effective across different temporal profiles of both the control and signal fields. It also exhibits robustness against imperfections in the CD drive. Even with imperfect single-photon writing and non-ideal Rydberg blockade, the scheme retains clear advantages, maintaining high storage performance and overcoming the intrinsic speed-fidelity trade-off of traditional EIT protocols. These features pave the way for fast and robust quantum devices suitable for high-throughput quantum repeaters and advanced quantum information processing.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation

Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

LibriConvo: Simulating Conversations from Read Literature for ASR and Diarization

We introduce LibriConvo, a synthetic conversational speech corpus for speaker diarization and automatic speech recognition (ASR), built by instantiating the previously proposed Speaker-Aware Simulated Conversation (SASC) framework in a dataset and benchmarking setting. The main contribution of this paper is a corpus construction pipeline and benchmark derived from that framework. To make the data more suitable for downstream ASR and diarization, conversational timing statistics are estimated from English CallHome using external voice activity detection, long pauses are compressed, LibriTTS utterances are grouped by book to improve local semantic continuity, and room impulse responses are selected with a spatial-plausibility heuristic. The resulting corpus contains 240.1 hours of audio across 1,496 dialogues involving 830 speakers, partitioned into speaker-disjoint train, validation, and test splits. We report baseline results for both diarization and ASR. On the test split, Sortformer outperforms the pyannote pipeline in diarization (11.1\% vs.~24.4\% DER). For ASR, a Fast Conformer-CTC XLarge model fine-tuned with Serialized Output Training achieves 7.29\% WER and 6.97\% cpWER, outperforming zero-shot Whisper-large-v3. These results position LibriConvo as a practical benchmark for studying synthetic conversational speech and for evaluating multi-speaker speech processing systems.

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

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

arXiv:2603.10444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals. We identify a counterintuitive source of this failure: dominant activation outliers are not merely arbitrary sparse events, but are largely induced by a coherent rank-one mean bias, whose direction aligns with the leading anisotropic spectral component. This mean component strengthens during training, is amplified and reshaped by attention and FFN operators, and increasingly dominates top activation magnitudes. Crucially, this discovery reveals that a seemingly complex outlier-suppression problem admits a truly simple solution: isolate the coherent mean before quantization. We therefore propose Averis, a mean-residual splitting quantization method that separates the mean component using only reductions and elementwise subtractions before FP4 quantization. Across Qwen3 0.6B Dense trained on 100B tokens and Qwen3 7B A1.5B MoE trained on 50B tokens, Averis enables robust W4A4G4 FP4 training, reducing BF16 loss gaps to 1.19%/0.81% versus 2.05%/1.10% for NVIDIA's recently released Hadamard-based outlier-smoothing method, while limiting downstream gaps to 0.89/0.71 points. With only 2.20% end-to-end overhead over vanilla NVFP4, about 30% of NVIDIA's Hadamard-based design, Averis provides a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training. Complementary to Hadamard, Averis further reduces the Qwen3-0.6B loss and downstream gaps to 0.94% and 0.73 points when combined. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/averis-504D.

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

SymQNet: Amortized Acquisition for Low-Latency Adaptive Hamiltonian Learning

arXiv:2606.12808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive Hamiltonian learning is central to calibrating and characterizing quantum devices. In an adaptive controller, choosing the next experiment is itself a computation. Bayesian design rules are recomputed after every posterior update, and that step can take seconds. Across hundreds of shots, those seconds become a significant wall-clock cost for adaptivity. We introduce SymQNet, an amortized reinforcement-learning approach for low-latency adaptive Hamiltonian learning. SymQNet learns a posterior-conditioned acquisition policy offline, then uses a fast policy forward pass online while retaining Bayesian posterior feedback. On transverse-field Ising benchmarks, SymQNet substantially reduces acquisition latency relative to bounded Fisher-information search and bounded two-step Bayesian active learning by disagreement (BALD). At five qubits, it reduces acquisition-only decision latency by $47.1\times$ and $72.6\times$ relative to these online baselines; at twelve qubits, full simulated steps take $1.02$ s for SymQNet versus $13.27$ s for bounded two-step BALD. Overall, we show that learned acquisition can make adaptive Hamiltonian learning practical for repeated low-latency workloads.

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

Reasoning as Pattern Matching: Shared Mechanisms in Human and LLM Everyday Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When large language models (LLMs) fail to generalize or make haphazard errors in reasoning, it is often taken as evidence that LLMs are not truly reasoning, but rather performing a kind of pattern matching. The implication is that people's behavior does not exhibit the same types of failures because human reasoning uses principled and abstract world models. We evaluate human participants and 25 LLMs on their ability to engage in common-sense reasoning about a variety of everyday situations and observe similar patterns of errors in both people and models. We then identify the set of attention heads driving LLM responses and find that these heads implement a form of pattern-matching. These attention heads allow us to predict seemingly inexplicable reasoning errors in people caused by ostensibly irrelevant prompt details. Taken together, our results suggest that everyday causal reasoning in people and LLMs is more consistent with a form of pattern-matching than with abstract world models.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Multiple-time Quantum Imaginary Time Evolution

arXiv:2512.10875v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Imaginary-Time Evolution (QITE) is a powerful method for preparing ground states on quantum hardware. However, executing QITE has costly measurement budgets for general Hamiltonians. Both fidelity and computational cost are strongly dependent on the definition of suitable local domains and Hamiltonian partitions. In this work, we introduce the Multiple-Time QITE algorithm (MT-QITE). We show how using more than one imaginary time substantially improves the fidelity of the resulting ground state as well as the measurement overhead with respect to the previously published QITE algorithm, while preserving its deterministic character and its independence from ad hoc ansatze. Moreover, unlike QITE and other QITE-based algorithms, MT-QITE is parallelizable, and we show that even in Hamiltonians with non-local interactions, partitioning may entail a computational advantage.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

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

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.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum charge pumping in helical systems: A comparative study of short- and long-range hopping

arXiv:2606.12914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using the Keldysh non-equilibrium Green's function approach, we investigate charge pumping through a single-stranded helical structure described by a tight-binding model that includes either short-range hopping (SRH) or long-range hopping (LRH). While quantum pumping has been studied in various low-dimensional systems, the detailed behavior of the spectral current and the pumped dc current in helical geometries in the presence of higher-order electron hopping (beyond nearest neighbors) has not yet been systematically explored. Here, we focus on the interplay between helicity and extended hopping ranges, analyzing how they jointly control the energy-resolved and dc pumped currents under time-periodic end potentials. For LRH, the pumped dc current exhibits pronounced plateau-like regions as a function of chemical potential when energy levels are sparsely spaced – consistent with adiabatic transport – whereas SRH yields more parameter-sensitive currents without clear plateaus. The plateau stability is controlled by the drive frequency: at higher frequencies, Floquet side-band mixing destroys the plateaus, leading to oscillatory currents. The phase dependence remains nearly sinusoidal, and the current vanishes at zero phase lag, confirming the necessity of out-of-phase potentials. Crucially, in helical systems, the decay exponent $(\ell_c)$ acts as an effective structural parameter that can tune both the magnitude and sign of the pumped current, offering a geometric knob for controlling quantum pumping. Our findings not only fill a gap in the understanding of spectral and pumped currents in helical systems with extended hopping but also provide tools that can be applied to analyze similar phenomena in other chiral or quasi-one-dimensional systems.

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

SMT-AD: a scalable quantum-inspired anomaly detection approach

arXiv:2604.06265v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum-inspired tensor networks algorithms have shown to be effective and efficient models for machine learning tasks, including anomaly detection. Here, we propose a highly parallelizable quantum-inspired approach which we call SMT-AD from Superposition of Multiresolution Tensors for Anomaly Detection. It is based upon the superposition of bond-dimension-1 matrix product operators to transform the input data with Fourier-assisted feature embedding, where the number of learnable parameters grows linearly with feature size, embedding resolutions, and the number of additional components in the matrix product operators structure. We demonstrate successful anomaly detection when applied to standard datasets, including credit card transactions, and find that, even with minimal configurations, it achieves competitive performance against established anomaly detection baselines. Furthermore, it provides a straightforward way to reduce the weight of the model and even improve the performance by highlighting the most relevant input features.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Evaluation of AI-Generated Synthetic Data for Clinical Research in Secondary Cardiovascular Prevention among Dyslipidemia Patients

Background: Access to high-quality clinical data is essential for advancing medical research and developing effective medical statistical and Artificial Intelligence models. However, privacy regulations and logistical barriers often hinder timely access to real-world data. Synthetic data offer a promising solution, preserving the statistical characteristics of original datasets while protecting patient privacy. Objectives: This study investigates the use of synthetic data for secondary cardiovascular prevention in patients with dyslipidemia, using two real-world datasets from Centro Cardiologico Monzino. Methods: Given the high dimensionality and limited sample size of the datasets, we employed a custom generative framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Pre-trained LLMs were fine-tuned on original clinical records to synthesize tabular data replicating source-data distributions. Fine-tuning was performed within the Centro Cardiologico Monzino's secure infrastructure to ensure data sovereignty. We evaluate clinical utility and privacy using fidelity and privacy metrics, identifying the optimal generative model and benchmarking against traditional anonymization methods. Results: Synthetic data achieved a superior trade-off than classically anonymized datasets. Real and synthetic datasets showed strong agreement, with significant distributional differences limited to few variables. Models trained on synthetic data replicated key associations from the original dataset, including therapy modification and creatine phosphokinase as predictors of SAMS, and pharmacological intensity as the main driver of LDL-C reduction. Conclusions: Results support the feasibility of using synthetic data as a proxy for real-world datasets in exploratory analyses and model development. Despite slight attenuation of some effect sizes, preserved clinical relationships reinforce the validity of synthetic data in medical research.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Multi-fidelity aerodynamic data fusion by autoencoder transfer learning

arXiv:2512.13069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate aerodynamic prediction often relies on high-fidelity simulations; however, their prohibitive computational costs severely limit their applicability in data-driven modeling. This limitation motivates the development of multi-fidelity strategies that leverage inexpensive low-fidelity information without compromising accuracy. Addressing this challenge, this work presents a multi-fidelity deep learning framework that combines autoencoder-based transfer learning with a newly developed Multi-Split Conformal Prediction (MSCP) strategy to achieve uncertainty-aware aerodynamic data fusion under extreme data scarcity. The methodology leverages abundant Low-Fidelity (LF) data to learn a compact latent physics representation, which acts as a frozen knowledge base for a decoder that is subsequently fine-tuned using scarce HF samples. Tested on surface-pressure distributions for NACA airfoils (2D) and a transonic wing (3D) databases, the model successfully corrects LF deviations and achieves high-accuracy pressure predictions using minimal HF training data. Furthermore, the MSCP framework produces robust, actionable uncertainty bands with pointwise coverage exceeding 95%. By combining extreme data efficiency with uncertainty quantification, this work offers a scalable and reliable solution for aerodynamic regression in data-scarce environments.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents

Existing benchmarks in e-commerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SMEPilot: Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference with Scalable Matrix Extensions

arXiv:2606.16332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern CPUs increasingly integrate matrix extensions, such as Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), that provide high-throughput matrix execution within the CPU. For LLM inference, however, these units are not a universal replacement for conventional CPU cores: prefill, decode, attention, and KV-cache operations expose different arithmetic intensities, vector behavior, and layout requirements, while SME units and CPU cores still compete for shared memory bandwidth. This paper studies this mismatch through a roofline-based characterization of SME-enabled CPUs and uses the resulting model to guide operator-level execution choices. We present SMEPilot, an LLM inference engine that selects CPU-only, SME-only, or cooperative SME+CPU execution for each operator shape. SMEPilot partitions matrix work across SME and CPU cores at tile granularity, overlaps SME-suitable matrix stages with CPU-suitable vector stages in attention, and maintains layout state so packed tensor representations are reused rather than repeatedly rebuilt on critical paths. Across Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-30BA3B on phone, PC, and server platforms, SMEPilot improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 3.94$\times$.

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

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

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

SoftSkill: Behavioral Compression for Contextual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly deployed as natural-language Markdown files that encode answer policies, evidence-use habits, and task procedures. These files are readable and portable, but they are consumed indirectly: for each task instance, a frozen language model must translate a long textual artifact into generation-time behavior. This paper asks whether a natural-language skill can instead initialize a compact continuous context object, refined by a trainable soft delta while the base model remains frozen. We propose SoftSkill, a frozen-backbone method that tunes such soft skills with next-token prediction and deploys them as latent behavioral priors at inference time. In our main single-round setting, a length-32 SoftSkill prefix on Qwen3.5-4B improves over no-skill prompting by 8.3 points on SearchQA, 42.1 points on LiveMath, and 1.3 points on DocVQA. Relative to SkillOpt, SoftSkill improves accuracy by 5.2 points on SearchQA and 12.5 points on LiveMath, while replacing hundreds to thousands of Markdown skill tokens with a few virtual tokens. We further study agentic execution as a harder boundary case, where sparse trajectory imitation provides useful signal but does not yet robustly compress long-horizon procedural behavior. More broadly, the results suggest that some task skills are better treated not as additional Markdown to be reinterpreted at inference time, but as compact latent controls over how a frozen model enters the task.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Improving Alignment Between Human and Machine Codes: An Empirical Assessment of Prompt Engineering for Construct Identification in Psychology

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies – codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.

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

Hyperdimensional computing for structured querying on tabular data embeddings

arXiv:2606.13871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular data embeddings have become a cornerstone of data profiling and data integration pipelines, enabling tasks such as entity annotation and resolution; schema matching; column type detection; and table search, among others. Existing approaches embed rows, columns, or entire tables into a vector space and rely on nearest-neighbor search to retrieve candidate matches. A fundamental limitation of current embedding methods is the lack of interpretable similarity scores: the concrete similarity value between a query and its nearest neighbour carries no intrinsic meaning, making it impossible to determine whether that neighbour is a true match or simply the least-dissimilar item in a corpus that contains no valid answer. This inability to set principled thresholds for retrieval undermines practical deployment, particularly for zero-match detection. We investigate the use of HyperDimensional Computing (HDC), specifically the Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR) model, as a framework for tabular row embeddings when the retrieval task corresponds to answering structured select-project queries in vector space. Exploiting the algebraic properties of HDC operations, we derive closed-form expected similarity values for both equality and non-equality retrieval predicates, which converge to interpretable values as dimensionality increases, and use these to identify suitable retrieval thresholds. We evaluate HDC against EmbDI, a graph-based baseline, on two real-world datasets across varying table sizes and predicate lengths. Our results show that HDC matches or outperforms EmbDI for row retrieval across all configurations, handles non-equality predicates more robustly, and achieves perfect attribute projection accuracy at sufficient dimensionality – while uniquely enabling reliable identification of zero-match predicates through its principled thresholds.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CrossMaps: Confidence-Aware Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping for Rover Navigation

arXiv:2606.16935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rovers rely on perception to maintain spatial maps that encode both objects and sensor quality (e.g., range reliability, lighting artifacts, data density), guiding data fusion, embedding updates, and navigation under partial observability. To study these coupled perception-navigation processes, we present CrossMaps, a real-time confidence-aware open-vocabulary semantic mapping pipeline that constructs language-queryable maps from RGB-D data. Building on VLMaps-style approaches, CrossMaps integrates multi-scale CLIP embeddings with confidence-aware fusion and a dual-memory architecture consisting of Short-Term Memory (STM) and Long-Term Memory (LTM). The STM aggregates noisy visual observations using geometric, semantic, and temporal confidence cues, while confident and coherent cells are promoted to the LTM as persistent semantic landmarks. Designed for deployment with a Jetson Orin-powered UGV alongside SLAM, CrossMaps runs in real time and produces semantic heatmaps that can be queried with natural language to guide rover navigation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing

In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.

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

Token Complexity Theory for AI-Augmented Computing

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-augmented computing delegates natural language queries, code generation requests, and other open-ended tasks to a cluster of AI models that processes queries and generates responses. This paradigm introduces a resource dimension that neither classical time nor space complexity captures: the cost of sending queries to and receiving responses from such a cluster. We introduce token complexity, a formal resource measure defined as the minimum expected token cost to achieve a specified level of output quality on a task, and develop a taxonomy classifying AI systems by the strength of their probabilistic properties. We develop token complexity within the framework of AI-Oracle Turing machines, in which a probabilistic Turing machine interacts with a stochastic oracle via dedicated query and response tapes. We prove basic theorems establishing that token complexity behaves as expected: monotonicity (higher quality costs more tokens), convexity (quality improvements become progressively more expensive), price sensitivity (small price changes produce bounded cost changes), and price-relativity of task ordering (the token complexity ordering of tasks can reverse depending on the query-to-response cost ratio). We prove that the complexity frontier, defined as the set of all feasible resource bounds in tokens, time, and space, is non-empty, upward-closed, and convex.

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

Language Model Circuits Are Sparse in the Neuron Basis

The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques which decompose the neuron basis into more interpretable units of model computation, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs). However, not all neuron-based representations are uninterpretable. For the first time, we empirically show that MLP neurons are as sparse a feature basis as SAEs. We use this finding to develop an end-to-end gradient-based attribution pipeline for circuit tracing on the MLP neuron basis, which surfaces causally effective neurons on a variety of tasks. On a standard subject-verb agreement benchmark (Marks et al., 2025), a circuit of $\approx 10^2$ MLP neurons is enough to control model behaviour. On the multi-hop city-state-capital task from (Lindsey et al., 2025), we find a circuit in which small sets of neurons encode specific latent reasoning steps (e.g. mapping a city to its state), and can be steered to change the model's output. This work thus advances automated interpretability of language models without imposing additional training costs.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CzechDocs: A Multiway Parallel Dataset of Formatted Documents for Minority Languages in Czechia

We present CzechDocs, a multiway parallel dataset of formatted documents (HTML, DOCX, and PDF) covering Czech and minority languages used in Czechia-primarily Ukrainian and English, with smaller portions of Vietnamese, Russian and other languages. The dataset is designed to support the evaluation of machine translation systems that aim to preserve document formatting during translation. We provide a comparison of the most common approaches to format-preserving machine translation on a validation subset of the dataset. This validation split, together with the evaluation toolkit, is publicly released for further research. A held-out test split will be reserved for a future shared task focused on document-level translation with formatting preservation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Priors Persist Through Suppression: A Stroop Paradigm for Lexical Override

Authors:

Glossaries, technical specifications, and system prompts routinely ask language models to use familiar words in unfamiliar ways. When this works, the local rule does not install the new meaning on top of the old one; the pretrained prior keeps operating underneath, and its strength still shows through. We test this with a Stroop-style paradigm: a remapping rule (doctor means forest) pitted against the query word's lexical-prior distractor (hospital), with matched neutral controls. Across 11 open-weight models spanning four families and 1B-9B parameters, lexical-prior strength predicts interference even after item-level controls for answer prior, frequency, tokenization, and prompt wording. Activation patching on five aligned models locates a source-position triplet (definition subject, definition target, query word) that nearly fully recovers the conflict effect (aggregate $R \in [0.92, 1.06]$); a definition-target swap shows the triplet performs binding rather than identity matching. Dissociation experiments isolate target preservation as the binding-specific signature: distractor suppression occurs under matched, swap, and item-mismatched conditions alike, whereas target logit collapse occurs only when the definition-target position is corrupted. Behavior and mechanism converge on the same channel: the prior's strength both predicts which overrides fail and marks where the causal repair lands.