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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

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

Korzhinskii-Net: Physics-Informed Neural Network for Sub-Surface Mineral Prospectivity Modelling

作者:

arXiv:2606.13695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mineral prospectivity modelling (MPM) underpins exploration economics, yet most operational pipelines reduce to data-driven classifiers trained on shallow surface proxies. Such models are blind to the subsurface physics that actually localises ore: heat advection, fluid flow, and lithology-dependent precipitation. We present Korzhinskii-Net, a 2-D radial physics-informed neural network (PINN) that couples Darcy flow, advective-diffusive heat transport, and a softplus-saturated reaction rate into a single differentiable forward model, weakly supervised by surface and remote-sensing proxies. The network is named after Dmitri S. Korzhinskii (1899-1985), whose theory of infiltration metasomatism provides the physical scaffold. We evaluate Korzhinskii-Net on five ore provinces spanning four commodity classes – Norilsk (Ni-Cu-PGE), Pechenga (Ni-Cu sulphide), Udokan (sandstone-hosted Cu), Sukhoi Log (orogenic Au), and Mirny (kimberlitic diamond) – under a fair, leakage-controlled 5-fold cross-validation protocol with hard ring-shaped negatives. Korzhinskii-Net attains a mean PR-AUC of 0.885 versus 0.281 for the strongest classical baseline (gradient boosting), and a mean fractional rank of 0.019 versus 0.413. The improvement is consistent across all five provinces and four commodity systems, suggesting that physics-informed differentiable simulators, even when constrained only by global open-data proxies, can recover localisation patterns that pure feature-based learners systematically miss. We release the full pipeline and evaluation harness as open source.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Dissecting the functional landscape of rare diseases through genomic variation in a heterogeneous cohort of 11,000 patients

Rare diseases (RDs) remain a major diagnostic challenge. Genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity, incomplete knowledge of disease mechanisms, and limitations in variant clinical interpretation leave many patients without a molecular diagnosis. Meanwhile, the growing volume of genomic data generated in clinical practice offers an opportunity to develop data-driven methodologies for exploring disease mechanisms and improving the reanalysis of unsolved cases. We aggregated real-world genomic data from 11,084 unrelated patients with suspected RD. Patients were clinically classified into 122 diseases. We built a multi-disease genomic variant frequency database (FJD-DB), which enabled the development of variant and gene-disease association scores by means of case-control subcohort comparisons across 32 disease groups. Functional enrichment analyses were then used to highlight disease-associated protein domains, pathways, biological processes, and phenotypes. Finally, the resulting knowledge was integrated into a data-driven framework for the guided reanalysis of unsolved RD patients applied to Inherited Retinal Dystrophies (IRD) patients as first use case. FJD-DB contained more than 45 million unique variants, including ~185,000 potentially pathogenic variants. Disease-specific analyses identified disease-associated pathogenic variants and highlighted both established and candidate disease genes. We detected 179 significantly enriched protein domains across 23 diseases, 124 Human Phenotype Ontology terms across 13 diseases, 79 Reactome pathways across 10 diseases, and 72 Gene Ontology biological processes across 8 diseases, revealing highly disease-specific functional signatures. Integration of disease-specific variant, gene, and functional association signals enabled the development of a data-driven framework for guided reanalysis of unsolved RD cases. Applied to more than 1,100 unsolved IRD cases, the framework generated clinically relevant findings in 26 patients, including four molecular diagnoses, seven candidate diagnoses, and 15 cases upgraded from non-informative findings to variants of uncertain significance. Aggregated real-world genomic data can be leveraged to identify disease-associated molecular signals generating novel biological hypotheses. A unified analytical framework provides a scalable strategy for knowledge discovery and guided reanalysis, facilitating the identification of overlooked and potentially novel genetic causes of RDs.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Attention in Motion: Secure Platooning via Transformer-based Misbehavior Detection

arXiv:2512.15503v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vehicular platooning promises transformative improvements in transportation efficiency and safety through the coordination of multi-vehicle formations enabled by Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. However, the distributed nature of platoon coordination creates security vulnerabilities, allowing authenticated vehicles to inject falsified kinematic data, compromise operational stability, and pose a threat to passenger safety. Traditional misbehaviour detection approaches, which rely on plausibility checks and statistical methods, suffer from high False Positive (FP) rates and cannot capture the complex temporal dependencies inherent in multi-vehicle coordination dynamics. We present Attention In Motion (AIMformer), a transformer-based framework specifically tailored for real-time misbehaviour detection in vehicular platoons with edge deployment capabilities. AIMformer leverages multi-head self-attention mechanisms to capture intra-vehicle temporal dynamics, with a spatio-temporal variant that further models inter-vehicle spatial correlations. It incorporates global positional encoding with vehicle-specific temporal offsets to handle join/exit maneuvers. We propose a Precision-Focused Binary Cross-Entropy (PFBCE) loss function that penalizes FPs to meet the requirements of safety-critical vehicular systems. Extensive evaluation across 4 platoon controllers, multiple attack vectors, and diverse mobility scenarios demonstrates superior performance ($\geq$ 0.93) compared to state-of-the-art baseline architectures. A comprehensive deployment analysis utilizing TensorFlow Lite (TFLite), Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), and TensorRT achieves sub-millisecond inference latency, making it suitable for real-time operation on resource-constrained edge platforms. Hence, validating AIMformer is viable for both in-vehicle and roadside deployment.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Frequency upconversion of infrared signals via molecular cavity optomechanical systems with gain

arXiv:2606.17877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular cavity optomechanical systems have recently emerged as a promising platform for enhancing infrared detection sensitivity, owing to their ability to up-convert low-frequency infrared (IR) photons to visible frequency range. Generally, under red-detuned pumping in such systems, the ideal conversion efficiency of the IR signal approaches 1. To overcome this efficiency constraint, we propose a scheme that incorporates gain into the infrared cavity of a molecular cavity optomechanical system comprising two cavities and an ensemble of N molecules. The upconversion process, which relies on IR absorption and Raman scattering associated with specific vibrational modes, is significantly amplified by the incorporation of gain under the red-detuned conditions. Moreover, our analysis demonstrates that the added noise is maintained near 0.5.

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

The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across natural language processing tasks, yet reliable reasoning remains an open challenge. Although modern LLMs show progress in structured inference, multi-step problem solving, and contextual understanding, their reasoning behavior is often inconsistent and sensitive to prompting strategies, task design, and model scale. This survey provides a systematic analysis of more than 300 recent papers from arXiv, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, Papers with Code, and the ACL Anthology to examine how reasoning capabilities emerge in LLMs and where they fail. We make three main contributions. First, we introduce a structured taxonomy of LLM reasoning research, covering Chain-of-Thought reasoning, multi-hop reasoning, mathematical reasoning, common sense reasoning, visual and temporal reasoning, code and algorithmic reasoning, retrieval-augmented reasoning, tool-augmented and agentic reasoning, and reinforcement learning-based reasoning. Second, we analyze methodological trends across these paradigms, including prompting methods, model architectures, training objectives, reward modeling, and evaluation benchmarks. Third, we synthesize recurring limitations and failure modes, such as reasoning hallucinations, brittle multi-step inference, weak causal abstraction, and poor cross-domain generalization. By organizing a rapidly expanding literature, this survey offers a unified view of the current capabilities and limitations of reasoning in LLMs. We also identify emerging research directions, including meta-reasoning, self-evolving reasoning frameworks, multimodal reasoning, and socially grounded reasoning. Overall, this work aims to serve as a reference for developing more robust, interpretable, and generalizable reasoning systems in future language models.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

On Subquadratic Architectures: From Applications to Principles

arXiv:2606.12364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers dominate modern sequence modeling, but their quadratic attention incurs substantial computational cost. Subquadratic architectures offer a scalable alternative. However, it remains unclear which designs yield the most effective sequence models. We compare three leading approaches: xLSTM, Mamba-2, and Gated DeltaNet. We evaluate these models on tasks with complex dependencies: (1) code-model pre-training, (2) distillation of code models from large language models, and (3) pre-training of time-series foundation models. Across these settings, xLSTM delivers the strongest overall performance. To explain xLSTM's advantage, we present a unified formulation and analyze the underlying architectural mechanisms, focusing on state tracking and memory dynamics. Our results show that xLSTM enables more flexible and stable memory correction via its gating scheme. We corroborate these findings on controlled synthetic length-generalization tasks. Overall, our findings indicate that xLSTM's gains on complex tasks stem from robust state tracking and accumulation.

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

Safe Exploration via Policy Priors

arXiv:2601.19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative policies (e.g., obtained from offline data or simulators) as priors. Our approach, SOOPER, uses probabilistic dynamics models to optimistically explore, yet pessimistically fall back to the conservative policy prior if needed. We prove that SOOPER guarantees safety throughout learning, and establish convergence to an optimal policy by bounding its cumulative regret. Extensive experiments on key safe RL benchmarks and real-world hardware demonstrate that SOOPER is scalable, outperforms the state-of-the-art and validate our theoretical guarantees in practice.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Artificial Intelligence-Based Detection of Airway Mucus Plugs on CT and Associations With Clinical Outcomes in COPDGene

RATIONALE: Airway mucus plugging is a clinically relevant manifestation of airway pathology in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is associated with increased mortality even in early disease; however, visual computed tomography (CT) assessment is subjective and labor intensive. OBJECTIVES: To develop an AI-based quantitative CT method for automated detection of airway mucus plugging and evaluate associations with physiologic impairment and clinical outcomes. METHODS: Inspiratory CT scans from 8,971 COPDGene Phase 1 (GOLD 0-4 and PRISm) participants were analyzed. An AI-based framework combining 3D airway segmentation discontinuities and convolutional neural network classification identified mucus plug obstructions, yielding mucus plug burden (total plug count). Associations with outcomes were evaluated using covariate-adjusted models. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS : Higher mucus plug burden was associated with lower post-bronchodilator FEV % predicted ({rho} = -0.41; P < 0.001), greater air trapping (LAA < -856 HU; {rho} = 0.33; P < 0.001), worse health status (SGRQ; {rho} = 0.31; P < 0.001), and shorter 6-minute walk distance ({rho} = -0.26; P < 0.001). Among GOLD 1-4 participants, mucus plug presence was independently associated with increased all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.28; P < 0.005) and exacerbation frequency (adjusted incidence rate ratio, 1.32; P < 0.005). Plug presence was also associated with increased respiratory mortality across GOLD categories and cardiovascular mortality in GOLD 1-2. CONCLUSIONS: AI-based quantitative CT assessment of airway mucus plugging provides a scalable, reproducible measure associated with physiologic impairment and adverse outcomes in COPD, supporting its role in risk stratification and future therapeutic studies.

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

Montreal Forced Aligner and the state of speech-to-text alignment in 2026

The Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) was released in 2016 and has since become the most widely used tool for forced alignment in research and industry. In the decade since, MFA has undergone substantial development, including expanded coverage across more languages and dialects using larger open-source datasets, harmonized IPA dictionaries, model adaptation, cross-language phone remapping, and support utilities. This paper documents MFA 3.0's developments since version 1.0 and evaluates MFA's performance across English, Japanese, and Korean, benchmarked against classic and neural forced aligners. MFA 3.0 achieves state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art performance across all four benchmark datasets with mean boundary errors below 15 ms. Adaptation and cross-language remapping are effective for languages outside MFA's training distribution, and pronunciation probability modeling and phonological rules provide gains in specific conditions.

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

ERTS: Adversarial Robustness Testing of Ethical AI via Semantic Perturbation in a Bounded Consequence Space

arXiv:2606.13282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems are deployed in high-stakes ethical contexts such as healthcare triage, autonomous vehicle control, and employment screening, formal methods for evaluating their robustness against adversarial manipulation of ethical reasoning remain underdeveloped. This paper introduces the Ethical Robustness Testing System (ERTS), a closed-pipeline framework that: (1) encodes ethical dilemmas into a 22-dimensional Ethical Consequence Space (ECS) grounded in established ethical theory; (2) applies 17 semantic perturbation functions subject to 6 validity constraint classes including a novel semantic coherence constraint; (3) measures decision deviation via a 4-component Ethical Instability Index (EII); and (4) produces domain-adaptive pre-deployment robustness assessment verdicts. We evaluate 4 structured baseline models and 2 production LLMs (Gemini 2.0 Flash and Llama 3.2) across 50 ethical scenarios spanning 8 deployment domains, generating 1,500 adversarial test cases. Results demonstrate that only 33% of models achieve assessment clearance, with the local Llama-3.2 model proving particularly vulnerable to fairness corruption and information degradation attacks (ERS = 0.737). To the best of our knowledge, no existing framework combines a bounded ethical consequence space, semantic coherence constraints, and domain-adaptive assessment in a single adversarial testing pipeline.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ToolSelf: Unifying Task Execution and Self-Reconfiguration via Tool-Driven Emergent Adaptation

arXiv:2602.07883v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-powered agentic systems excel at complex long-horizon tasks, but remain constrained by static configurations fixed before execution. Such rigidity forces a trade-off between domain-specific performance and cross-task generalization: strong priors and compact tool spaces aid specialization but weaken transfer, while task-agnostic workflows and broad action spaces expand coverage but dilute guidance. Existing pre-execution optimization, planner-worker orchestration, and configuration patching fall short of resolving this tension, as they decouple adaptation from execution, causing information loss, fragmented optimization, and ambiguous credit assignment. We propose ToolSelf, a tool-driven runtime self-reconfiguration paradigm that abstracts configuration updates as a standardized tool interface and unifies execution and adaptation within one policy's action space. The execution agent can dynamically update sub-goals, strategies, toolboxes, context, and context-management modes based on task progress and feedback. We further introduce Configuration-Aware Two-stage Training (CAT), which combines rejection sampling fine-tuning with trajectory-level KTO reinforcement learning to internalize self-reconfiguration. Across diverse benchmarks, zero-shot ToolSelf rivals task-specialized agents; after CAT training, ToolSelf gains 28.8 points over the static-configuration baseline on average, illuminating a path toward emergent adaptivity that obviates manually injected guidance. The code is available at https://github.com/lian-tian-mo-zun/ToolSelf.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Sorries Are Not the Hard Part: An Expert-Review Case Study of a Semi-Autonomous Formalization

arXiv:2606.13925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can often close proof gaps in interactive theorem provers, but a verified theorem is not the same thing as a reusable library contribution. We study this distinction through a detailed case study: a semi-autonomous formalization of Grothendieck's vanishing theorem. The initial version compiles with no sorries, but an expert review found serious problems in definitions, theorem generality, file organization, and the API. We then ran a review-driven refactor and compression process and obtained a second expert review. The before-and-after comparison shows a sharp split: agents adapted well to local, mechanically checkable feedback, but remained weak at choosing definitions and designing APIs. We argue that autoformalization should be evaluated not only by closed sorries, but by whether the resulting formalization survives expert review.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Ground-State Energy Solutions of the Lithium Atom: Zeroth-, First-, and Second-Order Perturbation Theory and the Variational Method

arXiv:2606.24238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, the ground-state energy of the lithium atom is systematically investigated using both time-independent perturbation theory and the variational method to provide a comprehensive pedagogical analysis of many-body atomic systems. The unperturbed Hamiltonian is initially constructed by neglecting electron-electron interactions, treating the system as three independent hydrogen-like electrons to yield a zeroth-order energy baseline of -275.51 eV. The antisymmetric fermionic nature of the exact wave function is rigorously enforced through the Slater determinant formalism. First-order perturbation theory is applied to evaluate static inter-electronic repulsion using exact Coulomb and exchange integrals, refining the energy state to -192.01 eV. To account for dynamical electronic correlation, second-order perturbation theory is computed numerically for virtual single-electron s-orbital transitions, leading to a total perturbative energy of -196.36 eV. A brief discussion of two-electron excitations is also included to encapsulate further physical realism within the framework. Furthermore, a non-orthogonal two-parameter variational approach is employed to model the shell-specific shielding effect. By optimizing the effective nuclear charges, the variational method establishes a superior upper bound energy of -201.187 eV. The results of both methods are comprehensively contrasted against each other and the reference baseline to provide critical insights into the nature of electron correlation and screening in multi-electron atoms.

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

ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.

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

Learning to Distort: Weakly-Supervised Image Quality Transfer for Prostate DWI Correction

Single-shot echo-planar prostate diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is frequently complicated by geometric distortions, which impact the ability to derive reliable diagnoses from such images. Developing automated correction methods is challenged by the absence of paired distorted and undistorted clinical scans. In this paper, we first propose a novel weakly-supervised image quality transfer (IQT) framework from undistorted to distorted images that utilizes image quality assessment (IQA) signals to supervise the transfer process. Unlike traditional methods that require expensive, voxel-wise paired data or resort to developing unpaired algorithms, our approach utilizes image-level quality labels (here, distorted vs. undistorted) to establish latent quality prototypes within a pre-trained feature space. Recognizing that simulating realistic distortions is more reliable than direct unpaired correction, we describe a weakly-supervised prototype flow matching algorithm to explicitly regularize generative trajectories towards distorted prototypes, producing realistic susceptibility artifacts that mimic clinical degradations. By synthesizing these realistic pairs, we enable a second IQT model to be trained in the forward direction for distortion correction. Experimental results demonstrate that our generated images successfully mimic the diagnostic interference of real-world artifacts, which leads to more capable distortion correction IQT models. In addition to qualitative comparisons, we also conduct exhaustive quantitative evaluations that compare our approach with existing unpaired approaches (e.g., CycleGAN, UNIT-DDPM, and OT-FM) - as either forward or reverse alternatives - by assessing clinical downstream task performance in PI-RADS and Gleason score classification, using both in-distribution and external data sets.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Does the method matter? Evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and ease of hearing-aid gain self-adjustment

In conventional hearing-aid personalisation, clinicians cannot hear what their patients hear, and patients cannot often reliably detect or describe what they hear. Self-adjustment avoids this issue but requires user controls that adjust hearing-aid signal processing parameters to be effective, efficient and easy. In this study, we explored (a) the roles of interface complexity and stimulus type in the self-adjustment of hearing-aid gain, and (b) how well individuals can adjust one sound to match another to assess the same interfaces and stimuli. Adult hearing-aid users with mild to moderate symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss repeatedly adjusted the gain (a) to their preference from individual prescription (n = 41) and (b) to match their previous preferences from a random starting point (n = 32) using three interfaces representing different bass/mid/treble configurations and three stimuli (music, speech and speech-in-noise). The large interindividual variability in self-adjusted gains clustered into three patterns of deviation from initial prescription: increased relative bass, overall gain reduction, and close to initial prescription. There were no substantial effects of interface nor stimulus on self-adjustment reliability (median {sigma} = 2.8 dB), whereas absolute sound-matching error increased with increasing interface complexity and centre frequency. Neither individual matching accuracy nor questionnaire responses predicted either self-adjusted gains or reliability. Overall, these results show that many - but not all - hearing-aid users can adjust gains with reasonable reliability, and while it can be difficult to predict the behaviour from the individual, the individual applies a similar self-adjustment behaviour across different interfaces and stimuli.

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

Can In-Context Learning Support Intrinsic Curiosity?

arXiv:2606.19476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect. While large sequence models have revolutionized data modeling, the problem of automated data selection, or "intrinsic curiosity", remains a significant challenge. Classic approaches incentivize exploration by rewarding an agent based on its "learning progress", which measures how much a newly acquired observation improves a world model's predictive ability. However, evaluating these rewards traditionally requires expensive inner loops of gradient descent updates within each trajectory, rendering them computationally impractical at scale. In this work, we investigate whether the emergent in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of sequence models can eliminate this bottleneck by serving as immediate, update-free world models. Specifically, we evaluate whether an exploration policy can be trained to maximize learning progress, using solely the prediction errors and counterfactual context manipulations of an in-context learner. We first prove that in general Markov decision processes, this is in fact impossible in an unbiased way: the resulting intrinsic rewards either suffer from nuisance terms that bias their estimation of true learning progress, or they cannot be implemented using an in-context learner's prediction errors. Conversely, we prove a positive result for a broad subclass of non-temporal settings, encompassing active learning and Bayesian Experimental Design: here, ICL-derived rewards successfully bound and asymptotically converge to the true learning progress. We corroborate our theory with controlled experiments across continuous and symbolic environments, demonstrating that our ICL-driven framework successfully trains curious data-collection policies that explore optimally.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Impossibility of superluminal signalling rules out causal loops in conical spacetimes

arXiv:2606.20476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In PRL 129, 110401 it was shown that it is theoretically possible to have operationally detectable causal loops without violating the principle of no superluminal signalling (NSS) in (1+1)-Minkowski spacetime. Whether or not such causal loops are also possible in $d > 1$ spatial dimensions, has remained a key open question. We resolve this question by showing that in a wide class of "conical" spacetimes, including Minkowski with d > 1, NSS does rule out all operationally detectable causal loops, in classical, quantum and post-quantum theories. This establishes that the relationship between the relativistic principles of NSS and no causal loops depends inherently on the geometry of spacetime.

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

Provably Safe, Yet Scalable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints. Predominant approaches rely on soft-constrained policy optimization, which has achieved empirical success but does not provide formal safety guarantees for the learned policy. In contrast, methods with strict guarantees typically rely on explicit certificate functions, whose construction requires the direct synthesis and verification of control-invariant sets, a process that scales poorly with state dimension and often yields overly conservative behavior. In this paper, we present the Provably Safe, yet Scalable RL (PS2-RL) framework, a novel two-phase architecture for learning provably safe policies in a scalable manner, designed to overcome the key bottlenecks of prior methods. Rather than explicitly computing invariant sets, PS2-RL leverages a learned backup policy to forward-integrate the system dynamics, generating an implicit control-invariant set online. In the first phase, the backup policy is trained with our proposed safe-arrival value function, which characterizes the optimal backup policy for invariant-set construction. In the second phase, an RL policy is trained end-to-end through a differentiable projection layer that strictly enforces the safety guarantees induced by the learned backup policy. By maximizing the volume of the implicit control-invariant set in the first phase, the resulting PS2 policy from the second phase is performant and scalable, while maintaining provable safety. Crucially, PS2-RL imposes no restrictions on the underlying RL algorithm and can be plugged into any existing training pipeline. We establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework and evaluate it on robotic control tasks with state dimensions up to 10, a regime in which prior provably safe RL methods struggle or become impractical.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Self-Recognition Finetuning can Prevent and Reverse Emergent Misalignment

Emergent misalignment (EM) has been linked to the activation of misaligned persona vectors and evil character traits, suggesting that EM operates through disruption of the model's aligned character rather than direct learning of harmful content. Motivated by this connection, we study self-generated text recognition (SGTR) finetuning as a character-targeted intervention that is distinct from existing in-training defenses. We conduct two-stage finetuning experiments across three models (GPT-4.1, Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct) and multiple EM datasets to compare SGTR finetuning against benign finetuning baselines (correct domain-specific data, general knowledge, and word counting) to find it an effective defense in both reversal and prevention settings. We find that all interventions produce comparable EM reversal, but only when restoring capabilities that EM had degraded. For prevention, only SGTR finetuning consistently reduces misalignment without exacerbating any individual metric, suggesting that character fortification specifically drives prevention. We provide further evidence for EM's relation to the LLM's default character by showing that EM finetuning induces diversity into the LLM's identity self-reports, artificially corrupting self-recognition exacerbates misalignment caused by EM finetuning, and that removing the model's identity-bearing system prompt substantially reduces the effect of EM finetuning. Together, these findings reframe EM not as the adoption of a coherent misaligned persona but as the destabilization of aligned character.

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

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Model Collapse Is Not a Bug but a Feature in Machine Unlearning for LLMs

arXiv:2507.04219v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current unlearning methods for LLMs optimize on the private information they seek to remove by incorporating it into their fine-tuning data. We argue this not only risks reinforcing exposure to sensitive data, but also fundamentally contradicts the principle of minimizing its use. As a remedy, we propose a novel unlearning method-Partial Model Collapse (PMC), which does not require unlearning targets in the unlearning objective. Our approach is inspired by recent observations that training generative models on their own generations leads to distribution collapse, effectively removing information from model outputs. Our central insight is that model collapse can be leveraged for machine unlearning by deliberately triggering it for data we aim to remove. We theoretically analyze that our approach converges to the desired outcome, i.e. the model unlearns the data targeted for removal. We empirically demonstrate that PMC overcomes four key limitations of existing unlearning methods that explicitly optimize on unlearning targets, and more effectively removes private information from model outputs while preserving general model utility. Overall, our contributions represent an important step toward more comprehensive unlearning that better aligns with real-world privacy constraints. Code available at https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/daml/partial-model-collapse/.

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

Value-order Decomposition for Generalist Anomaly Detection

Industrial anomaly detection suffers from limited data, making cross-domain generalization particularly challenging. Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to train a unified model on a source domain that can effectively detect anomalies in unseen target domains. In the initial semantic feature space, strong entanglement between anomalies and object categories or defect types hinders effective generalization across domains. Recent works address this issue by projecting features into a residual space; however, such methods primarily increase cross-domain overlap for normal features, while anomalous features remain specific to object categories, defect types and data domains, leading to poor alignment and generalization. To address this limitation, we propose Value-order Decomposition (VOD), a simple yet effective technique that bridges three types of generalization gaps across object categories, defect types (including real and synthetic defects), and data domains. VOD disentangles and suppresses object-category-, defect-type-, and domain-specific information, promoting alignment within normal and abnormal samples while preserving their separability, thereby enabling robust generalization across the three gaps. Leveraging the strong alignment between real and synthetic defects within the same object, we perform anomaly detection using only normal and synthetic-abnormal reference, and effectively generalize to unseen real defect types. Experiments on diverse industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that our method, using a simple cut-and-paste anomaly simulation strategy, achieves strong generalization across the three gaps.