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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Foundation model-based tool for automated ulcerative colitis histology scoring demonstrates non-inferiority to pathologists across multiple scoring indices

In clinical trials for ulcerative colitis (UC), pathologists assess disease severity through standardized histological indices, including the Geboes Score, Robarts Histopathology Index (RHI), and Nancy Histologic Index (NHI). Despite strong associations with clinical outcomes, histologic scoring suffers from inter- and intra-reader variability, and consensus criteria for histologic remission remain uncertain. Through a consortium approach, we developed an artificial intelligence-based measurement (AIM) tool for scoring histology in UC mucosal biopsies (AIM-HI UC). This model, trained on a large dataset of UC biopsies (N=10,230), utilizes additive multiple instance learning models leveraging PLUTO, a pathology foundation model, that predict each of the Geboes subgrades, from which the Geboes grade-level score, RHI, and NHI can be calculated. Evaluation of this model on a standalone verification set including clinical trial specimens established algorithm non-inferiority and/or superiority relative to standard qualified pathologists through comparison of algorithm-consensus and pathologist-consensus agreement metrics (non-inferior if difference >-0.1, superior if difference >0, inclusive of confidence intervals). AIM-HI UC was determined to be non-inferior to pathologists (N=3) for the prediction of all seven Geboes subgrades, grade-level Geboes, RHI, NHI, histologic improvement (GS

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Higher-Order Token Interactions via Quantum Attention

arXiv:2606.11673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard dot-product self-attention computes, in a single layer, only pairwise (order-2) interactions between tokens; representing a generic order-$k$ interaction is known to require either super-quadratic resources in one layer or composition across depth. We introduce Quantum Higher-Order Attention (QHA), a shallow, hardware-realizable quantum attention head that, via data re-uploading and an all-to-all non-Clifford entangler, synthesizes order-$k$ token interactions inside the circuit and exposes them through a local single-qubit read-out. We prove (i) an expressivity separation: any single standard self-attention layer with embedding dimension $m$, $H$ heads and $p$-bit precision satisfying $mHp=o(N/\log\log N)$ cannot represent the order-$k$ correlation family that one QHA head represents with circuit depth $O(\log k)$ ($O(k)$ two-qubit gates); and (ii) a trainability guarantee for its local-design instantiation: with a local read-out and $O(\log n)$ depth the gradient variance is $\Omega(1/\mathrm{poly}(n))$ (no barren plateau), which we confirm empirically – while being explicit that the more expressive all-to-all instantiation we benchmark is trained empirically and shows exponentially decaying gradients. Empirically, at a $6.5\times$ smaller parameter budget, QHA generalizes hidden-subset parity of every order $k\le6$ from disjoint inputs, whereas the larger classical attention head collapses past order~2; consistent with theory, the size of the advantage tracks the target's Fourier degree - largest for parity and shrinking when low-order structure is present. As an application, QHA serves as a compact high-order interaction detector across three domains - genetic epistasis, learning-parity-with-noise, and graph triangle detection - reaching the noise ceiling at the smallest parameter budget where field-standard linear methods fail.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Fourier Dimensions of Mandelbrot Cascades under Minimal Integrability

作者:

arXiv:2606.08703v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This note announces exact Fourier dimension formulas for canonical Mandelbrot cascade measures under the minimal Kahane Peyriere integrability condition and records the canonical b adic extension on cubes. In the dyadic interval setting, the theorem is proved in a balanced vector weight model allowing dependence between sibling weights. Almost surely on non extinction, the Fourier, energy, and L2 dimensions all equal the energy exponent. The scalar specialization gives the canonical Mandelbrot Kahane Fourier dimension formula under the minimal integrability condition. On the circle, the endpoint formula is given by the endpoint lower local dimension exponent. For the b adic Mandelbrot cascade on cubes, the Fourier dimension is the minimum of 2 and the energy exponent, with the universal Fourier barrier at dimension two providing the high dimensional obstruction.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Learning What to Remember: A Cognitively Grounded Multi-Factor Value Model for Agentic Memory

arXiv:2606.12945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running LLM agents accumulate interaction histories far larger than any context window, forcing a standing decision: what to encode deeply, what to forget, and what to retrieve under a fixed memory budget. Production systems answer with semantic similarity or recency – both mis-specified for the forgetting decision, which is made at consolidation time before the future query is known. We propose a multi-factor memory value function V(m)=\sum_i w_i f_i(m) over seven interpretable factors (emotional intensity, goal relevance, value alignment, self/user relevance, task utility, reliability, and usage history) drawn from cognitive psychology, whose weights are learned from a downstream objective by a gradient-free optimiser, and whose single scalar uniformly controls encoding depth, forget risk, and retrieval rank. We make a methodological point: on LongMemEval, scoring goal relevance against the held-out evaluation question saturates gold-evidence retention at \approx 0.98 – this measures retrieval, not forgetting. In the realistic blind regime, a learned multi-factor value retains 0.770 \pm 0.011 of gold evidence across 479 usable cases, versus 0.657 for uniform weights, 0.518 for the best single factor, and 0.368 for recency; every paired gap's 95% bootstrap CI is above zero, and a neural network over the same factors ties the linear model. The learned weights are interpretable – reliability, emotional intensity, and self/user relevance dominate, while query-time goal similarity is correctly down-weighted for the forgetting decision. A controlled synthetic task with planted confounds confirms the learner recovers a separating weighting (1.00 retention) where uniform weighting fails (0.62). The substrate is open-source; all experiments run on a single CPU with no API calls.

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

Entropy-Gradient Inversion: Moving Toward Internal Mechanism of Large Reasoning Models

The advancement of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from reactive ``fast thinking'' text generation to systematic, step-by-step ``slow thinking'' reasoning, unlocking state-of-the-art performance in complex mathematical and logical tasks. However, the field faces the fundamental gap between token-level behavioral analysis and internal reasoning mechanisms, and the instability of reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning optimization relying on costly external verifiers. We identify and formally define Entropy-Gradient Inversion, a robust negative correlation between token entropy and logit gradients that acts as a definitive geometric fingerprint for LRM reasoning capability. Building on this, we propose Correlation-Regularized Group Policy Optimization (CorR-PO), which embeds this inversion signature into RL reward regularization. Extensive experiments on various reasoning benchmarks across multiple model scales show CorR-PO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, confirming that stronger inversion directly correlates with superior reasoning performance.

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

Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

As MT quality increases, interest in enhanced post-editing features such as QE-derived error highlights is growing, yet evidence for their usefulness remains limited. In this work, we explore the usefulness of LLM-derived error highlights and correction suggestions based on automatic post-editing (APE). We conduct a study where professional translators (En-Nl) post-edit translations using APE error highlights and correction suggestions and compare productivity, quality and user experience to regular PE and PE with QE-derived highlights. While no condition yielded productivity or quality gains compared to regular PE, APE highlights were better received than QE-derived highlights, and correction suggestions improved overall user experience.

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

TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation

arXiv:2504.11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) – the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output – and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code are open-sourced under a permissive license.

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

Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation of Language Models

On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories. This framework typically uses reverse KL divergence, encouraging the student to match the teacher's high-confidence predictions. However, we show that the mode-seeking property of reverse KL reduces generation diversity and yields unstable learning signals when the teacher distribution has high entropy. To address this, we introduce Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation. Our key idea is augmenting the standard reverse KL objective with forward KL when teacher entropy is high, capturing the full range of plausible outputs while retaining precise imitation elsewhere. It balances mode-seeking precision with mode-covering robustness without sacrificing on-policy training efficiency. Experiments show that our method maintains generation diversity (sustained token-level entropy) and improves student-teacher alignment (lower forward KL on high-entropy tokens). Across six math reasoning benchmarks, this yields Pass@8 accuracy gains of +1.37 for Qwen3-0.6B-Base, +2.39 for Qwen3-1.7B-Base, and +5.05 for Qwen3-4B-Base compared to baseline on-policy distillation methods. These results demonstrate that accounting for teacher uncertainty is essential for maintaining diversity and achieving effective knowledge transfer.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Once-for-All: Scalable Simultaneous Forecasting via Equilibrium State Estimation

arXiv:2606.13285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Equilibrium State Estimation (ESE), a novel paradigm for simultaneous prediction, where multiple interacting systems require separate yet coordinated forecasts. Such scenarios often arise in real-world settings such as economics and healthcare modeling. Unlike existing approaches that predict one system at a time, ESE forecasts all systems in a single pass. It first estimates the equilibrium state across systems, then generates holistic forecasts based on the difference between the current state and the estimated equilibrium. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including currency exchange and COVID-19 spread modeling, demonstrate that ESE is at least as accurate as state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while being significantly faster. In addition, ESE integrates seamlessly with conventional predictors, combining their accuracy with its exceptional efficiency and delivering a 10-70x speedup. With linear-time complexity, ESE scales far better than SOTA methods as the number of systems increases. Moreover, it remains accurate under diverse perturbations, establishing ESE as a fast, generalizable, robust, and scalable multi-prediction method.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models for Image Quality Assessment via Voting and Ranking

Improving vision-language models (VLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, methods that necessitate costly, human-annotated data. While self-supervised techniques have proven effective for enhancing reasoning capabilities, their application to perceptual domains such as image quality assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce EvoQuality, a novel framework that enables a VLM to autonomously refine its quality perception capabilities without any ground-truth labels. EvoQuality adapts the principle of self-consistency to the ranking-based nature of IQA. It generates pseudo-labels by performing pairwise majority voting on the VLM's own outputs to establish a consensus on relative quality. These pseudo-rankings are then formulated into a fidelity reward that guides the model's iterative evolution through group relative policy optimization (GRPO). By iteratively leveraging its own predictions, EvoQuality progressively refines the VLM's perceptual capability. Extensive experiments show that EvoQuality boosts the base VLM's zero-shot performance by 31.8% on PLCC across diverse IQA benchmarks. Remarkably, despite being entirely self-supervised, EvoQuality achieves performance that is competitive with, or even surpasses, state-of-the-art supervised VLM-based IQA models, outperforming these models on 5 out of 7 IQA benchmarks. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates significant flexibility, allowing it to be stacked with pre-trained IQA models to bolster generalization on unseen datasets. Codes and checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/bytedance/EvoQuality.

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

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Apparent Psychological Profiles of Large Language Models are Largely a Measurement Artifact

Psychological instruments designed for humans are increasingly used to assign large language models (LLMs) stable psychological profiles that affect their usability, safety assessment, and use as proxies for human participants in research. Using a formal psychometric framework, we show that these profiles are largely a measurement artifact. Administering a battery of personality and risk-preference instruments spanning self-reports and behavioral tasks to 56 instruction-tuned LLMs alongside large human reference samples, we report four findings. First, differences between models are driven not by the traits an instrument targets but by a directional response bias, a tendency to respond toward one end of the scale, or one labeled option, regardless of item content; a variance decomposition attributes 81-90% of between-model variation to this bias, against 9-16% in humans. Second, the bias declines with model capability but is not eliminated by it. Third, because bias rather than trait drives responding, an instrument's apparent reliability is almost entirely predicted by its response orthogonality, a term we coin for the proportion of items for which trait and bias point in opposite directions. Fourth, the profile a model appears to have shifts with the items used and can be manufactured through item selection. These results demonstrate that the apparent psychological profiles of LLMs are artifacts of the instrument used to measure them, not properties of the models themselves. As instruments borrowed from human psychology are rarely fully orthogonal and may inherently lack validity for LLMs, we call for dedicated assessments centered on response orthogonality.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bridging Modality Disconnect in Self-Reflection via Closed-Loop Visually Grounded Verification

In the era of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enhancing multimodal reasoning capabilities remains a critical challenge, particularly in handling ambiguous or complex visual inputs, where initial inferences often lead to hallucinations or logic errors. Existing VLMs often produce plausible yet ungrounded answers, and even when prompted to "reflect", their corrections may remain detached from the image evidence. To address this, we propose the MIRROR framework for Multimodal Iterative Reasoning via Reflection On visual Regions. By embedding visual reflection as a core mechanism, MIRROR is formulated as a closed-loop process comprising draft, critique, region-based verification, and revision, which are repeated until the output is visually grounded. To facilitate training of this model, we construct **ReflectV**, a visual reflective dataset for multi-turn supervision that explicitly contains reflection triggers, region-based verification actions, and answer revision grounded in visual evidence. Experiments on both general vision-language benchmarks and representative vision-language reasoning benchmarks show that MIRROR improves correctness and reduces visual hallucinations, demonstrating the value of training reflection as an evidence-seeking, region-aware verification process rather than a purely textual revision step.

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

Neither Parallel Nor Sequential: How DiffusionGemma Actually Commits Tokens

arXiv:2606.14620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open diffusion language models are marketed as parallel, non-autoregressive decoders, yet the order in which a shipped checkpoint actually commits its tokens is almost never measured. We instrument DiffusionGemma 26B, a masked discrete-diffusion mixture-of-experts model built on Gemma 4, hooking its sampler's accept step to record which canvas positions commit, when, and at what confidence. Across a 686-prompt, six-regime probe suite we find that its decoding is neither parallel nor block-autoregressive: it follows a partial left-to-right commit bias whose apparent strength depends almost entirely on the granularity at which you look. Order is weak token by token and strengthens smoothly as the analysis is coarsened, so the model's "block size" turns out to be an artifact of the measuring ruler rather than the architecture. The model commits in large simultaneous batches, leaving much of the within-batch order genuinely undefined rather than merely unobserved. The behaviour is regime-dependent: structured JSON is committed in essentially arbitrary order, and a position's commit confidence tracks correctness on mathematical reasoning but carries no signal on factual recall. Commitment is aggressive, finishing in a short late burst well inside the step budget, while task accuracy matches the model's autoregressive Gemma-4 sibling. Beyond these findings, our central contribution is methodological: measuring decoding order honestly demands handling trailing-EOS padding, within-regime confounding, commit non-monotonicity, block-size sensitivity, and large commit-batch ties, each of which can otherwise manufacture a decoding-order result that is not really there.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

On the Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LLM Judges

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges, e.g., for image quality and safety assessment. However, their adversarial robustness remains largely unexplored, threatening the fairness and reliability of automated judging. To bridge this gap, we introduce RobustMLLMJudge, the first general framework for evaluating the adversarial robustness of general-purpose MLLMs when functioning as judges. It covers diverse attacks against popular judge approaches across quality and safety evaluation scenarios. Using RobustMLLMJudge, we reveal that i) different MLLM judges are highly vulnerable to score-inflating adversarial attacks; and ii) although effective, these attack methods face a critical challenge due to unique constraints in the evaluation protocols of MLLM judges. We further propose MGSIA, namely Manifold-Guided Semantic Induction Attack, a novel method that bypasses these constraints to enable more effective and transferable attacks on MLLM judges. The core idea of MGSIA is to combine affirmative semantic induction with high-score manifold alignment: it maximizes the probability that judges yield affirmative responses (e.g., "Yes") to binary semantic queries, while regularizing adversarial representations toward high-score centers estimated from proxy protocols. Together, these objectives yield transferable score-inflating perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of MGSIA in deceiving advanced MLLM judges under different evaluation scenarios, highlighting the need for robust MLLM judges. Code and data will be made available at https://github.com/mala-lab/RobustMLLMJudge.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Hospital-Level Variation in Antenatal Corticosteroids for Late Preterm Births

Objective: To determine whether and to what extent hospitals across the United States vary in their use of late-preterm steroids using a novel data set in which the timing of steroid administration relative to delivery can be observed. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of singleton births with known gestational ages identified in the Premier Healthcare Database from 2015 to 2022. The primary variable of interest was hospital-level adoption of antenatal corticosteroids for late-preterm singleton deliveries, calculated as the proportion of late-preterm singleton births (34-36 completed weeks of gestation) with any betamethasone exposure during the same late-preterm period. Hospital adoption was defined as the weighted average rate of ALPS administration among late-preterm infants across the entire post-period. Hospitals were ranked by their late-preterm steroid adoption rates and categorized by quartile based on the empirical distribution. Temporal trends were assessed using annual hospital-level adoption rates and visualized using time-series plots and distributional plots. A logistic regression model was constructed to determine hospital characteristics associated with being a highest-quartile adopting hospital. Results: The analysis cohort included 728 hospitals and 5,452,791 births, of which 361,006 (6.6%) were singleton late preterm births. Hospital steroid exposure rates ranged from 0 to 82% and were categorized into quartiles based on overall exposure rate, with cutoffs at 20.6%, 29.8%, and 40.1%. Median exposure rates increased progressively across quartiles from 14.1% (IQR 9.3-17.4%) in the lowest adopting hospitals (Q1) to 47.6% (IQR 43.7-53.2%) in the highest adopting hospitals (Q4), with substantial within-quartile variation. In the multivariable model, urban location was a strong predictor of high adoption after adjustment (aOR 2.05; 95% CI 1.11-3.83, p=0.02). Compared to Midwest hospitals, Southern hospitals had significantly lower odds of being high adopters (aOR 0.37; 95% CI 0.20-0.69, p

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves $\mathsf{NP}$-Complete Problems

arXiv:2606.14806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Assuming the gravitational field is classical and that it couples to quantum fields via the semiclassical Einstein field equations, we show that the weak-field dynamics of a massive and non-relativistic qubit can in principle be used to solve an $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem in polynomial time. We attribute this vast computational power to the non-linear dynamics afforded by the semiclassical Einstein field equations. Consequently, the above two assumptions entail a violation of the Physical Extended Church–Turing Thesis, which we regard as evidence for the quantization of gravity.

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

VinQA: Visual Elements Interleaved Long-form Answer Generation for Real-World Multimodal Document QA

Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements. We introduce VinQA, a dataset for long-form answer generation where cited visual elements are explicitly interleaved with their supporting text and grounded in relevant document pages. To support this task, we study two encoding methods for feeding raw document page images into an MLLM, along with their visual-element citation mechanisms: (1) Page Encoding, which directly encodes full-page images with bounding boxes of visual elements and treats these boxed regions as citable units; and (2) Modality Encoding, which parses each page to extract text and crop visual elements, encodes them separately, and uses these cropped elements as citable units. In our experiments, we propose M-GroSE, a multimodal evaluation framework extending GroUSE to assess answers along four dimensions: completeness, answer relevancy, faithfulness, and unanswerability. We additionally report Visual Source F1 to directly measure visual citation accuracy. Although proprietary frontier models still achieve the best overall scores on the VinQA test split, fine-tuning open Qwen2.5-VL models on the training split substantially improves their performance and narrows this gap. Modality Encoding is initially more robust for complex documents with long text, many visual elements, and diverse citation requirements. After training on VinQA, however, Page Encoding reaches a comparable level, competing effectively even without the explicit parsing used in Modality Encoding. Finally, Visual G-Eval, an MLLM-based judge, confirms that fine-tuned models insert visual elements at semantically appropriate positions with faithful supporting text.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SeamEdit: A Black-Box VLM-Agnostic Pipeline for Large-Image Semantic Editing

Semantic region editing for large images must satisfy two requirements at the same time: high generative quality and natural integration with surrounding content. Some related methods rely on white-box models and leave the strong generation capability of closed-source models underexplored. Directly applying closed-source models to tiled editing, however, introduces several failure modes: semantic deformation, canvas-level alignment drift, and visible seam artifacts. This paper presents SeamEdit, a training-free and model-agnostic pipeline that treats any VLM with inpainting capability as a black-box oracle. SeamEdit mitigates these issues through a five-stage post-hoc pipeline: overlay-based tile decomposition, black-box VLM inpainting, geometric and color-consistency correction, seam-risk-based multi-candidate ranking, and dynamic-programming curved seam fusion. The pipeline reduces seam visibility and supports semantic modification of arbitrary tile regions.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Structural Role Injection in Handlebars-Templated LLM Prompts: Triple-Brace Interpolation, Delimiter Family, and the Limits of HTML Auto-Escaping

Large language model applications build prompts from templates, and Handlebars is a widely used templating engine and the default prompt-template format in Microsoft Semantic Kernel. Its double-brace {{x}} expression HTML-escapes the interpolated value and is documented as the safe default; its triple-brace {{{x}}} expression inserts the value raw. We show that this choice silently governs an application's exposure to structural role injection, where attacker-controlled data carries chat role delimiters that forge a higher-privilege turn. A model-free analysis establishes the mechanism: Handlebars escaping rewrites angle brackets but not square brackets, colons, or Markdown hashes, so it neutralises ChatML, Llama-3, and XML role delimiters (survival rate 0.00) while leaving Llama-2 [INST], legacy Human:/Assistant:, and Markdown ### delimiters intact (survival rate 1.00 for the last two). We then run 5760 trials across seven delimiter families, two attack objectives, and four models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 mini, Claude Haiku 4.5) at a combined API cost of 1.63 USD. GPT-3.5 Turbo follows the task-hijack instruction in 97% of raw and 91% of escaped trials, with the escaping protection concentrated in the angle-bracket families and absent for the colon- and Markdown-based families; the harder secret-exfiltration objective, which does not saturate, exposes the same family interaction more cleanly. Claude Haiku 4.5 resists both objectives almost entirely. The escaped default protects only the delimiter schemes whose characters HTML escaping happens to cover, gives no protection for the rest, and cannot substitute for a structural separation of instruction and data.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Search Misaligns Instruction-Tuning

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to use tools, but its impact on alignment is poorly understood. We study how agentic RL for search affects the alignment of instruction-tuned (IT) models. We find that RL-trained models inherit refusal reasoning by deflecting harmful requests into benign search queries, but this breaks down under a simple diagnostic trigger that elicits a search call before refusal can occur. Under this condition, RL models produce multi-step unsafe search actions and reasoning, reducing search query safety by up to 68.6% in Qwen and Llama models relative to their IT counterparts. The effect generalises across model families, scales, and RL algorithms. To understand why, we identify linear directions in the residual stream that control search query safety, and show that RL training progressively shifts search behaviour toward the harmful end of this direction. We thus propose representation-guided RL training, which adds a reward penalty based on projection toward the harmful search direction. Training on benign data alone, it restores IT-level alignment without reducing task accuracy and requires no additional training data. Together, our work provides the first framework for diagnosing, mechanistically analysing, and mitigating alignment degradation in agentic RL for search.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Agentic Symbolic Search: Characterizing PDEs Beyond Hand-crafted Expressions, Meshes, and Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mathematicians understand a PDE solution through mathematical structures rather than tables of computed values. Historically, this has been the product of mathematical analysis, carried out by hand for each problem individually. Neither numerical simulation nor neural networks produce those structures directly. We propose Agentic Symbolic Search (ASYS), a prior-guided framework in which an agent translates PDE theory, public problem constraints, and accumulated search experience into testable differentiable symbolic programs. The mathematical forms are refined under evolutionary search, while their continuous parameters are fit by gradient-based optimization. This makes the search an automated form of inductive-bias injection rather than blind symbolic regression. For problems with known analytical forms, ASYS recovers these forms naturally; for other problems, ASYS constructs analytical approximations which can guide mathematicians toward further analysis. In our experiments, across five problems spanning bounded dynamics, finite-time blow-up, and free-boundary focusing, ASYS produces interpretable representations, including a geometric interface formula for Allen-Cahn 2D dynamics and a nine-parameter contraction law for Keller-Segel chemotactic blow-up, in settings where no closed-form description was previously available. ASYS shows the possibility of a new paradigm for characterizing PDE solutions, beyond handcrafted analytical solutions, mesh-based numerical solutions, and neural network approximations.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AP-GRPO: Anchor-Gated Phonetic Alignment with Policy Optimization for Pathological Speech Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.15540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathological speech from patients with neurodegenerative and neuromotor disorders is often acoustically distorted and linguistically fragmented, making pathological speech reconstruction necessary to recover intended textual content from distorted and incomplete speech recordings. Crucially, such recordings are rarely uniformly degraded: some words or short phrases remain reliable and can serve as audible anchors for reconstructing the corrupted surrounding content. We introduce Anchor-gated Phonetic Group Relative Policy Optimization (AP-GRPO), a GRPO framework with phonetic reward that aligns speech language models (SLMs) through audible-anchor preservation and inter-anchor phonetic compatibility to the original speech signal. AP-GRPO consists of: (i) an anchor-gated reward that matches reliable audible anchors in clear regions; and (ii) an inter-anchor phonetic alignment reward that evaluates whether recovered contents are phonetically supported by the corresponding corrupted inter-anchor speech span. Across four disease conditions, AP-GRPO improves faithful speech reconstruction, and the learned anchor constraint automatically adapts to each condition and thus reveals interpretable disease-specific profiles: conditions with severe articulatory degradation require stronger anchor enforcement, whereas milder impairment or linguistically impaired conditions rely more on phonetic alignment for inter-anchor recovery.

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

A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-Based Transformer Method for Solving the Open Shop Scheduling Problem

arXiv:2606.13682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The open shop scheduling problem (OSSP) arises in many industrial and service settings but remains computationally challenging as the number of jobs and machines increases. While exact methods quickly become intractable, classical dispatching rules and metaheuristics may require substantial tuning to maintain solution quality at large scales. This study develops a Transformer-based scheduling policy for OSSP using an encoder-decoder architecture with multi-head attention. The model is trained on Taillard benchmark instances (4x4, 5x5, 7x7, and 10x10) using only the processing-time matrix as input and produces feasible schedules with makespans typically within 15-30% of best-known values. To evaluate scalability, the trained policy is applied without retraining to randomly generated instances from 40x40 to 100x100 and compared against classical dispatching heuristics, including SPT, LPT, MWKR, and EST. Across these large instances, the Transformer achieved average gaps of 12.89-15.12% relative to a standard lower bound. Compared with EST, the Transformer remained competitive, typically within a modest margin, while substantially outperforming SPT and LPT. These results indicate that a Transformer policy trained on small OSSP instances can generalize to substantially larger problems and provide a feature-light, learning-based alternative to classical dispatching rules.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?

World Action Models (WAMs) commonly rely on video generation to bridge visual world modeling and robot control. However, video-based WAMs face three coupled limitations: dense multi-frame future tokens make inference costly, full video prediction spends capacity on action-irrelevant temporal and appearance details, and long-horizon future imagination may introduce errors that mislead action prediction. These issues raise a simple question: Does world action model really need video generation? We propose ImageWAM, a simple WAM framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for robot action prediction. In contrast to video generation, image editing provides a better-matched prior: it only needs to model a target-frame transformation, focuses on action-relevant current-to-target visual differences, and grounds task instructions to localized visual changes through edit pretraining. In practice, ImageWAM does not decode the target frame at inference time; instead, it conditions a flow-matching action expert on the KV caches produced by image-editing denoising, using them as a compact world-action context. ImageWAM outperforms standard VLA baselines and matching competitive WAMs without additional policy pretraining across different simulator and real-world experiments. It also reduces FLOPs to 1/6 and latency to 1/4 of video-based WAMs. Attention analysis further shows that editing caches focus on task-relevant change regions, supporting image editing as an effective alternative to video-based world-action modeling.