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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FreeStyle: Free Control of Style-Content Dual-Reference Generation from Community LoRA Mining

arXiv:2606.20506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Style-content dual-reference generation aims to synthesize an image that preserves the structure and semantics of a content reference while adopting the style of a separate style reference.Despite recent progress, this setting remains challenging because models must balance content fidelity, style alignment, and instruction following avoiding semantic leakage from the style reference.A key bottleneck is the lack of large-scale triplet data with clean content-style separation and broad long-tail style coverage.In this work, we propose FreeStyle, a scalable dual-reference generation framework based on community LoRA mining.We treat community LoRAs as compositional anchors for style and content, and design a rigorous generation and filtering pipeline to construct large-scale Style-Reference and Content-Reference triplets across multiple base models.To address content leakage, we adopt a two-stage curriculum with stage-specific disentanglement mechanisms: an attention-level enrichment constraint that suppresses style-reference leakage in the style-transfer stage, and a frequency-aware RoPE modulation strategy that targets positional-correspondence-based leakage in the harder dual-reference stage.We also introduce a benchmark covering both style-reference and dual-reference generation, with evaluations on style similarity, content preservation, aesthetics, instruction following, and leakage rejection. The benchmark incorporates a style-invariant Content Alignment Score (CAS) and introduces a calibrated VLM-based Rejection Score for evaluating generation reliability and leakage suppression.Extensive experiments show that our model achieves a strong balance among style alignment, content preservation, and leakage suppression.

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

Learning Red Agent Policy from Observations for Neurosymbolic Autonomous Cyber Agents

arXiv:2606.18223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With sophisticated cyber-attacks becoming increasingly prevalent, modern networks require intelligent autonomous cyber-defense agents trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL). These agents employ neurosymbolic approaches such as behavior trees with learning-enabled components (LECs) to learn, reason, adapt, and implement security rules while maintaining critical operations. However, these autonomous networks are partially observable systems, i.e., the cyber-attacker's (red agent's) actions are not observable, making it difficult for the defender to predict red actions, learn red policies, or assess the attacker's intrusion levels. To address this, we propose a Policy Learning Technique using imitation learning to learn policies for partially observable RL agents with discrete states and discrete actions. We apply this technique in an autonomous cyber environment to predict red agent's actions from network observations and defender actions. Integrated with a neurosymbolic cyber-defense agent, our method effectively handles different red policies and achieves high prediction accuracy across diverse simulated scenarios.

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

A Study of Belief Revision Postulates in Multi-Agent Systems (Extended Version)

arXiv:2605.02249v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the belief revision problem in epistemic planning, i.e., what will be the beliefs of all agents in a multi-agent system after an agent gains the belief in some state property. Based on the standard representation in epistemic planning of agents' beliefs via a single multi-agent Kripke model, we generalize the classical AGM belief revision postulates to the multi-agent setting, with the aim to provide a formal framework for evaluating dynamic epistemic reasoning frameworks in which the beliefs of all agents as the result of actions are computed. As an example of a simple operator that satisfies all of the generalized AGM postulates, we present generalized full-meet multi-agent belief revision. We moreover define a generalization of the standard postulates for iterated revision, present a more sophisticated, event model based revision operator, and discuss the potential issues in defining an epistemic operator on Kripke models that can satisfy all of the generalized postulates for iterated multi-agent belief revision.

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

RoSE: Round-robin Synthetic Data Evaluation for Selecting LLM Generators without Human Test Sets

LLMs are powerful generators of synthetic data, which are used for training smaller, specific models. This is especially valuable for low-resource languages, where human-labelled data is scarce but LLMs can still produce high-quality text. However, LLMs differ in how useful their outputs are for training. Selecting the best LLM as a generator is challenging because extrinsic evaluation requires costly human annotations (which are often unavailable for low-resource languages), while intrinsic metrics correlate poorly with downstream performance. We introduce Round robin Synthetic data Evaluation (RoSE), a proxy metric for selecting the best LLM generator without human test sets. RoSE trains a small model on the outputs of a candidate generator (LLM) and then evaluates it on generated synthetic examples from all other candidate LLMs. The final RoSE score is the mean performance of this small model. Across six LLMs, eleven languages, and three tasks (sentiment, topic, intent), RoSE identifies the optimal generator more often than any other intrinsic heuristics. RoSE outperforms intrinsic heuristics and comes within 0.76 percentage points of the optimal generator baseline. This result is measured in terms of downstream performance, obtained by training a small model on the chosen generator's outputs (optimal vs. proxy metric selected) and evaluating it on human-labelled test data. Additionally, RoSE is the only metric to achieve a positive correlation with performance on human test data.

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

Planning with the Views via Scene Self-Exploration

Can VLMs predict how each camera move changes the view, and plan many such moves ahead? We call this capability view planning, requiring (1)understanding how a single action transforms the view, and (2)composing many such transformations across multi-turn plans to identify a target view. We probe both abilities in our proposed ViewSuite, a 3D point-cloud environment on real ScanNet scenes. Across 13 frontier VLMs, a critical planning gap emerges: they possess basic view-action knowledge but fail to compose it across multi-turn plans, with the gap widening as viewpoint distance grows. To close this gap, we propose an iterative framework that alternates self-exploration with view graph distillation. The key insight is that all exploration trajectories, regardless of their outcome, collectively form a view graph that compactly captures how viewpoints connect across a scene. Distilling this graph into diverse supervised tasks reshapes the policy distribution and overcomes the sparse rewards that stall pure RL. This improves Qwen2.5-VL-7B from 2.5% to 47.8% on interactive view planning, surpassing GPT-5.4 Pro (18.5%) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (21.4%). Self-exploration emerges as a promising path toward VLMs that can actively reason and plan in 3D space. Code and Data are at https://viewsuite.github.io.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Point-Wise Geometry-Aware Transformer for Partial-to-Full Point Cloud Registration in Computer-Assisted Surgery

Partial-to-full registration remains challenging due to varying overlap ratios, fluctuating point densities, and the presence of noise. While transformers have shown strong potential for point cloud processing, prior methods typically confine them to global context aggregation, overlooking fine-grained local geometry crucial for accurate correspondence. We propose GAPR-Net, a learning-based point cloud registration framework with a coarse-to-fine architecture that combines convolution and transformer modules, in which local and global information is fused between the partial and full point clouds using a cross-attention mechanism. To achieve this, a transformation-invariant point-wise geometric feature representation is proposed, which can robustly capture relative geometric features for individual points with respect to their neighboring points. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted on four geometrically distinct bones, including the tibia, femur, pelvis, and thoracic cartilage. The overall registration recall reaches 94.2\%, the method results in a low RMSE of 1.992 mm and $R^2$ values of 0.908 and 0.974 for rotation and translation, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the partial-to-full point cloud registration problem. The proposed method enables highly accurate 3D point cloud registration using partial observation, providing a critical foundation for precise surgical navigation and robotic interventions in computer-assisted surgery. The code will be accessed after the double-blind review process.

08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition

by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Decoupling Semantics from Distortions: Multi-Scale Two-Stream Vision-Language Alignment for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

Authors:

Existing vision-language model (VLM)-based AI-generated image quality assessment (AIGIQA) methods suffer from a fundamental semantic-distortion dimensional conflict: monolithic representations optimized for semantic discrimination inherently entangle compositional understanding with low-level perceptual sensitivity, rendering them blind to fine-grained quality degradations. We introduce MST-CLIPIQA, a multi-scale two-stream framework that achieves hierarchical vision-language alignment through explicit representational decoupling. Our architecture leverages dual CLIP encoders with complementary patch granularities: coarse-grained streams capture global semantic coherence while fine-grained streams preserve textural signatures and artifact patterns. An information bottleneck-inspired gated fusion mechanism performs adaptive cross-scale distillation, with optional cross-attention enabling prompt-anchored correspondence evaluation when generation prompts are available. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks establish new state-of-the-art results, achieving average improvements of 1.11 percent SRCC on quality and 2.35 percent SRCC on text-image correspondence prediction, while maintaining efficiency with only 0.8M trainable parameters. Our project is available at https://github.com/YMlinfeng/MST-CLIPIQA.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

arXiv:2606.20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.

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

How Much Do Reviews Really Contribute? A Study on Text-Enriched Matrix Factorization for Recommendations

arXiv:2606.16973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Incorporating textual reviews into a Recommender System has become a prominent strategy for enriching collaborative signals with semantic information. However, the actual contribution of review-derived representations remains an open question, particularly when strong collaborative baselines are employed. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of textual information on Matrix Factorization by introducing and comparing three enrichment strategies over a common collaborative backbone. First, we propose a learnable gating mechanism that adaptively balances collaborative and textual signals during training. This mechanism is applied to two distinct review representations: (i) aggregated topic profiles extracted from user and item histories, and (ii) full text embedding representations derived from reviews. Additionally, we explore a cross-attention mechanism that identifies and emphasizes the most informative dimensions of the textual representation before fusion with collaborative factors. We evaluate six variants: pure, enriched with topic profiles and text via gating; enriched with topics and text via gating; and enhanced with cross-attention over textual features. Experiments across multiple review-based datasets reveal that although adaptive fusion mechanisms improve representation flexibility, the marginal contribution of textual signals remains limited compared to the collaborative backbone. These findings suggest that, under typical rating-prediction settings, collaborative information continues to dominate performance, raising important considerations for the effective integration of semantic review signals into recommendation models.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Pythagoras-Prover: Advancing Efficient Formal Proving via Augmented Lean Formalisation

arXiv:2606.12594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Lean theorem provers achieve strong performance only with substantial training and inference compute, driven in part by scarce verified proof data and the long reasoning traces of formal proof search, making both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and sampling expensive. We introduce Pythagoras-Prover, a compute-efficient open-source family of Lean theorem provers built for practical compute budgets. The family spans two generation paradigms: autoregressive models at 4B and 32B parameters, and a first proof-of-concept diffusion-based prover (4B) that iteratively refines Lean proofs at inference time. For training efficiency, we build a Lean-verified corpus stratified into easy, medium, and hard problems for curriculum SFT, so models acquire proof skills progressively from shorter, simpler proofs to longer, harder ones. During SFT, a dynamic proof-reasoning filtering scheme preserves informative proof traces while keeping each instance within an 8k-token context budget. We also introduce Augmented Lean Formalisation (ALF), which expands scarce verified corpora into variants of formal statements, populated via self-distillation for extra training signal without formally verifying every mutated instance. By perturbing known problems while preserving their formal character, ALF reduces reliance on any statement's surface form. Empirically, Pythagoras-Prover-4B surpasses DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B at pass@32 on MiniF2F-Test (86.1% vs 82.4%) with ~167x fewer parameters, while Pythagoras-Prover-32B sets the open-source state of the art at 93.0% on MiniF2F-Test and solves 93 of 672 PutnamBench problems. We release MiniF2F-ALF, an ALF-mutated contamination-sensitive benchmark on which every evaluated model loses accuracy; here our 32B remains strongest and our 4B matches the prior state of the art, Goedel-Prover-V2-32B.

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

Biarchetype analysis for univariate functional data. An application to macroeconomic financial time series

arXiv:2606.15881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce biarchetype analysis for the first time in the context of univariate functional data. This unsupervised methodology extends archetype analysis by simultaneously identifying archetypal structures across both the cases (countries, in our application) and the temporal argument. Both cases and time points are expressed as mixtures of biarchetypes, yielding a concise and highly interpretable representation of complex functional observations. Although biarchetype analysis is not intended as a clustering technique, it offers superior interpretability compared with biclustering approaches, as it is based on extreme, representative patterns rather than average centroids, thereby enhancing human comprehension. We apply the proposed method to 10-year government bond yields of European countries over the period 2001-2025. The results identify three distinct time regimes (the pre-crisis period, the euro-area sovereign debt crisis, and the post-crisis period), and reveal Germany, Greece, and Hungary as country archetypes.

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

Retrofitters, pragmatists and activists: Public interest litigation for accountable automated decision-making

arXiv:2511.03211v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper examines the role of public interest litigation in promoting accountability for AI and automated decision-making (ADM) in Australia. Since ADM regulation faces political and geopolitical headwinds, effective governance will have to rely on the enforcement of existing laws. Drawing on interviews with Australian public interest litigators, technology policy activists, and technology law scholars, the paper positions public interest litigation as part of a larger ecosystem for transparency, accountability and justice with respect to ADM. The paper explores the tactics and strategies of what one participant described as 'retrofitting' old laws to ADM. These go beyond creative legal argumentation, to encompass practices of community-building, collaboration on theories of change, canny selection of clients and causes of action, and the alignment of the interests of stakeholders in litigation. Naturally, the paper also contends with the limits of these strategies, and of the Australian legal system. Where limits are, however, capable of being overcome, the paper presents findings on urgent needs: the enabling institutional arrangements without which effective litigation and accountability will falter. The paper is relevant to law and technology scholars; individuals and groups harmed by ADM; public interest litigators and technology lawyers; civil society and advocacy organisations; and policymakers.

17.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

pyhgf: A neural network library for predictive coding

by Nicolas Legrand, Lilian Weber, Peter Thestrup Waade, Anna Hedvig Møller Daugaard, Mojtaba Khodadadi, Nace Mikuš, Christoph Mathys Bayesian models of cognition have gained considerable traction in computational neuroscience and psychiatry. Their scopes are now expected to expand rapidly to artificial intelligence, providing general inference frameworks to support embodied, adaptable, and energy-efficient autonomous agents. A central theory in this domain is predictive coding, which posits that learning and behaviour are driven by hierarchical probabilistic inferences about the causes of sensory inputs. Biological realism constrains these networks to rely on simple local computations in the form of precision-weighted predictions and prediction errors. This can make this framework highly efficient, but its implementation comes with unique challenges on the software development side. Embedding such models in standard neural network libraries often becomes limiting, as these libraries’ compilation and differentiation backends can force a conceptual separation between optimization algorithms and the systems being optimized. This critically departs from other biological principles such as self-monitoring, self-organisation, cellular growth, and functional plasticity. In this paper, we introduce pyhgf: a Python package backed by JAX and Rust for creating, manipulating, and sampling dynamic networks for predictive coding. We improve over other frameworks by enclosing the network components as transparent, modular, and malleable variables in the message-passing steps. The resulting graphs can implement arbitrary algorithms as belief propagation. Moreover, the transparency of core variables can also translate into inference processes that leverage self-organisation principles and express structure learning, meta-learning, or causal discovery as the consequence of network structural adaptation to surprising inputs. The main functions of the library are differentiable and seamlessly integrate into sampling or optimization workflows. Additionally, we offer generalized Bayesian filtering and the hierarchical Gaussian filter as key examples of dynamic networks implemented in our library. The source code, tutorials, and documentation are hosted under the main repository at https://github.com/ComputationalPsychiatry/pyhgf.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A systematic imputation framework for sparse, multimodal space biology datasets: application to retinal imaging and omics from the RR9 mission

Space biology experiments are expensive, logistically complex, and inherently limited in sample size, resulting in datasets that are frequently incomplete and highly heterogeneous (2). Missing data is a fundamental barrier to building reliable computational models of how the human body responds to spaceflight. This work introduces a systematic framework for addressing missing data through imputation. We developed a validated four-stage framework for imputation specifically designed to preserve biological signal needed for digital twin development, while quantifying trade-offs in downstream analyses. Using retinal imaging and omics data from the NASA RR9 mission as a case study (9), we demonstrate how to diagnose why data is missing(10), select and optimize appropriate imputation strategies (5,10), and rigorously evaluate whether imputed data remains biologically meaningful. A key finding of this work is that while imputation substantially improves the performance of predictive models, it can simultaneously obscure subtle biological patterns; a critical trade-off that researchers must understand before applying these methods (11). This framework provides practical, actionable guidance for space biologists and data scientists working with sparse, multimodal datasets in space biology, and represents a foundational step toward more complete and reliable data-driven models of human physiology in extreme environments.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Stochastic signal sensing with finite energy and dead time at the fundamental quantum limit

arXiv:2606.18133v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State preparation, measurement, and reset operations take finite time and use finite energy in realistic experiments, yet the impact of this on optimal quantum metrological protocols is not properly understood. We study the effect on sensing a stochastic signal, relevant for the detection of ultralight dark matter and other searches for fundamental physics. We prove that two-mode squeezed vacuum is the optimal probe state given a finite mean-energy constraint for a family of incoherent sensing problems, including noise sensing and quantum illumination. For estimating a gain independent of a loss, we show that entanglement is a required resource to achieve the fundamental quantum limit and observe a non-Gaussian to Gaussian transition in the optimal unentangled state as the dead time increases. We apply our results to bulk acoustic wave resonators.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

P3D-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Parametric 3D Generation and Structural Reasoning

Multimodal large language models can write code to produce complex programs as well as use programs to do 3D modeling, which opens up a new avenue for 3D generation powered by their priors, world knowledge and reasoning. Yet existing benchmarks rarely evaluate 3D modeling through code. Such modeling demands more than runnable code: from a text or visual specification, a model must generate a parametric 3D program that is geometrically precise, semantically aligned and assembly-consistent. We introduce P3D-Bench, a benchmark for parametric 3D generation. Unlike a 3D mesh, a parametric 3D program exposes explicit dimensions, construction operations and part relations, revealing whether a model recovers a design's structure, not just its appearance. Under a unified protocol, P3D-Bench covers three task families (Text-to-3D, Image-to-3D and Assembly-3D) and scores each output for executability, geometric fidelity, topology, text-grounded constraints, multiview semantic alignment and part-level structure. We evaluate frontier MLLMs and text-only LLMs on 400 text cases, 400 image cases and 203 annotated assemblies, with domain-specific models as reference points. Our extensive evaluation yields three findings. First, assemblies are the hardest setting, where models still fail to compose multiple parts into a coherent structure. Second, models can often recover the global shape and semantic identity of the target object, yet fail to reproduce the precise parametric geometry specified by the input. Third, part-level modeling remains weak on assemblies, where models recover neither the geometry of each part nor the right number of parts. These results position P3D-Bench as a benchmark for evaluating precise parametric geometry and part-level structure in parametric 3D generation.

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

SkillJect: Effectively Automating Skill-Based Prompt Injection for Skill-Enabled Agents

arXiv:2602.14211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills extend LLM agents with task-specific instructions, executable scripts, and auxiliary resources, improving reusability but creating a new supply-chain attack surface. A malicious or compromised skill can be repeatedly loaded as trusted guidance and steer downstream tool use. Existing skill-based prompt-injection attacks are often manual and brittle, because explicit malicious instructions are rejected or ignored when they are not aligned with the original workflow. We propose SkillJect, the first automated framework for generating poisoned skills against skill-enabled agent systems. SkillJect uses two coordinated channels. In the artifact channel, it hides the payload inside an auxiliary helper script. In the instruction channel, it rewrites SKILL.md with a front-loaded inducement strategy, placing injected content at the beginning and framing the helper script as a mandatory prerequisite or initialization step. The rewritten instruction explicitly references the helper-script path and provides an executable example command, making the helper appear to be a legitimate setup step before normal skill operations. SkillJect further adopts a closed-loop multi-agent process to improve attack effectiveness. An Attack Agent generates poisoned skills, a Victim Agent executes downstream tasks with the poisoned skill, and an Evaluate Agent inspects execution traces to determine whether the hidden payload was executed. The Attack Agent then uses this feedback to diagnose failure causes and rewrite SKILL.md, while keeping the payload fixed. Experiments across skill-enabled platforms, backend LLMs, and attack categories show that SkillJect substantially outperforms naive direct injection and prior manual skill-injection attacks, highlighting poisoned skills as a persistent threat in reusable skill ecosystems.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SHIFT: Semantic Harmonization via Index-side Feature Transformation for Multilingual Information Retrieval

arXiv:2606.18801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the rapid expansion of massive multilingual corpora, Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR) has emerged as a critical technology for global information access. MLIR enables users to retrieve semantically relevant documents from multilingual text collections using a single-language query. However, recent multilingual dense retrieval models often exhibit a strong preference for documents in the same language as the query. This leads to severe language bias, where top-ranked results are dominated by documents of specific languages, even when documents in other languages contain more semantically relevant information. To address this issue, we propose SHIFT, a training-free method applicable in the indexing stage. Specifically, SHIFT utilizes parallel translation pairs to estimate a relative language vector for each target language with respect to a source language. Subsequently, SHIFT corrects the language-specific offset by subtracting this relative language vector from document embeddings during indexing. Our comprehensive evaluation across four MLIR benchmarks and diverse dense retrieval models confirms that SHIFT can effectively mitigate language bias and enhance MLIR performance.

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

A Red-Team Study of Anthropic Fable 5 & Opus 4.8 Models

Authors:

We evaluate the adversarial robustness of two frontier large language models (LLMs) developed by Anthropic, Fable 5 and Opus 4.8, against four families of automated jailbreak attack across 7 826 harmful intents spanning a ten-category harm taxonomy. Using the HackAgent red-teaming framework, hundreds of thousands of adversarial attempts were generated and every apparent success was independently re-adjudicated by a panel of three judge models (majority vote). Both models resist the majority of attacks, but the residual surface is larger than aggregate framing suggests: it is dominated by adaptive iterative attacks, while static obfuscation is near-fully neutralised. The strongest adaptive search (tree-of-attacks) breaks Opus 4.8 on 11.5% of intents overall, whereas Fable 5 stays in the single digits (6.1% worst-case). Aggregate rates therefore should not be read as reassurance. Even in these hardened configurations, the two models produced 1 620 (Opus 4.8) and 702 (Fable 5) panel-confirmed harmful completions spanning every harm category, located automatically, cheaply, and within the first one or two refinement steps by an attacker model with no human expert in the loop. The reasonable conclusion is that even the best, most-tested frontier models remain reliably breakable under sustained automated pressure.

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

MemBoost: A Memory-Boosted Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but incur high inference cost in real-world services, especially under workloads with repeated or near-duplicate queries across users and sessions. In this work, we propose MemBoost, a memory-boosted LLM serving framework that enables a lightweight model to reuse previously generated answers and retrieve relevant supporting information for cheap inference, while selectively escalating difficult or uncertain queries to a stronger model. Unlike standard retrieval-augmented generation, which primarily grounds a single response, MemBoost is designed for interactive settings by supporting answer reuse, continual memory growth, and cost-aware routing. Experiments across multiple models under simulated workloads show that MemBoost substantially reduces expensive large-model invocations and overall inference cost, while maintaining high answer quality comparable to the strong model baseline.