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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

M-CTX: Exact and Scalable Spatial Context Retrieval for Trajectory Analytics

arXiv:2606.15244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern trajectory predictors increasingly condition on external spatial context, such as map geometry, signed distance fields (SDFs), and nearby moving agents. While this context improves prediction quality, constructing it for every training anchor has become a hidden systems bottleneck. In a representative maritime AIS pipeline, spatial context construction requires roughly 17 CPU-days for a 5.48M-anchor corpus, dominating the cost of the downstream predictor. We present M-CTX, an exact and scalable spatial context-retrieval framework for trajectory analytics. M-CTX recasts context construction as an ingest-once, query-many spatial database workload and replaces three brute-force stages – OSM range retrieval, SDF computation, and moving-vessel neighbour lookup – with composable, index-backed operators. Its learned range-index backend, BR-LZ, provides recall-complete MBR-overlap range retrieval and reduces candidate amplification by 1.1x–2.7x relative to global-expansion one-curve baselines. Across four maritime regions, eight baseline systems, synthetic workloads with up to 40M spatial features, and 10^7-record AIS streams, M-CTX reproduces the reference context exactly. On the 5.48M-anchor corpus, it reduces context construction from about 17 CPU-days to 1.8 hours, a measured 226x end-to-end speed-up. An optional storage mode further compresses SDF context by 64x with only a 0.04 m ADE change. These results establish exact spatial context retrieval as a first-class database problem in modern trajectory analytics. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/mark000071/M-CTX-Traj.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

On the Variance of Temporal Difference Learning and its Reduction Using Control Variates

arXiv:2606.20357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the variance of temporal difference (TD) learning using the phased setting with tabular representation, and show that one of the mechanisms behind its ability to reduce variance is by effectively aggregating over a larger number of independent trajectories. Based on this insight, we demonstrate that (1) the variance of TD is asymptotically bounded from above by Monte Carlo (MC) estimators, and (2) shorter horizon updates incurs less variance for a fixed number of samples. Beyond TD, we show that Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE), a method for estimating the advantage function, can be seen as a type of regression-adjusted control variate, which achieves a tighter bound on the variance compared to TD in the large-sample limit. Finally, we numerically illustrate the behaviors of these estimators with carefully designed environments.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

The Risk Shadow of Principal Component Analysis: When 99.9999% Variance Preservation Causes Catastrophic Decision Errors

arXiv:2606.14533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) preserves variance, not the information needed to detect rare catastrophic events. This paper proves the existence of a {\it Risk Shadow}: PCA can retain over 99.9999 percent of total variance while completely erasing all signal about rare, high-impact failures. When this happens, even the best possible classifier operating on the PCA representation reduces to a constant predictor. The root cause is a fundamental mismatch between variance maximization and tail risk awareness. To break the shadow, we introduce Expectile PCA (ExPCA) and Tail-Preserving PCA (TP-PCA), two methods that reweight the data covariance toward high-impact events. We prove theoretically that ExPCA strictly outperforms PCA in retaining rare-event information, and we validate our claims on synthetic data and a real-world credit card fraud detection benchmark. Our results call for a fundamental rethinking of variance-based dimensionality reduction in high-stakes decisions.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Boltzmann-Like Occupation of Nonequilibrium Steady States on Dense Networks

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central problem in statistical physics is to extend the Boltzmann distribution to nonequilibrium steady states (NESS). We prove that NESS on large dense networks have Boltzmann-like occupation despite extensive entropy production. We further show that the active-matter heuristic of "low rattling" is asymptotically exact. Intuitively, these NESS spend a greater fraction of their time in states they leave more slowly. This explanation extends to the broader class of "equiaccessible" steady states, which play a role in our analysis akin to that of equilibrium in linear response.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

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

Rethinking Air-Ground Collaboration: A Progressive Cross-Task Benchmark and Socialized Learning Framework

Air-ground collaborative perception is crucial for robust visual understanding in real-world dynamic environments. However, existing studies typically formulate collaboration as single-task cross-view fusion, overlooking the functional dependencies among localization, target association, and fine-grained parsing. In addition, the heterogeneous nature of aerial and ground views introduces substantial geometric, scale, and occlusion discrepancies, making uniform feature sharing vulnerable to negative transfer. To tackle these issues, we model air-ground perception as a progressive cross-task collaboration task and construct the Air-Ground Progressive Collaboration (AGPC) benchmark, a spatio-temporally aligned benchmark comprising more than 745K raw video frames. Built upon this benchmark, we propose Socialized Co-Perception (SCP), a coarse-to-fine framework that organizes collaboration progressively from aerial global localization to ground target association and identity-aware parsing. Its core module, the Dual-Layer Router (DLR), decouples input-side multi-scale expert selection from output-side task-conditioned modulation, enabling selective cross-view and cross-task interaction while suppressing harmful interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SCP. It achieves a 3.73\% coevolutionary gain and a 7.86\% improvement in average downstream performance. These results show that task-conditioned collaboration is more effective than uniform fusion for heterogeneous air-ground perception. The code is available at https://github.com/g1136639260-spec/AGSCP.

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

Geometric bias in eigenspace perturbation under random heterogeneous noise

arXiv:2606.11263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spectral methods rely fundamentally on the stability of principal eigenspaces under random perturbations. Classically, this stability is quantified by the Davis-Kahan and Wedin theorems, which bound the eigenspace error using the operator norm of the noise and the relevant spectral gaps. While these worst-case bounds are sharp for arbitrary deterministic perturbations, they can be wasteful in the low-rank signal-plus-random-noise setting, as they fail to capture the fine-grained interaction between the signal geometry and the noise distribution. In this paper, we study the spectral perturbation of signal-plus-noise matrices corrupted by sparse, random noise with an arbitrary, inhomogeneous variance profile. We demonstrate that under heterogeneous noise variances, the empirical eigenvectors suffer a systematic, deterministic geometric bias that is entirely invisible to classical perturbation bounds. By leveraging the Quadratic Vector Equation (QVE) and establishing fine-grained isotropic local laws, we derive near-optimal, non-asymptotic perturbation bounds for the leading eigenspaces in the operator and $2\to\infty$ norms. The bounds separate the usual signal-to-noise contribution, stochastic fluctuations, and structured geometric bias terms determined by the alignment between the signal eigenspaces and the row-wise variance profile.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Granularity-Regulated Adaptive Computational Efficiency for Optimal Verification in Test-Time Scaling

Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by investing additional compute at inference time. A central component of TTS is the verifier, which selects or scores candidate solutions to guide the search process. While prior work has explored the benefit of verification, a fundamental question remains underexplored: what is the optimal granularity of verification under a given compute budget? Coarse-grained outcome reward models (ORMs) and fine-grained process reward models (PRMs) represent two extremes, yet neither alone achieves compute-optimality across all regimes. In this paper, we establish a unified theoretical framework, called GRACE (\underline{G}ranularity-\underline{R}egulated \underline{A}daptive \underline{C}omputational \underline{E}fficiency), that characterizes the optimal verification granularity as an explicit function of problem difficulty, verifier accuracy, and compute budget. We prove that there exists a phase transition: fine-grained verification dominates when either the compute budget is large or the problem is hard, whereas coarse-grained verification is preferred in the low-budget, easy-problem regime. Our theory unifies Best-of-$N$, beam search, and step-level MCTS within a single Pareto-optimality framework, and motivates an adaptive granularity strategy that provably achieves the compute-performance Pareto frontier. Empirical results on MATH-500, GSM8K, and AIME benchmarks corroborate all four theoretical claims, with our adaptive strategy outperforming fixed-granularity baselines by up to 3.1\% accuracy at matched compute.

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

Proact-VL: A Proactive VideoLLM for Real-Time AI Companions

Proactive and real-time interactive experiences are essential for human-like AI companions, yet face three key challenges: (1) achieving low-latency inference under continuous streaming inputs, (2) autonomously deciding when to respond, and (3) controlling both quality and quantity of generated content to meet real-time constraints. In this work, we instantiate AI companions through two gaming scenarios, commentator and guide, selected for their suitability for automatic evaluation. We introduce the Live Gaming Benchmark, a large-scale dataset with three representative scenarios: solo commentary, co-commentary, and user guidance, and present Proact-VL, a general framework that shapes multimodal language models into proactive, real-time interactive agents capable of human-like environment perception and interaction. Extensive experiments show Proact-VL achieves superior response latency and quality while maintaining strong video understanding capabilities, demonstrating its practicality for real-time interactive applications.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LSTM-Based Detection of Structural Breaks in Property Insurance Loss Reserving: A Climate-Informed Approach

arXiv:2606.11463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate loss reserving is foundational to insurer solvency, yet accelerating climate driven catastrophes systematically violate the stability assumptions on which traditional actuarial methods depend. This white paper presents a research program testing whether Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks can detect and adapt to these structural breaks faster and more accurately than Chain Ladder, Bornhuetter Ferguson, and Cape Cod methods. Using 15 plus years of regulatory development triangle data from Florida and Louisiana, enriched with NOAA hurricane intensity indices and sea surface temperatures, we hypothesize a targeted improvement of 15, 20% in reserve accuracy for catastrophe exposed years, a threshold grounded both in the prior neural network reserving literature and in the formal convergence results developed here. Beyond empirical validation, we develop a theoretical framework grounding LSTM structural break detection in probabilistic terms, providing formal performance guarantees that compensate for the limited number of catastrophe events in the test period. We document the research design, methodology, expected contributions, and a candid assessment of limitations.

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

Unsupervised Diffusion Solver for Combinatorial Optimization via Combinatorial Adjoint Matching

arXiv:2605.30920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based neural solvers have shown strong promise for combinatorial optimization (CO), but existing methods typically rely on supervised training with large collections of near-optimal solutions. In this work, we extend adjoint-based trajectory optimization methods to discrete combinatorial domains. We formulate diffusion-based CO as a stochastic control problem over Continuous-Time Markov Chains and introduce discrete adjoint dynamics for propagating optimization signals through discrete generative trajectories. Building on this formulation, we propose Combinatorial Adjoint Matching (CAM), an unsupervised training framework for discrete diffusion solvers with structured and low-variance trajectory-level optimization signals. Empirically, CAM consistently outperforms existing unsupervised diffusion baselines and achieves performance competitive with strong supervised diffusion solvers and even traditional solvers across diverse combinatorial optimization problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/Shengyu-Feng/CAM.

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

The Register Gap: A Meaning Intelligence Framework for Nigerian Public Discourse

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task (positive, negative, neutral). We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate a frontier language model (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. The headline finding is the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. The composite Meaning Intelligence Score increases by 5.4 points (73.2 to 78.6) under schema-informed prompting, with the largest practical gains in register identification, coded-subtext detection (+10 points), and strategic action recommendation (+10.3 points). We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and the 30-item public calibration set to support reproducibility, while retaining a private holdout corpus for contamination-protected evaluation.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

14.
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.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Beyond Uniform Forgetting: A Study of Sequential Direct Preference Optimization Across Preference Settings

Aligning language models with human preferences often requires optimising multiple behavioural objectives. A practical approach is to apply these objectives sequentially using preference optimisation methods such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO), but it remains unclear whether later training uniformly degrades preferences learned earlier or whether the effect depends on the relationship between objectives. We study sequential DPO across four preference settings covering distributional conflict, multi-attribute interaction, strong safety signal, and compatible response-quality objectives. Using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with LoRA adapters, we evaluate all objectives after every stage with a fixed base-model reference. We find that sequential DPO does not produce a single forgetting pattern; preference change ranges from partial degradation to stability, pair-level redistribution, or positive transfer depending on objective relationship, signal strength, and training order. Pair-level analysis using length-normalised policy margins shows that aggregate metrics can mask heterogeneous changes across preference pairs, whereas quartile decomposition reveals that high-confidence pairs can either degrade or improve depending on the setting. Mechanistic diagnostics show that Stage~2 gradients and adapter updates are near-orthogonal to the previous objective across all settings, providing little evidence that direct gradient opposition is the primary driver. These findings suggest that future sequential alignment pipelines should account for objective compatibility and signal strength, rather than assuming that later objectives affect earlier preferences uniformly.

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

HanDyVQA: A Video QA Benchmark for Fine-Grained Hand-Object Interaction Dynamics

Hand-object interaction (HOI) inherently involves dynamics where human manipulations produce distinct spatio-temporal effects on objects. However, existing semantic HOI benchmarks focused either on manipulation or on the resulting effects at a coarse level, lacking fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning to capture the underlying dynamics in HOI. We introduce HanDyVQA, a fine-grained video question-answering benchmark that comprehensively covers both the manipulation and effect aspects of HOI. HanDyVQA comprises six complementary question types (Action, Process, Objects, Location, State Change, and Object Parts), totalling 11.1K multiple-choice QA pairs. Collected QA pairs recognizing manipulation styles, hand/object motions, and part-level state changes. HanDyVQA also includes 10.3K segmentation masks for Objects and Object Parts questions, enabling the evaluation of object/part-level reasoning in video object segmentation. We evaluated recent video foundation models on our benchmark and found that even the best-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, reached only 73% average accuracy, which is far from human performance (97%). Further analysis shows the remaining challenges in spatial relationship, motion, and part-level geometric understanding. We also found that integrating explicit HOI-related cues into visual features improves performance, offering insights for developing future models with a deeper understanding of HOI dynamics.

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

Aligning Implied Statements for Implicit Hate Speech Generalizability with Context-Bounded Semi-hard Negative Mining

Classifying implicit hate speech remains a challenge, as intent is often masked through insinuation and context rather than explicit slurs. Prior supervised contrastive approaches improve in-domain detection but can overfit surface cues and struggle to transfer across datasets. We propose ImpSH, a triplet-based framework that aligns posts with implied statements when available and uses context-bounded semi-hard negatives to focus learning on near confusions. We also examine AugSH, which forms positives via data augmentation. In controlled evaluations on IHC, SBIC, and DynaHate with BERT and HateBERT, ImpSH is a viable alternative to standard supervised contrastive baselines and often improves cross-domain performance under matched preprocessing and tuning budgets. Representation analysis using alignment and uniformity indicates tighter positive pairs with balanced global spread, and qualitative nearest-neighbor case studies illustrate typical false negatives under domain shift. These results demonstrate that aligning posts with their implied statements via context-bounded mining provides a more stable, bijective-like mapping to related insinuations, overcoming the volatility inherent in traditional clustering-based representation learning.

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

Optimal Transport for Machine Learners

arXiv:2505.06589v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern machine learning repeatedly manipulates probability measures: empirical datasets, generated samples, latent distributions, class-conditional laws, particle systems, weights of wide networks and attention patterns. Optimal transport is useful in this setting because it compares such objects by asking how mass should move. It therefore combines a statistically meaningful notion of discrepancy with a geometry of interpolation, dual certificates and variational dynamics. This makes OT a common language for losses, generative modeling, domain adaptation, robust learning, barycenters, gradient flows and mean-field descriptions of learning algorithms. This book presents the main OT techniques with these machine-learning uses in mind. It starts from finite assignment and the Monge map viewpoint, passes to Kantorovich couplings and dual potentials, and then explains the algorithmic ideas that make transport usable: linear programming, semi-discrete cells, Sinkhorn scaling and low-dimensional projections. The same objects are then reused as a geometry of measures, giving Wasserstein distances, barycenters, gradient flows, dynamic formulations and Gaussian/Bures formulas. The final chapters emphasize the variants most relevant to modern ML: divergences and adversarial losses, entropic and unbalanced relaxations, robust or spectral ground geometries, Gromov and quantum extensions, and transport-based views of generative models, mean-field networks and attention dynamics. The goal is to keep the mathematics explicit while exposing the computational and geometric intuitions needed to turn OT into a working toolbox for machine learners.

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

ATLAS: Active Theory Learning for Automated Science

arXiv:2606.12386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Advancing scientific understanding through mechanistic modeling requires posing the right experimental questions to yield maximally informative data. To automate this pursuit within cognitive science, we introduce ATLAS (Active Theory Learning for Automated Science), an active learning framework for the data-driven discovery of interpretable behavioral models. ATLAS iterates between generating mechanistic hypotheses–instantiated as a diverse ensemble of sparse neural networks (Disentangled RNNs)–and designing experiments that optimally distinguish between them. We test this approach on the problem of recovering reinforcement learning agents from their behavior in bandit tasks. ATLAS designs varied sequences of qualitatively novel experiments with temporal structure tailored to underlying agent characteristics. The models trained on these experiments are evaluated against a comprehensive set of metrics for mechanistic modeling that capture behavioral, structural, and computational similarity. ATLAS achieves a 5-10x improvement in sample efficiency across all metrics compared to random experimentation, and its performance is further validated against expert-designed experiments derived from literature. These in silico results showcase ATLAS's potential to accelerate human-interpretable insights in cognitive science and other domains where scientific inquiry relies on discovering mechanistic models.

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

MODE-RAG: Manifold Outlier Diagnosis and Energy-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation

While Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (M-RAG) enhances Large Vision-Language Models, it remains highly susceptible to cross-modal hallucinations, causal fabrications, and sycophancy. Furthermore, existing mitigation pipelines often face an intervention paradox: static rules tend to unnecessarily disrupt accurate generations, whereas leaving the multi-modal reasoning completely unguided allows existing mismatches to cascade into severe logical fabrications. To quantify and mitigate these hallucinations, we propose a Multi-Agent system, MODE-RAG, driven by Variational Free Energy (VFE) and internal attention states to dynamically gate interventions. High-risk queries are routed to five stage-specific agents, integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for rigorous causal derivation and logit perturbations to penalize sycophancy. Dedicated Correction and Overseer agents ensure formatting stability and perform post-hoc factual verification. To objectively evaluate our approach, we introduce ModeVent, a challenging subset derived from the MultiVent dataset. Extensive experiments indicate that our system effectively reduces hallucination rates and logical fabrication, significantly improving the robustness of M-RAG systems.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Accounting for allelic diversity and multicopy gene detection improves the accuracy of antibiotic resistance genotypic determination

Background Genomic prediction of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) relies on the accurate detection of resistance genes or allelic variants of core genes from raw or assembled genomes sequences. For several bacterial species and antibiotics, AMR genotype-phenotype discrepancies are common, indicating that important sources of error remain unresolved. For Enterococcus faecium, we focused on identifying the sources of discrepancies for tetracycline resistance, for which genotypic detection had shown particularly low accuracy. We investigated the effect of structural variation in antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), including gene duplications, truncations, interruptions, and mixed configurations of complete and partial gene copies, as a source of genotype-phenotype discrepancies from short-read data. We conduct further extended investigations to other antibiotic families and into another bacterial species: Escherichia coli. Methods We analyzed collections of E. faecium and E. coli genomes, integrating high-quality complete assemblies, simulated Illumina short reads, and matched AMR phenotypic data. The integrity, copy number, and allelic diversity of ARGs were examined for multiple antibiotic classes, and their impact on ARG detection and accuracy of AMR determination was assessed using several commonly used bioinformatic tools (SRST2, ARIBA and AMRFinderPlus). Results For E. faecium, after ruling out the effect of specific tet allelic variants on tetracycline susceptibility, we found that the integrity and copy number of tet(M) had a major effect on detection accuracy. Duplicated and incomplete ARGs are also common in E. faecium genomes, particularly for macrolides (erm(B)) and aminoglycosides (ant(6)-Ia and aph(3')-IIIa). In E. coli, similar patterns were observed for tet(A), erm(B) and aminoglycoside-associated genes (aph(3')-IIIa and ant(6)-Ia). Across ARGs in both species, short-read mapping methods wrongly reported interrupted genes as complete in some instances, while assembly-based methods often failed to resolve complete copies of duplicated genes. Detection accuracy improved when tools were adapted to account for gene integrity and when extended AMR databases incorporating species-specific alleles were included. Conclusions Our findings reveal that bioinformatic limitations in dealing with ARG copy number and completeness, and in accounting for allelic variation, underly a substantial source of genotype-phenotype errors, highlighting the need for improved AMR databases and bioinformatic tools that consider these factors to achieve reliable genomic prediction of AMR.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Approximately Decoding the Colour Code

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently we showed that minimum weight decoding in the (6.6.6 planar) colour code is NP-hard. However, it remained an open question as to whether it was possible to approximate the minimum weight decoding arbitrarily closely in polynomial time. In this paper we prove that it is possible: for any $\varepsilon>0$ there is an polynomial time algorithm that, given a syndrome, can find an error-set generating that syndrome whose weight is at most $1+\varepsilon$ times the weight of the minimum weight decoding. As a consequence we see that, for any $\varepsilon>0$, there is a polynomial time algorithm that can correct all errors of weight up to $(1-\varepsilon)d/2$ in the distance $d$ colour code (so almost up to the theoretical $d/2$ limit). The polynomial we give is impractically large, but it does open the door for sensible polynomial time algorithms that approximate minimum weight decoding and, in particular, shows that approximate decoding is not NP-hard.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

What Do Safety-Aligned LLMs Learn From Mixed Compliance Demonstrations?

arXiv:2606.20508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has shown that in-context demonstrations can jailbreak language models, but it remains unclear how models interpret different types of compliance demonstrations. We study this by mixing benign compliance demonstrations (non-harmful request, helpful response) with harmful compliance demonstrations (harmful request, helpful response) and testing three hypotheses about how demonstration composition drives harmful compliance. Across four models, we find that benign and harmful demonstrations are not interchangeable: benign demonstrations can either reduce or increase harmful compliance depending on the model. We further show that preference optimization is the critical training stage that prevents benign demonstrations from increasing harmful compliance, that demonstration ordering exhibits strong recency bias, and that models differ in how refusal interacts with in-context learning: some adopt demonstrated formatting even when refusing, while others override all in-context signals upon refusal. Taken together, this work moves beyond showing that demonstration-based jailbreaking works to characterizing how it works: what models extract from compliance demonstrations depends on demonstration content, ordering, and training methodology.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

EA-WM: Event-Aware World Models with Task-Specification Grounding for Long-Horizon Manipulation

arXiv:2606.13053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained-feature world models provide a useful substrate for robot imagination, but visual or latent prediction alone does not determine whether an imagined future satisfies task-relevant events. Long-horizon manipulation requires progress signals that are relational, predicate-level, and physically grounded: whether an object has moved, whether a drawer or contact state has changed, whether a placement predicate is satisfied, and whether a candidate future is reliable enough for execution. We introduce EA-WM, an event-aware world-model framework that augments frozen visual-feature dynamics with task-specification-grounded event prediction and verification. EA-WM rolls out candidate futures in pretrained visual-feature space, decodes them into structured event states, and scores them using task-progress, semantic-consistency, physical-feasibility, and uncertainty terms. The verifier guides sampling-based planning, gates candidate actions, and, in the contact-sensitive LIBERO wine-rack setting, selects among PPOgenerated proposals. Across navigation, deformable-object, wall-constrained, and languagedescribed manipulation studies, EA-WM shows that event-aware verification can make featurespace world models more interpretable and better aligned with task progress.

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

AQ4SViT: An Automated Quantization Framework with Search Gating Policy for Compressing Spiking Vision Transformers

arXiv:2606.15523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking Vision Transformers (SViTs) have emerged as alternative low-power ViT models, but their large sizes hinder their deployments on resource-constrained embedded AI systems. To address this, state-of-the-art works proposed quantization techniques to compress SViT models, but their manual, human-guided approach needs a huge design time and power/energy consumption to find the appropriate quantization setting for each given network, making this approach not scalable for quantizing multiple networks. Toward this, we propose AQ4SViT, a novel automated quantization framework for SViTs that can provide quick quantization settings with good trade-offs between accuracy and memory. To achieve this, AQ4SViT employs the following key ideas: quantization search strategy that evaluates the quantization setting candidates while considering the accuracy constraint; and search gating policy that quickly evaluates and selects promising quantization candidates by leveraging membrane potential drift as a performance proxy. In the search gating policy, AQSViT employs two search algorithm variants to provide trade-off options: Greedy search, which performs fast but may lead to local optima; and Beam search, which performs slower but has better performance in finding global optima selection due to a wider search space. Experimental results show that AQ4SViT-Greedy quickly finds the appropriate quantization settings, achieving up to 6.6x faster search time and up to 82.5% memory saving compared to the state-of-the-art; while AQ4SViT-Beam further reduces the memory footprint by up to 90% compared to the state-of-the-art, but with 4.5x longer search time; all these results are obtained while maintaining high accuracy within 1.5% from the original/non-quantized models on the ImageNet dataset. These results highlight that AQ4SViT framework offers advancements toward SViT deployments on embedded AI systems.