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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

HAMNO: A Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator with Physics-Informed Learning for Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.11963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operators provide a powerful framework for learning solution mappings of partial differential equations directly in function space. However, many existing architectures still struggle to represent nonlinear time-dependent systems that involve multi-scale structures, long-range interactions, and stable long-time evolution. In this work, we introduce the Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator (HAMNO), a neural-operator architecture that combines local convolutional representations, global spectral operators, and hierarchical encoder-decoder processing. The central component of HAMNO is a data-dependent gating mechanism that adaptively balances local and global information at each spatial location, allowing the model to resolve fine-scale features while preserving long-range dependencies. We further develop a physics-informed extension, PI-HAMNO, based on a multi-objective loss strategy that combines data fitting with strong- and weak-form physics constraints. The strong-form term penalizes the domain-integrated squared PDE residual in physical coordinates, while the weak-form term is constructed by multiplying the governing residual by finite-element test functions and evaluating the resulting element integrals using centroid-based tetrahedral quadrature. The framework is evaluated on non-periodic Allen-Cahn (AC), Cahn-Hilliard (CH), and Swift-Hohenberg (SH) equations defined on cubic domains. Across long-horizon rollout, data-limited training, out-of-distribution initial-condition shifts, and random-seed variations, HAMNO improves predictive accuracy over standard neural-operator baselines, while PI-HAMNO further enhances stability, physical consistency, and data efficiency. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/MBamdad/HAMNO .

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian for Projective Quantum Feature Maps

arXiv:2606.13641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projected quantum feature maps provide a strategy for using quantum processors as feature generators for classical machine-learning models. Building on counterdiabatic Ising-glass and one-dimensional Heisenberg PQFMs, we introduce a generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian-based PQFM that provides a unified way to encode classical features through local Pauli fields and pairwise two-qubit Pauli interactions. This construction allows distinct classical variables to be embedded along different Pauli axes of the same qubit, increasing the information density of shallow circuits while remaining compatible with hardware constraints. We develop and implement these methods in pqfmlib, a publicly available Python library for constructing, executing, and benchmarking Hamiltonian-based PQFMs.We then benchmark the generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs against reference PQFMs on four biomedical classification datasets under a nested cross-validation protocol with paired statistical tests. Quantum features are generated using both IBM quantum processors with up to 156 qubits and statevector simulations. Our results show that the generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian family provides the most consistent pattern of statistically supported gains over matched classical baselines, although the performance of all methods depends on the dataset, encoding strategy, measured observables, and hardware conditions. These findings support generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs as a promising route toward near-term quantum utility.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Witnessing Spin-Orbital Entanglement using Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering

arXiv:2512.06718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement plays a central role in quantum technologies, yet its characterization and control in materials remain challenging. Recent developments in spectrum-based entanglement witnesses have enabled new strategies for quantifying many-body entanglement in macroscopic materials. Here, we develop a protocol for detecting spin-orbital entanglement using experiment-accessible resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS). Central to our approach is the construction of a Hermitian generator from experimentally measurable spectra, which allows us to compute the quantum Fisher information (QFI) available in spin–orbital systems. The resulting QFI provides upper bounds for $k$-producible states and thus serves as a robust witness of spin-orbital entanglement. To account for realistic experimental limitations, we further extend our framework to include relaxed QFI bounds applicable to measurements lacking full polarization resolution.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Tyler: Typed Latent Reasoning for Language Models – When to Think, What to Compute, and How Much to Allocate

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by externalizing intermediate computation as discrete text tokens, but this textual interface also introduces redundancy and inference overhead. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by carrying part of the computation in continuous representations. However, existing methods typically predefine when latent computation is invoked and how it is allocated during decoding, leaving a key problem unresolved: when to invoke latent computation, what type of computation to perform, and how much budget to allocate. We propose Typed Latent Reasoning (Tyler), a typed and budget-aware framework for latent reasoning during autoregressive decoding. Tyler learns a policy that, at each decoding step, chooses between emitting a text token and switching to a latent computation module specialized for a particular reasoning function. Once invoked, an operator maps the current reasoning state into latent tokens that support global planning, local state updates, or reusable procedural abstraction. Across extensive experiments on three backbone LLMs, Tyler improves accuracy by up to 14.49 points over CoT and by up to 4.30 points over the strongest competing baseline. It further generalizes across diverse reasoning domains and achieves the best final-stage performance with the lowest forgetting.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Quality Perceptions and Intended Engagement in Response to AI-Generated and AI-Assisted News

arXiv:2409.03500v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in news production raises important questions about how audiences perceive and respond to AI-generated journalism. This preregistered survey experiment (N = 599, German-speaking Switzerland) examines (i) perceptions of article quality (measured as credibility, readability, and expertise) across news excerpts that were human-written, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated, and (ii) self-reported intentions to engage following disclosure of AI involvement. Participants rated two short news excerpts before learning how they had been produced. Articles across all conditions were evaluated similarly in perceived quality. After disclosure, participants in the AI-assisted and AI-generated conditions reported a higher willingness to continue reading their assigned articles compared to the control group, but future willingness to read AI-generated news did not differ across conditions. Overall, the findings suggest that readers assess AI-generated and human-written news comparably in quality, while disclosure of AI use can momentarily increase curiosity or interest without yet changing longer-term reading intentions.

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

REGRID-QAOA: A Resource-Efficient Graph-Reduced Hybrid QAOA Framework for Physics-Constrained Power System Islanding

arXiv:2606.15083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing has rapidly emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling computationally demanding problems. In particular, quantum optimization shows strong promise for hard combinatorial problems in power systems, where increasing distributed energy penetration heightens the need for intentional islanding to maintain grid reliability and resilience. However, power system islanding is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that becomes computationally prohibitive for classical solvers as network size grows, motivating the use of quantum computing as a promising alternative pipeline. This study develops a resource-efficient hybrid QAOA islanding framework that brings physics-constrained power-system partitioning into the quantum optimization workflow. The framework combines coherency-informed graph reduction, physics-aware constraint modeling, and structured post-processing to efficiently convert shallow-circuit QAOA samples into high-quality feasible islanding decisions without deep circuits or large shot budgets. The proposed framework is validated on the standard IEEE benchmark systems (9-, 14-, 24-, 30-, 39-, and 57-bus), demonstrating that the hybrid workflow achieves Gurobi-optimal solution quality with a clear quantum resource advantage over vanilla QAOA, while the resulting islanding solutions satisfy all physical feasibility requirements after network separation. This study establishes QAOA-based islanding as a viable quantum approach for critical infrastructure, with structured post-processing as the key enabler of quantum resource efficiency.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SPARX: Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration with Edge RISC-V SoC

Edge-AI systems increasingly require real-time CNN inference under strict energy, performance, security, and privacy constraints. Approximate computing improves hardware efficiency by exploiting the error resilience of neural network workloads; however, most approximate CNN accelerators do not jointly consider secure, privacy-aware edge deployment. This paper presents SPARX, a Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration framework integrated within a heterogeneous RV32IMC RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC). SPARX combines a custom RISC-V instruction extension, an approximate logarithmic CNN acceleration unit, a lightweight differential-noise-based privacy engine, and a challenge-response authentication mechanism. To guide arithmetic selection, an approximation-aware decision framework is introduced that uses the Approximation Severity Index (ASI), Approximation Efficiency (AE), Quality of Approximation (QoA), Approximation Figure-of-Merit (AFOM), and Hardware Acceleration Efficiency (HAE). Evaluation across 11 state-of-the-art approximate MAC architectures identifies the Iterative Logarithmic Multiplier (ILM) as the most suitable design, achieving 51.7% area reduction, 81.5% power reduction, and 2.13x throughput improvement compared with an accurate radix-4 Booth MAC, while only reducing ResNet-20/CIFAR-10 accuracy by 2.82 percentage points. FPGA implementation on a Xilinx VC707 platform achieves 58.4 GOPS/W energy efficiency at 250 MHz, while 28-nm CMOS physical implementation validates ASIC feasibility

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Towards Leveraging AutoML for Sustainable Deep Learning: A Multi-Objective HPO Approach on Deep Shift Neural Networks

arXiv:2404.01965v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Learning (DL) has advanced various fields by extracting complex patterns from large datasets. However, the computational demands of DL models pose environmental and resource challenges. Deep shift neural networks (DSNNs) offer a solution by leveraging shift operations to reduce computational complexity at inference. Following the insights from standard DNNs, we are interested in leveraging the full potential of DSNNs by means of AutoML techniques. We study the impact of hyperparameter optimization (HPO) to maximize DSNN performance while minimizing resource consumption. Since this combines multi-objective (MO) optimization with accuracy and energy consumption as potentially complementary objectives, we propose to combine state-of-the-art multi-fidelity (MF) HPO with multi-objective optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, resulting in models with over 80\% in accuracy and low computational cost. Overall, our method accelerates efficient model development while enabling sustainable AI applications.

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

Fibonacci Steady-States and Persistent Oscillations in an Ordered Multimode Dicke Model

arXiv:2606.13072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultracold atoms in multimode optical cavities provide a rich testbed for many-body phenomena enabled by light-mediated interactions. Recent experiments include realizations of spin glasses and associative memories, as described by multimode Dicke models with disordered couplings. However, the properties of multimode Dicke models with ordered coupling geometries remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate the stable steady-states of the multimode Dicke model with an ordered nearest-neighbor coupling geometry, where $n_c$ atomic clusters are coupled via $n_c-1$ cavity modes. We show that the number of mean-field stable steady-states in the superradiant phase exhibits Fibonacci scaling with the number of atomic clusters, and that a subset of these steady-states exhibit persistent oscillations. Using both the truncated Wigner approximation and the numerically-exact hierarchy of pure states, we further demonstrate that these features of the stable steady-state solutions persist for finite cluster sizes. Ordered multimode Dicke models, such as the nearest-neighbor coupling geometry considered here, are accessible with current experimental technologies and point toward a broader class of strongly interacting dissipative systems with similarly rich behavior.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Minimum Zero-Forcing Sets

arXiv:2606.18106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper explores the problem of finding the minimum zero-forcing set on undirected graphs and proposes an adapted machine-learning framework to solve the problem. The minimum zero-forcing set problem is a graph coloring problem where the color of an initial set of nodes propagates throughout a network. The set of nodes is zero-forcing if it forces all uncolored nodes to change color under the constraint of the color-change rule. There are several applications to this problem across different domains such as network science, network control, and designing logical circuits. Finding the minimum zero-forcing set is shown to be NP-hard. We propose a reinforcement learning framework, SD-ZFS, that adapts the S2V-DQN architecture to the ZFS problem. We train several models on this adapted framework and analyze the performance across graph datasets that have varying structures. We evaluate how the models trained on the framework generalize, scale, and transfer to different network types. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework when compared against the optimal solution and greedy heuristic. We provide further insight into how the ZFS problem can be solved through machine-learning and the influence of network structure on the problem.

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

LedgerAgent: Structured State for Policy-Adherent Tool-Calling Agents

Policy-adherent tool-calling agents in customer-service domains must maintain task states across turns while calling tools and obeying domain policies. Task states consist of relevant facts, identifiers, constraints, and conditions observed through user interaction and tool calls. In standard agents, task states are not represented separately. Observations, tool returns, and policy instructions are placed in the prompt, leaving agents to reconstruct the relevant states from the prompt each time they decide what to do next. This design makes state management implicit, creating two common failure modes. An agent may retrieve the right facts but later ground its decision in stale, missing, or incorrect information; and a syntactically valid tool call may still violate a domain policy that depends on the current task state. We introduce \textsc{LedgerAgent}, an inference-time method for tool-calling agents that maintains observed task states in a separate ledger and renders the states into the prompt. The ledger is also used to check state-dependent policy constraints before environment-changing tool calls are executed, blocking policy violations. Across four customer-service domains and a mixed panel of open- and closed-weight models, \textsc{LedgerAgent} improves average pass\textasciicircum{}k over a standard prompt-based tool-calling approach, with the largest gains under stricter multi-trial consistency metrics.

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

From Noise to Intent: Anchoring Generative VLA Policies with Residual Bridges

arXiv:2604.21391v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bridging high-level semantic understanding with low-level physical control remains a persistent challenge in embodied intelligence, stemming from the fundamental spatiotemporal scale mismatch between cognition and action. Existing generative VLA policies typically adopt a "Generation-from-Noise" paradigm, which disregards this disparity, leading to representation inefficiency and weak condition alignment during optimization. In this work, we propose ResVLA, an architecture that shifts the paradigm to "Refinement-from-Intent." Recognizing that robotic motion naturally decomposes into global intent and local dynamics, ResVLA utilizes spectral analysis to decouple control into a deterministic low-frequency anchor and a stochastic high-frequency residual. By anchoring the generative process on the predicted intent, our model focuses strictly on refining local dynamics via a residual diffusion bridge. Extensive simulation experiments show that ResVLA achieves competitive performance, strong robustness to language and robot embodiment perturbations, and faster convergence than standard generative baselines. ResVLA also demonstrates strong performance in real-world robot experiments.

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

SpatialSV: Internalizing Interpretable 3D Spatial Awareness in MLLMs via Task-Oriented Visual Supervision

Unlocking the spatial intelligence of multimodal large language model (MLLMs) is crucial for understanding and interacting with the 3D world. Prevailing approaches typically inject spatial priors via external tools, which impose significant inference overhead, or rely on latent feature distillation, which remains uninterpretable and lacks fine-grained geometric constraints. To address these issues, we propose SpatialSV, a framework designed to internalize robust 3D spatial awareness within MLLMs while simultaneously offering inherent interpretability. Deviating from passive feature imitation, SpatialSV employs task-oriented visual supervision, compelling the model to actively lift its 2D visual features into explicit 3D representations, including depth maps, camera poses, and point clouds. Crucially, this 2D-to-3D lifting process provides a transparent window into the model's representations: the resulting 3D reconstructions serve as an intuitive proxy for visualizing and diagnosing the quality of the model's intrinsic spatial knowledge. Extensive experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SpatialSV in enhancing and interpreting MLLMs' spatial intelligence. Furthermore, the framework exhibits strong generalization in semi-supervised settings, validating its potential to leverage unlabeled visual data for scalable, interpretable spatial representation learning.

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

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fun with Graph States: Nonlocal Bell Pairs and the Arf Invariant

arXiv:2606.06582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study inner products and partial amplitudes of graph states–a commonly employed class of quantum states, which are specified by graphs. We find that the magnitudes of these quantities are simply related to the rank of the adjacency matrix of the graph over F_2 while the phase is determined by the Arf invariant of its quadratic refinement. These facts motivate a nonlocal tensor factorization of the Hilbert space, with respect to which all graph states are products of Bell pairs with unentangled ancillae. These results may illuminate the quantum advantage in the framework of Measurement-Based Quantum Computation and suggest that graph states can be usefully visualized in the language of algebraic topology. In addition, we develop a specialized technique for computing expectation values of qubit-wise permutations in graph states, which is useful for calculating multi-invariants.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Using visual biofeedback to reduce step length error at fast walking speeds is feasible after stroke

Background and Purpose: Walking after stroke is often characterized by persistent biomechanical impairments and reduced walking capacity. While visual biofeedback can improve gait mechanics and fast walking can enhance capacity, it is unclear whether individuals post-stroke can effectively use biofeedback at higher walking speeds to address both deficits simultaneously. This study examined the effects of walking speed on the ability of participants with chronic stroke to reduce step length (SL) errors using visual biofeedback. Methods: Sixteen individuals with chronic stroke walked on a treadmill at slow, self-selected, and fast speeds with and without visual SL biofeedback. Absolute SL error relative to individualized targets was calculated for paretic and non-paretic limbs. Linear mixed-effects models with piecewise linear splines assessed the effects of speed, limb, and feedback condition. Post hoc comparisons were performed for significant interactions. Results: At lower speeds, increasing speed reduced SL error in both limbs (p < 0.001). At higher speeds, the effects of speed were dependent on limb and condition (p < 0.001). Paretic SL error increased with speed without feedback but remained stable with feedback (p < 0.001). Non-paretic SL error decreased with speed regardless of condition. SL error was greater in the paretic limb overall (p < 0.001). Discussion and Conclusions: Fast walking alone did not reduce paretic SL errors. Participants with chronic stroke can effectively use visual biofeedback to reduce paretic SL errors at higher speeds, supporting its integration into high-intensity gait training to simultaneously treat biomechanical impairments and walking capacity deficits after stroke.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Power Term Polynomial Algebra for Boolean Logic

arXiv:2603.13854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce power term polynomial algebra, a representation language for Boolean formulae designed to bridge conjunctive normal form (CNF) and algebraic normal form (ANF). The language is motivated by the tiling mismatch between these representations: direct CNFANF conversion may cause exponential blowup unless formulas are decomposed into smaller fragments, typically through auxiliary variables and side constraints. In contrast, our framework addresses this mismatch within the representation itself, compactly encoding structured families of monomials while representing CNF clauses directly, thereby avoiding auxiliary variables and constraints at the abstraction level. We formalize the language through power terms and power term polynomials, define their semantics, and show that they admit algebraic operations corresponding to Boolean polynomial addition and multiplication. We prove several key properties of the language: disjunctive clauses admit compact canonical representations; power terms support local shortening and expansion rewrite rules; and products of atomic terms can be systematically rewritten within the language. Together, these results yield a symbolic calculus that enables direct manipulation of formulas without expanding them into ordinary ANF. The resulting framework provides a new intermediate representation and rewriting calculus that bridges clause-based and algebraic reasoning and suggests new directions for structure-aware CNFANF conversion and hybrid reasoning methods.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

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

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

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

AGE-MIL: Anchor-Guided Evidence Learning for Patient-Level Prediction

Existing computational pathology methods predominantly operate within whole-slide image (WSI)-level multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigms, while patient-level modeling remains underexplored. In routine pathological practice, however, pathologists derive diagnostic and prognostic conclusions by integrating evidence across multiple WSIs rather than relying on any single slide. This discrepancy creates a fundamental misalignment when patient-level supervision is directly imposed on conventional MIL frameworks, often leading to unstable optimization and degraded predictive reliability. To address this issue, we propose Anchor-Guided Evidence MIL (AGE-MIL), a weakly supervised framework for patient-level prediction. AGE-MIL constructs a patient-level anchor from slide representations to capture global pathological context and guide the retrieval and integration of diagnostically relevant local patches, enabling robust patient-level modeling. Patient-level risk is further modeled as an evidence accumulation process, promoting stable optimization under weak supervision. AGE-MIL is evaluated on six clinically relevant patient-level prediction tasks from two independent cohorts. Experimental results show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms eight state-of-the-art MIL methods. Code is available at https://github.com/wodeniua/AGE-MIL.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Design Methodology and Performance Trade-offs Management for Distributed and Compound AI Systems

arXiv:2606.14350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems must typically satisfy service-level objectives including accuracy, latency, and cost. The prevailing model-centric approaches select a monolithic model at design time and apply identical computation regardless of input difficulty, cannot decompose tasks across specialized components, and have knowledge that is fixed at training time. During runtime, this can lead to performance degradation and increasing costs. Because the model is the main design variable, it determines the majority of system behavior, coupling operational objectives to a single design-time choice. Addressing these limitations requires shifting from model-centric to system-centric design. Compound AI systems realize this shift by orchestrating multiple models, algorithms, and tools as distributed AI systems through explicit control logic. The performance of such systems depends on their workflow topology, the models assigned to each task, and the parameters governing runtime behavior. We present a design methodology that organizes this space along two dimensions, workflow topology and configuration selection, and identifies eight design patterns, each consolidating techniques to address a specific limitation of monolithic deployment. We validate our methodology through three case studies. Across our case studies, Compound AI configurations approach accuracy of monolithic models within 2.5 to 4 percentage points while reducing latency by up to 60% and cost by up to 71%. We show that model selection and parameter configuration jointly determine system performance, but the resulting design space grows combinatorially, as workflows compose more patterns and components. Thus, we identify five open challenges that define a roadmap from manually configured prototypes towards systems that automatically discover and maintain SLO-compliance in Compound and Distributed AI systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Token to Fool LLM-as-a-Judge

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted as automated judges, assisting evaluation and providing reward signals for training other models, particularly in reference-based settings like Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, we uncover a critical vulnerability even in this reference-based paradigm: generative reward models are systematically susceptible to reward hacking. We find that superficial inputs, which we term ''master keys'' such as non-word symbols (e.g., '':'' or ''.'') or generic reasoning openers (e.g., ''Thought process:'' or ''Let's solve this problem step by step.''), can consistently elicit false positive rewards without any substantive reasoning. Our systematic evaluation demonstrates this is a widespread failure affecting a diverse range of models, including leading proprietary systems such as GPT-o1 and Claude-4. These results challenge the assumed robustness of LLM judges and pose a significant threat to their reliability. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy using truncated model outputs as adversarial negative examples. The resulting Master Reward Models (Master-RMs) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness against these ''master key'' attacks while maintaining high performance in standard evaluation settings. We supplement these findings with a comprehensive analysis of the vulnerability across model scales, prompt variations, and common inference-time strategies, offering insights to guide future research on robust LLM evaluation. We release our robust, general-domain reward models and the synthetic training data at https://huggingface.co/sarosavo/Master-RM and https://huggingface.co/datasets/sarosavo/Master-RM.

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

Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.

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

Marginal Alignment Does Not Guarantee Joint-Distribution Fidelity: An Official-Reference Audit of Nemotron-Personas-Korea with Cross-Locale Replication

Synthetic persona datasets cite alignment with official demographics as a basis for trust, yet downstream users consume them as joint structures across age, sex, region, occupation, education, name, and institutional status. Marginal alignment does not imply that these joints are preserved. We propose the Independence-Assumption Footprint (IAF), an audit primitive that operates on the attribute combinations a dataset card itself documents as treated independently. For each such combination, IAF compares the synthetic joint against an external official or institutional reference, using direct joint tables where available and rule-implied checks otherwise. Applied to NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-Korea (one million Korean synthetic personas), IAF finds that NPK aligns with KOSIS marginals while three joints fail. The major-by-occupation distribution against the KEIS graduate universe carries a large conditional mismatch. The age profile of military service is institutionally inconsistent. Female representation in male-dominated occupations is substantially over-flattened toward parity, with the strict screening verdict mapping-dependent and age-robust under direct standardisation. A transferability demonstration across six further NPK locales finds locale-dependent rather than universal diagnostics, with reference-taxonomy cardinality confounding cross-locale flag counts. For synthetic personas used as silicon samples, marginal claims must therefore be paired with disclosure-anchored joint audits before reuse. The released audit artefacts (reference manifests, occupational crosswalks, derived metrics, reproducibility scripts) instantiate this protocol on the NPK family and are released for retargeting at other synthetic persona resources.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

On the empirical spectral distribution of matrix perpetuities

arXiv:2605.31054v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study matrix perpetuities, that is, solutions to affine fixed-point equations of the form \[ \mathbf{X} \stackrel{d}{=} \mathbf{A}\,\mathbf{X} \,\mathbf{A}^\top+\mathbf{B},\qquad (\mathbf{A},\mathbf{B})\mbox{ and }\mathbf{X} \mbox{ are independent}, \] with particular emphasis on the empirical spectral distribution of the solution. We first establish existence and uniqueness results by relating the problem to classical vector perpetuities, and then develop tools that preserve the matrix structure under orthogonal invariance. For positive semidefinite, orthogonally invariant models, we obtain power-law tail asymptotics for the expected empirical spectral distribution and show that the tail is governed by the largest eigenvalue. We also prove that, in the subcritical regime, the expected empirical spectral distribution of matrix perpetuities converges weakly, as the dimension tends to infinity, to the distribution of the corresponding free perpetuity. Our results are illustrated by matrix Beta prime perpetuities, for which explicit limiting spectral distributions are available.

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

Hierarchical GRU with Input-Conditioned Slot Queries for Ball Action Anticipation

We present a hierarchical model for ball action anticipation in football broadcast video. Given a 30-second observation window, the system predicts actions occurring in the subsequent 5-second window across 10 classes. A shared local Transformer encodes clip-level features within each 5-second sub-window; a GRU then aggregates temporal context across all sub-windows; finally, a Transformer decoder with K input-conditioned event slots decodes the anticipation target via three decoupled heads (objectness, class, temporal offset). We introduce frequency-reweighted Hungarian matching that systematically favours rare action classes, and Gaussian soft targets for temporal bin supervision. On the SoccerNet Ball Action Anticipation benchmark, our method achieves 17.91% mAP on the test server.