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

Nonslop: A Gamified Experiment in Human-AI Collaborative Writing

arXiv:2606.12350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) raises critical questions about human creativity and individual expression in an era of AI-assisted creation. When do humans adopt AI suggestions, and what are the implications for individual voice? This study examines these questions through a gamified writing exercise where 74 participants (214 responses) replied to prompts while AI-generated word suggestions were available as they wrote. The game simulates a dystopian future in which an AI is attempting to learn from what remains of human individuality, and disincentivizes AI-like writing. In doing so, it attempts to create conditions that reveal authentic user preferences rather than default behaviors, such as accepting a readily available AI-generated suggestion. Note that this is a deliberate inversion of the "helpful assistant" design pattern; the system is explicitly forbidding you from accepting AI suggestions. We analyze user behavior patterns across different task types, user behaviors, and response characteristics to understand the factors influencing human-AI interaction in creative tasks. The study focuses on when users choose to maintain creative autonomy versus violating the rules of the game and accepting AI assistance. It also explores how these choices relate to response patterns, task characteristics, and user behavior. This gamified approach offers both a framework for studying authentic human-AI interaction and a provocative lens for understanding the tension between efficiency and authenticity in AI-augmented creativity.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Self-Supervised Learning as Discrete Communication

Most self-supervised learning (SSL) methods learn continuous visual representations by aligning different views of the same input, offering limited control over how information is structured across representation dimensions. In this work, we frame visual self-supervised learning as a discrete communication process between a teacher and a student network, where semantic information is transmitted through a fixed-capacity binary channel. Rather than aligning continuous features, the student predicts multi-label binary messages produced by the teacher. Discrete agreement is enforced through an element-wise binary cross-entropy objective, while a coding-rate regularization term encourages effective utilization of the constrained channel, promoting structured representations. We further show that periodically reinitializing the projection head strengthens this effect by encouraging embeddings that remain predictive across multiple discrete encodings. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over continuous agreement baselines on image classification, retrieval, and dense visual prediction tasks, as well as under domain shift through self-supervised adaptation. Beyond backbone representations, we analyze the learned binary codes and show that they form a compact and informative discrete language, capturing semantic factors reusable across classes.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Toward quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of optical nonlinearity in vacuum

arXiv:2602.10896v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum Electrodynamics predicts that the vacuum must behave as a nonlinear optical medium: the vacuum optical index should increase when it is stressed by intense electromagnetic fields. The DeLLight (Deflection of Light by Light) project aims to measure it by using intense and ultra-short laser pulses. The experiment uses a Sagnac interferometer to amplify the tiny deflection signal of a low-intensity probe pulse crossing the vacuum refractive-index gradient produced by an external high-intensity pump pulse. The measurement of the amplified signal by a CCD camera requires a high spatial resolution, which is limited by the ultimate quantum noise of the CCD. However, interferometric phase noise induced by the mechanical vibrations of the interferometer is also amplified and degrades spatial resolution. To overcome this, we propose a new method named High-Frequency Phase Noise Suppression (HFPNS), based on the addition of a delayed replica (5 ns) of the probe pulse. The delayed pulse, which is not affected by the pump but is subject to the same vibration noise, enables offline subtraction of correlated phase noise. In this work, we present an experimental proof-of-concept on a prototype interferometer operating with a limited amplification factor ($\mathcal{A}\simeq25$), about 10 times smaller than the required value of the final experiment. We have succeeded in reducing phase noise by a factor of 40, resulting in a residual noise level 2.3 times higher than the expected quantum noise. The residual noise is linked to delay-line instabilities and incident beam pointing fluctuations present during these tests. This result validates HFPNS as a robust method for future quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of vacuum optical nonlinearity, though additional stabilization and higher interferometric amplification are still needed.

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

Evaluating the Robustness of Proof Autoformalization in Lean 4

Proof autoformalization aims to translate a mathematical informal proof written in natural language into a formal proof in a formal language such as Lean~4. Several works have developed LLM-based models for proof autoformalization. However, existing evaluations have typically focused on translating well-formed informal proofs from curated datasets. We argue that a robust proof autoformalizer must remain faithful even for informal proofs that diverge from these idealized ones, and we present the first study on the robustness of proof autoformalization models. We formulate two categories of perturbations and evaluate robustness under each: a global perturbation paraphrases the informal proof in a different style, under which the formalization should remain consistent; a local perturbation alters a value, symbol, or proof step, possibly in a counterfactual way, and a robust formalization should faithfully reflect the perturbation rather than reverting to the original one or inferring a different one on its own. We build a benchmark with both perturbations on miniF2F and MATH-500, and automatically measure how stable a proof autoformalization's correctness is under global perturbations and how faithfully its output reflects local perturbations. We evaluate seven recent models, all of which are sensitive to global perturbations and mostly fail to remain faithful under local perturbations. Code and data are available via https://github.com/ucr-rai/robust-proof-autoformalization.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Gumbel-BEARD: Automatic Layer Selection for Self-Supervised Adaptation of Whisper in Low-Resource Domains

Speech foundation models often struggle in low-resource domains due to domain mismatch and data scarcity. We propose Gumbel-BEARD, a domain adaptation framework that automates Whisper encoder layer selection via an end-to-end trainable hard Gumbel-Softmax selector. It enables self-supervised adaptation with a BEST-RQ objective that dynamically adapts to target acoustic characteristics without manual tuning. Experiments on the MyST child speech corpus demonstrate efficiency and scalability: with 10 h of labeled data for fine-tuning, our method matches a fully supervised baseline trained on the complete 133 h labeled set. We establish new state-of-the-art word error rates (WERs) of 8.21% using Whisper-medium on MyST and 11.06% using Whisper-small on the OGI Spontaneous dataset. Evaluation on CORAAL further confirms robustness to adult dialectal domain shifts, with up to 6% relative WER reduction, highlighting the generalizability of our approach to diverse low-resource conditions.

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

A Quantum Approach to Stochastic Optimization in Insurance Underwriting

arXiv:2605.01169v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The presence of stochastic elements in combinatorial optimization problems makes them particularly challenging, as such problems quickly become intractable for classical computers even at relatively small sizes. In this work, we propose a novel quantum-classical hybrid scheme for solving a class of stochastic optimization problems known as chance-constrained knapsack problems, in which item weights follow probability distributions and constraints may be violated within a specified risk tolerance. Our method employs knapsack-specific QAOA-based circuits to generate samples which, when combined with a new self-consistent classical recovery scheme introduced in this work, produce high-quality solutions. Experiments carried out on IBM Heron processors, using circuits with depths up to 177 and comprising 3443 gates acting on as many as 150 qubits, yield solutions that indicate performance comparable to classical optimization schemes. The proposed quantum-classical scheme paves the way to tackling such problems, with the potential to outperform approaches that rely solely on classical computation.

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

Structured Spectral Graph Representation Learning for Multi-label Abnormality Analysis from 3D CT Scans

With the growing volume of CT examinations, there is an increasing demand for automated tools such as organ segmentation, abnormality detection, and report generation to support radiologists in managing their clinical workload. Multi-label classification of 3D Chest CT scans remains a critical yet challenging problem due to the complex spatial relationships inherent in volumetric data and the wide variability of abnormalities. Existing methods based on 3D convolutional neural networks struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Vision Transformers often require extensive pre-training on large-scale, domain-specific datasets to perform competitively. In this work, we propose a 2.5D alternative by introducing a new graph-based framework that represents 3D CT volumes as structured graphs, where axial slice triplets serve as nodes processed through spectral graph convolution, enabling the model to reason over inter-slice dependencies while maintaining complexity compatible with clinical deployment. Our method, trained and evaluated on 3 datasets from independent institutions, achieves strong cross-dataset generalization, and shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art visual encoders. We further conduct comprehensive ablation studies to evaluate the impact of various aggregation strategies, edge-weighting schemes, and graph connectivity patterns. Additionally, we demonstrate the broader applicability of our approach through transfer experiments on automated radiology report generation and abdominal CT data.

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

Discovering Functionally Selective Brain Regions with a Deep Topographic Multimodal Model

arXiv:2606.09770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Nearby neurons in cortex share similar response profiles, producing systematic spatial organization across sensory and cognitive systems. Recent topographic models reproduce aspects of this structure but remain unimodal and spatially constrain each layer separately, yielding fragmented maps that capture neither the contiguity of cortical processing streams nor their integration across modalities. We introduce Topo-Omni, a topographic multimodal model in which visual, auditory, and language/cognitive processing share a single contiguous in-silico sheet. Built by fine-tuning a pretrained foundation model with a spatial smoothness objective, this architecture develops clusters across modalities that are consistent with human neuroimaging, from sensory to cognitive systems. Driving or suppressing a cluster selectively biases or impairs perception, paralleling human intervention studies. Finally, we use our model to screen for novel clusters in-silico and discover new natural landscape and animal networks which we validate in human data. A single spatial principle thus organizes representations across modalities and processing stages, yielding testable hypotheses about cortical organization.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

arXiv:2606.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative – from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Large deviations for marked sparse random graphs with applications to interacting diffusions

arXiv:2204.08789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs, obtained by decorating edges and vertices of a sparse Erdős-Rényi random graph with i.i.d. random elements taking values on Polish spaces. We prove that the empirical neighborhood distribution of this model satisfies a large deviation principle in the framework of local weak convergence. We rely on the concept of BC-entropy introduced by Delgosha and Anantharam~(2019) which is inspired on the previous work by Bordenave and Caputo~(2015). Our main technical contribution is an approximation result that allows one to pass from graph with marks in discrete spaces to marks in general Polish spaces. As an application of the results developed here, we prove a large deviation principle for interacting diffusions driven by gradient evolution and defined on top of sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs. In particular, our results apply for the stochastic Kuramoto model. We obtain analogous results for the sparse uniform random graph with given number of edges.

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

Uncertainty Decomposition for Clarification Seeking in LLM Agents

Recent position papers argue that the classical aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty framework is insufficient for interactive large language model (LLM) agents and call for underspecification-aware, decomposed, and communicable uncertainty representations that can unlock new agent capabilities such as proactive clarification seeking and shared mental-model building. Practical deployment constraints – black-box APIs, interactive latency budgets, and the absence of labeled trajectories – rule out logprob-based, multi-sampling, and training-based methods, leaving prompt-based estimation as the most viable family for surfacing such signals at deployment time. We answer this call with a simple prompt-based decomposition that separates action confidence from request uncertainty (u), enabling the agent to ask for clarification when the task specification is ambiguous. To evaluate it, we introduce two clarification-augmented benchmarks (WebShop-Clarification and ALFWorld-Clarification) in which 50% of tasks are deliberately underspecified, and systematically compare the proposed decomposition against ReAct+UE and Uncertainty-Aware Memory (UAM) across five LLM backbones (GPT-5.1, DeepSeek-v3.2-exp, GLM-4.7, Qwen3.5-35B, GPT-OSS-120B) on these variants together with the standard WebShop, ALFWorld, and REAL benchmarks for fault detection. Averaged across the five backbones, the proposed decomposition improves clarification F1 on ALFWorld-Clarification by 73% over ReAct+UE and by 36% over UAM, and leads clarification F1 on every backbone on WebShop-Clarification and on four of five backbones on ALFWorld-Clarification, indicating that the gains generalize beyond a single LLM.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Offline Diffusion Policy for Multi-User Delay-Constrained Scheduling

arXiv:2501.12942v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective multi-user delay-constrained scheduling is crucial in various real-world applications, including embodied AI, instant messaging, live streaming, and data center management, where efficient resource allocation is required among users with diverse delay sensitivities. In these scenarios, schedulers must make real-time decisions to satisfy both delay and resource constraints without prior knowledge of system dynamics, which are often time-varying and challenging to estimate. {Current learning-based methods typically require online interactions with actual systems during the training stage. Therefore, these approaches are often difficult or impractical, as they can significantly degrade system performance and incur substantial service costs.} To address these challenges, we propose a novel offline reinforcement learning-based algorithm, named \underline{S}cheduling By \underline{O}ffline Learning with \underline{C}ritic Guidance and \underline{D}iffusion Model (SOCD), to learn efficient scheduling policies purely from pre-collected offline data. SOCD innovatively employs a diffusion policy, complemented by a sampling-free critic network for policy guidance. By integrating the Lagrangian multiplier optimization into the offline reinforcement learning, SOCD efficiently trains high-quality constraint-aware policies exclusively from available datasets, eliminating the need for online interactions with the system. Experimental results demonstrate that SOCD is resilient to various system dynamics, including partially observable and large-scale environments, and delivers superior performance compared to existing methods.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Excursion Fluctuations and Spectral Universality in Gaussian Fields

arXiv:2606.15630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the large-scale spatial fluctuations of excursion volumes for a class of smooth stationary Gaussian fields. In the case of Berry's random wave model in dimension $d \geq 2$, we show that the spatial fluctuations for fixed $u>0$ converge to the fractional Gaussian field $(-\Delta)^{-1/4}W$ in the space of tempered distributions $\mathcal S'(\mathbb{R}^d)$, where $W$ is the $d$-dimensional Gaussian white noise. This explains the long-range correlations in the apparent filament structure of the Random Plane Wave model. For a class of smooth planar Gaussian fields whose spectral density has a power-law singularity at the origin, we prove convergence to fractional Gaussian fields with an index determined by the singularity exponent. More generally, the results illustrate that, for stationary random measures, large-scale spatial fluctuations are determined by the behaviour of the spectral measure density exponent near zero.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PCBSchemaGen: Reward-Guided LLM Code Synthesis for Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) Schematic Design with Structured Verification

arXiv:2602.00510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most LLM code-synthesis benchmarks rely on unit tests as the reward oracle, but PCB schematic design has none: correctness is defined by structured physical constraints over real IC packages and pin-level assignments, per-task golden references are unavailable, and SPICE simulation does not validate schematic-level correctness. We introduce PCBSchemaGen, a training-free inference-time framework that turns a frozen LLM into a verifiable, repairable PCB schematic generator. The framework induces a domain schema from IC datasheets to ground LLM decoding, pairs it with a deterministic 5-layer continuous-reward verifier with pin-level error localization, and refines candidates through a Thompson Sampling arm-acquiring bandit. We evaluate on 2 PCB benchmarks covering 227 real-IC tasks across 22 unified circuit domains, including a public-schematic-derived suite that serves as a fully held-out generalization test (verifier, KG library, and prompts frozen before any evaluation). Under our framework, an open-weight 31B model (Gemma-4-31B) passes 81.3% of PCBBench tasks on average, and the same framework transfers across both benchmarks with zero verifier code changes; a Circuitron-style inference-time prompting baseline on the same Gemma-4-31B backbone collapses on hard system-level designs. This suggests inference-time refinement under a deterministic structural verifier is a general recipe for reference-free LLM code synthesis in domains without unit-test oracles. Our benchmarks and deterministic verifier are publicly available at https://github.com/HZou9/PCBSchemaGen_v2.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Internet of Agentic AI: Communication, Coordination, and Collective Intelligence at Scale

作者:

arXiv:2606.12835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents is transforming artificial intelligence from isolated model inference into distributed systems of reasoning, communication, and action. This paper develops the vision of the Internet of Agentic AI (IoAI): an open ecosystem in which heterogeneous agents discover one another, negotiate responsibilities, exchange context, invoke tools, and execute workflows across cloud, edge, device, organizational, and cyber-physical environments. We synthesize foundations from single-agent agentic AI, multi-agent systems, distributed computing, communication networks, game theory, and security engineering to characterize the architectures and mechanisms required for scalable agent ecosystems. The paper examines agent deployment models, workflow lifecycles, communication protocols, interoperability layers, resource-management challenges, and trust architectures, with case studies in adaptive manufacturing and distributed operational coordination. The resulting framework highlights the central research challenges of controlled emergence, semantic interoperability, secure identity, incentive-compatible coordination, resource-aware orchestration, and governance for large-scale networks of autonomous agents.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Softmax as Linear Attention in the Large-Prompt Regime: a Measure-based Perspective

arXiv:2512.11784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis. We develop a unified, measure-based framework for studying single-layer softmax attention under both finite and infinite prompts. For i.i.d. Gaussian inputs, we lean on the fact that the softmax operator converges in the infinite-prompt limit to a linear operator acting on the underlying input-token measure. Building on this insight, we establish non-asymptotic concentration bounds for the output and gradient of softmax attention, quantifying how rapidly the finite-prompt model approaches its infinite-prompt counterpart, and prove that this concentration remains stable along the entire training trajectory in general in-context learning settings with sub-Gaussian tokens. In the case of in-context linear regression, we use the tractable infinite-prompt dynamics to analyze training at finite prompt length. Our results allow optimization analyses developed for linear attention to transfer directly to softmax attention when prompts are sufficiently long, showing that large-prompt softmax attention inherits the analytical structure of its linear counterpart. This, in turn, provides a principled and broadly applicable toolkit for studying the training dynamics and statistical behavior of softmax attention layers in large prompt regimes.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Data Augmentations for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora. Standard autoregressive (AR) pretraining overfits severely in this setting, reaching its optimum early and then continuously deteriorating. We investigate data augmentation as a regularizer to mitigate this overfitting and enable productive training for hundreds of epochs on the same data. We introduce three orthogonal categories of augmentation for AR pretraining: token-level noise (masking, random replacement), sequence permutations (right-to-left prediction, Fill-in-the-Middle), and target offset prediction ($x_{t+i}$ for $i > 1$). Through systematic ablations, we find that individual augmentations delay overfitting and lower validation loss relative to the baseline, with random token replacement achieving the best minimum loss among individual methods. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss. Our experiments demonstrate that data augmentations mitigate AR pretraining's data inefficiency and offer a promising solution to the data-constrained regime. All code and data are available at https://github.com/michaelchen-lab/data-augmentations-for-pretraining

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Reservoir-controlled electromagnetically induced gratings in a weakly driven two-level medium

arXiv:2606.13085v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We theoretically investigate the transmission and diffraction of a weak probe field from an electromagnetically induced grating formed in a weakly driven two-level medium coupled to engineered quantum reservoirs. Using a perturbative solution of the optical Bloch equations in the weak-driving regime, we analyze how normal-vacuum, thermal, and broadband squeezed-vacuum environments modify the probe susceptibility and consequently reshape both the spatial transmission function and the far-field diffraction patterns. We show that reservoir statistics have a pronounced impact on the diffraction response by altering the amplitude and phase of the induced grating. Thermal reservoirs enhance the transmission modulation and increase the intensity of the dominant diffraction orders, whereas squeezed-vacuum reservoirs generate strongly phase-sensitive modifications that selectively redistribute optical power among diffraction channels. We further demonstrate that the detuning between the squeezed reservoir and the driving field provides an efficient mechanism for controlling diffraction directionality, leading to substantial amplification of selected angular orders. In two-dimensional geometries, squeezed-vacuum correlations produce highly structured phase landscapes and strongly anisotropic diffraction patterns, enabling directional enhancement of specific diffraction channels while suppressing others. These results establish reservoir engineering as a versatile approach for controlling transmission, diffraction efficiency, and angular selectivity in minimal two-level systems, with potential applications in programmable photonic devices, beam steering, and quantum optical platforms.

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

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

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

Models That Know How Evaluations Are Designed Score Safer

The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings. Prior work has identified test-time contextual cues, such as hypothetical scenarios, as a source of verbalized evaluation awareness and subsequent behavioral shift. In this paper, we investigate a potential explanation of this phenomenon: evaluation meta-knowledge, defined as parametric knowledge about the structural traits that characterize evaluations. Similar to dataset contamination, where benchmark exposure leads to higher performance through memorization, we hypothesize that models trained on texts describing evaluation practices may implicitly learn to recognize and respond to evaluation-like contexts, for instance, through exposure to scientific articles or social media posts about AI benchmarking. To test this, we fine-tune models on synthetic documents describing evaluation traits such as verifiable structures or moral dilemmas. Evaluating this fine-tuned model on six safety benchmarks, we find that it is significantly safer than the base model and control model. This behavioral shift persists even when restricting the analysis to responses lacking explicit verbalization of evaluation awareness. Our results demonstrate that evaluation meta-knowledge may inflate safety benchmark performance, introducing a novel confounder that is independent of explicit memorization or verbalized evaluation awareness, thus, challenging to detect. These findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of AI safety evaluations. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/compass-group-tue/arxiv2026_evaluation_meta_knowledge.

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

PaperJury: Due-Process Review for Bounded LaTeX Revision

Pre-submission hardening of human-authored LaTeX computer science papers differs from drafting assistance because it requires adversarial whole-paper review, explicit no-fix outcomes, and bounded artifact-safe revision. Existing writing assistants, critique generators, and judge-centered loops lack durable issue identity across rounds, deterministic routing from critique to adjudication, and manuscript control that can reject invalid concerns or defer author-dependent ones. We present PaperJury, a closed-loop review-verdict-revise-verify system built on a deterministic-versus-semantic split: deterministic orchestration manages decomposition, a frozen claim spine, a durable ledger, routing, stopping, and exact-once patch application, while semantic agents are limited to bounded review, judgment, and repair. PaperJury combines bounded holistic review, contestability-based routing, a due-process trial, and risk-proportional guard chains for anchor-bounded edits, yielding terminal outcomes of invalid-drop, valid-fixable, and author-required. In a two-arm expert-review evaluation on held-out Vision, natural language processing, and machine learning papers against four baselines, we assess issue quality, verdict and routing quality, edit safety, convergence behavior, and cost, supporting the thesis that load-bearing safety and completion logic should reside in deterministic orchestration rather than model discretion. PaperJury is available at https://github.com/u7079256/paperjury.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Weight Norm Sets the Grokking Timescale: A Causal Delay Law

arXiv:2606.13753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grokking is the delayed onset of generalization in neural networks, arising long after they fit the training data. Whether the weight norm causes this delay is disputed: some studies report a critical norm at the transition, others observe grokking with no fixed norm at all. We settle this by intervening on the norm during training rather than only observing it. Under free training with weight decay, networks grok when the weight norm reaches a value Wc that varies little across seeds and learning rates (CV 1 to 2 percent) and grows with the modular base as a power law. When we instead clamp the norm to a fixed multiple rho of Wc and hold it there, the network still groks, but the delay follows T_grok proportional to exp(alpha rho). One exponent, alpha near 7.5, fits this delay across four moduli (R^2 = 0.996). Over the swept ranges the held norm moves the delay by about 19x and the learning rate by only about 2x, and holding the norm above Wc slows grokking rather than preventing it. A final LayerNorm removes the dependence by decoupling weight scale from the network function; without it the exponential law returns. This pinned-norm delay is the exponential counterpart to the logarithmic delay predicted for a freely contracting norm.

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

Moving Beyond Diversity: Visual Token Pruning as Subspace Reconstruction for Efficient VLMs

Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.

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

Achieving Precise Text-To-Cypher Via Grounded Knowledge Graph Data Generation

Property Graphs are rapidly being adopted as database frameworks for representing heterogeneous data sources. To enable precise access to the information contained in them we need conversational interfaces based on Text-To-Cypher (Text2Cypher) parsers. This paper presents an automatic synthetic data generation method that can be leveraged to fine-tune small LLMs for this task. We conduct experiments on all the major Text-To-Cypher benchmarks, demonstrating that with our synthetic data generation approach we can significantly increase the performance of small LLMs, allowing them to compete with much larger proprietary models. This means that in settings in which models must be locally deployed we can ensure data-sovereignty without sacrificing accuracy and without costly annotation campaigns.