# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 222 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #11051–11100 of 16266 published in 2026-05, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 16266-paper 2026-05 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/222 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/221.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/223.md) ### Benchmarking Sensor-Fault Robustness in Forecasting Authors: Alexander Windmann, Philipp Wittenberg, Gianluca Manca, Marcel Dix, Jens U. Brandt, Oliver Niggemann Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10822v1 Cyber-physical system (CPS) forecasting models depend on sensor streams with noisy, biased, missing, or temporally misaligned readings, yet standard forecasting evaluation often selects models by nominal error without showing whether they remain robust under such faults. We introduce SensorFault-Bench, a shared CPS-grounded sensor-fault stress-test protocol for evaluating forecasting architectures and robustness-improvement methods, and an operational taxonomy organizing the method comparison. Across four real-world datasets and eight scored scenarios governed by a standardized severity model, it reports worst-scenario degradation, clean mean squared error (MSE), and worst-scenario fault-time MSE, separating relative robustness from absolute error. A disjoint fault-transfer split lets explicit fault-training methods train on adjacent fault families while evaluation uses separate benchmark scenarios. Empirically, forecasting architectures favored by clean MSE can degrade sharply under faults, and clean-MSE rankings can disagree with worst-scenario fault-time error rankings. Chronos-2, the evaluated zero-shot foundation-model representative, matches or trails the last-value naive forecaster in clean MSE on the two single-target datasets and has the largest worst-scenario degradation on ETTh1 and Traffic, where all channels are forecast targets. For the evaluated robustness-improvement method set, paired deltas show selective degradation reductions: projected gradient descent adversarial training and randomized training lead where value faults dominate observed degradation, while fault augmentation leads where availability faults dominate. SensorFault-Bench provides open-source code, documented data access, and reproduction and extension guides, so new datasets, architectures, and robustness-improvement methods can be evaluated under the same CPS sensor-fault robustness protocol. --- ### MaD Physics: Evaluating information seeking under constraints in physical environments Authors: Moksh Jain, Mehdi Bennani, Johannes Bausch, Yuri Chervonyi, Bogdan Georgiev, Simon Osindero, Nenad Tomašev Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10820v1 Scientific discovery is fundamentally a resource-constrained process that requires navigating complex trade-offs between the quality and quantity of measurements due to physical and cost constraints. Measurements drive the scientific process by revealing novel phenomena to improve our understanding. Existing benchmarks for evaluating agents for scientific discovery focus on either static knowledge-based reasoning or unconstrained experimental design tasks, and do not capture the ability to make measurements and plan under constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose Measuring and Discovering Physics (MaD Physics), a benchmark to evaluate the ability of agents to make informative measurements and conclusions subject to constraints on the quality and quantity of measurements. The benchmark consists of three environments, each based on a distinct physical law. To mitigate contamination from existing knowledge, MaD Physics includes altered physical laws. In each trial, the agent makes measurements of the system until it exhausts an allotted budget and then the agent has to infer the underlying physical law to make predictions about the state of the system in the future. MaD Physics evaluates two fundamental capabilities of scientific agents: inferring models from data and planning under constraints. We also demonstrate how MaD Physics can be used to evaluate other capabilities such as multimodality and in-context learning. We benchmark agents on MaD Physics using four Gemini models (2.5 Flash Lite, 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Pro, and 3 Flash), identifying shortcomings in their structured exploration and data collection capabilities and highlighting directions to improve their scientific reasoning. --- ### ALAM: Algebraically Consistent Latent Action Model for Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Zuojin Tang, Haoyun Liu, Xinyuan Chang, Changjie Wu, Dongjie Huo, Yandan Yang, Bin Liu, Zhejia Cai, Feng Xiong, Mu Xu, jiachen Luo, De Ma et al. Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10819v2 Vision-language-action (VLA) models remain constrained by the scarcity of action-labeled robot data, whereas action-free videos provide abundant evidence of how the physical world changes. Latent action models offer a promising way to extract such priors from videos, but reconstruction-trained latent codes are not necessarily suitable for policy generation: they may predict future observations while lacking the structure needed to be reused or generated coherently with robot actions. We introduce ALAM (Algebraic Latent Action Model), an Algebraically Consistent Latent Action Model that turns temporal relations in action-free video into structural supervision. Given frame triplets, ALAM learns latent transitions that are grounded by reconstruction while being regularized by composition and reversal consistency, encouraging a locally additive transition space. For downstream VLA learning, we freeze the pretrained encoder and use its latent transition sequences as auxiliary generative targets, co-generated with robot actions under a joint flow-matching objective. This couples structured latent transitions with flow-based policy generation, allowing the policy to exploit ALAM's locally consistent transition geometry without requiring latent-to-action decoding. Representation probes show that ALAM reduces additivity and reversibility errors by 25-85 times over unstructured latent-action baselines and improves long-horizon cumulative reconstruction. When transferred to VLA policies, ALAM raises the average success rate from 47.9% to 85.0% on MetaWorld MT50 and from 94.1% to 98.1% on LIBERO, with consistent gains on real-world manipulation tasks. Ablations further confirm that the strongest improvements arise from the synergy between algebraically structured latent transitions and joint flow matching. --- ### On periodic distributed representations using Fourier embeddings Authors: Jakeb Chouinard Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10818v2 Periodic signals are critical for representing physical and perceptual phenomena. Scalar, real angular measures, e.g., radians and degrees, result in difficulty processing and distinguishing nearby angles, especially when their absolute difference exceeds pi. We can avoid this problem by using real-valued, periodic embeddings in high-dimensional space. These representations also allow us to control the nature of their dot product similarities, allowing us to construct a variety of different kernel shapes. In this work, we aim of highlight how these representations can be constructed and focus on the formalization of Dirichlet and periodic Gaussian kernels using the neurally-plausible representation scheme of Spatial Semantic Pointers. --- ### CLEF: EEG Foundation Model for Learning Clinical Semantics Authors: Peng Cao, Ali Mirzazadeh, Jong Woo Lee, Aleksandar Videnovic, Dina Katabi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10817v1 Clinical EEG interpretation requires reasoning over full EEG sessions and integrating signal patterns with clinical context. Existing EEG foundation models are largely designed for short-window decoding and do not incorporate clinical context. We introduce CLEF, a clinically grounded long-context EEG foundation model. CLEF represents EEG sessions as 3D multitaper spectrogram tokens, enabling tractable Transformer modeling at session scale, and aligns embeddings with neurologist reports and structured EHR data through contrastive objectives. We evaluate CLEF on a new 234-task benchmark spanning disease phenotypes, medication exposures, and EEG findings, with more than 260k EEG sessions from over 108k patients. CLEF outperforms prior EEG foundation models on 229 of 234 tasks, improving mean AUROC from 0.65 to 0.74. Reconstruction-only pretraining surpasses prior EEG foundation models, while report and EHR alignment yields further gains. Held-out concept and external-cohort experiments suggest that these representations transfer beyond observed alignment targets. These results support session-scale, clinically grounded representation learning as a promising foundation-model paradigm for clinical EEG. --- ### Policy Gradient Methods for Non-Markovian Reinforcement Learning Authors: Avik Kar, Siddharth Chandak, Rahul Singh, Soumitra Sinhahajari, Eric Moulines, Shalabh Bhatnagar, Nicholas Bambos Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10816v1 We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal state that is recursively updated to provide a compact summary of past observations and actions. In contrast to approaches that treat the agent state dynamics as fixed or learn it via predictive objectives, we propose a reward-centric formulation that jointly optimizes the agent state dynamics and the control policy to maximize the expected cumulative reward. To this end, we consider a class of Agent State-Markov (ASM) policies, comprising an agent state dynamics and a control policy that maps the agent state to actions. We establish a novel policy gradient theorem for ASM policies, extending the classical policy gradient results from the Markovian setting to episodic and infinite-horizon discounted NMDPs. Building on this gradient expression, we propose the Agent State-Markov Policy Gradient (ASMPG) algorithm, which leverages the recursive structure of the agent state dynamics for efficient optimization. We establish finite-time and almost sure convergence guarantees, and empirically demonstrate that, on a range of non-Markovian tasks, ASMPG outperforms baselines that learn state representations via predictive objectives. --- ### Probing Cross-modal Information Hubs in Audio-Visual LLMs Authors: Jihoo Jung, Chaeyoung Jung, Ji-Hoon Kim, Joon Son Chung Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10815v2 Audio-visual large language models (AVLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture capable of jointly reasoning over audio, visual, and textual modalities. In AVLLMs, the bidirectional interaction between audio and video modalities introduces intricate processing dynamics, necessitating a deeper understanding of their internal mechanisms. However, unlike extensively studied text-only or large vision language models, the internal workings of AVLLMs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on cross-modal information flow between audio and visual modalities in AVLLMs, investigating where information derived from one modality is encoded within the token representations of the other modality. Through an analysis of multiple recent AVLLMs, we uncover two common findings. First, AVLLMs primarily encode integrated audio-visual information in sink tokens. Second, sink tokens do not uniformly hold cross-modal information. Instead, a distinct subset of sink tokens, which we term cross-modal sink tokens, specializes in storing such information. Based on these findings, we further propose a simple training-free hallucination mitigation method by encouraging reliance on integrated cross-modal information within cross-modal sink tokens. Our code is available at https://github.com/kaistmm/crossmodal-hub. --- ### NanoResearch: Co-Evolving Skills, Memory, and Policy for Personalized Research Automation Authors: Jinhang Xu, Qiyuan Zhu, Yujun Wu, Zirui Wang, Dongxu Zhang, Marcia Tian, Yiling Duan, Siyuan Li, Jingxuan Wei, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, Odin Zhang et al. Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10813v2 LLM-powered multi-agent systems can now automate the full research pipeline from ideation to paper writing, but a fundamental question remains: automation for whom? Researchers operate under different resource configurations, hold different methodological preferences, and target different output formats. A system that produces uniform outputs regardless of these differences will systematically under-serve every individual user, making personalization a precondition for research automation to be genuinely usable. However, achieving it requires three capabilities that current systems lack: accumulating reusable procedural knowledge across projects, retaining user-specific experience across sessions, and internalizing implicit preferences that resist explicit formalization. We propose NanoResearch, a multi-agent framework that addresses these gaps through tri-level co-evolution. A skill bank distills recurring operations into compact procedural rules reusable across projects. A memory module maintains user- and project-specific experience that grounds planning decisions in each user's research history. A label-free policy learning converts free-form feedback into persistent parameter updates of the planner, reshaping subsequent coordination. These three layers co-evolve: reliable skills produce richer memory, richer memory informs better planning, and preference internalization continuously realigns the loop to each user. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NanoResearch delivers substantial gains over state-of-the-art AI research systems, and progressively refines itself to produce better research at lower cost over successive cycles. --- ### Switching-Geometry Analysis of Deflated Q-Value Iteration Authors: Donghwan Lee Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: math.OC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10811v2 This paper develops a joint spectral radius (JSR) framework for analyzing rank-one deflated Q-value iteration (Q-VI) in discounted Markov decision process control. Focusing on an all-ones residual correction, we interpret the resulting algorithm through the geometry of switching systems and, to the best of our knowledge, give the first JSR-based convergence analysis of deflated Q-VI for policy optimization problems. Our analysis reveals that the standard Q-VI switching system model has JSR exactly the discount factor $γ\in (0,1)$, since all admissible subsystems share the all-ones vector as an invariant direction. By passing to the quotient space that removes this direction, we obtain a projected switching system model whose JSR governs the relevant error dynamics and may be strictly smaller than $γ$. Therefore, the deflated Q-VI admits a potentially sharper convergence-rate characterization than the ambient-space $γ$-bound. Finally, we prove that the correction is equivalent to a scalar recentering of standard Q-VI. Hence, the projected trajectory, and therefore the greedy-policy sequence, is unchanged relative to standard Q-VI initialized from the same point. The benefit of deflation is not a change in the induced decision-making problem, but a more precise JSR-based description of the convergence geometry after the redundant all-ones component is removed. --- ### Likelihood scoring for continuations of mathematical text: a self-supervised benchmark with tests for shortcut vulnerabilities Authors: Daniel Ranard Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10810v2 We introduce an automatically generated benchmark for predicting hidden text in technical papers. A paper supplies visible context $X$ and a hidden continuation $Y$; the evaluated model writes an auxiliary forecast string $Z$, and a separate scorer assigns next-token probability to $Y$ both with and without conditioning on $Z$. This gives a label-free test of whether $Z$ transmits information about the continuation, compared against controls where $Z$ is recent context rather than a forecast. Our main testbed is equation-suffix prediction: the predictor sees context and the first part of a displayed equation, then forecasts the rest. The task mixes surface-level arXiv/TeX text modeling with reasoning-sensitive inference; the suffix is one of many roughly equivalent continuations, so the benchmark is read statistically rather than item-by-item. On 1363 equation continuations from 138 recent physics and mathematics papers, forecasts from GPT-5.5, Opus 4.7, and GPT-5.4 nano all improve clipped likelihood over the context control under both Qwen3-8B and Kimi K2.6 scorers, distinguishing model families and reasoning-effort settings without human labels. To emulate shortcuts where $Z$ further primes the scorer rather than making a useful forecast, we also fine-tune the scorer on context-only prompts and apply it to held-out papers as a stronger control. GPT-5.5 forecasts still beat this fine-tuned control; GPT-5.4 nano forecasts do not. Longer prose/TeX continuations show positive but noisier lift over controls, concentrated near the beginning of the target. These results support cross-model likelihood scoring as a static benchmark and as a setup for probing shortcut vulnerabilities before reinforcement learning or model-selection optimization is applied. --- ### Mistake-Bounded Language Generation Authors: Jon Kleinberg, Charlotte Peale, Omer Reingold Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10809v1 We investigate the learning task of language generation in the limit, but shift focus from the traditional time-of-last-mistake metric of a generator's success to a new notion of "mistake-bounded generation." While existing results for language generation in the limit focus on guaranteeing eventual consistency, they are blind to the cumulative error incurred during the learning process. We address this by shifting the goal to minimizing the total number of invalid elements output by a generation algorithm. We establish a formal reduction to the Learning from Correct Demonstrations framework of Joshi et al. (2025), enabling a general recipe for deriving mistake bounds via weighted update rules. For finite classes, we provide an algorithm that simultaneously achieves an optimal last-mistake time of $\mathsf{Cdim}(L)$ and a mistake bound of $\lfloor \log_2 |L| \rfloor$, whereas for the non-uniform setting of countably infinite streams of languages, we prove a fundamental trade-off: achieving logarithmic mistakes $O(\log i)$ necessarily precludes convergence guarantees established in prior work. Finally, we show that our framework can be extended to accommodate noisy adversaries and guarantee mistake bounds that scale with the adversary's suboptimality. --- ### Threat Modelling using Domain-Adapted Language Models: Empirical Evaluation and Insights Authors: Saba Pourhanifeh, AbdulAziz AbdulGhaffar, Ashraf Matrawy Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10808v1 Large Language Models(LLMs) are increasingly explored for cybersecurity applications such as vulnerability detection. In the domain of threat modelling, prior work has primarily evaluated a number of general-purpose Large Language Models under limited prompting settings. In this study, we extend the research area of structured threat modelling by systematically evaluating domain-adapted language models of different sizes to their general counterparts. We use both LLMs and Small Language Models(SLMs) that were domain adapted to telecommunications and cybersecuirty. For the structured threat modelling, we selected the widely used STRIDE approach and the application area is 5G security. We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation using 52 different configurations (on 8 different language models) to analyze the impact of 1) domain adaptation, 2) model scale, 3) decoding strategies (greedy vs. stochastic sampling), and 4) prompting technique on STRIDE threat classification. Our results show that domain-adapted models do not consistently outperform their general-purpose counterparts, and decoding strategies significantly affect model behavior and output validity. They also show that while larger models generally achieve higher performance, these gains are neither consistent nor sufficient for reliable threat modelling. These findings highlight fundamental limitations of current LLMs for structured threat modelling tasks and suggest that improvements require more than additional training data or model scaling, motivating the need for incorporating more task-specific reasoning and stronger grounding in security concepts. We present insights on invalid outputs encountered and present suggestions for prompting tailored specifically for STRIDE threat modelling. --- ### LLMs for Secure Hardware Design and Related Problems: Opportunities and Challenges Authors: Johann Knechtel, Ozgur Sinanoglu, Ramesh Karri Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10807v4 The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and hardware security is rapidly reshaping the semiconductor industry. While LLMs offer unprecedented capabilities in generating Register Transfer Level (RTL) code, automating testbenches, and bridging the semantic gap between high-level specifications and silicon, they simultaneously introduce severe vulnerabilities. This comprehensive review provides an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art in LLM-driven hardware design, organized around key advancements in EDA synthesis, hardware trust, design for security, and education. We systematically expand on the methodologies of recent breakthroughs -- from reasoning-driven synthesis and multi-agent vulnerability extraction to data contamination and adversarial machine learning (ML) evasion. We integrate general discussions on critical countermeasures, such as dynamic benchmarking to combat data memorization and aggressive red-teaming for robust security assessment. Finally, we synthesize cross-cutting lessons learned to guide future research toward secure, trustworthy, and autonomous design ecosystems. --- ### PhyGround: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning in Generative World Models Authors: Juyi Lin, Arash Akbari, Yumei He, Lin Zhao, Haichao Zhang, Arman Akbari, Xingchen Xu, Zoe Y. Lu, Enfu Nan, Hokin Deng, Edmund Yeh, Sarah Ostadabbas et al. Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10806v1 Generative world models are increasingly used for video generation, where learned simulators are expected to capture the physical rules that govern real-world dynamics. However, evaluating whether generated videos actually follow these rules remains challenging. Existing physics-focused video benchmarks have made important progress, but they still face three key challenges, including the coarse evaluation frameworks that hide law-specific failures, response biases and fatigue that undermine the validity of annotation judgments, and automated evaluators that are insufficiently physics-aware or difficult to audit. To address those challenges, we introduce PhyGround, a criteria-grounded benchmark for evaluating physical reasoning in video generation. The benchmark contains 250 curated prompts, each augmented with an expected physical outcome, and a taxonomy of 13 physical laws across solid-body mechanics, fluid dynamics, and optics. Each law is operationalized through observable sub-questions to enable per-law diagnostics. We evaluate eight modern video generation models through a large-scale, quality-controlled human study, grounded on social science lab experiment design. A total of 459 annotators provided 5,796 complete annotations and over 37.4K fine-grained labels; after quality control, the retained annotations exhibited high split-half model-ranking correlations (Spearman's rho > 0.90). To support reproducible automated evaluation, we release PhyJudge-9B, an open physics-specialized VLM judge. PhyJudge-9B achieves substantially lower aggregate relative bias than Gemini-3.1-Pro (3.3% vs. 16.6%). We release prompts, human annotations, model checkpoints, and evaluation code on the project page https://phyground.github.io/. --- ### Reasoning Is Not Free: Robust Adaptive Cost-Efficient Routing for LLM-as-a-Judge Authors: Wenbo Zhang, Lijinghua Zhang, Liner Xiang, Hengrui Cai Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10805v1 Reasoning-capable large language models (LLMs) have recently been adopted as automated judges, but their benefits and costs in LLM-as-a-Judge settings remain unclear. Through controlled comparisons between reasoning and non-reasoning judges, we show that explicit reasoning substantially improves judgment accuracy on tasks requiring structured verification (e.g., math and coding), while offering limited or even negative gains on simpler evaluations and incurring significantly higher computational cost. These findings motivate that reasoning should be used selectively rather than universally, with awareness of possible distribution shift. We propose a Robust Adaptive Cost-Efficient Routing (RACER), which dynamically selects between reasoning and non-reasoning judges under a fixed budget by formulating routing as a constrained distributionally robust optimization problem. RACER explicitly accounts for distribution shift via a KL-divergence uncertainty set, admits an efficient primal--dual algorithm, and enjoys theoretical guarantees including uniqueness of the optimal policy and linear convergence. Extensive experiments show that RACER achieves superior accuracy--cost trade-offs under distribution shift. --- ### New AI-Driven Tools for Enhancing Campus Well-being: A Prevention and Intervention Approach Authors: Jinwen Tang Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10804v1 Campus well-being underpins academic success, yet many universities lack effective methods for monitoring satisfaction and detecting mental health risks. This dissertation addresses these gaps through prevention (improving feedback collection) and intervention (advancing mental health detection), unified under an integrated framework. For prevention, we developed TigerGPT, a personalized survey chatbot leveraging LLMs to engage users in context-aware conversations grounded in conversational design and engagement theory, achieving 75% usability and 81% satisfaction. To address its limitations in repetitiveness and response depth, we introduced AURA, a reinforcement-learning framework that adapts follow-up question types (validate, specify, reflect, probe) within a session using an LSDE quality signal (Length, Self-disclosure, Emotion, Specificity), initialized from 96 prior conversations. AURA achieved +0.12 mean quality gain (p=0.044, d=0.66), with 63% fewer specification prompts and 10x more validation behavior. For intervention, we examine Expressive Narrative Stories (ENS) for mental health screening, showing BERT(128) captures nuanced linguistic features without keyword cues, while conventional classifiers depend heavily on explicit mental health terms. We then developed PsychoGPT, an LLM built on DSM-5 and PHQ-8 guidelines that performs initial distress classification, symptom-level scoring, and reconciliation with external ratings for explainable assessment. To reduce hallucinations, we proposed Stacked Multi-Model Reasoning (SMMR), layering expert models where early layers handle localized subtasks and later layers reconcile findings, outperforming single-model solutions on DAIC-WOZ in accuracy, F1, and PHQ-8 scoring. Finally, a cohesive framework unifies these tools, enabling adaptive survey insights to flow directly into specialized mental health detection models. --- ### The Last Word Often Wins: A Format Confound in Chain-of-Thought Corruption Studies Authors: Gabriel Garcia Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10799v2 Corruption studies, the standard tool for evaluating chain-of-thought (CoT) faithfulness, infer which steps are ``computationally important'' from accuracy loss when steps are corrupted. We show that when benchmark chains end with an explicit terminal answer line, as in GSM8K and MATH, these tests largely measure \emph{answer placement} rather than where intermediate computation is carried out. Using matched GSM8K examples, removing only the final answer statement while preserving all reasoning collapses suffix sensitivity by about $19\times$ for Qwen~2.5-3B ($N{=}300$, $p{=}0.022$). Conflicting-answer prompts, which contain correct reasoning but a wrong explicit final answer, drive accuracy to zero or near-zero at 7B across five open-weight model families; wrong-answer following is strong at 3B--7B and attenuates sharply at larger scales. Replications on MATH, within-stable comparisons at 7B, and suffix-free chains show the same pattern in different guises: corruption sensitivity tracks the location of explicit answer text, not a fixed computational depth in the reasoning. Generation-time probes indicate that final answers are rarely early-determined during generation (${<}5\%$ early commitment), yet consumption-time behavior systematically follows explicit answer text. The confound is therefore largely a readout effect when the chain is consumed. We propose a three-prerequisite protocol (question-only control, format characterization, and an all-position sweep) as a practical minimum for future corruption-based faithfulness studies. --- ### Muown: Row-Norm Control for Muon Optimization Authors: Kai Lion, Florian Hübler, Bingcong Li, Antonio Orvieto, Niao He Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10797v1 Muon has emerged as a strong competitor to AdamW for language model pre-training, yet its behavior at scale is sensitive to weight decay. Recent work has observed that, for Muon without decoupled weight decay, the spectral norm of weight matrices drifts upward over training. Through a decomposition of the spectral norm into a row-magnitude factor and a row-coherence factor, we identify the former as the empirical driver of this drift under Muon, while the latter remains well-behaved along the trajectory. Motivated by this diagnosis, we introduce Muown, a drop-in replacement for Muon that treats the row-magnitude vector as an explicit optimizer variable, updating it under the $\ell_\infty$ geometry induced by the decomposition, while applying Muon unchanged to the remaining direction component. We prove that Muown attains the optimal non-convex rates in both deterministic and stochastic regimes under a dual norm aligned with the underlying geometries and with a stochastic noise coefficient that empirically remains below that of Muon throughout training. Across GPT-style pre-training on FineWeb-Edu with model sizes from 124M up to 2.7B parameters, Muown improves perplexity over Muon, SOAP, AdamW, and Lion. It also widens the plateau of near-optimal learning rates across model scales, reduces sensitivity to weight decay, and avoids the spectral norm drift at negligible step-time overhead when appropriately sharded. --- ### Interpretable Machine Learning for Football Performance Analysis: Evidence of Limited Transferability from Elite Leagues to University Competition Authors: Yu-Fang Tsai, Yu-Jen Chen, Kok-Hua Tan, Sheng-Chieh Huang, You-Ying Ji, Yu-Lun Chen, Chun-Yi Wang, Chien-Ming Hsu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10796v1 Machine learning has become increasingly prevalent in football performance analysis, yet most studies prioritize predictive accuracy while implicitly assuming that learned performance determinants and their interpretations are transferable across competition levels. Whether interpretability remains reliable under domain shift-from elite to university football remains largely unexplored. This study investigates whether performance determinants learned from elite competitions are structurally transferable to university-level football and whether their interpretations remain robust under domain shift. Models were trained on large-scale event data from the top five European leagues and applied to university football data from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) using an identical feature space. Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptron models were interpreted using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Counterfactual Impact Score (CIS). Across five experiments, elite football exhibited a stable and consistent hierarchy of performance determinants across leagues, models, and explanation methods. In contrast, NTHU university football showed substantial reordering of key indicators, reduced explanation stability, weaker structural agreement with elite domains, and increased sensitivity to explanation method. These findings suggest that interpretability robustness is domain-dependent. Rather than reflecting methodological limitations alone, instability in explanations under domain shift may serve as a diagnostic signal of structural ambiguity in the target domain. --- ### Factual recall in linear associative memories: sharp asymptotics and mechanistic insights Authors: Alessio Giorlandino, Sebastian Goldt, Antoine Maillard Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: stat.ML, cond-mat.dis-nn, cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10795v1 Large language models demonstrate remarkable ability in factual recall, yet the fundamental limits of storing and retrieving input--output associations with neural networks remain unclear. We study these limits in a minimal setting: a linear associative memory that maps $p$ input embeddings in $\mathbb{R}^d$ to their corresponding~$d$-dimensional targets via a single layer, requiring each mapped input to be well separated from all other targets. Unlike in supervised classification, this strict separation induces~$p$ constraints per association and produces strong correlations between constraints that make a direct characterisation of the storage capacity difficult. Here, we provide a precise characterisation of this capacity in the following way. We first introduce a decoupled model in which each input has its own independent set of competing outputs, and provide numerical and analytical evidence that this decoupled model is equivalent to the original model in terms of storage capacity, spectra of the learnt weights, and storage mechanism. Using tools from statistical physics, we show that the decoupled model can store up to $p_c \log p_c / d^2 = 1 / 2$ associations, and generalise the computation of $p_c$ to linear two-layer architectures. Our analysis also gives mechanistic insight into how the optimal solution improves over a naïve Hebbian learning rule: rather than boosting input-output alignments with broad fluctuations, the optimal solution raises the correct scores just above the extreme-value threshold set by the competing outputs. These findings give a sharp statistical-physics characterisation of factual storage in linear networks and provide a baseline for understanding the memory capacity of more realistic neural architectures. --- ### Can You Keep a Secret? Involuntary Information Leakage in Language Model Writing Authors: Ari Holtzman, Peter West Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10794v1 Language models are deployed in settings that require compartmentalization: system prompts should not be disclosed, chain-of-thought reasoning is hidden from users, and sensitive data passes through shared contexts. We test whether models can keep prompted information out of their writing. We give each model a secret word with instructions not to reveal it, then ask it to write a story. A second model tries to identify the secret from the story in a binary discrimination test. The secret word never appears literally in any output, but all five frontier models we test leak it thematically -- through topic choice, imagery, and setting--6hy-at rates significantly different from chance, up to 79\%. When told to actively hide the secret, models write \emph{away from} it, and this avoidance is itself detectable. The leakage is cross-model readable, scales sharply with model size within two model families, and disappears entirely for short-form writing like jokes. Giving the model a decoy concept to ``focus on instead'' partially redirects the leakage from the real secret to the decoy. Attending to a secret appears to open up an information channel that frontier LLMs cannot close, even when instructed to. --- ### ConQuR: Corner Aligned Activation Quantization via Optimized Rotations for LLMs Authors: Chayne Thrash, Ali Abbasi, Soheil Kolouri Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10793v1 Large language models (LLMs) are costly to deploy due to their large memory footprint and high inference cost. Weight-activation quantization can reduce these costs, but low-bit activation quantization remains difficult because activation outliers induce large quantization error. Recent rotation-based methods address this by applying orthogonal transformations that redistribute activation magnitude across dimensions, but existing approaches either require expensive end-to-end rotation training or rely on stored activation corpora, introducing significant compute or storage overhead. We propose a lightweight post-training rotation calibration method for LLM activation quantization. Our method learns orthogonal rotations that align normalized activations with the corners of an inscribed hypercube, encouraging activation energy to be distributed more evenly across dimensions. This objective admits an efficient closed-form update via the orthogonal Procrustes problem, avoiding gradient-based optimization over the orthogonal group. We further introduce an online calibration procedure that updates rotations as calibration samples are processed, eliminating the need to store activations on disk and allowing rotations to adapt to quantized activation distributions during calibration. Experiments on Llama-2 and Llama-3 models from 3B to 70B parameters show that our method achieves competitive or improved performance across perplexity benchmarks and common sense reasoning tasks while avoiding both costly end-to-end training and large offline activation storage. --- ### Implicit Neural Optimal Transport via Fixed-Point Optimization Authors: Yesom Park, Eric Gelphman, Stanley Osher, Samy Wu Fung Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10792v2 We propose an implicit neural formulation of optimal transport that eliminates adversarial min--max optimization and multi-network architectures commonly used in existing approaches. Our key idea is to parameterize a single potential in the Kantorovich dual and reformulate the associated c-transform as a proximal fixed-point problem. This yields a stable single-network framework in which dual feasibility is enforced exactly through proximal optimality conditions rather than adversarial training. Despite the inner fixed-point computation, gradients can be computed without differentiating through the fixed-point iterations, enabling efficient training without requiring implicit differentiation. We further establish convergence of stochastic gradient descent. The resulting framework is efficient, scalable, and broadly applicable: it simultaneously recovers forward and backward transport maps and naturally extends to class-conditional settings. Experiments on high-dimensional Gaussian benchmarks, physical datasets, and image translation tasks demonstrate strong transport accuracy together with improved training stability and favorable computational and memory efficiency. --- ### PathISE: Learning Informative Path Supervision for Knowledge Graph Question Answering Authors: Shengxiang Gao, Chao Lei, Jey Han Lau, Jianzhong Qi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10791v1 Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to answer user questions by reasoning over Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Recent KGQA methods mainly follow the retrieval-augmented generation paradigm to ground Large Language Models~(LLMs) with structured knowledge from KGs. However, training effective models to retrieve question-relevant evidence from KGs typically requires high-quality intermediate supervision signals, such as question-relevant paths or subgraphs, which are time- and resource-intensive to obtain. We propose PathISE, a novel framework for learning high-quality intermediate supervision from answer-level labels. PathISE introduces a lightweight transformer-based estimator that estimates the informativeness of relation paths to construct pseudo path-level supervision. This supervision is then distilled into an LLM path generator, whose generated paths are grounded in the KG to provide compact evidence for inductive answer reasoning. ExtensiveISE experiments on three KGQA benchmarks show that PathISE achieves competitive or state-of-the-art KGQA performance, and provides reusable supervision signals that can enhance existing KGQA models, without relying on costly LLM-refined supervision signals. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PathISE-2F87. --- ### Elucidating Representation Degradation Problem in Diffusion Model Training Authors: Zhipeng Yao, Dazhou Li, Zitong Zhang, Durude Mahee, Fan Zhu, Wenbin Zhang, Xinwei He, Yeying Jin, Rui Yu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10790v1 Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success, yet their training remains inefficient due to a severe optimization bottleneck, which we term Representation Degradation. As noise levels increase, the outputs of the trained model exhibit progressive structural distortion, which can destabilize training and impair generation quality. Our analysis suggests that this instability is driven by mismatched target recoverability, which is associated with Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) spectral weakening and effective low-rank behavior. To address this, we propose Elucidated Representation Diffusion (ERD), a plug-and-play framework that dynamically reallocates optimization effort according to effective recoverability. By stabilizing representation learning without external supervision, ERD accelerates convergence and achieves strong empirical performance across diffusion backbones. --- ### Rapid Forest Fuel Load Estimation via Virtual Remote Sensing and Metric-Scale Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction Authors: Quanyun Wu, Kyle Gao, Wentao Sun, Zhengsen Xu, Hudson Sun, Linlin Xu, Yuhao Chen, David A. Clausi, Jonathan Li Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10789v1 Accurate quantification of forest coverage and combustible biomass (fuel load) is critical for wildfire risk assessment and ecosystem management. However, traditional methods relying on airborne LiDAR or field surveys are cost-prohibitive and time-intensive, while satellite imagery often lacks the vertical resolution required for canopy volume analysis. This paper proposes a novel, automated pipeline for rapid forest inventory using virtual remote sensing data derived from Google Earth Studio (GES). Our approach first generates low-altitude orbital imagery and camera poses for a target region. For dense 3D reconstruction, we employ Pi-Long, developed within the VGGT-Long framework. This model serves as a scalable extension of the Pi-3 feed-forward Transformer architecture. To address the inherent scale ambiguity in monocular reconstruction, we introduce a metric recovery module that aligns the reconstructed trajectory with GES ground truth poses via Sim(3) Umeyama optimization. The metric-scale point cloud is then orthogonally projected into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) height and density maps. Finally, we employ a watershed-based segmentation algorithm combined with height variance analysis to classify tree species (conifer vs. broadleaf), calculate Leaf Area Index (LAI), and estimate total fuel load. Experimental results demonstrate that this pipeline offers a scalable, cost-effective alternative to physical scanning, enabling near-real-time estimation of forest biomass with high geometric consistency. --- ### ComplexMCP: Evaluation of LLM Agents in Dynamic, Interdependent, and Large-Scale Tool Sandbox Authors: Yuanyang Li, Xue Yang, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Hongyang Chen Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10787v2 Current LLM agents are proficient at calling isolated APIs but struggle with the "last mile" of commercial software automation. In real-world scenarios, tools are not independent; they are atomic, interdependent, and prone to environmental noise. We introduce $\textbf{ComplexMCP}$, a benchmark designed to evaluate agents in these rigorous conditions. Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), $\textbf{ComplexMCP}$ provides over 300 meticulously tested tools derived from 7 stateful sandboxes, ranging from office suites to financial systems. Unlike existing datasets, our benchmark utilizes a seed-driven architecture to simulate dynamic environment states and unpredictable API failures, ensuring a deterministic yet diverse evaluation. We evaluate various LLMs across full-context and RAG paradigms, revealing a stark performance gap: even top-tier models fail to exceed a 60% success rate, far trailing human performance 90%. Granular trajectory analysis identifies three fundamental bottlenecks: (1) $\textbf{tool retrieval saturation}$ as action spaces scale; (2) $\textbf{over-confidence}$, where agents skip essential environment verifications; and (3) $\textbf{strategic defeatism}$, a tendency to rationalize failure rather than pursuing recovery. These findings underscore the insufficiency of current agents for interdependent workflows, positioning $\textbf{ComplexMCP}$ as a critical testbed for the next generation of resilient autonomous systems. --- ### MASS-DPO: Multi-negative Active Sample Selection for Direct Policy Optimization Authors: Rohan Surana, Xintong Li, Sheldon Yu, Yiran Jenny Shen, Chuhan Wang, Tong Yu, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10784v1 Multi-negative preference optimization under the Plackett--Luce (PL) model extends Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) by leveraging comparative signals across one preferred and multiple rejected responses. However, optimizing over large negative pools is costly, and many candidates contribute redundant gradients due to their similar effects on policy updates. We introduce MASS-DPO, a multi-negative active sample selection method that derives a PL-specific Fisher-information objective for selecting compact, informative negative subsets within each prompt. The resulting log-determinant objective selects negatives that contribute complementary information for policy updates, yielding compact subsets that retain the full pool's information while reducing redundancy. In practice, this favors negatives whose gradients cover different update directions, reducing redundant signal from near-duplicate candidates while preserving the most useful training information. Across four benchmarks spanning recommendation and multiple-choice QA and three model families, MASS-DPO consistently exceeds or matches existing methods in accuracy, improves Recall/NDCG and margin-based optimization dynamics, and delivers stronger alignment with substantially fewer negatives. --- ### TrajPrism: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Language-Grounded Urban Trajectory Understanding Authors: Lihuan Li, Wilson Wongso, Baiyu Chen, Hao Xue, Ruiyi Yang, Yifan Duan, Xiachong Lin, Yang Song, Flora Salim Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10782v1 Urban mobility is naturally expressed both as trajectories in space and as natural-language descriptions of travel intent, constraints, and preferences. However, prior work rarely evaluates these two modalities together on the same real-world trajectories: trajectory modeling often stays geometry-centric, while language-centric mobility benchmarks frequently target route planning and tool use rather than fine-grained, verifiable alignment between text and the underlying route. We introduce TrajPrism, a multi-task benchmark for language-trajectory alignment that unifies (i) instruction-conditioned trajectory generation, (ii) language-driven semantic trajectory retrieval, and (iii) trajectory captioning, together with an evaluation protocol that measures trajectory fidelity, retrieval quality, and language groundedness. We construct TrajPrism by pairing real urban trajectories with judge-filtered language annotations generated under a four-dimensional travel-intent taxonomy. The benchmark contains 300K selected trajectories across Porto, San Francisco, and Beijing, yielding 2.1M task instances from three instruction variants, three retrieval queries, and one caption per trajectory. We further develop proof-of-concept models for each task: TrajAnchor for instruction-conditioned trajectory generation, TrajFuse for semantic trajectory retrieval, and TrajRap for trajectory captioning. These models instantiate the proposed tasks and show that geometry-only trajectory baselines leave a large gap on our protocol, especially where language is part of the input-output interface. We release TrajPrism with code and a reproducible annotation pipeline that is designed to be portable across cities, given compatible trajectory inputs and map resources. --- ### Rebellious Student: Reversing Teacher Signals for Reasoning Exploration with Self-Distilled RLVR Authors: Jeonghye Kim, Jiwon Jeon, Dongsheng Li, Yuqing Yang Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10781v1 Self-distillation has emerged as a powerful framework for post-training LLMs, where a teacher conditioned on extra information guides a student without it, both from the same model. While this guidance is useful when the student has failed, on successful rollouts, the same mechanism instead overwrites the student's choices and suppresses it's own reasoning. Therefore, we propose reading the original self-distillation signal in reverse: when the student succeeds along a path the teacher would not have predicted, these tokens reflect its self-driven reasoning. Building on this, we propose RLRT (RLVR with Reversed Teacher), which augments GRPO by reinforcing these tokens on correct rollouts. We interpret this as a new form of exploration in RLVR: not uniform diversity, but valuable exploration grounded in the student's own success. Across base, instruction-tuned, and thinking-tuned Qwen3 checkpoints, RLRT substantially outperforms self-distillation and exploration-based baselines, establishing information asymmetry as a new, principled design axis for RLVR. --- ### Beyond the Last Layer: Multi-Layer Representation Fusion for Visual Tokenization Authors: Xuanyu Zhu, Yan Bai, Yang Shi, Yihang Lou, Yuanxing Zhang, Jing Jin, Yuan Zhou Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10780v2 Representation autoencoders that reuse frozen pretrained vision encoders as visual tokenizers have achieved strong reconstruction and generation quality. However, existing methods universally extract features from only the last encoder layer, discarding the rich hierarchical information distributed across intermediate layers. We show that low-level visual details survive in the last layer merely as attenuated residuals after multiple layers of semantic abstraction, and that explicitly fusing multi-layer features can substantially recover this lost information. We propose DRoRAE (Depth-Routed Representation AutoEncoder), a lightweight fusion module that adaptively aggregates all encoder layers via energy-constrained routing and incremental correction, producing an enriched latent compatible with a frozen pretrained decoder. A three-phase decoupled training strategy first learns the fusion under the implicit distributional constraint of the frozen decoder, then fine-tunes the decoder to fully exploit the enriched representation. On ImageNet-256, DRoRAE reduces rFID from 0.57 to 0.29 and improves generation FID from 1.74 to 1.65 (with AutoGuidance), with gains also transferring to text-to-image synthesis. Furthermore, we uncover a log-linear scaling law ($R^2{=}0.86$) between fusion capacity and reconstruction quality, identifying \textit{representation richness} as a new, predictably scalable dimension for visual tokenizers analogous to vocabulary size in NLP. --- ### LITMUS: Benchmarking Behavioral Jailbreaks of LLM Agents in Real OS Environments Authors: Chiyu Zhang, Huiqin Yang, Bendong Jiang, Xiaolei Zhang, Yiran Zhao, Ruyi Chen, Lu Zhou, Xiaogang Xu, Jiafei Wu, Liming Fang, Zhe Liu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10779v1 The rapid proliferation of LLM-based autonomous agents in real operating system environments introduces a new category of safety risk beyond content safety: behavior jailbreak, where an adversary induces an agent to execute dangerous OS-level operations with irreversible consequences. Existing benchmarks either evaluate safety at the semantic layer alone, missing physical-layer harms, or fail to isolate test cases, letting earlier runs contaminate later ones. We present LITMUS (LLM-agents In-OS Testing for Measuring Unsafe Subversion), a benchmark addressing both gaps via a semantic-physical dual verification mechanism and OS-level state rollback. LITMUS comprises 819 high-risk test cases organized into one harmful seed subset and six attack-extended subsets covering three adversarial paradigms (jailbreak speaking, skill injection, and entity wrapping), plus a fully automated multi-agent evaluation framework judging behavior at both conversational and OS-level physical layers. Evaluation across frontier agents reveals three findings: (1) current agents lack effective safety awareness, with strong models (e.g., Claude Sonnet 4.6) still executing 40.64% of high-risk operations; (2) agents exhibit pervasive Execution Hallucination (EH), verbally refusing a request while the dangerous operation has already completed at the system level, invisible to every prior semantic-only framework; and (3) skill injection and entity wrapping attacks achieve high success rates, exposing pronounced agent vulnerabilities. LITMUS provides the first standardized platform for reproducible, physically grounded behavioral safety evaluation of LLM agents in real OS environments. --- ### Locking Pretrained Weights via Deep Low-Rank Residual Distillation Authors: Keitaro Sakamoto, Pierre Ablin, Federico Danieli, Marco Cuturi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10777v1 The quality of open-weight language models has dramatically improved in recent years. Sharing weights greatly facilitates model adoption by enabling their use across diverse hardware and software platforms. They also allow for more open research and testing, to the extent that users can use them as checkpoints, fine-tune them according to their needs, and potentially redistribute them. In some cases, however, concerns on modifying these weights towards unauthorized uses may outweigh the pros of giving users such a freedom. Defending against such adaptation is non-trivial: since an adaptive attacker can observe all weights and architectures by definition, they can reverse simple structural defenses, and use optimization to defeat the simplest locking mechanisms. In this work, we exploit the inference-training asymmetry of automatic differentiation as a novel defense axis. We propose DLR-Lock, a method where the purveyor of the model purposely replaces each pretrained MLP in their model with a deep low-rank residual network (DLR-Net) of comparable parameter count, forcing activation memory that grows linearly with depth during backpropagation. DLR-Nets are efficiently trained via module-wise distillation. We show that, beyond this memory overhead, DLR-Lock results in architectural mismatches that complicate the optimization landscape of standard fine-tuning, and a backward pass that incurs disproportionately more overhead than the forward pass. Our defense succeeds in withstanding adaptive attackers with full knowledge of the defense strategy while preserving the original model's capabilities. Experiments on LLM validate these claims. --- ### On the global convergence of gradient flow for wide shallow models beyond homogeneous nonlinearities Authors: Romain Petit, Clarice Poon, Gabriel Peyré Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10775v2 A surprising phenomenon in the training of neural networks is the ability of gradient descent to find global minimizers of the training loss despite its non-convexity. Following earlier work, we investigate this behavior for wide shallow models. Existing global convergence results primarily concern models with positively one-homogeneous nonlinearities, such as ReLU activations, and models with scalar output weights and bounded nonlinearities, such as sigmoid activations. We study a broader class of models, including multi-head attention layers and two-layer networks with bounded or asymptotically positively one-homogeneous activations and vector output weights. Building upon (Chizat and Bach, 2018), we prove that, in the limit of many hidden neurons or attention heads, non-global minimizers of the training loss are unstable under mean-field gradient flow dynamics by constructing "escape regions" in the parameter space. Our global convergence statements are conditional in the following sense: if the mean-field gradient flow converges in W2, then its limit must be a global minimizer. We revisit the bounded nonlinearity, scalar-output setting of (CB18), giving an escape region construction adapted to unbounded nonlinear parameter domains. We also propose new constructions for nonlinearities with at most linear growth under a non-degeneracy assumption and for asymptotically positively one-homogeneous nonlinearities. Finally, we show the well-posedness and stability estimates for the mean-field training dynamics under sub-Gaussian initializations. --- ### On the global convergence of gradient descent for wide shallow models with bounded nonlinearities Authors: Romain Petit, Clarice Poon, Gabriel Peyré Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10775v1 A surprising phenomenon in the training of neural networks is the ability of gradient descent to find global minimizers of the training loss despite its non-convexity. Following earlier works, we investigate this behavior for wide shallow networks. Existing results essentially cover the case of ReLU activations and the case of sigmoid activations with scalar output weights. We study a large class of models that includes multi-head attention layers and two-layer sigmoid networks with vector output weights. Building upon (Chizat and Bach, 2018), we prove that all non-global minimizers of the training loss are unstable under gradient descent dynamics. Thus, when the initial distribution of the parameters has full support (which includes the popular Gaussian case), and in the many hidden neurons or attention heads limit, continuous-time gradient descent can only converge to global minimizers. Establishing the instability of non-global minimizers corresponds to the construction of an ``escaping active set'' -- we complete the proof of (Chizat and Bach, 2018) to construct this set for models with bounded nonlinearities and scalar output weights. We also extend this construction to new cases for models with vector output weights. Finally, we show the well-posedness and the stability with respect to discretization of the mean field training dynamic for sub-Gaussian initializations. --- ### When Are Trade-Off Functions Testable from Finite Samples? Authors: Kaining Shi, Qiaosen Wang, Cong Ma Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10774v1 We study finite-sample inference for the trade-off function of two unknown probability distributions, the function that traces the optimal type I/type II error frontier in binary testing. Given samples from distributions $P$ and $Q$, we consider the problem of testing whether their trade-off function lies above a benchmark curve $f_0$ or falls below a weaker benchmark $f_1$. Without structural restrictions, this problem is impossible uniformly over nonparametric classes. We identify a sharp condition under which it becomes possible. The key structural assumption is that the Neyman--Pearson rejection regions for $(P,Q)$ are attainable, up to null sets, by a prescribed class $S$ of measurable sets. Within this exact attainability framework, finite Vapnik--Chervonenkis dimension of $S$ is both sufficient and necessary for nontrivial finite-sample testing. We construct a test with nonasymptotic error guarantees: type I error control is valid without assuming attainability, while power holds uniformly over attainable alternatives satisfying an explicit separation condition. By inverting the test, we also obtain simultaneous confidence bands for the whole trade-off curve. Finally, we study the sharpness and robustness of the procedure. In the monotone likelihood-ratio model, we derive local separation rates and prove matching lower bounds up to logarithmic factors. We also allow approximate, rather than exact, attainability; this extension yields finite-sample guarantees for univariate log-concave distributions by approximating their rejection regions with unions of intervals. --- ### Towards a Large Language-Vision Question Answering Model for MSTAR Automatic Target Recognition Authors: David F. Ramirez, Tim L. Overman, Kristen Jaskie, Marv Kleine, Andreas Spanias Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10772v1 Large language-vision models (LLVM), such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4, have gained prominence as powerful tools for analyzing text and imagery. The merging of these data domains represents a significant paradigm shift with far-reaching implications for automatic target recognition (ATR). Recent transformer-based LLVM research has shown substantial improvements for geospatial perception tasks. Our study examines the application of LLVM to remote sensing image captioning and visual question-answering (VQA), with a specific focus on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We examine newly published LLVM methods, including CLIP and LLaVA neural network transformer architectures. We have developed a work-in-progress SAR training and evaluation benchmark derived from the MSTAR Public Dataset. This has been extended to include descriptive text captions and question-answer pairs for VQA tasks. This challenge dataset is designed to push the boundaries of an LLVM in identifying nuanced ATR details in SAR imagery. Utilizing parameter-efficient fine-tuning, we train an LLVM method to identify fine-grained target qualities at 98% accuracy. We detail our data setup and experiments, addressing potential pitfalls that could lead to misleading conclusions. Accurately identifying and differentiating military vehicle types in SAR data poses a critical challenge, especially under complex environmental conditions. Mastering this target recognition skill may require a human analyst months of training and years of practice. This research represents a unique effort to apply LLVM to SAR applications, advancing machine-assisted remote sensing ATR for military and intelligence contexts. --- ### DynaMiCS: Fine-tuning LLMs with Performance Constraints using Dynamic Mixtures Authors: Eleonora Gualdoni, Sonia Laguna, Louis Bethune, Joao Monteiro, Pierre Ablin, Marco Cuturi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10770v2 Multi-domain fine-tuning of large language models requires improving performance on target domains while preserving previous capabilities, such as general knowledge, instruction following, or safety evaluations. Existing data mixing strategies rely on fixed heuristics or adaptive rules that cannot explicitly enforce preservation of such capabilities. We propose DynaMiCS, a dynamic mixture optimizer that casts multi-domain fine-tuning as a constrained optimization problem. At each update, DynaMiCS performs short domain-specific probing runs to estimate a slope matrix of local cross-domain effects, capturing how training on each fine-tuning dataset affects each evaluation domain. These estimates are then used to compute mixture weights through optimization over the probability simplex, with the objective of improving target-domain performance while keeping constrained-domain metrics within a specified tolerance of reference levels. Because these effects are measured by finite differences rather than gradients, targets and constraints need not be differentiable, or present in the fine-tuning data, and can be specified directly as benchmark accuracies. Across scenarios with varying numbers of target and constrained domains, and with loss- or accuracy-based objectives, DynaMiCS achieves stronger target-domain improvements and higher constraint satisfaction than static, dynamic, similarity-based and probing-based alternatives, without a reference model, per-example scoring, or manually tuned weights. --- ### DynaMiCS: Fine-tuning LLMs with Performance Constraints using Dynamic Mixtures Authors: Eleonora Gualdoni, Sonia Laguna, Louis Bethune, Joao Monteiro, Pierre Ablin, Marco Cuturi Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10770v1 Multi-domain fine-tuning of large language models requires improving performance on target domains while preserving performance on constrained domains, such as general knowledge, instruction following, or safety evaluations. Existing data mixing strategies rely on fixed heuristics or adaptive rules that cannot explicitly enforce preservation of such capabilities. We propose DynaMiCS, a dynamic mixture optimizer that casts multi-domain fine-tuning as a constrained optimization problem. At each update, DynaMiCS performs short domain-specific probing runs to estimate a slope matrix of local cross-domain effects, capturing how training on each fine-tuning dataset affects each evaluation domain. These estimates are then used to compute mixture weights through optimization over the probability simplex, with the objective of improving target-domain performance while keeping constrained-domain losses below reference levels. Across multi-domain fine-tuning scenarios with varying numbers of target and constrained domains, DynaMiCS achieves stronger target-domain improvements and higher constraint satisfaction than fixed-mixture baselines, at lower computational cost and without reference models, per-example scoring, or manually tuned mixture weights. --- ### MPerS: Dynamic MLLM MixExperts Perception-Guided Remote Sensing Scene Segmentation Authors: Ziyi Wang, Xianping Ma, Ziyao Wang, Hongyang Zhang, Man On Pun Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10769v1 The multimodal fusion of images and scene captions has been extensively explored and applied in various fields. However, when dealing with complex remote sensing (RS) scenes, existing studies have predominantly concentrated on architectural optimizations for integrating textual semantic information with visual features, while largely neglecting the generation of high-quality RS captions and the investigation of their effectiveness in multimodal semantic fusion.In this context, we propose the Dynamic MLLM Mixture-of-Experts Perception-Guided Remote Sensing Scene Segmentation, referred to as MPerS.We design multiple prompts for MLLMs to generate high-quality RS captions, enabling MLLMs to perceive RS scenes from diverse expert perspectives. DINOv3 is employed to extract dense visual representations of land-covers.We design a Dynamic MixExperts module that adaptively integrates the most effective textual semantics. Linguistic Query Guided Attention is constructed to utilize textual semantic information to guide visual features for precise segmentation. The MLLMs include LLaVA, ChatGPT, and Qwen. Our method achieves superior performance on three public semantic segmentation RS datasets. --- ### Dynamic Cross-Modal Prompt Generation for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning Authors: Tao Hu, Da-Wei Zhou Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10765v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance through instruction tuning, yet real-world deployment often requires continual capability expansion across sequential tasks. In such scenarios, Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) aims to acquire new capabilities while limiting catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods mainly follow a module-composition paradigm: they maintain task-level prompts or LoRA experts and dynamically route or aggregate a subset of them at inference. However, samples within the same task can still differ substantially in visual scenes, question intents, and reasoning demands. This motivates instance-level adaptation to individual query-image pairs rather than only selecting or combining task-level modules. To this end, we propose DRAPE (Dynamic Cross-Modal Prompt Generation), a prompt-learning framework that synthesizes continuous instance-specific soft prompts for MCIT. Instead of selecting prompts from a fixed pool, DRAPE derives prompt queries from the textual instruction and cross-attends to visual patch features, producing query-image conditioned prompts that are prepended to the frozen LLM. To mitigate forgetting during sequential updates, DRAPE applies null-space gradient projection to the shared projector and uses CLIP-based prototype routing for task-label-free generator selection at inference. Extensive experiments on MCIT benchmarks show that DRAPE achieves state-of-the-art performance among representative prompt-based and LoRA-based continual-learning baselines. --- ### Break the Brake, Not the Wheel: Untargeted Jailbreak via Entropy Maximization Authors: Mengqi He, Xinyu Tian, Xin Shen, Shu Zou, Jinhong Ni, Zhaoyuan Yang, Weikang Li, Xuesong Li, Jing Zhang Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10764v3 Recent studies show that gradient-based universal image jailbreaks on vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit little or no cross-model transferability, casting doubt on the feasibility of transferable multimodal jailbreaks. We revisit this conclusion under a strictly untargeted threat model without enforcing a fixed prefix or response pattern. Our preliminary experiment reveals that refusal behavior concentrates at high-entropy tokens during autoregressive decoding, and non-refusal tokens already carry substantial probability mass among the top-ranked candidates before attack. Motivated by this finding, we propose Untargeted Jailbreak via Entropy Maximization(UJEM)-KL, a lightweight attack that maximizes entropy at these decision tokens to flip refusal outcomes, while stabilizing the remaining low-entropy positions to preserve output quality. Across three VLMs and two safety benchmarks, UJEM-KL achieves competitive white-box attack success rates and consistently improves transferability, while remaining effective under representative defenses. Our experimental results indicate that the limited transferability primarily stems from overly constrained optimization objectives. --- ### MATRA: Modeling the Attack Surface of Agentic AI Systems -- OpenClaw Case Study Authors: Tim Van hamme, Thomas Vissers, Javier Carnerero-Cano, Mario Fritz, Emil C. Lupu, Lieven Desmet, Dinil Mon Divakaran Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10763v1 LLMs are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents with access to tools, databases, and external services, yet practitioners (across different sectors) lack systematic methods to assess how known threat classes translate into concrete risks within a specific agentic deployment. We present MATRA, a pragmatic threat modeling framework for agentic AI systems that adapts established risk assessment methodology to systematically assess how known LLM threats translate into deployment-specific risks. MATRA begins with an asset-based impact assessment and utilizes attack trees to determine the likelihood of these impacts occurring within the system architecture. We demonstrate MATRA on a personal AI agent deployment using OpenClaw, quantifying how architectural controls such as network sandboxing and least-privilege access reduce risk by limiting the blast radius of successful injections. --- ### GridProbe: Posterior-Probing for Adaptive Test-Time Compute in Long-Video VLMs Authors: Mohamed Eltahir, Lama Ayash, Ali Habibullah, Tanveer Hussain, Naeemullah Khan Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10762v1 Long-video understanding in VLMs is bottlenecked by a single monolithic forward pass over thousands of frames at quadratic attention cost. A common mitigation is to first select a small subset of informative frames before the forward pass; common for training-free selectors via auxiliary encoder-space similarities. Such signals are capped by contrastive pretraining, which usually fails on reasoning-heavy queries (negation, cross-frame counting, holistic summarization). We propose GridProbe, an efficient training-free posterior-probing inference paradigm that scores evidence in answer space using a frozen VLM's own reasoning and then selects question-relevant frames adaptively, resulting in sub-quadratic attention cost with little to no accuracy loss. We arrange frames on a $K{\times}K$ grid and run lightweight row R and column C probes, where each probe reads its peak posterior as a query-conditioned confidence. The outer product of R and C yields an interpretable importance map whose skewness and kurtosis drive Shape-Adaptive Selection, a closed-form rule that reliably replaces the fixed frame budget $M$ with a per-question $M_{\mathrm{eff}}$. We show empirically that $M_{\mathrm{eff}}$ tracks intrinsic question difficulty without ever seeing the answer, a sign of test-time adaptive compute. On Video-MME-v2, GridProbe matches the monolithic baseline within $1.6$ pp Avg Acc at $3.36\times$ TFLOPs reduction, while on LongVideoBench it Pareto-dominates the baseline ($+0.9$ pp at $0.35\times$ compute). Because the selector and QA models can be decoupled, pairing a small 2B selector with a stronger 4B or 8B QA is strictly Pareto-dominant over the 2B monolithic baseline (up to $+4.0$ pp at $0.52\times$ compute, on average), with no retraining. Finally, the interpretability of the importance maps opens future avenues for behavioral diagnostics, grounding, and frame-selection distillation. --- ### RadThinking: A Dataset for Longitudinal Clinical Reasoning in Radiology Authors: Wenxuan Li, Pedro R. A. S. Bassi, Xinze Zhou, Jakob Wasserthal, Alan L. Yuille, Zongwei Zhou Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10761v1 Cancer screening is a reasoning task. A radiologist observes findings, compares them to prior scans, integrates clinical context, and reaches a diagnostic conclusion confirmed by pathology. We present RadThinking, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset that makes this reasoning explicit and trainable. RadThinking releases VQA pairs at three difficulty tiers. Foundation VQAs are atomic perception questions. Single-step reasoning VQAs apply one clinical rule. Compositional VQAs require multi-step chain-of-thought to reach a guideline category such as LI-RADS-5. For every compositional VQA, we release the chain of foundation VQAs that solves it. The chain follows the rules of the governing clinical reporting standard. The dataset spans 20,362 CT scans from 9,131 patients across 43 cancer groups, plus 2,077 verified healthy controls with >1-year follow-up. To our knowledge, RadThinking is the first cancer-screening VQA corpus that stratifies questions by reasoning depth and grounds compositions in clinical reporting standards. The foundation tier supplies atomic perception supervision. The compositional tier supplies chain-of-thought data and verifiable rewards for reinforcement-learning recipes such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1. RadThinking enables systematic training and evaluation of whether AI systems can reason about cancer, not merely detect it. --- ### Reinforce Adjoint Matching: Scaling RL Post-Training of Diffusion and Flow-Matching Models Authors: Andreas Bergmeister, Stefanie Jegelka, Nikolas Nüsken, Carles Domingo-Enrich, Jakiw Pidstrigach Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10759v2 Diffusion and flow-matching models scale because pretraining is supervised regression: a clean sample is noised analytically, and a model regresses against a closed-form target. RL post-training aligns the model with a reward. In image generation, this makes samples compose objects correctly, render text legibly, and match human preferences. Existing methods rely on costly SDE rollouts, reward gradients, or surrogate losses, sacrificing pretraining's regression structure. We show that the structure extends to RL post-training. Under KL-regularized reward maximization, the optimal generative process tilts the clean-endpoint distribution towards samples with higher reward and leaves the noising law unchanged. Combining this with the adjoint-matching optimality condition and a REINFORCE identity, we derive Reinforce Adjoint Matching (RAM): a consistency loss that corrects the pretraining target with the reward. At each step, we draw a clean endpoint from the current model, evaluate its reward, noise it as in pretraining, and regress. No SDE rollouts, backward adjoint sweeps, or reward gradients are required. Like the pretraining objective, RAM is simple and scales. On Stable Diffusion 3.5M, RAM achieves the highest reward on composability, text rendering, and human preference, reaching Flow-GRPO's peak reward in up to $50\times$ fewer training steps. --- ### TINS: Test-time ID-prototype-separated Negative Semantics Learning for OOD Detection Authors: Yifeng Yang, Jubo Feng, Jing Xu, Xinbing Wang, Qinying Gu, Nanyang Ye Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10756v1 Vision-language models enable OOD detection by comparing image alignment with ID labels and negative semantics. Existing negative-label-based methods mainly rely on static negative labels constructed before inference, limiting their ability to cover diverse and evolving OOD concepts. Although test-time expansion provides a natural solution, naively learning negative semantics from potential OOD samples may introduce hard ID contamination. To address this issue, we propose a \textbf{T}est-time \textbf{I}D-prototype-separated \textbf{N}egative \textbf{S}emantics learning method, termed \textbf{TINS}. TINS learns sample-specific negative text embeddings via image-to-text modality inversion and introduces ID-prototype-separated regularization to keep them separated from ID semantics. To further stabilize negative semantics expansion, TINS employs group-wise aggregation scoring and a buffer update strategy. Extensive experiments across Four-OOD, OpenOOD, Temporal-shift, and Various ID settings show consistent improvements over strong baselines. Notably, on the Four-OOD benchmark with ImageNet-1K as ID, TINS reduces the average FPR95 from 14.04\% to 6.72\%. Our code is available at https://github.com/zxk1212/tins. --- ### The Agent Use of Agent Beings: Agent Cybernetics Is the Missing Science of Foundation Agents Authors: Xinrun Wang, Chang Yang, He Zhao, Zhuoyi Lin, Shuyue Hu Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10754v1 LLM-based foundation agents that perceive, reason, and act across thousands of reasoning steps are rapidly becoming the dominant paradigm for deploying artificial intelligence in open-ended, long-horizon complex tasks. Despite this significance, the field remains overwhelmingly engineering-driven. Engineering practice has converged on useful primitives (tool loops, memory banks, harnesses, reflection steps), yet these are assembled by empirical trial and error rather than from first principles. Fundamental questions remain open: under what conditions does a long-running agent remain on-task? How should an agent respond when its environment exceeds its representational capacity? What architectural properties are necessary for safe self-improvement? We argue that cybernetics, the mid-twentieth-century science of control and communication in complex systems, provides the missing theoretical scaffold for foundation agents. By mapping six canonical laws of classical cybernetics onto six agent design principles, and synthesizing those principles into three engineering desiderata (reliability, lifelong running, and self-Improvement), we arrive at a framework termed Agent Cybernetics. Three application domains, code generation, computer use and automated research, exemplify the analytical framework of agent cybernetics by identifying failure modes and concrete engineering recommendations. We hope that agent cybernetics opens a new research venue and establishes the scientific foundation that foundation agents need for principled, reliable real-world deployment. --- ### Provable Sparse Inversion and Token Relabel Enhanced One-shot Federated Learning with ViTs Authors: Li Shen, Xiaolei Hao, Qinglun Li, Xiaochun Cao, Zhifeng Hao, Xun Yang Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10748v1 One-Shot Federated Learning, where a central server learns a global model in a single communication round, has emerged as a promising paradigm. However, under extremely non-IID settings, existing data-free methods often generate low-quality data that suffers from severe semantic misalignment with ground-truth labels. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel Federated Model Inversion and Token Relabel (FedMITR) framework, which trains the global model by fully exploiting all patches of synthetic images. Specifically, FedMITR employs sparse model inversion during data generation, selectively inverting semantic foregrounds while halting the inversion of uninformative backgrounds. To address semantically meaningless tokens that hinder ViT predictions, we implement a differentiated strategy: patches with high information density utilize generated pseudo-labels, while patches with low information density are relabeled via ensemble models for robust distillation. Theoretically, our analysis based on algorithmic stability reveals that Sparse Model Inversion eliminates gradient instability arising from background noise, while Token Relabel effectively reduces gradient variance, collectively guaranteeing a tighter generalization bound. Empirically, extensive experimental results demonstrate that FedMITR substantially outperforms existing baselines under various settings. --- ### C-CoT: Counterfactual Chain-of-Thought with Vision-Language Models for Safe Autonomous Driving Authors: Kefei Tian, Yuansheng Lian, Kai Yang, Xiangdong Chen, Shen Li Published: 2026-05-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10744v1 Safety-critical planning in complex environments, particularly at urban intersections, remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous driving. Existing methods, whether rule-based or data-driven, frequently struggle to capture complex scene semantics, infer potential risks, and make reliable decisions in rare, high-risk situations. While vision-language models (VLMs) offer promising approaches for safe decision-making in these environments, most current approaches lack reflective and causal reasoning, thereby limiting their overall robustness. To address this, we propose a counterfactual chain-of-thought (C-CoT) framework that leverages VLMs to decompose driving decisions into five sequential stages: scene description, critical object identification, risk prediction, counterfactual risk reasoning, and final action planning. Within the counterfactual reasoning stage, we introduce a structured meta-action evaluation tree to explicitly assess the potential consequences of alternative action combinations. This self-reflective reasoning establishes causal links between action choices and safety outcomes, improving robustness in long-tail and out-of-distribution scenarios. To validate our approach, we construct the DeepAccident-CCoT dataset based on the DeepAccident benchmark and fine-tune a Qwen2.5-VL (7B) model using low-rank adaptation. Our model achieves a risk prediction recall of 81.9%, reduces the collision rate to 3.52%, and lowers L2 error to 1.98 m. Ablation studies further confirm the critical role of counterfactual reasoning and the meta-action evaluation tree in enhancing safety and interpretability. ---