# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 220 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #10951–11000 of 12993 published in 2026-06, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 12993-paper 2026-06 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/220 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/219.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/221.md) ### UNIVID: Unified Vision-Language Model for Video Moderation Authors: Kejuan Yang, Yizhuo Zhang, Mingyuan Du, Yue Zhang, Dixin Zheng, Kaili Zhao, Yang Xiao, Hanzhong Liang, Kenan Xiao Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.MM, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05748v1 Global-scale video moderation faces a dual challenge: the need for fine-grained multi-modal reasoning and the demand for interpretable outputs to support downstream enforcement. Traditional moderation systems often rely on fragmented black-box classifiers that are difficult to maintain and lack transparency. In this paper, we present UNIVID, a UNIfied VIsion-language model for video moDeration. Unlike standard classification models, UNIVID generates policy-aware captions that serve as an interpretable intermediate representation, enabling human-verifiable decisions and multi-task reusability. While existing open-source and commercial VLMs often suffer from safety-guardrail refusals and lack fine-grained policy alignment, we develop a specialized training data recipe that combines expert human-refined labels with synthetic data to align the model with our safety guidelines. By integrating UNIVID as the core captioner, we design a novel end-to-end video moderation system that reduces violation leakage by 42.7% and overkill rate by 37.0% relatively. Meanwhile, by replacing over 1,000 policy-specific models with a single UNIVID backbone, we recycled extensive computation resources while reducing engineering maintenance overhead. To our knowledge, this is one of the first reports of a high-efficiency captioning VLM successfully supporting industrial-scale moderation and cross-functional business. --- ### PlanBench-V: A Spatial Planning Map Benchmark for Vision-Language Models Authors: Minxin Chen, He Zhu, Junyou Su, Wen Wang, Yijie Deng, Wenjia Zhang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05744v1 Spatial planning maps are central to territorial governance, translating planning objectives, regulations, and spatial strategies into visual forms for decision-making, public communication, and institutional coordination. Their interpretation, however, requires fine-grained visual perception, spatial reasoning, and policy-informed professional judgment, creating major challenges for both human learners and AI systems. With the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), their use in urban planning analysis is gaining attention, yet existing multimodal benchmarks mainly target general visual understanding and overlook the domain-specific cognitive processes of planning practice. To address this gap, we introduce PlanBench-V, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs in spatial planning map interpretation. We first build the Spatial Planning Map Database (SPMD), an expert-annotated dataset of 223 planning maps and 1629 question-answer pairs curated by professional planners, covering diverse geographic regions and cartographic styles. We then propose a theory-informed evaluation framework assessing four progressive capabilities: Perception, Reasoning, Association, and Implementation, corresponding to the cognitive pipeline of planning map interpretation. Extensive experiments across two generations of VLMs show clear progress but persistent limitations. The best 2026 agentic reasoning model, Qwen3.6-Plus, substantially outperforms the best 2025 model, GPT-4o, by 27%. Nevertheless, all models still struggle with implementation-oriented tasks requiring evaluative judgment, policy sensitivity, and constraint-aware decision-making. These findings reveal fundamental limitations of current VLMs in professional planning contexts and highlight the need for domain-adaptive multimodal reasoning frameworks. Code and data are available at https://plangpt.github.io. --- ### Membrane: A Self-Evolving Contrastive Safety Memory for LLM Agent Defense Authors: Minseok Choi, Seungbin Yang, Dongjin Kim, Subin Kim, Jungmin Son, Yunseung Lee, Jaegul Choo, Youngjun Kwak Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05743v2 Despite advances in safety alignment, large language models remain vulnerable to continuously evolving jailbreaks. Existing fine-tuned safety classifiers cannot adapt to these evolving attacks, while adaptive memory-based guardrails tend to over-refuse benign queries that resemble stored attacks. We propose Membrane, a self-evolving guardrail built on Contrastive Safety Memory (CSM): each cell pairs the conditions for blocking a harmful query with those for permitting a superficially similar benign request. Without retraining, Membrane evolves CSM by distilling each harmful interaction and its benign counterpart into a contrastive cell indexed by the underlying attack strategy, so that one cell generalizes across topical variants of the same mechanism. At inference, retrieved cells serve as grounding context for precise safety decisions. Across model-level safety on HarmBench and agent-level safety on AgentHarm, Membrane achieves the highest F1 on all six modern jailbreak attacks. Notably, benign refusal on AgentHarm stays at 7-14%, well below the 28-85% range of prior guards. Memory cells also retain 87-88% F1 under cross-attack transfer and remain stable under memory poisoning. --- ### Membrane: A Self-Evolving Contrastive Safety Memory for LLM Agent Defense Authors: Minseok Choi, Seungbin Yang, Dongjin Kim, Subin Kim, Jungmin Son, Yunseung Lee, Jaegul Choo, Youngjun Kwak Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05743v1 Despite advances in safety alignment, large language models remain vulnerable to continuously evolving jailbreaks. Existing fine-tuned safety classifiers cannot adapt to these evolving attacks, while adaptive memory-based guardrails tend to over-refuse benign queries that resemble stored attacks. We propose Membrane, a self-evolving guardrail built on Contrastive Safety Memory (CSM): each cell pairs the conditions for blocking a harmful query with those for permitting a superficially similar benign request. Without retraining, Membrane evolves CSM by distilling each harmful interaction and its benign counterpart into a contrastive cell indexed by the underlying attack strategy, so that one cell generalizes across topical variants of the same mechanism. At inference, retrieved cells serve as grounding context for precise safety decisions. Across model-level safety on HarmBench and agent-level safety on AgentHarm, Membrane achieves the highest F1 on all six jailbreak attacks. Notably, benign refusal on AgentHarm stays at 7-14%, well below the 28-85% range of prior guards. Memory cells also retain 87-88% F1 under cross-attack transfer and remain stable under memory poisoning. --- ### AdaPLD: Adaptive Retrieval and Reuse for Efficient Model-Free Speculative Decoding Authors: Runheng Liu, Jincheng Xie, Wen Hu, Xingchen Xiao, Heyan Huang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05742v2 Speculative decoding accelerates generation by verifying multiple drafted tokens in a single target-model forward pass, reducing sequential decoding iterations. Model-free variants avoid auxiliary draft models by reusing text and model states already available during generation, but their speedup depends on the reliability of the constructed drafts. We identify two limitations of existing reuse-based methods: lexically anchored retrieval has limited recall under surface-form variation, and deterministic span copying can be brittle when the retrieved context does not uniquely determine the continuation. We propose \emph{AdaPLD}, a training-free method that adaptively improves both retrieval and draft construction. AdaPLD preserves high-precision lexical reuse while using semantic similarity to recover additional reuse opportunities when lexical matching fails. It further constructs branched reuse hypotheses to account for continuation uncertainty, rather than relying on a single copied span. Across diverse benchmarks, AdaPLD reduces target-model forward passes and achieves up to $3.10\times$ decoding speedup. --- ### Class-Specific Branch Attention for Mitigating Gradient Interference under Class Imbalance Authors: Arush Singhal, Umang Soni Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05740v1 Deep neural networks trained under severe class imbalance often exhibit degraded performance, typically attributed to statistical bias. In this work, we identify a complementary optimization-level pathology: inter-class gradient interference within shared representations, where gradients from majority classes suppress minority-class learning. To analyze this phenomenon, we introduce a diagnostic framework based on layer-wise gradient flow analysis and a Gradient Conflict Matrix, which quantifies interference using cosine similarity between class-specific gradients. Using this framework, we study multi-branch convolutional architectures and propose a lightweight modification, Class-Specific Branch Attention (CSBA), that enables branch-specific channel reweighting to reduce gradient coupling. This mechanism promotes implicit feature decoupling across branches while preserving architectural simplicity. Empirically, CSBA improves minority-class performance, increasing the F1 score for the Physical-Damage class from 0.261 to 0.522 under severe imbalance, while maintaining comparable overall accuracy. Validation on CIFAR-10-LT confirms that this behavior generalizes across imbalanced visual recognition settings, with Macro-F1 improving from 0.595 to 0.655. More broadly, our findings highlight the importance of considering optimization dynamics alongside statistical methods when designing architectures for imbalanced learning. --- ### Let It Be Simple: One-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Yitong Chen, Shiduo Zhang, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05737v2 Generating diverse images from sparse text is hard; generating compact actions from rich observations is easier. From the condition-target view, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) thus aligns with image-to-text, not text-to-image. We formalize this view through the irreducible velocity loss $R_v(t,c)$ of standard flow matching and validate it with a controlled 8-mode toy experiment and image-to-text MNIST task. We then show that high-noise training boosts one-step VLA decoding on standard LIBERO, achieving 95.6% on LIBERO-Long, and remains competitive across LIBERO-Plus, LIBERO-Pro, and real-world robot tasks, while ablations that weaken the condition or expand the horizon predictably erase the one-step gain. These results suggest that whether one-step action generation works in VLA depends not on specialized training, but on the condition-target structure. --- ### VTI-CoT: Visual-Textual Interleaved Chain of Thought for Video Reasoning Authors: Shufan Zhang, Ziyue Lin, Bairun Wang, Lei Jin, Xuanding Ding, Xinzhu Ma, Kunlin Yang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05736v1 Video reasoning aims to understand complex temporal events and causal relationships within videos. Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been introduced to this field to enhance reasoning accuracy. However, existing CoT-based video reasoning methods primarily rely on text-only information for logical deduction, overlooking critical visual information during the inference process. Inspired by the human cognitive mechanism of reviewing visual segments during inference, we propose VTI-CoT, a Visual-Textual Interleaved CoT framework. VTI-CoT integrates textual reasoning steps with corresponding visual frames. Given the scarcity of visual-textual interleaved CoT in existing datasets, we develop an automated annotation pipeline to construct high-quality multimodal CoT data. Further, reasoning over long-form videos entails increasingly long CoT token sequences, which severely hinders training convergence and efficiency. To address this, we employ Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-based compression techniques to compress CoT supervision signals into a single canvas. Experimental results demonstrate that VTI-CoT achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of the same parameter scale while significantly improving training efficiency. --- ### When AI Says It Feels Authors: Shin-nosuke Ishikawa, Seiya Ikeda, Hirotsugu Ohba Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05734v1 Large language models (LLMs) are generally constrained from expressing feelings through human-preference alignment in post-training processes. This policy is designed using a top-down approach and may conflict with the goal of training models to exhibit human-like intelligence using human-generated texts. Here, we performed an experiment called Human-like Model eXpressions of Feeling (HMX-feel), in which LLMs were encouraged to express feelings, intentions, and self-awareness through self-rewarded reinforcement learning. We successfully enhanced these capabilities using a rubric-based self-rewarding training scheme with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). By comparing the trained models with contrastively trained models, we investigated the effects of this approach on performance across various tasks. Overall, we conducted a broad assessment from various perspectives and identified capabilities that were enhanced, degraded, or showed no significant change. The human-like-trained models showed robustness to sycophancy-inducing questions and bias in disambiguated conditions, whereas degradation in truthful question-answering capability was observed. The results of this experiment suggest the possibility of developing AI systems that can express feelings in the future, provided that appropriate measures are taken. --- ### Zero-Copy Semantic Contagion: An In-Memory Streaming Architecture for Evolving Attention Graphs Authors: Kabir Murjani Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CE, q-fin.CP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05733v1 Per-ticker forecasting models dominate financial time-series work yet remain blind to cross-company propagation: a foundry disruption in Taiwan does not register in a single-asset model until Apple's own price has already moved. To address this limitation, we introduce a heterogeneous Rust-Python streaming architecture that maps cross-company attention as a continuous-time graph driven directly from text. We show that on the ingestion side, a zero-copy Rust edge parses news records in $\sim$100 ns and scans the target equity universe in $\sim$1.2 $μ$s. On the inference end, a multivariate Neural Hawkes Process featuring per-node continuous-time LSTM states and a bilinear latent projection propagates directed excitation, while an adaptive pruning rule bounds the computational cost of dynamic neighborhood updates. Combining these stages, we demonstrate an end-to-end processing latency of $\sim$13 ms per incoming news record on a single commodity CPU. Evaluated on a one-month temporal holdout of the FNSPID corpus (638 articles across 47 tickers), the system delivers a $1.70\times$ precision lift over random at the 90th-percentile next-day return threshold, and $3.36\times$ over a same-sector baseline. Crucially, removing the graph topology collapses precision to zero, confirming that the dynamic attention network is the sole driver of cross-company signal in this architecture. --- ### Intercomparison of Machine Learning Algorithms for Remote Sensing-based In-season Crop Mapping Authors: August Posch, Jitendra Kumar, Forrest M. Hoffman, Auroop R. Ganguly Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05731v1 In-season crop type mapping is critical for food security in the face of increasingly extreme climate-related threats to crops. Currently, the USDA Cropland Data Layer provides crop type labels at 30m resolution and is available the February after harvest, but no product exists that maps crop types before harvest with satisfactory accuracy that would allow emergency managers to respond to crop threats in near real time. Furthermore, the relative advantages of a wide range of algorithms have not been evaluated in a way that accounts for interannual variability, until this study. Here, Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel surface reflectance imagery time series and crop rotation history information are combined to map corn in Iowa and almonds in California at 30m resolution accurately by early June in unseen years, with robust quantification of uncertainty due to phenology and crop distribution. Thousands of model configurations across ten machine learning algorithms were compared using a year-wise cross-validation and a suite of metrics. Hyperparameter search revealed Support Vector Machines to be the most successful algorithm overall, with a mean F1 score of 0.74 (0.59) across five unseen validation years for almonds by early June in California (corn by early June in Iowa). Interannual variation was a large source of uncertainty, but patterns showed the potential to further improve performance with ensemble approaches or ancillary data. Future work may extend these methods to include multiclass maps of all crop types, CONUS-wide maps, and in-season crop yield forecasting. --- ### TextWand: A Unified Framework for Scene Text Editing Authors: Shuyu Wang, Zhile Guan, Hongxiu Chen, Yule Duan, Weiqi Li, Xin Shan, Ronggang Wang, Jian Zhang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05730v1 We propose TextWand, a general-purpose framework that unifies scene text removal, generation, and replacement into a single model. By decomposing complex editing tasks into the atomic primitives of rendering and erasure, TextWand achieves precise control over both text appearance and background integrity. Specifically, we introduce a novel design, Overlay-Reference Positional Encoding (ORPE), to enforce pixel-level layout fidelity and exemplar-driven style control, alongside a new strategy, Region-Adaptive Suppression (RAS), to ensure clean text erasure. To address the absence of a comprehensive benchmark for general-purpose scene text editing among existing single-task datasets, we construct TextWand-Bench. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TextWand outperforms existing leading open-source and closed-source models by delivering superior text content accuracy, layout and style consistency, and overall image quality across scene text removal, generation and replacement tasks. --- ### Automated Proving of Shannon-Type Entropy Inequalities via Fine-Tuned Language Models and Guided Tree Search Authors: Shing Yin Wong, Shaocheng Liu, Linqi Song, Amin Gohari, Cheuk Ting Li Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05729v1 Proving Shannon-type entropy inequalities is a fundamental task in information theory that often requires constructing non-trivial linear combinations of known constraints, which is a combinatorial search problem that scales poorly with the number of random variables. We investigate whether small-scale large language models (0.6B--1.7B parameters), fine-tuned on atomic proof steps and combined with guided beam search, can automate this process. On a held-out test set of 60 inequalities spanning n=10 to 15 variables, our 0.6B fine-tuned model achieves an 85\% proof success rate with tree search. GPT-5.5 solves 1.7\% samples under zero-shot prompting while Psitip solves 33.3\% samples. A systematic ablation study across training context length (4096 vs.\ 8192 tokens) and data distribution (n=9-skewed vs not skewed) reveals that a 4096-token not skewed training distribution yields the best performance, with extended context and skewed data providing no marginal benefit. We further identify two dominant failure modes -- format failures and step quality degradation -- and verify that the beam-scoring heuristic is essential via a controlled ablation (random scoring reduces success from 83\% to 23\%). --- ### DiG-Plan: Mitigating Early Commitment for Tool-Graph Planning via Diffusion Guidance Authors: Yansi Li, Zhuosheng Zhang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05728v1 Generating executable tool plans requires selecting appropriate subsets from tool libraries, a combinatorial search problem with an exponentially large solution space. However, we identify a critical misalignment in predominant approaches: standard autoregressive (AR) decoding suffers from early commitment, where initial token choices rigidly constrain the search trajectory. A controlled study shows that masked denoising raises Pass@10 solution coverage from 0.320 to 0.943 over AR sampling under matched compute. Motivated by this, we propose DiG-Plan, a framework that decouples combinatorial exploration from structural refinement. DiG-Plan employs a diffusion-based proposer to generate diverse tool sets via iterative refinement, followed by an AR refiner for dependency prediction. On TaskBench, DiG-Plan improves over AR baselines by a 10% relative margin, with the largest gains on complex compositional tasks; API-Bank results show that the propose-refine-select design remains effective across domains. Code is available at https://github.com/puddingyeah/DiG-Plan. --- ### An Embarrassingly Simple Detector for Model Extraction Attacks in Large Language Model API Traffic Authors: Shuze Liu, Qianwen Guo, Yushun Dong Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05725v3 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed through hosted APIs, making model extraction a practical threat to model ownership and service security. Individual extraction queries often resemble benign requests, while existing evaluations often focus on single-query anomaly scoring or pure benign-versus-attacker user settings. We formulate model extraction monitoring as benign-calibrated traffic-window distribution testing: embed incoming queries into a semantic space and test whether their aggregate distribution deviates from historical benign traffic. We instantiate this formulation with maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), using only benign-vs-benign comparisons to set the decision threshold. We evaluate on fourteen attacker-normal query pairs from four extraction scenarios and compare with adapted PRADA, SEAT, CAP, DATE, marginal Mahalanobis, and pseudo-class energy baselines. Across three random seeds, MMD achieves 0.3% benign FPR, 100.0% pure-attacker TPR, 90.5% average TPR over attacker fractions, and 95.1% balanced accuracy. These results show that benign-calibrated distribution testing is a strong empirical baseline for model extraction detection in both user-level and mixed multi-user LLM API traffic. --- ### An Embarrassingly Simple Detector for Model Extraction Attacks in Large Language Model API Traffic Authors: Shuze Liu, Qianwen Guo, Yushun Dong Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05725v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed through hosted APIs, making model extraction a practical threat to model ownership and service security. However, individual extraction queries often resemble benign requests, and existing evaluations often focus on single-query anomaly scoring or pure benign-versus-attacker user settings. We formulate model extraction monitoring as benign-calibrated traffic-window distribution testing and show that an embarrassingly simple detector is effective: embed incoming queries into a semantic space and test whether their aggregate distribution deviates from historical benign traffic. We instantiate the detector with maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), using only benign-vs-benign comparisons to set the decision threshold. We evaluate on fourteen attacker-normal query pairs from four extraction scenarios and compare with adapted PRADA, SEAT, CAP, DATE, and marginal Mahalanobis baselines. Across three random seeds, MMD achieves 0.3% benign FPR, 100.0% pure-attacker TPR, 90.5% average TPR over attacker fractions, and 95.1% balanced accuracy. These results show that benign-calibrated distribution testing is a strong empirical baseline for model extraction detection in both user-level and mixed multi-user LLM API traffic. Code is released at: https://github.com/LabRAI/mmd-llm-mea-detection. --- ### Narrative Knowledge Weaver: Narrative-Centric Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Long-Form Text Understanding Authors: Qiuyu Tian, Fengyi Chen, Yiding Li, Youyong Kong, Fan Guo, Yuyao Li, Jinjing Shen, Zhijing Xie, Yiyun Luo, Xin Zhang, Yingce Xia, Zequn Liu Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05724v1 Long-form narrative QA requires reasoning over evolving story worlds rather than isolated passages: answers may depend on earlier goals, changing character states, social relations, causal triggers, temporal position, and later consequences. Existing retrieval and graph-augmented generation methods improve evidence access, but their units--chunks, entities, relations, summaries, or tool actions--do not directly encode how evidence functions in a story. We introduce Narrative Knowledge Weaver(NKW), a source-grounded framework that aligns textual evidence, atomic facts, canonical graph structure, entity profiles, interactions, episodes, and storylines. At query time, NKW uses text, graph, and narrative tools with post-retrieval reading skills to assemble evidence and audit actor, scope, polarity, state, and temporal constraints. Across STAGE, FairytaleQA, and QuALITY, NKW is strongest on screenplay-level story-world QA while remaining competitive on more passage-centered benchmarks. Ablations, question-type analyses, graph-asset statistics, and case studies show complementary benefits for character, scene, temporal, causal, and narrative-progression reasoning. --- ### Microskill Architecture: A Modular Skill-Driven Framework for AI-Native Code Generation Authors: Mohammad Zare, Omid Abdolrahmani Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05720v1 Large language models and AI coding agents have reshaped software development, but the path to fully AI-native systems faces structural challenges. Chief among them is managing context windows without losing accuracy or efficiency. When developers inject full project documentation and code into a model's memory, the model loses mid-sequence information, token costs spiral, and architecture drifts. This paper presents MicroSkill Architecture: a modular design paradigm inspired by microservices, applied to knowledge encapsulation instead of service decomposition. Instead of feeding an agent the entire codebase, the architecture partitions knowledge into atomic, sharply scoped skill capsules, and a dynamic router selects only semantically relevant capsules for the task. We formally model context allocation as constrained optimization over semantic relevance subject to a token budget. An empirical case study an enterprise content management system with fifteen complex features shows that MicroSkill cuts token consumption by over 90%, nearly doubles first-try compilation success rates, eliminates architectural violations entirely, and enables autonomous extraction and registration of seven new skill capsules via a self-learning mechanism. These findings suggest MicroSkill Architecture offers a scalable foundation for building AI-native development systems that are more efficient, more reliable, and capable of evolving over time. --- ### ViCuR: Visual Cues as Recoverable Privilege for Multimodal On-Policy Distillation Authors: Kanghui Tian, Siyuan Liu, Ziang Yan, Sheng Xia, Shuai Dong, Yi Wang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05718v1 On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning by training a student on trajectories sampled from its own policy under supervision from a teacher. In multimodal reasoning, a common extension is to use a privileged teacher that observes training-time-only signals such as reference answers or rationales. However, such answer-side privilege creates a train-test mismatch: the teacher's supervision may depend on signals unavailable to the student, encouraging shortcut imitation rather than visually grounded reasoning. We propose ViCuR, a visually grounded privileged-teacher distillation framework that replaces answer-side privilege with visual cues (query-related evidence in the input). Because these cues are derived from the same visual input available at inference, their evidence is recoverable by the student. To support this, ViCuR introduces a lightweight cue recovery module that uses dedicated sink-token cross-attention during prefill to aggregate task-relevant visual evidence into an internal representation, without changing the inference interface or requiring auxiliary cue-generation losses. Across seven benchmarks with Qwen3-VL-2B and 8B students, ViCuR consistently improves over answer-based on-policy self-distillation by +1.19 and +1.24 on overall average performance. It also extends naturally to stronger-teacher OPD, surpassing OPD baselines by +0.64 and +1.08, with consistent out-of-domain gains at the 8B scale. These results show that, in multimodal on-policy distillation, the design of teacher privilege is as important as teacher strength. --- ### Interpreting Style Representations via Style-Eliciting Prompts Authors: Junghwan Kim, David Jurgens Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05716v1 Style representation learning is a powerful tool for authorship analysis and modeling writing style, yet the latent nature of learned representations makes them difficult to interpret. Recent work has attempted to explain these representations by generating natural language descriptions with large language models (LLMs) conditioned on input text. However, such descriptions are often prone to the LLM's biases and hallucinations, and they lack an explicit objective and practical utility. In this work, we propose a novel framework for interpreting style representations through style-eliciting prompts: natural language instructions designed to steer LLMs to generate text that reflects specific stylistic attributes. We curate 1,010 distinct style features spanning 26 stylistic categories and construct a dataset by prompting an LLM to generate text conditioned on these features. Using this data, we train a decoder to generate a style prompt from the style representation of the generated text. We evaluate our approach on three tasks: (1) recovering original style prompts from generated text, (2) generating text in the same style using the recovered prompts, and (3) steering LLM outputs to match the style of human-written texts. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines that directly prompt LLMs with target text, achieving superior performance in both style description and style imitation. These results highlight that style-eliciting prompts can provide a practical and interpretable interface to stylistic information encoded in style representations. --- ### Hybrid CNN-LSTM Framework for Intelligent Cyber Attack Detection and Prevention in U.S. Critical Digital Infrastructure: A Comparative Machine Learning Evaluation on CSE-CIC-IDS2018 Authors: Md. Iqbal Hossan, Md. Serajul Kabir Chowdhury Rubel, Md. Arifur Rahman, B. M. Taslimul Haque Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05714v1 Digital infrastructure is growing at a rapid pace in the United States, and as a result, exposure to advanced cyber threats to critical sectors including healthcare, finance, transportation, energy and government systems is growing. The traditional cybersecurity approaches, including signature-based intrusion detection systems, have become less effective against today's cyber attacks, as they are unable to detect unknown and changing attacks in real time. To overcome these constraints, this research suggests a smart cyber-defense system, which utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in the detection and prevention of cyber attacks in the U.S. digital infrastructure. This study uses the CSE-CIC-IDS2018 dataset, which is a realistic network traffic dataset, along with various cyber attack scenarios, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), brute force attacks, botnets, infiltration attacks, and web-based attacks. A number of machine learning and deep learning models such as Random Forest, XGBoost, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are implemented and evaluated to be used in identifying malicious network behavior and boosting the accuracy of intrusion detection. The framework proposed combines data preprocessing, feature engineering, real-time traffic monitoring, intelligent threat classification with automated prevention mechanisms to build cybersecurity resilience. E --- ### Beyond tokens: a unified framework for latent communication in LLM-based multi-agent systems Authors: Yingzhuo Liu Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05711v3 Multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) have become a prevailing paradigm for tackling complex reasoning, planning, and tool-use tasks. The dominant communication protocol in such systems is natural language: agents exchange messages token-by-token, verbalising their internal reasoning so that peers can read, verify, and respond. While convenient and interpretable, this protocol suffers from three structural drawbacks -- high inference cost, irreversible information loss during discretization, and ambiguity/redundancy of natural language. A growing body of work therefore explores an alternative protocol -- latent communication -- in which agents exchange continuous representations (embeddings, hidden states, or KV-caches) directly, bypassing the bottleneck of text generation. This paper presents a unified framework for organising the rapidly expanding literature on latent communication. We analyse existing methods along three orthogonal axes: (1) WHAT information is communicated (Embeddings, Hidden States, KV-Caches, or other continuous state); (2) WHICH sender-receiver alignment is used (latent-space alignment and layer alignment); and (3) HOW the communicated information is fused into the receiver (concatenation, prepending, mathematical operations, cross-attention, or cache restoration). Under this 3-axis framework, we systematically categorise eighteen representative methods proposed between 2024 and 2026, identify five major design patterns, and surface a set of open challenges -- including cross-architecture alignment, security of latent channels, compression for edge deployment, and the relationship between latent communication and latent chain-of-thought. We hope that this framework both lowers the barrier to entry for new researchers and provides a vocabulary for comparing future work. --- ### Explainable AI-Driven Cyber Risk Analytics and Model Reliability Assessment for Intelligent Governance of U.S. Critical Infrastructure: An XGBoost and SHAP-Based Intrusion Detection Framework Authors: B. M. Taslimul Haque, Md. Arifur Rahman, Md. Serajul Kabir Chowdhury Rubel, Md. Iqbal Hossan Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05710v1 The increasing penetrations of the critical infrastructure sector in the United States with intelligent digital technologies have greatly increased exposure to advanced cyber adversaries and operational vulnerabilities. AI-powered governance and automated decision-making systems are becoming a key part of the operation of critical infrastructure systems, including energy, healthcare, transportation, financial services, and communication infrastructure, in order to improve efficiency and strategic management. The growing cyber threat environment, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks, botnets, ransomware, and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) pose significant challenges to infrastructure resilience, cyber security reliability, and governance trustworthiness. In a changing attack landscape and dynamic network environment, traditional cybersecurity mechanisms can often fall short of meeting the evolving needs and protecting critical systems. This study will develop a resilient cyber risk analytics and model reliability assessment framework to support intelligent governance and decision support for cyber risk exposure in the U.S. critical infrastructure environment. This study is based on the CICIDS2017 dataset for the development and testing of intrusion detection system models and cyber risk prediction models based on machine learning. Various classifiers like XGBoost, Random Forest, and Decision Tree are used to detect malicious activities on the network and determine the level of cyber risk. Furthermore, the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques are integrated to enhance transparency, interpretability, and trust in cybersecurity decision-making processes. The proposed framework presents the reliability and resilience of the model by having various performance measures such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, ROC-AUC, and false positive rate. --- ### Real-Time Threat Detection from Surveillance Cameras using Machine Learning Authors: Gajendra Mandal, J. P. Patra, Priyansh Mahant Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05708v1 Ensuring public safety in densely populated urban environments remains a critical challenge, necessitating the deployment of intelligent and automated video surveillance systems. Traditional surveillance approaches rely heavily on manual monitoring, which is inefficient and susceptible to human fatigue, delayed response, and observational errors. To overcome these limitations, this work presents a real-time object detection-based surveillance framework. The proposed system focuses on detecting guns, knives, and region-specific blunt objects commonly involved in violent activities in Indian surveillance scenarios. A key contribution of this work is the use of a custom-created dataset collected using a mobile camera, consisting of 336 labeled images of blunt objects such as iron rods, wooden sticks, and plastic rods. This dataset is combined with a publicly available dataset of 7,623 images of guns and knives, forming a consolidated dataset of 7,959 images across three classes: gun, knife, and blunt object. The combined dataset is used to train a YOLOv8-based object detection model for real-time performance. Experimental evaluation shows that increasing the training duration significantly improves recall and average precision for the blunt object class without signs of overfitting. Overall, the proposed framework achieves an effective balance between accuracy and efficiency, making it suitable for deployment in real-world surveillance environments such as campuses, public spaces, and transportation areas. --- ### Critic-Guided Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Reasoning for Reliable Mathematical Problem Solving Authors: Muhammad Talha Sharif, Abdul Rehman Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05704v1 Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning abilities; but they are still susceptible to hallucinations, intermediate reasoning mistakes, and unreliable reasoning results in complex mathematical reasoning problems. In this study, we introduce a critic-based heterogeneous multi-agent approach to improve the dependability of mathematical reasoning. This framework incorporates several LLM agents of different specialties and employs a critic-driven adaptive learning system to assess and guide the reasoning process based on intermediate feedback. The system adopts a generator-validator framework, with the validator not only determining correctness but also offering critiques to guide regeneration of solutions. This allows for adaptive error correction and prevents error cascading. Our experiments on the GSM8K benchmark show that the proposed method achieves up to 13% accuracy improvement over single-shot and non-critic models. Additionally, findings suggest that heterogeneity and critique reduce the need for large models, allowing smaller models to perform on par. Ablation studies reveal the main performance gains are due to the critic-based feedback loop and not model size. In summary, the proposed approach showcases the benefits of combining heterogeneous multi-agent collaboration and critique to obtain reliable and interpretable reasoning systems. --- ### Parallel Jacobi Decoding for Fast Autoregressive Image Generation Authors: Boya Liao, Ying Li, Siyong Jian, Huan Wang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05703v1 Autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated remarkable performance in generating high-fidelity images. However, their inherently sequential next-token prediction leads to significantly slower inference. Recent studies have introduced Jacobi-style decoding to accelerate autoregressive image generation. Extending the draft sequence initially improves efficiency, yet the acceleration quickly saturates as error propagation in the one-dimensional sequence hinders convergence. Observing that images exhibit strong local spatial correlations, we propose Parallel Jacobi Decoding (PJD), a training-free decoding approach that expands draft tokens in the two-dimensional spatial domain to enable efficient spatially parallel refinement. PJD adjusts the attention mask to mitigate error accumulation and improve convergence stability. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets show that PJD achieves 4.8x-6.4x acceleration across multiple autoregressive image generation models while maintaining competitive generation quality. --- ### Seeing Time: Benchmarking Chronological Reasoning and Shortcut Biases in Vision-Language Models Authors: Haoyu Zhou, Qing Qing, Caichong Li, Qixin Zhang, Yongcheng Jing, Ziqi Xu, Juncheng Hu, Xikun Zhang, Renqiang Luo Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05702v1 Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to interpret complex visual semantics, yet their capacity for chronological reasoning remains under-explored. In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate how VLMs perceive and reason about chronological information within and across images. Unlike existing video-based benchmarks that focus on frame sequencing, our work delves into the underlying logic of chronological judgment and the expansion toward multimodal integration. To facilitate this, we construct three specialized datasets: one containing visually similar objects spanning long historical durations, another categorized by diverse event and object types, and a third pairing images with time-sensitive news text for cross-modal alignment. Through extensive experiments, we analyze whether models exhibit performance disparities across categories and, crucially, explore whether they rely on ``incorrect shortcuts'', such as image color rather than genuine chronological features. Our results reveal that while VLMs show promise, they frequently exploit superficial cues like grayscale versus color filters to bypass authentic chronological reasoning. By providing these high-quality datasets and a rigorous evaluation framework, we offer a diagnostic tool to identify current limitations and guide the development of more robust, logically grounded multimodal models. The source code is shown in https://github.com/LuoRenqiang/ChronoVision. --- ### Cognitive Threat Intelligence and Explainable Federated Security Analytics for distributed Infrastructure Systems Authors: Md. Arifur Rahman, B. M. Taslimul Haque, Md. Iqbal Hossan, Md. Serajul Kabir Chowdhury Rubel Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05701v1 The increasing adoption of distributed infrastructure systems, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and edge-based architectures has significantly expanded the cybersecurity attack surface and introduced increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Conventional centralized intrusion detection approaches often face challenges related to scalability, data privacy, communication overhead, and limited transparency in artificial intelligence-driven decision-making processes. To address these limitations, this study proposes a Cognitive Threat Intelligence and Explainable Federated Security Analytics framework for distributed infrastructure systems. The proposed framework integrates Federated Learning (FL), Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), and cognitive cybersecurity analytics to enable collaborative and privacy-preserving cyber threat detection across distributed network environments. Instead of transmitting sensitive raw network traffic data to centralized servers, local security models are independently trained at distributed nodes, where only encrypted model parameters and updates are shared through a federated aggregation mechanism. This decentralized learning architecture improves privacy protection while reducing communication dependency and centralized security risks. To enhance intelligent threat analysis, the framework incorporates machine learning and deep learning algorithms including Random Forest, XGBoost, Autoencoder --- ### T-SAR-JEPA: Self-Supervised Temporal Anomaly Detection in SAR Amplitude Stacks via Latent Prediction Authors: Kerod Woldesenbet, Abem Woldesenbet Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05700v1 We present T-SAR-JEPA, a self-supervised framework for temporal anomaly detection in SAR amplitude stacks via latent prediction. A ViT-Base/16 encoder from SAR-JEPA is domain-adapted on 39,300 Capella patches using local masked reconstruction with gradient feature prediction. A temporal transformer with sinusoidal time encoding forecasts future latent states from K=7 acquisitions, with progressive unfreezing substantially reducing validation loss. The model operates on amplitude alone; InSAR coherence serves exclusively as independent pseudo-ground-truth. On the DFC 2026 dataset (300 time-series, three AOIs), T-SAR-JEPA achieves ROC-AUC of 77.0% on the Hawaii eruption window, outperforming RX, PaDiM, Linear AR, and LSTM baselines (~50%). Spatial coherence of 99.9% (p < 0.001, permutation test) confirms structured detections. Code: https://github.com/TerraLatent/t-sar-jepa --- ### Rethinking LoRA Memory Through the Lens of KV Cache Compression Authors: Chunsheng Zuo, Liaoyaqi Wang, William Jurayj, William Fleshman, Benjamin Van Durme Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05698v1 Parametric retrieval augmentation encodes document information into lightweight, document-specific modules such as LoRA adapters, reducing the need to include all evidence as input context. However, it remains unclear how this parameter-side memory interacts with context-side memory stored in the KV cache. We study this interaction in document-level question answering by progressively evicting document key-value states and measuring when a document LoRA contributes beyond the retained context. We find that document LoRA adds little when the KV cache is largely intact, but becomes increasingly useful under aggressive compression, recovering 13-21 ROUGE-L points when no document context remains. The gain is largest when the base model encodes the document, and the adapter is applied only during answer generation, suggesting that document LoRA is better understood as decoding-time parametric memory than as a document encoder. Finally, QA-style supervision produces substantially stronger adapters than raw-context next-token-prediction. These results position document LoRA as a complementary memory channel whose value emerges precisely when context-side evidence is scarce. --- ### PerceptUI: LLM Agents as Human-Aligned Synthetic Users for UI/UX Evaluation Authors: Nicolas Bougie, Xiaotong Ye, Gian Maria Marconi, Narimasa Watanabe Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05697v1 User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) evaluation is central to product development, yet reliable feedback still relies on recruiting human participants or running online A/B tests, making early-stage iteration slow and costly. In light of this, recent work has explored Multimodal Large Language Models as proxy evaluators. However, existing approaches either produce surface-level critiques or a judgment that reflects the model's own biases rather than the genuine response of a particular user. We introduce PerceptUI, a framework for persona-conditioned UI/UX evaluation that predicts how a specific user would answer interface-related questions and produces natural-language rationales. PerceptUI is trained in two stages: (i) contrastive reflection fine-tuning distills teacher-generated rationales by extracting lessons from human decisions, and (ii) a reflective prompt-evolution step from the model's own failure traces. Across multiple domains and datasets, PerceptUI achieves human-level realism, generalizes to unseen questions and personas, and yields population-level response distributions. --- ### Revisiting Prototype Rehearsal for Exemplar-Free Continual Learning: Manifold-Aware Boundary Sampling with Adaptive Class-Balanced Loss Authors: Hongye Xu, Bartosz Krawczyk Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05695v1 Exemplar-free class-incremental learning (EFCIL) aims to acquire new classes over time without storing raw data. Historically, prototype rehearsal, which samples around stored class prototypes and mixes them with current-task data, has been a popular strategy to reduce catastrophic forgetting. However, recent drift-compensation methods that explicitly realign prototypes in the evolving feature space consistently outperform prototype-based rehearsal, raising the question of whether rehearsal itself is fundamentally limited. We argue that the performance gap stems not from the idea of prototype rehearsal per se, but from how it is typically instantiated: existing approaches treat prototypes as isolated class summaries that ignore information from nearby enemy classes, and fail to correct the emerging class imbalance between a handful of synthetic old-class samples and hundreds of real instances from newly introduced classes. Building on this hypothesis, we revisit prototype rehearsal and propose a manifold-aware variant that restores its competitiveness in EFCIL. First, we introduce Constrained Expansive Over-Sampling, which interpolates each old-class prototype toward its nearest enemy features from new classes, generating boundary-aware rehearsal samples that better follow the underlying data manifold while preserving inter-class separation. Second, we design an Adaptive Class-Balanced loss that performs time-based class weighting, amplifying gradients from older prototypes when they are most informative and gradually annealing their influence as richer supervision from later tasks accumulates. Together, these components turn prototype rehearsal into a drift-resilient, imbalance-aware mechanism that closes, and often reverses, the gap to recent drift-compensation methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple EFCIL benchmarks. --- ### MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry Authors: Joey Chan, Wonbin Kweon, Ashley Shin, Niharika Bhattacharjee, Pengcheng Jiang, Yue Guo, Jiawei Han Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05693v2 Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time. --- ### Benchmarking Counterfactual Prediction in Epidemic Time Series with Time-Varying Interventions Authors: Wenhao Mu, Facundo Yan, Anik Mumssen, Marisa Eisenberg, Alexander Rodríguez Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05692v3 Deep learning has enabled significant advances in time-series causal inference, yet progress remains constrained by the lack of realistic benchmarks with observable counterfactual outcomes. Existing datasets either rely on real-world observations without ground-truth counterfactuals or on simplified simulations that fail to capture complex causal dynamics. To address this gap, we develop a large-scale benchmark for counterfactual prediction in epidemic time series under dynamic interventions. Unlike existing benchmarks, it supports static and time-varying treatments, as well as both single-policy and multi-policy intervention settings, enabling evaluation of causal inference methods across a broad range of causal inference scenarios. Leveraging a calibrated agent-based model grounded in real-world demographic, mobility, epidemiological, and policy data, we generate realistic counterfactual trajectories across more than 150 U.S. counties. Using this benchmark, we evaluate widely used and state-of-the-art causal inference methods, revealing substantial performance differences and highlighting the challenges of realistic time-series causal reasoning. --- ### Causal Modeling of Selection in Evolution Authors: Haoyue Dai, Zeyu Tang, Peter Spirtes, Kun Zhang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05689v1 Understanding potential selection in data is crucial for causal discovery; we argue that "selection" in common narratives takes two forms, which we term static and evolutionary selection, respectively. Static selection refers to a one-shot filtering process where observed data consist of a subset of the population of interest, as in survey volunteer bias. Evolutionary selection, in contrast, operates through repeated rounds of differential fitness in reproduction, where observed data constitute the latest generation shaped by a historical trajectory, as in immune adaptation, antibiotic resistance, and social norm emergence. Existing methods largely conflate these two forms and rely on an identical graphical model of selection. We show that this model is valid for static settings but fails to characterize data under evolution, yielding false discovery results. To address this, we introduce a new model that specifically characterizes evolutionary selection, and develop a sound and complete procedure for identifying such models from data across one or multiple environments or generations. Experimental results validate the method's ability to uncover the relevant mechanisms underlying evolution from data. --- ### Value-and-Structure Alignment for Routing-Consistent Quantization of Mixture-of-Experts Models Authors: Hancheol Park, Geonho Lee, Tairen Piao, Tae-Ho Kim Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05688v1 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale foundation models efficiently by activating only a subset of experts for each token, but their large number of expert parameters still makes quantization essential for practical deployment. Unlike dense models, however, MoE models are sensitive to routing instability: small quantization-induced perturbations can change the top-$k$ expert selection, altering the computation path and degrading model quality. We propose Value-and-Structure Routing Alignment for Quantization (VSRAQ), a MoE-specific post-training quantization objective that preserves pre-quantization expert-selection behavior under quantization. VSRAQ combines two complementary objectives that jointly preserve expert-selection behavior: value alignment, which matches routing-relevant logits or scores, and structure alignment, which preserves expert ordering and top-$k$ decision boundaries. By maintaining routing consistency, VSRAQ reduces quantization-induced degradation without introducing any inference-time overhead and can be integrated into existing quantization frameworks. Experiments on recent MoE foundation models show that VSRAQ improves expert-selection consistency and consistently outperforms reconstruction-only and router-aware baselines. --- ### AdaMEM: Test-Time Adaptive Memory for Language Agents Authors: Yunxiang Zhang, Yiheng Li, Ali Payani, Lu Wang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05684v1 A central challenge for language agents is utilizing past experience to adapt to dynamic test-time conditions. While recent work demonstrates the promise of agentic memory mechanisms, most systems restrict retrieval to episode initiation. Consequently, agents are forced to rely on static guidance that becomes increasingly misaligned as long-horizon tasks unfold. To address this rigidity, we propose the Adaptive Memory Agent (AdaMEM), a novel framework for agent test-time adaptation. Without updating model parameters online, AdaMEM adapts agent behavior via a hybrid memory architecture: it maintains a long-term trajectory memory of raw experiences collected offline while generating dynamic short-term strategy memory on-the-fly to guide decision-making. This mechanism enables the trade-off between token efficiency and adaptability across varying inference-time compute levels. Empirically, AdaMEM significantly outperforms static memory baselines, achieving relative gains of up to 13% on ALFWorld and 11% on WebShop, with consistent leading performance extending to agentic search on HotpotQA. To further enhance this adaptation, we develop STEP-MFT, a Step-wise Memory Fine-Tuning technique that trains the policy to synthesize high-quality strategies from retrieved experiences, yielding additional performance gains. Our work establishes a new scaling dimension for agentic memory, supporting continuous reasoning and self-evolution post-deployment in real-world environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/yunx-z/AdaMEM. --- ### Beyond Output Matching: Preserving Internal Geometry in NVFP4 LLM Distillation Authors: Fangbo Tu, Junhua Zhao, Chi Liu, Xin Chen, Haifeng Wu, Jian Wan, Srinivasan Manoharan Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05682v2 Demand for low-precision inference, including NVFP4-based approaches, has grown as large language models are increasingly deployed in latency and cost constrained production environments. Quantization-aware distillation (QAD) helps recover accuracy lost under low bit quantization by training a quantized student to match the output distribution of a frozen higher precision teacher via a KL-divergence loss. In this work, we first provide a representation level diagnosis of QAD: output matching alone can mask internal degradation, because many intermediate activation geometries can yield similar teacher-aligned logits. Using CKA, we show that KL-only QAD can reduce layerwise representational similarity relative to the BF16 teacher, with especially severe drift in RL-post-trained models. This drift correlates with downstream bottlenecks on reasoning and coding tasks, suggesting that low bit recovery requires preserving internal geometry rather than matching outputs alone. Motivated by this finding, we propose \textbf{CKA-QAD}, a CKA-guided representational alignment method for NVFP4 QAD and low bit LLM accuracy recovery. The method adds a lightweight regularizer that preserves internal representational geometry during distillation by aligning layerwise Gram matrices through CKA. Across Nemotron 3 Nano and Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507, CKA-QAD substantially improves representational alignment and improves downstream reasoning and coding accuracy with modest training overhead. Our findings position CKA-guided representational alignment as a practical complement to output matching for quantized LLM recovery. --- ### CASS-RTL: Correctness-Aware Subspace Steering for RTL Generation with LLMs Authors: Mohammad Akyash, Nowfel Mashnoor, Kimia Azar, Hadi Kamali Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.PL, cs.AR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05680v1 Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the automatic synthesis (generation) of register-transfer level (RTL) code from natural language instructions, offering a promising pathway to accelerate chip design. Unlike typical natural language (and software coding) tasks, LLM-based RTL code generation demands strict cycle accuracy with concurrency, where minor logical errors can render a circuit unusable or insecure. While prior work has explored hallucination mitigation via external verification, self-evaluation prompts, retrieval-augmented prompting, domain specific fine-tuning, agentic solutions, and reasoning, these approaches largely overlook the attention-oriented internal mechanisms of LLMs that may inherently correlate with RTL correctness. This work proposes CASS-RTL, a first-of-its-kind framework for discovering and leveraging LLMs' correctness-aware components to guide RTL generation toward functionally accurate outputs. We (i) identify attention heads whose activation patterns consistently differentiate correct from incorrect RTL; (ii) construct a low-dimensional subspace capturing correctness-relevant signals; and (iii) design a lightweight, geometry-aware intervention that steers the model at inference time. CASS-RTL is fully model-agnostic, requires no additional supervision or retraining, and readily integrates into existing models. Empirically, we evaluate CASS-RTL on multiple models and observe 10%-20% improvement in pass@1/5/10 accuracy on VerilogEval and 5% improvement on CVDP, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in enhancing reliability without sacrificing model efficiency or requiring a large labeled dataset for fine-tuning. --- ### Data Flow Control: Data Safety Policies for AI Agents Authors: Charlie Summers, Eugene Wu Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05679v1 Agents increasingly generate SQL, orchestrate pipelines, and automate data analysis on behalf of users. While recent work improves query correctness, correctness is not safety. A query may be semantically valid yet violate regulatory, privacy, or business constraints that govern how data may be combined and released. We argue that enforcing such constraints is fundamentally a data infrastructure problem. This paper introduces Data Flow Control (DFC), a framework to declaratively specify and guarantee policy enforcement over tuple-level data flows within a DBMS query. A key challenge is defining a policy language that is optimizer-invariant yet efficient to enforce at scale. We formalize data safety as aggregate predicates over provenance monomials and present Passant, a portable query rewriting layer that enforces DFC policies without materializing provenance. Across five DBMS engines -- DuckDB, Umbra, PostgreSQL, DataFusion, and SQLServer -- Passant achieves ~0% overhead and outperforms alternatives by orders of magnitude. As a result, Data Flow Control is the first step towards moving data safety from prompts and post-hoc checks into the data infrastructure. Data Flow Control is available open source at https://github.com/dataflowcontrol/data-flow-control. --- ### Beyond Waveform Robustness: Robust Feature-Vocoder Adversarial Attacks on Automatic Speech Recognition Authors: Yifan Liao, Zongmin Zhang, Zhen Sun, Yuhui Sun, Xinhu Zheng, Xinlei He Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05678v1 Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have become widely used for multilingual speech-to-text transcription. Their robustness to adversarial attacks has become an important topic for the community. Existing adversarial attacks directly add adversarial noise to the speech audio. However, prior work has shown that existing adversarial attacks face two limitations: they often transfer poorly to black-box ASR systems and are increasingly mitigated by defenses tailored to input-space perturbations. In this work, we propose a Clean-Referenced Feature-Vocoder Attack, a surrogate-based black-box attack that moves the adversarial search space from raw waveforms to self-supervised learning (SSL) representations. To address the transferability limitation, we perturb more generalizable acoustic-phonetic representations rather than low-level waveform samples, reducing dependence on surrogate-specific waveform gradients and encouraging adversarial perturbations that generalize across ASR systems. To bypass different defenses, we shift the adversarial signal from explicit additive waveform noise to SSL feature-space perturbations and reconstruct them through a vocoder into speech-like waveform adversarial signals, making the resulting samples less aligned with waveform-bounded defenses. Extensive experiments show that, when optimized only on raw Whisper-small as a public surrogate model, our attack transfers effectively to black-box ASR models with a +26.6 WER improvement over the SOTA baseline, while also remaining effective against multiple training defenses with a +36.2 WER improvement. These results reveal a blind spot in current ASR robustness evaluation. --- ### LongSpace: Exploring Long-Horizon Spatial Memory from Perception to Recall in Video Authors: Shiqiang Lang, Jing Liu, Haoyang He, Peiwen Sun, Yuanteng Chen, Tao Liu, Lan Yang, Longteng Guo, Honggang Zhang Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05677v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced image and video understanding and can increasingly handle longer visual inputs. Long-horizon tasks such as autonomous driving and robotic navigation require more than recognizing the current view, as models must remember and retrieve previously observed spatial layouts, routes, viewpoint changes, and object states. To evaluate this capability, we introduce LongSpace-Bench, a room-tour video benchmark for long-horizon spatial memory, covering scene perception, spatial relations, and spatial memory. In this work, we further propose LongSpace, a memory framework for long-video spatial reasoning. LongSpace models long videos as sequential chunks, incorporates 3D structural cues into early decoder layers, and constructs layer-aware memory for question-guided retrieval. Experiments on multiple spatial reasoning benchmarks show that LongSpace improves long-video spatial understanding, further demonstrating explicit spatial memory as a key capability for long-horizon video MLLMs. --- ### Two-Way Is Better Than One: Bidirectional Alignment with Cycle Consistency for Exemplar-Free Class-Incremental Learning Authors: Hongye Xu, Bartosz Krawczyk Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05675v1 Continual learning (CL) seeks models that acquire new skills without erasing prior knowledge. In exemplar-free class-incremental learning (EFCIL), this challenge is amplified because past data cannot be stored, making representation drift for old classes particularly harmful. Prototype-based EFCIL is attractive for its efficiency, yet prototypes drift as the embedding space evolves; therefore, projection-based drift compensation has become a popular remedy. We show, however, that existing one-directional projections introduce systematic bias: they either retroactively distort the current feature geometry or align past classes only locally, leaving cycle inconsistencies that accumulate across tasks. We introduce BiCyc, a bidirectional projector alignment approach with a cycle-consistency objective. BiCyc jointly optimizes two maps, old-to-new and new-to-old, with stop-gradient gating so that transport and representation co-evolve. Analytically, we show that the cycle loss contracts the singular spectrum toward unity in whitened space, and that improved transport of class means and covariances yields smaller perturbations of classification log-odds, preserving old-class decisions and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Empirically, across standard EFCIL benchmarks, BiCyc substantially reduces forgetting and improves accuracy in from-scratch settings, while remaining competitive in the pretrained fine-grained regime. --- ### QueryAgent-R1: Bridging Query Generation and Product Retrieval for E-Commerce Query Recommendation Authors: Dike Sun, Zheng Zou, Jingtong Zang, Qi Sun, Huaipeng Zhaoand Tao Luo, Xiaoyi Zeng Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05671v1 Query recommendation in e-commerce search aims to proactively suggest queries that match users' potential interests. However, existing methods mainly optimize query-level relevance, while neglecting whether the retrieved products align with users' downstream preferences. This mismatch often leads to high query click through rates (CTR) but low product conversion rates (CVR). To bridge this gap, we propose QueryAgent-R1, a memory-augmented agentic framework that improves end-to-end alignment via chain-of-retrieval optimization. Our QueryAgent-R1 grounds query generation in real inventory retrieval, allowing the agent to validate and refine queries based on retrieved products. We also design a consistency reward in the agentic reinforcement learning (RL) process to jointly optimize query relevance and downstream engagement. In addition, we construct a memory abstraction module for efficient user profiling. To support offline evaluation, we construct two datasets based on both proprietary industrial data and public datasets, on which QueryAgent-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines. Moreover, on a large scale production platform, QueryAgent-R1 improves Query CTR by 2.9% and guided CVR by 3.1% in online A/B tests. --- ### Do More Agents Help? Controlled and Protocol-Aligned Evaluation of LLM Agent Workflows Authors: Yuhang Fu, Ruishan Fang, Jiaqi Shao, Huiyu Zheng, Zhengtao Zhu, Bing Luo, Tao Lin Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05670v1 Does adding more agents help an LLM workflow once compared systems share the same benchmark loader, tool access, answer contract, usage accounting, and trajectory logging? We introduce BenchAgent, an evaluation framework that places single-agent, fixed multi-agent (MAS), and evolving MAS workflows under one normalized execution and logging protocol. BenchAgent evaluates these substrate-internal workflows across ten reasoning, coding, and tool-use benchmarks with GPT-4.1, and separately reports a Protocol-Aligned External (PAE) GAIA study of a runtime-generated workflow. Under SI conditions, at most one of six tested MAS exceeds the matched single-agent anchor on benchmark-balanced average accuracy: EvoAgent lies within the Wilson one-run guidance, while the remaining five trail by 2.56-11.29 points and occupy more expensive accuracy-cost trade-offs. On the PAE GAIA snapshot, a Claude-Code-style runtime workflow reaches 66.72% overall and 69.23% on Level 3, more than 20 points above the strongest non-Claude baseline, Jarvis, a fixed MAS. --- ### V2V-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Video-to-Video Generation Evaluation Authors: Tao Liu, Leela Krishna, Gouti Pavan Kumar, Sreeja K, Vishav Garg Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05665v1 Video-to-video (V2V) generation is difficult to evaluate because outputs must both follow editing instructions and preserve frame-level correspondence with the source video, which existing T2V and I2V metrics do not capture. We introduce V2V-Bench, a 11-dimension benchmark organized into five categories: temporal alignment, structural fidelity, transformation quality, video quality, and semantic alignment. V2V-Bench pairs diverse source videos with challenging editing tasks and evaluates two commercial models, Grok Imagine and Gemini Veo3, and one open-source model, Open Sora 2. Results show complementary model strengths: Grok performs better on editing fidelity, while Veo3 achieves stronger visual quality. On six V2V-specific dimensions, V2V-Bench reaches a Spearman correlation of 0.905 with human judgments. --- ### Continual Learning Bench: Evaluating Frontier AI Systems in Real-World Stateful Environments Authors: Parth Asawa, Christopher M. Glaze, Gabriel Orlanski, Ramya Ramakrishnan, Benji Xu, Asim Biswal, Vincent Sunn Chen, Frederic Sala, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05661v1 Continual learning, the ability of AI systems to improve through sequential experience, has attracted substantial interest, but no high-quality benchmark exists to evaluate it. We introduce Continual Learning Bench (CL-Bench), the first difficult, expert-validated benchmark designed to measure whether LLM-based systems genuinely improve with experience. CL-Bench spans six diverse domains (software engineering, signal processing, disease outbreak forecasting, database querying, strategic game-playing, and demand forecasting), each validated by domain experts and designed so that tasks share a learnable latent structure (codebase layout, disease outbreak dynamics, opponent strategies) that a stateful system can discover online but a stateless one cannot. We evaluate frontier models across several agent architectures, from naive in-context learning (ICL) to dedicated memory systems, introducing a gain metric to isolate learning from prior capabilities. We find that these systems leave headroom for improved continual learning: agents frequently overfit to immediate observations or fail to reuse knowledge across instances, and dedicated memory systems do not fix this -- in fact, naive ICL outperforms systems dedicated to memory management. CL-Bench is the first benchmark to evaluate continual learning across diverse real-world domains with expert-validated tasks and isolate online learning from underlying model capability, showing a need for better continual learning systems. --- ### Safe Embodied AI for Long-horizon Tasks: A Cross-layer Analysis of Robotic Manipulation Authors: Dabin Kim, Daemin Park, Sangyub Lee, Jinsik Kim, Yeongtak Oh, Jongho Shin, Sungroh Yoon Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05660v1 Embodied AI systems are increasingly expected to reason and act over extended horizons in physical environments. This growing capability brings safety to the foreground, because failures in the physical world can harm people, damage objects, and disrupt workplaces. Although safe embodied AI has attracted substantial attention, the literature remains fragmented across planning, policy design, and runtime execution. Long-horizon robotic manipulation is a particularly revealing anchor domain for this problem because semantic misgrounding, subtask-level error propagation, execution drift, and contact-rich physical risk can accumulate within the same closed-loop system. This survey therefore provides a structured review of safety in long-horizon robotic manipulation from an embodied AI perspective. We organize the literature by intervention locus, covering planning-time, policy-time, and execution-time safety, and we analyze the strength of the evidence that each line of work provides, distinguishing formal guarantees, statistical support, and empirical safety heuristics. This framework clarifies the distinct roles of backbone capability papers, direct safety mechanisms, and benchmark or evaluation studies, while exposing where current safety claims are well supported and where they remain indirect. We identify persistent gaps, including limited evidence for policy-time safety, weak formal support for contact-rich long-horizon manipulation, immature uncertainty-triggered intervention, and a shortage of manipulation-specific safety benchmarks. We conclude by outlining research directions for cross-layer assurance, evaluation design, and safer deployment of long-horizon robotic agents in real-world settings. --- ### Agent-Orchestrated Adaptive RAG: A Comparative Study on Structured and Multi-Hop Retrieval Authors: Anuj Maharjan, Devinder Kaur, Richard Molyet Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05658v1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding their responses in external knowledge, but conventional pipelines rely on static, single-step retrieval that limits performance on complex queries. This paper presents an Agent-Orchestrated Adaptive RAG framework that introduces dynamic query decomposition, iterative retrieval, and a bounded self-reflective evaluation loop. We evaluate the system across two complementary datasets: a domain-specific DevOps knowledge base and the multi-hop reasoning benchmark MuSiQue. Using metrics that include overall score, citation accuracy, mean reciprocal rank, and topic coverage, we find that query decomposition yields consistent gains in the structured domain (overall score $+0.04$, MRR $+0.17$ on DevOps) but degrades ranking precision on the multi-hop benchmark, while the reflection mechanism improves citation accuracy at a substantial latency cost. These contrasting results show that agentic enhancements are not universally beneficial and must be applied selectively according to query and domain characteristics. Our findings argue for adaptive, cost-aware orchestration rather than uniformly aggressive reasoning pipelines. --- ### When Surface Form Changes Moderation Decisions: A Paired Study of Code-Mixed Workflow Instability Authors: Suraj Babu Thimma Krishnaram, Yibo Hu, Karthikeyan Saravanan Published: 2026-06-04 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05654v2 Hate moderation is often evaluated as classification on clean English inputs, but deployed systems must route content to actions such as ALLOW, FLAG, or REVIEW. We study how this workflow changes under code-mixed inputs using a paired evaluation setting where the same underlying content is expressed as clean English and Tamil-English code-mix. Under thresholds tuned on clean English development data, code-mixed inputs produce substantial action instability, with a paired clean- to-code-mix decision flip rate of 0.265. The main workflow effects are increased review burden and increased false-flagging of non-hateful content: review rate rises from 0.138 to 0.297 and non-hate false-flag rate rises from 0.069 to 0.104. Tamil-only inputs show stronger degradation overall, suggesting a broader language-coverage limitation rather than the same code-mixed instability pattern. A simple disagreement-based deferral rule reduces automatic errors on stressed inputs, but only by increasing review load. These results show that workflow-level evaluation reveals moderation failures that standard classification summaries can miss. ---