# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 72 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #3551–3600 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/72 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/71.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/73.md) ### Sublinearly Structured Deep Neural Networks Achieve Feature Learning Consistency for Compositional Functions Authors: Sehwan Kim, Yan Sun, Faming Liang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23477v1 Over the past decade, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success on complex machine-learning tasks, yet the theoretical foundations of their performance remain incomplete. From a statistical viewpoint, a natural question is: can DNNs attain feature-learning and prediction consistency comparable to that of classical models? While a full characterization is open, we provide positive results for a broad subclass. We establish feature-learning consistency guarantees for sublinearly structured DNNs-architectures whose input/output dimensions and number of hidden neurons grow sublinearly with the sample size-when learning hierarchically compositional target functions. Importantly, this consistency still holds even in the conventional "over-parameterized" regime where the total number of parameters exceeds the number of training samples. Empirically, sublinearly structured DNNs match or surpass wide DNNs in prediction. A structural audit further indicates that widely used convolutional neural networks (CNNs), including AlexNet, VGGNet, ResNet, GoogLeNet, are sublinearly structured on their image classification benchmarks. We further prove that the sublinearly structured DNNs achieve universal approximation for hierarchically compositional functions in the large-sample limit. Moreover, images exhibit an inherent hierarchical, compositional structure. Taken together, these results explain, through a statistical lens, why many large-scale deep learning models succeed after adequate training on massive image datasets. --- ### C^2GR: Coupled Comprehensive Generative Replay for a Continually Learnable Universal Segmentation Model Authors: Wei Li, Jingyang Zhang, Guoan Wang, Junzhi Ning, Yang Chen, Guang Yang, Lixu Gu Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23473v1 Universal segmentation models exhibit significant potential for diverse tasks involving different imaging modalities and segmentation objectives. Task-Incremental Learning provides a privacy-preserving approach to continually evolve a universal model on tasks from sequentially-arriving medical departments. However, training the model solely on the incoming task induces forgetting on past tasks, since consecutive tasks exhibit concurrent shifts in image appearance and segmentation objective. To address this problem, we propose a novel Coupled Comprehensive Generative Replay (C^2GR) framework that simultaneously synthesizes image-mask pairs of previous tasks to mitigate forgetting under concurrent appearance and objective shifts. This requires preserving image-mask correspondence for structure-realistic generation and bridging asynchronous optimization of the generator and segmentor for segmentation-oriented generation. Specifically, we propose a Bayesian Joint Diffusion (BJD) method that formulates the correspondence as conditional distributions optimized via conditional denoising. Furthermore, we develop a Relation-aware Unified Prompt Synchronization (RUPS) scheme to simultaneously modulate the generator and segmentor via a shared task-relation-aware prompt for synchronizing their optimization. Experiments on 20 tasks spanning diverse modalities and objectives demonstrate that C^2GR exhibits only a 2.44% drop in overall performance compared to joint training with all task data, effectively alleviating forgetting from the concurrent shifts. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mar-cry/C2GR. --- ### Time Series Classification through Diffeomorphic Time Warping (DiffTW) Authors: Vicky Geneva Haney, Kamel Lahouel, Victor Rielly, Bruno M. Jedynak Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23472v2 Time series classification involves learning a mapping from a continuous, temporally ordered sequence of real-valued observations to discrete response variables, like class labels. This task is fundamental in domains, including health monitoring, where temporal structure is critical for prediction. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a standard technique for measuring similarity between sequences varying in time or speed. However, DTW is restricted to discrete point matching. Moving beyond pairwise alignment, we propose a theoretical framework learning mappings between real-valued functions. These mappings approximate the flow associated with the characteristic curves of a linear transport equation with a space-dependent velocity field, providing a diffeomorphic transformation between time series. Using the method of characteristics, we transform this partial differential equation into ordinary differential equations (ODEs) modeling system dynamics. The objective function to learn these ODEs derives from the fundamental theorem of calculus. To enable flexible, expressive representations of the velocity field, we utilize reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and optimal control methods. Our method, Diffeomorphic Time Warping (DiffTW), provides a theoretically grounded dissimilarity measure. Using a 1-nearest neighbor classifier, DiffTW outperforms unconstrained DTW on 39 of 85 datasets with 3 ties; however, constrained DTW outperforms DiffTW on 48 of 85 datasets with 5 ties. --- ### War in the Abstract: The Rise and Consequences of Militarized Language in Scientific Communication Authors: Sovesh Mohapatra, David Lydon-Staley, Dani S. Bassett Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.DL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23462v2 Scientists do not, by profession, wage war. Yet warfare's vocabulary consistently appears in their abstracts. To quantify the extent to which warfare's vocabulary pervades scientific abstracts, we analyze 21.4 million papers (2010-2025; OpenAlex, PubMed). We additionally run a within-subject war-framing experiment ($N = 801$; 32{,}040 trials) designed to provide causal insight into the effects of militaristic language on persuasion. Between 2010 and 2025, the presence of militaristic terms in scientific abstracts rose 48\% in OpenAlex and 32\% in PubMed, with the rise accelerating sharply after 2019 (cross-database $r = 0.96$, $p < 10^{-8}$). The prevalence of militaristic language is conflict-aligned at both country and annual scales (Uppsala Conflict Data Program; $r = 0.77$-$0.84$), with the abstracts from the Global South displaying the fastest rise in militaristic language. Among disciplines, social sciences leads in level of such language while engineering and computer science lead in growth. The COVID and post-2022 large-language-model eras also accelerated the rise and narrowed the language gap between native-English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries. In our follow-up experiment, we found that war framing reduced credibility (mean shift $-0.176$ Likert units, 95\% CI $(-0.21, -0.14)$; $d_z = -0.28$, $p < 10^{-20}$), funding willingness ($d_z = -0.12$) and policy support ($d_z = -0.08$), with a trend-level increase in sense of urgency ($d_z = +0.07$). Collectively, findings reveal that while scientific abstracts drift toward warfare, the use of militaristic language may erode credibility, funding willingness, and policy support. --- ### TriggerBench: Investigating Prospective Memory for Large Language Models Authors: Tianhua Zhang, Xinjiang Wang, Qianxi Zhang, Qi Chen, Kun Li, Yaoqi Chen, Dingdong Wang, Helen Meng, Yan Lu Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23459v1 While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in long interactions, existing evaluations focus predominantly on retrospective memory (RM) via explicit queries. Prospective memory (PM), the critical ability to spontaneously recall and act on latent constraints without direct prompts, remains largely unevaluated. We introduce TriggerBench, a comprehensive PM benchmark spanning five dimensions across both daily assistants and professional workflows. TriggerBench pairs scenarios with matched RM controls, contrastive positive/negative variants, and overloaded triggers, enabling fine-grained measurement of proactive recall, false-alarm rate, and attentional robustness under a single protocol. Our evaluation yields three key findings. (i) PM shows a precision-recall trade-off and attentional fragility. Though enhanced reasoning significantly improves proactive recall, models may overfit to an "always-remind" heuristic. Furthermore, PM accuracy degrades substantially under implicit constraints or triggers overloaded by concurrent user requests, indicating that robust PM remains an open challenge. (ii) PM is notably harder than RM: on identical contexts, RM near-saturates up to 100K tokens, while PM decays sharply as context length scales. (iii) PM may serve as a behavioral probe of spare reasoning capacity. Pairing PM scenarios with AIME-2025 math problems reveals that successful trajectories yield higher PM accuracy than failed ones at the same context length, showing PM tracks spare reasoning budget that token count obscures. Project page: https://github.com/KristenZHANG/TriggerBench-Official. --- ### MeGAS: Thermomechanical Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Thermophysical Scene Editing Authors: Zesong Yang, Yuanhang Lei, Liyuan Cui, Yihang Chen, Jiaer Huang, Boming Zhao, Peter Yichen Chen, Hujun Bao, Zhaopeng Cui Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23455v1 Recent advances integrate physically grounded Newtonian dynamics with neural rendering frameworks, narrowing the gap between photorealistic scene reconstruction and physics-based animation. However, existing approaches focus on mechanically driven dynamics while neglecting temperature, a fundamental yet invisible physical factor underlying phenomena such as melting, solidification, and other thermomechanical processes. In this paper, we propose MeGAS, a novel framework that incorporates thermomechanical phase-change dynamics into 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, we propose a new thermomechanical dynamic Gaussian Splatting representation that augments 3DGS with temperature attributes and employs a heat advection-diffusion solver with MPM dynamics incorporating phase transitions, enabling physically plausible and visually realistic synthesis of thermophysical phenomena. Furthermore, a new topology-adaptive Gaussian rendering strategy is proposed to mitigate cracking and floaters under extreme deformation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MeGAS produces physically consistent thermomechanical behavior while maintaining high-fidelity photorealistic rendering, advancing toward physics-integrated world models. --- ### Do Location Encoders Capture Spatial Effects? A GeoShapley Benchmark Across Scales Authors: Daniel Kiv, Shaowen Wang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23453v2 Location encoders transform geographic coordinates into high dimensional embeddings for downstream machine learning, but it is unclear how well these representations capture interpretable spatial effects. We benchmark whether GeoShapley, a game-theoretic explainer that treats all location features as a single joint player, can recover spatially varying coefficients from models built on location-encoder embeddings. Eleven encoders from the TorchSpatial framework are evaluated against a synthetic process with known coefficients, across three scales (grid, county, global), with and without raw coordinates alongside the embedding, and under untrained and contrastively trained conditions. Measuring recovery as the correlation between estimated and true coefficients, we report how it varies with scale and encoder architecture and compare the embeddings against a raw-coordinate baseline. Recovery of the primary coefficient is consistently high across encoders, whereas recovery of a secondary coefficient is more scale-dependent, differing most at the global scale; the raw-coordinate baseline remains competitive throughout. --- ### Do Location Encoders Capture Spatial Effects? A GeoShapley Benchmark Across Scales Authors: Daniel Kiv, Shaowen Wang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23453v1 Location encoders transform geographic coordinates into high dimensional embeddings for downstream machine learning, but it is unclear how well these representations capture interpretable spatial effects. We benchmark whether GeoShapley, a game-theoretic explainer that treats all location features as a single joint player, can recover spatially varying coefficients from models built on location-encoder embeddings. Eleven encoders from the TorchSpatial framework are evaluated against a synthetic process with known coefficients, across three scales (grid, county, global), with and without raw coordinates alongside the embedding, and under untrained and contrastively trained conditions. Measuring recovery as the correlation between estimated and true coefficients, we report how it varies with scale and encoder architecture and compare the embeddings against a raw-coordinate baseline. Recovery of the primary coefficient is consistently high across encoders, whereas recovery of a secondary coefficient is more scale-dependent, differing most at the global scale; the raw-coordinate baseline remains competitive throughout. --- ### AOHP: An Open-Source OS-Level Agent Harness for Personalized, Efficient and Secure Interaction Authors: Shanhui Zhao, Jiacheng Liu, Guohong Liu, Jichao Yan, Jialei Ye, Yuhao Yang, Hao Wen, Shizuo Tian, Yizhen Yuan, Yuxuan Chen, Yunxin Liu, Ju Ren et al. Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI, cs.OS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23449v1 AI agents are driving a new software paradigm, with the ability to autonomously call tools, extract information, manage memory, and complete tasks that span applications and data sources. Most existing end-user operating systems, however, are designed for application-centric workflows and offer little native support for AI agents. This mismatch limits the wider adoption of agents and leads to execution overhead and safety risks when running agents on conventional systems. While the concept of agent-native operating systems is emerging, the research community lacks an open testbed to explore the architectural primitives desired for agent-mediated interaction. We present AOHP (Android Open Harness Project), an OS-level agent harness built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The core design principle of AOHP is to treat agents as first-class OS actors, enabling adaptive user interfaces and agent-friendly runtime environments. AOHP preserves the mature Android software and hardware ecosystem while introducing three agent-oriented system mechanisms: personalized service composition, efficient agent interfaces, and secure information flow. Based on preliminary experiments on challenging tasks covering key capabilities of OS agents, AOHP shows clear advantages in task completion (+21.12% completion rate), execution cost (-51.55% token cost), and security-policy compliance. --- ### Selective Time Series Forecasting via Metalearning Authors: Ricardo Inácio, Vitor Cerqueira, Marília Barandas, Carlos Soares Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23448v1 Deep learning methods have achieved state-of-the-art in time series forecasting, yet their accuracy varies considerably across samples, as some instances remain inherently difficult to predict. Reject option mechanisms, which allow models to abstain from high-risk predictions, are well established in classification and regression but underexplored in forecasting. Existing abstention strategies typically rely on proxies, such as the width of the prediction interval or learned confidence scores derived from forecasts. However, these approaches are inherently tied to the training domain, limiting their ability to generalize. We propose a selective forecasting framework that addresses this limitation by modeling the empirical percentile of forecasting errors, that is, a scale-invariant statistic, based on structural characteristics extracted from recent lags via metalearning. By decoupling the rejection decision from the forecast itself and grounding it in domain-agnostic features, the framework enables effective abstention transfer across heterogeneous time series. Experiments in both in-domain and transfer learning settings show that rejecting samples predicted as challenging consistently improves forecasting accuracy across coverage levels. --- ### SkyJEPA: Learning Long-Horizon World Models for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Control of Quadrotors Authors: Pratyaksh Rao, Wancong Zhang, Randall Balestriero, Yann LeCun, Giuseppe Loianno Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23444v2 Accurate dynamics models are critical for informed decision-making in robotic systems, particularly for agile aerial vehicles operating under uncertainty. Neural network dynamics models are attractive for capturing complex nonlinear effects, but existing predictive approaches struggle with long-horizon forecasting because their autoregressive rollout mechanism amplifies errors over time. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a compelling alternative by modeling dynamics in latent space, yet prior JEPA-style methods for robot navigation have been studied primarily for kinematic-level planning, with limited investigation in high-frequency control. In this work, we introduce the JEPA-style model for real-time quadrotor control. The proposed approach combines a latent dynamics model with a novel physics-inspired prober that maps frozen latents to interpretable state, enabling physically grounded long-horizon prediction. Additionally, we combine the learned model with a sampling-based optimal control solution to take advantage of its predictive capabilities for real-time control on embedded hardware. Finally, to reduce the dependence on expensive and unsafe real-world data collection, we develop a structured pipeline for automated dataset generation. Extensive open-loop and outdoor closed-loop experiments demonstrate accurate prediction, robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, and strong generalization across diverse operating conditions. --- ### What Does a Chemical Language Model Know About Molecules? Authors: Christian Kenneth, Etowah Adams, Liam Bai, Gerard JP van Westen Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, physics.chem-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23443v1 Chemical language models (cLMs) are widely assumed to learn surface-level syntactic patterns rather than learning meaningful molecular semantics. Here, we apply sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to MolFormer, an encoder-only cLM, to mechanistically examine how molecular representations are built across layers. We discover that early layers rely on position-tracking latents to parse molecular grammar, while later layers encode atom-in-substructure and pharmacologically relevant features. Additionally, we show that non-canonical SMILES produce more disruptive representation shifts than invalid SMILES, driven by position-latent disruption propagating across layers. To support further exploration, we develop InterMol, an interactive visualizer for SAE activations on molecular strings and structures. --- ### Cross-Architectural Mixture-of-Experts with Adaptive Soft Routing for Plant Leaf Disease Classification Authors: Phi-Hung Hoang, Thi-Thu-Hong Phan Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23441v1 Plant leaf disease classification is crucial for crop protection and precision agriculture but remains challenging under complex backgrounds, illumination variations, and severe class imbalance. Moreover, single-architecture models often fail to effectively capture both local and global representations. To address these challenges, this study proposes an adaptive soft Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework with cross-architectural routing that integrates EfficientNet-B0, DenseNet-121, and Swin-Tiny to exploit complementary multi-scale, local, and global features. A soft gating mechanism dynamically assigns input-dependent expert weights, while a two-stage refinement training strategy improves optimization stability and generalization. Experiments on a highly imbalanced potato leaf disease dataset achieve 91.68% recall and 92.62% F1-score, surpassing the strongest individual expert by 5.91% and 5.03%, respectively. Additional evaluations on durian and sesame leaf disease datasets yield F1-scores of 94.03% and 97.04%, demonstrating robust cross-dataset generalization and the potential of the proposed framework for reliable real-world crop health monitoring --- ### Rethinking Object-Centric Representations for Video Dynamics Modeling Authors: Amaury Wei, Ismail Nejjar, Olga Fink Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23436v2 Learning to decompose videos into persistent objects is a fundamental challenge in unsupervised object-centric representation learning. Despite recent progress, existing methods struggle to simultaneously achieve accurate object segmentation, consistent identities over time, and reliable foreground-background separation. To address these challenges, we introduce UniSlot (Unified Slots), an unsupervised framework for learning robust and disentangled object-centric representations from videos. UniSlot explicitly separates object appearance from its 3D-aware geometric pose in the scene, linking object identity to appearance while leveraging depth to better distinguish objects from their surroundings. UniSlot achieves state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised object-centric video decomposition and tracking across synthetic and real-world benchmarks, yielding substantially tighter object masks and reducing background leakage while preserving object identities. Beyond decomposition and tracking, these improved representations translate directly to downstream tasks such as unsupervised object dynamics prediction, enabling more accurate forecasting of future object trajectories. --- ### Rethinking Object-Centric Representations for Video Dynamics Modeling Authors: Amaury Wei, Ismail Nejjar, Olga Fink Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23436v1 Unsupervised video object tracking aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-centric entities without manual annotations. Many recent approaches rely on slot-based representations, where a fixed set of latent variables ("slots") represent individual objects across frames. To preserve object identity, these models enforce temporal consistency on slot embeddings. However, when appearance and pose are entangled, this consistency objective conflicts with object motion and viewpoint changes. As a result, slots tend to lock onto static regions (e.g., background) to satisfy the consistency objective, while foreground objects become fragmented across multiple slots or frequently swap identities. To address these limitations, we propose STAITUS, a unified framework that explicitly disentangles each slot into appearance and geometric pose (position/scale). Leveraging this disentanglement, STAITUS enforces within-frame spatial separation and applies temporal alignment only in appearance space, yielding sharper masks and more persistent identities under motion, occlusion, and object entry/exit. Furthermore, to mitigate over-segmentation, we introduce an adaptive gating mechanism that dynamically adjusts the number of active slots to match scene complexity. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that STAITUS substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in segmentation quality and tracking stability. --- ### Interpretable Kolmogorov-Arnold Network with Feature-Isolated Temporal Attention Mechanism for Electricity Load Forecasting Authors: Jinhao Li, Hao Wang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CE, cs.SC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23425v1 Accurate electricity load forecasting is a crucial prerequisite for stable power system operations. While prevalent deep learning models present competitive performance, they often operate as black boxes and lack interpretability. While the Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN) has emerged as a promising alternative because of its learnable activation function design, its direct application to time-series forecasting faces challenges in modeling complex temporal data patterns. Also, simple integration into existing architectures, such as serving as replacement of neural modules, cannot fully leverage KAN's interpretability strengths. To address these gaps, this study develops LoadKAN, a novel hybrid and interpretable framework for load forecasting that synergistically combines a specifically-designed feature-isolated temporal attention mechanism with a KAN module. The attention stage aims to extract temporal dynamics from each input feature independently, such as historical load and human mobility, providing distilled feature representations to the KAN module for interpretable predictions. When evaluated on datasets from three representative U.S. electricity markets, our LoadKAN remains highly competitive when compared to extensively-tuned, state-of-the-art, black-box deep learning benchmarks. More importantly, LoadKAN's interpretability enables a granular analysis of the learned non-linear relationships between six distinct mobility patterns and electricity load. Through KAN-learned activation functions, our quantitative sensitivity analyses on mobility features reveal complex and market-specific dependencies. These findings further demonstrate the ability of our LoadKAN to generate insights often obscured by opaque black-box neural forecasting models. --- ### GRINQH: Graded Input-based Quantization Hierarchy for Efficient LLM Generation Authors: Jette Oberländer, Jan Finkbeiner, Catherine M. Schöfmann, Emre Neftci Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23419v1 Autoregressive decoding with LLMs is primarily bottlenecked by GPU memory bandwidth, especially in edge-computing settings. While quantization is essential for mitigating this bottleneck, most existing methods treat inference as a uniform process and fail to account for the asymmetry between the compute-bound prefill stage and the memory-bound decoding stage. We propose GRINQH (GRaded INput-based Quantization Hierarchy), a weight-only post-training quantization framework that accelerates decoding by unifying quantization and sparsification. GRINQH leverages activation magnitudes as a proxy for computational importance to dynamically assign weight channels to different precision levels, enabling flexible average bit widths during decoding. Evaluated on Llama3 and Qwen3 models, GRINQH outperforms state-of-the-art fixed- and mixed-precision baselines at comparable 3- and 4-bit settings, even enabling effective 2-bit generation. We experimentally verify theoretical speedups by leveraging a hierarchical nested memory layout for multi-precision storage in a custom GPU kernel. Ultimately, GRINQH establishes a new state-of-the-art Pareto frontier for LLM generation, enabling a dynamic trade-off between generation quality and inference speed. --- ### Digital Humanism and Evolutionary Design Authors: Wolfgang Höhl Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23417v1 This paper examines the two concepts of digital humanism and evolutionary design. The aim is to identify and highlight potential common structures, synergies, and challenges. How should and can technical systems be designed, and what implications does this have for the design of our environment? In light of the current debate surrounding artificial intelligence, this paper aims to serve as a preliminary study to help better understand the two concepts of digital humanism and evolutionary design within the context of human-centered technological development. Following a brief introduction, the two concepts of Digital Humanism and Evolutionary Design are presented and graphically visualized. The terms of freedom and responsibility in human decision-making, conviviality, and subjectivity are discussed, along with examples illustrating the distinction between human and artificial intelligence (Turing Test and Chinese Room). The various concepts of evolutionary design (e.g., co-evolutionary or sustainable software development, clean code, or green IT) and Gilbert Simondon's concept of the "open machine" are introduced. The interdependencies between functional specialization and open technology development are highlighted. Both concepts share similar structures. In joint cooperation, they can lead to positive effects and mutual synergies. Significant differences lie in the areas of autonomy and determination in decision-making, as well as in genuine and simulated subjectivity. Open technology development is also currently suffering from the functional specialization of software and AI applications due to a purely market- and consumer-oriented approach. Even optimizations for energy efficiency in sustainable software development lead to greater specialization and thus also have a detrimental effect on open and quality-oriented technology development. --- ### Detecting Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild using Attention Authors: Bacem Etteib, Daniele Lunghi, Tégawendé F. Bissyandé Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23416v1 LLM agents increasingly load skills, file-based packages of natural-language instructions written by third parties and distributed through marketplaces, that execute with the user's privileges. A single malicious skill can exfiltrate data, hijack the agent, or persist as a supply-chain foothold, which turns the skill marketplace into a new attack surface for agentic systems. Prompt-injection defenses do not carry over to this setting. They rely on a boundary between trusted instructions and untrusted data, whereas a skill is itself a body of instructions, so an injected command sits among many legitimate ones and inherits their authority. We present Locate-and-Judge, a two-stage detector designed for this regime. A lightweight locator scores the structural spans of a skill by the instruction-following attention each span draws and retains only the top-K. A judge then examines the retained spans in detail. Concentrating the costly judgment on a few high-attention spans lets the detector audit an entire marketplace instead of a sample. Compared to direct LLM-based scanning, this approach offers an order-of-magnitude cost reduction, dramatically increasing its scalability at a small cost to recall, and it dominates keyword and regex baselines at comparable expense. Deployed at marketplace scale and at negligible cost, Locate-and-Judge flags skills with high precision, the majority of which we manually confirmed as malicious, surfacing dozens of live malicious skills, including several disguised as benign functionality and many that SkillSpector and Cisco Skill Scanner fail to detect. We release the resulting labeled dataset. --- ### Leveraging Similarities in Multi-Armed Bandits Authors: Khaled Eldowa, Thibaud Rahier, Augustin Cablant, Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Pierre Gaillard Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23414v1 In many online learning and bandit problems, the actions we consider possess inherent similarities--for instance because they share latent traits, tags, or hierarchical structure. We study online learning with a similarity-structured action set, encoded by a rooted tree whose leaves are the actions and whose levels quantify how closely two actions are related. The loss sequence is assumed tree-compatible: losses of similar actions are constrained to be close. We establish an impossibility result showing that usual one-point bandit feedback cannot, in general, leverage range or tree-induced similarity, even under very strong similarity constraints. We then provide a unified set of algorithms which adapt to a wide range of richer feedback models, from semi-bandit feedback down to multi-point bandit protocols, including the minimal two-point feedback setting. We show these algorithms exhibit best-of-both-worlds guarantees and provably exploit action similarities by replacing the number of actions $K$ by a similarity-aware effective number of actions $K_{\mathrm{eff}}$ in the regret bounds. As an application, we show that under two-point feedback, it is possible to achieve $\sqrt{T}$ regret in Lipschitz bandits when $d \leq 2$. --- ### UnBias-Plus: Detect, Explain, and Rewrite Bias Authors: Ahmed Y. Radwan, Ahmed ElKady, Sindhuja Chaduvula, Mohamed Hafez, Amrit Krishnan, Shaina Raza Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23412v1 Bias in natural language remains a persistent challenge in both human-written and AI-generated content, affecting domains such as journalism, education, and AI research. Most existing detection methods identify only the presence of bias, with limited support for granular detection, interpretable explanations, neutral rewriting, and openly available trained models. We present UnBias-Plus, an open-source toolkit unifying (1) segment-level multi-class bias classification, (2) biased span localization, (3) neutral text rewriting, and (4) reasoning for each decision. Available via Python, CLI, REST API, and web interfaces, UnBias-Plus supports accessible bias analysis. The toolkit, source code, models, datasets, and documentation are publicly available. --- ### Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks for Groundwater Heat Plume Prediction: A Surrogate Modeling Approach Authors: Danyal Maheshwari, Julia Pelzer, Miriam Schulte Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23411v1 Quantum machine learning methods are increasingly explored for modeling complex environmental systems, including groundwater heat plume dynamics. In this work, we explore a Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) as a surrogate model for predicting temperature variations in groundwater induced by geothermal heat pumps in the city of Munich. To comply with the scalability constraints of current quantum hardware, the original high-dimensional simulation output is reduced to a compact set of representative parameters that serve as training targets for the surrogate. The proposed QCNN architecture consists of a quantum convolutional layer, a quantum pooling layer, and a fully connected quantum readout stage. Convolution and pooling operations are realized via parameterized quantum circuits based on rotational gates and measurement-driven decoding, while a Hamiltonian-inspired feature-encoding scheme is used to prepare informative input states on the quantum device. We evaluate the QCNN across multiple execution backends, including an ideal statevector simulator, a noisy simulator, IBM's 127-qubit Kyiv quantum processor, and the same hardware augmented with advanced error-mitigation techniques. Realistic noise models are employed to approximate device behavior and to assess the impact of mitigation strategies. Model performance is benchmarked using mean squared error (MSE) on both training and testing sets. The results show that, although classical neural networks still achieve the highest predictive accuracy, the QCNN attains competitive and consistent performance on simulators and exhibits noticeable improvement under error-mitigated hardware conditions. These findings indicate that quantum-enhanced surrogate modeling is a promising direction for future groundwater temperature prediction as quantum hardware and error-mitigation techniques continue to mature. --- ### Differential Spectral Damping Gap Adaptive Regularization for Ill-Conditioned Kernel Methods Authors: Praveg Vashishtha Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23407v1 Kernel methods requiring matrix inversion -- particularly Least-Squares Twin Support Vector Machines (LSTSVM) -- suffer from exponential eigenvalue decay in their system matrices, producing severely ill-conditioned problems where standard Tikhonov regularization applies uniform damping regardless of eigenvector reliability. We propose Differential Spectral Damping (DSD), a regularization formula that adapts its penalty to localized eigengap structure: preserving eigenvectors with large spectral gaps (reliable per Davis-Kahan perturbation theory) while aggressively suppressing those with small gaps (directionally corrupted beyond recovery). We motivate DSD through a principled design procedure grounded in the Davis-Kahan $\sin(Θ)$ theorem, systematically deriving the requirements for a reliability-aware damping function and selecting the exponential form for its smoothness, differentiability, and natural saturation properties. Through rigorous paired testing with fairly optimized baselines (including gradient-optimized Tikhonov receiving equal optimization opportunity), we demonstrate that DSD improves LSTSVM classification accuracy by +4.8 percentage points on real-world GINA ($d=970$, Cohen's $d = 4.49$, $p < 0.0001$), +10.4 percentage points at $d=200$, and +2.6 percentage points on Madelon ($d=500$) -- all using only principled spectral initialization while Tikhonov receives grid search. For pre-image reconstruction on manifold data, DSD ties Tikhonov at high perturbation noise ($p=0.99$) but slightly underperforms at lower noise levels; both reduce naive inversion error by $66\times$. We characterize the precise operating regime ($d \geq 100$, condition number $> 10^3$) and document where simpler methods suffice, providing practitioners with clear deployment guidance. --- ### HyperQuant: A Rate-Distortion-Optimal Quantization Pipeline for Large Language and Diffusion Models Authors: Yuval Domb, Hadar Sackstein, Tomer Solberg Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23406v1 We present HyperQuant (Hadamard, optimallY Packing, Entropy Rice-coding), a unified post-training quantization pipeline for the weights and the KV cache of large language and diffusion transformers. Across a suite of self-contained experiments (Table 1), HyperQuant outperforms the recent HIGGS scheme at every operating point from 3 to 5 bits per scalar (bps) on weights, and beats both TurboQuant and OCTOPUS on KV quantization down to 1.7 bps. Beyond the LLM setting, HyperQuant quantizes the 19B-parameter LTX-2 DiT video model with no observable per-frame artifacts. End-to-end on an H100 at 4 bps, HyperQuant compresses the linear weights ~3.9x and the KV cache ~3.79x at near-lossless quality. HyperQuant combines four known ideas into a single construction: (i) a per-tile Randomized Hadamard Transform that makes the per-coordinate distribution of weights and activations approximately Gaussian; (ii) quantization to a low-dimensional optimal lattice (E8, D4, A2, or Z); (iii) lossless bit-stripping and near-entropy-optimal variable-length Rice coding of the lattice indices; and (iv) bias-correction methods for the KV cache that keep the reconstruction unbiased under inner products, preserving attention semantics. We further integrate the pipeline with 8-bit and 4-bit Tensor-Core MMA paths (fp8-e4m3, int8, nvfp4, mxfp4), and find that int8 beats fp8 on the post-RHT lattice output. Project page: https://moonmath.ai/hyperquant/ --- ### ReasoningLens: Hierarchical Visualization and Diagnostic Auditing for Large Reasoning Models Authors: Jun Zhang, Jiasheng Zheng, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Xianpei Han, Le Sun Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23404v1 The emergence of Large Reasoning Models has introduced exceptionally long Chain-of-Thought traces, creating a transparency burden where critical logic is often buried under massive procedural text. To address this, we present ReasoningLens, an open-source framework designed for the hierarchical visualization and diagnostic auditing of complex reasoning chains. ReasoningLens addresses information necropsy by: (1) structuring traces into interactive hierarchies that separate high-level strategy from low-level execution; (2) leveraging an agentic auditor for automated error detection and tool-augmented verification; and (3) synthesizing systemic reasoning profiles to reveal model-specific blind spots. By transforming unstructured walls of text into actionable insights, ReasoningLens provides a modular foundation for interpreting, debugging, and optimizing the next generation of reasoning-centric AI. --- ### Litmus: Zero-Label, Code-Driven Metric Specification for Evaluating AI Systems Authors: Prajjwal Gupta, Prasang Gupta, Vishal Bhutani, Apoorva Sharma, Sumanth Chundru, Waqar Sarguroh, Kevin Paul Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23403v1 As agentic LLM systems move from prototypes to deployment across increasingly diverse domains, evaluating them has become both more important and more difficult. The challenge is not only that individual metrics may be unreliable, but that evaluation goals are often left implicit. Without a clear account of what a system is expected to do, how it can fail, and which failures matter, metric choices become difficult to justify, interpret, or validate. We present Litmus, a zero-label system that designs evaluation and monitoring metrics for AI pipelines by eliciting evaluation intent from source code and targeted interrogation. Instead of assuming that the evaluation target is already known, Litmus first identifies what must be measured and why, then converts those answers into constraints for constructing a justified, per-stage metric portfolio. We evaluate Litmus on three real, code-defined AI pipelines - financial account grouping, scientific QA, and inherent risk assessment - against AutoMetrics and three DynamicRubric baselines. Litmus achieves the broadest or tied-broadest concern coverage, spans more pipeline stages, produces a near-zero-redundancy portfolio, and ranks first in validity against per-row quality labels on all three pipelines - decisively on scientific QA (Spearman $ρ=0.72$ vs. less than $0.47$ for every baseline), and within overlapping confidence intervals in relation to two components of the audit framework despite using no labels during metric design. Our results support a shift from automatic metric implementation to automatic metric specification: before asking which metric to compute, evaluation systems should ask what must be measured and why. --- ### Physics-Informed Modeling for Wood Thermal Analysis and Prediction Authors: Jingren Xie, Alex John Buckthal, Ryan Anthony O'Connor, Isak Worre Foged, Dim P. Papadopoulos Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23402v1 Wood materials exhibit complex, spatially varying thermal properties that challenge traditional architectural assumptions of material homogeneity. Although data-driven approaches can directly map wood RGB images to their corresponding thermal responses, they operate as uninterpretable black boxes that prioritize statistical correlation and may absorb experimental noise rather than thermodynamic plausibility. To address these limitations, we present physics-informed deep learning frameworks that integrate partial differential equations (PDEs) to predict pixel-level thermal responses of spatially heterogeneous wood materials using wood RGB images and testbed temperature maps. Specifically, we investigate two distinct approaches to enforcing a normalized 2D steady-state heat transfer equation derived from the general heat transfer equation: Physics-Informed Convolutional Neural Networks (PICNNs), which embed physics as a soft penalty term in the loss function, and Physics-Integrated Convolutional Neural Networks (PInteCNNs), which hard-code an analytical approximator-predictor-corrector solver directly into convolutional neural networks. To validate our proposed approaches, we collect three real-world multimodal datasets of Poplar, Grandis Cross-Cut (Grandis-CC), and Grandis Radial-Cut (Grandis-RC) wood samples. We further demonstrate that embedding physical inductive biases successfully balances predictive accuracy, physical interpretability, and intra-species diversity, outperforming data-driven approaches in handling complex wood material heterogeneity and enabling the extraction of interpretable physical parameters. Project: https://zekifayes.github.io/pim --- ### Automated Semantic Fault Localization in SysML v2: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework Using Knowledge-Graph Augmented LLMs Authors: Haitham Al-Shami, Rohail Malik, Riku Ala-Laurinaho, Jari Vepsäläinen, Raine Viitala Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23395v1 SysML v2's textual syntax enables compiler-based validation of model structure and language conformance. However, semantic mistakes that preserve syntactic validity but violate domain rules cannot be detected through compilers. These errors can propagate through the design process and surface late as costly integration failures. This paper presents a human-in-the-loop framework for identifying and repairing such errors automatically. It combines a fine-tuned Small Language Model (SLM) with a domain knowledge graph encoding physical compatibility rules between system elements. The knowledge graph also guides the generation of synthetic training data by systematically introducing plausible domain violations, and augments the model at inference time to ground repair suggestions in valid engineering constraints. We demonstrate the framework using the vehicle systems domain, where the knowledge graph captures the relationships between the mechanical, electrical, fluid, and signal interfaces. Two SLMs, Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B, are fine-tuned to output unified diff patches that localize faults and present candidate repairs for engineer review, preserving human judgment in the design process. Evaluation of 1,184 test samples shows that fine-tuning improves semantic fault repair from less than 3% to more than 91%, with patch-based output reducing token length by over 60%. The framework offers a practical path toward AI-assisted model verification that complements existing MBSE tools. --- ### Do LLM Embedding Spaces Recover Expert Structure? Authors: Yixuan Zhu, Zhenke Duan, Fanghen Li Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23394v1 Pretrained text embeddings are increasingly used as representational maps, yet high category separability does not imply that their geometry recovers expert-defined structure. We study this problem in mental-health-related language, where symptom relations provide an external reference and online communities introduce strong domain, affective, stylistic, and discourse confounds. Using 28 Reddit communities, we compare pretrained and supervised fine-tuned Qwen3 embedding spaces at two scales (0.6B and 4B). We construct category prototypes, evaluate their representational dissimilarity matrices against an expert symptom matrix with representational similarity analysis, and complement this global test with prototype-based typicality and multi-baseline confound controls. Pretrained embeddings show measurable alignment with expert structure within the mental-health subset; fine-tuning strengthens this alignment most at the finest category level; and larger scale improves both zero-shot alignment and supervision-induced gains. Residual alignment remains substantial after controlling for VAD, LIWC, lexical style, and topic-distribution structure. These results suggest that LLM embeddings can recover expert-relevant category geometry, but this recovery is level-dependent and should be tested against explicit confounds rather than inferred from classification alone. --- ### Distribution-Aware Diffusion-LLM for Robust Ultra-Long-Term Time Series Forecasting Authors: Falguni Ghosh, Vahid Hashemi, Bernhard Kainz Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23391v1 Time series forecasting is a fundamental machine learning task. Recent work has explored Large Language Models (LLMs) for this purpose due to their strong generalization, pattern recognition, and zero-shot or few-shot capabilities. Despite their suitability for long-context learning, LLMs face challenges in multimodal settings: they lack calibrated probabilistic modeling for non-text data and struggle to align heterogeneous representations. To address these issues, we propose a new framework Diffusion-LLM that integrates a conditional diffusion model into an LLM-based forecasting pipeline. This joint design enables learning the conditional distribution of future data while improving semantic alignment in a shared latent space. We evaluate Diffusion-LLM on six long-term forecasting benchmarks, including ETT, Weather, and ECL. Our method consistently outperforms existing LLM-based baseline, achieving notable gains in ultra-long-term and few-shot forecasting and demonstrating the value of distribution-aware regularization for enhancing robustness and generalization in time series LLMs. --- ### Self-Stigma Is Not a Monolith, but Generic Empathy Is: Persona-Conditioned LLM Support for People Who Use Drugs Authors: Layla Bouzoubaa, Rezvaneh Rezapour Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23387v2 Self-stigma predicts treatment avoidance and disengagement among people who use drugs (PWUD), yet conversational systems aiming to provide support typically treat self-stigma expression as a uniform signal. We present a three-phase, proof-of-concept study of a persona-aware approach to LLM support. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) on indicator-level features from 1,174 self-stigma expressors on Reddit yields a four-persona typology validated against held-out behavioral and linguistic features. Sequential Bayesian and recurrent neural classifiers recover these personas from limited posting histories, substantially outperforming batch and few-shot LLM baselines (macro-F1 = 0.74 at 30 posts). Evaluation by eight clinical experts across three contemporary LLMs revealed a misalignment: persona-matched responses successfully achieved targeted behavioral shifts, yet raters holistically preferred the generic empathy of the persona-neutral baseline. Our findings suggest that holistic empathy judgments and clinically-aligned response design can pull in opposite directions, and that evaluating LLM-based stigma support requires rubrics capable of decomposing the two. --- ### Near-Lipschitz stability of the Kim--Milman flow map Authors: Sinho Chewi, Katharina Eichinger, Aram-Alexandre Pooladian Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: math.PR, math.FA, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23383v1 We prove that the Kim--Milman flow map enjoys favorable stability properties with respect to variations in the target measure, provided that one of the target measures is sufficiently regular. Our results include stability in relative entropy, and more notably, Lipschitz stability in the $2$-Wasserstein distance up to a logarithmic factor. We complement our results with a general existence theorem for these maps for any target measure with finite second moment. --- ### Energy-Based Transformers as Predictors of Reading Difficulty Authors: Jakub Dotlacil, Ece Takmaz Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23382v2 Transformer language models have become established tools for modeling human sentence processing, with measures such as surprisal and attention entropy serving as effective predictors of reading difficulty that together capture complementary aspects of processing load. Here, we explore a related class of transformer models: energy-based transformers, which provide a principled formal link to associative memory models, bringing processing research into direct contact with the broader literature on Hopfield networks and dense associative memory. To our knowledge, this is the first exploration of an energy-based transformer measure in computational psycholinguistics. Across reading-time corpora (Natural Stories, UCL eye-tracking, UCL self-paced reading), the energy measure is a robust predictor of reading times, providing significant fit beyond surprisal and entropy in all three. In a controlled experiment on relative clause processing, energy at a single layer captures the well-known object/subject asymmetry. We find evidence that it subsumes effects attributable to both attention entropy and surprisal, suggesting that energy may serve as a single unified predictor where multiple complementary measures have previously been required. --- ### Energy-Based Transformers as Predictors of Reading Difficulty Authors: Jakub Dotlacil, Ece Takmaz Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23382v1 Transformer language models have become established tools for modeling human sentence processing, with measures such as surprisal and attention entropy serving as effective predictors of reading difficulty that together capture complementary aspects of processing load. Here, we explore a related class of transformer models: energy-based transformers, which provide a principled formal link to associative memory models, bringing processing research into direct contact with the broader literature on Hopfield networks and dense associative memory. To our knowledge, this is the first exploration of an energy-based transformer measure in computational psycholinguistics. Across reading-time corpora (Natural Stories, UCL eye-tracking, UCL self-paced reading), the energy measure is a robust predictor of reading times, providing significant fit beyond surprisal in all three. In a controlled experiment on relative clause processing, energy at a single layer captures the well-known object/subject asymmetry. We find evidence that it subsumes effects attributable to both attention entropy and surprisal, suggesting that energy may serve as a single unified predictor where multiple complementary measures have previously been required. --- ### Measuring & Mitigating Over-Alignment for LLMs in Multilingual Criminal Law Courts Authors: Arthur Wuhrmann, Gaetan Stein, Daniel Brunner, Andrei Kucharavy Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23375v2 While the wider applicability of LLMs in the legal field is currently debated due to their reliability and the gravity of any errors, narrow uses with well-understood and mitigated risks have emerged. Notably the Swiss Federal Supreme Court uses small on-premises models for tentative translations and short-passage summarization across the four official languages. However, such usage is challenging in the context of Criminal Law. Since rulings and cases employees work on routinely can contain detailed descriptions of violent and sexual offenses, their legitimate work is compromised by refusals and disclaimers due to the activation of model guardrails (over-alignment). To measure this phenomenon, we introduce TF-RefusalBench, a multilingual benchmark for criminal-law translation and summarization derived from public Swiss Supreme Court rulings. TF-RefusalBench contains 5,200 total prompts across French, German, Italian, and English, corresponding to common task prompts and passages likely to trigger refusal. We then use TF-RefusalBench to show that over-alignment is a multifaceted phenomenon, influenced by the model and the prompt and text languages being processed, and that its impact cannot be evaluated solely from an over-refusal perspective, given the disclaimer's impact on task faithfulness. Finally, we evaluate approaches to enable on-premises LLMs for Criminal Law Tasks, demonstrating that while prompting can be effective, abliteration (refusal directions ablation) eliminates refusal with minimal impact on task performance. --- ### Polynomial Dice Loss for Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Hiroaki Aizawa Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23373v1 Medical image segmentation is a fundamental task for medical image processing and computer-assisted intervention, yet data imbalance and small lesion detection pose significant challenges. Dice Loss, which measures the overlap between predicted and ground truth regions, is widely used to mitigate these issues. To further emphasize its properties, we propose Polynomial Dice Loss, a polynomial extension of Dice Loss. Specifically, by leveraging the geometric characteristics of Dice Loss and formulating the loss function as a polynomial representation via Taylor expansion, we enable the adjustment of the contribution of higher-order components to the loss function. In our experiments, we evaluate the proposed method against loss functions derived from conventional Dice and Tversky coefficients. Experimental results and further analysis show that the polynomial formulation provides a simple way to control the loss shape and achieves competitive performance across multiple segmentation settings. --- ### FlexServe: A Fast and Secure LLM Serving System for Mobile Devices with Flexible Resource Isolation Authors: Yinpeng Wu, Yitong Chen, Lixiang Wang, Jinyu Gu, Zhichao Hua, Yubin Xia Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.OS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23370v2 Device-side Large Language Models (LLMs) have grown explosively, offering stronger privacy and higher availability than their cloud-side counterparts. During LLM inference, both the model weights and the user data are valuable, and attackers may compromise the OS kernel to steal them. ARM TrustZone is the de facto hardware-based isolation technology on mobile devices, used to protect sensitive applications from a compromised OS. However, protecting LLM inference with TrustZone incurs significant overhead to both the secure inference and the normal aplications, due to two challenges: the inflexible resource isolation and the inefficient secure resource management. To address these challenges, this paper presents FlexServe, a fast and secure LLM inference system for mobile devices. The key idea is to decouple the access permission from the management permission of secure resources, so that the normal-world OS cannot access them but can still manage them as usual. First, FlexServe introduces a Recallable Resource Isolation mechanism to construct Recallable Secure Memory (Flex-Mem) and a Recallable Secure NPU (Flex-NPU). They can only be accessed by the secure world, but can be efficiently allocated and reclaimed by the normal-world OS. Based on them, FlexServe further introduces a FlexServe Framework to run secure LLM inference in the secure world. It works together with the normal-world OS to perform cooperative secure memory management. We implement a prototype of FlexServe and compare it with two TrustZone-based strawman designs. The results show that FlexServe achieves average TTFT speedups of 10.05X over the strawman and 2.44X over an optimized strawman. --- ### Convergence of Gradient Descent for General Neural Network Architectures Beyond the NTK Regime Authors: Yuqing Wang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, math.DS, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23364v1 Training dynamics is central to understanding neural networks, yet its theoretical analysis remains difficult even for simple architectures and becomes substantially more challenging for general modern architectures. In this paper, we propose a convergence framework for analyzing gradient descent (GD) dynamics under a broad family of neural network architectures and datasets beyond the neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime. The framework is formulated at the level of network blocks and covers architectures including pre-normalized multi-layer transformers. More precisely, under mild assumptions, we prove that for almost all initializations, GD with regular learning rates converges to the neighbourhood of a stationary point. This is mainly proved by establishing an iterate-dependent PL-type inequality through analyticity and measure-zero arguments, and by proving Lipschitz smoothness along the GD trajectory through polynomial generalized smoothness and a local relaxed dissipative condition. We further interpret the theorem under Xavier initialization and practical architectural scaling, showing that the learning rate scale depends on the depth and effective bottleneck dimensions rather than the largest width. Finally, we derive structural nondegeneracy implications for residual connections and function composition, and provide a generic characterization of global minimizers within our framework. --- ### TooBad: Backdoor Diffusion Models with Ultra-Low Poison Rate and Imperceptible Trigger Authors: Vu Tuan Truong, Long Bao Le Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23362v1 Diffusion models (DMs), despite their impressive capabilities across a wide range of generative tasks, have been shown to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. However, existing backdoor methods face critical trade-offs among key factors: attack performance, stealthiness, time complexity, and required poison rates. For example, achieving high attack performance typically demands a high poison rate and prolonged training, which undermines stealthiness, making the attack more detectable by backdoor defenses. This paper proposes TooBad (trigger optimization for backdoor diffusion models), a backdoor framework which introduces a novel DM-tailored trigger optimization technique to dramatically enhance the performance of backdoor attacks on DMs. Experiments on representative benchmarks such as CIFAR-10 show that TooBad can achieve high ASRs ($> 85$%) at only 0.5% poison rate, significantly lower than the 10% typically required by prior work on the same datasets. At 5% poison rate, TooBad reaches nearly 100% ASR within just 3-5 backdoor injection epochs, whereas existing methods need at least 30-50 epochs at double the poison rate for comparable results. Despite its potency, TooBad easily evades SOTA defenses and maintains high utility. These results reveal a critical threat on DMs and highlight the need for more robust defenses against such stealthy yet efficient attacks. --- ### Rethinking Molecular Graph Backdoors under Chemistry-aware Admission Authors: Thinh T. H. Nguyen, Sze Jue Yang, Khoa D. Doan, Chee Seng Chan, Kok-Seng Wong Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23361v1 Backdoor attacks on molecular graph neural networks (GNNs) are typically evaluated as abstract graph edits, but real molecular learning pipelines do not train on arbitrary graphs. Molecular records must first survive parsing, sanitization, canonicalization, and graph-string consistency checks. We formalize this overlooked admission stage as ChemGuard, an operational protocol for testing whether a submitted molecular record can enter a realistic learning pipeline, while complementing existing defenses. ChemGuard admits a record only when its molecular string is sanitizable and the graph reconstructed from that string matches the submitted molecular graph. Under this operational view, many existing graph-based backdoors lose much of their apparent efficacy because their poisons are chemically invalid or representation-inconsistent. We then show that admission checks alone are insufficient to rule out molecular backdoors. We propose ChemBack, an admission-aware molecular backdoor attack that constructs chemically feasible motif-anchor attachments and ranks admitted candidates by fingerprint-based Tanimoto similarity to clean target-class molecules. ChemBack is model-free during trigger selection, using molecular structures, target labels, fingerprints, and public validity checks, but no victim model, surrogate GNN, learned embedding, gradient, logit, or training-code access. Across molecular benchmarks, validators, architectures, and defenses, \textbf{ChemBack} achieves high attack success with fully admitted poisons while preserving clean accuracy. Our results reveal a two-sided lesson, chemistry-aware admission suppresses many graph-only backdoors, yet chemically valid and target-aligned molecular backdoors remain a practical threat. --- ### Adaptive Hard-Soft Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Robust Boundary-Constrained PDE Solving Authors: Duc Tien Nguyen, Trinh Minh Tuan, Nguyen Duc Manh, Vu Linh Nguyen, Dinh Gia Ninh Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23359v1 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) provide an effective way to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding physical principles into the learning process. However, the conventional PINN formulation, in which all constraints are imposed as soft penalty terms within a composite loss, often exhibits slow convergence, sensitivity to loss weight scaling, and inaccurate boundary enforcement due to poor conditioning of the optimization landscape. To address these limitations, this study proposes a unified hard--soft physics--informed neural network (HSPINN) with adaptive loss weighting. In this framework, Dirichlet and periodic boundary conditions are enforced exactly by construction through analytical or polynomial lifting, masking functions, and periodic feature mappings, while the governing PDE residuals, Neumann fluxes, and initial conditions are treated as soft constraints. An inverse-share softmax strategy dynamically balances the relative importance of individual loss components during training, eliminating manual penalty tuning and improving gradient stability. This formulation ensures boundary admissibility throughout optimization and enhances convergence efficiency and numerical robustness. Applications to representative elliptic (Poisson), parabolic (Burgers), and hyperbolic (convection with periodic boundaries) problems demonstrate that HSPINN consistently achieves faster convergence, higher accuracy, and greater stability than conventional PINNs, establishing a general and scalable foundation for physics-constrained deep learning across science and technology. --- ### SOAP-Bubbles: Structured Weight Uncertainty for Neural Networks Authors: Adrian Robert Minut, Nico Daheim, Marco Miani, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan, Wu Lin, Thomas Möllenhoff Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23357v2 Structured weight-uncertainty can improve many aspects of deep learning, but it remains costly to estimate and difficult to implement. Here, we show that these issues can be addressed by adapting the SOAP optimizer. Our key idea is to run IVON, an existing diagonal-covariance variational method, in the eigenspace of SOAP's preconditioner and then use the preconditioner to transform the diagonal estimate into a non-diagonal covariance. The resulting method has costs similar to those of SOAP and requires no drastic changes to training pipelines. We call the posteriors obtained in this way SOAP-Bubbles and our new optimizer Eigenspace-VON (EVON). We show that, for logistic regression, EVON recovers the exact Gaussian covariance and that, for language model pretraining, it yields significantly better results than existing diagonal-covariance methods. Our work makes it easier to estimate more expressive posterior distributions for deep learning at scale. --- ### Changing Modalities: Adapting Remote Sensing Models to New Satellites and Sensors Authors: Tim G. Zhou, Anthony Fuller, Geoff Pleiss, Evan Shelhamer Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23356v1 Machine learning models for remote sensing are trained and deployed on a static set of modalities. However, as we equip newer satellites with novel sensors and retire old ones, practitioners may wish to deploy an existing model on a substitution, superset, or subset of modalities with minimal retraining given data availability or practical computational constraints. We study the setting of updating existing models to changing modalities and identify three main scenarios: Modality Transfer (substitution), Addition (superset), and Peeking (subset). We propose DeluluNet, an architecture with modular components for all three changing modality scenarios. DeluluNet is trained end-to-end, learning a multi-modal model from a unimodal teacher and unlabeled multimodal data via modality hallucination--predicting missing modality representations from those that are present. As a result, DeluluNet can keep predicting even when input modalities change, providing a practical alternative to re-labeling and re-training in a changing world. --- ### Faithful Grounded Visual Reasoning via Learned Proxy-Tokens Authors: Tom Hodemon, Mohamed Chaouch, Aboubacar Tuo, Angelique Loesch Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23354v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in Visual Question Answering (VQA), yet their "black-box" nature hinders deployment in critical domains. Grounded Visual Reasoning (GVR) approaches attempt to improve interpretability by explicitly couple textual rationales with visual grounding information, which are typically textual coordinates. This mechanism lacks a learnable semantic link to the visual features, often resulting in a semantic-spatial gap where the model hallucinates coordinates that do not correspond to image evidences. In this work, we introduce Composer, a MLLM that leverages a novel visual grounding mechanism based on learned proxy-tokens to promote faithful interpretability. These discrete symbolic pointers explicitly index the image latent space, allowing the model to manipulate visual regions as addressable, semantically manipulable sets. To rigorously validate our novel grounding mechanism, we constructed ComposerGCoT, a dataset synthesized to enable holistic assessment of reasoning consistency and grounding accuracy. Experimental results indicate that Composer achieves performance parity with its coordinate-based counterpart in final answer accuracy, while improving visual grounding accuracy by +9.0 points. By demonstrating that discrete proxy-tokens capture spatial semantics more effectively than typical textual coordinates, we establish that visual grounding mechanisms with learnable semantic links represent a promising path toward trustworthy and reliable MLLMs. --- ### Ultra-Peripheral Collisions as a Nuclear-Structure Interferometer with Interpretable Multitask Deep Learning Authors: Jing-Zong Zhang, Wang-Mei Zha, Lingxiao Wang, Guo-Liang Ma Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: nucl-th, cs.LG, nucl-ex, physics.optics, quant-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23353v1 Precise knowledge of nuclear structure is essential across fundamental physics, yet probing these structures is notoriously difficult. To address this challenge, ultra-peripheral collisions (UPCs) provide a femtoscopic tomography for imaging the atomic nucleus. UPCs offer a pristine electromagnetic pathway: coherent vector-meson photoproduction generates patterns of diffraction and two-source interference that directly encode the nuclear spatial density. Turning these patterns into quantitative constraints is, however, a challenging inverse problem, complicated by correlated sensitivities to deformation and neutron skin, phase smearing, and experimental backgrounds. Here we introduce an interpretable Multitask deep-learning framework that maps transverse momentum distributions to multiple nuclear-structure indicators simultaneously and identifies the kinematic regions driving each inference. We demonstrate the approach with coherent $J/ψ$ photoproduction in $^{96}_{40}\text{Zr} + ^{96}_{40}\text{Zr}$ collisions, showing that the learned features separate diffraction-dominated and interference-dominated information and provide analysis-ready observables for future high-luminosity data. --- ### Superhuman AI for Generals.io Using Self-Play Reinforcement Learning Authors: Matej Straka, Viliam Lisý, Martin Schmid Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23348v1 We present a superhuman AI agent for Generals.io, a real-time strategy game that requires both long-horizon planning and short-term tactics under strong imperfect information. Trained for four days on 4x NVIDIA H200 GPUs, our agent reaches #1 on the public 1v1 leaderboard of over 5,000 human players, leading the second-ranked player by the same margin that separates second place from 25th, and beats the two top-ranked humans head-to-head with a combined 199-70 record across 269 ladder matches. A key enabler is a JAX-native simulator that reaches tens of millions of frames per second on a single GPU, roughly a 10,000x speedup over the prior simulator. On top of this, we train a vision transformer policy end-to-end by self-play with a policy-gradient loop and sparse win/loss reward, using top-advantage sample filtering and an exponential moving average of the policy parameters. Taken together, our findings highlight what matters, and what does not, once a fast simulator removes the data bottleneck. --- ### Field-level weak lensing cosmology with $60$ simulations using multifidelity simulation-based inference Authors: Alex A. Saoulis, Kiyam Lin, Niall Jeffrey, Maximilian von Wietersheim-Kramsta, Davide Piras, Alessio Spurio Mancini, Ana M. G. Ferreira, Benjamin Joachimi Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: astro-ph.CO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23346v2 We perform a realistic KiDS-Legacy mock analysis with field-level neural compression and simulation-based inference using just 60 $N$-body simulations. The weak lensing shear field encodes substantially more cosmological information than standard two-point summary statistics such as the power spectrum. Field-level inference can fully exploit this information, but physical realism at the field-level requires very high-fidelity simulations. This poses a major challenge for simulation-based inference (SBI): accurate empirical density modelling and deep-learning-based neural compression require tens of thousands of training samples, but achieving physical realism at the field level makes each simulation extremely costly. We demonstrate that multifidelity SBI can alleviate this tension by substantially reducing the number of high-fidelity simulations needed for accurate cosmological inference. We pre-train neural inference models on realistic KiDS-Legacy-like shear mocks using fast log-normal \texttt{GLASS} simulations and fine-tune them on a small set of high-fidelity $N$-body simulations. We show that $60$ high-fidelity simulations are sufficient to obtain informative and well-calibrated cosmological posteriors, enabling at least an order-of-magnitude reduction in simulation cost for accurate field-level inference in a realistic setting. --- ### Field-level weak lensing cosmology with $<100$ simulations using multifidelity simulation-based inference Authors: Alex A. Saoulis, Kiyam Lin, Niall Jeffrey, Maximilian von Wietersheim-Kramsta, Davide Piras, Alessio Spurio Mancini, Ana M. G. Ferreira, Benjamin Joachimi Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: astro-ph.CO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23346v1 We perform a realistic KiDS-Legacy mock analysis with field-level neural compression and simulation-based inference using fewer than 100 $N$-body simulations. The weak lensing shear field encodes substantially more cosmological information than standard two-point summary statistics such as the power spectrum. Field-level inference can fully exploit this information, but physical realism at the field-level requires very high-fidelity simulations. This poses a major challenge for simulation-based inference (SBI): accurate empirical density modelling and deep-learning-based neural compression require many training simulations, but achieving physical realism at the field level makes each simulation extremely costly. We demonstrate that multifidelity SBI can alleviate this tension by substantially reducing the number of high-fidelity simulations needed for accurate cosmological inference. We pre-train neural inference models on realistic KiDS-Legacy-like shear mocks using fast log-normal GLASS simulations and fine-tune them on a small set of high-fidelity $N$-body simulations. We show that between $60$-$100$ high-fidelity simulations are sufficient to obtain informative and well-calibrated cosmological posteriors, enabling an order-of-magnitude reduction in simulation cost for accurate field-level inference in a realistic setting. --- ### Abstract representational geometry supports inference in large language models Authors: Yunan Zeng, Yuwang Wang Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23345v1 A defining feature of human intelligence is the ability to adapt to changing environments by inferring latent task structure from sparse observations. Neuroscientific research indicates that this capability relies on the hippocampus constructing abstract representations, expressed as low-dimensional, approximately orthogonal manifolds in neural state space. However, the internal mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) remain largely opaque, making it unclear whether they form comparable abstract representations or instead rely on task-specific statistical regularities when performing comparable reasoning tasks. Here we adapt a contextual reversal-learning paradigm to a text-based setting and compare humans and LLMs at both the Behavioural and representational levels. We report that although LLMs exhibit generalizable reasoning less frequently than humans, when such inference occurs, their internal states exhibit abstract geometric structures that resemble those reported in the hippocampus. Notably, this representational geometry is not uniformly distributed but is organized hierarchically across model depth: whereas lower layers show early, stable encoding of stimulus identity, higher layers form a hippocampal-like functional band enriched for abstract context geometry associated with inference. Furthermore, complementary intervention experiments mechanistically implicate geometry in reasoning: task-sequence language modelling induces geometric disentanglement, whereas geometric regularization of higher layers increases the emergence of generalizable inference. Together, these findings establish abstract representational geometry as a mechanistic principle supporting inference in large language models. --- ### RT-DocLayout: Real-Time End-to-End Document Layout Analysis with Reading Order in the Wild Authors: Cheng Cui, Tingquan Gao, Xueqing Wang, Changda Zhou, Hongen Liu, Ting Sun, Yubo Zhang, Zelun Zhang, Jiaxuan Liu, Manhui Lin, Yue Zhang, Suyin Liang et al. Published: 2026-06-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23344v1 Accurate document layout analysis remains a critical bottleneck for document parsing systems, due to the intricate coupling among heterogeneous document layout elements, geometric distortions (\eg, paper warping and bending, perspective variations), and reading order within diverse layout structures. Existing approaches typically rely on fragmented multi-stage pipelines or computationally heavy generative Transformer architectures, leading to error propagation and limited efficiency. In this paper, we present RT-DocLayout, a highly efficient end-to-end framework for document layout analysis, designed as a front-end for document parsing tasks. The proposed model unifies classification, detection, pixel-level segmentation, and reading order prediction for layout elements within a single 33M-parameter architecture. Built upon the RT-DETR, our key contribution is a unified multi-task formulation within a single query-based decoder that simultaneously classifies, regresses bounding box, generates masks, and constructs relationship to reason reading order. By jointly learning geometric and structural representations, RT-DocLayout introduces multi-task optimization that substantially improves robustness under real-world document distortions. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in document layout analysis while maintaining real-time inference speed(132.1 FPS). When coupled with downstream OCR engines, RT-DocLayout significantly improves full-document reconstruction quality, providing a scalable and practical foundation for real-world document intelligence systems. ---