arXiv:cs/0201024v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In general, we can not use algebraic or enumerative methods to optimize a quality control (QC) procedure so as to detect the critical random and systematic analytical errors with stated probabilities, while the probability for false rejection is minimum. Genetic algorithms (GAs) offer an alternative, as they do not require knowledge of the objective function to be optimized and search through large parameter spaces quickly. To explore the application of GAs in statistical QC, we have developed an interactive GAs based computer program that designs a novel near optimal QC procedure, given an analytical process. The program uses the deterministic crowding algorithm. An illustrative application of the program suggests that it has the potential to design QC procedures that are significantly better than 45 alternative ones that are used in the clinical laboratories.
Science Journals
arXiv:2606.29011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The DC optimal power flow is widely used in power system operations because of its computational efficiency and scalability. However, DC dispatches are not guaranteed to satisfy the nonlinear AC power-flow equations or associated operational limits. This paper develops a parameterized, differentiable AC power-flow restoration method for mapping DC dispatches to AC-consistent operating points. The method incorporates distributed slack for active-power balancing and PV/PQ switching for reactive-power regulation, both implemented using smooth differentiable surrogates with tunable parameters, including slack participation factors, voltage setpoints, and regulation steepness. These parameters are trained offline by differentiating through the AC restoration equations using the implicit function theorem. Once trained, the optimized parameters are fixed and used directly during AC power-flow recovery from DC dispatches. The approach is evaluated on IEEE, ACTIVSg, and PEGASE test systems using setpoints computed by standard DC optimal power flow. Results show that the optimized restoration method improves AC feasibility recovery across various systems relative to conventional single-slack AC power-flow recovery. On the 9,241-bus case, the optimized method improves cost difference by 80% relative to the conventional recovery baseline and improves solving time relative to ACOPF by 75%.
arXiv:2606.29038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Metric aggregation divergence (MAD) is the silent inconsistency that arises when distinct pipeline stages in an agent-based model coupled with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (ABM+MOEA) independently re-implement how an outcome metric is extracted from simulation trajectories. Unlike deliberate analytical choices, MAD operates at the level of pipeline architecture: each stage is internally coherent, and the inconsistency becomes visible only when cross-stage outputs are compared. Code inspection of EpidemiOptim, a JAIR-published epidemic policy toolbox, reveals three structurally independent aggregation paths in peer-reviewed code. A faithful replication of this structure produces champion disagreement in 64.2% of independent runs (n=500, 95% CI: [59.9%, 68.3%]). In a 300-seed policy-flip experiment, divergent aggregation causes the optimizer to recommend the wrong champion in 83% of replications, with a mean welfare gap of 2.19 units and a Gini inequality gap of 0.050 units. In a follow-up inference audit, 3 of 249 flipped seeds cross the significance boundary itself. A complementary enterprise follow-up produces the predicted null under near-commensurable rankings (rho = 0.991), while a public upstream rerun of the Lake Problem DPS workflow shows that the archived published-path recommendation reaches joint-threshold success 0.401 whereas a shared contract-path rule reaches 0.552. We introduce the metric contract - a single shared callable enforced at dispatch time across all pipeline stages - as the remedy. Framed as standard engineering discipline applied to the cross-stage metric interface, the contract eliminates divergence by construction with approximately 3% runtime overhead.
arXiv:2606.29047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extracting interpretable, localized physical mechanisms from complex spatiotemporal data is a foundational challenge across physics, biology, and engineering, but has remained out of reach on real measurements. The central obstacle is obtaining high-quality gradients of data via numerical differentiation, which amplifies noise, diverges for high-order equations, and falters on irregular geometries, limiting the scope of existing approaches to clean simulations of low-order systems. Here, we present weak dominant balance, a derivative-free framework that projects governing equations into a weak (integral) formulation, offloading differentiation onto smooth analytical test functions and leaving the data untouched. The method sustains accurate regime identification under severe noise where existing approaches categorically fail, delivers the first data-driven decomposition of a third-order partial differential equation applied to turbulent duct flow, and produces matching decompositions across direct numerical simulation and particle-image velocimetry measurements of a wavy channel flow, uncovering a previously uncharacterized dynamical regime. Weak dominant balance brings mechanism-level analysis out of simulation and onto measured data, and opens complex physical systems to direct, equation-grounded interpretation.
arXiv:2602.12957v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Document parsing is a fundamental task in multimodal understanding, supporting a wide range of downstream applications such as information extraction and intelligent document analysis. Benefiting from strong semantic modeling and robust generalization, VLM-based end-to-end approaches have emerged as the mainstream paradigm in recent years. However, these models often suffer from substantial inference latency, as they must autoregressively generate long, full-page sequences when processing long-form documents. While recent hybrid methods mitigate this issue via region-level parallel decoding with VLMs, independent region decoding loses full-page context and might weaken global coherence. To address this issue, we propose Hierarchical Speculative Decoding (HSD), a two-stage local-to-global framework for document parsing. HSD first employs a lightweight pipeline drafter to predict region partitions and generate coarse drafts for each region. The first stage verifies the generated region-level drafts in parallel for efficiency, while the second stage further performs page-level verification on these refined outputs to preserve full-page coherence. Experimental results show that HSD achieves a near-lossless 2.7x speedup with HunyuanOCR on OmniDocBench v1.5 and up to 7.04x speedup on long-document parsing tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/whlscut/HSD.
arXiv:2604.04385v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We localize the policy routing mechanism in alignment-trained language models. An intermediate-layer attention gate reads detected content and triggers deeper amplifier heads that boost the signal toward refusal. In smaller models the gate and amplifier are single heads; at larger scale they become bands of heads across adjacent layers. The gate contributes under 1% of output DLA, yet interchange testing (p < 0.001) and knockout cascade confirm it is causally necessary. Interchange screening at n >= 120 detects the same motif in twelve models from six labs (2B to 72B), though specific heads differ by lab. Per-head ablation weakens up to 58x at 72B and misses gates that interchange identifies; at scale, interchange is the only reliable audit. Modulating the detection-layer signal continuously controls policy from hard refusal through evasion to factual answering. On safety prompts the same intervention turns refusal into harmful guidance, showing that the safety-trained capability is gated by routing, not removed. Thresholds vary by topic and by input language, and the circuit relocates across generations within a family even while behavioral benchmarks register no change. Routing is early-commitment: the gate fires at its own layer before deeper layers finish processing the input. An in-context substitution cipher collapses gate interchange necessity by 70 to 99% across three models, and the model switches to puzzle-solving rather than refusal. Injecting the plaintext gate activation into the cipher forward pass restores 48% of refusals in Phi-4-mini, localizing the bypass to the routing interface. A second method, cipher contrast analysis, uses plain/cipher DLA differences to map the full cipher-sensitive routing circuit in O(3n) forward passes. Any encoding that defeats detection-layer pattern matching bypasses the policy regardless of whether deeper layers reconstruct the content.
arXiv:2606.29748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The application of graph data in numerous disciplines raises the need for gathering and analyzing huge volumes of data, some of which is private and sensitive. The non-Euclidean nature of the graph data makes the analysis computationally challenging, leading to the use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in the age of AI. GNNs may inadvertently leak sensitive data they are trained on, which raises serious data security issues, including the model inversion attack. In this study, we analyze GNNs' vulnerabilities by introducing two novel graph inversion (i.e., reconstruction) attacks: graph-label conditioned (GLC) attack and embedding-label conditioned (ELC) attack, utilizing targetmodel predictions and their intermediate representations, respectively. We perform a comprehensive analysis of our introduced privacy attacks and compare them with existing baselines across three benchmark graph datasets (i.e., NCI1, PROTEINS, and AIDS) and four graph distributional/structural metrics (i.e., FGD, EGD, MMD, and GKS). Our work demonstrates that an adversary can use the generator-discriminator technique to reconstruct high-quality graphs in real-world black-box attack scenarios against GNNs. Additionally, we present a variant of our attacks (Ours--) with 50% reduced queries, achieving good or comparable reconstruction attack performance. In addition, we show that GNNs are highly vulnerable to privacy attacks, varying Laplacian noise-scales.
arXiv:2406.03616v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Novelty search (NS) aims to uncover diverse system behaviors through simulation or experiment without requiring a pre-specified scalar objective. This capability is especially relevant to modern discovery problems in chemistry, materials science, and molecular design, where researchers often seek broad coverage of attainable property space rather than a single optimum and where each evaluation may require a costly computation or experiment. For such expensive black-box settings, we propose BEACON, a sample-efficient NS strategy inspired by Bayesian optimization principles. BEACON models the input-to-outcome mapping using multi-output Gaussian processes and selects new inputs by scoring how far plausible posterior outcomes lie from a denoised archive of previously observed outcomes. This gives a distance-based novelty acquisition that accounts for predictive uncertainty and observational noise while operating directly in continuous outcome space, rather than requiring direct optimization over a discretized partition of behaviors. By leveraging efficient posterior sampling together with scalable high-dimensional Gaussian process models, the proposed framework can be extended to settings with large data sets and high-dimensional design variables. We demonstrate BEACON on established benchmark problems together with real-world case studies in materials and molecular discovery. Across these settings, BEACON consistently discovers broader sets of distinct behaviors than several competing baselines under limited evaluation budgets.
arXiv:2407.07338v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the problem of restricting a Markov equivalence class of maximal ancestral graphs (MAGs) to only those MAGs that contain certain edge marks, which we refer to as expert or orientation knowledge. Such a restriction of the Markov equivalence class can be uniquely represented by a restricted essential ancestral graph. Our contributions are several-fold. First, we prove certain properties for the entire Markov equivalence class including a conjecture from Ali et al. (2009). Second, we present several new sound graphical orientation rules for adding orientation knowledge to an essential ancestral graph. We also show that some orientation rules of Zhang (2008b) are not needed for restricting the Markov equivalence class with orientation knowledge. Third, we provide an algorithm for including this orientation knowledge and show that in certain settings the output of our algorithm is a restricted essential ancestral graph. Finally, outside of the specified settings, we provide an algorithm for checking whether a graph is a restricted essential graph and discuss its runtime. This work can be seen as a generalization of Meek (1995) to settings which allow for latent confounding.
arXiv:2410.01244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a novel Wasserstein-1 ($W_1$) path-space divergence for stochastic and deterministic dynamics and establish a Wasserstein Uncertainty Propagation (WUP) theorem that bounds the $W_1$ distance between terminal distributions by the proposed divergence, equivalently characterized by a weighted $L^2$ discrepancy between the underlying drifts and the $W_1$ distance between their initial measures. A key ingredient is a probabilistic framework combining adjoint Feynman-Kac representations with synchronous coupling (and reflection coupling on bounded domains), yielding Wasserstein stability estimates beyond existing PDE- and Girsanov-based approaches. The framework accommodates time-varying and possibly degenerate diffusion coefficients, empirical and singular measures, and remains valid in the deterministic limit of flow matching. Unlike KL-based uncertainty quantification bounds, it does not require absolute continuity of path measures and therefore remains well-defined in singular settings. As consequences of the WUP theorem, we derive $W_1$ robustness and generalization bounds for score-based generative models and flow matching at both population and finite-sample levels. We further specialize the framework to group-symmetric targets, providing the first error analysis of equivariant flow-based models and the first quantitative comparison between data augmentation and equivariant inductive bias. Our analysis identifies a symmetry-aware Wasserstein path-space divergence that quantifies the model-form error induced by non-equivariant parametrizations. We prove that this error cannot be removed by additional data or training and vanishes only under equivariant architectures, establishing a precise theoretical advantage of equivariant inductive bias over data augmentation. Numerical experiments on group-symmetric Gaussian mixtures corroborate the theory.
arXiv:2601.03555v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training reliable tool-augmented agents remains a significant challenge, largely due to the difficulty of credit assignment in multi-step reasoning. While process-level reward models offer a promising direction, existing LLM-based judges often produce noisy and inconsistent signals because they lack fine-grained, task-specific rubrics to distinguish high-level planning from low-level execution. In this work, we introduce SCRIBE (Skill-Conditioned Reward with Intermediate Behavioral Evaluation), a reinforcement learning framework that intervenes at a novel mid-level abstraction. SCRIBE grounds reward modeling in a curated library of skill prototypes, transforming open-ended LLM evaluation into a constrained verification problem. By routing each subgoal to a corresponding prototype, the reward model is equipped with precise, structured rubrics that substantially reduce reward variance. Experimental results show that SCRIBE achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of reasoning and tool-use benchmarks. In particular, it improves the AIME25 accuracy of a Qwen3-4B model from 43.3% to 63.3%, and significantly increases success rates in complex multi-turn tool interactions. Further analysis of training dynamics reveals a co-evolution across abstraction levels, where mastery of mid-level skills consistently precedes the emergence of effective high-level planning behaviors. Finally, we demonstrate that SCRIBE is additive to low-level tool optimizations, providing a scalable and complementary pathway toward more autonomous and reliable tool-using agents.
arXiv:2602.15257v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present the first comprehensive, large-scale study of training long-context vision language models up to 344K context, targeting long-document visual question answering with measured transfer to long-context text. While several such strong are open-weight, namely Qwen3 VL and GLM 4.5/6V, their training recipes and data pipelines are not reproducible. We systematically study continued pretraining, supervised finetuning, and preference optimization for 24B and 32B parameter models, backed by extensive LC evaluations and ablations to bridge this gap, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on MMLongBenchDoc for both parameter scales. In addition to this, our key findings include: (i) training on context lengths that match evaluation context lengths outperforms training on longer contexts, (ii) training and evaluating with page indices provides a simple, high-impact boost to long-document performance, (iii) our synthetic data pipelines enable self-improvement via continued pretraining and supervised finetuning, and (iv) we extend the known text-to-visual long context transfer to the reverse, showing that visual long context training transfers to long-context text performance. We also release MMLBD-C, a manually corrected version of MMLongBenchDoc to reduce erroneous and low quality examples in the benchmark.
arXiv:2509.07123v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generalized extreme value models capture dependence among choice alternatives in discrete choice modeling, but require this dependence to be predefined, symmetric, and shared uniformly across individuals. Recent efforts to synergize discrete choice models with deep neural networks have improved predictive performance but still cannot explicitly represent alternative dependence within neural architectures. To address these gaps, we introduce the alternative graph -- a graph in which nodes represent choice alternatives and edges encode their dependence -- and propose Alternative Graph Neural Networks (Alt-GNNs), a family of GNN-based discrete choice models that embed alternative dependence within a unified framework. Theoretically, Alt-GNNs incorporate multinomial logit, nested logit, and ASU-DNN as special cases and enable innovative model designs, including Nested Alt-GNN, Complete Alt-GNN, and Attention Alt-GNN. Alt-GNNs are consistent with random utility maximization theory, enforce behavioral constraints through alternative graphs, and offer a novel graph-based interpretation of utility functions. Empirically, on two travel mode choice datasets from London and Chicago, Alt-GNNs significantly improve predictive performance over all benchmark models in mode choice modeling because of their flexible alternative graph design and vast hyperparameter space. Even the simplest Alt-GNN variant -- Nested Alt-GNN -- generalizes the nested logit model while preserving its unique two-layer substitution properties, enabling graph-based behavioral constraints over otherwise unconstrained behavioral patterns from deep neural networks.
arXiv:2606.29159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline root-cause-analysis (RCA) benchmarks commonly rank methods by a single pooled top-1 accuracy across multiple subsystems, and engineers often read the pooled winner as a recommendation for their own subsystem. We audit that reading on three public RCA benchmark families -- OpenRCA, RCAEval, and PetShop -- covering 11 subsystems and 778 matched scoring units. To keep pairwise comparisons on identical cases, the main analysis retains four methods or comparators with complete coverage: BARO, a CD-1min adapter, max-$|Z|$, and per-service alert-count. All six pairwise comparisons show subsystem-level effects of both signs, every random-effects 95\% prediction interval crosses zero, and case-level interaction tests reject exchangeability in 5 of 6 pairs. Leave-one-system-out selection picks the lower-scoring method on up to 5 of 11 held-out subsystems, with regret reaching 24.8 pp on RCAEval / Sock-Shop. We release a 320-line audit module; given a matched RCA benchmark score table, it recomputes the same per-subsystem stability checks alongside pooled scores.
arXiv:2606.30335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous scientific discovery systems increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to propose new hypotheses, but many such systems condition primarily on experimental memory: archives of high-scoring candidates or heuristic summaries of recent trials. We argue that discovery agents should instead maintain explicit, uncertainty-aware beliefs about hypothesis quality. We introduce BayesEvolve, a belief-guided discovery framework that converts experimental evidence into a predictive belief state and uses this belief to guide future experimentation. As a controlled testbed for belief-guided discovery, we evaluate BayesEvolve on shifted BBOB-style black-box optimization tasks, leaving program and laboratory discovery domains to future work. BayesEvolve improves sample efficiency over memory- and archive-guided LLM baselines under a fixed evaluation budget. We further show that the belief state is predictive on held-out candidate pools, that controlled decision-rule ablations favor belief-guided selection with an annealed uncertainty bonus, and that BayesEvolve exhibits productive late-stage concentration rather than unfocused exploration.
arXiv:2505.15437v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable probability estimates by classifiers are essential in high-risk applications. In practice, however, predicted probabilities are often miscalibrated, and many existing post-hoc calibration methods typically lack guarantees that a specific notion of calibration is achieved after the correction procedure is applied. We introduce a *set-based* perspective on calibration through the notion of *cumulative mass calibration* and the corresponding error measures. We propose a new calibration procedure based on conformal prediction that forms cumulative probabilities with guaranteed marginal coverage. We introduce an __adaptive temperature scaling algorithm__, with the temperature tuned for each input to satisfy the conformal coverage constraint. As we show, this procedure can be efficiently implemented. Across image classification tasks, particularly in settings with many classes, our method improves newly introduced calibration error measures (__CMCE__ and $\alpha$-CMCE) *and* standard metrics (such as ECE, cw-ECE, MCE) over the existing baselines.
arXiv:2507.06764v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we propose Fast Equivariant Imaging (FEI), a novel unsupervised learning framework to rapidly and efficiently train deep imaging networks without ground-truth data. FEI reformulates the EI objective through an inexact variable-splitting scheme, decoupling network training from an auxiliary restoration step implemented with a plug-and-play denoiser, this novel unsupervised scheme shows superior efficiency and performance compared to the standard Equivariant Imaging paradigm. In particular, our FEI schemes achieve an order-of-magnitude (10x) acceleration over standard EI on training U-Net for X-ray CT reconstruction and image inpainting, with improved generalization performance. Beyond offline training, the proposed scheme also enables efficient test-time adaptation of a pretrained model to individual samples, to secure further performance improvements. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach provides a noticeable efficiency and performance gain over existing unsupervised methods and model adaptation techniques.
arXiv:2606.30455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard convergence analysis of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) models gradient noise using a single variance term that treats all parameter directions equally, ignoring the fact that noise in high-curvature directions has less impact because learning rates are already constrained there. We introduce Curvature-Weighted Gradient Diversity (CWGD), a geometry-aware measure that weights per-sample gradient diversity by the inverse square root of the Hessian, providing a tighter proxy for the effective optimization noise. For strongly convex quadratic objectives with diagonal Hessians and isotropic noise, we prove that a CWGD-modulated cosine learning-rate schedule can reduce the asymptotic optimization error floor by up to a factor of two compared with standard cosine annealing. We implement this idea as CWGD-Cosine using a Hutchinson-based diagonal Hessian estimator that is exact for quadratic objectives. Across a range of condition numbers, batch sizes, and noise structures, CWGD-Cosine consistently achieves approximately 20% lower final optimization error than standard cosine annealing while incurring negligible overhead in the quadratic setting. We also identify and correct a degenerate curvature estimator, analyze the robustness of the proposed estimator, and explicitly discuss the limitations of the method, including Hessian staleness in non-convex optimization. These results establish CWGD as a principled geometry-aware measure of optimization noise and motivate future extensions to more general learning problems.
arXiv:2606.29849v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Near-infrared (NIR) imaging has emerged as an important technology for night vision, remote sensing, and biological imaging, yet conventional array-detector-based systems are often limited by insufficient sensitivity, high cost, and substantial dark noise. Single-pixel imaging (SPI) offers an attractive alternative, enabling single-photon-level NIR imaging by using a cost-effective single-element detector. Nevertheless, SPI remains restricted by photon noise, leading to degraded imaging quality and limited frame rate under extremely low photon flux conditions. Here, we present a Hessian sparsity-constrained self-supervised network (HS3N) for single-photon NIR SPI, which can suppress noise and enable high-fidelity and real-time imaging under ultra-low illumination conditions. The HS3N integrates the physical forward model of SPI with an untrained neural network regularized by both sparsity priors and Hessian-based structural constraints, enabling effective noise suppression while preserving structural fidelity and continuity. Both simulated and experimental results demonstrate that HS3N enables high-fidelity reconstructions under ultra-low NIR photon levels down to ~0.01 photons per pixel. Furthermore, we demonstrate its dynamic capability by monitoring the dynamic evolution and detachment of infrared-absorbing droplets, at a frame rate of ~20 Hz under ~0.19 photons per pixel, highlighting its potential for high-sensitivity infrared inspection. The proposed reconstruction framework paves the way for practical NIR imaging in extreme low light conditions, which can be extended to visible, mid-infrared or terahertz imaging, offering broad potential for photon-efficient sensing across a wide spectral range.
arXiv:2606.29850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual pointing maps a language instruction to pixel co ordinates, a core skill for embodied AI. We describe our PointArena 2026 solution, which achieves 77.2% overall accuracy and ranks second on the benchmark. The ap proach targets three failure modes. First, agent-driven syn thesis builds large semantic and anchor-relative candidate pools; the server inventory contains 55,372 processed out puts, 53,772 de-duplicated sample IDs, and 37,574 train able completed or accepted rows. Second, a determinis tic steerable-data pipeline creates a verified 10,000-sample main set, plus reserve samples, using masks, templates, and path verification. Third, two model-side modules address complementary errors: AttnRes adds gated cross-block at tention for steerability, while ABC correction encodes per turbed coordinates with visual features for general coordi nate grounding. Category-aware routing combines comple mentary specialists; local validation used to select experts records 93.9% Affordance, 82.6% Spatial Relation, 78.2% Reasoning, 70.4% Counting, and 63.0% Steerability.
arXiv:2512.14643v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we prove the strongest known lower bounds for QAC$^0$, allowing polynomially many gates and ancillae. Our main results show that: (1) Depth-3 QAC$^0$ circuits cannot compute PARITY, and require $\Omega(\exp(\sqrt{n}))$ gates to compute MAJORITY. (2) Depth-2 circuits cannot approximate high-influence Boolean functions (e.g., PARITY) with non-negligible advantage, regardless of size. We develop new classical simulation techniques for QAC$^0$ to obtain our depth-3 bounds. In these results, we relax the output requirement of the quantum circuit to a single bit, making our depth $2$ approximation bound stronger than the previous best bound of Rosenthal (2021). This also enables us to draw natural comparisons with classical AC$^0$ circuits, which can compute PARITY exactly in depth $2$ (exp size). Our techniques further suggest that, for boolean total functions, constant-depth quantum circuits do not necessarily provide more power than their classical counterparts. Our third result shows that depth $2$ QAC$^0$ circuits, regardless of size, cannot exactly synthesize an $n$-target nekomata state (a state whose synthesis is directly related to the computation of PARITY). This complements the depth $2$ exponential size upper bound of Rosenthal (2021) for approximating nekomatas (which is used as a sub-circuit in the only known constant depth PARITY upper bound). Finally, we argue that approximating PARITY in QAC0, with significantly better than 1/poly(n) advantage on average, is just as hard as computing it exactly. Thus, extending our techniques to higher depths would also rule out approximate circuits for PARITY and related problems
arXiv:2606.29239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model quantization is a key technique for reducing storage and inference costs when deploying large language models in practice. However, recent studies show that the discretization and rounding errors introduced by quantization can be exploited by adversaries to construct quantization-conditioned backdoor (QCB) attacks. Under such attacks, malicious behaviors remain dormant in the full-precision stage and are activated only after quantized deployment, thereby bypassing conventional security auditing and detection mechanisms. To address this threat, we propose a proactive pre-quantization defense method, QuantGuard. Our method introduces differentiable rounding control variables and combines error-guided rounding reversal constraints, output-distribution consistency, and weight-distance regularization to finely regulate critical rounding behaviors. Crucially, QuantGuard utilizes only a small calibration dataset and does not modify existing quantization algorithms. This design breaks the precise alignment between attacker-crafted weight patterns and quantization boundaries, effectively suppressing the post-quantization backdoor activation pathway while preserving the model's original functionality and performance. We conduct systematic experiments on six mainstream LLMs (including the LLaMA-3 and Qwen2.5-Coder) using three quantization precisions (INT8, FP4, and NF4) across three representative scenarios: vulnerable code generation, content injection, and over-refusal. The results show that QuantGuard consistently mitigates QCB attacks, reducing the attack success rate to a level comparable to the clean model while largely preserving performance on general capability benchmarks. With low computational overhead, our method offers an effective, practical solution for secure quantized LLM deployment.
arXiv:2606.29883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modeling tissue states and their transitions is essential for understanding tissue homeostasis in health and pathological remodeling in disease. However, conventional computational modeling approaches are inadequate to capture the complexity of tissues as spatially organized, multiscale biological systems. Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown a remarkable ability for representing intricate systems, creating new opportunities to characterize tissue states and their transitions. Here, we propose the concept of AI virtual tissue (AIVT), an AI framework grounded in spatial multimodal data for modeling tissues in health and disease. AIVT is designed to learn unified, spatially resolved, and dynamically manipulatable representations of tissue state, enabling tissue state representation and analysis, molecular and morphological feature prediction, and simulation of spatiotemporal tissue dynamics. We outline the fundamental assumptions, core capabilities, architectural components, as well as data and algorithm foundations of AIVT as a framework for AI-driven tissue modeling.
arXiv:2606.30491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background. The widespread deployment of ambient digital scribes is driving large-scale capture of clinician-patient dialogues. Human coding of clinical communication data remains costly, inconsistent, and difficult to scale, motivating AI-driven communication coding systems. However, evaluating these systems requires real-world dialogues and human-coded labels, both hard to obtain at scale. Methods. We developed SIMAX (Scalable and Interpretable Framework for Multi-Fidelity and Annotated Clinician-Patient Dialogue Simulation), a framework for generating controlled clinical dialogue data with reference behavioral annotations. SIMAX generates clinician-patient dialogues from predefined clinical scenarios, personas and voice conditions, and target communication behaviors. Behaviors are controlled using two codebooks: the Global Codebook for overall communication quality and the WISER Codebook for specific countable behaviors. We evaluated SIMAX using automated and human quality assessments and an example communication coding system. Results. SIMAX generated 3,388 simulated dialogues across three specialties, multiple visit stages, persona characteristics, and accent conditions. Automated assessment showed mean UTMOS and WV-MOS scores of 3.03 and 2.61, WER and CER of 0.07 and 0.05, and CLAP cosine similarity of 0.41, suggesting reasonable speech naturalness, high transcription fidelity, and positive text-audio correspondence. Human evaluation showed a median MOS of 4.67 and a median clinical realism score of 3.00. Downstream evaluation suggests that SIMAX can assess how a communication coding system responds to behavioral targets and reveal insufficient sensitivity in some dimensions. Conclusions. SIMAX generates controlled and reproducible simulated clinician-patient dialogues, providing a data foundation for developing, validating, and refining communication coding systems.
arXiv:2606.30493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intrusion detection in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) is typically evaluated on a small set of public benchmarks using binary ``normal'' versus ``attack'' labels, a practice that can mask the behavioral diversity of cyber-physical attacks. To address this limitation, we propose a behavioral characterization framework that maps raw multivariate process traces into five interpretable physical primitives: drift, spike, oscillation, repetition, and switching. We apply the framework to three widely used ICS benchmarks, namely, SWaT, WADI, and HAI, and show that attack windows exhibit clear behavioral shifts relative to normal operation while the three datasets occupy largely distinct regions of the behavioral space, revealing both cross-dataset bias and intra-dataset diversity. In particular, WADI is dominated by repetition, HAI emphasizes sustained drift and oscillation, and SWaT is characterized by stealthier frozen-telemetry behavior. To examine the evaluation implications, we use an indicative Random Forest baseline and show that aggregate binary metrics can limit visibility into performance across different behavioral proxies. For example, in SWaT, macro F1 drops from 85.44% under binary evaluation to 37.84% under behavior-proxy multiclass prediction, with similar degradations observed on WADI and HAI. Based on these findings, we argue for complementing conventional binary benchmarking with behavior-stratified evaluation to expose blind spots that aggregate scores leave hidden and to better support targeted incident response.