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Peer-reviewade publikationer — 60529 artiklar

Pure or Unstable: A Generic Dichotomy for Strong Stackelberg Commitments
arXiv:2606.17415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the robustness of the Strong Stackelberg Equilibrium (SSE) in finite leader--follower games when the follower's best-response correspondence is set-valued. While optimistic tie-breaking (in the leader's favor) is commonly adopted, it can hinge on knife-edge indifferences. We formalize a stability notion: an SSE is unstable if, at the leader's committed strategy, the follower has an alternative best response that strictly reduces the leader's payoff. Our main results establish a sharp generic dichotomy. Fixing the follower's utility and sampling the leader's utility from any continuous distribution, with probability one the optimal Stackelberg commitment is unique and is either (i) pure, or (ii) mixed and unstable. When both players' utilities are sampled generically, this strengthens to: with probability one, the unique optimal commitment is either pure and stable or mixed and unstable. These theorems complement the classic generic-value result of von Stengel and Zamir by showing that even when optimistic and pessimistic leader values coincide generically, the strategy-level SSE prediction is generically fragile whenever optimality requires genuine randomization. We further apply this perspective to Stackelberg satisfaction games, disproving a conjecture from prior work via counterexamples and identifying conditions under which it nonetheless holds.
Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones
arXiv:2603.26551v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.
Evidence of Layered Positional and Directional Constraints in the Voynich Manuscript: Implications for Cipher-Like Structure
arXiv:2604.19762v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Voynich Manuscript (VMS) exhibits a script of uncertain origin whose grapheme sequences have resisted linguistic analysis. We present a systematic analysis of its grapheme sequences, revealing two complementary structural layers: a character-level right-to-left optimization in word-internal sequences and a left-to-right dependency at word boundaries, a directional dissociation not observed in any of our four comparison languages (English, French, Hebrew, Arabic). We further evaluate two classes of structured generator against a four-signature joint criterion: a parametric slot-based generator and a Cardan grille implementing Rugg's (2004) gibberish hypothesis. Across their full tested parameter spaces, neither class reproduces all four signatures simultaneously. While these results do not rule out generator classes we have not tested, they provide the first quantitative benchmarks against which any future generative or cryptanalytic model of the VMS can be evaluated, and they suggest that the VMS exhibits cipher-like structural constraints that are difficult to reproduce from simple positional or frequency-based mechanisms alone.
A Stateful Stochastic Allocation Mechanism with Fairness Guarantees for Networked Electricity Systems
arXiv:2606.17217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops and analyses the Fair Play Automatic Market Maker (FP-AMM), a programmable electricity allocation mechanism in which scarcity allocation is treated as a controlled, stateful, and auditable cyber-physical process. Existing mechanisms such as locational marginal pricing are memoryless and cannot account for historical service outcomes, preventing guarantees of equitable treatment across market intervals. The FP-AMM employs a two-stage stochastic clearing rule comprising service-priority sampling and inverse-fairness weighting, coupled with a DC-OPF feasibility set and bounded shortage memory updated through a saturated integrator. Four main results are established. First, the shortage-memory state is invariant in $[0,1]^N$ and the update map is a contraction with rate $1-\beta$. Second, the intra-interval clearing operator converges linearly to a unique fixed point with contraction factor $q\in(0,1)$. Third, under the Fair Play priority rule, the per-node delivery ratio converges almost surely to the contracted target $F^\star$, with a finite-time $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ bound obtained via Lyapunov analysis of the deficit recursion. Fourth, event-triggered execution guarantees practical ultimate boundedness of the allocation tracking error and quantifies the computation-fidelity trade-off. The mechanism is validated on the IEEE 14-, 57-, and 118-bus systems over $T=5000$ market intervals. Fairness convergence to $F^\star$ is achieved on all benchmarks, peak weak-bus fairness error is reduced by 54% on the IEEE-57 network and by up to 55% relative to an equal-weight baseline during scarcity periods, and DC feasibility is maintained throughout.
E2Vec: Feature Embedding with Temporal Information for Analyzing Student Actions in E-Book Systems
arXiv:2407.13053v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Digital textbook (e-book) systems record student interactions with textbooks as a sequence of events called EventStream data. In the past, researchers extracted meaningful features from EventStream, and utilized them as inputs for downstream tasks such as grade prediction and modeling of student behavior. Previous research evaluated models that mainly used statistical-based features derived from EventStream logs, such as the number of operation types or access frequencies. While these features are useful for providing certain insights, they lack temporal information that captures fine-grained differences in learning behaviors among different students. This study proposes E2Vec, a novel feature representation method based on word embeddings. The proposed method regards operation logs and their time intervals for each student as a string sequence of characters and generates a student vector of learning activity features that incorporates time information. We applied fastText to generate an embedding vector for each of 305 students in a dataset from two years of computer science courses. Then, we investigated the effectiveness of E2Vec in an at-risk detection task, demonstrating potential for generalizability and performance.
Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing
arXiv:2408.12099v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.
When Dynamics Models Read the Wrong Time Steps: Label-Free Event Credit Re-Anchoring for Robust Global Readouts
arXiv:2606.17572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned dynamics models often answer global physical questions, such as fault severity or impact stiffness, by pooling a per-step feature sequence into one readout vector. This sequence-to-global interface creates an under-studied temporal credit problem: with only trajectory-level supervision, a model can predict accurately in training conditions while reading from abundant smooth correlates rather than the brief physical events that determine the target. We call this failure temporal credit dilution. It is not exposed by the training loss and is not removed by standard physics-informed residuals, because the error lies in where the global readout assigns functional credit. We introduce Credit-in-Event, an interface-level probe for measuring how much pooled credit lands on event steps, and prove in closed form that a pooled linear reader routes credit to a spurious background channel as the event fraction shrinks. We then propose CREST, a training-free and label-free readout that estimates a transient event core from learned features and re-anchors the pooled representation through event-versus-rest contrast. Across simulated gear and impact systems, recurrent and attention encoders, and public bearing vibration data, CREST reduces out-of-distribution error while restoring event credit. Ablations show that stable-step selection and receptive-field shrinking fail, confirming that the gain comes from event-core credit re-anchoring rather than a generic locality or stability prior.
Cordon: Semantic Transactions for Tool-Using LLM Agents
arXiv:2606.17573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents are shifting the unit of computation from explicit human-issued commands to model-driven tasks with stateful consequences. Yet today's agent runtimes still expose tools as isolated RPCs. This interface gives runtimes a convenient integration point, but it lacks a task-scoped execution boundary for commit, rollback, recovery, and audit across multi-step agent workflows. We argue that this mismatch calls for a runtime containment boundary rather than another per-call guardrail. This paper introduces Cordon, a transactional runtime system for staging and validating irreversible agent effects before commit. A semantic transaction is a task-level execution boundary that binds tool intents and runtime-tracked result lineage to reversible local state, staged external effects, delegated authority, and audit metadata. Cordon implements this abstraction with a transaction manager that tracks derived result objects, executes reversible mutations in shadow state, stages outward-facing actions in an effect outbox, and records recovery metadata. The runtime then validates the composed execution flow before it commits state or releases external effects. Our evaluation across adversarial and benign workflows shows that Cordon exposes cross-step violations missed by existing defenses. It also reduces irreversible-effect failures while preserving benign task completion with modest approval and latency overhead.
Surrogate Assisted Pedestrian Protection Design via a Foundation Model Orchestrated Workflow
arXiv:2606.17577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven engineering workflows face particular challenges in crash safety design: unlike aerodynamics, crash events involve highly nonlinear contact dynamics, material nonlinearity, and discrete state transitions that are difficult to capture with data-driven surrogate models. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first foundation model--orchestrated workflow for crash safety design that enables surrogate-assisted exploration for pedestrian protection, reducing evaluation time from hours per CAE simulation to seconds. The workflow integrates four components: (1) a surrogate trained on CAE crash simulations to predict pedestrian leg injury metrics from design parameters, achieving an average $R^2=0.87$ and providing distribution-free conformal prediction intervals; (2) multiobjective evolutionary search (NSGA-II) to discover diverse feasible parameter sets under user-specified constraints; (3) a morphing-based geometry generator that maps parameters to topology-preserving 3D shapes; and (4) a natural-language interface in which an LLM orchestrates the workflow and a vision--language model supports semantic comparison of generated designs. In an automotive front-bumper case study, the workflow produces 35 distinct safety-compliant alternatives from a single exploration, a process that would require weeks with conventional CAE iteration. These results suggest that foundation models can serve as integration layers between ML surrogates and physics-based simulation, helping bring AI capabilities to safety-critical engineering domains.
Collaborative Large and Small Language Models for Accurate and Scalable Data Repair
arXiv:2606.17582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of data repair, a key task in data cleaning that corrects erroneous entries in raw datasets to improve overall data quality. Although recent data-driven methods, especially those based on large language models (LLMs), achieve remarkable performance, we observe that: (i) they directly repair data in the raw and low-quality context, which may compromise learning signals, and (ii) they directly use uncertain model outputs as repairs, potentially introducing unreliable corrections and compromising repair quality. Motivated by the efficiency of small language models (SLMs) and the capabilities of LLMs, and aiming to address the above limitations, we propose LasRepair, a framework that collaborates Large and small language models for data repair. LasRepair employs an LLM as an instructor, which selects a global repair context to guide the SLM. The SLM acts as a corrector, using the selected context to repair erroneous data more efficiently. Moreover, to further improve context quality, we extend LasRepair to LasRepair+, which formulates data repair as an Expectation-Maximisation (EM) procedure that alternates between an E-step for updating the corrector parameters and an M-step for refining the repair context. Furthermore, to mitigate model uncertainty, we propose LasRepair++, which uses column-calibrated model confidence to down-weight unreliable repaired rows when updating the corrector, thereby enhancing repair quality. Theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation demonstrate the superiority of our methods. We theoretically prove the effectiveness of the EM-style procedure and the confidence-based weighting. Experiments on real-world datasets show that LasRepair++~ achieves an average F1-score improvement of 18.1% over the strongest baseline.
Characterizing Admissible Objective Functions for Hierarchical Clustering
arXiv:2604.23628v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hierarchical clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis, but classical methods have long lacked a principled objective function. Dasgupta [STOC 2016] took an important step toward addressing this gap by proposing a well-motivated objective function for cluster trees. Cohen-Addad et al. [J. ACM 2019] subsequently introduced the notion of admissibility: an objective function is admissible if, whenever the input similarity matrix admits generating trees, its minimizers are precisely those generating trees. They also gave a necessary and sufficient condition for admissibility within a family of objective functions based on aggregate intercluster similarity. We refer to this family as sum-type objective functions. However, apart from Dasgupta's original objective function, no explicit admissible objective functions in this family were provided. In this paper, we study admissible objective functions for hierarchical clustering in two directions. For sum-type objective functions, we give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two, and we derive sufficient conditions for degree-three polynomials. We also show that the recursive sparsest cut algorithm achieves an O$(\phi)$-approximation ratio for the admissible objective functions covered by our characterization, where $\phi$ is the approximation factor of the sparsest cut subroutine. We then introduce max-type objective functions, where cluster interaction is measured by maximum, rather than aggregate, intercluster similarity. For this class, we characterize which objective functions are admissible for arbitrary symmetric scaling functions and give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two.
Weisfeiler Lehman Test on Combinatorial Complexes: Generalized Expressive Power of Topological Neural Networks
arXiv:2605.00725v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topological neural networks have emerged as effective tools for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise graphs, including hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. However, existing Weisfeiler-Leman type expressivity analyses are typically developed on different structural domains and rely on domain-specific neighborhood systems, making their expressive powers difficult to compare within a common formalism. In this paper, we introduce the Combinatorial Complex Weisfeiler-Leman (CCWL) framework, a unified expressive power refinement defined on combinatorial complexes. By exploiting the ability of combinatorial complexes to represent both set-type relations and part-whole hierarchies, CCWL performs topological color refinement through four structural neighborhoods: boundary, co-boundary, lower adjacency, and upper adjacency. We show that, under specified lifting maps, CCWL can simulate several domain-specific WL-type refinements, thereby providing a common theoretical baseline for analyzing topological message passing. We further study the neighborhood sufficiency problem and prove that, under explicit coverage conditions, a reduced refinement using only lower- and upper-adjacent bridge information preserves the distinguishing power of the full four-neighborhood CCWL refinement. Guided by this theoretical result, we instantiate the reduced refinement as the Combinatorial Complex Isomorphism Network (CCIN). Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that CCIN achieves competitive performance against representative graph and topological neural network baselines. Ablation studies and resource-efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed lower/upper-neighborhood design.
Continual Online Personalization of Exoskeleton Control via Manifold-Aware Experience Replay
arXiv:2606.17455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalizing exoskeleton control remains a critical challenge for clinical users with gait disabilities. Online adaptation (OA) offers an effective solution by adapting in real time to subject variability, device fit, and diverse locomotor tasks. However, OA involves a continual stream of user state data, which can lead to catastrophic forgetting of previously learned locomotor contexts. Here, we develop a manifold-aware experience replay-based online personalization framework designed to maintain user-specific representations across diverse tasks during OA of exoskeleton control. By replaying previously experienced tasks from a replay buffer, we preserve the personalized exoskeleton assistance across all learned tasks. Furthermore, we capture a gait manifold that distinguishes between different locomotor tasks, removing the need for explicit task labeling when selecting target replay bins. We evaluated our framework on emulated hemiplegic gait, which largely deviates from able-bodied patterns, across multiple forgetting scenarios with speed and incline transitions. Our manifold-aware replay framework achieved 40% and 60% improvements in torque and gait phase tracking accuracy, respectively, compared to a baseline framework without replay, which exhibited catastrophic forgetting during task transitions. This demonstrates that our proposed framework personalizes exoskeleton control in real time across diverse locomotor contexts in daily ambulation of clinical populations.
Geometrical fairness in graph neural networks
arXiv:2606.17684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based learning methods have become increasingly prominent due to their strong performance across diverse applications. Among these, recent frameworks grounded in diffusion processes provide a unifying perspective that extends traditional graph neural network formulations while addressing limitations of standard message-passing mechanisms. Despite these advances, concerns remain regarding the fairness of such models, as they may propagate or amplify biases present in the data. In this work, we introduce a fairness-aware adaptation of graph-based diffusion by modifying the underlying Laplacian operator. Our approach incorporates multiple complementary transformations, including subspace projections, spectral adjustments, and frequency-based filtering, to mitigate bias-related components. Leveraging the intrinsic smoothing properties of graph diffusion, we provide a principled analysis of the resulting behavior and establish theoretical insights into fairness properties. We evaluate the proposed framework on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that it achieves competitive performance while improving fairness metrics with limited additional computational cost.
Feedforward and Iterative Phase Noise Compensation for Channels with Chromatic Dispersion
arXiv:2606.17876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Equalization-enhanced phase noise is avoided by applying phase noise compensation (PNC) before chromatic dispersion compensation. Feedforward and iterative PNC algorithms based on expectation propagation are proposed. Both achieve information rates close to channels without phase noise for 100 GBaud 64-QAM and 10,000 km of fiber.
Reading between the Lines: Leveraging Large Language Models for Global Dementia and Depression Assessment from Clinical Interviews
arXiv:2606.18019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dementia and depression are the most prevalent neuropsychiatric disorders in geriatric populations, and their overlapping symptoms pose major challenges for differential diagnosis. In this study, we investigate open-weights Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting dementia and depression severity from speech samples collected during standardized history taking interviews with 154 German-speaking subjects. We introduce an observer-based Global Depression Scale (GDS-D) aligned with the established Global Deterioration Scale (GDS), enabling parallel global staging of affective and cognitive symptoms. We compare three LLMs (Mistral 3.1, DeepHermes, Qwen3) in two settings: (1) zero-shot prediction and (2) LLM-based feature extraction for Support Vector Regression, using human and pause-enriched transcripts. Results show that LLMs effectively predict depression severity in zero-shot settings (best MAE of 0.60), while dementia assessment benefits substantially from structured feature extraction (best MAE of 0.78), reducing errors by up to 35% over zero-shot baselines. Pause-enriched transcripts achieve competitive performance with human transcriptions, demonstrating the viability of fully automatic screening pipelines for differential neuropsychiatric assessment.
A posteriori study of Thermal-Large Eddy Simulation in solar receiver operating conditions
arXiv:2606.17596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study investigates Thermal-Large Eddy Simulations (T-LES) of anisothermal and turbulent channel flows under physical conditions representative of solar receivers. Solving the low-Mach number Navier-Stokes equations, T-LES results are evaluated a posteriori against Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) data. We assess 12 subgrid-scale models. All models are based on the Anisotropic Minimum Dissipation (AMD) model. After computing a global error rate to evaluate all models, we select four for a detailed analysis regarding the effects of mesh resolution, numerical schemes, and model formulations. Results demonstrate that a two-layered mixed model combining the AMD/AMD-scalar with the Gradient model yields the best agreement with DNS.
Diapycnal material transport driven by submesoscale frontogenesis
arXiv:2606.17473v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Submesoscale fronts, occurring at intermediate scales between mesoscale eddies and boundary layer turbulence, play a crucial role in driving vertical transport from the ocean surface into the interior. Their dynamics involve complex interactions between submesoscale currents and turbulence. However, the mechanisms by which these multiscale processes combine to transport tracers such as pollutants or nutrients remain less well understood. This study uses large-eddy simulation to investigate passive tracer transport associated with submesoscale fronts. Intense turbulence develops during frontogenesis, leading to strong diapycnal tracer transport into the ocean interior. While part of this transport arises from the direct turbulent flux, represented by the covariance between turbulent velocity and tracer concentration fluctuations, a substantial portion is due to an advective diapycnal flux driven by the mean diapycnal velocity. The mean diapycnal velocity results from the evolving secondary circulation in the presence of turbulent density mixing. These findings reveal an underexplored diapycnal transport pathway in submesoscale frontal zones, with implications for improved representation of vertical exchange in ocean models.
AIPatient Arena: EHR-grounded evaluation of large language models in end-to-end clinical consultation workflows
arXiv:2606.17474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for use in clinical consultation tasks, yet most medical evaluations remain static, single-turn, or narrowly outcome-based, limiting their ability to reflect the sequential, uncertain, and interactive nature of real-world care. Here, we propose AIPatient Arena, an EHRs-grounded evaluation framework for assessing the clinical utility of LLMs across eight dimensions of clinical competence. The framework integrates EHR data into patient-specific knowledge graphs, enabling multi-turn physician-patient interactions. We applied AIPatient Arena on a primary cohort of 437 patients and two out-of-distribution validation cohorts of 119 and 67 patients. We observe that LLMs performed well in medical interview questioning skills (QS; mean scores, 4.43-4.99/5), ethical and professional conduct (ET; 4.38-4.93/5), and clarity and transparency of clinical explanations (EX; 3.80-4.72/5). Performance was moderate in information integration (II; 3.19-4.21/5) and medication safety and justification (MS; 3.13-3.78/5), but persistent weaknesses were observed in handling of ambiguous patient responses (HR; 2.57-3.32/5), information coverage (IC; 2.08-3.02/5), and diagnostic accuracy and reasoning (Dx; 2.63-3.55/5). Process-based evaluation revealed recurrent interaction failures, including repetitive questioning, omission of past medical history, and inadequate handling of uncertainty. Richer conversational context improved diagnostic reasoning but yielded limited gains in treatment planning. These findings indicate that final-answer accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating clinical readiness and highlight the importance of assessing how models gather, interpret, and communicate information throughout a consultation. AIPatient Arena provides an EHR-grounded framework for workflow-oriented pre-deployment evaluation of medical LLMs.
Data-Driven Stabilizing Controller Design for Linear Infinite Networks
arXiv:2606.17509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a direct data-driven method for controller synthesis of infinite networks composed of unknown linear time-invariant subsystems. Using a single set of noise-corrupted input-state trajectories collected from each subsystem, and provided that certain linear matrix inequalities hold, each subsystem is rendered exponentially input-to-state stable (eISS) by locally constructing an eISS control Lyapunov function together with an exponentially input-to-state stabilizing feedback controller. We then compose these local components under a compositional small-gain condition in infinite-dimensional spaces to obtain a global control Lyapunov function and an associated stabilizing controller, ensuring uniform global exponential stability of the infinite network. The approach is validated on a physical case study with unknown dynamics.
Flux-Guard: Facial Identity Protection using diffusion models
arXiv:2606.17606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The widespread deployment of face recognition (FR) systems exposes personal images shared on social media and public platforms to identity linkage and privacy risks. Existing adversarial privacy protection methods can degrade unauthorized FR performance but are not compatible with generative face editing. Artificial intelligence-driven face editing tools are gaining popularity, which has significantly increased user demand for personalized portrait generation and social sharing. However, current editing methods often preserve identity features, making the edited images still susceptible to tracking by malicious FR systems. Thus, this paper proposes Flux-Guard, a privacy-preserving face editing framework based on adversarial attacks, which integrates face editing and privacy protection within a unified generative process. Specifically, we design a flow trajectory control method to align semantic manipulations with the generative process and introduce latent-space adversarial optimization with an adaptive perceptual-loss-driven weighting strategy, dynamically adjusting adversarial strength to maximize attack effectiveness while preserving visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flux-Guard supports face editing while significantly improving attack success rates against cross-domain face recognition models on the CelebA-HQ and LADN datasets. Furthermore, evaluation results for commercial APIs have confirmed its effectiveness in real-world applications. The code is released at https://github.com/JLMWang/Flux-Guard.
The Benchmark Illusion: Pruned LLMs Can Pass Multiple Choice but Fail to Answer
arXiv:2606.17609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compressing large language models reduces memory use and inference cost, but it can also create failures that standard benchmarks miss. A pruned model may still perform well on multiple-choice evaluations, yet fail to answer the same question in open generation. We ask what pruning changes: does it erase the correct answer, or does it make the answer harder to produce as the top output? We study this question with multilingual question answering, tracking the same questions before and after pruning. We find a benchmark illusion. Under high-sparsity pruning, especially Wanda, models often fail in greedy open generation while still selecting the correct answer under multiple-choice scoring. In these recognition-only errors, the answer is usually not gone, but demoted: it often reappears with beam search, sampling, or one in-context example. Overall, multiple-choice benchmarks can overstate the usability of compressed LLMs, creating an evaluation blind spot. Compressed models should be tested on what they can produce, not only on what they can recognize.
Understanding and Quantifying Banana Coil Magnetic Fields and Forces for Enhanced Optimisation
arXiv:2606.18029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The optimised tokamak-stellarator hybrid concept (Henneberg and Plunk 2024) has the potential to combine tokamak and stellarator advantages to achieve magnetically confined fusion. These compact quasi-axisymmetric designs can have a low aspect ratio and large plasma volume, good particle confinement, and relatively simple coils. Previous work showed that such magnetic configurations can in principle be reproduced by a single type of non-planar "banana coil" alongside the conventional tokamak coilset (Henneberg and Plunk 2025). In this work, we optimise banana coils while also considering engineering constraints beyond simple geometric measures. We quantify the characteristic geometries of force-optimised banana coils and the magnetic fields they generate, and analyse the mechanisms by which forces may be reduced through optimisation.
PracRepair: LLM-Empowered Automated Program Repair Inspired by Human-Like Debugging Practices
arXiv:2606.17612v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As software systems grow in scale and complexity, debugging and repair remain costly and time-consuming. Large language models (LLMs) have advanced automated program repair (APR), but existing LLM-based APR approaches still largely rely on static or retrieved context, error messages, and coarse-grained validation outcomes. As a result, they underutilize dynamic information for failure understanding and repair, including failure-execution dynamics and patch-validation dynamics. Effectively leveraging such information, however, is challenging: failure-execution traces are large and noisy, raw static-dynamic context is not self-explanatory, and patch-validation dynamics are often reduced to coarse feedback. To address these challenges, we propose \textsc{PracRepair}, a fully automated LLM-based APR framework inspired by human-like debugging practices. \textsc{PracRepair} constructs an on-demand static-dynamic context from buggy programs and failure executions, performs question-driven failure diagnosis to formulate explicit repair hypotheses, and iteratively refines candidate patches using validation diagnostics and trace-level behavioral changes. Experimental results on Defects4J V1.2 and V2.0 show that \textsc{PracRepair} consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, under GPT-3.5, \textsc{PracRepair} correctly fixes 139/136 bugs on Defects4J V1.2/V2.0, while under GPT-4o it further improves to 162/171. Moreover, \textsc{PracRepair} generalizes effectively to RWB (Real-World Bugs), achieving the best performance across multiple foundation models.
From GPU to Microcontroller: Online Ridge Regression for Edge-Deployable Traffic Prediction
arXiv:2606.17613v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State-of-the-art traffic flow forecasting models, including Graph Convolutional Networks and graph-less MLPs, require centralized GPU training across all sensors, making them impractical for resource-constrained intelligent transportation deployments. We show that much of this complexity is unnecessary. A parametric analysis of the recent graph-less model GLMST reveals that reducing its internal embedding dimension from 64 to 4 degrades MAPE by less than one percentage point, suggesting that the model's effective capacity far exceeds what the task requires. Motivated by this finding, we replace the neural architecture entirely with per-sensor Ridge regression using horizon-aligned periodic features, combined with Recursive Least Squares (RLS) for online adaptation. With only 444 parameters per sensor (80x fewer than GLMST) and test-time online adaptation, our method achieves the best MAPE on three of four PEMS benchmarks, and remains within one percentage point on the fourth. Because each sensor's model is self-contained and involves only elementary linear algebra, the entire pipeline (training, inference, and online adaptation) runs on edge hardware without a GPU. An ESP32 microcontroller (160 MHz, 520 KB SRAM) completes cold-start training in 7.4s and each predict-and-update in under 2ms with zero heap allocation; a single Raspberry Pi 5 core completes cold-start training in 0.21s and each predict-and-update in 0.26ms.