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Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 55347 artiklar

Vectors Are Not Neutral: Sensitive-Information Inference from Exported LLM Representations in Summarization
arXiv:2605.26433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) summarization systems may pass compact vector representations of private inputs to downstream retrieval, monitoring, audit, or analytic workflows. Even when source documents remain access-restricted, derived vectors may be handled under different access controls and still support sensitive-information inference, creating a residual information-disclosure risk. We study this issue in clinical discharge-summary generation as a high-stakes case study, using electronic health record (EHR)-recorded race as a controlled sensitive-label audit. We audit two artifacts that a system might retain or expose to downstream components: the final prompt-token hidden state and the mean-pooled prompt representation. Our results show that reducing recoverability of the case-study sensitive label from one exported artifact does not necessarily reduce recoverability from another. As a mitigation case study, we introduce SurfaceLoRA, an exported-vector-targeted parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that uses a gradient-reversal discriminator attached to a designated exported vector. Under a balanced five-way probing protocol, SurfaceLoRA reduces EHR-recorded race recoverability from the targeted final-token artifact toward chance while preserving summarization utility, yet recoverability remains substantially higher from untargeted pooled artifacts. These findings show that privacy auditing and mitigation should be performed on the exact vector artifact retained or exposed to downstream components.
ECSEL: Explainable Classification via Signomial Equation Learning
arXiv:2601.21789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce ECSEL, an explainable classification method that learns formal expressions in the form of signomial equations, motivated by the observation that many symbolic regression benchmarks admit compact signomial structure. ECSEL directly constructs a structural, closed-form expression that serves as both a classifier and an explanation. On standard symbolic regression benchmarks, our method recovers a larger fraction of target equations than competing state-of-the-art approaches while requiring substantially less computation. Leveraging this efficiency, ECSEL achieves classification accuracy competitive with established machine learning models without sacrificing interpretability. Further, we show that ECSEL satisfies some desirable properties regarding global feature behavior, decision-boundary analysis, and local feature attributions. Experiments on benchmark datasets and two real-world case studies i.e., e-commerce and fraud detection, demonstrate that the learned equations expose dataset biases, support counterfactual reasoning, and yield actionable insights.
On the Sensitivity of Instruction-tuned LLMs to Harmful Sentences in Long Inputs
arXiv:2510.05864v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate on long inputs, yet their behavior when harmful sentences are sparsely embedded within such inputs remains poorly understood. We present a sensitivity analysis that probes how LLMs extract harmful sentences embedded in long inputs. We construct long inputs by combining neutral and harmful sentences, and systematically vary four factors: input length (600--30,000 tokens), the proportion of harmful sentences (0.01--0.50), harm realization (explicit vs. implicit), and the position of harmful sentences within the input (beginning, middle, end), enabling a controlled stress-test evaluation. Experiments across toxic, offensive, and hate content, and across LLaMA-3.1, Qwen-2.5, and Mistral, reveal consistent patterns: sensitivity is non-monotonic with respect to harmful prevalence, peaking at moderate levels; sensitivity degrades as input length increases; harmful sentences placed earlier in the input are more strongly prioritized; and explicit harm is more reliably identified than implicit harm. These findings provide a systematic view of how LLMs prioritize harmful sentences in long input under controlled stress conditions, highlighting both emerging strengths and remaining challenges for safety-related use.
MoDAl: Self-Supervised Neural Modality Discovery via Decorrelation for Speech Neuroprosthesis
arXiv:2605.00025v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech neuroprosthesis systems decode intended speech from neural activity in the absence of audible output, offering a path to restoring communication for individuals with speech-impairing conditions. Current approaches decode predominantly from motor cortical areas, discarding others -- such as area 44, part of Broca's area -- that may encode complementary linguistic information. We introduce MoDAl (Modality Decorrelation and Alignment), a framework that discovers complementary neural modalities through the interplay of two objectives in a shared projection space. A contrastive loss aligns each of several parallel brain encoders with the text embeddings of a pretrained large language model (LLM), while a decorrelation loss prevents the encoders from coalescing to duplicative representations. We prove that these objectives are in productive tension: Contrastive alignment induces transitive modality coalescence, which decorrelation must counteract for the framework to discover diverse neurolinguistic modalities. On the Brain-to-Text Benchmark '24, MoDAl reduces word error rate (WER) from 26.3% to 21.6% compared to the previous best end-to-end method, with the gain from incorporating previously discarded area 44 signals arising entirely from the decorrelation mechanism. Analysis of the discovered modalities reveals functional specialization: Encoders receiving area 44 input capture structural and syntactic properties (sentence length, grammatical voice, wh-words), consistent with the neurolinguistic understanding of Broca's area.
MemMark: State-Evolution Attribution Watermarking for Agent Long-Term Memory Systems
arXiv:2605.25002v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory-backed agents need provenance that can survive leaked or migrated snapshots, where logs, visible outputs, and trusted metadata may be absent. We propose MemMark, a state-evolution attribution watermark that embeds an owner-controlled signal into latent memory-write decisions. At each internal LLM call, MemMark samples among admissible candidates using keyed, distribution-preserving selection, and records cryptographic commitments with signed session anchors and reveal evidence. This makes attribution depend on reproducible backend behavior rather than mutable provenance fields. Across A-Mem and Graphiti on LoCoMo, with three LLM backbones, MemMark preserves memory utility: Overall F1 retains 99.6% of the unwatermarked baseline, while BLEU-1 changes by +0.2%. It also provides usable carrier capacity, with 1.16, 1.14, and 1.26 bits of mean entropy for update-target, link-target, and semantic-realization decisions. In the snapshot-only R3 setting, MemMark recovers the full 40-bit payload from final snapshots, while wrong-key verification remains near chance. Under nine memory-lifecycle attacks, verification distinguishes tampering, evidence deletion, and partial payload recovery. These results show that robust snapshot-only attribution is feasible for long-term agent memory without surviving traces, trusted metadata, or utility-degrading.
AssetGen: Deployable 3D Asset Generation at Interactive Speed
arXiv:2605.26137v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While 3D generation is progressing rapidly, recent work has often focused on obtaining high-resolution assets, leaving user experience and deployability as afterthoughts. We present AssetGen, a 3D generator that focuses instead on these two aspects. Given one reference image, in 30 seconds it produces a high-quality mesh with baked normals, a color texture, and a controlled polygon budget suitable for real-time rendering, including mobile use cases. The AssetGen Flash variant further reduces latency to 14 seconds for interactive and agentic creation loops. Our model generates the object geometry with a coarse-to-refine VecSet framework, which implements mesh simplification, cleaning, and normal baking on the GPU, and a fast parallel UV unwrapping. It then generates textures in a multi-view fashion, followed by backprojection and 3D inpainting. Model distillation, kernel optimization, and pipeline parallelization are co-designed to accelerate the system end-to-end. We introduce numerous automated and blind human evaluations and demonstrate competitive visual quality against leading commercial solutions in 30 seconds and preview-quality results in less than 15 seconds. The final result is a system that supports AI-assisted, deployable 3D content creation in interactive workflows.
Kandinsky 5.0: A Family of Foundation Models for Image and Video Generation
arXiv:2511.14993v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This report introduces Kandinsky 5.0, a family of state-of-the-art foundation models for high-resolution image and 10-second video synthesis. The framework comprises three core line-up of models: Kandinsky 5.0 Image Lite - a line-up of 6B parameter image generation models, Kandinsky 5.0 Video Lite - a fast and lightweight 2B parameter text-to-video and image-to-video models, and Kandinsky 5.0 Video Pro - 19B parameter models that achieves superior video generation quality. We provide a comprehensive review of the data curation lifecycle - including collection, processing, filtering and clustering - for the multi-stage training pipeline that involves extensive pre-training and incorporates quality-enhancement techniques such as self-supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. We also present novel architectural, training, and inference optimizations that enable Kandinsky 5.0 to achieve high generation speeds and state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, as demonstrated by human evaluation. As a large-scale, publicly available generative framework, Kandinsky 5.0 leverages the full potential of its pre-training and subsequent stages to be adapted for a wide range of generative applications. We hope that this report, together with the release of our open-source code and training checkpoints, will substantially advance the development and accessibility of high-quality generative models for the research community.
OMD-GraphRAG: Enhancing GraphRAG with Ontology-Guided Extraction, Multi-Dimensional Clustering and Dual-Channel Fusion
arXiv:2603.25152v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face significant challenges in complex reasoning, multi-hop queries, and domain-specific QA. While existing GraphRAG frameworks have made progress in structural knowledge organization, they still have limitations in knowledge extraction precision, community report integrity, and retrieval performance. This paper proposes OMD-GraphRAG, an enhanced framework built upon open-source GraphRAG. The framework introduces three core innovations: (1) Ontology-Guided Knowledge Extraction that uses predefined Schema to guide LLMs in accurately identifying domain-specific entities and relations; (2) Multi-Dimensional Community Clustering Strategy that improves community completeness through alignment completion, attribute-based clustering, and multi-hop relationship clustering; (3) Dual-Channel Graph Retrieval Fusion that balances QA accuracy and performance through hybrid graph and community retrieval. Evaluation results on MultiHop-RAG benchmark show that OMD-GraphRAG outperforms mainstream open source solutions (e.g., LightRAG) in comprehensive F1 scores, particularly in inference and temporal queries.
Towards Real-World Identification of Fatigued Muscle Groups via Musculoskeletal Simulation
arXiv:2605.26151v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contactless diagnosis of musculoskeletal disorders can potentially improve population health as well as robot behaviours in collaborative settings. However, current diagnosis methods require an in-person physical examination in which a trained physician senses, through contact, the force applied by various muscles. Simulation tools exist, but their use for diagnosis with real data is under-explored. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for identifying which upper-limb muscle group is fatigued. Our algorithm compares the realworld free-space motion of the subject with that of a simulated musculoskeletal model, and is therefore contactless: preventing the need for invasive sensing or in-person assessment. Our algorithm simulates various fatigue conditions using a physics-based musculoskeletal model and extracts diagnostic motion features from both real and simulated data, which are compared for diagnosis. Experimental results on real data demonstrate that the proposed method can reliably distinguish between multiple muscle-groups of fatigue. Additionally, through comprehensive performance comparisons, we show how recent advanced musculoskeletal simulators can be properly configured to address the sim-to-real gap in the context of the fatigue diagnosis task. Our approach can potentially spur further research in remote and automated diagnosis, significantly lowering the barrier to large-scale and early detection.
LiveK12Bench: Have Large Multimodal Models Truly Conquered High School-level Examinations?
arXiv:2605.26781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in K-12 reasoning tasks, exhibiting great promise as intelligent tutors. Realizing this potential requires models to navigate real-world examinations effectively, yet most existing benchmarks fail to capture the complexity of authentic testing environments. Specifically, most datasets are static, prone to data contamination, and are often confined to restricted modalities, disciplines, and evaluation criteria. To address these issues, we introduce LiveK12Bench, a dynamic, holistic, multi-disciplinary benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning abilities of LMMs in realistic examination scenarios. LiveK12Bench comprises 2K+ verified questions spanning Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, sourced from the latest real-world exam papers and designed to grow over time. Our framework features several core innovations: 1) featuring an automated pipeline that continuously ingests and parses the latest examination papers to mitigate data leakage; and 2) proposing a novel `Mock Exam' evaluation scheme, which assesses the ability to complete end-to-end exams autonomously with accurate and efficient reasoning paths. Extensive experiments on 12 LMMs reveal that advanced models suffer substantial performance degradation under exam-realistic constraints: GPT-5's score drops from 79 to 53 (out of 100) when process rigor and efficiency are jointly evaluated. Our findings expose critical vulnerabilities, such as sensitivity to complex visual layouts, highlighting the gap between idealized reasoning capabilities and true educational readiness. Both code and dataset are publicly available.
QUACK: Questioning, Understanding, and Auditing Communicated Knowledge in Multimodal Social Deduction Agents
arXiv:2605.27068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social deduction games have become a popular testbed for probing reasoning, deception, coordination, and belief modeling in Large Language Model (LLM) agents. However, most environments are scored only by game outcomes such as win rates and largely remain to text-only interaction, making it difficult to tell whether an agent's language is actually grounded in what it perceived and did, or to identify the failure modes underlying its behavior. To address this gap, we introduce QUACK, an open-source environment and evaluation framework for auditing the grounding of agent language in multimodal social reasoning. QUACK evaluates agents at three levels: game outcomes, behavioral trajectories, and utterance-level consistency. Its core Statement Verification Pipeline reconstructs each agent's ground-truth trajectory from engine logs and checks every discussion claim against it, automatically flagging spatial hallucination, unsupported accusation, deception collapse, and language-action inconsistency. Evaluating three frontier VLMs in both homogeneous and cross-model adversarial settings, we find that even the strongest agent hallucinates 15.1% of its verifiable spatial claims and makes over half of its accusations without grounded evidence. We release the full engine, evaluation framework, toolkit, and logs at https://github.com/AAAAA-Academia-Attractions/QUACK.
ARBITER: Reasoning Trajectory Basins and Majority Vote Failures in Test-Time Sampling
arXiv:2605.26172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When language models use test-time sampling, they generate multiple reasoning trajectories and select an answer by majority vote. We show that these trajectories are not independent: for a given question, they concentrate into a small number of clusters, or reasoning basins, each defined by a normalized final answer and the solutions that reach it. A majority vote therefore selects the most stable basin rather than the most accurate one, which creates wrong-majority failures where the correct answer is present but outvoted. We introduce ARBITER, a model-agnostic approach that models interactions between basins using only the base model's own sampled outputs, hidden states, and derived evidence. Most direct correction strategies fail; ARBITER instead uses conservative additive evidence on top of consensus. In its simplest parameter-free form, ARBITER-{\Delta} adds same-model evidence to the majority prior, while ARBITER-Enc augments this with bounded residual signals from hidden states over complete solutions. On GSM8K with Qwen3-4B, consensus over K=24 samples achieves around the mid-94% range, while a same-pool top-2 oracle reaches around the mid-96% range. ARBITER recovers a subset of these cases using zero external information. Across three model families and three math benchmarks, it yields consistent gains with no net-negative cases; for example, on Llama-3.1-8B MMLU-HS-Math, it improves accuracy from the mid-78% range to the mid-82% range, recovering about 22% of the available oracle headroom, indicating that this headroom can be partially recovered from the sample pool itself.
A Universal Cliff and a Design Fingerprint: Cross-Section Defect Detection Under LLM Orchestration
arXiv:2605.26174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production language-model systems answer a request by partitioning it across an invisible orchestration of worker agents that recompose one integrated report. We ask what this does to a class of defect no single worker can see: a contradiction in the relation between two distant sections of a document. Holding the documents, defects, mechanism, scoring, and seed fixed, we vary only the model -- ten systems across five generations from one developer and five providers from distinct alignment paradigms. Two layers separate. First, a universal detection cliff: every model that finds these cross-section defects under a single agent loses that ability under orchestration, detection falling two-thirds or more across every paradigm tested. The cliff is mechanism-derived and not closed by scale or extended reasoning. Second, how models behave once fallen. A signal-detection decomposition shows that, among the six models discriminating above chance, only one developer's generations move along the reporting-criterion axis: as alignment is strengthened, the model misses fewer defects yet raises more false alarms on clean documents -- two faces of one criterion shift, scaling with generation within that developer (p < 0.001) and near-absent elsewhere. At the floor the missed defect is often not out of view: the model's private record reconstructs the structural fault accurately, while the integrated report signs off on its soundness, its concern spent on the artifact and an absent collaborator. This resists quantification -- an automated judge is unstable (precision 17-50%) and keywords cannot separate it from ordinary agreement -- a resistance we report as a finding. We release all runs, probes, defect keys, scorer prompts, and scripts. An integrated report's confidence is uninformative about partition-spanning defects, the most aligned systems are not the safest, and the cliff is structural.
Counteraction-Aware Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for General Capability Recovery with Domain Preservation
arXiv:2605.27115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain specialization can improve LLM behavior in vertical domains, but often weakens the general capabilities inherited from the original model. Recent Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) pipelines recover model capabilities by supervising student-generated trajectories with teacher feedback, but typically assume teacher-aligned prompt coverage, requiring prompts to match the teachers' training distributions. This assumption is difficult to satisfy when the general teacher is an open-source model whose post-training data are unknown. Instead of attempting to reconstruct this hidden distribution, we study general capability recovery with readily available proxy general prompts. We identify two failure modes of vanilla MOPD in this incomplete-coverage situation: recovery-preservation counteraction from mixing conflicting recovery and preservation gradients, and weak-signal flattening from uniformly averaging samples with unequal correction demand. We propose Counteraction-Aware Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (CaMOPD), which addresses these issues with decoupled alternating training and gap-based sample selection. CaMOPD gives general recovery dedicated updates, periodically reviews domain prompts for preservation, and selects samples with larger averaged token-level teacher-student log-probability gaps to concentrate correction signals. Across role-play dialogue and medical reasoning QA scenarios, CaMOPD performs best in general recovery over baselines while maintaining domain-specific behavior. Gradient coherence analyses further support the intended effect of CaMOPD in producing more coherent correction signals.
Cities of Knowledge and Big Science in Developing Countries: Luxury or Investment? The GCLSI Case
arXiv:2605.11297v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article analyzes the feasibility of having a second synchrotron in Latin America, to be located, in principle, in a city within the Greater Caribbean region but open to all the continent. It is shown that an initiative of this sort is compatible with the economies of the region and would require a marginal increase of the current regional investment in science, which is broadly below that of other regions of the world, with peaks of low financing precisely in the Greater Caribbean. The project is not only feasible, but, beyond its purely scientific interest. it would have an impact for the development of cities in the region. The article is mainly focused to analyze this impact from the social, economic, and political point of view. It is shown that the return of the investment would have its break-even point long before the end of the expected lifetime of the infrastructure, and that through a system of smaller accelerators, that would be part of the same project, the benefit would not concentrate on the country hosting the facility. These smaller facilities could contribute to the national development as possible nuclei of cities of knowledge, project which belongs to the priority of some countries/cities of the region.
Hide to See: Reasoning-prefix Masking for Visual-anchored Thinking in VLM Distillation
arXiv:2605.11651v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent think-answer approaches in VLMs, such as Qwen3-VL-Thinking, boost reasoning performance by leveraging intermediate thinking steps before the final answer, but their computational cost becomes substantial, especially for larger VLMs. To distill such capabilities into compact think-answer VLMs, a primary objective is to improve the student's ability to utilize visual evidence throughout its reasoning trace, as long think-answer traces suffer from visual forgetting issues. To this end, we introduce a novel think-answer distillation framework that encourages the student to anchor its thinking on visual information by masking the student's salient reasoning prefixes. To compensate for such masked textual cues, the student is encouraged to rely more on visual evidence as an alternative source of information during distillation. Our masking strategies include: 1) token-wise salient reasoning-prefix masking, which masks high-influence reasoning prefixes selectively for each next-token prediction, and 2) self-paced masking budget scheduling, which gradually increases the masking scale according to distillation difficulty, measured by the discrepancy between teacher--student distributions. In the distillation phase, the student is guided by our salient reasoning-prefix mask, which blocks both future tokens and salient reasoning cues, in place of the standard causal mask used for auto-regressive language modeling. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms recent open-source VLMs, VLM distillation, and self-distillation methods on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, while further analyzes confirm enhanced visual utilization along the student thinking process.
SenBen: Sensitive Scene Graphs for Explainable Content Moderation
arXiv:2604.08819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Content moderation systems classify images as safe or unsafe but lack spatial grounding and interpretability: they cannot explain what sensitive behavior was detected, who is involved, or where it occurs. We introduce the Sensitive Benchmark (SenBen), the first large-scale scene graph benchmark for sensitive content, comprising 13,999 frames from 157 movies annotated with Visual Genome-style scene graphs (25 object classes, 28 attributes including affective states such as pain, fear, aggression, and distress, 14 predicates) and 16 sensitivity tags across 5 categories. We distill a frontier VLM into a compact 241M student model using a multi-task recipe that addresses vocabulary imbalance in autoregressive scene graph generation through suffix-based object identity, Vocabulary-Aware Recall (VAR) Loss, and a decoupled Query2Label tag head with asymmetric loss, yielding a +6.4 percentage point improvement in SenBen Recall over standard cross-entropy training. On grounded scene graph metrics, our student model outperforms all evaluated VLMs except Gemini models and all commercial safety APIs, while achieving the highest object detection and captioning scores across all models, at $7.6\times$ faster inference and $16\times$ less GPU memory.
Furina: Fragmented Uncertainty-Driven Refusal Instability Attack
arXiv:2605.26158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is commonly assumed to operate as a near-binary threshold mechanism. We challenge this assumption by revealing that safety behavior is governed by an instability region where small perturbations induce stochastic refusal decisions rather than deterministic outcomes. We develop a multi-metric diagnostic framework combining external and internal signals to characterize this instability. Through systematic experiments, we identify a characteristic diagnostic signature: inputs in unstable regimes exhibit elevated output uncertainty yet decreased internal safety activation, a decoupling phenomenon that explains why detection-based defenses fail against sophisticated attacks. Building on this framework, we introduce Furina, a jailbreak attack that deliberately induces this signature through fragmented, scene-anchored prompts without model-specific optimization. Furina outperforms strong single-turn and multi-turn baselines on HarmBench and achieves competitive results on MM-SafetyBench, demonstrating that uncertainty amplification provides a principled and transferable mechanism for understanding safety vulnerabilities. Code is available at: https://github.com/0xCavaliers/Furina_Jailbreak.
DynFrame: Adaptive Reasoning-Driven Multimodal Framework with Dynamic Frame Augmentation for Complex Video Understanding
arXiv:2605.26680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent video multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly couple step-by-step reasoning with on-demand visual evidence retrieval, allowing models to revisit relevant video segments during inference. However, two structural gaps remain in existing thinking-with-video systems. (i) Sampling density is not a learnable decision: existing methods may let the model decide where to look, but the per-window frame rate is largely fixed. As a result, fine-grained evidence is often recovered through repeated retrieval calls, which increases inference context length and training difficulty. (ii) Retrieval and answer generation are usually optimized with a single trajectory-level advantage, so the "where to look" tokens and the "how to answer" tokens receive the same credit even when one is correct and the other is not. To address these gaps, we present DynFrame, a framework that emits the temporal window and the sampling density as native tokens within a single autoregressive pass. This learnable span-density retrieval enables acquiring multi-granularity evidence with a single retrieval step. Based on the above tokenized retrieval interface, we further introduce Segment-Decoupled GRPO (SD-GRPO), which splits each rollout at the retrieval boundary and assigns role-specific token-level advantages, separately crediting the sampling decision and the answer. Trained on the curated DM-CoT-74k and DM-RL-45k, DynFrame-4B is competitive with strong 7B-8B baselines across six benchmarks (NExT-GQA, Charades-STA, ActivityNet-MR, Video-MME, MLVU, LVBench), and DynFrame-8B sets new state-of-the-art on most metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangguanghao523/DynFrame.
Rethinking AI Psychosis: Misnomers, Conceptual Limits, and Existential Drift
arXiv:2605.26858v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: There has been a proliferation of media reports about so-called AI psychosis in the last year. Not surprisingly, this has prompted growing academic work on the ways in which AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Replika might aggravate or even induce psychosis, typically understood in terms of users acquiring or maintaining delusional beliefs. Our paper consists of two parts. First, we provide a number of reasons to be sceptical about understanding 'AI psychosis' as a novel psychiatric category. We argue that many of the purportedly new phenomena are better understood through Stompe et al.'s (2003) metaphor of 'old wine in new bottles' and highlight conceptual, nosological, clinical, and social risks associated with the uncritical adoption of this terminology. Second, we develop a positive phenomenological account of what may nevertheless be at stake in sustained human-AI interaction. Rather than focusing primarily on whether AI systems induce, amplify, or sediment delusional beliefs, we examine how conversational AI may participate in transforming a person's lived experience of reality itself. We claim that the sycophantic and pseudo-intersubjective nature of AI could lead to what we call "existential drift", whereby individuals may continue to feel rooted in a shared reality through their interactions with AI, while actually becoming entrenched in increasingly private and subjective worlds.
How Students (Mis)understand Conditionals and Loops -- A Taxonomy
arXiv:2605.26966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding student difficulties in programming is a complex challenge due to the wide range of topics and the abundant varieties of misconceptions and errors. This paper presents the design and development of a fine-grained taxonomy that categorizes novice programmers' difficulties specifically related to reading and understanding the control flow constructs selection and iteration. Building upon prior research and our own empirical data from quizzes and interviews with students, the taxonomy is constructed through the iterative methodology of the Extended Taxonomy Design Process (ETDP). Key contributions include clear distinctions between different student difficulties and a detailed analysis of common student misunderstandings concerning conditional statements and loops. The taxonomy aims to aid computing education researchers by providing a harmonized framework to classify and analyze student errors, fostering deeper theoretical insights and informing pedagogical strategies. Future work will involve applying the taxonomy to novel student data and evaluating its usability among educators and researchers.
Nonlinear spectral clustering with C++ GraphBLAS
arXiv:2605.26975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Nonlinear reformulations of the spectral clustering method have gained a lot of recent attention due to their increased numerical benefits and their solid mathematical background. However, the estimation of the multiple nonlinear eigenvectors is associated with an increased computational cost. We present an implementation of a direct multiway spectral clustering algorithm in the $p$-norm, for $p\in(1,2]$, using a novel C++ GraphBLAS API. The key operations are expressed in linear algebraic terms and are executed over the resulting sparse matrices and dense vectors, parameterized in the algebra pertinent to the computation. We demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our shared-memory algorithm on several artificial test cases. Our numerical examples and comparative results against competitive methods indicate that the proposed implementation attains high quality clusters in terms of the balanced graph cut metric. The strong scaling capabilities of our algorithm are showcased on a range of datasets with up to $8$ million nodes and $48$ million edges.
DEI: Diversity in Evolutionary Inference for Quality-Diversity Search
arXiv:2605.27130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present DEI: Diversity in Evolutionary Inference, a distributed Quality-Diversity (QD) search framework that assigns heterogeneous large language models (LLMs) as mutation operators across peer nodes communicating with non-blocking collective operations. Unlike homogeneous parallel search, which replicates a single model's inductive biases across all workers, DEI treats each LLM's distinct creative prior as a complementary source of behavioral novelty. Extending the Digital Red Queen framework with DEI, nodes share local optimal solutions at the end of each round to seed the next round's population. This creates cross-model adversarial pressure that drives robustness beyond intra-model self-play. Evaluated on the Core War domain, a competitive programming benchmark in which Redcode warrior programs battle inside a simulated machine, a four-node heterogeneous ensemble (GPT-5.4-mini, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.2, and Claude Haiku 4.5) achieves 124 percent higher merged-archive QD-Score (45.90 vs. 20.46) and 28 percent higher coverage (80.6 percent vs. 63.0 percent of cells) than a single-node baseline at equal total LLM-call budget. The heterogeneous ensemble also outperforms an equally-budgeted homogeneous ensemble on QD-Score, coverage, and held-out solution generality across all four model families. These results provide the first empirical evidence that model diversity, not merely parallelism, is the key driver of gain in distributed LLM-based QD search.
A Simple Method of Demonstration of Characteristics of Rainbows Using a Glass of Water and a Few Laser Sources
arXiv:2605.26148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A rainbow is a captivating natural phenomenon resulting from the refraction, dispersion, and reflection of sunlight within water droplets. Traditional classroom demonstrations often focus on qualitative explanations of the formation of rainbows using prisms or water bowls. This study presents a simple experimental approach to analysing the process of rainbow formation through quantitative analysis using a cylindrical glass filled with water, graph paper, and three semiconductor laser sources emitting red, green, and blue light. By measuring the angles of minimum deviation for different wavelengths, we have found that the experimental values closely match the theoretical predictions. This method offers a hands-on, cost-effective approach to enhance students' understanding of the physics behind rainbows.
Joint Localization and Orientation with Triple-Beam Fingerprints in Massive MIMO-OFDM
arXiv:2605.26549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the widespread application of location-based services, fingerprint-based localization has demonstrated advantages in environments with complex signal propagation. Deep learning has significantly improved the efficiency of both offline training and online matching in localization processes. However, existing fingerprints only contain terminal position information without capturing motion states, and neural network designs have not fully incorporated structural features such as fingerprint sparsity. In this paper, we propose a triple-beam fingerprint (TBF) incorporating Doppler information and design a Transformer-based localization and orientation awareness network (LOA-Net) to simultaneously estimate user position and motion direction in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. We first show the correlation between TBF and multipath information, and investigate the collinearity of different TBFs, demonstrating that TBF is an effective small-size sparse fingerprint. Then, we propose LOA-Net containing a mask-augmented detection Transformer for regression (MaskDETR-Reg) module and a fusion-enhanced Transformer for direction classification (Fusion-TDC) module to process angle-delay domain information and Doppler domain information, respectively. Finally, in the simulation of indoor scenarios defined in 3GPP 38.901, the proposed method achieves significantly better localization accuracy than weighted $K$-nearest neighbors (WKNN), 2D and 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and achieves satisfactory motion direction estimation accuracy.