arXiv:2602.02138v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Despite the remarkable success that Multi-Agent Code Generation Systems (MACGS) have achieved, the inherent complexity of multi-agent architectures produces substantial volumes of intermediate outputs. To date, the individual importance of these intermediate outputs to the system correctness remains opaque, which impedes targeted optimization of MACGS designs. To address this challenge, we propose CAM, the first \textbf{C}ausality-based \textbf{A}nalysis framework for \textbf{M}ACGS that systematically quantifies the contribution of different intermediate features for system correctness. By comprehensively categorizing intermediate outputs and systematically simulating realistic errors on intermediate features, we identify the important features for system correctness and aggregate their importance rankings.
We conduct extensive empirical analysis on the identified importance rankings. Our analysis reveals intriguing findings: first, we uncover context-dependent features\textemdash features whose importance emerges mainly through interactions with other features, revealing that quality assurance for MACGS should incorporate cross-feature consistency checks; second, we reveal that hybrid backend MACGS with different backend LLMs assigned according to their relative strength achieves up to 7.3\% Pass@1 improvement, underscoring hybrid architectures as a promising direction for future MACGS design. We further demonstrate CAM's practical utility through two applications: (1) failure repair which achieves a 73.6\% success rate by optimizing top-3 importance-ranked features and (2) feature pruning that reduces up to 33.6\% intermediate token consumption while maintaining generation performance. Our work provides actionable insights for MACGS design and deployment, establishing causality analysis as a powerful approach for understanding and improving MACGS.
Science Journals
arXiv:2607.18088v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Standard evaluation of many recognition systems contains distribution shift by construction, since benchmarks place disjoint conditions in the training and test splits. Under such a shift, split conformal prediction keeps marginal coverage near the nominal level while per-class coverage fails silently: on a real cross-subject skeleton benchmark, marginal coverage stays near ninety percent, the worst action class is covered about seventy percent of the time, and ten of the sixty classes fall below eighty percent coverage.
We characterize the cost of restoring per-class validity. First, an impossibility: once the shift acts jointly on the covariates and the labels, the target class-conditional score law is unidentified from source labels and an unlabeled target sample, so no label-free method attains per-class coverage that is at once valid and efficient. Second, we make the cost precise: per-class validity alone needs only a handful of target labels per class, while the label count necessary and sufficient for validity together with per-class efficiency grows as the inverse square of the efficiency tolerance and the logarithm of the number of classes, with matching upper and lower bounds. Third, within the evaluated prediction-powered inference family, even the most favorable use of the classifier's own pseudo-labels on an unbounded unlabeled target pool improves efficiency by at most a small constant factor where coverage collapses.
Skeleton action recognition is our real-data case study. A per-class calibration using source labels alone recovers a substantial share of the per-class gap while the shift preserves marginal coverage, and stops helping exactly when marginal coverage itself breaks. Three real shifts of increasing severity trace this boundary, and the same collapse and recovery appears on a natural-image corruption benchmark, beyond any single modality.
arXiv:2607.18109v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Understanding human emotions in spoken conversations is a key challenge in affective computing, with applications in empathetic AI, human computer interaction, and mental health monitoring. However, existing datasets vary in scale, emotion distribution, modality alignment, and data partitioning strategies, which can influence reliable cross-dataset generalization and minority-emotion modeling. We introduce SpEmoC a Speaking segment Emotion for Conversations comprising 306,544 raw clips from 3,100 English language movies and TV series. From these, 30,000 high quality, class balanced clips are curated, featuring synchronized visual, audio, and textual modalities annotated for seven emotions through a hybrid pipeline that integrates pretrained models with human validation. SpEmoC uses strict movie- and series-level splits to prevent content overlap between split sets, allowing more reliable evaluation of model generalization. The dataset also maintains a near-balanced distribution across seven emotions, including minority classes such as Fear and Disgust, which supports more balanced learning across categories. Extensive experiments, including in-domain benchmarking, cross-dataset transfer, low-data training, class-imbalance analysis, and modality transfer show that balanced data and careful splitting lead to more stable performance across emotions when models are evaluated on other datasets. These results highlight the importance of dataset design for robust and transferable multimodal emotion recognition.
Graph-Induced Tensor Liftings for Networked SEIR Models: Dimensional Reduction and Residual Analysis
arXiv:2607.17664v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Networked SEIR models describe epidemic spread within and between interacting subpopulations through contact-supported nonlinear transmission. Standard polynomial liftings based on complete ordered Kronecker tensors yield linear higher-dimensional representations, but their dimensions grow rapidly because they retain interactions absent from the transmission graph. This paper develops a graph-induced tensor lifting whose observables are selected from the effective transmission support.
An exact edge-based quadratic representation separates linear compartmental transitions from nonlinear infection terms. A homogeneous hierarchy is then constructed recursively. The quadratic transmission field generates the next degree. The linear compartmental field saturates the resulting dictionary within that degree. The first edge-closure dynamics are linear up to an explicit cubic truncation residual, and higher-order truncations contain only next-degree terms.
The first lifted dimension scales with the numbers of subpopulations and effective transmission channels. At fixed order, graph-induced dictionaries grow linearly with network size under uniformly bounded local connectivity, whereas complete polynomial liftings retain order-dependent polynomial growth. Uniform first edge-closure residual bounds depend on the transmission rate and the maximum weighted incoming transmission intensity. Numerical illustrations compare equal intensity per active channel with equal total incoming intensity. They confirm that dictionary dimensions depend only on graph support, whereas residual trajectories also reflect weight accumulation, weight distribution, and nonlinear propagation. These results provide a structured basis for reduced modeling and subsequent model-specific analysis and control.
arXiv:2510.23060v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Industrial control systems (ICS) form the operational backbone of critical infrastructure networks (CIN) such as power grids, water supply systems, and gas pipelines. As cyber threats to these systems escalate, regulatory agencies are imposing stricter compliance requirements to ensure system-wide security and reliability. A central challenge, however, is enabling regulators to verify the effectiveness of detection mechanisms without requiring utilities to disclose sensitive operational data. In this paper, we introduce zkSTAR, a zero-knowledge based cyberattack detection framework that leverages zk-SNARKs to enable regulatory compliance while delivering provable detection guarantees with complete data privacy. Our approach builds on established residual-based statistical hypothesis testing methods applied to state-space detection models. Specifically, we design a two-pronged zk-SNARK architecture that enforces (i) temporal consistency of the state-space dynamics and (ii) statistical consistency of the detection tests, enabling regulators to verify correctness and prevent suppression of alarms without visibility into utility-level data. We formally analyze the soundness and zero-knowledge properties of our framework and validate its practical feasibility through computational experiments on real-world ICS datasets. Our work demonstrates that zkSNARKs can provide a compliant, scalable, privacy-preserving alternative for detecting data-driven cyberattacks on ICS driven critical infrastructure networks.
arXiv:2607.17442v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Background. Predicting conversion from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is central to trial enrichment and care planning, yet existing models provide no individual-level uncertainty estimates and rarely include transparent leakage audits. We introduce the first application of persistent homology to longitudinal clinical trajectory point clouds for this task, and the first split-conformal individual risk guarantee for any AD-conversion model. Methods. We analysed 741 MCI subjects (240 converters, 32.4%) from ADNI with a uniform 4-year follow-up cap. Five leakage sources were corrected; without them a naive pipeline achieved AUC=0.934, inflated by +0.075. Vietoris-Rips persistent homology and sublevel-set proxies were combined with trajectory slopes and engineered features (76 total) in a stacking ensemble evaluated by 5-fold cross-validation. Results. Cox and Random Survival Forest models with TDA features achieved concordance C=0.799 and C=0.826 versus C=0.753 and C=0.812 without (+0.045 and +0.014). The primary nested AUC is 0.840 (same-fold bound 0.866); external AUC was 0.879 on a zero-overlap ADNI-2/GO/3 cohort. H0 persistence entropy was the top SHAP feature and significantly associated with APOE4 dosage (Spearman r=-0.191, p<0.0001, Bonferroni-corrected). Cross-conformal coverage was 90.4%+-2.2% (target 90%); empirical external coverage 96.9%. Maximum fairness gap in false-negative rate across seven subgroups was 0.092. Conclusions. We propose H0 persistence entropy as a topological biomarker of cognitive decline and demonstrate that a leakage-audited, conformally calibrated pipeline reaches competitive accuracy with individual-level uncertainty quantification not previously available for this task.
arXiv:2607.18114v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern LLMs are alarmingly susceptible to surprisingly simple immaterial changes of input prompts: a casual hint, an incorrectly labeled few-shot example, or a fake prior assistant turn often flips an originally correct answer. We study where this susceptibility, spanning sycophancy and related cue-induced biases, lives inside the model. Across five model families and seven BCT bias types, we extract a per-bias direction from hidden states and triangulate it through three measures: probing, leave-one-dataset-out transfer, and causal intervention. The susceptibility is largely installed by alignment tuning rather than pretraining: pretrained base models barely cave to these biases, and their activations carry no cue-specific signal beyond question content. Within aligned models, each bias becomes a single coherent direction that we can both decode and steer along, recovering the unbiased answer across every family we test. The biases stay representationally distinct, however: cross-bias entanglement is model-specific rather than a property of the bias category, and even behaviorally similar biases occupy different directions. The same intervention also serves as a modest debiasing tool, recovering a meaningful share of bias-induced errors while preserving most correct answers across all instruct families. Cue-induced bias is therefore best understood not as a single flaw in LLMs but as a family of distinct, causally active directions that alignment tuning installs.
arXiv:2607.18116v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent work leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate executable code for pedagogical animations using libraries such as Manim. However, ensuring spatial correctness and visual legibility remains challenging, as existing frameworks emphasize pedagogical content while overlooking geometric occlusions. We propose the Symbolic Geometric Agent (SGA), a plug-and-play module for code-centric animation pipelines that intercepts LLM-generated code, performs partial execution to extract symbolic scene graphs, and applies targeted refinement when spatial conflicts are detected. We further introduce the Manim Visual Quality Score (MVQS), a deterministic rendering-free proxy for spatial integrity. Experiments on the MMMC-Code benchmark across four LLM backbones and two agentic pipelines show that SGA achieves a peak MVQS of 73.11 (Code2Video + GPT-5.1), corresponding to a 16.1% relative improvement over the raw baseline, and improves MVQS in 7 of 8 backbone x pipeline configurations.
arXiv:2509.25624v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As LLMs advance into autonomous agents with tool-use capabilities, they introduce security challenges that extend beyond traditional content-based LLM safety concerns. This paper introduces Sequential Tool Attack Chaining (\STAC), a novel multi-turn attack framework that exploits agent tool use. \STAC chains together tool calls that each appear harmless in isolation but, when combined, collectively enable harmful operations that only become apparent at the final execution step. At the core of \STAC is an automated, closed-loop pipeline that synthesizes executable multi-step tool chains, validates them through in-environment execution, and reverse-engineers stealthy multi-turn prompts that reliably induce agents to execute the verified malicious sequence. Using this framework, we generate and systematically evaluate 483 \STAC cases, featuring 1,352 sets of user-agent-environment interactions and spanning diverse domains, tasks, agent types, and 10 failure modes. Our evaluations show that state-of-the-art LLM agents are highly vulnerable to \STAC, with an average final attack success rate (ASR) of 91.2\% -- exceeding 90\% for all but one of the eight agents evaluated. We further perform defense analysis and find that existing prompt-based defenses provide limited protection. To address this gap, we propose a new reasoning-driven defense prompt that achieves the strongest initial-turn protection, cutting ASR by up to 28.8\%; however, this advantage erodes sharply under adaptive attacks, and an experience-based defense (ToolShield) proves more durable over sustained multi-turn interactions. These results highlight a crucial gap: defending tool-enabled agents requires reasoning over entire action sequences and their cumulative effects, rather than evaluating isolated prompts or responses.
arXiv:2607.17327v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Quantum machine learning models define probabilistic input--output maps through coherent quantum evolution and measurement. While such models can exhibit computational advantages, their internal functioning and decision making generally resists interpretation in terms of stochastic trajectories through intermediate configurations. In contrast to classical (Markovian) stochastic processes, quantum dynamics generically violates the Chapman--Kolmogorov divisibility condition, preventing a decomposition into probabilistically meaningful intermediate transitions. We develop a probabilistic framework for representing quantum learning models as stochastic processes over configuration spaces where the dynamics are modeled as linear maps on probability distributions. Starting from a fixed POVM, arbitrary quantum channels induce transition kernels on the associated probability representation. For informationally complete POVMs, and in particular SIC-POVMs, these kernels are Markovian but generally quasi-stochastic, with non-classicality appearing as negativity. By contrast, projective spaces admit positive stochastic kernels but generally require non-Markovian dynamics due to the failure of Chapman--Kolmogorov divisibility. This yields a trade-off between negativity and dependence on past configurations, i.e. quantum dynamics can be represented either by Markovian quasi-stochastic maps or by positive stochastic processes with higher Markov order. We discuss how such representations of quantum dynamics can be interpreted as stochastic walks through a memory space in the spirit of Projective Simulation, a model of learning and agency in which decisions arise from random walks over an episodic memory network. We further outline how finite-order stochastic kernels can approximate such quantum deliberation processes and show in what regimes the classical machine learning model is recovered.
arXiv:2607.17365v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: High-contrast imaging demands extremely sensitive wavefront sensing to correct atmospheric effects and surface errors. While the limits of the sensitivity of a wavefront sensor are well known, a practical, robust design that saturates these limits remains elusive. This work further investigates the PIAA-ZWFS (Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization-Zernike Wavefront Sensor). In previous work, we developed a framework to optimise its design, maximising Fisher information per frame in the presence of phase aberrations. In these proceedings, we study the effect of various manufacturing and alignment errors in the system on the overall performance. We employ both traditional Monte Carlo sampling and a 2nd order expansion using our auto-differentiable simulator. The performance of the PIAA-ZWFS is not significantly degraded by these errors at values typical for manufacturing.
arXiv:2507.05278v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The TRIUMF Ultracold Advanced Neutron (TUCAN) collaboration has been developing a high-intensity ultracold neutron (UCN) source aimed at searching for the neutron electric dipole moment (EDM) with a sensitivity goal of $10^{-27}\ e{\rm cm}$. This article reports on recent progress in commissioning of the UCN source and in the development of the neutron EDM spectrometer. In its final configuration, the accelerator-driven super-thermal UCN source will enable a neutron EDM experiment with two orders of magnitude improved statistics compared to the current best experiment. Substantial progress in 2024 allowed the collaboration to operate the complete source system, with the exception of the liquid deuterium cold moderator, resulting in the first production of UCNs. The status of the EDM spectrometer is also presented, with emphasis on UCN handling components and magnetic subsystems relevant to field control, shielding, and magnetometry.
arXiv:2602.03061v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Evaluating mathematical reasoning in LLMs is constrained by limited benchmark sizes and inherent model stochasticity, yielding high-variance accuracy estimates and unstable rankings across platforms. On difficult problems, an LLM may fail to produce a correct final answer, yet still provide reliable pairwise comparison signals indicating which of two candidate solutions is better. We leverage this observation to design a statistically efficient evaluation framework that combines standard labeled outcomes with pairwise comparison signals obtained by having models judge auxiliary reasoning chains. Treating these comparison signals as control variates, we develop a semiparametric estimator based on the efficient influence function (EIF) for the setting where auxiliary reasoning chains are observed. This yields a one-step estimator that achieves the semiparametric efficiency bound, guarantees strict variance reduction over naive sample averaging, and admits asymptotic normality for principled uncertainty quantification. Across simulations, our one-step estimator substantially improves ranking accuracy, with gains increasing as model output noise grows. Experiments on GPQA Diamond, AIME 2025, and GSM8K further demonstrate more precise performance estimation and more reliable model rankings, especially in small-sample regimes where conventional evaluation is pretty unstable.
arXiv:2602.01131v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: With the rapid expansion of the low-altitude economy, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) serve as pivotal aerial base stations supporting diverse services from users, ranging from latency-sensitive critical missions to bandwidth-intensive data streaming. However, the efficacy of such heterogeneous networks is often compromised by the conflict between limited onboard resources and stringent stability requirements. Moving beyond traditional throughput-centric designs, we propose a Sensing-Communication-Computing-Control closed-loop framework that explicitly models the impact of communication latency on physical control stability. To guarantee mission reliability, we leverage the Lyapunov stability theory to derive an intrinsic mapping between the state evolution of the control system and communication constraints, transforming abstract stability requirements into quantifiable resource boundaries. Then, we formulate the resource allocation problem as a Stackelberg game, where UAVs (as leaders) dynamically price resources to balance load and ensure stability, while users (as followers) optimize requests based on service urgency. Furthermore, addressing the prohibitive computational overhead of standard Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on energy-constrained edge platforms, we propose a novel and lightweight pruning-based Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. By integrating a dynamic structured pruning mechanism, the proposed algorithm significantly compresses the neural network scale during training, enabling the UAV to rapidly approximate the game equilibrium with minimal inference latency. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively secures control loop stability while maximizing system utility in dynamic low-altitude environments.
arXiv:2602.05463v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Modern AI systems achieve remarkable capabilities at the cost of substantial energy consumption. To connect intelligence to physical efficiency, we propose two complementary bits-per-joule metrics under explicit accounting conventions: (1) Thermodynamic Epiplexity per Joule, new bits of structure about a specified environment-instance variable encoded in an agent's state per unit energy, and (2) Empowerment per Joule, sensorimotor channel capacity per expected energetic cost over a fixed horizon. These give two axes of physical intelligence, recognition versus control, but the resulting numbers are benchmark-relative rather than universal. Drawing on stochastic thermodynamics, we formulate a Landauer-scale closed-cycle benchmark for epiplexity acquisition by combining a thermodynamic-learning inequality with data processing, and clarify why boundary closure is required; conversely, a decoupling construction shows that without such assumptions information gain and in-boundary dissipation need not be tightly linked. For empirical settings where the latent structure variable is unavailable, we recommend compute-bounded MDL epiplexity / compression-gain surrogates. Finally, we propose a unified efficiency framework with a minimal checklist of conventions for relative bits-per-joule comparisons, and give a compact language-model reporting example.
arXiv:2602.07008v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reliable models should not only predict correctly, but also justify decisions with acceptable evidence. Yet conventional supervised learning typically provides only class-level labels, allowing models to achieve high accuracy through shortcut correlations rather than the intended evidence. Human priors can help constrain such behavior, but aligning models to these priors remains challenging because learned representations often diverge from human perception. To address this challenge, we propose an attribution-based human prior alignment method. We encode human priors as input regions that the model is expected to rely on (e.g., bounding boxes), and leverage a highly faithful subset-selection-based attribution approach to expose the model's decision evidence during training. When the attribution region deviates substantially from the prior regions, we penalize reliance on off-prior evidence, encouraging the model to shift its attribution toward the intended regions. This is achieved through a training objective that imposes attribution constraints induced by the human prior. We validate our method on both image classification and click decision tasks in MLLM-based GUI agent models. Across conventional classification and autoregressive generation settings, human prior alignment consistently improves task accuracy while also enhancing the model's decision reasonability.
arXiv:2605.31581v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The same arguments often need to be evaluated under different external regimes. An agent with influence over the regime has a strategic lever that standard formalisms do not directly capture. We introduce context-dependent argumentation frameworks (CDAFs), an extension of Dung's theory in which a defeat function determines, per context, which attacks succeed. Blocked attacks are inverted rather than deleted, so extensions stay conflict-free with respect to the attack relation. A perspective-labeled specialisation derives the defeat function from a relevance set $\rho$ and a priority $\pi$. The relevance set is the agent's action space. In a small worked example, the agent's target argument is rejected under every full-relevance priority, yet accepted under a partial activation whose outcome no VAF audience can mirror. We define the corresponding decision problem, ACTIVATION-MANIPULATION, and record baseline complexity bounds. For grounded semantics with mandatory perspectives the problem is NP-complete, and the hardness comes from the activation choice itself.
arXiv:2602.02402v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions. Existing simulators rely on predefined physics or data-driven dynamics without robot-conditioned control, limiting accuracy, stability, and generalization. This paper presents SoMA, a 3D Gaussian Splat simulator for soft-body manipulation. SoMA couples deformable dynamics, environmental forces, and robot joint actions in a unified latent neural space for end-to-end real-to-sim simulation. Modeling interactions over learned Gaussian splats enables controllable, stable long-horizon manipulation and generalization beyond observed trajectories without predefined physical models. SoMA improves resimulation accuracy and generalization on real-world robot manipulation by 20%, enabling stable simulation of complex tasks such as long-horizon cloth folding.
arXiv:2602.08556v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: While deep learning has advanced speech enhancement (SE), effective phase modeling remains challenging, as conventional networks typically operate within a flat Euclidean feature space, which is not easy to model the underlying circular topology of the phase. To address this, we propose a magnitude-phase dual-stream framework that aligns the phase stream with its intrinsic circular geometry by enforcing Global Rotation Equivariance (GRE) characteristic. Specifically, we introduce a Magnitude-Phase Interactive Convolutional Module (MPICM) for modulus-based information exchange and a Hybrid-Attention Dual Feed-Forward Network (HADF) bottleneck for unified feature fusion, both of which are designed to preserve GRE in the phase stream. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted across phase retrieval, denoising, dereverberation, and bandwidth extension tasks to validate the superiority of the proposed method over multiple advanced baselines. Notably, the proposed architecture reduces Phase Distance by over 20\% in the phase retrieval task and improves PESQ by more than 0.1 in zero-shot cross-corpus denoising evaluations. The overall superiority is also established in universal SE tasks involving mixed distortions. Qualitative analysis further reveals that the learned phase features exhibit distinct periodic patterns, which are consistent with the intrinsic circular nature of the phase. The source code is available at https://github.com/wangchengzhong/GRE-Net.
arXiv:2602.09441v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Production state-machine replication (SMR) implementations are complex, multi-layered architectures comprising data dissemination, ordering, execution, and reconfiguration components. Existing research consensus protocols rarely discuss reconfiguration. Those that do tightly couple membership changes to a specific algorithm. This prevents the independent upgrade of individual building blocks and forces expensive downtime when transitioning to new protocol implementations. Instead, modularity is essential for maintainability and system evolution in production deployments. We present Gauss, a reconfiguration engine designed to treat consensus protocols as interchangeable modules. By introducing a distinction between a consensus protocol's inner log and a sanitized outer log exposed to the RSM node, Gauss allows engineers to upgrade membership, failure thresholds, and the consensus protocol itself independently and with minimal global downtime. Our initial evaluation on the Rialo blockchain shows that this separation of concerns enables a seamless evolution of the SMR stack across a sequence of diverse protocol implementations.
arXiv:2602.10020v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: In this work, we solve a long-standing open problem in coding theory with broad applications in networking and systems: designing an erasure code that simultaneously satisfies three requirements: (1) high coding efficiency, (2) low coding complexity, and (3) being a streaming code (defined as one with low decoding latency). We propose METTLE (Multi-Edge Type with Touch-less Leading Edge), the first erasure code to meet all three requirements. Compared to "streaming RaptorQ" (RaptorQ configured with a small source block size to ensure a low decoding latency), METTLE is only slightly worse in coding efficiency, but 47.7 to 84.6 times faster to decode.
arXiv:2602.10247v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The Bayesian approach to inverse problems provides a practical way to solve ill-posed problems by augmenting the observation model with prior information. Due to its measure-theoretic underpinnings, the approach has raised theoretical interest, leading to a rather comprehensive description in infinite-dimensional function spaces. The goal of this article is to bridge the infinite-dimensional theory for linear inverse problems in distribution spaces and associated computational inverse problems without resorting to a discrete approximation of the forward model. We show that the discretization of the unknown of interest is not necessary for the numerical treatment of the problem, the only approximations required being numerical quadratures that are independent of any discrete representation of the unknown. To demonstrate the viability of the approach, an analysis of X-ray tomography inverse problem is given in the proposed framework, and an analysis of the connection between the proposed approach and a discretization-based one is also provided.
arXiv:2602.10382v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Backdoor attacks pose significant security risks for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the internal mechanisms by which triggers operate remain poorly understood. We present the first mechanistic analysis of trigger-induced language-switching backdoors injected during pre-training, studying the Gaperon model family (1B, 8B and 24B). Using activation patching, we localize trigger formation and identify which attention heads process trigger and natural language information. Our central finding is that trigger heads substantially overlap with heads naturally encoding output language across model scales, with Jaccard indices between 0.18 and 0.43 over the top 10 heads identified. This suggests that backdoor triggers do not form new circuits but instead co-opt the model's existing language components and representations. These findings have implications for backdoor defense as detection methods and mitigation strategies could leverage this entanglement between triggers and natural behaviors. More broadly, our work represents a first step toward a more realistic mechanistic understanding of pre-training-injected backdoors in LLMs, paving the way for principled, interpretability-driven defenses.
arXiv:2602.13780v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Remote sensing (RS) change detection is essential for interpreting surface dynamics. Semantic change detection (SCD) further enables pixel-level understanding of multi-class transitions, yet remains sensitive to pseudo-changes induced by imaging conditions. Recent RS foundation models extract semantically consistent features across temporal and environmental variations, which is critical for mitigating pseudo-changes. However, existing SCD methods are often rigid and backbone-specific, lacking the flexibility to integrate diverse multi-scale features from emerging foundation models. To this end, we introduce a modular Cascaded Gated Decoder (CG-Decoder) that bridges various backbones and SCD tasks, processing multi-scale features in a coarse-to-fine manner while enabling adaptive change extraction. Building upon the RS foundation model PerA, we present PerASCD, a unified SCD framework. We further propose a Soft Semantic Consistency Loss (SSCLoss) to mitigate numerical instability in mixed-precision training. Extensive experiments on SECOND and LandsatSCD show that PerASCD achieves new state-of-the-art Sek scores (26.11% and 65.21%), surpassing the previous best by 0.61% and 4.95%, respectively. It also demonstrates exceptional data efficiency (outperforming the full-data baseline with 50% data), seamless cross-backbone generalization, and enhanced interpretability. Our approach maintains robust semantic consistency under radiometric variations, providing a reliable SCD solution. Code: https://github.com/SathShen/PerASCD.git.
arXiv:2602.13795v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating the shift from an Internet of information to an Internet of Agents (IoA), where autonomous entities discover services, negotiate, execute tasks, and exchange value. Yet today's agents are still confined to platform silos and proprietary interfaces, lacking a common stack for interoperability, trust, and pay-per-use settlement. This article proposes \textit{Agent-OSI}, a functional interoperability architecture for a decentralized IoA, whose core contribution is agent-to-agent (A2A) communication and a Web-compatible, backend-agnostic settlement protocol built on HTTP 402 (Payment Required); identity, verifiable execution, and semantic orchestration are treated as boundary layers with interfaces to existing standards. We treat HTTP 402 as an application-layer challenge-response primitive -- analogous to HTTP 401 for authentication -- whose settlement backend (escrow contract, payment channel, or signed off-chain receipt) is a pluggable choice, instantiated via a blockchain escrow in our prototype. We implement a prototype and evaluate its communication and settlement performance. Results show that, for generative workloads, end-to-end latency is dominated by task execution rather than settlement confirmation, and that keeping negotiation and delivery off the settlement backend reduces per-session settlement cost by approximately 51\% relative to a more on-chain baseline.