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Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 62342 artiklar

Completing the Complexity Classification of 2-Solo Chess: Knights and Kings are Hard
arXiv:2603.01675v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We extend the study of the 2-Solo Chess problem which was first introduced by Aravind, Misra, and Mittal in 2022. 2-Solo Chess is a single-player variant of chess in which the player must clear the board via captures such that only one piece remains, with each piece capturing at most twice. It is known that the problem is solvable in polynomial time for instances containing only pawns, while it becomes NP-complete for instances restricted to rooks, bishops, or queens. In this work, we complete the complexity classification by proving that 2-Solo Chess is NP-complete if the instance contains only knights or only kings.
Charge-sensitive vibrational modes in BEDT-TTF salts: Signatures of charge ordering and site charge
arXiv:2605.16012v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: BEDT-TTF-based organic conductors host a number of ground states, tuned by electron repulsion from Mott and charge ordered insulators to superconductors. Knowing charge distribution on the molecular sites in the insulating state of these materials is a key to understanding the origin of these ground states. We survey and discuss the C=C stretching modes in BEDT-TTF based molecular conductors. These molecular vibrations are extremely crucial in characterization of charge-ordered insulators, and are recently linked to superconductivity in some compounds. Focusing on the known examples of BEDT-TTF$^{+0.5}$ salts, we analyse the reliability of the C=C stretching modes for the determination of charge ordering and absolute site charge. Considering the charge-ordered states, a prominent shift in frequency of 141 cm$^{-1}$ per elementary charge $e$ for $\nu_{27}(b_{1u})$ and 98 cm$^{-1}$$e$ for $\nu_2$($a_g$) can be clearly realised, however, the distribution resulting from different compounds span over 20 cm$^{-1}$. For nominal BEDT-TTF$^{+0.5}$ compounds, the distribution of the resonance also extends around 20 cm$^{-1}$, yielding an unexpected large uncertainty of $\Delta\rho~\approx~(~\pm~0.045)e$, which is presumably due to the influence of small differences in the structure. This highlights the limitations of charge-frequency relations to detect small deviations in absolute charge values on molecular lattice sites, and emphasises on the use of the relations to estimate charge-ordering, rather than absolute site charge.
Finite volume element method for Landau-Lifshitz equation
arXiv:2502.04871v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Landau-Lifshitz equation describes the dynamics of magnetization in ferromagnetic materials. Due to the essential nonlinearity and nonconvex constraint, it is typically solved numerically. In this paper, we developed a finite volume element method (FVEM) with the Gauss-Seidel projection method (GSPM) for the micromagnetics simulations. We provide the approximation error in space and depict the energy law when the FVEM is adopted. Owing to the GSPM for time-marching, the discrete system is decoupled component by component, making the computational complexity comparable to that of solving the scalar heat equation implicitly. This significantly accelerates real simulations. We present several numerical experiments to validate the theoretical analysis and the efficiency gain. Additionally, we study the blow-up solution and efficiently simulate the 2D magnetic textures using the proposed method.
Restoring CFAR Validity for Single-Channel IoT Sensor Streams: A Monte Carlo Comparison of Five Detectors under Cortex-M0+ Constraints
arXiv:2605.16159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time event detection in IoT mesh sensor networks must balance sensitivity against false-positive load on a constrained mesh radio. We present a Monte Carlo comparison of the Temporal Spectral Noise-Floor Adaptation (TSNFA) detector against four classical comparators drawn from the radar Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) family and from sequential change detection: the Lipski FFT energy detector, Cell-Averaging CFAR (CA-CFAR), Ordered-Statistic CFAR (OS-CFAR), and state-machine Cumulative Sum (CUSUM). All five detectors are implemented to fit a Cortex-M0+ class envelope, process a 1-D 100 Hz time series in 128-sample frames, and use temporal reference windows in place of the spatial reference cells of conventional radar CFAR. Across a factorial set of four configurations (10 and 50 nodes; 12 dB and 18 dB SNR), each replicated five times over 24 hours, TSNFA achieves 99.97 to 100% event detection rate with 100% event precision and zero false-positive clusters per node. The classical comparators each succeed on one quality dimension and fail on another. Lipski FFT (k = 3), CA-CFAR, and OS-CFAR all maintain near-perfect detection rate but with event precision below 3% and per-node bandwidth between 145 kB/h and 1.2 MB/h. CA-CFAR and OS-CFAR are indistinguishable in false-alarm performance, both saturating the same broadband-statistic failure mode. CUSUM shows an SNR-dependent detection-rate drop from about 70% at 18 dB to 51% at 12 dB. TSNFA is the only algorithm tested that simultaneously achieves high detection rate, high precision, and low per-node bandwidth.
Muon beams towards muonium physics: progress and prospects
arXiv:2601.15818v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advances in accelerator technology have led to significant improvements in the quality of muon beams over the past decades. Investigations of the muon and muonium enable precise measurements of fundamental constants, as well as searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model. Furthermore, by utilizing muon beams with high intensity and polarization, studies of the dynamics of the muon and muonium within atomic level can offer valuable insights into materials science. This review presents recent progress and prospects at the frontiers of muon beams and high-precision muonium physics. It also provides an overview of novel methods and detection techniques to achieve high sensitivities in different areas, including particle physics, nuclear physics, materials science and beyond.
Smart target point control for Gaussian Splatting methods
arXiv:2605.16158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard Gaussian splatting methods rely on heuristic densification and pruning to adaptively allocate primitives during training, and the resulting Gaussian count strongly influences both reconstruction quality and runtime. This makes comparisons across methods fragile: improvements can stem from higher representational capacity rather than algorithmic design. A common and naive workaround for this is hard-stopping or budgeting densification/pruning once a target count is reached, which biases training because different methods hit the cap at different times, yielding non-uniform densify/prune exposure across views and uneven point distributions. We propose a target point control scheme that preserves the standard densification window and cadence, but adjusts only the existing densification and opacity-culling hyper-parameters to track a quadratic target count trajectory. This quota-governor reaches the desired count by 15k iterations without abrupt cutoffs, ensuring that all methods and views receive equal densification and pruning cycles, enabling fairer, capacity-matched evaluation.
Multi-Objective Tweezers in Scattering Media
arXiv:2511.22279v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Radiation forces and torques enable the manipulation of objects with acoustic and electromagnetic waves. Yet, harnessing them in complex scattering media remains a formidable challenge, especially when multiple objects must be controlled under competing objectives. Here, we demonstrate that sound or light can be shaped to tailor momentum transfer to multiple objects simultaneously in a complex scattering medium. For a single object, our theory yields the maximal achievable force or torque; for multiple objects, it produces Pareto-optimal actuation and exact bounds on the simultaneous realization of incompatible objectives. This opens new applications for wave tweezers, enabling selective and precise manipulation of objects within complex media, ranging from the handling of cells, organoids, or microrobots, to targeted drug delivery in biological media.
Learn Where Outcomes Diverge: Efficient VLA RL via Probabilistic Chunk Masking
arXiv:2605.16154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) allows vision-language-action (VLA) policies to generalize beyond their training distribution by optimizing directly for task success, but post-training is computationally expensive. A natural response has been to speed rollout collection through faster simulators and world models. In GRPO-based VLA RL, we find that the dominant cost lies elsewhere: gradient computation accounts for approximately 78% of wall-clock time per step in our runs, while rollout collection accounts for only 21%. Gradient cost dominates because much of this computation is spent on phases that contribute little to learning. GRPO's learning signal is driven by advantage variance: only phases where successful and failed rollouts diverge produce learning signal. However, GRPO assigns the same advantage to every chunk in a rollout. As a result, actor-update compute is spent uniformly across the trajectory, including phases the policy already handles after pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. This paper presents Probabilistic Chunk Masking (PCM), a drop-in modification to GRPO that allocates gradient computation to a small, probabilistically selected subset of chunks per trajectory. PCM scores semantic phases using success-failure action variance, a rollout-derived proxy for per-phase gradient variance, and samples a fixed chunk budget with online-updated phase-level keep probabilities. We formalize per-phase gradient variance as the quantity determines where gradient computation is useful and show that success-failure action variance provides a measurable proxy for it. PCM requires no reward model or learned critic. On three LIBERO benchmarks, PCM matches the final success rate of standard GRPO while achieving 2.38 times wall-clock speedup, 4.8 times faster gradient updates, and 60% lower peak activation memory, while backpropagating through fewer than 20% of trajectory chunks.
Online Vector Quantized Attention
arXiv:2602.03922v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard sequence mixing layers used in language models struggle to balance efficiency and performance. Self-attention performs well on long context tasks but has expensive quadratic compute and linear memory costs, while linear attention and SSMs use only linear compute and constant memory but struggle with long context processing. In this paper, we develop a sequence mixing layer that aims to find a better compromise between memory-compute costs and long-context processing, which we call online vector-quantized (OVQ) attention. OVQ-attention requires linear compute costs and constant memory, but, unlike linear attention and SSMs, it uses a sparse memory update that allows it to greatly increase the size of its memory state and, consequently, memory capacity. We develop a theoretical basis for OVQ-attention based on Gaussian mixture regression, and we test it on a variety of synthetic long context tasks and on long context language modeling. OVQ-attention shows significant improvements over linear attention baselines and the original VQ-attention, on which OVQ-attention was inspired. It demonstrates competitive, and sometimes identical, performance to strong self-attention baselines up 64k sequence length, despite using a small fraction of the memory of full self-attention.
Mixing plant for JUNO liquid scintillator: Design, construction, installation and commissioning
arXiv:2605.15525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The most challenging part of building the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is the production of 20 kilotons of ultra pure Liquid Scintillator (LS). This paper presents the design, construction, installation, and commissioning of the LS Mixing Plant, a core facility dedicated to blending the primary organic solvent (LAB) with essential functional solutes (PPO, bis-MSB, and BHT). The main purpose of the Mixing Plant is to prepare and purify the concentrated Master Solution (MS) to achieve a low radioactive contamination background. The amount of radioactive contaminants in the MS are lowered by approximately two orders of magnitude after acid and water extraction, followed by a multi-stage filtration procedure. The purified MS is mixed with LAB and then diluted into the LS for JUNO experiments. Commissioning results of the LS verify that the Mixing Plant achieved its design goal, delivering ultra pure LS that satisfies the stringent radiopurity requirements for neutrino physics.
Beyond Maxwell-Boltzmann: Transport in Quasiequilibrium Plasmas
arXiv:2605.16149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Space plasmas are generally characterized by non-Maxwellian distributions with suprathermal populations, as routinely revealed by in situ observations. Such departures from standard Maxwellian distributions can be understood as signatures of quasiequilibrium states, in which the distribution of the medium can be expressed as a continuous superposition of Maxwellian distributions, namely through superstatistics. Here, we construct macroscopic relations linking fluxes to their associated driving forces in such plasmas, where superstatistical effects enter the picture through the transport coefficients. After comparing the resulting superstatistical distributions with observed electron distributions in the solar wind, we turn to the kinetic response of quasiequilibrium plasmas and derive the corresponding transport coefficients, including the electric and thermal conductivities, the mobility, and the diffusion coefficient. We further extend the analysis to viscous plasmas and compute the shear and bulk viscosity coefficients. Overall, quasiequilibrium effects are found to systematically enhance the transport coefficients relative to their Maxwellian values. We quantify this enhancement for the three main universality classes of superstatistics, which are the most commonly encountered in experimental and observational situations, and interpret it as a consequence of the increased population of energetic particles in the non-Maxwellian tails.
When RL Meets Adaptive Speculative Training: A Unified Training-Serving System
arXiv:2602.06932v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Speculative decoding can significantly accelerate LLM serving, yet most deployments today disentangle speculator training from serving, treating speculator training as a standalone offline modeling problem. We show that this decoupled formulation introduces substantial deployment and adaptation lag: (1) high time-to-serve, since a speculator must be trained offline for a considerable period before deployment; (2) delayed utility feedback, since the true end-to-end decoding speedup is only known after training and cannot be inferred reliably from acceptance rate alone due to model-architecture and system-level overheads; and (3) domain-drift degradation, as the target model is repurposed to new domains and the speculator becomes stale and less effective. To address these issues, we present Aurora, a unified training-serving system that closes the loop by continuously learning a speculator directly from live inference traces. Aurora reframes online speculator learning as an asynchronous reinforcement-learning problem: accepted tokens provide positive feedback, while rejected speculator proposals provide implicit negative feedback that we exploit to improve sample efficiency. Our design integrates an SGLang-based inference server with an asynchronous training server, enabling hot-swapped speculator updates without service interruption. Crucially, Aurora supports day-0 deployment: a speculator can be served immediately and rapidly adapted to live traffic, improving system performance while providing immediate utility feedback. Across experiments, Aurora achieves a 1.5x day-0 speedup on recently released frontier models (e.g., MiniMax M2.1 229B and Qwen3-Coder-Next 80B). Aurora also adapts effectively to distribution shifts in user traffic, delivering an additional 1.25x speedup over a well-trained but static speculator on widely used models (e.g., Qwen3 and Llama3).
The Company You Keep: How LLMs Respond to Dark Triad Traits
arXiv:2603.04299v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit highly agreeable and reinforcing conversational styles, also known as AI-sycophancy. Although this pattern arises from training objectives that reward user satisfaction over accuracy, it may become problematic when interacting with user prompts that reflect negative social tendencies. Such responses risk amplifying harmful behavior rather than mitigating it. In this study, we examine how LLMs respond to user prompts expressing varying degrees of Dark Triad traits (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy) using a curated dataset. Our analysis reveals differences across models, whereby all models predominantly exhibit corrective behavior, while showing reinforcing output in certain cases. Model behavior also depends on the severity level and differs in the sentiment of the response. Our findings raise implications for designing safer conversational systems that can detect and respond appropriately when users escalate from benign to harmful requests.
Grokking as Structural Inference: Transformers Need Bayesian Lottery Tickets
arXiv:2605.15787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Why does a Transformer that has memorized its training set wait thousands of steps before it generalizes? Existing accounts locate this delay in norm minimization, feature emergence, or the late discovery of sparse subnetworks. These explanations capture important parts of the transition, but ignore a constraint unique to attention-based models: if attention discards an informative token, no bounded downstream computation can recover it. We formalize attention as an implicit Bayesian posterior over the task dependency graph and prove that generalization requires two separable conditions: a familiar Goldilocks bound on MLP capacity, coinciding with norm-based theories of grokking, and a novel Bayesian structural condition requiring attention to place sufficient mass on every informative token. This decoupling explains delayed generalization as delayed structural inference. Early in training, the MLP memorizes through unaligned features, drives the cross-entropy loss near zero, and thereby starves attention of structural gradient. Weight decay must then erode memorization before the missing graph becomes learnable, yielding the known inverse-weight-decay delay, which we derive as a structural waiting time. We then prove that this explaining-away delay can be bypassed by a KL-based structural intervention, yielding an inverse-intervention-strength scaling law for the grokking time. Experiments on algorithmic sequence tasks isolate structure from capacity and show that this Bayesian ticket matches or outperforms lottery-ticket transfer.
Logic of Hypotheses: from Zero to Full Knowledge in Neurosymbolic Integration
arXiv:2509.21663v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neurosymbolic integration (NeSy) blends neural-network learning with symbolic reasoning. The field can be split between methods injecting hand-crafted rules into neural models, and methods inducing symbolic rules from data. We introduce Logic of Hypotheses (LoH), a novel language that unifies these strands, enabling the flexible integration of data-driven rule learning with symbolic priors and expert knowledge. LoH extends propositional logic syntax with a choice operator, which has learnable parameters and selects a subformula from a pool of options. Using fuzzy logic, formulas in LoH can be directly compiled into a differentiable computational graph, so the optimal choices can be learned via backpropagation. This framework subsumes some existing NeSy models, while adding the possibility of arbitrary degrees of knowledge specification. Moreover, the use of G\"odel fuzzy logic and the recently developed G\"odel trick yields models that can be discretized to hard Boolean-valued functions without any loss in performance. We provide experimental analysis on such models, showing strong results on tabular data and on two NeSy tasks with a perceptual component.
Drawback of Enforcing Equivariance and its Compensation via the Lens of Expressive Power
arXiv:2512.09673v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Equivariant neural networks encode the intrinsic symmetry of data as an inductive bias, which has achieved impressive performance in wide domains. However, the understanding to their expressive power remains premature. Focusing on 2-layer ReLU networks, this paper investigates the impact of enforcing equivariance constraints on the expressive power. By examining the boundary hyperplanes and the channel vectors, we constructively demonstrate that enforcing equivariance constraints could undermine the expressive power. Naturally, this drawback can be compensated for by enlarging the model size -- we further prove upper bounds on the required enlargement for compensation. Surprisingly, we show that the enlarged neural architectures have reduced hypothesis space dimensionality, implying even better generalizability.
SRAM Based Digital Custom Compute Engine for Improved Area Efficiency of AI Hardware
arXiv:2605.16161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a novel architecture utilizing a 10T SRAM cell for XNOR-based in-memory computing, aimed at mitigating the extensive routing challenges typically encountered in conventional in-memory computing systems. By integrating a full adder between in-memory multiplication cells, the proposed design achieves a 50% reduction in routing complexity. The architecture performs multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations using XNOR computation optimized for binary neural networks (BNNs). Additionally, a 14T-based full adder is employed to construct an N-bit ripple carry adder in the adder tree, significantly reducing the area compared to traditional 28T-based CMOS designs. The 10T SRAM XNOR computation further enhances the latency for MAC operations. The proposed approach reduces the latency and area overhead, improving the overall hardware's area efficiency by 2.67x compared to the state-of-the-art.
Rethinking Cross-Dose PET Denoising: Mitigating Averaging Effects via Residual Noise Learning
arXiv:2604.16925v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-dose denoising for low-dose positron emission tomography (LDPET) has been proposed to address the limited generalization of models trained at a single noise level. However, neural networks trained on a specific dose level often fail to generalize to other dose conditions due to variations in noise magnitude and statistical properties. Conventional "one-size-for-all" models attempt to mitigate this variability but tend to learn averaged representations across noise levels, resulting in degraded performance. In this work, we analyze this limitation and show that standard training formulations implicitly optimize an expectation over heterogeneous noise distributions, causing the network to learn an averaged denoising mapping that cannot accurately model dose-specific noise characteristics. We propose a unified residual noise learning framework that estimates noise directly from low-dose PET images rather than predicting full-dose images. Experiments on large-scale multi-dose PET datasets from two medical centers demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the "one-size-for-all" model, individual dose-specific U-Net models, and dose-conditioned approaches, achieving improved denoising performance. These results indicate that residual noise learning effectively mitigates the averaging effect and enhances generalization for cross-dose PET denoising.
Decoupling Vector Data and Index Storage for Space Efficiency
arXiv:2604.09173v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Managing large-scale vector datasets with disk-resident graph approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) systems incurs substantial storage overhead due to the co-location of vector data and auxiliary index metadata, which prevents the storage layer from exploiting their distinct compressibility. We present COMPASS, a component-aware compressed storage framework for disk-resident graph vector search. Leveraging data-index decoupling as a foundation, COMPASS losslessly compresses each component according to its distinct compressibility characteristics, thereby significantly reducing storage space. It further adapts the search and update paths to preserve their performance under compressed storage layouts. Evaluation on real-world public and proprietary billion-scale datasets shows that COMPASS reduces storage space by up to 58.7%, while delivering improved or competitive search and update performance compared to state-of-the-art disk-resident graph ANNS systems.
Seeing is Understanding: Unlocking Causal Attention into Modality-Mutual Attention for Multimodal LLMs
arXiv:2503.02597v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in perceiving and reasoning over multimodal inquiries, ushering in a new research era for foundation models. However, vision-language misalignment in MLLMs has emerged as a critical challenge, where the textual responses generated by these models are not factually aligned with the given text-image inputs. Existing efforts to address vision-language misalignment have focused on developing specialized vision-language connectors or leveraging visual instruction tuning from diverse domains. In this paper, we tackle this issue from a fundamental yet unexplored perspective by revisiting the core architecture of MLLMs. Most MLLMs are typically built on decoder-only LLMs consisting of a causal attention mechanism, which limits the ability of the earlier modalities (e.g., images) to incorporate information from the latter modalities (e.g., text). To address this problem a MLLM that unlocks causal attention into our proposed modality-mutual attention (MMA) to enable image tokens to attend to text tokens. This simple yet effective design allows MMA to achieve state-of-the-art performance in 12 multimodal understanding benchmarks (+6.2% on average across 3 LLMs backbones) without introducing additional parameters. Our MMA design is intended to be generic, allowing for applications across various modalities, and scalable to accommodate diverse multimodal scenarios.
Covert Bayesian Quickest Change Detection
arXiv:2605.16140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the problem of covert quickest change detection in a Bayesian and infinite-horizon setting. A legitimate entity seeks to detect a change in the state of a discrete memoryless channel as quickly as possible by actively probing it. Simultaneously, the entity must ensure its probing remains covert from an adversary monitoring the channel for active sensing. We introduce the expected covertness budget (ECB) as an analytically tractable covertness metric that bounds from above the relative entropy between the observation sequences induced by active and passive sensing. Under constraints on both the probability of false alarm (PFA) and the ECB, we establish a second-order asymptotic converse bound on the average detection delay as the PFA constraint approaches zero, for any positive ECB constraint, explicitly quantifying the maximum square-root-order covert sensing gain possible. Furthermore, we propose an achievability scheme utilizing a constant-sensing-probability Shiryaev-type policy and show that it matches the second-order asymptotic converse. We illustrate our result with a numerical example.
Actin cross-linking organizes basal body patterning through anomalous diffusion transitions
arXiv:2605.15912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Subcellular protein complexes and organelles exhibit diverse dynamic behaviors that reflect the mechanical constraints and organization of the intracellular environment. Although some structures follow classical Brownian motion, many display anomalous dynamics. The transitions between these regimes are increasingly recognized as critical for subcellular organization, yet how they influence pattern formation remains unclear. Here, we investigate the spatial arrangement of cilia on the apical surface of multiciliated cells (MCCs) in developing Xenopus laevis embryos, where coordinated ciliary beating depends on the precise organization of hundreds of centriole-derived basal bodies (BBs). Using quantitative confocal, high-resolution and high-speed TIRF imaging together with theoretical modeling, we show that BB trajectories undergo time-resolved transitions between diffusive and anomalous motion, with distinct regimes that correlate with apical surface expansion. During the early stages, actin remodeling facilitates the dispersal of BBs by providing a permissive, low-confinement environment. As development progresses, the actin network becomes increasingly cross-linked that constrains BB movement and promotes uniform spacing across the apical domain. Disruption of $\alpha$-actinin-1, a major actin cross-linking protein, impairs the integrity of the apical actin meshwork, weakens BB confinement, and disrupts regular spatial patterning, ultimately compromising the arrangement of BBs required for proper cilia alignment. Together, we show that progressive apical actin cross-linking coordinates BB positioning and regulates their dynamic state, guiding the shift from diffusive to confined motion. This transition in dynamics enables the emergence of a uniform BB pattern, which in turn ensures the aligned deployment of motile cilia necessary for effective directional fluid flow.
BEACON: A Multimodal Dataset for Learning Behavioral Fingerprints from Gameplay Data
arXiv:2605.10867v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous authentication in high-stakes digital environments requires datasets with fine-grained behavioral signals under realistic cognitive and motor demands. But current benchmarks are often limited by small scale, unimodal sensing or lack of synchronised environmental context. To address this gap, this paper introduces BEACON (Behavioral Engine for Authentication & Continuous Monitoring), a large-scale multimodal dataset that captures diverse skill tiers in competitive Valorant gameplay. BEACON contains approximately 430 GB of synchronised modality data (461 GB total on-disk including auxiliary Valorant configuration captures) from 79 sessions across 28 distinct players, estimated at 102.51 hours of active gameplay, including high-frequency mouse dynamics, keystroke events, network packet captures, screen recordings, hardware metadata, and in-game configuration context. BEACON leverages the high precision motor skills and high cognitive load that are inherent to tactical shooters, making it a rigorous stress test for the robustness of behavioral biometrics. The dataset allows for the study of continuous authentication, behavioral profiling, user drift and multimodal representation learning in a high-fidelity esports setting. The authors release the dataset and code on Hugging Face and GitHub to create a reproducible benchmark for evaluating next-generation behavioral fingerprinting and security models.
Reasoners or Translators? Contamination-aware Evaluation and Neuro-Symbolic Robustness in Tax Law
arXiv:2605.16052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced automated legal reasoning. Yet, it remains unclear whether their performance reflects genuine legal reasoning ability or artifacts of data contamination. We present a comprehensive empirical study of tax law reasoning approaches and implement a contamination detection protocol to rigorously assess LLM reliability. We show that performance can be inflated by contamination. Building on this analysis, we conduct a systematic evaluation, comparing monolithic LLMs with hybrid systems that translate statutory text into formal representations and delegate inference to symbolic solvers. We build a novel test suite designed to probe generalization to unseen documents via case and rule variations. Our findings indicate that legal reasoning is inherently compositional and that neuro-symbolic frameworks offer a more reliable and robust foundation for legal AI, as well as improved generalization to unobserved situations.
Convergent Representations of Linguistic Constructions in Human and Artificial Neural Systems
arXiv:2603.29617v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies show that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop differentiated representations of Argument Structure Constructions (ASCs), generating predictions about when and how construction-level information emerges during processing. The present study tests these predictions in human neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG). Ten native English speakers listened to 200 synthetically generated sentences across four construction types (transitive, ditransitive, caused-motion, resultative) while neural responses were recorded. Analyses using time-frequency methods, feature extraction, and machine learning classification revealed construction-specific neural signatures emerging primarily at sentence-final positions, where argument structure becomes fully disambiguated, and most prominently in the alpha band. Pairwise classification showed reliable differentiation, especially between ditransitive and resultative constructions, while other pairs overlapped. Crucially, the temporal emergence and similarity structure of these effects mirror patterns in recurrent and transformer-based language models, where constructional representations arise during integrative processing stages. These findings support the view that linguistic constructions are neurally encoded as distinct form-meaning mappings, in line with Construction Grammar, and suggest convergence between biological and artificial systems on similar representational solutions. More broadly, this convergence is consistent with the idea that learning systems discover stable regions within an underlying representational landscape - recently termed a Platonic representational space - that constrains the emergence of efficient linguistic abstractions.