OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Phase-space entropy at acquisition reflects downstream learnability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Modern learning systems work with data that vary widely across domains, but they all ultimately depend on how much structure is already present in the measurements before any model is trained. This raises a basic question: is there a general, modality-agnostic way to quantify how acquisition itself preserves or destroys the information that downstream learners could use? Here we propose an acquisition-level scalar $ΔS_{\mathcal B}$ based on instrument-resolved phase space. Unlike pixelwise distortion or purely spectral errors that often saturate under aggressive undersampling, $ΔS_{\mathcal B}$ directly quantifies how acquisition mixes or removes joint space--frequency structure at the instrument scale. We show theoretically that \(ΔS_{\mathcal B}\) correctly identifies the phase-space coherence of periodic sampling as the physical source of aliasing, recovering classical sampling-theorem consequences. Empirically, across masked image classification, accelerated MRI, and massive MIMO (including over-the-air measurements), $|ΔS_{\mathcal B}|$ consistently ranks sampling geometries and predicts downstream reconstruction/recognition difficulty \emph{without training}. In particular, minimizing $|ΔS_{\mathcal B}|$ enables zero-training selection of variable-density MRI mask parameters that matches designs tuned by conventional pre-reconstruction criteria. These results suggest that phase-space entropy at acquisition reflects downstream learnability, enabling pre-training selection of candidate sampling policies and as a shared notion of information preservation across modalities.
The Epistemological Consequences of Large Language Models: Rethinking collective intelligence and institutional knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

We examine epistemological threats posed by human and LLM interaction. We develop collective epistemology as a theory of epistemic warrant distributed across human collectives, using bounded rationality and dual process theory as background. We distinguish internalist justification, defined as reflective understanding of why a proposition is true, from externalist justification, defined as reliable transmission of truths. Both are necessary for collective rationality, but only internalist justification produces reflective knowledge. We specify reflective knowledge as follows: agents understand the evaluative basis of a claim, when that basis is unavailable agents consistently assess the reliability of truth sources, and agents have a duty to apply these standards within their domains of competence. We argue that LLMs approximate externalist reliabilism because they can reliably transmit information whose justificatory basis is established elsewhere, but they do not themselves possess reflective justification. Widespread outsourcing of reflective work to reliable LLM outputs can weaken reflective standards of justification, disincentivize comprehension, and reduce agents' capacity to meet professional and civic epistemic duties. To mitigate these risks, we propose a three tier norm program that includes an epistemic interaction model for individual use, institutional and organizational frameworks that seed and enforce norms for epistemically optimal outcomes, and deontic constraints at organizational and or legislative levels that instantiate discursive norms and curb epistemic vices.
Bottom-up Policy Optimization: Your Language Model Policy Secretly Contains Internal Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches treat large language models (LLMs) as a unified policy, overlooking their internal mechanisms. In this paper, we decompose the LLM-based policy into Internal Layer Policies and Internal Modular Policies via Transformer's residual stream. Our entropy analysis on internal policy reveals distinct patterns: (1) universally, policies evolve from high-entropy exploration in early layers to deterministic refinement in top layers; and (2) Qwen exhibits a progressive, human-like reasoning structure, contrasting with the abrupt final-layer convergence in Llama. Furthermore, we discover that optimizing internal layers induces feature refinement, forcing lower layers to capture high-level reasoning representations early. Motivated by these findings, we propose Bottom-up Policy Optimization (BuPO), a novel RL paradigm that reconstructs the LLM's reasoning foundation from the bottom up by optimizing internal layers in early stages. Extensive experiments on complex reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of BuPO. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trae1ounG/BuPO.
Discovering Symmetry Groups with Flow Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Symmetry is fundamental to understanding physical systems and can improve performance and sample efficiency in machine learning. Both pursuits require knowledge of the underlying symmetries in data, yet discovering these symmetries automatically is challenging. We propose LieFlow, a novel framework that reframes symmetry discovery as a distribution learning problem on Lie groups. Instead of searching for the symmetry generators, our approach operates directly in group space, modeling a symmetry distribution over a large hypothesis group $G$. The support of the learned distribution reveals the underlying symmetry group $H \subseteq G$. Unlike previous works, LieFlow can discover both continuous and discrete symmetries within a unified framework, without assuming a fixed Lie algebra basis or a specific distribution over the group elements. Experiments on synthetic 2D and 3D point clouds and ModelNet10 show that LieFlow accurately discovers continuous and discrete subgroups, significantly outperforming a state-of-the-art baseline, LieGAN, in identifying discrete symmetries.
Adaptive Multi-task Learning for Probabilistic Load Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Simultaneous load forecasting across multiple entities (e.g., regions, buildings) is crucial for the efficient, reliable, and cost-effective operation of power systems. Accurate load forecasting is a challenging problem due to the inherent uncertainties in load demand, dynamic changes in consumption patterns, and correlations among entities. Multi-task learning has emerged as a powerful machine learning approach that enables the simultaneous learning across multiple related problems. However, its application to load forecasting remains underexplored and is limited to offline learning methods, which cannot capture changes in consumption patterns. This paper presents an adaptive multi-task learning method for probabilistic load forecasting. The proposed method can dynamically adapt to changes in consumption patterns and correlations among entities. In addition, the techniques presented provide reliable probabilistic predictions for loads of multiple entities and assess load uncertainties. Specifically, the method is based on vectorvalued hidden Markov models and uses a recursive process to update the model parameters and provide predictions with the most recent parameters. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using datasets that contain the load demand of multiple entities and exhibit diverse and dynamic consumption patterns. The experimental results show that the presented techniques outperform existing methods both in terms of forecasting performance and uncertainty assessment.
CRAFT: Continuous Reasoning and Agentic Feedback Tuning for Multimodal Text-to-Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Recent work has shown that inference-time reasoning and reflection can improve text-to-image generation without retraining. However, existing approaches often rely on implicit, holistic critiques or unconstrained prompt rewrites, making their behavior difficult to interpret, control, or stop reliably. In contrast, large language models have benefited from explicit, structured forms of **thinking** based on verification, targeted correction, and early stopping. We introduce CRAFT (Continuous Reasoning and Agentic Feedback Tuning), a training-free and model-agnostic framework for multimodal image generation. CRAFT transforms a user prompt into a set of explicit, dependency-structured visual constraints, verifies generated images using a vision-language model, and performs targeted prompt updates only when specific constraints are violated. This iterative process includes an explicit stopping criterion, resulting in an interpretable and controllable inference-time refinement loop. Across multiple model families and challenging benchmarks, CRAFT consistently improves compositional accuracy, text rendering, and preference-based evaluations, with particularly strong gains for lightweight generators. Importantly, these improvements incur only a negligible inference-time overhead, allowing smaller or cheaper models to approach the quality of substantially more expensive systems. Our results suggest that explicitly structured, constraint-driven inference-time reasoning is a key ingredient for improving the reliability of multimodal generative models.
Performative Policy Gradient: Optimality in Performative Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this performative setting has recently been studied in supervised learning, the RL counterpart remains under-explored. In this paper, we prove the performative counterparts of the performance difference lemma and the policy gradient theorem in RL, and further introduce the Performative Policy Gradient algorithm (PePG). PePG is the first policy gradient algorithm designed to account for performativity in RL. Under softmax parametrisation, and also with and without entropy regularisation, we prove that PePG converges to performatively optimal policies, i.e. policies that remain optimal under the distribution shifts induced by themselves. Thus, PePG significantly extends the prior works in Performative RL that achieves performative stability but not optimality. Furthermore, our empirical analysis on standard performative RL environments validate that PePG outperforms the existing performative RL algorithms aiming for stability.
Saddle-to-Saddle Dynamics Explains A Simplicity Bias Across Neural Network Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Neural networks trained with gradient descent often learn solutions of increasing complexity over time, a phenomenon known as simplicity bias. Despite being widely observed across architectures, existing theoretical treatments lack a unifying framework. We present a theoretical framework that explains a simplicity bias arising from saddle-to-saddle learning dynamics for a general class of neural networks, incorporating fully-connected, convolutional, and attention-based architectures. Here, simple means expressible with few hidden units, i.e., hidden neurons, convolutional kernels, or attention heads. Specifically, we show that linear networks learn solutions of increasing rank, ReLU networks learn solutions with an increasing number of kinks, convolutional networks learn solutions with an increasing number of convolutional kernels, and self-attention models learn solutions with an increasing number of attention heads. By analyzing fixed points, invariant manifolds, and dynamics of gradient descent learning, we show that saddle-to-saddle dynamics operates by iteratively evolving near an invariant manifold, approaching a saddle, and switching to another invariant manifold. Our analysis also disentangles data-induced and initialization-induced saddle-to-saddle dynamics. In particular, the former leads to low-rank weights while the latter to sparse weights. Equipped with the theory, we predict the effects of data distribution and weight initialization on the duration and number of plateaus in learning. Overall, our theory offers a framework for understanding when and why gradient descent progressively learns increasingly complex solutions.
SoK: Speedy Secure Finality
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

While Ethereum has successfully achieved dynamic availability together with safety, a fundamental delay remains between transaction execution and immutable finality. In Ethereum's current Gasper protocol, this latency is on the order of 15 minutes, exposing the network to ex ante reorganization attacks, enabling MEV extraction, and limiting the efficiency of economic settlement. These limitations have motivated a growing body of work on Speedy Secure Finality (SSF), which aims to minimize confirmation latency without weakening formal security guarantees. This paper surveys the state of the art in fast finality protocol design. We introduce the core theoretical primitives underlying this space, including reorganization resilience and the generalized sleepy model, and trace their development from Goldfish to RLMD-GHOST. We then analyze the communication and aggregation bottlenecks faced by single-slot finality protocols in large validator settings. Finally, we survey the 3-slot finality (3SF) protocol as a practical synthesis that balances fast finality with the engineering constraints of the Ethereum network.
Safety Alignment of LMs via Non-cooperative Games
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Ensuring the safety of language models (LMs) while maintaining their usefulness remains a critical challenge in AI alignment. Current approaches rely on sequential adversarial training: generating adversarial prompts and fine-tuning LMs to defend against them. We introduce a different paradigm: framing safety alignment as a non-zero-sum game between an Attacker LM and a Defender LM trained jointly via online reinforcement learning. Each LM continuously adapts to the other's evolving strategies, driving iterative improvement. Our method uses a preference-based reward signal derived from pairwise comparisons instead of point-wise scores, providing more robust supervision and potentially reducing reward hacking. Our RL recipe, AdvGame, shifts the Pareto frontier of safety and utility, yielding a Defender LM that is simultaneously more helpful and more resilient to adversarial attacks. In addition, the resulting Attacker LM converges into a strong, general-purpose red-teaming agent that can be directly deployed to probe arbitrary target models.
Uncertainty in security: managing cyber senescence
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

My main worry, and the core of my research, is that our cybersecurity ecosystem is slowly but surely aging and getting old and that aging is becoming an operational risk. This is happening not only because of growing complexity, but more importantly because of accumulation of controls and measures whose effectiveness are uncertain. I introduce a new term for this aging phenomenon: cyber senescence. I will begin my lecture with a short historical overview in which I sketch a development over time that led to this worry for the future of cybersecurity. It is this worry that determined my research agenda and its central theme of the role of uncertainty in cybersecurity. My worry is that waste is accumulating in cyberspace. This waste consists of a multitude of overlapping controls whose risk reductions are uncertain. Unless we start pruning these control frameworks, this waste accumulation causes aging of cyberspace and could ultimately lead to a system collapse.
Your Reasoning Benchmark May Not Test Reasoning: Revealing Perception Bottleneck in Abstract Reasoning Benchmarks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Reasoning benchmarks such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) and ARC-AGI are widely used to assess progress in artificial intelligence and are often interpreted as probes of core, so-called ``fluid'' reasoning abilities. Despite their apparent simplicity for humans, these tasks remain challenging for frontier vision-language models (VLMs), a gap commonly attributed to deficiencies in machine reasoning. We challenge this interpretation and hypothesize that the gap arises primarily from limitations in visual perception rather than from shortcomings in inductive reasoning. To verify this hypothesis, we introduce a two-stage experimental pipeline that explicitly separates perception and reasoning. In the perception stage, each image is independently converted into a natural-language description, while in the reasoning stage a model induces and applies rules using these descriptions. This design prevents leakage of cross-image inductive signals and isolates reasoning from perception bottlenecks. Across three ARC-style datasets, Mini-ARC, ACRE, and Bongard-LOGO, we show that the perception capability is the dominant factor underlying the observed performance gap by comparing the two-stage pipeline with against standard end-to-end one-stage evaluation. Manual inspection of reasoning traces in the VLM outputs further reveals that approximately 80 percent of model failures stem from perception errors. Together, these results demonstrate that ARC-style benchmarks conflate perceptual and reasoning challenges and that observed performance gaps may overstate deficiencies in machine reasoning. Our findings underscore the need for evaluation protocols that disentangle perception from reasoning when assessing progress in machine intelligence.
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Synthetic Data Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Synthetic data generation (SDG) is a promising approach for enabling data sharing in biomedical studies while preserving patient privacy. Yet, state-of-the-art generative models often require large datasets and complex training procedures, limiting their applicability in small-sample settings common in biomedical research. This study aims to develop a more principled and efficient approach to SDG and evaluate its efficacy for biomedical applications. In this work, we reframe SDG as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem and introduce RLSyn, a novel framework that models the data generator as a stochastic policy over patient records and optimizes it using Proximal Policy Optimization with discriminator-derived rewards. We evaluate RLSyn on two biomedical datasets--AI-READI and MIMIC-IV--and benchmark it against state-of-the-art generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion-based methods across extensive privacy, utility, and fidelity evaluations. On MIMIC-IV, RLSyn achieves predictive utility comparable to diffusion models (S2R AUC 0.902 vs 0.906 respectively) while slightly outperforming them in fidelity (NMI 0.001 vs. 0.003; DWD 2.073 vs. 2.797) and achieving comparable, low privacy risk (~0.50 membership inference risk AUC). On the smaller AI-READI dataset, RLSyn again matches diffusion-based utility (S2R AUC 0.873 vs. 0.871), while achieving higher fidelity (NMI 0.001 vs. 0.002; DWD 13.352 vs. 16.441) and significantly lower vulnerability to membership inference attacks (AUC 0.544 vs. 0.601). Both RLSyn and diffusion-based models substantially outperform GANs across utility and fidelity on both datasets. Our results suggest that reinforcement learning provides a principled and effective approach for synthetic biomedical data generation, particularly in data-scarce regimes.
A Quantitative Method for Evaluating Security Boundaries in Quantum Key Distribution Combined with Block Ciphers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

With the rapid development of quantum computing, classical cryptography systems are increasingly vulnerable to security threats, thereby highlighting the urgency of constructing architectures that are resilient to quantum computing attacks. While Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) offers security with information-theoretic guarantees, its relatively low key generation rate necessitates integration with classical cryptographic techniques, particularly block ciphers such as AES and SM4, to facilitate practical applications. However, when a single QKD-key is employed to encrypt multiple data blocks, the reduction in cryptographic security strength has not yet been quantitatively analyzed. In this work, we focus on the security strength in the application scenario where QKD is combined with block ciphers. We propose a quantitative evaluation method for the security benefits of the QKD-key renewal period, aiming to provide a precise measure of the cryptographic security strength in such hybrid systems. Our method is based on concrete security paradigm of block cipher modes of operation. We demonstrate that under practical security level requirements, for files consisting of specific blocks, rekeying k times can provide an additional log2(k) to 2log2(k) bits of security. Our research offers a novel perspective on balancing the security and efficiency of QKD-based encryption.
Modified TSception for Analyzing Driver Drowsiness and Mental Workload from EEG
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Driver drowsiness is a leading cause of traffic accidents, necessitating real-time, reliable detection systems to ensure road safety. This study proposes a Modified TSception architecture for robust assessment of driver fatigue and mental workload using Electroencephalography (EEG). The model introduces a five-layer hierarchical temporal refinement strategy to capture multi-scale brain dynamics, surpassing the original TSception's three-layer approach. Key innovations include the use of Adaptive Average Pooling (ADP) for structural flexibility across varying EEG dimensions and a two-stage fusion mechanism to optimize spatiotemporal feature integration for improved stability. Evaluated on the SEED-VIG dataset, the Modified TSception achieves 83.46% accuracy, comparable to the original model (83.15%), but with a significantly reduced confidence interval (0.24 vs. 0.36), indicating better performance stability. The architecture's generalizability was further validated on the STEW mental workload dataset, achieving state-of-the-art accuracies of 95.93% and 95.35% for 2-class and 3-class classification, respectively. These results show that the proposed modifications improve consistency and cross-task generalizability, making the model a reliable framework for EEG-based safety monitoring.
SoliReward: Mitigating Susceptibility to Reward Hacking and Annotation Noise in Video Generation Reward Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Post-training alignment of video generation models with human preferences is a critical goal. Developing effective Reward Models (RMs) for this process faces significant methodological hurdles. Current data collection paradigms, reliant on in-prompt pairwise annotations, suffer from labeling noise. Concurrently, the architectural design of VLM-based RMs, particularly their output mechanisms, remains underexplored. Furthermore, RM is susceptible to reward hacking in post-training. To mitigate these limitations, we propose SoliReward, a systematic framework for video RM training. Our framework first sources high-quality, cost-efficient data via single-item binary annotations, then constructs preference pairs using a cross-prompt pairing strategy. Architecturally, we employ a Hierarchical Progressive Query Attention mechanism to enhance feature aggregation. Finally, we introduce a modified BT loss that explicitly accommodates win-tie scenarios. This approach regularizes the RM's score distribution for positive samples, providing more nuanced preference signals to alleviate over-focus on a small number of top-scoring samples. Our approach is validated on benchmarks evaluating physical plausibility, subject deformity, and semantic alignment, demonstrating improvements in direct RM evaluation metrics and in the efficacy of post-training on video generation models. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/lian700/SoliReward