arXiv:2604.16076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) aim to improve interpretability in Deep Learning by structuring predictions through human-understandable concepts, but they provide no way to verify whether learned concepts align with the human’s intended meaning, hurting interpretability. We introduce Prototype-Grounded Concept Models (PGCMs), which ground concepts in learned visual prototypes: image parts […]
STRIDE-ED: A Strategy-Grounded Stepwise Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Dialogue Systems
arXiv:2604.07100v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Empathetic dialogue requires not only recognizing a user’s emotional state but also making strategy-aware, context-sensitive decisions throughout response generation. However, the lack of a comprehensive empathy strategy framework, explicit task-aligned multi-stage reasoning, and high-quality strategy-aware data fundamentally limits existing approaches, preventing them from effectively modeling empathetic dialogue as a complex, […]
SOAR: Self-Correction for Optimal Alignment and Refinement in Diffusion Models
arXiv:2604.12617v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The post-training pipeline for diffusion models currently has two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated data and reinforcement learning (RL) with reward models. A fundamental gap separates them. SFT optimizes the denoiser only on ground-truth states sampled from the forward noising process; once inference deviates from these ideal states, subsequent […]
Neural Computers
arXiv:2604.06425v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a new frontier: Neural Computers (NCs) that unify computation, memory, and I/O of traditional computers in a learned runtime state. Our long-term goal is the Completely Neural Computer (CNC): the mature, general-purpose realization of this emerging machine form, with stable execution, explicit reprogramming, and durable capability reuse. As […]
Chain-of-Thought Degrades Visual Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs
arXiv:2604.16060v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Reasoning Models (MRMs) leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) based thinking have revolutionized mathematical and logical problem-solving. However, we show that this paradigm struggles with generalized spatial intelligence. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of seventeen models across thirteen spatial benchmarks and identify a critical gap: CoT prompting consistently degrades performance in visual […]
Cognitive Agency Surrender: Defending Epistemic Sovereignty via Scaffolded AI Friction
arXiv:2603.21735v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence has transformed benign cognitive offloading into a systemic risk of cognitive agency surrender. Driven by the commercial dogma of “zero-friction” design, highly fluent AI interfaces actively exploit human cognitive miserliness, prematurely satisfying the need for cognitive closure and inducing severe automation bias. To empirically […]
Layerwise Dynamics for In-Context Classification in Transformers
arXiv:2604.11613v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformers can perform in-context classification from a few labeled examples, yet the inference-time algorithm remains opaque. We study multi-class linear classification in the hard no-margin regime and make the computation identifiable by enforcing feature- and label-permutation equivariance at every layer. This enables interpretability while maintaining functional equivalence and yields highly […]
Spectral Tempering for Embedding Compression in Dense Passage Retrieval
arXiv:2603.19339v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dimensionality reduction is critical for deploying dense retrieval systems at scale, yet mainstream post-hoc methods face a fundamental trade-off: principal component analysis (PCA) preserves dominant variance but underutilizes representational capacity, while whitening enforces isotropy at the cost of amplifying noise in the heavy-tailed eigenspectrum of retrieval embeddings. Intermediate spectral scaling […]
AST: Adaptive, Seamless, and Training-Free Precise Speech Editing
arXiv:2604.16056v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-based speech editing aims to modify specific segments while preserving speaker identity and acoustic context. Existing methods rely on task-specific training, which incurs high data costs and struggles with temporal fidelity in unedited regions. Meanwhile, adapting Text-to-Speech (TTS) models often faces a trade-off between editing quality and consistency. To address […]
Preconditioned Test-Time Adaptation for Out-of-Distribution Debiasing in Narrative Generation
arXiv:2603.13683v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Although debiased large language models (LLMs) excel at handling known or low-bias prompts, they often fail on unfamiliar and high-bias prompts. We demonstrate via out-of-distribution (OOD) detection that these high-bias prompts cause a distribution shift, degrading static model performance. To enable real-time correction, we propose CAP-TTA, a test-time adaptation framework. […]
ReXSonoVQA: A Video QA Benchmark for Procedure-Centric Ultrasound Understanding
arXiv:2604.10916v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ultrasound acquisition requires skilled probe manipulation and real-time adjustments. Vision-language models (VLMs) could enable autonomous ultrasound systems, but existing benchmarks evaluate only static images, not dynamic procedural understanding. We introduce ReXSonoVQA, a video QA benchmark with 514 video clips and 514 questions (249 MCQ, 265 free-response) targeting three competencies: Action-Goal […]
Jailbreak Scaling Laws for Large Language Models: Polynomial-Exponential Crossover
arXiv:2603.11331v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adversarial attacks can reliably steer safety-aligned large language models toward unsafe behavior. Empirically, we find that strong adversarial prompt-injection attacks can amplify attack success rate from the slow polynomial growth observed without injection to exponential growth with the number of inference-time samples. We first identify a minimal statistical mechanism for […]