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arXiv

Is More Privileged Information Better? From Solution Traces to Problem-Solving Structure in Self-Distilled Reasoning

Xuyang Zhao, Liting Zhang, Zichen Xu, Zhihu Wang, Xu Caiyue, Shiwan Zhao, Qicheng Li

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves reasoning by using a privileged view of a model conditioned on reference solutions to supervise a student view that observes only the question. However, the teacher-provided token-level targets may depend on reference-specific information unavailable at inference time. We propose Problem-Space-Guided OPSD (PS-OPSD), which replaces the complete solution with trajectory-grounded guidance describing the initial state, goal conditions, constraints, and a selected state-transition path. The student rollout and OPSD objective remain unchanged. Across three mathematical reasoning benchmarks and model scales ranging from 1.7B to 8B, PS-OPSD achieves the highest aggregate question-only accuracy among the compared methods. Controlled experiments further indicate that guidance relevance and path coherence contribute to these gains, highlighting the representation of privileged information as an important design choice in OPSD.

arXiv

Securing Agentic AI: From Per-Action Checks to Trajectory Assurance

Alireza Lotfi, Subangkar Karmaker Shanto, Imtiaz Karim, Elisa Bertino

Autonomous agents are increasingly used to execute consequential tasks in environments governed by operational constraints, organizational policies, regulatory requirements, and technical standards. Their safety is therefore determined not by the correctness of individual actions, but by whether their overall behavior remains consistent with the rules and invariants of the systems in which they operate. As large language model (LLM)-based agents become more autonomous and increasingly delegate tasks across organizational boundaries, securing them evolves from a single challenge into a broad and interconnected landscape spanning the entire agentic stack. At the single-agent level, untrusted inputs through prompts, memory, retrieved knowledge, and tool interfaces create attack surfaces. In multi-agent settings, delegation and communication introduce challenges related to identity, trust, capability control, and decision transparency, while the underlying model routing and execution control plane remains vulnerable to manipulation and to unverified model provenance. Perhaps the most fundamental challenge is behavioral containment: sequences of individually permissible actions may collectively violate system-level constraints and safety invariants. At the broader level, supply-chain integrity, provenance, accountability, and end-to-end observability remain largely open problems. A common principle unifies these directions: security must become a verifiable property of the architectures, protocols, and runtimes that govern agent behavior, rather than an optional layer of guidance. Charting these challenges provides a roadmap toward trustworthy autonomous agent deployment.

arXiv

LoBoost: Fast Model-Native Local Conformal Prediction for Gradient-Boosted Trees

Vagner Santos, Victor Coscrato, Luben Cabezas, Rafael Izbicki, Thiago Ramos

Gradient-boosted decision trees are among the strongest off-the-shelf predictors for tabular regression, but point predictions alone do not quantify uncertainty. Conformal prediction provides distribution-free marginal coverage, yet standard split conformal uses a single global residual quantile and can adapt poorly to heteroscedasticity. We propose LoBoost, a model-native local conformal method that reuses the fitted ensemble's leaf structure to define a multiscale partition of the feature space. Each input is represented by the sequence of leaves it visits along the boosting path, and matching leaf prefixes define nested groups in which residual quantiles are estimated locally. By reusing the predictive structure already learned by the model, LoBoost requires no auxiliary partition or nuisance model, no retraining, and no additional data split beyond standard conformal calibration. Our theory connects the stability of the fitted ensemble and the geometry of its induced cells to local residual-score homogeneity, providing finite-sample coverage-error control and asymptotic pointwise validity as the local calibration size grows and the cells become sufficiently homogeneous. Experiments show competitive interval quality, low post-hoc calibration costs, and stable behavior across local calibration-size settings.

arXiv

AgenticSCR: An Autonomous Agentic Secure Code Review for Immature Vulnerabilities Detection

Wachiraphan Charoenwet, Kla Tantithamthavorn, Patanamon Thongtanunam, Hong Yi Lin, Minwoo Jeong, Ming Wu

Secure code review is critical during pre-integration, where Atlassian developers rely on lightweight analysis tools, while deep security assessment is deferred to later stages, delaying feedback and increasing remediation costs. Existing static analyzers are often noisy and struggle with context-dependent or partially manifested vulnerabilities, while static large language model (LLM) reviewers are constrained by context windows and lack tool interaction. Agentic AI, which combines LLMs with code navigation, shows promise; however, its effectiveness for early-stage secure code review remains underexplored. We present AgenticSCR, an agentic secure code reviewer augmented with security-focused semantic memory that grounds reasoning in structured security knowledge to detect vulnerabilities before they fully manifest. AgenticSCR achieves at least 153% relative improvement in generating comments with correct localization, vulnerability type, and relevance over static LLM baseline, multi-agent reviewer, and SAST tools. In a shadow deployment, 54% of its comments were validated by security engineers for developer reporting, demonstrating practical utility while underscoring the difficulty of the task. These findings position the security-focused semantic memory as a promising direction for agentic secure code review, enabling early-stage vulnerability identification. Our approach builds an important step toward reliable localization, detection, and explanation in shift-left security practices

arXiv

PRIVEE: Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning Against Feature Inference Attacks

Sindhuja Madabushi, Haider Ali, Ahmad Faraz Khan, Rui Ning, Hongyi Wu, Chunsheng Xin, Ali. R. Butt, Jin-Hee Cho

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables collaborative model training across organizations that share common user samples but hold disjoint feature spaces. Despite its potential, VFL is susceptible to feature inference attacks, in which adversarial parties exploit shared confidence scores (prediction probabilities) during inference to reconstruct private input features of other participants. To counter this threat, we propose PRIVEE (PRIvacy-preserving Vertical fEderated lEarning), a novel defense mechanism named after the French word privée, meaning "private." PRIVEE obfuscates confidence scores while preserving critical properties such as relative ranking and inter-score distances. Rather than exposing raw scores, PRIVEE only shares transformed representations, mitigating risk of reconstruction attacks without degrading model prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments show that PRIVEE achieves up to a 30 times increase in reconstruction error (MSE) against feature inference attacks, compared to the strongest competing defense, while preserving full predictive performance against advanced feature inference attacks.

arXiv

PRISMA: Improving the Accuracy-Latency Frontier of Diffusion-based PDE Solvers Using Physics-Informed Spectral Attention

Medha Sawhney, Abhilash Neog, Mridul Khurana, Anuj Karpatne

Diffusion-based solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs) are often bottle-necked by slow gradient-based test-time optimization routines that use PDE residuals for loss guidance. They additionally suffer from optimization instabilities and are unable to dynamically adapt their inference scheme in the presence of noisy PDE residuals. To address these limitations, we introduce PRISMA (PDE Residual Informed Spectral Modulation with Attention), a conditional diffusion neural operator that embeds PDE residuals directly into the model's architecture via an attention-inspired modulation mechanism in the spectral domain, enabling gradient-descent free inference. In contrast to previous methods that use PDE loss solely as external optimization targets, PRISMA integrates PDE residuals as integral architectural features, making it inherently fast, robust, accurate, and free from sensitive hyperparameter tuning. We show that PRISMA has competitive accuracy, at substantially lower inference costs, compared to previous methods across five benchmark PDEs especially with noisy observations, while using 10x to 100x fewer denoising steps, leading to 15x to 250x faster inference.

arXiv

Malice in Agentland: Down the Rabbit Hole of Backdoors in the AI Supply Chain

Léo Boisvert, Abhay Puri, Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru, Nazanin Sepahvand, Nicolas Chapados, Quentin Cappart, Jason Stanley, Alexandre Lacoste, Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham, Alexandre Drouin

While finetuning AI agents on interaction data -- such as web browsing or tool use -- improves their capabilities, it also introduces critical security vulnerabilities within the agentic AI supply chain. We show that adversaries can effectively poison the data collection pipeline at multiple stages to embed hard-to-detect backdoors that, when triggered, cause unsafe or malicious behavior. We formalize three realistic threat models across distinct layers of the supply chain: direct poisoning of finetuning data, pre-backdoored base models, and environment poisoning, a novel attack vector that exploits vulnerabilities specific to agentic training pipelines. Evaluated on two widely adopted agentic benchmarks, all three threat models prove effective: poisoning only a small number of demonstrations is sufficient to embed a backdoor that causes an agent to leak confidential user information with over 80\% success.

arXiv

Language Models for Portuguese: A Systematic Mapping Study

Jhessica Silva, Carlos Caetano, Helena Maia, Breno Bernard Nicolau de França, Sandra Avila, Helio Pedrini

In recent years, the rapid development of language models has transformed the field of Natural Language Processing through a wide range of applications. However, the development of language models has not progressed uniformly across all languages. In the case of the Portuguese language, there has recently been a growing effort by academia and companies to develop language models and create data resources for Portuguese. These efforts have resulted in the rise of an increasingly diverse ecosystem of language models for Portuguese. However, information on these models remains dispersed in scientific publications, technical reports, model repositories, and project documentation. This survey presents a systematic mapping study of language models developed for Portuguese, providing a comprehensive overview of the current state of the field. We map a total of 46 models, characterizing them by various aspects, including base model, architecture, computational resources, training datasets, licensing, code availability, data, and model weights. Furthermore, we analyzed the evolution and relationships among these models through a phylogenetic perspective, identified current research gaps and opportunities, and discussed future directions for the development of language models for Portuguese.

arXiv

Bi-Lipschitz Ansatz for Anti-Symmetric Functions

Nadav Dym, Jianfeng Lu, Matan Mizrachi

Motivated by applications to the simulation of quantum many-body systems by neural networks, researchers have suggested several models which are antisymmetric by construction, and can approximate all antisymmetric functions. However, these works either require very high computational complexity to attain universal approximation, or suffer from discontinuities. In this paper, we introduce two antisymmetric ansatzes which do not suffer from these disadvantages. The first is based on a bi-Lipschitz embedding with respect to a naturally defined metric. The second is a modular anti-symmetrizing projection framework based on the frame-averaging methodology. Both approaches yield continuous antisymmetric models which attain universal approximation guarantees with a polynomial complexity in problem size. Moreover, for both approaches, we obtain quantitative approximation results that bound the number of parameters required to approximate Lipschitz antisymmetric functions to a given accuracy $ε$. We also provide preliminary experimental evidence suggesting improved performance in learning antisymmetric functions.

arXiv

Virtual Patients, Real Gains: Digital Twin-Based Simulated CT for Multitask Lung Nodule Analysis

Fakrul Islam Tushar, Lavsen Dahal, Paul Segars, Joseph Y. Lo

AI-based lung cancer screening is constrained by scarce, annotated CT data, particularly for rare nodule presentations. We investigate whether physics-based, anatomy-informed simulated CT can improve AI performance across three lung-nodule tasks: detection, segmentation, and malignancy classification. Using the Virtual Lung Screening Trial framework, we generated 174 digital human twins (XCAT3), embedded 512 procedurally controlled nodules (X-Lesions, 4-30 mm), and simulated CT (DukeSim) under two scanner configurations, yielding 1,044 annotated scans. Combined with clinical data, these trained models for detection (MONAI), segmentation (VISTA3D, nnU-Net), and classification (Med3D), evaluated on external test sets. Detection sensitivity at 1 FP/scan rose from 0.37 to 0.56 (p < 0.001); segmentation improved modestly (Dice 0.61 to 0.64, 0.66 to 0.69); classification AUC rose from 0.78 to 0.87 (p < 0.001). Physics-based virtual imaging trials can help address data scarcity in medical AI.

arXiv

Patient-centered data science: an integrative framework for evaluating and predicting clinical outcomes in the digital health era

Mohsen Amoei, Dan Poenaru

This study proposes a novel, integrative framework for patient-centered data science in the digital health era. We developed a multidimensional model that combines traditional clinical data with patient-reported outcomes, social determinants of health, and multi-omic data to create comprehensive digital patient representations. Our framework employs a multi-agent artificial intelligence approach, utilizing various machine learning techniques including large language models, to analyze complex, longitudinal datasets. The model aims to optimize multiple patient outcomes simultaneously while addressing biases and ensuring generalizability. We demonstrate how this framework can be implemented to create a learning healthcare system that continuously refines strategies for optimal patient care. This approach has the potential to significantly improve the translation of digital health innovations into real-world clinical benefits, addressing current limitations in AI-driven healthcare models.

arXiv

Robust Biharmonic Skinning Using Geometric Fields

Ana Dodik, Vincent Sitzmann, Justin Solomon, Oded Stein

Bounded bihramonic weights are a popular tool used to rig and deform characters for animation, to compute reduced-order simulations, and to define feature descriptors for geometry processing. They necessitate tetrahedralizing the volume bounded by the surface, introducing the possibility of meshing artifacts or tetrahedralization failure. We introduce a mesh-free and robust automatic skinning technique that generates weights comparable to the current state of the art, but works reliably even on open surfaces, triangle soups, and point clouds where current methods fail. We achieve this through the use of a specialized Lagrangian representation enabled by the advent of hardware ray-tracing, which circumvents the need for finite elements while optimizing the biharmonic energy and enforcing boundary conditions. The flexibility of our formulation allows us to integrate artistic control through weight painting during the optimization. We offer a thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation of our method.

arXiv

onepot-Bench 0: towards lab-aware in silico chemistry benchmarks

Brandon Wang, Andrei S. Tyrin, Daniil A. Boiko

Language models are playing an increasingly important role in laboratory science, performing tasks such as experiment planning, execution, and post-hoc analysis. However, precisely measuring their abilities is difficult, as scientific capabilities require a mixture of both problem-solving skills and domain-specific intuition. Existing evaluations rarely measure the capabilities required to make reliable decisions in a physical laboratory and often rely on public data that may have appeared in model training corpora. We introduce onepot-Bench 0, a proprietary benchmark suite for evaluating language models on synthetic chemistry capabilities relevant to wet-lab execution. onepot-Bench 0 comprises three complementary evaluations: ChemAbacus measures tool-free cheminformatics literacy and numerical reasoning; SynthRefusal characterizes safety and refusal behavior across a variety of benign, controlled, and designer-drug targets; and SynthBench evaluates reaction-outcome prediction and catalyst selection using private experimental data generated in our laboratory. Together, these evaluations probe basic competency, reliability, and deeper knowledge, all skills which are required for reliable performance in the lab.

arXiv

The Condition-Number Barrier in Sparse Least Squares

Honghao Lin, Vahab Mirrokni, David P. Woodruff

In [AS21], Axiotis and Sviridenko conjectured that the linear dependence on the restricted condition number in sparse convex optimization cannot be improved by a polynomial-time algorithm. We establish their conjectured lower bound for least-squares objectives, conditional on the randomized exact-volume Small-Set Expansion Hypothesis in the weighted regular-graph formulation of Raghavendra, Steurer, and Tulsiani [RST12]. Concretely, for every fixed $γ\in(0,1]$, there is no randomized polynomial-time algorithm that, with probability at least $2/3$, returns a vector $x$ such that, writing $s=\lVert x\rVert_0$, \[ \lVert Ax-b\rVert_2^2 \leq \min_{\lVert z\rVert_0\leq k}\lVert Az-b\rVert_2^2+\varepsilon \quad\text{and}\quad s=O\!\left(k\,κ_{s+k}^{\,1-γ}\right), \] where $κ_r$ is the restricted condition number at sparsity level $r$. The result holds even on rational instances with $A$ of full column rank. The proof was first obtained using a fully automated Gemini-based agentic system developed internally at Google. The authors have verified the proof and edited it for clarity of presentation.

arXiv

CoWAM: Coordination Contracts for Selective Policy Intervention with WAMs

Shuaijun Liu, Qifu Wen, Shuyang Hao, Qi Luo, Chenglong Zhang, Feiyang You, Chengyu Wu, Ningxin Su

World Action Models (WAMs) augment robot policies with action-conditioned predicted futures, but a plausible future alone does not justify changing the action that a bimanual policy would execute. We present CoWAM, a selective intervention layer that expresses synchronization, role compatibility, and collision convergence as coordination contracts. Each contract combines typed admissibility checks with event-conditioned verification and calibrated intervention gates. CoWAM preserves the nominal action unless an alternative satisfies every active obligation and provides a clear, low-risk improvement; when the nominal action is also inadmissible, it invokes a predefined abstention fallback. To separate selector quality from proposal quality, all methods operate on identical candidate pools and commit their decisions before shared oracle labeling. Across eight simulated bimanual tasks, CoWAM improves coordination-valid selection by 16.7 percentage points over the contract-only variant and raises closed-loop success by 9.6 percentage points over the strongest selective baseline, while keeping harmful interventions below 1%. Together, these results establish coordination contracts as an effective interface for conservative policy intervention with predicted world-action evidence across coordination-rich bimanual tasks.

arXiv

Smooth Reparameterizations of Functions on Simplicial Product Spaces: Applications to Probabilistic Tensor Decomposition and Functional Data Registration

Shashwat Kumar, Arafat Rahman, Anuj Srivastava, P. -A. Absil

We consider optimization problems defined on product spaces of simplices. Examples of this class of problems include learning low-rank discrete multivariate probability distributions via simplex constrained tensor decomposition and performing functional data registration under the Square Root Velocity Function (SRVF) representation. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of replacing the product simplex with a smooth, elementwise strictly convex reparameterization, resulting in an unconstrained optimization problem on a manifold. We show that performing such a reparameterization results in the second order Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points on the smooth manifold being mapped to the weak second order KKT points on the product simplex. This leads to a Riemannian Gradient Descent (RGD) algorithm for solving the reparameterized problem, which outperforms Projected Gradient Descent (PGD), and provides a more faithful representation of the original function shapes while performing curve registration.

arXiv

Structured Memory for Edge Language Models: Persistent Context and Corpus Retrieval via O(1) SSM State Injection

Anusha Madan Gopal, Aras Pirbadian, Kristofor D. Carlson, M Anthony Lewis, Jonathan Tapson

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) imposes a prefill cost proportional to retrieved context length, and -- with Transformer backbones -- a KV-cache that grows with each generated token. State-Space Models (SSMs) avoid the second cost by construction; we eliminate the first, collapsing prefill from $O(L_{context})$ to $O(1)$ per query. We introduce PRECOG (Pre-Computed Context Injection), a retrieval mechanism that exploits a property unique to SSMs: the fixed-size, position-agnostic recurrent hidden state is a complete summary of everything the model has read. PRECOG pre-encodes document corpora offline as SSM hidden states and injects the best-matching state directly at query time, bypassing in-context re-ingestion entirely. The same state-injection mechanism enables SMC (Structured Memory Consolidation): a hierarchical persistent memory with cognitive-domain clustering, an adjustable fidelity-vs-storage dial, and $O(1)$ session initialization, which consolidates short-term episodic states into long-term semantic memory and fuses both with retrieved corpus states at query time. We demonstrate the system on TENNs-LLM, a 1.2B-parameter gated-SSM language model with a 192 KB hidden state. PRECOG matches in-context RAG answer quality, reducing prefill latency from $\sim$27 s to $<$6 ms on edge hardware -- a $\sim$4500$\times$ speedup that crosses the threshold from unusable to interactive. The mechanism is architecturally impossible for Transformer KV-caches, which are position-entangled and grow linearly with context length.

arXiv

Benchmarking Sheaf Neural Networks for Inductive Tasks

Stefano Fiorini, Edoardo Coppola, Pietro Liò

Sheaf Neural Networks (SNNs) generalize message passing by replacing scalar edge weights of standard Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with learnable, edge-dependent restriction maps between node stalks. Despite their strong theoretical foundations and promising transductive results, SNNs have been evaluated almost exclusively on transductive node classification, leaving their behaviour under inductive protocols unknown. We address this gap through the first systematic benchmark of the sheaf design space, evaluating three diffusion mechanisms (neural sheaf diffusion, sheaf attention, and sheaf attention with Graph Attention Network v2), three restriction-map parameterizations, three stalk dimensions, and six modern GNN architectural components, within a message-passing reformulation that never assembles the heavy sheaf Laplacian, making the full design space trainable under cross-graph batching. Across $1{,}890$ controlled experiments on 14 inductive datasets, multiple insights emerge: restriction maps are the dominant design choice and general maps are preferable, larger stalks add capacity but not long-range reach, architectural components explain more performance variation than the entire sheaf-specific design space itself. Under a matched protocol, SNNs transfer to inductive settings but do not reach the strongest baselines, with gaps being dataset-dependent. Practically, a single sheaf configuration can generalize across datasets, so effort is better spent tuning the surrounding architectural recipe than the sheaf operator itself.

arXiv

A Simple Approximation to the Distribution of the Ridge Regression Estimator

José Luis Montiel Olea, Ryan Strong, Amilcar Velez, Zhuoheng Xu, Haomin Yu

We present a simple Gaussian approximation to the finite-sample distribution of the classical ridge regression estimator. Our approximation captures the fact that, in finite samples, the ridge regression estimator trades off bias and variance to reduce estimation and prediction error. Our approximation is based on nonstandard asymptotics where $i)$ we let the estimator's regularization parameter grow proportionally to the sample size; and $ii)$ we treat the population regression coefficients as \emph{local} to the reference vector that defines the estimator's direction of shrinkage. In contrast to other asymptotic approximations in the literature, we allow for general forms of heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation in the data generating process (at the cost of considering a low-dimensional model where the number of covariates is not allowed to grow with the sample size). We use our simple Gaussian approximation to propose two new strategies to select the regularization parameter for the ridge regression estimator. The suggested strategies select the regularization parameter to minimize either average or worst-case excess prediction risk, where risk is computed using our suggested Gaussian approximation.

arXiv

Interaction Is Not Necessary for Order-Optimal 1-Bit Mean Estimation

Jiachen Hu, Han Zhong

This paper is concerned with one-bit mean estimation, where each independent sample is represented by a single binary message. We consider distributions on $\mathbb{R}$ with mean in $[-λ,λ]$ and absolute $k$-th central moment at most $σ^k$, where $k>1$ is fixed. For this class, previous work attained the optimal sample complexity for general queries using a two-stage protocol. The first stage localizes the mean. The second-stage queries are chosen after localization and refine the estimate around the decoded center. We show that this interaction can be avoided by constructing a randomized fully non-adaptive protocol that fixes all queries before observing the data and matches the optimal adaptive sample complexity. For target accuracy $ε$ and confidence $1-δ$, its sample complexity scales as \[ \log\fracλσ + \begin{cases} (σ/ε)^2\log(1/δ), & k>2,\\ (σ/ε)^2\log(σ/ε)\log(1/δ), & k=2,\\ (σ/ε)^{k/(k-1)}\log(1/δ), & 1<k<2, \end{cases} \] up to constants depending only on $k$. In the range covered by the known lower bound, this rate is minimax optimal even among fully adaptive protocols. This gives a negative answer to the COLT 2026 open problem asking whether interaction is necessary for order-optimal one-bit mean estimation with general queries \citep[Open Problem~1]{lau2026open}.

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