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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Functional central limit theorems for non-local branching Markov processes

Authors:
Christopher B. C. Dean↗Emma Horton↗

arXiv:2502.19382v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study the fluctuations of a general class of supercritical branching Markov processes with non-local branching mechanisms. We establish functional central limit theorems and show that the limiting behaviour falls into three regimes, determined by the size of the spectral gap associated with the first-moment semigroup of the branching process. The main novelty is to develop a unified functional fluctuation theory for spatial branching Markov processes with non-local reproduction, allowing a general finite-dimensional spectral structure for the first-moment semigroup, including non-simple leading eigenvalues and nilpotent Jordan-type components. In doing so, we extend the classical small, critical and large fluctuation trichotomy beyond the finite-type and local spatial settings, and obtain limiting processes that capture the covariance structure induced by non-local offspring displacement.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

G$^3$VLA: Geometric inductive bias for Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors:
Yue Peng↗Yongzhe Zhao↗Artur Habuda↗Khuyen Pham↗Yanheng Zhu↗Tran Nguyen Le↗Fares Abu-Dakka↗Li Guo↗

arXiv:2606.24472v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have made rapid progress in generalist robot manipulation by harnessing semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language backbones, but their visual tokens remain grounded in 2D image coordinates rather than the calibrated geometry of the robot's cameras – a mismatch especially pronounced in multi-camera setups, where views are coupled by known intrinsics and extrinsics yet processed as independent images. We propose G$^3$VLA, a camera-aware geometric module that injects calibrated structure into the visual-token stream of a pretrained VLA without altering its action space or imitation objective, combining intrinsic-conditioned ray embeddings, projective positional encoding (PRoPE), and bidirectional cross-view fusion. Geometric supervision is provided either from ground-truth point maps when available, or from confidence-gated $\pi^3$X teacher predictions, requiring no depth sensors or manual annotations. Instantiated on $\pi_0$, G$^3$VLA yields consistent gains across the LIBERO suites, RoboCasa24, RoboTwin2.0, and real-robot settings, with the largest improvements on spatially and object-sensitive tasks. We further validate on $\pi_{0.5}$ and GR00T 1.5, with results suggesting that geometric transfer is most effective when geometry-aware tokens have direct access to the action generation pathway. Our project page is at https://sites.google.com/view/g3vla

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

OmniLoc: A Geometry-Aware Foundation Model for Anchor-Free UE Localization Across Diverse Indoor Environments

Authors:
Lei Chu↗Yuning Zhang↗Omer Gokalp Serbetci↗Anushka Katiyar↗Bassel Abou Ali Modad↗Andreas F. Molisch↗

arXiv:2606.11490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indoor localization from wireless measurements remains challenging in large-scale deployments due to substantial variation in building geometry, the set of detectable access points (APs), and the heterogeneity of received signals. Existing learning-based methods often perform well only in limited settings and degrade under environmental shifts, making robust anchor-free localization across diverse indoor environments notoriously difficult. In this paper, we present OmniLoc, an environment-interactive foundation model for anchor-free user equipment localization across diverse indoor environments. To the best of our knowledge, OmniLoc is the first foundation-model-based approach built directly on wireless measurements for this task. OmniLoc is built on three key designs. First, a unified input tokenization module converts heterogeneous wireless measurements into a common representation that is more amenable to learning. Second, a geometry-aware Transformer performs AP-aware feature extraction by emphasizing dominant APs while aggregating complementary evidence from supporting APs. Third, a geometry-aware location estimation module conditions regression on geometric embeddings to produce geometrically consistent location predictions. We evaluate OmniLoc on both a large-scale in-house dataset and a public benchmark dataset. Results show that OmniLoc significantly outperforms existing methods, consistently improves existing backbones when its design components are integrated, and demonstrates strong generalization in cross-environment evaluations.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LM-SPT: LM-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Speech Tokenization

Authors:
Daejin Jo↗Jeeyoung Yun↗Byungseok Roh↗Sungwoong Kim↗

With the rapid progress of speech language models (SLMs), discrete speech tokens have emerged as a core interface between speech and text, enabling unified modeling across modalities. Recent speech tokenization approaches aim to isolate semantic information from low-level acoustics to better align with language models (LMs). In particular, previous methods use self-supervised learning (SSL) teachers such as HuBERT to extract semantic representations, which are then distilled into a semantic quantizer to suppress acoustic redundancy as well as capture content-related latent structures. However, these tokenizers often operate at relatively high frame rates, producing token sequences significantly longer than their textual counterparts and hindering seamless integration with pretrained LMs. Although recent methods attempt to reduce the token rate by applying uniform average pooling to SSL features, this can over-smooth content-bearing regions and dilute the structural information, thereby potentially limiting the LM alignment. To address this, we propose LM-SPT, an LM-aligned speech tokenization method based on semantic speech-resynthesis distillation. Instead of directly matching teacher and student features via pooling, LM-SPT resynthesizes speech from semantic tokens only and minimizes the discrepancy between representations extracted from the original and resynthesized waveforms using a frozen, LM-aligned speech encoder. This indirect supervision avoids rigid temporal alignment and encourages dedicated semantic units that are more semantically aligned with LMs under reduced frame rates. Experimental results show that the proposed LM-SPT consistently outperforms previous semantic-enhanced speech tokenizers when applied to SLMs for the tasks of automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech, even without compromising the speech reconstruction fidelity at the codec level.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Ismail Geles↗Leonard Bauersfeld↗Markus Wulfmeier↗Davide Scaramuzza↗

arXiv:2605.22748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous systems have achieved superhuman performance in isolation or simulation, yet they remain brittle in shared, dynamic real-world spaces. This failure stems from the dominant single-agent paradigm for physical applications, where other actors are ignored or treated as environmental noise, preventing effective coordination. Here we show that multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the essential safety scaffolding required for real-world interaction. Using high-speed quadrotor racing as a high-stakes testbed, we train agents to navigate complex aerodynamic interactions and strategic maneuvering with a variable number of racers. Through league-based self-play, agents evolve sophisticated anticipatory behaviors, including proactive collision avoidance, overtaking, and handling multi-agent physical interactions, including aerodynamic downwash. Our agents outperform a champion-level human pilot in multi-player races at speeds exceeding 22 m/s, while simultaneously reducing collision rates by 50 % compared to state-of-the-art single-agent baselines. Crucially, training with diverse artificial agents enables zero-shot generalization to safer human interaction. These results suggest that the path to robust robotic co-existence lies not in isolated safety constraints, but in the rigorous demands of multi-agent interaction. Multimedia materials are available at: https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/marl

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

Authors:
Hengjie Cao↗Zhendong Huang↗Mengyi Chen↗Yifeng Yang↗Fang Dong↗Anrui Chen↗Ruijun Huang↗Xin Zhang↗Mingzhi Dong↗Yujiang Wang↗Jinlong Hou↗Qin Lv↗…

arXiv:2603.10444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals. We identify a counterintuitive source of this failure: dominant activation outliers are not merely arbitrary sparse events, but are largely induced by a coherent rank-one mean bias, whose direction aligns with the leading anisotropic spectral component. This mean component strengthens during training, is amplified and reshaped by attention and FFN operators, and increasingly dominates top activation magnitudes. Crucially, this discovery reveals that a seemingly complex outlier-suppression problem admits a truly simple solution: isolate the coherent mean before quantization. We therefore propose Averis, a mean-residual splitting quantization method that separates the mean component using only reductions and elementwise subtractions before FP4 quantization. Across Qwen3 0.6B Dense trained on 100B tokens and Qwen3 7B A1.5B MoE trained on 50B tokens, Averis enables robust W4A4G4 FP4 training, reducing BF16 loss gaps to 1.19%/0.81% versus 2.05%/1.10% for NVIDIA's recently released Hadamard-based outlier-smoothing method, while limiting downstream gaps to 0.89/0.71 points. With only 2.20% end-to-end overhead over vanilla NVFP4, about 30% of NVIDIA's Hadamard-based design, Averis provides a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training. Complementary to Hadamard, Averis further reduces the Qwen3-0.6B loss and downstream gaps to 0.94% and 0.73 points when combined. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/averis-504D.

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08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Role of methanesulfonic acid in atmospheric particle nucleation and growth

Authors:
Rima Baalbaki↗

Dimethylsulfide (DMS; CH3SCH3) from marine phytoplankton is a major source of atmospheric sulfur 1. Its oxidation products include sulfuric acid (SA; H2SO4) and methanesulfonic acid (MSA; CH3SO3H), which has a higher yield than SA below 10 °C 2. Whereas SA is known to drive the formation of new particles 3, which may subsequently grow and act as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), the role of MSA remains unclear 4. Here, in experiments performed under atmospheric conditions at the CERN CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) chamber, we show that MSA nucleates together with ammonia (NH3) below −10 °C, at rates comparable to SA-NH3. Moreover, MSA and SA nucleate synergistically below −10 °C, forming multi-acid molecular clusters with NH3. Even at ultra-low NH3 levels, MSA drives particle growth at or near the kinetic limit below 9 °C and above 40 % relative humidity (RH). Since MSA and SA generally coexist at similar concentrations in cool marine regions, our findings indicate that nucleation rates may be accelerated up to tenfold and growth rates up to twofold compared with SA-NH3 alone. Our global model simulations indicate that MSA can enhance CCN concentrations, especially in polar regions. We propose that MSA might be an important driver of biogenic particles in cool, pristine marine regions of both the present-day and pre-industrial atmospheres, and yet is unaccounted for in global climate models 5.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Shattering the Autoregressive Curse: Dynamic Epistemic Entropy Orchestrated Erasable Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

Authors:
Ziliang Wang↗Kang An↗Faqiang Qian↗Jialu Cai↗Cijun Ouyang↗Yuhang Wang↗Qibing Ren↗Yichao Wu↗

arXiv:2606.17735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although reinforcement learning (RL) has expanded the cognitive boundaries of large language models (LLMs), it often remains vulnerable to the autoregressive curse in long-horizon logical reasoning: small epistemic perturbations introduced early in generation can propagate irreversibly along the Markov decision process flow, triggering cascading failures that drive the reasoning trajectory toward collapse. To overcome this autoregressive cascade, in which a single early mistake can compromise all subsequent reasoning steps, we propose dynamic epistemic entropy orchestrated erasable reinforcement learning ($E^3RL$). $E^3RL$ eliminates reliance on external signals by grounding the model's endogenous local autoregressive cross-entropy as an intrinsic coordinate of epistemic uncertainty. By introducing segment-level adaptive dynamic thresholds and advantage allocation, $E^3RL$ enables the model to precisely excise localized logical defects while reusing historical key-value (KV) cache streams, thereby endowing the reasoning process with a self-healing capability. We train $E^3RL$ on the DeepMath-103k dataset. Experimental results show that $E^3RL$ reshapes the exploration efficiency of long-sequence reasoning and improves sample efficiency while maintaining linear memory overhead. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as AIME, $E^3RL$ achieves substantial performance gains, with the 4B and 8B parameter models surpassing previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) results by 5.349\% and 6.514\%, respectively. These findings suggest that $E^3RL$ shatters the autoregressive curse in long-sequence reasoning and establishes a theoretical and systems-level foundation for the next generation of self-healing artificial general intelligence (AGI).

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Depth-Width tradeoffs in Algorithmic Reasoning of Graph Tasks with Transformers

Authors:
Gilad Yehudai↗Clayton Sanford↗Maya Bechler-Speicher↗Orr Fischer↗Ran Gilad-Bachrach↗Amir Globerson↗

Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a transformer that can implement the task. Recent work has begun to explore this problem for graph-based tasks, showing that for sub-linear embedding dimension (i.e., model width) logarithmic depth suffices. However, an open question, which we address here, is what happens if width is allowed to grow linearly, while depth is kept fixed. Here we analyze this setting, and provide the surprising result that with linear width, constant depth suffices for solving a host of graph-based problems. This suggests that a moderate increase in width can allow much shallower models, which are advantageous in terms of inference and train time. For other problems, we show that quadratic width is required. Our results demonstrate the complex and intriguing landscape of transformer implementations of graph-based algorithms. We empirically investigate these trade-offs between the relative powers of depth and width and find tasks where wider models have the same accuracy as deep models, while having much faster train and inference time due to parallelizable hardware.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Fast-dLLM++: Fr\'{e}chet Profile Decoding for Faster Diffusion LLM Inference

Authors:
Siva Rajesh Kasa↗Yasong Dai↗Sumit Negi↗Hongdong Li↗

Diffusion large language models promise parallel token generation, yet inference remains bottlenecked by deciding which masked tokens can be safely committed together. Fast-dLLM addressed this with KV caching and confidence-guided parallel decoding, but its decoding theory uses a homogeneous high-confidence assumption that effectively reduces each candidate set to its weakest selected token. We argue that this leaves speed on the table because real decoding steps exhibit heterogeneous confidence profiles. We propose Fast-dLLM++, a training-free extension that introduces Fr\'{echet profile decoding}: selecting parallel commit sets from the full sorted confidence profile rather than a single worst-case confidence. The resulting rule is a heterogeneous-confidence generalization of Fast-dLLM's factor selector and it recovers the previous rule exactly in the equal-confidence case and adds a provable heterogeneity bonus when the selected tokens have uneven confidences. Fast-dLLM++ leaves the model, diffusion process, and cache implementation entirely unchanged, making it a drop-in replacement for existing Fast-dLLM decoding. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH, HumanEval, and MBPP with the LLaDA-8B model show that the theoretical improvement translates directly into empirical gains: profile-aware selection improves the accuracy–throughput frontier by exploiting safe parallelism that weakest-token rules miss, achieving up to 37\% higher throughput at comparable accuracy. Our code release is at https://github.com/Ringo-Star/FastdLLM_plusplus.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Triangular Consistency as a Universal Constraint for Learning Optical Flow

Authors:
Yi Xiao↗Carlos Rodriguez Coronel↗Jing Zhan↗Haniyeh Ehsani Oskouie↗Alex Wong↗Dong Lao↗

arXiv:2606.19938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose triangular consistency as a first-principled constraint for optical flow, which is agnostic to network architecture, supervision type, and dataset, and applies to both image-pair and multi-frame settings. This simple but powerful constraint is to compose two flows to induce a third flow and enforce consistency among the three. The composed flows may arise from (i) image pairs, yielding cycle consistency; (ii) multiple video frames, producing longer-range motion through temporal chaining; or (iii) image pairs combined with controlled synthetic transformations, which becomes data augmentation. This triangular consistency introduces negligible computational overhead and requires no additional annotations. Since it is derived directly from the geometry of optical flow, it does not rely on model-specific assumptions and serves as a ``universal'' plug-and-play component for optical flow training. Experiments show consistent improvement across supervised, unsupervised, and transfer learning settings.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

The Pragmatic Persona: Discovering LLM Persona through Bridging Inference

Authors:
Jisoo Yang↗Jongwon Ryu↗Minuk Ma↗Trung X. Pham↗Junyeong Kim↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) reveal inherent and distinctive personas through dialogue. However, most existing persona discovery approaches rely on surface-level lexical or stylistic cues, treating dialogue as a flat sequence of tokens and failing to capture the deeper discourse-level structures that sustain persona consistency. To address this limitation, we propose a novel analytical framework that interprets LLM dialogue through bridging inference – implicit conceptual relations that connect utterances via shared world knowledge and discourse coherence. By modeling these relations as structured knowledge graphs, our approach captures latent semantic links that govern how LLMs organize meaning across turns, enabling persona discovery at the level of discourse coherence rather than surface realizations. Experimental results across multiple reasoning backbones and target LLMs, ranging from small-scale models to 80B-parameter systems, demonstrate that bridging-inference graphs yield significantly stronger semantic coherence and more stable persona identification than frequency or style-based baselines. These results show that persona traits are consistently encoded in the structural organization of discourse rather than isolated lexical patterns. This work presents a systematic framework for probing, extracting, and visualizing latent LLM personas through the lens of Cognitive Discourse Theory, bridging computational linguistics, cognitive semantics, and persona reasoning in large language models. Codes are available at https://github.com/JiSoo-Yang/Persona_Bridging.git

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

DREG: A Layer-Wise Jacobian Regularization as a General-Purpose Penalty

Authors:
Rowan Martnishn↗

arXiv:2606.23942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a large-scale empirical study isolating the contributions of the Derivative Regularization penalty (DREG). Across a fully-crossed factorial sweep of 960 experiments spanning 4 activations, 6 regularizers, 8 datasets, and 5 random seeds, we ask: when, where, and why does DREG work? Our results establish three principal findings. First, DREG achieves the highest overall and clean-regime accuracy among all regularizers evaluated (significantly so against the unregularized baseline, Weight Decay, and IGPen; Wilcoxon $p \leq 0.031$). It ranks second in noise robustness behind Spectral Normalization (SN) - the only two layer-wise regularizers in the study. Second, DREG is globally the best-performing regularizer under GELU, the default activation in modern transformer architectures, particularly on both messy vision and messy NLP benchmarks, suggesting direct applicability to frontier deep learning settings. Third, DREG's advantage over competing regularizers is most pronounced under data scarcity, consistent with its role as a geometric inductive bias that substitutes for the regularizing effect of data volume. Throughout, DREG is applied with a single fixed hyperparameter $\lambda = 10^{-2.5}$ and no per-dataset tuning, supporting its characterization as a plug-and-play regularizer for neural networks with nontrivial Jacobian structure. These findings are consistent with DREG's design: concentrating regularization pressure on layers where the activation derivative is largest, rather than constraining the network uniformly.

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15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Stereoretentive decarbonylative C(sp<sup>3</sup>)-C(sp<sup>3</sup>) cross-coupling

Authors:
Zhidao Huang↗

While C(sp3)–C(sp3) bond-forming cross-coupling methods have become more common, stereocontrolled bond-formation remains a challenge,1 despite its importance for drug discovery, where there is a emerging demand for molecules with increased sp3 character.2-4 Enantiospecific cross-coupling approaches would complement advances in enantioselective coupling,5-8 but have been limited to specialized substrates with lower availability5,9 because stereospecific oxidative addition of more abundant chiral alkyl electrophiles is unknown.10 Inspired by the classic, stereoretentive Curtius rearrangement,11 herein we disclose a catalytic strategy that proceeds by an analogous stereoretentive decarbonylation step to form a versatile chiral alkylnickel intermediate from easily-available chiral amino-acid and α-hydroxy-acid derivatives. The chiral alkylnickel intermediates decompose and/or racemize on the order of minutes, but are sufficiently stable to enable stereoretentive cross-electrophile coupling12 with alkyl radicals (derived from alkyl iodides) at relatively low temperature (22-40 °C). This mechanistic strategy provides a straightforward approach to stereocontrolled C(sp3)–C(sp3) bond formation, including diastereomers that are inaccessible by stereoselective radical mechanisms. The “metallo-Curtius” strategy described in this study lays a mechanistic foundation for the development many new stereospecific cross-coupling reactions.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Speculative Rollback Correction for Quality-Diverse Web Agent Imitation

Authors:
Longkun Hao↗Hongyu Lin↗Hao Li↗Zhichao Yang↗Haojie Hao↗Dongshuo Huang↗Haitao Yang↗Hongyu Ge↗Ming jie Xie↗Yanjun Wu↗Zi Hao Yin↗Yan Bai↗…

arXiv:2606.12485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training interactive web agents through imitation learning from expert trajectories has emerged as a highly effective approach. However, determining the optimal timing for expert intervention presents a critical challenge in this context. Delayed intervention often leads to the accumulation of early-stage errors, pushing the page state into an irrecoverable regime. Conversely, premature or excessive intervention causes the agent to become overly reliant on expert policies, trapping the model in local optima characterized by a single, rigid trajectory. We propose Speculative Rollback Correction (SRC), a branch-level imitation framework for resettable agent environments. Instead of requesting teacher labels at every visited state or correcting only after a completed trajectory, SRC uses fixed-horizon branch review: the student executes a short speculative segment before teacher review, and the teacher localizes the first harmful deviation only when local progress breaks. Rollback preserves useful prefixes, while successful rollouts are filtered by a hard verifier and retained in a lightweight quality-diversity archive. The resulting data supports next-action supervised fine-tuning on both localized corrections and verifier-passing trajectories. On WebArena-Infinity, SRC collects 977 verifier-passing trajectories and 9,183 next-action examples; fixed-horizon review improves the recovery-versus-query tradeoff over step-level review while retaining verifier-passing solution variants. Code is available at https://github.com/LongkunHao/SRC_gui_agent.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Latent Space Reinforcement Learning for Inverse Material Estimation in Food Fracture Simulation

Authors:
Adrian Ramlal↗Yuhao Chen↗John S. Zelek↗

Realistic visual simulation of food manipulation requires accurate material parameters, yet these are difficult to measure directly and vary across the heterogeneous regions of a single food item. We address the inverse problem of estimating material parameters from a target description of fracture behavior in a non-differentiable continuum damage mechanics simulator. Using orange peeling as a test case, we train a neural surrogate on 2,000 forward simulations and compare Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES, a gradient-free evolutionary optimizer) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm) across the original 9-dimensional parameter space and two learned 4-dimensional latent representations. Since different oranges have different material properties, a practical inverse system must handle arbitrary targets without retraining. We train a goal-conditioned PPO policy that learns a general inverse mapping: given any target description of peeling behavior, the policy produces a material parameter estimate in a single forward pass (8 surrogate evaluations, approximately 10ms). Operating in a normalizing flow latent space with a shared surrogate evaluator, the goal-conditioned policy achieves 0.642 actual recovery when validated through the simulator, outperforming the original parameter space by 23%. A warm-start extension that initializes CMA-ES refinement from the policy's output further improves recovery to 0.828 with 540 evaluations. These findings provide a practical framework for inverse food physics and lay groundwork for vision-driven material identification from video observations of food manipulation.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

Authors:
Yuxuan Chen↗Haoyuan Yu↗Peize He↗

Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equalization cancellation baseline and a GCC PHAT positive control we evaluate nine frozen audio models spanning binaural SSL, monaural SSL, and neural audio codecs. Four monaural negative controls yield zero BMLD confirming binaural specificity. Two general purpose binaural SSL models exhibit minimal phase sensitivity while dedicated binaural spatial SSL models achieve BMLD comparable to the analytical baseline. Progressive physical ablations show that general purpose binaural SSL models rely on spectro temporal interference textures rather than cross channel phase computation. High detection rates in speech reflect a confounding reliance on broadband envelopes rather than genuine phase encoding.

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19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-09

Multi-stable oscillations in cortical networks with two classes of inhibition

Authors:
Arnab Dey Sarkar↗

by Arnab Dey Sarkar, Bard Ermentrout In the classical view of cortical rhythms, interactions between excitatory pyramidal neurons (E) and inhibitory parvalbumin-expressing interneurons (I) are sufficient to generate gamma- and beta-band oscillations. However, it is now well established that multiple inhibitory interneuron subtypes exist and that they play important roles in the generation and modulation of these rhythms. In this paper, we develop a spiking network model consisting of populations of E, I, and an additional interneuron type, somatostatin-expressing neurons (S), which receive excitation from the E cells and inhibit both the E and I populations. The S cells are further modulated by a third inhibitory subtype, vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) neurons, which receive inputs from other cortical areas. We reduce the spiking network to a system of nine differential equations that describe the mean membrane potential, firing rate, and synaptic conductance for each population. Using this reduced model, we identify a wide range of parameters that exhibit multiple coexisting rhythms. Employing tools from nonlinear dynamics, we then explore the roles of the two classes of inhibition, as well as VIP modulation, in shaping the properties of these rhythms.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

One Probe Won't Catch Them All: Towards Targeted Deception Detection

Authors:
Vikram Natarajan↗Devina Jain↗Shivam Arora↗Satvik Golechha↗Joseph Bloom↗

arXiv:2602.01425v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear probes are a promising approach for monitoring AI systems for deceptive behaviour. Previous work has shown that a linear classifier trained on a contrastive instruction pair and a simple dataset can achieve good performance. However, these probes exhibit notable failures even in straightforward scenarios, including spurious correlations and false positives on non-deceptive responses. In this paper, we demonstrate that deception detection is inherently heterogeneous: while a single universal probe achieves modest improvements (+0.032 AUC), post-hoc oracle analysis reveals substantially higher potential (+0.108 AUC) when probes are matched to specific deception types, and synthetic validation experiments suggest this ceiling is achievable a priori when the deception type is known in advance. Our findings reveal that instruction pairs capture deceptive intent rather than content-specific patterns, explaining why prompt choice dominates probe performance (70.6% of variance). Given this heterogeneity, we conclude that organizations should define their specific threat models and deploy appropriately matched probes rather than seeking a universal deception detector.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A fast direct solver based neural network for solving PDEs

Authors:
Jashwanth Reddy Kadaru↗Vaishnavi Gujjula↗

arXiv:2606.19895v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The matrices arising from large scale $N$-body problems can be efficiently represented using hierarchical matrices, whose key idea is that the admissible off-diagonal sub-matrices can be well approximated by low-rank matrices across a hierarchy of matrix partitions. HODLR (Hierarchical Off-Diagonal Low-Rank) matrices are a subclass of hierarchical matrices in which all off-diagonal submatrices at every level of a recursive binary partition are low-rank. In this article, we present a neural network that learns the inverse operation of HODLR matrices based on the fast direct solver for HODLR matrices developed by Ambikasaran and Darve (2013). We further extend the architecture to learn nonlinear solution operators associated with PDEs by replacing some of the linear layers with deep sub-networks. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed architecture by performing a comprehensive set of experiments that include (i) solving a linear problem such as the Fredholm integral equation of the second kind, (ii) solving PDEs such as the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, Burgers' equation, and the steady-state Darcy's flow equation, (iii) generalization study across varying parameter values, (iv) comparing the inference time of the proposed network with the run time of a classical numerical solver, and (v) comparing the proposed network with some of the existing neural operator learning networks.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MBABench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

Authors:
Thomson Yen↗Julian Poeltl↗Harshith Srinivas Gear↗Yilin Meng↗Joshua Fan↗Adam Shen↗Yili Liu↗Ali Bauyrzhan↗Siri Du↗Haoyang Liu↗Daniel Guetta↗Hongseok Namkoong↗…

arXiv:2605.22664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

Authors:
Varun Reddy Nalagatla↗

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Contaminated Collaboration: Measuring Gender Bias Transfer in LLM-Assisted Student Writing

Authors:
Ariyan Hossain↗Kazi Kamruzzaman Rabbi↗Farig Sadeque↗S M Taiabul Haque↗

Gender bias in LLMs has been studied extensively in model outputs, with biased prompts shown to amplify stereotyped generations. Whether such bias propagates into text produced by humans who use these systems, however, remains underexplored. We investigate whether gender bias in an LLM writing assistant transfers into career plan essays written by students. We first verify that a gender-biased prompt induces gender-differentiated language in LLM-generated essays, while a neutral prompt does not. We then recruited participants (N = 123) in a controlled environment to write career plan essays for paired biographical profiles differing only in gender under three conditions: no AI assistance, neutral LLM assistance, or gender-biased LLM assistance. Students in the biased condition produced essays with a significantly larger agentic gap and more gender-stereotypic occupation suggestions than those in the control and neutral conditions. Our results also reveal that this bias transfer is asymmetric: agency is suppressed in female-target essays while male-target writing remains largely unaffected. Our findings highlight the risk of bias propagation in AI-assisted writing, calling for fairness-aware design in educational AI tools.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalar-Stepsize Nonuniform Monte Carlo Optimistic Policy Iteration: A Certified Counterexample

Authors:
Yuanlong Chen↗

arXiv:2606.15978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsitsiklis proved convergence of Monte Carlo optimistic policy iteration under a uniform update structure and identified nonuniform update frequencies as a delicate obstruction. We give a certified negative answer for the natural scalar-stepsize, unnormalized asynchronous state-value recursion with fixed nonuniform state-selection probabilities. In a three-state, two-action discounted MDP, the nonuniform update frequencies induce a diagonally scaled greedy-policy mean field with a certified nonconstant attracting hybrid periodic orbit. With a bounded unbiased geometric-horizon estimator and Robbins–Monro stepsizes, the original stochastic recursion remains trapped near the cycle with positive probability and therefore fails to converge. The example pinpoints a geometric obstruction: uniform sampling gives radial residual contraction, whereas scalar nonuniform sampling anisotropically distorts the residual dynamics and can generate switched attracting cycles.

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