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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Construction of ergodic IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

arXiv:2506.10476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the existence of infinite-volume IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ , with $d \geq 2$, based on a multi-source IDLA protocol. Unlike IDLA aggregates, the laws of the IDLA forests studied here depend on the trajectories of particles, and then do not satisfy the famous Abelian property. Their existence is due to a stabilization result (Theorem 1.1, our main result) that we establish using percolation tools. Although the sources are infinitely many, we also prove that each of them play the same role in the building procedure, which results in an ergodicity property for the IDLA forests (Theorem 1.2).

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Multi-Granular Attention-Driven Reinforcement Learning Framework for Web Intelligent Enhancement Systems

arXiv:2606.19690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: From the past few years, web intelligent enhancement systems increasingly rely on heterogeneous and dynamic web data to deliver personalized, context-aware services. However, traditional machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning models often struggle with semantic understanding, adaptability, and scalability in continuously evolving web environments. In this research, a Multi-Granular Attention-based Reinforcement Web Intelligent Enhancement System (MGAR-WIES) is proposed to address the challenges by integrating semantic graph modeling, attention mechanisms, and adaptive reinforcement learning. Initially, heterogeneous web data comprising structured, semi-structured and unstructured sources are collected and preprocessed for generating unified feature representations. These representations are transformed into a dynamic semantic graph, where entities and their relationships are modeled by using graph embeddings enhanced by attention mechanisms for capturing both local relevance and global contextual dependencies. Subsequently, an adaptive multi-agent reinforcement learning strategy leverages the attention-aware semantic states to optimize personalized web actions like content recommendation, navigation optimization, and service adaptation. Finally, the continuous online feedback is further integrated to update graph representations and learning policies in real time by ensuring sustained adaptability and performance. The proposed MGAR-WIES acheived better results in terms of accuracy (80%) when compared with existing approaches.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Extrema of microscopically slowed-down Gaussian fields

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a family of Gaussian fields whose covariance structure exhibits an inhomogeneous, microscopic slowdown and it interpolates between a $\log$ profile (for a certain interpolation parameter $\alpha=0$) and a $\log\log$ profile (when the interpolation parameter is $\alpha=1/2$). We consider both one dimensional such objects (which we call {\it Branching Brownian Motions in a cooling environment}) as well as higher dimensional, spatial fields. We identify the correct centering of the maximum at time $T$ and prove tightness of the recentered maximum. While the exponent in the first-order growth varies linearly with $\alpha$, giving a leading order of $T^{1-\alpha}$, the second-order correction exhibits a phase transition at $\alpha=1/3$.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Foresight: Iterative Reasoning About Clues that Matter for Navigation

arXiv:2606.12550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-world mapless navigation from sparse language instructions requires resolving underspecified goals and inferring which environmental cues are relevant for reaching the goal. For instance, reaching an out-of-view destination may require interpreting ramps, signs, or detours that reveal where to go or which route to take. Prior works are limited by their reliance on known navigation factors and closed-set factor categories, or identify cues before motion planning and miss plan-dependent cues. We argue that pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can discover novel instruction-relevant cues, but require adaptation to focus on which cues matter and how they should influence motion planning. We realize these ideas in Foresight, a test-time framework in which a finetuned VLM alternates between proposing image-space motion plans and critiquing them using the language goal and visual context. Subsequent plans are conditioned on prior critiques, enabling iterative motion refinement before execution. To align plan critiques and refinements with open-set behavior preferences, we learn a reward model from human feedback and use it to post-train the VLM with reinforcement learning in the plan-critique loop. In offline evaluations and 6 real-world environments, Foresight improves average task success by 37% and reduces interventions per mission by 52% relative to state-of-the-art test-time reasoning and foundation-model baselines, while running in real-time on a Jetson AGX Orin. We will release code, data, and training details to support future work on test-time reasoning for robot motion refinement. Additional videos at: https://amrl.cs.utexas.edu/foresight

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

DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models – DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) – both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.

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

AnonShield: Scalable On-Premise Pseudonymization for CSIRT Vulnerability Data

arXiv:2606.15650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present AnonShield, a high-throughput, on-premise pseudonymization system that combines GPU-accelerated NER, streaming processing, caching, and schema-aware configuration. Evaluated on datasets up to 550 MB (70,951 records), AnonShield reduces processing time from over 92 hours to under 10 minutes (up to 738x speedup) while achieving up to 94.2% F1-score and 96.7% recall. Our results show that scalable pseudonymization of vulnerability data is feasible without sacrificing analytical utility, enabling compliant data sharing in operational CSIRT environments.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Right Regions, Wrong Labels: Semantic Label Flips in Segmentation under Correlation Shift

The robustness of machine learning models can be compromised by spurious correlations between non-causal features in the input data and target labels. A common way to test for such correlations is to train on data where the label is strongly tied to some non-causal cue, then evaluate on examples where that tie no longer holds. This idea is well established for classification tasks, but for semantic segmentation the specific failure modes are not well understood. We show that a model may achieve reasonable overlap while assigning the wrong semantic label, swapping one plausible foreground class for another, even when object boundaries are largely correct. We focus on this semantic label-flip behaviour and quantify it with a simple diagnostic (Flip) that counts how often ground truth foreground pixels are assigned the wrong foreground identity while remaining predicted as foreground. In a setting where category and scene are correlated during training, increasing the correlation consistently widens the gap between common and rare test conditions and increases these within-object label swaps on counterfactual groups. Overall, our results motivate assessing segmentation robustness under distribution shift beyond overlap by decomposing foreground errors into correct pixels, flipped-identity pixels, and missed-to-background pixels. We also propose an entropy-based, ground truth label-free `flip-risk' score, which is computed from foreground identity uncertainty, and show that it can flag flip-prone cases at inference time. Code is available at https://github.com/acharaakshit/label-flips.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A polynomial-time approximation scheme for minimum-weight decoding of topological codes

arXiv:2606.18145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two-dimensional topological translationally invariant (2D TTI) stabilizer codes lie at the heart of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but using them requires solving the decoding problem. Minimum-weight decoding of these codes was recently shown to be NP-hard, even in basic settings, such as the color code with Pauli $Z$ errors and the toric code with Pauli $X$, $Y$ and $Z$ errors. Here, we prove that minimum-weight decoding of 2D TTI codes nonetheless admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS), i.e., for any constant $\varepsilon>0$, a recovery operator of weight within a multiplicative factor of $1+\varepsilon$ of the minimum can be found in polynomial time. Our approach builds on Arora's PTAS for Euclidean problems, such as the traveling salesman problem, and applies when decoding can be cast in terms of point-like excitations connected by string-like errors. It therefore extends beyond two dimensions, covering certain higher-dimensional topological codes and quantum memories, including the toric code with phenomenological or circuit-level noise.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Beyond Continuity: Simulation-free Reconstruction of Discrete Branching Dynamics from Single-cell Snapshots

arXiv:2605.00545v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inferring cellular trajectories from destructive snapshots is complicated by the challenges of stochasticity and non-conservative mass dynamics such as cell proliferation and apoptosis. Existing unbalanced Optimal Transport (OT) methods treat mass as a continuous fluid, performing inference at the population level. However, this macroscopic view often fails to capture the discrete, jump-like nature of birth-death events at single-cell resolution, which is essential for understanding lineage branching and fate decisions. We present Unbalanced Schrödinger Bridge (USB), a simulation-free framework for learning underlying dynamics that effectively integrates both stochastic and unbalanced effects which also models the discrete, jump-like birth-death dynamics at single-cell resolution. Theoretically, USB provides a tractable solution to the Branching Schrödinger Bridge (BSB) problem, offering a rigorous microscopic interpretation where individual cells undergo both Brownian motion and discrete birth-death jumps. Technically, the method implements an efficient solver by introducing a simulation-free training objective that effectively scales to high-dimensional omics data. Empirically, we demonstrate on both simulated and real-world datasets that USB not only achieves trajectory reconstruction performance better than or comparable to deterministic baselines but also uniquely enables realistic discrete simulation of birth-death dynamics at single-cell resolution.

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

EMS: Multi-Agent Voting via Efficient Majority-then-Stopping

arXiv:2604.02863v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Majority voting is the standard for aggregating multi-agent responses into a final decision. However, traditional methods typically require all agents to complete their reasoning before aggregation begins, leading to significant computational overhead, as many responses become redundant once a majority consensus is achieved. In this work, we formulate efficient multi-agent voting as a reliability-aware agent scheduling problem and propose Efficient Majority-then-Stopping (EMS) to improve reasoning efficiency. EMS first estimates a Task-Conditioned Reliability Ordering (TCRO) for each agent by retrieving its historical consensus evidence on semantically similar queries, and then invoking agents in descending reliability order. Next, Adaptive Incremental Voting (AIV) terminates the process once the current leading answer cannot be overturned by any possible votes from the remaining agents, and returns this answer. Finally, Reliability History Updating (RHU) updates only the invoked agents according to their consensus with the final decision. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks show that EMS preserves the accuracy of Majority Voting while reducing the average number of invoked agents by 35% and token consumption by 44%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/fuyu66/EMS.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Improved delta-kick cooling with multiple nonideal kicks

arXiv:2505.08413v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Delta-kick cooling is a technique employed to achieve low kinetic temperatures by decreasing momentum width at the cost of increased position width. In an ideal implementation, this method uses a harmonic potential to deliver a single near-instantaneous momentum kick. In practice, potentials that are approximately harmonic near their center are commonly used. As a result, the breakdown of the harmonic approximation far from the center limits the cooling performance. Inspired by aberration cancellation in optics, we propose to use compound matter-wave lens systems for $\delta-$kick cooling with Gaussian potentials. By strategically combining attractive and repulsive kicks, we show that it is possible to mimic the effect of a harmonic potential. For a test case with reasonable experimental parameters, our method suggests a reduction in kinetic temperature by a factor of $2.5$ using a 2-pulse sequence and by a factor of $3.2$ using a 3-pulse sequence.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Independent-Component-Based Encoding Models of Brain Activity During Story Comprehension

Encoding models provide a powerful framework for linking continuous stimulus features to neural activity; however, traditional voxelwise approaches are limited by measurement noise, inter-subject variability, and redundancy arising from spatially correlated voxels encoding overlapping neural signals. Here, we propose an independent component (IC)-based encoding framework that dissociates stimulus-driven and noise-driven signals in fMRI data. We decompose continuous fMRI data from naturalistic story listening into ICs using one subset of the data, and train encoding models on independent data to predict IC time series from large language model representations of linguistic input. Across subjects, a subset of ICs exhibited consistently high predictivity. These ICs were spatially and temporally consistent across subjects and included cognitive networks known to respond during story listening (auditory and language). Auditory component time series were strongly correlated with acoustic stimulus features, highlighting the interpretability of identified component time series. Components identified as noise or motion-related artifacts by ICA-AROMA showed uniformly poor predictive performance, confirming that highly predicted components reflect genuine stimulus-related neural signals rather than confounds. Overall, IC-based encoding models enable analyses at the level of functional networks, accommodating the variability in network locations across individuals and providing interpretable results that are easy to compare across subjects. Code provided at: https://github.com/kamyahari/IC-Encoding-Models.git

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

No Hidden Prompts Needed! You Can Game AI Peer Review with Presentation-Only Revisions

As AI-generated reviews move from experimental tools into peer-review infrastructure, most robustness concerns have focused on explicit attacks such as hidden instructions and prompt injection. We study a harder and more policy-relevant failure mode: no hidden text, no prompt injection, and no changes to methods, experiments, figures, equations, proofs, or numerical results. The attacker modifies only presentation-level content, such as the abstract, contribution framing, related work, discussion, and narrative structure. We introduce adversarial repackaging: a closed-loop attack that uses AI-reviewer feedback to search for presentation-level revisions while keeping the scientific evidence fixed. Across three mainstream AI reviewers, adversarial repackaging achieves a 75.1% attack success rate and a mean score gain of +1.21/10. The effect is not explained by ordinary prose polishing. We also reveal that strategies that change how the reviewer interprets the paper, such as related-work repositioning and analytical discussion expansion, substantially outperform surface edits such as local polishing, table formatting, and algorithm boxes. Our analysis reveals two deeper structural failure modes. First, AI reviewers are easier to impress than to convince: highlighting strengths reliably increases perceived merit, while attempts to dissolve weaknesses frequently backfire. Second, AI reviewers can confuse the appearance of addressing a limitation with actually resolving it, allowing unchanged evidence to be reinterpreted as stronger scientific contribution. These results show that the deployment risk is not only malicious hidden instructions, but the emergence of paper presentation itself as an optimization surface. We release a contamination-free rolling benchmark and attack framework for testing whether AI reviewers remain anchored to scientific content under presentation-only edits.

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

Scalable Batch Bayesian Optimization Via Subspace Acquisition Functions

arXiv:2411.16206v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Extending Bayesian optimization to batch evaluation can enable the designer to make the most use of parallel computing technology. However, most of current batch approaches do not scale well with the batch size. That is, their optimization efficiencies often deteriorate as the batch size increases. To address this issue, we propose a simple and efficient approach to extend Bayesian optimization to large-scale batch evaluation in this work. Different from existing batch approaches, the idea of the new approach is to draw a batch of axis-aligned subspaces of the original problem and select one point from each subspace using existing acquisition functions. Numerical experiments show that our proposed approach speedups the convergence significantly when compared with the sequential Bayesian optimization algorithm, and performs very competitively when compared with ten batch Bayesian optimization algorithms. The implementation of our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/zhandawei/SubSpace_Acquisition_Functions.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

How should I respond to race-based exclusion in my lab?

Authors:

A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position? A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position?

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Moving Beyond Diversity: Visual Token Pruning as Subspace Reconstruction for Efficient VLMs

Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Fully Quantum Algorithm for the 1-dimensional linear Lattice Boltzmann Method

arXiv:2606.16514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A fully quantum algorithm for solving the one-dimensional linear advection-diffusion equation using the Lattice Boltzmann method as a numerical procedure is presented in this work. We start by presenting a state of the art of the current usage of quantum algorithms for solving ordinary and partial differential equations. We then describe two algorithms for the one-dimensional Lattice Boltzmann method with two degrees of freedom. The first one is an existing hybrid quantum-classical algorithm with measurements at each time step, and the second one is our improved version, viz. a fully quantum algorithm where only one measurement is needed at the end of the algorithm. The fully quantum algorithm is first executed on a quantum simulator and then compared with a classical approach. Subsequently, the fully quantum algorithm is run on a quantum system with 133 qubits to investigate the effect of noise and the depth of the circuit on the output state. We find fluctuations in the final result due to the decoherence noise of the qubits.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Inferring Cell Fate Trajectories in Time-Resolved Metabolic RNA Labeling data

Single-cell RNA sequencing provides high-resolution snapshots of cellular states but lacks direct information about transcriptional dynamics. Metabolic RNA labeling addresses this limitation by distinguishing newly synthesized RNA, offering insight into the direction of cell state changes, and providing valuable information when attempting to recover the underlying continuous dynamics from static snapshots of cell distributions. However, existing trajectory inference methods do not fully exploit this additional signal. Here, we propose FLOWSATATE, a framework for single-cell trajectory inference that leverages time-resolved RNA labeling within an Optimal Transport setting. We model cell dynamics as a gradient flow in an inferred potential landscape parameterized by a neural network, integrating both total and labeled RNA across time points. The learned potential enables identification of key genes and transcription factors driving cell fate decisions and supports prediction of future cellular states. We benchmark our approach on its ability to generalize unseen data and recover coherent trajectories. We also apply it to study colorectal cancer response to demethylation treatment as well as neuronal differentiation of embryonic stem cells.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Does Traversal Order Matter? A Systematic Study of Tree Traversal Methods in Transformer Grammars

Transformer Grammars (TGs) enhance language modeling by incorporating syntactic tree structures. Despite the potentially significant impact on model performance of how syntactic trees are linearized in TGs, existing studies rely solely on Depth-First Traversal (DFT) for linearization. In this paper, we expand the traversal design space by exploring Breadth-First Traversal (BFT) and a novel hybrid traversal strategy, Production-Rule Traversal (PRT), which combines the structural lookahead of BFT with the early lexical generation of DFT. We integrate these traversal methods with varying tree configurations and masking strategies, and empirically evaluate their performance on language modeling, syntactic generalization and summarization. We reveal the inherent trade-offs between nested composition and global lookahead, providing actionable recommendations for designing task-aware Transformer Grammars.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Graph Alignment for Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks and Learning Positional Encodings

arXiv:2505.13087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a novel benchmarking methodology for graph neural networks (GNNs) based on the graph alignment problem, a combinatorial optimization task that generalizes graph isomorphism by aligning two unlabeled graphs to maximize overlapping edges. We frame this problem as a self-supervised learning task and present several methods to generate graph alignment datasets using synthetic random graphs and real-world graph datasets from multiple domains. For a given graph dataset, we generate a family of graph alignment datasets with increasing difficulty, allowing us to rank the performance of various architectures. Our experiments prove that there is an optimal task difficulty for having a statistically relevant ranking of different models and that, even on a structure-only task, anisotropic models perform better compared to isotropic ones. To further prove that our synthetic task capture meaningful information, we show its effectiveness for self-supervised GNN pre-training: the learned node embeddings can be leveraged as positional encodings by transformers for graph regression or can be used to reconstruct the full structure of the graph with $98\%$ accuracy. To support reproducibility and further research, we provide an open-source Python package to generate graph alignment datasets and benchmark new GNN architectures. The source code is available at https://github.com/adrien-lagesse/graph-alignment-benchmark.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CORE-Bench: Fostering the Credibility of Published Research Through a Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark

AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research. To spur the development of useful agents, we need benchmarks that are challenging, but more crucially, directly correspond to real-world tasks of interest. This paper introduces such a benchmark, designed to measure the accuracy of AI agents in tackling a crucial yet surprisingly challenging aspect of scientific research: computational reproducibility. This task, fundamental to the scientific process, involves reproducing the results of a study using the provided code and data. We introduce CORE-Bench (Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark), a benchmark consisting of 270 tasks based on 90 scientific papers across three disciplines (computer science, social science, and medicine). Tasks in CORE-Bench consist of three difficulty levels and include both language-only and vision-language tasks. We provide an evaluation system to measure the accuracy of agents in a fast and parallelizable way, saving days of evaluation time for each run compared to a sequential implementation. We evaluated two baseline agents: the general-purpose AutoGPT and a task-specific agent called CORE-Agent. We tested both variants using two underlying language models: GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best agent achieved an accuracy of 21% on the hardest task, showing the vast scope for improvement in automating routine scientific tasks. Having agents that can reproduce existing work is a necessary step towards building agents that can conduct novel research and could verify and improve the performance of other research agents. We hope that CORE-Bench can improve the state of reproducibility and spur the development of future research agents.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

PorTEXTO: A European Portuguese Benchmark for Visual Text Extraction

European Portuguese (pt-PT) is largely absent from OCR benchmarks, which skew toward high-resource languages. The few benchmarks that cover pt-PT focus on historical artifacts and literature. This work addresses modern OCR applications, introducing PorTEXTO, the first benchmark for contemporary and culturally relevant pt-PT visual text extraction. To ascertain quality, we employ an annotation pipeline combining transcriptions from a frontier LVLM with exhaustive review by native speakers. We observe a sharp performance drop from synthetic to real world samples in most models, and find that, currently, specialized multilingual data is a better driver for pt-PT performance than model size or resolution budget, motivating the release of open pt-PT OCR resources.

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

David vs. Goliath in Next Activity Prediction: Argmax vs. LSTM, Transformer, and LLM

arXiv:2606.15868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Next activity prediction (NAP) is a cornerstone of predictive process monitoring (PPM), enabling organizations to move from retrospective analysis to proactive process steering. The PPM field has progressed from classical machine learning through deep learning architectures such as LSTMs and Transformers to large language models (LLMs). Despite growing model complexity, no benchmark jointly compares LLMs, Transformers, LSTMs, and simple baselines in a direct sequence modeling setting for NAP. In this paper, we fill this gap with a systematic benchmark. We compare vocabulary-adapted LLMs, Transformers trained from scratch, LLM-distilled Transformers, and LSTMs against a simple counting-based argmax baseline across seven real-life event logs. Our results tell a David vs. Goliath story: pretraining confers no consistent improvement over training from scratch, model size shows little effect on performance, and on most datasets the argmax baseline matches or approaches the performance of billion-parameter LLMs.