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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Conditional means, vector pricings, amenability and fixed points in cones

Authors:

arXiv:2512.13829v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a generalization of conditional probability for arbitrary ordered vector spaces. A related problem is that of assigning a numerical value to one vector relative to another. We characterize the groups for which these generalized probabilities can be stationary, respectively invariant. Our results deviate from the setting of classical probability and lead to a new criterion for amenability and for fixed points in cones.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

I'm Sorry Driver, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That: Appraising the Safety of LLMs within Automotive Contexts

arXiv:2606.14327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper appraises recent frameworks within AI development to integrate LLMs into control tasks in automotive contexts from the perspective of safety assurance. This work has built upon the rapid integration of LLMs across automotive settings. However, we find that at present, these frameworks face significant challenges, limiting their efficacy in real-time safety-critical contexts. Firstly, we consider conceptual challenges, including the fact that deployers are faced with a dual challenge, wherein they must assure a model which has been developed upstream, i.e. as general-purpose tools by the large AI labs, in a downstream context, i.e. into specific vehicle architectures. Secondly, we consider concrete challenges from across existing standards. We show that there are currently both fundamental engineering constraints covered in ISO21448, such as latency, and novel LLM-specific issues, such as alignment-related issues covered in ISO/PAS8800. We ground both examples in a concrete introductory, experimental case study exploring an existing open-source repository, Talk2Drive. We present a safety argument in order to make explicit the limitations of existing solutions. Nonetheless, given that the use of LLMs in automotive contexts is being explored at a technical level and operationalised, we propose potential assurance mechanisms for LLM-related hazardous events going forward.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Influence-Guided Concolic Testing of Transformer Robustness

arXiv:2509.23806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Concolic testing for neural networks alternates concrete execution with constraint solving to search for inputs that flip model decisions. We present a concolic tester for Transformer classifiers that uses SHAP estimates to rank pending path predicates by their impact on the current prediction. To support self-attention with multiple heads in execution backed by SMT solving, we implement attention semantics in pure Python that are compatible with the solver and make the softmax boundary explicit by concretizing exponentiation arguments. We evaluate our method on CIFAR-10 across three compact Transformer classifiers, ResNet18, and VGG16 under a one-pixel budget and a 900s horizon. Across the 500 model–input pairs in this matched comparison, our method achieves 60% success, compared with 15% for a differential evolution baseline that treats the model as a black box. In the primary two-layer Transformer branch-ordering study, SHAP-based predicate prioritization raises success from 56% to 60% and reduces median attack time by 51%. These results show that influence-guided path exploration can make concolic testing a practical way to find adversarial examples in Transformer models.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adiabatically-induced Kawaguchi geometry and jerk in quantum-classical systems

arXiv:2606.16037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatically eliminating the quantum degrees of freedom in a mixed quantum-classical system produces an effective force in the classical equation of motion. The elimination can be made to any order in the adiabatic parameter, generating a series of higher order forces. By applying a sequence of near-identity unitary transformations to the quantum state, we derive a hierarchy of increasingly accurate effective actions for the classical variables. The third order Euler-Lagrange equation is non-Newtonian as the force depends on the jerk, the third order time derivative of position. We find that the third order terms induce a special kind of Kawaguchi geometry on the space of classical variables. This geometry is characterized by an almost symplectic structure and a differential line element that depends on the acceleration in addition to the velocity. Our results can be used to efficiently capture higher order nonadiabatic effects in molecular dynamics simulations.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new physics. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)4 is a 20-ktonne liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple reactor cores, designed to resolve the interference pattern of reactor neutrinos with sub-percent precision5,6. Here we report, using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025, the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters, $${\sin }^{2}{\theta }_{12}=0.3092\,\pm \,0.0087$$ and $$\Delta {m}_{21}^{2}=(7.50\,\pm \,0.12)\times 1{0}^{-5}\,{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$$ for the normal mass ordering scenario, improving the precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements. These results advance the basic understanding of neutrinos, validate the design of the detector and indicate the readiness of JUNO for resolving the neutrino mass ordering with a larger dataset. The rapid achievement with a short exposure highlights the potential of JUNO to push the frontiers of precision neutrino physics and paves the way for its broad scientific programme. The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ALAS: An Automatic Latent Alignment Score for Audio Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extended into Speech-LLMs, and the quality of the audio–text alignment they learn affects most downstream Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) behavior. Yet despite a growth of fusion strategies, there is no standard way to measure how well a Speech-LLM internally binds audio frames to text tokens. We introduce ALAS (Automatic Latent Alignment Score), a model and task-agnostic metric that probes the LLM's per-layer hidden states, scoring the cross-modal cosine similarity between audio and text representations against a Whisper-derived reference. ALAS needs only a frozen forward pass and an off-the-shelf ASR reference, with no training or fitted classifier, and is calibrated to an interpretable uniform baseline comparable across tasks. Applying ALAS to four open-source Speech-LLMs (AF3, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen-Omni, SALMONN) across emotion recognition (IEMOCAP), open-ended SQA (LibriSQA), and multi-choice audio understanding (MMAU-speech), we find that the depth and strength of alignment reflect each model's audio-encoder design and the acoustic-versus-semantic demands of the task, and that ALAS tracks but does not duplicate task accuracy, exposing models that score well without genuinely grounding in the audio. We release ALAS as an open-source library so that practitioners can probe their own Speech-LLMs or try it on new tasks.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ORAgentBench: Can LLM Agents Solve Challenging Operations Research Tasks End to End?

arXiv:2606.19787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear. Existing OR evaluations often decouple modeling from solving, rely on pre-formalized or text-only instances, and rarely test the full workflow from operational artifacts to validated decisions. In this work, we introduce ORAgentBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on challenging end-to-end operations research tasks. It contains 107 human-reviewed tasks across diverse operational scenarios, each packaged in an isolated environment with a natural-language brief, multi-file data, configuration artifacts, and a required submission schema. Agents must write and run solution code, and their submissions are evaluated by hidden validators for schema validity, hard-constraint feasibility, and normalized objective quality. Experiments with fourteen frontier agent-model configurations show that current agents remain far from reliable OR practice. The best agent passes only 35.51% of all tasks and 20.59% of hard tasks, and many feasible submissions still fall below the required quality threshold. Failure analysis further shows that errors are dominated by strategic weaknesses, including missed operational rules, brittle formulations, weak feasible-solution construction, and insufficient solution improvement. OR-specific procedural skills increase hard-task feasibility, but do not reliably improve solution quality or pass rate. These results suggest that progress in OR agents requires moving beyond plausible optimization code toward dependable, high-quality operational decision-making.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Navigating a crowded developing brain leaves neurons with broken DNA

As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails. As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Diffusive Relaxation of Participation Entropy in U(1)-symmetric Dynamics

arXiv:2606.11561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Participation entropy (PE) quantifies the spread of a many-body wavefunction across configuration space. While PE relaxes rapidly in generic chaotic systems, we show that $\mathrm{U}(1)$ conservation laws slow it down by imprinting with the slow hydrodynamic modes. Using a cluster expansion around equilibrium, we show that, after local density inhomogeneities decay, the leading PE deficit is dominated by squared connected density correlations. The long time relaxation is therefore controlled by diffusive correlation spreading, giving $\Delta S(t)\sim t^{-1/2}$ in the hydrodynamic regime and crossing over to $\sim \exp[-O(t/L^2)]$ when $t\geq L^2$. We confirm this entropy correlation relation using exact computation and infinite system tensor network simulations in various quantum $\mathrm{U}(1)$ conserving circuits. Our results establish PE as a sensitive probe of hydrodynamic memory and suggest that slow relaxation is a generic consequence of conservation laws.

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

TCHG: Tri-Trust Conditioned Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Reliable Dynamic Trust Prediction

arXiv:2606.16611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust prediction infers latent user-user trust relations and provides important support for social recommendation, fake-review and manipulation detection, and risk identification. Graph neural networks have become a prominent approach to trust prediction because of their ability to learn network structures and complex trust dependencies. However, existing methods often rely on a unified representation of trust signals and do not disentangle heterogeneous trust evidence into separate evidence channels, failing to exploit the distinct roles that different evidence channels should play during trust modeling. To address this gap, this paper argues that trust evidence should not be treated as an undifferentiated input, but should be decomposed and used as functional control factors over graph propagation. We propose TCHG, a tri-trust conditioned heterogeneous graph learning framework that decomposes trust evidence into three channels and assigns them distinct functional roles in propagation: entity reliability governs message admission, interaction-behavior reliability modulates propagation strength, and contextual trust adjusts the propagation mode through context-conditioned operator selection. Since the three evidence channels evolve at different temporal scales, TCHG maintains independent temporal states with non-uniform decay rates to prevent rapidly changing contextual signals from overwriting slowly accumulated entity reliability. It further predicts trust probability and calibrates the output probability, improving predictive confidence under sparse or conflicting evidence. Extensive experiments on multiple public trust datasets show that TCHG achieves effective and reliable trust prediction compared with representative trust prediction and heterogeneous graph baselines.

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

Fast Non-Episodic Finite-Horizon RL with K-Step Lookahead Thresholding

arXiv:2602.00781v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time. Existing infinite-horizon methods, which often rely on discounted contraction, do not naturally account for this fixed-horizon structure. We introduce a modified Q-function: rather than targeting the full-horizon, we learn a K-step lookahead Q-function that truncates planning to the next K steps. To further improve sample efficiency, we introduce a thresholding mechanism: actions are selected only when their estimated K-step lookahead value exceeds a time-varying threshold. We provide an efficient tabular learning algorithm for this novel objective, proving it achieves fast finite-sample convergence: it achieves minimax optimal constant regret for $K=1$ and $\mathcal{O}(\max((K-1),C_{K-1})\sqrt{SAT\log(T)})$ regret for any $K \geq 2$. We numerically evaluate the performance of our algorithm under the objective of maximizing reward. Our implementation adaptively increases K over time, balancing lookahead depth against estimation variance. Empirical results demonstrate superior cumulative rewards over state-of-the-art tabular RL methods across synthetic MDPs and RL environments: JumpRiverswim, FrozenLake and AnyTrading. Code is provided on \href{https://github.com/jamie01713/K-Step-Lookahead}{github}.

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

LLM-based Embeddings: Attention Values Encode Sentence Semantics Better Than Hidden States

Sentence representations are foundational to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. While recent methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive sentence representations, most rely on final-layer hidden states, which are optimized for next-token prediction and thus often fail to capture global, sentence-level semantics. This paper introduces a novel perspective, demonstrating that attention value vectors capture sentence semantics more effectively than hidden states. We propose Value Aggregation (VA), a simple method that pools token values across multiple layers and token indices. In a training-free setting, VA outperforms other LLM-based embeddings, even matches or surpasses the ensemble-based MetaEOL. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when paired with suitable prompts, the layer attention outputs can be interpreted as aligned weighted value vectors. Specifically, the attention scores of the last token function as the weights, while the output projection matrix ($W_O$) aligns these weighted value vectors with the common space of the LLM residual stream. This refined method, termed Aligned Weighted VA (AlignedWVA), achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free LLM-based embeddings, outperforming the high-cost MetaEOL by a substantial margin. Finally, we highlight the potential of obtaining strong LLM embedding models through fine-tuning Value Aggregation.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance

A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Side-Channel Attacks Bypass Protection in 3D Printers

arXiv:2606.13952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active Motor Noise Cancellation (AMNC) ships in commercial fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers as a hardware countermeasure against acoustic side-channel attacks that target intellectual property (IP). We present the first empirical evaluation of a deployed AMNC countermeasure, using a public dataset of synchronized acoustic and vibration recordings from two AMNC-equipped Bambu Lab printers across 12 object classes. AMNC fully neutralizes the acoustic channel: classification accuracy is indistinguishable from the 8.33% random baseline. The vibration channel, which AMNC does not target, still leaks. With summary statistics the leak is coarse and amplitude-driven (vibration accuracy approximately 31% pooled, 36-47% within-printer), while the waveform shape carries essentially nothing (frequency-only features at chance). A full-sequence temporal model that ingests the ordered evolution of the print raises accuracy to approximately 61%, and an order-shuffling control (approximately 33%) shows that a substantial component is genuinely sequential and tied to print progression. The leak is device-specific: a classifier trained on one printer transfers near chance to the other. We conclude that AMNC is an acoustic-only defense: vibration remains a partial, geometry-correlated side channel it does not address, but one that does not, on this dataset, support full geometric reconstruction; reconstruction-grade attacks would require the magnetic or power channels AMNC also leaves untouched. We release all code.

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

Natural Identifiers for Privacy and Data Audits in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.24408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Assessing the privacy of large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges. In particular, most existing methods for auditing differential privacy require the insertion of specially crafted canary data during training, making them impractical for auditing already-trained models without costly retraining. Additionally, dataset inference, which audits whether a suspect dataset was used to train a model, is infeasible without access to a private non-member held-out dataset. Yet, such held-out datasets are often unavailable or difficult to construct for real-world cases since they have to be from the same distribution (IID) as the suspect data. These limitations severely hinder the ability to conduct scalable, post-hoc audits. To enable such audits, this work introduces natural identifiers (NIDs) as a novel solution to the above-mentioned challenges. NIDs are structured random strings, such as cryptographic hashes and shortened URLs, naturally occurring in common LLM training datasets. Their format enables the generation of unlimited additional random strings from the same distribution, which can act as alternative canaries for audits and as same-distribution held-out data for dataset inference. Our evaluation highlights that indeed, using NIDs, we can facilitate post-hoc differential privacy auditing without any retraining and enable dataset inference for any suspect dataset containing NIDs without the need for a private non-member held-out dataset.

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

Parallelizing Tool Execution and LLM Generation for Low-Latency Agent Serving

arXiv:2603.18897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-powered agents execute tasks through a sequential loop of model generation and tool execution. Today's serving systems serialize this loop, leaving tool latency exposed on the task critical path. This paper presents PASTE, a tool-aware agent-serving system that predicts concrete future tool invocations from recurring agent patterns and executes them speculatively while the LLM is still generating. PASTE isolates speculative results until confirmed by the LLM and jointly schedules tool execution and returning LLM sessions to avoid shifting bottlenecks to the GPU. Across deep research, coding, and scientific-agent workloads, PASTE reduces average task completion time by 43.5% and lowers observed tool latency by 1.8x.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CacheRL:Multi-Turn Tool-Calling Agents via Cached Rollouts and Hybrid Reward

We present CacheRL, a system for training small agent foundation models that achieves 92 percent process accuracy on multi-step tool-calling tasks, approaching GPT-5's 94 percent while requiring 100 times less compute. Our approach addresses three challenges in practical agent training: transferring tool-calling knowledge from large models at scale, enabling reinforcement learning without costly live tool execution, and learning robustly from noisy cached environments. CacheRL introduces three key innovations. First, a hybrid thinking trajectory pipeline augments agent trajectories with LLM-generated reasoning traces, producing training examples that teach models not only what tools to call but also why. Second, the CacheAgentLoop eliminates live execution costs through a three-tier fuzzy cache while preserving trajectory fidelity using token-level masking. Third, a cache-tier-aware reward dynamically adjusts answer-quality weights to avoid penalizing models for cache-induced limitations. Through iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), CacheRL improves Qwen3-4B-Thinking's validation reward from 0.43 to 0.78. On public agentic tool-calling benchmarks, our model achieves competitive performance against frontier models such as GPT-5. Ablation studies show that removing knowledge transfer reduces performance by 41 percent, while cache-aware rewards contribute a 17 percent improvement. Interestingly, reinforcement learning improves training stability but yields limited gains beyond strong supervised fine-tuning, suggesting that data quality and reward design play a more important role than complex optimization methods in building practical small agent models.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Non-invasive intracranial pressure waveform reconstruction with deep learning

Purpose: Continuous intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring requires invasive instrumentation, reaching only a narrow subset of critically ill patients. We tested whether deep learning models trained on routinely acquired extracranial signals can reconstruct continuous ICP waveforms at clinically relevant accuracy in an independent external cohort. Methods: In adults admitted to the ICU at a single quaternary health system, five deep learning architectures were trained on high-frequency arterial blood pressure (ABP), photoplethysmography (PPG), and electrocardiography (ECG) waveforms, using invasive (intraparenchymal) ICP as ground truth. Two fusion strategies (early and late) and three training objectives (waveform-morphology, baseline robust regression, and weighted robust regression) were evaluated. Models were externally validated on the held-out MIMIC-III Waveform Database. Performance was assessed by mean absolute error (MAE) and waveform similarity by Pearson correlation (r). Results: We analyzed data from 158 critically ill adults (~5,322 hours) across two quaternary health systems (Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston). Validation MAE ranged from 4.276 mmHg [95% CI 4.269, 4.283] (gated recurrent, late fusion) to 4.946 mmHg [95% CI 4.938, 4.956] (attention-based, early fusion), with Pearson r ranging from 0.599 [95% CI 0.599, 0.600] to 0.722 [95% CI 0.722, 0.723]. The multiscale encoder-decoder model demonstrated the most favorable MAE-correlation tradeoff. Conclusion: This is the first demonstration that continuous ICP waveform reconstruction from bedside signals generalizes across institutions at clinically relevant accuracy, establishing a foundation for non-invasive ICP monitoring and motivating validation across broader populations and ICP ranges.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Preregistration for Experiments with AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents has given rise to a rapidly growing methodological paradigm: "in silico" behavioral experiments. Originally conceived as a way to use AI agents as proxies for human participants in studies of cognition, decision-making, and social dynamics, this approach has taken on new significance – as AI agents increasingly negotiate, transact, and make consequential decisions on behalf of people and organizations, understanding their behavior has become a research priority in its own right. While these experiments with AI agents offer unprecedented advantages in terms of scalability, cost efficiency, and experimental control, they also inherit, and in some cases amplify, methodological vulnerabilities that have long plagued human subjects research. To address these issues, this paper argues that preregistration practices – central to improving the credibility of human subjects experiments – should now be extended to experiments with AI agents. We systematically catalog the researcher degrees of freedom that experiments with AI agents introduce – model selection, prompt wording, settings, and outcome-contingent redesign, for example – and show how the low cost of iteration and lack of reporting norms make these choices both easy to exploit and difficult to detect. We propose a preregistration template tailored to experiments with AI agents and call on conferences, journals, and funding agencies to make preregistration standard practice for this emerging research paradigm.

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

Odds Law: The Decomposition Algebra On How Intelligence Organizes Itself to Solve Difficult Problems Reliably

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We ask a structural question: given unreliable elementary problem-solvers, what organizations of them solve hard problems reliably, and what are the limits? We develop a $decomposition~algebra$: elementary solvers are morphisms in a stochastic category, and four combinators (sequential composition, parallel ensembling, verification gating, and recursive reduction) generate the space of compound solvers. We equip this algebra with two homomorphisms, a $reliability$ valuation into the ordered monoid $([0,1],\le)$ and a $cost$ valuation into a commutative semiring, and we derive the composition laws that govern how reliability flows through structure. Our central results are (i) a $verification~odds~law$ (the result that names this report), showing that a verification gate multiplies the odds of correctness by the verifier's likelihood ratio $\Lambda$, so that $k$ conditionally independent gates yield geometric amplification; (ii) a $reliability~amplification~theorem$, giving target reliability $1-\delta$ at $O(\log 1/\delta)$ verification depth whenever $\Lambda>1$; and (iii) a $threshold~dichotomy$: above the critical parameters reliability can be driven arbitrarily close to one at logarithmic cost, while at or below them no amplification is possible. We then show that $self-organization$ is the least fixed point of a monotone improvement operator on the complete lattice of strategies, and that this fixed point equalizes marginal log-odds gain per unit cost. Finally, we prove matching limits: an information ceiling bounds per-gate amplification by a divergence quantity; shared error causes create a strictly positive voting floor, so diversity is $necessary$ for unbounded amplification. Reliability, in short, is neither free nor magical: it is bought with independent information, arranged by composition, and bounded by the verifier.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A simple approach to the L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy for absolutely continuous dividend strategies

arXiv:2604.13302v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We revisit the optimization problem solved in L{\o}kka & Zervos (2008), i.e., the maximization of dividends, in a Brownian risk model, with the possibility (not the obligation) of making capital injections. Following the approach introduced in Alvarez & Shepp (1998), Renaud & Simard (2021), Renaud et al. (2023), we consider instead absolutely continuous (AC) dividend strategies with an affine bound on the payment rates, while singular capital injections are still allowed. In addition, we incorporate a parameter for the cost of ruin or, said differently, a penalty at ruin in the performance function. We show that the solution is a so-called L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy: the surplus is never ruined by making bail-out payments, or no capital is injected and bankruptcy can occur; in either case, dividends are paid at full rate when the surplus is above a threshold. Our framework allows us to provide explicit conditions to express the dichotomy, either using the cost of capital injections or the cost of ruin as a criterion, which also exposes the underlying structure of the solution. In particular, for some values of the parameters, we show that it is optimal to liquidate. Moreover, we perform a numerical analysis highlighting the range of values generated under this AC affine-bound structure.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Bridging Geographic Bias in Urban Streetscape Inference via Lifelong Learning with Visual-Semantic Pivoting

Authors:

Visual perception of urban streetscapes underpins evidence-based decisions in landscape planning, public health, and place-making. Yet models trained on a few well-photographed metropolises systematically misjudge underrepresented districts, propagating geographic bias into downstream policy. We address this gap with HVSP-LL, a lifelong learning framework that couples a stratified visual-semantic pivoting module with an equity-aware rehearsal mechanism. The pivoting module organises landscape concepts along a three-tier ontology (macro structure, meso composition, micro element) and aligns image features to learnable semantic anchors at each tier, providing transferable representations that resist distributional drift. The lifelong adaptation component sequentially absorbs new urban regions while constraining inter-region perception gaps through a worst-region sample-reweighting objective and a structurally-aware exemplar buffer. We evaluate HVSP-LL on a panoramic streetscape benchmark assembled from twelve cities across four continents and seven perceptual dimensions. The framework attains 0.834 Spearman correlation on the held-out city sequence, an absolute 6.1 point improvement over the strongest continual baseline, and shrinks the inter-city perception gap to 0.094 – a 38% reduction relative to the strongest continual baseline (0.151) and a 57% reduction relative to a representative regularisation baseline (0.218). Ablations confirm that each tier of the pivoting hierarchy contributes monotonically, and the equity-aware rehearsal converts mean backward transfer from -0.038 (without retention) to +0.013, eliminating catastrophic forgetting on the held-out sequence. Our results indicate that hierarchical anchoring is a practical pathway toward geographically equitable streetscape inference at city scale.

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

WorldLines: Benchmarking and Modeling Long-Horizon Stateful Embodied Agents

arXiv:2606.18847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To assist humans over extended periods in real homes, embodied agents must remember user routines, world states, and past interactions. Existing long-term memory benchmarks mainly evaluate language-centric retrieval and question answering, while embodied benchmarks often focus on short-horizon task execution without testing long-term memory use in dynamic environments. We introduce WorldLines, a project-driven benchmark for long-horizon embodied household assistance. It constructs temporally extended household traces with dialogues, actions, execution feedback, object and device state changes, and converts them into evidence-linked samples for Memory QA and Embodied Task Planning. We further propose ObsMem, an observer-grounded memory framework that maintains visibility-aware memories and action-native state trails for state-aware decisions. Experiments reveal persistent challenges in partial observability, overwritten world states, and translating long-term memory into embodied plans, while ObsMem offers a stronger reference architecture for this setting.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SMART: A Flexible, Interpretable, and Scalable Spatio-temporal Brain Atlas from High-Resolution Imaging Data

We introduce SMART, a framework for learning a flexible, interpretable, and scalable spatio-temporal brain atlas from longitudinal high-resolution 3D medical images. Existing approaches to spatio-temporal atlas construction rely on black-box generative models that lack flexibility, limit interpretability, and struggle to scale to high-dimensional data. SMART addresses these challenges by learning a continuous disease-time atlas that decouples global group-wise disease dynamics from their patient-specific anatomical manifestation. Guided by anatomically inspired priors, SMART models interpretable global trajectories of regional progression along a shared disease timeline through region-specific differential equations. Global trajectories are further personalized to individual anatomies via dense diffeomorphic displacements parameterized by a flexible and scalable multi-scale Neural Cellular Automata. Evaluated on five longitudinal MRI datasets in Alzheimer's disease (ADNI-1/GO/2, OASIS-3, AIBL; > 1,300 subjects), SMART produces anatomically meaningful predictions of disease progression and achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy and improved temporal consistency over adversarial and diffusion baselines. Our approach establishes a new paradigm for flexible, interpretable, and scalable modeling of spatio-temporal change in high-dimensional medical image time-series.