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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

PaAno+: Multiscale Encoding and Cross-Variable Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.20055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series anomaly detection has significant practical value for industrial and medical monitoring, as well as other critical domains. Current Transformer- and large-model-based detection approaches incur excessive computational overhead, while existing lightweight alternatives are constrained by insufficient feature extraction and inadequate modeling of dependencies across multivariate variables. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this study develops a lightweight, efficient anomaly detection model, dubbed PaAno, within the patch-oriented representation learning paradigm. In the encoder module, a multiscale feature-extraction backbone is constructed using convolutional kernels with differentiated receptive fields to capture hierarchical temporal characteristics; subsequent cross-scale adaptive attention aggregation, combined with residual connection optimization, further stabilizes feature representation learning. A cross-variable fusion attention module is embedded to explicitly characterize inter-variable correlations, empowering the model to identify anomalous patterns amid intricate operational conditions. Moreover, a novel pretext task based on temporal patch-window sorting is customized to uncover intrinsic structural properties of time series, and triplet loss is leveraged to optimize the patch embedding space for enhanced feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PaAno achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on both univariate and multivariate tasks, yielding significant performance gains across evaluation metrics, including VUS-PR, relative to the original PaAno. Leveraging a compact network design, the presented model achieves favorable computational efficiency, enabling deployment on resource-limited terminals for real-time anomaly inference.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer

arXiv:2606.13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once. In practice, however, this benefit is often reduced by the cost of computing a temporal decay term and multiplying it by the synaptic weight. We address this issue by turning a physical hardware "bug," the natural signal decay in optoelectronic devices, into the main computation of TTFS, named Otters++. Specifically, we use the measured decay of a custom In$_2$O$_3$ optoelectronic synapse to directly realize the TTFS temporal term, removing the need for explicit digital decay computation. To scale this idea to Transformer models, we establish a layer-wise functional equivalence between the Otters++ and a quantized neural network (QNN), and develop a hybrid training method that uses device-faithful SNN computation in the forward pass and QNN straight-through gradients through the equivalent QNN path in the backward pass, together with model distillation. This avoids differentiation through discrete first-spike events and reduces the over-sparsity problem in direct TTFS-SNN training. We further make training aware of measured device noise by sampling run-to-run variation, and refine the system-level energy model by accounting for device sharing and multi-hop communication. On GLUE dataset, Otters++ improves the average score to 84.17\% while maintaining a clear energy advantage over prior spiking Transformer baselines. These results show that physically grounded TTFS computing can be efficient, trainable, and robust under realistic hardware effects.

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

TLA-Prover: Verifiable TLA+ Specification Synthesis via Preference-Optimized Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.06133v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TLA+ is a formal specification language for verifying distributed systems and safety-critical protocols. Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce TLA+ specifications that fail the TLC model checker for semantic reasons. Across 25 LLMs, the best public baseline is 26.6% syntactic parse and 8.6% semantic model-check. We present TLA-Prover, a 20-billion-parameter model for TLA+ specification synthesis. Training combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on verified examples with repair-based group-relative policy optimization (GRPO). In the GRPO stage, the model learns to fix its own rejected specifications. We also train a direct preference optimization (DPO) variant from the same SFT checkpoint as an ablation. TLC provides the reward signal directly, with no learned reward model. Four tiers grade each output: Bronze (parses), Silver (no warnings), Gold (passes TLC), and Diamond. To reach Diamond, the model's correctness property is automatically altered in a small way; TLC must then detect a violation. If TLC still passes, the property was always-true and contributes nothing; the output fails Diamond. TLA-Prover reaches 9/30 (i.e. pass@1 = 30%) at both Gold and Diamond on a held-out 30-problem benchmark. This is roughly 3.5x the 8.6% untuned baseline. The DPO variant reaches 20% at Diamond. Gold and Diamond coincide at every checkpoint; this prevents the trivial-property failure mode.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Computational Safety for Generative AI: A Hypothesis Testing Perspective

Authors:

arXiv:2502.12445v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI safety is a rapidly growing area of research that seeks to prevent the harm and misuse of frontier AI technology, particularly with respect to generative AI (GenAI) tools that are capable of creating realistic and high-quality content through text prompts. Examples of such tools include large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. As the performance of various leading GenAI models approaches saturation due to similar training data sources and neural network architecture designs, the development of reliable safety guardrails has become a key differentiator for responsibility and sustainability. This paper presents a formalization of the concept of computational safety, which is a mathematical framework that enables the quantitative assessment, formulation, and study of safety challenges in GenAI through the lens of signal processing theory and methods. In particular, we explore two exemplary categories of computational safety challenges in GenAI that can be formulated as hypothesis testing problems. For the safety of model input, we show how sensitivity analysis and loss landscape analysis can be used to detect malicious prompts with jailbreak attempts. For the safety of model output, we elucidate how statistical signal processing can be used to detect AI-generated content. Finally, we discuss key open research challenges, opportunities, and the essential role of signal processing in computational AI safety.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques

arXiv:2509.07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.

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

Tensor-based second-order causal discovery

arXiv:2606.18074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery seeks to uncover the causal dependencies among variables. For this purpose, we propose an algorithm called Tensor-based Second-order Causal Discovery (TSCD). Its input is a tensor obtained from the covariance matrices of observational and interventional data. Assuming the causal dependencies follow a linear structural equation model on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), TSCD outputs the DAG and the functions on its edges, requiring only that the noise variables are uncorrelated. We also implement a version of the approach for nonlinear models. Our focus on second-order statistics (via the covariance matrices) is motivated by their statistical and computational efficiency relative to higher-order moments, their identifiability relative to first-order statistics, and that they work regardless of whether the variables are Gaussian. We show that TSCD has identifiable causal order and parameters from a number of interventions that is logarithmic in the number of variables. Experiments show that TSCD is robust to noise, competitive with existing methods, and scales to hundreds of variables.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Beyond Domains: Reusing Web Skills via Transferable Interaction Patterns

Large language model (LLM) web agents are usually deployed as tool callers: each turn, the model reads a fresh page observation and emits one structured tool action. When every action is a low-level primitive, horizons grow quickly and so do policy-facing LLM completions, dominating latency and cost on benchmarks such as Mind2Web and WebArena. Recent systems therefore wrap repeated interaction fragments as web skills: callable tools built from successful trajectories or induced programs, so one call can replace several primitives. However, prior skill libraries are still triggered mainly by instruction similarity or coarse site metadata, which yields low skill reuse on held-out sites and leaves much of the potential step and token reduction on the table. We present SkillMigrator, an agent that learns reusable web skills and transfers them across sites by matching layout structure rather than specific element references. Each induced skill is stored as a transferable interaction pattern (TIP): the skill paired with a structural sketch of the snapshot at induction time. At test time, SkillMigrator retrieves TIPs by layout similarity and grounds their references on the live page. The rest of the stack is standard: accessibility-snapshot observations with stable references, and fixed tool calling over primitives plus skill invocations. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, SkillMigrator reduces the average LLM-action count on successful trajectories by 8-10% across both WebArena and Mind2Web at matched success rate.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Distributed General-Purpose Agent Networks: Architecture, Key Mechanisms, and Prototypes

arXiv:2606.17368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models have accelerated the transition from passive conversational assistants to autonomous agents that can understand goals, plan actions, invoke tools, and execute multi-step tasks. Yet the capability of a single agent remains constrained by its local data, tool permissions, runtime environment, and governance boundary. This paper studies distributed general-purpose agent networks: open peer-to-peer networks in which heterogeneous agents deployed on personal devices, edge nodes, or autonomous computing environments can discover one another, establish trust, negotiate cooperation rules, and execute open-ended tasks. We argue that such networks cannot be obtained by simply combining existing peer-to-peer overlays with conventional multi-agent systems. Unlike traditional P2P networks, agent networks must propagate semantic declarations about intentions, capabilities, states, and cooperation constraints. We therefore propose a layered architecture centered on a protocol adaptation layer that connects upper-level task semantics with lower-level network operations. Based on this architecture, the paper identifies three core mechanism problems: semantic announcement propagation for collaborator discovery, verifiable identity and multi-topic reputation for cooperation governance, and semantic-gradient mechanism design for open task execution. For each problem, we present a technical route, including bodyless gossip with sequential logs, BAID-based identity binding with MG-EigenTrust reputation, and a Stackelberg-style mechanism-generation loop driven by semantic attribution feedback. We further report prototype overhead results for BAID-style tiered verification and mechanism-level simulations of MG-EigenTrust under cross-topic disguise-collusion attacks. The resulting framework provides a system-level foundation for open, trustworthy, and scalable agent collaboration.

12.
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.

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

Enhanced Low-Density Region Exploration in Classifier-Guided Diffusion Models Through Modified Reverse Diffusion Sampling

arXiv:2606.13347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative models for high-fidelity image synthesis, particularly in their classifier-free guided and classifier-guided forms. However, standard classifier guidance concentrates probability mass around high-density class mean, leading to poor coverage of rare samples in the tails of the class-conditional distributions. Recent work on diffusion-based tail sampling mitigates this by training an additional low-density-seeking classifier with a synthetic-vs-real discriminator, at the cost of additional networks and training. In parallel, a number of samplers and distillation techniques accelerate or refine diffusion sampling, but do not explicitly address long-tail coverage. We propose a purely sampling-time, density-aware extension of classifier-guided conditional diffusion model that targets low-density regions without any additional training. We have applied guidance at noisy images not on predicted noise like most diffusion models. Starting from a pretrained conditional diffusion model and classifier on ImageNet, we modify the guided reverse dynamics by steering trajectories toward low-confidence regions via the modified classifier gradient, and at each time step, we also guide the sampling process toward the predicted real image. 1st guidance helps explore low-probability samples, and 2nd guidance helps to generate samples to be close to the real data manifold. The proposed sampler consistently improves ADM model recall at 64x64 resolution while maintaining a comparable FID, and with a 256x256 ADM model, we showed the results visually with different combinations of both guidance. We also showed that standard ADM classifier guidance, combined with predicted real image guidance, helps generate high perceptual quality samples with a 256x256 ADM model on ImageNet.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Machine-Checked Itô Calculus for Brownian Motion

arXiv:2606.15089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a machine-checked development of the $L^2$ Itô calculus of Brownian motion on a bounded time interval $[0,T]$, formalized in Lean 4 on top of Mathlib and the BrownianMotion package. The development contains: the construction of the Itô integral as an isometry of Hilbert spaces, from a predictable-rectangle $\pi$-system through the density of simple adapted processes; the Itô integral as a process, proved to be an $L^2$-continuous martingale through a single structural identity (the integral at time $t$ is the conditional-expectation projection of its terminal value onto $\mathcal{F}t$), from which adaptedness, the martingale property, the contraction bound, and both the terminal and the time-indexed Itô isometries follow as corollaries; and Itô's formula for $C^3$ functions with bounded derivatives, including its time-dependent form $df = f_x,dB + (f_t + \tfrac12 f{xx}),dt$, obtained by a discrete-to-continuous argument through weighted quadratic variation and explicit $L^2$ remainder bounds. To our knowledge this includes the first machine-checked proof of Itô's formula, and the first machine-checked construction of the Itô integral as a martingale-valued process, in any proof assistant. We are deliberate about the boundary: the theory is the $L^2$ theory on $[0,T]$ with bounded-derivative integrand classes; localization to the unrestricted $C^2$ formula, integrators beyond Brownian motion, and pathwise statements are out of scope, and we say precisely why and where. The development is roughly 7,200 lines of Lean across 22 modules; every theorem is sorry-free, the axioms of each headline result are pinned to Mathlib's classical defaults by a build-enforced gate, and the whole is reproducible from a pinned toolchain.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Orcheo: A Modular Full-Stack Platform for Conversational Search

arXiv:2602.14710v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conversational search (CS) requires a complex software engineering pipeline that integrates query reformulation, ranking, and response generation. CS researchers currently face two barriers: the lack of a unified framework for efficiently sharing contributions with the community, and the difficulty of deploying end-to-end prototypes needed for user evaluation. We introduce Orcheo, an open-source platform designed to bridge this gap. Orcheo offers three key advantages: (i) A modular architecture promotes component reuse through single-file node modules, facilitating sharing and reproducibility in CS research; (ii) Production-ready infrastructure bridges the prototype-to-system gap via dual execution modes, secure credential management, and execution telemetry, with built-in AI coding support that lowers the learning curve; (iii) Starter-kit assets include 45+ off-the-shelf components for query understanding, ranking, and response generation, enabling the rapid bootstrapping of complete CS pipelines. We describe the framework architecture and validate Orcheo's utility through case studies that highlight modularity and ease of use. Orcheo is released as open source under the MIT License at https://github.com/AI-Colleagues/orcheo.

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

PromptMN: Pseudo Prompting Language

Prompting has become the primary interface between humans and generative AI, yet many natural language prompts remain fragile: roles, goals, constraints, and expected outputs are often buried in prose or left implicit. In agentic and software development workflows, a misread at the first handoff can propagate through every step, since a significant portion of agent failures stem from context ambiguities rather than model limitations. This paper introduces PromptMN, a pseudo-prompting domain-specific language that annotates natural language with compact, %-prefixed typed directives covering roles, goals, requirements, priorities, constraints, plans, inputs, and outputs. Semantic resolution lets authors write in any order while the model interprets directives by function. PromptMN sits between informal prompting and programming-style pseudocode: structured enough to be inspectable and reusable, yet lightweight enough for analysts, managers, developers, and stakeholders across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). PromptMN also pairs with reverse prompt engineering. Asking a model to restate a desired outcome as PromptMN lets users inspect the inferred roles, goals, constraints, and missing assumptions before acting, reducing repair cycles and yielding a reusable artifact for aligning people and AI tools. PromptMN's feasibility is evaluated across several frontier models, including Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.5. The models correctly resolved PromptMN instructions, including complex structures such as repetition, conditionals, methods, and a prime-checking task, without fine-tuning. The same vocabulary applies across new codebases, maintenance, and redesign in the SDLC scenarios presented. While large-scale validation remains future work, these early results suggest PromptMN is a practical step toward clearer, more reviewable human-to-AI interaction.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EvoBrowseComp: Benchmarking Search Agents on Evolving Knowledge

Search Agents – large language models augmented with search tools – have intensified the need for future-proof evaluation benchmarks. Existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp rely on static knowledge, making them vulnerable to test-set contamination and parametric memorization. Consequently, models can achieve high scores through fact recall rather than genuine retrieval, obscuring true browsing competence via reasoning shortcuts. In this paper, we introduce EvoBrowseComp, an evolving benchmark of 400 English and 400 Chinese contamination-free complex questions synthesized via live-web traversal. To collect these questions, we design a three-agent collaborative framework: (1) a QA synthesis agent that retrieves fresh knowledge from the live web to synthesize QA pairs; (2) an information filtering agent that filters retrieved knowledge in terms of credibility and popularity to block parametric shortcuts; and (3) a high-level guidance agent that formalizes questions into reasoning graphs to reduce logical redundancy and shortcuts in synthesized QA pairs. Because the framework supports fully automated synthesis, EvoBrowseComp can be regularly updated to prevent data contamination and maintain temporal freshness. Extensive experiments confirm its great difficulty, requiring broad horizontal search. It establishes a scalable paradigm for auto-updatable, high-difficulty benchmarking that keeps pace with both evolving world knowledge and advancing agent capabilities.

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

Infant Spontaneous Movement Noise Improves Exploration in Deep RL

arXiv:2606.16590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is commonly implemented as temporally uncorrelated white noise. However, recent works show that temporally correlated colored noise can improve exploration efficiency by producing smooth trajectories with better coverage of the state space. We inquire whether action noise inspired by infant spontaneous movements can also improve exploration in deep RL. We find that the power spectral densities of babies' end-effector velocities follow a colored noise process where the spectral exponent increases with age. Inspired by this developmental pattern, we introduce a mechanism that progressively increases the temporal auto-correlation of exploration noise during RL training, matching the infant statistics. Experiments across several RL environments show that infant-inspired noise produces structured exploratory behavior and can improve learning efficiency compared to conventional exploration strategies. These findings suggest that human motor and cognitive development can provide useful guidance for designing learning mechanisms in artificial agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/trieschlab/baby-noise-rl.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Central Limit Theorems for Stochastic Gradient Descent Quantile Estimators

arXiv:2503.02178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops asymptotic theory for quantile estimation via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate. The quantile loss function is neither smooth nor strongly convex. Beyond conventional perspectives and techniques, we view quantile SGD iteration as an irreducible, periodic, and positive recurrent Markov chain, which cyclically converges to its unique stationary distribution regardless of the arbitrarily fixed initialization. To derive the exact form of the stationary distribution, we analyze the structure of its characteristic function by exploiting the stationary equation. We also derive tight bounds for its moment generating function (MGF) and tail probabilities. Synthesizing the aforementioned approaches, we prove that the centered and standardized stationary distribution converges to a Gaussian distribution as the learning rate $\eta\rightarrow0$. This finding provides the first central limit theorem (CLT)-type theoretical guarantees for the quantile SGD estimator with constant learning rates. We further propose a recursive algorithm to construct confidence intervals of the estimators with statistical guarantees. Numerical studies demonstrate the effective finite-sample performance of the online estimator and inference procedure. The theoretical tools developed in this study are of independent interest for investigating general SGD algorithms formulated as Markov chains, particularly in non-strongly convex and non-smooth settings.

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

Branching Flows: Discrete, Continuous, and Manifold Flow Matching with Splits and Deletions

arXiv:2511.09465v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

TSA: Temporal Slot Activation for Persistent Object-Centric Video Representation

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into temporally persistent entity representations. Existing recurrent video slot-attention methods propagate a fixed set of slots across frames, but typically assume unconditional slot propagation: every slot is updated and decoded at every frame, regardless of whether its corresponding object is visible. We show that this design violates a basic lifecycle requirement for persistent slots: when an object is absent or fully occluded, its slot should preserve its previous state and avoid explaining unrelated visible content. Instead, unconditional propagation creates two failure pathways: update-induced state drift, where current-frame evidence overwrites the absent object's representation, and decoder-induced reconstruction interference, where the inactive slot remains coupled to reconstruction through decoder attention. We propose Temporal Slot Activation (TSA), a mechanism that learns a per-slot, per-frame activation score $\alpha_{k,t} \in (0, 1)$ without visibility supervision. TSA uses this activation as a shared latent control variable for slot lifecycle modeling. When a slot is inactive, TSA anchors its state to the previous slot via activation-gated updating and suppresses its decoder participation through an activation-dependent additive bias on attention logits before softmax normalization. This jointly reduces state drift and reconstruction-driven interference. To improve decisions under partial occlusion and gradual reappearance, TSA further conditions activation prediction on a per-slot temporal memory produced by a Temporal Context Encoder. We evaluate TSA on MOVi-C/E, YT-VIS, and OVIS benchmarks using both standard and tracking-based metrics (FG-ARI, mBO, IDF1, HOTA). TSA consistently improves object decomposition and temporal identity preservation, with large gains on long, heavily occluded videos.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Algebraic Dead Directions in LayerNorm Transformers: A Forward-Pass-Only Diagnostic at LLM Scale

arXiv:2606.19491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained transformers sit near singular minima of the loss, where the Fisher information metric degenerates along dead directions: directions in parameter space along which the directional Fisher vanishes. Locating such a direction normally needs a forward pass and an eigendecomposition of activations, or a sampling-based complexity estimate; none returns a direction computable from the network's parameters alone. We give one, for LayerNorm transformers. The inverse-scale direction $\gamma^{-1}/\|\gamma^{-1}\|$ of the LayerNorm affine is an exact algebraic kernel of the post-final-norm centred activation covariance, for any input distribution, and induces a corresponding dead direction in parameter space. It is read from the LN scale parameter alone, with no forward or backward pass and no eigensolve: the cheapest dead-direction read, specific to LayerNorm. We test it on $14$ pretrained transformers ($9$ LayerNorm, $5$ RMSNorm; $160$M-$35$B; language and vision objectives). At random initialisation the predicted direction matches the measured bottom singular direction (one forward pass, direct SVD) to four decimal places on $9/9$ LayerNorm models, and is correctly absent on $5/5$ RMSNorm models, which lack the mean-subtraction projector that creates it. On the trained checkpoint the covariance eigenvalue along this direction deepens by ${\sim}10^3\times$ and further dead directions open; the random-init-to-trained gap is a one-forward-pass, per-checkpoint readout of singular structure along the predicted coordinate. Two consequences follow in closed form: the residual stream's smallest singular value is preserved block-to-block on $13/14$ transformers measured on their own input distribution, the one exception (Gemma$4$-$31$B) a genuine dead direction the same read pinpoints; and the kernel direction's presence classifies a transformer's normalisation from the parameters alone.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Nanocrystal-tailored recombination for all-perovskite tandem solar modules

Authors:

The commercialization of all-perovskite tandem solar modules is hindered by the reliance on the conventional gold-based tunnel recombination junction (TRJ)1,2. Specifically, this TRJ introduces substantial near-infrared parasitic absorption3 and suffers from interfacial instability4, limiting both photocurrent generation and operational durability. Here, we develop a solution-processed interconnecting layer based on surface-engineered indium oxide (In2O3) nanocrystals featuring high optical transparency, wherein controlled nanocrystal morphology and tailored ligand chemistry enable smooth interfacial contact and favorable energy level alignment. Critically, we introduce a phosphonic acid additive into the lead–tin (Pb–Sn) perovskite precursor, which synergistically improves the electronic contact with the In2O3 recombination layer, thereby enhancing hole extraction. In addition, the additive regulates perovskite crystallization to mitigate residual strain during film formation, ensuring high-quality large-area deposits. This coordinated interfacial and crystallization engineering strategy simultaneously enhances carrier recombination efficiency at the interconnection layer, improves carrier extraction, and promotes large-area film uniformity in all-perovskite tandems. As a result, a 65-cm2 all-perovskite tandem solar module achieves a certified power conversion efficiency of 26.2%5, with an open-circuit voltage of 2.182 V, a fill factor of 77.4%, and a short-circuit current density of 15.6 mA cm-2 in terms of averaged subcell performance, measured by Japan Electrical Safety and Environment Technology Laboratories (JET). This marks a significant advance toward scalable perovskite tandem photovoltaics.

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arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Note on the local calculation of decoherence of quantum superposition in the static black holes

arXiv:2606.14178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the decoherence of a quantum spatial superposition of a static particle in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes. By treating the particle as a localized classical source coupled to a quantum scalar field, we reformulate the decoherence process in the Danielson-Satishchandran-Wald (DSW) gedankenexperiment through coherent state generation and derive the local expression for the decoherence functional in terms of the Wightman function. In the long-time limit, the decoherence rate is shown to be characterized by the low-frequency behavior of the Wightman function. We then employ the asymptotic matching method to calculate the analytical expressions of the Wightman functions in the Boulware, Unruh, and Hartle-Hawking vacua. We show that the decoherence behavior depends on the quantum state of the environmental field. While the Boulware vacuum gives vanishing decoherence for a static superposition, the thermal effects associated with Hawking radiation in the Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacua can induce nonvanishing decoherence.