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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Tail-Respecting Splitting Numerical Scheme for Lévy-Driven SDEs With Superlinear Drifts

arXiv:2504.07255v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present an explicit numerical approximation scheme, denoted by $\{X^n\}$, for the effective simulation of solutions $X$ to a multivariate stochastic differential equation (SDE) with a superlinearly growing $\kappa$-dissipative drift, where $\kappa>1$, driven by a multiplicative heavy-tailed Lévy process that has a finite $p$-th moment, with $p>0$. We show that the strong $L^{p_X}$-convergence $\sup_{t\in[0,T]}\mathbf E \|X^n_t-X_t\|^{p_X}=\mathcal O (h_n^{\gamma})$ holds for any $p_X\in (0,p+\kappa-1)$, which is exactly the range where the $p_X$-moment of the solution is known to be finite. Additionally, for any $p_X\in (0,p)$ we establish strong uniform convergence: $\mathbf E\sup_{t\in[0,T]} \|X^n_t-X_t\|^{p_X}=\mathcal{O} ( h_n^{\delta} )$. In both cases we determine the convergence rates $\gamma$ and $\delta$. In the special case of SDEs driven solely by a Brownian motion, our numerical scheme preserves super-exponential moments of the solution. The scheme $\{X^n\}$ is realized as a combination of a well-known Euler method with a Lie-Trotter type splitting technique.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A comparative and critical study of EEGNet for fNIRS-driven cognitive load classification

arXiv:2606.16160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately classifying cognitive load from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals remains a significant challenge due to temporal variability, inter-subject differences, and sensitivity to preprocessing choices. This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of EEGNet for fNIRS-based cognitive load classification by systematically examining the effects of temporal segmentation strategies (overlapping vs. non-overlapping), window lengths (10s, 20s, 30s), feature extraction methods (Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA)), learning rate configurations (fixed and adaptive), and evaluation protocols (random split vs. subject-independent (SI)). Results from random-split experiments show that overlapping segmentation, combined with smaller fixed learning rates (0.01-0.001), yields the highest accuracies, due to temporal redundancy and dense sampling of hemodynamic transitions. However, SI evaluation reveals a substantial drop in accuracy, demonstrating limited generalization to unseen participants. Under SI evaluation, non-overlapping segmentation outperformed overlapping windows, with the best accuracy of 56.11% achieved using PCA features with a 20-second window and a 0.1 learning rate. These findings indicate that eliminating temporal redundancy helps the model learn more robust and generalizable representations of cognitive load across individuals. Although adaptive learning rate strategy improved training stability, it did not surpass the performance of optimally selected fixed learning rates. The study highlights the critical role of segmentation strategy and learning rate selection in improving model generalization and identifies methodological considerations essential for developing reliable, real-time, and SI cognitive load classification systems using fNIRS.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Data Augmentations for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora. Standard autoregressive (AR) pretraining overfits severely in this setting, reaching its optimum early and then continuously deteriorating. We investigate data augmentation as a regularizer to mitigate this overfitting and enable productive training for hundreds of epochs on the same data. We introduce three orthogonal categories of augmentation for AR pretraining: token-level noise (masking, random replacement), sequence permutations (right-to-left prediction, Fill-in-the-Middle), and target offset prediction ($x_{t+i}$ for $i > 1$). Through systematic ablations, we find that individual augmentations delay overfitting and lower validation loss relative to the baseline, with random token replacement achieving the best minimum loss among individual methods. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss. Our experiments demonstrate that data augmentations mitigate AR pretraining's data inefficiency and offer a promising solution to the data-constrained regime. All code and data are available at https://github.com/michaelchen-lab/data-augmentations-for-pretraining

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cost-effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic versus traditional in-person fracture clinic care for adults with acute simple fractures: a protocol for a health economic evaluation within the RECITAL trial

ABSTRACT Introduction Traditional in-person fracture clinics are often overcrowded and inconvenient for patients. Virtual fracture clinics aim to address some of these concerns by improving the efficiency of the orthopaedic service and reducing unnecessary interventions while maintaining safety and quality of care. The RECITAL trial is a non-inferiority randomised controlled trial comparing follow-up care provided at a virtual fracture clinic for people with acute simple fractures to follow-up care provided at an in-person fracture clinic. This study describes the protocol for an economic evaluation of RECITAL where the primary aim is to investigate the cost-effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic compared with traditional in-person fracture clinic care from a health system perspective. Methods and analysis The RECITAL trial recruited 312 participants with acute simple fractures and randomised them to receive follow-up care provided at a virtual fracture clinic or follow-up care provided at an in-person fracture clinic. We will conduct a within-trial analysis from a health system perspective (primary analysis), as well as a health service, patient and societal perspective. The economic evaluation will estimate the difference in the cost of resource inputs on an intention to treat basis used by participants in the two arms of the trial, allowing comparisons to be made between the in-person and virtual fracture clinics. Data for intervention costs and healthcare utilisation will be collected from trial records, hospital electronic medical records and district performance units. The results of the economic evaluation will be expressed in terms of incremental cost per utility weight gained at 12 weeks and will be plotted on a cost-effectiveness plane. Bootstrapping by resampling will be used to estimate 95% confidence intervals around costs and outcomes, and to calculate the confidence intervals around the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio. A cost-effectiveness acceptability curve (CEAC) will be plotted, which will provide information about the probability that an intervention is cost-effective, given the level of a decision makers willingness to pay for each additional outcome. Ethics and Dissemination The trail was approved by the SLHD Ethics Review Committee (RPAH Zone) (X23-0200 and 2023/ETH01038). The findings will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed journal and conference presentations. Trial registration number The trial was prospectively registered on the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR; 12623000934640)

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

Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes. To address this, a growing body of work has sought to extend masked dLLMs with self-correcting (remasking) capabilities. One appealing subset of these methods does so in a training-free, post-hoc manner based on token confidences, with encouraging early reported results. In this work, we revisit the empirical evaluation of a representative post-hoc remasking method, WINO [Hong et al., 2026], and find that under standard decoding settings (shorter block lengths) it brings little-to-no benefit over confidence-based unmasking alone [Wu et al., 2025]. Extending the evaluation to non-greedy decoding, we find that while confidence-based remasking can mitigate errors introduced by increased stochasticity to some extent, it also exacerbates the diversity collapse previously reported for confidence-based unmasking. Overall, our results show that the benefits of post-hoc confidence-based remasking are highly setting-dependent, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

$\alpha$-fair heterogeneous agent reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.13076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperation in multi-agent systems is typically optimized through utilitarian objectives that maximize overall efficiency but fail to account for reward distribution, often resulting in inequitable "leader-follower" dynamics. While fairness-based approaches encourage pro-social behaviors where every agent benefits from cooperation, many current algorithms - including those utilizing reward shaping - break the stationarity of Markov Games or lack rigorous theoretical guarantees. This creates a critical gap between fair objective methods and theoretically safe learning frameworks. We propose a novel framework that bridges $\alpha$-fairness with Heterogeneous-Agent Trust Region Learning (HATRL), ensuring monotonic improvement and convergence toward Nash Equilibria. Our approach leverages a fair advantage function that dynamically weights agent utilities based on their expected returns, allowing the global objective to transition from purely utilitarian efficiency to $\alpha$-fairness welfare based on the parameter $\alpha$. We introduce two practical algorithms, $\alpha$-fair HATRPO and $\alpha$-fair HAPPO, and demonstrate through experiments in sequential social dilemmas like CleanUp and CommonHarvest that they perform better than HATRL's algorithms from a utilitarian point of view while achieving socially higher outcomes.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Surveying GenAI-based Automation in Printed Circuit Board Design and Test

arXiv:2606.17074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used for applications in the hardware and software domains. It purports to reduce the manual effort involved in the development and testing of complex systems before release. Within the hardware space, most tasks have focused on design automation of integrated circuits, particularly with hardware description languages. However, other types of hardware also exist! In this survey, we instead examine how GenAI has been and is being across the printed circuit board (PCB) design life cycle. This includes everything from supply chains, system specification, circuit design, layout and optimisation, validation and test, and PCB assembly and distribution. Through this lens we present a taxonomy of discovered works, categorising them according to their intent and contributions. This survey also identifies key technical challenges that GenAI faces in this space, such as domain-specific data scarcity and limited support for integration with existing PCB tools. Finally, future research directions are discussed: our survey shows that there are many opportunities remaining when considering how GenAI may be integrated into various tasks in PCB design and test.

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

Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Concatenated Matrix SVD: Compression Bounds, Incremental Approximation, and Error-Constrained Clustering

arXiv:2601.11626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large collections of matrices arise throughout modern machine learning, signal processing, and scientific computing, where they are commonly compressed by concatenation followed by truncated singular value decomposition (SVD). This strategy enables parameter sharing and efficient reconstruction and has been widely adopted across domains ranging from multi-view learning and signal processing to neural network compression. However, it leaves a fundamental question unanswered: which matrices can be safely concatenated and compressed together under explicit reconstruction error constraints? Existing approaches rely on heuristic or architecture-specific grouping and provide no principled guarantees on the resulting SVD approximation error. In the present work, we introduce a theory-driven framework for compression-aware clustering of matrices under SVD compression constraints. Our analysis establishes new spectral bounds for horizontally concatenated matrices, deriving global upper bounds on the optimal rank-$r$ SVD reconstruction error from lower bounds on singular value growth. The first bound follows from Weyl-type monotonicity under blockwise extensions, while the second leverages singular values of incremental residuals to yield tighter, per-block guarantees. We further develop an efficient approximate estimator based on incremental truncated SVD that tracks dominant singular values without forming the full concatenated matrix. Therefore, we propose three clustering algorithms that merge matrices only when their predicted joint SVD compression error remains below a user-specified threshold. The algorithms span a trade-off between speed, provable accuracy, and scalability, enabling compression-aware clustering with explicit error control.

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

Mosaic: Data-Free Knowledge Distillation via Mixture-of-Experts for Heterogeneous Distributed Environments

arXiv:2505.19699v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables clients to collaboratively train models while preserving data privacy. However, the coexistence of model and data heterogeneity gives rise to inconsistent representations and divergent optimization dynamics across clients, ultimately hindering robust global performance. To transcend these challenges, we propose Mosaic, a novel data-free knowledge distillation framework tailored for heterogeneous distributed environments. Mosaic first trains local generative models to approximate each client's personalized distribution, enabling synthetic data generation that safeguards privacy through strict separation from real data. Subsequently, Mosaic forms a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) from client models based on their specialized knowledge, and distills it into a global model using the generated data. To further enhance the MoE architecture, Mosaic integrates expert predictions via a lightweight meta model trained on a few representative prototypes. Extensive experiments on standard image and multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that Mosaic consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under both model and data heterogeneity. The source code has been published at https://github.com/Wings-Of-Disaster/Mosaic.

12.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Histology-informed spatial domain identification through multi-view graph convolutional networks

Authors:

by Huihui Zhang, Jiaxing Chang, Zirong Li, Yue Sun, Pinli Hu, Haoxiu Wang, Hang Yang, Yonglin Ren, Xingtan Zhang, Zehua Chen, Kok Wai Wong, Haojing Shao Identifying spatial domains is crucial in spatial transcriptomics, yet effectively integrating gene expression, spatial location, and histology remains challenging. We present STESH, a Spatial Transcriptomics clustering method that combines Expression, Spatial information and Histology. STESH extracts histological features using a convolutional neural network and generates expression, histology, spatial, and collaborative convolution modules for a multi-view graph convolutional network with a decoder and attention mechanism. We evaluated STESH on multiple tissue types and technology platforms. STESH consistently outperformed ten state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior clustering accuracy with the highest scores in adjusted Rand index, normalized mutual information, and Fowlkes-Mallows index.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

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

A non-asymptotic bound on the TV distance between a Wishart matrix and an appropriately scaled GOE matrix

arXiv:2606.16018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this note, we prove a non-asymptotic version of a theorem by Bubeck, Ding, Eldan, and Rácz, showing that a Wishart matrix is close in total variation to an affine transformation of a GOE matrix. The proof mirrors the proof given by Bubeck et al., with some changes made to make it non-asymptotic.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

From Awareness to Action: Understanding and Overcoming the Research-Practice Gap in Algorithmic Fairness for Public Health

arXiv:2606.11214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Algorithmic fairness is essential for responsible ML-driven public health research, yet its practical implementation remains limited. To investigate this awareness-action gap, we conducted a sequential mixed-methods study comprising expert interviews, an online survey, and systematic mapping. The expert interviews informed the design of the survey, which in turn revealed fragmented definitions of fairness, limited training and guidance, reliance on external sources, and rare use of formal assessment, mitigation, or monitoring. These findings were subsequently mapped onto three established research-practice gap lenses: the Knowledge-Practice Gap, the Knowledge-to-Action Cycle, and the Knowing-Doing Gap, each offering complementary perspectives. Building on this synthesis, we introduce the Fairness-to-Action framework, which integrates methodological, organizational, and systemic dimensions to identify where translation of algorithmic fairness knowledge stalls. Our analysis shows that fairness remains weakly institutionalized, translation mechanisms are externally driven, and system-level priorities continue to emphasize accuracy over fairness. These insights suggest critical leverage points for advancing safe, fair, and ethical ML-driven public health research practice.

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

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

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

Test-Time Training for Robust Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) enables counting arbitrary object categories specified by text prompts, offering substantially greater flexibility than conventional closed-set counting. However, existing TOOC methods are developed and evaluated primarily on ideal images, while real-world scenes often suffer from adverse conditions such as rain, fog, darkness, and sensor noise, which severely degrade visual quality and impair vision-language alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Robust-TOOC, the first benchmark for evaluating TOOC under diverse corruption conditions, which covers six representative degradation types: rain, fog, darkness, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and mixed corruption. To improve robustness while preserving the original counting architecture, we propose Dual-TTT, a dual-architecture test-time training framework for TOOC. Specifically, during test-time training, Dual-TTT updates only the Text-guided Lightweight Denoising module (TL-Denoiser), while keeping the original counting network frozen. Inspired by diffusion models, the TL-Denoiser is optimized to remove corruption-aware noise from image representations under degraded conditions. Since only the TL-Denoiser is trained at test time, Dual-TTT is annotation-free and can be seamlessly integrated into existing TOOC models without modifying their original architecture. Extensive experiments on multiple recent TOOC baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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

Global Offshore Wind Infrastructure: Deployment and Operational Dynamics from Dense Sentinel-1 Time Series

The offshore wind energy sector is expanding rapidly, increasing the need for independent, high-temporal-resolution monitoring of infrastructure deployment and operation at global scale. While Earth Observation based offshore wind infrastructure mapping has matured for spatial localization, existing open datasets lack temporally dense and semantically fine-grained information on construction and operational dynamics. We introduce a global Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) time series data corpus that resolves deployment and operational phases of offshore wind infrastructure from 2016Q1 to 2025Q1. Building on an updated object detection workflow, we compile 15,606 time series at detected infrastructure locations, with overall 14,840,637 events as analysis-ready 1D SAR backscatter profiles, one profile per Sentinel-1 acquisition and location. To enable direct use and benchmarking, we release (i) the analysis ready 1D SAR profiles, (ii) event-level baseline semantic labels generated by a rule-based classifier, and (iii) an expert-annotated benchmark dataset of 553 time series with 328,657 event labels. The baseline classifier achieves a macro F1 score of 0.84 in event-wise evaluation and an area under the collapsed edit similarity-quality threshold curve (AUC) of 0.785, indicating temporal coherence. We demonstrate that the resulting corpus supports global-scale analyses of deployment dynamics, the identification of differences in regional deployment patterns, vessel interactions, and operational events, and provides a reference for developing and comparing time series classification methods for offshore wind infrastructure monitoring.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Network Routing based on Surface Code Error Correction

arXiv:2606.12781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum networks encounter unavoidable channel noises and erasure errors, presenting a huge obstacle in designing protocols that attain both high reliability and efficiency. Typically, quantum networks fall into two categories: those utilize quantum entanglements for quantum teleportation, and those directly transfer the actual quantum messages. In this paper, we present SurfNet, a quantum network that inherits the main advantages from both categories. It employs surface codes as logical qubits for encoding messages, and utilizes two parallel communication channels to fault-tolerantly transfer each surface code in a modular manner. Our approach of using surface codes can timely correct both operational and photon loss errors within the network, and the integration of the two channels within the network can greatly improve network throughput. For the implementation of SurfNet, we propose a novel network architecture, designed to better integrate surface codes into quantum networks. We also propose a novel error correction decoder, designed to fully utilize the modular characteristic of surface codes within our network. Simulation results demonstrate that SurfNet with its decoder significantly enhances the communication fidelity within quantum networks.

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

PsyScore: A Psychometrically-Aware Framework for Trait-Adaptive Essay Scoring and ZPD-Scaffolded Feedback

Effective Automated Essay Scoring (AES) are expected to support both reliable assessment and actionable instructional feedback. However, existing approaches often treat scoring and feedback as separate components: neural scoring models provide limited interpretability, while Large Language Model (LLM)-based feedback is typically insensitive to learners proficiency levels. To address this fragmentation, this work proposes PsyScore, a psychometrically-aware framework that integrates diagnostic assessment with instructional scaffolding through a shared latent ability representation. PsyScore comprises three key modules: a Trait-Adaptive Neural IRT Scorer that incorporates the Graded Partial Credit Model (GPCM) into a neural architecture, enabling the precise estimation of student ability while maintaining psychometric interpretability, a ZPD-Scaffolded Feedback Generator, which conditions multi-agent feedback strategies on the diagnosed ability parameter to adapt instructional focus across different proficiency levels, and a Multi-Perspective Feedback Evaluation Strategy that assesses feedback quality via pairwise preference judgements and student revision simulations. Experiments on the ASAP++ dataset demonstrate that PsyScore achieves competitive scoring performance while providing more pedagogically aligned feedback.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Daily briefing: Trial to ‘de-age’ cells treats first person

Authors:

The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight. The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Reinforcement Twinning for Hybrid Control of Flapping-Wing Drones

arXiv:2505.18201v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling flapping-wing drones requires controllers that handle time-varying, nonlinear, underactuated dynamics from incomplete, noisy sensor data. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly reinforcement learning (RL), have opened new perspectives for addressing such complex control problems through data-driven policy optimization from interaction with the environment. Yet purely data-driven methods are sample-inefficient, demanding extensive, sometimes unsafe exploration, especially without guiding physical models. This motivates hybrid AI-physics frameworks. This article proposes a hybrid model-free/model-based flight-control approach using the reinforcement twinning algorithm. The model-based (MB) component uses an adjoint formulation and an adaptive digital twin continuously identified from live trajectories; the model-free (MF) component uses RL. The two agents share knowledge via transfer learning, imitation learning, and shared experience between the real environment and the digital twin, coordinated by a policy referee that selects which agent acts in reality based on digital-twin performance and a real-to-virtual consistency ratio. The framework is evaluated for the longitudinal control of a flapping-wing drone, modelled as a nonlinear time-varying system driven by quasi-steady aerodynamic forces. The hybrid strategy is tested under three adaptive-model initializations: (1) offline identification from existing data, (2) random initialization with fully online identification, and (3) offline pre-training with biased parameters followed by online adaptation. In all cases, the hybrid framework improves performance, robustness, and sample efficiency over purely model-free and purely model-based approaches.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Eigen-Spike Emergence and Quadratic Equivalents for Conjugate Kernels on Nonlinearly Separable Data

arXiv:2605.29669v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work in random matrix theory (RMT) has developed the notion of deterministic equivalents: typically linear surrogate models that approximate the spectral behavior of large nonlinear random matrices, such as nonlinear feature maps in neural networks (NNs). Such equivalents make theoretical predictions tractable by reducing a complex model to a simpler one with properties that fall under the umbrella of classical RMT tools. However, this leaves open the question of whether this idealized linear equivalence remains meaningful for classification of high-dimensional nonlinearly separable data. Motivated by this, we consider the conjugate kernel (CK), which is the nonlinear feature map of a one-layer feedforward NN, under a canonical nonlinearly separable dataset for the XOR problem; and we use the study of informative outlier eigenvalues in the CK and whether their corresponding eigenvectors asymptotically align with XOR labels as a proxy for nonlinear learnability. We develop a robust quadratic equivalent of the CK matrix that enables a precise analysis of emergent informative spikes, as one modifies various knobs common in ML practice: sample complexity, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), nonlinear activation choice, and pretrained features. We identify regimes in which these knobs move the CK beyond the linear equivalent and produce BBP-type transitions to label-aligned outlier eigenspaces. Our analysis helps bring deterministic-equivalence tools from RMT to bear on problems of practical relevance in ML.

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

Keep It in Mind: User Centric Continual Spatial Intelligence Reasoning in Egocentric Video Streams

We introduce UCS-Bench, a dataset spanning 170+ hours of egocentric visual observations with 8.1K+ timestamped questions for diagnosing User-Centric Continual Spatial intelligence in egocentric video streams. UCS-Bench targets a new problem that emphasizes dynamic spatial reasoning, long-term memory, and their alignment with users' real-time locations. We propose DirectMe, a framework that incrementally constructs and maintains a structured spatial memory from streaming egocentric observations. DirectMe enables robust tracking and recall of object locations, all relative to the user's movement over time. By tightly coupling visual perception with memory updates and spatial reasoning, our approach supports long-horizon queries that require recalling interactions, resolving viewpoint-induced ambiguities, and adapting to dynamic scenes. Our experiments show that DirectMe significantly improves the spatial reasoning of leading multimodal LLMs; it also surpasses many spatially aware and long-form streaming video models. We hope our benchmark and solution will advance spatial intelligence research for egocentric AI assistants. Data and code are available at https://github.com/cocowy1/UCS-Bench.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Finite free perpetuities

arXiv:2606.19115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce and study finite free perpetuities, defined as monic polynomial solutions of degree $n$ to the affine fixed-point equation \[ p(z) = \mathbb{E}\!\left[ A^{n}\,p\!\left(\frac{z-B}{A}\right)\mathbf{1}_{\{A\neq0\}} \right] + \mathbb{E}\!\left[ (z-B)^n\mathbf{1}_{\{A=0\}} \right], \] where $A$ and $B$ are complex-valued random variables with finite moments up to order $n$. Equivalently, if $p(z)=\mathbb{E}[(z-X)^n]$, then $p$ encodes a truncated moment version of the classical perpetuity equation $X\stackrel{d}{=}AX+B$ with $X$ and $(A,B)$ independent. This places finite free perpetuities between classical perpetuities and free-probabilistic fixed-point laws. We prove existence and uniqueness under weak conditions, and we identify a broad class of admissible pairs $(A,B)$ for which the resulting polynomial has only real, nonnegative zeros. Our approach uses finite free additive and multiplicative convolutions together with a probabilistic representation via the $U$-transform. As a motivating example, we exhibit an explicit family of finite free perpetuities expressed in terms of Jacobi polynomials and show that their empirical root distributions converge to a free-beta-prime law. More generally, for admissible sequences of parameters, we prove weak convergence of the empirical root distributions of finite free perpetuities to the law of a free perpetuity characterized by the corresponding free fixed-point equation. This yields a finite-degree polynomial model approximating free perpetuities and clarifies the connection between classical affine recursions, finite free convolutions, and free probability.