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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Contrastive Regularization for Accent-Robust ASR

arXiv:2605.03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability. We investigate supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) as a lightweight, accent-invariant auxiliary objective for CTC fine-tuning. An utterance-level contrastive loss regularizes encoder representations without architectural modification or explicit accent supervision. Experiments on the L2-ARCTIC benchmark show consistent WER reductions across multiple pretrained encoders, with up to 25 – 29\% relative reduction under unseen-accent evaluation. Analysis using within-transcript cosine dispersion indicates that SupCon promotes more compact and stable representation geometry under accent variability. Overall, SupCon provides an effective and model-agnostic regularization strategy for improving accent robustness.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Predictive Analytics in E-Commerce for CustomerBehavior Forecasting using hybrid Ret-DNN withXGBoost Model

arXiv:2606.17931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, electronic (E) commerce services have rapidly increased in the daily lives of people, which helpsthem to purchase products online. However, retail platforms have struggled to understand customer behavior and make it difficult to predict their future purchases. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid Retail Deep NeuralNetwork (Ret-DNN) with an Extreme Gradient Boosting(XGBoost) model for capturing temporal features and tabular dynamics of retail data. First, data were sourced from a UnitedKingdom (UK)-based online retailer that contains transactions with almost 500,000 records. Then, the collected data were pre-processed using a series of techniques, such as data cleaning, outlier handling, temporal feature extraction, feature encoding, and z-score normalization, to ensure that the data were ready for model training and testing. Subsequently, the preprocessed data were fed into the Ret-DNN model, which acts as a feature extractor to understand the complete context of customer transactions. Further, the extracted data were fed as input into the XGBoost model, which predicted the final output as the purchase probability of customers. Finally, the proposed Ret-DNN XGBoost model achieved better results by attaining aMean Absolute Error (MAE) 0.2193 when compared to the existing Ret-DNN model. Keywords: Customer behavior forecasting, extreme gradientboosting, electronic commerce, predictive analytic, retail deepneural networks.

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

Large Language Models as Optimizers: A Survey of Direct vs. Tool-Augmented Approaches and Their Performance Frontiers

arXiv:2606.15577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in complex mathematical optimization, even if the pragmatic user who triggers them is unaware of it. After all, many real-world problems reduce to the search for better or the best solutions. The field of LLM-as-optimizer has three paradigms: direct optimization, tool-augmented optimization, and tool-creating optimization. Direct optimization uses iterative prompting and heuristic generation to navigate solution spaces. Tool-augmented optimization translates natural language problems into formal specifications and orchestrates external solvers. Tool-creating optimization goes further, using LLMs to discover reusable algorithms or heuristics that can be deployed at zero marginal LLM cost. We describe current performance frontiers based on the benchmarks from the literature. We identify the critical reasoning gap in current architectures and argue for trade-offs between the future potential of direct optimization and the auditability of tool-augmented optimization. Even future, more powerful models might opt for tool-making to improve operational efficiency for repetitive families of problems.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Augmenting Molecular Language Models with Local $n$-gram Memory

Transformer-based language models for SMILES strings suffer from a locality gap: standard character-level tokenization fragments chemically meaningful motifs, forcing models to repeatedly learn local syntax at the expense of long-range dependencies. To address this without disrupting standard tokenizers, we propose MolGram, which integrates a conditional $n$-gram memory module into molecular language models. MolGram maps local string patterns to learned embeddings via scalable hash lookups and dynamically injects this regional context into hidden states. Evaluations across three tasks, including unconditional molecule generation, forward reaction prediction, and single-step retrosynthesis, show that MolGram consistently improves performance. Crucially, our analyses demonstrate that MolGram outperforms baselines with 3$\times$ more parameters, establishing explicit local pattern memory as a highly efficient inductive bias.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Knockoffs-based False Discovery Rate Control and Simplification for Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.04404v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The deep neural network is a widely used framework in machine learning that has been widely applied in various fields. However, deep neural networks often involve a large number of parameters and inputs, many of which may be irrelevant to the goal or true output. These parameters and input variables not only increase computational complexity, but also contribute to additional computational cost. One solution to this problem is knockoff methods, which have proven successful in controlling false discovery rates in high-dimensional regression. Building on the knockoff methods and using the regularised neural network, this paper proposes three variable screening methods under the condition of controlling false discovery rates: one layer filter, multiple layers filter, and variable weight aggregation filter. In comparison with existing algorithms, we find that our algorithms show satisfactory performance.

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

No One Knows the State of the Art in Geospatial Foundation Models

Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) have been proposed as generalizable backbones for disaster response, land-cover mapping, food-security monitoring, and other high-stakes Earth-observation tasks. Yet the published work about these models does not give reviewers or users enough information to tell which model fits a given task. We argue that nobody knows what the current state of the art is in geospatial foundation models. The methods may be useful, but the GFM literature does not standardize evaluations, training and testing protocols, released weights, or pretraining controls well enough for anyone to compare or rank them. In a 152-paper audit, we find 46 cross-paper disagreements of at least 10 points for the same model, benchmark, and protocol; 94/126 papers with extractable pretraining data use a configuration no other paper uses; and 39% of GFM papers release no model weights. This lack of community standards can be solved. We propose six concrete expectations: named-license weight release, shared core evaluations, copied-versus-rerun baseline annotations, variance reporting, one shared evaluation harness, and data-vs-architecture-vs-algorithm controls. These gaps are a coordination failure, not a fault of any individual lab; the authors of this paper, like many others in the GFM community, have contributed to them. Rather than just critiquing the community, we aim to provide concrete steps toward a shared understanding of how to innovate GFMs.

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

EKF-Based Depth Camera and Deep Learning Fusion for UAV-Person Distance Estimation and Following in SAR Operations

arXiv:2602.20958v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) frameworks aid human search tasks by detecting and recognizing specific individuals, then tracking and following them while maintaining a safe distance. A key safety requirement for UAV following is the accurate estimation of the distance between camera and target object under real-world conditions, achieved by fusing multiple image modalities. As part of the system for automatic people detection and face recognition using deep learning, in this paper we present the fusion of depth camera measurements and monocular camera-to-body distance estimation for robust tracking and following. Deep learning based filtering of depth camera data and estimation of camera-to-body distance from a monocular camera are achieved with YOLO-pose, enabling real-time fusion of depth information using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. The proposed subsystem, designed for use in drones, estimates and measures the distance between the depth camera and the human body keypoints, to maintain the safe distance between the drone and the human target. Our system provides an accurate estimated distance, which has been validated against motion capture ground truth data. The system has been tested in real time indoors, where it reduces the average errors, RMSE and standard deviations of distance estimation up to 15,3% in three tested scenarios. Based on the test results, the EKF fusion-based approach increases the depth detection range by reducing the errors outside the optimal depth camera working range. It also shows improved robustness and precision in challenging conditions, such as reflections and poor visibility, making it suitable for SAR.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Stochastic Inflation

arXiv:2606.12636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We formulate stochastic inflation in an open quantum system framework. The field coarse-grained in a patch of fixed physical size, and the total momentum of that patch, form a canonical pair and act on a one-mode Fock space which we identify as the "bulk". At each time step, new comoving modes join the coarse-grained patch and the bulk has to be redefined. This redefinition produces an entangled mode that is traced over, yielding a non-unitary evolution equation for the bulk's density matrix. For a free test field in de Sitter, one obtains GKLS dynamics, generated by an effective Hamiltonian and a single non-Hermitian Lindblad operator, hence diffusion and Hubble friction originate from the same quantum channel. The Wigner-Weyl transform of the GKLS equation leads to a Fokker-Planck equation for the Wigner function, which matches the one that applies to the classical phase-space distribution of stochastic inflation. We also provide several schemes under which one can unravel the GKLS dynamics into stochastic Schrodinger equations when continuous measurements of the decoupled mode are performed, making contact with Langevin formulations of stochastic inflation. In the light-field regime, an additional overdamped reduction can be performed by integrating out the momentum variable in the Wigner distribution, leading to Starobinsky's slow-roll Fokker-Planck equation. In that regime, the purity of the patch is strongly suppressed. In contrast, for heavy fields, field diffusion is suppressed and the coarse-grained patch remains close to a pure underdamped oscillator, which prevents a classical stochastic treatment.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Regular Fourier Features for Nonstationary Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2602.23006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulating a Gaussian process requires sampling from a high-dimensional Gaussian distribution, which scales cubically with the number of sample locations. Spectral methods address this challenge by exploiting the Fourier representation and treating the spectral density as a probability distribution suitable for Monte Carlo approximation. Although this probabilistic interpretation is valid for stationary processes, it is overly restrictive for the nonstationary case, where spectral densities are generally not probability measures. We propose regular Fourier features for harmonizable processes to avoid this limitation. Our method discretizes the spectral representation directly, preserving the correlation structure among spectral weights without requiring probability assumptions. Under a finite-spectral-support assumption, this yields an efficient low-rank approximation that is consistent and positive semi-definite by construction. When the spectral density is unknown, the framework extends naturally to kernel learning from data. We demonstrate the method on locally stationary and harmonizable mixture kernels, the latter with a complex-valued spectral density, and apply the kernel-learning extension to real and synthetic data.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

InstructTime++: Time Series Classification with Multimodal Language Modeling via Implicit Feature Enhancement

arXiv:2601.14968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most existing time series classification methods adopt a discriminative paradigm that maps input sequences directly to one-hot encoded class labels. While effective, this paradigm struggles to incorporate contextual features and fails to capture semantic relationships among classes. To address these limitations, we propose InstructTime, a novel framework that reformulates time series classification as a multimodal generative task. Specifically, continuous numerical sequences, contextual textual features, and task instructions are treated as multimodal inputs, while class labels are generated as textual outputs by tuned language models. To bridge the modality gap, InstructTime introduces a time series discretization module that converts continuous sequences into discrete temporal tokens, together with an alignment projection layer and a generative self-supervised pre-training strategy to enhance cross-modal representation alignment. Building upon this framework, we further propose InstructTime++, which extends InstructTime by incorporating implicit feature modeling to compensate for the limited inductive bias of language models. InstructTime++ leverages specialized toolkits to mine informative implicit patterns from raw time series and contextual inputs, including statistical feature extraction and vision-language-based image captioning, and translates them into textual descriptions for seamless integration. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of InstructTime++.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

HeatKV: Head-tuned KV-cache Compression for Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive image generation quality while maintaining low latency. However, they suffer from severe KV-cache memory constraints, often requiring gigabytes of memory per generated image. We introduce HeatKV, a novel compression method that adapts cache allocation in each head based on its attention to previously generated scales. Using a small offline calibration set, the attention heads are ranked according to their attention scores over prior scales. Based on this ranking, we construct a static pruning schedule tailored to a given memory budget. Applied to the Infinity-2B model, HeatKV achieves $2 \times$ higher compression ratio in memory allocation for KV cache compared to existing methods, while maintaining similar or better image fidelity, prompt alignment and human perception score. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for VAR model KV-cache compression, showcasing the effectiveness of fine-grained, head-specific cache allocation. Code and calibration script available at https://github.com/arm-research/heatkv.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The systole of random hyperbolic 3-manifolds

arXiv:2406.11783v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the systole of a model of random hyperbolic 3-manifolds introduced by Petri and Raimbault, answering a question posed in that same article. These are compact manifolds with boundary constructed by randomly gluing truncated tetrahedra along their faces. We prove that the limit, as the volume tends to infinity, of the expected value of their systole exists and we give a closed formula of it. Moreover, we compute a numerical approximation of this value.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Dysplasia-Stratified Management of Barrett's Esophagus: An Incidence-Based U.S. Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

Authors:

Background and Aims Barrett's esophagus (BE) is the principal precursor of esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC), whose incidence has risen sharply in Western countries since the 1960s. Effective, dysplasia stratified surveillance strategies are needed to prevent progression. This study evaluated the cost effectiveness of dysplasia stratified surveillance intervals and endoscopic eradication therapy (EET) across the BE spectrum. Methods We developed an incidence-based Markov state transition model of BE progression calibrated to U.S. epidemiologic data from a healthcare sector perspective over a lifetime horizon. Four hypothetical cohorts of 50-year-old individuals with short segment BE (SSBE), nondysplastic BE (NDBE), low grade dysplasia (LGD), or high-grade dysplasia (HGD) were evaluated. Strategies included no surveillance; surveillance at 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, or 10-year intervals; standard or AI assisted endoscopy; non endoscopic screening (sponge, breath, miRNA tests); and EET for LGD and HGD. Outcomes included costs, quality adjusted life years (QALYs), incremental cost effectiveness ratios (ICERs), net monetary benefits (NMBs), EAC cases, and EAC-related deaths. Sensitivity analyses used a willingness to pay threshold of US$100,000 per QALY. Results No surveillance was the most cost-effective strategy for SSBE and NDBE. For LGD, upfront EET was more cost effective than all surveillance strategies, with results sensitive to EAC incidence and recurrence. For HGD, EET was cost saving and yielded the greatest QALYs, with findings robust in 99.9% of simulations. EET prevented 12,614 and 44,295 EAC related deaths per 100,000 individuals with LGD and HGD, respectively. Conclusion Dysplasia-stratified management is essential for optimizing surveillance and treatment strategies in BE. Any degree of dysplasia should receive EET followed by targeted post-treatment monitoring, establishing EET as the central therapeutic pathway for dysplastic BE.

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

Null-Space Diffusion Distillation Unlocks Speed, Fidelity and Realism in Lensless Imaging

Lensless imaging reconstructs scenes from highly multiplexed measurements, resulting in a severely ill-posed inverse problem. In this work, we identify a fundamental trade-off between measurement consistency, perceptual quality, and inference speed across lensless reconstruction paradigms. Traditional methods favor consistency but produce perceptually degraded results, supervised approaches achieve high-quality reconstructions with fast inference but may violate physical constraints, and diffusion-prior methods achieve high perceptual quality and consistency–particularly when structured constraints such as range-null decomposition are used–but remain slow due to iterative sampling. Motivated by this observation, we propose Null-Space Diffusion Distillation (NSDD), a single-pass reconstruction model that distills structured diffusion-prior inference into an efficient feed-forward network. NSDD learns to produce high-quality reconstructions that preserve measurement consistency while avoiding costly iterative sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that NSDD achieves perceptual quality and consistency competitive with diffusion-prior methods, while providing significantly faster inference and offering a favorable balance across all three objectives. Furthermore, ablation experiments show that distilling the range–null decomposition improves reconstruction quality and robustness over unstructured full-reconstruction distillation, including on unseen real scenes. These results highlight the potential of structure-aware distillation for efficient lensless imaging. Code is available at github.com/JRCSAVSN/NullSpaceDiffusionDistillation.

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

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Altermagnet-Superconductor Heterostructure: a Scalable Platform for Braiding of Majorana Modes

arXiv:2506.08095v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological quantum computation, featuring qubits built out of anyonic excitations known as Majorana zero modes (MZMs), have long presented an exciting pathway towards scalable quantum computation. Recently, the advent of altermagnetic materials has presented a new pathway towards localized MZMs on the boundary of two-dimensional materials, consisting of an altermagnetic film, subject to a superconducting proximity effect from a superconducting substrate. In this work, we demonstrate the possibility for an altermagnet-superconductor heterostructure, to not only harbor MZMs, but also freely manipulate their position along the topological boundary of the material, via rotation of the Néel vector. Using this mechanism, on a square platform, we utilize a time-dependent method to simulate the Z-gate via braiding, and then extend this to a larger H-junction, where we implement the $\sqrt{X}$ and $\sqrt{Z}$ gate on a single-qubit system. Further, this structure is eminently scalable to many-qubit systems, thus providing the essential ingredients towards universal quantum computation.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Model soups need only one ingredient

arXiv:2602.09689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on a target distribution often improves in-distribution (ID) accuracy, but at the cost of out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness as representations specialize to the fine-tuning data. Weight-space ensembling methods, such as Model Soups, mitigate this effect by averaging multiple checkpoints, but they are computationally prohibitive, requiring the training and storage of dozens of fine-tuned models. In this paper, we introduce MonoSoup, a simple, data-free, hyperparameter-free, post-hoc method that achieves a strong ID-OOD balance using only a single checkpoint. Our method applies Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to each layer's update and decomposes it into high-energy directions that capture task-specific adaptation and low-energy directions that introduce noise but may still encode residual signals useful for robustness. MonoSoup then uses entropy-based effective rank to automatically re-weigh these components with layer-wise coefficients that account for the spectral and geometric structure of the model. Experiments on CLIP models fine-tuned on ImageNet and evaluated under natural distribution shifts, as well as on Qwen language models tested on mathematical reasoning and multiple-choice benchmarks, show that this plug-and-play approach is a practical and effective alternative to multi-checkpoint methods, retaining much of their benefits without their computational overhead.

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

Competition and Diversity in Generative AI

arXiv:2412.08610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent evidence, both in the lab and in the wild, suggests that the use of generative artificial intelligence reduces the diversity of content produced. The use of the same or similar AI models appears to lead to more homogeneous behavior. Our work begins with the observation that there is a force pushing in the opposite direction: competition. When producers compete with one another (e.g., for customers or attention), they are incentivized to create novel or unique content. We explore the impact competition has on both content diversity and overall social welfare. Through a formal game-theoretic model, we show that competitive markets select for diverse AI models, mitigating monoculture. We further show that a generative AI model that performs well in isolation (i.e., according to a benchmark) may fail to provide value in a competitive market. Our results highlight the importance of evaluating generative AI models across the breadth of their output distributions, particularly when they will be deployed in competitive environments. We validate our results empirically by using language models to play Scattergories, a word game in which players are rewarded for answers that are both correct and unique. Overall, our results suggest that homogenization due to generative AI is unlikely to persist in competitive markets, and instead, competition in downstream markets may drive diversification in AI model development.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Send a SCOUT First: Pre-hoc Reasoning for Adaptive Detector Allocation in Prompt-Injection Defense

arXiv:2605.30837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are heterogeneous: each is strong on a different slice of attacks, and none is always reliable. Yet existing systems still treat detection as a fixed single-detector pipeline, committing every request to one detector's blind spots. We reframe defense as detector allocation: given a heterogeneous pool, decide per request which detectors to run and whether to escalate to an LLM judge. Our framework SCOUT (Scalable and Controllable Outcome-prediction for Uncertainty-aware Triage) makes this decision dynamic by predicting each detector's per-sample reliability and latency from how it behaved on similar past inputs, and exposes a single safety-utility threshold to the operator (where utility bundles benign-pass rate and wall-clock). To evaluate this setting, we build SCOUT-450, a benchmark that captures the structurally complex, agent-facing injections that older prompt-injection sets under-represent. On SCOUT-450, a safety-oriented operating point reduces attack-success rate by 46% and total wall-clock by 40% relative to an always-on GPT-4o judge, at a 5.1-point benign-utility drop. SCOUT also transfers to three external benchmarks (BIPIA, IPI, and IHEval), improving the safety-utility frontier.

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

Early Diagnosis of Wasted Computation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems via Failure-Aware Observability

arXiv:2606.01365v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Failure-aware observability diagnoses wasted computation in multi-agent LLM systems before final-answer evaluation can explain what went wrong. We propose a trace-based framework for a three-agent architecture – orchestrator, search agent, and execution agent – that converts structured events into online signals for loops, budget pressure, low information gain, and tool instability, then adds offline semantic grounding metrics and selective LLM-as-judge evaluation. On 165 GAIA validation traces under identical caps, 98 runs produce usable final answers and 67 fail or stop without one. Among warned failed runs, 58.1% of tokens are spent after the first warning on average, indicating substantial opportunity for intervention. A 10-task Level-2 pilot uses warnings to diversify search or require evidence, reducing post-warning token fraction from 0.638 in the baseline to 0.304. The results support a layered design: cheap online signals help the orchestrator redirect or halt redundant behavior, while deeper semantic checks identify whether completed answers are grounded enough to trust.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

NeuralMUSIC: A Hybrid Neural-Subspace Framework for Robot Sound Source Localization

arXiv:2606.18664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable sound source localization is fundamental to robot audition, enabling autonomous robots to perceive spatial cues and operate effectively in dynamic environments. Classical methods such as Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) offer strong theoretical foundations but degrade under low signal-to-noise ratios. While deep learning-based approaches achieve promising performance, they often struggle with limited generalization across conditions. To address these challenges, we propose NeuralMUSIC, a hybrid neural-subspace framework for robotic sound source localization. Specifically, a neural network first estimates the spatial covariance matrix from multichannel microphone observations. The predicted covariance is then integrated into a classical MUSIC pipeline with eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) and pseudo-spectrum computation, followed by a Frequency Attention Fusion (FAF) module to produce the final DOA estimates. To improve data efficiency, we further introduce a Self-supervised Spatial Correlation Learning (SSCL) strategy that leverages unlabeled acoustic data to capture spatial structure. Extensive experiments across different robotic tasks demonstrate that NeuralMUSIC achieves competitive localization accuracy while exhibiting improved robustness and cross-domain generalization.

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

Benchmarking Counterfactual Prediction in Epidemic Time Series with Time-Varying Interventions

arXiv:2606.05692v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has enabled significant advances in time-series causal inference, yet progress remains constrained by the lack of realistic benchmarks with observable counterfactual outcomes. Existing datasets either rely on real-world observations without ground-truth counterfactuals or on simplified simulations that fail to capture complex causal dynamics. To address this gap, we develop a large-scale benchmark for counterfactual prediction in epidemic time series under dynamic interventions. Unlike existing benchmarks, it supports static and time-varying treatments, as well as both single-policy and multi-policy intervention settings, enabling evaluation of causal inference methods across a broad range of causal inference scenarios. Leveraging a calibrated agent-based model grounded in real-world demographic, mobility, epidemiological, and policy data, we generate realistic counterfactual trajectories across more than 150 U.S. counties. Using this benchmark, we evaluate widely used and state-of-the-art causal inference methods, revealing substantial performance differences and highlighting the challenges of realistic time-series causal reasoning.

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

Lightweight Transformer Models for On-Device Fault Detection: A Benchmark Study on Resource-Constrained Deployment

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24173v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-device fault detection enables real-time diagnostics without cloud dependency, but deploying machine learning models on resource-constrained hardware demands careful tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, and model size. We present a benchmark comparing traditional ML methods (Random Forest, XGBoost, SVM, Logistic Regression) against lightweight transformer architectures (DistilBERT, TinyBERT-6L, TinyBERT-4L, MobileBERT) for binary fault detection across three public datasets: NASA C-MAPSS turbofan degradation, SECOM semiconductor manufacturing, and UCI AI4I 2020 predictive maintenance. We evaluate classification performance (F1-score, AUC), model size, and CPU inference latency, and further assess INT8 dynamic quantization and a two-stage adaptive inference pipeline. Our results reveal that on well-separated sensor data (C-MAPSS), lightweight transformers match traditional ML at 87.8% F1 but at 100x the model size and 9000x the latency. TinyBERT-4L emerges as the most deployment-friendly transformer at 55 MB and 18 ms CPU latency. INT8 quantization reduces size by 25% while preserving 86.9% F1. Our adaptive pipeline, routing 97.9% of predictions through a quantized triage model and only 2.1% to a larger expert, achieves 87.6% F1 at 19.5 ms average latency. On severely imbalanced datasets (SECOM, UCI-PM), both traditional and transformer methods struggle significantly, highlighting fundamental limitations of current approaches for extreme class imbalance in fault detection. All code is publicly available.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mahalanobis-Guided Latent OOD Detection for Hybrid ES-DRL Control in Time-Varying Systems

arXiv:2606.11474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study Mahalanobis-guided latent out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for test-time RL controller switching in nonlinear time-varying systems. RL controllers can quickly control high-dimensional systems within the training distribution, but their performance can degrade when time-varying dynamics produce unseen observations. We consider a combined ES–DRL controller, where RL provides fast in-distribution actions and bounded extremum seeking (ES) provides robust model-independent control under OOD operation. The key challenge is deciding when to switch. We train a variational autoencoder (VAE) on in-distribution beam-profile observations and use Mahalanobis distance in the VAE latent space to detect OOD beam profiles at test time. This OOD decision sets a binary switch that selects either the RL controller or the ES controller. We evaluate the approach in safety-critical particle accelerator control. In this setting, spatial magnet motion creates OOD beam profiles that were not seen during RL training. Visualization of the VAE latent space shows that the proposed method identifies this OOD scenario and provides an interpretable signal for switching between RL and ES in the combined controller.