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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

3D-RFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards ( RLVR ) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models ( LLMs), yet its potential in 3D scene understanding remains under-explored. Existing approaches largely rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning ( SFT), where the token-level cross-entropy loss acts as an indirect proxy for optimization, leading to a misalignment between training objectives and task performances. To bridge this gap, we present Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding (3D-RFT ), the first framework to extend RLVR to video-based 3D perception and reasoning. 3D-RFT shifts the paradigm by directly optimizing the model towards evaluation metrics. 3D-RFT first activates 3D-aware Multi-modal Large Language Models ( MLLM s) via SFT, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning using Group Relative Policy Optimization ( GRPO) with strictly verifiable reward functions. We design task-specific reward functions directly from metrics like 3D IoU and F1-Score to provide more effective signals to guide model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-RFT-4B achieves state-of-the-art performance on various video-based 3D scene understanding tasks. Notably, 3D-RFT-4B significantly outperforms larger models (e.g., VG LLM-8B) on 3D video detection, 3D visual grounding, and spatial reasoning benchmarks. We further reveal good properties of 3D-RFT such as robust efficacy, and valuable insights into training strategies and data impact. We hope 3D-RFT can serve as a robust and promising paradigm for future development of 3D scene understanding.

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

Lost at the End: Primacy Bias in Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) lets vision-language systems answer questions that exceed their parametric knowledge by conditioning a reader on passages retrieved from a Wikipedia-scale knowledge base. In pure-text long-context LLMs, retrieved-context use follows the U-shaped "lost-in-the-middle" effect of Liu et al. (2024): information at the start and end of context is used, the middle is lost. Whether this transfers to deployed multimodal KB-VQA is open. To close this gap, we design the first controlled probe of reader-side position dependence in multimodal KB-VQA: a gold-position protocol in which only the gold passage's prompt slot varies within question. We run it on three open-source 7B/8B VLM readers and two KB-VQA benchmarks at k up to 20. The shape flips from U to primacy: gold-at-first beats gold-at-last by 16 to 26 points on every reader-by-benchmark cell, an effect we call "Lost at the End". Three targeted ablations narrow the cause: a text-only control shows the multimodal setting amplifies an already-present text-mode primacy 2.2 to 4.5 times, and image-position and distractor-shuffle ablations together pin the locus to prompt slot 0 of the instruction-tuned reader. On a frozen reader, three retrieval-side fixes (MMR, oracle reranking, rank-based reordering) all leave the gap intact (no separable improvement). Our findings indicate that recall@k is the wrong metric for deployed KB-VQA and that closing the gap requires reader-side intervention; we release our protocol as a controlled instrument for evaluating such interventions.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Gradual Fine-Tuning for Flow Matching Models

arXiv:2601.22495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning flow matching models is a central challenge in settings with limited data, evolving distributions, or computational constraints. While recent work has produced significant advances, particularly in the area of reward-based fine-tuning, current methods fail to demonstrate both theoretical correctness as well as strong empirical results in terms of stability, efficiency, and diversity preservation. In this work, we propose Gradual Fine-Tuning (GFT), a simple yet principled annealing-based framework for fine-tuning flow generative models when only samples from the target distribution are available. For stochastic flows, GFT defines a temperature-controlled sequence of intermediate objectives that smoothly interpolate between the pretrained and target drifts, provably approaching the true target as the temperature approaches zero. We analytically demonstrate that sample generation after GFT can be made substantially more efficient with the use of arbitrary (e.g., optimal transport) couplings, as well as by utilizing few-step inference methods. Empirically, GFT significantly improves convergence stability, while maintaining or improving generation quality, training speed, and generation diversity compared to other fine-tuning methods. Our results position GFT as a simple yet theoretically grounded and practically effective alternative for scalable adaptation of flow matching models under distribution shift.

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

NightFeats @ MMU-RAGent NeurIPS 2025: A Context-Optimized Multi-Agent RAG System for the Text-to-Text Track

We present NightFeats, a structured multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system submitted to the MMU-RAGent competition at NeurIPS 2025, where it was awarded Best Dynamic Evaluation in the text-to-text track. Rather than targeting benchmark maximization, this work proposes a principled pipeline that decomposes knowledge synthesis into three coordinated phases: retrieval, curation, and composition, each governed by explicit intermediate representations and handoff contracts. Inspired by Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), the system introduces temporal-semantic reranking, bounded contradiction reconciliation, and citation-preserving composition as core architectural primitives. Competition results show that NightFeats surpasses proprietary baselines including Claude-SonnetV2 and Nova-Pro on LLM-as-a-Judge and Human Likert evaluations, confirming that architectural transparency and verifiable evidence grounding are better aligned with human preferences than systems optimizing narrowly for automatic similarity metrics.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Conditional Score-Based Modeling of Effective Langevin Dynamics

arXiv:2604.23952v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic reduced-order models are widely used to represent the effective dynamics of complex systems, but estimating their drift and diffusion coefficients from data remains challenging. Standard approaches often rely on short-time trajectory increments, state-space partitioning, or repeated simulation of candidate models, which become unreliable or computationally expensive for high-dimensional systems, coarse temporal sampling, or unevenly sampled data. We introduce a data-driven calibration method based on a novel relationship between the coefficients of a stochastic reduced model and the conditional score of the finite-time transition density, defined as the gradient of the logarithm of the transition density with respect to the initial state. The resulting identity expresses derivatives of lagged correlation functions as stationary expectations over observed lagged pairs involving this conditional score and the unknown model coefficients. This formulation allows the drift and diffusion structure to be constrained directly from finite-lag statistics, without differentiating trajectories, partitioning state space, or repeatedly integrating candidate reduced models during calibration, yielding a least-squares fitting problem over stationary lagged pairs. We validate the approach on three systems of increasing complexity: an analytically tractable Cox–Ingersoll–Ross diffusion, a two-dimensional nonequilibrium diffusion with affine multiplicative noise, and a periodic soft-spin stochastic Landau–Lifshitz chain. Across these tests, the inferred models preserve the invariant statistics while reproducing finite-lag dynamical correlations. The framework provides a scalable route for learning stochastic reduced-order models from data that reproduce prescribed statistical and dynamical properties.

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

Optimal Impulse Control for Cyber Risk Management

arXiv:2410.17706v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We explore an optimal impulse control problem wherein an electronic device owner strategically calibrates protection levels against cyber attacks. Utilizing epidemiological compartment models, we qualitatively characterize the dynamics of cyber attacks within the network. We determine the optimal protective measures against effective hacking by formulating and solving a stochastic control problem with optimal switching. We demonstrate that the value function for the cluster owner constitutes a viscosity solution to a system of coupled variational inequalities associated with a fully coupled reflected backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive algorithm alongside a verification procedure to ascertain the optimal timing for network protection across various cyber attack scenarios. Our findings are illustrated through numerical approximations employing deep Galerkin methods for partial differential equations (PDEs). We visualize the optimal protection strategies in the context of two distinct attack scenarios: (1) a constant cyber attack, (2) an exogenous cyber attack strategy modeled with a Poisson process.

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

Tacit Coordination of Large Language Models

arXiv:2601.22184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent settings that require coordination without communication, from human-AI interaction to safety-critical scenarios. Humans often overcome the absence of communication through focal points: salient solutions that naturally stand out to all participants. We present the first large-scale evaluation of how, when, and why focal points emerge in LLMs, comparing their behaviour with humans across cooperative and competitive games, including realistic search and rescue scenarios, demonstrating when focal points enable effective coordination. Across more than 20 open- and closed-source models, we find that LLMs exhibit a remarkable ability to coordinate without communication, often matching or outperforming humans. However, the same models consistently fail in tasks requiring numerical common sense or culturally nuanced notions of salience. We additionally evaluate simple learning-free strategies that substantially improve coordination both among LLMs and between humans and LLMs. Our results reveal striking coordination capabilities, as well as social limitations in modern LLMs, and offer new insight into the latent notions of salience encoded within them. Our findings caution against assuming that LLMs share humans' cultural and perceptual substrate when deployed in coordination settings.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Primary care practitioners preconception health literacy and information-seeking: A cross-sectional survey.

Background Parental health before pregnancy influences maternal and child outcomes. Primary care professionals, including general practitioners [GPs], midwives, and naturopaths, can provide preconception care, yet many report limited knowledge and difficulty accessing relevant information. This study described Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths preconception health literacy, including knowledge and ability to access information. Methods Between July and September 2022, Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths completed a 32-item online cross-sectional survey. Participants were recruited through professional associations, and data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics Results Participants (N=373) included naturopaths (40.7%), GPs (32.4%), and midwives (26.8%). Reported barriers to clinician health literacy including lack of preconception care resources (25.5%), and limited clinician knowledge (23.6%). The proportion identifying limited clinician knowledge differed significantly between professions (GP: 31.4%; midwives: 23.0%; naturopaths: 17.8%; p=0.030). The highest level of accurate knowledge regarding preconception exposures was for pre-pregnancy obesity (82.7%), while low birth weight was the most accurately identified preconception outcomes (83.7%). Incorrect responses were most common for maternal multivitamin use as an exposure (28.3%) and childhood leukaemia as an outcome (26.3%). Differences between professions were strongest for infant outcomes, with moderate associations observed for shoulder dystocia (V=.2355), precipitous labour (V=.2173), macrosomia (V=.2060), labour dystocia (V=.2018) and cryptorchidism (V=.2018). Discussion Preconception health literacy varies across primary care professions. Clinicians require greater access to targeted resources and education tailored to their differing scopes of practice and experience. Improving clinician preconception health literacy may strengthen consistent evidence-based care and support better maternal, child, and long-term family health outcomes.

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

Prototyping an AI-powered Tool for Energy Efficiency in New Zealand Homes

arXiv:2509.05364v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Residential buildings contribute significantly to energy use, health outcomes, and carbon emissions. In New Zealand, housing quality has historically been poor, with inadequate insulation and inefficient heating contributing to widespread energy hardship. Recent reforms, including the Warmer Kiwi Homes program, Healthy Homes Standards, and H1 Building Code upgrades, have delivered health and comfort improvements, yet challenges persist. Many retrofits remain partial, data on household performance are limited, and decision-making support for homeowners is fragmented. This study presents the design and evaluation of an AI-powered decision-support tool for residential energy efficiency in New Zealand. The prototype, developed using Python and Streamlit, integrates data ingestion, anomaly detection, baseline modeling, and scenario simulation (e.g., LED retrofits, insulation upgrades) into a modular dashboard. Fifteen domain experts, including building scientists, consultants, and policy practitioners, tested the tool through semi-structured interviews. Results show strong usability (M = 4.3), high value of scenario outputs (M = 4.5), and positive perceptions of its potential to complement subsidy programs and regulatory frameworks. The tool demonstrates how AI can translate national policies into personalized, household-level guidance, bridging the gap between funding, standards, and practical decision-making. Its significance lies in offering a replicable framework for reducing energy hardship, improving health outcomes, and supporting climate goals. Future development should focus on carbon metrics, tariff modeling, integration with national datasets, and longitudinal trials to assess real-world adoption.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Causal Clothes-Invariant Feature Learning for Cloth-Changing Person Re-ID

In cloth-changing person re-identification (CCReID), it is critical to learn clothes-invariant feature, which can provide discriminative ID features that remain robust against clothing changes. However, a spurious correlation currently limits existing ReID methods from effectively extracting these clothing-invariant features. This spurious correlation arises from clothing ownership: clothing is rarely shared across different identities, so models tend to memorize clothing cues for identity recognition, and this strategy generalizes poorly to unseen clothing. In this paper, we propose Causal Clothes-Invariant Learning (CCIL), which explicitly shifts CC-ReID from likelihood learning P (Y|X) to causal intervention learning P (Y|do(X)) to block the clothing shortcut. CCIL realizes this intervention through three modules: a Confounder Dictionary, an Intervention Module, and Disentangle Regularization. The causality-based modeling makes the entire model naturally clothes-invariant, effectively preventing the capture of spurious correlations in feature learning. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of CCIL. On PRCC and DeepChange datasets, CCIL achieves Rank-1 accuracies of 66.4% and 59.2%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 1.4 and 4.1 percentage points, respectively.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-Like Caregiver Support

Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support. In these spaces, peer supporters frequently draw on personal narratives to respond to emotionally complex caregiving situations. As LLMs are increasingly designed as peer-like sources of support, they introduce a critical tension: AI can provide immediate, private, and nonjudgmental support, but it cannot authentically possess the lived experiences that make human peer support meaningful. Yet, when prompted to sound peer-like, LLMs may generate language that implies lived experience. This creates a synthetic lived experience paradox: the same experiential language that may make AI support feel warm, relatable, and peer-like can also falsely position the system as someone with lived experience. We examine this paradox in the context of family caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). Drawing on caregiver support exchanges from online communities and prompted peer-like responses from three LLMs – LLaMA, GPT-4o-mini, and MedGemma – we analyze how human peers use personal narratives and how AI incorporates similar narrative forms. Psycholinguistic analysis shows that peer responses used significantly more first-person and past-focused language than peer-like AI responses. Qualitatively, we identify seven types of personal narratives in human peer support and show that AI often captures their emotional work, but can fabricate experiential grounding. These findings reveal a narrative authenticity gap: peer-like AI can generate synthetic lived experience without the real experience that makes peer support meaningful. We argue that caregiver-support AI systems need mechanisms to distinguish supportive peer-like framing from fabricated lived experience, ensuring that models can offer warmth and validation without falsely positioning themselves as experiential peers.

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

Fusion Learning from Dynamic Functional Connectivity: Combining the Amplitude and Phase of fMRI Signals to Identify Brain Disorders

arXiv:2603.24603v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) derived from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been extensively utilized in brain science research. The sliding window correlation (SWC) method is a widely used approach for constructing dFC by computing correlation coefficients between amplitude time series of signals from pairs of brain regions. In this study, we propose an integrated approach that incorporates both amplitude and phase information of fMRI signals to improve the detection of brain disorders. Specifically, we introduce a multi-scale fusion learning framework, namely MSFL, which leverages two complementary dFC features derived from SWC and phase synchronization (PS). Here, SWC captures amplitude correlations, while PS measures phase coherence within dFC. We evaluated the efficacy of MSFL in classifying autism spectrum disorder and major depressive disorder using two publicly available datasets: ABIDE I and REST-meta-MDD, respectively. The results indicate that MSFL significantly outperforms existing comparative models. Moreover, we performed model explanation analysis using the SHAP framework, which showed that both types of dFC features from SWC and PS contribute to detecting brain disorders.

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

Upper Bounds on the Generalization Error of Deep Learning Models via Local Robustness and Stability

arXiv:2606.16883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalization is a critical property of data-driven models, particularly deep learning models deployed in safety-critical applications. Robustness-based generalization bounds have gained attention as a principled way to link robustness properties to generalization performance, often in a data-dependent manner. However, most existing bounds suffer from vacuousness in practical settings, yielding loose upper bounds that greatly exceed the actual error rates and limiting their usefulness for real-world evaluation. While this issue is often attributed to the uncertainty term, a substantial part of the problem originates from the robustness term itself, particularly for the 0-1 loss. Existing approaches typically treat the robustness term as a global measure, ignoring its variation across different sub-regions of the input space. In this work, we propose a generalization bound that addresses this limitation by scaling the robustness term according to the number of stable and unstable samples within each sub-region. Our bounds incorporate both data- and model-dependent factors while maintaining practical relevance (yielding tighter upper bounds on true error). Experiments on models trained on the ImageNet dataset show that our bounds remain consistently non-vacuous and achieve the tightest estimates among existing methods, closely aligning with empirical performance across a range of robust deep neural networks.

16.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Microglia at a key inflection point in Alzheimer’s disease

Authors: Unknown Author

We analyzed brains from octogenarians and cognitively resilient centenarians to understand why some individuals with substantial Alzheimer’s disease pathology develop dementia whereas others remain cognitively intact. Spatial transcriptomics revealed gene expression changes in discrete tissue domains surrounding amyloid plaques and tau pathology that distinguish early, clinically silent, disease from later stages associated with cognitive decline.

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

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Atom–photon Entanglement with a Single Trapped Cesium Atom

arXiv:2605.28968v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate atom–photon entanglement using a single cesium atom trapped in an optical tweezer. Entanglement is generated by resonant excitation and subsequent spontaneous decay, which entangles the atomic Zeeman state with photon polarization. The photon is collected with a high numerical aperture objective (NA = 0.55) and coupled into a single-mode fiber, enabling atom photon measurements and measurement of the Bell-state fidelity. We obtain raw entanglement fidelity of ${\mathcal F} = 0.942(16)$ and inferred fidelity of ${\mathcal F}_inf = 0.962(26)$ after correcting independently characterized atom measurement errors. Compared with related free-space experiments using $^{87}$Rb, the multilevel structure of the relevant excited state in $^{133}$Cs requires the use of a single short excitation pulse in each entanglement attempt in order to suppress unwanted re-excitation. These results establish a free-space Cs atom–photon interface and provide a step toward dual-species Rb–Cs quantum networking.

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

SSD: Spatially Speculative Decoding Accelerates Autoregressive Image Generation

Autoregressive models excel in visual generation by treating images as 1D sequences of discrete tokens, mirroring language modeling. However, this flattening discards the intrinsic 2D spatial locality of visual signals, creating severe computational bottlenecks during inference. We introduce Spatially Speculative Decoding (SSD), a framework that aligns the predictive objective with the natural geometry of images. Rather than predicting only the immediate next token in a 1D sequence, our model simultaneously predicts the adjacent horizontal token and the token directly below it. By capitalizing on this 2D spatial correlation, spatially speculative decoding overcomes the memory wall in visual inference. Our approach accelerates autoregressive image generation by up to 13.3x while maintaining high fidelity on DPG-Bench and GenEval. Our results suggest that respecting the underlying geometry of vision unlocks massive computational efficiencies, paving the way for real-time, high-resolution autoregressive generative models.

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

AL-GNN: Privacy-Preserving and Replay-Free Continual Graph Learning via Analytic Learning

arXiv:2512.18295v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual graph learning (CGL) aims to enable graph neural networks to incrementally learn from a stream of graph structured data without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Existing methods particularly those based on experience replay typically store and revisit past graph data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these approaches pose significant limitations, including privacy concerns, inefficiency. In this work, we propose AL GNN, a novel framework for continual graph learning that eliminates the need for backpropagation and replay buffers. Instead, AL GNN leverages principles from analytic learning theory to formulate learning as a recursive least squares optimization process. It maintains and updates model knowledge analytically through closed form classifier updates and a regularized feature autocorrelation matrix. This design enables efficient one pass training for each task, and inherently preserves data privacy by avoiding historical sample storage. Extensive experiments on multiple dynamic graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that AL GNN achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing methods. For instance, it improves average performance by 10% on CoraFull and reduces forgetting by over 30% on Reddit, while also reducing training time by nearly 50% due to its backpropagation free design.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Two-Phase Stability Study of LLM Judges and Bar Council Examiners on Thai Bar-Exam Free-Form Essays

Free-form legal essay evaluation in NLP treats expert inter-rater stability as a single ceiling number, and treats LLM-judge agreement with that ceiling as evidence of judge stability. We test both assumptions on the Thai bar examination through an identical-inputs protocol: three Bar Council-trained examiners (A, B, C) and a 26-LLM judge panel score the same 15 cross-graded answers from the same four inputs (question, official Bar Council grading regulation, gold answer, candidate answer). The headline finding is asymmetric. On 10 of 15 cells where the rubric prescribes both axes, all 29 raters converge in a tight band: panel agreement is universal. On the remaining 5 cells where the rubric does not prescribe how to grade a correct final answer that omits a decisive statutory citation, the human panel splits between two coherent readings (B/C majority at the upper rubric band, score 6-8; A minority at the lower band, score 1-2). The LLM judge population does not split symmetrically: 22 of 26 LLMs score in or near B/C's contested band, 3 sit in the regulation-silent middle gap, and only 1 (GPT-5.4 Nano) approaches A's band without consistently scoring within it. Zero LLMs in our 26-judge panel reproduce the minority human reading on the contested cells. The B/C-direction cluster spans every model size, vendor, and price tier we tested. An instrumented three-LLM anchor sub-panel (Claude 4.6 Opus, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.4 Pro) carries determinism probes, input ablations, and bootstrap CIs, and reaches anchor panel $\alpha = 0.77$ on the 15 cells against human-panel $\alpha = 0.36$. The high LLM-panel $\alpha$ reflects systematic convergence on the majority reading rather than balanced reproduction of both readings; a benchmark that selects its LLM judge by maximising agreement with a human reference panel will inherit this asymmetry by construction.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Transposition Approach to Optimal Control of McKean-Vlasov SPDEs

arXiv:2603.06245v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we investigate an optimal control problem for McKean-Vlasov stochastic partial differential equations, in which the coefficients depend on the law of the state process. For systems with nonconvex control sets, we establish a Pontryagin-type stochastic maximum principle that provides necessary optimality conditions for admissible controls. The analysis is based on the classical spike variation method together with the introduction of an adjoint backward stochastic partial differential equation involving Lions derivatives with respect to probability measures. Our results extend the stochastic maximum principle for McKean-Vlasov controlled stochastic differential equations to the infinite-dimensional SPDE setting.

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

Enhancing Physics-Informed Neural Networks Through Feature Engineering

arXiv:2502.07209v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) seek to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) with deep learning. Mainstream approaches that deploy fully-connected multi-layer deep learning architectures require prolonged training to achieve even moderate accuracy, while recent work on feature engineering allows higher accuracy and faster convergence. This paper introduces SAFE-NET, a Single-layered Adaptive Feature Engineering NETwork that achieves orders-of-magnitude lower errors with far fewer parameters than baseline feature engineering methods. SAFE-NET returns to basic ideas in machine learning, using Fourier features, a simplified single hidden layer network architecture, and an effective optimizer that improves the conditioning of the PINN optimization problem. Numerical results show that SAFE-NET converges faster and typically outperforms deeper networks and more complex architectures. It consistently uses fewer parameters – on average, 65% fewer than the competing feature engineering methods – while achieving comparable accuracy in less than 30% of the training epochs. Moreover, each SAFE-NET epoch is 95% faster than those of competing feature engineering approaches. These findings challenge the prevailing belief that modern PINNs effectively learn features in these scientific applications and highlight the efficiency gains possible through feature engineering.

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

Is Your Trajectory Displacement Safe in Long-tail?

arXiv:2606.16313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-tail scenarios remain a major bottleneck for autonomous driving evaluation, even as datasets grow by orders of magnitude. Existing evaluation pipelines are rarely human-aligned, safety-aware, verifiable, and explainable at the same time: closed-loop metrics often saturate among strong planners, while unstructured human ratings can be noisy without a carefully designed protocol. We formulate planning evaluation as additional-threat detection: given a planner trajectory and an expert reference, does the planner's displacement introduce new unsafe driving behavior? We propose FluidTest, an evaluation pipeline with three components: a pairwise WebUI protocol for reliable human annotation; a taxonomy of 32 semantic threats with evidence-grounded decision graphs; and a three-agent verification system with reflection for precision and auditability. Experiments on the WOD-E2E dataset show that FluidTest produces consistent labels among trained annotators and identifies additional threats in 65% of Poutine trajectories and 51% of RAP trajectories. These results show that state-of-the-art planners can still exhibit substantial safety-relevant failures despite high Rater Feedback Scores (RFS) and low Average Displacement Error (ADE). Additional details, guidance, and code are available at https://fluidtest.web.app.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Fidelity bounds for adiabatic gates and other quantum operations with time-dependent dissipation

arXiv:2606.20501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum-computing platforms are susceptible to noise, the fidelity of quantum operations is limited by decoherence. Understanding this limitation is crucial for building utility-scale quantum processors. In previous works [Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 150504 (2022); Quantum 9, 1684 (2025)], we presented analytical formulae for the average gate fidelity of multi-qubit operations under static Markovian noise processes, including operations that temporarily leave the computational subspace. However, some quantum-computing architectures dynamically modulate qubit or coupler frequencies to implement two-qubit gates, e.g., baseband flux gates; such modulation can lead to dissipation rates varying in time. In this Letter, we therefore generalize the fidelity-reduction formulae to encompass time-dependent dissipation. Applying our generalized formula, we obtain a fidelity bound for adiabatic operations and demonstrate that flux-dependent noise sensitivity, combined with qubit-coupler hybridization, significantly reduces the fidelity of adiabatic controlled-Z (CZ) gates in superconducting quantum computers. Our work thus provides essential theoretical tools for evaluating error budgets and optimizing the design of quantum operations in tunable quantum-computing architectures, and may also find applications in quantum-sensing and quantum-communication protocols that are affected by time-dependent dissipation.