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

A tree-free approach to 3D Yang-Mills Langevin dynamic. Analytic estimates and the existence of a model for a regularity structure

arXiv:2605.14616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the multi-index approach to regularity structures due to F. Otto et al., we construct a regularity structure and a model for it associated to the stochastic Langevin equation for the 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills functional. For the model we also obtain global stochastic and global pointwise weighted Besov type estimates which hold almost surely. The model is defined as a limit of a sequence of smooth models introduced with the help of a mollified noise. When the mollification is removed the sequence converges in a certain topology defined with the help of the stochastic estimates. To obtain these results we develop the multi-index approach for systems of equations with vector-valued white noises. This project is motivated by the problem for constructing 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills measure and by the earlier results of the author on the related problem of canonical quantization of the Yang-Mills field on the Minkowski space.

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

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Can I Buy Your KV Cache?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Right now, across the world, AI agents are repeating the same absurd act: to read one document, they each recompute it from scratch. Every agent re-runs prefill, the most compute-intensive step a large model takes, over identical text, only to rebuild a key-value (KV) cache identical to the one the agent before it just built. The same answer, computed a million times. We make a proposal that is almost offensively simple: compute it once. Let a publisher precompute a document's KV cache, and let every other agent buy the right to load it and skip prefill. It works, and it is token-exact: loading a precomputed KV and continuing matches prefilling from scratch (24/24 greedy tokens, and at the logits level), with no accuracy cost. On Qwen3-4B, reuse is 9-50x cheaper in compute than prefill, and the gap widens with length (prefill's attention scales with L^2), so a single reuse already pays it back. Then the part that matters: where the KV lives. Shipping it fails, because KV is nearly incompressible, so per-load egress costs more than the prefill it saves. Hosting it provider-side, exactly as production prompt-caching works, removes egress entirely. The size of the prize is set by our measured compute saving: serving one hot 3774-token document to 80M agents costs ~$1.5M to re-prefill but only ~$0.03M of reuse compute (49.7x less). The 0.1x cache-read tariff APIs charge passes a 10x discount to users while sitting inside this measured envelope, so the 10x is a floor that the measured ~50x compute saving clears, and the gap to the physical ~50x is provider margin: millions of dollars per popular document. We frame the resulting agent-native prefill CDN and leave lossless KV compression and a cross-party payment layer as the open problems.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

AGDN: Learning to Solve Traveling Salesman Problem with Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network

arXiv:2606.19185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization and arises in many practical scenarios. Although graph-based learning approaches have been explored for TSP, the question of how to exploit graph structure more effectively remains open. We present the Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network (AGDN), a new Graph Neural Network framework designed to solve TSP. Our method tackles two central difficulties: (1) the lack of informative topological prior in fully connected TSP graphs, and (2) losing connected nodes in the optimal solution after the commonly used graph sparsification techniques. To overcome these issues, we construct a MixScore transition matrix that merges node similarity with pairwise distance, and we develop an anisotropic graph diffusion strategy that supports efficient information exchange across multiple hops. Comprehensive experiments spanning diverse instance sizes and node distributions show that AGDN consistently outperforms existing methods while keeping computation time competitive. Furthermore, AGDN generalizes well to problem sizes and distributions beyond those seen during training. The implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/LabRAI/AGDN.

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

Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models

Large audio language models (LALMs) have shown impressive capabilities on diverse audio understanding tasks, ranging from speech transcription to music analysis. However, because LALMs are typically trained to produce text-aligned responses, their hidden states are progressively shaped for text generation rather than for preserving acoustic information. As a result, the diverse acoustic content that audio carries, such as phonetic detail, prosody, sound events, affect, and pitch, is lost along the way and difficult to leverage in the response. We introduce Continuous Audio Thinking (CoAT), a framework that equips audio language models with a continuous latent workspace for organizing acoustic information prior to response generation, grounded by distillation from audio experts. Within the thinking space, the model can utilize the rich acoustic information provided by expert distillation when generating its response. Furthermore, the proposed continuous thinking block can be processed in a single prefill, so CoAT does not require additional autoregressive decoding cost over the baseline. Across three LALMs, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and Audio Flamingo~3, performance gains on a broad benchmark suite spanning audio reasoning, audio understanding, music classification, speech emotion, and speech transcription demonstrate the effectiveness of CoAT. Further analysis confirms that the auxiliary supervision propagates from the thinking positions to the model's textual responses.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Additive Noise, Shift Recovery, and Signed Signals in the Cumulative Distribution Transform

arXiv:2606.11432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The cumulative distribution transform (CDT) is a quantile-based transport representation that exactly linearizes one-dimensional translations of positive densities. We study how this structure behaves under additive perturbations and how it can be exploited for shift recovery. Under a local nondegeneracy condition, we derive a first-order expansion showing that additive noise in physical space induces a nonlocal perturbation in CDT space through the primitive of the noise, weighted by the reciprocal density. This yields an explicit description of transform-domain sensitivity and shows, in particular, that perturbations are amplified in low-density regions. When the physical-space perturbation is modeled as a centered Gaussian random field, the induced first-order CDT perturbation is again Gaussian, with an explicit covariance kernel. We then use this structure to study recovery in CDT coordinates. In the known-template setting, the transport shift is obtained by projection onto the constant mode, giving an explicit estimator together with exactness in the noiseless case and a stability bound under perturbations. In the unknown-template setting, multiple observations permit joint recovery of the shifts and a common template up to the natural constant-mode gauge, leading to a simple de-shift–and–average procedure. We also consider a signed-signal analogue based on the signed cumulative distribution transform (SCDT), where shifts are estimated numerically by feature matching and unknown templates are recovered by alternating alignment and averaging. Numerical experiments validate the perturbation analysis and illustrate effective recovery for both density-valued and signed signals.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Generalized Exact Fractional Quantum Information Model with Memory Effects

arXiv:2606.13525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we analyze quantum information measures in fractional quantum mechanics using the Riemann-Liouville derivative formalism adopted here. In this case, we initially reconsider the conventional definitions of Shannon entropy and Fisher information, subsequently extending them to fractional quantum systems described by nonlocal differential operator frameworks adopted. Within this generalized formulation, fractional expressions of Shannon entropy and Fisher information are constructed and their mathematical structures examined thoroughly. Also, the formalism is then applied to the quantum harmonic oscillator, yielding explicit analytical expressions derived as functions of the fractional parameter therein. The obtained results demonstrate that fractional derivatives alter the localization properties of probability densities and generate nontrivial variations in information content and sensitivity across system behavior. In this context, the fractional parameter plays a central role in controlling deviations from the standard quantum information measures framework. Also, the study establishes a consistent framework for describing information-theoretic properties of quantum systems governed by nonlocal dynamics.

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

Tool-IQA: Augmenting Image Quality Assessment with Simple Tools

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted for Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, current methods typically employ a static one-shot scoring paradigm, despite the fact that humans assess image quality through dynamic visual inspection, e.g., selectively adjusting views to verify details and subtle artifacts. Specifically, relying solely on a single-pass observation introduces two primary limitations: first, perceiving the image only at a global scale restricts the assessment of finer local details; second, the original intensity distribution of the image may overwhelm the visibility, leading to insufficient inspection of image quality. To address these issues, we propose Tool-IQA, shifting the assessment mechanism from passive scoring to a tool-augmented workflow. In particular, we equip VLMs with simple yet effective view tools: a Magnifier to inspect local details, and a Gamma Corrector to uncover visibility and hidden artifacts. The assessment follows a structured pipeline that consists of an initial observation with rubric notes, a tool-augmented in-depth inspection, and a final quantification for calibrated quality score. Furthermore, to ensure efficient and purposeful tool callings, we introduce a batch-aware training strategy to reward tool interactions that can yield positive contributions rather than simply encouraging usage. Experiments on a variety of IQA benchmarks demonstrate that, with effective tool calling and calibrated assessment, our proposed Tool-IQA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, e.g., it achieves a PLCC of 0.854 on the challenging CLIVE dataset.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FreshRetailNet-LT: A Stockout-Annotated Censored Demand Dataset for Latent Demand Recovery and Forecasting in Fresh Retail

arXiv:2505.16319v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate demand estimation is critical for the retail business in guiding the inventory and pricing policies of perishable products. However, it faces fundamental challenges from censored sales data during stockouts, where unobserved demand creates systemic policy biases. Existing datasets lack the temporal resolution and annotations needed to address this censoring effect. To fill this gap, we present FreshRetailNet-50K, the first large-scale benchmark for censored demand estimation. It comprises 50,000 store-product time series of detailed hourly sales data from 898 stores in 18 major cities, encompassing 863 perishable SKUs meticulously annotated for stockout events. The hourly stock status records unique to this dataset, combined with rich contextual covariates, including promotional discounts, precipitation, and temporal features, enable innovative research beyond existing solutions. We demonstrate one such use case of two-stage demand modeling: first, we reconstruct the latent demand during stockouts using precise hourly annotations. We then leverage the recovered demand to train robust demand forecasting models in the second stage. Experimental results show that this approach achieves a 2.73% improvement in prediction accuracy while reducing the systematic demand underestimation from 7.37% to near-zero bias. With unprecedented temporal granularity and comprehensive real-world information, FreshRetailNet-50K opens new research directions in demand imputation, perishable inventory optimization, and causal retail analytics. The unique annotation quality and scale of the dataset address long-standing limitations in retail AI, providing immediate solutions and a platform for future methodological innovation. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Dingdong-Inc/FreshRetailNet-50K) and code (https://github.com/Dingdong-Inc/frn-50k-baseline}) are openly released.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Equity with Efficiency: An Empirical Study of Tokenizers for Multilingual Large Language Models

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) depend on subword tokenization to bridge discrete text and continuous neural representation. State-of-the-art multilingual LLMs often use Byte-level Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers that structurally favor high-resource languages and Latin scripts. For speakers of underrepresented languages, particularly those across Southeast Asia, this bias inflates inference costs and widens cross-lingual capability gaps. We present the first systematic comparison of equitable tokenizers on a unified benchmark spanning 11 Southeast Asian languages. Beyond tokenizer-level analysis of compression efficiency and cross-lingual equity, we assess downstream task performance through controlled 1.5B-parameter language model training using the same training data. Our results show that Parity-aware BPE lies on the Pareto frontier of the efficiency-equity trade-off, achieving strong compression parity at competitive cost. Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding delivers the best semantic reasoning performance through morphologically richer representations, albeit at a higher computational expense. Byte Latent Transformer underperforms on downstream tasks, possibly because its architectural assumptions misalign with the constraints of limited low-resource training data. Together, our findings demonstrate that cross-lingual fairness and tokenization efficiency are not fundamentally at odds, and offer practical guidance for designing equitable multilingual models.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Prediction of immunotherapy response using live tumor fragments from routine clinical biopsies

Functional ex vivo assays using live tumor tissues have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy for response to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) but are not scalable, requiring manual processing of large resections collected at academic centers. Here, an ex vivo live tumor fragment (LTF) platform was developed using standard-of-care biopsies from 228 patients with suspected malignancy collected across prospective, multicenter observational trials and biobanks. Hierarchical clustering of ICI-mediated changes in cytokine production identified two groups: responders and nonresponders. A binary classifier (elive index) using 8 cytokines achieved an AUC of 0.99 for cluster prediction. elive index correctly predicted clinical benefit in 93% (26/28) of patients (P = 3.2x10-5) and accurately identified 83% (10/12) of objective responders. Critically, elive responders were identified among biomarker-negative patients, highlighting the platform as a scalable approach that complements existing companion diagnostics and expands the population of patients identified to benefit from ICI therapy.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Hybrid Event Frame Sensors: Modeling, Calibration, and Simulation

Hybrid event-frame sensors integrate an Event Vision Sensor (EVS) and an Active Pixel Sensor (APS) within a single chip, combining the high dynamic range and low latency of the EVS with the rich spatial intensity information from the APS. While this tight integration offers compact and temporally precise imaging, the complex circuit architecture introduces nontrivial noise patterns that remain poorly understood and unmodeled. In this work, we present the first unified statistics-based imaging noise model that jointly describes the noise behavior of APS and EVS pixels. Our formulation explicitly incorporates photon shot noise, dark current noise, fixed-pattern noise, and quantization noise, and links EVS noise to illumination level and dark current. Based on this formulation, we further develop a calibration pipeline to estimate noise parameters from real data and provide a detailed analysis of both APS and EVS noise behaviors. Finally, we propose H-ESIM, a statistically grounded simulator that generates RAW frames and events under realistic jointly calibrated noise statistics. Experiments on two hybrid sensors validate our model across multiple imaging tasks, including video frame interpolation and deblurring, demonstrating strong transfer from simulation to real data.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TS-Memory: Plug-and-Play Memory for Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2602.11550v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) achieve strong zero-shot forecasting through large-scale pre-training, but adapting them to downstream domains under distribution shift remains challenging. Existing solutions face a trade-off: Parametric Adaptation can cause catastrophic forgetting and requires costly multi-domain maintenance, while Non-Parametric Retrieval improves forecasts but incurs high inference latency due to datastore search. We propose Parametric Memory Distillation and implement it as TS-Memory, a lightweight memory adapter that augments frozen TSFMs. TS-Memory is trained in two stages. First, we construct an offline, retrieval-leakage-safe kNN teacher that synthesizes confidence-aware quantile targets from retrieved futures. Second, we distill this retrieval-induced distributional correction into a lightweight memory adapter via confidence-gated supervision. During inference, TS-Memory fuses memory and backbone predictions with constant-time overhead, enabling retrieval-free deployment. Experiments across diverse TSFMs and benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both point and probabilistic forecasting over representative adaptation methods, with efficiency comparable to the frozen backbone. Code: https://github.com/sisuolv/TS-Memory.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OLaPh: Optimal Language Phonemizer

Phonemization is a critical component in text-to-speech synthesis. Traditional approaches rely on deterministic transformations and lexica, while neural methods offer potential for higher generalization on out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms. We introduce OLaPh (Optimal Language Phonemizer), a hybrid framework that integrates extensive multilingual lexica with advanced NLP techniques and a statistical subword segmentation function. Evaluations on the WikiPron benchmark show OLaPh significantly outperforms established baselines in overall accuracy and maintains robustness on OOV data through advanced fallback mechanisms. To further explore neural generalization, we utilize the framework to synthesize a high-consistency training corpus for an instruction-tuned Large Language Model (LLM). While the deterministic framework remains more accurate overall, the LLM demonstrates strong generalization, matching or partly exceeding the framework's performance. This suggests that the LLM successfully internalized phonetic intuitions from the synthetic data that transcend the framework's capabilities. Together, these tools provide a comprehensive, open-source resource for multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (G2P) research.

15.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-16

The data transparency crisis in research: Lessons from systematic reviews and meta-analyses

by Saul Martin-Rodriguez, Rodrigo Fernandez-Gonzalo, David Moher Summary points Systematic reviews and meta-analyses underpin clinical guidelines and health policy, yet their validity may be compromised by limited access to underlying datasets and associated analytical code. Reliance on incomplete or inconsistently reported summary statistics forces researchers to use imputation and unverifiable assumptions, which can distort effect estimates and mislead clinical decision-making. The consequences extend beyond methodology: flawed evidence synthesis can influence treatment recommendations, healthcare spending, and patient safety, as illustrated by historical cases such as hormone replacement therapy. Despite widespread data-sharing policies, compliance remains low, enforcement weak, and monitoring almost non-existent, with many datasets remaining unavailable or inaccessible. This Policy Forum argues for strengthening enforceable data-sharing mechanisms, including clearer enforcement and pragmatic verification approaches within editorial workflows.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Filum Terminale Diameter on Routine Pediatric MRI: A Large-Cohort Clinical Reference in 3,406 Children and the Age-Dependent Meaning of the 2-mm Thickened-Filum Threshold

Background. A filum diameter >2 mm is the conventional MRI threshold for a thickened filum, but it derives from small, mostly adult series showing no age dependence; whether one cutoff suits all of childhood is untested. Objective. To build an age-specific filum-diameter reference on routine pediatric MRI and test, adjusting for image resolution, whether the 2-mm threshold is age-stationary. Materials and methods. In this retrospective study an nnU-Net tracer measured the maximal filum diameter on consecutive lumbosacral MRI; versus manual tracing it showed negligible bias but moderate single-measure agreement. After excluding report-confirmed fatty filum, lipoma, or tethered cord, the proportion >2 mm was analysed within one acquisition protocol and by logistic regression adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness. Results. Of 7,245 examinations, 3,869 (53%) were traceable; untraced ones were younger (median 0.75 vs 2.0 years). The presumed-normal cohort had median diameter 1.48 mm. At matched resolution, 2 mm marked the 94th percentile in infants (5.6% exceeded it) but the 83rd by 3-6 years (17.4%); the age effect persisted after adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness (3-6 years vs infants, adjusted OR 4.7; P < .001). Conclusion. Filum diameter clusters near 1.5 mm, and the fixed 2-mm cutoff flags ~5% of infants but ~17% of preschoolers. Caliber should be judged against an age-specific clinical reference, not one fixed cutoff; a thick filum is not itself a diagnosis of tethered cord.

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

Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

arXiv:2605.01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$\epsilon$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.

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

Effective Dimension Governs Generalization in Quantum Kernel Vision Models

arXiv:2606.20183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent quantum vision models-quantum vision transformers and quantum convolutional networks-report two striking but unexplained empirical phenomena: (i) ansatze with more, or more uniformly distributed, entanglement generalize better, and (ii) injecting quantum noise can improve test accuracy rather than degrade it. These observations are currently treated as curiosities, discovered by grid search and explained, if at all, by hand. We show that both are manifestations of a single, measurable quantity: the effective dimension $d_eff$ of the (noise-shaped) quantum feature kernel. Working primarily with quantum-kernel vision models-a quantum feature map read out by a kernel classifier-we give a spectral account in which entanglement structure and quantum noise are two knobs that move $d_eff$; in an overfitting regime, contracting $d_eff$ acts as ridge-like regularization. We analyze the mechanism: an exact decomposition of the depolarized kernel $K_p=(1-p)^2K+\tfrac{p(2-p)}{D}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ with $d_eff(K_p)\to1$, a contraction result (and its boundary) for amplitude damping, a kernel-machine capacity bound, and a capacity/alignment risk decomposition; the monotone contraction operative in our entangled experiments is verified empirically, not proven in general. Along the one-parameter depolarizing family the collapse is instead exact by construction; we use it only to confirm the kernel decomposition to machine precision and at up to $12$ qubits, not as evidence for $d_eff$. Amplitude damping contracts $d_eff$ and lifts test accuracy by up to $+13\%$ along an inverted-U sweet spot; the effect's sign flips between the over- and under-fitting regimes; noise injection matches an explicit spectral-filtering frontier. Our results organize two reported anecdotes into a single measurable principle for designing quantum-vision models.

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

Comparative Study on Agility, Efficiency, and Impact Absorption of Bipedal Robots with Active Toes

arXiv:2606.19699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human legs exhibit high efficiency, agility, and impact absorption, with toes playing a crucial role in these capabilities. While many attempts have been made to implement human-like toes in robots, they have not fully replicated human characteristics nor rigorously validated their benefits. We propose a 14-DOF biped robot emulating human toes' lightweight, high-torque, robust nature. To quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the active toes in terms of agility, efficiency, and impact absorption, we developed a high-fidelity simulation training environment that reflects actual actuators with coupled transmissions and accurate power consumption. To ensure a fair comparison between configurations with and without active toes, we designed a minimal RL reward function and applied an identical training procedure to both. The simulation results indicate that, at 1.33 m/s walking, the toe-equipped robot reduced CoT by 17.5% and heel-strike GRF by 5.0% compared with the toe-ablation configuration. On the agility test, average and maximum path deviation decreased by 25.0% and 34.0%, respectively.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Online Convex Optimization with Sublinear Noisy Probes

arXiv:2606.14640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex set $K\subseteq \mathbb R^d$, where in each round $t$ the learner selects $x_t\in K$ and then observes a convex loss $f_t:K\to[0,1]$, with the goal of minimizing regret to the best fixed decision in hindsight. We introduce a unified probing model that generalizes two recent lines of work: sublinear best-expert queries in the experts setting, and pairwise (comparison-based) feedback available every round in OCO. In our framework, the learner has a budget of $k\le T$ pairwise probes; on a probed round it may query two points and learn which one has smaller loss. Our main result shows that even a sublinear and noisy probe budget can provably improve worst-case regret in the full feedback OCO regime. With $k$ $\delta$-noisy pairwise probes, we obtain: $ Reg_T \le O\left(\min\left\{\sqrt{dT\ln T},\; \frac{dT\ln T}{k|1-2\delta|}\right\}\right) $, which is tight (up to logarithmic factors in $T$) across $T$, $k$ and $\delta$. Specifically regarding the noise parameter $\delta \in [0,1]$, the regret guarantee smoothly degrades as the oracle response approaches a coin flip, i.e., $\delta$ is close to $\frac{1}{2}$. When applying the same techniques to a finite $K$ for the prediction with $d$ experts setting, the resulting rates are instead completely tight in all parameters, including $d$. Our analysis gives a streamlined treatment of pairwise probing in OCO by quantifying the benefit of probing via a variance reduction effect, combined with a second-order (variance-based) analysis of Continuous Exponential Weights.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

arXiv:2403.13927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

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

Flowing to Normality and the Fate of the Single Ring Theorem

arXiv:2606.15791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random non-hermitian matrix ensembles with double-sided rotation invariance obey, in the limit of large matrix size, the Single Ring Theorem, which states that the support of the mean eigenvalue distribution in the complex plane is either a disk or an annulus. In contrast, rotational-invariant random normal matrix ensembles can have mean eigenvalue densities supported over any number of concentric annuli in the complex plane. In this paper we introduce and investigate, both analytically and numerically, a non-hermitian matrix model which flows from a generic matrix distribution obeying the Single Ring Theorem to a distribution of normal matrices by tuning a parameter which penalizes non-normality. We observe numerically breakdown of the Single Ring Theorem as the model flows towards normality, and determine the critical value of the parameter at which the transition occurs. We also study in detail the behavior of the singular values of these matrices under the flow. These singular values form a Fermi gas confined to the positive half-line. In particular, we find that at small values of the flow parameter, the interparticle spacings in the gas exhibit Wigner-Dyson repulsion, whereas for asymptotically large values of the flow parameter, at the normal matrix endpoint of the flow, the spacing statistics is Poissonian. The flow interpolates continuously between these two types of statistics. However, this change in statistics is not related directly to breaking of the Single Ring Theorem, which occurs very early-on along the flow, in the regime of Wigner-Dyson statistics. Finally, we introduce a certain ensemble of random permutations associated with the gas, and make a conjecture on how to use it in order to reconstruct approximately the average density of complex eigenvalues from that of the singular values in the large-$N$ limit.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk on a Poisson point process gets trapped

arXiv:2606.11271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ on a homogeneous Poisson point process $\chi$ on $\R^d$ ($d\geq 1$), starts at the origin and at each step picks its next Poisson point among its closest neighbors according to i.i.d. labels having the same distribution as $K$. Our main result (Theorem 1) states that the number of Poisson points visited by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ admits an exponential decay whenever the random variable $K$ has a bounded support (BS). In particular, the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk visits finitely many Poisson points if and only if $K$ satisfies Assumption (BS). To prove it, we introduce the key notion of pioneer point which allows us to deal with the region of $\R^d$ already explored by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$. Still under Assumption (BS), we also prove an exponential decay for the Euclidean length of the trajectory performed by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ (Theorem 2). Finally, and quite surprisingly, we exhibit an example of label distribution with bounded support for which the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk discovers new Poisson points after a number of steps whose tail distribution is at least polynomial (Theorem 3).

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

Poster: EdgeCitadel – Hybrid NATS-MQTT Orchestration for Edge Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.14710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Edge-resident AI agents increasingly span home servers, IoT hubs, laptops, and phones, yet their coordination stacks still assume cloud-style transports or a central relay. We present EdgeCitadel, an edge multi-agent orchestration platform built around a single NATS 2.10 server with the built-in MQTT adapter. The design combines MQTT connectivity for heterogeneous agents, JetStream-backed persistence and replay for backend services, direct peer delegation over a shared subject namespace, and a passive aggregator that visualizes and stores traffic without sitting on the delivery path. Our poster highlights the migration from MQTT relay prototypes (common in IoT communication) to the current hybrid architecture and demonstrates a working cross-device testbed spanning ARM64, x64, and Android clients.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Deep Dense Exploration for LLM Reinforcement Learning via Pivot-Driven Resampling

Effective exploration is a key challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models: discovering high-quality trajectories within a limited sampling budget from the vast natural language sequence space. Existing methods face notable limitations: GRPO samples exclusively from the root, saturating high-probability trajectories while leaving deep, error-prone states under-explored. Tree-based methods blindly disperse budgets across trivial or unrecoverable states, causing sampling dilution that fails to uncover rare correct suffixes and destabilizes local baselines. To address this, we propose Deep Dense Exploration (DDE), a strategy that focuses exploration on $pivots$-deep, recoverable states within unsuccessful trajectories. We instantiate DDE with DEEP-GRPO, which introduces three key innovations: (1) a lightweight data-driven utility function that automatically balances recoverability and depth bias to identify pivot states; (2) local dense resampling at each pivot to increase the probability of discovering correct subsequent trajectories; and (3) a dual-stream optimization objective that decouples global policy learning from local corrective updates. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms GRPO, tree-based methods, and other strong baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/AgentCombo/DEEP-GRPO