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

Evidence of an Emergent "Self" in Continual Robot Learning

Authors:
Adidev Jhunjhunwala↗Judah Goldfeder↗Hod Lipson↗

arXiv:2603.24350v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A key challenge to understanding self-awareness has been a principled way of quantifying whether an intelligent system has a concept of a "self", and if so how to differentiate the "self" from other cognitive structures. We propose that the "self" can be isolated by seeking the invariant portion of cognitive process that changes relatively little compared to more rapidly acquired cognitive skills - because our self is the most persistent aspect of our experiences. We used this principle to analyze the cognitive structure of robots under two conditions: One robot learns a constant task, while a second undergoes continual learning under variable tasks. We find that robots subjected to continual learning develop an invariant subnetwork that is significantly more stable (p < 0.001) compared to the control, and that this subnetwork is also functionally important: preserving it aids adaptation while damaging it impairs performance. We validate this pattern across three different robots spanning locomotion and manipulation.

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

Rethinking Structural Anomaly Detection: From Decision Boundaries to Projection Operators

Authors:
Alexander Bauer↗

arXiv:2606.15280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most existing anomaly detection methods rely on estimating a probability density or learning an enclosing decision boundary, implicitly assuming that normal data occupies a region of non-zero volume in the ambient space. In contrast, structural anomaly detection considers data that lies near a low-dimensional manifold, creating a mismatch between the inductive bias of existing methods and the structure of the data, often resulting in degraded performance. To address this mismatch, we introduce a geometric perspective. Specifically, we learn a projection operator onto the manifold of normal samples and define a sample as anomalous if it is altered by this projection. This formulation naturally integrates the inductive bias of manifold-supported data and reframes anomaly detection in terms of a projection residual, thereby resolving issues arising from modeling degenerate distributions. Notably, it provides a unifying interpretation of reconstruction-based methods by explaining their success and failure in terms of projection quality. In particular, it explains the strong generalization ability of projection-aligned models as a consequence of contraction behavior toward the manifold. Moreover, by decoupling anomaly detection from probabilistic modeling, it reduces the tendency to misclassify rare but normal samples, a widely recognized limitation of existing approaches. Empirically, we demonstrate that projection-aligned methods achieve strong performance, outperforming boundary-based methods while improving upon existing reconstruction-based approaches.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Ensuring Trustworthy Online A/B Testing: Addressing Five Key Questions on CUPED

Authors:
Yu Zhang↗Bokui Wan↗Yongli Qin↗Jinyong Ma↗Yifan Guo↗

arXiv:2606.18750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A/B testing has become the gold standard for data-driven decision-making in large-scale online experimentation, providing critical guidance for feature launch, pricing optimization, and user experience enhancement. To maximize statistical sensitivity, many technology companies routinely employ Controlled-experiment Using Pre-Experiment Data (CUPED), a technique that achieves substantial variance reduction while preserving the unbiasedness of estimating the average treatment effect. Despite its widespread adoption, several critical methodological and practical nuances of CUPED remain underexplored. This paper systematically addresses five frequently encountered yet overlooked questions regarding the application of CUPED. First, we provide a comparative analysis of various post-CUPED estimators to identify the optimal adjustment specification. Second, we evaluate the validity of regression-based adjustments and delineate robust variance estimation methods tailored for such frameworks. Finally, we extend our investigation to complex but common scenarios, including multi-arm experiments and two-stage sampling designs. Our findings reveal that in these settings, naive reliance on standard variance estimators can lead to severely misleading inferences. By offering rigorous theoretical insights and extensive experimental validation, this work deepens the conceptual understanding of CUPED. Notably, the recommended methodologies have been successfully deployed and integrated into ByteDance's experimentation platform.

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04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

Authors:
Puja Pandey↗Palaniappan Vellaisamy↗

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models

Authors:
Donghang Wu↗Haoyang Zhang↗Chen Chen↗Tianyu Zhang↗Fei Tian↗Xuerui Yang↗Gang Yu↗Hexin Liu↗Nana Hou↗Yuchen Hu↗Eng Siong Chng↗

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.

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

Pepti-Agent: An AI Agent for Peptide Design and Optimization

Authors:
Houxu Chen↗Achuth Chandrasekhar↗Amir Barati Farimani↗

Therapeutic peptides occupy a valuable design space between small molecules and biologics, but their development requires satisfying several competing constraints at once: solubility, hemolytic activity, and nonspecific surface fouling are governed by overlapping sequence features, so improving one property often degrades another. Computational design addresses this by pairing generative models with sequence-based property predictors, iteratively proposing and refining candidates. However, these components are typically wired together as monolithic scripts that are difficult to inspect, extend, or reuse, and they often refine sequences by natural-language reasoning rather than by tracking the evolving multi-property state of each candidate. We present Pepti-Agent, a closed-loop, peptide-specific framework that exposes generation, property prediction, and single-residue mutation as independently inspectable Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools. A large language model controller invokes these tools and consults live predictor output between calls, so refinement is guided by each sequence's current property profile rather than by language reasoning alone. Task-specific PeptideGPT models generate candidates, ProtBERT-based classifiers score solubility, hemolysis, and non-fouling, and two interchangeable mutation operators propose sequence edits. By recording a per-step trace of controller decisions, predictor outputs, and accepted mutations, Pepti-Agent offers a reproducible substrate for benchmarking multi-objective design strategies and for prioritizing candidates for experimental validation.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LARE: Low-Attention Region Encoding for Text-Image Retrieval

Authors:
Abdulmalik Alquwayfili↗Faisal Almeshal↗Jumanah Almajnouni↗Leena Alotaibi↗Faisal Alhajari↗Mohammed Alkhrashi↗Alreem Almuhrij↗Abdullah Aldwyish↗Raied Aljadaany↗Huda Alamri↗Muhammad Kamran J. Khan↗

Image retrieval in crowded scenes is particularly challenging due to the salience bias of conventional visual encoders, which tend to focus on dominant objects while neglecting low-attention regions that are often crucial for fine-grained retrieval. We propose LARE (Low-Attention Region Encoding), a framework that explicitly models these overlooked regions. LARE adopts a dual-encoding strategy that encodes low-attention regions of an image and the full image in parallel, leading to more diverse and informative image embeddings. To evaluate image retrieval performance in challenging crowded scenes, we introduce Dense-Set, a challenging subset derived from COCO and Flickr30K. In this subset, images are re-captioned to provide richer descriptions of low-attention or previously overlooked regions. This dataset highlights the limitations of existing retrieval models and enables a more rigorous evaluation under densely crowded scene conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves retrieval performance by preserving subtle, non-dominant visual cues within the shared latent space.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Intermittent time series forecasting: local vs global models

Authors:
Stefano Damato↗Nicol\`o Rubattu↗Dario Azzimonti↗Giorgio Corani↗

arXiv:2601.14031v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Forecasting intermittent time series, which contain zeros, is a crucial challenge in supply chains as inventory policies require probabilistic forecasts to establish safety levels. Intermittent time series are commonly forecast using local models, trained individually on each time series. In the last years global models, trained on a large collection of time series, have become popular for time series forecasting. Global models are often based on neural networks or gradient boosted trees. We carry out the first study comparing state-of-the-art probabilistic local and global models on intermittent time series. For global models we consider three different distribution heads suitable for intermittent time series: negative binomial, hurdle-shifted negative binomial and Tweedie. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first use of the latter two with neural networks. We perform experiments on five datasets comprising overall more than 40'000 real-world time series. Among global models, TiDE, a simple neural network architecture, achieves the best accuracy; it also consistently outperforms local models and has lower computational requirements. Large global models are instead much more computationally demanding and less accurate. Among the distribution heads, the Tweedie provides the best estimates of the highest quantiles.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Deep Learning of Solver-Aware Turbulence Closures from Nudged LES Dynamics

Authors:
Ashwin Suriyanarayanan↗Dibyajyoti Chakraborty↗Romit Maulik↗

arXiv:2604.23874v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The differentiable physics paradigm may be leveraged as an a-posteriori approach for discovering turbulence closure models by embedding a neural network parameterization directly inside the solver and optimizing it given potentially sparse target data. This addresses a key limitation of a-priori learning where direct numerical simulation (DNS) data is used to approximate the subgrid stress with the assumption of a low-pass filter. Closures trained in this a-priori manner frequently lead to unstable deployments due to the mismatch between the assumed filter and the effect of numerical discretizations and coarse-graining. In comparison, while typically stable during deployment, a-posteriori learning incurs high computational costs due to the need to backpropagate through a large eddy simulation (LES) solver. Furthermore, a-posteriori methods are challenging to apply broadly since they require significant modification of existing solvers. Finally, both approaches are limited when generalization is desired across different numerical schemes with their implicit filtering characteristics. In this work, we present a deep-learning approach for turbulence closure modeling built on the continuous data assimilation framework. Our approach enables the a-priori training of closures using sparsely observed DNS data without modifying or differentiating through the LES solver, while preserving stability during deployment for the recovery of invariant statistics. We focus on the model's ability to adapt to different discretizations by explicitly conditioning it on the numerical scheme. We use two- and three-dimensional canonical cases to test our framework and show that the learned correction systematically tracks the discretization error of the coarse solver.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Inverted Dirac oscillator

Authors:
Mustapha Maamache↗

arXiv:2606.15303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Dirac oscillator is obtained from the Dirac Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{D}} = \left( c\vec{\alpha}\cdot \vec{p} + mc^{2}\beta \right)$ by modifying the momentum through a non-Hermitian substitution $\overrightarrow{p} \rightarrow \overrightarrow{p} \pm i\omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$. Despite the non-Hermitian nature of this momentum operator, the full Hamiltonian remains Hermitian due to the presence of the Dirac matrix $\vec{\alpha}$. However, if one instead introduces a Hermitian modification of the form $\vec{p} \rightarrow \vec{p} \pm \omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$, the resulting Hamiltonian is no longer Hermitian. In this case, the system corresponds to an inverted Dirac oscillator $H^{\mathrm{r}}$, where the potential becomes unbounded from below, the energy spectrum becomes continuous, and the eigenfunctions fail to be square-integrable, leading to normalization difficulties. We show that the Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ is a pseudo-$\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric operator, and we introduce an unbounded, non-unitary transformation that establishes a connection between $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ and $H^{\mathrm{D}}$. The purpose of this work is to analyze this relativistic quantum system – known as the Dirac inverted oscillator – which, despite its various applications, admits an exact analytical solution

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11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Promera: a unified model for biomolecular structure prediction, filtering, and design

Authors:
Jing↗Bafna↗Diaz↗D. J↗Klivans↗A. R↗Berger↗

Generative models have become staple tools for modeling and designing biomolecular structures. However, although these tools have improved in structural prediction accuracy, their ability to filter designed binders—an essential use case—remains insufficient; whereas design methods have focused more on unconstrained binder generation rather than capabilities enabled by controllable design. We introduce Promera, a unified generative model that combines all-atom structure prediction with improved filtering and controllable design. We find that Promera's confidence metrics are more accurate for filtering binders from non-binders for both miniproteins and nanobodies, while its co-folding performance surpasses popular open-source models (OpenFold3-p2, Boltz-2) on therapeutically relevant categories. As a design model, Promera generates binders by predicting masked protein sequences with optional epitope, paratope, and template constraints. Remarkably, our nanobody designs match the in silico success rates from backprop-based techniques (mBER) when evaluated under co-folding confidence filters. We further provide two in silico demonstrations of the the versatile capabilities of our design method: epitope targeting of the Andes hantavirus glycoprotein with VHHs and active state stabilization of the beta-2 andrenergic GPCR. We conclude by proposing a scaling law for co-folding models, suggesting a path for further performance improvement.

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

LUCID: Learning Embodiment-Agnostic Intent Models from Unstructured Human Videos for Scalable Dexterous Robot Skill Acquisition

Authors:
Harsh Gupta↗Guanya Shi↗Wenzhen Yuan↗

arXiv:2606.11628v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The most widely-adopted robot learning pipelines today learn skills from robot demonstrations or structured human data, which are expensive to collect and tied to specific embodiments. In contrast, unstructured human videos provide a scalable alternative. They contain diverse manipulation demonstrations across objects, scenes, and strategies, but are not directly connected to robot action. We propose LUCID, a two-stage framework that learns task intent from unstructured human videos drawn from internet-scale datasets and learns robot control in massively-parallel simulation. The intent model predicts short-horizon intent (what should happen next in the scene) from the current observation in closed loop. An embodiment-specific sensorimotor policy converts this intent into robot actions. The intent interface is shared across controllers, so the same intent model can be applied to different embodiments, from our primary dexterous hand to a parallel-jaw gripper. We evaluate LUCID on five real-world manipulation tasks: stirring, wiping, and binning supervised by only internet video, with zero-shot transfer to novel scenes and object instances; and push-T and cable routing supervised by 1 hr each of self-collected smartphone video. Project page: https://lucid-robot.github.io/.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Detecting Hallucinations for Large Language Model-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Authors:
Xinyan Zhu↗Yaoqi Liu↗Yue Gao↗Huadong Ma↗Cheng Yang↗Chuan Shi↗

Knowledge graph (KG) reasoning infers new knowledge from existing facts and is widely applied in question answering, recommendation, and decision support. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based KG reasoning frameworks have become increasingly popular by leveraging retrieved KG information. However, hallucinations in LLMs remain a critical issue. Even when relevant KG knowledge is incorporated, models may still generate incorrect outputs, leading to misinformation and unreliable decisions. Existing hallucination detection methods either focus on LLM internal states or verify consistency with retrieved contexts, but both overlook the structural information in KGs, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this gap, we propose LUCID, the first halLUcination deteCtIon method for LLM-based knowleDge graph reasoning frameworks. LUCID jointly leverages LLM attention scores, KG semantics, and structural information. Specifically, it extracts node and edge features from attention scores and semantic similarities, and integrates them with KG structure using a graph neural network. We also construct manually annotated benchmark datasets for evaluation. Experiments on nine datasets show that LUCID achieves state of the art performance compared to 15 baselines.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

Authors:
Donald Loveland↗Puja Trivedi↗Ari Weinstein↗Edward W Huang↗Danai Koutra↗

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

SAT, MaxSAT, and SMT for QLDPC Distance Computation: A Large-Scale Empirical Study

Authors:
Yu-Fang Chen↗Seyed Mohammad Reza Jafari↗Ching-Yi Lai↗

arXiv:2606.12445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact distance computation for quantum LDPC (QLDPC) codes plays a central role in validating candidate fault-tolerant quantum-code constructions, yet the computational structure of this problem remains poorly understood. Despite substantial recent progress in QLDPC design, it remains unclear which algorithmic principles govern the practical scalability of exact distance computation and which classes of exact solvers are best suited to this task. To address these questions, we conduct a systematic study of SAT- and MaxSAT-based formulations for exact QLDPC distance computation across representative codes. We further compare these formulations against several established exact-distance approaches in order to better understand the algorithmic landscape of exact QLDPC distance computation. Our study challenges and refines several prevailing intuitions about exact QLDPC distance computation. First, despite the XOR-rich structure of QLDPC parity checks, practical scalability appears to be governed more by the handling of cardinality constraints and optimization bounds than by parity reasoning alone. Accordingly, XOR-aware reasoning does not provide a systematic advantage across our benchmark suite. Second, Brouwer-Zimmermann-style search, long regarded as the benchmark paradigm for exact distance computation in sparse classical codes, no longer maintains its traditional scalability advantage in the QLDPC setting. This finding challenges the expectation that techniques successful for sparse classical codes remain dominant for QLDPC codes. Third, substantial qualitative differences arise even among MaxSAT solvers themselves. Branch-and-bound MaxSAT significantly outperforms unsat-core-based MaxSAT on challenging benchmarks, demonstrating that solver architecture and optimization strategy play a decisive role in practical scalability.

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16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Instabilities in a Non-KAM System via Information Scrambling: A Note

Authors:
Naga Dileep Varikuti↗

arXiv:2606.12761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study operator growth in quantized non-KAM systems using out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), focusing on the kicked harmonic oscillator as a representative example. Since the classical harmonic oscillator is degenerate, the dynamics fall outside the usual Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) framework, and resonances play a central role in shaping the phase space. We examine the system near resonances, where the ratio between the oscillator and driving frequencies takes integer values. Even though the classical Lyapunov exponent remains small at these points, and hence no conventional chaos, the phase space still undergoes strong structural changes. The OTOCs are particularly sensitive to these resonances, with a quadratic-in-time growth at resonance compared to linear growth away from it. Within a perturbative treatment, we derive closed-form expressions for the OTOCs and uncover a number-theoretic structure emerging in the behavior of OTOCs, governed by the Euler totient function of the frequency ratio. Overall, the results we present in this short note imply that resonant structures can play an important role in controlling information spreading.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

iTryOn: Mastering Interactive Video Virtual Try-On with Spatial-Semantic Guidance

Authors:
Jun Zheng↗Zhengze Xu↗Mengting Chen↗Jing Wang↗Jinsong Lan↗Xiaoyong Zhu↗Kaifu Zhang↗Bo Zheng↗Xiaodan Liang↗

Video Virtual Try-On (VVT) aims to seamlessly replace a garment on a person in a video with a new one. While existing methods have made significant strides in maintaining temporal consistency, they are predominantly confined to non-interactive scenarios where models merely showcase garments. This limitation overlooks a crucial aspect of real-world apparel presentation: active human-garment interaction. To bridge this gap, we introduce and formalize a new challenging task: Interactive Video Virtual Try-On (Interactive VVT), where subjects in the video actively engage with their clothing. This task introduces unique challenges beyond simple texture preservation, including: (1) resolving the semantic ambiguity of interactions from standard pose information, and (2) learning complex garment deformations from video where interactive moments are sparse and brief. To address these challenges, we propose iTryOn, a novel framework built upon a large-scale video diffusion Transformer. iTryOn pioneers a multi-level interaction injection mechanism to guide the generation of complex dynamics. At the spatial level, we introduce a garment-agnostic 3D hand prior to provide fine-grained guidance for precise hand-garment contact, effectively resolving spatial ambiguity. At the semantic level, iTryOn leverages global captions for overall context and time-stamped action captions for localized interactions, synchronized via our novel Action-aware Rotational Position Embedding (A-RoPE). Extensive experiments demonstrate that iTryOn not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on traditional VVT benchmarks but also establishes a commanding lead in the new interactive setting, marking a significant step towards more dynamic and controllable virtual try-on experiences.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Conditional Local Importance by Quantile Expectations

Authors:
Kelvyn K. Bladen↗Adele Cutler↗D. Richard Cutler↗Kevin R. Moon↗

arXiv:2411.08821v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Global variable importance measures are commonly used to interpret the results of machine learning models. Local variable importance techniques assess how variables contribute to individual observations. Current, popular methods, including LIME and SHAP, provide useful measures of feature contribution in the prediction space, while leaving opportunities for improved characterization of local structure in the model loss space. Additionally, they are not natively adapted for multi-class classification problems. We propose a new model-agnostic method for calculating local variable importance, CLIQUE, that highlights locally dependent relationships, provides improved stability over permutation-based methods, and can be directly applied to multi-class classification problems. Simulated and real-world examples show that CLIQUE emphasizes locally dependent information, captures interaction behavior beyond what can be evaluated by correlations, and assigns zero importance in regions where the response is invariant to changes in variables.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ALAS: An Automatic Latent Alignment Score for Audio Language Models

Authors:
Pooneh Mousavi↗Yingzhi Wang↗Mirco Ravanelli↗Cem Subakan↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extended into Speech-LLMs, and the quality of the audio–text alignment they learn affects most downstream Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) behavior. Yet despite a growth of fusion strategies, there is no standard way to measure how well a Speech-LLM internally binds audio frames to text tokens. We introduce ALAS (Automatic Latent Alignment Score), a model and task-agnostic metric that probes the LLM's per-layer hidden states, scoring the cross-modal cosine similarity between audio and text representations against a Whisper-derived reference. ALAS needs only a frozen forward pass and an off-the-shelf ASR reference, with no training or fitted classifier, and is calibrated to an interpretable uniform baseline comparable across tasks. Applying ALAS to four open-source Speech-LLMs (AF3, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen-Omni, SALMONN) across emotion recognition (IEMOCAP), open-ended SQA (LibriSQA), and multi-choice audio understanding (MMAU-speech), we find that the depth and strength of alignment reflect each model's audio-encoder design and the acoustic-versus-semantic demands of the task, and that ALAS tracks but does not duplicate task accuracy, exposing models that score well without genuinely grounding in the audio. We release ALAS as an open-source library so that practitioners can probe their own Speech-LLMs or try it on new tasks.

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

A Computational Audit of Demographic Association Encoding in ClinicalBERT Language Predictions

Authors:
Kehinde Temitayo Soetan↗

Transformer-based clinical language models are increasingly integrated into high-stakes clinical decision support pipelines, yet the computational mechanisms through which demographic associations encoded in medical documentation propagate into model probability distributions remain empirically underspecified. We present a systematic computational audit of representational bias in ClinicalBERT (Alsentzer et al., 2019), a BERT-based model pretrained on MIMIC-III discharge summaries, employing two complementary probing methodologies: Log Probability Bias Analysis (LPBA), which quantifies demographic descriptor-induced shifts in masked token probability distributions across behavioral and evaluative semantic categories, and Masked Language Model-based analysis (MLM), which probes internal representational structure for demographic agency attribution encoding across 98 real clinical sentence templates and eight intersectional race-gender combinations. Corpus frequency analysis operationalizes the distinction between statistical disparity and bias amplification by benchmarking model outputs against empirical term frequencies in the MIMIC-III training corpus. Of 32 statistically significant findings, 65.6% contradict observed corpus distributions, rising to 80% for Black patients and 87.5% for agency attribution under MLM probing, providing direct empirical evidence that representational bias in ClinicalBERT operates predominantly through model-internal amplification rather than training data inheritance. Keywords: natural language processing, clinical documentation, algorithmic auditing, representational bias, health equity 1

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

Sobolev Approximation by Fixed-Size Neural Networks with Arbitrary Accuracy

Authors:
Baicheng Li↗Haizhao Yang↗Shijun Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.16975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate new activation functions for achieving arbitrary-accuracy Sobolev approximation by fixed-size neural networks. We first show that any function in $W^{2,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ can be approximated with arbitrary accuracy, measured in the $W^{1,\infty}$-norm, by a fixed-size neural network using the Elementary Universal Activation Function ($\mathrm{EUAF}$). To extend this result to $W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ for $s\in\mathbb{N}$, we introduce a smooth activation $\mathrm{DUAF}_{\infty}$ from the family of Differentiable Universal Activation Functions ($\mathrm{DUAF}_n$). We prove that any function in $W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ can be approximated with arbitrary accuracy in the $W^{s-1,\infty}$-norm by a fixed-size $\mathrm{DUAF}_{\infty}$-activated network. We further construct sigmoidal variants $\widetilde{\mathrm{DUAF}}_n$ and show that, for every $1\leq s\leq n$, fixed-size $\widetilde{\mathrm{DUAF}}_n$-activated networks still approximate any $f\in W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ with arbitrary accuracy in the $W^{s-1,\infty}$-norm. In all these results, the width and depth bounds are computed explicitly, and the proposed activations are elementary.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A prior-free blind detection of information leakage from model predictions

Authors:
Laurence A. Jacobs↗

arXiv:2606.11267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data leakage – contamination of a model with information unavailable at baseline – is the dominant reproducibility failure in machine-learning-based science, yet detection tools require training code, external data, or domain expertise. None operates on the artifact an auditor most often holds: the model's output. We ask what can be decided about leakage from predictions and outcomes alone. We give a decision-theoretic framework in which leakage diagnostics are functionals of the predicted-risk/outcome law, parameterized by a threshold-weighting linked to proper scoring rules and decision-curve analysis. We prove a sharp impossibility: a recalibrated leak matching an honest model's calibration and discrimination is indistinguishable from honest performance by any function of the predictions, so the broad class is detectable only against an externally supplied ceiling on achievable discrimination. We then prove what leakage cannot hide: a near-deterministic subgroup – the signature of a near-label leak – produces a sustained unit-purity head that no legitimate predictor of a non-deterministic outcome can manufacture, yielding a prior-free test. These results organize leakage into a trichotomy – miscalibrated, broad-calibrated, and deterministic – each with a matched detector and failure mode. We validate on UK Biobank using time-windowed comorbidity leakage with known, graded severity, measuring a detection floor of $\Delta\cstar \approx 0.007$ on this endpoint, below which residual leakage is undetectable from output and too small to alter conclusions. The numerical floor is cohort- and endpoint-specific; the structural lesson is general: output-only detection fails where residual leakage is indistinguishable from an honestly stronger predictor. The test returns a verdict on a prediction vector in under a second on commodity hardware.

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

Counterfactual Explanations for Deep Two-Sample Testing

Authors:
Wei-Cheng Lai↗Marco Simnacher↗Christoph Lippert↗

arXiv:2606.04009v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two-sample testing is a fundamental tool for detecting distributional differences across scientific domains, but classical tests (including kernel-based tests) can be ineffective on high-dimensional structured data such as images. Recent deep two-sample tests improve sensitivity in these settings by learning informative representations, yet they provide limited insight into which data features drive rejection of the null hypothesis $H_0$. To address this issue, we propose a counterfactual explanation framework for deep two-sample testing that generates sample-level edits moving observations from a source group toward a target group while explicitly reducing the discrepancy measured by the test. Our method combines a diffusion autoencoder with a pretrained deep two-sample test model and optimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) objective in the test model's representation space to produce plausible counterfactuals. We quantify distribution-level effects through changes in the test statistic and the resulting two-sample p-values. We evaluate the method on synthetic 2D shape datasets and two MRI cohorts. Across both settings, the counterfactual transformations consistently increase p-values relative to the original samples, indicating that the edited source set becomes statistically closer to the target distribution under the test. We measure minimality using LPIPS to ensure the counterfactuals remain close to the original samples. The resulting edits provide interpretable evidence of the features associated with the detected group differences. On MRI, the localized changes are consistent with known anatomical differences between cohorts.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MUSE: Agentic 3D Scene Authoring via Memory-Grounded Incremental Requirement Satisfaction

Authors:
Ruijie Xu↗Xinnan Zhu↗Jiayu Ying↗Daoguo Dong↗Yuzhou Ji↗Xin Tan↗

Text-driven 3D scene generation is a promising technique for digital content creation, embodied AI simulation, and interactive design, yet practical workflows often require refining, extending, or correcting existing scenes while preserving non-target content. Existing methods can produce realistic and structurally plausible scenes, but they generally lack editability with requirement-level state tracking, so part-level failures often lead to full-scene regeneration or manual intervention. To tackle this challenge, we formulate controllable 3D scene authoring as incremental requirement satisfaction, unifying construction and editing. In this paper, we present MUSE, a memory-grounded multi-agent framework in which an Architect compiles instructions into structured requirements, a Sculptor executes local scene operations, and an Inspector verifies each step while updating Working, Scene, and Skill Memory. To evaluate requirement-level controllability and preservation-aware editing, we introduce AuthorBench, offering 145 constrained construction cases and a 1,584-case preservation-aware editing pool paired with external structured checks. On full construction cases, MUSE improves All-Goal success from 37.9 to 80.7 and surface-constraint fulfillment from 35.0 to 92.6 over the strongest baseline. On a stratified 240-case editing test split, MUSE achieves 49.6 All-Goal success, 99.9 preservation rate, and only 0.6 unintended change rate. Beyond automated metrics, human evaluations on compared local-editing baselines support stronger alignment with user intent, and downstream navigation-proxy tests indicate stronger spatial stability. Combined with ablations validating our memory designs, these results establish MUSE as an effective framework for controllable 3D scene authoring.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Biarchetype analysis for univariate functional data. An application to macroeconomic financial time series

Authors:
Aleix Alcacer↗Rafael Benitez↗Vicente J. Bolos↗Irene Epifanio↗

arXiv:2606.15881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce biarchetype analysis for the first time in the context of univariate functional data. This unsupervised methodology extends archetype analysis by simultaneously identifying archetypal structures across both the cases (countries, in our application) and the temporal argument. Both cases and time points are expressed as mixtures of biarchetypes, yielding a concise and highly interpretable representation of complex functional observations. Although biarchetype analysis is not intended as a clustering technique, it offers superior interpretability compared with biclustering approaches, as it is based on extreme, representative patterns rather than average centroids, thereby enhancing human comprehension. We apply the proposed method to 10-year government bond yields of European countries over the period 2001-2025. The results identify three distinct time regimes (the pre-crisis period, the euro-area sovereign debt crisis, and the post-crisis period), and reveal Germany, Greece, and Hungary as country archetypes.

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