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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Scaling Enterprise Agent Routing: Degradation, Diagnosis, and Recovery

Production LLM assistants route user requests to growing libraries of specialized tools, but how does routing accuracy degrade as the catalog scales? We study single-step routing on a 110-agent, 584-tool catalog from a deployed enterprise productivity assistant, evaluating three frontier models from 10 to 110 agents. Routing F1 on under-specified requests drops 16–23 percentage points across models. An oracle analysis decomposes the degradation into a retrieval gap (the model cannot surface the right tool) and a confusion gap (even with perfect retrieval, the oracle ceiling drops 10pp). Embedding-based shortlisting recovers +10–11pp F1 at full scale across all three models and two providers. A production annotation study (1,435 human-labeled utterances, three annotators) confirms the recovery on real traffic at +10–17pp despite 10–15pp lower absolute performance.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Minimum measurements quantum protocol for band structure calculation

arXiv:2511.04389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protocols for quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computing. Measurements are no longer confined to the final step of computation but are increasingly embedded within quantum circuits as integral components of noise-resilient algorithms. However, each observable typically requires a distinct measurement basis, often demanding a different circuit configuration. As the number of such configurations typically grows with the number of qubits, measurements constitute a major bottleneck. Focusing on electronic structure calculations in crystalline systems, we propose a measurement protocol that restricts the required measurement configurations to an absolute minimum of just three, independent of the number of qubits. This makes it one of the few known protocols that do not scale with qubit number. In particular, we derive the measurement protocol from the symmetries of tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians and implement it within the Orthogonal-Ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolver (OA-VQE) algorithm. We demonstrate its performance on three systems, namely a two-dimensional CuO$_2$ square lattice (3 qubits), bilayer graphene with hexagonal (Honeycomb) lattice (4 qubits) and three-dimensional diamond lattice (10 qubits). Beyond tight-binding systems, the protocol can be extended to enable efficient initial state preparation for many-body Hamiltonians, such as multi-orbital Hubbard models in a momentum space.

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

Representing Time Series as Structured Programs for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, making them potentially powerful tools for time-series analysis. However, time series lie outside their native textual modality, raising a fundamental question: how should time series be represented so that LLMs can reason about them effectively? Existing work typically serializes raw numerical sequences or fine-tunes pre-trained LLMs on time-series data. These approaches place the burden of extracting temporal structure directly on the LLM, creating a modality mismatch that often degrades performance on long sequences and introduces substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Time-Series-to-Structured-Program representation (T2SP), a deterministic, training-free method that represents a time series as a structured symbolic program. T2SP decomposes time series into trends, periods, and salient events, expressing them in a program-friendly format aligned with the textual and code-like modalities on which LLMs are natively trained. By shifting temporal-structure extraction from the model to the representation itself, T2SP enables off-the-shelf LLMs to leverage their existing reasoning capabilities for time-series understanding. We evaluate T2SP on three reasoning tasks – editing, captioning, and question answering – where it consistently improves performance, reduces reasoning time, and lowers failure rates compared with raw-string representations. Our results demonstrate that T2SP provides an effective interface between time series and LLMs.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

On the Variance of Temporal Difference Learning and its Reduction Using Control Variates

arXiv:2606.20357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the variance of temporal difference (TD) learning using the phased setting with tabular representation, and show that one of the mechanisms behind its ability to reduce variance is by effectively aggregating over a larger number of independent trajectories. Based on this insight, we demonstrate that (1) the variance of TD is asymptotically bounded from above by Monte Carlo (MC) estimators, and (2) shorter horizon updates incurs less variance for a fixed number of samples. Beyond TD, we show that Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE), a method for estimating the advantage function, can be seen as a type of regression-adjusted control variate, which achieves a tighter bound on the variance compared to TD in the large-sample limit. Finally, we numerically illustrate the behaviors of these estimators with carefully designed environments.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entanglement-Rank Duality in Quadratic Phase Quantum States

arXiv:2605.05167v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Absolutely maximally entangled (AME) states are fundamental resources in quantum information theory, yet their construction and certification remain a nontrivial problem. Within the family of quadratic phase quantum states, defined by symmetric matrices $P$ over finite fields $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, we show that the Rank-Purity Duality $\operatorname{Tr}(\rho_S^2) = |\mathbb{F}|^{-\operatorname{rk}_{\mathbb{F}}(P_{S,\bar{S}})}$ follows from additive character orthogonality and holds over all $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, yielding a polynomial-time AME certification criterion. For square-free dimensions $d = p_1\cdots p_r$, the Chinese Remainder Theorem induces a prime-field factorisation. This implies additivity of Rényi-2 entropy and yields sharp obstruction criteria that rule out cases such as $\operatorname{AME}(4,6)$ and constrain the open case $\operatorname{AME}(8,6)$. As a proof of concept, we construct an explicit $\operatorname{AME}(17,10001)$ state, certified across all $65{,}535$ bipartitions, demonstrating that the framework scales to large systems and previously inaccessible local dimensions.

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

CoMNeT: A MedNeXt-CorrDiff Framework for Volumetric Brain Tumor Segmentation

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critical for treatment planning, response assessment, and quantitative neuro-oncology research. However, automated segmentation remains a difficult task in computer vision because of variation in tumor appearance and MRI protocols across patient scans. Moreover, clinically important regions such as enhancing tumor (ET) and tumor core (TC) are often small relative to the full brain volume, furthering increasing the difficulty of achieving high voxel-level precision. In this paper, we show that combining a modern 3D convolutional segmentation model with corrective diffusion-based refinement and ensembling improves volumetric glioma segmentation on the UTSW-Glioma dataset. We propose CoMNeT, a MedNeXt-CorrDiff framework that uses four MRI modalities as input and predicts ET, TC, and whole tumor (WT) regions for automated brain tumor segmentation. MedNeXt is used as the primary segmentation model with Global Response Normalization for feature learning, while CorrDiff is trained as a postprocessing residual refinement method to correct errors in the probability maps before final thresholding. Using five-fold cross-validation, CoMNeT achieved the highest Dice score for most tumor regions, with ET, TC, WT, and average Dice scores of 0.7543 +/- 0.0261, 0.6806 +/- 0.0166, 0.9049 +/- 0.0128, and 0.7798 +/- 0.0184, respectively. CoMNeT outperformed two selected baseline models: SegResNet (0.7555 +/- 0.0190 average Dice) and standalone MedNeXt (0.7697 +/- 0.0154 average Dice). Our findings support the use of corrective diffusion and fold-level probability ensembling as practical additions to existing state-of-the-art 3D convolutional models for automated glioma segmentation.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Discrete Autoregressive Transformer for Generative Mechanism Synthesis

arXiv:2606.17409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planar path synthesis requires mechanisms whose coupler curves match a prescribed trajectory; the mapping from curve to linkage is inherently one-to-many across four-, six-, and eight-bar topologies. We address this design problem with simulation-grounded evaluation on a curated corpus of over one million mechanisms, reporting Chamfer distance and dynamic time warping after forward kinematics and geometric alignment. We formulate synthesis as conditional autoregressive sequence modeling: joint coordinates are uniformly quantized to tokens and generated by a decoder-only transformer with a variational-autoencoder (VAE) latent of the target curve and an explicit mechanism-type token. Training combines token cross-entropy with a Gaussian-smoothed bin auxiliary loss that respects ordinal structure among bins. At inference, a bounded latent-noise schedule decodes all mechanism types at each noise level; we retain the top five candidates by geometric error, yielding diverse accurate families without dataset lookup. On held-out tests, aggregate mean Chamfer distance is $0.0132$ and mean dynamic time warping is $0.153$; a latent $k$-nearest-neighbor baseline that conditions on training-set neighbor latents in VAE space achieves matched-topology mean Chamfer distance $0.0071$ and mean dynamic time warping $0.117$ using the same decoder.

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

SAGE: Answer-Conditioned Uncertainty Targets for Verbal Uncertainty Alignment

Large language models increasingly express uncertainty through natural-language statements, yet these expressions often fail to reflect the model's sampled behavior. We study verbal uncertainty alignment as a distributional calibration problem: the appropriate uncertainty target for a prompt should be estimated from repeated model outputs rather than from an isolated response. However, group rollouts alone are insufficient, since the resulting target must provide a useful training signal. Existing targets only partially satisfy this requirement. We propose SAGE, Semantic-Answer Guided Entropy, a group-level uncertainty target that constructs an answer-conditioned uncertainty geometry over sampled responses. SAGE preserves categorical, numeric, and symbolic answer distinctions while maintaining a smooth and scale-preserving calibration signal. We further apply this target through Group-Uncertainty Preference Optimization, or GUPO, an uncertainty-channel training framework that supervises verbal uncertainty expressions rather than the full response. Experiments across factual, mathematical, and multiple-choice reasoning tasks show improved uncertainty ranking, lower calibration error, and reduced overconfidence.

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

Selective Agentic Recovery for UAV Autonomy with a Persistent Mission Runtime

arXiv:2606.14219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI can support unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomy by providing high-level recovery reasoning when local waypoint- or setpoint-based execution encounters blocked passages, repeated no-progress behavior, or mission-level ambiguity. On physical UAVs, however, remote reasoning is most useful when it is invoked selectively, since each call introduces latency, resource cost, backend uncertainty, and a need to validate the returned decision. This paper presents Persistent Mission Runtime (PMR), a UAV recovery framework that keeps the mission loop and safety-critical execution local while using an external agentic reasoner only as an on-demand recovery module. The reasoner selects from predefined recovery skills, and each returned decision is parsed, verified, safety-filtered, and mapped to local executor actions before it can affect flight. PMR introduces learned Cognitive Value of Invocation (learned-CVI), a compact admission gate that estimates when remote agentic reasoning is likely to improve near-term mission progress enough to justify its operational cost. Across a fixed 400-run Gazebo/PX4 benchmark with eight scenarios, learned-CVI raises hard/ambiguous-regime success from 5.0% under local-only autonomy to 95.0%, outperforms one-shot and periodic reasoning baselines by 20.0 and 32.5 percentage points, and reduces remote-agent calls by 16.7% and logged tokens by 29.2% relative to a manually tuned rule-based invocation baseline.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Creativity Reconsidered: Generative AI and the Problem of Intentional Agency

arXiv:2601.15797v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many theorists maintain that conscious intentional agency is a necessary condition of creativity. We argue that this requirement, which we call the Intentional Agency Condition (IAC), should be abandoned. We motivate this by highlighting the problems this criterion encounters in the face of recent advances in generative AI, which is ostensibly creative despite being incapable of intentional agency. We present two corpus analyses to illustrate the rapidly increasing tendency of people to predicate creativity to generative AI. In response to this predicament, theorists of creativity have proposed a range of conflicting solutions, which we critically evaluate. We find that none of these satisfyingly resolves the initial predicament, and we therefore propose a novel approach. Our claim is that ascriptions of creativity are dependent on what we call creative ability. This solution explains why intentional agency is important for judgements of creativity, without being a necessary condition. Our approach thereby accommodates AI creativity without dismissing the intuition that perceived intentions are of key importance for ascriptions of creativity.

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

Towards End-to-End Automation of AI Research

arXiv:2606.15497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The automation of science is a long-standing ambition in the field of AI. While the community has made significant progress in automating individual components of the scientific process, a system that autonomously navigates the entire research lifecycle – from conception to publication – has remained out of reach. Here, we present the strongest demonstration to date toward automating the entire process end-to-end. We present The AI Scientist, which creates research ideas, writes code, runs experiments, plots and analyzes data, writes the entire scientific manuscript and performs its own peer review. Its ideas, execution, and presentation are of sufficient quality to produce a manuscript generated by an AI system that passes the first round of peer review at a major machine learning conference workshop. The workshop has an acceptance rate of 70 percent. Our system leverages modern foundation models within a complex agentic system. We evaluate The AI Scientist in two settings: a focused mode using human-provided code templates as an initial scaffold to conduct research on a specific topic, and a template-free, open-ended mode that leverages agentic search for wider scientific exploration. Both settings produce diverse ideas and automatically test, report on, and evaluate them. This achievement demonstrates AI's growing capacity for scientific contribution and signifies a potential paradigm shift in how research is conducted. As with any impactful new technology, there could be significant risks, including taxing overwhelmed review systems and adding noise to scientific literature. However, if developed responsibly, such autonomous systems could greatly accelerate scientific discovery.

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

Bimanual Robot Manipulation via Multi-Agent In-Context Learning

arXiv:2604.20348v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control. In particular, In-Context Learning (ICL) enables off-the-shelf, text-only LLMs to predict robot actions without any task-specific training while preserving their generalization capabilities. Applying ICL to bimanual manipulation remains challenging as the high-dimensional joint action space and tight inter-arm coordination constraints rapidly overwhelm standard context windows. To address this, we introduce BiCICLe (Bimanual Coordinated In-Context Learning), the first framework that enables standard LLMs to perform few-shot bimanual manipulation without fine-tuning. BiCICLe frames bimanual control as a multi-agent leader-follower problem, decoupling the action space into sequential, conditioned single-arm predictions. Evaluated on 13 tasks from the TWIN benchmark, BiCICLe achieves 70.5% average success rate, outperforming the best training-free baseline by 6.1 percentage points and surpassing most supervised methods. We also demonstrate superior real-world performance on 3 tasks without hardware-specific retraining.

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

Diffusion-Refined Segmentation and Vision-Language Interpretation for Pediatric Brain Tumor MRI

Accurate pediatric brain tumor segmentation remains challenging due to limited annotated data, heterogeneous imaging phenotypes, diffuse tumor boundaries, and class imbalance across tumor subregions. Here, we present a two-stage deep learning framework for improving multi-modal pediatric brain MRI segmentation and clinical interpretation. First, we evaluate 3D Res U-Net and Swin-UNETR baselines on BraTS-PEDs MRI scans, using four co-registered modalities to predict tumor core, whole tumor, and enhancing tumor regions. Second, we introduce diffusion-based refinement models conditioned on coarse Swin-UNETR predictions, including a 3D DDPM refiner and MedSegDiff. Conditioning substantially improves diffusion stability and performance, particularly for enhancing tumor boundary segmentation. Conditioned MedSegDiff achieves the strongest boundary agreement with the lowest HD95. Finally, predicted tumor volumes and representative segmentation overlays are integrated with a multimodal language model to generate structured radiology-style reports. Together, our results suggest that coarse-to-refined diffusion segmentation can improve pediatric tumor boundary delineation and support end-to-end interpretable AI-assisted neuro-oncology workflows.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

PRInTS: Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Information Seeking

Information-seeking is a core capability for AI agents, requiring them to gather and reason over tool-generated information across long trajectories. However, such multi-step information-seeking tasks remain challenging for agents backed by language models. While process reward models (PRMs) can guide agents by ranking candidate steps at test-time, existing PRMs - designed for short reasoning with binary judgment - cannot capture richer dimensions of information-seeking steps, such as tool interactions and reasoning over tool outputs, nor handle the rapidly growing context in long-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce PRInTS, a generative PRM trained with dual capabilities: (1) dense scoring based on the PRM's reasoning across multiple dimensions of step quality (e.g., interpretation of tool outputs, tool call informativeness) and (2) trajectory summarization that compresses the growing context while preserving essential information for step evaluation. Extensive evaluations across FRAMES, GAIA (levels 1-3), and WebWalkerQA (easy-hard) benchmarks on multiple models reveal that best-of-n sampling with PRInTS enhances information-seeking in open-source models as well as specialized agents, matching or surpassing frontier models with a much smaller backbone agent and outperforming other strong reward modeling baselines.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

SPA-C: an hybrid tool to accurately scaffold genomes using Hi-C and Deep-Learning

Genome assembly is a computational pipeline designed to reconstruct chromosomes from small sequencing reads. Following their assembly, contiguous sequences (contigs) are arranged into chromosome-long sequences during scaffolding. Hi-C, a long-range linkage information between regions of the genome widely used in recent large sequencing projects, is often required to correctly order contigs. Several tools have been developed to automate this task following either statistical or deep-learning approaches. Statistical approaches summarise 2D Hi-C matrices into contact densities across sequences, thus ignoring informative visual patterns. The sole existing deep-learning tool uses a transformer-based computer vision model to correct the assembly. It has been trained on several species and uses Hi-C matrices directly. Yet it comes as a supplementary step in the scaffolding process, introducing extra computation time, and has been trained on a dataset that might contain labelling errors, which could provide sub-optimal results. We propose SPA-C, an hybrid pipeline combining the strengths of both approaches. Linkage prediction is handled with a frugal CNN-based model and a graph-solving algorithm is used to generate the scaffolds. Through our input's design, the model is able to both correct errors within assemblies and link contigs, leveraging small, local Hi-C contact matrices. We handled low-complexity regions that might induce erroneous predictions using an external tool, improving the overall accuracy of generated assemblies. On a benchmark of six various genomes and four standard metrics, SPA-C outperformed four out of four state-of-the-art methods while achieving comparable start-to-end computation time.Python and Bash scripts are available on GitHub (https://github.com/SPA-C/SPA-C.git) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19000361).

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

ArFake: A Robust Framework for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Spoofing Detection Benchmark

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The systole of random hyperbolic 3-manifolds

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

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Probabilistic Signature Inversion: Learning Conditional Distributions from Truncated Signatures

arXiv:2606.15332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The signature transform is a principled feature map for continuous-time paths, valued for its uniqueness and universality. Recovering a path from its truncated signature is, however, structurally ill-posed because the truncated signature map is not injective. We therefore reframe truncated signature inversion as a probabilistic problem – learning the conditional distribution of a path given its truncated signature – and adopt a signature-conditioned flow matching model as a practical estimator. This probabilistic formulation elucidates the fundamental difficulty of inversion: Bayes reconstruction error quantifies the irreducible uncertainty remaining after conditioning on a statistic. We derive the Bayes-optimal error under linear statistics, obtaining a closed form for log-GBM and numerically tractable formulas for log-fBM and OU, yielding a concrete theoretical baseline for model validation. This baseline upper-bounds the Bayes error under truncated-signature conditioning, since truncated signatures provide richer information than linear statistics. Experiments show that empirical reconstruction errors under linear-statistics conditioning faithfully align with the theory-derived baseline, while errors decrease when the statistic is replaced with truncated signatures. Moreover, generated paths faithfully recover the conditioning signature while preserving key distributional and temporal structures, indicating that the estimator is well-calibrated to the target conditional distribution. Together, these results establish a well-posed probabilistic framework for truncated-signature inversion, with applicability demonstrated on real financial data beyond the parametric process families covered by theory.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Trimodal Glioma Representation Alignment via Volumetric Contrastive Learning

Glioma grading and survival prediction require the integration of heterogeneous information collected at different spatial and biological scales. Histopathology describes tissue morphology, mRNA expression captures molecular activity, and magnetic resonance imaging provides a non-invasive view of tumor extent and radiological heterogeneity. Existing glioma prognosis models often combine only two of these sources, while their alignment objectives remain mostly pairwise. This paper introduces GLORIA, a novel trimodal framework for GLioma Omics - Radiology - hIstopathology Alignment. GLORIA processes whole-slide image regions, gene-expression profiles, and 3D MRI volumes through modality-specific encoders, projects them into a shared latent space, and aligns them with a Gramian contrastive loss that measures the volume spanned by the three modality embeddings. The aligned representations are fused through a cross-modal gating module and optimized jointly for three-class glioma grading and overall survival prediction. We evaluate GLORIA on a matched TCGA-GBM/LGG and BraTS21 cohort, comprising 132 patients with all three modalities. On the shared trimodal test set, GLORIA improves over the bimodal WSI-mRNA baseline in all the metrics considered.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Ex-Omni: Enabling 3D Facial Animation Generation for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify multimodal understanding and generation, yet extending them to jointly produce speech and 3D facial animation remains largely unexplored despite its importance for natural human-computer interaction. A key challenge is the mismatch between the discrete semantic reasoning of LLMs and the dense temporal dynamics required for 3D facial motion. We propose Expressive Omni (Ex-Omni), an open-source model that augments OLLMs with native speech-accompanied 3D facial animation. Ex-Omni decouples semantic reasoning from temporal generation through a blendshape-aware speech unit generator and a blendshape decoder, where speech units provide temporal scaffolding and hidden speech representations carry facially relevant cues. We further introduce a unified token-as-query gated fusion (TQGF) mechanism for controlled semantic injection, as well as InstructS2SF-1200K, a dataset consisting of 1200K samples for pre-training. Extensive experiments show that Ex-Omni maintains competitive speech understanding and generation ability while achieving better audio-visual synchronization and lower face-generation latency than cascaded pipelines.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

arXiv:2606.20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Visual Place Recognition in Forests with Depth-Aware Distillation

Visual place recognition in natural forest environments remains challenging due to repetitive vegetation, weak structural cues, and significant appearance variation across traversals. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a lightweight depth-aware distillation framework that injects geometric cues into a DINOv2-based place recognition model, while maintaining its pre-trained descriptor space. Evaluated on the recent WildCross benchmark, the proposed approach yields gains over an appearance-only counterpart, providing robustness to appearance variations. These results demonstrate the importance of depth as a strong complementary modality for place recognition in natural environments and identify depth-aware distillation as a promising direction for more robust forest perception.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On the Stability of the Jacobian Matrix in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2506.08764v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep neural networks are known to suffer from exploding or vanishing gradients as depth increases, a phenomenon closely tied to the spectral behavior of the input-output Jacobian. Prior work has identified critical initialization schemes that ensure Jacobian stability, but these analyses are typically restricted to fully connected networks with i.i.d. weights. In this work, we go significantly beyond these limitations: we establish a general stability theorem for deep neural networks that accommodates sparsity (such as that introduced by pruning) and non-i.i.d., weakly correlated weights (e.g. induced by training). Our results rely on recent advances in random matrix theory, and provide rigorous guarantees for spectral stability in a much broader class of network models. This extends the theoretical foundation for initialization schemes in modern neural networks with structured and dependent randomness.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TuneAhead: Predicting Fine-tuning Performance Before Full Training Begins

arXiv:2606.17660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is compute-intensive and error-prone: model performance depends sensitively on data quality and hyperparameter choices, and naïve runs can even degrade model performance. This raises a practical question:can we predict fine-tuning performance before committing to a full training run? We present TUNEAHEAD, a lightweight framework for pre-hoc prediction of fine-tuning performance. TUNEAHEAD encodes each candidate run as a meta-feature vector that combines static dataset descriptors with dynamic probe features from a short standardized probe. A predictor maps these features to performance estimates, while SHAP-based attributions provide interpretable diagnostics that reveal which specific features drive the prediction. Across 1,300+ fine-tuning runs on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TUNEAHEAD consistently outperforms strong baselines such as Early-Stop Extrapolation and ProxyLM. On a held-out test set of 370 runs, TUNEAHEAD achieves an RMSE of 1.47 percentage points and places 95.1% of predictions within +3/-3 percentage points of the true score. These accurate continuous predictions support practical go/no-go screening policies that can reduce unnecessary full fine-tuning while retaining most promising runs.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

arXiv:2605.03460v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail in the financial domain, which exhibits unique characteristics. We propose a general 2 x 2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain-where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical-as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.