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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FundaPod: A Multi-Persona Agent Pod Platform with Knowledge Graph Memory for AI-Assisted Fundamental Investment Research

arXiv:2605.27864v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in finance, yet most existing work emphasizes trading signals or financial NLP tasks centered on prediction. Institutional fundamental research, by contrast, requires human analysts or AI agents to gather evidence, identify business drivers, compare competing viewpoints, and generate investment memos. Its broader goal is not merely to predict outcomes, but to produce investment plans that are transparent, reusable, and verifiable, while contributing to the cumulative development of investment knowledge. We present FundaPod, a multi-persona agent platform for AI-assisted fundamental investment research. We argue that fundamental research is a human-centric decision-support task that is qualitatively distinct from trading-signal generation, and is therefore better served by an independence-preserving architecture. In FundaPod, AI agents with different personas, such as value investors or macro strategists, conduct research independently under a shared provenance contract. Their disagreements are then surfaced post hoc for adjudication by the human portfolio manager (PM) through a knowledge-graph memory system. This paper contributes five design principles for human-AI hybrid systems supporting fundamental research, grounded in design-science practice and theories of cognitive isolation and human-machine coordination. It also describes four architectural mechanisms: a persona distillation pipeline that turns public investor materials into deployable agents; a declarative skill registry that lets the planner derive typed task graphs; a grounded evidence model that links memo claims to verifiable sources; and a knowledge-graph "second brain" that connects tickers, memos, analysts, and themes. We demonstrate the architecture through a complete case study and a persona-based memo comparison.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Deep-Learning Based Quantification of Breast Arterial Calcification on Mammography for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning model for automated quantification of breast arterial calcification (BAC) on screening mammography and to assess whether AI-derived BAC burden predicts major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in women. Methods: In this retrospective study, 202,006 women who underwent screening mammography without history of MACE were included. A BAC segmentation model was trained on an expert-annotated dataset using a multi-task U-Net with a ResNet-18 encoder to detect and segment BAC. BAC burden was quantified as area (mm{superscript 2}) from model-generated masks using DICOM pixel spacing and categorized by tertiles into low, intermediate, and high. The PREVENT score and incident MACE were identified from electronic health records. Cox proportional hazards models were developed to evaluate AI-derived BAC burden and PREVENT score alone, and combined models for 5 - and 10-year cardiovascular risk prediction. Results: Among 202,006 women (mean age 54.8{+/-}11.7 years), 23.1% had AI-detected BAC, and 7,701 (3.8%) developed incident MACE during a median follow - up of 7.5 years. On the geographically held-out test set, the BAC model achieved an AUROC of 0.97, Dice score of 0.6678, and Pearson correlation of 0.961 between AI-derived and manually annotated BAC burden. BAC burden increased with age and was higher among women who developed MACE. Five - year MACE incidence increased across BAC categories from 1.5% in women without BAC to 6.9% in those with high BAC burden. BAC burden alone showed modest prediction of MACE, with 5-year and 10-year AUROCs of 0.661 and 0.650, respectively, while PREVENT achieved AUROCs of 0.781 and 0.771. Adding BAC to PREVENT produced minimal improvement in discrimination. Conclusion: Deep learning-based BAC quantification from routine mammography is feasible, accurate, and associated with future cardiovascular risk. Although BAC added little to PREVENT for overall discrimination, it may serve as a scalable opportunistic imaging biomarker to identify women at elevated cardiovascular risk and support preventive care.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Online Shift Detection and Conformal Adaptation for Deployed Safety Classifiers

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an online monitoring system for distributional shift in deployed safety classifiers, using calibrated sequential statistics to detect when a classifier has moved out of distribution. Upon detection, a conformal abstention layer adapts decision thresholds to recover a target error rate epsilon=0.1. In a pre-registered factorial evaluation (4 classifiers x 5 shift conditions x 20 seeds x 2 window sizes, 800 cells), the system achieves 86.6% valid detection (693/800, 95% CI [84.1%, 88.8%]) with mean latency of 39.5 steps. Detection holds across three ground-truth regimes: synthetic onset (86.6%), real temporal jailbreaks (85%, 17/20), and GCG adversarial attacks. Weighted conformal prediction recovers up to 39 pp of lost coverage for DeBERTa (ESS=46/300) but collapses for all other classifiers (ESS~300): logistic density ratio estimation achieves perfect source/target separability in high-dimensional embedding spaces, clipping all importance weights to the floor. DeBERTa shows a gradient from effective correction (paraphrase, ESS=46) to near-total collapse (adversarial suffix, ESS=206). PCA to 32 dimensions breaks the collapse, recovering 33 pp for Llama Guard and 21 pp for ShieldGemma. Variance decomposition reveals classifier (eta^2=0.243), shift type (eta^2=0.237), and their interaction (eta^2=0.185) all contribute substantially to detection latency variance (all p

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Conformal Orbit-Valid Trust Horizons for Equivariant World Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24946v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned world models are useful only over horizons on which their rollout error remains controlled. We study trust-horizon certification for latent world models with known group symmetries. Given a one-step latent residual and a finite-time expansion estimate, we form a raw horizon curve and calibrate it with a split-conformal multiplicative factor. On the reproducible audit set, the conformal factor is $\gamma_\alpha=1.0$: the raw certificate is already conservative under the audit protocol. Across 50 stable audits, we observe zero anti-conservative violations, corresponding to an exact-binomial 95% upper bound of 5.8% on the violation rate. Our main structural result is that exact equivariance transports a calibrated trust-horizon curve over the group orbit: when the environment dynamics, encoder, predictor, action transform, and latent metric satisfy the stated equivariance/invariance conditions, rollout errors and trust horizons are orbit-constant. Empirically, the implemented models exhibit small orbit-transport residuals, with median 1.1% and maximum 4.1% over 14 orbit audits. The certificate is also non-vacuous (median certified-to-measured horizon ratio 0.67). A certificate-level calibration-cost study shows two complementary regimes. On a symmetric 2D substrate, equivariant, plain, and augmented models are all orbit-valid from a single calibration sector – no separation, because the substrate already makes non-equivariant baselines approximately orbit-robust. A 3D yaw audit shows the other regime: the equivariant model obtains a one-sector safe and non-vacuous orbit-valid certificate, while healthy non-equivariant baselines pay violation, slack, sharpness, or additional-sector cost. The certificate is a conservative, distributional audit rather than a global reachability guarantee, and certificate-guided subgoal spacing is not confirmed in the current 3D CEM-MPC behavior layer.

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

AI-PAVE-Br: Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhanced Product Attribute Value Extraction through a Golden Set Approach

The explosive growth and complexity of product data within the dynamic Brazilian e-commerce landscape demand robust and specialized methods for structured information extraction. Traditional approaches to Product Attribute Value Extraction (PAVE) often struggle with the linguistic nuances and sheer diversity of product descriptions in Portuguese. To address this critical gap, this paper introduces two major contributions. First, we present AI-PAVEBr, a specialized system engineered with Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform high-accuracy PAVE specifically for Brazilian e-commerce catalogs. Second, to facilitate reproducible research and provide a definitive benchmark, we introduce and share the Golden Set, a new, meticulously curated, and manually annotated dataset for PAVE in Portuguese. We detail the creation process and structure (Entity, Category, Subcategories) of this high-quality reference set. Our experiments conclusively show that AI-PAVE-Br, leveraging targeted prompt engineering, dramatically outperforms conventional Named Entity Recognition (NER) baselines. This work not only delivers a superior, scalable solution for a major non-English market but also enriches the NLP community with a valuable, publicly available resource for future PAVE research.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Battery-Explicit Thermodynamic Witnesses of Bell Post-Quantumness

arXiv:2605.09149v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a battery-explicit thermodynamic witness of post-quantum Bell correlations. In each round, a single supplied excitation is routed into an explicit two-level battery if and only if a Bell-game condition is satisfied. The routing operation is implemented by an energy-preserving controlled SWAP, with all logical control registers taken to be degenerate. Thus the correlation resource does not create energy; it only determines the probability that the supplied excitation reaches the battery. The construction is first formulated for finite two-player XOR games. For any such game, the mean battery charge is exactly the game success probability multiplied by the battery gap. Optimizing over local, quantum, or nonsignalling behaviours therefore turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, or nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. For the CHSH game, Tsirelson's bound becomes a strict quantum ceiling on the mean battery charge, while a PR-box behaviour reaches the single-excitation cap. The witness is trusted-module rather than device-independent: it assumes calibrated Hamiltonians, correct classical wiring, and a trusted energy-preserving battery module. We also discuss a reversible-controller implementation, finite-statistics certification from work data, robustness to imperfect battery readout, and cyclic bookkeeping showing that no positive net work is obtained once fuel restoration and memory erasure are included.

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

SkillWiki: A Living Knowledge Infrastructure for Agent Skills

While knowledge is managed through Wikipedia and software through GitHub, agent skills still lack an infrastructure for large-scale production, governance, and evolution. SkillWiki is a living knowledge infrastructure that supports the organization, grounding, and continuous evolution of agent skills by transforming heterogeneous knowledge into reusable skill assets linked to their originating evidence. Our demonstration presents the complete skill lifecycle, from knowledge ingestion and skill production to provenance-aware exploration, governance, and execution-driven evolution. SkillWiki highlights a future in which knowledge, skills, and execution experience co-evolve within a shared infrastructure. The live demonstration and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/Huangdingcheng/SkillWiki.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The Almost Intelligent Revolution: Options for Scaling Up Deliberation and Empowering People with AI

Authors:

The increasing prominence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in public discourse presents both opportunities and challenges for democratic deliberation. While red teaming strategies help mitigate specific risks, broader concerns persist regarding linguistic constraints, biases, and the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs. This chapter explores how LLMs can be used to significantly scale up and democratise deliberation, particularly in fostering inclusivity and empowering traditionally marginalised groups. Drawing on concepts from Systemic-Functional Linguistics, the chapter examines how variations across language users (for example, with respect to socio-demographic groups) and across language use (for example, with respect to communicative functions) shape participation in AI-supported deliberation. The chapter presents AI-driven deliberation studies and assesses their potential to scaffold argumentation, enhance access, and reduce the influence of exclusionary linguistic norms and biases which are embedded in prestigious registers. At the same time, the chapter cautions against both overclaiming, which leads to unrealistic expectations, and underclaiming, which risks missed opportunities for AI-assisted engagement. The chapter concludes by identifying future research directions to maximise the democratic potential of AI-assisted participation while embedding ethical safeguards to counteract the reproduction of linguistic inequalities.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Imprecise Transition Matrices for Markov Cohort Models: Lower and Upper Expectations with a Practical Health Economic Application

arXiv:2606.25716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In applied health research, Markov cohort models are built on a precisely specified transition probability matrix. However, in many applications, the available evidence – transition counts, structural constraints, and treatment-effect data – identifies a set of admissible matrices rather than one uniquely justified matrix. This paper formulates an imprecise-probability extension in which inference yields lower and upper expectations over an evidence-compatible set of precise Markov cohort models. The contribution differs from existing imprecise Markov-chain work by focusing on finite-horizon cohort trajectories, additive accumulated outcomes, and transition matrices constructed from empirical transition counts. Under non-empty compact separately specified outgoing-row sets, the lower and upper accumulated outcomes are computed exactly by Bellman-style lower and upper transition operators. We prove the envelope theorem, reduction to the classical model, coherence properties of the lower transition operator, and algebraic conditions under which a single selected matrix yields a non-robust decision. We then show how multinomial transition counts induce admissible matrix sets through the Imprecise Dirichlet Model. A real-world cost-effectiveness example of patent foramen ovale closure after cryptogenic stroke illustrates the practical consequence: the empirical transition matrix slightly favors closure, whereas the imprecise analysis yields an incremental net monetary benefit interval crossing zero. The method provides both a rigorous lower-expectation formulation and a practical diagnostic for decisions that depend on transition probabilities not fully resolved by the evidence.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Value of XOR-Game-Induced Side Information in a Szilard Engine

arXiv:2605.12044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a Szilard-type thermodynamic valuation of side-information channels induced by Bell-type correlations. In each round, a two-level working system is thermalized with a degenerate Hamiltonian, so that its physical microstate is a uniform classical bit. A trusted referee embeds this bit into a finite two-player XOR game, and a correlation resource produces a compressed controller bit. The controller uses only this compressed bit as side information for feedback. The construction is formulated first for arbitrary finite XOR games. The referee encoding makes the game-winning event equivalent to correct prediction of the physical microstate. Consequently, the induced side-information channel is binary symmetric, with success probability equal to the XOR-game winning probability of the supplied behaviour. The reversible Szilard feedback value is therefore fixed by the mutual information between the microstate and the controller record. Optimizing over local, quantum, and nonsignalling behaviour sets turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, and nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. The construction is an effective-channel valuation, not a claim that Bell nonlocality is thermodynamic fuel. The controller receives only the compressed prediction bit, not the auxiliary variables that define the game. The thermodynamic costs of the referee, the correlation resource, and the preprocessing are not included. When controller-memory reset is included in a full cycle, the net work is non-positive, consistently with the second law.

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

On the Limitations of Ray-Tracing for Learning-Based RF Tasks in Urban Environments

arXiv:2507.19653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the realism of Sionna v1.0.2 ray-tracing for outdoor cellular links in central Rome. We use a real measurement set of 1,664 user-equipments (UEs) and six nominal base-station (BS) sites. Using these fixed positions we systematically vary the main simulation parameters, including path depth, diffuse/specular/refraction flags, carrier frequency, as well as antenna's properties like its altitude, radiation pattern, and orientation. Simulator fidelity is scored for each base station via Spearman correlation between measured and simulated powers, and by a fingerprint-based k-nearest-neighbor localization algorithm using RSSI-based fingerprints. Across all experiments, solver hyper-parameters are having immaterial effect on the chosen metrics. On the contrary, antenna locations and orientations prove decisive. By simple greedy optimization we improve the Spearman correlation by 5% to 130% for various base stations, while kNN-based localization error using only simulated data as reference points is decreased by one-third on real-world samples, while staying twice higher than the error with purely real data. Precise geometry and credible antenna models are therefore necessary but not sufficient; faithfully capturing the residual urban noise remains an open challenge for transferable, high-fidelity outdoor RF simulation.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Macro Graph of Experts for Billion-Scale Multi-Task Recommendation

arXiv:2506.10520v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph-based multi-task learning at billion-scale presents a significant challenge, as different tasks correspond to distinct billion-scale graphs. Traditional multi-task learning methods often neglect these graph structures, relying solely on individual user and item embeddings. However, disregarding graph structures overlooks substantial potential for improving performance. In this paper, we introduce the Macro Graph of Experts (MGOE) framework, the first approach capable of leveraging macro graph embeddings to capture task-specific macro features while modeling the correlations between task-specific experts. Specifically, we propose the concept of a Macro Graph Bottom, which, for the first time, enables multi-task learning models to incorporate graph information effectively. We design the Macro Prediction Tower to dynamically integrate macro knowledge across tasks. MGOE has been deployed at scale, powering multi-task learning for a leading billion-scale recommender system, Alibaba. Extensive offline experiments conducted on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art multi-task learning methods, establishing MGOE as a breakthrough in multi-task graph-based recommendation. Furthermore, online A/B tests confirm the superiority of MGOE in billion-scale recommender systems.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Mean-field games with rough common noise: the linear-quadratic case

arXiv:2602.19210v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by mean-field games (MFG) with common noise on the one hand and pathwise stochastic control theory on the other, we formulate here a linear-quadratic (LQ) MFG with rough common noise, along with a satisfactory well-posedness theory for the linear-quadratic case. A novel Volterra-type (or mild) formulation allows to keep technical (rough-stochastic) consideration to a minimum. We derive a characterization of the optimal state and optimal control through a rough forward-backward SDE (rough FBSDE), and provide an existence and uniqueness result under the usual assumptions. Our theory is accompanied by stability estimates with respect to initial data and common noise while we also establish continuity of what we call the Itô-Lions-Lyons map for rough mean-field games. Finally, we discuss randomization of the rough common noise under appropriate conditions on the coefficients. When the latter is given by the Stratonovich lift of a Brownian motion independent of the idiosyncratic noise, we show that solutions of the rough LQ MFG coincide with those obtained by conditioning on the common noise.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model

Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object control with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather state, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at \url{https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/}.

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

A Unified Framework for Runtime Verification and Model-Based Diagnosis in LOLA

arXiv:2606.23720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an integrated framework that unifies runtime verification and model-based diagnosis within the stream specification language LOLA. By encoding system descriptions, component health states, and observations into a single stream-based formalism, the approach enables continuous, online fault localization directly alongside fault detection, without requiring separate toolchains. The framework supports both time-invariant and transient faults, and naturally accommodates nondeterministic observations.

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

Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods in computational pathology rely on a multi-stage paradigm: class activation map (CAM) generation, offline pseudo-mask refinement, and fully supervised retraining. While established, this decoupled approach presents fundamental limitations. The multi-stage process not only incurs high computational training costs but also suffers from error propagation: local texture biases in shallow CNN layers generate false-positive artifacts that subsequent refinement steps often fail to correct. To address these persistent challenges through a simple yet highly effective approach, we propose the Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification (SSHR) framework. Rather than passively refining CAMs post-hoc, our method proactively purifies intermediate feature representations during the forward pass. We introduce a Hierarchical Feature Rectification Module (HFRM) that utilizes deep global semantic context to filter out local anomalies in shallow layers. This mechanism generates high-fidelity activation maps directly within a single training loop. Experiments on the LUAD-HistoSeg and BCSS datasets demonstrate that SSHR outperforms state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Furthermore, SSHR reduces training duration by 2 to 5 times. This efficiency minimizes computational overhead and accelerates clinical translation for large-scale histopathology workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/trongduc-nguyen/SSHR

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Phase Transition for Stochastic Block Model with more than $\sqrt{n}$ Communities

arXiv:2509.15822v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predictions from statistical physics postulate that recovery of the communities in the Stochastic Block Model (SBM) with a fixed number $K$ of communities is possible in polynomial time above, and only above, the Kesten-Stigum (KS) threshold. This conjecture has given rise to a rich literature, proving that non-trivial community recovery is indeed possible in SBM above the KS threshold. Failure of low-degree polynomials (LDP) below the KS threshold was also proven, as long as $K\ll \sqrt{n}$, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the observed graph. When $K\geq \sqrt{n}$, Chin et al.(2025) recently proved that, in a sparse regime, community recovery in polynomial time is possible below the KS threshold by counting non-backtracking paths. This breakthrough led them to postulate a new threshold for the many-communities regime $K\geq \sqrt{n}$. In this work, we provide evidence supporting their conjecture:\\ 1- We prove that, for any graph density, LDP fail to recover communities below the threshold postulated by Chin et al.(2025) ;\\ 2- We prove that community recovery is possible in polynomial time above the postulated threshold, not only in the sparse regime considered in Chin et al.~(2025), but also in moderately sparse regimes, by counting occurrences of some specific motifs inspired by the LDP analysis.\\ In particular, counting self-avoiding paths of length $\log(n)$, which is closely related to spectral algorithms based on the Non-Backtracking operator, is optimal only in the sparse regime. More complex motifs based on the blow-up of a cycle must be considered in denser regimes.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stochastic Thermodynamics and SDE-based Generative Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SDE-based generative models, including diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge, have found broad applications in signal processing tasks such as speech enhancement, image restoration, and time-series generation. This note presents a modeling framework for such models within the context of stochastic thermodynamics. The main results of this note are trajectory-level definitions of work, heat, and entropy production, along with a generalized Jarzynski identity and a second-law-like inequality. The proposed framework extends the original Jarzynski setup to accommodate time-dependent bath temperature and nonconservative driving forces. This thermodynamic perspective may deepen our understanding of diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge from a nonequilibrium statistical mechanics viewpoint.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Resilient Consensus in Agentic AI

arXiv:2606.15024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems where they must coordinate and agree on shared decisions. We ask whether classical resilient consensus theory, developed for deterministic agents, transfers to LLM agents that may behave adversarially. Framing LLM agreement as a Byzantine consensus game, we run controlled experiments on complete and general communication graphs. We find that prompted LLM agents fail to reach agreement that is achievable in principle: consensus can fail even in settings where classical theory guarantees that a convergent algorithm exists, and this failure persists across temperatures and horizons. At the same time, wrapping the agents with classical resilient consensus filters improves agreement. The benefit of filtering depends on how much robustness the underlying topology already provides. Our results suggest that classical resilient consensus theory is a useful lens for the safety of agentic AI.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Olmo Hybrid: From Theory to Practice and Back

Recent work has demonstrated the potential of non-transformer language models, especially linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and hybrid models that mix recurrence and attention. Yet there is no consensus on whether the potential benefits of these new architectures justify the risk and effort of scaling them up. To address this, we provide evidence for the advantages of hybrid models over pure transformers on several fronts. First, theoretically, we show that hybrid models do not merely inherit the expressivity of transformers and linear RNNs, but can express tasks beyond both, such as code execution. Putting this theory to practice, we train Olmo Hybrid, a 7B-parameter model largely comparable to Olmo 3 7B but with the sliding window layers replaced by Gated DeltaNet layers. We show that Olmo Hybrid outperforms Olmo 3 across standard pretraining and mid-training evaluations, demonstrating the benefit of hybrid models in a controlled, large-scale setting. We find that the hybrid model scales significantly more efficiently than the transformer, explaining its higher performance. However, its unclear why greater expressivity on specific formal problems should result in better scaling or superior performance on downstream tasks unrelated to those problems. To explain this apparent gap, we return to theory and argue why increased expressivity should translate to better scaling efficiency, completing the loop. Overall, our results suggest that hybrid models mixing attention and recurrent layers are a powerful extension to the language modeling paradigm: not merely to reduce memory during inference, but as a fundamental way to obtain more expressive models that scale better during pretraining.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Closing the Calibration Gap in Semantic Caching

Semantic caching cuts LLM inference costs by serving a cached response to semantically similar queries. Standard practice evaluates these systems using PR-AUC, a metric that only measures how well scores rank and ignores whether they are usable at a fixed threshold. We show this mismatch leads to systematically poor deployment choices, as models with the highest PR-AUC are often the worst in operation. We introduce Precision-Cache Hit Ratio (P-CHR) AUC, a cache-aware metric that measures precision across cache utilization levels, and Calibration Retention Rate (CRR), which captures how much offline ranking quality survives at deployment. We decompose the operational gap between offline and deployed quality into a recoverable calibration component and an irreducible structural component fixed by the dataset's positive rate. Our experiments show that the calibration gap is governed by the training objective rather than data scale, and post-hoc calibration only partially closes it. Ultimately, model selection for semantic caching is a calibration problem, not a ranking one, and measuring it is the first step to closing the gap.

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

SED:Lightweight Saliency prediction for Event-based data via Distillation

Event-based saliency prediction has gained attention recently, as combining event cameras with saliency estimation can act as an upstream stage that naturally improves the efficiency of downstream eventbased perception at the edge. However, current approaches are either neuromorphic, underperforming on event-based saliency benchmarks, or too heavy for resource-constrained edge applications due to their reliance on transformers or 3D convolutions. Drawing inspiration from efficient convolutional modules, SED and aiming to exploit the temporal information in event data, we propose a lightweight network, trained through knowledge distillation, built on a Depthwise Spatio-Temporal Block (DSTconv) – a factorization of the 3D depthwise separable convolution. Relative to its teacher, our model reduces the model size from 180 MB to 0.32 MB (562x) and the parameter count from 45M to 81k (554x), while matching or outperforming it on the N-DHF1K and N-UCF Sports datasets. Moreover, it generalizes strongly beyond its training distribution, transferring from synthetic to real event data where a model trained from scratch fails.