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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

BOFA: Bridge-Layer Orthogonal Low-Rank Fusion for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to continually learn new categories without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Vision-language models such as CLIP offer strong transferable representations via multi-modal supervision, making them promising for CIL. However, applying CLIP to CIL poses two major challenges: (1) adapting to downstream tasks often requires additional learnable modules, increasing model complexity and susceptibility to forgetting; and (2) while multi-modal representations offer complementary strengths, existing methods have yet to fully realize their potential in effectively integrating visual and textual modalities. To address these issues, we propose BOFA (Bridge-layer Orthogonal Fusion for Adaptation), a novel framework for CIL. BOFA confines all model adaptation exclusively to CLIP's existing cross-modal bridge-layer, thereby adding no extra parameters or inference cost. To prevent forgetting within this layer, it leverages Orthogonal Low-Rank Fusion, a mechanism that constrains parameter updates to a low-rank ``safe subspace" mathematically constructed to be orthogonal to past task features. This ensures stable knowledge accumulation without data replay. Furthermore, BOFA employs a cross-modal hybrid prototype that synergizes stable textual prototypes with visual counterparts derived from our stably adapted bridge-layer, enhancing classification performance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that BOFA achieves superior accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Hybrid Sequence Modeling and Reinforced Verification for Controllable Target-Conditioned Decision Making

arXiv:2508.16420v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Target-conditioned sequence models provide a simple interface for controllable offline decision making, but the requested target return can be an unreliable control signal, especially when the target return lies in underrepresented regions of the dataset. This paper proposes Doctor, a hybrid sequence modeling and reinforced verification framework for controllable target-conditioned offline decision making. Doctor trains a shared masked trajectory Transformer with two complementary objectives: masked trajectory reconstruction for candidate generation and in-sample value learning for action-value verification. At inference time, the model samples multiple nearby target returns, generates candidate actions in parallel, and selects the action whose verified value is closest to the requested target return. We analyze this verifier-guided selection rule and show that its value-level alignment error is bounded by candidate-value coverage around the target return and verifier accuracy. Experiments on D4RL and EpiCare show that Doctor improves target-return alignment under reduced high-return coverage, remains competitive on standard offline return-maximization benchmarks, and enables a single policy to modulate between conservative and aggressive operating points in a simulated clinical decision-making task. These results suggest that reinforced verification can improve the controllability of target-conditioned policies.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Moving Out: Physically-grounded Human-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2507.18623v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The ability to adapt to physical actions and constraints in an environment is crucial for embodied agents (e.g., robots) to effectively collaborate with humans. Such physically grounded human-AI collaboration must account for the increased complexity of the continuous state-action space and constrained dynamics caused by physical constraints. However, most existing collaboration benchmarks are discrete or do not consider physical attributes and constraints. To address this, we introduce Moving Out, a human-AI collaboration benchmark that resembles a wide range of collaboration modes affected by physical attributes and constraints, such as moving heavy items together and coordinating actions to move an item around a corner. Moving Out consists of two challenges and human-human interaction data to comprehensively evaluate models' abilities to adapt to diverse human behaviors and unseen physical attributes. To give embodied agents the capability to collaborate with humans under physical attributes and constraints, we propose a novel method, BASS (Behavior Augmentation, Simulation, and Selection), to enhance the diversity of agents and their understanding of the outcome of actions. We systematically compare BASS and state-of-the-art models in AI-AI and human-AI experiments, showing that BASS can effectively collaborate with both unseen AI and humans. The project page is available at https://live-robotics-uva.github.io/movingout_ai/.

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

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.

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

Invariant Measures and Weak-Magic-Injection Asymptotics in Random Monitored Quantum Circuits

arXiv:2606.13470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monitored quantum circuits provide a natural setting in which scrambling, measurements, and measurement-conditioned updates compete within a stochastic many-body dynamics. From the viewpoint of nonstabilizer resource theory, this competition is especially relevant because Clifford-compatible operations preserve the stabilizer structure, while weak non-Clifford perturbations inject magic resource. Most of the existing understanding of monitored quantum circuits has been shaped by numerical simulations and phenomenological descriptions, while a rigorous dynamics theory remains less developed. In this paper, we address this gap by developing an analytical framework which lays a rigorous mathematical foundation for the study of random monitored quantum dynamics. Specifically, we study a class of monitored quantum circuits driven by random Clifford. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the stationary law, which gives an ergodic description of the long-time dynamics. We then resolve the leading asymptotics of steady magic in the weak-magic-injection limit. This tangent description makes the contrast between resource measures transparent: in odd-prime local dimension, the steady Gross–Wigner mana has a linear leading asymptotic, whereas in qubit systems the steady 2-stabilizer Rényi entropy has a quadratic leading asymptotic. These different powers reflect the distinct local geometries of the two resource measures near the stabilizer layer. In this way, this work develops an analytical framework that first establishes the stationary ergodic dynamics of random monitored quantum circuits.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CLoVE: Personalized Federated Learning through Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings

arXiv:2506.22427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose CLoVE (Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings), a novel algorithm for Clustered Federated Learning (CFL). In CFL, clients are naturally grouped into clusters based on their data distribution. However, identifying these clusters is challenging, as client assignments are unknown. CLoVE utilizes client embeddings derived from model losses on client data, and leverages the insight that clients in the same cluster share similar loss values, while those in different clusters exhibit distinct loss patterns. Based on these embeddings, CLoVE is able to iteratively identify and separate clients from different clusters and optimize cluster-specific models through federated aggregation. Key advantages of CLoVE over existing CFL algorithms are (1) its simplicity, (2) its applicability to both supervised and unsupervised settings, and (3) the fact that it eliminates the need for near-optimal model initialization, which makes it more robust and better suited for real-world applications. We establish theoretical convergence bounds, showing that CLoVE can recover clusters accurately with high probability in a single round and converges exponentially fast to optimal models in a linear setting. Our comprehensive experiments comparing with a variety of both CFL and generic Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) algorithms on different types of datasets and an extensive array of non-IID settings demonstrate that CLoVE achieves highly accurate cluster recovery in just a few rounds of training, along with state-of-the-art model accuracy, across a variety of both supervised and unsupervised PFL tasks.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Networks: Unlocking High-Frequency Potential

arXiv:2502.18959v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The architecture of a neural network and the choice of its activation function are both fundamental to its performance. Equally important is ensuring that these two elements are well matched, as their alignment is key to effective representation and learning. In this paper, we introduce the Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Network (FMMNN), a model that combines sine-type activations with the multi-component and multi-layer structure of MMNNs. In an FMMNN, each component is represented as a trainable linear combination of fixed random sine-type basis functions, while multi-layer composition generates more complex and adaptive high-frequency features. We establish that FMMNNs retain exponential expressive power for function approximation even under a low-rank architectural structure. We also analyze the optimization landscape of FMMNNs and find it to be substantially more favorable than that of standard fully connected neural networks, especially for high-frequency targets. In addition, we propose a scaled random initialization method for the first-layer weights in FMMNNs, which accelerates training and improves final performance when sufficient samples are available. Extensive numerical experiments support our theoretical insights, showing that FMMNNs achieve strong accuracy and favorable convergence behavior on oscillatory function-approximation benchmarks.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Evaluating LLM Personalization via Semantic Constraint Verification

Current evaluation paradigms for Large Language Model (LLM) personalization rely heavily on brittle surface-matching metrics or computationally expensive LLM-as-a-judge protocols, both of which lack interpretability. To address these limitations, we introduce Natural Language Inference Constraint Verification (NLICV), a scalable, semantically invariant framework that maps sentence meanings to truth-condition sets to verify personalization constraints via a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model. Moving beyond binary scoring, NLICV categorizes LLM behaviors into four distinct modes: personalization, generalization, sycophancy, and failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLICV aligns closely with human annotations while drastically reducing the latency and token costs associated with LLM judges (up to 2100 inference speedup). Finally, through an ablation-based procedure, NLICV pinpoints the exact sentences driving the constraint verification, yielding faithful, understandable evidence for its evaluations.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

ROSA-TFormer: A Radar-Optical Sensor-Aware Temporal Transformer for Pinus sylvestris Plantation Classification in Northern Shaanxi Using GEE-Derived Sentinel-1/2 Time Series

Accurate identification of Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica plantations is important for monitoring afforestation quality and ecological restoration in northern Shaanxi. This paper proposes ROSA-TFormer, a radar-optical sensor-aware temporal Transformer for P. sylvestris classification using Sentinel-1/2 time-series data generated on Google Earth Engine. The model integrates separate SAR and optical embedding branches, a sensor-aware gate, and temporal attention pooling to capture multi-source seasonal features. Experiments on monthly and half-month point-level datasets show that ROSA-TFormer achieves strong classification performance, with 99.67% overall accuracy, 99.56% macro F1, and 98.91% P. sylvestris F1 on the HalfMonth-dataBig dataset. Spatial block validation and ablation results further indicate the effectiveness of radar-optical temporal fusion and sensor-aware modeling. The results demonstrate the potential of ROSA-TFormer for point-level P. sylvestris plantation classification, while broader wall-to-wall validation remains necessary.

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

State-Grounded Multi-Agent Synthetic Data Generation for Tool-Augmented LLMs

Training tool-augmented LLM agents requires large corpora of multi-turn, tool-grounded conversational data that is expensive to annotate, privacy-constrained in production settings, and largely absent from public datasets. We present StateGen, a synthetic data generation platform that produces scored, reasoning-trace-rich training conversations by orchestrating a four-role LLM loop: a persona-conditioned user simulator, an agent under test, a state-grounded tool simulator, and a multi-axis LLM judge. The key architectural contribution is an authoritative state manager that maintains a structured world-state object across turns, enforcing a backend-is-truth invariant that eliminates the dominant class of tool-call hallucinations by construction. StateGen extends naturally to hierarchical multi-agent settings by declaring sub-agents as tools, all sharing a single state object. We report results on 64,698 evaluated conversations across three production corpora: tool-call hallucination scores reach 9.66/10, the system supports persona-driven variation via a 23-dimensional trait vector, and a cleanly separated train and golden evaluation set split confirms the data is not memorization bait (per-criterion gap analysis). Comparison with eight external systems shows that no single publicly available platform combines multi-turn generation, state-grounded tool simulation, hierarchical multi-agent support, and built-in judge scoring.

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

Neuro-Symbolic Agents for Regulated Process Automation: Challenges and Research Agenda

arXiv:2606.13405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based agents are entering regulated industries where they automate judgment intensive quality management processes. We argue that symbolic structures already embedded in these domains, including regulations, typed process models, and compliance constraints, should be treated not merely as external monitoring mechanisms but as core architectural components that shape the agent's decision-making and behavior. We propose compliance-by-construction as a complementary paradigm to guardrail-based monitoring: a structural foundation that prevents control-flow violations, while guardrails remain essential for catching semantic errors. We identify a structured set of neuro-symbolic research challenges on foundational and capability level and show that addressing them jointly enables compliance-by-construction. We call on the neuro-symbolic community to engage with regulated process automation as a high impact research domain.

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

Service-Induced Congestion in Memory-Constrained LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.15555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In large language model (LLM) serving, each request accumulates persistent graphics processing unit (GPU) memory during service as its key-value cache grows with every generated token. Under high concurrency, aggregate memory usage therefore increases endogenously over time: the service process itself creates future capacity pressure. When memory capacity is exceeded, systems evict active requests, discarding cached state and restarting them later, which wastes computation and reduces throughput. We develop a discrete-time dynamical model of memory-constrained LLM inference that captures admission, memory growth, and eviction under continuous batching. In the saturated-input regime, the system admits both eviction-free fixed points and limit cycles with evictions. For homogeneous workloads, we show that the eviction-free equilibrium is unstable and that, except for a Lebesgue-measure-zero exact-capture set, the system converges to a unique worst-case limit cycle that is asymptotically stable outside this exceptional set, with throughput losses as large as 50%. For heterogeneous workloads, we prove a stability criterion in the two-class common-input setting and explain how the survival-polynomial mechanism generalizes to multiple classes and heterogeneous-input lengths. Under an input-dominated scaling regime, coprime decoding lengths stabilize the eviction-free equilibrium, while non-coprime lengths create synchronized modes that drive instability. These results characterize when workload heterogeneity desynchronizes completions and helps stabilize memory-constrained serving. More broadly, we identify service-induced congestion as a structural instability mechanism and derive scheduling design principles for sustaining high throughput.

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

VIMPO: Value-Implicit Policy Optimization for LLMs

arXiv:2606.20008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a central tool for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but current methods face a trade-off between simplicity and credit assignment. Group-relative methods such as GRPO avoid training a critic, but typically assign a trajectory-level advantage to every token. Actor-critic methods provide denser learning signals, but require a learned value function with its own training instability. We introduce VIMPO, a critic-free policy optimization method that derives a policy-implied value function from the optimality conditions of KL-regularized reinforcement learning. For autoregressive generation, the resulting value recurrence can be written in terms of policy-reference log-ratios and anchored by the terminal condition that no future reward remains at the end of a trajectory. This gives a simple value loss that incorporates outcome-level verifiable rewards without training a critic. The same derivation also yields a critic-free actor advantage, allowing VIMPO to separate reward incorporation through the value loss from policy improvement through a PPO-style actor update. On mathematical RLVR benchmarks, VIMPO improves over GRPO across MATH-500, AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and OlympiadBench, with especially larger gains on competition-style evaluations. Under noisy rewards, VIMPO retains a consistent advantage over GRPO, suggesting that policy-implied value optimization can provide finer credit assignment while preserving the practical simplicity of critic-free training.

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

A Low-Rank Subspace Analysis of LLM Interventions

arXiv:2606.14388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interventions designed to modify a particular behavior in LLMs, such as refusal or sycophancy, often produce unintended changes in other behaviors. This lack of targeted control makes it difficult to design and implement reliable safety controls. To understand these side-effects, we introduce a diagnostic framework for analyzing interacting behaviors in LLMs. We model behaviors as low-rank subspaces in activation space, and study how interventions influence across behaviors. Across multiple instruction-tuned models (7B-70B) and across refusal, jailbreak, and sycophancy settings, we find that different behaviors share internal representations, and intervening on one behavior alters others in asymmetric ways. Some behaviors act as upstream control points whose interventions propagate broadly across other behaviors, while others remain more isolated. We relate these effects to two geometric quantities: (i) the overlap between behavior subspaces, measured as the average squared cosine of principal angles, and (ii) the angle between each behavior subspace and the decision subspace (capturing the model's final decision e.g., refuse vs. comply). Empirically, intervention effects on other behaviors tend to be larger for behavior pairs with higher subspace overlap, and for source behaviors whose subspaces lie closer (smaller angle) to the decision subspace. These findings highlight a challenge for targeted behavior control: behaviors are difficult to modify independently, as interventions can propagate through shared representations and asymmetric interactions.

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

In-Context Learning Is Provably Bayesian Inference: A Generalization Theory for Meta-Learning

arXiv:2510.10981v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates the total ICL risk into two orthogonal components: Bayes Gap and Posterior Variance. The Bayes Gap quantifies how well the trained model approximates the Bayes-optimal in-context predictor. For a uniform-attention Transformer, we derive a non-asymptotic upper bound on this gap, which explicitly clarifies the dependence on the number of pretraining prompts and their context length. The Posterior Variance is a model-independent risk representing the intrinsic task uncertainty. Our key finding is that this term is determined solely by the difficulty of the true underlying task, while the uncertainty arising from the task mixture vanishes exponentially fast with only a few in-context examples. Together, these results provide a unified view of ICL: the Transformer selects the optimal meta-algorithm during pretraining and rapidly converges to the optimal algorithm for the true task at test time.

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

MGI: Member vs Generated Inference

arXiv:2606.23872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative models increasingly produce samples that are indistinguishable from human-created content, it becomes difficult to determine whether a given data point was part of a model's natural training set or was generated by the model itself, especially when models memorize and reproduce training data. We formalize this challenge as Member vs Generated Inference (MGI): given a sample and a target generative model, infer whether the sample is a true training member or a generated output of that model. Focusing on image generation, we show that existing membership inference methods systematically misclassify generated samples as training members, while attribution-based methods often misclassify true members as generated. This failure arises because both approaches rely on likelihood-related signals that are similarly elevated for training examples and for the model's own outputs. To address MGI, we propose Data Circuit Breaker (DCB), a three-stage method that combines complementary signals from a generative model's autoencoder and latent generator to distinguish training members from generated samples. Across multiple generative models, including image autoregressive and diffusion models, DCB consistently addresses the shortcomings of membership inference and attribution methods, remains effective even when models reproduce near-duplicates of training samples, and generalizes to challenging model derivative settings in which new models are trained on generated data.

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

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

The EU needs to back its ambition to end animal testing with cash

Authors: Unknown Author

The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment. The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Stabilizing black-box algorithms through task-oriented randomization

arXiv:2606.25269v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As black-box models become foundational to modern research, ensuring their stability is paramount for the realization of trustworthy artificial intelligence. The inherent diversity of inputs - ranging from structured Gaussian distributions to complex data with unknown structures - poses a significant challenge: how to stabilize black-box outputs while effectively leveraging available prior information. This paper introduces a task-oriented randomization methodology that adaptively tailors its strategy to the underlying generative mechanisms of the input data, specifically addressing unstructured complexities. A comprehensive suite of stability guarantees is proposed. Beyond establishing rigorous theoretical foundations for stability, the research provides a detailed analysis of the intrinsic trade-off between stability and exploration. Motivated by the architecture of Large Language Models, the framework is further extended to top-k ranking problems. The validity and effectiveness of the proposal are demonstrated through extensive numerical simulations and applications to the real-world dataset.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Haagerup property and group-invariant percolation

arXiv:2303.17429v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Let $\mathcal G$ be the Cayley graph of a finitely generated, infinite group $\Gamma$. We show that $\Gamma$ has the Haagerup property if and only if for every $\alpha\alpha\mathrm{deg}_{\mathcal G}(g)$ for every vertex $g$ and with the two-point function $\tau(g,h)=\mathbb P\big[g\leftrightarrow h\big]$ vanishing as $d(g,h)\to\infty$. On the other hand, we show that $\Gamma$ has Kazhdan's property (T) if and only if there exists a threshold $\alpha^*\alpha^*\mathrm{deg}(o)$ implies that the two-point function is uniformly bounded away from zero. These results in particular answer questions raised by Lyons (J. Math. Phys. 41. 1099-1126 (2000)) about characterizations of properties of groups beyond amenability through group-invariant percolations. The method of proof is new and is based on a construction of percolations with suitable dependence structures built from invariant point processes on spaces with measured walls. This construction furthermore leads to quantitative bounds on the two-point functions, exhibiting in particular exponential decay of the two-point function in several prominent examples of Haagerup groups, including co-compact Fuchsian groups, co-compact discrete subgroups of $\mathrm{Isom}(\mathbb H^n)$ and lamplighters over free groups. This method also allows us to extend the aforementioned characterization of property (T) to the setting of relative property (T) and provide an application to Bernoulli percolation at the uniqueness threshold.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Story Operators: Decomposing the Original $\to$ Sequel Transformation in Embedding Space

I treat a book as a point in a sentence-embedding space and a literary transformation as an operation on points. Given an original novel and its sequel, I ask what it takes, geometrically, to turn the first into the second. Using all-mpnet-base-v2 paragraph embeddings drawn from a precomputed index of the PG19 corpus, I form the displacement $d=\bar{x}_seq-\bar{x}_orig$ and greedily decompose it along a content basis obtained by PCA over the two books' own paragraphs. Each component is an interpretable axis anchored by real passages at its poles. Across thirteen verified author pairs from Project Gutenberg, the decomposition reveals a small taxonomy of sequels: formulaic (a tiny, low-rank change: Doyle's Holmes collections, $\|d\|=0.12$), concentrated (one dominant axis: Alcott's Little Women $\to$ Little Men, 75% on a single move), and compositional (many small axes: Twain, Burroughs's Barsoom, Nesbit). For the canonical case, Tom Sawyer $\to$ Huckleberry Finn, the dominant recovered axis is structural – the collapse of sheltering domesticity into a picaresque road – rather than the famous surface themes of vernacular voice or slavery, which ride later, smaller axes; and the transformation routes through adventure-journey space rather than diluting toward generic realism. I corroborate the recovered geometry against Twain's documented authorial intent (his 1875–76 letters to Howells), which names the first-person picaresque move years in advance, and I quantify, with an explicit representation caveat, how much of the realized transformation his stated intentions span. All computations are reproducible from the released scripts and data.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Communicability-Inspired Positional Encoding (CIPE)

arXiv:2606.25293v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) are essential for Transformers. Yet designing effective PEs for non-Euclidean graphs remains challenging. Such encodings should ideally induce an Attention-Compatible Geometry for self-attention: not merely describing graph structure, but defining a geometry whose inner products reflect meaningful structural relatedness. To realize this geometry, we propose Communicability-Inspired Positional Encoding (CIPE), built from communicability, a measure between pairs of nodes that aggregates contributions from paths of all lengths. By construction, CIPE inner products recover communicability, converting global multi-path connectivity into an attention-ready similarity geometry. For practical Transformer training, we introduce dimensionality alignment, mapping graph-size-dependent CIPE representations to prescribed dimensions while faithfully preserving the induced geometry. Empirically, CIPE improves structure-agnostic Transformers by 35.5% on average across seven benchmarks, outperforming representative PEs; it also consistently improves structure-biased graph Transformers, where competing PEs often yield only marginal benefits. These results position CIPE as a principled framework for attention-compatible graph positional encodings.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Bias-Controlled Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic: Optimal Rates for Constrained Multi-Objective Average-Reward RL

arXiv:2606.25012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many reinforcement learning (RL) problems in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting require optimizing multiple conflicting objectives while satisfying multiple safety constraints. A common approach is concave scalarization, where the agent maximizes a utility $ f(J^\pi_{r_1}, \ldots, J^\pi_{r_M}) $ subject to a scalarized constraint $ g(J^\pi_{c_1}, \ldots, J^\pi_{c_N}) \ge 0 $, where $J^\pi_{r_m}$ and $J^\pi_{c_n}$ denote the average-reward and cost under policy $\pi$. However, the nonlinearity of $f$ and $g$ introduces bias in policy-gradient and actor-critic methods, since gradients must be evaluated using noisy estimates of $J^\pi,$ and $ \mathbb{E}[\partial f(J^\pi)] \neq \partial f(\mathbb{E}[J^\pi]),$ and this bias propagates through both primal and dual updates. We propose an MLMC-based primal-dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm for average-reward MDPs that controls bias in scalarized objectives, constraint evaluation, and actor-critic estimation without requiring mixing-time knowledge. We show that the algorithm achieves optimal global convergence and constraint-violation rates of $ \tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{T}) $. To our knowledge, this is the first result establishing optimal convergence for concave scalarized multi-objective RL in the average-reward setting, both with and without constraints, and the first to do so without mixing-time information even in the absence of scalarization.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

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

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