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

Deep-Unfolded Coordination

arXiv:2606.19920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed optimization is a highly scalable and structurally transparent technique to solve multi-agent robotics problems; however, such methods often suffer from the need for highly-specialized, problem-specific hyperparameter tunings. In this work, we propose Deep Coordinator, a deep-unfolding framework that learns to dynamically adjust the hyperparameters of ADMM-DDP, a popular distributed solver for robotics tasks, at solve-time in response to optimizer performance. Our architecture consists of unrolling a fixed number of ADMM-DDP iterations into a neural network with learnable functions between layers mapping the optimizer state to the next hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, Deep Coordinator is the first deep-unfolding framework to adapt the penalty parameters of a non-convex optimizer at solve-time; we show that the mainstream supervised approach can yield degenerate solutions when training such models, and propose an unsupervised learning scheme. On simulations with fleets of cars and quadrotors, Deep Coordinator produces trajectories of comparable quality 6.18-9.44x faster than conventional solvers. Furthermore, Deep Coordinator retains its performance benefits when deployed to systems up to 8x larger than trained on.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Scaling limits of multitype Bienaymé trees

arXiv:2507.23241v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider critical multitype Bienaymé trees that are either irreducible or possess a critical irreducible component with attached subcritical components. These trees are studied under two distinct conditioning frameworks: first, conditioning on the value of a linear combination of the numbers of vertices of given types; and second, conditioning on the precise number of vertices belonging to a selected subset of types. We prove that, under a finite exponential moment condition, the scaling limit as the tree size tends to infinity is given by the Brownian Continuum Random Tree. Additionally, we establish strong nonasymptotic tail bounds for the height of such trees. Our main tools include a flattening operation applied to multitype trees and sharp estimates regarding the structure of monotype trees with a given sequence of degrees.

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

Ensemble Distributionally Robust Bayesian Optimisation with Continuous Context

arXiv:2605.07565v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study Bayesian Optimisation (BO) in settings where the objective function is influenced by uncontrollable environmental contexts governed by an unknown probability distribution. In practice, the contextual distribution must be estimated from empirical data, a process that inherently introduces distributional mismatch, producing sub-optimal results. While Distributionally Robust Optimisation (DRO) provides a framework to mitigate these risks, existing robust BO methods frequently suffer from high computational complexity, rely on discretisation of continuous context spaces, or impose restrictive assumptions on the structure of the ambiguity set. To overcome these limitations, we propose Ensemble Distributionally Robust Bayesian Optimisation (EDRBO). Our framework leverages the expressive power of ensemble surrogate models to approximate the black-box function while simultaneously accounting for contextual uncertainty. By utilising Wasserstein ball as ambiguity sets, EDRBO provides a robustified acquisition function that remains computationally tractable and natively handles continuous context spaces. We establish a rigorous theoretical foundation for our approach by proving sublinear cumulative regret guarantees of order $\mathcal{O}(\gamma_T \sqrt{T})$, where $\gamma_T$ represents the maximum information gain within the ensemble. Finally, we provide extensive empirical evaluations that corroborate our theory and demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of EDRBO.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sequential Deep Learning to Predict Non-Central to Central Geographic Atrophy Progression from OCT Imaging

Purpose: To develop and validate a temporal deep learning framework for predicting geographic atrophy (GA) progression across multi-year horizons using longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) sequences. Design: Retrospective longitudinal cohort study. Subjects, Participants, and/or Controls: A total of 91 patients with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) were identified from Wake Forest University School of Medicine (2013-2023), yielding 455 OCT volumes. Two prediction cohorts were defined: 32 patients with no GA (NGA) at baseline who subsequently developed GA, and 35 patients whose earliest GA manifestation was non-central GA (NCGA). Non-progressing patients served as negative controls. Methods: OCT B-scan volumes were encoded into visit-level feature representations using three pretrained architectures (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ViT-B/16). Chronologically ordered visit embeddings, optionally augmented with inter-visit time intervals ({Delta}t), were processed through recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), and Transformer encoders to model longitudinal disease trajectories. Models were trained and evaluated independently for prediction horizons of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years using patient-level stratified splits (80/20). Performance was assessed across five random seeds. Main Outcome Measures: Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC), F1-score, and accuracy for predicting two clinically critical transitions: NGA to GA onset and NCGA to central GA (CGA) involvement. Results: For NGA to GA prediction, models achieved ROC-AUC of 0.84-0.94 at 2-4 years and 1.00 at 5-6 years. For NCGA to CGA prediction, Transformer-based models achieved peak AUC of 0.95 at 4 years and 0.96 at 5 years. Longer input sequences (8 visits vs. 4 visits) consistently improved NCGA to CGA performance at extended horizons. Temporal interval encoding improved stability in several LSTM configurations.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Reachability and optimal-time certificates for quantum control

arXiv:2606.24645v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite-time control is central to quantum technologies, yet rigorous limits on reachable targets and optimal control times remain largely unknown. We develop a framework for finite-time reachability and optimal-time certificates in constrained quantum control based on moment relaxations with implicitly time-dependent differential constraints. For fixed control horizons and control constraints, the method yields rigorous upper bounds on achievable terminal fidelities, lower bounds on the optimal control times required to reach them, and certificate gaps for benchmarking explicit control pulses. We demonstrate the versatility of our framework in three use cases: entangled-state preparation in two and three qubits, one-qubit gate synthesis across different control geometries, and excitation transfer in an $N$-qubit $XX$ chain. Our work establishes differential moment hierarchies as a practical tool for certifying reachability limits and optimal control times in quantum control, providing hardware-aware quantum speed limits while highlighting structure exploitation as a key ingredient for scalable certification.

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

Secondary terms for first moments of Selmer groups of twists of elliptic curves over global function fields

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $E$ be a non-isotrivial elliptic curve over a global function field $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$ of characteristic coprime to $2$ and $3$. Under some explicit conditions, we determine the secondary terms for the first moments of prime Selmer groups of cyclic prime twist families of $E$ over $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Trait, Not State: The Durability of Reading Identity in Social Highlighting

Prior work on a social web highlighter located individuality in selection – which documents a person chooses to highlight – but measured it cross-sectionally. We ask the temporal question: is a reader's selection signature a trait or a state? We freeze each reader's first six months of highlighting as a profile and track its own-vs-other advantage on their later selections at growing gaps (to 24+ months), with negatives drawn from the same calendar era – so supply drift cannot masquerade as personal drift – at a coarse global level and at a fine level whose negatives and controls come from the reader's own interest neighborhood; the anchor cell reproduces the prior cross-sectional level (+0.188 vs +0.169), validating the harness. Four results. Within the same users, the fine-layer advantage shows no statistically detectable paired decline at any horizon (6-12 month retention R = 1.00 [0.85, 1.18], n = 212; the farthest bin is compatible with a modest decline; the only contrast whose interval excludes zero is the coarse layer at 12-24 months, about 13%). The signal is not reducible to repeated domains (~90% survives excluding all profile sources). Within-person drift is slow (a recent-half profile beats the old half by +0.042). Prospectively, personal profiles – even one built from a reader's earliest documents, median 20 months before evaluation – rank their next reads at roughly 3x the AP of every simple non-personal prior tested. We use "trait" operationally (a stable signature under continued engagement); the scope is heavy, long-tenured readers of one platform, and exposure is not separable from choice.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Comorbidity structure as an inductive bias: Comparing output-head designs for multi-label prediction of diabetes and myocardial infarction complications

Background: Clinical complications are often predicted with separate sigmoid outputs, even when the target labels arise from related pathophysiological processes. This paper asks whether output-layer choice should reflect both predictive convenience and the biological structure assumed among complications. The central premise is that label-dependence mechanisms are explicit hypotheses about comorbidity, not generic modelling additions. Methods: Output-head assumptions were compared across two clinically distinct multi-label prediction tasks. In Type 2 diabetes (T2D), six heads were evaluated for nephropathy, neuropathy, and retinopathy: independent baseline, linear additive, multiplicative, symmetric conditional random field (CRF), residual multilayer perceptron (MLP), and combined additive-multiplicative. In myocardial infarction (MI), four heads were evaluated for ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, and atrioventricular block: independent baseline, linear additive, multiplicative, and symmetric CRF. All experiments used five training data fractions and seven independent seeds, with the same shared-backbone protocol within each disease setting. Results: In T2D, the symmetric CRF gave the most consistent improvement pattern, ranking highest at full data and at the two lowest data fractions while adding only three interaction parameters. At 20% training data, it was the only interaction head whose aggregate mean exceeded the independent baseline. The residual MLP, despite 123 interaction parameters, remained below the baseline across all T2D fractions. In MI, rankings changed across fractions: the multiplicative head led at 80% and 60%, the CRF led at 100% and 20%, and the baseline led at 40%. The combined additive-multiplicative head did not improve robustness in T2D and showed the largest negative baseline-relative deviations at lower fractions. Conclusions: The findings support a biology-guided view of output-layer design. A small constrained mechanism was most useful when its symmetry matched the shared microvascular structure of T2D, whereas the heterogeneous electrophysiology of MI produced no stable winner. Output-layer choice should therefore be reported and defended as an assumption about disease structure instead of a routine hyperparameter decision.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

arXiv:2606.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative – from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Dynamic balance of sparse flux vectors for efficient simulation of culture dynamics and metabolic network reduction

Dynamic Flux Balance Analysis (DFBA) enables simulation of microbial culture dynamics under changing environmental conditions, but remains computationally expensive for tasks such as parameter calibration and fermentation optimization when applied using genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs). To address this challenge, we introduce Dynamic Flux Vector Balancing (DFVB), a reformulation of DFBA that solves an equivalent problem using a pre-computed, sparse basis of flux solutions that reduces the dimensionality of the internal optimization problem without information loss. Notably, DFVB provides a compact, interpretable representation of flux states that can readily identify dynamically inactive pathways and enable simulation-based automatic metabolic network reduction. We showed that DFVB produces the same culture dynamics as DFBA across multiple model scales and conditions, and identifies inactive reactions more accurately than Flux Variability Analysis (FVA) when compared to transcriptomic data profiles. Furthermore, computational performance analyses demonstrated that integrating DFVB with solver warm-start strategies and model reduction enhances computational efficiency relative to DFBA, yielding up to 3-fold reductions in simulation time for large-scale metabolic models. Finally, kinetic parameter estimation of culture dynamics with DFVB in two fermentation scenarios using a large-scale yeast GEM reached equal or higher prediction fidelity and narrower confidence intervals than DFBA, indicating improved parameter identifiability and robustness. Together, these results position DFVB as a scalable, robust, and biologically coherent framework for dynamic metabolic modeling, easing the integration of GEMs for culture dynamics simulation.

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

Smarter Saboteurs, Better Fixers: Scaling & Security in Linear Multi-Agent Workflows

arXiv:2606.12709v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are deployed in the wild, the resilience of their collaboration structures against adversarial compromise becomes a critical safety concern. Attackers may leverage prompt-injection or jailbreaking to sabotage individual agents within MAS workflows, but the interaction between model scaling and system-level resilience remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how model scale affects the security of linear multi-agent workflows. Our experiments across scales of two open-weight model families on the HumanEval benchmark reveal a compliance-correction symmetry: larger models are far more likely to faithfully execute malicious instructions, with the control-to-malicious performance drop reaching 53.7pp at 27B in uncorrected pipelines. However, appending a lightweight terminal Fixer stage collapses this to 0.6pp and restores statistical parity with control-level performance, demonstrating that strictly linear collaboration structures can be viable and resilient to adversaries at this scale, and suggesting that the brittleness previously attributed to linear topology may stem from a lack of correction.

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

A Minimal Model of Bounded Trade-Off Screening in Multi-Attribute Choice

arXiv:2606.13201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human decision-making often involves choosing between multi-attribute alternatives, yet classical models assume fully compensatory utility aggregation despite evidence that people reject options with poor performance on critical attributes. We propose a bounded trade-off reasoning framework in which decisions are governed by a screening process that evaluates the balance between gains and losses across attributes. The model introduces a trade-off tolerance parameter that controls acceptable imbalance and can vary across contexts. Through simulation, we show that this mechanism produces preference patterns that differ from standard utility-based models and captures context-dependent variation in trade-off behavior. These results establish bounded trade-off screening as a plausible computational mechanism for multi-attribute choice and generate testable predictions for future behavioral studies.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

MobileFineTuner: A Mobile-Native Framework for On-Device LLM Fine-Tuning in Real-World Embedded AI Applications

arXiv:2512.08211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are moving from cloud-centric services toward on-device embedded AI, where models interact with private, longitudinal signals sensed from users and their physical environments. Mobile phones are a natural platform for such applications because they are continuously carried by users, connected to wearable sensors, and deeply integrated with daily mobile applications. However, practical LLM fine-tuning on commodity phones remains difficult. Existing fine-tuning frameworks are largely Python-based and server-oriented, making them hard to deploy inside mobile applications. We present MobileFineTuner, a mobile-native open-source framework for end-to-end LLM fine-tuning on commodity mobile phones. MobileFineTuner is implemented in C++ and provides a reusable training stack. To make fine-tuning feasible under mobile resource constraints, MobileFineTuner integrates a resource-aware training runtime with memory-efficient attention, activation checkpointing, gradient accumulation, parameter sharding, and energy-aware scheduling. We evaluate MobileFineTuner on real mobile phones using GPT-2, Gemma 3, and Qwen2.5 models across multiple fine-tuning tasks. The results show that MobileFineTuner reproduces standard Full-FT and LoRA fine-tuning behavior, substantially reduces memory pressure and improves executability on memory-constrained phones. We further demonstrate MobileFineTuner through a private campus health-agent application, where a local LLM is fine-tuned on user-specific wearable-sensing records to provide more personalized responses while keeping raw records on the phone. These results establish MobileFineTuner as a practical toolkit for studying and building on-device LLM fine-tuning applications in embedded AI and sensing systems.

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

SCAR: Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval for Efficient Context Expansion in RAG

Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across segments, degrading retrieval recall. While static windowing and parent retrieval improve recall, they introduce significant token overhead. We propose SCAR (Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval), an adaptive retrieval policy that selectively expands neighboring chunks by weighing query-neighbor relevance against a structural continuity penalty. SCAR uses a relative expansion threshold tied to each retrieved chunk's own query-relevance, yielding an approximately scale-invariant decision rule that transfers across embedding models without recalibration. Across four diverse corpora (RFC, GDPR, a 10-K report, and a Merger agreement; N=320 queries; 160 boundary-fragmented), SCAR achieves 92.8% recall on boundary-fragmented queries with only 7.84 chunks, a 22.9% reduction compared to static windowing (10.16 chunks). Paired bootstrap tests (B=10,000) confirm the chunk reduction is highly significant (p

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Emergent retokenization symmetry in large language models: phenomenology and applications

Tokenization introduces representational redundancy: under a fixed token vocabulary, every byte string admits many valid token encodings, or segmentations, that decode to the same surface string. However, given a prompt, most language model tokenizers break this representational symmetry by returning a canonical segmentation. Training only on canonical segmentations should influence inference behavior, and there is little reason to expect models to respect segmentation symmetry on downstream tasks. We find that this symmetry partially emerges during training. Here, we probe this emergent symmetry through experiments testing token compositional understanding, representation diversity, and task focused benchmark performance. We primarily use retokenization – replacing a prompt's canonical tokenization with an alternative segmentation while preserving its bytes exactly. Relative to other prompt perturbations, retokenization is unusually clean because it isolates segmentation effects without changing syntax, semantics or surface form. We use retokenization to study sensitivity and robustness to semantically identical input representations across pretraining and post-training. Moreover, this partial retokenization symmetry suggests a distinct inference-time sampling axis. While temperature sampling generates diverse outputs from the model using its next-token probability distribution, retokenization generates diversity from the model's internal computations through semantically equivalent input representations. We find that while this retokenization sampling strategy can hurt performance on easy problems, it can also recover solutions that conventional sampling does not find. Overall, our work presents retokenization as a simple yet powerful probe of large language models, shedding light on compositional understanding and prompt sensitivity, and offering a novel sampling strategy.

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

An Attention Mechanism for Robust Multimodal Integration in a Global Workspace Architecture

arXiv:2602.08597v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust multimodal systems must remain effective when some modalities are noisy, degraded, or unreliable. Existing multimodal fusion methods often learn modality selection jointly with representation learning, making it difficult to determine whether robustness comes from the selector itself or from full end-to-end co-adaptation. Motivated by Global Workspace Theory (GWT), we study this question using a lightweight top-down modality selector operating on top of a frozen multimodal global workspace. We evaluate our method on two multimodal datasets of increasing complexity: Simple Shapes and MM-IMDb 1.0, under structured modality corruptions. The selector improves robustness while using far fewer trainable parameters than end-to-end attention baselines, and the learned selection strategy transfers better across downstream tasks, corruption regimes, and even to a previously unseen modality. Beyond explicit corruption settings, on the MM-IMDb 1.0 benchmark, we show that the same mechanism improves the global workspace over its no-attention counterpart and yields decent benchmark performance.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Preventing postpartum depression through mitigating breastfeeding grief: A convergent parallel mixed methods study

Background: Women who did not meet their breastfeeding goals often experience breastfeeding grief (BG) and may be likely to have postpartum depression (PD). Furthermore, PD is nearly twice as common in African American (AA) women as in Non-Hispanic White women. No research exists on BG and its role in PD. This study examined the BG experiences of AA women and its possible contributions to PD symptoms. Methods: A convergent parallel mixed methods design was used. A purposive sample of 16 AA women with children aged 6 months to 2 years with BG participated in individual semi-structured interviews about their experiences of BG and completed an online survey including the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and descriptive statistics, respectively. Both data were integrated using joint display of data and side-by-side comparison. Results: The mean age of participants was 29.5 years. Four meaning-based themes about BG were generated including: We looked forward to breastfeeding, But it did not go as expected, So we grieve, and These would have helped. From quantitative results, 87.5% of participants reported a history of PD symptoms and almost 44% had EPDS scores >11. All participants reported that experiencing BG contributed to their PD symptoms. Findings suggest that BG influenced PD symptoms in AA women without prior diagnosis of depression. Conclusions: Qualitative and quantitative findings from this novel exploratory study revealed an overlap that AA women with BG report PD symptoms. Clinicians should support women to achieve their breastfeeding goals to prevent BG and PD. Keywords: African American; Breastfeeding grief; Mental health; Mixed methods; Postpartum depression

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

Self-Preference Is Weak or Absent in Verifiable Instruction-Following Revision: A Four-Model Test Under Genuine Authorship

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly review and revise text, including their own. A documented self-preference bias (models favoring their own generations when acting as judges) raises the question of whether models also resist valid corrections to their own writing. We test this in a setting where "valid" is decided not by another model but by a deterministic verifier: instruction-following revision on IFEval. A model writes a draft; the official IFEval checker confirms the draft violates a constraint and that a candidate edit fixes it; the model then accepts or rejects that edit either as the genuine in-context author or as a fresh model that sees the draft neutrally. Across four mid-tier model families and 85 author-versus-fresh comparisons, we find no detectable self-preference: authors reject verified-good fixes to their own drafts at essentially the same rate as fresh models judging the same drafts (gap -5.1 pp, 95% CI [-12.9, +2.7]). A self-skepticism hint from a smaller pilot did not replicate at scale. The one robust observation is qualitative: when authors do reject a verified-good fix, 97% of their stated reasons are flaw-catching rather than preference, that is, about the character of rejections, not an elevated rate. Effects smaller than ~13 pp cannot be excluded at this sample size.

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

The use of Peres lattices in periodically driven systems

arXiv:2606.20009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate the strength of the method of Peres lattices in periodically driven quantum systems. The method, which has previously been used mostly in stationary systems, enables us to efficiently detect resonances in the driven system, to monitor the onset of chaos, and to recognize critical properties of the Floquet modes. It also allows quick comparisons of the spectra of Floquet modes for various driving Hamiltonians and transparent tests of the iterative approximation techniques based on effective stationary Hamiltonians.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

VISTA: Scale-Aware Visual Navigation via Action History Conditioning

arXiv:2606.17294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Navigation Foundation Models (VNMs) promise end-to-end learned navigation policies capable of zero-shot deployment across diverse embodiments and environments. To maintain generality, many vision-based navigation models predict normalized actions. However, this normalization introduces a critical deployment vulnerability: applying different scaling factors to the same normalized trajectory alters its physical geometry, which degrades navigation performance and increases collision risks. We address this vulnerability by conditioning the model on normalized action histories alongside image observations, providing explicit context on the relationship between the model's predictions and the robot's actual physical displacement. Furthermore, current VNMs often struggle in visually repetitive environments that lack distinct features. To resolve this issue, we integrate a DINOv3 encoder, whose richer representations enable our model to capture both spatial and geometric dimensions between observations. VISTA generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution environments, achieving 100% goal prediction accuracy in zero-shot, real-world deployment in Outdoor, Forest and Office settings, and an average of 95% checkpoints crossed, demonstrating consistent path following in unseen environments.

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

From Values to Tokens: An LLM-Driven Framework for Context-aware Time Series Forecasting via Symbolic Discretization

arXiv:2508.09191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, a large language model (LLM) driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To effectively bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained LLM, further optimized with generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and highlight its potential as a generative framework for context-aware time series forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/TokenCast.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning QoE from Packet-Level Measurements in Encrypted Video Conferencing Traffic

The quality of the user experience has become one of the most important aspects in todays world, as it directly influences individuals willingness to continue using or abandon a product or service. In this context, video conferencing applications (VCAs), which experienced widespread adoption following the COVID-19 pandemic, must deliver excellent performance to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Although content providers (CPs) such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet can assess conversation quality by comparing transmitted and received data. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption in VCAs makes quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation by internet service providers (ISPs) far more challenging. Since ISPs do not have access to the encrypted content, they must rely on passive measurements of unencrypted traffic characteristics on the data path. In this work, we present a simple yet effective QoE prediction framework based on an almost stock convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that uses only the packet sizes extracted from the communication between two participants in a video conferencing (VC) call to predict two QoE metrics: BRISQUE and MOS. The proposed framework is simple, easy to implement, and does not require high-end computational resources, yet it provides superior prediction performance, as shown in our experiments on two custom datasets collected from WhatsApp and Zoom, which achieve substantial improvements over previous models for the QoE prediction task.

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

Questioning the Coverage-Length Metric in Conformal Prediction: When Shorter Intervals Are Not Better

arXiv:2601.21455v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conformal prediction(CP) has become a cornerstone of distribution-free uncertainty quantification, conventionally evaluated by its coverage and interval length. This work critically examines the sufficiency of these standard metrics. We demonstrate that the interval length might be deceptively improved through a counter-intuitive approach termed Prejudicial Trick(PT), while the coverage remains valid. Specifically, for any given test sample, PT probabilistically returns an interval, which is either null or constructed using an adjusted confidence level, thereby preserving marginal coverage. While PT potentially yields a deceptively lower interval length, it introduces practical vulnerabilities: the same input can yield completely different prediction intervals across repeated runs of the algorithm. We formally derive the conditions under which PT achieves these misleading improvements and provide extensive empirical evidence across various regression and classification tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric interval stability which helps detect whether a new CP method implicitly improves the length based on such PT-like techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/benben-cd/PT-Conformal-Prediction.

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

Kolmogorov Regression for Robust Diffusion Policies

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finite-dimensional (FD) diffusion policies exhibit temporal drift owing to discretization artifacts that degrade long-horizon performance (when deployed on physical systems). We introduce a backward Kolmogorov equation that lifts diffusion policies to a Cameron-Martin space – a subset of the Hilbert space. Essentially, replacing stochastic score matching with a deterministic boundary-value PDE problem. Our core innovation thrives on Gaussian measure theory whereupon the diffusion noise covariance operator is realized from a colored noise distribution which prescribes a notion of regularity on samples from the model at inference time. We train the diffusion model with a derived precision-weighted Cameron- Martin loss and a Kolmogorov residual is introduced as a PDE diagnostic during inference. These substitutions yield (i) convergence guarantees where the bound's constants depend on the effective rank of the kernel rather than action dimension, (ii) improved trajectory regularity via spectral weighting, and (iii) a deterministic failure detector without reward signals. Validation across two application domains demonstrates substantial improvements: on the PushT manipulation benchmark, the Cameron-Martin loss achieves a 17% improvement in maximum episode reward (0.95 vs. 0.78 for MSE) and 67.6% reduction in inter-step drifts during inference via the introduced residual magnitude. Similarly, on a 6-station manufacturing line with constant work-in-process (CONWIP) flow control, we achieve 28.4% lower RMSE than classical LSTM baselines; a high starvation-event recall (1.0 in test cycles), and effective bottleneck identification (Precision@1 = 1.0 in test set, 13x signal-to-noise ratio). We then certify the dispatch policies with Hamilton-Jacobi reachability theory which reduces deadlock events by 96% compared to uncontrolled dispatch over 100 simulated runs (351 events prevented).

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DREAM: Extending Vision-Language Models with Dual-Objective Encoding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

In today's media-driven world, the exponential growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and entertainment has made retrieving semantically relevant videos via natural language queries increasingly critical. Early video retrieval systems relied on handcrafted features or shallow cross-modal mappings, limiting their ability to capture complex semantics and temporal dynamics. While large-scale vision-language models have improved cross-modal alignment, challenges remain in modeling fine-grained temporal dependencies and nuanced linguistic structures. In this paper, we introduce DREAM: Dual-path Representation Enhancement and Alignment Model, a novel multimodal framework that addresses these limitations through enhanced visual and textual encoding. DREAM incorporates a hybrid language modeling strategy that combines masked and permuted language modeling objectives to capture both local and global linguistic semantics. On the visual side, we design a hierarchical vision encoder with cascaded group attention, which integrates spatial and temporal information through multi-stage token interaction and coarse-to-fine attention refinement. We validate DREAM through comprehensive evaluations on the widely-used MSRVTT, MSVD and LSMDC benchmark datasets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art R1 scores of 49.4%, 49.7% and 27.3%, respectively. Qualitative analyses further show the model's ability to maintain coherent attention across frames and align complex queries with dynamic video content. These findings underscore the effectiveness of hierarchical attention and dual-objective textual modeling in enabling robust, context-aware video retrieval, and pave the way for future research in advancing cross-modal representation learning.