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

Quantum Computing Algebra (QCA), the theory and implementation

arXiv:2606.17621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a real geometric algebra framework designed for the direct translation of the Dirac formalism into geometric algebra representations. Unlike previous approaches based on positive-definite signatures, QCA employs a split-signature construction that enables a natural realization of quantum states and operators while simplifying computational implementation. We further present an implementation of QCA using the GAALOP software and show how quantum gates and multi-qubit systems can be efficiently represented and generated computationally. As an application, we demonstrate the use of QCA in quantum game theory, where the real-algebraic formulation provides computational advantages for modeling entangled strategies and quantum interactions. The proposed framework establishes a practical bridge between the abstract formalism of quantum computation and efficient geometric algebra implementations.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Infant Spontaneous Movement Noise Improves Exploration in Deep RL

arXiv:2606.16590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is commonly implemented as temporally uncorrelated white noise. However, recent works show that temporally correlated colored noise can improve exploration efficiency by producing smooth trajectories with better coverage of the state space. We inquire whether action noise inspired by infant spontaneous movements can also improve exploration in deep RL. We find that the power spectral densities of babies' end-effector velocities follow a colored noise process where the spectral exponent increases with age. Inspired by this developmental pattern, we introduce a mechanism that progressively increases the temporal auto-correlation of exploration noise during RL training, matching the infant statistics. Experiments across several RL environments show that infant-inspired noise produces structured exploratory behavior and can improve learning efficiency compared to conventional exploration strategies. These findings suggest that human motor and cognitive development can provide useful guidance for designing learning mechanisms in artificial agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/trieschlab/baby-noise-rl.

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

Power Partitions and Hayman Functions

arXiv:2602.18575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove, within the probabilistic framework of Khinchin families, that the generating function $P_k$ of partitions into $k$-th powers is strongly Gaussian in the sense of Báez-Duarte, and even further that it is a Hayman function. Thus the Hardy–Ramanujan asymptotic formula for the number $p_k(n)$ of partitions of $n$ into $k$-th powers which reads \[ p_k(n) \sim \frac{\alpha_k}{n^{(3k+1)/(2k+2)}} \exp\!\Big(\beta_k\, n^{1/(k+1)}\Big), \qquad n\to\infty, \] where $\alpha_k$ and~$\beta_k$ are explicit constants depending only on $k$, follows directly from Hayman's asymptotic formula for strongly Gaussian power series. The proof of strong Gaussianity of $P_k$ combines a Gaussianity criterion for Khinchin families with certain bounds of Tenenbaum, Wu and Li on the generating function; the asymptotic formula is recovered by computing asymptotic approximations of the mean and variance of the associated family. Analogous results are presented for the generating function $Q_k$ of partitions into distinct $k$-th powers.

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

Hitting a Moving Target: Test-Time Adaptation for AI Text Detection under Continual Distribution Shift

Deployed approaches for AI text detection often rely on training-time access to labeled datasets of both human-written and AI-generated text. This approach is vulnerable to three types of distribution shifts that occur continually post-deployment, and for which labeled data is often unavailable: adversarial humanization, new LLMs being released, and temporal drift in human writing. Simultaneously, existing approaches do not leverage a key signal of LLM usage: inference-time homogeneity. We propose a test-time adaptation (TTA) approach, using semi-supervised learning, that adapts to distribution shifts by leveraging homogeneity among unlabeled samples observed at inference time. Empirically, we find that state-of-the-art supervised detectors systematically fail when they encounter distribution shifts in AI-generated and human writing, both adversarial and natural, while test-time adaptation with semi-supervised learning is largely robust; e.g., the commercial model Pangram detects just 24.1% of our adversarial AI-generated text, compared to 90.5% for our test-time approach. We establish that test-time adaptation is a promising framework for AI text detection in the wild. We publicly release our code (which includes code for model training, evaluation, and plots) at https://github.com/kkr36/llm_detection.

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

The Risk Shadow of Principal Component Analysis: When 99.9999% Variance Preservation Causes Catastrophic Decision Errors

arXiv:2606.14533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) preserves variance, not the information needed to detect rare catastrophic events. This paper proves the existence of a {\it Risk Shadow}: PCA can retain over 99.9999 percent of total variance while completely erasing all signal about rare, high-impact failures. When this happens, even the best possible classifier operating on the PCA representation reduces to a constant predictor. The root cause is a fundamental mismatch between variance maximization and tail risk awareness. To break the shadow, we introduce Expectile PCA (ExPCA) and Tail-Preserving PCA (TP-PCA), two methods that reweight the data covariance toward high-impact events. We prove theoretically that ExPCA strictly outperforms PCA in retaining rare-event information, and we validate our claims on synthetic data and a real-world credit card fraud detection benchmark. Our results call for a fundamental rethinking of variance-based dimensionality reduction in high-stakes decisions.

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

Uncertainty Quantification for Flow-Based Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.18043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) combine vision-language backbones with expressive generative action heads trained via flow matching on large-scale robotic datasets. Despite their strong empirical performance in robotic manipulation, VLAs lack mechanisms to quantify confidence in their predictions and to detect when their actions may be unreliable. This presents a critical limitation for real-world deployment in non-stationary environments, where models inevitably encounter scenarios outside their pretraining distribution and may fail without warning. To address this, we derive an efficient method for quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-matching models by leveraging velocity-field disagreement (VFD) across a small ensemble. We successfully use this uncertainty estimate for failure detection during deployment and active fine-tuning of flow-based VLAs. To this end, we propose SAVE, a framework for uncertainty-guided active multitask fine-tuning that reduces the number of costly expert demonstrations required to adapt VLAs to new tasks. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we demonstrate that VFD yields better-calibrated uncertainty estimates predictive of downstream performance, that VFD achieves strong performance in detecting failures, and that uncertainty-guided data acquisition with SAVE requires at least 22% fewer samples than baselines. In summary, our work shows that quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-based VLAs improves both failure awareness and adaptation. Project website: tum-lsy.github.io/uq_vla/.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

The Cost of Removing Tunability in Quantum Data Re-Uploading

arXiv:2606.25598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fixed encoding data re-uploading quantum circuits provide a striking example of universality emerging from a highly constrained architecture. However, universality alone is insufficient for assessing the theoretical and practical value of fixed and tunable upload circuits. The resource cost of removing tunability remains poorly understood. In this work, we establish quantitative depth-error scaling for approximating tunable upload circuits with fixed upload circuits. We show that a tunable upload circuit can be approximated by a fixed upload circuit using depth \( D = O_\sigma\!\left[(\log(1/\varepsilon))^\sigma\right] \) for every \(\sigma>1\), with a target dependent constant overhead, thereby improving the previously known polynomial dependence on \(1/\varepsilon\) with the same overhead. Our proof is based on an auxiliary extension approximation mechanism that combines Gevrey class construction, Jackson's theorem and generalized quantum signal processing theorem. Thus, the expressive power lost by removing tunability can be recovered using only polylogarithmic growth in circuit depth with a target dependent constant overhead. We further identify a periodic mismatch obstruction intrinsic to fixed upload approximations and use Turán-Nazarov inequalities to prove logarithmic lower bounds \( D = \Omega(\log(1/\varepsilon)) \) for the approximation of mismatch class target tunable upload circuits. Conceptually, our analysis reveals two structural mechanisms underlying approximation in fixed upload architectures: auxiliary extensions and mismatch obstructions. These results provide a quantitative understanding of how expressivity is transferred from tunable frequencies into circuit depth, and suggest a broader framework for studying approximation complexity in quantum signal processing and related quantum learning models.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QMCtwin: Master-Equation Simulation of Syndrome Statistics Beyond Pauli Noise

arXiv:2606.19848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum error correction moves toward large-scale experimental implementations, decoder performance increasingly depends on how faithfully hardware noise is translated into syndrome statistics. Standard stabilizer workflows achieve scalability by replacing device dynamics with stochastic Pauli or detector-error models, but this compression can discard coherent phase information, nonunital drift, continuous-time effects of always-on couplings, and correlations generated by simultaneous Hamiltonian and dissipative evolution. Here we present QMCtwin, a sign-problem-suppressed quantum Monte Carlo framework for master-equation simulation of QEC circuits, and apply it to a full syndrome-extraction round of a distance-$7$ rotated surface code with $97$ physical qubits. The open-system model includes realistic superconducting-device noise mechanisms such as relaxation, pure dephasing, coherent gate miscalibration, residual $ZZ$ crosstalk, and drive-qubit detuning. By directly estimating syndrome observables from the QMC-generated stochastic density matrix estimator, we compare the master-equation dynamics with their Pauli-twirled Clifford simulation counterparts. QMCtwin predicts syndrome-extraction biases and correlations between syndromes and proxies of logical-string-parity that are absent or strongly suppressed in the stochastic Pauli description. We introduce information-theoretic diagnostics that further quantify how information concerning syndromes versus string-parity proxies differs between the realistic master-equation simulation and the corresponding Pauli-twirled model. These results show that QMC-based master-equation digital twins can expose noise features hidden by conventional Pauli/Clifford noise models and provide a practical path toward more accurate decoder-facing syndrome models.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Ductile alloys offering 100 MPa tensile strength at 2,400 °C

Authors:

Extreme applications call for materials that are not only strong to withstand thermomechanical loads at temperatures in excess of 2,000 °C (refs. 1–3), but also highly formable at room temperature to allow for processing into complex-shaped parts. The latter excludes brittle ceramics4 and intermetallic compounds5, limiting the selection to highly ductile metals and their alloys, but for them, an adequate strength at ultrahigh temperatures seems unreachable. Here we show a breakthrough in casting alloys that achieve both simultaneously. A boron-stabilized HfO2-strengthened Ta-based alloy was carefully crafted using a new boron-intervened in situ oxidation reaction, producing about 50-nm diameter oxide particles dispersed densely and uniformly in the grain interior. The new alloy fills the blank at ultrahigh temperatures in terms of tensile yield strength, around 200 MPa at 2,000 °C and 100 MPa at 2,400 °C, while simultaneously possessing an excellent strength–ductility balance at room temperature (ultimate tensile strength >800 MPa, elongation-to-failure of about 35%), a property combination surpassing all previous refractory (including multi-principal-element) alloys. Moreover, the boron segregation around the oxide nanoparticles imparts excellent thermal stability against coarsening at 2,000–2,400 °C. Our strategy thus goes beyond traditional oxide-dispersion strengthening to enable highly ductile refractory alloys that are capable of load-bearing applications at extreme temperatures. A boron-stabilized oxide-strengthened tantalum alloy combines exceptional room-temperature ductility with record ultrahigh-temperature strength, enabling load-bearing applications above 2,000 °C.

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

Position: Hippocampal Explicit Memory Is the Cornerstone for AGI

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, raising expectations for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This position paper argues that integrating explicit memory is the cornerstone for advancing LLMs toward AGI. The key reason is that the underlying learning mechanism of LLMs is highly analogous to human implicit memory. However, higher-order cognitive functions necessary for AGI, such as long-term strategic planning, metacognition, and symbolic reasoning, heavily rely on hippocampal explicit memory and cannot arise solely from implicit statistical learning. Drawing on findings from neuroscience, I advance this perspective and complement it with computational requirements for artificial explicit memory systems, hoping to foster further research and lay the groundwork for explicit memory integration.

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

Exploring Information Seeking Agent Consolidation

arXiv:2602.00585v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-seeking agents have emerged as a powerful paradigm for knowledge-intensive tasks, yet today's systems remain specialized for the open web, documents, or local knowledge bases, hindering scalable and cross-domain deployment. We present the first systematic empirical study of consolidating these information-seeking agents into a single foundation agentic model. We compare two paradigms – data-level mixing, which trains a unified model on a mixture of datasets, and parameter-level merging, which merges independently trained experts in parameter space – across 3 training scenarios, evaluating 26 representative parameter-level methods on 10 benchmarks. To compare across heterogeneous benchmarks, we introduce a geometric Composite Score and an Imbalance Score that describe overall performance and task skew. Our analysis shows that (i) well-designed parameter-level merging attains parity with data mixing at a fraction of its training cost and is order-agnostic; (ii) parameter-level merging structurally preserves out-of-domain capabilities that data mixing universally forgets; and (iii) cross-scenario stability is strongly tied to consolidation quality. We distil our observations into a method-selection guide and design principles for next-generation merging operators.

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

CoBit: Language Modeling with Bitstream Diffusion

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion approaches have narrowed this gap. In this work, we further close the autoregressive gap by modeling text as a continuous diffusion process over fixed-width binary bitstreams. We refer to the resulting model as CoBit (Continuous Bitstream Diffusion). Our approach represents semantic tokens as analog bit sequences and uses a matched-filter residual parameterization to isolate contextual learning from analytic independent-bit posteriors. Crucially, we adopt a stochastic sampler that applies Langevin-type corrections gated by the entropy-rate profile, concentrating stochasticity in high-information regions while remaining nearly deterministic elsewhere. On LM1B, our 130M-parameter model reaches a generative perplexity (GenPPL) of 59.76 at matched real-data entropy (4.31) using 256 neural function evaluations (NFEs), outperforming prior DLM baselines and reaching the autoregressive reference. On OpenWebText (OWT), our sampler establishes a new continuous-DLM Pareto frontier, achieving GenPPL 27.06 at entropy 5.26 using 4x fewer steps than previous 1024-NFE baselines. Scaling the same recipe to a 462M-parameter model (CoBit-M) further improves the OWT GenPPL-entropy frontier over the 130M model (CoBit-S) and over medium-scale continuous and discrete DLM baselines, reaching GenPPL 19.5 at entropy 5.40, near real-data entropy (5.44), and approaching pretrained GPT-2 Medium over the high-quality region. As an additional benefit, bitstream diffusion removes the O(V) vocabulary scaling bottleneck of standard DLMs: by predicting O(log V) bitwise logits via semantic bit-patching, it lowers memory and raises throughput, a scalable paradigm as vocabulary sizes grow.

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

Circuit Tracing in Autoregressive Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.16044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (pLMs) can generate novel protein sequences with properties beyond those observed in nature, yet the mechanisms underlying protein generation remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods based on sparse autoencoders and transcoders primarily focus on protein representation learning models and do not capture the computation required for autoregressive generation. Here, we introduce ProGenMech, a mechanistic interpretability framework for generative protein language models that extends cross-layer transcoders (CLTs) to ProGen3, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model trained for both causal generation and span infilling. Unlike per-layer approaches, CLTs reconstruct each layer using sparse latent variables from all preceding layers, enabling faithful recovery of inter-layer generative computation. We further develop a zero-shot circuit discovery framework to identify sparse latent circuits responsible for protein generation and fitness prediction. In causal generation and zero-shot fitness estimation tasks, ProGenMech outperforms local transcoder baselines in recovering ProGen3's probability distribution and functional scoring behavior, while matching the original model's generative distribution in span infilling tasks. Moreover, the recovered circuits reveal biologically meaningful motifs and functional regions associated with conserved sequence patterns and protein fitness landscapes, establishing a foundation for interpretable and steerable protein generation.

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

Explainable Control Framework (XCF) based on Fuzzy Model-Agnostic Explanation and LLM Agent-Supported Interface

arXiv:2606.25941v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Increasing demand for precise and reliable control in complex scenarios has led to the development of increasingly sophisticated controllers, including data-driven approaches employing closed box models and mathematically rigorous yet complex designs. This complexity highlights the needs for explainable control that can provide human-understandable insights into controller behavior. In this paper, an explainable control framework (XCF) along with supporting algorithms and user interface are proposed to explain how controllers determine their control actions and their underlying working mechanism. The novel contributions of this work are threefold: First, the XCF is designed to provide model-agnostic explanations for controllers in closed-loop systems and can optionally refine local explanations by system response dynamics. Second, a novel explanation method, hierarchical fuzzy model-agnostic explanation for control systems (HFMAE-C), is proposed based on the designed framework. The HFMAE-C employs a fuzzy logic system to approximate the controller's behavior and system dynamics, providing sample, local, domain and universe level explanations via IF-THEN rules revealing the controller's decision logic and salience values quantifying the contribution of system states to control actions. Third, a large language model agent-supported user interface is developed to automatically analyze user requirements, select appropriate algorithms, interpret the generated explanations to a natural language report, and provide interactive consultation. Case studies on inverted pendulum system and Turtlebot obstacle avoidance demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through simulated user experiments and quantitative comparisons with mainstream explainable control approaches.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Symplectic Transversality and Endpoint Green Estimates for Finite-Horizon Pontryagin Systems

arXiv:2606.17762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study horizon-uniform local branches of finite-horizon discrete-time Pontryagin boundary value systems after smooth control elimination. The central input is a two-point endpoint inverse for the linearization. We verify this inverse from scaled stable–unstable boundary transversality, prove the associated endpoint-corrected Green estimate, and combine it with weighted contractions to obtain existence, uniqueness, Lipschitz dependence, and first-order expansions with constants independent of the horizon. The framework covers smooth nonlinear endpoint maps, including the original Pontryagin rows that fix the initial state and couple the terminal costate to the terminal state. Symplectic and Riccati criteria verify the inverse hypothesis at the level of the matrix data; in particular, every stabilizable linear-quadratic system with invertible dynamics and definite weights is covered, including noncommuting coupled data. A numerical section illustrates the certificates and the horizon-uniform first-order expansion.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Moving Beyond Diffusion: Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Autoregression for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction

Reconstructing visual stimuli from fMRI signals is a central challenge bridging machine learning and neuroscience. Recent diffusion-based methods typically map fMRI activity to a single neural embedding, using it as static guidance throughout the entire generation process. However, this fixed guidance collapses hierarchical neural information and is misaligned with the stage-dependent demands of image reconstruction. In response, we propose MindHier, a coarse-to-fine fMRI-to-image reconstruction framework built on scale-wise autoregressive modeling. MindHier introduces three components: a Hierarchical fMRI Encoder to extract multi-level neural embeddings, a Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Alignment scheme to enforce layer-wise correspondence with CLIP features, and a Scale-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Neural Guidance strategy to inject these embeddings into autoregression at matching scales. These designs make MindHier an efficient and cognitively aligned alternative to diffusion-based methods by enabling a hierarchical reconstruction process that synthesizes global semantics before refining local details, akin to human visual perception. Extensive experiments on the NSD dataset show that MindHier achieves superior semantic fidelity, 4.67$\times$ faster inference, and more deterministic results than the diffusion-based baselines.

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

PerceptionDLM: Parallel Region Perception with Multimodal Diffusion Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual understanding tasks. However, most existing MLLMs rely on autoregressive generation, which limits their efficiency for perception tasks that require captioning multiple regions. In this work, we propose PerceptionDLM, a multimodal diffusion language model optimized for efficient parallel region perception. Built upon PerceptionDLM-Base, a strong foundational baseline that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source diffusion MLLMs, our architecture fully leverages the parallel decoding nature of DLMs. Specifically, we introduce efficient prompting and structured attention masking to enable simultaneous perception of multiple masked regions, allowing the model to generate region descriptions in parallel at both the sequence and token levels. This design significantly improves inference efficiency compared with existing approaches that process regions sequentially. To systematically evaluate the parallelism property of visual perception capability for DLMs, we construct a new Parallel Detailed Localized Captioning Benchmark (ParaDLC-Bench) by scaling the DLC-Bench to include multiple region masks per image, enabling joint evaluation of both caption quality and inference efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that PerceptionDLM maintains competitive performance in region captioning while achieving substantial speed improvements for multi-region perception tasks. Our results highlight the potential of multimodal diffusion language models for efficient, parallel visual perception. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to achieve parallel region caption and perception by leveraging the advantages of diffusion language models. Code, models, and datasets are released.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Resource-state Quantum RAM for Fast and Error-Correctable Queries

arXiv:2503.19172v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum devices can process data in a fundamentally different way than classical computers. To leverage this potential, many algorithms require the aid of a quantum Random Access Memory (QRAM), i.e. a module capable of efficiently loading datasets onto the quantum processor. However, a realisation of this building block is still outstanding due to its formidable resource requirements, which become even more demanding in quantum error-correction schemes. Here we show that the challenge of implementing QRAM can be entirely reduced to a state-preparation problem: since such resource-state is independent on the memory, our approach allows one to prepare it offline, opening the door to new design strategies. As an example, we introduce a heralded 'QRAM factory' which enables improved fidelities with high acceptance rate. More broadly, our results introduce the concept of resource-state QRAM: we study its performance in noisy settings, showing that it preserves the noise-resilience of standard QRAM, and discuss how it can be efficiently combined with quantum error-correction. Finally, we propose an implementation with neutral-atom hardware, where our analysis suggests that high-fidelity and low-latency queries can be implemented.

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

Delving into Latent Spectral Biasing of Video VAEs for Superior Diffusability

Latent diffusion models pair VAEs with diffusion backbones, and the structure of VAE latents strongly influences the difficulty of diffusion training. However, existing video VAEs typically focus on reconstruction fidelity, overlooking latent structure. We present a statistical analysis of video VAE latent spaces and identify two spectral properties essential for diffusion training: a spatio-temporal frequency spectrum biased toward low frequencies, and a channel-wise eigenspectrum dominated by a few modes. To induce these properties, we propose two lightweight, backbone-agnostic regularizers: Local Correlation Regularization and Latent Masked Reconstruction. Experiments show that our Spectral-Structured VAE (SSVAE) achieves a $3\times$ speedup in text-to-video generation convergence and a 10\% gain in video reward, outperforming strong open-source VAEs. The code is available at https://github.com/zai-org/SSVAE.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Reward Modeling for Multi-Agent Orchestration

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on Large Language Models (LLMs) require effective orchestration to coordinate specialized agents, yet training such orchestrators is hindered by limited supervision and high computational cost. We propose Orchestration Reward Modeling (OrchRM), a self-supervised framework for evaluating orchestration quality without human annotations. OrchRM leverages intermediate artifacts from multi-agent executions to construct win-lose pairs for Bradley-Terry reward model training. Unlike existing MAS test-time scaling and orchestrator training frameworks that rely on costly sub-agent rollouts, OrchRM operates directly at the orchestration level, enabling efficient and high-performing reward-guided orchestrator training and MAS test-time scaling. OrchRM improves training efficiency by up to 10x in token usage while improving MAS test-time scaling performance by up to 8% in accuracy. These gains consistently transfer across multiple domains, including mathematical reasoning, web-based question answering, and multi-hop reasoning, demonstrating orchestration-level reward modeling as a scalable direction for robust multi-agent orchestration. Code will be available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/OrchRM.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Optimal Deterministic Multicalibration and Omniprediction

arXiv:2606.20557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A model is multicalibrated on a collection of group weights $G$ if it is calibrated – i.e. unbiased even conditional on its prediction – not just overall, but also after reweighting contexts by each $g \in G$. It is a useful property for many downstream applications and is a basic desideratum of trustworthy machine learning. Before this work, all predictors known to attain the minimax-optimal $\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity rate for $\varepsilon$-multicalibration were randomized, while deterministic predictors were known only with substantially worse sample complexity. Whether randomization is necessary for optimal sample complexity in multicalibration was explicitly asked by [CLNR26] and implicitly in several prior works. We resolve this open problem by giving a minimax-optimal multicalibration algorithm that outputs a deterministic predictor. We then generalize the algorithm to produce optimal deterministic predictors that satisfy outcome indistinguishability (OI) with respect to finite or finitely covered collections of tests. As an application, this also gives deterministic omnipredictors and panpredictors with optimal sample complexity, resolving open problems posed by [OKK25] and [BHHLZ25].

23.
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.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

HTS-Oracle v2: Prospective AI-Guided Discovery and Experimental Validation of Small Molecule Modulators Across Multiple Targets

High-throughput screening (HTS) remains the cornerstone of early-phase small molecule discovery yet consistently underperforms against immunotherapy targets, yielding validated hit rates below 0.1%. Here we introduce HTS-Oracle v2, which features rigorous cross-validation that ensures honest performance estimates. HTS-Oracle v2 was trained and validated across four clinically significant immune checkpoint targets (CD28, ICOS, LAG-3, and TIGIT) achieving ROC-AUC values of 0.968, 0.969, 0.875, 0.928 respectively under rigorous cross-validation. For prospective experimental validation, HTS-Oracle v2 was applied to an 8,960-compound Enamine Protein Mimetic Library, selecting only 25 compounds per target for experimental testing using temperature-related intensity change (TRIC) technology, a 99.7% reduction in screening burden. HTS-Oracle v2 identified 4, 5, 4, and 6 validated binders from 25 prospectively selected compounds per target, corresponding to validated hit rates of 16%, 20%, 16%, and 24%, respectively. Notably, 67-80% of all experimentally confirmed hits across the full 8,960-compound library were captured within just 25 model-selected compounds per target. For CD28, this represents a 28-fold improvement over HTS-Oracle v1 (239x versus 8.4x), establishing HTS-Oracle v2 as an efficient platform for AI-guided prospective hit discovery across immunotherapy targets.

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

RECTOR: Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling for Affective and Cognitive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.15278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Affective and cognitive disorders manifest as distributed, time-varying brain network dynamics across regions, channels, and time, challenging robust representation learning from EEG/sEEG for clinical diagnosis. We propose RECTOR (Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling), an end-to-end self-supervised framework that unifies joint region-channel-temporal representation learning beyond fixed anatomical priors. At its core, RECTOR-SA is a hierarchical, block-sparse self-attention induced by Adaptive Functional Partitioning that evolves region structures from static anatomical definitions to adaptive functional regions. The self-supervision is driven by Masked Topology and Representation Learning, which jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: Masked Predictive Modeling, Topological Structure Modeling, and Cross-View Consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, RECTOR sets a new state-of-the-art in EEG emotion recognition and sEEG task-engagement classification. Crucially, its strong robustness to missing channels and cross-montage generalization underscores its potential for large-scale pre-training on heterogeneous EEG/sEEG, providing interpretable insights at both region and channel levels.