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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The Backward Stochastic Partial Differential Integral Equations: Solvability and Comparison Principle

arXiv:2606.16237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The paper is concerned with the well-posedness of backward stochastic partial differential equations with jumps, also called backward stochastic partial differential integral equations. We start from the proof for the existence and uniqueness of solution to backward stochastic evolution equation with jump in the Gelfand triple framework. Then the well-posedness of both weak solution and strong solution to backward stochastic partial differential integral equation is obtained with the Gelfand triple replaced by specific Sobolev spaces. Finally, the comparison principle for backward stochastic partial differential integral equation is proved, which has potential applications in financial mathematics.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SDFLoRA: Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA for Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning with Heterogeneous Clients

arXiv:2601.11219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) for large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention as a privacy-preserving approach for adapting models over distributed data, where parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely adopted to reduce communication and memory costs. However, practical deployments often exhibit rank and data heterogeneity: clients operate under different low-rank budgets and data distributions, making direct aggregation of LoRA updates biased and unstable. Existing approaches either enforce a unified rank or align heterogeneous updates into a single shared subspace, which tends to mix transferable and client-specific directions and consequently undermines personalization. Moreover, under differential privacy (DP), perturbing such structurally mixed updates injects noise into directions that should remain purely local, leading to unnecessary utility degradation. To address these issues, we propose Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA (SDFLoRA), a structure-aware LoRA framework that decouples each client update into a shared component for aggregation and a private component that preserves client-specific semantics. Only the shared component participates in subspace alignment, while the private component remains local and uncommunicated, making the training DP-compatible and stabilizing aggregation under rank heterogeneity. By injecting noise only into the aggregated shareable update, this approach avoids perturbations to local directions and improves the utility-privacy trade-off. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SDFLoRA outperforms federated LoRA baselines and achieves a strong utility-privacy trade-off.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Fuzzy-Geometric Branch-Point Modeling for Structure-Aware Augmentation of Handwritten Chinese Characters

Data scarcity and structural distortion significantly limit handwriting recognition in high-security authentication. Existing augmentation methods often cause topological and morphological damage, particularly when processing complex Chinese characters where stroke intersections, ligatures, and sharp turns render traditional branch-point detection unreliable. To address this, this paper proposes a fuzzy geometry-driven structure-aware (FGSA) augmentation framework. We model branch points as fuzzy sets within the skeleton space, constructing a continuous branch-point membership field by integrating topological neighborhood evidence with direction field divergence. This membership field is adaptively optimized via an unsupervised surrogate objective, enabling robust stroke decoupling without manual annotation. Finally, kinematically-aligned samples are synthesized through parameterized cubic Bézier reconstruction and multi-strategy perturbations, ensuring a balance between structural fidelity and sample diversity. Moreover, we establish LZUSig, a large-scale, highly challenging dataset specifically dedicated to fine-grained structural degradation in Chinese handwritten signatures. Extensive experiments on CASIA-HWDB1.1, ChiSig, and LZUSig demonstrate that FGSA significantly reduces the word-level error rate ($\Delta$WER), achieving optimal recognition gains over the compared baselines. More importantly, it strikes a robust trade-off among task gain, structural fidelity, and discriminative feature preservation, offering a highly controllable solution for handwriting augmentation.

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

Kemeny's constant minimization for reversible Markov chains via structure-preserving perturbations

arXiv:2510.24679v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Kemeny's constant measures the efficiency of a Markov chain in traversing its states. We investigate whether structure-preserving perturbations to the transition probabilities of a reversible Markov chain can improve its connectivity while maintaining a fixed stationary distribution. Although the minimum achievable value for Kemeny's constant can be estimated, the required perturbations may be infeasible. We reformulate the problem as an optimization task, focusing on solution existence and efficient algorithms, with an emphasis on the problem of minimizing Kemeny's constant under sparsity constraints.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Response kinetic uncertainty relation for Markovian open quantum systems

arXiv:2501.04895v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Response uncertainty relations in stochastic thermodynamics extend precision bounds to the sensitivity of observables under external perturbations. Here we derive a quantum response kinetic uncertainty relation for continuously monitored Markovian open quantum systems in the steady state of the Lindblad master equation. The response precision of a measured trajectory observable is bounded by two contributions: the conventional quantum dynamical activity and a perturbation-induced intersubspace transition term. The latter is absent in the classical limit and captures a genuinely quantum part of the response cost. We identify simple conditions under which either contribution vanishes, and we further clarify the structure of the intersubspace term through a symmetry-resolved decomposition and exact sector-selection rules. The bound and its structure are illustrated in a driven two-level atom.

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

Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603.14867v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions. In many situations, a fundamental challenge arises when the leader cannot intervene in the follower's optimization process; it can only observe the optimization outcome. We address this decentralized setting by deriving the hypergradient of the leader's objective, i.e., the gradient of the leader's strategy that accounts for changes in the follower's optimal policy. Unlike prior hypergradient-based methods that require extensive data for repeated state visits or rely on gradient estimators whose complexity can increase substantially with the high-dimensional leader's decision space, we leverage the Boltzmann covariance trick to derive an alternative hypergradient formulation. This enables efficient hypergradient estimation solely from interaction samples, even when the leader's decision space is high-dimensional. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first method that enables hypergradient-based optimization for 2-player Markov games in decentralized settings. Experiments highlight the impact of hypergradient updates and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in both discrete and continuous state tasks.

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Daily briefing: Iron-Age human bones were made into tools before interment

Authors:

Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools. Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools.

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

Lect\=uraAgents: A Multi-Agent Framework for Adaptive Personalized AI-Assisted Learning and Embodied Teaching

Effective personalized AI-assisted learning demands systems that can not only generate accurate learner-specific educational materials, but also dynamically adapt their instruction to diverse learners. However, existing educational agents have primarily focused on lecture content automation and simulations, which often fall short of modelling multimodal and embodied instructional methods tailored for the individual learner. To this end, we propose Lect\=uraAgents - a multi-agent framework that enables personalized learning through end-to-end adaptive embodied teaching. At its core, Lect\=uraAgents mirrors a professor-student relationship, in which a ProfessorAgent leads a collaborative team of specialized subordinate agents through research, planning, review, and embodied delivery of lecture contents that adapt to a learner's needs. The framework offers three main contributions: (1) a hierarchical multi-agent architecture for end-to-end personalized learning; (2) an adaptive embodied teaching mechanism, wherein the ProfessorAgent executes visible and pedagogically motivated teaching actions (e.g., handwrite, highlight, underline, etc.) over contents in a teaching environment; and (3) a Teaching Action-Speech Alignment (TASA) algorithm that employs salience-based heuristics and temporal semantic segmentation to generate coherent teaching action sequences aligned with learner profiles. We evaluate Lect\=uraAgents on diverse courses at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels using sample-specific rubric-based analysis; with generated lecture materials and teaching actions assessed and validated by expert educators. Experimental results show consistent gains in lecture content quality, embodied teaching quality, assessment, and personalization over existing approaches, positioning Lect\=uraAgents as a pedagogically well-grounded framework for personalized learning at scale.

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

ReNikud: Audio-Supervised Hebrew Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Modern Hebrew is needed for applications like text-to-speech (TTS), but is challenging due to the language's abjad writing system, which leaves vowels largely unwritten, creating substantial ambiguity. Standard approaches first predict vowel diacritics (nikud) to produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, but this is limited: vocalization data is scarce and laborious to produce, it does not specify features such as lexical stress, and it reflects formal grammatical rules rather than everyday spoken pronunciation. Direct sequence-to-sequence IPA prediction, meanwhile, struggles on limited data and fails to exploit the character-level alignment characteristic of abjads. Our method, ReNikud, overcomes these limitations with two key insights: (1) Weak audio supervision via a phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) pseudo-labeling pipeline on thousands of hours of unlabeled Hebrew audio, yielding phonemic transcriptions that reflect natural spoken norms without manual annotation. (2) A pseudo-vocalization architecture that predicts IPA phonemes at each character position, enforcing character-level alignment as an inductive bias. Results on existing Hebrew G2P benchmarks and the new targeted MILIM benchmark for spoken Hebrew show that ReNikud surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. We will release our code and trained models to support further work on Hebrew TTS and speech technologies.

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

Flash-GRPO: Efficient Alignment for Video Diffusion via One-Step Policy Optimization

Group Relative Policy Optimization has emerged as essential for aligning video diffusion models with human preferences, but faces a critical computational bottleneck: training a 14B parametered model typically demands hundreds of GPU days per experiment. Existing efficiency methods reduce costs through sliding window subsampling training timesteps, but fundamentally compromise optimization, exhibiting severe instability and failing to reach full trajectory performance. We present Flash-GRPO, a single-step training framework that outperforms full trajectory training in alignment quality under low computational budgets while substantially improving training efficiency. Flash-GRPO addresses two critical challenges: iso-temporal grouping eliminates timestep-confounded variance by enforcing prompt-wise temporal consistency, decoupling policy performance from timestep difficulty; temporal gradient rectification neutralizes the time-dependent scaling factor that causes vastly inconsistent gradient magnitudes across timesteps. Experiments on 1.3B to 14B parameter models validate Flash-GRPO's effectiveness, demonstrating substantial training acceleration with consistent stability and state-of-the-art alignment quality.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

From Agent Traces to Trust: A Survey of Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.04990v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents are evolving from passive text generators into autonomous systems capable of planning, tool use, retrieval, memory access, environmental interaction, and multi-agent collaboration. These capabilities expand agent autonomy, but also make agent behavior harder to verify, debug, and audit. Final-answer accuracy alone cannot explain how an output was produced, which evidence supported each claim, whether tool calls were justified, how memory influenced later decisions, or where failures originated. This survey examines evidence tracing and execution provenance as foundations for process-level accountability in trustworthy LLM agents. We define execution provenance as the typed graph of an agent execution and evidence tracing as its projection onto evidence-support relations. This perspective connects retrieval grounding, claim support, tool-use safety, memory lineage, observability, debugging, audit, and recovery within a unified framework. We introduce a taxonomy covering trace sources, evidence and execution units, provenance relations, tracing granularity and timing, representation forms, and trust functions. We then review key methodological directions, including provenance representation, evidence attribution, tool-use provenance, runtime guardrails, provenance-bearing memory, observability, and failure diagnosis. Finally, we discuss benchmarks, datasets, metrics, and open challenges for building provenance-aware, auditable, and recoverable agent systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

OneCanvas: 3D Scene Understanding via Panoramic Reprojection

Existing approaches to 3D scene understanding in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) either rely on complex, model-specific geometry encoders or large training budgets in pursuit of spatial reasoning. Instead, OneCanvas aggregates patch features from all views onto a single equirectangular panoramic canvas. Namely, each patch is unprojected to a 3D world coordinate using its depth and camera pose, then placed on the canvas at the continuous longitude and latitude of that point as seen from the canvas origin, with no rasterization or aggregation across overlapping views. A 3D position embedding of the patch's metric coordinates is added to its feature, restoring the depth lost when collapsing the world position to an angular canvas coordinate. Patches from all frames thus share one spatial coordinate system with no fusion or major architectural modifications of the backbone. The pretrained VLM consumes this representation as if it were an ordinary image. Because the canvas can be centered on any pose of interest, the same representation directly supports situated reasoning from a specific viewpoint, a common requirement in robotics and embodied AI. Thanks to this representation, we can also introduce a spatial pretraining curriculum: by procedurally placing patch features of objects, drawn from real images, at chosen 3D world positions on an otherwise empty canvas, we generate on-the-fly supervision spanning a broad range of spatial reasoning tasks, with answer distributions controlled to reduce spatial reasoning shortcuts. OneCanvas achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on SQA3D and VSI-Bench, and generalizes to out-of-distribution data on SPBench, using an order of magnitude less training compute than the strongest competing methods.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cost analysis of overseas versus domestic vaccination of US-bound refugees

Context: To ensure healthy resettlement and protect US health security, the Vaccination Program for US-bound Refugees (VPR) offers some recommended vaccines to refugees overseas before resettlement to the United States. The selected vaccines and number of doses vary by country of departure. VPR was found to be cost-saving in 2018 but had since expanded to more sites. Objective: Assess VPR's current costs and impact on post-arrival domestic vaccination needs and costs. Setting and Participants: A model-based analysis of the Federal government costs for VPR and post-arrival (US) vaccination of resettled refugees separated across five regions: Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa/Republic of Turkiye and Middle East, Europe, and the Americas using fiscal year 2024 data. Design: We quantified and compared full vaccination costs for refugees under two scenarios: (1) 'No VPR' and (2) 'VPR'. Refugees would receive no vaccines overseas and be fully vaccinated after US arrival under 'No VPR'. Under 'VPR', refugees receive one or two doses of selected vaccines overseas before completing vaccination schedules after arrival. Main Outcomes: Costs were reported in 2023 US dollars for 'VPR' and 'No VPR' scenarios and further subdivided by grouping countries/sites depending on whether the International Organization for Migration (IOM) provides vaccination services for refugees (IOM sites) versus non-IOM providers (non-IOM sites). Results: 'VPR' resulted in average net cost savings of $147 per person or $14.7 million per 100,000-refugee cohort compared to providing all vaccines after US arrival ('No VPR'). 'VPR' was cost-saving across most regions, except for IOM sites in Europe, where a net cost of $44 per person was observed. Net cost savings per person were highest for IOM sites in Africa ($333). Conclusions: VPR remains a cost-saving strategy, while protecting US-bound refugees' health and US health security by preventing disease outbreaks during resettlement.

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

LoRDO: Distributed Low-Rank Optimization with Infrequent Communication

arXiv:2602.04396v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed training of foundation models via $\texttt{DDP}$ is limited by interconnect bandwidth. While infrequent communication strategies reduce synchronization frequency, they remain bottlenecked by the memory and communication requirements of optimizer states. Low-rank optimizers can alleviate these constraints; however, in the local-update regime, workers lack access to the full-batch gradients required to compute low-rank projections, which degrades performance. We propose $\texttt{LoRDO}$, a principled framework unifying low-rank optimization with infrequent synchronization. We first demonstrate that, while global projections based on pseudo-gradients are theoretically superior, they permanently restrict the optimization trajectory to a low-rank subspace. To restore subspace exploration, we introduce a full-rank quasi-hyperbolic update. $\texttt{LoRDO}$ achieves near-parity with low-rank $\texttt{DDP}$ in language modeling and downstream tasks at model scales of $125$M–$720$M, while reducing communication by $\approx 10 \times$. Finally, we show that $\texttt{LoRDO}$ improves performance even more in very low-memory settings with small rank/batch size.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Suppressing Intrinsic Spin-Phonon Errors in Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulation

arXiv:2606.15518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trapped-ion quantum simulators realize programmable spin models through phonon-mediated interactions. For Hamiltonians with noncommuting terms, however, the same phonon bus generates intrinsic spin-phonon errors that strongly distort the target dynamics. Because these errors are governed by the full time history of the spin-dependent phonon motion, they survive standard loop-closing control and limit simulation accuracy. Using a sequence of frame transformations, we isolate the residual error dynamics and show that this intrinsic error can be strongly suppressed while preserving programmable Ising couplings. Full spin-boson simulations of multi-ion chains demonstrate orders-of-magnitude lower error than both constant-drive and conventional loop-closing protocols. These results remove a central precision barrier in trapped-ion analog quantum simulation and enable accurate programmable simulation of noncommuting many-body Hamiltonians and dynamical protocols.

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

Identification and Inference for Algorithmic Frontiers with Selective Labels

arXiv:2606.14977v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper provides identification results to characterize a fairness-accuracy (FA) frontier, and statistical inference tools to test hypotheses and build a confidence set for the FA-frontier, when outcomes are observed only for selected individuals. When the selection process is unrestricted but loss is measured in specific ways, we provide a characterization of the sharp identification region of the FA-frontier. Under an assumption of unconfoundedness conditional on observables (and unrestricted loss functions), we obtain point identification and propose a debiased machine learning estimator, derive its asymptotic distribution, and show how this can be used to carry out inference for the FA-frontier. In work in progress, we extend the partial identification results to a broader class of loss functions.

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

What Limits Does Quantization Place on Dense Top-$k$ Retrieval? A Theoretical Study

arXiv:2606.11780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish conditions for embedding a corpus of $N$ documents as $d$-dimensional vectors such that every $k$-subset $S \subseteq [N]$ is realizable as a result of top-$k$ retrieval by some query vector. Recent work shows that $d = O(k)$ suffices for such embeddings to exist in $\mathbb{R}^d$, independently of $N$. We theoretically prove that this corpus-independent bound is specific to infinite precision. With $B$ bits per coordinate, perfect top-$k$ retrieval requires $Bd = \Omega(k \ln N)$; thus, at any fixed precision, the dimension must grow at least logarithmically with $N$. Specializing to a $\ell_2$-normalized $B$-bit uniform scalar quantization model, we also identify a threshold on the precision $B^{*} = O(\ln \ln N)$ below which no dimension suffices, together with two further regimes that bound the feasible $(B, d)$ pairs. Our result implies that in practical vector databases and dense retrieval systems where quantization is standard, the embedding dimension and possibly the precision must grow with the corpus size.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Where Does Texture Evidence Live in SAM? Features, Proposal Masks, and Texture Segmentation

Texture segmentation stresses foundation segmentation because meaningful regions are defined by material or repeated appearance rather than object identity. Segment Anything Models (SAMs) often fail by default on such texture-defined partitions, but this failure is ambiguous: the texture evidence may be absent, missing from the proposal bank, or present but selected or assembled incorrectly by an object-centric readout. We ask what texture-relevant evidence is already preserved in frozen SAM before adaptation. We study two frozen evidence spaces: multiscale features, probed with a minimal clustering readout, and the automatic proposal bank, treated as evidence for a supervised consolidation readout. SAM is frozen throughout; we do not fine-tune the backbone or retrain the proposal generator. Across RWTD, STLD, an ADE20K-selected refined-crop complement, and a ControlNet-stitched PTD bridge archive, frozen SAM is not a texture segmenter by default, but its failures are not simple texture blindness. Coarse frozen features preserve texture organization, and proposal banks often contain texture-aligned masks or fragments. Natural scenes more often require assembly and commitment over fragments, while cleaner synthetic cases more often reduce to selecting an already coherent proposal. Default mask failure should therefore be decomposed into representation evidence, proposal-bank support, readout mismatch, and commitment failure.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

StereoGeo: an end-to-end stereo camera calibration method

In this work, we propose StereoGeo, an end-to-end network-based approach for stereo camera calibration. Our method estimates the focal lengths and gravity directions of the left and right cameras, as well as the relative extrinsic transformation relating them. Existing methods often rely on calibration patterns in structured environments or address only a single camera configuration, being limited to either intrinsic or extrinsic estimation, and depending on a multi-view setups. StereoGeo extends the GeoCalib algorithm, integrating deep neural network feature extraction with a differentiable optimizer. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that StereoGeo achieves competitive performance for intrinsic calibration and provides accurate stereo extrinsic estimation, outperforming existing methods that are limited to monocular settings. The dataset used in this work is partially publicly available at https://github.com/meddourimane/StereoGeo-dataset.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Real-order moments, tail representations, and logarithmic means

arXiv:2606.14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a unified framework for the study of real-order moments of arbitrary random variables. General integral representations are established in terms of cumulative distribution functions and survival functions, covering continuous, discrete, and mixed distributions supported on the whole real line. These formulas extend the classical tail-integral identities for nonnegative random variables and provide a common treatment of positive, fractional, and negative moments. For discrete distributions, explicit series representations are derived in terms of cumulative probabilities, yielding simple criteria for the existence of moments. Applications are presented for the zeta and Skellam distributions, illustrating how tail behavior determines moment finiteness and how moments can be represented geometrically through cumulative distribution functions. In addition, a representation for logarithmic moments is obtained, linking logarithmic means, Laplace transforms, and the classical Frullani identity. The results provide a unified perspective on moment representations and establish useful connections between tail probabilities, distribution functions, Laplace transforms, and moment existence.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Evidence of an Emergent "Self" in Continual Robot Learning

arXiv:2603.24350v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A key challenge to understanding self-awareness has been a principled way of quantifying whether an intelligent system has a concept of a "self", and if so how to differentiate the "self" from other cognitive structures. We propose that the "self" can be isolated by seeking the invariant portion of cognitive process that changes relatively little compared to more rapidly acquired cognitive skills - because our self is the most persistent aspect of our experiences. We used this principle to analyze the cognitive structure of robots under two conditions: One robot learns a constant task, while a second undergoes continual learning under variable tasks. We find that robots subjected to continual learning develop an invariant subnetwork that is significantly more stable (p < 0.001) compared to the control, and that this subnetwork is also functionally important: preserving it aids adaptation while damaging it impairs performance. We validate this pattern across three different robots spanning locomotion and manipulation.

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

Performance-Driven Environment Abstraction with Multi-Timescale Learning

arXiv:2606.17377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study performance-driven environment abstraction for decision-making in large Markov decision processes. Rather than preserving geometric or topological structure, we seek abstractions that directly optimize decision quality. We model abstraction as a controlled approximation obtained by aggregating the state space and enforcing a shared action distribution within each aggregated state. For a fixed partition, we establish a performance guarantee that separates value-function approximation error from the loss introduced by action sharing. Guided by this analysis, we develop a multi-timescale reinforcement learning framework that jointly adapts the policy and a tree-structured environment abstraction. The resulting algorithm refines and coarsens regions of the state space based on Q-value discrepancies, balancing performance against abstraction size and complexity. Empirical results demonstrate substantial state compression, improved sample efficiency, and faster replanning compared to actor-critic baselines.

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

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.