中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Against probability: A quantum state is more than a list of probability distributions

Authors:
Ladina Hausmann↗Renato Renner↗

arXiv:2601.18872v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The state of a quantum system can be represented by listing the outcome probabilities for a tomographically complete set of measurements. Such representations appear throughout physics, for example, in quantum field theory via correlation functions and in quantum foundations within generalized probabilistic frameworks. In this paper, we show a no-go result: To enable useful statements, the probability representation must be topologically robust$\unicode{x2014}$preserving the notion of closeness between states. Yet, a topologically robust probability representation cannot simultaneously retain other essential structure, such as the subsystem structure.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SAM-Deep-EIoU: Selective Mask Propagation for Multi-Object Tracking

Authors:
Alexander Holmberg↗

Multi-object tracking has a heavy-tailed difficulty distribution: most frames are easy for a lightweight base tracker, while a small fraction are intrinsically hard. Video object segmentation (VOS) models can often preserve identity through the hard frames where the base tracker fails, but they are much more expensive in compute and memory. We propose selective mask propagation, a tracking algorithm that dispatches from a base tracker to a VOS model only on windows where an assignment-uncertainty signal fires. The base tracker's output is modified only when the VOS model makes a confident prediction that contradicts the base tracker's identity assignment; weak or inconclusive predictions preserve the base output. The method is training-free, treats both the base tracker and the VOS model as black boxes, and can benefit from replacing the VOS component with a more capable model. On DanceTrack, selective mask propagation improves three different base trackers. On SportsMOT, where identity preservation is central to sports analytics, SAM3-Deep-EIoU with global track association achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark with 86.8 HOTA.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

In-Domain Supervised Pathology Report Classification: A Reproducible Pipeline from Data Curation to Production-Matched Evaluation

Authors:
Isaac Hands↗Bin Huang↗Adam Spannaus↗John Gounley↗Heidi Hanson↗Eric Durbin↗Sally R. Ellingson↗

We introduce an in-domain supervised pipeline designed to counter the out-of-distribution performance drop that hampers supervised biomedical NLP models, a problem observed when models trained on pathology reports are moved across cancer registries. Our contribution is a reproducible recipe for training a supervised classifier from routinely collected cancer registry data. It describes how to build the in-domain training set and a production-matched holdout, and to choose operating points that keep the false-negative rate (FNR) very low while keeping reviewer workload manageable. The pipeline standardizes data curation with facility-stratified sampling and separate handling of reports linked to registry cases, and includes a blinded manual audit to estimate positive-case prevalence and label noise. On a 418k-report holdout set, the Kentucky model achieved FNR 0.003 and false-positive rate (FPR) 0.097, improving over the Seattle-trained MOSSAIC OncoID baseline (FNR 0.010, FPR 0.183) and raising F1 from 0.860 to 0.922. In a blinded manual review of 600 reports, estimated positive prevalence declined from 0.500 to 0.398, indicating substantial label noise with errors concentrated in rare primary sites.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Authors:
Tianyi Xiang↗Mingming He↗Li Ma↗Jing Liao↗

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

Authors:
Zirui Cheng↗Zeyu Shen↗Thomas L. Griffiths↗Peter Henderson↗

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Boundary-Centric Clip-Budgeted Active Learning for Temporal Action Segmentation

Authors:
Halil Ismail Helvaci↗Sen-ching Samson Cheung↗

Temporal action segmentation (TAS) in untrimmed videos requires dense temporal supervision. However, most of the annotation cost is spent identifying action transitions where segmentation errors concentrate and small temporal shifts can disproportionately degrade segment-level metrics. We introduce B-ACT, a clip-budgeted active learning framework that explicitly allocates supervision to these error-prone boundary regions. B-ACT operates in a hierarchical two-stage loop: (i) it ranks and queries unlabeled videos using predictive uncertainty, and (ii) within each selected video, it detects candidate transitions from the current model predictions and selects the top-$K$ boundaries via a novel boundary score. The boundary score fuses neighborhood uncertainty, class ambiguity, and temporal prediction dynamics to reveal the underlying importance of each frame. Importantly, our annotation protocol requests labels only at the boundary frames while still training on boundary-centered clips to exploit temporal context through the model's receptive field. Extensive experiments on GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast demonstrate that boundary-centric supervision delivers strong label efficiency and consistently surpasses representative TAS active learning baselines and prior state of the art under sparse budgets. Gains are largest on datasets where performance is highly sensitive to boundary placement, as measured by edit and overlap-based F1 metrics.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A Zeroth-Order Deep Learning Method for Fully Nonlinear Parabolic Partial Differential Equations with Unknown Coefficients

Authors:
Yanwei Jia↗Du Ouyang↗Huy\^en Pham↗Xun Yu Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.24999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs) with unknown coefficients arise widely in scientific machine learning, including continuous-time reinforcement learning, yet solving them efficiently in a data-driven way remains challenging. Existing deep learning solvers often rely on repeated automatic differentiation to evaluate differential operators, which can cause instability and amplify derivative errors in high dimensions, while probabilistic methods based on stochastic representations require explicit knowledge of the data-generating dynamics and therefore do not apply to black-box environments. We introduce two types of simulators as data-generating mechanisms, and take a ``representing-then-learning" approach that learns the solutions and their derivatives under settings where the underlying PDE operators are accessible only through simulations and pointwise evaluations. Our representation of derivatives relies on the zeroth-order derivative (ZOD) estimators derived from perturbed Monte Carlo trajectories. This fully model-free approach generates targets for the gradient and Hessian networks using only function evaluations. We provide a statistical learning analysis of the proposed approach, including a bias–variance tradeoff for ZODs. Assuming a standard contraction property of the underlying operator, we establish a non-asymptotic error bound that decomposes the total error into discretization error, approximation error, statistical error, and ZOD bias. Crucially, we derive the sample complexity of the learned representations in (weighted) Sobolev space, characterizing the error up to second-order derivatives. Numerical experiments illustrate the competitive performance of the method in moderate and high dimensions.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

RoboAtlas: Contextual Active SLAM

Authors:
Alexander Schperberg↗Shivam K. Panda↗Abraham P. Vinod↗M. K. Jawed↗Stefano Di Cairano↗

We present RoboAtlas, a contextual Active SLAM framework that adaptively balances geometric exploration and semantic reasoning using a scalable 3D semantic mapping system, OpenRoboVox. RoboAtlas integrates frontier exploration, global semantic-map reasoning, and egocentric VLM-based reasoning through a contextual multi-armed bandit that transitions from exploration to semantically guided navigation as scene understanding improves. We evaluate the system in simulation and on a Unitree Go2 robot in large-scale real-world environments exceeding 1800 m2 with approx. 30k mapped semantic instances, achieving a 100% task success rate. On the GOAT-Bench "Val Unseen" benchmark, RoboAtlas achieves state-of-the-art performance with highest reported success rate (SR) of 90.6%, using GPT-4o, improving over the strongest prior baseline by 17.8 percentage points in SR. Using the much smaller Qwen2.5-VL-7B model, it still achieves 88.8% SR, outperforming all baselines using GPT-4o in SR, and revealing the importance of the information gained by our semantic mapping framework over simply replacing the underlying foundation model. The results demonstrate that grounding foundation models with large-scale 3D semantic maps enables robust and efficient contextual Active SLAM.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Is GraphRAG Needed? From Basic RAG to Graph-/Agentic Solutions with Context Optimization

Authors:
Long Chen↗Ryan Razkenari↗Yuxuan Zhou↗Yuan Tian↗Rahul Ghosh↗Venkatesh Pappakrishnan↗Disha Ahuja↗Vidya Sagar Ravipati↗

As advanced RAG variants like GraphRAG and Agentic RAG emerge, one leading question is when and how to use them. Here, we introduce a framework for different RAG scenarios evaluation and comparison on semi-structured knowledge bases, including regular RAG, GraphRAG, Modular RAG and Agentic RAG. We provide implementation for 9 standardized RAG scenarios, and conduct experiments for a comprehensive comparison. These scenarios are designed for real use cases regarding data and domain restrictions, spanning from simple document-based retrieval to advanced features such as hybrid text-graph retrieval, integration with computed or pre-defined domain knowledge graphs, agentic multi-step planning, and agent-graph integration. Besides, we present a novel context engineering method for GraphRAG and Agentic RAG, addressing the context/memory overflow issues, efficiently managing text and graph retrievals with new representations and agentic loop design, leading to 19%-53% reduction on token usage. Moreover, further analysis identifies a retrieval-generation gap where expanded retrieval does not proportionally improve generation quality, suggesting retrieval-oriented metrics overstate advanced retrieval benefits. This work provides data-driven insights on when and how to use them for building production-ready intelligent RAG systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

InfoPO: Information-Driven Policy Optimization for User-Centric Agents

Authors:
Fanqi Kong↗Jiayi Zhang↗Mingyi Deng↗Chenglin Wu↗Yuyu Luo↗Bang Liu↗

arXiv:2603.00656v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world user requests to LLM agents are often underspecified. Agents must interact to acquire missing information and make correct downstream decisions. However, current multi-turn GRPO-based methods often rely on trajectory-level reward computation, which leads to credit assignment problems and insufficient advantage signals within rollout groups. A feasible approach is to identify valuable interaction turns at a fine granularity to drive more targeted learning. To address this, we introduce InfoPO (Information-Driven Policy Optimization), which frames multi-turn interaction as a process of active uncertainty reduction and computes an information-gain reward that credits turns whose feedback measurably changes the agent's subsequent action distribution compared to a masked-feedback counterfactual. It then combines this signal with task outcomes via an adaptive variance-gated fusion to identify information importance while maintaining task-oriented goal direction. Across diverse tasks, including intent clarification, collaborative coding, and tool-augmented decision making, InfoPO consistently outperforms prompting and multi-turn RL baselines. It also demonstrates robustness under user simulator shifts and generalizes effectively to environment-interactive tasks. Overall, InfoPO provides a principled and scalable mechanism for optimizing complex agent-user collaboration. Code is available at https://github.com/kfq20/InfoPO.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

GCT-MARL: Graph-Based Contrastive Transfer for Sample-Efficient Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Animesh Animesh↗Satheesh K Perepu↗Kaushik Dey↗

arXiv:2606.25073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), from a deployment perspective, it is challenging and expensive to train agents from scratch for each new environment or task. In this work, we propose GCT-MARL, a transfer learning framework that builds on the multi-view graph contrastive backbone of MAIL and augments it with a per-view, adaptively weighted alignment loss and a two-phase training protocol specifically designed for transfer across populations of varying sizes and compositions. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed framework markedly accelerates convergence on the target task relative to from-scratch training, in both homogeneous (within-faction, varying N) and heterogeneous (cross-faction and mixed unit-type) transfer scenarios. Furthermore, we show that the framework naturally supports continual learning by sequentially chaining the two-phase transfer protocol across a series of related tasks. Overall, this work provides a unified approach to mitigating key limitations in current MARL transfer methods with new insights at both methodological and empirical levels.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

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

Authors:
Koki Okajima↗Tsukasa Yoshida↗

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.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Taming Curvature: Architecture Warm-Up for Stable Transformer Training

Authors:
Sameera Ramasinghe↗Ajanthan Thalaiyasingam↗Hadi Mohaghegh Dolatabadi↗Chamin Hewa Koneputugodage↗Gil Avraham↗Violetta Shevchenko↗Yan Zuo↗Karol Pajak↗Alexander Long↗

arXiv:2606.16768v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training billion-parameter Transformers is often brittle, with transient loss spikes and divergence that waste compute. Even though the recently developed Edge of Stability (EoS) theory provides a powerful tool to understand and control the stability of optimization methods via the (preconditioned) curvature, these curvature-controlling methods are not popular in large-scale Transformer training due to the complexity of curvature estimation. To this end, we first introduce a fast online estimator of the largest (preconditioned) Hessian eigenvalue (i.e., curvature) based on a warm-started variant for power iteration with Hessian-vector products. We show theoretically, and verify empirically, that the proposed method makes per-iteration curvature tracking feasible at billion parameter scale while being more accurate. Using this tool, we find that training instabilities coincide with surges in preconditioned curvature and that curvature grows with depth. Motivated by these observations, we propose architecture warm-up: progressively growing network depth to carefully control the preconditioned Hessian and stabilize training. Experiments on large Transformers validate that our approach enables efficient curvature tracking and reduces instabilities compared to existing state-of-the-art stabilization techniques without slowing down convergence.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Test-Time Training for Robust Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Authors:
Hao-Yuan Ma↗Yuda Zou↗Li Zhang↗Yongchao Xu↗

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) enables counting arbitrary object categories specified by text prompts, offering substantially greater flexibility than conventional closed-set counting. However, existing TOOC methods are developed and evaluated primarily on ideal images, while real-world scenes often suffer from adverse conditions such as rain, fog, darkness, and sensor noise, which severely degrade visual quality and impair vision-language alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Robust-TOOC, the first benchmark for evaluating TOOC under diverse corruption conditions, which covers six representative degradation types: rain, fog, darkness, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and mixed corruption. To improve robustness while preserving the original counting architecture, we propose Dual-TTT, a dual-architecture test-time training framework for TOOC. Specifically, during test-time training, Dual-TTT updates only the Text-guided Lightweight Denoising module (TL-Denoiser), while keeping the original counting network frozen. Inspired by diffusion models, the TL-Denoiser is optimized to remove corruption-aware noise from image representations under degraded conditions. Since only the TL-Denoiser is trained at test time, Dual-TTT is annotation-free and can be seamlessly integrated into existing TOOC models without modifying their original architecture. Extensive experiments on multiple recent TOOC baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SSD: Spatially Speculative Decoding Accelerates Autoregressive Image Generation

Authors:
Shilong Xiang↗Zirui Zhang↗Lijun Yu↗Chengzhi Mao↗

Autoregressive models excel in visual generation by treating images as 1D sequences of discrete tokens, mirroring language modeling. However, this flattening discards the intrinsic 2D spatial locality of visual signals, creating severe computational bottlenecks during inference. We introduce Spatially Speculative Decoding (SSD), a framework that aligns the predictive objective with the natural geometry of images. Rather than predicting only the immediate next token in a 1D sequence, our model simultaneously predicts the adjacent horizontal token and the token directly below it. By capitalizing on this 2D spatial correlation, spatially speculative decoding overcomes the memory wall in visual inference. Our approach accelerates autoregressive image generation by up to 13.3x while maintaining high fidelity on DPG-Bench and GenEval. Our results suggest that respecting the underlying geometry of vision unlocks massive computational efficiencies, paving the way for real-time, high-resolution autoregressive generative models.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Authors:
Julia Romero↗Qin Lv↗Morteza Karimzadeh↗

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Stabilizing Black-Box Prompt Optimization with Textual Regularization and Signal Aggregation

Authors:
MohammadReza Davari↗Utkarsh Garg↗Weixin Cai↗Eugene Belilovsky↗

arXiv:2507.09839v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model behavior. Recent Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) methods iteratively refine prompts using model-generated critiques (often called textual gradients), but they predominantly optimize from failures and underutilize information contained in correct predictions, leading to instability and semantic drift. We propose TRAS (Textual Regularization with Aggregated Signals), a feedback-centric framework that is plug-and-play with existing APO search backbones. It retains the standard textual gradient signal from prior work for error correction and introduces a complementary textual regularizer derived from successful predictions to preserve beneficial prompt components. Because both signals are stochastic and can be noisy, we further introduce Monte Carlo Signal Aggregation (MCSA), which samples multiple gradients or regularizers and aggregates them into a single actionable directive, emphasizing consistent, actionable advice while filtering out outliers. Motivated by rapid model churn, we also formalize Automatic Prompt Migration (APM), the practical problem of adapting an expert prompt across model versions or API providers without losing critical instructions. Across standard APO and APM scenarios, our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding higher accuracy, faster convergence, and lower query cost, while substantially reducing the degradation observed under naive prompt migration.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Geometric and Stochastic Analysis of Discontinuities in Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

Authors:
Tho Tran Huu↗Huu-Tuan Nguyen↗Thien-Hai Nguyen↗Nhat-Tri Ho↗Viet-Hoang Tran↗Tho Quan↗Tan Minh Nguyen↗

arXiv:2606.19036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are now widely deployed in state-of-the-art language and vision models, where conditional routing allows scaling to very large networks. However, this very Top-$k$ expert selection that enables conditional routing also renders the SMoE map inherently discontinuous. In the vicinity of these discontinuity surfaces, even inputs that are arbitrarily close may activate substantially different sets of experts resulting in significantly different outputs. In this work we give a rigorous geometric and stochastic analysis of these discontinuities. We first classify them by order, determined by the number of tied experts at a switching event. Using measure-theoretic slicing arguments, we establish asymptotic volume estimates for the thickened discontinuity surfaces, showing that lower-order discontinuity sets dominate, whereas higher-order ones occupy a vanishingly small relative volume. Next, modeling random perturbations in the input space via a diffusion process, we prove that the path eventually encounter a discontinuity, and moreover that the first hit almost surely occurs on an order-1 discontinuity with explicit finite-time probability bounds. We further derive occupation-time bounds that quantify the duration the random path spend in the neighborhoods of each discontinuity order. These theoretical results imply that inputs are more likely to lie near lower order discontinuities. Motivated by this insight, we propose a simple smoothing mechanism that can be directly applied to existing SMoEs, softly incorporating experts near discontinuities; our analysis guarantees that the added computational overhead remains small while providing localized smoothing near discontinuities, and experiments across language and vision tasks show that smoothing not only enforces continuity of the SMoE map but also enhances empirical performance.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Revisiting the Systematicity in Negation in the Era of In-Context Learning

Authors:
Hitomi Yanaka↗Taisei Yamamoto↗

Understanding the meaning of negated sentences remains one of the challenges for language models, even in the era of large language models (LLMs). We analyze systematicity regarding LLM understanding of negation from two perspectives: behavioral systematicity and representational systematicity. For behavioral systematicity, we confirm that through demonstrations and in-context learning, LLMs can recognize negation expressions and scope within sentences to some extent, but they fail to achieve perfect performance. In particular, the difficulty of the negation scope recognition for models varies depending on the output format. For representational systematicity, we analyze the extent to which function vectors can be robustly constructed from in-context examples for tasks that are essential to understanding negation. The experiments suggest that while function vectors can be composed for negation cue extraction tasks, extracting function vectors for recognizing scope is more challenging.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Authors:
Boyi Zeng↗Yiqin Hao↗Zitong Wang↗Shixiang Song↗He Li↗Feichen Song↗Yifan Liu↗Ziwei He↗Xinbing Wang↗Zhouhan Lin↗

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

ProtoX-AD: Self-Explainable Time Series Anomaly Detection and Characterization

Authors:
Aitor S\'anchez-Ferrera↗Elisabeth Wetzer↗Kristoffer Wickstr{\o}m↗Michael Kampffmeyer↗Robert Jenssen↗

arXiv:2606.13277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in time series anomaly detection (TSAD) have highlighted the effectiveness of self-supervised classification-based approaches. These methods apply transformations to normal training samples, training a classifier to recognize transformation-specific patterns that help identify anomalies through increased classification errors. Despite their strong performance, a significant challenge is their lack of explainability, as they provide limited insight into the characteristics of flagged anomalies. To address this limitation, we propose ProtoX-AD, a prototype-based self-explainable framework for self-supervised TSAD. ProtoX-AD learns transformation-aware latent representations alongside interpretable prototypes, enabling both accurate anomaly detection and the identification of distinct anomalous profiles through prototype-based explanations. Additionally, it allows for systematic analysis of how transformation design impacts detection performance and explainability. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProtoX-AD achieves detection performance comparable to its black-box counterparts while offering more consistent and semantically meaningful explanations than existing explainable baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Aitorzan3/ProtoX-AD.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Semidefinite programming for understanding the limitations of Lindblad equations

Authors:
Soumyadeep Sarma↗Manas Kulkarni↗Archak Purkayastha↗Devashish Tupkary↗

arXiv:2602.01794v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lindbladian quantum master equations (LEs) are the most popular descriptions for quantum systems weakly coupled to baths. But, recent works have established that in many situations such Markovian descriptions are fundamentally limited: they cannot simultaneously capture populations and coherences even to the leading-order in system-bath couplings. This can cause violation of fundamental properties like thermalization and continuity equations associated with local conservation laws, even when such properties are expected in the actual setting. This begs the question: given a physical situation, how do we know if there exists an LE that describes it to a desired accuracy? Here we show that, for both equilibrium and non-equilibrium steady states (NESS), this question can be succinctly formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP), a convex optimization technique. If a solution to the SDP can be found to a desired accuracy, then an LE description is possible for the chosen setting. If not, no LE description is fundamentally attainable, showing that a consistent Markovian treatment is impossible even at weak system-bath coupling for that particular setting. Considering few qubit isotropic XXZ-type models coupled to multiple baths, we find that in most parameter regimes, LE description giving accurate populations and coherences to leading-order is unattainable, leading to rigorous no-go results. However, in some cases, LE description having correct populations but inaccurate coherences, and satisfying local conservation laws, is possible over some of the parameter regimes. Our work highlights the power of semidefinite programming in the analysis of physically consistent LEs, thereby, in understanding the limits of Markovian descriptions at weak system-bath couplings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Judge-Aware Ranking Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models without Ground Truth

Authors:
Mingyuan Xu↗Xinzi Tan↗Jiawei Wu↗Doudou Zhou↗

arXiv:2601.21817v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on open-ended tasks without ground-truth labels is increasingly done via the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm. A critical but under-modeled issue is that judge LLMs differ substantially in reliability; treating all judges equally can yield biased leaderboards and misleading uncertainty estimates. More data can make evaluation more confidently wrong under misspecified aggregation. We propose a judge-aware ranking framework that extends the Bradley-Terry-Luce model by introducing judge-specific discrimination parameters, jointly estimating latent model quality and judge reliability from pairwise comparisons without reference labels. We establish identifiability up to natural normalizations and prove consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator, enabling confidence intervals for score differences and rank comparisons. Across multiple public benchmarks and a newly collected dataset, our method improves agreement with human preferences, achieves higher data efficiency than unweighted baselines, and produces calibrated uncertainty quantification for LLM rankings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

PROBE: Probabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding with Analytical Translation Robustness for 3D Place Recognition

Authors:
Jinseop Lee↗Byoungho Lee↗Gichul Yoo↗

We present PROBE (PRobabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding), a learning-free LiDAR place recognition descriptor that models each BEV cell's occupancy as a Bernoulli random variable. Rather than relying on discrete point-cloud perturbations, PROBE analytically marginalizes over continuous Cartesian translations via the polar Jacobian, yielding a distance-adaptive angular uncertainty $\sigma_\theta = \sigma_t / r$ in $\mathcal{O}(R{\cdot}S)$ time. The primary parameter $\sigma_t$ represents the expected translational uncertainty in meters, a sensor-independent physical quantity that enhances cross-sensor generalization while reducing the need for extensive per-dataset tuning. Pairwise similarity combines a Bernoulli-KL Jaccard with exponential uncertainty gating and FFT-based height cosine similarity for rotation alignment. Evaluated on four datasets spanning four diverse LiDAR types, PROBE achieves the highest accuracy among handcrafted descriptors in multi-session evaluation and competitive single-session performance relative to both handcrafted and supervised baselines. The source code and supplementary materials are available at https://sites.google.com/view/probe-pr.

Read & Discuss → View Source →