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

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

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.

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

LLMs on Tabular Data with Limited Semantics: Evidence from Industrial Car Retrofit Prediction

arXiv:2606.15314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industrial retrofit planning depends on structured operational data rather than free text: planners must estimate whether a newly registered prototype will require a retrofit, which retrofit package it will need, and how long the work will take. We study an industrial dataset linking a prototype-registration system (284,271 vehicles) with a retrofit-management system (48,716 cleaned visits), and compare strong tabular machine learning baselines with three LLM-based strategies on row-serialized inputs: embedding features (Amazon Titan), direct prompted classification (Claude Sonnet 4), and an ML+LLM stacking approach. Across binary occurrence prediction, 15-way retrofit-type classification, per-visit duration regression, and an aggregated monthly benchmark, classical tree ensembles remain the strongest standalone models. However, the LLM results reveal a consistent pattern: embeddings remain useful on tables (binary AUC = 0.982), direct prompting collapses once semantic signal is stripped by hashing (binary AUC = 0.500; multiclass weighted F1 = 0.018), and hybrid stacking yields the best manually built multiclass model (weighted F1 = 0.626). On the monthly benchmark, lag-based machine learning outperforms time-series foundation models, though Chronos-small remains competitive in zero-shot forecasting. The results suggest that on privacy-constrained industrial tables, LLMs are more effective as complementary components than as replacements for strong tabular baselines.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MOCHI: Motion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions

Collaborative human-object interaction shows dynamic and complex movements that require mutual anticipation and continuous adjustment between participants and the shared object. Modeling such collaborative multi-human object interaction (MHOI) scenarios requires high-quality data acquisition as a foundational step; however, this is challenging due to the inherent complexity of MHOI where human-human and human-object interactions occur simultaneously. Such complexity leads to noisy MHOI captures characterized by several artifacts: contact misalignment between hands and objects, motion jitter and temporal inconsistencies in the captured sequences, and missing or incomplete finger-level articulation details. To address these challenges, we present MOCHI (MOtion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions), a two-stage framework for enhancing noisy MHOI data. Our approach first generates physically plausible hand grasps through optimization from noisy body input, producing grasps that are both physically plausible and semantically consistent with the body pose, where these optimized grasps are extended into complete hand-object interaction sequences. Consequently, the full-body motion for all participants are refined through a diffusion-based noise optimization framework that uses single-person motion priors. During the optimization process, we introduce optimization objectives to encode human-object and human-human interaction information within these single-person priors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline across diverse MHOI data, either acquired by existing capture methods or synthesized by generative models. We further show robustness of our system across varying numbers of participants and types of interactions, and demonstrate various applications including keyframe-based MHOI creation and data augmentation through varying object geometries.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Selective Synergistic Learning for Video Object-Centric Learning

Typical video object-centric learning (VOCL) approaches employ slot-based frameworks that rely on reconstruction-driven encoder-decoder architectures, where learning is mediated by two spatial maps: attention maps from the encoder and object maps from the decoder. As these two distinct maps exhibit different properties, a recent dense alignment strategy attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by enforcing agreement across all spatio-temporal patches via contrastive learning. However, this indiscriminate alignment inadvertently propagates the inherent weaknesses of each module, such as noisy encoder predictions and blurred decoder boundaries. Moreover, computing dense similarities across all pairs incurs a computational cost quadratic in the total number of spatio-temporal patches, severely limiting scalability. Motivated by this, we propose Selective Synergistic Learning (SSync). Instead of exhaustive patch-to-patch alignment, SSync prevents error propagation by selectively distilling only the most reliable cues: leveraging the encoder strictly for boundary refinement and the decoder for interior denoising. This is realized via a pseudo-labeling with linear complexity, eliminating the need for quadratic spatial comparisons. Also, to prevent the reinforcement of architectural biases like slot redundancy, we introduce a transitive pseudo-label merging that consolidates overlapping slots based on spatio-temporal activation consistency. Extensive studies demonstrate that SSync improves decomposition quality and serves as a versatile, plug-and-play module while also exhibiting exceptional robustness to slot configurations. Code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SSync.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Establishing an $\Omega(\sqrt{d})$ complexity lower bound for PDMP samplers and how to break it: a sub-$\sqrt{d}$ algorithm for Gaussian-tailed targets

arXiv:2606.19909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the theoretical appeal of their non-reversibility, to date, no Piecewise Deterministic Markov Process (PDMP) samplers have been developed that scale better than $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{d})$ in computational complexity with respect to the target dimension $d$. We prove that this is a fundamental limitation by establishing an $\Omega(\sqrt{d})$ lower bound on the algorithmic complexity of PDMP samplers in a standard setup. By relaxing the assumption that the target density must remain invariant at all continuous times, we then demonstrate how to bypass this barrier. Specifically, we introduce a novel PDMP sampling scheme and show that it achieves an empirical complexity of $\mathcal{O}(d^\alpha)$, where $\alpha \in [0.2, 0.3]$ for Gaussian-tailed targets. In addition, this PDMP scheme is locally adaptive in both trajectory length and distance between velocity updates.

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

Evaluating Local Explainability Metrics for Machine Learning Models on Tabular Data

arXiv:2605.27618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the wide use of explainability techniques to attempt to understand the behavior of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the generated explanations may not always be reliable. An explanation can appear plausible to humans but fail to capture the internal reasoning of a model, particularly when dealing with complex tabular data. This paper studies the trustworthiness of local explainability techniques when applied to complex tabular classification tasks, considering evaluated metrics for three main properties: faithfulness to the model's predictions, robustness to input data variations, and complexity of the explanation itself. A benchmark was performed for Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), Kernel SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Feature Ablation techniques, across 32 datasets and different types of machine learning models. Model performance ranges were analyzed to identify two groups: consensus-correct, which are samples that all models predicted correctly, and consensus-wrong, samples that all models predicted incorrectly. The obtained results demonstrate that that the explanations are not always correlated with a model's predictive performance. Instead, dataset complexity and feature distributions seem to be the main factors affecting explanation quality and reliability.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Anti-causal domain generalization: Leveraging unlabeled data

arXiv:2602.17187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of domain generalization concerns learning predictive models that are robust to distribution shifts when deployed in new, previously unseen environments. Existing methods typically require labeled data from multiple training environments, limiting their applicability when labeled data are scarce. In this work, we study domain generalization in an anti-causal setting, where the outcome causes the observed covariates. Under this structure, environment perturbations that affect the covariates do not propagate to the outcome, which motivates regularizing the model's sensitivity to these perturbations. Crucially, estimating these perturbation directions does not require labels, enabling us to leverage unlabeled data from multiple environments. We propose two methods that penalize the model's sensitivity to variations in the mean and covariance of the covariates across environments, respectively, and prove that these methods have worst-case optimality guarantees under certain classes of environments. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical performance of our approach on a controlled physical system and a physiological signal dataset.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neural Slack Variables for Shape Constraints

arXiv:2606.13803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enforcing functional inequality constraints such as monotonicity and convexity in neural networks is a fundamental challenge in many industrial and scientific applications. Classical one-sided penalty methods, along with primal-dual methods gated by complementary slackness, provide constraint gradients only at violated locations, resulting in fragile satisfaction. Architectures that guarantee feasibility by construction, on the other hand, remain largely limited to elementary cases and impose additional inductive biases. We introduce neural slack variables, a deep learning native primal-side approach that converts constraint enforcement into a regression problem by coupling the primary network with a jointly learned auxiliary network. The auxiliary network serves as a valid target for the primary network's constraint quantities, inducing feasibility and regularity. Neural slack variables achieve zero measured violations on dense-grid monotonicity and convexity test cases, where penalty and primal-dual baselines leave residual violations, and enable arbitrage-free learning of volatility surfaces, an open industrial challenge in quantitative finance.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

VrySure: A Multi-Task AI Scientific Fraud Detection Platform for Identifying Manipulated and AI-Generated Biomedical Research Images

Integrity of scientific data is critical in biomedical research, where images often serve as primary evidence for experimental observations and conclusions. Advances in image-editing technologies and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have increased the accessibility and realism of visual manipulation, making detection through manual review increasingly challenging. To empower our laboratory researchers to continuously monitor and uphold scientific rigor and data integrity, and serve the global scientific community, we developed VrySure, an easy-to-deploy, AI-driven multi-task platform for automated image-integrity screening in biomedical research. VrySure integrates four detection modules: cross-image transformation detection, within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection in blot and gel images, and AI-generated image detection. The system identifies potentially manipulated images and, when possible, localizes suspicious regions using bounding-box outputs to support downstream verification. To support development and evaluation, we constructed task-specific datasets by combining public biomedical image resources, curated manipulated examples, and synthetic images generated by multiple generative AI systems. We evaluated VrySure using region-level F1 score, recall, precision, false negative rate (FNR), and false discovery rate (FDR) across multiple manipulation categories and compared its performance with two commonly used commercial image-integrity screening platforms under a predefined benchmark protocol. Under the tested conditions, VrySure achieved a higher F1 score and recall, lower FNR, and maintained a low FDR for within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection, and AI-generated image detection, while showing comparable performance in transformation detection. Beyond automated screening, VrySure is designed to support source-data comparison and evidence-based assessment in scientific integrity investigations. By integrating multiple detection capabilities into a unified and scalable workflow, VrySure provides a practical framework to improve the efficiency and consistency of image-integrity screening in biomedical research.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Multidimensional Bayesian Active Machine Learning of Working Memory Task Performance

arXiv:2510.00375v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While adaptive experimental design has outgrown one-dimensional, staircase-based adaptations, most cognitive experiments still control a single factor and summarize performance with a scalar. We show a validation of a Bayesian, two-axis, active-classification approach, carried out in an immersive virtual testing environment for a 5-by-5 working-memory reconstruction task. Two variables are controlled: spatial load L (number of occupied tiles) and feature-binding load K (number of distinct colors) of items. Stimulus acquisition is guided by posterior uncertainty of a nonparametric Gaussian Process (GP) probabilistic classifier, which outputs a surface over (L, K) rather than a single threshold or max span value. In a young adult population, we compare GP-driven Adaptive Mode (AM) with a traditional adaptive staircase Classic Mode (CM), which varies L only at K = 3. Parity between the methods is achieved for this cohort, with an intraclass coefficient of 0.755 at K = 3. Additionally, AM reveals individual differences in interactions between spatial load and feature binding. AM estimates converge more quickly than other sampling strategies, demonstrating that only about 30 samples are required for accurate fitting of the full model.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

fuzzyfold: a high-performance framework for stochastic RNA folding kinetics

Authors:

The analysis of nucleic acid secondary structures is overwhelmingly dominated by methods that analyze the thermodynamic equilibrium distribution and which ignore all dynamic aspects of nucleic acid folding. Yet, there are numerous popular examples of nucleic acid folding that rely on kinetic models, such as RNA riboswitches or DNA strand displacement systems. Here, I am presenting fuzzyfold, a Rust-based software package for nucleic acid secondary structure analysis with an explicit focus on stochastic modeling. The framework introduces three-way and four-way shift moves with a biophysically motivated rate-model parameterization, and it is developed with an emphasis on both model flexibility and performance, e.g. allowing for the generation of single co-transcriptional trajectories for thousand-nucleotide long RNA molecules in just a few minutes. The main strength of the fuzzyfold package, however, is its focus on user and developer interfaces for long-term development. It provides easily installable command-line interfaces, e.g. for aggregating data from multiple parallel trajectories efficiently into an ensemble-level dynamic analysis. For developers, the code-base supports straight-forward substitution of thermodynamic and kinetic free-energy models, and a flexible library interface with Python bindings, enabling integration of individual components into custom computational workflows.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-fidelity two-qubit gates in a 7-qubit register for quantum networks

arXiv:2606.14847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum networks based on optically active solid-state spins may enable quantum technologies including long-range quantum communication and distributed quantum computing. Network nodes containing multiple high-fidelity qubits can facilitate large-scale fault-tolerant operation. However, the stringent error thresholds remain out of reach for multi-qubit registers. In this work, we demonstrate high-fidelity two-qubit gates in a 7-qubit register, based on nuclear spins coupled to a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond. We analyze crosstalk in highly connected spin systems, develop an efficient optimization procedure, and characterize the gates using gate set tomography. The two-qubit gate fidelities (best: 99.61(5)%, average: 99.18(2)%) demonstrate a multi-qubit register at the threshold for distributed quantum computation. Finally, as an example application, we perform a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) simulation of the ground-state energy of H2 and LiH molecules. These results demonstrate one of the key prerequisites for scalable quantum networks based on solid-state spins.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

On the QUEST for Uncertainty Quantification via Highest Density Regions

arXiv:2606.19569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for reliable decision-making in safety-critical applications in probabilistic machine learning. For regression problems, dominant scalar UQ approaches - notably, those based on proper scoring rules - measure uncertainty via pointwise predictive risk. This can lead to counterintuitive results when the target statistic is not the conditional expectation. We propose an alternative framework, in which uncertainty is characterised by the volume of the most probable subset of a distribution's support. QUEST (Quantifying Uncertainty via highest dEnSiTy regions) is a novel approach to UQ based on the concentration of Lebesgue measure at a distribution's peak(s), evaluated at one or more values of a robustness parameter $\alpha$. We establish connections between our measures and classical statistics from information theory and economics. We show that, unlike popular alternatives based on proper scoring rules, QUEST measures of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty satisfy a set of axioms adapted from the UQ literature, including monotonicity under distributional spread and invariance to location shifts. Selective prediction benchmarks confirm that QUEST performs favourably against standard measures such as variance and differential entropy.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MiniMax Sparse Attention

arXiv:2606.13392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-long-context capability is becoming indispensable for frontier LLMs: agentic workflows, repository-scale code reasoning, and persistent memory all require the model to jointly attend over hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, yet the quadratic cost of softmax attention makes this untenable at deployment scale. We introduce MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA), a blockwise sparse attention built upon Grouped Query Attention (GQA). A lightweight Index Branch scores key-value blocks and independently selects a Top-k subset for each GQA group, enabling group-specific sparse retrieval while maintaining efficient block-level execution; the Main Branch then performs exact block-sparse attention over only the selected blocks. Designed around a principle of simplicity and scalability, MSA is deliberately streamlined, making it straightforward to deploy efficiently across a broad range of GPUs. To translate sparsity into practical speedups, we co-design MSA with a GPU execution path that uses exp-free Top-k selection and KV-outer sparse attention to improve tensor-core utilization under block-granular access. On a 109B-parameter model with native multimodal training, MSA performs on par with GQA while reducing per-token attention compute by 28.4x at 1M context. Paired with our co-designed kernel, MSA achieves 14.2x prefill and 7.6x decoding wall-clock speedups on H800. Our inference kernel is available at: https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MSA. A production-grade natively multimodal model powered by MSA has been publicly released at: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MPC-Patch-Bench: Security-Aware LLM Code Patch for Multi-Party Computation

arXiv:2606.11416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Repository-level benchmarks for evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) code repair on Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) software do not yet exist, and directly transplanting general-purpose benchmarks such as SWE-bench fails on three structural fronts: (i) MPC repositories are dominated by generic Python infrastructure rather than cryptographic logic; (ii) high-value MPC fixes lack the standardized tests rigid extraction pipelines require; and (iii) standard fail-to-pass evaluation is insufficient for code that must also be cryptographically safe. MPC is increasingly deployed for privacy-preserving machine learning, biomedical collaboration, and secure analytics. Existing MPC-specific code-synthesis efforts cover only operator-level or single-framework tasks; evaluating LLM agents on real repository-level MPC repair instead demands MPC-aware data curation and a verifier matched to the security and numerical-fidelity guarantees MPC programs must obey neither of which existing benchmarks provide. We introduce MPC-Patch-Bench, a repository-level benchmark organised around two frameworks. (1)The Data Curation Framework combines a domain-specific curation agent that filters raw pull requests through three cryptographic layers with a human-AI completion engine that synthesizes missing problem statements and Fail-to-Pass/Pass-to-Pass tests, yielding 205 fully verified instances. (2)The MPC Verifier provides dedicated security and numerical-fidelity checks via dynamic differential testing against plaintext oracles and MPC-specific static analysis rules that flag unsafe reveals, insecure arithmetic, and illegal public/private casts. The strongest evaluated LLM functionally resolves only 22.9% of MPC-Patch-Bench tasks; the MPC Verifier further reduces verified resolution to 17.1%, with up to 40% of functionally-passing patches rejected for cryptographic or numerical-fidelity violations.

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

Follow the Latent Roadmap: Navigating Revocable Decoding for Diffusion LLMs with Anchor Tokens

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising avenue for parallel generation but face a trade-off between decoding speed and quality. While revocable decoding strategies attempt to mitigate errors by verifying and remasking tokens, they typically operate within a mixed-quality context. This leads to two critical failures: Error Propagation, where new tokens absorb toxic information from erroneous context, and Local Error Reinforcement, where errors mutually reinforce each other to evade detection. To alleviate these challenges, we propose ASRD (Anchor Supervised Revocable Decoding), a training-free framework that operates within the embedding space. ASRD explicitly decouples the decoding context into trusted Anchor Tokens, which are identified via temporal consistency, and uncertain candidates. Leveraging a dynamic Anchor Tokens Cache, we introduce two complementary mechanisms: (1) Anchor-Guided Generation, which injects entropy-weighted anchor signals into masked positions to implicitly rectify attention toward the reliable global skeleton; and (2) Anchor-Perturbed Verification, which applies orthogonal perturbations to uncertain candidate tokens, destabilizing and remasking errors driven by fragile local consensus. Extensive experiments on math and coding benchmarks demonstrate that ASRD outperforms recent remasking baselines, achieving accuracy improvements of up to 6.4\% while accelerating inference throughput by up to 7.2$\times$.

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

Machine Learning and the Random Walk Puzzle: Forecasting the CAD/USD Exchange Rate with Expanding Window Evaluation and SHAP Interpretability

arXiv:2606.15058v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines whether machine learning (ML) models can outperform the naive random walk benchmark in forecasting the monthly USD/CAD exchange rate. Using daily data from the Bank of Canada spanning January 2017 to May 2026, resampled into 113 monthly observations, five ML models are evaluated: linear regression, random forest, gradient boosting, XGBoost, and AdaBoost. These models are benchmarked against the naive random walk model and exponential smoothing with Holt-Winters seasonality (ETS). All models are evaluated using an expanding-window framework to maintain strict out-of-sample integrity, and forecast-accuracy differences are assessed using the Diebold-Mariano (DM) test. Structural break detection identifies four significant breakpoints in the series, corresponding to the escalation of the US-China trade war in 2018, the COVID-19 economic recovery in 2020, the peak of the Bank of Canada rate-hiking cycle in 2022, and the start of the Bank of Canada rate-cutting cycle in 2024. SHAP, or Shapley Additive Explanations, analysis is applied to interpret the drivers of the best-performing ML model. The results show that the naive random walk model remains a formidable benchmark. Linear regression is the only model that statistically outperforms the naive random walk model, with a DM statistic of 3.0585 and a p value of 0.0071, whereas the ML ensemble models show only marginal differences. Random Forest with an expanding-window framework achieves the lowest MAPE of 1.17 percent among all models except the random walk. SHAP analysis confirms that short-term lags, particularly lag1 and lag2, and recent rolling means dominate predictions, consistent with the near-random-walk behavior of exchange rates.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mixed-State Topological Order under Coherent Noise

arXiv:2411.03441v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixed-state phases of matter under local decoherence have recently garnered significant attention due to the ubiquitous presence of noise in current quantum processors. One of the key issues is understanding how topological quantum memory is affected by realistic coherent noise, such as random rotation noise and amplitude-damping noise. In this work, we investigate the intrinsic error threshold of the two-dimensional toric code (TC), a paradigmatic topological quantum memory, under these types of coherent noise by employing both analytical and numerical methods based on the doubled-Hilbert-space formalism. A connection between the mixed-state phase of the decohered TC and a non-Hermitian Ashkin-Teller-type statistical-mechanics model is established, and the mixed-state phase diagrams under the coherent noise are obtained. We find remarkable stability of mixed-state topological order under random rotation noise with axes near the $Y$-axis of qubits. We also identify intriguing extended critical regions at the phase boundaries, highlighting a connection with non-Hermitian physics. We argue that these phase boundaries provide upper bounds for the intrinsic error threshold, beyond which quantum error correction becomes impossible. We complement these findings by estimating the error thresholds for random rotation noise under standard quantum error correction, thereby providing lower bounds on the intrinsic error threshold.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Radar-Guided Polynomial Fitting for Metric Depth Estimation

We propose POLAR, a novel radar-guided depth estimation method that introduces polynomial fitting to efficiently transform scaleless depth predictions from pretrained monocular depth estimation (MDE) models into metric depth maps. Unlike existing approaches that rely on complex architectures or expensive sensors, our method is grounded in a fundamental insight: although MDE models often infer reasonable local depth structure within each object or local region, they may misalign these regions relative to one another, making a linear scale and shift (affine) transformation insufficient given three or more of these regions. To address this limitation, we use polynomial coefficients predicted from cheap, ubiquitous radar data to adaptively adjust predictions non-uniformly across depth ranges. In this way, POLAR generalizes beyond affine transformations and is able to correct such misalignments by introducing inflection points. Importantly, our polynomial fitting framework preserves structural consistency through a novel training objective that enforces local monotonicity via first-derivative regularization. POLAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three datasets, outperforming existing methods by an average of 24.9% in MAE and 33.2% in RMSE, while also achieving state-of-the-art efficiency in terms of latency and computational cost.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CCKS: Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing

arXiv:2606.12281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Decentralized Training and Decentralized Execution (DTDE) for cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), action-advising-based knowledge sharing promotes interpretable and scalable cooperation among agents. However, current action advising approaches often adhere too much to the teacher's guidance without evaluating teacher-student compatibility, which causes excessive advising, suboptimal stability, and degraded performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing (CCKS) framework, which allows agents to adopt recommendations based on consensus-derived constraints and to follow the teacher's instructions more smartly. This mechanism enables agents to balance exploration and learning from experienced teachers, improving overall performance. The key is the consensus model construction, for which we propose to employ contrastive learning to construct consensus models based on local observations in the agents' training phase. In action selection, agents score and choose actions based on consensus and shared knowledge. Designed as a plug-and-play solution, CCKS integrates seamlessly with existing DTDE algorithms. Experiments conducted in the Google Research Football environment and the complex StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge demonstrate that the integration with CCKS significantly improves cooperation efficiency, learning speed, and overall performance compared with current DTDE baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanxpy/CCKS.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

A random approach to the multibonacci sequence

arXiv:2606.14294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a random approach to the multibonacci sequence. We generalise the model introduced by Benjamin, Levin, Mahlburg, and Quinn, which is based on a random tiling method using dominoes and squares that leads to the Fibonacci sequence, and which was extended to the tribonacci case in a previous work by the authors. Our approach employs tiling with linear $k$-ominoes, $k=1,\ldots,s$, combined with specific colouring, to generate a weighted multibonacci sequence. For a natural random variable~$X$ defined by this model, we establish the distribution of $X$ in terms of multibonacci numbers and compute $\mathbb{E}[X] = 2^{s+1}-3$.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Extrema of microscopically slowed-down Gaussian fields

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a family of Gaussian fields whose covariance structure exhibits an inhomogeneous, microscopic slowdown and it interpolates between a $\log$ profile (for a certain interpolation parameter $\alpha=0$) and a $\log\log$ profile (when the interpolation parameter is $\alpha=1/2$). We consider both one dimensional such objects (which we call {\it Branching Brownian Motions in a cooling environment}) as well as higher dimensional, spatial fields. We identify the correct centering of the maximum at time $T$ and prove tightness of the recentered maximum. While the exponent in the first-order growth varies linearly with $\alpha$, giving a leading order of $T^{1-\alpha}$, the second-order correction exhibits a phase transition at $\alpha=1/3$.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Shifting-based Optimizable Linear Relaxations for General Activation Functions

arXiv:2606.20292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The use of neural networks (NNs) is rapidly increasing, including in safety- and security-critical domains. To provide formal guarantees about NN behavior, many verification methods rely on optimizable linear relaxations of activation functions. However, existing techniques depend on hand-crafted relaxations for each activation function. Extension to state-of-the-art activation functions therefore requires substantial manual effort. In contrast, our approach SLiR (Shifting-based Linear Relaxations) is broadly applicable, requiring only a Lipschitz constant or a set of critical points. SLiR parameterizes relaxations by their slope and computes the corresponding offset via a shifting procedure that ensures sound upper and lower bounds over the input domain, enabling efficient optimization while maintaining correctness. Our experiments show that SLiR produces tight relaxations across a wide range of practical activation functions and enables verification of up to 7.8x more properties compared to state-of-the-art methods.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Revisiting Chebyshev Polynomial and Anisotropic RBF Models for Tabular Regression

arXiv:2602.22422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smooth-basis models such as Chebyshev polynomial regressors and radial basis function (RBF) networks are well established in numerical analysis. Their continuously differentiable prediction surfaces suit surrogate optimisation, sensitivity analysis, and other settings where the response varies gradually with inputs. Despite these properties, smooth models seldom appear in tabular regression, where tree ensembles dominate. We ask whether they can compete, benchmarking models across 55 regression datasets organised by application domain. We develop an anisotropic RBF network with data-driven centre placement and gradient-based width optimisation, a ridge-regularised Chebyshev polynomial regressor, and a smooth-tree hybrid (Chebyshev model tree); all three are released as scikit-learn-compatible packages. We benchmark these against tree ensembles, a pre-trained transformer, and standard baselines, evaluating accuracy alongside generalisation behaviour. The transformer ranks first on accuracy across a majority of datasets, but its GPU dependence, inference latency, and dataset-size limits constrain deployment in the CPU-based settings common across applied science and industry. Among CPU-viable models, smooth models and tree ensembles are statistically tied on accuracy, but the former tend to exhibit tighter generalisation gaps. We recommend routinely including smooth-basis models in the candidate pool, particularly when downstream use benefits from tighter generalisation and gradually varying predictions.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Simple analytical flux-tuned iSWAP pulses for leakage suppression

arXiv:2606.13052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast, high-fidelity two-qubit gates are a key requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Tunable coupler architectures provide a flexible approach for implementing entangling gates through flux control with large on-off ratios, but fast flux modulation can induce diabatic transitions and population leakage to non-computational states, limiting gate performance. Here we present an analytical flux control method enabling derivative removal by adiabatic gate ($\Phi$-DRAG) for suppressing leakage in flux tunable two-qubit gates. We show that $\Phi$-DRAG differs fundamentally from conventional microwave implementations and derive modified flux modulation protocols that suppress leakage below $10^{-4}$ for fast entangling gates. The method remains effective across a range of asymmetry between qubit anharmonicities and different circuit parameters, enabling high-fidelity two-qubit gates within the fifteen nanosecond range.