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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Digital programming of spin correlations in a fermionic lattice quantum simulator

arXiv:2606.13772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analog quantum simulation provides a highly controlled platform to study diverse quantum many-body phenomena. However, current methods for state initialisation are limited to thermal ensembles or uncorrelated product states. Here we present a hybrid approach that complements analog preparation with a digital quantum-gate protocol. This approach enables the engineering of target states with specific, long-range spin-correlations from the same initial resource state. By applying collisional gates to adiabatically prepared and filtered four-fermion singlet chains, we program diverse spin-correlation patterns, including that of a Heisenberg chain. We measure the spin correlations using a sequence of quantum gates followed by singlet-pair measurements. Our method paves the way to the targeted preparation of strongly correlated states of matter.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Confidence-Aware Automated Assessment of Student-Drawn Scientific Models

arXiv:2606.20264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Student-generated drawings are widely used in science education to assess learners' conceptual understanding in modeling-based tasks aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). However, scoring such drawings requires expert human judgment to interpret complex visual representations, making large-scale assessment costly to implement and sustain in classroom settings. In this work, we study automated scoring of student-generated scientific drawings using a vision-based model. We evaluate a Vision Transformer (ViT) with parameter-efficient adaptation and propose a confidence-aware scoring framework that derives response-level confidence from test-time predictive distributions. This confidence signal enables selective automation by scoring high-confidence responses automatically while deferring uncertain cases for human review. Experiments on six NGSS-aligned middle school assessment items show that the proposed approach improves scoring reliability while supporting a practical trade-off between automated coverage and scoring risk, highlighting the value of confidence-aware methods for trustworthy educational assessment.

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

Tractable Reasoning and Conjunctive Query Answering for Defeasible DL-Lite under Rational Closure

arXiv:2606.24279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Description Logics (DLs), reasoning under Rational Closure (RC) is a well-known and widely accepted non-monotonic formalism to handle defeasible knowledge. In this paper, we study the application of RC to the core and horn variants of the DL-Lite family of lightweight description logics. We analyze both entitlement (instance checking) and Conjunctive Query (CQ) answering under RC. Our main contribution is providing a plug-in architecture that builds upon existing standard classical reasoners, establishing that reasoning and CQ answering under RC for DL-Lite can be done efficiently with minimal computational overhead.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Characterizing Software Aging in GPU-Based LLM Serving Systems

arXiv:2606.11916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes an empirical methodology to study software aging in GPU-based LLM serving systems. Traditional aging studies focus on CPU-centric software with relatively regular workloads; LLM serving is different, spanning a Python host and a CUDA device, handling requests whose cost varies by orders of magnitude, and relying on rapidly evolving software stacks. We run a 216-hour campaign across six co-located deployments under identical stress conditions, monitor host, device, and client metrics in parallel, and apply a statistical pipeline that accounts for autocorrelation and multiple testing. Our results reveal statistically significant memory aging in all deployments, with leak rates strongly dependent on the serving runtime and deployment configuration. Beyond these findings, we provide a reproducible framework that opens a research direction at the intersection of the software aging and rejuvenation and LLM serving communities.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Unified Framework for Context-Aware and Relation-Aware Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2606.18075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, yet existing graph-based methods face a fundamental limitation: entity-centric and chunk-centric approaches operate on representations anchored to original text without true knowledge fusion. While entity-centric methods connect logically related content and chunk-centric methods preserve context, both retrieve information separately through similarity search, missing emergent understanding from their synthesis. In this paper, we propose HyGRAG, a hierarchical graph RAG framework that transcends source documents by addressing three core challenges: constructing summaries that genuinely integrate contextual and relational information, leveraging these synthesized representations to access emergent knowledge during retrieval, and efficiently updating hierarchical structures for dynamic corpora. Specifically, we design hierarchical index structures over hybrid graphs with both chunk and entity nodes, then iteratively cluster them and generate LLM-based summaries. Then, we design context and relation-aware retrieval that searches across all abstraction levels while expanding through community membership. Moreover, we enable dynamic knowledge update through attachment-based algorithms with only local re-summarization. Experimental results show that HyGRAG improves the average accuracy of multi-hop reasoning tasks by 9.7%, while maintaining reasonable efficiency.

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

Beyond IGO-Flow: Toward Convergence Analysis of IGO in Continuous Spaces

arXiv:2606.17523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information-Geometric Optimization (IGO) provides a unified framework for black-box optimization by interpreting the adaptation of a search distribution as a natural gradient update. Despite its conceptual importance, the convergence theory of IGO remains limited: most existing results concern continuous-time idealizations such as the IGO flow, rather than discrete-time updates with non-infinitesimal learning rates. In this paper, we study discrete-time IGO in continuous spaces, formulated as natural gradient updates in the expectation-parameter coordinates of an exponential family. In particular, we analyze IGO over the multivariate Gaussian family on strongly convex quadratic objective functions. Our analysis covers a setting that simultaneously incorporates full covariance adaptation, a fixed positive learning rate, and quantile-based weights. In this setting, we prove that the covariance matrix converges to the zero matrix. We further show that the mean vector converges to the global optimum, provided that the condition number of the appropriately scaled covariance matrix is bounded at sufficiently frequent iterations. These results advance the convergence theory of IGO and help bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of IGO and practical covariance-adaptive search methods such as CMA-ES.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Exploring the relationship between human-centric AI and firm idiosyncratic risks

arXiv:2606.24224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the extensive discussions of human-centric AI (HCAI) in Industry 5.0, its effects on firms' idiosyncratic risks (IR) remains underexplored. This is an imperative issue for firms navigate financial risks during the current technological revolution, as IR reflects investor reactions to corporate heterogeneous AI strategies and implementations by isolating firm-level stock volatility from systematic factors. Integrating situated AI theory with social-technical systems theory, we conceptualise HCAI as a situated AI strategy that reduces AI-related ethical risks and fosters AI-Human synergies in firms' business operations, ultimately reducing IR by aligning with stakeholders' diverse expectations. Moreover, socio-technical factors, namely digitalisation, operational efficiency, executive shareholding, and CEOs with IT background, may moderate the HCAI-IR relationship. Using a multi-source panel dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2023, we find that HCAI is associated with lower firm IR. Furthermore, digitalisation and executive shareholding strengthen this risk-reducing effect, whereas operational efficiency and CEOs with IT background surprisingly attenuate it. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and practical insights for both ethical AI governance and firm financial risk management in the AI era.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Prompting-Based Defenses Against Domain-Camouflaged Injection Attacks

Authors:

Domain-camouflaged injection attacks embed malicious instructions in retrieved content using domain-appropriate vocabulary, evading standard detectors that rely on syntactic injection markers. When detection fails, practitioners need to know which defense architectures reduce attack success. We evaluate five prompting-based defenses (spotlighting, paraphrasing, prompt sandwiching, and two combinations) against domain-camouflaged injection across three model families (Claude Haiku, Llama 3.1 8B, Gemini 2.0 Flash) and three deployment domains (financial, legal, general) using 3,510 trials. Paraphrasing retrieved content before agent processing is the most consistently effective defense in this benchmark, reducing camouflage attack success rate by 55-84\% depending on model, and achieves lower attack success rates than our Llama Guard 4 configuration on every model tested. Defense effectiveness is strongly model-dependent: spotlighting halves attack success on Claude Haiku but provides no benefit on Llama 3.1 8B. Financial domain deployments face the highest residual risk at 26-33\% baseline attack success rate, with no prompting-based defense fully eliminating the threat on weaker models. These results provide the first systematic evaluation of prompting-based defenses specifically against camouflage-class injection attacks and establish benchmark-based recommendations for practitioners. All tasks use synthetically constructed professional documents; whether these benchmark rankings generalize to real enterprise documents remains an open question.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Semi-Device-Independent Certification for Nonlocality without Entanglement

arXiv:2606.13667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we investigate maximum-confidence discrimination, which encompasses minimum-error and unambiguous discrimination, for ensembles of separable states by considering global and separable measurements. We demonstrate that global measurements outperform separable ones, thereby establishing nonlocality without entanglement (NLWE) in terms of confidence in a detection event, a fine-grained state-identification strategy that maximizes the probability of a correct guess given a measurement outcome. Conversely, verifying achievable confidence in measurement outcomes can certify global measurements, namely, semi-device-independent certification of NLWE. Our results make it feasible to experimentally demonstrate NLWE using present-day quantum measurement devices, even with non-unit detection efficiencies, since maximum-confidence measurements rely only on detected measurement outcomes.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

A mathematical study of the excess growth rate

arXiv:2510.25740v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The excess growth rate, defined as the gap in Jensen's inequality for the logarithm, is a fundamental functional in portfolio theory. In this paper, we present a mathematical study motivated by information theory. We begin by establishing its properties and showing that it has rich connections with information theoretic concepts such as the Helmholtz free energy, L. Campbell's measure of average code length and large deviations. Our main results consist of three axiomatic characterization theorems of the excess growth rate, in terms of (i) the relative entropy, (ii) the gap in Jensen's inequality, and (iii) the logarithmic divergence that generalizes the Bregman divergence. Furthermore, we study maximization of the excess growth rate and compare it with the growth optimal portfolio. Our results not only provide theoretical justifications of the significance of the excess growth rate, but also establish new connections between information theory and quantitative finance.

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

SpAArSIST: Sparsified AASIST for Efficient and Reliable Anti-Spoofing

arXiv:2606.11674v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpAArSIST, a deployment-oriented refinement of the widely used AASIST graph pooling backend for self-supervised learning (SSL) based anti-spoofing. Motivated by redundant operations in public implementations, we replace learned pooling and stack-node attention with explicit, lightweight choices: separate train and inference graph pooling ratios $(k_{\mathrm{tr}},k_{\mathrm{inf}})$, magnitude-based node scoring, and mean aggregation of graph nodes. The best overall configuration (rank 1) cuts backend compute by 20.7% (195.045M $\rightarrow$ 154.706M MACs) and model size by 4.1% (611.8k $\rightarrow$ 586.4k params), while improving out-of-domain robustness on In-the-Wild to 2.82% EER and 0.078 minDCF (from 4.64% and 0.133) and remaining competitive on ASVspoof5. We further provide a composite selection score that summarizes accuracy, calibration, and compute to support balanced deployment-oriented model choice.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Scalable Batch Bayesian Optimization Via Subspace Acquisition Functions

arXiv:2411.16206v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Extending Bayesian optimization to batch evaluation can enable the designer to make the most use of parallel computing technology. However, most of current batch approaches do not scale well with the batch size. That is, their optimization efficiencies often deteriorate as the batch size increases. To address this issue, we propose a simple and efficient approach to extend Bayesian optimization to large-scale batch evaluation in this work. Different from existing batch approaches, the idea of the new approach is to draw a batch of axis-aligned subspaces of the original problem and select one point from each subspace using existing acquisition functions. Numerical experiments show that our proposed approach speedups the convergence significantly when compared with the sequential Bayesian optimization algorithm, and performs very competitively when compared with ten batch Bayesian optimization algorithms. The implementation of our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/zhandawei/SubSpace_Acquisition_Functions.

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

AnchorEdit: Maintaining Temporal Consistency in Multi-turn Image Editing via Causal Memory

Multi-turn image editing is essential for iterative design, yet current models often struggle with identity drift and error accumulation over successive steps. While existing research leverages video priors for consistency, their reliance on bidirectional attention is fundamentally misaligned with the causal, sequential nature of interactive editing. In this paper, we propose AnchorEdit, the first autoregressive (AR) diffusion-based framework designed specifically for high-resolution, long-term multi-turn editing. AnchorEdit bridges the gap between video priors and causal inference through a three-stage training curriculum: identity-preserving sing-turn pretraining, causal AR forcing fine-tuning with a novel self-rollout strategy to mitigate exposure bias, and consistency distillation for efficient 4-step generation. During inference, we introduce a memory mechanism to anchor the initial subject identity and ensure stable extrapolation across extended editing trajectories. To evaluate performance, we provide a new high-resolution multi-turn editing benchmark designed to stress-test long-horizon stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorEdit achieves state-of-the-art results, maintaining exceptional subject fidelity and instruction following even over 10+ interaction rounds.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Precision Physical Activity Prescription via Reinforcement Learning for Functional Actions

arXiv:2605.19208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physical activity (PA) plays an important role in maintaining and improving health. Daily steps have been a key PA measure that is easily accessible with common wearable devices. However, methods are lacking to recommend a personalized optimal distribution of daily steps over a period of time for the best of certain health biomarkers. In this paper, we fill this void based on the data from the All of Us Research Program which includes months of step counts as well as repeated measurements of key health biomarkers. We develop a new offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to learn personalized and optimal PA distributions associated with cardiometabolic risk, where the action is a function representing the daily step distribution over a period of time. Simulation studies demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach over existing continuous-action RL methods. The learned optimal policy from the All of Us data generally suggests people take more daily steps and also follow a more consistent pattern of PA over time while offering tailored recommendations for subgroups in blood glucose level, body mass index, blood pressure, age, and sex.

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

Contextual Bandits for Maximizing Stimulated Word-of-Mouth Rewards

arXiv:2606.15146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stimulated word-of-mouth is a strategy that promotes information sharing through prompts or incentives. Optimizing stimulated word-of-mouth through social networks requires identifying and targeting connected users who are most susceptible to spillover, a phenomenon where the influence of recommendations extends beyond the immediate audience to impact their connected users. The probability of spillover varies across individuals, and their connections, leading to heterogeneity. Understanding and accurately estimating the spillover probabilities among users in social networks is crucial for improving the effectiveness of stimulated word-of-mouth. To address this, we present a novel contextual multi-armed bandit framework that learns individual spillover probabilities and ranks connected users to maximize rewards from stimulated word-of-mouth. Experiments on real-world network datasets demonstrate that accounting for spillover heterogeneity enhances the targeting precision of top-$k$ connected users, boosting rewards and outperforming baseline methods that do not learn individual spillover effects.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SPEA2$^+$: Improved Density Estimation in SPEA2 with Provable Runtime Guarantees

arXiv:2606.12382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA2) is a popular and prominent evolutionary algorithm for solving multi-objective optimisation problems. Despite its popularity, theoretical analyses of SPEA2 have only appeared recently. Moreover, these analyses focus exclusively on how SPEA2 handles non-dominated solutions and disregard the algorithmic components responsible for handling dominated solutions. We conduct a first runtime analysis of SPEA2 for which these components are analysed. We prove that, unlike other prominent algorithms, including NSGA-II, NSGA-III and SMS-EMOA under the same setting of constant population size and duplicate elimination, SPEA2 is unable to cover the Pareto front of the OneTrapZeroTrap benchmark efficiently. Our results indicate that using k-th nearest-neighbour distance in the fitness assignment provides an insufficient signal to maintain diversity among dominated individuals. To address this issue, we propose an improved variant, SPEA2$^+$, that considers all pairwise distances. The new algorithm achieves the same performance guarantees as the other prominent algorithms on OneTrapZeroTrap, while matching the performance of the original SPEA2 on simpler problems. Experimental results complement our theoretical findings.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Self-Generated Error Training for Token Editing in Diffusion Language Models

Authors:

Token-to-token (T2T) editing lets LLaDA2.1 revise committed tokens during block-diffusion decoding. The released recipe trains this editor on random vocabulary corruptions, but at inference the editor sees the model's own fluent, high-confidence draft errors instead. We study this training-inference mismatch and propose self-generated T2T, which performs a no-gradient draft pass, fills masked positions with predicted tokens, and supervises recovery in a second pass under these self-generated corruptions. We implement the update as a short LoRA continued-pretraining pass on LLaDA2.1-mini and evaluate on several benchmarks under the official Q-Mode T2T procedure with unchanged inference parameters. The method generally improves accuracy while reducing T2T edit intensity, mitigating failure modes such as final-digit transcription errors after otherwise correct reasoning and excessive self-correction before short factual answers.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

KFTD: Koopman-Fourier Time-Differentiable Network for Continuous Ocean Spatiotemporal Forecasting

arXiv:2606.17070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate oceanic forecasting is critical for climate monitoring and disaster early warning. However, ocean spatiotemporal forecasting encounters the double challenges of modeling complex dynamical systems and ensuring computational efficiency. We present Koopman Fourier Time-Differentiable (KFTD) Network, a time continuous twostage paradigm that decouples interpolation from prediction to achieve efficient and scalable spatiotemporal modeling. We map complex nonlinear dynamics into the Koopman linear space and exploit Fourier analysis to enable continuous time interpolation at arbitrary sub-steps. A lightweight residual network consumes the high fidelity intermediate states to yield the final forecast. Unlike diffusion models, KFTD eliminates multi step noise sampling and directly evolves the system in continuous time, yielding a 4 computational speedup. We further introduce a DPP Loss that supports arbitrary PDE constraints in an endtoend manner, breaking the physical consistency bottleneck of pure data-driven approaches. Empirical results on four ocean datasets confirm that our continuous time framework reduces MSE by an average of 5.6% (up to 12.7% for SST) and improves efficiency over MCVD by 76.25%.

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

A Self Consistency Based Reranking for Narrative Question Answering

Narrative question answering (NQA) is a challenging task in natural language processing that requires models to understand long textual contexts, capture relationships across events, and generate coherent responses. Despite recent advances in pretrained language models, most existing approaches rely on a single decoding output during inference, making them sensitive to generation variability and often resulting in incomplete or inconsistent answers .To address this limitation, we propose a self-ensemble Self-Consistency-Based reranking framework for narrative question answering. The proposed method generates multiple candidate answers for each story-question pair and selects the final answer based on semantic agreement among the generated responses. This allows the model to explore diverse answer formulations while improving robustness through consensus-based selection without requiring modifications to the underlying architecture .The framework combines pretrained and fine-tuned language generation with multi-answer inference and similarity-based reranking. We evaluate the proposed approach on the NarrativeQA dataset using multiple models, including FLAN-T5 (Base and Small) and Pegasus-Large, under both baseline and fine-tuned settings .Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves performance across all models. In particular, FLAN-T5-Base achieves the best overall performance, improving from 82.32% to 86.66% (+4.34%) when combined with self-ensemble inference. Additionally, the largest improvement is observed with Pegasus-Large, which increases from 72.50% to 87.07% (+14.57%), highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

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

FOUNDv2: Learning Unified User Quantized Tokenizers for User Representation

arXiv:2508.00956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: User representation learning serves as a fundamental pillar for personalized services on large-scale web platforms. Despite its importance, conventional continuous embedding methods face significant challenges, including the lack of a unified paradigm for multi-source data integration, prohibitive storage overhead due to low information density, and the lack of multi-scale modeling granularity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FOUNDv2, a comprehensive user representation scheme centered on the Unified User Quantized Tokenizer U2QT) framework. FOUNDv2 transforms heterogeneous user data into a standardized discrete token space through a robust two-stage architecture. Specifically, the framework first extracts compact feature representations and subsequently employs a multi-view RQ-VAE to discretize them into storage-efficient tokens using shared and source-specific codebooks. To empower these representations with predictive intelligence, we further design multi-scale alignment objectives to capture both fine-grained behavioral dependencies and macro-temporal periodicity. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that FOUNDv2 consistently outperforms task-specific baselines while achieving substantial reductions in storage and computational costs. Finally, the large-scale deployment of FOUNDv2 on Alipay validates its practical scalability and efficiency across diverse industrial scenarios. The main code is available at: https://github.com/chuanhe1999/FOUNDv2.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SMEPilot: Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference with Scalable Matrix Extensions

arXiv:2606.16332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern CPUs increasingly integrate matrix extensions, such as Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), that provide high-throughput matrix execution within the CPU. For LLM inference, however, these units are not a universal replacement for conventional CPU cores: prefill, decode, attention, and KV-cache operations expose different arithmetic intensities, vector behavior, and layout requirements, while SME units and CPU cores still compete for shared memory bandwidth. This paper studies this mismatch through a roofline-based characterization of SME-enabled CPUs and uses the resulting model to guide operator-level execution choices. We present SMEPilot, an LLM inference engine that selects CPU-only, SME-only, or cooperative SME+CPU execution for each operator shape. SMEPilot partitions matrix work across SME and CPU cores at tile granularity, overlaps SME-suitable matrix stages with CPU-suitable vector stages in attention, and maintains layout state so packed tensor representations are reused rather than repeatedly rebuilt on critical paths. Across Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-30BA3B on phone, PC, and server platforms, SMEPilot improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 3.94$\times$.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

How fast can you find a good hypothesis?

arXiv:2509.03734v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the hypothesis selection problem, we are given sample and query access to finite set of candidate distributions (hypotheses), $\mathcal{H} = \{H_1, \ldots, H_n\}$, and samples from an unknown distribution $P$, both over a domain $\mathcal{X}$. The goal is to output a distribution $Q$ whose distance to $P$ is comparable to that of the nearest hypothesis in $\mathcal{H}$. Specifically, if the minimum distance is $\mathsf{OPT}$, we aim to output $Q$ such that, with probability at least $1-\delta$, its total variation distance to $P$ is at most $C \cdot \mathsf{OPT} + \varepsilon$. The optimal approximation for proper algorithms (where $Q \in \mathcal{H}$) is $C=3$ using $\Theta(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$ and for improper algorithms (where $Q$ is not necessarily in $\mathcal{H}$) is $C=2$ using $\tilde{\Theta}(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$. In the improper setting, the algorithm achieving $C=2$ [Bousquet, Braverman, Kol, Efremenko, Moran, FOCS 2021] runs in time which grows polynomially with $|\mathcal{X}|$ – it does not run in finite time for real-valued distributions. A promising path towards improved runtime is to consider improper algorithms which output a mixture $Q$ of the hypotheses as such a distribution can be represented in $n$ words of memory. We show (1) a lower bound that no algorithm which outputs a mixture can achieve approximation better than $C = 3-2/n$ unless the number of samples is polynomial in $|\mathcal{X}|$, as well as (2) an algorithm which runs in time $poly(n)$ and achieves the same approximation guarantee. In the proper setting, [Aliakbarpour, Bun, Smith, NeurIPS 2024] provided an algorithm with $C=3$ running in $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta^3\varepsilon^3))$ time. We improve this time complexity to $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta \varepsilon^2))$, significantly reducing the dependence on the confidence and error parameters.

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

AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward

arXiv:2606.19630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The March 2020 INCOSE INSIGHT special issue on AI and Systems Engineering (SE) became the most downloaded issue in the publication's history and launched a research community that now draws over 250 registrants to its annual workshop. In this article, we trace the progress in AI and SE across three phases (labeled here foundational, applied, and LLM inflection) based on the authors' reading of the field's core papers, and describe our opinions of where the community has converged and where critical gaps remain. Separately, a human-AI agreement literature review leveraging both human expertise and six AI models was performed to assess the relevance of 1,712 INCOSE INSIGHT articles and 889 SERC publications. The results identify five critical research gaps and offer guidance for practitioners navigating AI adoption, assurance, and workforce transformation in SE. We share the agreement data and the AI4SE/SE4AI Explorer web application so readers can compare their own relevance judgments with the human and AI raters.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

RAMAC: Multimodal Risk-Aware Offline Reinforcement Learning and the Role of Behavior Regularization

arXiv:2510.02695v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In safety-critical domains where online data collection is infeasible, offline reinforcement learning (RL) is attractive only if policies achieve high returns without catastrophic lower-tail risk. Prior work on risk-averse offline RL achieves safety at the cost of either (i) value/model-based pessimism or (ii) restricted policy classes that limit expressiveness, whereas diffusion/flow-based expressive generative policies have largely been used in risk-neutral settings. We introduce Risk-Aware Multimodal Actor-Critic (RAMAC), a simple, modular, model-free framework that couples an expressive generative actor (e.g., diffusion/flow) with a distributional critic and optimizes a composite objective that combines Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) with behavioral cloning (BC), enabling risk-sensitive learning in complex multimodal scenarios. Since out-of-distribution (OOD) actions are a major driver of catastrophic failures in offline RL, we further provide an objective-level analysis showing that controlling behavior divergence via BC suppresses OOD actions and stabilizes CVaR. Instantiating RAMAC with a diffusion actor, we illustrate these insights on a 2-D risky bandit and evaluate on Stochastic-D4RL, observing consistent gains in $\mathrm{CVaR}_{0.1}$ while maintaining strong returns. The code and experimental results are available on the \href{https://kaifukazawa.github.io/ramac-project/} {project website}

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

Can LLM Coding Agents Reason About Time Series?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for automated decision-making systems in finance, healthcare, or environmental monitoring. Time series data are ubiquitous in these fields, yet hard to process automatically. Can time series be analyzed by LLM agents? We examine three approaches: providing the agent with raw numerical data, using the LLM as a coding agent, or a combination of both. In the coding agent setup, the model iteratively queries the data using Python code. Using two time series understanding benchmarks, we show that agents with code access can outperform models processing raw data by up to 10%. However, even the best performing agent still answers about 22-34% of the questions incorrectly. To get insights into models' strategies and reasoning gaps, we analyze the model outputs with a strong LLM judge. Our analysis reveals that coding agents can select appropriate statistical tests, but often miss important nuances. Meanwhile, models with access to raw data can reach the right conclusions using back-of-the-envelope calculations.