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

On the empirical spectral distribution of matrix perpetuities

arXiv:2605.31054v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study matrix perpetuities, that is, solutions to affine fixed-point equations of the form \[ \mathbf{X} \stackrel{d}{=} \mathbf{A}\,\mathbf{X} \,\mathbf{A}^\top+\mathbf{B},\qquad (\mathbf{A},\mathbf{B})\mbox{ and }\mathbf{X} \mbox{ are independent}, \] with particular emphasis on the empirical spectral distribution of the solution. We first establish existence and uniqueness results by relating the problem to classical vector perpetuities, and then develop tools that preserve the matrix structure under orthogonal invariance. For positive semidefinite, orthogonally invariant models, we obtain power-law tail asymptotics for the expected empirical spectral distribution and show that the tail is governed by the largest eigenvalue. We also prove that, in the subcritical regime, the expected empirical spectral distribution of matrix perpetuities converges weakly, as the dimension tends to infinity, to the distribution of the corresponding free perpetuity. Our results are illustrated by matrix Beta prime perpetuities, for which explicit limiting spectral distributions are available.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Heat kernel estimates for Markov processes with blowing-up jump kernels

arXiv:2512.24807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we establish sharp two-sided heat kernel estimates for a large class of purely discontinuous symmetric Markov processes on closed subsets $F$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, whose jump kernels blow up on a Borel subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. We assume that $F\setminus \Sigma$ is a $\kappa$-fat set and is dense in $F$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work establishing sharp heat kernel estimates for jump processes whose jump kernels blow up on part of the state space. The jump kernels under consideration take the form $J(x,y)=|x-y|^{-d-\alpha}{\mathcal B}(x,y)$, where $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and the function ${\mathcal B}(x,y)$ blows up at a subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. A fundamental obstacle is that the tails of the jump measures are not uniformly bounded, and hence standard techniques in heat kernel analysis do not provide a priori off-diagonal estimates. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a new approach based on weighted integral estimates for the heat kernel that are sensitive to both the blow-up behavior of the jump kernel and the geometry of $F\setminus \Sigma$. Examples of processes falling within our general framework include traces of isotropic $\alpha$-stable processes in $C^{1,\rm Dini}$ sets, processes in Lipschitz sets arising in connection with the nonlocal Neumann problem, and a large class of resurrected self-similar processes in the closed upper half-space.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Allure of Craquelure: A Variational-Generative Approach to Crack Detection in Paintings

Recent advances in imaging technologies, deep learning and numerical performance have enabled non-invasive detailed analysis of artworks, supporting their documentation and conservation. In particular, automated detection of craquelure in digitized paintings is crucial for assessing degradation and guiding restoration, yet remains challenging due to the possibly complex scenery and the visual similarity between cracks and crack-like artistic features such as brush strokes or hair. We propose a hybrid approach that models crack detection as an inverse problem, decomposing an observed image into a crack-free painting and a crack component. A deep generative model is employed as powerful prior for the underlying artwork, while crack structures are captured using a Mumford–Shah-type variational functional together with a crack prior. Joint optimization yields a pixel-level map of crack localizations in the painting.

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

An affordable hardware-aware neural architecture search for deploying convolutional neural networks on ultra-low-power computing platforms

arXiv:2606.16290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS) allows the integration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in microcontrollers devices by automatically designing neural architectures that can fit prearranged hardware constraints. However, state-of-the-art HW-NAS target high-performance microcontrollers, whose power consumption does not meet sensing nodes requirements. This work presents a HW-NAS generating tiny CNNs that can run on ultra-low-power microcontrollers, featuring a lightweight search procedure enabling its execution even on embedded devices. Empirical results on three well-known benchmarks for tiny computer vision proved that the proposed HW-NAS was able to generate tiny CNNs while preserving state-of-the-art classification accuracy.

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

Are Tabular Foundation Models Robust to Realistic Query Distribution Shifts in Microbiome Data?

arXiv:2606.24995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular foundation models (TFMs) achieve strong performance on microbiome abundance data, yet their robustness under realistic distribution shift remains poorly characterized. We introduce a benchmark that evaluates the robustness of TFMs to biologically inspired perturbations across six gut microbiome datasets spanning four disease contexts. In this in-context learning setting, models receive unperturbed support sets as context and are evaluated on perturbed query samples. To isolate robustness beyond "shortcut" features, we preserve the most discriminative taxa and apply three controlled perturbation strategies: (i) removal of high-abundance (uninformative) taxa, (ii) sparsification via increased zero-inflation, and (iii) zero-imputation via spurious non-zero injections. Our results show that protecting discriminative features is insufficient to guarantee stability under support-query shift: across datasets, all perturbations degrade model performance, with zero-imputation consistently the most harmful, indicating that corrupting global feature structure can break generalization even when key taxa are retained. Sparsification disproportionately affects TFMs relative to a classical random forest baseline, suggesting greater sensitivity to zero-inflation-type shifts. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/UMMISCO/metagenomics-fm/.

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

Context-Aware Prediction of Student Quiz Performance with Multimodal Textbook Features

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Educational platforms often predict student performance from prior interactions, but the assessment content itself also varies in linguistic and visual complexity. This paper studies whether lightweight content features extracted from CourseKata chapter-review questions improve prediction of end-of-chapter quiz scores beyond a student's average prior exercise performance. The study combines 2023 CourseKata student response data with chapter-level text features from review-question wording and image features from textbook visuals. Across 4,742 student-chapter observations from 562 class-student IDs, adding content features improves student-grouped five-fold quiz prediction performance by 9.1% relative to a prior-performance baseline. In leave-chapter-out validation, text features reduce prediction error relative to the baseline, while image-containing models have higher error. This paper suggests that a context-aware model adds useful signal about the text and visual features of questions to better predict student quiz performance compared with using past student performance alone.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

How to Score Experts for One-Shot MoE Expert Pruning: A Unified Formulation and Selection Principle

arXiv:2606.15716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models reduce per-token computation through sparse expert activation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making one-shot expert pruning a practical approach for reducing memory usage. Although effective, existing criteria are largely heuristic, and no single criterion is universally optimal. Thus, establishing a principle for selecting pruning criteria suited to different deployment objectives remains an important yet largely underexplored problem in one-shot expert pruning. To this end, we introduce a unified formulation for one-shot MoE expert pruning organized around three factors: routing frequency, gate weighting, and activation strength. The formulation yields a criteria selection principle: task-agnostic pruning should favor routed-token-averaged, gate-free activation-based criteria, whereas task-specific pruning can benefit from retaining routing-frequency and gate-weight information. Beyond this principle, the formulation also provides a systematic view of existing heuristic criteria and gives rise to two new task-agnostic criteria, Mean Activation Norm (MAN) and Mean Squared Activation Norm (MSAN). Across four representative MoE models and 16 diverse benchmarks, MAN and MSAN are consistently strong in the task-agnostic setting, obtain the top-two average ranks, and improve average performance by up to 8.8 points over the strongest baseline.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Page image classifier fine-tuned on century-spanning archives of scanned documents for further content-specific processing

arXiv:2606.07558v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Purpose: Digitization projects in the humanities produce vast, heterogeneous archives of historical documents, making manual sorting impractical at scale. This work addresses the need for an automated system to classify scanned page images based on visual content type - text, tables, and graphics - enabling content-specific downstream processing such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or structured data extraction. Methods: An image classification system was developed and evaluated on a dataset of over 48,000 annotated historical page images from century-old Czech archaeological archives, refined through four successive annotation stages with domain-expert review. A Random Forest Classifier baseline was established using hand-crafted image features. Subsequently, deep learning architectures were fine-tuned and compared: Convolutional Neural Networks (EfficientNetV2, RegNetY), Vision and Document Image Transformers (ViT, DiT), and multimodal CLIP models. An 11-category label scheme was designed collaboratively with domain experts and evaluated via five-fold cross-validation. Results: The feature-based baseline achieved approximately 75% accuracy. Fine-tuned CNNs and Transformers substantially outperformed it, with RegNetY-16GF achieving 99.16% and ViT-large 99.12% Top-1 accuracy on the held-out test set. CLIP ViT-B/16 reached 99.14% with optimized text descriptions. Conclusion: Image-only models, particularly RegNetY-16GF, deliver near-perfect classification accuracy and produce consistent labels across 649,508 unlabeled archival pages with over 90% inter-model agreement. Fine-tuned CLIP, despite competitive test-set accuracy, showed under 65% agreement with image-only models on unlabeled data, making it less suitable for deployment. The final models, annotated dataset, and software are publicly available under open-source licenses.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Method comparisons for differentiation of Schizophrenia and Bipolar based on rs-fMRI Intrinsic and Functional Networks

Psychosis as a symptom manifests in schizophenia and bipolar disorder, two highly heterogeneous psychiatric illnesses with overlapping clinical manifestations. Resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rsfMRI), represents a promising tool for identifying objective biomarkers of functional brain alterations to aid differential diagnosis. In this work, we comparatively evaluate multiple rs-fMRI representations for differentiating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using intrinsic connectivity network (ICN) temporal profiles and several functional network connectivity (FNC) approaches, including static, dynamic, and high-order connectivity analyses. The study was conducted on a cohort of 371 subjects with psychosis, while evaluation was performed using a separate held-out cohort of 315 subjects. We investigated convolutional neural network architectures applied to ICN temporal profiles, spectrograms, and scalograms, alongside classical machine learning models trained on connectivity-derived features. Across the evaluated approaches, ICN temporal profiles provided the most consistent discriminative performance, with a 1D convolutional neural network achieving the strongest overall results under the benchmark protocol. Among connectivity-based methods, static functional connectivity generally outperformed dynamic and high-order representations, suggesting that increased representational complexity did not necessarily translate into improved generalization. Although the obtained classification performance remained modest, the results highlight the challenges of robust psychosis differentiation using rs-fMRI while emphasizing the relative stability of low-order connectivity representations and temporal ICN features. These findings contribute to ongoing efforts toward reproducible and interpretable neuroimaging biomarkers for psychiatric disorders.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Low-Cost High-Order Singular Value Decomposition for Tensor-Based Reconstruction from Sparse Sensor Measurements: Urban Flow and Air-Quality Applications

arXiv:2606.24989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Urban flow and air-quality simulations generate high-dimensional datasets describing velocity and pollutant transport across multiple spatial, temporal, and physical-variable dimensions. Reconstructing these fields from sparse sensor measurements is a fundamental challenge in environmental monitoring, digital twins, forecasting, and data assimilation. Existing low-cost reconstruction approaches are commonly based on matrix decompositions, which require multidimensional datasets to be flattened into two-dimensional snapshot matrices, thereby discarding important structural information. This work introduces the low-cost High-Order Singular Value Decomposition (lcHOSVD), a novel tensor-based sparse-sensing reconstruction framework for high-dimensional environmental fields. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first methodology that combines sparse sensing and HOSVD for field reconstruction. Unlike matrix-based approaches, lcHOSVD preserves the natural tensor structure of the data, enabling the exploitation of correlations across spatial, temporal, and physical-variable dimensions while substantially reducing the computational requirements of conventional HOSVD. The methodology is applied to urban flow and air-quality datasets, where three-dimensional velocity and pollutant concentration fields are reconstructed using only 1-4% of the available spatial locations. While lcSVD provides larger computational speed-ups, lcHOSVD consistently achieves lower reconstruction errors in configurations characterized by strong multidimensional coupling and heterogeneous dynamics across dimensions. Additional sensor-anisotropy analyses demonstrate that the tensor formulation is significantly more robust to uneven sensor distributions, a common situation in practical environmental monitoring networks.

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

Cognitive Trajectory Modeling: Quantifying Human-AI Co-Creation through Cognitively Grounded Interaction Trajectories

arXiv:2606.15358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Co-creative AI research increasingly seeks methods capable of representing how interaction dynamics evolve through time. While many existing approaches focus on observable interaction characteristics, interaction metrics, behavioral coding schemes, or activity traces, these methods often struggle to capture higher-order interaction dynamics, including how collaborative processes reorganize, stabilize, regulate, and evolve through time. This paper introduces Cognitive Trajectory Modeling (CTM) as a cognitive theory of interaction dynamics that conceptualizes cognition, interaction, and creative processes as temporally organized trajectories unfolding across cognitively meaningful attractor landscapes. CTM builds upon the theoretical foundations of the Enactive Model of Creativity and Creative Sense-Making (CSM), revisiting the role of sense-making curves and cognitive trajectories in representing co-creative interaction dynamics. We formalize this perspective through the Cognitive Trajectory Principle, which states that temporal representations are only theoretically interpretable as cognitive trajectories when their underlying states possess directional cognitive meaning. Building on this principle, CTM generalizes the notion of cognitive trajectories beyond any particular coding scheme and provides a broader framework for modeling interaction dynamics through trajectories unfolding across meaningful attractor landscapes. We further distinguish cognitive trajectories from interaction traces and situate CTM within a broader hierarchy of cognitive, interaction, and domain dynamics. More broadly, we argue that understanding co-creative systems requires methods capable of modeling how cognition and interaction dynamics unfold through time. CTM provides a foundation for studying interaction dynamics across co-creative AI and human-AI interaction.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Simulation of Non-Markovian Quantum Accelerated Dynamics via Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation

arXiv:2606.20024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation (TFSE) is an effective tool for simulating the dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems. The Quantum Speed Limit (QSL) time characterizes the minimum time required for the evolution of a non-Markovian quantum system. In this paper, Wei's TFSE is employed to simulate the non-Markovian quantum accelerated evolution process in the Resonant Dissipative Jaynes-Cummings (RDJC) model. By solving the QSL time of a time-fractional single-qubit open system, the enhancement mechanism of the system evolution speed induced by the non-Markovian memory effects of the environment is revealed. Further studies show that the optimized acceleration of the system evolution can be achieved by jointly regulating the fractional order, coupling strength, and photon number. Comparative analyses indicate that Wei's TFSE can accurately capture the non-Markovian accelerated dynamical features of the system over the entire fractional order range, whereas Naber's TFSE is applicable only within a limited fractional order interval. In addition, the comparisons of the average simulation time for calculating the dynamical trajectory of the excited-state probability demonstrate that Wei's TFSE has a significant simulation advantage in computational efficiency. Therefore, Wei's TFSE is more accurate and efficient for simulating the accelerated dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the structure of the sandpile identity element on Sierpinski gasket graphs

arXiv:2603.12006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the identity of the abelian sandpile group of finite approximation graphs of the Sierpinski gasket, and we show that the second-order term in the scaling limit converges to the path distance to the nearest corner on the Sierpinski gasket. The proof relies on a decomposition of the identity of the sandpile group into the sum of a constant function and the Laplacian of the graph distance on the approximating graphs.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Zero-Inflated Gaussian Distributions Enable Parameter-Space Sparsity in Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a powerful class of evolutionary methods for black-box optimization, especially when little is known about the structure of the objective. Whereas classical evolutionary algorithms rely on hand-designed mutation and crossover operators, hard to devise for unknown problem structures, and a source of bias, EDAs sidestep operator design entirely: they fit a probability distribution to the best individuals and sample the next generation from it. EDAs are well established on continuous parameter spaces, but they have not previously been generalized to sparse ones, in which most coefficients of a good solution are exactly zero. Existing sparse black-box optimizers therefore reintroduce exactly what EDAs were designed to avoid: hand-crafted sparsity operators, bi-level schemes alternating between support set and active values, zeroing thresholds, and other baked-in assumptions. We close this gap by proposing multivariate zero-inflated Gaussian (ZIG) distributions as EDA sampling laws. A latent Gaussian model with separate indicator and value dimensions represents sparsity patterns, correlations among active parameters, and the interactions between the two, so sparsity patterns and active values are optimized jointly, hierarchy-free. We show that the latent parameters of this model are identifiable from observed samples, unlike in the missing-data settings where related constructions originate, and introduce practical amortized inversion-based estimators for them. The estimators accurately recover latent correlation structures, and on the Lunar Lander benchmark the resulting ZIG-EDA converges faster and reaches higher final returns than a dense Gaussian EDA, a hand-crafted sparse evolutionary algorithm, and an ad-hoc sparse EDA, while finding controllers with only a small fraction of parameters active.

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

Neural ensemble Kalman filter: Data assimilation for compressible flows with shocks

arXiv:2602.23461v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) for compressible flows with shocks is challenging because many classical DA methods generate spurious oscillations and nonphysical features near uncertain shocks. We focus here on the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). We show that the poor performance of the EnKF may be attributed to the bimodal forecast distribution that can arise in the vicinity of an uncertain shock location; this violates the assumptions underpinning the EnKF, which assume a forecast which is close to Gaussian. To address this issue we introduce the new neural EnKF. The basic idea is to systematically embed neural function approximations within ensemble DA by mapping the forecast ensemble of shocked flows to the parameter space (weights and biases) of a deep neural network (NN) and to subsequently perform DA in that space. The nonlinear mapping encodes sharp and smooth flow features in an ensemble of NN parameters. Neural EnKF updates are therefore well-behaved only if the NN parameters vary smoothly within the neural representation of the forecast ensemble. We show that such a smooth variation of network parameters can be enforced via physics-informed transfer learning, and demonstrate that in so-doing the neural EnKF avoids the spurious oscillations and nonphysical features that plague the EnKF. The applicability of the neural EnKF is demonstrated through a series of systematic numerical experiments with the inviscid Burgers' equation, the Sod shock tube, and a two-dimensional blast wave.

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

Experimental Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in a Dephased Photonic Quantum Walk

arXiv:2606.15935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamical phase transitions in open quantum systems govern how non-equilibrium states relax toward a stationary state. We study these transitions experimentally using a discrete-time photonic quantum walk on a three-node graph. A tunable synthetic gauge flux and calibrated dephasing allow us to control time-reversal symmetry and the detailed balance properties of the effective Markovian dynamics. With detailed balance, we observe a first-order dynamical phase transition marked by a crossing of real Liouvillian eigenvalues. When detailed balance is broken, we observe a second-order dynamical phase transition at an exceptional point where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce. By progressively reducing the dephasing strength, we track the crossover toward the quantum-coherent regime and determine that the transitions persist down to a finite threshold. Our results link Liouvillian spectral topology to relaxation criticality and demonstrate a controllable platform for engineered dissipative dynamics.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Convergence rate of Euler–Maruyama scheme to the invariant probability measure under total variation distance for the SDEs

arXiv:2505.04218v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article shows the geometric decay rate of Euler-Maruyama scheme for one-dimensional stochastic differential equation towards its invariant probability measure under total variation distance. Firstly, the existence and uniqueness of invariant probability measure and the uniform geometric ergodicity of the chain are studied through introduction of non-atomic Markov chains. Secondly, the equivalent conditions for uniform geometric ergodicity of the chain are discovered, by constructing a split Markov chain based on the original Euler-Maruyama scheme.

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

AI Economist Agent: An Agentic Framework for Model-Grounded Economic Analysis with RAG, Knowledge Graphs, and Large Language Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20041v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a model-grounded RAG-based AI economist with an agentic framework for economic scenario analysis using large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. While LLMs can generate fluent economic narratives, economists are often required to make economic claims grounded by economic theory and real-world data. Based on this motivation, this study proposes an RAG-based AI economist, which utilizes knowledge graphs including economic data and theory and LLM-based agents to plan the analysis, retrieve relevant evidence, select appropriate models, and generate reports. In our framework, we do not produce quantitative claims directly with the language model alone; instead, we generate narratives grounded in explicit model-based computations and linked to the retrieved evidence via AI agents. We refer to our framework as an AI economist agent. We evaluate the AI economist agent in two applications: economist report generation for U.S. inflation persistence and Federal Reserve policy, and bank stress-test narrative generation for U.S. commercial real estate refinancing stress. The results illustrate how grounding the generated reports improves their economic coherence and traceability.

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

Pseudo-Formalization for Automatic Proof Verification

arXiv:2605.20531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable verification of proofs remains a bottleneck for training and evaluating AI systems on hard mathematical reasoning. Fully formal proofs, in languages like Lean, are easy to verify because they are unambiguous and modular. Most proofs, particularly those written by AI systems, have neither property, and translating them into formal languages remains challenging in many frontier math settings. We propose Pseudo-Formalization (PF), a proof format that captures the modularity and precision of formal proofs while retaining the flexibility of natural language. A Pseudo-Formal proof is decomposed into self-contained modules, each stating its premises, conclusion, and proof in natural language. To verify the correctness of a regular natural language proof, an LLM translates it to Pseudo-Formal and then verifies each module independently, an algorithm we call Block Verification (BV). We evaluate PF+BV on two benchmarks spanning olympiad and research-level mathematics, where it pareto-dominates LLM-as-judge baselines on error-finding precision and recall. To support future work, we release our research-level proof verification benchmark ArxivMathGradingBench.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Metabolic cost of information processing in Poisson variational autoencoders

arXiv:2602.13421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Computation in biological systems is fundamentally energy-constrained, yet standard theories of computation treat energy as freely available. Here, we argue that variational free energy minimization under a Poisson assumption offers a principled path toward an energy-aware theory of computation. Our key observation is that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence term in the Poisson free energy objective becomes proportional to the prior firing rates of model neurons, yielding an emergent metabolic cost term that penalizes high baseline activity. This structure couples an abstract information-theoretic quantity – the *coding rate* – to a concrete biophysical variable – the *firing rate* – which enables a trade-off between coding fidelity and energy expenditure. Such a coupling arises naturally in the Poisson variational autoencoder (P-VAE) – a brain-inspired generative model that encodes inputs as discrete spike counts and recovers a spiking form of *sparse coding* as a special case – but is absent from standard Gaussian VAEs. To demonstrate that this metabolic cost structure is unique to the Poisson formulation, we compare the P-VAE against Grelu-VAE, a Gaussian VAE with ReLU rectification applied to latent samples, which controls for the non-negativity constraint. Across a systematic sweep of the KL term weighting coefficient $\beta$ and latent dimensionality, we find that increasing $\beta$ monotonically increases sparsity and reduces average spiking activity in the P-VAE. In contrast, Grelu-VAE representations remain unchanged, confirming that the effect is specific to Poisson statistics rather than a byproduct of non-negative representations. These results establish Poisson variational inference as a promising foundation for a resource-constrained theory of computation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

FedReLa: Imbalanced Federated Learning via Re-Labeling

Federated learning has emerged as the foremost approach for decentralized model training with privacy preservation. The global class imbalance and cross-client data heterogeneity naturally coexist, and the mismatch between local and global imbalances exacerbates the performance degradation of the aggregated model. The agnosticism of global class distribution poses significant challenges for data-level methods, especially under extreme conditions with severe class absence across clients. In this paper, we propose FedReLa, a novel data-level approach that tackles the coexistence of data heterogeneity and class imbalance in federated learning. By re-labeling samples with a feature-dependent label re-allocator, FedReLa corrects biased global decision boundaries without requiring knowledge of the global class distribution. This modular, model-agnostic approach can be integrated with algorithmic methods to deliver consistent improvements without additional communication overhead. Through extensive experiments, our method significantly improves the accuracy of minority classes and the overall accuracy on stepwise-imbalanced and long-tailed datasets, outperforming the previous state of the art.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SplatPainter: Interactive Authoring of 3D Gaussians from 2D Edits via Test-Time Training

The rise of 3D Gaussian Splatting has revolutionized photorealistic 3D asset creation, yet a critical gap remains for their interactive refinement and editing. Existing approaches based on diffusion or optimization are ill-suited for this task, as they are often prohibitively slow, destructive to the original asset's identity, or lack the precision for fine-grained control. To address this, we introduce SplatPainter, a state-aware feedforward model that enables continuous editing of 3D Gaussian assets from user-provided 2D view(s). Our method directly predicts updates to the attributes of a compact, feature-rich Gaussian representation and leverages Test-Time Training to create a state-aware, iterative workflow. The versatility of our approach allows a single architecture to perform diverse tasks, including high-fidelity local detail refinement, local paint-over, and consistent global recoloring, all at interactive speeds, paving the way for fluid and intuitive 3D content authoring.

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

A Definition of Good Explanations and the Challenges Explaining LLM Outputs

arXiv:2606.14838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How to define a good explanation is a long-standing philosophical debate which has found recent renewed interest in the context of AI outputs. Explainability is crucial for AI adoption in many contexts, but in order to produce good explanations of AI systems, we must first have an understanding of what good explanations are. In this paper we propose a definition inspired by the notion of counterfactual explanations, however we argue that one must also take into account the interlocutor's prior beliefs in each fact that could be offered in an explanation. We explore the ramifications of this definition for AI explainability and, in particular, why LLM outputs are difficult to produce good explanations for.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Steering the Noise: Turning Random Perturbations into Effective Descent for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization avoids this overhead by estimating gradients through forward passes alone, yet it typically converges slowly because random Gaussian perturbations yield high-variance gradient estimates in high-dimensional parameter spaces. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework that turns random perturbations into more effective descent directions. The key idea is to draw a small pool of candidate perturbations, evaluate their loss values, and then select or combine those that are best aligned with the optimization objective. We develop two instantiations of this idea: MeZO-GV, which forms a guiding vector from the contrast between low-loss and high-loss perturbation groups, and MeZO-Greedy, which keeps the single best perturbation within a fixed evaluation budget. We theoretically show that both strategies yield a larger per-step reduction in the objective than standard ZO estimation, leading to improved convergence rates. Experiments on LLMs of different scales and architectures confirm that the proposed methods integrate naturally with existing ZO optimizers and consistently improve convergence speed and task accuracy. On OPT-13B, our approach outperforms all ZO baselines across 11 benchmarks and exceeds gradient-based methods on 9 of them, while retaining the memory efficiency of forward-only optimization.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Talking to Your Data: Exploring Embodied Conversation as an Interface for Personal Health Reflection

arXiv:2606.17767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personal health data from wearables are typically presented through dashboards of charts and summary statistics, requiring users to actively interpret patterns and implications. We explore an alternative interaction paradigm: engaging with personal health data through an embodied conversational agent that facilitates objective data reflection in dialogue with the user. We present a system that combines lightweight preprocessing of wearable data with a Unity-based embodied character. Internally, the system follows a dual-agent design in which an Observer agent extracts descriptive statistics and temporal trends, and a Presenter agent communicates these findings through "spoken statistics," intentionally refraining from clinical advice to isolate the impact of the interaction modality. We evaluate this approach through a simulated-self user study (N=5) using a within-subject design. Participants adopted health personas and goals derived from the LifeSnaps dataset to compare traditional dashboard exploration with embodied conversational reflection. Our evaluation focuses on perceived understanding, the specificity of generated actions, and the cognitive shift from passive viewing to active sensemaking. The paper contributes a functional prototype, a design pattern for objective health data narrative generation, and early empirical insights into how embodiment affects the interpretation of personal health metrics.