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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MapSatisfyBench: Benchmarking Satisfaction-Aware Map Agents through Behavior-Grounded Implicit Decision Factors

arXiv:2606.17453v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents are increasingly integrated into map services. Since map services are embedded in everyday-life scenarios rather than professional task settings, users often express their needs informally, resulting in underspecified queries with many unspoken needs, namely, implicit decision factors that are critical for user satisfaction. Although clarification is an effective way to mitigate this issue, it increases user burden in daily interaction, and a capable agent should first proactively recover such factors from available information sources. However, evaluating this ability is challenging. The first challenge is to determine which implicit decision factors are suitable for evaluation. A factor is evaluable only if it affects user acceptance and can be recovered from information available to the agent before it responds. Second, user satisfaction cannot be reliably represented by a single reference answer, requiring a benchmark that converts satisfaction-relevant factors into objective and quantifiable evaluation targets. To address these challenges, we propose a restore-identify-filter framework that reconstructs complete user needs from behavior-chain evidence, identifies implicit decision factors, and retains only those supported by pre-query evidence. Building on this methodology, we construct MapSatisfyBench from large-scale, real-world anonymized user data and annotate ground truth from five dimensions and enables full-chain evaluation of satisfaction-aware map agents. Experiments show that current agents generally perform well on explicit task completion, but remain limited in satisfying implicit decision factors and proactively acquiring the evidence needed for satisfaction-aware decisions. These findings establish MapSatisfyBench as a benchmark for shifting map-agent evaluation from task completion toward satisfaction-aware spatial decision making.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Cross-Model Disagreement as a Label-Free Correctness Signal

arXiv:2603.25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment. Existing approaches rely on a model's own uncertainty – such as token entropy or confidence scores – but these signals fail critically on the most dangerous failure mode: confident errors, where a model is wrong but certain. In this work we introduce cross-model disagreement as a correctness indicator – a simple, training-free signal that can be dropped into existing production systems, routing pipelines, and deployment monitoring infrastructure without modification. Given a model's generated answer, cross-model disagreement computes how surprised or uncertain a second verifier model is when reading that answer via a single forward pass. No generation from the verifying model is required, and no correctness labels are needed. We instantiate this principle as Cross-Model Perplexity (CMP), which measures the verifying model's surprise at the generating model's answer tokens, and Cross-Model Entropy (CME), which measures the verifying model's uncertainty at those positions. Both CMP and CME outperform within-model uncertainty baselines across benchmarks spanning reasoning, retrieval, and mathematical problem solving (MMLU, TriviaQA, and GSM8K). On MMLU, CMP achieves a mean AUROC of 0.75 against a within-model entropy baseline of 0.59. These results establish cross-model disagreement as a practical, training-free approach to label-free correctness estimation, with direct applications in deployment monitoring, model routing, selective prediction, data filtering, and scalable oversight of production language model systems.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Speed Limit in a Far-from-Equilibrium Bose Gas: Symmetry and Dynamical Decoherence

arXiv:2605.11895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting universal transport coefficients in far-from-equilibrium quantum systems remains a fundamental challenge. A paradigmatic example is the non-thermal fixed point (NTFP) of isolated Bose gases, where coherence spreads as $\ell^2(t) = C\hbar t/m$ with a universal constant $C$. While the scaling exponent $z=2$ is well established, the amplitude $C$ has remained elusive because the underlying particle cascade $n(k)\sim k^{-4}$ leads to a divergent kinetic energy, threatening the very existence of a constant speed limit. Here we resolve this paradox and present the first analytical, parameter-free prediction of a universal amplitude $C$. A deep interplay between symmetry and dissipation is uncovered. The emergent weak U(1) symmetry at the NTFP enforces a conserved total current, forcing the low-energy phase dynamics to obey a diffusive Langevin equation with noise entering as the divergence of a stochastic current. This structure, combined with dynamical decoherence of high-momentum modes, yields a universal power-law momentum distribution $\tilde{f}(v)\sim(1+v^2)^{-3}$ (with $v=k\ell$) that naturally regularizes the ultraviolet divergence. From this, a parameter-free geometric baseline $C=3$ is obtained, independent of microscopic details. The experimental value $C=3.4(3)$ [Martirosyan et al., Nature 647, 608 (2025)] is then shown to be quantitatively consistent with universal logarithmic corrections arising from a marginally irrelevant coupling at the fixed point. A new paradigm is thus established for predicting transport coefficients in strongly correlated non-equilibrium systems: symmetry constraints determine the low-energy effective theory, dynamical decoherence provides a natural ultraviolet completion, and scaling analysis delivers testable predictions moving beyond scaling exponents to quantitative amplitude prediction.

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

Density estimation for Hellinger via minimum-distance estimators: mixtures of Gaussians, log-concave, and more

arXiv:2606.11469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the task of density estimation, where we hope to accurately estimate a probability density from $n$ samples. A textbook method for density estimation in total variation distance is the minimum-distance estimator approach, where we conclude both the algorithm and the analysis merely from bounding the VC dimension of a particular concept class (the so-called Yatracos class). While this technique has originally yielded sharp guarantees primarily for total variation distance, in this work we extend the minimum-distance estimator approach for learning within Hellinger distance. Our main observation is that we may produce an analogous recipe for Hellinger (where we only require bounding the VC dimension of a related concept class) by drawing connections to recent results yielding reverse data processing inequalities. This recipe is flexible enough to accommodate fast algorithms originally designed for total variation distance; by modifying the approach of Acharya et al. (2017) we conclude the first near-linear time algorithm for learning classes including univariate mixtures of log-concave densities and mixtures of Gaussians (with arbitrary variances), with near-optimal sample complexity.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

GrowthHacker: Automated Off-Policy Evaluation Optimization Using Code-Modifying LLM Agents

With data-driven development now widely adopted, online A/B testing is an established method for measuring the effects of new technologies. However, deploying online experiments demands resources for design, implementation, and deployment, and may negatively impact users (e.g., unsafe or unethical outcomes) while requiring weeks of data collection. To address this, the growing research area of off-policy evaluation (OPE), or offline A/B testing, assesses new technologies offline using previously collected logged data. OPE is also a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and is important where online testing is expensive or risky, such as healthcare, recommender systems, education, and robotics. Despite advances in code-generation large language models (LLMs) and agentic workflows, little is known about whether and how LLMs and LLM-based agents can automatically optimize OPE implementations. We propose GrowthHacker, a benchmark that evaluates baseline LLMs and LLM-based agents on large-scale public datasets. GrowthHacker autonomously and iteratively modifies code, runs OPE, and uses the metrics to guide subsequent optimization. We evaluate methods on Open Bandit Pipeline (OBP) and Scope-RL, and develop a two_agent framework that addresses limitations of existing frameworks while reducing complexity. Across both libraries, two_agent shows the highest reliability (98.1%-100% success rate) and positive-outcome rate (78%), with a median improvement of 4.4% among positive outcomes; CrewAI achieves the highest average improvement (37.9%) and is the only framework with zero extreme-value failures. AutoGen and Default each reach 65% positive-outcome rates. These results establish the feasibility of using LLM-based agents as automated "growth hackers" to continuously improve OPE systems, with implications for scaling data-driven decision-making where manual optimization is expensive.

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

Virtual Sensing to Enable Real-Time Monitoring of Inaccessible Locations & Unmeasurable Parameters

arXiv:2412.00107v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-time monitoring of safety-critical interior states remains an open problem in energy systems where physical instrumentation is infeasible. Existing approaches rely on explicit governing equations, finite-dimensional state vectors, or per-instance retraining, which prevents mesh-independent, field-level inference at arbitrary interior coordinates under real-time constraints. We introduce operator-based virtual sensing for nuclear-grade thermal-fluid systems: we use the neural-operator framework to learn solution operators that map sparse boundary measurements to coupled internal fields in physically inaccessible regions, framing the problem class explicitly to distinguish it from classical state estimation and pointwise soft sensing. We instantiate this framework with MIMONet, a branch-trunk operator extended with three practical choices: multi-modal branch encoders for heterogeneous (scalar and function-valued) inputs; multiplicative branch fusion to preserve the bilinear PDE coupling structure; and shared-latent multi-field decoding with per-channel basis projections at the trunk's final layer. Evaluated across escalating complexity, from canonical lid-driven cavity flow to pressurized water reactor subchannels to fully coupled heat exchangers, MIMONet achieves below 5% relative errors and sub-millisecond inference on data-center accelerators (0.35 ms / 46 mJ per heat-exchanger inference on an NVIDIA H200, and sub-millisecond across the A40-H200-GH200 range), while remaining stable under 50% sensor noise. By staying accurate as geometric confinement and physics coupling intensify, MIMONet shows that operator-based virtual sensing can restore observability where physical instrumentation fails, establishing simulation-based feasibility within the evaluated operating envelopes as a step toward future experimental and cross-solver validation for safety-critical energy systems.

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

Scalar-pathway fidelity improves physical accuracy in short-range equivariant interatomic potentials

arXiv:2606.15892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate interatomic potentials enable molecular dynamics of materials, molecules, and interfaces beyond density-functional-theory length and time scales. Equivariant neural network potentials have improved the representation of local geometry. However, their deployable energy surfaces ultimately manifest through invariant scalar channels, whose aggregation and spectral resolution remain comparatively underexamined. Here we use Physics-Aware Neighborhood (PAN) pooling and Physics-Guided Spectral (PGS) mixers as controlled scalar-pathway probes: lightweight, symmetry-preserving modifications that act only on \(\ell=0\) channels while leaving the equivariant tensor backbone unchanged. Using MACE as a high-body-order mechanistic scaffold, PAN adds coordination-sensitive amplitude modulation, whereas PGS augments edge and readout scalar features with radial and tapered spectral bases. Across metallic Ag, covalent Si, a short-range ionic LiF/Li–F subset, and MD17/rMD17 molecules, this scalar-pathway correction reduces MACE force errors by 22–27\% and energy errors by 19–22\%; on systems with stress labels, stress errors decrease by 27–28\%, at approximately 5\% additional inference-FLOPs cost. Directionally consistent gains in Allegro and NequIP further indicate that the correction is portable across distinct short-range equivariant backbones, although effect sizes remain architecture-dependent. These results identify scalar-pathway fidelity as a practical design dimension for short-range equivariant interatomic potentials.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Sample Path Properties of the Fractional Wiener–Weierstrass Bridge II

arXiv:2606.11994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fractional Wiener–Weierstrass bridges are a class of Gaussian processes obtained by replacing trigonometric functions in the construction of classical Weierstrass functions by fractional Brownian bridges. A number of their sample path properties were derived in Schied–Zhang (2024,2026). The analysis in these papers left several open questions, most of which are addressed here. Specifically, we prove that, in the regime in which the Weierstrass mechanism dominates the underlying fractional Brownian bridge, the limiting $b$-adic variation coefficient has an absolutely continuous distribution and is therefore genuinely random. At the critical point between the two roughness regimes, we establish the power-variation formula and the critical $\Phi$-variation limit conjectured in Schied–Zhang (2024). Finally, we derive the Hausdorff dimension for the graphs of the sample paths by proving a conjecture from Schied–Zhang (2026) for the missing high-Hurst case.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ComAct: Reframing Professional Software Manipulation via COM-as-Action Paradigm

Existing computer-use agents remain fundamentally limited in professional software manipulation: GUI-based agents suffer from fragile visual grounding and long-horizon error accumulation, while API-basedapproaches struggle with heterogeneous protocols and inaccessible commercial interfaces. In this work,we identify the Component Object Model (COM) as a unified executable abstraction, proposing COM-as-Action: a new paradigm that reframes professional software interaction as deterministic program synthesisrather than sequential visual control. To validate this paradigm in the most demanding environments, weintroduce ComCADBench, the first benchmark for agents operating real industrial CAD software. Ourexperiments reveal a substantial paradigm gap: frontier proprietary models achieve near-zero successunder GUI-based interaction, whereas COM-based execution yields substantial immediate gains. Tobridge the remaining gap between syntactic correctness and geometric accuracy, we develop ComActor, aself-correcting agent trained through a progressive three-stage framework, alongside ComForge, a scalableplatform for large-scale training in Windows containers. Extensive experiments show that ComActorachieves state-of-the-art performance on ComCADBench, with strong resilience in long-horizon taskswhere baselines collapse, and generalizes to external CAD benchmark.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards an Inferentialist Account of Information Through Proof-theoretic Semantics

arXiv:2605.05368v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Information is one of the most widely-discussed concepts of the current era. However, a great deal of insightful work notwithstanding, it is yet to be given wholly convincing logical or mathematical foundations. Without them, we lack adequate reasoning tools for understanding the complex ecosystems of systems upon which the society depends. We seek to rectify this by taking a first step towards developing an inferentialist semantic theory of information. There are three key interacting components. First, conceptual analysis: the metaphysics of information. Dretske expressed the key concepts of information in terms of intentionality, truth, and transmissibility. We replace truth with inferability, and trace the consequences of this replacement. Second, logic: proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) provides a mathematical-logical realization of inferentialist reasoning. Using P-tS, we develop the first steps towards a mathematical-logical theory of an inferentialist primitive unit of information, the 'inferon'. This proof-theoretic approach counterpoints the model-theoretic view of information articulated in situation theory. Furthermore, we argue that it facilitates addressing all three components of van Benthem and Martinez's categorization of the understandings of information, as range, as correlation, and as code. Our focus is on information-as-correlation. Third, systems: the P-tS tools we develop provide the basis for a mathematical account of distributed systems modelling – a key tool from informatics for understanding the organization of information processing systems. This yields a reasoning-based theory of information flow in models of distributed systems. Overall, we seek to give a conceptually rigorous mathematical-logical account of information and its role within informatics, grounded in inference and reasoning.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Diffusion approximations for interacting stochastic systems with reflection and control

arXiv:2601.05895v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study diffusion approximations for a class of interacting stochastic systems with reflection and control. Motivated by interacting stochastic dynamics subject to feedback mechanisms and boundary constraints, we consider diffusion-scaled stochastic processes incorporating stochastic fluctuations, state-dependent interactions, and reflection. Under suitable assumptions, we establish convergence in distribution of the scaled processes to systems of interacting reflected stochastic differential equations of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type. The limiting dynamics capture key features of constrained multi-agent systems, including mean-reverting behavior, interaction effects, and confinement within bounded domains through Skorokhod reflection. The analysis combines diffusion-scaling arguments, stability estimates, and continuity properties of the Skorokhod map to connect discrete stochastic systems with their reflected diffusion limits. To illustrate the framework, we present numerical examples motivated by crowd dynamics and neural population dynamics. The simulations demonstrate qualitative agreement between the finite stochastic systems and the corresponding reflected diffusion models and illustrate how diffusion approximations can provide tractable descriptions of interacting stochastic systems with constraints.

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

EffGen: Enabling Small Language Models as Capable Autonomous Agents

Most existing language model agentic systems today are built and optimized for large language models (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini) via API calls; while powerful, this approach faces several limitations including high token costs and privacy concerns for sensitive applications. We introduce EffGen, an open-source agentic framework optimized for small language models (SLMs) that enables effective, efficient, and secure local deployment. EffGen makes four major contributions: (1) Enhanced tool-calling with prompt optimization that compresses input prompts by up to 70-80% (and 57% on average across our benchmarks) while preserving task semantics, (2) Intelligent task decomposition that breaks complex queries into parallel or sequential subtasks based on dependencies, (3) Complexity-based routing using five factors to make smart pre-execution decisions, and (4) Unified memory system combining short-term, long-term, and vector-based storage. Additionally, EffGen unifies multiple agent protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP) for cross-protocol communication. Results on 13 benchmarks show EffGen outperforms LangChain, AutoGen, and Smolagents with higher success rates, faster execution, and lower memory. Our results reveal that prompt optimization and complexity routing have complementary scaling behavior: optimization benefits SLMs more (11.2% gain at 1.5B vs 2.4% at 32B), while routing benefits large models more (3.6% at 1.5B vs 7.9% at 32B), providing consistent gains across all scales when combined. EffGen is released under the Apache 2.0 License, ensuring broad accessibility for research and commercial use, with the code available at https://github.com/ctrl-gaurav/effGen, the Python package at https://pypi.org/project/effgen/ (pip install effgen), and the project website and documentation at https://effgen.org/ and https://docs.effgen.org/.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Listening with Attention: Entropy-Guided Explainability for Transformer-Based Audio Models

arXiv:2606.14647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper are highly accurate, but their predictions remain difficult to interpret. Existing explainable AI (XAI) methods often lack faithfulness and precise temporal grounding. We propose Listening with Entropy-guided Attention for Faithful explainability (LEAF-X), a model-intrinsic XAI framework for transformer-based ASR. LEAF-X combines entropy-guided attention weighting, multi-layer attention rollout, and optional causal ablations to identify low-entropy, high-impact heads and layers, producing sparse token-to-frame attributions. Unlike perturbation-based explainers or raw attention maps, LEAF-X exploits the internal structure of encoder-decoder and speech-augmented decoder-only models to generate explanations that better reflect model computation. Results show 32% improved faithfulness, 35-39% stronger locality/sparsity, and the most stable attributions, supporting more transparent and auditable ASR.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Machine-Learned Comorbidity Index

arXiv:2606.17450v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional comorbidity scores (e.g., Charlson and Elixhauser) are widely used for risk adjustment and patient stratification, but they have two key limitations: (i) they are largely mortality-centric and do not align well with other clinical outcomes, and (ii) their linear, rule-based structure cannot capture nonlinear, outcome-specific risk relationships. We propose a Machine-Learned Comorbidity Index (MLCI) that maps diagnosis codes to a single scalar by maximizing the normalized Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (nHSIC) between the learned score and multiple clinical outcomes. MLCI captures nonlinear risk-outcome dependence and is supported by a theory that characterizes when a unified, informative admission-level ordering can be achieved across outcomes. Empirical results on multiple benchmark electronic health record (EHR) datasets show that MLCI outperforms strong baselines across multiple evaluation metrics.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Consistent Evaluation of Operators Involving the Position Operator in the Bloch Representation: Application to the Orbital Moment

arXiv:2606.11679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The position operator plays a central role in condensed-matter observables such as velocity, orbital moment, and electric polarization. In solid-state physics, the evaluation of operators incorporating the position operator has not reached a consensus, as observed in the operator-level discrepancy between the local circulation of Wannier functions and the self-rotation of wave packets. Here, to achieve a consistent evaluation of such operators, we propose three rules for evaluating operators involving the position operator in the Bloch representation. The rules are devised to satisfy physical conditions: independence from the choice of unit cell, preservation of Hermitian conjugacy for the product of operators, and recovery of the correct intraband velocity. We further address the gauge dependence of the position operator and introduce a scheme termed gauge filtration, which systematically removes gauge-dependent contributions from the operators containing the position operator. This methodology ensures that the quantities obtained from the operator evaluation correspond to observable physical phenomena. By applying our framework, we reconcile the results concerning the self-rotation of the wave packet and the local circulation of the Wannier function. We expect our proposal to establish a consistent framework for evaluating operators involving the position operator.

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

Snyk VulnBench JS 1.0: Can LLMs Find the Same Bugs Twice?

arXiv:2606.15762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We ran 300 repeated vulnerability-finding scans to measure how repeatable agentic large language model (LLM) security review is on the same JavaScript code, prompt, and benchmark harness. The headline result is that LLM security findings were unevenly repeatable: reference-matched findings were stable, but extra model reports varied heavily from run to run. Across 250 model runs, 80 of 161 unique unmatched findings appeared in only one of five identical repetitions, while only 22 appeared in all five. By contrast, when Claude matched a Snyk Code reference finding, the behavior was much more stable: 134 of 158 unique reference-matched findings appeared in all five repetitions. The benchmark also shows complementarity. Models consistently found familiar, high-signal exploit shapes, and in one case surfaced a likely Snyk Code product gap. Snyk Code static application security testing (SAST) was deterministic and better at systematically enumerating repeated data-flow sinks. The results support combining agentic LLM review with deterministic SAST rather than treating either technique as a replacement for the other.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Holistic Storage of Verb+Up Phrases in Text-based and Audio-based Language Models

A crucial aspect of linguistic capability is the ability to trade off between stored representations and abstract knowledge: one must retrieve learned representations, but also generate novel ones by applying productive rules. While recent work has examined abstract knowledge in language models, holistic storage of multi-word units has received far less attention. We probe internal representations in text-based LLMs and an ASR model, testing whether V+up phrasal verbs develop distinct representations as a function of frequency and predictability. All models show evidence of holistic storage driven by frequency and predictability, further supporting usage-based theories of language.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Microwave-free vector magnetometry and crystal orientation determination with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers using Bayesian inference

arXiv:2512.13835v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond provide a solid-state platform for quantum sensing. While optically detected magnetic resonance techniques offer high sensitivity, their reliance on microwaves introduces heating and stray electromagnetic fields that can perturb nearby samples. Optical approaches based on cross-relaxation between differently oriented NV centers remove this constraint but have so far required stringent alignment of the external field with crystallographic axes, restricting their practicality. Here we introduce a general framework for microwave-free vector magnetometry at near-zero field that leverages Bayesian inference to extract both the magnetic field vector and the NV orientation directly from photoluminescence maps. An analytical model of cross-relaxation resonances enables efficient inference under arbitrary field and orientation configurations, while naturally incorporating the discrete degeneracies of the NV symmetry. We experimentally demonstrate robust orientation determination and vector-field reconstruction, establishing a general route toward compact and alignment-free NV magnetometers for practical sensing applications.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Experimental Characterization and Modeling of Measurement-Induced State-Transitions in a Fluxonium Superconducting Qubit

arXiv:2606.17866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting qubits are most often measured using dispersive readout, which, ideally, implements a projective quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement. While a larger readout drive can increase the signal and, thus, reduce discrimination errors in the readout, strong microwave drives may also cause non-QND errors by driving the qubit to a state outside the computational subspace. In this work, we experimentally characterize measurement-induced state transitions (MIST) in a fluxonium qubit over its full external flux range. We further numerically calculate the MIST errors, and find that the theory accurately predicts eleven experimentally identified regions with increased MIST. In addition to transitions to higher fluxonium levels, we also find that, at certain flux points, MIST errors are dominated by transitions that include the transmission-line-like array modes of the fluxonium's superinductor. The excellent match between theory and experiment validates that the models accurately predict the occurrence of MIST in these systems, and further highlights the influence of array modes in fluxonium readout.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

RT-Counter: Real-Time Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Text-guided open-vocabulary object counting (TOOC) aims to count objects belonging to the categories specified by natural language descriptions. Although vision-language pre-trained models have been successful applied to TOOC tasks, they still struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and real-time inference requirements in counting scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a real-time TOOC framework, called the Real-Time Counter (RT-Counter), that achieves not only good counting accuracy but also high computational efficiency. RT-Counter designs a novel Visual Prototype Textualization (VPT) module that can project learned visual features into a text feature space and then generate features containing the abstract information that is hard to capture with visual prototypes and the detailed prototype information that is difficult to describe in text, enhancing the object-level visual-language model's counting capabilities. Additionally, RT-Counter incorporates our Weaving Transformer (Weaformer) layers, maintaining high descriptive power at a fraction of the computational cost. The Weaformer layer adopts a novel hybrid attention mechanism that can efficiently weave together local and global visual features. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that RT-Counter successfully breaks the accuracy-speed trade-off in TOOC. While achieving a competitive MAE of 13.30 on FSC147, RT-Counter operates at 112.48 FPS, making it 7.4x faster and over 4$\times$ more parameter-efficient than the existing leading methods in TOOC. Our work aims at balancing high accuracy and real-time performance in TOOC. Code is available at: https://github.com/Jason-Mar1/RT-Counter.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ICA Lens: Interpreting Language Models Without Training Another Dictionary

Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become the standard tool for this purpose, but using them as the default first lens often requires training, storing, and evaluating large overcomplete dictionaries. This bottleneck limits rapid exploration and raises a fundamental question: how much interpretable structure is already visible from activation geometry before training another neural dictionary? Our intuition is simple: many interpretable directions are selective on tokens, and these directions should look less Gaussian than random directions. We therefore revisit independent component analysis (ICA), a classical method for finding non-Gaussian directions, as a compact lens for language-model interpretability. We find that ICA has been underestimated for LLM interpretability, because prior uses often relied on off-the-shelf ICA implementations that are brittle on LLM activations and lacked systematic tools for inspecting and evaluating the recovered directions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ICALens, the first practical workflow for stable, efficient, and auditable ICA analysis of LLM representations. It combines an optimized GPU-parallel FastICA pipeline with LLM-specific stability recipes and better fitting diagnostics, enabling efficient and reliable layer-wise analysis. Across GPT-2 Small, Gemma 2 2B, and Qwen 3.5 2B Base, ICALens efficiently recovers compact, human-interpretable directions without per-layer gradient-based dictionary training. On SAEBench, ICA is competitive with public SAEs in sparse probing and outperforms them in targeted probe perturbation under small-to-medium budgets. These results suggest that ICA should not be viewed as a weak baseline, but as an efficient and complementary first lens for exploring language-model representations.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

UR-BERT: Scaling Text Encoders for Massively Multilingual TTS Through Universal Romanization and Speech Token Prediction

We propose UR-BERT, a Romanized transcription-based text-to-speech (TTS) encoder for massively multilingual TTS systems. Conventional grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P)-based approaches are limited to around 100 languages due to the availability of reliable G2P resources. In contrast, UR-BERT scales to 495 languages by unifying diverse writing systems into a shared Romanization representation. To further enhance phonetic fidelity and text-speech alignment, we introduce a speech token prediction objective during training, which encourages the encoder to learn speech-aware phonetic representations in a data-efficient manner. Experiments show that TTS systems built on UR-BERT consistently outperform recent text encoder baselines across a wide range of languages and resource conditions, and demonstrate strong generalization to unseen languages.

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

Beyond Models: Reflections on Engineering AI-enabled Systems in a Project-Based Course

arXiv:2606.16842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Teaching Software Engineering for AI-enabled systems entails addressing the integration of AI components within full-scale software architectures under realistic constraints. While machine learning courses emphasize model development, students often lack experience in architectural design, deployment, and monitoring of AI-enabled systems. Empirical evaluations of such system-oriented AI courses remain limited. This paper reflects on the design and implementation of a project-based master's-level course titled AI Algorithms: Theory and Engineering, at the University of Bremen, in which students developed a movie recommendation system while making architectural design decisions to address challenges related to scalability, deployment, and evolving requirements. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining analyses of student submissions and questionnaire responses to investigate integration challenges, learning outcomes, and opportunities for improvement. Our results indicate persistent difficulties in early architectural decisions, heterogeneous ML integration, evolving requirements, and data management, largely due to uneven ML and software engineering expertise. From the educator's perspective, the course fostered system-level reasoning and strengthened awareness of data-centric ML practices in AI-enabled systems.

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

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.14029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks.

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

The Benchmark Illusion: Pruned LLMs Can Pass Multiple Choice but Fail to Answer

Compressing large language models reduces memory use and inference cost, but it can also create failures that standard benchmarks miss. A pruned model may still perform well on multiple-choice evaluations, yet fail to answer the same question in open generation. We ask what pruning changes: does it erase the correct answer, or does it make the answer harder to produce as the top output? We study this question with multilingual question answering, tracking the same questions before and after pruning. We find a benchmark illusion. Under high-sparsity pruning, especially Wanda, models often fail in greedy open generation while still selecting the correct answer under multiple-choice scoring. In these recognition-only errors, the answer is usually not gone, but demoted: it often reappears with beam search, sampling, or one in-context example. Overall, multiple-choice benchmarks can overstate the usability of compressed LLMs, creating an evaluation blind spot. Compressed models should be tested on what they can produce, not only on what they can recognize.