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

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types – nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak. Our evaluation of 31 embedding models reveals that large instruction-tuned multilingual models achieve the strongest performance, while existing Slovak-specific models trained for NLU tasks transfer poorly to embedding tasks. To address the need for efficient, locally-deployable Slovak embeddings, we develop \texttt{e5-sk-small} (45M parameters) and \texttt{e5-sk-large} (365M) by applying vocabulary trimming and fine-tuning to Multilingual E5 models. Despite size reductions of up to 62\%, our open-source models achieve competitive performance with proprietary APIs while remaining locally deployable for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We release the benchmark, models, datasets, and code openly, hoping our approach offers a replicable path for other under-resourced languages.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

TIMI: Training-Free Image-to-3D Multi-Instance Generation with Spatial Fidelity

Precise spatial fidelity in Image-to-3D multi-instance generation is critical for downstream real-world applications. Recent work attempts to address this by fine-tuning pre-trained Image-to-3D (I23D) models on multi-instance datasets, which incurs substantial training overhead and struggles to guarantee spatial fidelity. In fact, we observe that pre-trained I23D models already possess meaningful spatial priors, which remain underutilized as evidenced by instance entanglement issues. Motivated by this, we propose TIMI, a novel Training-free framework for Image-to-3D Multi-Instance generation that achieves high spatial fidelity. Specifically, we first introduce an Instance-aware Separation Guidance (ISG) module, which facilitates instance disentanglement during the early denoising stage. Next, to stabilize the guidance introduced by ISG, we devise a Spatial-stabilized Geometry-adaptive Update (SGU) module that promotes the preservation of the geometric characteristics of instances while maintaining their relative relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields better performance in terms of both global layout and distinct local instances compared to existing multi-instance methods, without requiring additional training and with faster inference speed.

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

MADAR: An Address-Free Processor

arXiv:2606.15535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In a modern processor, computing is the cheap part. Most of its area and energy go to addressing – moving operands to and from a register file and cache, and running the tags, ports, miss queues, and bypass networks that find a value where it was left. MADAR deletes that machinery by abolishing the address. All state circulates in rings of slots that advance one position per clock; instructions and data ride in the same slots; a value is named by its place in an orbit – a \rp{} coordinate – not by an address; a fixed station computes when a circulating instruction sweeps past its operands, on a schedule set at compile time; and a hierarchy of rings of increasing period replaces the cache hierarchy, movement between them scheduled rather than triggered by a miss. No prior circulating-store, dataflow, or statically scheduled machine combines all four of these. We define the execution model, validate it in a cycle-accurate register-transfer-level implementation, show it compilable – a constructive scheduler emits programs cross-checked against the implementation – and price it with a first-order energy model. The payoff is clearest for AI acceleration: the multiply-accumulate at the heart of every matmul and convolution compiles to a streaming form whose energy per operation stays flat as the reduction grows, and the operand reuse that makes matrix multiplication efficient is carried by the ring-period hierarchy – the memory hierarchy doing by rotation what a cache does by tags. MADAR is a new design point for any computation whose data movement is known before the program runs.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

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

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Libraries: A Systematic Review

arXiv:2112.04573v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the concept and implementation of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning has become relevant, academics, researchers and information professionals involve research in this area. The objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a synthesis of empirical studies exploring application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in libraries. To achieve the objectives of the study, a systematic literature review was conducted based on the original guidelines proposed by Kitchenham et al. (2009). Data was collected from Web of Science, Scopus, LISA and LISTA databases. Following the rigorous/ established selection process, a total of thirty-two articles were finally selected, reviewed and analyzed to summarize on the application of AI and ML domain and techniques which are most often used in libraries. Findings show that the current state of the AI and ML research that is relevant with the LIS domain mainly focuses on theoretical works. However, some researchers also emphasized on implementation projects or case studies. This study will provide a panoramic view of AI and ML in libraries for researchers, practitioners and educators for furthering the more technology-oriented approaches, and anticipating future innovation pathways.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Improving Variational Counterdiabatic Driving with Weighted Actions and Computer Algebra

arXiv:2505.18367v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Variational counterdiabatic (CD) driving is a disciplined and widely used method to robustly control quantum many-body systems by mimicking adiabatic processes with high fidelity and reduced duration. Central to this technique is a universal structure of the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) over a parameterized Hamiltonian. Here, we reveal that introducing a new degree of freedom into the theory of the AGP can significantly improve variational CD driving. Specifically, we find that the algebraic characterization of the AGP is not unique, and we exploit this nonuniqueness to develop the weighted variational method for deriving a refined driving protocol. This approach extends the conventional method in two aspects: it assigns customized weights to matrix elements relevant to specific problems, and it effectively incorporates nonlocal information into local driving coefficients. We also develop an efficient numerical algorithm to compute the refined driving protocol using computer algebra. Our framework is broadly applicable and, in principle, it can replace any previous use of variational CD driving. We demonstrate its practicality by applying it to adiabatic evolution along the ground state of a parameterized Hamiltonian. This proposal outperforms the conventional method in terms of fidelity, as confirmed by extensive numerical simulations on quantum Ising models.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Analysis of the asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In an asymmetric shelf shuffle, a deck of $n$ cards is dealt sequentially from the bottom and assigned one of the $m$ shelves uniformly at random. The card is placed at the top of the assigned shelf with probability $p$, and at the bottom of the assigned shelf with probability $(1-p)$. Analysis of the shelf shuffle has gained much attention recently, and the case $p=1/2$ was first treated by Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes [Ann. Appl. Prob. 23 (2013), no. 4, 1692–1720]. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the shelf shuffle to general $p\in (0, 1)$. In particular, we study the distribution of cycles, cycle lengths, number of descents, number of valleys, number of inversions, and the RSK shape of a permutation obtained from an asymmetric shelf shuffle. Our results extend the analysis of Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes to arbitrary $p$. Furthermore, our analysis of the distribution of descents and inversions is new even for $p=1/2$.

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

SDQM: Synthetic Data Quality Metric for Object Detection Dataset Evaluation

The performance of machine learning models depends heavily on training data. The scarcity of large-scale, well-annotated datasets poses significant challenges in creating robust models. To address this, synthetic data generated through simulations and generative models has emerged as a promising solution, enhancing dataset diversity and improving the performance, reliability, and resilience of models. However, evaluating the quality of this generated data requires an effective metric. We introduce the Synthetic Dataset Quality Metric (SDQM) to assess data quality for object detection tasks without requiring model training to converge. This metric enables more efficient generation and selection of synthetic datasets, addressing a key challenge in resource-constrained object detection tasks. In our experiments, SDQM demonstrated a strong correlation with the mean average precision (mAP) scores of YOLO11, a leading object detection model, whereas previous metrics only exhibited moderate or weak correlations. In addition, it provides actionable insights into improving dataset quality, minimizing the need for costly iterative training. This scalable and efficient metric sets a new standard for evaluating synthetic data. The code for SDQM is available at https://github.com/ayushzenith/SDQM

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.

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

LAUKIN: A Multi-jurisdictional Common Law Contract Dataset

Multinational companies increasingly require cross-jurisdictional contract review, yet existing legal NLP datasets are largely restricted to a single jurisdiction. We introduce LAUKIN (Legal equivalence dataset of Australia, UK, and INdia), a dataset of clause pairs (AU-UK, UK-IN, IN-AU) labelled for boolean legal equivalence. We develop a novel multi-stage retrieval and reranking pipeline to construct the initial clause pair mapping, with a subset of clause pairs subsequently annotated by legal experts as Equivalent or Not Equivalent. The dataset comprises 14,727 clause pairs from 204 contracts across 8 agreement types, of which 3,000 are manually labelled: 900 train, 600 dev, and 1,500 test. We evaluate 12 models across 4 techniques, achieving a best macro-F1 of 65.11%, establishing LAUKIN as a challenging benchmark. Results reveal that, despite shared legal heritage, drafting conventions diverge significantly across jurisdictions, making cross-jurisdictional equivalence classification non-trivial. LAUKIN also includes 11,727 unlabelled training pairs to support future semi-supervised learning research in legal NLP.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

Authors:

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.16461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running large language models locally is often impractical, pushing inference on sensitive text to third-party providers. Split inference partially mitigates this by keeping tokens on the client and sending only hidden representations, but these representations can still be recovered via nearest-neighbor search against the public embedding table. We propose an orthogonal obfuscation procedure in which the client multiplies embeddings by a secret orthogonal matrix before transmission. To enable correct inference under arbitrary rotations, we introduce ConjFormer, a transformer variant that is exactly $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariant via a lightweight normalization change (scalar RMSNorm) together with blockwise orthogonal conjugation of all linear weights. As a result, the server performs the full forward pass entirely in the rotated basis and never observes unrotated hidden states. Experiments on GPT-2 and Llama 3.2 1B models fine-tuned on PubMed show that orthogonal obfuscation eliminates direct cosine nearest-neighbor inversion and reduces token recovery from over 35% top-10 to at most 1.3%, while increasing perplexity by only 0.4% after fine-tuning. These results indicate that enforcing symmetry at the architectural level can provide a practical defense for privacy-preserving LLM inference without noise injection or heavy cryptographic machinery.

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

DeepInsight: A Unified Evaluation Infrastructure Across the Physical AI Stack

arXiv:2606.17574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating a Physical AI stack spans operators that differ by more than three orders of magnitude – from a single foundation-model decoding step to thousands of physics ticks of whole-body control – varying orthogonally in modality, reward semantics, and resource profile. No existing framework spans this range, so the stack is evaluated today by stitching together separate harnesses that share neither runtime nor scoring, preserving each segment's local validity but losing the shared identity needed to diagnose cross-layer regressions. We present DeepInsight, an evaluation infrastructure that serves this full spectrum on a single runtime. Rather than homogenize the regimes, it preserves their heterogeneity behind three narrow abstractions – task, resource, and result – each realized as one invariant shared by every subsystem: one episode driver, one resource-handle protocol implemented by every expensive backend (LLM inference and sandboxed runtimes alike), and one trace identity scheme under which every event is written. Deployed in production across all three layers of an embodied humanoid stack, this single set of invariants onboards new benchmarks largely by configuration. Where mature peer orchestrators exist – at the foundation-model end – it reproduces published references and peer-framework readings within their own spread, runs the same suites faster on a single node, and scales near-linearly across nodes. Its distinctive return is diagnostic: because every layer writes into one shared trace, a regression that begins in one layer and surfaces in another stays localizable on that trace – a cross-layer payoff no federation of per-segment harnesses can reproduce.

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

Edge Flow: A Tractable and Predictive Continuous-Time Model for Gradient Descent at the Edge of Stability

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient descent in deep learning may operate at the edge of stability (EoS), a regime in which the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian hovers near the stability threshold $2/\eta$, where $\eta$ is the learning rate. Classical analysis tools such as gradient flow and the descent lemma do not apply here, motivating the search for a continuous-time model valid at EoS. We propose Edge Flow, a system of three coupled ordinary differential equations that provides a tractable, faithful, and predictive model of gradient descent dynamics at EoS. Edge Flow decomposes the dynamics into a center, an oscillation direction, and an oscillation magnitude. The center follows a modified gradient flow on a symmetrized loss; the direction tracks a top eigenvector of the Hessian via Rayleigh quotient dynamics; and the magnitude grows or decays exponentially depending on whether the sharpness exceeds or falls below the threshold $2/\eta$. Crucially, sharpness stabilization emerges from the coupled dynamics via a self-stabilization feedback loop. Discretizing Edge Flow only requires two gradient evaluations and one Hessian–vector product at each iteration. We demonstrate empirically that Edge Flow tracks the dynamics of gradient descent at least as faithfully as previously proposed continuous-time EoS models, while in addition resolving the oscillation of the sharpness at the onset of EoS, and that it provides a principled framework for understanding and mitigating instabilities in this regime.

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

Ensembling Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv:2505.16077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that a single SAE captures only a limited subset of features that can be extracted from the activation space. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce and formalize SAE ensembles. Furthermore, we propose to ensemble multiple SAEs through naive bagging and boosting. In naive bagging, SAEs trained with different weight initializations are ensembled, whereas in boosting SAEs sequentially trained to minimize the residual error are ensembled. Theoretically, naive bagging and boosting are justified as approaches to reduce reconstruction error. Empirically, we evaluate our ensemble approaches with three settings of language models and SAE architectures. Our empirical results demonstrate that, compared to an expanded SAE that matches the number of features in the ensemble, ensembling SAEs improves the reconstruction of language model activations along with SAE stability. Additionally, on downstream tasks such as concept detection and spurious correlation removal, SAE ensembles achieve better performance, showing improved practical utility.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The circulating blood proteome of childhood acute leukemia

The circulating blood proteome provides a systemic readout of disease biology and holds promise for advancing diagnostics and disease monitoring in pediatric leukemia. Here, we profiled 3072 proteins in diagnostic serum from 54 children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), 21 with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and 12 healthy controls using the Olink Proximity Extension Assay. We observed profound alterations in circulating protein levels in leukemia patients compared with controls and identified immunophenotype-specific proteins, including SIGLEC15 in B-cell precursor ALL (BCP-ALL), NOTCH1 in T-ALL, and CEBPA in AML, all which remained high even in patients with low (

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

Bayesian Tensor Decomposition with Diffusion Model Prior

arXiv:2606.03212v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Low-rank tensor decomposition (TD) is usually effective on clean, fully observed data, but it often degrades under severe missingness or noise. Low-rankness is itself a useful but limited structural prior, and additional handcrafted priors (e.g., sparsity or smoothness) still fall short of capturing the rich statistics of real-world data. To compensate for this weak inductive bias under heavy corruption, one would like to inject a learned, data-driven prior; however, the state-of-the-art diffusion models are not readily compatible with current TD and tractable posterior inference. To address these challenges, we introduce DiffBCP, a hybrid-prior Bayesian CP decomposition framework that couples a cumulative shrinkage process prior over the CP factors for automatic rank selection with an off-the-shelf pre-trained diffusion model as an implicit data prior on the reconstructed tensor. To make posterior inference tractable despite the coupling among the likelihood, low-rank constraint, and diffusion prior, we develop a split Gibbs sampler: CP factors admit conjugate updates, while the diffusion block is sampled via low-rank-guided denoising. A noise-adaptive coupling schedule further reduces sensitivity to hand-tuned annealing. Experiments on image inpainting and denoising, including high-resolution out-of-distribution images, show consistent gains over Bayesian, nonlinear, and plug-and-play TD baselines.

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

Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model

Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains. However, existing Multi-modal Coreference Resolution (MCR) methods require training with (partially) annotated data from the target dataset before they can be applied, preventing their direct usability and raising concerns about generalization. While Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) with billions of parameters offer promising zero-shot capabilities, they remain largely inaccessible. Their massive size limits deployability, and many are only accessible through paid APIs. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-adapt method that strategically adapts a carefully pre-trained alignment model for immediate use in MCR tasks, designed to eliminate the need for training on scarce benchmark datasets or relying on resource-intensive VLLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train a fine-grained alignment model between textual and visual contextual information using vision-language alignment datasets. We then repurpose the alignment model to MCR through similarity aggregation by fusing visual and categorical cues with evidence theory, thereby enhancing effectiveness. Experiments on the Coreference Image Narratives (CIN) benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 5.31\% and 2.12\% improvement in CoNLL F1 over SOTA dedicated methods and popular VLLMs, respectively. We further evaluate our method on a masked CIN dataset for robustness testing and on a specially constructed VCR-MCR dataset for generalization assessment, with results confirming both capabilities.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Counterdiabatic Raman Atom Optics for Compact High-Sensitivity Gravimetry

arXiv:2606.16945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-momentum-transfer (LMT) atom interferometry provides a route toward enhanced inertial sensitivity in compact quantum sensors, but its scalability is limited by the accumulation of pulse-transfer errors across long Raman pulse sequences. We investigate theoretically the use of stimulated Raman shortcut-to-adiabatic passage (STIRSAP) for high-fidelity LMT atom optics in a Mach–Zehnder interferometer geometry. The counterdiabatic correction is encoded directly into the Raman pulse envelopes, eliminating the need for auxiliary microwave or radio-frequency control fields. Numerical simulations based on an effective Raman model show that $1~\mu\mathrm{s}$ STIRSAP pulses achieve single-pulse transfer fidelities of $F_\pi = 0.99902$ while maintaining negligible pulse-time overhead even at high momentum order. We analyze the resulting tradeoff between interferometric phase enhancement and compound contrast decay and identify an unconstrained shot-noise optimum near $n\approx270$. The analysis further shows that practical operation at extreme LMT order is constrained by wave-packet separation, vibration noise, Doppler detuning, and accumulated systematic effects rather than by pulse duration itself. These results establish superadiabatic Raman control as a promising approach for scalable high-fidelity atom optics and clarify the physical limitations governing compact high-order atom interferometers.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Policy-driven Conformal Prediction for Trustworthy QoT Estimation

arXiv:2606.12501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Conformal QoT, a policy-driven framework that combines statistically guaranteed QoT estimation with operational decision policies, enabling reliable lightpath-feasibility predictions under domain shift and improving accuracy from 92\% to 99.6\% on open datasets.

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

ORAgentBench: Can LLM Agents Solve Challenging Operations Research Tasks End to End?

arXiv:2606.19787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear. Existing OR evaluations often decouple modeling from solving, rely on pre-formalized or text-only instances, and rarely test the full workflow from operational artifacts to validated decisions. In this work, we introduce ORAgentBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on challenging end-to-end operations research tasks. It contains 107 human-reviewed tasks across diverse operational scenarios, each packaged in an isolated environment with a natural-language brief, multi-file data, configuration artifacts, and a required submission schema. Agents must write and run solution code, and their submissions are evaluated by hidden validators for schema validity, hard-constraint feasibility, and normalized objective quality. Experiments with fourteen frontier agent-model configurations show that current agents remain far from reliable OR practice. The best agent passes only 35.51% of all tasks and 20.59% of hard tasks, and many feasible submissions still fall below the required quality threshold. Failure analysis further shows that errors are dominated by strategic weaknesses, including missed operational rules, brittle formulations, weak feasible-solution construction, and insufficient solution improvement. OR-specific procedural skills increase hard-task feasibility, but do not reliably improve solution quality or pass rate. These results suggest that progress in OR agents requires moving beyond plausible optimization code toward dependable, high-quality operational decision-making.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Robust Local Polynomial Regression with Similarity Kernels

Authors:

arXiv:2501.10729v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Local Polynomial Regression (LPR) is a widely used nonparametric method for modeling complex relationships due to its flexibility and simplicity. It estimates a regression function by fitting low-degree polynomials to localized subsets of the data, weighted by proximity. However, traditional LPR is sensitive to outliers and high-leverage points, which can significantly affect estimation accuracy. This paper revisits the kernel function used to compute regression weights and proposes a novel framework that incorporates both predictor and response variables in the weighting mechanism. The focus of this work is a conditional density kernel that robustly estimates weights by mitigating the influence of outliers through localized density estimation. The proposed method is implemented in Python and is publicly available at https://github.com/yaniv-shulman/rsklpr. The population analysis quantifies the bias induced by density-based robust weighting, and the reported experiments show lower empirical bias than iterative robust LOWESS while remaining competitive with standard LOWESS. This advancement provides a promising extension to traditional LPR, opening new possibilities for robust regression applications.

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

Environment-Grounded Automated Prompt Optimization for LLM Game Agents

LLM agents in interactive environments are highly sensitive to their prompts, yet prompt engineering remains a manual, task-specific process. We introduce an automated prompt optimization framework for LLM agents that decomposes the observation-to-action pipeline into a goal-conditioned descriptor agent and an action selection agent, and iteratively refines each module's prompt through an LLM-driven evolutionary loop guided by environment returns. We propose a behavior analyzer to attribute episode outcomes to specific prompt components, and a mutator to propose targeted revisions to the prompt, before validating them through environment rollouts. We evaluate on all five BabyAI tasks in the BALROG benchmark, comparing our pipeline against BALROG's RobustCoTAgent under both plain and guided prompt initializations. Optimization improves performance consistently across tasks and conditions, without requiring updates to the model weights. On PutNext, a multi-step coordination task where the RobustCoTAgent achieves 0% success, our framework reaches up to 72.5% success rate using the same underlying LLM with optimized prompts. These results suggest that a multi-agent framework, combined with automatic prompt optimization, enhances LLMs without the need for fine-tuning or extensive human supervision.