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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Algorithm for Open-System Battery Cathodes by Modeling Multiple Strongly Coupled Holstein Polarons with Chain-Mapped Caldeira-Leggett Dynamics

arXiv:2606.16017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cathode lithiation occupies a chemical regime of tightly localized orbitals, narrow bandwidths, and strong electron-lattice coupling. The defining electrochemical observables (open-circuit voltage and differential capacity) are open-system, reservoir-equilibration quantities that closed-Hamiltonian quantum simulation cannot produce, set by exchange with electron, Li$^+$, and phonon baths. We present a fault-tolerant quantum algorithm that recovers them through a unitary chain-mapped Caldeira-Leggett embedding, rendering the baths Trotterizable. The resulting fourth-order Trotter step has a T-gate count polynomial in system size, validating its open-system dynamics against hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) at strong coupling and the Lindblad limit at weak coupling. For single-carrier olivine LiFePO$_4$, a single voltage anchor on an otherwise DFT-fixed Hamiltonian places the differential-capacity peak within the $\pm5$ mV reproducibility of the experimental plateau. For multi-carrier spinel LiMn$_2$O$_4$, whose $1{:}1$ Mn$^{3+}$/Mn$^{4+}$ filling makes the inter-site Coulomb repulsion dynamically active, the same kernel yields a two-plateau voltage curve with a $125$ mV split, within $17\%$ of the observed $150$ mV. We deliver an end-to-end fault-tolerant resource estimate for such a multi-carrier, three-reservoir observable: $368$ logical qubits and $\sim3\times10^5$ T-gates per step, or $\sim1.7\times10^{12}$ T-gates for a full voltage curve (parallelizable over $\sim10^3$ trajectories), leaving the production-scale dynamical run as a milestone for future hardware. The same kernel reproduces macroscopic quantum coherence, two-band superconductivity, and the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein resonance without modification, placing dynamical battery chemistry and similar Hamiltonians within scope for fault-tolerant quantum simulation.

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

Reward Modeling for Multi-Agent Orchestration

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on Large Language Models (LLMs) require effective orchestration to coordinate specialized agents, yet training such orchestrators is hindered by limited supervision and high computational cost. We propose Orchestration Reward Modeling (OrchRM), a self-supervised framework for evaluating orchestration quality without human annotations. OrchRM leverages intermediate artifacts from multi-agent executions to construct win-lose pairs for Bradley-Terry reward model training. Unlike existing MAS test-time scaling and orchestrator training frameworks that rely on costly sub-agent rollouts, OrchRM operates directly at the orchestration level, enabling efficient and high-performing reward-guided orchestrator training and MAS test-time scaling. OrchRM improves training efficiency by up to 10x in token usage while improving MAS test-time scaling performance by up to 8% in accuracy. These gains consistently transfer across multiple domains, including mathematical reasoning, web-based question answering, and multi-hop reasoning, demonstrating orchestration-level reward modeling as a scalable direction for robust multi-agent orchestration. Code will be available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/OrchRM.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Explicit Solution of Infinite-Horizon Linear Backward Stochastic Volterra Integral Equations

arXiv:2603.15479v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study linear backward stochastic Volterra integral equations (BSVIEs) on the infinite time horizon. By introducing weighted function spaces with exponential decay, we establish existence and uniqueness of adapted M-solutions. We construct an infinite-horizon resolvent kernel and derive explicit formulas for the solution components (Y,Z,K) using a Girsanov transformation and Hida Malliavin calculus. The results extend the finite-horizon theory of Hu and Oksendal to the infinite horizon framework.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully. Hence, the trade-off between accuracy and computation in an MoE model typically exhibits large discontinuities. We propose Mixture of Slimmable Experts (MoSE), an MoE architecture in which each expert has a nested, slimmable structure that can be executed at variable widths. This enables conditional computation not only over which experts are activated but also over how much of each expert is utilized. Consequently, a single pretrained MoSE model can support a more continuous spectrum of accuracy-compute trade-offs at inference time. We present a simple and stable training recipe for slimmable experts under sparse routing, combining multi-width training with standard MoE objectives. During inference, we explore strategies for runtime width determination, including a lightweight test-time training mechanism that learns how to map router confidence/probabilities to expert widths under a fixed budget. Experiments on GPT-style models, various routing regimes, zero-shot downstream reasoning benchmarks, and continual pre-training adaptation of DeepSeek model show that MoSE matches or improves standard MoE at full width and consistently shifts the compute-quality frontier toward lower inference FLOPs. The code can be found at: https://github.com/tnurbek/mose.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

How reliable are LLMs when it comes to playing dice?

We investigate the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of large language models through a controlled benchmarking study on discrete probability problems. We constructed two datasets, respectively a set of standard exercises and a set of counterintuitive exercises, designed to trigger heuristic reasoning, and evaluated 8 state-of-the-art models, each tested with and without Chain-of-Thought prompting. Models achieve an average accuracy of 0.96 on standard problems but only 0.59 on counterintuitive ones. We further provide empirical evidence of token bias: performance drops by over 20% when canonical formulations are replaced by disguised variants. Embedding misleading suggestions in the prompt reduces performance by up to 34%, with no model proving immune. Taken together, the reported findings suggest that current LLMs are not yet genuine probabilistic reasoners, despite their success in advanced mathematical problems.

06.
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.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Finite-Time Queue Peak Laws in Stochastic Networks: Logarithmic Scaling After Geometric Thresholds

arXiv:2606.18218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study finite-horizon queue peaks in generalized switches, a standard stochastic-network model in which many queues share constrained service resources. Arrivals may be dependent, time-varying, and adapted to the past; the standing load condition is uniform interior slack, meaning the conditional mean arrival vector stays in a fixed contraction of the capacity region. We show that this slack reshapes the finite-time peak law for drift-minimizing scheduling policies such as MaxWeight. The square-root envelope that is sharp without slack persists only up to a geometry-dependent threshold; beyond that threshold, the running maximum grows only logarithmically with the horizon, both with high probability and in expectation. The mechanism is self-normalization: in the current queue direction, the projected fluctuation scale is normalized by the stabilizing drift scale. This removes capacity geometry from the logarithmic coefficient, while geometry remains in the threshold. Matching lower bounds show that both the logarithmic term and a geometric threshold are unavoidable. When finite-time state-space collapse is available, the threshold can be sharpened using local bottleneck geometry. For generalized input-queued switches, we obtain finite-time peak bounds with tight logarithmic coefficients. Simulations illustrate the two-phase envelope, local geometric refinements, and variance-sensitive improvements predicted by the theory.

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

The More the Merrier: Combining Properties for ABox Abduction under Repair Semantics for ELbot

arXiv:2606.19197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Abduction is a central approach to explain missing entailments from a knowledge base by providing a hypothesis, that would, if added to the knowledge base, make the missing entailment become true. Abduction under repair semantics has recently been investigated in detail, where several desirable properties and optimality criteria were considered, such as signature-restrictions and minimality in size and of introduced conflicts. Naturally, hypotheses that satisfy more than one of these properties or combine a property with an optimality criterion would be even more desirable for applications. So far, such hypotheses have not been investigated in the literature. In the present paper, we consider the ABox abduction problem for hypotheses satisfying more than one property or additional optimality criteria, for EL_bot under brave and AR semantics. Our main observation is that often requiring additional properties for hypotheses does not lead to an increase of complexity.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

PaAno+: Multiscale Encoding and Cross-Variable Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.20055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series anomaly detection has significant practical value for industrial and medical monitoring, as well as other critical domains. Current Transformer- and large-model-based detection approaches incur excessive computational overhead, while existing lightweight alternatives are constrained by insufficient feature extraction and inadequate modeling of dependencies across multivariate variables. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this study develops a lightweight, efficient anomaly detection model, dubbed PaAno, within the patch-oriented representation learning paradigm. In the encoder module, a multiscale feature-extraction backbone is constructed using convolutional kernels with differentiated receptive fields to capture hierarchical temporal characteristics; subsequent cross-scale adaptive attention aggregation, combined with residual connection optimization, further stabilizes feature representation learning. A cross-variable fusion attention module is embedded to explicitly characterize inter-variable correlations, empowering the model to identify anomalous patterns amid intricate operational conditions. Moreover, a novel pretext task based on temporal patch-window sorting is customized to uncover intrinsic structural properties of time series, and triplet loss is leveraged to optimize the patch embedding space for enhanced feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PaAno achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on both univariate and multivariate tasks, yielding significant performance gains across evaluation metrics, including VUS-PR, relative to the original PaAno. Leveraging a compact network design, the presented model achieves favorable computational efficiency, enabling deployment on resource-limited terminals for real-time anomaly inference.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation

arXiv:2606.17459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce \textsc{CEO-Bench}, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation – the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In \textsc{CEO-Bench}, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration – the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Ex-Omni: Enabling 3D Facial Animation Generation for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify multimodal understanding and generation, yet extending them to jointly produce speech and 3D facial animation remains largely unexplored despite its importance for natural human-computer interaction. A key challenge is the mismatch between the discrete semantic reasoning of LLMs and the dense temporal dynamics required for 3D facial motion. We propose Expressive Omni (Ex-Omni), an open-source model that augments OLLMs with native speech-accompanied 3D facial animation. Ex-Omni decouples semantic reasoning from temporal generation through a blendshape-aware speech unit generator and a blendshape decoder, where speech units provide temporal scaffolding and hidden speech representations carry facially relevant cues. We further introduce a unified token-as-query gated fusion (TQGF) mechanism for controlled semantic injection, as well as InstructS2SF-1200K, a dataset consisting of 1200K samples for pre-training. Extensive experiments show that Ex-Omni maintains competitive speech understanding and generation ability while achieving better audio-visual synchronization and lower face-generation latency than cascaded pipelines.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

How Inference Compute Shapes Frontier LLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606.17930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI evaluations are shifting toward harder tasks that benefit from longer trajectories involving tool use and iterative problem solving. As a result, performance is increasingly sensitive to the amount and allocation of compute available at test time ("inference compute"). Yet many evaluations still report performance at a single restrictive budget, meaning that low scores may reflect the evaluation setup rather than the model's underlying capability. To test this, we evaluate up to 12 frontier language models on seven challenging benchmarks spanning software engineering, mathematics, medicine, and cybersecurity. We use a controlled setup combining three simple inference-scaling interventions: larger token budgets, context compaction, and repeated submission attempts, guided either by the model itself or by minimal correctness feedback. We find three main results. First, larger token budgets substantially improve performance on benchmarks across multiple domains, including cybersecurity, FrontierMath, Humanity's Last Exam, and TerminalBench. Second, fixed-budget evaluations can increasingly understate frontier capability as models advance. Newer models reach higher performance at large budgets, where they unlock harder tasks and solve them more reliably. Third, benchmarks differ in which inference-scaling methods help most: repeated submission broadly improves performance, but the value of larger token budgets, external feedback, and parallel attempts varies by benchmark. Overall, our results show that benchmark scores are protocol-dependent. We therefore argue that evaluations should report capability as a function of inference-time compute, specify protocol choices explicitly, and compare model generations over a large shared compute range at matched budgets, especially in safety- or policy-relevant settings.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SmartFont: Dynamic Condition Allocation for Few-Shot Font Generation

Few-shot font generation simultaneously requires global structural completeness and fine-grained local style fidelity. Existing methods usually either rely on global content-style modeling, which is robust but imperfectly disentangled, or emphasize component/local modeling, which captures fine details but relies heavily on local priors and reference coverage. We argue that the key challenge is not merely to learn purer conditions, but to organize complementary yet biased global and local conditions through multi-level allocation during generation. To this end, we propose SmartFont, a diffusion-based few-shot font generation framework that combines global content-style generation with weakly supervised local corrective experts. The local branch performs semantic-spatial allocation by learning expert-wise local concepts and semantically meaningful spatial maps under weak component supervision, enabling fine-grained correction without requiring explicit component-conditioned inference. On top of this, a denoising-state condition allocation module adaptively weights global content, global style, and local corrective feature across timesteps and injection blocks. Extensive experiments show that SmartFont achieves better global-local balance, improves glyph quality and local detail fidelity.

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

Machine-Learning Emulation of Satellite Greenhouse Gas Retrievals: Stability over Time

arXiv:2606.09313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval algorithms are used to estimate atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), by solving inverse problems from high-spectral-resolution satellite radiance measurements. However, these algorithms are computationally expensive, which makes real-time estimation at scale difficult. Machine-learning models have therefore been proposed as fast emulators of retrieval algorithms. Most existing studies, however, evaluate them only on test data from the same period as the training data. We study the stability over time of such emulators using data from the Greenhouse Gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). We show that prediction accuracy generally deteriorates when the test period moves away from the training period. We also show that including time as an input feature substantially improves XCH4 prediction for Lasso and neural-network models. Among the methods considered, a simple Lasso model performs as well as or better than more complex methods such as neural networks, and yields more stable predictions over time. We further validate the results using the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), a ground-based observation network. On the TCCON-matched dataset, the time-augmented Lasso achieves errors against TCCON that are comparable to the disagreement between GOSAT and TCCON for both XCO2 and XCH4.

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

Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cost signal that constrained-RL algorithms optimize against is almost always reactive: the simulator emits a non-zero cost only after a collision has begun, and the Lagrange multiplier of PPO-Lagrangian grows only after the episode budget has been exceeded. At race speeds, where collisions are instantaneous and irreversible, any safety mechanism that waits for cost to accumulate is structurally too late. We present VLM-Safe-RL, a framework that integrates a frozen vision-language model into the CMDP Lagrangian update as an anticipatory cost term. The framework comprises four contributions: (i) Decoupled Dual-Path CLIP, independent reward/cost paths that respect the CMDP's factorization; (ii) VLM-Lagrange, an augmented multiplier update that incorporates a per-step VLM cost as an anticipatory term; (iii) Confidence Gating, a Bayes-optimal weight derived from a logistic noise model on the CLIP margin; and (iv) VLMPPOLag, the composed algorithm. On Safety-Gymnasium FormulaOne L2, our principal evaluation ($n{=}5$ seeds, $10^{6}$ steps, budget $d_{lim}{=}25$) VLMPPOLag$+$Conf is the only configuration in our default budget comparison that simultaneously retains substantive return ($J_r{\approx}40$) and holds cost within budget on a majority of seeds; the five constraint-aware baselines (PPOLag, CPO, CPPOPID, CPO-CLG, PPOLag-RND) each fail at least one requirement. The mechanism generalizes to held-out MetaDrive Medium (catastrophe rate $41\%{\to}26\%$, 95\% bootstrap CI $[-26,-5]$\,pp) and shows directionally consistent transfer to Bullet Safety-Gym; we report honestly where it does not (MetaDrive Easy/Hard, Qwen2-VL backbone) and trace the Hard failure to a Lagrangian-regulation pathology rather than the VLM signal itself. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use frozen VLM signals as an anticipatory cost term inside the CMDP Lagrangian update.

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

CycliST: A Video Language Model Benchmark for Reasoning on Cyclical State Transitions

We present CycliST, a novel benchmark dataset designed to evaluate Video Language Models (VLM) on their ability for textual reasoning over cyclical state transitions. CycliST captures fundamental aspects of real-world processes by generating synthetic, richly structured video sequences featuring periodic patterns in object motion and visual attributes. CycliST employs a tiered evaluation system that progressively increases difficulty through variations in the number of cyclic objects, scene clutter, and lighting conditions, challenging state-of-the-art models on their spatio-temporal cognition. We conduct extensive experiments with current state-of-the-art VLMs, both open-source and proprietary, and reveal their limitations in generalizing to cyclical dynamics such as linear and orbital motion, as well as time-dependent changes in visual attributes like color and scale. Our results demonstrate that present-day VLMs struggle to reliably detect and exploit cyclic patterns, lack a notion of temporal understanding, and are unable to extract quantitative insights from scenes, such as the number of objects in motion, highlighting a significant technical gap that needs to be addressed. More specifically, we find no single model consistently leads in performance: neither size nor architecture correlates strongly with outcomes, and no model succeeds equally well across all tasks. By providing a targeted challenge and a comprehensive evaluation framework, CycliST paves the way for visual reasoning models that surpass the state-of-the-art in understanding periodic patterns.

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

{\alpha}-Fair Insurance Pricing: A Fairness Continuum

arXiv:2606.14898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness in insurance pricing remains a long-standing and deeply debated puzzle. On one hand, insurers, driven by profitability considerations, set premiums that differentiate across individual risks to achieve actuarial fairness. On the other hand, insurance serves a critical societal function by pooling risks across a population, motivating cross-subsidization among groups to promote solidarity fairness. The tension between these two competing notions of fairness makes insurance pricing inherently complex, particularly in modern settings where granular data allow for increasingly fine risk differentiation and regulators face growing pressure to protect vulnerable groups. To address this challenge, we propose an $\alpha$-Fair Individual Solvent Premium ($\alpha$-FISP) framework for insurance pricing that explicitly captures the trade-off between actuarial and solidarity fairness while guaranteeing solvency, a fundamental requirement in insurance operations. We formulate the pricing problem as a constrained optimization task, where actuarially fair premiums are adjusted subject to budget constraints on cross-subsidization within each risk class. This formulation naturally yields a family of solutions parameterized by $\alpha$, tracing a continuum between purely actuarial and purely solidarity-based pricing and enabling decision-makers to select an operating point along this fairness spectrum. We derive theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework. Numerical experiments show that $\alpha$-FISP is computationally tractable and aligns well with the U.S. regulatory regimes featuring heterogeneous state-level fairness requirements.

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

Building Social World Models with Large Language Models

Understanding and predicting how social beliefs evolve in response to events – from policy changes to scientific breakthroughs – remains a fundamental challenge in social science. Given LLMs' commonsense knowledge and social intelligence, we ask: Can LLMs model the dynamics of social beliefs following social events? In this work, we introduce the concept of the Social World Model (SWM), a general framework designed to capture how social beliefs evolve in response to major events. SWM learns state-transition functions for social beliefs by mining temporal patterns in social data and optimizing the evidence lower bound, without the need for explicit human annotations linking events to belief shifts, or for expensive census data. To evaluate SWM, we introduce a benchmark, SWM-bench, derived from real-world prediction markets, specifically Kalshi and Polymarket. SWM-bench includes over 12k data points for social belief prediction tasks spanning diverse domains such as politics, finance, and cryptocurrency. Our experimental results show that SWM significantly outperforms time-series foundation models, achieving state-of-the-art results on Kalshi data and demonstrating competitive performance on Polymarket data, while offering interpretable insights into the underlying mechanisms of social belief dynamics.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Raw-Curve Quantum Fingerprints: A Mahalanobis Authentication Framework with Drift Early Warning and Adversarial Detection

arXiv:2606.11644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum cloud platforms are poised to deliver powerful computing capabilities, but users have no direct means to verify which physical device executes their workload. This lack of transparency enables hardware substitution attacks, where a malicious adversary could redirect a job to a substituted or inferior processor. We present a general authentication framework that addresses this problem by constructing multi-dimensional quantum fingerprints from raw measurement data. Without any curve fitting, we directly concatenate the raw statistics of complementary experiments into a high-dimensional feature vector that preserves subtle device-specific information. A Mahalanobis nearest-neighbor classifier achieves 100\% benign authentication accuracy on three superconducting processors over a three-week chronological split. The classifier naturally yields an authentication confidence $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ which reveals device-specific safety margins and motivates per-device alert thresholds. We assess the framework's robustness under two distinct scenarios. Under additive isotropic Gaussian noise, $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ decays predictably at a rate explained by inverse covariance traces, enabling an early warning mechanism. Against white-box adversarial perturbations, the same confidence threshold detects $L_2$ targeted attacks with near-perfect success and reveals device-dependent empirical thresholds for $L_\infty$ attacks, while untargeted and sparse attacks are ineffective. The proposed framework thus unifies fingerprint extraction, drift-resilient authentication, proactive health monitoring, and adversarial defense, offering a practical step toward trustworthy quantum cloud computing.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Fermi surface change and $d$-wave superconductivity in the square lattice Kondo-Heisenberg model

arXiv:2606.23799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the two-dimensional Kondo-Heisenberg model on a square lattice, with the conduction electrons away from half-filling, using neural network quantum states. Mapping the ground-state phase diagram as a function of the Kondo and Heisenberg couplings, we identify (i) at weak Kondo coupling, antiferromagnetic Néel order with a Fermi surface whose enclosed area counts only the conduction electrons and is insensitive to the Néel order, and (ii) at strong coupling, a heavy Fermi liquid with a Fermi surface whose enclosed area counts both the conduction electrons and the spins. In the crossover between these regimes, we find $d_{x^2-y^2}$ superconductivity, evidenced by off-diagonal long-range order in the pair-pair correlations and a pairing-amplitude dome that coexists with the underlying magnetic phase. Our results establish Fermi volume change and unconventional superconductivity as intrinsic features of the two-dimensional Kondo-Heisenberg model.

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

From Tokens to Policy: Causal and Interpretable Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Identification

arXiv:2606.17010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) identification is crucial to explain the impact of an intervention and optimize our policies accordingly. Existing approaches trade expressivity for interpretability, but, if some active heterogeneity drivers are unmeasured, methods at both ends of this spectrum allow for spurious HTE characterization with no causal reading. In this work, we focus on controlled experiments and argue that an oracle HTE causal characterization via the latent interactors is now within reach, thanks to (i) more extensive pre-treatment measurements, i.e., multi-modal and multi-view, and (ii) scalable representations with minimal human supervision. We then re-frame HTE identification as a Markov-blanket discovery problem on a sufficient and aligned pre-treatment representation, and introduce Neural EXposure Interaction Search (NEXIS), an iterative procedure with provable and empirically validated consistent selection. We deploy NEXIS on two anti-poverty programs in Africa, augmenting each with satellite imagery capturing previously unmeasured environmental effect modifiers, leading to novel, interpretable and prescriptive guidelines to optimize the programs' next iterations.

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

ReMoT: Reinforcement Learning with Motion Contrast Triplets

We present ReMoT, a unified training paradigm to systematically address the fundamental shortcomings of VLMs in spatio-temporal consistency – a critical failure point in navigation, robotics, and autonomous driving. ReMoT integrates two core components: (1) A rule-based automatic framework that generates ReMoT-16K, a large-scale (16.5K triplets) motion-contrast dataset derived from video meta-annotations, surpassing costly manual or model-based generation. (2) Group Relative Policy Optimization, which we empirically validate yields optimal performance and data efficiency for learning this contrastive reasoning, far exceeding standard Supervised Fine-Tuning. We also construct the first benchmark for fine-grained motion contrast triplets to measure a VLM's discrimination of subtle motion attributes (e.g., opposing directions). The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark and multiple standard VLM benchmarks, culminating in a remarkable 25.1% performance leap on spatio-temporal reasoning tasks.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MET-Bench: Multimodal Entity Tracking for Evaluating the Limitations of Vision-Language and Reasoning Models

Entity state tracking is a necessary component of world modeling that requires maintaining coherent representations of entities over time. Previous work has benchmarked entity tracking performance in purely text-based tasks. We introduce MET-Bench, a multimodal entity tracking benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of vision-language models to track entity states across modalities. Using three domains, we assess how effectively current models integrate textual and image-based state updates. Our findings reveal a significant performance gap between text-based and image-based entity tracking. We empirically show this discrepancy primarily stems from deficits in visual reasoning rather than perception. We further show that explicit text-based reasoning strategies improve performance, yet limitations remain, especially in long-horizon multimodal tasks. We apply reinforcement learning to improve entity tracking in open-source VLMs. This yields substantial in-modality gains, but does not transfer robustly across input modalities. Our results highlight the need for improved multimodal representations and reasoning techniques to bridge the gap between textual and visual entity tracking.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Compute Efficiency and Serial Runtime Tradeoffs for Stochastic Momentum Methods

arXiv:2606.19179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic momentum methods such as heavy ball (HB), Nesterov momentum, and variants of Accelerated SGD (ASGD) [Kidambi et al., 2018] are widely used in modern training, but their stochastic benefits depend on two distinct quantities: serial runtime, the number of iterations needed to reach a target accuracy, and compute efficiency (CE), the inverse total gradient-query or FLOP cost. Larger batches reduce serial runtime without hurting CE only when the contraction gap grows linearly with batch size. We study stochastic HB and ASGD for consistent linear regression with Gaussian covariates and prove finite-dimensional, discrete-time lower bounds on their batch-size tradeoffs. Our first result shows that HB does not improve the CE frontier over SGD for arbitrary spectra; rather, it preserves SGD-level CE over a larger batch-size window, allowing larger batches to reduce serial runtime until HB reaches its deterministic accelerated scale. This window can be a factor $\sqrt{\kappa}$ larger than the SGD critical batch size. For ASGD, the picture is more spectrum-dependent: for rapidly decaying power-law spectra, ASGD improves small-batch CE over HB/SGD, but as batch size grows it trades this CE advantage for improved serial runtime. Synthetic linear-regression experiments verify these qualitative regimes, including near-overlap of ASGD and HB for slowly decaying spectra and the predicted CE–serial tradeoff for rapidly decaying spectra.

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

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.