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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Point-Cloud-Assistant Localized Statistical Channel Prediction by Tangent Gaussian Splatting

arXiv:2606.18734v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate, site-specific channel information is crucial for optimizing next-generation wireless networks. Among various approaches, localized statistical channel modeling (LSCM), which models the channel multipath angular power spectrum (APS) from the reference signal received power (RSRP) measurement, has emerged as a state-of-the-art method tailored for efficient network optimization. However, despite its effectiveness, LSCM cannot predict APS at the vast majority of locations where no measurements are available, which significantly restricts its applicability in large-scale, real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we present point-cloud-assisted tangent Gaussian splatting (PC-TGS), the first framework to extrapolate APS to unmeasured outdoor grids by integrating sparse radio measurements with dense LiDAR-based geometry. PC-TGS represents environmental scatterers as anisotropic 3D Gaussians, initialized and refined through a relaxed-mean reparameterization of the raw point cloud. A tangent-plane projection accurately maps each Gaussian into the local angular domain, while a depth-aware electromagnetic splatting process aggregates their contributions. To ensure practical deployment, we derive a closed-form Gaussian-weighted average (GWA) for APS bin integration and provide a provable error bound. { Evaluations on a LiDAR-scanned city-scale dataset (5M points, 6,310 RSRP samples) demonstrate that PC-TGS achieves better APS and RSRP prediction performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines and faster inference time for APS extrapolation task. These results highlight the potential of PC-TGS to enable geometry-aware and data-efficient channel prediction in large-scale wireless digital twins.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Think Fast: Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models

arXiv:2606.07157v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many efforts to ensure frontier AI models are safe rely on monitoring their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. If models become able to perform sufficiently complex reasoning internally, without explicit thinking tokens, this would undermine such oversight. We measure how well frontier models reason without CoT across a suite of over 30,000 questions spanning 43 benchmarks in domains including math, coding, puzzles, causality, theory-of-mind, and strategic reasoning. To compare models against humans, we estimate the $50\%$-task-completion time horizon (TH): the human time required for tasks a model completes with $50\%$ success rate. We complement this with a $50\%$ reasoning token horizon: the minimum number of o3-mini reasoning tokens needed for tasks a model solves with $50\%$ success rate. We find that the no-CoT $50\%$ TH of frontier models has been doubling roughly every year over the past six years, with GPT-5.5's TH reaching over 3 minutes and reasoning token horizon exceeding 1,500 tokens. Our median estimates predict that frontier no-CoT THs could exceed 7 minutes by 2028, and 25 minutes by 2030, though these projections carry substantial uncertainty. We recommend frontier developers track this explicitly.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Performance Analysis of YOLOv11 and YOLOv8 for Mixed Traffic Object Detection under Adverse Weather Conditions in Developing Countries

In modern vehicular systems, robust performance under harsh conditions has become a critical problem of autonomous driving. Our study delivers a comprehensive evaluation of the newest iteration of the YOLO series, which is YOLOv11 Nano architecture benchmarked against the widely adopted YOLOv8 Nano as a baseline on a custom fused dataset that combines the Indian Driving Dataset (IDD) [1] and Berkeley Deep Drive Dataset (BDD100K) [2]. We have analyzed the trade-offs among detection accuracy, inference speed, and computational efficiency in high-entropy scenarios involving dense mixed traffic, rain, and low-light conditions. Specifically, YOLOv11n achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@50) of 46.6%, with a notable 3.2% improvement in Precision over the baseline, effectively reducing false positives in cluttered scenes. Furthermore, the proposed model exhibits enhanced energy efficiency, requiring 22% fewer FLOPs (6.3G vs. 8.1G) while maintaining real-time inference speed of 70.9 FPS on a Tesla T4 GPU, offering an optimal trade-off for safety-critical edge deployment.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Classical representation of the dynamics of quantum spin chains

Authors:

arXiv:2502.10502v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Since the advent of quantum mechanics, classical probability interpretations have faced significant challenges. A notable issue arises with the emergence of negative probabilities when attempting to define the joint probability of non-commutative observables. In this work, we propose a resolution to this dilemma for quantum spin chains, by introducing an exact representation of their dynamics in terms of classical continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs). These CTMCs effectively model the creation, annihilation, and propagation of pairs of classical particles and antiparticles. The quantum dynamics then emerges by averaging over various realizations of this classical process.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ACCORD: Action-Conditioned Contextual Grounding for Language Agents

User instructions are often underspecified because humans rely on implicit assumptions about the surrounding environment. For large language model (LLM) agents operating in information-rich digital and physical environments, these assumptions cannot be inferred from the instruction alone; they must be recovered from the current state of tools, data, interfaces, and observations. Effective execution therefore requires agents to identify missing context, ground it in observed evidence, and carry it forward into subsequent actions. We show that current agents often fail to do so. They act from assumed rather than observed specifics, overlook information they could have gathered, and fail to incorporate evidence that has already been returned. Building on this insight, we propose ACCORD (Action-Conditioned Contextual Grounding), a simple and effective agent framework for adaptive grounding. Before each action, ACCORD actively probes the environment for missing information and integrates relevant context from the agent's trajectory that would otherwise be overlooked. Requiring no additional training or task-success signals, ACCORD improves task-goal completion on AppWorld by up to +20.6 points with GPT-5-mini, from 42.0% to 62.6%, compared to strong baselines. These gains persist with a substantially stronger base model (+10.8 with Claude-4.5-sonnet), an open-weight model (+10.1 with Qwen3.5-27B-FP8), and on the embodied AlfWorld benchmark (+7.4 success rate with GPT-5-mini).

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Factor Analysing Predictive Processing: No Evidence for a General Factor Across Tasks

Background & Hypothesis: Dysfunctional predictive processing (PP), specifically the aberrant weighting of priors, is a frequently-proposed mechanism for psychosis and psychosis-like phenomena (schizotypy). Evidence for this theory mostly originates from single-task studies, which assume that all tasks load onto a single latent construct of PP performance, but the underlying factor structure of PP tasks is unknown. PP deficits in psychosis may be better described by a two-factor, hierarchical model: weakened lower-level (perceptual) priors compensated by higher-level (cognitive) priors. Study Design: This study implements a multi-paradigm approach in healthy participants to investigate latent constructs underlying PP and their relationship to schizotypy. Participants (N = 73) completed 6 tasks measuring reliance on priors across language, memory, visual, and auditory domains. A factor analysis investigated whether performance across tasks is captured by a single or two-factor model. Study Results: Although a two-factor model best described performance, factors reflected within-task correlations rather than a PP hierarchy. Cross-task PP measures were poorly correlated, suggesting that individuals' weighting of priors was task-specific. A full model including all task outcomes (not factors) significantly predicted the severity of schizotypal aberrant beliefs but no other schizotypal measures. Conclusions: These results do not evidence a single factor underpinning PP performance. It is therefore inappropriate to use results from single tasks to propose a generalised PP deficit in psychosis. Variation was also not captured by a two-factor hierarchical model of priors. Further multi-paradigm research is required to evaluate alternative models or additional variables that describe aberrant PP in psychosis.

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

A New k-Space Model for Non-Cartesian Fourier Imaging

For the past several decades, it has been popular to reconstruct Fourier imaging data using model-based approaches that can easily incorporate physical constraints and advanced regularization/machine learning priors. The most common modeling approach is to represent the continuous image as a linear combination of shifted "voxel" basis functions. Although well-studied and widely-deployed, this voxel-based model is associated with longstanding limitations, including high computational costs, slow convergence, and a propensity for artifacts. In this work, we reexamine this model from a fresh perspective, identifying new issues that may have been previously overlooked (including undesirable approximation, wrap-around, and nullspace characteristics). Our insights motivate us to propose a new model that is more resilient to the limitations (old and new) of the previous approach. Specifically, the new model is based on a Fourier-domain basis expansion rather than the standard image-domain voxel-based approach. Illustrative results, which are presented in the context of non-Cartesian MRI reconstruction, demonstrate that the new model enables improved image quality (reduced artifacts) and/or reduced computational complexity (faster computations and improved convergence).

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mitigating Trotter Errors via Post-Processed Symmetry Restoration

arXiv:2606.20242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum simulation is a powerful tool for exploring complex quantum many-body systems such as condensed matter physics and gauge theories. Trotterization, which approximates the ideal time evolution operator by decomposing it into a sequence of local gate operations, is one of the most widely used quantum simulation algorithms. However, such Trotterized implementations generally fail to preserve the symmetries of the target Hamiltonian during compilation. As a result, they can drive quantum states out of symmetrically allowed subspaces, leading to unphysical dynamics and symmetry-violating algorithmic errors. In this work, we propose a symmetry-based Trotter error mitigation protocol using classical post-processing. By applying symmetry transformations to the initial state or interleaving them between discrete Trotter layers, and then averaging an ensemble of the resulting measurement outcomes via classical post-processing, our method systematically projects out the symmetry-violating components of the Trotter error while leaving the ideal dynamics unchanged. Importantly, this framework naturally accommodates non-local spatial symmetries and anti-unitary operations such as time reversal, which are difficult or impossible to implement directly with hardware-native quantum gates. We benchmark our protocol on the one-dimensional XY model and the one-dimensional Schwinger model. In the XY model, enforcing reflection symmetry suppresses the leading-order Trotter error, whereas in the Schwinger model, interleaving gauge transformations between Trotter layers enables gauge-twirling effectively to reduce unphysical violations of local Gauss's law. These results demonstrate that symmetry-based post-processing provides a depth-preserving route to substantially improving the fidelity of Trotterized quantum simulations on near-term devices.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Random Schrödinger operators on manifolds and abstract bounds for multiplier-type operators

arXiv:2606.19075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study random Schrödinger operators on closed Riemannian manifolds with Anderson-type potentials. We prove high-probability spectral inclusion bounds showing that eigenvalues remain close to those of the Laplacian, with deviations controlled by a norm of the potential coefficients. Compared with deterministic bounds, this yields a square-root cancellation gain. The proof is based on a general principle showing that randomisation improves operator norm bounds for multiplier-type operators, which we formulate in both discrete and continuous settings.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Unveiling Hierarchical Invariants in Multiphoton Linear Optics

arXiv:2506.12857v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear optical networks driven by quantum states of light are important building blocks of photonic quantum technologies. They access large bosonic Hilbert spaces through multiphoton interference. At the same time, their dynamics are generated by single-particle mode transformations, thereby defining a highly structured subset of multiphoton unitaries and setting boundary on linear optics capability. To elucidate this boundary, we reveal an underlying fine-grained symmetry structure that partitions the multiphoton operator space into invariant subspaces and generates a hierarchy of invariants. We experimentally confirm the conservation of high-order invariants and demonstrate their operational utility in characterizing state reachability and the metrological capability of multiphoton probes. Our framework provides a symmetry-based perspective for understanding and harnessing structured multiphoton dynamics across photonic quantum technologies.

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

Visualizing Uncertainty: Spatial Maps of Missing and Conflicting Evidence in Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.15767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Enhancing Graph Neural Networks Using Proximity Graphs for Dust Source Emission Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of dust source emissions is critical for mitigating the significant environmental and health hazards posed by dust storms. Traditional forecasting methods often struggle to capture the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of these phenomena. In this paper, we demonstrate that proximity graphs enable Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to effectively model the intricate spatial and temporal relationships between data points. Specifically, we use proximity graphs–such as Delaunay triangulation, Gabriel graph, k-Nearest Neighbor graph, and Yao graph–as the input for GNNs (including GraphSAGE, Graph Convolutional Networks, and Graph Attention Networks) to perform message passing. Our approach highlights the effectiveness of integrating proximity graphs with GNNs for robust and accurate dust source forecasting. To emphasize the importance of proximity graph representations, we compare our method against GNNs using random graphs for message passing. The results show that GNNs with proximity graphs significantly outperform those with random graphs and are also far superior to Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model in dust source emission forecasting.

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

Verbatim Chunks Beat Extracted Artifacts: A Controlled Ablation of Memory Representations for Long LLM Conversations

Authors:

A growing class of conversational-memory systems compresses dialogue history into structured artifacts – extracted facts, decisions, or events – on the premise that distilled structure retrieves better than raw text. We test this premise with a controlled ablation: within one fixed retrieval-rerank-reasoning pipeline, we swap only the stored representation – LLM-extracted typed artifacts versus verbatim conversation chunks – holding the model, retriever, reranker, and judge constant. Verbatim chunks win by 15.9 points on LoCoMo (43.9% vs. 28.0%) and 22.0 points on LongMemEval-S (67.4% vs. 45.4%); a 1-hop semantic graph does not recover the gap, and five confound controls reproduce the effect. The mechanism is lossy distillation: extraction discards verbatim detail that chunks retain for free, and the extracted-artifact pipeline never beats naive RAG in overall accuracy. Concurrent positive results with near-verbatim, provenance-preserving units fit the same account: retrieval accuracy tracks how far the representation departs from the source. For the extraction designs we test, structured memory should augment verbatim text rather than replace it: a chunks $\cup$ artifacts union store matches chunks on both benchmarks while artifacts alone forfeit the gap. Code and data: https://github.com/tao-hpu/cog-canvas

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Why Sampling Is Not Choosing: Intentionality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Large Language Models

Authors:

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionality is derived rather than intrinsic, and their outputs are neither owned as commitments nor guided by reasons. Variability introduced by stochastic sampling does not amount to choice or authorship. We address objections from the intentional stance, functionalism, compatibilism, and the presence of moral reasoning in model outputs, arguing that none suffice to establish genuine agency.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Bidirectional Distillation

Autoregressive video diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for long video generation, achieving strong performance in streaming settings. However, existing methods are restricted to forward temporal generation, whereas practical video creation often requires flexible generation order, e.g., conditioning on future context to extend backward, or on both past and future context for inbetween generation. We bridge this gap by training an autoregressive model that supports generation in arbitrary temporal directions. A key technical challenge arises from the Causal 3D VAE widely used in video diffusion models, which encodes latents strictly conditioned on past context. While suited for forward generation, this causal structure causes inter-block discontinuities when generation proceeds backward. To address this, we introduce blockwise anchor latents, a set of auxiliary latents that restore the missing past context at block boundaries during backward generation. Built on this design, we propose UniTemp, a bidirectional distillation framework that trains a single autoregressive student model for any-direction video generation. At inference time, UniTemp conditions on arbitrary past and/or future frames, improving controllability for both bidirectional and inbetween generation. Experiments show that UniTemp maintains competitive performance on short and long video generation compared to forward-only methods, while enabling diverse workflows such as bidirectional video extension, inbetween generation, looping video generation, scene transition, and visual story generation. Project website: https://lzhangbj.github.io/projects/unitemp/

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

Be My Tutor: On-Policy Co-Distillation for Mutual LLM Improvement via Peer Feedback

We study multi-domain LLM training in which two models, each stronger in a different domain, co-evolve by tutoring each other through on-policy feedback. Unlike one-way distillation or single-model fine-tuning, our goal is mutual Pareto improvement: each model improves across domains without losing its original strength. To this end, we propose On-Policy Co-Distillation (OPCoD), where each student's self-distillation is conditioned on its own correct rollout and feedback from its peer. To make feedback exchange effective, OPCoD uses cognizance-based gating to decide when to give feedback and feedback anchoring to ground feedback in the problem. On Science Q\&A tasks, OPCoD consistently outperforms baselines and achieves Pareto improvement across all evaluated domain pairs and students.

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

SPARK: Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement learning for Knowledge distillation

Low-bit quantization enables deployment of image restoration (IR) networks on resource-constrained devices, but introduces rounding noise that disproportionately degrades high-frequency regions such as edges and fine textures. Existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods apply distillation signals uniformly across all spatial locations, overlooking the varying reconstruction difficulty across image regions. To address this, we propose SPARK (Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Distillation), a framework that adaptively allocates distillation effort using a lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) policy network. At each training step, a difficulty feature extractor computes four signals, namely Laplacian variance, pixel variance, student reconstruction error, and teacher-student knowledge gap, which are fed into a compact policy CNN that produces a stochastic spatial weight map to modulate the KD loss during quantization-aware training (QAT). SPARK is IR task-agnostic, adds no inference cost, and integrates into any existing QAT pipeline without architectural changes. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPARK consistently outperforms PTQ, QAT, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) KD approaches across multiple student architectures, achieving reconstruction quality closest to the full-precision teacher under significant computational constraints.

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

Multi-View Decompilation for LLM-Based Malware Classification

arXiv:2606.20436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Malware analysts often inspect compiled binaries through decompiled pseudo-C, when source code is unavailable. Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) can assist this process by classifying decompiled code as benign or malicious, but existing pipelines typically rely on a single decompiler view. We argue that this assumption is fragile: decompilers are lossy heuristic tools, and different decompilers can expose different artefacts of the same binary. We curate a benchmark of benign utilities and malicious programs spanning a range of threat behaviors. Each sample is compiled and decompiled with both Ghidra and RetDec, yielding matched pseudo-C views. Across a range of LLMs from major model families, we find that providing both decompiler views improves malicious-class F1, mainly by increasing recall on malicious samples. Agreement analyses further show that Ghidra and RetDec make partially different errors, supporting the view that decompiler outputs provide complementary evidence. Our results suggest that multi-decompiler prompting is a simple, training-free way to improve LLM-based malware triage in practical settings.

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

Beyond Predefined Schemas: TRACE-KG for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graph Generation

arXiv:2604.03496v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graph generation typically relies either on predefined ontologies or on schema-free extraction. Ontology-driven pipelines enforce consistent typing but require costly schema design and maintenance, whereas schema-free methods often produce fragmented graphs with weak global organization, especially in long technical documents with dense, context-dependent information. We propose TRACE-KG (Text-dRiven schemA for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graphs), a framework that jointly constructs a context-enriched knowledge graph and an induced schema without assuming a predefined ontology. TRACE-KG captures conditional relations through structured qualifiers and organizes entities and relations using a data-driven schema that serves as a reusable semantic scaffold while preserving full traceability to the source evidence. Experiments show that TRACE-KG produces structurally coherent, traceable knowledge graphs and offers a practical alternative to both ontology-driven and schema-free construction pipelines.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-performance gates on trapped ion qubits using counterpropagating pulse-shaped laser beams

arXiv:2606.15672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly-localized light-matter interactions are necessary for scaling trapped-ion architectures. In hyperfine qubits, counterpropagating beams generate entangling gates by coupling with motion, but this effect is undesirable during single-qubit operations. For that reason, single-qubit gates are traditionally implemented with copropagating beams, and the coexistence of two beam geometries adds hardware and computational overhead. In an effort towards collective performance improvement with minimal overhead, we design and implement pulse-amplitude and dephasing robust dynamically corrected gates using Space Curve Quantum Control (SCQC) and compare them against the constant-amplitude gate implementation. We perform gate set tomography on a four-qubit trapped-ion register, and we discover more than 50% error reduction when robust pulses are used. We find that counterpropagating robust gates often outperform their copropagating counterparts and reach error rates as low as $(3.59 \pm 1.25)\cdot 10^{-3}$, using diamond distance as a metric. This value establishes a laser-driven-gate error reference and is merely an order of magnitude higher than the best reported $microwave$ gate on a $single$ ion. Additional experiments reveal that robust pulses can effectively suppress non-Markovian errors that grow during runtime. Our work challenges the widely accepted belief that copropagating gates should be preferred for their weak motional coupling and invites the adoption of high-performance robust pulses that suppress multiple noise sources of the trapped-ion error budget.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effective Faraday interaction between light and Helium-3 nuclear spins in a multi-pass cell

arXiv:2606.20328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Helium-3 nuclear spins form an exceptionally stable quantum system with extremely long coherence time, offering exciting opportunities for quantum technologies. In particular, nuclear spin-squeezed states promise enhanced precision for sensing tasks and tests of new physics. A central challenge for all these applications is the realization of a controllable light-nuclear spin interface. Here we experimentally demonstrate such an interface by exploiting metastability-exchange collisions in a low-pressure helium-3 gas cell at room temperature. A radio-frequency discharge produces a small population of metastable atoms that both enables efficient optical pumping and mediates an effective Faraday interaction between the collective nuclear spin and an optical probe. We quantitatively characterize the strength of this interaction as a function of the nuclear polarization, applied magnetic field, and probe-beam parameters. Moreover, we show that using a multi-pass cell enhances this interaction by effectively increasing the optical depth. Extrapolating to a tenfold increase of the probe power used in the present experiment, we project a measurement-induced squeezing rate of 0.52 s$^{-1}$. Our results provide a practical pathway for optical access to helium-3 nuclear spins and open prospects for generating long-lived, macroscopic nuclear spin-squeezed states for quantum metrology.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

All Smoke, No Alarm: Oracle Signals in Agent-Authored Test Code

arXiv:2606.18168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software practitioners increasingly use AI coding agents that generate test code alongside production code in open source pull requests (PRs). Recent studies report more than 932,000 agent-authored PRs across more than 116,000 repositories, yet whether their test files contain meaningful verification logic remains underexplored. Test files lacking explicit assertions execute code without verifying behavior, so quality gates based on test-file presence overestimate verification strength. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners assess the verification strength of agent-authored patches by characterizing oracle signals and their link to merge outcomes and review effort. We conduct an empirical study of 86,156 test-file patches from 33,596 agent-authored PRs across 2,807 GitHub repositories produced by five coding agents: OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Cursor, and Claude Code. A qualitative analysis of 384 stratified patches informs a syntactic taxonomy of eight oracle signal categories. Applied at scale, 80.2% of test patches contain weak or no explicit oracle signals. While raw merge rates are lower for strong-oracle PRs, a regression analysis adjusting for agent, PR size, repository popularity, task type, and language shows strong oracles significantly improve merge likelihood (OR = 1.28, p < 0.001). Our findings suggest that test file counts substantially overestimate verification strength and that practitioners can adopt oracle-aware quality checks to more accurately evaluate agent-authored contributions.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Approximately Decoding the Colour Code

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently we showed that minimum weight decoding in the (6.6.6 planar) colour code is NP-hard. However, it remained an open question as to whether it was possible to approximate the minimum weight decoding arbitrarily closely in polynomial time. In this paper we prove that it is possible: for any $\varepsilon>0$ there is an polynomial time algorithm that, given a syndrome, can find an error-set generating that syndrome whose weight is at most $1+\varepsilon$ times the weight of the minimum weight decoding. As a consequence we see that, for any $\varepsilon>0$, there is a polynomial time algorithm that can correct all errors of weight up to $(1-\varepsilon)d/2$ in the distance $d$ colour code (so almost up to the theoretical $d/2$ limit). The polynomial we give is impractically large, but it does open the door for sensible polynomial time algorithms that approximate minimum weight decoding and, in particular, shows that approximate decoding is not NP-hard.

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

Gradient boosting for extremes: sampling theory and application to insurance

arXiv:2606.14268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a statistical learning theory for gradient boosting applied to the estimation of covariate-dependent Generalized Pareto (GP) distributions in the context of Peaks-over-Threshold modeling. After an orthogonal reparametrization of the GP likelihood that diagonalizes its Fisher information matrix, we cast the estimation problem within the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) framework and derive non-asymptotic error bounds for the boosting estimator. Our analysis accounts for three distinct sources of error in the process: statistical fluctuations, the approximation bias inherent to the asymptotic nature of the GP model-controlled under second-order regular variation-and the approximation error associated with the finite number of boosting iterates, making explicit the resulting bias-variance trade-off. We illustrate the practical benefits of the reparametrization through simulations, showing that it significantly reduces gradient correlation during training and improves convergence stability. The methodology is applied to a medical malpractice insurance dataset from the Texas Department of Insurance, comprising over 18 000 closed claims. The gradient boosting approach yields a good fit for the tail of settlement cost distributions and reveals that the number of days to settlement is the dominant predictor of tail heaviness, consistent with earlier findings in the reserving literature.

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

Conditional Local Importance by Quantile Expectations

arXiv:2411.08821v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Global variable importance measures are commonly used to interpret the results of machine learning models. Local variable importance techniques assess how variables contribute to individual observations. Current, popular methods, including LIME and SHAP, provide useful measures of feature contribution in the prediction space, while leaving opportunities for improved characterization of local structure in the model loss space. Additionally, they are not natively adapted for multi-class classification problems. We propose a new model-agnostic method for calculating local variable importance, CLIQUE, that highlights locally dependent relationships, provides improved stability over permutation-based methods, and can be directly applied to multi-class classification problems. Simulated and real-world examples show that CLIQUE emphasizes locally dependent information, captures interaction behavior beyond what can be evaluated by correlations, and assigns zero importance in regions where the response is invariant to changes in variables.