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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies

Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Stabilizing Black-Box Prompt Optimization with Textual Regularization and Signal Aggregation

arXiv:2507.09839v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model behavior. Recent Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) methods iteratively refine prompts using model-generated critiques (often called textual gradients), but they predominantly optimize from failures and underutilize information contained in correct predictions, leading to instability and semantic drift. We propose TRAS (Textual Regularization with Aggregated Signals), a feedback-centric framework that is plug-and-play with existing APO search backbones. It retains the standard textual gradient signal from prior work for error correction and introduces a complementary textual regularizer derived from successful predictions to preserve beneficial prompt components. Because both signals are stochastic and can be noisy, we further introduce Monte Carlo Signal Aggregation (MCSA), which samples multiple gradients or regularizers and aggregates them into a single actionable directive, emphasizing consistent, actionable advice while filtering out outliers. Motivated by rapid model churn, we also formalize Automatic Prompt Migration (APM), the practical problem of adapting an expert prompt across model versions or API providers without losing critical instructions. Across standard APO and APM scenarios, our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding higher accuracy, faster convergence, and lower query cost, while substantially reducing the degradation observed under naive prompt migration.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Event-Grounded Question Answering over Long Audio via Structured Retrieval

arXiv:2602.14612v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Answering natural-language questions over multi-hour audio requires both event recognition and temporal grounding. Current large audio-language models perform well on short clips, but are limited by context length, query-time cost, and weak temporal localization. We present LA-RAG (Long Audio-Retrieval Augmented Generation), a structured framework that converts continuous audio into timestamped event records using an open-vocabulary Audio Grounding Model (AGM), stores them in a SQL event database, and answers queries through intent-aware retrieval followed by LLM-based generation. LA-RAG supports offline grounding mode, where long recordings are pre-indexed for low-latency QA, and inference-time grounding mode, where query-conditioned grounding is performed for shorter open-ended clips. We create 24-hour Home-IoT and Industrial-IoT audio benchmarks and augment CASTELLA, a real-world audio moment retrieval dataset with QA pairs. In offline grounding mode, LA-RAG achieves 76.88% overall accuracy on Home-IoT and 71.10% on Industrial-IoT, with average query latencies below 0.6 seconds. In inference-time grounding mode, state-of-the-art LALMs achieve competitive event-detection accuracy on CASTELLA-QA but low temporal detection F1. We further show that LALMs augmented with our structured retrieval metadata achieve consistent temporal detection improvements, with F1 gains of 11-17% across baseline models with improved latency. These results show that explicit timestamped grounding and structured retrieval provide a practical complement to generative audio-language models for deployment-oriented long-audio QA.

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

"That's AI Slop, You Bot!" Studying Accusations, Evidence, and Credibility in Online Discourse Towards LLM-Generated Comments

arXiv:2606.12073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI has made fluent prose cheap to produce, breaking the old promise to readers that good writing meant real thinking. How have readers responded, and what can this tell us about changing anti-AI attitudes? We analyzed 25 million comments from Hacker News and Reddit (2023-2026), combining LLM judgment on 7,500 sampled accusations of AI use, sentiment trajectories, speech-act coding of 300 confirmed accusations of AI use, and a matched-control test of accused versus non-accused parent comments. We found that the pejorative-label share of accusations rose more than tenfold on both platforms while a placebo vocabulary of pre-2022 inauthenticity terms (shill, astroturf) did not. This shift reflected a fast-growing trend of branding any suspicious or seemingly inauthentic prose as "AI slop". The slop frame now constitutes 94 percent of pejorative mentions, with the dominant comments shifting in tone from mockery toward gatekeeping and structural protest. The key surprise comes from a matched-control test which found that prose features that statistically distinguish AI from human text do not predict which human text gets accused as AI. The new accusations work as social gatekeeping of perceived authenticity without actually screening for AI. This research extends signaling theory by showing that substitute signals used socially can grow even when inaccurate if the underlying detection problem cannot be solved at the non-expert level. It shows that AI's effects on writing from the reader side are distinct from those on the production (writer) side. Detection technology cannot resolve this dynamic because the social function of accusations is increasingly to perform social gatekeeping and in-group signaling as opposed to identifying AI-generated writing.

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

A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models

As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer. The prevailing recipe in industrial pipelines, static imitation of teacher-generated text, carries a structural weakness that grows more severe as tasks become longer and more reasoning-intensive. Because the student is trained on flawless teacher prefixes but generates its own at inference, small errors tend to accumulate into trajectories it has rarely been trained to recover from, and the resulting exposure bias has been shown to scale roughly with the square of sequence length. On-Policy Distillation reorganizes the training loop around this observation by having the teacher provide feedback on what the student actually produces, with the goal of reducing the compounding term toward linear and reframing distillation as an iterative correction process rather than single-pass imitation. The resulting literature has expanded along divergence design, reward-guided optimization, and self-play, yet contributions remain scattered across the knowledge distillation, RLHF, and imitation learning communities without a unified treatment. This survey provides such a treatment. We formalize OPD as f-divergence minimization over student-sampled trajectories, organize the field along three design axes (what to optimize, where the signal comes from, and how to stabilize training in practice), and consolidate success conditions, recurring failure modes, and the connection between OPD and KL-constrained reinforcement learning. We close with open problems that emerge from this synthesis, including distillation scaling laws, uncertainty-aware feedback, agent-level distillation, and the growing overlap between knowledge distillation and RL.

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

Beyond Function Calling: Benchmarking Tool-Using Agents under Tool-Environment Unreliability

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that solve tasks by interacting with external tool environments. Although recent tool-use benchmarks increasingly cover complex task settings, they still largely assume clean, stable, and trustworthy tool environments, leaving tool-environment unreliability insufficiently examined. We introduce ToolBench-X, a benchmark for evaluating agents under recoverable reliability hazards. ToolBench-X contains executable multi-step tasks across diverse domains and sequential, parallel, and mixed workflows, each paired with deterministic tools and a canonical final answer for automatic evaluation. Starting from clean tool environments, ToolBench-X injects five structured hazard types: Specification Drift, Invocation Error, Execution Failure, Output Drift, and Cross-source Conflict. Crucially, each injected instance remains solvable through at least one valid recovery path, such as retrying, fallback, verification, or cross-checking. Experiments reveal a substantial reliability gap: agents that perform well with reliable tools often fail under recoverable hazards. Further analysis shows that failures are driven less by tool-use volume or inference budget than by limited hazard diagnosis and ineffective recovery. Targeted recovery hints recover many failed tasks, while test-time scaling yields more limited gains. These results suggest that tool-use evaluation should move beyond function-call accuracy toward task completion under unreliable tool environments. The code and data is available at https://github.com/Foreverskyou/ToolBench-X.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Static Endpoints: Tool Programs as an Interface for Flexible Agentic Web Services

arXiv:2606.19992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain static endpoints that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an executable tool program that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4\% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1\%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Do We Need LLMs? A Diagnostic for Language-Driven Bandits

arXiv:2604.05859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic decision-making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer selection; all frequent problems in finance). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to these settings, utilizing LLMs for reasoning at every decision step is computationally expensive, and uncertainty estimates are difficult to obtain. To address this, we introduce LLMP-UCB, a bandit algorithm that derives uncertainty estimates from LLMs via repeated inference. However, our experiments demonstrate that lightweight numerical bandits operating on text embeddings (dense or Matryoshka) match or exceed the accuracy of LLM-based solutions at a fraction of their cost. We further show that embedding dimensionality is a practical lever on the exploration-exploitation balance, enabling cost-performance tradeoffs without prompt complexity. Finally, to guide practitioners, we propose a geometric diagnostic based on the arms' embeddings to decide when to use LLM-driven reasoning versus a lightweight numerical bandit. Our results provide a principled deployment framework for cost-effective, uncertainty-aware decision systems with broad applicability across AI use cases.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

RAVEN: Long-Horizon Reasoning & Navigation with a Visuo-Spatio-Temporal Memory

Long-term robot deployment requires a compact and scalable memory that preserves fine-grained visual semantics, grounds observations in space and time, and enables efficient storage and retrieval. In this paper, we propose RAVEN, an agentic memory system for long-horizon robotic question answering and navigation. RAVEN stores visual embeddings with pose and time in a vector database, and grounds retrieval in a spatial map to answer queries and navigate to goals. By operating directly on visual embeddings, RAVEN avoids lossy image-to-text captioning and enables accurate semantic, spatial, and temporal retrieval at scale. Across several simulated and real-world video question-answering benchmarks, RAVEN consistently surpasses caption-based memory systems and matches frontier VLMs on long-horizon tasks at 10$\times$ lower retrieval cost. Finally, we instantiate RAVEN on a Unitree Go1 robot for the task of long-horizon navigation for natural language goal-reaching, and show successful deployment over several large indoor environments.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Temporal modulation as a resource: enhanced frequency estimation in continuous variable systems

arXiv:2606.15108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frequency estimation, a cornerstone of quantum metrology, has been significantly enhanced by advanced quantum sensing strategies. However, most protocols rely either on static or time-independent encoding mechanisms, inherently limiting their achievable precision scaling, or on control strategies requiring changing the Hamiltonian and/or implementing feedback mechanisms. To overcome this, we investigate a simpler dynamical encoding protocol where the quantum oscillator is driven by a general continuous temporal frequency modulation $\Omega(t) = \omega_0 f(t)$. We analytically demonstrate that for a given modulation profile $f(t)$ and its corresponding time-integral $F(t)$, the quantum Fisher information (QFI) scales as $\mathcal{O}(F(t)^2)$. This enhancement stems from the fact that temporal encoding fundamentally alters the mechanism of dynamical phase accumulation. Crucially, when evaluated under the energy and evolution-time constraints, this framework reveals a genuine precision enhancement over the conventional time-independent baseline. By analyzing explicit polynomial and exponential modulations, we establish that arbitrary precision scaling can be deterministically engineered, with ultimate bounds that are asymptotically saturable via optimal homodyne detection. Our framework provides a universal paradigm for exploiting time-dependent quantum control in next-generation sensors.

12.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

A multiscale, Bayesian inference approach to augment mechanistic models of cell signaling with machine-learning predictions of binding affinity

by Holly A. Huber, Stacey D. Finley Computational models in systems biology are often underdetermined—that is, there is little data relative to the complexity and size of the model. This lack of data is primarily due to limits in our ability to observe specific biological systems and restricts the utility of computational models. To reduce this uncertainty, recent methods have explored augmenting parameter inference of systems biology models with predictions from machine learning models. Such approaches expand the pool of data that is applicable for the inference problem. Here, we explore augmenting the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models. We choose to investigate signaling because experimental measurements of the variables of interest, protein dynamics, are still quite limited. To investigate, we propose a novel, multiscale, Bayesian inference approach that augments traditional signaling data with predictions of binding affinity. These predictions are generated using a machine learning pipeline with measurements of amino acid sequence, from the Universal Protein Resource, or protein structure, from the Protein Data Bank, as inputs. We find that we can successfully integrate these measurements into the inference problem using our novel framework. Excitingly, this integration significantly improves the parameter estimates of signaling models. We demonstrate that how much this improvement impacts predictions of signaling depends on the sensitivity of the prediction to perturbations in the parameter values. Overall, the framework we establish here improves the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models by successfully bridging data on protein sequence and structure with systems-level signaling.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Accurate detection of tumor clonality and ongoing expansion mode from genomic data

Recent evidence shows that despite considerable effort, currently available algorithms for estimating intra-tumor heterogeneity (ITH) remain limited. We developed DECODE (Deciphering Cancer Origin from DNA Evolution), a novel mutation clustering method that incorporates the impact of sample-specific sequencing coverage and mutation calling biases. On synthetic data, DECODE outperformed existing methods across multiple clonality metrics and accurately detected and characterized the neutral tail in the site frequency spectrum (SFS), which encodes the tumor's ongoing expansion mode. In acute myeloid leukemia, accounting for the neutral tail enabled DECODE to yield more parsimonious clonal decompositions that align more closely with known subclonal dynamics that drive relapse. Applied to data from The Cancer Genome Atlas, DECODE not only detected a neutral SFS tail in most samples across tumor types but also uncovered a clinically meaningful link between ITH and survival in low-grade glioma. By jointly inferring clonality and expansion mode, DECODE provides two complementary and prognostically relevant readouts of tumor evolution from single tumor genomic samples.

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

PCBSchemaGen: Reward-Guided LLM Code Synthesis for Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) Schematic Design with Structured Verification

arXiv:2602.00510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most LLM code-synthesis benchmarks rely on unit tests as the reward oracle, but PCB schematic design has none: correctness is defined by structured physical constraints over real IC packages and pin-level assignments, per-task golden references are unavailable, and SPICE simulation does not validate schematic-level correctness. We introduce PCBSchemaGen, a training-free inference-time framework that turns a frozen LLM into a verifiable, repairable PCB schematic generator. The framework induces a domain schema from IC datasheets to ground LLM decoding, pairs it with a deterministic 5-layer continuous-reward verifier with pin-level error localization, and refines candidates through a Thompson Sampling arm-acquiring bandit. We evaluate on 2 PCB benchmarks covering 227 real-IC tasks across 22 unified circuit domains, including a public-schematic-derived suite that serves as a fully held-out generalization test (verifier, KG library, and prompts frozen before any evaluation). Under our framework, an open-weight 31B model (Gemma-4-31B) passes 81.3% of PCBBench tasks on average, and the same framework transfers across both benchmarks with zero verifier code changes; a Circuitron-style inference-time prompting baseline on the same Gemma-4-31B backbone collapses on hard system-level designs. This suggests inference-time refinement under a deterministic structural verifier is a general recipe for reference-free LLM code synthesis in domains without unit-test oracles. Our benchmarks and deterministic verifier are publicly available at https://github.com/HZou9/PCBSchemaGen_v2.

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

Overcoming the Incentive Collapse Paradox

arXiv:2603.27049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted task delegation is increasingly common, yet human effort in such systems is costly and typically unobserved. Recent work by Bastani and Cachon (2025); Sambasivan et al. (2021) shows that accuracy-based payment schemes suffer from incentive collapse: as AI accuracy improves, sustaining positive human effort requires unbounded payments. We study this phenomenon in a budget-constrained principal-agent framework with strategic human agents whose output accuracy depends on unobserved effort. Our first contribution is a general impossibility result showing that incentive collapse is not merely a limitation of simple linear payments, but arises for any payment rule based only on observed task accuracy.To overcome this barrier, we propose a sentinel-auditing payment mechanism that enforces a strictly positive and controllable level of human effort at finite cost, independent of AI accuracy. Building on this incentive-robust foundation, we develop an incentive-aware active statistical inference framework that jointly optimizes (i) the auditing rate and (ii) active sampling and budget allocation across tasks of varying difficulty to minimize the final statistical loss under a single budget. Experiments demonstrate improved cost-error tradeoffs relative to standard active learning and auditing-only baselines.

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

Deep Learning of Solver-Aware Turbulence Closures from Nudged LES Dynamics

arXiv:2604.23874v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The differentiable physics paradigm may be leveraged as an a-posteriori approach for discovering turbulence closure models by embedding a neural network parameterization directly inside the solver and optimizing it given potentially sparse target data. This addresses a key limitation of a-priori learning where direct numerical simulation (DNS) data is used to approximate the subgrid stress with the assumption of a low-pass filter. Closures trained in this a-priori manner frequently lead to unstable deployments due to the mismatch between the assumed filter and the effect of numerical discretizations and coarse-graining. In comparison, while typically stable during deployment, a-posteriori learning incurs high computational costs due to the need to backpropagate through a large eddy simulation (LES) solver. Furthermore, a-posteriori methods are challenging to apply broadly since they require significant modification of existing solvers. Finally, both approaches are limited when generalization is desired across different numerical schemes with their implicit filtering characteristics. In this work, we present a deep-learning approach for turbulence closure modeling built on the continuous data assimilation framework. Our approach enables the a-priori training of closures using sparsely observed DNS data without modifying or differentiating through the LES solver, while preserving stability during deployment for the recovery of invariant statistics. We focus on the model's ability to adapt to different discretizations by explicitly conditioning it on the numerical scheme. We use two- and three-dimensional canonical cases to test our framework and show that the learned correction systematically tracks the discretization error of the coarse solver.

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

OmniDrive: An LLM-Choreographed Multi-Agent World Model with Unified Latent Co-Compression for Multi-View Driving Video Generation

Generative world models for autonomous driving face two unresolved tensions: heterogeneous control injection, where free-form language, HD-maps, trajectories, and camera poses reside in incompatible representational spaces, and post-hoc cross-view fusion, where per-camera latents fail to encode global 3-D geometry. We trace both to a single root cause: the absence of a shared symbolic interlingua aligning language, geometry, and pixels at the latent-token level. We present DRIVE-CHOREO, an LLM-choreographed multi-agent world model that recasts controllable multi-view video generation as latent choreography. Three Qwen2.5-VL agents - a Director parsing user intent into a structured WorldScript, a Cartographer grounding it into spatially-anchored layout tokens, and an Auditor feeding cross-view critiques back as auxiliary supervision - jointly author a single position-aware token sequence. This sequence is co-compressed with the multi-view video via a view-time permutation that enforces inter-camera geometry within the convolutional receptive field of a 3-D VAE. On nuScenes, DRIVE-CHOREO sets new state-of-the-art multi-view consistency and BEV mAP (21.6) with competitive FVD (45.7); a detector trained purely on our synthetic data gains +2.4 NDS on the real validation split, validating downstream utility.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

BrainPro: Towards Large-scale Brain State-aware EEG Representation Learning

arXiv:2509.22050v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) reflects underlying brain states, whose activities are distributed across brain regions and manifest as spatial patterns on the scalp. Learning these spatially structured, state-related patterns requires consistent spatial representations across datasets. However, existing EEG foundation models are typically based on self-attention, which does not preserve location-specific information and struggles to align signals recorded with different channel configurations. Moreover, brain states contain both shared and state-specific regional activity, suggesting that learning neurophysiologically plausible, state-aware representations can complement the shared representations targeted by current models and improve downstream decoding. To address these limitations, we propose BrainPro, a large EEG model that combines a retrieval-based spatial learning mechanism for cross-layout spatial alignment with a brain state-decoupling module that learns both shared and state-specific representations through parallel encoders and region-aware reconstruction. Pre-trained on a large EEG corpus, BrainPro achieves state-of-the-art performance across nine public BCI datasets spanning emotion, motor, speech, stress, mental disease, and attention tasks. Analyses of spatial filters, channel-drop robustness, and encoder contributions further validate the effectiveness of its spatial alignment and state-aware pathways. These results show that BrainPro achieves improved interpretability of learned spatial patterns and produces representations that benefit diverse EEG decoding tasks.

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

Attention is Just Another Name for Coupling?: A Fast-Slow ODE Perspective on Hierarchical Pretraining

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal self-attention is a coupling mechanism: each token's hidden state is updated by a learned mixture of preceding tokens at the same timescale. This paper asks whether a second, temporally slower coupling-a slow sub-system operating on a temporally-downsampled view of the sequence and fed back into the fast path through a zero-initialised gate-complements it. The question is framed in the language of singularly perturbed ordinary differential equations (ODEs), where the fast variable $x$ evolves at the token rate, the slow variable $y$ evolves at one update per $P$ tokens, and the timescale ratio $\varepsilon = 1/P$ is enforced structurally by causal block-mean pooling. The paper instantiates the fast-slow ODE formalism as a concrete neural network: a fast path of standard causal attention over $T$ tokens, a slow path of full attention over $T/P$ pooled tokens ($P^2 \times$ cheaper per layer), and a zero-initialised additive gate. In addition, under a linear-generator assumption on the fast dynamics, we prove that the equilibrium manifold $x = \phi(y)$ is exactly the master-equation (ME) stationary distribution $p_{\mathrm{st}}(y)$; in that regime a learned MLP $\phi_\theta(y)$ is a variational approximation of it (the trained block is not a generator, so this identity is the structured limit, not a claim about the network as trained). Empirically, at $500$k tokens the coupling is neutral – the gate stays closed and the coupled and frozen ablations are within run-to-run noise – at a wall-clock cost comparable to a dense baseline. The contribution is the precise, gap-marked mapping itself, not a performance gain.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Law of the Iterated Logarithm for $p$-Walks on $\mathbb{Z}$

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The $p$-rotor walk on $\mathbb{Z}$ is a self-interacting walk that interpolates between the simple random walk and the deterministic rotor walk. While the weak convergence of this model to a perturbed Brownian motion is known, its almost sure asymptotic boundaries have not been characterized. In this paper, we establish the exact Law of the Iterated Logarithm (LIL) for the $p$-rotor walk. Utilizing the decomposition of the walk into a martingale perturbed by its running extrema, we obtain first a functional Law of the Iterated Logarithm for the linearly interpolated paths of the $p$-walk. We then obtain the classical LIL constants by solving a calculus of variations problem over the perturbed Strassen set.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Beyond Uniform Forgetting: A Study of Sequential Direct Preference Optimization Across Preference Settings

Aligning language models with human preferences often requires optimising multiple behavioural objectives. A practical approach is to apply these objectives sequentially using preference optimisation methods such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO), but it remains unclear whether later training uniformly degrades preferences learned earlier or whether the effect depends on the relationship between objectives. We study sequential DPO across four preference settings covering distributional conflict, multi-attribute interaction, strong safety signal, and compatible response-quality objectives. Using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with LoRA adapters, we evaluate all objectives after every stage with a fixed base-model reference. We find that sequential DPO does not produce a single forgetting pattern; preference change ranges from partial degradation to stability, pair-level redistribution, or positive transfer depending on objective relationship, signal strength, and training order. Pair-level analysis using length-normalised policy margins shows that aggregate metrics can mask heterogeneous changes across preference pairs, whereas quartile decomposition reveals that high-confidence pairs can either degrade or improve depending on the setting. Mechanistic diagnostics show that Stage~2 gradients and adapter updates are near-orthogonal to the previous objective across all settings, providing little evidence that direct gradient opposition is the primary driver. These findings suggest that future sequential alignment pipelines should account for objective compatibility and signal strength, rather than assuming that later objectives affect earlier preferences uniformly.

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

CCKS: Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing

arXiv:2606.12281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Decentralized Training and Decentralized Execution (DTDE) for cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), action-advising-based knowledge sharing promotes interpretable and scalable cooperation among agents. However, current action advising approaches often adhere too much to the teacher's guidance without evaluating teacher-student compatibility, which causes excessive advising, suboptimal stability, and degraded performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing (CCKS) framework, which allows agents to adopt recommendations based on consensus-derived constraints and to follow the teacher's instructions more smartly. This mechanism enables agents to balance exploration and learning from experienced teachers, improving overall performance. The key is the consensus model construction, for which we propose to employ contrastive learning to construct consensus models based on local observations in the agents' training phase. In action selection, agents score and choose actions based on consensus and shared knowledge. Designed as a plug-and-play solution, CCKS integrates seamlessly with existing DTDE algorithms. Experiments conducted in the Google Research Football environment and the complex StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge demonstrate that the integration with CCKS significantly improves cooperation efficiency, learning speed, and overall performance compared with current DTDE baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanxpy/CCKS.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Guiding the development of climate counterfactuals for health impact attribution studies

Climate change detection and attribution (D&A) methods have become vital for quantifying the influence of anthropogenic forcing on the Earth's systems, including human health. Health impact attribution (HIA) studies seek to disentangle climate-driven health effects from natural variability yet are often constrained by the availability of accessible counterfactual climate scenarios. This tutorial paper presents a flexible, reproducible framework for developing counterfactual climates without reliance on computationally intensive global circulation models. We provide practical, R-based methodologies for constructing both trend-based (temperature and non-temperature) and event-based counterfactual, using a variety of techniques including model residual detrending, data-driven decomposition (e.g., Singular Spectrum Analysis and Empirical Mode Decomposition) and stochastic weather generators. The tutorial also explores the incorporation of greenhouse gas concentrations as forcing variables, rather than global mean temperature anomalies. By operationalising these methods through worked examples and an open code repository, this paper aims to build capacity within the HIA community, enhance methodological transparency, and foster interdisciplinary collaboration between climate and health researchers.

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

Recursive Learning Without Collapse: A Weighting-Based Stabilization Framework

arXiv:2502.18049v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies identified an intriguing phenomenon in recursive generative model training known as model collapse, where models trained on data generated by previous models exhibit severe performance degradation. Addressing this issue and developing more effective training strategies have become central challenges in generative model research. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon within a novel framework, where generative models are iteratively trained on a combination of newly collected real data and synthetic data from the previous training step. To develop an optimal training strategy for integrating real and synthetic data, we evaluate the performance of a weighted training scheme in various scenarios, including Gaussian distribution estimation, generalized linear models, and nonparametric estimation. We theoretically characterize the impact of the mixing proportion and weighting scheme of synthetic data on the final model's performance. Our key finding is that, across different settings, the optimal weighting scheme under different proportions of synthetic data asymptotically follows a unified expression, revealing a fundamental trade-off between leveraging synthetic data and model performance. In some cases, the optimal weight assigned to real data corresponds to the reciprocal of the golden ratio. Finally, we validate our theoretical results on extensive simulated datasets and a real tabular dataset.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PSCT-Net: Geometry-Aware Pediatric Skull CT Reconstruction via Differentiable Back-Projection and Attention-Guided Refinement

arXiv:2606.19867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computed Tomography (CT) is essential for diagnosing pediatric craniofacial abnormalities, yet poses radiation risks to developing anatomies. Reconstructing 3D CT from sparse bi-planar X-rays offers a low-dose alternative but is severely ill-posed. Existing methods employ geometry-agnostic feature lifting, naively projecting 2D features into 3D without explicit spatial modeling, causing depth ambiguity and degraded osseous boundaries. We present PSCT-Net, a geometry-aware framework with differentiable back-projection. Differentiable back-projection establishes a spatially faithful volumetric prior, alleviating depth ambiguity. An Attention-Guided Projection (AGP-3D) module then learns non-linear voxel-wise correspondences between 2D regions and 3D locations. A Bidirectional Mamba (BiM-3D) module captures long-range volumetric dependencies with linear complexity. We further curate a private institutional pediatric skull CT cohort, PedSkull-CT, comprising normal and pathological cases for internal evaluation, addressing the gap in adult-centric, trunk-focused datasets.