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

Low-Cost Neuromorphic Fall Detection Using Synthetic Event Data and Hybrid SNNs

This work presents the development of hybrid models that integrate spiking neural networks (SNNs) with components of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn from simulated event-based camera data (Dynamic Vision Sensor, DVS) generated from conventional smartphone videos. Aimed primarily at human fall detection, the approach leverages the energy efficiency and spatio-temporal processing capabilities of SNNs by converting video frames into event-based data. The proposed models are evaluated through simulations on multiple datasets, comparing their performance to that of traditional machine learning models. Results demonstrate significant gains in efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, underscoring the potential of combining SNNs and DVS technology for complex tasks in real-world environments.

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

Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.13989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent alignment-free non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-speech (TTS) models formulate synthesis as a conditional infilling task, bypassing explicit duration predictors and external aligners. When speech is represented with neural codec tokens, the infilling problem becomes discrete, making Discrete Flow Matching (DFM), a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) framework for discrete generation, a natural fit. However, inference-time control for stable low-step conditional infilling remains underexplored. We propose Mask, Sample, Revise, an inference-time CTMC stack for alignment-free DFM-TTS. The stack combines predictor-free guidance to strengthen text conditioning, prompt-matched conditional coupling to align the probability path with the acoustic prompt, and SC-ReMask, a schedule-constrained remasking mechanism that introduces token-to-mask transitions so early de-masking decisions can be revised. These components require no post-hoc fine-tuning and operate in a single tau-leaping sampler. Controlled ablations show that this stack improves intelligibility and robustness in the low-NFE prompted setting, outperforming unguided and guidance-only samplers with substantially more steps.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Markov property and path regularity for the solutions to SPDEs driven by cylindrical-martingale valued measures

arXiv:2606.12381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we prove the Markov property for the solution to stochastic partial differential equations driven by a cylindrical orthogonal martingale-valued measure. We assume our coefficients are time-dependent and satisfy some growth and Lipschitz conditions. We also prove that for time-independent coefficients and under mild assumptions on the cylindrical orthogonal martingale-valued measure, the solutions to our stochastic partial differential equations are Feller. Finally, in the case that the $C_{0}$-semigroup is quasi-contraction, we show that the solution to our stochastic partial differential equation possesses a càdlàg version.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Distributional Biases in Post-Training: A Markovian Analysis of Reasoning Trajectories

arXiv:2511.07368v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models exhibit broad knowledge but limited task-specific reasoning, motivating post-training strategies such as RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and test-time scaling (TTS). While recent work highlights the role of exploration in improving pass@K, empirical evidence points to a paradox: RLVR and ORM/PRM typically reinforce existing paths rather than expanding the reasoning scope, raising the question of why exploration helps if no new patterns emerge. To reconcile this paradox, we adopt the perspective of Kim et al. (2025), viewing easy (e.g., simplifying a fraction) versus hard (e.g., discovering the some symmetry) reasoning steps as low versus high probability Markov transitions. In this tractable model, pretraining corresponds to tree-graph discovering, while post-training corresponds to CoT reweighting. We provably show that, both RLVR and ORM/PRM would favor heavily to several high-probability paths, and thereby forget rare-but-crucial CoTs. Building on this, we further prove that exploration strategies such as rejecting easy instances and KL regularization help preserve rare CoTs. Empirical simulations corroborate our theoretical results.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning Patterns and Abstractions from Perceptual Sequences

Authors:

arXiv:2503.10973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cognition swiftly breaks high-dimensional sensory streams into familiar parts and uncovers their relations. Why do structures emerge, and how do they enable learning, generalization, and prediction? What computational principles underlie this core aspect of perception and intelligence? A sensory stream, simplified, is a one-dimensional sequence. In learning such sequences, we naturally segment them into parts – a process known as chunking. In the first project, I investigated factors influencing chunking in a serial reaction time task and showed that humans adapt to underlying chunks while balancing speed and accuracy. Building on this, I developed models that learn chunks and parse sequences chunk by chunk. Normatively, I proposed chunking as a rational strategy for discovering recurring patterns and nested hierarchies, enabling efficient sequence factorization. Learned chunks serve as reusable primitives for transfer, composition, and mental simulation – letting the model compose the new from the known. I demonstrated this model's ability to learn hierarchies in single and multi-dimensional sequences and highlighted its utility for unsupervised pattern discovery. The second part moves from concrete to abstract sequences. I taxonomized abstract motifs and examined their role in sequence memory. Behavioral evidence suggests that humans exploit pattern redundancies for compression and transfer. I proposed a non-parametric hierarchical variable model that learns both chunks and abstract variables, uncovering invariant symbolic patterns. I showed its similarity to human learning and compared it to large language models. Taken together, this thesis suggests that chunking and abstraction as simple computational principles enable structured knowledge acquisition in hierarchically organized sequences, from simple to complex, concrete to abstract.

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

DarkVGGT: Seeing Through Darkness Using Thermal Geometry without Daylight Tax

Recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated strong performance and flexibility in efficient end-to-end scene geometry estimation from image streams. However, their reliance on visible-light appearance makes them vulnerable in dark and low-visibility environments, where RGB cues are severely degraded and geometric evidence becomes ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose DarkVGGT, an RGB-T feed-forward geometry framework that uses physics-aware thermal modeling for robust 3D estimation in low-light scenes. DarkVGGT introduces two complementary modules. First, physics-inspired thermal factorization extracts emissive-dominant, geometry-consistent thermal cues while isolating sparse reflective residuals that may introduce geometric ambiguity. Second, geometry-shared thermal routing isolates modality-invariant geometric structures from thermal-specific patterns, selectively injecting reliability-aware structural guidance into the RGB stream. Together, these components enable accurate thermal-informed geometry estimation under degraded RGB conditions while largely preserving performance in well-lit environments. Experiments on low-visibility RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both depth and camera pose estimation over existing feed-forward geometry baselines.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Proposal of quantum arrival-time measurement with a Bose-Einstein condensate

arXiv:2606.20278v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work shows how a Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold atoms could be used to address a long-standing question in quantum theory: how much time does it take for a particle to reach a detector? To this end, we propose a realistic experimental setup, whose key idea is not to measure arrival times directly, but the arrival flux on the detector as a function of its position. This novel approach not only solves practical issues with having a detector close to the system, but also results in signals that allow to unambiguously distinguish different theoretical predictions. This proposal raises prospects for resolving the decades-old debate on this fundamental issue.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Library-Aware Doubles and Iterative Repair for Large Language Model-Generated Unit Tests in OpenSIL Firmware

arXiv:2606.19725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Validating changes in low-level C firmware is expensive because unit tests (UTs) are fragile under strict build constraints, where missing headers, unresolved symbols, and dependency mismatches frequently prevent compilation and linking. This study introduces an automated UT authoring workflow for the Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library (openSIL) firmware codebase maintained by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that reduces manual effort through a large language model (LLM) guided multi-agent pipeline. The workflow combines automated generation of test scaffolds, library-aware creation or reuse of stubs, mocks, and fakes, and an iterative compile-dispatch repair loop driven by build logs and line-coverage feedback. We evaluate the approach using compilation success, repair iterations, dispatch success, and line coverage, with time, cost, and token usage as secondary measures. Across 76 functions under test, the workflow generated compilable UTs for 73 functions. In a configuration without line coverage guidance or retrieval augmentation, mean line coverage reached 73.9%. On a 48-function subset evaluated under both configurations, mean line coverage reached 98.8% with line-coverage guidance alone and reached 94.7% when combined with vector-database retrieval. Results show that automated generation-and-repair pipelines can substantially improve UT creation efficiency and coverage for constrained firmware environments while reducing manual debugging effort.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Understanding Sample Efficiency in Predictive Coding

arXiv:2605.11911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) is an influential account of cortical learning. Much of recent work has focused on comparing PC to Backpropagation (BP) to find whether PC offers any advantages. Small scale experiments show that PC enables learning that is more sample efficient and effective in many contexts, though a thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomena remains elusive. To address this, we quantify the efficiency of learning in BP and PC through a metric called ``target alignment'', which measures how closely the change in the output of the network is aligned to the output prediction error. We then derive and empirically validate analytical expressions for target alignment in Deep Linear Networks. We show that learning in PC is more efficient than BP, which is especially pronounced in deep, narrow and pre-trained networks. We also derive exact conditions for guaranteed optimal target alignment in PC and validate our findings through experiments. We study full training trajectories of linear and non-linear models, and find the predicted benefits of PC persist in practice even when some assumptions are violated. Overall, this work provides a mechanistic understanding of the higher learning efficiency observed for PC over BP in previous works, and can guide how PC should be parametrised to learn most effectively.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Circulators Based on Coupled Quantum Anomalous Hall Insulators and Resonators

arXiv:2505.07770v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrated plasmonics is advancing rapidly, enabling a wide range of functionalities to be incorporated onto a single chip. Applications span information processing, computation, quantum sensing, and dark-matter detection. This progress has driven the development of integrated non-reciprocal devices, which are essential for preventing unwanted feedback that can degrade system performance. While non-reciprocal devices have been realized in edge magnetoplasmon materials via classical interference effects, their operation is often limited by the input power range. Here, we demonstrate that topological circulators utilizing asymmetric coupling offer improved input power range, isolation, and insertion loss. In this configuration, we demonstrate the coupling between a chiral edge magnetoplasmonic resonator and a pair of LC resonators is well described by an effective non-Hermitian two-site Hatano-Nelson model with asymmetric directional couplings, resulting in nonreciprocal behavior. The coherent photon-plasmon interaction enables a circulator with up to 50 dB of isolation across a broad range of excitation power. These results suggest that magnetic topological insulators provide a promising platform for realizing asymmetric non-Hermitian couplings at radio frequencies and for exploring regimes of strong directional suppression and possible exceptional-point physics. More broadly, they highlight the potential of topological-material-based microwave devices for future integration with superconducting quantum information platforms.

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

G2IA: Geometry-Guided Instance-Aware Retrieval and Refinement for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) enables camera-only robots to localize against pre-built LiDAR maps in autonomous navigation scenarios. This image-to-point-cloud setting is challenged by two coupled ambiguities: the modality gap between perspective RGB appearance and sparse metric geometry, and perceptual aliasing among urban places with similar roads, facades, intersections, and object arrangements. Instead of treating CMPR as a single global descriptor matching problem, we argue that reliable retrieval requires both geometry-aware representation alignment and fine-grained candidate verification. In this paper, we propose G2IA, a geometry-guided instance-aware framework for image-to-point-cloud place recognition. In the retrieval stage, visual geometry priors from VGGT and instance features are integrated to construct place descriptors that are more compatible with LiDAR-derived map representations. In the refinement stage, the retrieved candidates are re-ranked by explicitly verifying whether local instance shapes and their relative spatial layouts are consistent across modalities. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that G2IA consistently improves image-to-point-cloud place recognition under different localization thresholds, and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization.

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

Second-order PACF asymptotics and discrimination between fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$

Authors:

arXiv:2605.31416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$ have the same long-memory pole $|\theta|^{-2d}$ and hence the same leading PACF law $\alpha(n)\sim d/n$. We show that this agreement breaks at the first non-universal order. For $0

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

The Illusion of Multi-Agent Advantage

Prevailing wisdom posits that Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are superior to Single-Agent Systems (SAS), citing advantages like context protection, parallel processing and distributed decision-making. However, empirical support for this claim relies primarily on comparisons with SAS baselines using benchmarks that prioritize isolated reasoning tasks, which do not adequately assess these advantages. Focusing on automatically generated MAS that are designed for enhanced generalizability over manually-designed counterparts, we perform a rigorous, systematic evaluation against SAS, specifically Chain-of-Thought with Self-Consistency (CoT-SC). Across traditional reasoning datasets and tasks with interactive multi-step workflows (e.g., BrowseComp-Plus), we demonstrate that automatic MAS consistently underperform CoT-SC despite being up to 10x more expensive. To isolate these failures from limitations inherent to task structure, we introduce a diagnostic synthetic dataset tailored for MAS featuring explicit task decomposition, context separation and parallelization potential. We show that expert-architected MAS consistently outperforms automatically generated architectures in both raw performance and cost-efficiency on this dataset, demonstrating that existing evaluation frameworks mask critical architectural gaps and inefficiencies of complex MAS by failing to account for the marginal utility of increased computational cost. Critically, systematic deconstruction of the generated MAS architectures reveals that current automated design paradigms produce architectural bloat that prioritizes superficial complexity which does not translate into functional utility, exposing a fundamental misalignment with multi-agent principles.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

QSignAI: Quantum-Randomness-Seeded Identity Signatures at the Intersection of AI for Science and Science for AI

arXiv:2605.27729v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The 2024-2025 Nobel and Turing awards recognised AI and quantum science simultaneously. Yet no deployed system has brought these streams together for the public. This paper presents QSignAI, a production-deployed platform demonstrating a bidirectional AI-quantum relationship in a real-time event participation system. We address three questions: can quantum-randomness generation via a two-source extractor be embedded in an AI-driven social platform with acceptable latency; can an AI bot make quantum phenomena perceptually legible to general audiences; and does the combined system work in practice? A conversational bot routes each participant's first message through a quantum pipeline comprising a Toeplitz two-source extractor over independent single-qubit Hadamard measurements on SV1 and DM1 simulators, plus a 2-qubit Bell state, producing a unique quantum-randomness-seeded identity signature per participant. The first two questions are answered through system architecture and qualitative deployment evidence from live events; the third through successful production deployment. The current deployment uses cloud quantum simulators; physical QPU randomness is the near-term extension. Measurable benchmarks are identified as priority future work.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Average entropy of Bogoliubov-Kubo-Mori random state ensemble

arXiv:2606.17960v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random states play a foundational role in different branches of modern quantum science. In this work, we study a recently proposed random state ensemble induced from von Neumann entropy through the Bogoliubov-Kubo-Mori (BKM) metric. In particular, we derive an exact yet explicit formula of average entanglement entropy over BKM ensemble. In obtaining the formula, we only make use of properties of normalization constant of the ensemble in the absence of its correlation kernel, contrary to average entropy computation of other ensembles. This new framework paves the way for calculating higher-order cumulants of BKM ensemble beyond the average.

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

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

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

LLM-Evolved Domain-Independent Heuristics for Symbolic AI Planning

arXiv:2605.29649v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heuristic search is the dominant paradigm in symbolic AI planning, and the strongest heuristics are the result of decades of work by planning researchers. Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can design heuristics for individual planning domains, but no LLM-generated heuristic has so far worked on arbitrary planning tasks. In this paper, we use evolutionary search to produce the first LLM-generated domain-independent heuristics that exceed the hand-engineered state of the art. We let an LLM mutate parent heuristics written in C++, store candidates in a MAP-Elites archive keyed on informedness and speed and calculate fitness scores by blending coverage with solving time. To place the evolved programs in context, we additionally benchmark a broad set of hand-engineered heuristics on their informedness-speed tradeoff, which to our knowledge has not been done before. On unseen testing domains, our best evolved heuristic solves more tasks than even the strongest baseline, with our full heuristic suite spanning the Pareto frontier of said tradeoff. We also find that seeding evolution from the trivial blind heuristic outperforms seeding from the strong FF heuristic, even when the resulting program is itself an FF variant, and that LLM reasoning effort affects how often candidates compile much more than the quality of those that do. Because the evolved programs are plain C++, they slot into existing planners as drop-in replacements and inherit the soundness and completeness guarantees of the underlying search.

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

FLiP: Towards understanding and interpreting multimodal multilingual sentence embeddings

This paper presents factorized linear projection (FLiP) models for understanding pretrained sentence embedding spaces. We train FLiP models to recover the lexical content from multilingual (LaBSE), multimodal (SONAR) and API-based (Gemini) sentence embedding spaces in several high- and mid-resource languages. We show that FLiP can recall more than 75% of lexical content from the embeddings, significantly outperforming existing non-factorized baselines. Using this as a diagnostic tool, we uncover the modality and language biases across the selected sentence encoders and provide practitioners with intrinsic insights about the encoders without relying on conventional downstream evaluation tasks. Our implementation is public https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/FLiP.

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

Exactly Solvable Quantum Model with Spin-Dependent Coulomb Interaction

arXiv:2501.05103v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we report an exactly solvable quantum model featuring a spin-dependent Coulomb interaction, described by the spin vector potential \(\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2\) together with a Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\varphi = \kappa / r\) . The model is governed by the Schrödinger-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_S = \vec{\Pi}^2 / (2M) + q \varphi\) in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and by the Dirac-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_D = c \vec{\alpha} \cdot \vec{\Pi} + \beta M c^2 + q \varphi\) in relativistic quantum mechanics, where \(\vec{\Pi} = \vec{p} - (q/c)\vec{\mathcal{A}}\) is the canonical momentum. We demonstrate two main results: (i) Just as the Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\mathcal{S}_Maxwell = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = 0,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) is a local exact solution of Maxwell's equations on $r\neq0$, the gauge potential \(\mathcal{S}_YM = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) constitutes a local exact solution of the Yang–Mills equations on the punctured region $r\neq0$. (ii) Both Hamiltonians \(\mathcal{H}_S\) and \(\mathcal{H}_D\) can be solved exactly in the presence of this spin-dependent Coulomb interaction. The resulting energy spectra are derived, and they naturally reduce to those of the ordinary hydrogen atom when the spin-dependent terms are neglected. Finally, we clarify the quantization conditions and the fixed-background interpretation of the model.

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

GPT-Based Fast Simulation of CLAS12 Detector Hits via Conditional Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2606.16035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern particles physics experiments have demonstrated an increasing need for fast, high-fidelity detector simulation as detector components have improved and subsequent computational requirements approach the limits of available resources. Recently, deep generative models have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Monte-Carlo methods, with recent works drawing inspiration from large language models (LLMs) and self-supervised next-token prediction methods. In this work, we present an application of a GPT-style autoregressive transformer as a fast surrogate model for the calorimeter inside the CLAS12 experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The model is conditioned on incident momentum and generates realistic detector hits autoregressively across all nine calorimeter layers as sequences of strip, ADC, and TDC tokens. We demonstrate that the model faithfully reproduces hit multiplicity, spatial distributions, energy deposits, and the energy-momentum response of the electromagnetic calorimeter. The generator achieves inference rates exceeding 700 events per second on a single GPU, providing a substantial speedup over traditional Geant4-based simulations while maintaining physics fidelity essential for high-luminosity experimental programs.

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

A Risk Decomposition Framework for Pre-Hoc Fine-Tuning Prediction

arXiv:2606.17649v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The high cost of fine-tuning LLMs poses a significant economic barrier; pre-hoc performance prediction offers a critical solution to substantially reduce this expense. However, the theoretical limits of pre-hoc performance prediction remain unexplored. We formulate it as a stochastic estimation problem under information constraints, decomposing prediction risk into two components: an intrinsic limit (static data-model compatibility) and a reducible optimization variance. We prove that optimization variance admits a necessary lower bound on its decay rate, implying fundamental constraints on how quickly uncertainty dissipates, regardless of the predictor used. Based on these dynamics, we derive a budget-optimal probing principle and introduce a predictability phase diagram that organizes tasks into three distinct regimes: Static-Sufficient, Dynamic-Critical, and Noise-Dominant. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate these theoretical regimes and demonstrate the efficiency of our probing strategy.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Rotational Vacuum Friction of Nonabsorbing Particles

arXiv:2606.24723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A nonabsorbing particle rotating in vacuum can lose angular momentum only by converting mechanical energy into electromagnetic radiation. Here, we develop a quantum theory of rotational vacuum friction for small lossless particles and show that axial symmetry qualitatively changes the leading dissipation channel. At zero temperature, the frictional torque scales as $M\propto\Omega^7$ with rotation frequency $\ Omega$ in anisotropic particles due to the emission of correlated photon pairs whose frequencies sum to $2\Omega$, while a contribution to the torque linear in $\ Omega$ is found at finite temperature. In contrast, axisymmetric particles are protected against photon-assisted friction regardless of temperature.

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

SAGE: Stochastic Prompt Optimization via Agent-Guided Exploration

Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search. We introduce SPO (Stochastic Prompt Optimization), a framework for stochastic search over prompt space, and compare three strategies of increasing sophistication: error-informed random search, a genetic algorithm with evolutionary operators, and SAGE (SPO via Agent-Guided Exploration), a multi-agent pipeline with diagnostic code execution. Across three benchmarks, no single strategy dominates; effectiveness depends on the interaction of landscape structure with error type. We further deploy SAGE on a mental-health chatbot under a continuous optimization paradigm, where it compounds eight cycles of individually-noisy A/B tests into a statistically robust gain in next-day retention. We argue that coupling qualitative diagnosis with quantitative validation is what makes agentic optimization effective for open-ended task-oriented dialogue.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

HeatKV: Head-tuned KV-cache Compression for Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive image generation quality while maintaining low latency. However, they suffer from severe KV-cache memory constraints, often requiring gigabytes of memory per generated image. We introduce HeatKV, a novel compression method that adapts cache allocation in each head based on its attention to previously generated scales. Using a small offline calibration set, the attention heads are ranked according to their attention scores over prior scales. Based on this ranking, we construct a static pruning schedule tailored to a given memory budget. Applied to the Infinity-2B model, HeatKV achieves $2 \times$ higher compression ratio in memory allocation for KV cache compared to existing methods, while maintaining similar or better image fidelity, prompt alignment and human perception score. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for VAR model KV-cache compression, showcasing the effectiveness of fine-grained, head-specific cache allocation. Code and calibration script available at https://github.com/arm-research/heatkv.