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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MambaRaw: Selective State Space Modeling for Efficient 4K Raw Image Reconstruction

In-camera JPEG previews are ubiquitous in raw image formats and provide an sRGB reference at negligible storage cost. Although existing metadata-based reconstruction frameworks can exploit this side information when recovering raw images, their context models often become computationally expensive especially at high resolution, eg, 4K raw image, given that attention mechanisms scale quadratically with feature maps, hindering its practical application. To address these limitations, we propose MambaRaw, a JPEG-conditioned metadata-based raw image reconstruction framework that uses State Space Models (SSMs) to estimate entropy parameters efficiently. Our key contribution comprises a Spatial-Energy Coupled Context Modeling mechanism with two lightweight modules: (1) TileMambaBlock, which performs Mamba-style selective scanning only on information-dense tiles to improve the efficiency; and (2) Energy-Aware Refinement (EAR), an identity-initialized residual module that enhance feature representation to match the long-tail energy distribution of raw signals. Extensive experiments on three camera datasets (Sony, Olympus, Samsung) show consistent improvements over strong metadata-based baselines and set a new state of the art for JPEG-guided raw reconstruction with great efficiency. Notably, at low metadata bitrates, MambaRaw increases PSNR by 1.2–1.4 dB and reduces end-to-end coding latency by about 9%. Code is released at https://github.com/Peizeli1/MambaRaw.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Broadband High-Level Squeezed Light using Waveguide Optical Parametric Amplifiers with External Dispersion Compensation

arXiv:2606.17422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate broadband phase-sensitive amplification (PSA) measurement of squeezed light generated by a waveguide optical parametric amplifier (OPA) with external dispersion compensation. In broadband systems, group velocity dispersion (GVD) induces a frequency-dependent rotation of the squeezing axis, which limits the observable bandwidth in PSA measurements. To overcome this limitation, we introduce external dispersion compensation between two OPAs and suppress the quadrature rotation over a wide frequency range. As a result, we observe a maximum squeezing of 5.9 dB near the carrier frequency and more than 5 dB of squeezing up to a frequency offset of 4.5 THz from the carrier. Furthermore, squeezing below the shot-noise level is confirmed up to a frequency offset of 6 THz from the carrier, corresponding to the accessible phase-matching bandwidth of the waveguide OPA. Our results establish a practical method for broadband characterization of squeezed light and provide a key step toward ultrafast continuous-variable quantum information processing.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

TransLaw: A Large-Scale Dataset and Multi-Agent Benchmark Simulating Professional Translation of Hong Kong Case Law

Translating Hong Kong Court Judgments from English to Traditional Chinese is mandated by Articles 8-9 of the Basic Law, yet remains constrained by a shortage of parallel resources and rigorous demands on legal terminology, citation format, and judicial style. We introduce HKCFA Judgment 97-22, the first large-scale sentence-aligned parallel corpus for HK case law, comprising 344 professionally translated judgments (11,099 sentence pairs; 2.1M tokens) spanning 1997-2022. Building on this resource, we propose TransLaw, a multi-agent framework that decomposes translation into word-level expression, sentence-level translation, and multidimensional review, integrating a specialized Hong Kong legal glossary database, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and iterative feedback, with four-dimensional expert review covering semantic alignment, terminology, citation, and style. Benchmarking 13 open-source and commercial LLMs, we demonstrate that TransLaw significantly outperforms single-agent baselines across all evaluated models, with convergence within 3 iterations. Human evaluation by 10 certified legal translators using our proposed Legal ACS metric confirms gains in legal-semantic accuracy, while showing that TransLaw still trails human experts in stylistic naturalness. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/xuanxixi/TransLaw.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

VeriPilot: An LLM-Powered Verilog Debugging Framework

arXiv:2606.23759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verilog debugging remains one of the most time-consuming stages in digital circuit design. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled automated debugging; however, most existing approaches rely solely on test outputs and compiler feedback in an end-to-end manner, limiting their effectiveness on complex bugs. A key challenge is that the root cause of an error may be far removed from its observable outputs, making it difficult for LLMs to trace long dependency chains in code. This challenge is further exacerbated in large codebases, where long context lengths hinder efficient reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose VeriPilot, an LLM-powered debugging framework that leverages golden reference models to enable fine-grained bug localization and repair. VeriPilot goes beyond output-level comparison by aligning internal variable semantics between the Verilog design and its corresponding golden model through LLM-based analysis. It then performs step-by-step signal tracing using Control-Data-Flow Graphs (CDFGs) derived from static analysis, identifying a minimal set of suspicious code regions along with their correct counterparts from the golden model. These structured insights are subsequently provided to the LLM to guide reasoning and automated code repair. Experimental results on the Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems (CVDP) benchmark from NVIDIA demonstrate that VeriPilot improves the repair success rate of GPT-4o from 54.3\% to 85.71\%, significantly enhancing both bug localization accuracy and repair effectiveness for complex Verilog designs. The source code and benchmark are publicly available at Github https://github.com/YihanWn/VeriPilot.git.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Adversarial dynamical systems characterize when data-driven learning succeeds or fails

arXiv:2407.06312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many systems resist analytical modeling, making data-driven inference of dynamics important. Yet data-driven methods can fail to converge or generalize, leaving open a central question: When can system behavior be learned reliably from data, and when is such learning impossible? We answer this question using adversarial dynamical systems to identify the boundary between accessible and inaccessible regimes. In Koopman operator learning, a leading framework for representing nonlinear dynamics through linear spectral objects, we design optimal data-driven spectral algorithms with convergence and certification guarantees under conditions arising broadly in physical systems. This yields a convergence theory for Koopman-operator approximations and resolves a longstanding open problem in Koopman spectral analysis. Conversely, by constructing adversarial systems, we prove matching impossibility results: without these conditions, no single-sequence limiting procedure can guarantee learning, regardless of data quality. These results sharply characterize when data-driven spectral learning can succeed and when it must fail. We validate the framework on oscillators, chaotic fluid flows and Arctic sea ice concentration forecasting. In the latter, we uncover hidden modes of Arctic sea ice decline, deliver long-range forecasts with geographic error bounds, and outperform state-of-the-art dynamical and deep learning models at substantially lower computational cost, enabling real-time deployment on standard CPUs.

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

EDEN: A Large-Scale Corpus of Clinical Notes for Italian

We present EDEN (Emergency Department Electronic Notes), a new and unique large-scale corpus of clinical notes produced in Emergency Departments of Italian hospitals. The corpus, in its current version, is composed of approximately 4 million clinical notes fully anonymized, covering diverse phases of patient care during the stay in the emergency department. In addition, a subset of about six thousand notes has been manually annotated by clinical experts through a structured Case Report Form (CRF) containing 132 items relevant for two patient situations in emergency departments, dyspnea and loss of consciousness. Items may assume numerical values (e.g., for blood saturation), categorical (e.g., for level of consciousness ), binary (e.g., for presence of traumas), and mixed value types. The annotation process involved multiple clinicians and underwent iterative revision to resolve ambiguities in item formulation, resulting in a richly structured (although high imbalanced) resource. The dataset aims to fill a relevant gap of data able to support both the development and the use of Large Language Models in concrete medical applications. We describe the data collection protocol, the on-site anonymisation pipeline, corpus statistics, and the annotation scheme. Finally, we propose CRF-filling as a novel structured information extraction benchmark, and provide zero-shot baseline resulting from Gemma-27B and MedGemma-27B. To the best of our knowledge, the EDEN dataset is the largest freely available corpus of clinical notes existing for the Italian language.

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

LLM Jaggedness Unlocks Scientific Creativity

arXiv:2605.10574v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As artificial intelligence advances, models are not improving uniformly. Instead, progress unfolds in a jagged fashion, with capabilities growing unevenly across tasks, domains, and model scales. In this work, we examine this dynamic jaggedness through the lens of scientific idea generation. We introduce SciAidanBench, a benchmark of open-ended scientific questions designed to measure the scientific creativity of large language models (LLMs). Given a scientific question, models are asked to generate as many unique and coherent ideas as possible, with the total number of valid responses serving as a proxy for creative potential. Evaluating 19 base models across 8 providers (30 total variants including reasoning versions), we find that jaggedness manifests both across models and within models. First, in a cross-task comparison between general and scientific creativity, improvements in general creativity do not translate uniformly to scientific creativity, revealing divergent capability profiles across models. Second, at the prompt level, stronger models do not improve uniformly; instead, they exhibit high variability, with bursts of creativity on some questions and limited performance on others. Third, at the domain level, individual models display uneven strengths across scientific subfields, reflecting fragmented internal capability profiles. Finally, we show that this jaggedness can be harnessed. We explore mechanisms of inference-time compute, knowledge pooling, and brainstorming to combine models effectively and construct meta-model ensembles that outperform any single model. Our results position jaggedness not as a limitation, but as a resource, a structural feature of AI progress that, when understood and leveraged, can amplify LLM-driven scientific creativity.

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

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

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

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Abstracting Cross-Domain Action Sequences into Interpretable Workflows

Sequential or time-stamped interaction logs provide objective records of digital application usage, yet their granularity and noise often obscure meaningful insights into people's work. Such insights are essential for improving digital products in ways grounded in real-world user interactions. Prior research has applied deep learning models to cluster user actions into high-level activities, but these approaches are highly sensitive to noise and struggle to generalize across applications. To address this limitation, we introduce WorkflowView, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to abstract low-level action sequences into high-level activities. We establish the effectiveness and generality of our approach across three distinct, challenging sequential tasks and diverse domains: (a) zero-shot task description reconstruction from browser logs (achieving high semantic similarity, $\mu_{sim} = 0.91$), (b) few-shot student dropout prediction using MOOC interaction logs (reaching weighted $F_1 = 0.90$ with only five few-shot examples), and (c) anonymized, privacy-preserving analysis of AI tool integration within document workflows in Microsoft Word. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based abstraction is a robust and efficient path forward for transforming low-level behavioral data into high-level, interpretable, and actionable insights. We also discuss practical considerations for deploying LLM-based inferences within logging infrastructures, including computational efficiency and user privacy.

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

All-Mem: Agentic Lifelong Memory via Dynamic Topology Evolution

Lifelong interactive agents are expected to assist users over months or years, which requires continually writing long term memories while retrieving the right evidence for each new query under fixed context and latency budgets. Existing memory systems often degrade as histories grow, yielding redundant, outdated, or noisy retrieved contexts. We present All-Mem, an online/offline lifelong memory framework that maintains a topology structured memory bank via explicit, non destructive consolidation, avoiding the irreversible information loss typical of summarization based compression. In online operation, it anchors retrieval on a bounded visible surface to keep coarse search cost bounded. Periodically offline, an LLM diagnoser proposes confidence scored topology edits executed with gating using three operators: Split, Merge, and Update, while preserving immutable evidence for traceability. At query time, typed links enable hop bounded, budgeted expansion from active anchors to archived evidence when needed. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-s show improved retrieval and QA over representative baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/LvCan926/All-Mem.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Binary Tracking for Spatial QA and Navigation with Open Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.16902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work addresses spatial question answering for service robots traversing long egocentric routes. Given a query such as "where can I find a dry cleaner on the way back home?", the system returns a metric coordinate that downstream navigation components can act on. Prior Spatial Question Answering approaches leverage retrieval-augmented agents built on closed-source models such as GPT-4o for path exploration. However, robots operating in the real world often cannot reliably depend on online closed-source models due to network instability, communication latency, and deployment cost. It creates a need for open-source based Spatial Question Answering approaches that can run onboard the robot, yet prior research in this direction remains limited. This work proposes BinTrack, a simple yet effective, fully open-source spatial-localization agent that leverages the temporal ordering of a robot's trajectory. BinTrack performs a binary search over the trajectory segments between two anchor landmarks identified from a query. It improves overall accuracy by up to 22.8% over other open-source implementations and even matches the reported closed-source model result on the global category of the SpaceLocQA benchmark, the most challenging setting that has so far required strong reasoning agents such as GPT-4o. Furthermore, its optimized inference strategy consistently yields more than a 1.5x inference speedup over previous approaches. Finally, this work releases GangnamLoop, a novel and practical multi-trip outdoor benchmark collected by deploying a real quadruped robot on public streets with the anonymization policy. It revisits the same locations under different outdoor conditions and pairs the robot's low viewpoint with the human owner's. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/BinaryTracking

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAG: SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation with Query-Time Dynamic Hyperedges

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective approach for large language models to access external knowledge. However, existing methods rely on dense similarity retrieval and face inherent limitations in handling structured constraints and multi-hop reasoning. Incorporating knowledge graphs partially alleviates these issues, but at the cost of semantic fragmentation, high maintenance overhead, and difficult incremental updates. This paper introduces SAG (SQLRetrieval Augmented Generation), a structured architecture for retrieval and agent systems. Instead of pre-building a global static graph, SAG converts each chunk into one semantically complete event and a set of indexing entities, then uses SQL join queries to dynamically link events that share entities into local hyperedges,constructing, at query time, a dynamically instantiated local index structure. This design avoids the need for global graph rebuilding and ongoing maintenance; the system naturally supports incremental writes, concurrent processing, and continuous scaling through its reliance on standard database infrastructure. Across HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue, three standard multi-hop benchmarks,SAG achieves the best results on 8 out of 9 Recall@K metrics, reaching 80.0% Recall@5 on MuSiQue, the benchmark with the highest multi-hop reasoning demands.SAG has also been deployed at a production scale of hundreds of millions of data items, with online retrieval latency kept within seconds. Project site and code are available at https://github.com/Zleap-AI/SAG-Benchmark.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Memory-Efficient Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Safety-Critical Control in Adversarial Spacecraft Proximity Operations

arXiv:2606.17414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) require controllers that guarantee safety under thrust constraints while minimizing fuel expenditure. Input-constrained control barrier functions (ICCBFs) provide a control method for nonlinear systems with actuation constraints that construct a forward-invariant safe set. Previous work has shown that learning class-$\mathcal{K}$ functions defining the ICCBF recursion via meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) yields a robust, non-greedy approach to safety-critical control in RPO. This paper extends that framework further by investigating the performance of three recurrent network architectures (Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Selective State Space Model (Mamba)) and two training algorithms (Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor Critic (SAC)) to identify the best setup for tuning ICCBF class-K functions via meta-RL. In addition to cooperative test cases, performance is evaluated in the presence of adversarial behavior where the target spacecraft behaves in a way that worsens the safety of the chaser spacecraft. Results indicate that state space models such as Mamba when used with PPO achieve superior task completion, safety, and fuel-savings compared to other architectures, across all cooperative and uncooperative scenarios tested.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Using visual biofeedback to reduce step length error at fast walking speeds is feasible after stroke

Background and Purpose: Walking after stroke is often characterized by persistent biomechanical impairments and reduced walking capacity. While visual biofeedback can improve gait mechanics and fast walking can enhance capacity, it is unclear whether individuals post-stroke can effectively use biofeedback at higher walking speeds to address both deficits simultaneously. This study examined the effects of walking speed on the ability of participants with chronic stroke to reduce step length (SL) errors using visual biofeedback. Methods: Sixteen individuals with chronic stroke walked on a treadmill at slow, self-selected, and fast speeds with and without visual SL biofeedback. Absolute SL error relative to individualized targets was calculated for paretic and non-paretic limbs. Linear mixed-effects models with piecewise linear splines assessed the effects of speed, limb, and feedback condition. Post hoc comparisons were performed for significant interactions. Results: At lower speeds, increasing speed reduced SL error in both limbs (p < 0.001). At higher speeds, the effects of speed were dependent on limb and condition (p < 0.001). Paretic SL error increased with speed without feedback but remained stable with feedback (p < 0.001). Non-paretic SL error decreased with speed regardless of condition. SL error was greater in the paretic limb overall (p < 0.001). Discussion and Conclusions: Fast walking alone did not reduce paretic SL errors. Participants with chronic stroke can effectively use visual biofeedback to reduce paretic SL errors at higher speeds, supporting its integration into high-intensity gait training to simultaneously treat biomechanical impairments and walking capacity deficits after stroke.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Geometry of Lightning Self-Attention: Identifiability and Dimension

arXiv:2408.17221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider function spaces defined by self-attention networks without normalization, and theoretically analyze their geometry. Since these networks are polynomial, we rely on tools from algebraic geometry. In particular, we study the identifiability of deep attention by providing a description of the generic fibers of the parametrization for an arbitrary number of layers and, as a consequence, compute the dimension of the function space. Additionally, for a single-layer model, we characterize the singular and boundary points. Finally, we formulate a conjectural extension of our results to normalized self-attention networks, prove it for a single layer, and numerically verify it in the deep case.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

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

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

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

Social Structure Matters in 3D Human-Human Interaction Generation

arXiv:2606.24255v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although text-to-motion generation has achieved strong progress in synthesizing realistic single-person motions from language, extending it to text-driven 3D human-human interaction (HHI) remains non-trivial, as HHI requires modeling the underlying social structure that governs phase progression, actor roles, and inter-actor coordination. In this paper, we formulate HHI generation as a social structure modeling and grounding problem: the model must first infer how an interaction unfolds and how the two actors coordinate their roles, and then realize this structure as continuous, physically plausible, and partner-aware 3D motion. To study how such structure should be modeled, we first examine the capability boundary of large language models (LLMs) for HHI generation. Our analysis shows that LLMs can think by recovering phase decompositions and partner-aware roles, but cannot directly move, as they fail to generate dynamic, physically plausible, and interaction-aware motion. This motivates our planner-executor paradigm, Think with LLM, Move with Motion Skill. The LLM planner converts implicit interaction semantics into motion-aligned social supervision by decomposing interactions into phases, assigning partner-aware actor roles, and aligning them with motion sequence. The motion executor then grounds the planned social structure into coordinated two-person motion by adapting a pretrained solo motion model with LoRA, previous-phase self-conditioning, and ego-relative partner conditioning. Together, our Solo-to-Social framework bridges social organization and motion realization, producing 3D HHI with improved phase consistency, role alignment, and partner-aware coordination.

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

Vision-Encoder Behavioral Fingerprints of Image-to-Image Generative Models: A Training-Paradigm-Driven Taxonomy of Six Commercial APIs

Authors:

We study six production image-to-image AI systems (gpt-image-1, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Flux Kontext, SDXL img2img, SD3 img2img, and Qwen Image Edit) under a content-adaptive sub-JND adversarial perturbation pipeline, scoring all outputs by frozen DINOv2 ViT-B/14 token distances against clean references. Across a 3,588-call corpus spanning COCO photographs, CelebA-HQ portraits, and AI-generated inputs, the six systems partition into two image-invariant behavioral bands on a 2D (patch_mean, ssim_clean) plane: edit-trained models (Flux Kontext, Qwen Edit, Gemini) cluster in a tight band, while T2I-base models adapted at sampling time (SDXL, SD3, gpt-image-1) cluster in a drift band.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Explosion and non-explosion in pure birth Crump–Mode–Jagers branching processes

arXiv:2601.06850v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this short note, we provide an explicit sufficient condition for non-explosion of Crump–Mode–Jagers branching processes with pure birth reproduction. It shows that the standard sufficient condition for explosion, namely the convergence of the series of reciprocals of the birth rates, is – at least for rate sequences without excessive oscillations – remarkably close to being necessary. At the same time, it is not necessary in full generality: we construct a counterexample which also yields a general preferential attachment tree without fitness with an infinite path and no vertices of infinite degree, thereby answering an open question previously raised in the literature.

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

Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness

arXiv:2603.21396v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept – a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying this capability in open-weights models. First, we find that it is behaviorally robust: models detect injected steering vectors at moderate rates with 0% false positives across diverse prompts and dialogue formats. Notably, this capability emerges specifically from post-training; we show that preference optimization algorithms like DPO can elicit it, but standard supervised finetuning does not. We provide evidence that detection cannot be explained by simple linear association between certain steering vectors and directions promoting affirmative responses. We trace the detection mechanism to a two-stage circuit in which "evidence carrier" features in early post-injection layers detect perturbations monotonically along diverse directions, suppressing downstream "gate" features that implement a default negative response. This circuit is absent in base models and robust to refusal ablation. Identification of injected concepts relies on largely distinct later-layer mechanisms that only weakly overlap with those involved in detection. Finally, we show that introspective capability is substantially underelicited: ablating refusal directions improves detection by +53%, and a trained bias vector improves it by +75% on held-out concepts, both without meaningfully increasing false positives. Our results suggest that this introspective awareness of injected concepts is robust and mechanistically nontrivial, and could be substantially amplified in future models. Code: https://github.com/safety-research/introspection-mechanisms.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MATCH: Flow Matching for Multi-View Anomaly Detection

Detecting anomalies in industrial objects is an important topic for increasing production efficiency. More complex objects often require the analysis of several view points, which has led to the field of multi-view anomaly detection. We present MATCH, the first multi-view anomaly detection method based on Flow Matching (FM). With the ODE formulation of Flow Matching, we can estimate likelihoods and thereby derive an anomaly score to detect anomalies in multi-view image data at object, image, and pixel-level. The architectural flexibility of FM models allows us to efficiently transform features of different spatial sizes to the normal distribution. We evaluate thoroughly on the already established Real-IAD data set and are also the first to provide a comprehensive evaluation of popular anomaly detection methods for the MANTA-Tiny data set. MATCH achieves state-of-the-art performance in both anomaly detection and segmentation, all while running on consumer-level hardware. By omitting the costly divergence term needed for likelihood estimation, we ensure that MATCH is usable in real-time production scenarios. Lastly, several ablation studies are conducted to validate the methodological choices.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

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

Knowledge Cascade: Reverse Knowledge Distillation on Nonparametric Multivariate Functional Estimation

arXiv:2606.25927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As machine learning models and datasets continue to grow, developing complex models has become increasingly computationally demanding. Knowledge distillation reduces deployment cost by compressing a large, well-trained teacher model into a compact student model, but it does not address settings where constructing the teacher itself is the bottleneck. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce Knowledge Cascade (KCas), a reverse knowledge distillation framework that uses information from a small, inexpensive student model to guide the development of a more complex teacher model. Although this direction is counterintuitive because the teacher typically has greater representational capacity, we show that student-to-teacher transfer can be principled when supported by statistical scaling relationships. We first develop KCas for nonparametric multivariate functional estimation in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces via smoothing splines, where selecting multiple smoothing parameters is a major computational bottleneck. KCas transfers student-selected smoothing parameters to the full-sample regime through asymptotic scaling laws, substantially reducing computational cost for high-dimensional and large-scale datasets while retaining theoretical guarantees. Beyond smoothing splines, we illustrate the same principle through kernel density estimation and deep learning hyperparameter transfer. Simulations and real-data experiments show that KCas achieves substantial computational savings while maintaining strong statistical performance, and can sometimes outperform the corresponding full-sample procedure.