Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum metrology via partial quantum error correction

arXiv:2605.08341v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a method for error-corrected quantum metrology where only partial quantum error correction (QEC) is needed to suppress local noise and maintain the probe states' super-standard-quantum-limit (super-SQL) sensing performance. This stands in contrast to the existing QEC-assisted sensing schemes in Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 080801 (2014) and Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 150802 (2014), where a probe state is encoded into the logical subspace of a quantum code and error correction involves measurements on all checks of the code. Here, we encode the probe states into superpositions of energetically different states of the underlying quantum code. For our probe states, error correction using a subset of checks is enough to suppress noise both before and after phase imprinting. We analyze the tradeoff in noise suppression. For noise parallel to our phase imprinter of weight $l$, we achieve a suppression of $p^\delta$ where $p$ is the noise strength and $\delta = \lfloor (l+1)/2 \rfloor$. We propose an adaptive imprinter weight increasing strategy to maintain super-SQL performance as we scale up the system. In all our examples, checks and phase imprinters are chosen to be local operators avoiding non-local connectivity.

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

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TLA-Prover: Verifiable TLA+ Specification Synthesis via Preference-Optimized Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.06133v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TLA+ is a formal specification language for verifying distributed systems and safety-critical protocols. Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce TLA+ specifications that fail the TLC model checker for semantic reasons. Across 25 LLMs, the best public baseline is 26.6% syntactic parse and 8.6% semantic model-check. We present TLA-Prover, a 20-billion-parameter model for TLA+ specification synthesis. Training combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on verified examples with repair-based group-relative policy optimization (GRPO). In the GRPO stage, the model learns to fix its own rejected specifications. We also train a direct preference optimization (DPO) variant from the same SFT checkpoint as an ablation. TLC provides the reward signal directly, with no learned reward model. Four tiers grade each output: Bronze (parses), Silver (no warnings), Gold (passes TLC), and Diamond. To reach Diamond, the model's correctness property is automatically altered in a small way; TLC must then detect a violation. If TLC still passes, the property was always-true and contributes nothing; the output fails Diamond. TLA-Prover reaches 9/30 (i.e. pass@1 = 30%) at both Gold and Diamond on a held-out 30-problem benchmark. This is roughly 3.5x the 8.6% untuned baseline. The DPO variant reaches 20% at Diamond. Gold and Diamond coincide at every checkpoint; this prevents the trivial-property failure mode.

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

Understanding Cross-Sensor Feature Variations for Generalizable 3D Perception

Radar-camera BEV perception often suffers from degraded performance when evaluated across datasets, as changes in driving scenes, sensor configurations, and environmental conditions can alter both the input observations and the internal fused representations. This work studies this issue from the perspective of source-domain variation modeling, aiming to improve the robustness of BEV-based 3D detectors without relying on target-domain samples. We introduce a framework that characterizes visual scene variations in the frequency domain and uses them to synthesize diverse source-domain views. By comparing the resulting fused BEV representations, the framework further captures how image-level variations influence multi-modal BEV features. These variation patterns are then used to regularize the detector, encouraging the learned fusion space to remain stable under latent scene changes. The proposed method is applied only during training and leaves the inference pipeline unchanged. Experiments on cross-dataset radar-camera 3D detection between View-of-Delft and TJ4DRadSet demonstrate consistent improvements over multiple BEV fusion backbones, and the gains remain effective when a small amount of target-domain data is available.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Maximal rigidity of random measure and uniqueness pairs: stealthy processes, quasicrystals and periodicity

arXiv:2512.10686v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article investigates the phenomenon of maximal rigidity in spatial processes, where perfect interpolation of the process is possible from partial information, specifically, from its restriction to a strict subdomain, often resulting in a trivial tail $\sigma$algebra. A classical example known since the 1930's is that a time series is fully determined by its values on the negative integers if its spectrum has a gap, or at least a sufficiently deep zero. We extend such results to higher dimensions and continuous settings by establishing a connection with the concept of uniqueness pairs, rooted in the uncertainty principle of harmonic analysis. We present several other manifestations of this principle, unify and strengthen seemingly unrelated results across different models: quasicrystals and stealthy processes are shown to be maximally rigid on cones, and discrete integer-valued processes are necessarily periodic when they have a simply connected spectrum. Finally, we identify a surprising class of continuous fields with seemingly standard behavior, such as linear variance and finite dependency range, that undergo a phase transition: they are perfectly interpolable on B(0, $\rho$) for $\rho$ ___ 2 $\pi$ but exhibit no rigidity for $\rho$ > 2.

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

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Inferring Cell Fate Trajectories in Time-Resolved Metabolic RNA Labeling data

Single-cell RNA sequencing provides high-resolution snapshots of cellular states but lacks direct information about transcriptional dynamics. Metabolic RNA labeling addresses this limitation by distinguishing newly synthesized RNA, offering insight into the direction of cell state changes, and providing valuable information when attempting to recover the underlying continuous dynamics from static snapshots of cell distributions. However, existing trajectory inference methods do not fully exploit this additional signal. Here, we propose FLOWSATATE, a framework for single-cell trajectory inference that leverages time-resolved RNA labeling within an Optimal Transport setting. We model cell dynamics as a gradient flow in an inferred potential landscape parameterized by a neural network, integrating both total and labeled RNA across time points. The learned potential enables identification of key genes and transcription factors driving cell fate decisions and supports prediction of future cellular states. We benchmark our approach on its ability to generalize unseen data and recover coherent trajectories. We also apply it to study colorectal cancer response to demethylation treatment as well as neuronal differentiation of embryonic stem cells.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

When Language Representations Interact: Separability and Cross-Lingual Effects in LLMs

arXiv:2606.14347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, however, their internal representations are difficult to interpret. Understanding these interactions is important for ensuring reliable behavior in multilingual systems. Recent work has shown that causal-geometric structure can explain how certain concepts are encoded as approximately linear and separable directions, but whether this framework extends to multilingual models, where language identity is correlated and hierarchical, is underexplored. We apply causal-geometric analysis to multilingual LLMs, studying 28 bilingual contrasts across three models, allowing us to analyze when languages behave as approximately independent factors and when structured dependencies persist. We find evidence that language concepts admit stable linear representations that are largely separable under a covariance-adjusted (causal) inner product, with structured deviations reflecting linguistic similarity. Moreover, languages within the same family (such as Germanic or Romance) exhibit a simplex-like geometric structure, suggesting hierarchical organization. These results extend causal-geometric interpretability to multilingual settings and provide insight into how separability and similarity may exist in multilingual LLM representations, motivating interpretability analyses that diagnose when and how structured dependencies between concepts can be anticipated. This has implications for trustworthy deployment, as residual structure between languages may lead to unintended cross-lingual effects when models are monitored or intervened upon.

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

FitVTON: Fit-aware Virtual Try-On via Body-Garment Size Control

While diffusion-based virtual try-on has achieved impressive visual realism, most methods treat the task as 2D inpainting, prioritizing texture preservation over physical plausibility. Consequently, they often produce plausible-looking images that fail to reflect authentic garment fit across diverse body shapes. We present FitVTON, a Fit-aware virtual try-on model on different bodies in the wild. FitVTON encodes garment-body size through structured text prompts, and learn from simulated try-on triplets from parameterized garment model. To improve the fitting effects over garment silhouettes, we introduce two auxiliary head to predict the masks for both the garment and the exposed body. We further introduce a texture rectification stage to improve realistic appearance from simulated data. To evaluate the fitting fidelity, we curate a real-world dataset, FittingEffect3K, combining VLM-based scoring protocol. Both subjective and quantitive experiments show that FitVTON demonstrate authentic fitting fidelity, with significant sizing accuracy and shape preservation over state-of-the-art methods while maintaining competitive image quality. Project Page: https://zenoning.github.io/FitVTON/.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

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

Controllable Quantum Memory Capacity in Quantum Reservoir Networks with Tunable partial-SWAPs

arXiv:2605.12713v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the field of quantum reservoir computing (QRC), many different computational models and architectures have been proposed. From these models, we identify feedback-based models – which use a feedback mechanism to re-embed classical measurements from the QRC – and recurrent models – which use a multi-register approach with memory and readout qubits – as the two major competing architectures that have been discussed and validated on hardware. In this paper, we advance upon the recurrent architectures, which employ a two register approach to endow the QRC with a fading memory. While these approaches have been validated on hardware and have demonstrated great real-world performance on noisy-intermediate-scale-quantum (NISQ) quantum processing units (QPUs), the exact mechanism through which the memory capacity arises is not completely understood or fully controllable. With this, we augment the recurrent approaches and present a hardware-realizable mechanism, which we call a tunable partial-SWAP, that allows for the direct control of the rate of memory dissipation from a QRN implemented on a gate-based QPU. The theory behind this mechanism is discussed in terms of a controlled amplitude-damping channel and validation experiments using a randomized short-term memory capacity (STMC) recall benchmark and the NARMA-5 dataset are conducted using simulation and IBM QPUs, respectively.

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

HiGR: Industrial-Scale Hierarchical Generative Slate Recommendation Framework in Tencent

arXiv:2512.24787v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Slate recommendation, which presents users with a ranked item list in a single display, is ubiquitous across mainstream online platforms. While recent generative recommendation methods have shown strong potential in modeling item sequences with semantic IDs, directly applying them to industrial-scale slate recommendation faces a fundamental disconnect: entangled SID spaces confound high-level list planning, fine-grained autoregressive decoding over long sequences limits semantic planning efficiency, and token-level objectives misalign with holistic slate quality. In this paper, we propose HiGR, an industrial-scale hierarchical generative framework for slate recommendation that bridges this disconnect through a co-designed pipeline. First, HiGR learns structured SIDs via a Prefix-Contrastive Residual Quantized VAE (PCRQ-VAE). By enforcing high-level prefixes to capture shared semantics, PCRQ-VAE creates a controllable discrete space that acts as a prerequisite for efficient planning. Leveraging this structured space, our Hierarchical Slate Decoder (HSD) shifts autoregressive modeling from entangled token-level decoding to coarse-grained preference embeddings. This design significantly reduces inference latency while allowing explicit global slate structure planning. Finally, this stable planning space enables an ORPO-based listwise alignment mechanism to optimize triple-objective implicit feedback-ranking fidelity, genuine user interest, and diversity. Extensive offline experiments show that HiGR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10% in offline recommendation quality while achieving a $5\times$ inference speedup. Online A/B tests on Tencent platforms further improve watch time by 1.22% and video plays by 1.73%. HiGR has been deployed on multiple Tencent platform surfaces, serving hundreds of millions of users and proving its industrial-scale applicability.

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

A Decision-Theoretic View of Test-Time Training: When, How Far, and Which Directions to Adapt

arXiv:2606.15569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time training (TTT) adapts a pretrained model to each prompt via parameter updates, improving accuracy under pretraining-to-test distribution shifts. Yet, its performance often suffers from instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters such as update steps and subspace. We explain this behavior through a decision-theoretic lens, treating TTT as implicit Bayesian inference in the kernel regime. Under a Gaussian process benchmark, we show that TTT reduces prediction error when updates are spectrally matched to the prompt's signal-to-noise ratio and aligned with query-relevant eigen-directions. This perspective underpins the following results: (1) we show when fixed update steps and subspaces fail under distribution shifts, motivating adaptive strategies; (2) we prove that selecting update steps via prompt evidence admits a PAC-Bayes guarantee against overfitting; and (3) we characterize the Bayes-optimal update subspace under a linear-Gaussian correction model, yielding a scoring rule for selecting Transformer blocks and heads. Our theory helps explain the empirical instability of TTT, taking a step toward principled guidance for when, how far, and which directions to adapt.

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

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Multi-Token Residual Prediction

arXiv:2605.18817v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, offering a tradeoff between parallelism and quality compared to autoregressive models. In current practice, the number of tokens decoded per step is controlled by a confidence threshold, and quality degrades monotonically as more tokens are denoised per step. We introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a lightweight module that enables dependency-aware multi-token denoising within a single backbone forward pass. MRP exploits a key property of the denoising process: the logit distributions at adjacent denoising steps are remarkably similar. Rather than running the backbone a second time to obtain the next-step logits, MRP predicts the residual between steps from the backbone's hidden states, effectively denoising more tokens per backbone forward at a fraction of the cost. We apply MRP across the two operating regimes of DLM decoding. In the high-quality-low-throughput static denoising regime, MRP serves as a drafter for speculative decoding: its proposals are verified against the backbone, yielding lossless acceleration of up to 1.4x in SGLang. In the low-quality-high-throughput dynamic denoising regime, MRP instead drives a remasking scheme that revokes over-eager reveals, recovering most of the accuracy lost to aggressive low-threshold decoding and improving accuracy by up to 22.6 points on code generation task HumanEval and 17.7 points on reasoning task GSM8K.

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

Enhancing Quantum Machine Learning with Anyons

arXiv:2606.16090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The power of quantum computing and quantum machine learning relies on harnessing uniquely quantum phenomena as computational resources. While superposition, coherence and entanglement have been central to this effort, the role of particle exchange statistics remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce a quantum kernel framework that unifies bosonic, fermionic, and anyonic (fractional) exchange statistics within a single learning paradigm. We study this family of kernels from three perspectives. At the representation level, Haar-averaged effective-dimension analysis shows that fractional exchange phases access feature-space directions inaccessible to the purely symmetric or antisymmetric limits. At the level of kernel geometry, the corresponding Gram matrices show greater separation from the distinguishable-particle baseline and reduced label-dependent model complexity. Finally, on learning benchmarks, anyonic kernels consistently outperform their bosonic and fermionic counterparts, with stronger target alignment and more favorable class geometry. Together, these findings show that exchange statistics reshape the structure and geometry of quantum feature space, leading to enhanced learning performance. Our work identifies particle exchange statistics as an overlooked computational ingredient for quantum machine learning and provides the first systematic comparison of quantum learning models across exchange phases.

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

A Fixed-Point Neural Operator for Size- and Functional-Transferable Hamiltonian Prediction

arXiv:2606.14498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian with machine learning can accelerate density functional theory while retaining access to molecular orbitals, energy levels, and electronic-structure observables that energy-only surrogates cannot resolve. Yet element-wise agreement with the converged Hamiltonian, an implicit fixed point of the self-consistent field iteration, does not determine the occupied subspace that governs orbital energies and densities. Here we present HamEvo, a neural operator that learns the single-step self-consistent update and returns the converged Hamiltonian as its fixed point. HamEvo is pre-trained on intermediate self-consistent trajectories and calibrated at equilibrium with density-matrix supervision. Across benchmarks from MD17 to drug-like QMugs, HamEvo lowers Hamiltonian errors by 35-49% over direct-regression and deep-equilibrium baselines, and predicts QMugs HOMO and LUMO energies with mean absolute errors of 0.036 and 0.053 eV, near the 1 kcal/mol chemical-accuracy scale. Few-shot fine-tuning with only 20 reference conformations extends HamEvo to molecules of up to 122 atoms, well beyond the size range covered by pre-training. With thermal molecular-dynamics sampling, HamEvo captures temperature-dependent HOMO-LUMO gap renormalization beyond the harmonic approximation. Inference is up to 242 times faster than conventional DFT.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

XPASS-Vis: A Dataset for Cross-Domain Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment

Personalized image aesthetic assessment (PIAA) seeks to model, at the individual level, the subjective nature of aesthetic judgments toward artworks and photographs. Aesthetic preference is known to be both deeply personal and partially consistent across visual domains. Yet existing PIAA datasets and methods are largely confined to a single domain, or provide too few samples per annotator within each domain to enable personalization across domains. Consequently, the cross-domain generalization of personalized aesthetic preferences remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce XPASS-Vis, the first dataset explicitly designed for cross-domain PIAA. XPASS-Vis comprises 6,526 stimuli from three visual domains – art, fashion, and landscape – rated by 129 annotators, yielding 87,836 user-stimulus interactions, each annotated with an overall aesthetic score and nine aesthetic-emotion ratings. Notably, each annotator rated more than 200 stimuli per domain, providing sufficient per-domain coverage to support personalization both within and across domains. Moreover, we establish baseline models for cross-domain PIAA under unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where a model trained on a labeled source domain is transferred to an unlabeled target domain. A systematic evaluation of representative UDA approaches shows that the best-performing method recovers approximately 60\% (Spearman's $\rho$ = .28) of the supervised upper bound under a fully unsupervised setting. This provides encouraging evidence that personalized aesthetic preferences are, to a meaningful extent, transferable across visual domains. At the same time, a substantial gap remains, highlighting the need for PIAA-specific adaptation strategies. XPASS-Vis and the accompanying baselines provide a foundation for future research on cross-domain PIAA. All datasets and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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

Clifford disentanglers for entanglement reduction in molecular electronic structure simulations

arXiv:2606.12056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is a key bottleneck limiting the efficiency of tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structures. Here, we systematically assess and extend Clifford disentanglers as a structure-preserving approach to entanglement reduction: they can modify the entanglement structure of qubit wavefunctions while retaining the Pauli-string form of qubit Hamiltonians. To enable a practical search over Clifford transformations, we classify Clifford operators by their action on the Schmidt spectrum across a bipartition, reducing the two- and four-qubit search spaces to 20 and 91392 representatives, respectively. Embedded in an iterative Clifford-augmented matrix product state framework, these transformations reduce the energy errors at fixed bond dimension for the molecular test cases studied and mitigate the dependence on orbital orderings and fermion-to-qubit mappings. We further show that Clifford disentanglers can also benefit quantum simulations such as the shallow-circuit variational quantum eigensolver calculations. Together, these results establish Clifford disentanglers as a useful structure-preserving entanglement-engineering tool for tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structure, while also clarifying their correlation dependence and motivating future developments.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FactoryLLM: A Safe and Open-Source AI Playground for Evaluating LLMs in Smart Factories

arXiv:2606.14119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Shift-and-Sum Quantization for Visual Autoregressive Models

Post-training quantization (PTQ) enables efficient deployment of deep networks using a small set of data. Its application to visual autoregressive models (VAR), however, remains relatively unexplored. We identify two key challenges for applying PTQ to VAR: (i) large reconstruction errors in attention-value products, especially at coarse scales where high attention scores occur more frequently; and (ii) a discrepancy between the sampling frequencies of codebook entries and their predicted probabilities due to limited calibration data. To address these challenges, we propose a PTQ framework tailored for VAR. First, we introduce a shift-and-sum quantization method that reduces reconstruction errors by aggregating quantized results from symmetrically shifted duplicates of value tokens. Second, we present a resampling strategy for calibration data that aligns sampling frequencies of codebook entries with their predicted probabilities. Experiments on class-conditional image generation, inpainting, outpainting, and class-conditional editing show consistent improvements across VAR architectures, establishing a new state of the art in PTQ for VAR.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Direct Advantage Estimation for Scalable and Sample-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, its reliance on full environment observability limits its applicability in realistic settings, and its requirement to model transition probabilities incurs substantial computational overhead for high-dimensional observations. In the present work, we address both limitations. First, we extend the theoretical framework of DAE to partially observable domains with minimal modifications. Second, we reduce its computational complexity by introducing discrete latent dynamics models that efficiently approximate transition probabilities. We evaluate our approach on the Arcade Learning Environment and find that DAE scales effectively with function approximator capacity while retaining high sample efficiency.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Beyond Uniform Token-Level Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.10968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become standard for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing PPO-style trust-region mechanisms remain position-agnostic by enforcing uniform thresholds across all tokens independently. This pointwise treatment conflicts with autoregressive generation in two critical ways. First, uniform thresholds ignore autoregressive asymmetry. Early-stage deviations produce compounding sequence-level drift, causing static thresholds to under-regulate early divergence and excessively constrain late-stage exploration. Second, evaluating token-level divergence in isolation overlooks cumulative prefix drift, granting the same divergence allowance regardless of how far the conditioning history has already deviated from the rollout policy. To address this limitation, we propose CPPO (Cumulative Prefix-divergence Policy Optimization), a token-level masking rule that aligns updates with a finite-horizon policy-improvement bound via two coupled mechanisms. First, a position-weighted threshold imposes stricter limits at early positions whose effects persist longer, relaxing constraints for late-stage tokens. Second, a cumulative prefix budget tracks historical deviations, dynamically restricting further token-level deviation to prevent compounding errors along the prefix. Empirically, CPPO enhances training stability and significantly improves reasoning accuracy across various model scales.