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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DynFS-MoE: Dynamic Functional-Structural Mixture-of-Experts for Post-Traumatic Epilepsy Diagnosis

Post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE) is a severe complication of traumatic brain injury (TBI), yet early identification remains challenging due to the complex structural and functional alterations it induces in the brain. To address this, we propose a dynamic multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that integrates functional and structural MRI through time-aware functional-structural encoding and class-conditioned expert routing. Within this framework, modality-specific and cross-modal experts learn complementary representations, while a Modality-Class MoE (MCoE) module dynamically dispatches expert weights according to each classification objective. Experimental results across three binary classification tasks demonstrate that the framework consistently outperforms static fusion baselines, and high-interpretability analyses further reveal meaningful region-of-interest (ROI) interactions. This dynamic multimodal expert framework effectively captures class-dependent brain interaction patterns and provides an interpretable approach for PTE diagnosis and risk stratification.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

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

Convex training of Lipschitz-regularized shallow neural networks

arXiv:2606.19652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we introduce a training procedure for shallow neural networks that promotes robustness against adversarial attacks. We solve a non-convex Lipschitz-regularized training program by introducing a convex restriction that can be efficiently solved to global optimality. Our approach can be employed as a post-processing step by taking a pre-trained network as an initial solution to then solving the convex program whose optimal network is guaranteed to be no worse than the initial one. We illustrate the improvements of our training procedure with experiments using real world datasets for regression tasks under an adversarial setting. We show numerically that solving our proposed convex program yields networks with lower objective values on the Lipschitz-regularized program compared to existing methods. Additionally, we show that on certain datasets, networks obtained using our convex training program are both more accurate and robust with respect to adversarial attacks.

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

Holographic Complexity, Extremality, and Cosmic Censorship

arXiv:2604.20170v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a holographic complexity origin for the third law of black-hole mechanics and weak cosmic censorship. In both complexity equals action and complexity equals volume prescriptions, the relative complexity between subextremal and extremal AdS black holes diverges logarithmically. For overcharged RN-AdS, explicit calculations in both prescriptions show that the near-singularity action terms are power-law divergent or finite, while the maximal-volume contribution is finite. Thus, the extremal-to-naked relative complexity also diverges, obstructing finite-time transitions.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Counterdiabatic Raman Atom Optics for Compact High-Sensitivity Gravimetry

arXiv:2606.16945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-momentum-transfer (LMT) atom interferometry provides a route toward enhanced inertial sensitivity in compact quantum sensors, but its scalability is limited by the accumulation of pulse-transfer errors across long Raman pulse sequences. We investigate theoretically the use of stimulated Raman shortcut-to-adiabatic passage (STIRSAP) for high-fidelity LMT atom optics in a Mach–Zehnder interferometer geometry. The counterdiabatic correction is encoded directly into the Raman pulse envelopes, eliminating the need for auxiliary microwave or radio-frequency control fields. Numerical simulations based on an effective Raman model show that $1~\mu\mathrm{s}$ STIRSAP pulses achieve single-pulse transfer fidelities of $F_\pi = 0.99902$ while maintaining negligible pulse-time overhead even at high momentum order. We analyze the resulting tradeoff between interferometric phase enhancement and compound contrast decay and identify an unconstrained shot-noise optimum near $n\approx270$. The analysis further shows that practical operation at extreme LMT order is constrained by wave-packet separation, vibration noise, Doppler detuning, and accumulated systematic effects rather than by pulse duration itself. These results establish superadiabatic Raman control as a promising approach for scalable high-fidelity atom optics and clarify the physical limitations governing compact high-order atom interferometers.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Data-Driven Dynamic Assortment in Online Platforms: Learning about Two Sides

arXiv:2606.11118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a dynamic assortment problem on a two-sided service platform with incomplete information and heterogeneous customers in a discrete-time setting. In each period, a customer arrives seeking service, and the platform chooses an assortment of sellers to display. The customer then proposes a transaction to at most one seller in the assortment according to a multinomial logit choice model. After a fixed number of periods, sellers review the proposals they have received and each chooses at most one customer according to another multinomial logit choice model, after which the cycle repeats. A key challenge is that the platform does not know the choice-model parameters of either customers or sellers in advance. To our knowledge, this is the first study of a dynamic assortment problem in which both sides' choice parameters are unknown. We develop a data-driven algorithm that learns these parameters while optimizing the platform's objective over time. We evaluate performance using regret, which measures revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant benchmark that knows all parameters and customer arrivals in advance. We show that the algorithm's worst-case regret grows polylogarithmically over time, and we derive a matching lower bound, establishing its rate optimality.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Foundation model-based tool for automated ulcerative colitis histology scoring demonstrates non-inferiority to pathologists across multiple scoring indices

In clinical trials for ulcerative colitis (UC), pathologists assess disease severity through standardized histological indices, including the Geboes Score, Robarts Histopathology Index (RHI), and Nancy Histologic Index (NHI). Despite strong associations with clinical outcomes, histologic scoring suffers from inter- and intra-reader variability, and consensus criteria for histologic remission remain uncertain. Through a consortium approach, we developed an artificial intelligence-based measurement (AIM) tool for scoring histology in UC mucosal biopsies (AIM-HI UC). This model, trained on a large dataset of UC biopsies (N=10,230), utilizes additive multiple instance learning models leveraging PLUTO, a pathology foundation model, that predict each of the Geboes subgrades, from which the Geboes grade-level score, RHI, and NHI can be calculated. Evaluation of this model on a standalone verification set including clinical trial specimens established algorithm non-inferiority and/or superiority relative to standard qualified pathologists through comparison of algorithm-consensus and pathologist-consensus agreement metrics (non-inferior if difference >-0.1, superior if difference >0, inclusive of confidence intervals). AIM-HI UC was determined to be non-inferior to pathologists (N=3) for the prediction of all seven Geboes subgrades, grade-level Geboes, RHI, NHI, histologic improvement (GS

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

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TrustedARI: Towards Trust-Native Agentic Routing Infrastructure for Agentic AI

arXiv:2606.15822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents increasingly access external models, tools, and services through Agentic Routing Infrastructure (ARI) to manage the overhead of heterogeneous interfaces and fragmented subscriptions. Yet, the architecture of ARI introduces fundamental trust risks: it obtains plaintext access to agent queries and service responses, while leaving agents unable to verify that their queries are routed to intended service providers or that requests and responses remain untampered. To address this problem, we present TrustedARI, the first trust-native agentic routing infrastructure for agentic AI. Architecturally, TrustedARI is built upon three core innovations: (i) an ARI-adapted three-party TLS handshake that enables the agent and ARI to jointly authenticate the service provider through role-specific distribution of TLS key materials; (ii) a privacy-preserving query-construction protocol that allows the agent and ARI to collaboratively construct well-formed queries without exposing their respective private inputs; and (iii) a verifiable billing protocol that supports fair usage-based settlement while preserving the integrity and confidentiality of service responses. We implemented and extensively evaluated a prototype of TrustedARI to validate its performance. Experiments confirm that TrustedARI is highly efficient: our ARI-adapted handshake protocol reduces communication overhead by 39.34% compared to the existing three-party TLS handshake. Furthermore, the privacy-preserving query-construction protocol imposes negligible overhead-averaging 0.19 seconds in computation time and 0.58 MB in communication costs-while the verifiable billing protocol speeds up proof generation by 28.20x. Crucially, TrustedARI is readily deployable without any modification to the service providers.

11.
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

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

Causal-Privacy Audit Workflow for Synthetic and Distilled Data in Dropout Support

arXiv:2606.15940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic and distilled student data are increasingly used to enable privacy-conscious learning analytics, yet their suitability for decision-facing institutional support remains uncertain. In dropout support, generated data must preserve not only predictive utility or distributional resemblance, but also the financial-status evidence used to guide advising, payment-plan assistance, and scholarship-related decisions. Method: This study introduces CaP-Eval, a decision-facing causal-privacy audit workflow for evaluating generated student data under a fixed estimand, timing-aware adjustment design, estimator set, and empirical privacy-governance screen. The workflow compares original, distilled, adversarial synthetic, statistical synthetic, and DPGNet privacy-oriented generated data on predictive utility, treatment-effect fidelity, robustness to alternative estimators, and local training-record proximity. Results: DPGNet and distilled data preserved the original financial-status treatment-effect structure more reliably than the adversarial and Gaussian Copula baselines. DPGNet preserved full direction and rank agreement across epsilon levels; epsilon = 10 produced the smallest non-original IPW and DML deviations, while epsilon = 1 and epsilon = 5 amplified several financial-status contrasts. Distilled data remained highly faithful but retained the strongest local training-record proximity signal. TabularGNet preserved qualitative directions with moderate attenuation, and Gaussian Copula compressed effect magnitudes. Conclusions: Predictive utility, privacy orientation, empirical disclosure signals, and causal fidelity diverged; generated student data require joint audits of direction, magnitude, overlap, and release-governance risk before decision use.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Investigation of Intra-Fraction Stability and Inter-Fraction Reproducibility of Deep Inspiration Breath-Hold Across Two Hypofractionated Radiotherapy Regimens in the HYPORT Adjuvant Study.

Background: Deep Inspiration Breath Hold (DIBH) is a widely used respiratory motion management technique for minimizing cardiac dose in left-sided breast radiotherapy. In the Breast HYPORT Adjuvant study, DIBH was employed for cardiac sparing in patients without nodal irradiation using a standardized institutional protocol with the Varian Real-time Position Management (RPM) system. Both moderate-hypofractionation (control arm - 40Gy in 15 fractions) and one-week hypofractionation (experimental arm - 26 Gy in 5 fractions) regimens were delivered using this protocol. This study aimed to evaluate the robustness of DIBH by analyzing intra-fraction stability and inter-fraction reproducibility of breath-hold amplitude across the two treatment regimens. Methods: Respiratory waveforms acquired during each treatment session were analyzed to determine the median breath-hold amplitude and its standard deviation during beam delivery. Intra-fraction stability was assessed from vari- ations within individual treatment sessions, while inter-fraction reproducibility was evaluated relative to the simula- tion waveform amplitude across all treatment sessions. These parameters were compared between the two HYPORT regimens to examine breath-hold consistency during treatment delivery. Moreover, an additional comparison was made between the one-week hypofractionation regimen and the first five fractions of the moderate-hypofractionation regimen to evaluate the effect of treatment duration . Lung volumes from free-breathing and DIBH CT scans were analyzed to assess the effectiveness of patient breath-hold training. Results: Both arms demonstrated an average 1.7-fold increase of air volume in lung during the breath-hold position, confirming the effective implementation of DIBH during treatment planning and delivery. Structured training resulted in increased breath-hold amplitudes, with gains of 22.87% and 24.16% with respect to the first trial session in the experimental and control arms, respectively. Both regimens receive equivalent doses for approximately the same air volume in lung . Despite the different prescription doses in the two arms (26 Gy vs. 40 Gy), the experimental arm achieved an equivalent mean heart dose of 2.91% (75.6 cGy) compared with 2.95% (118.51 cGy) in the control arm, suggesting a similar cardiac preservation protocol adopted during treatment planning. Intra-fraction stability was similar between the control arm and the experimental arm, with median amplitude variations of 1.006 mm (95% CI: [0.998-1.015]) and 1.079 mm (95% CI: [1.067-1.097]), respectively. In contrast, inter-fraction reproducibility improved in the experimental arm, with lower deviation from simulation amplitude (0.44 {+/-} 0.24 mm vs. 0.66 {+/-} 0.25 mm) for the entire treatment schedule. The stability and reproducibility of experimental arm were further compared with the first five fractions of the control arm. The results were similar to those of the experimental arm. Conclusion: In this study, we compared two treatment regimens in terms of intra-fraction stability and inter-fraction reproducibility during DIBH radiotherapy. Both regimens demonstrated comparable intra-fraction stability, indicating effective motion management irrespective of treatment duration. However, the experimental arm showed better inter- fraction reproducibility, suggesting more consistent breath-hold performance throughout the treatment course. Based on stability and reproducibility, a reasonable narrowing of the DIBH gating window may be implemented with minor changes to the institutional protocol. The observed trend highlights the potential for improved consistency with the experimental approach and supports further investigation to better understand the underlying factors and strengthen these findings in future studies.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Optimizing Rank for High-Fidelity Implicit Neural Representations

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) based on vanilla Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are widely believed to be incapable of representing high-frequency content. This has directed research efforts towards architectural interventions, such as coordinate embeddings or specialized activation functions, to represent high-frequency signals. In this paper, we challenge the notion that the low-frequency bias of vanilla MLPs is an intrinsic, architectural limitation to learn high-frequency content, but instead a symptom of stable rank degradation during training. We empirically demonstrate that regulating the network's rank during training substantially improves the fidelity of the learned signal, rendering even simple MLP architectures expressive. Extensive experiments show that using optimizers like Muon, with high-rank, near-orthogonal updates, consistently enhances INR architectures even beyond simple ReLU MLPs. These substantial improvements hold across a diverse range of domains, including natural and medical images and novel view synthesis, with up to +9 dB PSNR over the same architecture. Code is available at (https://rank-inrs.github.io).

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

RadSEM: A Finding-by-Finding Metric for Clinical Consistency in Radiology Reports

arXiv:2606.17062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Radiology report evaluation must distinguish clinical compatibility from surface similarity, because negation, laterality, or normal-abnormal polarity can reverse a finding. We propose RadSEM (Radiology Sentence-Level Evaluation Metric), a constrained LLM-assisted metric for reference-based evaluation of radiology Findings. RadSEM rewrites reference and generated reports into ordered atomic finding sentences, each expressing one site-finding proposition. It then performs contradiction-constrained many-to-many matching: incompatible pairs such as "effusion" and "no effusion" receive no credit, while compatible granularity differences can receive partial credit. A deterministic stage weights pairs by part-whole and abnormal-detail relationships, counts unmatched findings, and produces an abnormal-focused weighted F1 score. Thus, the LLM supports structured rewriting and local alignment rather than acting as an opaque judge. We evaluate RadSEM with SSREE, a controlled monotonicity stress test built from 2,448 de-identified reports expanded into five graded corruption levels. RadSEM achieves Kendall tau_b of 0.957, all-pairs concordance of 97.8%, adjacent concordance of 95.0%, and strict five-level ordering for 81.9% of reports, outperforming radiology-specific and general text metrics while avoiding the failure in which polarity-inverted reports regain lexical overlap. On the same SSREE set, RadSEM outperforms the Ref-anchored RadSEM-Alt policy, improving adjacent concordance from 90.7% to 95.0% and strict ordering from 67.2% to 81.9%. On a 599-triplet synonym/antonym subset, RadSEM prefers synonyms in 597 cases (99.67%). These results suggest that explicit finding units, contradiction-aware matching, and abnormal-focused deterministic scoring make report scoring more interpretable and sensitive to clinically meaningful errors. Code is available at https://github.com/jdh-algo/RadSEM.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Calibrated Helstrom geometry on the Bloch ball via Connes spectral distance

arXiv:2606.13824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that the equal-prior Helstrom trace-distance geometry of qubit states is recovered from Connes spectral distance in a finite scalar-qubit-scalar model. The two scalar reference sectors couple isotropically to the qubit block through identity Dirac links, so that the full Bloch ball, including mixed states, inherits its standard chordal trace-distance geometry from the finite spectral metric. The scalar-sector distances serve a distinct calibration role: they determine the individual link lengths, satisfy a Pythagorean consistency relation, and reconstruct the middle-sector scale.

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

Regional Climate Model Emulation with Diffusion Approaches: What is the Added Value of Generative Machine Learning?

arXiv:2606.14570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emulators provide a cost-effective alternative to regional climate models (RCMs) by capturing their dynamical downscaling function. They link large-scale predictors simulated by global climate models (GCMs) to RCM-simulated high-resolution fields of the target variable, here precipitation. Machine learning methods, typically deep learning, are cheaper than running RCMs in computation time and energy. Among them, generative models are appealing because they can simulate ensembles of local high-resolution fields consistent with the predictors. This ensemble, which we call the uncertainty envelope, remains to be properly assessed for added value. Here, we make three contributions. First, we introduce ParamDiffusion, a new two-stage diffusion-based framework, and compare it with a state-of-the-art diffusion approach. Second, we expand standard validation through a comprehensive framework aligned with climate-science needs, examining specific precipitation events, including extremes. Third, within this framework, we assess the added value of diffusion approaches relative to deterministic methods. We intercompare four deep-learning models: a deterministic model designed to capture the precipitation tail; a parametric probabilistic model based on it; a recently proposed diffusion approach; and ParamDiffusion, which couples the parametric model with a diffusion model. Our results show that diffusion-based approaches reproduce climatological precipitation statistics with high skill, including distributional tails and spatially compounded extremes, while generating spatially detailed fields. However, none of the assessed models consistently accounts for the most extreme RCM-simulated events within its uncertainty envelope. Diffusion models are therefore promising for probabilistic RCM emulation, but progress is still required before they can reliably represent high-impact precipitation extremes.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Performance of family history-based colorectal cancer screening criteria by race and age at diagnosis in the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) study

Importance: Family history (FH) and age are the primary criteria employed for early colorectal cancer (CRC) risk stratification. We evaluated how well these criteria identify individuals diagnosed with CRC across age and racial groups. Objective: To evaluate the performance of FH and age based screening criteria for identifying individuals with CRC, with attention to differences by race and age at diagnosis. Design, Setting, and Participants: This case control and case only analysis used data from the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) cohort, a population based study of invasive CRC cases diagnosed from 2013 to 2022, recruited through the Metropolitan Detroit Cancer Surveillance System and the Louisiana Tumor Registry. Analyses included 1,158 non-Hispanic Black (NHB) and non-Hispanic White (NHW) CRC cases and 1,434 cancer-free controls from the Inflammation Health and Lung Epidemiology (INHALE) study, enrolled from the same Detroit catchment area. Data were analyzed in 2025. Exposures: Self reported cancer FH among first-degree (FD) relatives and grandparents, summarized into three FH-based screening criteria: at least one FD relative with CRC (colon early-screening criterion), any FH of Lynch syndrome related cancers, and meeting NCCN criteria for Lynch syndrome genetic testing. Main Outcomes and Measures: Proportion of cases meeting each FH based screening criterion stratified by race and age at diagnosis (

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

Early Diagnosis of Wasted Computation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems via Failure-Aware Observability

arXiv:2606.01365v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Failure-aware observability diagnoses wasted computation in multi-agent LLM systems before final-answer evaluation can explain what went wrong. We propose a trace-based framework for a three-agent architecture – orchestrator, search agent, and execution agent – that converts structured events into online signals for loops, budget pressure, low information gain, and tool instability, then adds offline semantic grounding metrics and selective LLM-as-judge evaluation. On 165 GAIA validation traces under identical caps, 98 runs produce usable final answers and 67 fail or stop without one. Among warned failed runs, 58.1% of tokens are spent after the first warning on average, indicating substantial opportunity for intervention. A 10-task Level-2 pilot uses warnings to diversify search or require evidence, reducing post-warning token fraction from 0.638 in the baseline to 0.304. The results support a layered design: cheap online signals help the orchestrator redirect or halt redundant behavior, while deeper semantic checks identify whether completed answers are grounded enough to trust.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

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

You Don't Need Strong Assumptions: Visual Representation Learning via Temporal Differences

Progress in AI has largely been driven by methods that assume less. As compute and data increase, approaches with weaker inductive biases generally outperform those with stronger assumptions. This is particularly characteristic of the field of Visual Representation Learning, where approaches have gone from being dominated by Supervised Learning, to Weakly Supervised Learning, to the now widespread success of Self-Supervised Learning without human labels. Yet, even modern Self-Supervised Learning approaches still depend on strong inductive biases such as augmentations, masking, or cropping. If this trend holds, even these remaining biases should become bottlenecks at scale – and our experiments confirm this: the optimal strength of inductive biases decreases as data grows. This motivates the search for approaches that rely on fewer assumptions. To this end, we introduce Temporal Difference in Vision (TDV), a new paradigm for self-supervised learning from video that avoids existing inductive biases, relying instead on a causal assumption that the past causes the future. TDV functions by jointly training an image encoder and a motion encoder so that the current frame's representation plus the encoded motion equals the next frame's representation. Despite not leveraging any strong inductive biases, TDV matches state-of-the-art recipes on dense spatial tasks, laying the foundation for representation learning without strong assumptions.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Acceleration-induced spectral blind spots in stimulated atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.17396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stimulated transitions are among the most fundamental processes in light-matter interaction, underlying resonant absorption and emission in atomic systems. Here we show that uniform acceleration can convert this familiar response into a frequency-selective absence of response. Specifically, when an incident photon has a nonzero momentum component transverse to the acceleration, the stimulated transition probability vanishes at a discrete set of frequencies fixed by the acceleration, the atomic transition frequency, and the photon propagation angle. At these spectral blind spots, both ordinary stimulated absorption and acceleration-induced excitation are simultaneously suppressed, rendering the atom effectively unresponsive to the incident radiation. The effect arises from the nontrivial response of accelerated atoms to quantum vacuum fluctuations and provides a distinctive signature of the Unruh effect through the absence, rather than the enhancement, of stimulated transitions. We further provide an order-of-magnitude estimate showing that an electron-based implementation with spin splitting in combined electric and magnetic fields could access the required parameter regime. These results reveal an unexplored form of acceleration-modified light-matter interaction and identify spectral blind spots as a new manifestation of the Unruh effect.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PEC-Home: Interpretation of Progressively Elliptical Commands in Smart Homes

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered home assistants with natural language interaction capabilities. However, current assistants overlook the progressive omission that occurs in human dialogue as shared context accumulates, leading to more elliptical expressions for efficient communication. Thus, current assistants still struggle to interpret such elliptical expressions accurately, which limits their effectiveness in real-world applications. In practical smart home scenarios, assistants face two major challenges caused by elliptical commands: (1) referential ambiguity caused by different environmental expectations among multiple users; and (2) intention ambiguity resulting from user preferences that evolve over time or change with the environment. To address these challenges, we introduce PEC-Home, the first simulated home dataset specifically designed for interpreting progressively elliptical commands in smart homes. Extensive experiments on various LLMs, including GPT-4o, show that existing home assistants struggle to execute user-intended operations based solely on elliptical commands. Even when equipped with tools for storing and retrieving user dialogue history, execution accuracy remains below that achieved with complete commands.}.

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

Curiosity-Critic: Cumulative Prediction Error Improvement as a Tractable Intrinsic Reward for World Model Training

arXiv:2604.18701v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Local prediction-error-based curiosity rewards focus on the current transition without considering the world model's cumulative prediction error across all visited transitions. We introduce Curiosity-Critic, which grounds its intrinsic reward in the improvement of this cumulative objective, and show that it admits a tractable per-step surrogate: the difference between the current prediction error and the asymptotic error baseline of the current state transition. We estimate this error baseline online with a learned critic co-trained alongside the world model; since the critic only has to learn how hard a transition is to predict, its estimate of the irreducible noise floor converges well before the world model saturates, redirecting exploration toward learnable transitions. The reward is higher for learnable transitions and collapses toward zero for stochastic ones, thereby separating epistemic (reducible) from aleatoric (irreducible) prediction error online. Prior prediction-error curiosity formulations, from Schmidhuber (1991) to learned-feature-space variants, emerge as special cases corresponding to specific approximations of this error baseline. Experiments on a stochastic grid world show that Curiosity-Critic outperforms prediction-error, visitation-count, and Random Network Distillation methods in training speed and final world model accuracy.

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

FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs

Real-world financial decision-making is a challenging problem that requires reasoning over heterogeneous signals, including company fundamentals derived from regulatory filings and trading signals computed from price dynamics. Recently, with advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), financial analysts have begun to use them for financial decision-making tasks. However, existing financial question-answering benchmarks for testing these models primarily focus on company balance sheet data and rarely evaluate reasoning about how company stocks trade in the market or their interactions with fundamentals. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we introduce FinTradeBench, a benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning that integrates company fundamentals and trading signals. FinTradeBench contains 1,400 questions grounded in NASDAQ-100 companies over a ten-year historical window. The benchmark is organized into three reasoning categories: fundamentals-focused, trading-signal-focused, and hybrid questions requiring cross-signal reasoning. To ensure reliability at scale, we adopt a calibration-then-scaling framework that combines expert seed questions, multi-model response generation, intra-model self-filtering, numerical auditing, and human-LLM judge alignment. We evaluate 14 LLMs under zero-shot prompting and retrieval-augmented settings and witness a clear performance gap. Retrieval substantially improves reasoning over textual fundamentals, but provides limited benefit for trading-signal reasoning. These findings highlight fundamental challenges in the numerical and time-series reasoning for current LLMs and motivate future research in financial intelligence.