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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Charge-Conjugation Violation and Population Asymmetry in Bipartite Fermionic Lattices

arXiv:2606.06138v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Charge conjugation violation (CCV) is a central concept in particle physics and appears also for quasiparticles in quantum many-body systems, which typically relies on an embedded external symmetry breaking to the underlying system. An open question is how an intrinsic CCV mechanism could emerge and what its macroscopic consequences would be. We establish sublattice kinks in bipartite fermionic lattices as a concrete setup showing intrinsic CCV. The intrinsic CCV of the sublattice kink is based on the graph-topological nature of the underlying Hamiltonian, with no explicit symmetry breaking taking place. It leads to a population asymmetry of different configurations and imprints a hidden leaf-like structure in the eigenenergy spectrum. The population asymmetry also leads to an imbalanced sublattice-kink production triggered by the vacuum-instability in the quench dynamics. Our work demonstrates the graph topology as the microscopic origin of intrinsic CCV, with the population asymmetry as the macroscopic consequence, of which the proposed setup is highly amenable to experimental implementation via cold-atom quantum simulators.

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

WOMBET: World Model-Based Experience Transfer for Robust and Sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2604.08958v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) in robotics is often limited by the cost and risk of data collection, motivating experience transfer from a source task to a target task. Offline-to-online RL leverages prior data but typically assumes a given fixed dataset and does not address how to generate reliable data for transfer. We propose World Model-Based Experience Transfer (WOMBET), a framework that jointly generates and utilizes prior data. WOMBET learns a world model in the source task and generates offline data via uncertainty-penalized planning, followed by filtering trajectories with high return and low epistemic uncertainty. It then performs online fine-tuning in the target task using adaptive sampling between offline and online data, enabling a stable transition from prior-driven initialization to task-specific adaptation. We show that the uncertainty-penalized objective provides a lower bound on the true return and derive a finite-sample error decomposition capturing distribution mismatch and approximation error. Empirically, WOMBET improves sample efficiency and final performance over strong baselines on continuous control benchmarks, demonstrating the benefit of jointly optimizing data generation and transfer.

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

3D-DLP: Self-Supervised 3D Object-Centric Scene Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.19451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce 3D-DLP, a self-supervised object-centric representation learning model that decomposes scene-level RGB-D or voxel observations into a set of 3D latent particles. Building on the Deep Latent Particles (DLP) framework, each particle encodes disentangled attributes, including 3D keypoint position, bounding box dimensions, and appearance features, and represents a distinct entity in the scene. The model learns interpretable per-particle segmentation maps through an end-to-end self-supervised reconstruction objective. We demonstrate on both simulated and real-world datasets that the learned latent space is interpretable and controllable: by manipulating particle positions and decoding, we can generate novel scene configurations. Furthermore, we show that leveraging these compact 3D latent particles for downstream robotic manipulation improves performance over baselines that either lack explicit 3D information or rely on memory-intensive dense 3D inputs without object-centric structure. Code and videos are available at https://eubooks3003.github.io/3d-dlp.

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

MedVeriSeg: Teaching LISA-Like Medical Segmentation Models to Verify Query Validity Without Extra Training

Despite recent progress in text-prompt-based medical image segmentation, existing LISA-like MLLM-based methods typically generate masks regardless of whether the target specified in the query is present, leading to hallucinated segmentation. In this work, we propose MedVeriSeg, a training-free query verification framework that enables LISA-like medical segmentation models to reject false segmentation queries. MedVeriSeg first quantifies the response quality between the [SEG] token and image features through a Similarity Response Quality Scoring Module. To further improve robustness, it employs a Lightweight Routed Multi-Agent Verification Module, which fuses quantitative score evidence with qualitative agent evidence to comprehensively verify the validity of the query. To support systematic evaluation, we construct MedVeriSeg-Bench, a benchmark designed for query verification in medical image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that MedVeriSeg effectively identifies false segmentation queries and reduces hallucinated segmentation, while maintaining a high acceptance rate for valid queries, thereby largely preserving the segmentation utility of LISA-like medical segmentation models.

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

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

OrthoReg: Orthogonal Regularization for Hybrid Symbolic-Neural Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.19145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamical systems are fundamental to modeling the natural world, yet modeling them involves a persistent trade-off: manually prescribed mechanistic models are interpretable by design but often overly simplistic and misspecified; in contrast, flexible data-driven neural methods lack physical insight. Hybrid modeling aims for the best of both worlds by combining a prescribed or symbolic, physics-based component with a flexible neural network. A critical challenge, however, is that the neural component may relearn mechanistic parts, yielding redundant and uninterpretable models, especially when the symbolic structure itself is discovered from data. Existing methods based on standard $L^2$ regularization rely on a projection argument that breaks when the symbolic component is learned through sparse discovery, allowing the neural augmentation to overlap with symbolic structure. We introduce OrthoReg (Orthogonal Regularization), which directly penalizes overlap between the symbolic and neural components, preventing symbolic structure from being absorbed by the neural residual. This yields a complementary decomposition: the symbolic part captures what the library can express, and the neural part captures what remains. On benchmark dynamical systems with partial library mismatch, OrthoReg improves symbolic recovery and out-of-distribution behavior.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RTSGameBench: An RTS Benchmark for Strategic Reasoning by Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.18950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with strategic reasoning, i.e., anticipating and influencing other agents' actions, under uncertainty in competitive and cooperative settings. Real-time strategy (RTS) games can be a natural testbed for diagnosing this limitation, as they demand coordination with allies, adaptation to opponents' strategy, and long-horizon planning under partial observability. However, existing RTS benchmarks offer limited evaluation scope, lack systematic competency diagnosis, and remain fixed in the pre-designed scenario coverage. To address these limitations, we present RTSGameBench, which is built on Beyond All Reason, a large-scale RTS game with an expanded battlefield that demands broader strategy diversity than the existing testbeds. The proposed benchmark provides evaluations through diverse gameplay across various matchup structures, diagnostic assessment via mini-games, each targeting an individual strategic competency, and extensible coverage via a self-evolving generation framework that converts free-form queries into new mini-games, improving over successive cycles. Additionally, for VLMs to operate in large-scale RTS games, we provide RTSGameAgent that manages units by an FSM with agentic memory. We empirically validate that multiple state-of-the-art VLMs do not perform well when matchups demand tighter coordination, multiagent coordination and when task scale increases.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Fair Cognitive Impairment Detection Through Unlearning

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a medical condition characterized by a noticeable decline in memory, language, or thinking abilities. MCI detection from spontaneous speech is promising for scalable screening. However, learned models often exploit demographic cues correlated with labels, resulting in a large performance gap across subgroups. We present a multimodal framework that combines (i) cross-model fusion between modalities (speech, text, and image), and (ii) unlearning using gradient reversal that discourages the shared embedding from encoding task-irrelevant demographic attributes. Evaluated on the multilingual benchmarks TAUKADIAL and PREPARE, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art multilingual and multimodal baseline in MCI classification while substantially reducing the performance gap across patient subgroups (sex and language). We further analyze transfer across datasets, showing that demographic unlearning helps learn more robust representations for MCI detection.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Evaluation of analysis modes for RNA coexpression in single-cell and bulk tissue

Coexpression of transcripts presents the most common means of computational inference of transcription factor regulation, and is often combined with other data types to infer regulatory networks. With the growing popularity of single-cell approaches, there are questions about how best to extract coexpression information from the data. Recently we reported a simulation study that explored the differences among coexpression performed at different levels: across single cells (xCell, per cell type), across subjects from pseudobulked single-cell data (xSubject, per cell type), or across subjects using bulk tissue samples (xBulk). Here we test predictions made by those models using real data. We consider both preservation (consistency of coexpression findings across different levels of analysis of the same data) and replicability across independent studies, as well as biological interpretability. We find that preservation across levels is limited, indicating the choice of analysis level will affect outcomes. We show that xCell coexpression is more replicable across studies compared to xSubject. xBulk coexpression is dominated by patterns driven by variability in cellular composition and fails to capture much coexpression that is reliably detected at finer resolutions. While all modes of analysis exhibit some enrichment for known regulatory relationships, it was highest with the xCell mode. Finally, we present a case study of the effect of analysis modes on a schizophrenia-associated pattern, reinforcing the importance of analytic choices in the interpretation and replicability of coexpression analyses. Together with our modeling study, this work emphasizes the importance of understanding sources of expression covariation as they relate to the goals of the analysis, and recommend single-cell-based data with biological replicates should be the focus of attempts to infer dynamic regulatory interactions that are more likely to be replicable by others.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

DF3DV-1K: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Distractor-Free Novel View Synthesis

arXiv:2604.13416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advances in radiance fields have enabled photorealistic novel view synthesis. In several domains, large-scale real-world datasets have been developed to support comprehensive benchmarking and to facilitate progress beyond scene-specific reconstruction. However, for distractor-free radiance fields, a large-scale dataset with clean and cluttered images per scene remains lacking, limiting the development. To address this gap, we introduce DF3DV-1K, a large-scale real-world dataset comprising 1,048 scenes, each providing clean and cluttered image sets for benchmarking. In total, the dataset contains 89,924 images captured using consumer cameras to mimic casual capture, spanning 128 distractor types and 161 scene themes across indoor and outdoor environments. A curated subset of 41 scenes, DF3DV-41, is systematically designed to evaluate the robustness of distractor-free radiance field methods under challenging scenarios. Using DF3DV-1K, we benchmark nine recent distractor-free radiance field methods and 3D Gaussian Splatting, identifying the most robust methods and the most challenging scenarios. Beyond benchmarking, we demonstrate an application of DF3DV-1K by fine-tuning a diffusion-based 2D enhancer to improve radiance field methods, achieving average improvements of 0.96 dB PSNR and 0.057 LPIPS on the held-out set (e.g., DF3DV-41) and the On-the-go dataset. We hope DF3DV-1K facilitates the development of distractor-free vision and promotes progress beyond scene-specific approaches. The dataset and leaderboard are available at https://johnnylu305.github.io/df3dv1k_web/.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PHI-Reason: evidence-grounded species-level phage-host prediction from structured biological text profiles

Phage–host interaction (PHI) prediction is a fundamental problem in microbiology with applications in microbial ecology and microbiome engineering. Existing computational approaches typically convert phage and host information into numerical representations derived from sequence similarity, protein content, genome composition or reference databases, then score candidate hosts or train host-prediction models. Although effective, such representations often make it difficult to inspect which biological evidence supports a prediction. Here, we present PHI-Reason, a species-level PHI prediction framework that reformulates host prediction as constrained biological text reasoning. Instead of embedding phages and hosts directly as numerical vectors, PHI-Reason converts heterogeneous PHI-related evidence from phage genomes, host genomes, functional annotations, homology searches and biological metadata into modular natural-language profiles. A frozen large language model then performs species-level candidate-host ranking or pairwise PHI assessment by integrating the supplied evidence at inference time. Across species-level benchmarks, PHI-Reason achieved competitive host-prediction performance and recovered complementary correct assignments relative to established sequence- and reference-based methods. Its explicit profile design enabled systematic evidence perturbation and rationale-grounding analyses, showing that predictions depend on coherent multi-source biological evidence and that hallucination risk from unsupported or incomplete profiles can be made operationally measurable. These results position PHI-Reason as a constrained evidence-integration framework for species-level PHI prediction. Rather than replacing sequence-based predictors, it provides an interpretable layer that shows how far explicit biological evidence can support host inference, and where that evidence falls short.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Semantic Grading of Written Answers in Low-Resource Language Bangla Using a Fine-Tuned Lightweight Language Model

Bangla is among the world's most widely spoken languages, yet it remains underserved in educational NLP research. In many remote and rural regions, access to qualified subject teachers is limited, and written answers are consequently graded largely by hand, restricting timely and consistent feedback. Automatic assessment is challenging because semantically correct responses can vary substantially in surface form. We present a bilingual (Bangla-English) evaluation system designed for low-resource educational settings that prioritizes semantic correctness over lexical overlap. Our approach fine-tunes a lightweight language model to grade each response using the question, reference answer, and student answer, producing a numeric score and concise, context-grounded feedback suitable for classroom deployment. We also construct a synthetic bilingual dataset to enable controlled training and evaluation. Across proprietary and open-source LLMs evaluated under a unified protocol, our QLoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B confirms consistent improvement by producing the most leakage-resistant feedback (RoRa = 0.819) in synthetic evaluation and the strongest agreement with human scores (rho = 0.936, MAE = 0.725) in a dedicated human study.

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

SPATIA: Multimodal Generation and Prediction of Spatial Cell Phenotypes

Understanding how cellular morphology, gene expression, and spatial context jointly shape tissue function is a central challenge in biology. Image-based spatial transcriptomics technologies now provide high-resolution measurements of cell images and gene expression profiles, but existing methods typically analyze these modalities in isolation or at limited resolution. We address the problem by introducing SPATIA, a multi-level generative and predictive model that learns unified, spatially aware representations by fusing morphology, gene expression, and spatial context from the cell to the tissue level. SPATIA also incorporates a spatially conditioned generative framework with confidence-aware OT reweighting and morphology-profile alignment for modeling target-state morphology distributions. Specifically, we propose a confidence-aware flow matching objective that reweights weak optimal-transport pairs based on uncertainty. We further apply morphology-profile alignment to encourage biologically meaningful image generation, enabling the modeling of microenvironment-dependent phenotypic transitions. We assembled a multi-scale dataset consisting of 25.9 million cell-gene pairs across 17 tissues. We benchmark SPATIA against 18 models across 12 tasks, spanning categories such as phenotype generation, annotation, clustering, gene imputation, and cross-modal prediction. SPATIA achieves improved performance over state-of-the-art models, improving generative fidelity by 8% and predictive accuracy by up to 3%.

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

Beyond Benchmarks: Continuous Edge Inference for Fine-Grained Roadside Perception

Continuous AI inference on resource-constrained edge hardware introduces deployment effects that are largely invisible to conventional benchmark evaluation, including temporal instability in streaming video, thermal throttling under sustained load, and workload-dependent performance variability. We present Edge-TSR, a deployment-oriented continuous edge inference system for sustained roadside perception on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Edge-TSR integrates detection, tracking, fine-grained classification, and a lightweight track-aware temporal stabilization mechanism that improves streaming inference consistency with negligible computational overhead. Our central finding is that benchmark-centric evaluation systematically overstates deployed edge inference performance. Across three state-of-the-art baselines, we observe consistent 20-30% relative degradation when transitioning from static-image evaluation to real-world streaming deployment. Edge-TSR addresses this gap through temporal inference stabilization, recovering up to 10.16% classification accuracy over per-frame inference baselines while maintaining sustained real-time performance under continuous operation. We evaluate the complete system under diverse real-world deployment conditions, jointly characterizing inference quality, latency, throughput, and thermal behavior during long-duration operation. A 55-minute vehicular deployment over a 26 km route demonstrates sustained operation at 16.18 FPS within safe thermal limits on a single embedded device without cloud offload. Our findings show that deployment-aware evaluation and temporal inference stabilization are necessary components of continuously operating edge AI systems intended for real-world sensing deployments. We release a sample annotated streaming video evaluation dataset and full system implementation to support reproducible deployment-centric evaluation.

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

Unifying Acoustic Features and Text with Multimodal LLMs for Neurodegenerative Screening

arXiv:2606.14788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice-based screening offers a scalable and non-invasive way to assess neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD), but their staging remains challenging due to the difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data. This paper presents NeurMLLM, an efficient multimodal generative framework for neurodegenerative disease staging. NeurMLLM first encodes the spectrograms and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients of audio data with vision transformers and projects their representations into the embedding space of a large language model (LLM), where they are concatenated with transcript and demographic instruction tokens as a single unified sequence. The LLM is then instruction-tuned via Low-Rank Adaptation using task prompts to autoregressively predict a constrained label token, enabling a generative classification. By evaluating on the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset for fine-grained staging of AD and PD, we observe that NeurMLLM achieves strong performance, consistently outperforming classical machine learning methods and existing LLM-based approaches. The results show the high potential of multimodal LLMs in neurodegenerative disease staging, improving staging accuracy and supporting accessible deployment.

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

Comparative Study on Agility, Efficiency, and Impact Absorption of Bipedal Robots with Active Toes

arXiv:2606.19699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human legs exhibit high efficiency, agility, and impact absorption, with toes playing a crucial role in these capabilities. While many attempts have been made to implement human-like toes in robots, they have not fully replicated human characteristics nor rigorously validated their benefits. We propose a 14-DOF biped robot emulating human toes' lightweight, high-torque, robust nature. To quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the active toes in terms of agility, efficiency, and impact absorption, we developed a high-fidelity simulation training environment that reflects actual actuators with coupled transmissions and accurate power consumption. To ensure a fair comparison between configurations with and without active toes, we designed a minimal RL reward function and applied an identical training procedure to both. The simulation results indicate that, at 1.33 m/s walking, the toe-equipped robot reduced CoT by 17.5% and heel-strike GRF by 5.0% compared with the toe-ablation configuration. On the agility test, average and maximum path deviation decreased by 25.0% and 34.0%, respectively.

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

Metric Match: A Subset Selection Approach to Evaluating LLM Judge Reliability

arXiv:2606.15029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM judges are used to reduce the need for costly human labor in evaluating open-ended text generation. However, the reliability of these judges depends critically on their alignment with human raters – a property that itself depends on costly human annotations. In this work, we develop a method (Metric Match) for estimating correlation-based reliability metrics of LLM judges from limited annotations. Metric Match selects a subset of samples for human annotation such that the subset matches the population reliability metric with respect to acquired synthetic labels. We empirically show that Metric Match achieves a win-rate of 0.838 against random subset selection across four different correlation metrics and 15 datasets, with an 18.7% decrease in average estimation error and reduces annotation needs by 32.5%. We provide a cost model and highlight a medical case study where our method saves $1,041.67 compared to random selection for expert annotation. Further, we shift our task from reliability estimation to reliability classification of whether a given judge is above a deployment threshold, outperforming random selection with Metric Match. All project code is publicly available, and we additionally provide an installable package for ease of use.

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

Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models

Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more stable optimization signals than modern learned metrics. Training on static scenes with dynamic cameras ensures metric quality while the model generalizes to various dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

The Simplified Stabilizer ZX-Calculus is Minimal

arXiv:2606.12383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The stabilizer fragment of the ZX calculus is amongst the most important fragments of the theory. The closely related Clifford+T fragment is approximately universal (arXiv:1705.11151). Additionally, the stabilizer calculus can be described by a small collection of rewrites, most of which have been shown to be necessary (arXiv:1709.08903). However, two rules, describing the red/green compact-structure coincidence and the important bialgebra law, had not been shown to be necessary. We present a countermodel-style argument showing that both of these rules are individually necessary relative to the connectivity meta-rule of Backens–Perdrix–Wang (arXiv:1709.08903), and hence establish that the rule set presented in arXiv:1709.08903 has no redundant rewrite rule.

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

Unifying Post-hoc Explanations of Knowledge Graph Completions

arXiv:2507.22951v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs organize information as entity-relation-entity triples, enabling machine learning models to predict plausible missing triples in a task known as Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC). Post-hoc explainability for KGC addresses the problem of identifying which triples most influence the predictions of machine learning models. Currently, the field lacks formalization and consistent evaluations, hindering reproducibility and cross-study comparisons. This paper argues for a unified taxonomy for post-hoc explainability in KGC. First, we propose a characterization of post-hoc explanations via multi-objective optimization that unifies existing post-hoc explainability algorithms in KGC and the explanations they produce, balancing explanation effectiveness and conciseness. Next, we examine improved evaluation protocols based on popular metrics, such as Mean Reciprocal Rank and Hits@k, through illustrative experiments. Finally, we stress the importance of interpretability as the ability of explanations to address queries meaningful to end users. By unifying methods and discussing evaluation standards, this work puts forward a case for more reproducible and impactful research in KGC explainability.

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

Closing the Approximation Gap in Simulation-free Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.16138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering dynamical systems from noisy observations is a recurring challenge across scientific domains, including neuroscience and physics. Latent stochastic differential equations (SDEs) address this by modeling the system as an unobserved state that evolves according to a learnable SDE and generates the observations. Variational inference (VI) provides a tractable objective for fitting latent SDEs. Traditional VI algorithms evaluate this objective by numerical simulation over a time discretization, trading fidelity for computational cost. A recent class of algorithms, simulation-free VI, sidesteps this tradeoff by parameterizing the posterior through its instantaneous marginals rather than its drift. In this work, we show that the efficiency of existing simulation-free VI algorithms comes at a price: their parameterizations restrict the approximate posterior to a subset of the SDEs available to simulation-based methods, degrading posterior inference and parameter learning. We propose Helmholtz-SDE, a simulation-free VI algorithm that closes this gap by optimizing over path laws compatible with a prescribed collection of marginals. Helmholtz-SDE recovers dynamics more faithfully than prior simulation-free methods, with the largest gains under high posterior uncertainty. It further matches the performance of simulation-based VI at a fraction of the runtime.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

When Does Mixing Help? Analyzing Query Embedding Interpolation in Multilingual Dense Retrieval

While mixed-language querying is ubiquitous in multilingual communities, the sensitivity of dense retrievers to such queries remains poorly understood. We present a ratio-controlled study on mMARCO that systematically evaluates retrieval performance by varying the mixing proportion of parallel query translations via embedding-level mixing – constructing mixed queries as an interpolation of monolingual embeddings. Experiments with BGE-M3 demonstrate that an optimal mixing ratio outperforms the best monolingual endpoint in 88/105 cases. We uncover a distinct asymmetry driven by English dominance: mixing is uniformly beneficial when retrieving from non-English document indices, whereas indices containing English are best served by pure English queries. Furthermore, English acts as the strongest mixing partner for every non-English document language. Finally, when controlling for English dominance, mixing gains correlate negatively with typological distance. We conclude that language-mix sensitivity is structured and predictable, and we validate the robustness of these patterns across model families and scales.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

The Mathematics of AI Winters: The mathematical Taxonomy of Paradigm Fragility in AI Winter

arXiv:2606.12610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two major periods of reduced funding and confidence in artificial intelligence research, commonly called the first and second AI winters, are usually explained through engineering failure, commercial disappointment, and inflated expectations. This article develops a complementary thesis: that the dominant paradigms of those periods also met genuine formal barriers, including limitations of representation, optimisation, computational complexity, statistical learnability, and high-dimensional approximation. The contribution is synthetic rather than archival. We do not claim that particular theorems mechanically caused the winters; rather, we show that several central disappointments of early AI were aligned with mathematically precise bottlenecks. We analyse these bottlenecks through the perceptron impossibility results of Minsky and Papert, the complexity-theoretic hardness of exact neural-network training established by Blum and Rivest, minimax rates for nonparametric estimation in high dimension due to Stone, vanishing-gradient analyses by Hochreiter and by Bengio and collaborators, and classical statistical learning theory in the tradition of Vapnik and Chervonenkis, Valiant, and Blumer and collaborators. We then relate these barriers to the later breakthroughs that mitigated, rather than eliminated, them.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists. We study LLM decision-making in a travel-assistant context by presenting models with choice dilemmas and analyzing their responses using multinomial logit models to derive implied willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. These WTP values are subsequently compared to human benchmark values from the economics literature. In addition to a baseline setting, we examine how model behavior changes under more realistic conditions, including the provision of information about users' past choices and persona-based prompting. Our results show that while meaningful WTP values can be derived for larger LLMs, they also display systematic deviations at the attribute level. Additionally, they tend to overestimate human WTP overall, particularly when expensive options or business-oriented personas are introduced. Conditioning models on prior preferences for cheaper options yields valuations that are closer to human benchmarks. Overall, our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of using LLMs for subjective decision support and underscore the importance of careful model selection, prompt design, and user representation when deploying such systems in practice.