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

PrologMCP: A Standardized Prolog Tool Interface for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.14935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier reasoning-tuned language models still fail on deductive tasks at depth, and the cost of improved performance through extended internal reasoning scales poorly. Symbolic delegation offers a complementary route: a language model translates the problem, while a solver performs the inference. However, current autoformalization pipelines for logic programming are typically bespoke integrations tied to particular tasks or agents. We introduce PrologMCP, a task-agnostic, open-source server that exposes Prolog as a stateful tool through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Its compact tool interface, structured error reporting, and per-session isolation make the translate-run-inspect-repair loop a reusable primitive for MCP-capable agents. We evaluate a formalizer agent enhanced with PrologMCP against standard and reasoning LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4.1, and o4-mini) on two subsets of PARARULE-Plus: a general-purpose sample and a more challenging one targeting a specific failure mode of natural-language reasoning. On the general sample, the formalizer matches or exceeds reasoning LLMs (accuracy 1.00 vs.\ 1.00 / 0.998), with the largest gains over standard models (0.762 for GPT-4.1). On the challenging subset, the formalizer remains near-perfect (1.00 / 0.99) while reasoning LLMs drop to 0.95 / 0.94. These results suggest that delegating inference to Prolog via MCP is a robust and inspectable alternative to extended natural-language reasoning.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Debiasing Without Protected Attributes: Latent Concept Erasure from Textual Profiles

Most fairness research in NLP assumes direct access to protected attributes such as gender, race, or nationality. In practice, however, such information is often unavailable due to privacy constraints, missing metadata, or legal restrictions, even though models may infer it from indirect textual cues. This raises a key question: can debiasing succeed without direct access to sensitive attributes? We propose H-SAL, which performs post-hoc concept and attribute erasure using self-description text as an implicit debiasing signal. To support this setting, we introduce a multi-domain Stack Exchange-based fairness benchmark for helpfulness prediction that includes both explicit and implicit signals, enabling comparison between standard debiasing with protected labels and debiasing without access to sensitive information. Across encoder and decoder-only language models, we find that implicit self-description often matches or outperforms explicit-label-based debiasing. Our results broaden representation-level fairness research and provide a new benchmark for studying debiasing under realistic data constraints.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

When Cars Have Stereotypes: Auditing Demographic Bias in Objects from Text-to-Image Models

While prior research on text-to-image generation has predominantly focused on biases in human depictions, demographic bias in generated objects remains relatively underexplored. We introduce SODA (Stereotyped Object Diagnostic Audit), a novel framework for systematically measuring these biases through automated attribute discovery and three standardized metrics: Base vs. Demographic Divergence (BDS), Cross-Demographic Disparity (CDS), and Visual Attribute Concentration (VAC). Applying SODA to 8,000 images across five state-of-the-art models and eight object categories (e.g., cars), we find that "neutral" prompts produce outputs most visually similar to middle-aged and White people, suggesting these groups are implicitly over-represented in model defaults. Furthermore, demographic cues trigger highly skewed stereotypical outputs: 26.6% of object-model-demographic combinations produce results where all 20 generated images share the exact same attribute value (e.g., rose gold laptops for women). Finally, prompt-level debiasing reduces inter-group disparity but paradoxically collapses within-group diversity, replacing one stereotype with another. SODA offers a practical pipeline for making these implicit associations measurable, serving as a step toward more responsible AI development.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

The Implicit Bias of Steepest Descent with Mini-batch Stochastic Gradient

arXiv:2602.11557v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries. In this work, we study the implicit bias of mini-batch stochastic steepest descent in multi-class classification, characterizing how batch size, momentum, and variance reduction shape the limiting max-margin behavior and convergence rates under general entry-wise and Schatten-$p$ norms. We show that, without momentum, worst-case convergence and successful classification can only be guaranteed with full-batch gradient. In contrast, momentum enables small-batch convergence to an approximate max-margin solution through a batch-momentum trade-off, though it slows convergence. This approach provides fully explicit, dimension-free rates that improve upon prior results. Moreover, we prove that variance reduction can recover the exact full-batch implicit bias for any batch size, albeit at a slower convergence rate. Finally, we further investigate the batch-size-one steepest descent without momentum, and reveal its convergence to a fundamentally different bias via a concrete data example, which reveals a key limitation of purely stochastic updates. Overall, our unified analysis clarifies when stochastic optimization aligns with full-batch behavior, and paves the way for perform deeper explorations of the training behavior of stochastic gradient steepest descent algorithms.

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

Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification via Prototype Adaptation and Pseudo Class-variable Training

arXiv:2606.08898v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the task of few-shot class-incremental audio classification, the number of classes is assumed to always increase without considering the possibility of decrease. However, the number of classes generally increases or decreases in practice. In this paper, we investigate a problem of Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification (FCIAC), in which the number of classes increases or decreases. We propose a FCIAC method using prototype adaptation and pseudo class-variable training. The model in our method consists of an encoder and a classifier. The classifier is initialized by a class-variable prototype adaptation network, whose structure dynamically changes with the change of classes. In addition, we design a pseudo class-variable training strategy to enhance the model's adaptability to changing classes. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method exceeds previous methods in average accuracy. The code is at: https://github.com/cgq2971-afk/FCIAC.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

TimeLens: On-Device Artifact Recognition with Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering for the Grand Egyptian Museum

TimeLens is an AI-powered bilingual mobile guide for the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). Pointing a phone at an exhibit, a visitor sees the artifact recognized in real time and can ask follow-up questions answered in English or Arabic. The work addresses three problems specific to in-gallery deployment: fine-grained visual similarity among 51 catalogued artifacts (many near-identical Ramesside statues), the gap between curated training data and handheld camera conditions, and the risk of an AI guide stating unsupported historical facts. Two engineering contributions are reported. First, an on-device artifact detector was developed through a data-quality-driven iteration study – from foundation-model auto-annotation (YOLO-World), through spatial label-cleaning rules, to a fully hand-annotated dataset – isolating label quality as the decisive factor: the final YOLOv8n model resolves every previously failing class while remaining a 5.97 MB TensorFlow Lite asset that runs in real time on a mid-range phone (mAP@0.5 = 0.995, mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.924). Second, a bilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) guide, grounded in a 108-record ChromaDB knowledge base, was benchmarked across seven candidate language models, with Gemma 4 E2B (Q4 K M) selected; ten targeted optimizations reduce end-to-end latency from over 30 s to approximately 10 s. Both subsystems are integrated in a production Flutter application with bilingual interface, museum location gating, and text-to-speech support.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Autoregressive Direct Preference Optimization

arXiv:2602.09533v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Direct preference optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, the widespread reliance on the response-level Bradley-Terry (BT) model may limit its full potential, as the reference and learnable models are assumed to be autoregressive only after deriving the objective function. Motivated by this limitation, we revisit the theoretical foundations of DPO and propose a novel formulation that explicitly introduces the autoregressive assumption prior to applying the BT model. By reformulating and extending DPO, we derive a novel variant, termed Autoregressive DPO (ADPO), that explicitly integrates autoregressive modeling into the preference optimization framework. Without violating the theoretical foundations, the derived loss takes an elegant form: it shifts the summation operation in the DPO objective outside the log-sigmoid function. Furthermore, through theoretical analysis of ADPO, we show that there exist two length measures to be considered when designing DPO-based algorithms: the token length $\mu$ and the feedback length $\mu'$. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explicitly distinguish these two measures and analyze their implications for preference optimization in LLMs.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Finite-Time Convergence of Distributionally Robust Q-Learning with Linear Function Approximation

arXiv:2510.01721v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) seeks policies that perform well when the deployment transition model differs from the nominal model generating the data. Most finite-sample guarantees for DRRL are tabular, model-based, rely on generative access, or obtain function-approximation guarantees only under additional structure, such as linear-transition models or restrictive discount-factor conditions. We study discounted model-free robust Q-learning under an $(s,a)$-rectangular chi-square uncertainty set, with linear approximation of the robust Q-function, using only a single Markovian trajectory from an unknown nominal model. Our algorithm combines a target-network outer loop with a dual function-approximation scheme for the chi-square robust Bellman update. The dual procedure uses moment-tracking critics, suffix averaging, a fresh-evaluation stage for the variance-like moment, and a tunable smoothing parameter to have a Lipschitz-continuous chi-square dual gradient. We prove a finite-time convergence bound to the optimal robust Q-function up to approximation error, without imposing a small-discount-factor assumption. Our results help close a gap between the empirical use of robust RL algorithms and the non-asymptotic guarantees available for their non-robust counterparts.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

INFRAMIND: Infrastructure-Aware Multi-Agent Orchestration

arXiv:2606.11440v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing multi-agent LLM orchestration methods, ranging from brute-force ensembles to learned routers, select models and topologies based on task and model features. However, these methods do not consider the runtime state of the serving infrastructure. On shared GPU clusters under concurrent load, this infrastructure blindness causes systematic resource underutilization: preferred models accumulate deep request queues while equally capable alternatives sit idle. In multi-agent pipelines, where each query triggers multiple sequential model calls, these delays then compound across every downstream step. Closing this gap is challenging because the relevant infrastructure signals (queue depths, KV-cache pressure, latencies) are dynamic and noisy, and they must drive three different decisions: planning, per-step routing, and scheduling. We introduce INFRAMIND, a framework that makes the entire multi-agent stack infrastructure-aware. An infra-aware planner conditions topology and role selection on real-time system load and remaining budget, biasing toward simpler graphs under congestion and richer ones at low load. An infra-aware executor then observes per-model queue depths, cache utilization, and response latencies at each agent step to decide which model to call and how deeply to reason; a budget-aware scheduler further reorders each model's queue so that urgent requests are served first. Cast as a hierarchical constrained MDP and solved end-to-end via reinforcement learning, the system learns to balance quality against latency automatically. Across five benchmarks, INFRAMIND delivers up to +7.6 pp accuracy over the prior baseline at low load with up to 7x lower latency, and sustains up to 99.9% SLO compliance under high load where every baseline drops below 50%.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Diffusion Policy Optimization without Drifting Apart

arXiv:2606.13795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL post-training has become increasingly pivotal for improving diffusion policies, but existing diffusion policy-gradient methods are often unstable and cannot achieve reliable policy improvement. We identify the cause as the double-drift phenomenon: optimizing a variational surrogate can let the ELBO separate from the true log-likelihood, which then makes the resulting proxy policy gradient misaligned with the true policy gradient of expected return. We propose DiPOD, a diffusion policy optimization framework that maintains tight-bound behavior throughout training by interleaving self-distillation with policy-improving gradient updates. This leads to a simple and practical algorithm: augmenting each diffusion policy-gradient update with an on-policy ELBO regularizer. Across diffusion language model post-training and continuous-control diffusion policies, DiPOD substantially stabilizes training and reaches higher rewards than previous methods.

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

Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents

Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations. We propose ModeratorLM, a role-playing voice agent that conditions turn-taking behavior on an explicitly assigned role in multi-party settings. The system is built on a speech large language model operating in chunk-wise streaming manner. We further introduce a reasoning-augmented variant that incorporates chain-of-thought reasoning over conversational context and the assigned role. We construct RolePlayConv, a large-scale synthetic dataset of spoken multi-party conversations with diverse assistant roles. Experiments on real-world meeting data and RolePlayConv show improved turn-taking precision by over 40% and recall by more than 70%, while substantially reducing false-positive interruptions compared to non-role-conditioned baselines.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Multi-Head Attention-Based Feature Extractor Integration with Soft Actor-Critic for Porosity Prediction and Process Parameter Optimization in Additive Manufacturing

arXiv:2606.20087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Additive manufacturing process optimization requires precise parameter control to minimize defects such as porosity. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) approaches using discrete action spaces suffer from slow convergence and susceptibility to local optima, limiting their effectiveness for high-precision manufacturing tasks. This study addresses these limitations by employing a continuous action space combined with a novel architecture that integrates a multi-head attention mechanism with the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm. The attention-based feature extractor enhances the agent's ability to capture subtle variations in low-dimensional input features, enabling more effective exploration-exploitation balance for navigating value spaces with local minima. We validate our approach on porosity prediction and process parameter optimization in laser powder bed fusion, demonstrating faster convergence and higher final reward values compared to standard RL methods including DQN, PPO, TD3, and vanilla SAC. The proposed methodology achieves a convergence value of 322.79 within 14 episodes, outperforming existing approaches while maintaining stability throughout training.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Superspace Concentration and Adversarial Robustness in Quantum Algorithms

arXiv:2606.11580v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study superspace concentration as a quantum resource, formalized through the focus measure F(\r{ho}) = {\lambda}_max(\r{ho}_super) - the largest eigenvalue of the reduced superspace state - which quantifies the capacity of a quantum system to concentrate informational weight into a preferred subspace of an extended degree-of-freedom space. We develop a complete resource-theoretic framework around this measure and validate its properties through GPU-accelerated numerical simulation. Analytic decoherence predictions are confirmed to machine precision (1.11 x 10^{-16}) for superspace dimensions dS in {2,4,8,16,32}. Focus monotonicity holds across 10,000 random states with zero violations under four focus-non-generating channels across six system configurations. Focused quantum states resist coherent unitary attacks with significantly greater resilience than standard fidelity predicts, with focus remaining above 0.9 at attack strength {\epsilon} = 0.302 versus {\epsilon} = 0.174 for fidelity. We further demonstrate that the focus measure and the U(dS)-asymmetry measure are operationally distinct: asymmetry remains near zero and provides no robustness signal under coherent and targeted attacks while focus tracks spectral concentration and remains robust until {\epsilon} > 0.3. The connection between Grover's algorithm and superspace concentration is made explicit via the identity F(|{\psi}_k>

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Early-Step Latent Verification for Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing has made notable progress with recent advances in generative models. However, the quality of the edited result is still influenced by the randomly sampled initial noise, particularly in complex editing scenarios. An unsuitable initial noise may lead to unsatisfactory editing results. Recent inference-time scaling methods address this issue by sampling multiple initial noises and selecting better candidates. Nevertheless, most of them follow a decode-then-verify scheme which introduces an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. When decoding is performed after limited inference steps, the decoded images often remain too noisy for reliable assessment, whereas sufficiently denoised images require much higher computational cost. To address this issue, we propose VeriLatent, a plug-and-play adaptive inference-time scaling framework with early-step latent verification for image editing. Specifically, we propose a novel verifier that scores each initial noise through a latent-space editing activation map at an early stage. It identifies promising candidates by assessing whether they can induce an effective edit in the correct region. This enables efficient early pruning without decoding latents into images. Building on this, we further develop an adaptive search strategy for inference-time scaling. It allocates inference budgets according to editing difficulty, thereby reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and different base models demonstrate that VeriLatent consistently improves both editing performance and inference-time scaling efficiency.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Unifying spacetime approaches to quantum mechanics

arXiv:2606.12539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent efforts to formulate quantum mechanics in a way that treats space and time on a more equal footing have led to a large variety of spacetime-oriented approaches. In this work we present a detailed study of spacetime states, the objects that play the role of quantum states in the recently introduced framework of spacetime quantum mechanics, and show that the main proposals in the literature are different manifestations of the same underlying object. Path integrals, quantum states over time, pseudo-density matrices, the Page and Wootters mechanism, superdensity operators, and timelike-entanglement proposals all arise from spacetime states through particular evaluations, reduced information, linear maps, or quantum channels. This unification provides explicit mathematical representations of these formalisms, reveals relations among them, and clarifies the spacetime information each one captures. We also study the broader relevance of the spacetime-state point of view for Leggett-Garg inequalities, OTOCs, temporal tensor networks, fermionic systems, relativistic QFTs, quantum reference frames, and classical physics, together with additional insights and perspectives revealed by the common unifying framework.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

In this paper, we contribute to the debate on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in scientometrics. We argue that moving from a trial-and-error approach to an explainable and actionable use requires a principled understanding of strengths and weaknesses of GenAI as compared with other techniques and with human judgment. To this end, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts, i.e. the meanings attributed to words, and their pragmatic dimension, i.e. their embedding within communicative situations. We leverage this framework to interpret the results of applications of GenAI in scientometrics and to provide guidance to users. Specifically, we conclude that key parameters to be considered are the nature of the task, the level of granularity of the analysis and whether the goal was descriptive, inferential or evaluative. These parameters lead to different strategies for using GenAI and human-machine integration. Finally, we suggest that, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might affect textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production in the age of AI.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Continuous-time Optimal Stopping through Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation based solvers for optimal stopping problems must discretize the stopping decision. Under classical dynamic programming, a coarse exercise grid with only a few stopping opportunities can materially undervalue the optimal expected reward, whereas on a very fine grid, approximation errors accumulate through the backward recursion. To remove this limitation, we develop a new reinforcement-learning inspired algorithm that enables us to learn the exercise rule at arbitrarily fine time resolution. Our CARLOS (Continuous-time Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Stopping) algorithm utilizes an aggregate deep neural network (ADNN) to learn a joint space-time decision boundary. Starting from a coarse time grid, we progressively increase the frequency of stopping opportunities, while in parallel training the ADNN to refine its timing-value estimates. We moreover design an adaptive sampling strategy that gradually concentrates training effort near the stopping boundary. Benchmarked results show that CARLOS delivers higher prices than existing Bermudan solvers, approaching the American upper bound, and achieves high computational efficiency relative to non-RL comparators.

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

Spectral Adaptive Conformal Prediction for Structured Non-Exchangeable Data

arXiv:2606.15950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal prediction gives prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage when the data are exchangeable. Many time-indexed datasets are not exchangeable. They have seasons, recurring regimes, changing frequencies, or other forms of structured dependence. This paper studies a simple way to use that structure. We propose spectral adaptive conformal prediction, a method that forms weighted conformal quantiles using local spectral similarity and then updates the target miscoverage level online. The spectral weights choose calibration residuals that look relevant to the current test point. The adaptive update corrects the long-run miss rate when uncertainty changes over time. We give an approximate coverage result for the fixed spectral weighted quantile and a deterministic long-run calibration result for the adaptive update. Simulations with recurring regimes and slowly changing frequencies, together with three U.S. real-data examples, show that the hybrid method can improve on fixed spectral weighting, while also showing that spectral weighting must be monitored through effective sample size diagnostics.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

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

Mitigating Heterogeneity-Induced Drift in Hierarchical Sign-Based Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.02355v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) is well suited for large-scale wireless and Internet of Things systems, where devices communicate with nearby edge servers before reaching the cloud. In these environments, uplink bandwidth and latency impose strict communication constraints, making aggressive gradient compression essential. One-bit sign-based stochastic gradient descent methods provide an attractive solution in flat federated settings, but their behavior in hierarchical edge–cloud architectures remains insufficiently understood, especially under inter-cluster data heterogeneity. To address this gap, we develop a sign-based HFL framework in which devices transmit binary stochastic-gradient signs to edge servers, edge servers apply majority voting, and the cloud periodically aggregates edge models. Our analysis reveals that inter-cluster heterogeneity induces a persistent bias term in the convergence bound, reflecting the drift of edge models toward local objectives. This term cannot be removed by increasing the number of training rounds or by tuning standard hyperparameters alone. We therefore propose \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\), a drift-corrected sign-based HFL algorithm in which devices apply a cloud-assisted gradient correction before taking the sign. We show that this pre-sign correction mitigates the non-vanishing heterogeneity-induced bias while preserving binary device–edge communication during the repeated local sign-update steps. Experiments under severe inter-cluster heterogeneity demonstrate that \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\) improves the stability and accuracy of sign-based HFL and achieves performance comparable to full-precision hierarchical SGD with substantially lower device–edge communication.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Post Hoc Localization of Beam F3 Stimulation Targets: An MRI-Derived Geodesic Approach for Refined TMS E-Field Simulations

Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is an established treatment option in major depressive disorder. One of the most common approaches for targeting the dlPFC is the Beam F3 method, which determines the stimulation site (F3Beam) as a function of external cranial measurements. Precise knowledge of the individual stimulation site is essential for imaging-based analyses of TMS effects. However, due to the method's reliance on individual anatomy, retrospective identification of F3Beam targets across cohorts is challenging, limiting the analysis of existing datasets. We developed a scalable method to reconstruct subject-specific F3Beam target locations for e-field simulations based on structural imaging. Methods: High-resolution three-dimensional (3D) T1-weighted MRI was used to generate individual scalp meshes via the ''Simulation of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation'' (SimNIBS) software. Subject-specific anatomical distances and coordinates of interest were measured geodesically using a Python-based script to reconstruct the individual F3Beam targets. Validation included a retrospective comparison between digital geodesic measurements and manual cranial measurements in 20 patients and a prospective comparison with MR-visible scalp markers in 2 healthy controls. To assess the impact of our targeting algorithm on e-field simulations, volumetric e-field maps based on three potential targets (F3Beam, F3MNI, F3Geo) were generated in SimNIBS and compared using voxel-wise statistics in SPM12. Results: Retrospective analysis revealed a systematic bias towards higher in vivo measurements compared to digital geodesic measurements, though deviations in the final distances determining F3Beam (xBeam and yBeam) were minimal ({Delta}xBeam: 0.11 {+/-} 0.08 cm; {Delta}yBeam: 0.14 {+/-} 0.21 cm). Prospective validation demonstrated that F3Beam coordinates better matched in vivo coil positions than group-template-derived targets (F3MNI). Group-level analysis showed method-dependent clustering of coil positions with corresponding voxel-wise e-field differences. Conclusions: Individualized geodesic measurements may enable accurate, scalable and retrospective identification of Beam F3 targets and coil orientations. This approach may yield more accurate e-field simulations than group-template based targeting and provides a practical method for retrospective analysis of existing TMS treatment cohorts. This could be leveraged to identify response predictors or imaging-based biomarkers of treatment response.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

The FBSDE approach to sine-Gordon up to $6\pi$

arXiv:2401.13648v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a stochastic analysis of the sine-Gordon Euclidean quantum field $(\cos (\beta \varphi))_2$ on the full space up to the second threshold, i.e. for $\beta^2 < 6 \pi$. The basis of our method is a forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE) for a decomposition $(X_t)_{t \geqslant 0}$ of the interacting Euclidean field $X_{\infty}$ along a scale parameter $t \geqslant 0$. This FBSDE describes the optimiser of the stochastic control representation of the Euclidean QFT introduced by Barashkov and one of the authors. We show that the FBSDE provides a description of the interacting field without cut-offs and that it can be used effectively to study the sine-Gordon measure to obtain results about large deviations, integrability, decay of correlations for local observables, singularity with respect to the free field, Osterwalder-Schrader axioms and other properties.

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

Compact Geometric Representations of Hierarchies

Computing geometric representations of data is a cornerstone of modern machine learning, typically achieved by training dual encoders which map queries and documents into a shared embedding space. Recent work of You et al. [NeurIPS '25] has extended this approach to hierarchical retrieval, where relevance is determined by the ancestor-descendant relationships in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). While previous work has shown that valid embeddings exist when the number of descendants is small, these bounds degrade significantly for deep hierarchies, requiring dimensions as large as the total number of nodes. In this paper, we investigate compact reachability embeddings for more general graph classes and provide theoretical guarantees for representing hierarchies using embeddings whose dimension depends on structural graph parameters. We prove that for any directed tree, there exists a reachability embedding in constant dimension 3, independent of the tree's size or depth. We generalize this result to graphs characterized by treewidth $t$, constructing embeddings of dimension $O(t \log n)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes. Complementing these upper bounds, we provide matching or near-matching lower bounds, showing that dimension $\Omega(n)$ is necessary for general DAGs and $\Omega(t/\log(n/t))$ is required for graphs of treewidth $t$. We also obtain upper and lower bounds parameterized by the number of cross-edges in the DAG. We additionally show that our embeddings can be constructed on real world datasets, and that they give much smaller dimensions in high recall regimes compared to prior embeddings with theoretical guarantees.

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

Effects of sparsity and superposition on loss in simple autoencoders

arXiv:2606.18538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One of the major difficulties in the mechanistic interpretability of neural networks is the occurrence of polysemanticity, which suggests that each neuron is typically responsible for multiple different tasks, impeding a clean interpretation of their function. The seminal paper of Elhage et al. (2022) argues that this occurs due to superposition, a phenomenon where the neural network represents distinct features as non-orthogonal directions in a lower-dimensional space, a strategy that allows much greater compression of the data without sacrificing fidelity due to the feature sparsity of input vectors. Elhage et al. (2022) empirically validates these hypotheses in a rather natural and simple autoencoder with sparse inputs. The contribution of the present work is to analyze the mathematical basis for the occurrence and optimality of superposition, while rigorously corroborating some of their findings. In particular, we provide upper and lower bounds for the L2 reconstruction loss, tight in the very sparse regime, for power activation functions. A short list of interesting open problems are also included at the end.