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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sticky CIR process with potential: invariant measure and exact sampling

arXiv:2605.13648v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the sticky Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) process in one dimension, a diffusion on $[0,\infty)$ with a sticky boundary condition at the origin, arising as the marginal process in a sparse Bayesian inference framework based on Hadamard–Langevin dynamics. For the parameter range $\delta\in(1,2)$, in which the origin is accessible but not absorbing, we prove well-posedness of the process and uniqueness of its invariant measure, which is a mixture of a point mass at zero and a weighted gamma-type density on the interior. We derive an explicit Green's function for the resolvent in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions, and use this to construct an exact sampler for the invariant measure in the zero-potential case. For a non-trivial potential $G$, we establish existence and uniqueness of the tilted invariant measure via a Girsanov change of measure, and develop two sampling algorithms: a Metropolis–Hastings corrected sampler that targets the invariant measure exactly, and a cheaper, biased unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) for a boundary-clamped variant of which we prove a first-order expansion of the stationary bias with an explicit constant: the leading error is a rank-one transfer of mass $K_\star h|\log h| $ onto the atom, so the total-variation bias is of exact order $h|\log h | $ – independent of $\delta$ – whenever the potential has nonzero boundary drift. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted behaviour: the Metropolis–Hastings sampler achieves the target invariant measure at all step sizes, while the ULA bias follows the proven first-order law, including its constant.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

EnerInfer: Energy-Aware On-Device LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.23001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-device LLM inference is increasingly attractive for privacy-preserving, reliable, and cost-effective deployment, yet its energy and thermal costs remain a critical bottleneck. Existing systems primarily optimize for decoding speed, implicitly assuming that faster execution is always preferable. We show instead that on-device LLM inference often has exploitable configuration slack: modestly lowering NPU and memory frequencies preserves quality of experience (QoE) while substantially improving energy efficiency and reducing heat. Realizing this opportunity in production is challenging. The most energy-efficient NPU/DDR setting varies with the model, inference engine, platform, and runtime conditions, with no stable ranking across configurations. Commercial devices further lack component-level power sensing, and shell temperature evolves with request arrivals, response lengths, and thermal history. To address these challenges, we propose EnerInfer, the first on-device LLM inference framework that jointly manages energy efficiency, throughput, and thermal comfort for LLM workloads. EnerInfer replaces per-model profiling and sensor-heavy control with disaggregated, model-structure-aware prediction and ranking-driven online feedback. It predicts throughput and power for unseen LLMs across NPU/DDR frequency settings, selects QoE-satisfying efficient configurations under runtime interference, and uses lightweight limited-horizon thermal prediction to dynamically switch between energy-optimized and thermally constrained inference. Evaluations on real-world LLMs show that EnerInfer improves energy efficiency by up to 65%, 12%, and 24% on phones, a laptop, and a development board, respectively, without QoE violation.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Causal Inference with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Application to Texts as Treatments

In this paper, we demonstrate how to enhance the validity of causal inference with unstructured high-dimensional treatments like texts, by leveraging the power of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Specifically, we propose to use a deep generative model such as large language models (LLMs) to efficiently generate treatments and use their internal representation for subsequent causal effect estimation. We show that the knowledge of this true internal representation helps disentangle the treatment features of interest, such as specific sentiments and certain topics, from other possibly unknown confounding features. Unlike existing methods, the proposed GenAI-Powered Inference (GPI) methodology eliminates the need to learn causal representation from the data, and hence produces more accurate and efficient estimates. We formally establish the conditions required for the nonparametric identification of the average treatment effect, propose an estimation strategy that avoids the violation of the overlap assumption, and derive the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator through the application of double machine learning. Finally, using an instrumental variables approach, we extend the proposed GPI methodology to the settings in which the treatment feature is based on human perception. The GPI is also applicable to text reuse where an LLM is used to regenerate existing texts. We conduct simulation and empirical studies, using the generated text data from an open-source LLM, Llama 3, to illustrate the advantages of our estimator over state-of-the-art causal representation learning algorithms.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Steady-State Approximation Error of Heterogeneous Mean-Field Models

作者:

arXiv:2606.09022v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies heterogeneous mean-field models in which agent parameters are sampled from a population distribution. We establish an $O(1/M)$ bound on the steady-state mean-square error between the occupancy measure of the $M$-agent system and the corresponding annealed mean-field equilibrium. The analysis extends Stein's method for homogeneous mean-field models and reveals a fundamental difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. While stability of the mean-field dynamics is sufficient in the homogeneous setting, heterogeneous systems further require uniform robustness of the occupancy dynamics with respect to perturbations of the initial condition. The results are illustrated through a heterogeneous SIS epidemic model.

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

Synergizing Physically Constrained MCMC and Chemical-Informed Gaussian Processes for Reaction Network Discovery

arXiv:2606.23757v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting interpretable governing equations from sparse, noisy chemical time-series data remains difficult because discrete reaction topology and continuous kinetic parameters are tightly coupled. We present PC-MCMC-CIGP, a reproducible gray-box workflow that combines spike-and-slab topology sampling, hard conservation and thermodynamic screening, and a Chemical-Informed Gaussian Process (CIGP) residual model for parameter calibration and experimental design. The methodological contribution is not a new MCMC or GP family in isolation; rather, it is the integration of these components into a physically constrained workflow with explicit uncertainty-aware acquisition choices. On the H2 + Br2 benchmark, the constrained sampler distinguishes elementary radical pathways from deceptive phenomenological fits in our experiments. On styrene epoxidation, the CIGP optimization loop improves final yield by 12.5% over the reported GP-BO baseline. A new 10-seed acquisition study shows that EI, GWU, PC-EI, uncertainty sampling, discrepancy hunting, and random search have different trade-offs: PC-EI substantially reduces low-yield BO suggestions, while EI-style criteria give the strongest final-yield performance.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Controlled Chaos in 4D SCFTs

arXiv:2606.23785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chaotic dynamics play an important role in a number of physical systems. One of the qualitative hallmarks of this behavior is the appearance of a sufficiently "complex" spectrum of energy levels. This also makes it challenging to directly verify the onset of chaos in interacting quantum field theories. We present a class of 4D superconformal field theories (SCFTs) given by orbifolds of 4D $\mathcal{N} = 4$ Super Yang–Mills theory in which operator mixing in a controlled subsector is described by an effective spin chain in one spatial dimension with nearest neighbor interactions tuned by the marginal couplings of the SCFT. Tuning the marginal couplings results in a chaotic spectrum, while generically the spin chain exhibits Anderson localization. We diagnose the onset of chaos by analyzing the statistical distribution of eigenvalues of the dilatation operator, in particular properties such as eigenvalue level repulsion, spectral rigidity, and the spectral form factor. We also show that other diagnostics such as Krylov complexity sometimes do not faithfully capture this information. This structure defines a chaotic billiard in the target space of the stringy realization. We also comment on the large $N$ holographic dual description, where the controlled single spin chain approximation must be supplemented by multi-trace dynamics, i.e., the splitting and joining of multiple spin chains.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [≥]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

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

How Far Can Machine Translation Quality Take You? Extrinsic Discourse Evaluation in Goal-Oriented Setups

Existing machine translation (MT) metrics and discourse-focused evaluations primarily assess translation quality intrinsically, without measuring the downstream consequences of translation errors. In this work, we focus on extrinsic discourse evaluation of machine translation under two distinct regimes: static and interactive. Under the static regime, we propose an entity counting task as a probe of referential consistency in discourse. We show that high intrinsic MT quality does not reliably predict downstream discourse success and strong MT systems still produce referential inconsistencies. For the interactive regime, we study the goal-oriented multi-agent Welfare Diplomacy game as a probe of long-horizon communication and coordination. We find that interaction-specific translation failures impact downstream coordination. Our results highlight goal-oriented environments as a viable framework for discourse-sensitive extrinsic MT evaluation.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Distributionally Robust Set Representation Learning Under Inference-Time Element Corruption

arXiv:2605.30089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard Set Representation Learning methods typically excel on curated data but often overlook the challenge of inference-time element corruption. This refers to scenarios where deployed models encounter element-level degradations, such as outliers or missing components, that may distort set representation and degrade performance. We propose SW-DRSO, a distributionally robust optimization framework tailored for sets. Rather than minimizing loss solely on observed training data, SW-DRSO optimizes a tractable surrogate of the worst-case expected loss over a family of plausible inference-time variations. We introduce a barycentric adversary that approximates the intractable search over corrupted sets by a differentiable training-time optimization over simplex weights. Extensive experiments across four tasks demonstrate that SW-DRSO effectively enhances robustness against corruption while maintaining high overall performance.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Risk-averse mean field games: exploitability and non-asymptotic analysis

arXiv:2301.06930v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we use mean field games (MFGs) to investigate approximations of $N$-player games ($N$pGs) with uniformly symmetrically continuous heterogeneous closed-loop actions. To incorporate agents' risk aversion (beyond the classical expected utility of total costs), we use an abstract evaluation functional for their performance criteria. Centered around the notion of exploitability, we conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the approximation capability of MFGs from the perspective of state-action distributions without requiring the uniqueness of equilibria. Under suitable assumptions, we first show that scenarios in the $N$pGs with large $N$ and small average exploitabilities can be well approximated by approximate solutions of MFGs with relatively small exploitabilities. We then show that $\delta$-mean field equilibria can be used to construct $\varepsilon$-equilibria in $N$pGs. Furthermore, in this general setting, we prove the existence of mean field equilibria. This proof reveals a possible avenue for incorporating penalization for randomized action into MFGs.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

The Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset: Reconstructing U.S. Corporate and Financial Disclosures into Layout-Faithful and Token-Efficient Pretraining Data

arXiv:2606.18192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As high-quality public web corpora become increasingly exhausted, clean long-context documents have become a scarce and expensive source of training data for large language models (LLMs). Existing long-context corpora are often proprietary and costly to acquire, synthetically generated, or concentrated in narrow domains such as programming. We introduce the Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset (SEFD), an open reconstruction of SEC filings into layout-faithful MultiMarkdown for financial language modeling and evaluation. SEFD makes audited financial statements, risk disclosures, ownership reports, accounting notes, and market-moving event filings usable as long-context pretraining data and as a basis for financial reasoning, forecasting, compliance, and document understanding. The resulting corpus is token-efficient, model-ready, and has less than 0.1% overlap with Common Crawl-derived corpora. We release SEFD-v1, a 152B-token initial public snapshot, and provide corpus-level analyses of a larger 18.5M-filing archive estimated at 550B tokens. We further introduce two SEFD-derived benchmarks: EDGAR-Forecast, which evaluates filing-grounded numerical forecasting after model knowledge cutoffs, and EDGAR-OCR, which evaluates transcription of complex financial tables.

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

LLM-Powered Personalized Glycemic Assessment in Type 2 Diabetes with Wearable Sensor Data

arXiv:2606.12699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) poses an increasing global health threat, demanding effective glycemic assessment to support personalized and improved diabetes care. Wearable sensors such as continuous glucose monitors (CGM) and fitness trackers offer many valuable insights for glycemic assessment. However, effectively analyzing these data requires integration with essential individual-level context. Existing methods are often based on traditional machine learning (ML) and rely primarily on historical blood glucose measurements and overlook personalized information, which limits their performance across diverse diabetes populations. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to integrate diverse data modalities while modeling sequential dependencies, motivating the exploration of their potential for personalized glycemic assessment. In this paper, we propose GlyLLM, an LLM-powered framework for modeling CGM-based glycemic dynamics through the integration of wearable sensor data and structured metadata. GlyLLM can leverage the extensive prior knowledge of pre-trained LLMs and achieve sensor-text semantic abstraction at decision time. Experiments on two related tasks on the AI-READI dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms traditional ML methods by an average of 13.66\% in Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) for glucose forecasting and 13.08\% in Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) for diabetes categorization. Additionally, our ablation study shows that diabetes surveys and biometric tests are more critical than other health information for glycemic assessment. Our work presents a promising step toward harnessing the power of LLMs to advance personalized glycemic assessment in T2D care.

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

LSTM based IoT Device Identification

arXiv:2304.13905v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While the use of the Internet of Things is becoming more and more popular, many security vulnerabilities are emerging with the large number of devices being introduced to the market. In this environment, IoT device identification methods provide a preventive security measure as an important factor in identifying these devices and detecting the vulnerabilities they suffer from. In this study, we present an end-to-end machine learning pipeline that identifies IoT devices in the Aalto university dataset (IoT devices captures) using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Raw network packet captures (PCAP) are processed into 25 engineered features, which are then arranged as sliding-window time-series sequences. We systematically evaluate sequence lengths from 2 to 20, reporting that performance improves approximately linearly up to length 6 and thereafter in a wave-like pattern, reaching its peak at length 18. On the final held-out test set with the optimal configuration, the model achieves an accuracy of 79.85% and a macro-averaged F1-score of 75.70% across 27 device classes.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Toeplitz Determinants and Admissible Correlation Intervals

作者:

arXiv:2606.24603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For a homogeneous one-dimensional random field, positive semidefiniteness of finite Toeplitz correlation matrices imposes non-trivial constraints on admissible correlation coefficients. The widths of the corresponding admissible intervals are closely related to determinants of principal Toeplitz submatrices. Using the classical Desnanot–Jacobi determinant identity, I derive a simple determinantal representation for the widths of admissible correlation intervals. As an immediate consequence, I recover the product expressions for admissible interval widths previously stated by Schneider & Hartlap (2009). The argument places these relations into the general framework of classical Toeplitz determinant theory.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Mean-field theory via dissociated arrays for particle systems interacting through noisy weights

arXiv:2606.12135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a mean-field limit for a $N$-particle system in which each particle follows a diffusion and interacts with other particles through a weight on each directed edge. Each weight evolves according to its own nonlinear SDE driven by a Brownian motion, with coefficients involving the states of the two endpoint particles of the edge. The initial vertex and edge variables are assumed to have a dissociated Aldous–Hoover form. We construct the limiting nonlinear SDE by averaging the interaction over an independent neighbor and an edge input, prove its well-posedness, and show that the dissociated vertex-edge structure is propagated by the dynamics. This propagation property is an analogue of propagation of chaos in the case where the weight of each edge may remain correlated with the states of the two endpoint particles. Under either a bounded-observable assumption or a sub-Gaussian edge-input condition, the finite system converges to this limit through quantitative coupling estimates for a typical particle and a typical edge. We also prove the convergence of the empirical measure of particle's state pairs and their interaction weights.

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

The Environmental Cost of LLMs in AIED: Reporting and Practices

arXiv:2606.11215v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) usage in recent years has become increasingly widespread in the Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) community. While LLMs offer unique avenues for learners and educators, using LLMs comes with computational and environmental costs. These costs are mostly hidden due to a lack of standardised procedures to measure and report these impacts. To address this gap, we first conducted a literature review of all papers published as part of the AIED 2025 conference proceedings, determining if and how computational or environmental costs of LLMs are reported. Most projects use LLMs, but few report computational resources used and almost none discuss environmental impacts of LLMs as an ethical concern. To address this lack of standardised reporting practices, we propose an open-source method for systematically measuring and reporting the computational expense of LLMs and environmental impact of running Machine Learning (ML) AIED systems. We provide software solutions to measure the carbon footprint for both local and cloud based hardware. We also provide an easy-to-use formula to calculate the computational expense of frontier LLMs even when the exact number of parameters is not known. Overall, we hope to motivate colleagues to use our method to strive for more transparent reporting of hidden costs of using LLMs in the AIED community.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Evaluation of AI-Generated Synthetic Data for Clinical Research in Secondary Cardiovascular Prevention among Dyslipidemia Patients

Background: Access to high-quality clinical data is essential for advancing medical research and developing effective medical statistical and Artificial Intelligence models. However, privacy regulations and logistical barriers often hinder timely access to real-world data. Synthetic data offer a promising solution, preserving the statistical characteristics of original datasets while protecting patient privacy. Objectives: This study investigates the use of synthetic data for secondary cardiovascular prevention in patients with dyslipidemia, using two real-world datasets from Centro Cardiologico Monzino. Methods: Given the high dimensionality and limited sample size of the datasets, we employed a custom generative framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Pre-trained LLMs were fine-tuned on original clinical records to synthesize tabular data replicating source-data distributions. Fine-tuning was performed within the Centro Cardiologico Monzino's secure infrastructure to ensure data sovereignty. We evaluate clinical utility and privacy using fidelity and privacy metrics, identifying the optimal generative model and benchmarking against traditional anonymization methods. Results: Synthetic data achieved a superior trade-off than classically anonymized datasets. Real and synthetic datasets showed strong agreement, with significant distributional differences limited to few variables. Models trained on synthetic data replicated key associations from the original dataset, including therapy modification and creatine phosphokinase as predictors of SAMS, and pharmacological intensity as the main driver of LDL-C reduction. Conclusions: Results support the feasibility of using synthetic data as a proxy for real-world datasets in exploratory analyses and model development. Despite slight attenuation of some effect sizes, preserved clinical relationships reinforce the validity of synthetic data in medical research.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Integrated expectile-based measures of inequality

arXiv:2606.12333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expectiles provide a class of asymmetric location functionals that incorporate the magnitude of deviations and admit a natural geometric interpretation. Building on their structural consistency with the convex stochastic order, this paper introduces a family of integrated expectile functionals for measuring risk, dispersion, and inequality. The proposed functionals admit analytical representations as integrals of expectiles across asymmetry levels. For a distinguished subclass of these constructions, a geometric representation is available: the resulting quantities can be expressed as weighted areas of star-shaped sets encoding the distributional asymmetry of a random variable. This approach yields a new class of expectile-based inequality indices, constituting a natural counterpart to classical Gini-type measures while preserving desirable monotonicity and consistency properties. Empirical counterparts are derived in closed form and admit explicit decompositions over finite samples. The framework extends naturally to multivariate settings through directional expectile constructions, leading to measures capable of capturing genuinely joint forms of multivariate dispersion and inequality.

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

Kernel of Partition Paths: A Unified Representation for Tree Ensembles

arXiv:2606.18853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A recent line of work has reframed individual decision trees as linear models on engineered features associated with their splits, opening routes for oracle inequalities and feature-importance reinterpretation, but leaving open the question of what unified geometric object a forest induces when one indexes its feature map by nodes rather than by splits. The present paper studies that object. KPP indexes the feature map by the nodes of the forest, weighted by a path metric that turns each coordinate into a component of a squared-Euclidean path-isometric embedding. KPP unifies four pillars under a single non-diagonal Gram that carries a metric: prediction, exact additive attribution, deterministic Lipschitz robust radius in the KPP metric, and uniform Rademacher risk bounds for regression and classification under fixed, honest, or cross-fit conditioning. All probabilistic guarantees are conditional on the representation and are stated under three explicit conditioning regimes; the robust-radius guarantee is deterministic in the KPP metric rather than in a norm on the raw input. Conjectured fast-rate refinements for both regression and classification are stated as open problems and are not claimed as theorems.

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

MamBOA: State-Space Architecture for Video Recognition

Fine-grained action recognition demands temporal reasoning that general-purpose architectures address through different cost-accuracy tradeoffs: 3D dense operators couple computation to the input volume, while difference-based methods approximate motion through rigid, hand-crafted subtraction of uncontextualized features - each reflecting a deliberate design choice with corresponding limitations in expressiveness or flexibility. We present MamBOA, a backbone-agnostic temporal framework built upon a novel interleaved scan structure that recasts the selective state-space recurrence (S6) as a native motion synthesizer. By interleaving consecutive feature representations extracted from a pretrained backbone into a single alternating sequence, the proposed scan structurally drives the recurrence to encode both temporal observations of each position within a shared hidden state, separated by only a single decay step - rendering the inter-frame transition an intrinsic component of the state dynamics rather than an externally computed quantity. A cascade of dedicated alignment and decoding operations then distills this joint encoding into an explicit motion representation, which a dual-path pooling mechanism adaptively aggregates by balancing attention-driven selection with uniform temporal coverage. The framework interfaces seamlessly with CNN, Transformer, and Mamba backbone families, adding only ~2.1 GFLOPs per feature pair. On Diving48, MamBOA achieves 85.02% Top-1 accuracy with an image-pretrained backbone and 86.24% with a video-pretrained backbone processing the entire video in a single forward pass - demonstrating that structurally induced state-space dynamics constitute a principled and general foundation for motion modeling.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Hellinger Multimodal Variational Autoencoders

arXiv:2601.06572v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used for weakly supervised generative learning with multiple modalities. Predominant methods aggregate unimodal inference distributions using either a product of experts (PoE), a mixture of experts (MoE), or their combinations to approximate the joint posterior. In this work, we revisit multimodal inference through the lens of probabilistic opinion pooling, an optimization-based approach. We start from Hölder pooling with $\alpha=0.5$, which corresponds to the unique symmetric member of the $\alpha-divergence$ family, and derive a moment-matching approximation, termed Hellinger. We then leverage such an approximation to propose HELVAE, a multimodal VAE that avoids sub-sampling, yielding an efficient yet effective model that: (i) learns more expressive latent representations as additional modalities are observed; and (ii) empirically achieves better trade-offs between generative coherence and quality, outperforming state-of-the-art multimodal VAE models.

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

Emergent retokenization symmetry in large language models: phenomenology and applications

Tokenization introduces representational redundancy: under a fixed token vocabulary, every byte string admits many valid token encodings, or segmentations, that decode to the same surface string. However, given a prompt, most language model tokenizers break this representational symmetry by returning a canonical segmentation. Training only on canonical segmentations should influence inference behavior, and there is little reason to expect models to respect segmentation symmetry on downstream tasks. We find that this symmetry partially emerges during training. Here, we probe this emergent symmetry through experiments testing token compositional understanding, representation diversity, and task focused benchmark performance. We primarily use retokenization – replacing a prompt's canonical tokenization with an alternative segmentation while preserving its bytes exactly. Relative to other prompt perturbations, retokenization is unusually clean because it isolates segmentation effects without changing syntax, semantics or surface form. We use retokenization to study sensitivity and robustness to semantically identical input representations across pretraining and post-training. Moreover, this partial retokenization symmetry suggests a distinct inference-time sampling axis. While temperature sampling generates diverse outputs from the model using its next-token probability distribution, retokenization generates diversity from the model's internal computations through semantically equivalent input representations. We find that while this retokenization sampling strategy can hurt performance on easy problems, it can also recover solutions that conventional sampling does not find. Overall, our work presents retokenization as a simple yet powerful probe of large language models, shedding light on compositional understanding and prompt sensitivity, and offering a novel sampling strategy.

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

Quality Perceptions and Intended Engagement in Response to AI-Generated and AI-Assisted News

arXiv:2409.03500v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in news production raises important questions about how audiences perceive and respond to AI-generated journalism. This preregistered survey experiment (N = 599, German-speaking Switzerland) examines (i) perceptions of article quality (measured as credibility, readability, and expertise) across news excerpts that were human-written, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated, and (ii) self-reported intentions to engage following disclosure of AI involvement. Participants rated two short news excerpts before learning how they had been produced. Articles across all conditions were evaluated similarly in perceived quality. After disclosure, participants in the AI-assisted and AI-generated conditions reported a higher willingness to continue reading their assigned articles compared to the control group, but future willingness to read AI-generated news did not differ across conditions. Overall, the findings suggest that readers assess AI-generated and human-written news comparably in quality, while disclosure of AI use can momentarily increase curiosity or interest without yet changing longer-term reading intentions.

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

S2D2: Fast Decoding for Diffusion LLMs via Training-Free Self-Speculation

Block-diffusion language models offer a promising path toward faster-than-autoregressive generation by combining block-wise autoregressive decoding with within-block parallel denoising. However, in the few-step regime needed for practical acceleration, standard confidence-thresholded decoding is often brittle: aggressive thresholds hurt quality, while conservative thresholds require unnecessary denoising steps. Existing approaches that address this issue either require additional training or incur extra test-time compute. We present S2D2, a training-free self-speculative decoding framework for block-diffusion language models. Our key observation is that a block-diffusion model becomes autoregressive when the block size is reduced to one, allowing the same pretrained model to act as both drafter and verifier. S2D2 inserts a speculative verification step into standard block-diffusion decoding and uses lightweight routing policies to decide when verification is worth its cost. This yields a hybrid decoding trajectory in which diffusion proposes tokens in parallel, while the autoregressive mode acts as a local sequence-level critic. Across three mainstream block-diffusion families, S2D2 consistently improves the accuracy-speed tradeoff over strong confidence-thresholding baselines. On SDAR, we observe up to $4.7\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding, and up to $1.57\times$ over a tuned dynamic decoding baseline while improving accuracy by up to $4.5$ points. On LLaDA2.1-Mini, S2D2 remains complementary to built-in self-correction, including a conservative setting where it is $4.4\times$ faster than the static baseline with slightly higher accuracy.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

A global cross-sectional survey of health professionals' interest-confidence gaps in value-based health care implementation: a learning needs assessment

Abstract Objectives Value-Based Health Care (VBHC) increasingly guides health system redesign internationally. Despite the increasing availability of VBHC education, gaps remain between health professionals' conceptual understanding of VBHC and their confidence to implement it in practice. This study assessed perceived learning needs and preferences of healthcare professionals across foundational topics essential to VBHC implementation. Design Cross-sectional online survey study Setting and participants The survey was distributed to the global VBHC community and yielded 518 responses. Most respondents were based in the UK and Ireland (51%) and 65% had more than 10 years of experience in the health sector. Participants represented a variety of professional backgrounds, including clinicians (34%), operational or executive managers and leaders (22%), and life sciences or procurement professionals (13%). Primary and secondary outcome measures Primary outcome measures included self-reported interest and confidence across 15 VBHC domains and the magnitude of the gap between them. Secondary outcomes included perceived implementation challenges and preferred VBHC learning approaches, including prior engagement with VBHC-related learning. Results Respondents identified substantial VBHC implementation challenges, including implementing outcome measurement (62.4%), conflicting priorities (57.7%), and resistance to change (56.8%). Interest in all VBHC domains was high (median >= 80/10), while confidence to implement remained substantially lower across most domains (median