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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Hybrid Uncertainty Sensitivity Analysis Based on the HSIC for High-Dimensional Responses with Aleatory–Epistemic Separation

arXiv:2606.14053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantifying the influence of hybrid aleatory and epistemic uncertainties on high-dimensional system responses remains a major challenge in global sensitivity analysis (GSA). Existing Hilbert–Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC)-based approaches are primarily restricted to single-output settings and lack a rigorous decomposition of heterogeneous uncertainty sources and their interactions. To address this limitation, a novel double-space tensor-product RKHS framework is proposed for sensitivity analysis under hybrid uncertainty. By constructing factorized kernels over both the latent input space and the multidimensional output space, a concurrent double Möbius inversion is derived to orthogonally decompose the global dependence measure into pure aleatory effects, pure epistemic effects, and their interaction contributions. The resulting dimension-wise sensitivity indices preserve the uncertainty attribution structure across all output dimensions. To satisfy the independence assumptions required by the decomposition, an auxiliary-variable representation based on the inverse probability integral transform is introduced, enabling the treatment of hierarchical uncertainties and Copula-induced correlations within a unified latent space. A fully vectorized single-loop implementation is further developed to avoid the computational burden of nested Monte Carlo simulation. Statistical significance and estimation uncertainty are quantified through permutation testing and Bootstrap confidence intervals. Numerical studies on a modified multi-output Ishigami function and an aerodynamic pressure-field problem demonstrate the accuracy, scalability, and practical applicability of the proposed framework.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Redesign Mixture-of-Experts Routers with Manifold Power Iteration

Router is the cornerstone component to the Mixture-of-Experts models. Serving as expert proxies, the rows of the router matrix compute their similarity to the MoE inputs to determine which subset of experts is activated. Ideally, each router row is designed to encode the expert matrix into this representative vector, such that its dot-product with token can better reflect token-expert affinity. However, there exists no design principles to enforce this condensation. In this paper, we propose to align each router row with the principal singular direction of the associated expert, as this direction provides the most expressive mathematical description of a matrix. Based on this principle, we propose a router redesign with Manifold Power Iteration (MPI). Specifically, it introduces a "Power-then-Retract" paradigm, where a power iteration step is performed on the router weights, followed by a retraction to impose a norm constraint to ensure both efficiency and stability. Theoretically, we show that MPI drives router rows to converge toward the principal singular directions of associated experts. Empirically, we pretrain MoE model across scales from 1B to 11B parameters to confirm that this alignment facilitates more effective MoE models.

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

The Hidden Cost of Approximation in Online Mirror Descent

arXiv:2511.22283v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which, oftentimes, can be solved only approximately, leading to an inexact version of the algorithm. Nonetheless, existing OMD analyses typically assume an idealized error free setting, thereby limiting our understanding of performance guarantees that should be expected in practice. In this work we initiate a systematic study into inexact OMD, and uncover an intricate relation between regularizer smoothness and robustness to approximation errors. When the regularizer is uniformly smooth, we establish a tight bound on the excess regret due to errors. Then, for barrier regularizers over the simplex and its subsets, we identify a sharp separation: negative entropy requires exponentially small errors to avoid linear regret, whereas log-barrier and Tsallis regularizers remain robust even when the errors are only polynomial. Finally, we show that when the losses are stochastic and the domain is the simplex, negative entropy regains robustness-but this property does not extend to all subsets, where exponentially small errors are again necessary to avoid suboptimal regret.

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

From Uniform to Learned Graph Priors: Diffusion for Structure Discovery

arXiv:2606.11831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural relational inference (NRI) methods discover interaction graphs from trajectories through variational reasoning on discrete potential edges. However, these methods typically rely on oversimplified, factorized graph priors. Such priors, typically nearing uniform distributions, treat edges as independent entities. This systemic misalignment does not match the real-world systems and yields diffuse and indecisive edge posteriors limiting the reliability of structural discovery. To address this, we propose Diff-prior, a diffusion-parameterized adaptive prior used to calibrate latent graph distribution rather than generate graphs. Our core insight is to reframe prior integration as a learnable denoising-style calibration that organizes scattered, uncertain edge posteriors into a more reliable overall structure which can be trained by the diffusion model. Diff-prior learns an adaptive structure prior that performs structured calibration on the edge posteriors during inference, guiding it towards a distribution closer to the underlying structure. The diff-prior operates before structural sampling and acts as a denoising calibrator directly on the encoder edge distribution, which provides a generic training paradigm over structured variables. Experiments on standard benchmarks validated our framework, and the results indicate that Diff-prior improves the performance of structure inference and generates more decisive edge posteriors across multiple NRI-family architectures. The code is available on https://github.com/Hardy158118/Diffprior.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Lost at the End: Primacy Bias in Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) lets vision-language systems answer questions that exceed their parametric knowledge by conditioning a reader on passages retrieved from a Wikipedia-scale knowledge base. In pure-text long-context LLMs, retrieved-context use follows the U-shaped "lost-in-the-middle" effect of Liu et al. (2024): information at the start and end of context is used, the middle is lost. Whether this transfers to deployed multimodal KB-VQA is open. To close this gap, we design the first controlled probe of reader-side position dependence in multimodal KB-VQA: a gold-position protocol in which only the gold passage's prompt slot varies within question. We run it on three open-source 7B/8B VLM readers and two KB-VQA benchmarks at k up to 20. The shape flips from U to primacy: gold-at-first beats gold-at-last by 16 to 26 points on every reader-by-benchmark cell, an effect we call "Lost at the End". Three targeted ablations narrow the cause: a text-only control shows the multimodal setting amplifies an already-present text-mode primacy 2.2 to 4.5 times, and image-position and distractor-shuffle ablations together pin the locus to prompt slot 0 of the instruction-tuned reader. On a frozen reader, three retrieval-side fixes (MMR, oracle reranking, rank-based reordering) all leave the gap intact (no separable improvement). Our findings indicate that recall@k is the wrong metric for deployed KB-VQA and that closing the gap requires reader-side intervention; we release our protocol as a controlled instrument for evaluating such interventions.

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

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Fourier Dimensions of Mandelbrot Cascades under Minimal Integrability

作者:

arXiv:2606.08703v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This note announces exact Fourier dimension formulas for canonical Mandelbrot cascade measures under the minimal Kahane Peyriere integrability condition and records the canonical b adic extension on cubes. In the dyadic interval setting, the theorem is proved in a balanced vector weight model allowing dependence between sibling weights. Almost surely on non extinction, the Fourier, energy, and L2 dimensions all equal the energy exponent. The scalar specialization gives the canonical Mandelbrot Kahane Fourier dimension formula under the minimal integrability condition. On the circle, the endpoint formula is given by the endpoint lower local dimension exponent. For the b adic Mandelbrot cascade on cubes, the Fourier dimension is the minimum of 2 and the energy exponent, with the universal Fourier barrier at dimension two providing the high dimensional obstruction.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Bacterial-Selective Membrane-Active Compounds Reveals Mechanistic Bias in Antibiotic Training Datasets

The rise of antibiotic resistance necessitates the discovery of antibacterial compounds with novel mechanisms of action (MoAs). Recent machine learning approaches have shown promise in antibacterial compound discovery, but often identify derivatives of known antibiotic classes rather than mechanistically novel compounds. Previous approaches applied Tanimoto similarity filters at the end of screening pipelines, but this method has substantial drawbacks: Tanimoto similarity can be misleading in chemical space, and post-hoc filtering does not influence what activity models learn to prioritize. Here, we present a machine learning pipeline that addresses chemical novelty upfront by employing an XGBoost-based MoA classifier to explicitly prioritize compounds predicted to have mechanisms distinct from known antibiotic classes, combined with graph neural networks for antibacterial activity and toxicity prediction. Applied to the Zinc20 database, our approach successfully identified non-toxic antibacterial compounds structurally distinct from known antibiotics. Notably, the majority of these hits exhibited membrane-targeting activity with selectivity for bacterial cells over mammalian cells, suggesting potential for next-generation membrane-active antibiotics. However, we did not identify compounds with novel protein targets. Systematic analysis revealed that this limitation stems from mechanistic bias in training data rather than model architecture. Specifically, our activity model learned to preferentially score compounds similar to specific groups in the training data, thus overrepresenting certain MoA classes including membrane-active compounds. Even substantial model architecture and training data enhancements did not overcome this constraint. Our findings demonstrate that the primary bottleneck for discovering mechanistically novel antibiotics is the scarcity of diverse, mechanistically-annotated training data. This work provides both a methodological framework for mechanism-aware screening and critical insights into data requirements for genuinely novel antibiotic discovery.

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

Long-Context Modeling via GSS-Transformer Hybrid Architecture with Learnable Mixing

Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing. Transformer architectures achieve strong performance via self-attention but scale quadratically ($O(N^2)$) with sequence length, while State Space Models (SSMs) scale linearly ($O(N)$) but suffer from a selective recall bottleneck, struggling to retrieve precise information from compressed states. This creates a fundamental tradeoff between efficiency and perplexity. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Parallel Hybrid Architecture (PHA), which runs Gated State Spaces (GSS), Grouped Query Attention (GQA), and Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) as independent parallel branches fused by a learnable mixing mechanism. Instead of forcing SSMs to approximate attention or serializing the two paradigms, PHA allows each branch to specialize: GSS captures global context, while attention performs selective retrieval, with FFN providing complementary processing. On WikiText-103, PHA achieves 16.51 PPL at 125M parameters, outperforming Hedgehog (16.70) and H3-125M (23.70). Scaling to 180M parameters yields 16.42 PPL, which gives comparable results with the pure attention baseline while delivering 24\% higher throughput and up to 40\% lower memory usage at long contexts. On OpenWebText, our 125M model achieves 19.72 PPL, outperforming standard Transformers (20.60) and GSS hybrid baselines (19.80). These results demonstrate that separating sequence modeling paradigms into parallel specialists enables Transformer-level perplexity with substantially improved efficiency for long-context language modeling.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection

arXiv:2606.17775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient processing of continuous audio streams remains a key challenge for real-time and resource-constrained systems. This paper introduces a neuromorphic trigger for audio event detection, based on a spiking neural network (SNN) that selectively gates input to downstream models. The proposed trigger acts as a low-cost front-end, identifying salient audio segments and forwarding only these to a more computationally intensive model for tasks such as classification. The trigger is implemented as a lightweight fully connected SNN and evaluated on two representative tasks: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED). For ASD, the trigger achieves a one-second segment-based F1 score of 0.97 on a class-agnostic form of the URBAN-SED dataset, demonstrating high reliability in identifying relevant audio regions. For SED, the trigger is combined with the Dang classifier on the DCASE 2017 Challenge Task 2 dataset, showing a potential $42.6\times$ reduction in FLOPs while reducing the lower bound of the event-based error rate from 0.41 to 0.25. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic triggers as real-time, energy-efficient front-end filters, enabling substantial reductions in computational cost.

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

PromptMN: Pseudo Prompting Language

Prompting has become the primary interface between humans and generative AI, yet many natural language prompts remain fragile: roles, goals, constraints, and expected outputs are often buried in prose or left implicit. In agentic and software development workflows, a misread at the first handoff can propagate through every step, since a significant portion of agent failures stem from context ambiguities rather than model limitations. This paper introduces PromptMN, a pseudo-prompting domain-specific language that annotates natural language with compact, %-prefixed typed directives covering roles, goals, requirements, priorities, constraints, plans, inputs, and outputs. Semantic resolution lets authors write in any order while the model interprets directives by function. PromptMN sits between informal prompting and programming-style pseudocode: structured enough to be inspectable and reusable, yet lightweight enough for analysts, managers, developers, and stakeholders across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). PromptMN also pairs with reverse prompt engineering. Asking a model to restate a desired outcome as PromptMN lets users inspect the inferred roles, goals, constraints, and missing assumptions before acting, reducing repair cycles and yielding a reusable artifact for aligning people and AI tools. PromptMN's feasibility is evaluated across several frontier models, including Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.5. The models correctly resolved PromptMN instructions, including complex structures such as repetition, conditionals, methods, and a prime-checking task, without fine-tuning. The same vocabulary applies across new codebases, maintenance, and redesign in the SDLC scenarios presented. While large-scale validation remains future work, these early results suggest PromptMN is a practical step toward clearer, more reviewable human-to-AI interaction.

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

AVA-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action models with Active Visual Attention

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep. This history-agnostic design treats robot manipulation as a Markov Decision Process, even though real-world robotic control is inherently partially observable and requires reasoning over past interactions. To address this mismatch, we reformulate VLA policy learning from a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process perspective and propose AVA-VLA, a framework that conditions action generation on a recurrent state that serves as a neural approximation to the agent's belief over task history. Built on this recurrent state, we introduce Active Visual Attention (AVA), which dynamically reweights visual tokens in the current observation to focus on regions most relevant given both the instruction and execution history. Extensive experiments show that AVA-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard robotic benchmarks, including LIBERO and CALVIN, and transfers effectively to real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of temporally grounded active visual processing for improving VLA performance in robotic sequential decision-making. The project page is available at https://liauto-dsr.github.io/AVA-VLA-Page.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AfriqueLLM: How Data Mixing and Model Architecture Impact Continued Pre-training for African Languages

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route to language adaptation, but improvements on demanding capabilities such as mathematical reasoning often remain limited. This limitation is driven in part by the uneven domain coverage and missing task-relevant knowledge that characterize many low-resource language corpora. We present \texttt{AfriqueLLM}, a suite of open LLMs adapted to 20 African languages through CPT on 26B tokens. We perform a comprehensive empirical study across five base models spanning sizes and architectures, including Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and systematically analyze how CPT data composition shapes downstream performance. In particular, we vary mixtures that include math, code, and synthetic translated data, and evaluate the resulting models on a range of multilingual benchmarks. Our results identify data composition as the primary driver of CPT gains. Adding math, code, and synthetic translated data yields consistent improvements, including on reasoning-oriented evaluations. Within a fixed architecture, larger models typically improve performance, but architectural choices dominate scale when comparing across model families. Moreover, strong multilingual performance in the base model does not reliably predict post-CPT outcomes; robust architectures coupled with task-aligned data provide a more dependable recipe. Finally, our best models improve long-context performance, including document-level translation. Models and code have been released on [Huggingface](https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-NLP/afriquellm) and [Github](https://github.com/McGill-NLP/AfriqueLLM).

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Attention and memory in Parkinson's disease: a discriminant analysis approach

Background. Cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD) is highly prevalent and heterogeneous. Assessing multiple cognitive domains is challenging and risks redundancy. This study evaluated whether a discriminant analysis approach could optimize the selection of specific tasks and measures for identifying attention and memory deficits in PD. Methods. Thirty PD patients and 25 cognitively unimpaired (CU) controls completed four experimental tasks: two assessing attention (flanker and spatial Stroop), one for recognition memory, one for working memory (n-back). Following group-level difference analyses, a discriminant analysis was performed to identify which tasks, and performance metrics possessed the highest sensitivity for distinguishing PD patients from CU individuals. Results. At the group level, PD patients exhibited significantly worse conflict costs in both attention tasks and lower sensitivity scores (d') in the recognition memory task compared to CU controls. The discriminant analysis revealed that time-based measures from the spatial Stroop task and the sensitivity score from the recognition memory task provided the highest discriminating power to differentiate between the two groups. Conclusion. These findings suggest that cognitive deficits in PD can be identified with high diagnostic accuracy using a targeted subset of metrics, eliminating the need for extensive and redundant neuropsychological testing batteries for attention and memory, without needing an extensive number of cognitive tasks for attention and memory.

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

CIAN: Multi-Stage Framework for Event-Enriched Image Captioning via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Event-enriched image captioning describes not only visible content but also the broader context of events, including timing, location, and participants, capabilities missing in most pixel-bound models. We propose the Contextual Image-Article Narrator (CIAN), a multi-stage framework that enriches captions with external narratives. CIAN retrieves relevant articles using SigLIP, summarizes them to guide a Narrative Generation stage with a LoRA-fine-tuned Qwen model, and applies N-Gram-based Refinement for fluency and coherence. On the OpenEvents-V1 benchmark, CIAN achieves high retrieval performance (mAP 0.979) and improves caption quality, increasing CIDEr from 0.030 to 0.094. These results highlight the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented reasoning combined with linguistic refinement for generating context-aware, human-like captions.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Perron–Frobenius theorem for a general tree-valued growth-fragmentation-isolation process

arXiv:2606.24599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A general tree-valued dynamics is considered in continuous time: new vertices are added, and the percolation happens on the links, and the connected components can be frozen. The model is an infinite-type branching process. The main result establishes the Perron–Frobenius type theorem on this model, which extends the previous work [Ann. Appl. Probab. 33 (6B) 5233 - 5278]. The proof does not rely on any property of the uniform random recursive tree.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Wearable-Grade Lead Reduction Disproportionately Degrades ECG AI Performance in Elderly Patients: Evidence from PTB-XL and MIT-BIH

Consumer wearable devices increasingly use single-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) for cardiac monitoring, but these signals contain substantially less spatial information than the clinical 12-lead standard. Whether this reduction dispro- portionately affects older adults, who often present with more complex cardiac conditions, remains poorly understood. In this study, we evaluated the impact of lead reduction on AI-ECG diagnostic performance across age groups. A 1D resid- ual neural network was trained on 21,091 PTB-XL ECG recordings spanning five diagnostic superclasses and assessed using 12-, 6-, 2-, and 1-lead configurations. Under the full 12-lead setting, model accuracy declined from 84.5% in patients younger than 40 years to 66.2% in patients aged 75 years or older. Progressive lead reduction further widened this gap. Under the 1-lead configuration, accuracy decreased by 14.1 percentage points in the 75+ group but by only 0.4 percent- age points in the

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

Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Society

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, enabling large language models (LLMs) to learn from rewards. We observe that societal regulations are structurally similar to reward functions. They define measurable outcomes, thresholds, and exceptions, while often leaving institutional intent only partially specified. We hypothesise that the RL training process may exploit these gaps and therefore ask whether models' well-known tendency to hack reward functions during RL can scale into a more consequential failure mode named societal hacking: discovering loopholes in the rules society runs on. To study this phenomenon, we introduce SocioHack, a sandbox of 72 societal environments, and find that within these environments, reward hacking naturally emerges and leads to regulatory loophole discovery. Models learn to hack the social rules and generate strategies that remain technically compliant while defeating regulatory intent, and current LLM safeguards provide only limited mitigation. Therefore, collecting in-the-wild feedback for model training requires greater caution, and we need a next-generation post-training paradigm for safely iterating LLMs in real society.=

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly adopt action chunking, i.e., predicting and committing to a short horizon of consecutive low-level actions in a single forward pass, to amortize the inference cost of large-scale backbones and reduce per-step latency. However, committing these multi-step predictions to real-world execution requires balancing success rate against inference efficiency, a decision typically governed by fixed execution horizons tuned per task. Such heuristics ignore the state-dependent nature of predictive reliability, leading to brittle performance in dynamic or out-of-distribution settings. In this paper, we introduce A3, an Adaptive Action Acceptance mechanism that reframes dynamic execution commitment as a self-speculative prefix verification problem. A3 first computes a trajectory-wise consensus score of actions via group sampling, then selects a representative draft and prioritizes downstream verification. Specifically, it enforces: (1) consensus-ordered conditional invariance, which validates low-consensus actions by judging whether they remain consistent when re-decoded conditioned on high-consensus actions; and (2) prefix-closed sequential consistency, which guarantees physical rollout integrity by accepting only the longest continuous sequence of verified actions starting from the beginning. Consequently, the execution horizon emerges as the longest verifiable prefix satisfying both internal model logic and sequential execution constraints. Experiments across diverse VLA models and benchmarks demonstrate that A3 eliminates the need for manual horizon tuning while achieving a superior trade-off between execution robustness and inference throughput.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Offline Channel-Independent QAOA Angles for RIS Power Aggregation: Unit-Circle Phase Dictionaries and Infinite-Size Spin-Glass Limits

arXiv:2606.24540v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) maximize received power by setting per-element phases. Discrete-phase optimization is NP-hard in the worst case, while the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) applied to RIS faces limited phase alphabets, either per-problem angle optimization or uncharacterized training cost exposed to barren plateaus, and no scalable performance benchmark. We introduce a $2^{M}$-phase $\theta$ dictionary for optimizing power $\|\mathbf{A} \, e^{j\theta}\|^{2}$ having $K \times N$ channel matrix $\mathbf{A}$ and QAOA angle offline optimization with instance and size-independent infinite-size limit of the mixed-$q$ Gaussian ensemble of Basso et al. Our design bounds the spin-Hamiltonian interaction order to at most quartic for any $M$, and the deployed order-2 reduction lies below the even-$q\!\ge\!4$ regime in which constant-level QAOA limitations are proved. We perform analytical, state-vector, matrix-product-state and Pauli-path-simulation numerical studies for $N=K \leq 100$ and QAOA depth $p=9$, verifying offline angle transfer to Rayleigh, Rician/line-of-sight, cascaded double-fading and spatially-correlated RIS channels at $N\!\in\!\{5,12\}$. We observe performance reaching a near-optimal multi-start single-flip local-search reference for $N\!\le\!16$ under order-2 modeling with $2^{5}{=}32$-phase dictionary while the order-4 model shows a performance ceiling below the classical reference. The approach suggests a route to near-optimal large-$N$ performance on future fault-tolerant (FTQ) quantum computers, which enable the higher-depth QAOA circuits.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Quantifying Aleatoric Uncertainty of In-Context Learning for Robust Measure of LLM Prediction Confidence

In-Context Learning (ICL) allows LLMs to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations. Uncertainty decomposition-separating aleatoric from epistemic sources-is particularly crucial in this setting, yet existing methods, designed for standard generation tasks, fail to capture the unique dynamics of ICL. To address this, we introduce a concept of self-function vectors, built upon Bayesian views and the mechanistic interpretability of ICL. These vectors leverage internal model representations to model the latent concept learned during in-context prompting, thereby enabling a direct estimation of aleatoric uncertainty within a Bayesian framework and circumventing the reliance on brittle input or decoding manipulations. Given the lack of established benchmarks and suitable evaluation protocols, we also propose the first and rigorous evaluation protocol, in which data is manipulated in controlled ways so as to quantify aleatoric uncertainty precisely and separately from epistemic uncertainty. With this new evaluation framework, initially grounded in synthetic tasks for conceptual development and subsequently extended to real-world datasets, we show that our proposed methodology can measure uncertainty of LLM predictions made under ICL more reliably than existing alternative methods. Moreover, we show it can be used as a practical tool for trustworthy-related applications, such as hallucination detection. Our findings pave a new direction for connecting the quantitative view of uncertainty with the mechanistic understanding of model behavior.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Accounting for uncertainty in the expected treatment effect substantially increases the sample size required for randomised trials: implications for the feasibility of clinical trials in anaesthesia and critical care

Background Multicentre trials in anaesthesia and critical care report low rates of statistically significant differences. This finding may partly reflect conventional sample size methods, which assume a fixed treatment effect. Assurance methods use a design prior to represent uncertainty in the expected treatment effect, which may provide a more realistic way of estimating sample sizes. Methods We calculated power curves across a range of effect sizes, design priors, and sample sizes using frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods and compared the sample sizes required to achieve 80% and 90% power to the conventional method. We standardised the design priors across effect sizes using the coefficient of variation. We derived a theoretical limit for achievable power. We validated a normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution. Results Frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods produced similar power curves across all scenarios. At a coefficient of variation of 0.5 - reflecting realistic prior uncertainty in the expected effect size - both methods required sample sizes that were approximately 1.5 to 3.5 times larger than the conventional method. The theoretical power limit depends only on the coefficient of variation of the design prior and holds true across all effect sizes. The normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution matched the results obtained from Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Conclusions Incorporating clinical uncertainty in the expected effect size substantially increases the sample size required to achieve adequate power, which has important implications for the feasibility of randomised trials in anaesthesia and critical care.

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

Contrastive-Difference CKA Reveals Concept-Specific Structural Alignment Across Language Model Architectures

作者:

Do different LLM architectures encode high-level concepts in structurally compatible ways? We systematically characterize a geometric-functional universality dissociation: across multiple concept domains and architectural families, moderate geometric convergence coexists with near-perfect functional transfer. Using contrastive-difference CKA (CKA_Delta), a training-free diagnostic that computes kernel alignment on per-sample contrastive differences, we isolate concept-specific convergence from generic similarity – achieving significant discrimination where standard CKA cannot. The dissociation replicates across all six concept domains we test (five with p =70B models. We position CKA_Delta as a practical regime classifier and architectural outlier detector (Gemma: d = 1.08, AUC = 0.79) rather than an absolute transfer-accuracy predictor, providing a training-free diagnostic for cross-architecture concept monitoring.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

作者:

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.