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

Kuramoto Attention: Synchronizing Self-Attention on the Torus

We introduce Kuramoto attention, a self-attention layer in which each hidden coordinate is an angle. The layer scores tokens by gated cosine similarity, attends over previous phase states, and updates each token by the tangent component of the attention-weighted circular mean. Because the values are the raw phase states, this update is exactly the Kuramoto coupling term $\sum_u A_{t,u}\sin(\theta_u-\theta_t)$, with the attention matrix acting as an adaptive, content-dependent coupling kernel. Equivalently, the gated score is a learned metric on the torus that selects which tokens couple, and the update pulls each token toward the circular mean of the tokens it selects, tightening their phase agreement. The same two ingredients, an invariant similarity score and an on-manifold mean, define such a layer on any compact group; the torus is the abelian case, where both are closed-form. The softmax weights solve an entropy-regularized phase-retrieval problem, and rotary position enters as a position-dependent phase drift in the score. On enwiki8 character-level language modeling, the layer trains as a functional language model whose bits-per-character stays close to a strong matched RoPE+SwiGLU transformer: within $0.02$ BPC at one million parameters ($1.637\pm0.010$ versus $1.616\pm0.004$) and level on the median at five million ($1.448$ versus $1.452$ over five seeds) with the transformer ahead on the mean ($1.468$ versus $1.456$). These experiments establish that the constrained geometric structure is a viable language model at this scale; the structure itself, and its synchronization reading, is the contribution. Ablations isolate the load-bearing components, and the result gives a compact bridge between self-attention and phase synchronization.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Do We Still Need Humans in the Loop? Comparing Human and LLM Annotation in Active Learning for Hostility Detection

Instruction-tuned LLMs can annotate thousands of instances at low cost. This raises two questions for active learning (AL): can LLM labels replace human labels within the AL loop, and does AL remain necessary when entire corpora can be cheaply labeled? We investigate both on a new dataset of 277,902 German political TikTok comments (25,974 LLM-labeled, 5,000 human-annotated), comparing LLM and human annotation across seven conditions, four encoders, and 10 random seeds. Under a two-question interface that mirrors the human annotation task, LLM annotation at scale outperforms human-supervised classifiers at roughly one-tenth the cost (\$28 for GPT-5.2 Batch API vs. \$316 for Prolific). The advantage holds for both a closed-source (GPT-5.2) and an open-weight (Qwen3.5-122B-10B) LLM, is robust under soft-label evaluation, and is unlocked specifically by the two-question decomposition; a holistic single-prompt baseline only ties with human supervision. AL provides no reliable advantage over random sampling under either LLM annotator. However, error structure varies sharply: only GPT-5.2 under the two-question interface produces classifiers with near-human FP/FN balance, while other LLM variants over-flag border-control and economic competition discourse. We release the dataset and code.

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

Deep Learning of Solver-Aware Turbulence Closures from Nudged LES Dynamics

arXiv:2604.23874v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The differentiable physics paradigm may be leveraged as an a-posteriori approach for discovering turbulence closure models by embedding a neural network parameterization directly inside the solver and optimizing it given potentially sparse target data. This addresses a key limitation of a-priori learning where direct numerical simulation (DNS) data is used to approximate the subgrid stress with the assumption of a low-pass filter. Closures trained in this a-priori manner frequently lead to unstable deployments due to the mismatch between the assumed filter and the effect of numerical discretizations and coarse-graining. In comparison, while typically stable during deployment, a-posteriori learning incurs high computational costs due to the need to backpropagate through a large eddy simulation (LES) solver. Furthermore, a-posteriori methods are challenging to apply broadly since they require significant modification of existing solvers. Finally, both approaches are limited when generalization is desired across different numerical schemes with their implicit filtering characteristics. In this work, we present a deep-learning approach for turbulence closure modeling built on the continuous data assimilation framework. Our approach enables the a-priori training of closures using sparsely observed DNS data without modifying or differentiating through the LES solver, while preserving stability during deployment for the recovery of invariant statistics. We focus on the model's ability to adapt to different discretizations by explicitly conditioning it on the numerical scheme. We use two- and three-dimensional canonical cases to test our framework and show that the learned correction systematically tracks the discretization error of the coarse solver.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

QMFOL: Benchmarking Large Language Model Reasoning via Quantifiable Monadic First-Order Logic Test Case Generation

arXiv:2606.20227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in reasoning, particularly in deductive reasoning, which is crucial for high-stakes decision-making. As models improve, evaluation benchmarks should evolve to keep pace. However, existing benchmarks lack fine-grained control over logical complexity and struggle to balance semantic diversity with logical consistency. To address these issues, we propose QMFOL, an automated framework for generating monadic first-order logic reasoning tasks with quantifiable and controllable complexity. It constructs formal logical structures using conjunction and disjunction patterns, enabling precise control over reasoning depth, width, label types, and distractors. These structures are then translated into natural language via LLMs, with logical consistency ensured through round-trip verification using an external prover. Based on our framework, we build QMFOLBench, a benchmark comprising 2880 instances with 960 configurations across diverse logical and semantic dimensions. Evaluations on six large reasoning models (LRMs) and two LLMs show that performance degrades and computational overhead increases with rising logical complexity. Models perform better on True-labeled tasks than on False or Unknown ones, and exhibit sensitivity to semantic variation. Overall, QMFOL offers a scalable and reliable approach for constructing deductive reasoning benchmarks with controllable complexity, enabling more precise evaluation of reasoning capabilities in modern language models.

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

Mapping Scientific Literature with Large Language Models and Topic Modeling

Scientific literature is increasingly fragmented by disciplinary boundaries, specialized terminology, and potentially sparse keyword systems, making it difficult to capture the evolving structure of modern science. This study introduces a large language model (LLM)-driven framework for mapping scientific literature from a topic modeling perspective. The approach is demonstrated on a 20-year corpus of more than 1,500 engineering-related articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). A two-stage classification pipeline first assigns a primary thematic category to each article based on its abstract, followed by full-text analysis to identify secondary classifications that reveal latent cross-topic connections within the corpus. Unlike conventional topic models, the LLM-based framework produces semantically interpretable topics while maintaining strong quantitative performance. Comparative evaluation against established topic modeling methods shows higher topic diversity and lower overlap with competitive coherence metrics. Manual validation on a randomly sampled subset of abstracts yields an accuracy of 75.9%. Additional traditional natural language processing analyses confirm that the generated topics correspond to meaningful linguistic patterns in the corpus. A bipartite network linking primary and secondary classifications further reveals implicit thematic relationships that are not readily observable through abstracts or keyword systems alone. The findings indicate that the framework independently recovers much of the journal's editorial dual-classification structure without prior knowledge of its schema. Overall, the proposed approach offers a powerful tool for mapping science and identifying emerging cross-topic connections in research.

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

Categorical Prior Lock-in: Why In-Context Learning Fails for Structured Data

arXiv:2606.11961v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as conditional generators for structured data, relying on in-context learning (ICL) to adapt to new distributions without parameter updates. We investigate the limits of ICL for structured generation under distribution mismatch, using high-cardinality tabular data as a controlled test case, and identify a structural failure mode we term categorical prior lock-in: the inability of ICL to update the model's prior over token distributions inherited from pre-training. Across two 7B-parameter open-weight models, ICL improves numerical fidelity with additional examples but exhibits a sharp ceiling on categorical distributions, failing to reproduce rare classes entirely. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) overcomes these limitations but introduces measurable memorization risk and, in some cases, destabilizes structured output generation, highlighting a fundamental trade-off between adaptability and privacy.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Exact Fourier dimensions of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades on curves of nonvanishing curvature under minimal integrability

arXiv:2606.11758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an exact Fourier-dimension formula for scalar dyadic Mandelbrot cascades pushed forward to fixed C^2 Jordan curves with nonvanishing curvature. Let W be in the minimal Kahane-Peyriere regime, let the scalar dyadic cascade live on T = R/Z, and let gamma map T to R^2 be a fixed C^2 Jordan curve with nonvanishing curvature, parametrized at constant speed. For the push-forward measure mu_gamma, we prove that, almost surely on non-extinction, its Fourier dimension is A_loc(W), the usual local exponent obtained by optimizing over q>1 from the moment expression involving E[W^q]. The upper bound follows from the scalar circle local-dimension theorem, bi-Lipschitz transfer to the fixed curve, and a deterministic curved-support obstruction for Fourier dimension. The lower bound follows from a fixed-curve finite-r annular theorem, which gives summable annular Fourier decay under a single finite moment witness. The main analytic input is a deterministic phase-geometry package for fixed nondegenerate C^2 curves: stationary tubes, derivative bands, and phase-bin coefficient estimates replacing the explicit trigonometric structure available on the unit circle.

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

ST-DiffEye: Diffusion-based Continuous Gaze Generation via Joint Scanpath-Trajectory Modeling

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

From Mechanistic to Compositional Interpretability

arXiv:2605.08934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be objectively verified, compared, or composed. We introduce compositional interpretability, a category-theoretic framework grounded in the principles of compositionality and minimum description length. Compositional interpretations are pairs of syntactic and semantic mappings that must commute to enforce consistency between a model's decomposition and its observed behaviour. We deconstruct explanation quality into measures of faithfulness and complexity to cast interpretability as a constrained optimisation problem, and introduce compressive refinement to systematically restructure models into simpler parts without altering their function. Finally, we derive a parsimony criterion under which syntactic compression theoretically guarantees more concise, human-aligned explanations. Our framework situates prominent mechanistic methods as subclasses of refinement, and clarifies why their compressibility heuristics tend to align with human interpretability. Our work provides a measurable, optimisable blueprint for automating the discovery and evaluation of mechanistic explanations.

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

Trimodal Glioma Representation Alignment via Volumetric Contrastive Learning

Glioma grading and survival prediction require the integration of heterogeneous information collected at different spatial and biological scales. Histopathology describes tissue morphology, mRNA expression captures molecular activity, and magnetic resonance imaging provides a non-invasive view of tumor extent and radiological heterogeneity. Existing glioma prognosis models often combine only two of these sources, while their alignment objectives remain mostly pairwise. This paper introduces GLORIA, a novel trimodal framework for GLioma Omics - Radiology - hIstopathology Alignment. GLORIA processes whole-slide image regions, gene-expression profiles, and 3D MRI volumes through modality-specific encoders, projects them into a shared latent space, and aligns them with a Gramian contrastive loss that measures the volume spanned by the three modality embeddings. The aligned representations are fused through a cross-modal gating module and optimized jointly for three-class glioma grading and overall survival prediction. We evaluate GLORIA on a matched TCGA-GBM/LGG and BraTS21 cohort, comprising 132 patients with all three modalities. On the shared trimodal test set, GLORIA improves over the bimodal WSI-mRNA baseline in all the metrics considered.

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

RGB-S: Image-Aligned Tactile Saliency for Robust Dexterous Manipulation

Effective visuo-tactile integration is critical for robotic dexterous manipulation, especially when visual observations are unreliable or occluded. However, robustly aligning sparse, heterogeneous tactile measurements with dense visual representations remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing approaches require policies to learn cross-modal correspondences implicitly from limited demonstrations, without leveraging geometric priors. As a result, they are often data-inefficient and generalize poorly when visual observations are degraded. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that explicitly grounds physical contacts in the image domain. Using robot forward kinematics and camera calibration, we project tactile sensor locations directly onto the RGB image plane. We then render force-modulated Gaussian saliency maps to model spatial uncertainty arising from kinematic and calibration errors. By integrating these 2D spatial anchors through a zero-initialized conditioning architecture, our method injects physical contact priors into standard visual backbones while preserving pre-trained visual representations. We evaluate our method on six dexterous manipulation tasks in both simulation and the real world under severe visual occlusions. Real-world experiments show that explicit RGB-S grounding in the image domain improves real-world occluded manipulation success rates by $26.7$ percentage points over the strongest implicit visuo-tactile baseline, suggesting its improved spatial reasoning and robustness to occlusion. Project page: touch-as-saliency.github.io

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive generative moment matching networks for improved learning of dependence structures

arXiv:2508.21531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adaptive bandwidth selection procedure for the mixture kernel in the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) for fitting generative moment matching networks (GMMNs) is introduced, and improved learning of copula random number generators is demonstrated. Based on the relative error of the training loss, the number of kernels is increased during training; additionally, the relative error of the validation loss is used as an early stopping criterion. While training time remains similar, adaptively training GMMNs (AGMMNs) significantly increases training performance, which is shown based on validation MMD trajectories, samples and validation MMD values. Superiority of AGMMNs over GMMNs and parametric copula models is also demonstrated in terms of three applications. First, convergence rates of estimators based on quasi-random versus pseudo-random samples from copulas are investigated in dimensions as large as 100 for the first time. Second, replicated validation MMDs, as well as Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo applications demonstrate the improved training of AGMMNs for a copula model implied by the 50 constituents of the S&P 500 index after deGARCHing. Last, both the latter dataset and 50 constituents of the FTSE 100 are used to demonstrate that the improved training of AGMMNs indeed translates to an improved model prediction.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Deep learning for interactive and automated inner retinal layer segmentation in OCT images of patients with retinitis pigmentosa using limited training data

Purpose: New therapeutic strategies such as optogenetics have created a need for accurate tracking of inner retina degeneration in Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) patients. We introduce two tailored deep learning models to segment the RNFL (retinal nerve fibre layer), GCIPL (ganglion cell inner plexiform layer), INL (inner nuclear layer), CFT (central foveal thickness) and RPE (retinal pigment epithelium) in RP: The first is based on a Segment Anything Model (SAM), the second on nnU-Net. To our knowledge, SAM has not yet been applied to retinal layers in OCT data. Methods: SD-OCT images of a retrospective cohort of 37 RP patients were included. Data for four training cycles were prepared semi-automatically in MATLAB, then assessed and corrected by three expert graders. 1,700 segmented B-Scans from two open datasets were used for pretraining. For post-processing, semantic retinal boundary detection was developed. The final models, OCT-SAM and nnU-Net, were trained on 228 annotated RP scans. Detected layer thicknesses were validated against manual segmentation at 90 random points in 30 OCT B-Scans. Finally, OCT-SAM was tested on three RP cases with retrospective, longitudinal OCT data. Results: nnU-Net achieved a precision, recall and F-1 score of 0.96 while OCT-SAM performance resulted in slightly lower values of 0.93, 0.8 and 0.85, respectively. OCT-SAM measurements had low bias and good agreement with manual annotations, confirming reliability. Conclusions: OCT-SAM enabled fast data annotation and tool integration, whereas nnU-Net provided the best segmentation performance. OCT-SAM demonstrated longitudinal reproducibility and detected RP-characteristic pathologies and degenerative changes. Future work will extend OCT-SAM to 3D OCT segmentation.

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

FATE: Pillar Encoding and Frequency-Aware Training for Event-Based Object Detection

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture logarithmic intensity changes, offering inherent advantages in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios. However, the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep learning architectures. To enable compatibility with standard models, most existing approaches partition the accumulation window into fixed temporal sub-bins. While effective for spatial processing, this internal discretization discards fine-grained temporal structure and constrains inference to the low temporal frequencies imposed by training supervision. To address this limitation, we propose FATE, a unified framework built upon a novel Pillar Encoding (PE). While operating over discrete macro-accumulation windows dictated by the target frequency, PE avoids internal temporal sub-binning. It organizes events into spatial pillars and approximates their intra-window evolution via projection onto a continuous-time orthogonal polynomial basis. This formulation yields an L2-optimal representation that retains rich temporal dynamics in a dense pseudo-image, mitigating information loss under sparse event conditions. To fully leverage this representation, we introduce Frequency-Aware Training (FAT), a soft mean-teacher curriculum that generates temporally dense pseudo-labels, effectively bridging the mismatch between low-frequency supervision and high-frequency inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FATE generalizes across architectural paradigms and consistently outperforms strong baselines. It enables robust object detection at high temporal resolutions up to 200 Hz, while incurring minimal overhead in parameter count and inference latency

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

On the Optimal Reasoning Length for RL-Trained Language Models

Reinforcement learning substantially improves reasoning in large language models, but it also tends to lengthen chain-of-thought outputs and increase computational cost. Although length-control methods have been proposed, the length-accuracy relationship they induce remains unclear. We train policies with several length-control methods on multiple base models in a controlled setup and find that, across both mathematical reasoning and code generation, accuracy is non-monotonic in output length, peaking at an intermediate value. Mode accuracy, however, continues to improve with length even in settings where sample accuracy plateaus or declines, indicating that the non-monotonic length-accuracy relationship is driven by dispersion around an increasingly correct center.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

arXiv:2403.13927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

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

Discriminative Span as a Predictor of Synthetic Data Utility via Classifier Reconstruction

In many real-world computer vision applications, including medical imaging and industrial inspection, binary classification tasks are characterized by a severe scarcity of positive samples. A widely adopted solution is to generate synthetic positive data using image-to-image transformations applied to negative samples. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how can we reliably assess whether such synthetic data will improve downstream model performance? In this work, we propose a geometry-driven metric that predicts the utility of synthetic data without requiring model training. Our approach operates in the embedding space of a pre-trained foundation model and represents the dataset through difference vectors between samples. We evaluate whether the weight vector of a linear classifier can be expressed within the subspace spanned by these variations by measuring the relative projection error. Intuitively, if the variations induced by synthetic data capture task-relevant directions, their span can approximate the classifier, resulting in low projection error. Conversely, poor synthetic data fails to span these directions, leading to higher error. Across multiple datasets and architectures, we show that this metric exhibits strong correlation with downstream classification performance of CNNs trained on mixtures of real negative and synthetic positive data. These findings suggest that the proposed metric serves as a practical and informative tool for evaluating synthetic data quality in data-scarce settings.

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

Sustainable Metal-Organic Framework Water Harvesters in the Artificial Intelligence Era

arXiv:2605.29179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are excellent candidates for water harvesting due to their tunable pore environments, which can be precisely engineered to capture and release water in arid conditions. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into MOF discovery can further accelerate the design of high-performance sorbents by identifying structural features that enhance atmospheric water harvesting (AWH), stability, and cycling efficiency. In this Perspective, we examine key MOF design principles, including cooperative adsorption, operational relative humidity (RH), uptake capacity, hysteresis, and scalability. We highlight recent design advancements such as multivariate strategies and long-arm linker extension, and examine how these principles tune pore capacity and hydrophilicity, while preserving stability and crystallinity. Furthermore, we discuss how AI, large language models (LLMs), and data mining can accelerate the discovery process through predictive synthesis, inverse design, and elucidating synthesis-structure-property relationships for the next generation of MOF water harvesters.

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

Stop When Further Reasoning Won't Help: Attention-State Adaptive Generation in Reasoning Models

By incorporating test-time compute scaling, large reasoning models (LRMs) can solve complex problems through explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning processes. However, they often suffer from overthinking, resulting in redundant token outputs and degraded accuracy. Current methods to mitigate this issue remain limited: training-based approaches require substantial computational resources, while training-free methods rely on well-crafted prompts or unreliable confidence signals. In this work, we investigate early stopping from the perspective of attention distributions and propose a simple method, ASAG, which infers the model's reasoning state and adaptively adjusts the generation strategy. The proposed framework is training-free and plug-and-play, enabling seamless integration into existing LRMs. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across mainstream LRMs with varying parameter scales, including the DeepSeek-R1-Distill and Qwen3 series. Specifically, ASAG improves average accuracy by 3.2% while reducing the number of generated tokens by nearly 40% across all reasoning tasks on Qwen3-8B.

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

Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models for Pure-State Ensemble Generation

arXiv:2605.03573v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum machine learning increasingly relies on pure-state representations, motivating generative models that sample directly in quantum representation space rather than perturbing classical inputs and re-encoding. We introduce Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models (SSDMs), a score-based generative framework that defines diffusion, scores, and reverse-time sampling intrinsically on the complex projective manifold $\mathbb{CP}^{d-1}$ under the Fubini–Study metric. SSDMs combine a Riemannian Ornstein–Uhlenbeck forward diffusion with a stochastic Schrödinger realization, and learn reverse-time dynamics driven by the Riemannian score. Our central technical contribution is a local-time learning objective that exploits the local Euclidean OU limit of intrinsic manifold diffusions in Fubini-Study normal coordinates to obtain an analytic teacher score, bypassing the intractable transition densities that limit existing Riemannian score-based models. Across synthetic, physics-inspired (TFIM, XXZ), and quantum feature-state benchmarks up to $14$ qubits, SSDMs match target pure-state ensembles by orders of magnitude on MMD and observable statistics over both ambient Euclidean and matched Riemannian score-based baselines, and improve representation-level diagnostics for downstream quantum kernel methods.

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

Variance Reduction for Non-Log-Concave Sampling with Applications to Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606.16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from high-dimensional, non-log-concave distributions with unnormalized densities is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when the exact gradient of the potential is unavailable and must be approximated via stochastic gradients that exhibit high variance under a fixed budget of gradient computations per iteration. Although variance reduction techniques such as SGD with momentum, STORM, and PAGE have demonstrated improved convergence properties in non-convex optimization, their implications for sampling from non-log-concave distributions remain largely unexplored. In this work, we develop the first unified analysis of these estimators for sampling from non-log-concave distributions. We establish improved non-asymptotic convergence rates in $\varepsilon$-relative Fisher information and, under a Poincaré inequality assumption, in squared total variation distance, and further prove weak convergence to the target distribution. We extend our analysis to solving inverse problems with score-based generative priors. We empirically validate our theory and demonstrate that, under a fixed gradient computations per iteration, variance-reduction techniques consistently improve sample quality in two standard imaging applications.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bootstrapped Monitoring: Leveraging Transparent Reasoning to Oversee Stronger AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trusted monitoring is a cornerstone of AI control. However, as frontier models grow more capable, the increasing capabilities gap between trusted and untrusted models may render trusted models unreliable monitors. We introduce bootstrapped monitoring, a protocol that addresses this by inserting a stronger, intermediate untrusted model with transparent chain-of-thought reasoning into the oversight chain. The untrusted monitor ($U_m$) evaluates the agent's actions, while a weaker trusted model ($T$) oversees $U_m$'s reasoning to detect collusion. We evaluate bootstrapped monitoring on multi-turn software engineering tasks (BashArena) across multiple agents and monitors. Bootstrapped monitoring substantially improves catch rates over trusted-only monitoring, even when the untrusted monitor actively colludes with the agent, provided we have access to its raw chain-of-thought. Our results suggest that bootstrapped monitoring can extend the useful lifetime of trusted models in control as AI capabilities advance.

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

Reinforcement Twinning for Hybrid Control of Flapping-Wing Drones

arXiv:2505.18201v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling flapping-wing drones requires controllers that handle time-varying, nonlinear, underactuated dynamics from incomplete, noisy sensor data. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly reinforcement learning (RL), have opened new perspectives for addressing such complex control problems through data-driven policy optimization from interaction with the environment. Yet purely data-driven methods are sample-inefficient, demanding extensive, sometimes unsafe exploration, especially without guiding physical models. This motivates hybrid AI-physics frameworks. This article proposes a hybrid model-free/model-based flight-control approach using the reinforcement twinning algorithm. The model-based (MB) component uses an adjoint formulation and an adaptive digital twin continuously identified from live trajectories; the model-free (MF) component uses RL. The two agents share knowledge via transfer learning, imitation learning, and shared experience between the real environment and the digital twin, coordinated by a policy referee that selects which agent acts in reality based on digital-twin performance and a real-to-virtual consistency ratio. The framework is evaluated for the longitudinal control of a flapping-wing drone, modelled as a nonlinear time-varying system driven by quasi-steady aerodynamic forces. The hybrid strategy is tested under three adaptive-model initializations: (1) offline identification from existing data, (2) random initialization with fully online identification, and (3) offline pre-training with biased parameters followed by online adaptation. In all cases, the hybrid framework improves performance, robustness, and sample efficiency over purely model-free and purely model-based approaches.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Model Stealing Through the Lens of Model Multiplicity

arXiv:2606.15493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services. Conventional wisdom suggests these surrogates could provide adversaries with economic leverage comparable to the original service providers. This paper challenges this assumption by evaluating model stealing attacks beyond mere fidelity to the target model. Because query-based extraction provides only partial supervision of the target's input-output behavior, the surrogate is not uniquely identified: many near-optimal surrogates can achieve comparable fidelity while differing in deployment-relevant properties. Instead of performing a classic learning-based model stealing attack, we compute the Rashomon Set (i.e., the set of almost-equally-accurate models) of surrogate models, and evaluate its diversity using multiplicity metrics (ambiguity, discrepancy, and Rashomon Capacity) and group fairness metrics. Across tabular, medical imaging, and NLP tasks, our experiments on real-world datasets reveal that despite exhibiting similar fidelity to the target model, surrogate models can display significant variances in other critical performance metrics. These findings cast doubt on the presumed equivalence between high-fidelity surrogates and the target model in practical deployment scenarios.