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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

How reliable are LLMs when it comes to playing dice?

We investigate the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of large language models through a controlled benchmarking study on discrete probability problems. We constructed two datasets, respectively a set of standard exercises and a set of counterintuitive exercises, designed to trigger heuristic reasoning, and evaluated 8 state-of-the-art models, each tested with and without Chain-of-Thought prompting. Models achieve an average accuracy of 0.96 on standard problems but only 0.59 on counterintuitive ones. We further provide empirical evidence of token bias: performance drops by over 20% when canonical formulations are replaced by disguised variants. Embedding misleading suggestions in the prompt reduces performance by up to 34%, with no model proving immune. Taken together, the reported findings suggest that current LLMs are not yet genuine probabilistic reasoners, despite their success in advanced mathematical problems.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Benefits of Weight Normalization for Overparameterized Matrix Sensing

arXiv:2510.01175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While normalization techniques are widely used in deep learning, their theoretical understanding remains relatively limited. In this work, we establish the benefits of (generalized) weight normalization (WN) applied to the overparameterized matrix sensing problem. We prove that WN with Riemannian optimization achieves linear convergence, yielding an exponential speedup over standard methods that do not use WN. Our analysis further demonstrates that both iteration and sample complexity improve polynomially as the level of overparameterization increases. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first characterization of how WN leverages overparameterization for faster convergence in matrix sensing.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sharp Favard length of random Cantor sets

arXiv:2512.17753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that for a large class of planar $1$-dimensional random fractals $S$, the Favard length $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))$ of the neighborhood $S(r)$ is comparable to $\log^{-1}(1/r)$, matching a universal lower bound; up to now, this was only known in expectation for a few concrete models. In particular, we show that there exist $1$-Ahlfors regular sets with the fastest possible Favard length decay. For a wide class of planar one-dimensional "grid random fractals", including fractal percolation and its Ahlfors-regular variants, we further show that $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))/\log(1/r)$ converges almost surely, and we identify the limit explicitly. Furthermore, we prove that for some $1$-dimensional Ahlfors-regular random fractals $S$, the Favard length of $S(r)$ decays instead like $\log\log(1/r)/\log(1/r)$, showing that the $1/\log(1/r)$ decay is not universal among random fractals, as might be expected from previous results.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Exploring Feature Extraction Technique Parameters for Acoustic Gunshot Classification

arXiv:2606.19568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Acoustic gunshot detection is a problem with applications across civilian public safety, military operations, and wildlife conservation, yet the field lacks a rigorous exploration of feature extraction techniques with a focus on generalization to realistic data. The mixed effectiveness of commercial gunshot detection and classification systems indicates an open problem that is not adequately addressed by the current literature. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation of common feature extraction techniques using a dataset of 23,000 gunshot recordings across 85 firearms and 21 calibers. We benchmark three feature extraction techniques with 12 total unique parameter sets using ResNet-18. Our results demonstrate that using the correct feature extraction technique can improve top-1 accuracy by up to 20%, and utilizing the correct parameters for a given feature extraction technique can improve that value by up to 4.7%.

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

Prototyping an AI-powered Tool for Energy Efficiency in New Zealand Homes

arXiv:2509.05364v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Residential buildings contribute significantly to energy use, health outcomes, and carbon emissions. In New Zealand, housing quality has historically been poor, with inadequate insulation and inefficient heating contributing to widespread energy hardship. Recent reforms, including the Warmer Kiwi Homes program, Healthy Homes Standards, and H1 Building Code upgrades, have delivered health and comfort improvements, yet challenges persist. Many retrofits remain partial, data on household performance are limited, and decision-making support for homeowners is fragmented. This study presents the design and evaluation of an AI-powered decision-support tool for residential energy efficiency in New Zealand. The prototype, developed using Python and Streamlit, integrates data ingestion, anomaly detection, baseline modeling, and scenario simulation (e.g., LED retrofits, insulation upgrades) into a modular dashboard. Fifteen domain experts, including building scientists, consultants, and policy practitioners, tested the tool through semi-structured interviews. Results show strong usability (M = 4.3), high value of scenario outputs (M = 4.5), and positive perceptions of its potential to complement subsidy programs and regulatory frameworks. The tool demonstrates how AI can translate national policies into personalized, household-level guidance, bridging the gap between funding, standards, and practical decision-making. Its significance lies in offering a replicable framework for reducing energy hardship, improving health outcomes, and supporting climate goals. Future development should focus on carbon metrics, tariff modeling, integration with national datasets, and longitudinal trials to assess real-world adoption.

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

MeiBRD: Meta-Learning Intraoperative Biomechanical Residual Deformation

Accurate intraoperative liver registration is challenging due to substantial soft-tissue deformation yet sparse intraoperative measurements. Biomechanical models regularize this ill-posedness with prior knowledge but exhibit persistent prediction bias due to simplifying assumptions, while data-driven learning solutions struggle with data efficiency, generalization, and physical plausibility. We propose a hybrid registration framework that adapts a biomechanical prior using sparse intraoperative correspondences. Rather than learning a full deformation field, we learn a residual deformation function that corrects linear biomechanical predictions, modeled as a graph neural diffusion function with geometry-aware attention over the 3D liver mesh. To enable long-range information transfer of sparse observations, we take a novel perspective of sparse intraoperative measurements as context samples where input-output pairs of the residual deformation function are fully observed, casting the problem into learning-to-learn this residual function from intraoperative context samples with feedforward meta-learners. Experiments on a deformable liver phantom dataset demonstrate improved registration accuracy and generalization compared to rigid, biomechanical, and data-driven baselines, particularly for out-of-distribution geometries and deformations.

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

Unraveling Syntax: Language Modeling and the Substructure of Grammars

While language models achieve impressive results, their learning dynamics are far from understood. Many domains of interest – such as natural language syntax, coding languages, arithmetic – are captured by context-free grammars (CFGs). In this work, we extend prior work on neural language modeling of CFGs in a novel direction: how language modeling behaves with respect to CFG substructure, namely subgrammars. We define subgrammars, and prove a set of fundamental theorems connecting language modeling and subgrammars. We show that language modeling loss recurses linearly over its top-level subgrammars; applied recursively, the loss decomposes into losses for "irreducible" subgrammars. Under additional assumptions, and empirically, parametrized models learn subgrammars in parallel, unlike children who first master simple substructures. We find that subgrammar pretraining can improve final performance, but only for tiny models relative to the grammar, while alignment analyses show that pretraining consistently leads to internal representations that better reflect the grammar's substructure.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Measure of Intelligence

arXiv:2606.20231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can intelligence be measured? We propose that intelligence can be defined as the lawful amplification of rare but valid futures: a system increases the probability of outcomes that would be unlikely under passive dynamics but remain admissible under the constraints of the domain. We start with the premise that an intelligent system must model the world and its own place within it. Because the system is part of the world it models, this leads naturally to recursive self-simulation: the system represents futures in which its own actions are part of the trajectory. Our central results give a necessity statement and a conditional near-sufficiency statement connecting this architecture to a precise thermodynamic measure of lawful amplification of rare-valid futures: high rare-valid lift is impossible unless the internal simulation identifies rare-valid futures with high fidelity; conversely, when rare-valid fidelity is high and the simulation contains an effective policy, the achievable lift approaches the actuation-limited optimum. Thus recursive self-simulation is not merely a plausible feature of intelligence but, under the stated assumptions, is necessary and nearly sufficient for high thermodynamic intelligence. The resulting framework makes intelligence measurable on a universal scale, from passive matter and feedback controllers, large language models, and humans as text generators to Maxwell-demon-like information engines.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Non-asymptotic Tail Bounds for the Kostlan–Shub–Smale Field: Tensor PCA and Spherical $k$-Spin Complexity

arXiv:2606.17665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper builds a hierarchy of explicit, non-asymptotic tail bounds for the supremum of the Kostlan–Shub–Smale (KSS) random field on the sphere, and applies it to two problems: Spiked Tensor PCA and the landscape of the spherical $k$-spin model. For Tensor PCA, we study the non-asymptotic statistical limits of estimating a rank-$R$ symmetric signal tensor of order~$k\ge 3$ and dimension~$d\ge 3$ from a single Gaussian observation at signal-to-noise ratio~$\lambda$, through the profile maximum likelihood estimator, the MLE restricted to normalized rank-$R$ tensors of coherence at least~$\kappa$. Our analysis uses a single reduction: a deterministic geometric inequality (the Tube Method) and a rank-reduction step bound the estimation error by the supremum of the canonical KSS field, which the Kac–Rice formula turns into a Gaussian integral against the expected absolute characteristic polynomial of a shifted Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble, controlled in turn by the four explicit tail bounds of our hierarchy (three from a Mehta–Fyodorov representation, one from a Ben Arous–Dembo–Guionnet large deviation). The same reduction yields two results, each with explicit constants. For estimation, a finite-$(k,d)$ error bound recovers the asymptotically optimal rate~$\sqrt{d\log k}$ of Perry, Wein and Bandeira, with explicit dependence on the rank~$R$ and the coherence~$\kappa$. For the landscape, a two-sided non-asymptotic bracketing of the annealed complexity of the spherical $k$-spin Hamiltonian recovers the Auffinger–Ben Arous–\v{C}ern\'y complexity function in the high-dimensional limit.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

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

Geometry-Aware Superpixel Graph Transformer with Metadata for Skin Lesion Classification

Automated skin cancer classification from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion structure, strong intra-class variability, and subtle visual differences between benign and malignant cases. Existing CNN/ViT pipelines typically rely on global or patch-level features and often combine patient metadata via late fusion, which limits spatially grounded multimodal reasoning. We present a novel region-based graph learning framework that explicitly models lesions as graphs of spatially coherent superpixel regions represented as frozen CNN features. To capture fine-grained lesion arrangements, we encode inter-regional geometry as edge attributes and introduce a dedicated metadata context node connected to all regions, providing structured integration of demographic/clinical variables within the same relational space. Node representations are updated using our edge-aware graph transformer followed by attention-driven propagation, and a final graph-level embedding for benign-malignant classification. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that explicit region-level relational modeling and graph-native multimodal fusion yield consistent gains over the state-of-the-art. Consequently, we establish a new graph-centric perspective in which CNN features are modeled as relational nodes and improved through contextual integration, yielding more expressive and robust classifications.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Exact Linear Attention

作者:

arXiv:2605.18848v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation error. We identify and address two key limitations of prior linear attention – gradient explosion and token attention dilution – by imposing kernel constraints that ensure non-negativity, discriminability, and geometric interpretability. Several kernel functions are proposed, including the Hadamard Exp Kernel, Summation Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, and Subtraction Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, each tailored for specific attention behaviors. Beyond the core attention formulation, the paper presents three engineering innovations: (1) a Hyper-Link structure that replaces traditional residual connections to mitigate gradient degradation; (2) a Memory Lobe module based on bidirectional linear attention, which captures "transformation flow" across layers to implement qualitative memory and an implicit reinforcement learning paradigm; and (3) a routing-score-based bias mechanism for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to improve interpretability and semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that ELA achieves up to 6x faster decoding speed and 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage compared to full attention, while maintaining comparable or superior training performance. The proposed memory module accelerates convergence and enhances generalization. Furthermore, we extend the linear attention principle to vision models, yielding YOLO-LAT, which attains up to 4.3x GPU inference speedup and 7.9x parameter reduction with competitive detection accuracy. These results underline the broad applicability of exact linear attention for scaling Transformer models to ultra-long sequences and efficient visual tasks.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Active Inference for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control in Noisy Nonstationary IoT Environments

arXiv:2606.13698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban traffic signal control at IoT-instrumented intersections must remain effective under sensor occlusion, weather attenuation, and nonstationary demand. Conventional controllers degrade under these conditions, and learned policies remain difficult to audit. To address these challenges, we propose an active inference controller for a four-arm signalized intersection that dynamically selects phases by minimizing expected free energy (EFE) over Gaussian beliefs about per-direction congestion levels, yielding a fully traceable decision pipeline. We benchmark the controller in a SUMO traffic simulator against a rule-based heuristic and a deep Q-network (DQN) across four scenarios that progressively increase noise and nonstationarity, spanning sensor occlusion, adverse weather, and stochastic accidents. Across 100 independent random evaluations per scenario, active inference attains the lowest idle times and CO2 emissions in the noisiest scenarios (56,977 s and 29.12 kg vs. 71,741 s and 30.56 kg for DQN). These gains come at a modest cost in bus priority service rate and phase switch frequency.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Generalizing GNNs with Tokenized Mixture of Experts

arXiv:2602.09258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deployed graph neural networks (GNNs) are frozen at deployment yet must fit clean data, generalize under distribution shifts, and remain stable to perturbations. We show that static inference induces a fundamental tradeoff: improving stability requires reducing reliance on shift-sensitive features, leaving an irreducible worst-case generalization floor. Instance-conditional routing can break this ceiling, but is fragile because shifts can mislead routing and perturbations can make routing fluctuate. We capture these effects via two decompositions separating coverage vs selection, and base sensitivity vs fluctuation amplification. Based on these insights, we propose STEM-GNN, a pretrain-then-finetune framework with a mixture-of-experts encoder for diverse computation paths, a vector-quantized token interface to stabilize encoder-to-head signals, and a Lipschitz-regularized head to bound output amplification. Across nine node, link, and graph benchmarks, STEM-GNN achieves a stronger three-way balance, improving robustness to degree/homophily shifts and to feature/edge corruptions while remaining competitive on clean graphs.

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

SuperThoughts: Reasoning Tokens in Superposition

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves LLM problem-solving but is computationally expensive due to sequential token generation. While recent works explore reasoning in continuous latent spaces to bypass discrete token generation, they often struggle with training stability and fail to scale to complex, long-horizon tasks due to lack of supervision signal. We propose SuperThoughts, which compresses pairs of consecutive CoT tokens into single latent representations and decodes two tokens per step via a lightweight Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) module. This preserves discrete token supervision at training time while doubling throughput at inference time. We finetune Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-14B-Instruct, and evaluate on MATH500, AMC, OlympiadBench, and GPQA-Diamond. With a confidence-based adaptive mechanism that falls back to standard decoding when uncertain, SuperThoughts achieves $\sim$20–30\% CoT length reduction while maintaining accuracy with minimal degradation (1-2 points accuracy drop on most tasks).

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

Reinforcement Learning with Action-Triggered Observations

arXiv:2510.02149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Action-Triggered Sporadically Traceable Markov Decision Processes (ATST-MDPs), a reinforcement learning framework for partial observability in which full state observations occur stochastically at each step, with probability determined by the chosen action. We derive Bellman equations tailored to this setting and establish the existence of an optimal policy. Exploiting the fact that sporadic observations reveal the full state, we provide an equivalent formulation in which agents commit to action-sequences between consecutive observations. Under the linear MDP assumption, we show that the value function over such action-sequences admits a linear representation in a finite-dimensional feature map, enabling standard regression-based methods. As an application, we derive ATST-LSVI-UCB, an optimistic algorithm achieving regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{Kd^3(1-\gamma)^{-3}})$ for episodic learning with geometrically distributed horizons, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $d$ the feature dimension, and $\gamma$ the discount factor (episode continuation probability), matching the known rate for linear MDPs with full observability.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance

A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative insights into the role of phages and plasmids in the persistence of nontuberculous mycobacteria in chloraminated drinking water

Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are opportunistic pathogens that persist in chloraminated drinking water systems, yet the roles of phages and plasmids in their persistence remain largely unexplored. Using genome-resolved and quantitative metagenomics, we characterized NTM, phages, prophages, and plasmids in a chloraminated building plumbing system. Bacterial metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and viral operational taxonomic units (vOTUs) were quantified at mean concentrations of 8.41 * 10^7 and 8.00 * 10^8 copies/L, respectively, including seven NTM MAGs at a mean total concentration of 4.01 * 10^5 copies/L. NTM concentrations were highest at the site with the lowest bacterial and viral diversity. Predicted NTM-infecting virus concentrations were inversely related to NTM concentrations across sites, suggesting complex phage-host dynamics that warrant direct experimental investigation. NTM, putative phages, prophages, and plasmids encoded functions related to disinfectant tolerance, stress response, metal resistance, and secretion. These findings identify phage interactions, prophages, and plasmids as overlooked genomic and ecological dimensions of NTM persistence in engineered water systems.

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

Greedy Coordinate Diffusion: Effective and Semantically Coherent Adversarial Attacks via Diffusion Guidance

arXiv:2606.15531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning aligned language models on benign tasks (e.g. math tutoring) systematically breaks safety guardrails, even when training data contains no harmful content. While mechanistic approaches have shed light on where alignment resides in model weights, they do not by provide a general formal framework for deriving guarantees about when fine-tuning degrades it – leaving the field without principled tools for predicting or preventing alignment collapse. We develop a local geometric framework through geometric analysis of parameter-space trajectories and apply it to understand the fragility of alignment in fine-tuning. While first-order analysis suggests orthogonal updates are safe, we prove this is illusory: the curvature of the fine-tuning loss induces second-order acceleration that can induce second-order drift into alignment-sensitive regions. We formalize a construct of our framework as the Alignment Instability Condition (AIC), three geometric properties that, when present, are sufficient to guarantee degradation. Our main result proves quartic onset of alignment degradation along gradient-flow trajectories, determined by how sharply alignment depends on specific parameters and how strongly tasks couple to these parameters. These findings yield formal sufficient conditions under which static first-order protection can fail under gradient descent. We further empirically validate the framework's foundations, showing that the Fisher Information Matrix provides a proxy for the degree of safety degradation across diverse fine-tuning.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

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

CMI-RewardBench: Evaluating Music Reward Models with Compositional Multimodal Instruction

arXiv:2603.00610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While music generation models have evolved to handle complex multimodal inputs mixing text, lyrics, and reference audio, evaluation mechanisms have lagged behind. In this paper, we bridge this critical gap by establishing a comprehensive ecosystem for music reward modeling under Compositional Multimodal Instruction (CMI), where the generated music may be conditioned on text descriptions, lyrics, and audio prompts. We first introduce CMI-Pref-Pseudo, a large-scale preference dataset comprising 110k pseudo-labeled samples, and CMI-Pref, a high-quality, human-annotated corpus tailored for fine-grained alignment tasks. To unify the evaluation landscape, we propose CMI-RewardBench, a unified benchmark that evaluates music reward models on heterogeneous samples across musicality, text-music alignment, and compositional instruction alignment. Leveraging these resources, we develop CMI reward models (CMI-RMs), a parameter-efficient reward model family capable of processing heterogeneous inputs. We evaluate their correlation with human judgment scores on musicality and alignment on CMI-Pref along with previous datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that CMI-RM not only correlates strongly with human judgments, but also enables effective inference-time scaling via top-k filtering. Code is available at GitHub (https://github.com/Haiwen-Xia/CMI-RewardBench). Model weights: CMI-RM (https://huggingface.co/HaiwenXia/CMI-RM). Datasets: CMI-Pref-Pseudo (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref-pseudo) and CMI-Pref (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref)

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Developmental Scaffoldings to Guide Self-Organisation

arXiv:2605.14998v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a significant portion of the information driving such processes is not produced by self-organisation itself, instead, it is often offloaded to initial conditions of the system. Biological development is a prime example, where maternal pre-patterns encode positional and symmetry-breaking information that scaffolds the self-organising process. From maternal morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis to tissue-level morphogenetic pre-patterns guiding organ formation, this transfer of information to initial conditions, analogous to a memory-compute trade-off in computational systems, is a fundamental part of developmental processes. In this work, we study this offloading phenomenon by introducing a model that jointly learns both the self-organisation rules and the pre-patterns, allowing their interplay to be varied and measured under controlled conditions: a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) paired with a learned coordinate-based pattern generator (SIREN), both trained simultaneously to generate a set of patterns. We provide information-theoretic analyses of how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process, and show that jointly learning both components yields improvements in robustness, encoding capacity, and symmetry breaking over purely self-organising alternatives. Our analysis further suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence, pointing to a non-trivial relationship between the structure of initial conditions and the dynamics of self-organisation.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Haiku to Opus in Just 10 bits: LLMs Unlock Large Compression Gains

arXiv:2604.02343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the compression of LLM-generated text across lossless and lossy regimes, characterizing a compression-compute frontier where more compression is possible at the cost of more compute. For lossless compression, domain-adapted LoRA adapters can improve LLM-based arithmetic coding by 2x over compression with the base LLM alone. For lossy compression, prompting a model for a succinct rewrite then applying arithmetic coding can achieve compression ratios of approximately 0.03, a 2x improvement over compressing the original response. We further introduce Question-Asking compression (QA), an interactive lossy protocol inspired by the game 'Twenty Questions'. A small model iteratively refines its response by asking yes/no questions to a stronger model, transferring exactly one bit per answer. On 8 benchmarks spanning math, science, and code, 10 binary questions recover 23% to 72% of the capability gap between a small and large model on standard benchmarks and 7% to 38% on harder benchmarks, achieving compression ratios of 0.0006 to 0.004. This is over 100x smaller than prior LLM-based compression (Deletang et al., 2024), suggesting that interactive protocols can transfer knowledge far more efficiently than transmitting full responses.

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

Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026

arXiv:2606.15708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Welcome to the ninth edition of the AI Index report. As AI continues to advance rapidly, the question becomes whether the systems built around it can keep up. Governance frameworks, evaluation methods, education systems, and the data infrastructure needed to track AI's impact are struggling to match the pace of the technology itself. That gap between what AI can do and how prepared we are to manage it runs through every chapter of this year's report. New in this edition, the report tracks how AI is being tested more ambitiously across reasoning, safety, and real-world task execution, and why those measurements are increasingly difficult to rely on. It also features new estimates of generative AI's economic value alongside emerging evidence of its labor market effects, an analytical framework on AI sovereignty, and a science chapter developed in collaboration with Schmidt Sciences. For the first time, the report features standalone chapters on AI in science and AI in medicine, reflecting AI's growing impact across these two domains.

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

Transformer Geometry Observatory TGO-I: Spectral Geometry Observatory

Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Transformer Geometry Observatory (TGO), a systematic framework of experiments and analysis pipelines designed to investigate the representational geometry and dynamics of Vision Transformers. TGO-I, the first installment of the framework, focuses on the spectral geometry of ViT representations. Using a ViT-Small/16 model trained on ImageNet-100, we analyze Effective Rank, Stable Rank, Participation Ratio, Spectral Entropy, Spectral Flatness, Spectral Anisotropy, covariance structure, eigenspectra, and singular value spectra throughout training. Our results reveal a consistent increase in dimensional utilization, accompanied by decreasing anisotropy, increasing spectral entropy, increasing participation ratio, and progressively flatter eigenspectra. Contrary to the common intuition that training should concentrate information into a small number of dominant directions, we observe a progressive redistribution of variance across representational dimensions. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the final CLS token representation, which exhibits the highest effective dimensionality and lowest anisotropy within the network.