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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Nonlinear cascaded quantum network with giant emitters

arXiv:2404.09829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chiral quantum optics is central to developing scalable quantum networks, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on linear single-photon regimes. It remains unclear how to generate directional multiphotons. Here we show that giant emitters coupled to nonlinear quantum optical baths enable tunable directional correlated photons, revealing a mechanism for multiphoton directional emission. We demonstrate that the propagation phases of correlated photons, together with the coupling phases of giant emitters, can generate destructive interference in one direction while enhancing emission in the opposite direction, making directionality fully tunable. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a nonlinear cascaded quantum network paradigm mediated by correlated flying qubits, providing a configurable building block enabling distinct many-body applications beyond linear unidirectional setups. These results reveal a rich landscape for engineering multiphoton propagation and correlations through interference in giant emitter-nonlinear bath architectures, offering pathways for quantum networks and strongly correlated light-matter platforms.

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

Encode Errors: Representational Retrieval of In-Context Demonstrations for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) involves detecting and correcting the wrong usage of grammar. While large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning (ICL) capabilities have shown significant progress on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their few-shot performance on GEC remains suboptimal. This is mainly due to the challenge of retrieving suitable in-context demonstrations that capture error patterns instead of semantic similarity. In this paper, we demonstrate that LLMs can inherently capture information related to grammatical errors through their internal states. From these states, we extract the Grammatical Error Representation (GER), an informative and semantically neutral encoding of grammatical errors. Our novel GER-based retrieval method significantly boosts performance in ICL settings on multilingual GEC datasets, improving the precision of correction. For high-resource languages, our results on 8B-sized open-source models match those of closed-source models such as Deepseek2.5 and GPT-4o-mini. For low-resource languages, our $F_{0.5}$ scores surpass the baseline by up to a factor of 1.20. This method provides a more precise and resource-efficient solution for multilingual GEC, offering a promising direction for interpretable GEC research.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

‘Megacluster’ of genes enables bacteria to make potent antibiotic mixture

Soil bacteria make cocktails of molecules that synergistically inhibit the growth of microbial pathogens — suggesting a strategy for tackling antibiotic-resistant infections. Soil bacteria make cocktails of molecules that synergistically inhibit the growth of microbial pathogens — suggesting a strategy for tackling antibiotic-resistant infections.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Implicit vs. Explicit Prompting Strategies for LVLMs in Referential Communication

Two recent studies (Jones et al. (2026); Zeng et al. (2026)) reach apparently contradictory conclusions about whether LVLMs can coordinate on efficient referring expressions. We control for task differences between the studies while directly comparing their prompting styles. We replicate the finding that models can coordinate efficient referring expressions when explicitly prompted to do so, suggesting that other task differences are not responsible for divergent results. However, we also find that the same models fail to infer the need for communicative efficiency from a more implicit prompt, highlighting critical differences between how humans and AI systems communicate.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Higher order PCA-like rotation-invariant features for detailed shape descriptors modulo rotation

作者:

PCA can be used for rotation invariant features, describing a shape with its $p_{ab}=E[(x_i-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])]$ covariance matrix approximating shape by ellipsoid, allowing for rotation invariants like its traces of powers. However, real shapes are usually much more complicated, hence there is proposed its extension to e.g. $p_{abc}=E[(x_a-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])(x_c-E[x_c])]$ order-3 or higher tensors describing central moments, or polynomial times Gaussian allowing decodable shape descriptors of arbitrarily high accuracy, and their analogous rotation invariants. Its practical applications could be rotation-invariant features to include shape modulo rotation e.g. for molecular shape descriptors, or for up to rotation object recognition in 2D images/3D scans maybe also for 3D scene understanding, or shape similarity metric allowing inexpensive comparison of objects modulo rotation avoiding costly optimization over rotations.

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

MIMFlow: Integrating Masked Image Modeling with Normalizing Flows for End-to-End Image Generation

Normalizing Flows (NFs) are powerful generative models capable of exact density estimation and sampling. However, their strict invertibility often forces the model to exhaust its capacity on low-level pixel details, hindering the capture of high-level semantic structures. While Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has excelled in representation learning, its integration into generative pipelines has remained largely modular and disjointed. In this paper, we propose MIMFlow, a unified end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes latent semantics, pixel reconstruction, and generative flow. By employing a VAE encoder to infer semantic latent from masked images, MIMFlow achieves a principled decoupling of the generative task: the Normalizing Flow focuses on modeling a simplified, low-frequency semantic manifold, while a specialized decoder handles high-frequency synthesis. This design effectively resolves the inherent capacity bottleneck of NFs, allowing the model to prioritize global structural coherence over redundant noise. Empirical results on ImageNet 256$\times$256 show that MIMFlow-L reaches 71.3\% linear probing accuracy and an FID of 2.50. Despite using only 128 tokens (50\% fewer than standard models), it yields a 32.8\% performance gain over similar-scale NF baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MIMFlow.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

pykarambola: Minkowski tensor morphometry of 3D structures

Three-dimensional biological morphologies encode functional and physiological state, yet the directional, orientational, and topological properties of these shapes are rarely captured by morphometric tools available for bioimage analysis. Minkowski tensors are mathematically rigorous tensor-valued measures that encode surface curvature and directionality for objects of arbitrary topology, with tensor eigensystems that directly quantify elongation axes and anisotropy. A C++ implementation, karambola, computes Minkowski tensors for triangulated surfaces but is inaccessible within Python-based bioimage workflows. Here we present pykarambola, a pip installable Python package that accepts NumPy arrays and standard mesh formats and returns Minkowski tensors, including derived anisotropy and orientation quantities. A high-level label-image API converts 3D integer arrays into per-object Minkowski tensors in a single call, making pykarambola directly compatible with the output of widely used segmentation tools. An optional Cython extension accelerates graph-traversal steps of mesh initialization for large-scale analyses. Benchmarked on 1,584 adrenal gland meshes, pykarambola reproduces all 121 C++ karambola output features to near-floating-point agreement and, in the pure-Python build, is 2.8x faster at 28^3 and 1.5x faster at 64^3 voxel resolution, with speedups primarily attributable to karambola's sequential per-object file I/O. pykarambola is freely available as an open-source software package.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MGI: Member vs Generated Inference

arXiv:2606.23872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative models increasingly produce samples that are indistinguishable from human-created content, it becomes difficult to determine whether a given data point was part of a model's natural training set or was generated by the model itself, especially when models memorize and reproduce training data. We formalize this challenge as Member vs Generated Inference (MGI): given a sample and a target generative model, infer whether the sample is a true training member or a generated output of that model. Focusing on image generation, we show that existing membership inference methods systematically misclassify generated samples as training members, while attribution-based methods often misclassify true members as generated. This failure arises because both approaches rely on likelihood-related signals that are similarly elevated for training examples and for the model's own outputs. To address MGI, we propose Data Circuit Breaker (DCB), a three-stage method that combines complementary signals from a generative model's autoencoder and latent generator to distinguish training members from generated samples. Across multiple generative models, including image autoregressive and diffusion models, DCB consistently addresses the shortcomings of membership inference and attribution methods, remains effective even when models reproduce near-duplicates of training samples, and generalizes to challenging model derivative settings in which new models are trained on generated data.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Internal Data Repetition Destroys Language Models

arXiv:2606.24998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models are running out of high-quality training data, and even aggressively deduplicated corpora retain some amount of repetition. Earlier controlled studies predated Chinchilla-style scaling laws and could only measure the cost of repetition indirectly. We revisit repetition in the Chinchilla era, using a fitted no-repetition scaling law to report Compute-Equivalent Gain and Compute-Equivalent Loss. We show that under this modernized paradigm, repetition damage is systematic in three ways. First, holding compute allocated to repeated data constant, eval loss peaks at an intermediate repeat count $\Rep$; repeating a moderately sized subset a moderate number of times damages performance more than repeating a large subset a few times or a small subset many times. Second, the location of this peak is well-fit by a power law in model size; this scaling law reveals that the most damaging number of repeated data grows more quickly than compute. Finally, when repeated documents consume 10\% of the FLOPs budget in a controlled exact-document repetition setting, the compute-equivalent loss can be large: on FineWeb-Edu-Dedup, the most damaging repeat count for a Qwen3-style 344M-parameter model at $\operatorname{OT}=1$ matches the loss of a no-repetition run using 67% of the FLOPs. We demonstrate that these phenomena are not language-model-specific, and can be analytically understood in a simple statistical model: a misspecified linear regression with verbatim duplicates reproduces the same qualitative loss peak, quantifying how such peaks can arise from a statistical tradeoff between memorization and generalization. Our findings add precision to the study of duplication in language models, allowing practitioners to quantify the wasted compute incurred by the presence and repeat structure of duplicates in pretraining corpora.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

3D Vessel Reconstruction from Sparse-View Dynamic DSA Images via Vessel Probability Guided Attenuation Learning

Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) is one of the gold standards for vascular disease diagnosis. With the help of a contrast agent, time-resolved 2D DSA images deliver comprehensive blood flow information and can be utilized to reconstruct 3D vessel structures for medical assessment. Current commercial DSA systems typically require hundreds of scanning views to perform reconstruction, resulting in substantial radiation exposure. In this study, we propose a neural rendering-based optimization framework tailored for high-quality sparse-view DSA reconstruction to reduce radiation dosage. Our approach, termed vessel probability guided attenuation learning, represents DSA imaging as a complementary weighted combination of static and dynamic attenuation fields, with the weights derived from the time-independent vessel probability field. Functioning as a foreground mask, vessel probability provides proper gradients for both static and dynamic fields adaptive to different scene types. This mechanism enables self-supervised decomposition between static backgrounds and dynamic contrast agent flow, and significantly improves reconstruction quality. Our model is trained by minimizing the discrepancy between synthesized projections and real captured DSA images. We further employ two training strategies to improve reconstruction quality: (1) coarse-to-fine progressive training for better geometry and (2) temporal perturbed rendering loss for temporal consistency. Experimental results have demonstrated high-quality 3D vessel reconstruction and 2D DSA image synthesis.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Daily briefing: NASA to launch satellite-rescue mission

作者:

The space agency will lift the orbit of a falling satellite by around 200 kilometres. Plus, Europe’s efforts to take on the US and China as a science superpower and the narcissism of bosses who want to nix remote working. The space agency will lift the orbit of a falling satellite by around 200 kilometres. Plus, Europe’s efforts to take on the US and China as a science superpower and the narcissism of bosses who want to nix remote working.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LSTM based IoT Device Identification

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

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

On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.07082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used to improve large language model reasoning, but its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize the trajectory of OPD updates in parameter space and compare it with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). A suite of parameter-space diagnostics consistently places OPD in a relaxed off-principal regime: compared with SFT, its updates affect fewer weights and avoid principal directions more strongly, while compared with RLVR, they remain less tightly constrained. Beyond this static localization, OPD exhibits subspace locking: its cumulative updates rapidly enter a narrow low-dimensional channel. Constraining training to the update subspace formed early in training preserves OPD performance but substantially degrades SFT, indicating that the locked subspace is functionally sufficient for OPD. Control experiments further show that sparsifying the update tokens and shifting rollout generation off-policy preserve the rank dynamics, whereas mixing the OPD objective with RLVR changes them. Overall, these results suggest that OPD is not merely an intermediate point between SFT and RLVR, but induces its own update geometry in parameter space.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Deep Neural Networks with Ordinal Loss for Medical Applications

arXiv:2606.25769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many prediction problems in medical applications, target labels exhibit an inherent ordinal structure, where class ordering reflects clinically meaningful severity levels. The cost associated with misclassification is often non-uniform and asymmetric, as errors between distant ordinal categories may have substantially more severe consequences than errors between adjacent ones, and overestimating disease severity may have different clinical implications than underestimating it. Traditional loss functions such as multi-class cross-entropy treat all misclassifications equally and fail to incorporate this ordering information. Recent advances in ordinal regression aim to address this limitation by integrating rank-based structures into deep learning models. In this work, we introduce the Ordinal Cross-Entropy (OCE) framework, a general and architecture-independent approach for learning from ordinal data. The proposed method extends the standard cross-entropy formulation to account for misclassification severity through an ordinal cost matrix while preserving the probabilistic interpretation and optimization benefits of the conventional loss. We provide a theoretical analysis of the OCE gradient behavior and show that it yields smoother optimization dynamics and improved ordinal consistency. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method achieves lower prediction error costs and better calibration compared to existing state-of-the-art ordinal approaches, establishing OCE as a simple yet effective solution for ordinal regression in deep neural networks.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MedP-CLIP: Medical CLIP with Region-Aware Prompt Integration

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated outstanding performance in global image understanding and zero-shot transfer through large-scale text-image alignment. However, the core of medical image analysis often lies in the fine-grained understanding of specific anatomical structures or lesion regions. Therefore, precisely comprehending region-of-interest (RoI) information provided by medical professionals or perception models becomes crucial. To address this need, we propose MedP-CLIP, a region-aware medical vision-language model (VLM). MedP-CLIP innovatively integrates medical prior knowledge and designs a feature-level region prompt integration mechanism, enabling it to flexibly respond to various prompt forms (e.g., points, bounding boxes, masks) while maintaining global contextual awareness when focusing on local regions. We pre-train the model on a meticulously constructed large-scale dataset (containing over 6.4 million medical images and 97.3 million region-level annotations), equipping it with cross-disease and cross-modality fine-grained spatial semantic understanding capabilities. Experiments demonstrate that MedP-CLIP significantly outperforms baseline methods in various medical tasks, including zero-shot recognition, interactive segmentation, and empowering multimodal large language models. This model provides a scalable, plug-and-play visual backbone for medical AI, combining holistic image understanding with precise regional analysis.

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

Benign overfitting beyond prediction: The ordinary least squares interpolator

arXiv:2309.15769v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning have highlighted the phenomenon of benign overfitting in overparameterized statistical models, sparking significant interest in understanding its foundations. Owing to its simplicity and practical relevance, the ordinary least squares (OLS) interpolator has become a key object of study for gaining theoretical insight into this phenomenon. While the properties of OLS are well understood in classical underparameterized settings, its behavior in the overparameterized regime – unlike that of ridge regression or the lasso – remains comparatively less explored. We contribute to this growing literature by deriving new algebraic and statistical results for the minimum $\ell_2$-norm OLS interpolator. In contrast to much of the existing work, which focuses on prediction risk, we center our analysis on parameter estimation and inference, which are fundamental for many statistics and causal inference applications. Specifically, we establish overparameterized analogues of (i) the leave-$k$-out formulas, (ii) the omitted variable bias formula, and (iii) the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell theorem. Under the Gauss-Markov model, we further extend the Gauss-Markov theorem and analyze variance estimation under homoskedasticity in the overparameterized setting. Collectively, these results provide a systematic framework for studying parameter estimation and inference in overparameterized linear models, offering a novel perspective on benign overfitting beyond its implications for prediction.

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

Beyond Defensive Reporting: Machine Learning for Active Anti-Money Laundering Control in Insurance

arXiv:2606.16663v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Money laundering through insurance claims poses a threat to insurers both through fraudulent payouts and reputational and regulatory risk. Despite this, little research has examined how such laundering can be prevented. This paper examines whether machine learning can help insurers flag suspicious claims before payout, shifting the focus from passive reporting to active prevention. Using production data from a major Norwegian insurer, we train gradient-boosted decision tree models to detect claims later reported to authorities for suspected money laundering. Because fraud and laundering may share behavioural patterns, we also examine whether insurance fraud labels can serve as an auxiliary training signal. We compare different learning setups using the Budget-Weighted Capture Rate, a metric introduced in this paper to measure how many laundering cases are captured when only a small share of claims can be manually reviewed. The results show that incorporating fraud-related investigation labels substantially improves laundering detection. The best-performing model captures nearly two-thirds of laundering cases within the top-ranked 2 to 6 percent of claims selected for investigation. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study of machine learning for money laundering detection in insurance claims.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal learning of quantum channels in diamond distance

arXiv:2512.10214v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum process tomography, the task of estimating an unknown quantum channel, is a central problem in quantum information theory. A long-standing open question is how many uses of an unknown channel are required to learn it in diamond distance, the standard metric for distinguishing quantum processes. While quantum state tomography is well understood, for general channels the problem remained open beyond the unitary case. Here we establish the query complexity of channel tomography with optimal dependence on the dimension parameters, at any fixed constant accuracy. We design an algorithm showing that any channel with input/output dimensions $d_{\mathrm{in}},d_{\mathrm{out}}$ and Kraus rank at most $k$ can be learned to accuracy $\varepsilon$ using $O(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k/\varepsilon^{2})$ channel uses. Conversely, we prove that $\Omega(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k)$ uses are necessary at constant accuracy and that, for non-minimal Kraus rank, a separate $\Omega(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ contribution is unavoidable. Since channels subsume states, unitaries, isometries, and measurements as special cases, our protocol provides a unified framework for these tomography tasks, yielding new guarantees for isometry and measurement tomography while recovering known optimal scalings for state and unitary tomography. Our algorithm follows the natural strategy of performing optimal tomography on the Choi state. The main technical contribution is to show that this suffices to control the induced diamond-distance error, avoiding the dimension loss incurred by a naive conversion from Choi-state trace distance to channel diamond distance. The protocol uses the channel non-adaptively to prepare Choi-state copies, purifies them in parallel, and performs optimal pure-state tomography on the resulting purifications. Hence, we reduce channel tomography to pure-state tomography.

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

On the Limits of LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Novelty Assessment

arXiv:2606.12071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used to generate and judge scientific ideas. This makes novelty evaluation a central problem. Full idea evaluation is difficult because it often requires judging a method, its feasibility, and its empirical promise. We therefore study a cleaner upstream object: the research question (RQ). RQ generation is a prerequisite for scientific ideation, and RQs can be compared against questions pursued in real papers. We introduce RQ-Bench, a benchmark built from recent arXiv papers. For each paper, we reconstruct author-anchored RQs from its cited background, gaps, and contributions. These RQs are not the only valid questions for the same background. They are author-anchored reference points for testing novelty judgments. We evaluate model-generated RQs with standalone LLM judging, comparative LLM judging, and human expert evaluation. LLM judges consistently rate model-generated RQs as highly novel, producing a novelty mirage; in comparative evaluations, this preference becomes even stronger. Domain experts, however, reach the opposite conclusion and prefer the author-anchored reference questions. We further find that many generated RQs are narrow or source-bound, a dimension that LLM judges often miss unless explicitly tested. Overall, the contradictory novelty evaluations between LLM judges and human experts raise a serious concern about the reliability of using LLMs to assess the scientific novelty of research questions.

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

Accelerated Convex Optimization via Hamiltonian Dynamics with Deterministic Integration Time

arXiv:2606.17260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop Hamiltonian dynamics-based algorithms for smooth convex optimization that achieve accelerated rates of convergence. By exploiting contraction of averaged Hamiltonian flow trajectories rather than requiring contraction at trajectory endpoints, we show that Hamiltonian dynamics-based optimization methods admit deterministic and accelerated convergence guarantees, extending prior work that is limited to quadratic objectives or holds only in expectation. We analyze an idealized continuous-time algorithm and derive practical discrete-time implementations with optimal first-order complexity, thereby establishing Hamiltonian dynamics as a useful algorithmic primitive for deterministic accelerated convex optimization.

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

Automated jailbreak attack targeting multiple defense strategies

arXiv:2606.16751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their safety remains a critical concern due to their susceptibility to adversarial prompt-based attacks. In this paper, we present UNIATTACK, an adversarial testing framework designed from a defense-oriented perspective to systematically construct effective black-box attack prompts. Unlike prior approaches that rely on static templates or iterative model-specific tuning, UNIATTACK extracts minimal but high-impact attack features from diverse existing attacks, optimizes them via a specialized attacker LLM, and composes them into flexible templates through automated refinement process. This feature-centric construction enables one-shot attacks that generalize across multiple models and safety categories, providing a practical tool for assessing LLM robustness. Our evaluation results shows that compared to the baselines, UNIATTACK achieves an average attack success rate (ASR) improvement of 64.63\%-248.82\% on models deployed with multi-layered defense mechanisms and it only takes 0.03\%-4.96\% cost of the baselines. UNIATTACK artifact is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UniAttack-Artifact-30F1.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Static Leaderboards: Predictive Validity for the Evaluation of LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.19704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent benchmarks are growing fast, but no single benchmark touches more than four or five of the dimensions that deployment exposes. This paper aggregates the largest coordinated deep-dive of one MCP-based industrial-agent benchmark to date: fourteen parallel implementation studies covering new asset classes (including a multi-modal visual extension), alternative orchestrations, retrieval strategies, reasoning modes, infrastructure optimizations, and evaluation-methodology probes. Consolidating those studies with seven prior agent benchmarks, we argue that aggregate-score leaderboards systematically underspecify deployed-agent evaluation. Rankings derived from aggregate scores do not transfer to out-of-distribution settings; recent public-to-hidden competition retrospectives provide direct empirical evidence of this rank instability. We propose ranking configurations by predictive validity, the correlation between in-sample and out-of-sample rank, rather than in-sample mean, and report a twelve-tier measurement apparatus that exposes the deployment-relevant dimensions HELM and its agent-era successors collapse. The position is operationalized through three falsifiable out-of-distribution criteria with explicit thresholds; existing evidence partly supports it but is too thin to confirm. We close with a pre-registered pilot design and a field-level vision for what the next generation of agentic benchmarks should report.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Data- and Variance-dependent Regret Bounds for Online Tabular MDPs

arXiv:2602.01903v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work studies online episodic tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with known transitions and develops best-of-both-worlds algorithms that achieve refined data-dependent regret bounds in the adversarial regime and variance-dependent regret bounds in the stochastic regime. We quantify MDP complexity using a first-order quantity and several new data-dependent measures for the adversarial regime, including a second-order quantity and a path-length measure, as well as variance-based measures for the stochastic regime. To adapt to these measures, we develop algorithms based on global optimization and policy optimization, both built on optimistic follow-the-regularized-leader with log-barrier regularization. For global optimization, our algorithms achieve first-order, second-order, and path-length regret bounds in the adversarial regime, and in the stochastic regime, they achieve a variance-aware gap-independent bound and a variance-aware gap-dependent bound that is polylogarithmic in the number of episodes. For policy optimization, our algorithms achieve the same data- and variance-dependent adaptivity, up to a factor of the episode horizon, by exploiting a new optimistic $Q$-function estimator. Finally, we establish regret lower bounds in terms of data-dependent complexity measures for the adversarial regime and a variance measure for the stochastic regime, implying that the regret upper bounds achieved by the global-optimization approach are nearly optimal.

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

Zero-order Parameter-free Optimization for LMO-based Methods: Novel Approach for Efficient Fine-tuning

arXiv:2606.14970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become a central application of modern optimization, enabling pretrained models to adapt to diverse downstream tasks and domain-specific data. A major obstacle in large-scale fine-tuning is the memory overhead of backpropagation, which requires storing activations, gradients, and optimizer states. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a memory-efficient alternative, but its performance is highly sensitive to the stepsize and smoothing parameter, often requiring costly task-specific tuning. Parameter-free (PF) optimization addresses this issue by adapting algorithmic parameters without prior knowledge of problem-dependent constants. Moreover, large-scale fine-tuning can benefit from geometry-aware updates that account for the heterogeneous structure of parameter blocks, which can be modeled through methods that exploit linear minimization oracle (LMO). In this work, we study PF adaptation for LMO-based ZO optimization and introduce $\texttt{AdaNAGED}$, a method that unifies gradient-free training, adaptive tuning, and non-Euclidean update geometry. We establish convergence guarantees and validate the method on large-scale LLM fine-tuning task with $\texttt{OPT}-1.3\mathrm{B}$ model.