Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Flow Matching: Dimension-Improved KL Bounds and Wasserstein Guarantees

arXiv:2606.16610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Flow Matching (DFM) has recently emerged as a versatile framework for generative modeling, yet its theoretical convergence properties remain only partially understood. In this work, we provide refined and novel convergence guarantees for Brownian motion based DFMs, focusing on the discretization error. Our analysis is conducted under the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the 2-Wasserstein distance. Under finite-moment conditions and a mild score integrability assumption, we derive KL convergence bounds with improved dimensional dependence compared to prior work, achieving, up to our knowledge, state-of-the-art scaling under minimal conditions. We further extend the analysis to the 2-Wasserstein distance: under an additional first-order score integrability assumption and a weak log-concavity condition, we obtain convergence guarantees with dimensional dependence consistent with the KL case.

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

Interactor: Agentic RL oriented Iterative Creation for Ad Description Generation in Sponsored Search

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate multi-dimensional qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and reasoning feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments on industrial datasets show that the Interactor framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Natural Identifiers for Privacy and Data Audits in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.24408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Assessing the privacy of large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges. In particular, most existing methods for auditing differential privacy require the insertion of specially crafted canary data during training, making them impractical for auditing already-trained models without costly retraining. Additionally, dataset inference, which audits whether a suspect dataset was used to train a model, is infeasible without access to a private non-member held-out dataset. Yet, such held-out datasets are often unavailable or difficult to construct for real-world cases since they have to be from the same distribution (IID) as the suspect data. These limitations severely hinder the ability to conduct scalable, post-hoc audits. To enable such audits, this work introduces natural identifiers (NIDs) as a novel solution to the above-mentioned challenges. NIDs are structured random strings, such as cryptographic hashes and shortened URLs, naturally occurring in common LLM training datasets. Their format enables the generation of unlimited additional random strings from the same distribution, which can act as alternative canaries for audits and as same-distribution held-out data for dataset inference. Our evaluation highlights that indeed, using NIDs, we can facilitate post-hoc differential privacy auditing without any retraining and enable dataset inference for any suspect dataset containing NIDs without the need for a private non-member held-out dataset.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Moment generating function of the tacnode process

作者:

arXiv:2606.17771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The tacnode process is a universal determinantal point process arising in non-intersecting particle systems and random tiling models. In this paper, we study the generating function for the counting functions of the tacnode process on a union of $m$ intervals, $m\in\mathbb{N}^{+}$. Our first result provides an integral representation for the $m$-point generating function in terms of the Hamiltonian governing a system of $8m+4$ coupled differential equations. Combined with several differential identities for this Hamiltonian, the representation yields the large gap asymptotics, up to and including the constant term. As further applications, we obtain asymptotic formulae for the expectations, variances, and covariances of the counting functions, and establish a central limit theorem for their joint fluctuations. These results extend the previously known $1$-point theory for the tacnode process to the multi-interval setting with multiple discontinuities.

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

Experience Makes Skillful: Enabling Generalizable Medical Agent Reasoning via Self-Evolving Skill Memory

Medical agent systems are increasingly expected to support interactive clinical decision making rather than only static question answering. In such settings, effective agents must reuse prior experience across evolving cases, yet existing memory mechanisms often retain raw historical traces that are redundant, noisy, and difficult to govern. More importantly, they rarely distinguish which memories are truly useful for future reasoning. This limits their ability to accumulate compact and reliable experience for long-horizon clinical reasoning. To close this gap, we propose SkeMex, a post-deployment self-evolution framework that improves medical agents through a skill-based memory without updating model weights. SkeMex distills informative interaction trajectories into structured skills that encode reusable procedural knowledge, and organizes them into a multi-branch repository spanning general, task-specific, and action-level experience. To determine which memories should be reused and retained, SkeMex estimates context-dependent utility from environment feedback and uses it to guide value-aware retrieval and repository governance. A closed-loop ``Read–Write–Assess–Govern" lifecycle further supports continual evolution by writing new skills, updating utilities, promoting useful memories, and removing harmful entries. Experiments across diverse clinical tasks show that SkeMex consistently outperforms representative memory-based agents in both offline and online settings. It also generalizes across model backbones and supports transferable skill memory. All data and code will be released publicly.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum turbulence in the many-body regime

arXiv:2606.23822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We discuss phenomenology associated with turbulent hydrodynamics in quantum fluids from a condensed-matter perspective. We begin with weakly-interacting superfluids, often modeled by a mean-field theory governed by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Considering the effect of quantum fluctuations beyond the mean-field approximation, we propose a study of many-body quantum effects in turbulent hydrodynamics, especially near zero temperature. We motivate examples of quantum many-body systems where such effects may be uncovered. These include bosons confined in a periodic potential in low spatial dimensions (one and two), and the associated quantum critical point of the superfluid-insulator transition, realized in present-day ultracold-atom and quantum computing platforms. We conclude by listing a set of (open) questions that may be answered using modern quantum many-body techniques. This article is part of the theme issue 'Frontiers of turbulence and statistical physics'.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Guiding the development of climate counterfactuals for health impact attribution studies

Climate change detection and attribution (D&A) methods have become vital for quantifying the influence of anthropogenic forcing on the Earth's systems, including human health. Health impact attribution (HIA) studies seek to disentangle climate-driven health effects from natural variability yet are often constrained by the availability of accessible counterfactual climate scenarios. This tutorial paper presents a flexible, reproducible framework for developing counterfactual climates without reliance on computationally intensive global circulation models. We provide practical, R-based methodologies for constructing both trend-based (temperature and non-temperature) and event-based counterfactual, using a variety of techniques including model residual detrending, data-driven decomposition (e.g., Singular Spectrum Analysis and Empirical Mode Decomposition) and stochastic weather generators. The tutorial also explores the incorporation of greenhouse gas concentrations as forcing variables, rather than global mean temperature anomalies. By operationalising these methods through worked examples and an open code repository, this paper aims to build capacity within the HIA community, enhance methodological transparency, and foster interdisciplinary collaboration between climate and health researchers.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

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

When Do Data-Driven Systems Exhibit the Capability to Infer?

arXiv:2606.11769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The European AI Act is the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), setting out extensive obligations, particularly for so-called high-risk and general-purpose AI systems. A key distinguishing feature of AI systems under the AI Act is the capability to infer. Since the AI Act does not clearly define what inference is, there is a gray area for certain data-driven systems. A specific example is credit scoring systems, which are listed by Annex III of the AI Act. At the same time, however, these are often implemented using statistical models for which it is unclear whether they have the capability to infer and thus fall under the AI definition of the AI Act at all. Motivated by statistical learning theory, this work develops a framework for grading different levels of the capability to infer. Based on the AI Act and the Commission Guidelines on the definition of an artificial intelligence system, we analyze which levels constitute sufficient capability to infer within the meaning of the AI Act and where further regulatory clarity is needed. We illustrate the framework by creating two realistic credit scoring workflows and show whether and where inference occurs in them. Our analysis illustrates that not only individual models but the entire data processing workflow must be considered. It also shows that the involvement of human experts during development can have significant influence on the capability to infer. Code can be found at https://github.com/fraunhofer-iais/inference-framework-creditscorecards.

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

Misinformation Propagation in Benign Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems, in which multiple large language model agents solve problems through turn-based interaction, are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as medical diagnosis, legal analysis, and forensic decision-making. Their reliability can be at risk when single agents reason from incorrect or misleading context, e.g., from tool calls, since errors may propagate through agent interactions. This work studies this risk by injecting intent-based misinformation into benign single-agent and multi-agent systems across reasoning, knowledge, and alignment tasks. We find that misinformation can degrade single-agent performance and persists across multi-agent debate, with agents often retaining answers introduced by misinformed peers. Nevertheless, multi-agent debate reduces the resulting performance degradation compared to single-agent prompting, especially when most agents are not exposed to misinformation. Robustness depends on group composition and decision protocol. Consensus can be more stable than voting under peer pressure, while majorities can often steer misinformed agents back toward correct answers. Our results show that misinformation robustness in multi-agent systems depends on the underlying model and also on how agents exchange information and aggregate decisions.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Reasoning in Computer Vision: Taxonomy, Models, Tasks, and Methodologies

Visual reasoning matters for many computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite progress in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys typically cover only one part of the problem, such as visual question answering, scene-graph generation, neuro-symbolic AI, or multimodal chain-of-thought, and rarely analyze reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols together. This survey addresses that gap. Following a structured literature review, we group visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and examine how each is implemented across methods that range from graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems to reasoning with vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including visual chain-of-thought, visual programming, and tool-augmented and test-time reasoning. We then review evaluation protocols for functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and we analyze their limits in generalizability, reproducibility, faithfulness, and explanatory power. We also identify open challenges: scaling to complex scenes, integrating symbolic and neural paradigms more deeply, the shortage of comprehensive benchmarks, language-prior shortcuts and hallucination in foundation models, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we set out a research agenda for vision systems and argue that connecting perception and reasoning is necessary for transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain models, especially in high-stakes settings such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

PROBE: Probabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding with Analytical Translation Robustness for 3D Place Recognition

We present PROBE (PRobabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding), a learning-free LiDAR place recognition descriptor that models each BEV cell's occupancy as a Bernoulli random variable. Rather than relying on discrete point-cloud perturbations, PROBE analytically marginalizes over continuous Cartesian translations via the polar Jacobian, yielding a distance-adaptive angular uncertainty $\sigma_\theta = \sigma_t / r$ in $\mathcal{O}(R{\cdot}S)$ time. The primary parameter $\sigma_t$ represents the expected translational uncertainty in meters, a sensor-independent physical quantity that enhances cross-sensor generalization while reducing the need for extensive per-dataset tuning. Pairwise similarity combines a Bernoulli-KL Jaccard with exponential uncertainty gating and FFT-based height cosine similarity for rotation alignment. Evaluated on four datasets spanning four diverse LiDAR types, PROBE achieves the highest accuracy among handcrafted descriptors in multi-session evaluation and competitive single-session performance relative to both handcrafted and supervised baselines. The source code and supplementary materials are available at https://sites.google.com/view/probe-pr.

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

A Data-Centric Framework for Detecting and Correcting Corrupted Labels

arXiv:2606.11699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of machine learning and deep learning models largely depends on the quality of the training data. However, the quality of the real-world datasets is often compromised by noisy labels, which can substantially degrade model accuracy and reliability. To address this challenge, we propose Relabeler, an end-to-end data-centric framework for detecting and correcting corrupted labels. For corrupted label detection, Relabeler jointly leverages both local and global relationships among data instances to identify potentially noisy samples. After detecting suspicious instances, Relabeler further performs label correction by estimating the most probable clean label for each instance based on both its input features and observed noisy label. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, noise types, and noise rates demonstrate that Relabeler consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 58% improvement in label correction precision and 6% improvement in downstream task performance.

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

NeuralMUSIC: A Hybrid Neural-Subspace Framework for Robot Sound Source Localization

arXiv:2606.18664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable sound source localization is fundamental to robot audition, enabling autonomous robots to perceive spatial cues and operate effectively in dynamic environments. Classical methods such as Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) offer strong theoretical foundations but degrade under low signal-to-noise ratios. While deep learning-based approaches achieve promising performance, they often struggle with limited generalization across conditions. To address these challenges, we propose NeuralMUSIC, a hybrid neural-subspace framework for robotic sound source localization. Specifically, a neural network first estimates the spatial covariance matrix from multichannel microphone observations. The predicted covariance is then integrated into a classical MUSIC pipeline with eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) and pseudo-spectrum computation, followed by a Frequency Attention Fusion (FAF) module to produce the final DOA estimates. To improve data efficiency, we further introduce a Self-supervised Spatial Correlation Learning (SSCL) strategy that leverages unlabeled acoustic data to capture spatial structure. Extensive experiments across different robotic tasks demonstrate that NeuralMUSIC achieves competitive localization accuracy while exhibiting improved robustness and cross-domain generalization.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

WorldOlympiad: Can Your World Model Survive a Triathlon?

We introduce WorldOlympiad, a benchmark for diagnosing video-based world models across physical faithfulness, geometric consistency, and interaction fidelity. While existing benchmarks often focus on visual quality, semantic alignment, or short-term temporal coherence, they provide limited insight into whether generated videos obey physical rules, preserve coherent 3D structure, and sustain controllable interactions over long horizons. To address this gap, WorldOlympiad decomposes world-model evaluation into three complementary dimensions. The physical track uses object segmentation and MLLM-as-judge to assess whether generated videos follow interpretable rules in mechanics, thermal phenomena, and material properties. The geometry track reconstructs generated videos with Gaussian splatting and evaluates structural consistency, cross-view coherence, and camera-trajectory alignment. The interaction track assesses whether generated rollouts follow complex action prompts and maintain smooth, coherent transitions across consecutive video chunks. WorldOlympiad further covers three major downstream scenarios, including gaming, robotics, and general real-world videos, capturing diverse challenges from interactive control and embodied manipulation to open-domain motion and camera dynamics. Together, these tracks and scenarios form a scalable and interpretable evaluation suite that exposes failure modes beyond generic video quality. Experiments on state-of-the-art models reveal substantial gaps in physical reasoning, 3D consistency, and long-horizon interaction, underscoring the need for more structured evaluation protocols for generative world models.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bernstein-Schur Kernels: Random Features by Sketched Modulation and Radial Randomization

arXiv:2606.11255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bernstein–Schur kernels are products of a finite-feature kernel (one with an explicit finite-dimensional feature map) and a completely monotone shift-invariant kernel: nonstationary kernels that fall between the shift-invariant and dot-product templates random features usually exploit, so in general neither Bochner sampling nor polynomial sketching applies to the full kernel directly. We give one random-feature construction for the whole class that randomizes both factors: it sketches the finite modulation and randomizes the completely monotone radial factor, sampling the latter's one-dimensional Bernstein–Widder scale and then applying Gaussian random Fourier features (whose frequency is still $d$-dimensional). The feature dimension is then $Dm$, set by the sketch size $m$ and the radial-draw count $D$, free of the $O(d^2)$ size of the exact modulation feature. Keeping the modulation \emph{exact is the analyzable limit ($m\to\infty$): there we prove unbiasedness, an exact variance for the recommended flat estimator, an expected matrix-Bernstein operator-norm bound (with a matching high-probability tail) controlled by the top eigenvalues of the kernel and modulation Gram matrices together with an intrinsic dimension rather than the crude $N\max_{ij}$ entrywise route, and a deterministic relative-spectral kernel-ridge stability result. By conditioning on the sketch, the doubly-randomized estimator inherits the same intrinsic-dimension operator-norm guarantee plus a single additive sketch term, tunable by $m$ independently of $D$. The motivating instance is the biased $yat$-kernel $k_{yat,b}(w,x)=(w^\top x+b)^2/(\|w-x\|^2+\varepsilon)$, $b\ge0$, whose family span contains the inverse-multiquadric kernel by finite differences in $b$; for it the radial mixture is the IMQ spectral sampler, and one frequency per scale is variance-optimal at a fixed radial-feature budget.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Approach for Melt Pool Prediction in Laser Powder Bed Fusion

arXiv:2606.23719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a promising additive manufacturing technique that suffers from quality assurance concerns. Predicting melt pools from process parameters is crucial for assessing quality prior to manufacturing but remains a difficult problem because of the complex physical processes underlying LPBF. Quantum computers present a new computing paradigm, providing a new approach to information processing using quantum entanglement and superposition. This paper presents a practical demonstration of a hybrid quantum-classical model that leverages quantum computing to improve process parameter feature extraction with a quantum feature encoder. To make the quantum approach computationally feasible for large datasets, we first employ a clustering algorithm to reduce the number of expensive quantum computations. These quantum features are then processed by a classical neural network to predict the melt pool morphology, allowing for more accurate predictions of melt pools. We demonstrate the method using a quantum simulator, analyze the effect of measurement shot noise on the predictive performance of the network, and verify the results using quantum hardware. Finally, by examining which quantum features are most important, we provide insights that can inform the future design of more effective quantum encoding circuits. Ultimately, the performance improvement over purely classical networks validates the hybrid approach, demonstrating an engineering application of quantum computing using noisy and intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TouchThinker: Scaling Tactile Commonsense Reasoning to the Open World with Large-scale Data and Action-aware Representation

arXiv:2606.11637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Touch is a key modality for embodied agents to understand the physical world. Although recent work has incorporated tactile signals into language systems for tactile commonsense reasoning, scaling such systems to realistic open-world settings remains challenging due to two key bottlenecks: (1) current tactile reasoning datasets remain limited in format and scale, providing insufficient supervision for reasoning from tactile observations to physical commonsense and hindering the learning of transferable tactile commonsense; (2) Tactile signals are inherently redundant and action-specific, yet existing methods often overlook these properties, resulting in inefficient representations with limited semantic expressiveness. To address these limitations, we propose TouchThinker, a tactile-language framework that scales tactile commonsense reasoning to the open world from both data and representation perspectives. First, we construct TouchThinker-1M, a million-scale, multi-source tactile reasoning dataset covering 415 objects, 8 scenarios, and 7 sensor types, providing a solid data foundation for open-world generalization. We further introduce TouchThinker-Bench, an open-world benchmark with more realistic and diverse tasks. Then, we propose action-aware modeling mechanism to improve tactile representation efficiency and enable efficient reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that TouchThinker achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art models across multiple datasets. Our code and dataset will be made available at: https://github.com/lvkailin0118/TouchThinker.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Performance-Driven Environment Abstraction with Multi-Timescale Learning

arXiv:2606.17377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study performance-driven environment abstraction for decision-making in large Markov decision processes. Rather than preserving geometric or topological structure, we seek abstractions that directly optimize decision quality. We model abstraction as a controlled approximation obtained by aggregating the state space and enforcing a shared action distribution within each aggregated state. For a fixed partition, we establish a performance guarantee that separates value-function approximation error from the loss introduced by action sharing. Guided by this analysis, we develop a multi-timescale reinforcement learning framework that jointly adapts the policy and a tree-structured environment abstraction. The resulting algorithm refines and coarsens regions of the state space based on Q-value discrepancies, balancing performance against abstraction size and complexity. Empirical results demonstrate substantial state compression, improved sample efficiency, and faster replanning compared to actor-critic baselines.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

EventDrive: Event Cameras for Vision-Language Driving Intelligence

Event cameras sense the world through asynchronous brightness changes with microsecond latency and high dynamic range, offering motion fidelity far beyond frame-based sensors and capturing temporal structure that conventional exposures often miss. These properties make events a powerful complement to RGB in autonomous driving, especially under blur, glare, and rapid motion, where frame-based perception can become unreliable. However, existing event-aware vision-language models remain limited to generic perception and do not reveal how event sensing contributes to reasoning and decision-making across the full driving loop. We present EventDrive, a large-scale benchmark and model suite that unifies event streams, RGB frames, and language supervision across four core dimensions: Perception, Understanding, Prediction, and Planning, covering captions, structured QA, grounding, motion-state recognition, trajectory forecasting, and planning tasks. Building on this foundation, EventDrive-VLM introduces a multi-horizon event pyramid and a temporal-horizon mixture-of-experts module to adaptively encode and fuse asynchronous and frame-based information for downstream reasoning. Comprehensive evaluation across diverse tasks shows that event streams provide substantial gains in temporal precision, motion awareness, and robustness, bringing event sensing into the center of driving intelligence.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Large deviations for marked sparse random graphs with applications to interacting diffusions

arXiv:2204.08789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs, obtained by decorating edges and vertices of a sparse Erdős-Rényi random graph with i.i.d. random elements taking values on Polish spaces. We prove that the empirical neighborhood distribution of this model satisfies a large deviation principle in the framework of local weak convergence. We rely on the concept of BC-entropy introduced by Delgosha and Anantharam~(2019) which is inspired on the previous work by Bordenave and Caputo~(2015). Our main technical contribution is an approximation result that allows one to pass from graph with marks in discrete spaces to marks in general Polish spaces. As an application of the results developed here, we prove a large deviation principle for interacting diffusions driven by gradient evolution and defined on top of sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs. In particular, our results apply for the stochastic Kuramoto model. We obtain analogous results for the sparse uniform random graph with given number of edges.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Sign-Rank, Index, and List Replicability: Connections and Separations

arXiv:2606.18236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In learning theory, the sign rank of a binary concept class captures the smallest dimension in which it can be represented by points and halfspaces. Despite tremendous interest, lower bounds on sign rank are notoriously difficult to come by. Two recent approaches to the problem establish lower bounds on sign rank by measures that are easier to analyze: the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index and the list replicability number. We order these measures, showing that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index is upper-bounded by a linear function of the list replicability number. As a main consequence, we obtain a strong separation between sign rank and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index, thereby resolving a question of Frick, Hosseini, and Vasileuski. This motivates a thorough study of list replicability, the stronger of the two lower-bounding measures. We establish upper bounds on the list replicability number by two combinatorial measures: height and minimum star number. We also prove a fundamental composition result, showing that the product of two concept classes has list replicability number bounded by the sum of the list replicability numbers of the two classes.