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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Neural Network Implementation of the Renormalization Group for Fault Diagnosis with Class Imbalance

arXiv:2606.18326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The application of machine learning models in practical tasks faces challenges such as class imbalance and multidimensional noise. This paper proposes RGNet, a neural network architecture based on the concept of the renormalization group (RG), for hierarchical coarse-graining of the feature space. The model sequentially compresses the input dimensionality and concatenates all scales before classification, allowing it to capture both local details and global patterns. The notion of RG-flows is introduced - interpretable low-dimensional representations whose visualization via t-SNE reveals a discrete curvilinear structure confirming the effectiveness of coarse-graining. Experimental results are presented on the imbalanced AI4I dataset. The obtained results demonstrate that RGNet is a universal, interpretable, and competitive solution for fault prediction in applications with imbalanced classes.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Faking entanglement with imperceptible measurement deviations

arXiv:2606.20396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is a central resource underpinning emerging quantum technologies, enabling capabilities beyond those of classical systems. Accurate verification of entanglement is therefore crucial. However, experimental schemes usually rely on the assumption that quantum measurements can be realized exactly. As the complexity of a quantum system grows, this assumption typically becomes increasingly unrealistic, therefore leading to a widening mismatch between theoretical models and experimental implementations. Here we demonstrate that arbitrarily small measurement errors, when adversarially encoded in the measurement apparatus, can lead to the false certification of high-dimensional entanglement in systems that are, in fact, separable. This is achieved by introducing explicit hacking attacks to measurement devices in well-established entanglement verification tests. We further experimentally demonstrate this effect using classical photonic states encoded in the spatial degree of freedom, spanning up to 61 dimensions with measurement fidelity errors as low as 0.23%. Our results uncover a fundamental vulnerability in current methods for high-dimensional entanglement detection, highlighting the susceptibility of complex quantum devices to small adversarial perturbations. The findings underscore the need for developing secure verification of quantum information that is robust to bounded discrepancies between theory and experiment.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Smoothness Errors in Dynamics Models and How to Avoid Them

arXiv:2602.05352v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern neural networks have shown promise for solving partial differential equations over surfaces, often by discretizing the surface as a mesh and learning with a mesh-aware graph neural network. However, graph neural networks suffer from oversmoothing, where a node's features become increasingly similar to those of its neighbors. Unitary graph convolutions, which are mathematically constrained to preserve smoothness, have been proposed to address this issue. Despite this, in many physical systems, such as diffusion processes, smoothness naturally increases and unitarity may be overconstraining. In this paper, we systematically study the smoothing effects of different GNNs for dynamics modeling and prove that unitary convolutions hurt performance for such tasks. We propose relaxed unitary convolutions that balance smoothness preservation with the natural smoothing required for physical systems. We also generalize unitary and relaxed unitary convolutions from graphs to meshes. In experiments on PDEs such as the heat and wave equations over complex meshes and on weather forecasting, we find that our method outperforms several strong baselines, including mesh-aware transformers and equivariant neural networks.

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

AURA: Adaptive Uncertainty-aware Refinement for LLM-as-a-Judge Auditing

arXiv:2606.19714v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for open-ended generation, as large-scale human evaluation is often expensive and difficult to scale, yet their preferences remain imperfect proxies for human judgment. Existing auditing pipelines often assume that a reliable subset of examples or clean supervision signals are available beforehand, for example from human annotation, heuristic filtering, or the outputs of strong judges. In LLM evaluation, this assumption is fragile: the initial split may inherit judge bias, while human verification is typically too scarce to define stable groups at scale. We propose AURA, an adaptive uncertainty–aware refinement framework for auditing pairwise LLM–as–a–judge decisions under selected human verification. AURA iteratively learns a human-consistency signal, propagates reliable evidence, and prioritizes uncertain comparisons for human review. The key idea is to treat trust in a judge as a latent quantity that is progressively refined as evidence accumulates. We provide a compact formulation, a stable refinement procedure, and a comprehensive evaluation on both synthetic and real pairwise LLM-answer data.

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

Measuring Epistemic Resilience of LLMs Under Misleading Medical Context

Large language models (LLMs) now reach expert-level scores on medical licensing exams, encouraging the assumption that high scores imply safe medical judgment while patients increasingly use them for health advice. We show this assumption is fragile: when misleading context is injected into questions that LLMs originally answer correctly, they abandon the correct answer. We call the ability to maintain correct judgment under adversarial context epistemic resilience, and introduce MedMisBench to measure it. MedMisBench contains 10,932 medical question items and 48,889 misleading context-option pairs spanning medical reasoning, agentic capability, and patient-journey evaluation. Across 11 model configurations, mean accuracy falls from 71.1% on original questions to 38.0% under focused misleading context, with 51.5% attack success. The most damaging injections are formal, rule-like fabrications: authority-framed falsehoods reach 69.5% attack success and exception-poisoning claims reach 64.1%. A 14-member clinical panel from 7 countries identified serious potential harm in 38.2% of reviewed cases. MedMisBench exposes a structural blind spot in LLM evaluation in medical settings: existing benchmarks measure what models know, but not whether they preserve correct medical judgment under misleading context.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RTSGameBench: An RTS Benchmark for Strategic Reasoning by Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.18950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with strategic reasoning, i.e., anticipating and influencing other agents' actions, under uncertainty in competitive and cooperative settings. Real-time strategy (RTS) games can be a natural testbed for diagnosing this limitation, as they demand coordination with allies, adaptation to opponents' strategy, and long-horizon planning under partial observability. However, existing RTS benchmarks offer limited evaluation scope, lack systematic competency diagnosis, and remain fixed in the pre-designed scenario coverage. To address these limitations, we present RTSGameBench, which is built on Beyond All Reason, a large-scale RTS game with an expanded battlefield that demands broader strategy diversity than the existing testbeds. The proposed benchmark provides evaluations through diverse gameplay across various matchup structures, diagnostic assessment via mini-games, each targeting an individual strategic competency, and extensible coverage via a self-evolving generation framework that converts free-form queries into new mini-games, improving over successive cycles. Additionally, for VLMs to operate in large-scale RTS games, we provide RTSGameAgent that manages units by an FSM with agentic memory. We empirically validate that multiple state-of-the-art VLMs do not perform well when matchups demand tighter coordination, multiagent coordination and when task scale increases.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dark state spectroscopy in nonlinear waveguide quantum electrodynamics

arXiv:2606.11997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum systems face a fundamental trade-off: they must remain decoupled from the environment to maintain long coherence times, yet they require interactions with the environment to be accessible for measurement. As a prime example, emitter arrays coupled to waveguides facilitate collective modes that, owing to interference, can suppress radiation into the waveguide. While complete destructive interference creates perfectly dark states with infinite lifetimes, their inherent decoupling makes them unmeasurable in standard waveguide quantum electrodynamics. Consequently, current approaches must rely on system non-idealities that permit measurement but limit the coherence times. In this work, we lift this limitation by proposing the use of weakly squeezed light generated in \{chi}(2) nonlinear waveguides for the spectroscopy of completely dark states. We show that the fluorescence spectrum probes transitions between the dressed dark states of the emitter array. This work paves the way towards the measurement and control of dark states, with applications for robust quantum memories, computation, and communication.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Robust Regularized Policy Iteration under Transition Uncertainty

arXiv:2603.09344v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables data-efficient and safe policy learning without online exploration, but its performance often degrades under distribution shift. The learned policy may visit out-of-distribution state-action pairs where value estimates and learned dynamics are unreliable. To address policy-induced extrapolation and transition uncertainty in a unified framework, we formulate offline RL as robust policy optimization, treating the transition kernel as a decision variable within an uncertainty set and optimizing the policy against the worst-case dynamics. We propose Robust Regularized Policy Iteration (RRPI), which replaces the intractable max-min bilevel objective with a tractable KL-regularized surrogate and derives an efficient policy iteration procedure based on a robust regularized Bellman operator. We provide theoretical guarantees by showing that the proposed operator is a $\gamma$-contraction and that iteratively updating the surrogate yields monotonic improvement of the original robust objective with convergence. Experiments on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that RRPI achieves strong average performance, outperforming recent baselines including percentile-based methods on the majority of environments while remaining competitive on the rest. Moreover, RRPI exhibits robust performance by aligning lower $Q$-values with high epistemic uncertainty, which prevents the policy from executing unreliable out-of-distribution actions.

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

Regularized Machine Learning for System Identification of Ship Free-Running Manoeuvres from CFD-Based Synthetic Data: A Comparative Study

arXiv:2606.17121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates supervised machine learning techniques for identifying ship hydrodynamic coefficients from CFD-generated data from free-running simulations. Specifically, ordinary least squares and regularized regression methods are applied to Abkowitz-type manoeuvring models. Training and validation datasets are derived from URANS simulations of zig-zag and turning circle manoeuvres, which are validated against experimental benchmark data. The analysis evaluates the effects of coefficient set size, minimum training length required for predictive model training, and manoeuvre combinations on model performance. Results demonstrate the suitability of large-angle zig-zag manoeuvres for hydrodynamic system identification, provided that multicollinearity is addressed through appropriate coefficient selection, regression models, or input data variability. Larger coefficient sets offer greater model flexibility for variable conditions but are more prone to multicollinearity. Regularized regression techniques effectively mitigate multicollinearity and notably enhance prediction accuracy, as does incorporating more diverse manoeuvring data. Among tested models, Ridge regression provided the best compromise between computational efficiency and prediction accuracy.

11.
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.

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

TSA: Temporal Slot Activation for Persistent Object-Centric Video Representation

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into temporally persistent entity representations. Existing recurrent video slot-attention methods propagate a fixed set of slots across frames, but typically assume unconditional slot propagation: every slot is updated and decoded at every frame, regardless of whether its corresponding object is visible. We show that this design violates a basic lifecycle requirement for persistent slots: when an object is absent or fully occluded, its slot should preserve its previous state and avoid explaining unrelated visible content. Instead, unconditional propagation creates two failure pathways: update-induced state drift, where current-frame evidence overwrites the absent object's representation, and decoder-induced reconstruction interference, where the inactive slot remains coupled to reconstruction through decoder attention. We propose Temporal Slot Activation (TSA), a mechanism that learns a per-slot, per-frame activation score $\alpha_{k,t} \in (0, 1)$ without visibility supervision. TSA uses this activation as a shared latent control variable for slot lifecycle modeling. When a slot is inactive, TSA anchors its state to the previous slot via activation-gated updating and suppresses its decoder participation through an activation-dependent additive bias on attention logits before softmax normalization. This jointly reduces state drift and reconstruction-driven interference. To improve decisions under partial occlusion and gradual reappearance, TSA further conditions activation prediction on a per-slot temporal memory produced by a Temporal Context Encoder. We evaluate TSA on MOVi-C/E, YT-VIS, and OVIS benchmarks using both standard and tracking-based metrics (FG-ARI, mBO, IDF1, HOTA). TSA consistently improves object decomposition and temporal identity preservation, with large gains on long, heavily occluded videos.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Speaker Verification with Speech-Aware LLMs: Evaluation and Augmentation

arXiv:2603.10827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech-aware large language models (LLMs) can accept speech inputs, yet their training objectives largely emphasize linguistic content or specific fields such as emotions or the speaker's gender, leaving it unclear whether they encode speaker identity. First, we propose a model-agnostic scoring protocol that produces continuous verification scores for both API-only and open-weight models, using confidence scores or log-likelihood ratios from the Yes/No token probabilities. Using this protocol, we benchmark recent speech-aware LLMs and observe weak speaker discrimination (EERs above 20% on VoxCeleb1). Second, we introduce a lightweight augmentation that equips an LLM with ASV capability by injecting frozen ECAPA-TDNN speaker embeddings through a learned projection and training only LoRA adapters. On TinyLLaMA-1.1B, the resulting ECAPA-LLM achieves 1.03% EER on VoxCeleb1-E, approaching a dedicated speaker verification system while preserving a natural-language interface.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Q-DICE: Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator

arXiv:2606.11340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As distributed quantum computing (DQC) offers a leading path towards scalable quantum computation, the ability to benchmark distributed algorithms under realistic conditions becomes critical for system co-design. However, without access to physical systems, researchers lack tools to evaluate distribution protocols. We introduce Q-DICE (Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator), a hardware-aware emulation environment for benchmarking distributed quantum circuits on classical simulators and on NISQ-era monolithic hardware. This work provides three core contributions: (1) a programmatic scheme to construct distributed QPU backends, utilizing two novel techniques - QPU slicing and stitching - to facilitate distributed circuit mapping, (2) a methodology for modeling nonlocal link noise using physically motivated Kraus operators and stochastic error channels, and (3) a boundary-aware circuit mapping algorithm enforcing distributed QPU topology constraints during transpilation. Together, these components constitute a distribution-aware compiler and noise-modeling engine that faithfully enforces the physical limitations of distributed quantum hardware within existing execution environments. We validate Q-DICE against a multitude of experimentally demonstrated quantum circuits, including a distributed Grover's search on optically linked trapped-ion hardware, achieving a worst-case fidelity deviation of 4% between simulated and experimental results. These findings demonstrate Q-DICE's capacity to accurately reproduce real distributed quantum system behavior across platforms, streamlining experimentation with distributed quantum algorithms and architectures.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Plateau Gaps of Poisson Correctors Encode Metastable Reaction Rates

arXiv:2606.14789v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Metastable reaction rates are commonly inferred from transition-state fluxes, mean first-passage times, or fitted kinetic models. We show that they are directly encoded in the plateau gap of an occupation-time Poisson corrector. For a centered basin-occupation observable, the Poisson corrector develops metastable plateaus in the reactant and product basins, and their separation determines the forward and backward transition rates. This construction requires only the generator, stationary measure, and metastable partition, and therefore does not rely on a predefined transition-state surface. In overdamped and underdamped double-well dynamics, the plateau-gap rate recovers the Kramers, Grote-Hynes, and Pollak-Grabert-Hänggi hierarchy. The same corrector-martingale decomposition yields a reactive-noise density, revealing where stochastic forcing contributes to transitions in configuration or phase space. Thus, reaction rates and their fluctuation sources emerge from a single corrector field.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Toward Entanglement Bootstrap for Conformal Field Theory in Any Dimension

arXiv:2606.12540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given a quantum critical wavefunction in any dimension, we propose a reconstructed Hamiltonian, analogous to the ones previously found for 1+1d CFT and for 2+1d bosonic liquid topologically-ordered states. We test numerically that, for known regularized approximate CFT groundstates (on the icosahedron and the fuzzy sphere), (1) they are close to the groundstate of their reconstructed Hamiltonian, and (2) the spectrum of their reconstructed Hamiltonian on the unit sphere has CFT properties (integer spacing of descendants) and matches known low-lying energies. We show that this provides an automated method to improve the finite-size effects in a fixed Hilbert space.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Score Approximation for Diffusion Models on Arbitrary Low-Dimensional Structures

arXiv:2606.19894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of score-based diffusion models has spurred significant efforts to establish their theoretical foundations. However, existing complexity bounds for score approximation rely heavily on restrictive assumptions like Lipschitz continuous densities or smooth manifold supports, which are routinely violated by the singularities, sharp boundaries, and disjoint clusters inherent to real-world perceptual data. This work establishes a universal score approximation theorem that works for any distribution supported on any compact set of upper Minkowski dimension $d$. Using a novel discrete-mixture formulation, we prove that the score function can be approximated with a ReLU network whose complexity grows exponentially only with $d$, thus breaking the exponential curse of ambient dimensionality. Combined with existing theories on accurately solving the backward diffusion SDE for arbitrary compact distributions, our work shows that diffusion models readily adapt to irregular, non-smooth data structures, explaining their competence in real-world generative tasks.

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

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

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

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

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

Iterative Tool Usage Exploration for Multimodal Agents via Step-wise Preference Tuning

Multimodal agents, which integrate a controller e.g., a vision language model) with external tools, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Existing approaches for training these agents, both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, depend on extensive human-annotated task-answer pairs and tool trajectories. However, for complex multimodal tasks, such annotations are prohibitively expensive or impractical to obtain. In this paper, we propose an iterative tool usage exploration method for multimodal agents without any pre-collected data, namely SPORT, via step-wise preference optimization to refine the trajectories of tool usage. Our method enables multimodal agents to autonomously discover effective tool usage strategies through self-exploration and optimization, eliminating the bottleneck of human annotation. SPORT has four iterative components: task synthesis, step sampling, step verification, and preference tuning. We first synthesize multimodal tasks using language models. Then, we introduce a novel trajectory exploration scheme, where step sampling and step verification are executed alternately to solve synthesized tasks. In step sampling, the agent tries different tools and obtains corresponding results. In step verification, we employ a verifier to provide AI feedback to construct step-wise preference data. The data is subsequently used to update the controller for tool usage through preference tuning, producing a SPORT agent. By interacting with real environments, the SPORT agent gradually evolves into a more refined and capable system. Evaluation in the GTA and GAIA benchmarks shows that the SPORT agent achieves 6.41% and 3.64% improvements, underscoring the generalization and effectiveness introduced by our method. The project page is https://SPORT-Agents.github.io.

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

On the Variance of Temporal Difference Learning and its Reduction Using Control Variates

arXiv:2606.20357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the variance of temporal difference (TD) learning using the phased setting with tabular representation, and show that one of the mechanisms behind its ability to reduce variance is by effectively aggregating over a larger number of independent trajectories. Based on this insight, we demonstrate that (1) the variance of TD is asymptotically bounded from above by Monte Carlo (MC) estimators, and (2) shorter horizon updates incurs less variance for a fixed number of samples. Beyond TD, we show that Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE), a method for estimating the advantage function, can be seen as a type of regression-adjusted control variate, which achieves a tighter bound on the variance compared to TD in the large-sample limit. Finally, we numerically illustrate the behaviors of these estimators with carefully designed environments.

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

Computational Identifiability

arXiv:2606.19361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identification conditions describe the computability of a target query or parameter of interest as a function of the type and amount of information available. In causal identification, this information is often expressed in the form of a causal graph, and data are observed or collected for some subset of variables in the graph. Target queries may be for a single effect alone or for a class of effects in a given model. The derivation of an identification algorithm then defines mathematically the process by which the desired causal effect(s) can be uniquely determined, theoretically, in expectation. Identifiability in expectation, or 'theoretical identifiability,' generally assumes asymptotic properties, infinite data, or other mathematically idealized conditions. In this paper, we explore a fundamental distinction between this theoretical, idealized notion of identifiability and a proposed alternative that is computation-bound. The framework we propose - 'computational identifiability' - is to instead define a finite computational search procedure for an empirical estimator. If this process finds an estimator empirically, within a desired error tolerance, then identifiability is satisfied, conditional on the specified assumptions of the search (i.e., a prior distribution over the parameters) and conditional on the search procedure itself. Through several experiments, we demonstrate how this framework allows us to answer fine-grained, practical identification questions, such as identification with small finite samples, with ambiguous graphical criteria, with mixed observational-interventional data, and across counterfactual data and estimands. Code is available at https://github.com/lbynum/metadentify.

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

Gender Differences in AI Literacy Workshop Outcomes and Deepfake Engagement

arXiv:2606.14718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy initiatives expand in K-12 settings, understanding how gender shapes student baseline perceptions, tool-use, and responsiveness to interventions is essential for equitable curriculum design. This study examines gender differences in AI literacy, safety awareness, and STEM career aspirations among Australian secondary students (Years 7, 8, and 10; N(pre) = 199, n(post) = 136) from two co-educational government schools who participated in a one-day AI literacy workshop. Using statistical regression methods controlling for year level and school, we found that pre-workshop, male students reported significantly higher STEM career interest across all three domains (AI, computer science, and engineering), while female students were significantly more likely to use AI for schoolwork and to seek advice from AI tools. Gender-differentiated patterns also emerged in deepfake behaviours: males were significantly more likely to have created or shared deepfake content. Both genders improved in AI knowledge post-intervention, yet females showed a richer profile of gains: wider conceptual understanding, greater confidence, and meaningful increases in AI and CS career interest that partially narrowed the gender STEM gap. These findings highlight the need for gender-responsive AI curricula, particularly deepfake safety education for male students, and demonstrate that even single-day workshops can narrow gender gaps in STEM aspirations and AI confidence.

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

Self-Generated Error Training for Token Editing in Diffusion Language Models

作者:

Token-to-token (T2T) editing lets LLaDA2.1 revise committed tokens during block-diffusion decoding. The released recipe trains this editor on random vocabulary corruptions, but at inference the editor sees the model's own fluent, high-confidence draft errors instead. We study this training-inference mismatch and propose self-generated T2T, which performs a no-gradient draft pass, fills masked positions with predicted tokens, and supervises recovery in a second pass under these self-generated corruptions. We implement the update as a short LoRA continued-pretraining pass on LLaDA2.1-mini and evaluate on several benchmarks under the official Q-Mode T2T procedure with unchanged inference parameters. The method generally improves accuracy while reducing T2T edit intensity, mitigating failure modes such as final-digit transcription errors after otherwise correct reasoning and excessive self-correction before short factual answers.