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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Daily briefing: How many elementary particles are there?

作者:

Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality. Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality.

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

SpAArSIST: Sparsified AASIST for Efficient and Reliable Anti-Spoofing

arXiv:2606.11674v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpAArSIST, a deployment-oriented refinement of the widely used AASIST graph pooling backend for self-supervised learning (SSL) based anti-spoofing. Motivated by redundant operations in public implementations, we replace learned pooling and stack-node attention with explicit, lightweight choices: separate train and inference graph pooling ratios $(k_{\mathrm{tr}},k_{\mathrm{inf}})$, magnitude-based node scoring, and mean aggregation of graph nodes. The best overall configuration (rank 1) cuts backend compute by 20.7% (195.045M $\rightarrow$ 154.706M MACs) and model size by 4.1% (611.8k $\rightarrow$ 586.4k params), while improving out-of-domain robustness on In-the-Wild to 2.82% EER and 0.078 minDCF (from 4.64% and 0.133) and remaining competitive on ASVspoof5. We further provide a composite selection score that summarizes accuracy, calibration, and compute to support balanced deployment-oriented model choice.

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

NarrativeWorldBench: A Frontier-Saturated Benchmark and a Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Co-Creative Audio Drama

Long-form serialized audio drama, with arcs that run for 200 to 800 episodes, is a major creative medium and a setting where frontier large language models (LLMs) fail. We benchmark 21 models, spanning classical, fine-tuned, open-frontier, closed-frontier, and reasoning tiers, on a uniform set of structural narrative metrics. All closed-frontier systems saturate at a plot-beat F1 in the band [0.78, 0.81] and collapse by about -0.20 F1 at horizon h=200. We introduce NarrativeWorldBench, an open benchmark of nine narrative-structure metrics evaluated across horizons h in {10, 20, 50, 100, 200}, with cross-lingual evaluation across four Indic languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi). We introduce N-VSSM, a Narrative Variational State-Space Model that maintains a structured 256-dimensional latent world state over more than 200 episodes via a Mamba-2 backbone with an event-conditioned posterior and an 8B decoder. N-VSSM holds plot-beat F1 >= 0.84 across all horizons at 4x lower compute than the closed-frontier band. A learned Cultural Transfer Function lifts cross-language fidelity by +0.20 to +0.23 Likert points. In a within-subjects writer study (n = 12 professional authors, 240 trials), N-VSSM is preferred over Claude Opus 4.5 on long-arc consistency 71% of the time and rated +1.3 Likert points higher on controllability.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

From Seeing to Experiencing: Scaling Navigation Foundation Models with Reinforcement Learning

Navigation foundation models trained on massive web-scale data enable agents to generalize across diverse environments and embodiments. However, these models, which are trained solely on offline data, often lack the capacity to reason about the consequences of their actions or adapt through counterfactual understanding. They thus face significant limitations in real-world urban navigation, where interactive and safe behaviors, such as avoiding obstacles and moving pedestrians, are critical. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Seeing-to-Experiencing (S2E) learning framework to scale the capability of navigation foundation models with reinforcement learning. S2E combines the strengths of pretraining on offline videos and post-training through reinforcement learning. It maintains the model's generalizability acquired from large-scale real-world videos while enhancing its interactivity through reinforcement learning in simulation environments. Specifically, we introduce two innovations: (1) an Anchor-Guided Distribution Matching strategy for offline pretraining, which stabilizes learning and models diverse motion patterns through anchor-based supervision; and (2) a Residual-Attention Module for reinforcement learning, which obtains reactive behaviors from simulation environments without erasing the model's pretrained knowledge. Moreover, we establish a comprehensive end-to-end evaluation benchmark, NavBench-GS, built on photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions of real-world scenes that incorporate physical interactions. It can systematically assess the generalizability and safety of navigation foundation models.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

DTVEM-RE: A Hierarchical Random-Effects Extension of the Differential Time-Varying Effect Model for Person-Specific Multi-Lag Estimation in Intensive Longitudinal Data

arXiv:2606.14116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Differential Time-Varying Effect Model (DTVEM) of Jacobson et al. (2019) is a popular tool for finding the best time lag in intensive longitudinal data, but it assumes everyone shares the same lag structure. The original authors named fixing this as future work, and it clashes with the premise of modern clinical research, which is that people differ. We present DTVEM-RE, an extension that lets each person have their own lag coefficients, with two versions of the confirmatory step: a discrete-time hierarchical Bayesian VAR in Stan, which pools across people and gives calibrated uncertainty, and a continuous-time per-person Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model in ctsem, which handles unevenly spaced beeps directly. We report four results. A simulation shows the Bayesian version recovers the between-person spread tau_a with bias below 0.01 and coverage of 90 to 93 percent. On the Fisher et al. (2017) EMA dataset (N=40), person-specific lag-1 effects vary by an order of magnitude across three mood items, the Bayesian and GAMM estimates agree closely (r=0.87 to 0.92), and DTVEM-RE gives the best one-step-ahead prediction among four discrete-time methods. A multi-lag version shows all nine tau_k values have credible intervals excluding zero, and the lag where people differ most changes across items, something lag-1-only methods like mlVAR cannot detect. Finally, the two versions agree almost exactly on person-specific lag-1 estimates (r >= 0.995), differing only as shrinkage predicts. DTVEM-RE is, to our knowledge, the first person-specific implementation of DTVEM-style lag detection, and it contains standard DTVEM as a special case.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Estimating the effectiveness of syndromic screening at airports for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease

We used a stochastic simulation model to estimate the effectiveness of combined exit and entry airport screening for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease (BVD), using natural-history parameters from a Bayesian re-analysis of the 2012 Isiro outbreak. For a 12-hour international flight from DRC or Uganda at 86% screening sensitivity, we estimate 65% of infected travellers would arrive undetected (95% CrI: 38 - 76%). The main driver of this outcome is the relative duration of the the incubation period (approximately 7.7 days) and the onset-to-severe-disease interval (approximately 4 days): most infected travellers board before symptom onset and are undetectable by any syndromic screen, whilst those who are symptomatic progress rapidly to illness severe enough to preclude travel. This is compounded during active epidemic growth, when recently exposed (and therefore pre-symptomatic) cases are overrepresented among travellers. Syndromic airport screening offers limited protection against BVD spread via air travel, and should be complemented by outbreak control at source and strengthened clinical surveillance in receiving countries with high travel connectivity to affected areas.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Units

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown strong potential for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. However, enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and editable facial expression control remains fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic conflicts between speech-driven facial dynamics and explicit expression signals. Existing methods rely on implicit multimodal fusion, leading to spatial entanglement and temporal instability. We present EmoZone-Talker, a novel framework that reformulates audio-driven facial animation as a structured spatial-temporal coordination problem under cross-modal conflicts. Our approach introduces an explicit spatial disentanglement and temporal dynamics modeling of facial motion. Specifically, we propose Synergy Zones with Prioritized Attention Bias (SZ-PAB) to explicitly decouple modality contributions via region-wise constraints guided by anatomical priors, and a Channel-Independent Temporal AU Encoder (CIT-AE) to model temporally coherent AU dynamics. By integrating these representations into 3D Gaussian deformation, EmoZone-Talker enables precise and interpretable control over facial expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves expression controllability and realism, with notable gains in upper-face accuracy and temporal coherence, while preserving high rendering quality and accurate lip synchronization. Code will be publicly released to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Beyond Perplexity: UTF-8 Validity in Byte-aware Language Models

Byte-level tokenization enables language models to handle any Unicode input, but models can generate invalid UTF-8 sequences when encountering rare or unseen characters. We investigate the relationship between training scale and UTF-8 generation reliability with a 355M parameter model trained on 80B tokens from a balanced multilingual corpus of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. We introduce multiple evaluation protocols that isolate UTF-8 structural validity from language modeling. UTF-8 validity convergence lags perplexity by a roughly a factor of two: perplexity stabilizes after 2.1B tokens, but UTF-8 validity requires 4.2B tokens. In context-free generation, rare characters achieve higher structural validity than common characters, suggesting over-specialization of frequent character representations. Through experiments, we observed that reliable UTF-8 generation is a distinct capability requiring evaluation beyond perplexity.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Embedded Machine Learning for Microcontroller-Class Edge Devices: Data, Feature, Evaluation, and Deployment Pipelines

arXiv:2606.18122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embedded machine learning moves inference from cloud services to resource-constrained devices that must acquire data, preprocess signals, run a model, and act within tight limits on memory, energy, and latency. This paper presents a systems-oriented synthesis of an embedded machine-learning workflow for microcontroller-class platforms. The emphasis is placed on engineering decisions that are often hidden in generic machine-learning introductions: sampling and buffering, feature extraction as dimensionality reduction, validation under class imbalance, model/runtime co-design, and streaming deployment. Two representative signal families are used throughout the paper. The first is inertial motion recognition, where a two-second, three-axis accelerometer window is transformed from raw samples into root-mean-square and spectral features before classification. The second is keyword spotting, where audio is sampled, anti-aliased, transformed into mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, and processed by a compact one-dimensional convolutional network. The paper concludes with practical design rules for robust on-device inference, including data curation, quantization, thresholding, scheduling, and field monitoring.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NOVA: NOise-aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration for Robust Large Language Models in RAG Systems

Accurately assessing model confidence is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in mission-critical factual domains. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely adopted to improve grounding, confidence calibration in RAG settings remains poorly understood. We conduct a systematic study across four benchmarks, revealing that LLMs exhibit poor calibration performance especially when noisy contexts are retrieved. Specifically, contradictory or irrelevant evidence tends to exacerbate the model's overconfidence issue. To address this, we propose NOVA Rules (NOise-Aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration Rules) to provide a principled foundation for resolving overconfidence under noise. We further design NOVA, a noise-aware calibration framework that synthesizes supervision from ~2K HotpotQA examples guided by these rules. By performing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with this data, NOVA equips models with intrinsic noise awareness without relying on stronger teacher models. Empirical results show that NOVA yields substantial gains, improving ECE scores by 10.9% in-domain and 8.0% out-of-domain. By bridging the gap between retrieval noise and verbal calibration, NOVA paves the way for both accurate and epistemically reliable LLMs.

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

A Learning Method with Gap-Aware Generation for Heterogeneous DAG Scheduling

arXiv:2603.23249v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient scheduling of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is a core problem in large-scale data-intensive computing systems, where query plans, data-processing workloads, and computation graphs consist of dependent tasks competing for limited heterogeneous resource pools. In practice, achieving high-performance execution requires schedulers to adapt across environments with varying resource pools and task types, while generating schedules under tight runtime budgets. We propose WeCAN, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework for heterogeneous DAG scheduling that addresses task-pool compatibility coefficients and generation-induced optimality gaps. It adopts a two-stage single-pass design: a single forward pass produces task-pool scores and global parameters, followed by a generation map that constructs schedules without repeated network calls. Its weighted cross-attention encoder models task-pool interactions gated by compatibility coefficients, and is size-agnostic to environment fluctuations. Moreover, widely used list-scheduling maps can incur generation-induced optimality gaps from restricted reachability. We introduce an order-space analysis that characterizes the reachable set of generation maps via feasible schedule orders, explains the mechanism behind generation-induced gaps, and yields sufficient conditions for gap elimination. Guided by these conditions, we design a skip-extended realization with an analytically parameterized decreasing skip rule, which enlarges the reachable order set while preserving single-pass efficiency. Experiments on real-world TPC-H query DAGs, resource-intensive workload datasets, and ML-compiler computation graphs demonstrate improved makespan over strong baselines, with inference time comparable to classical heuristics and faster than multi-round neural schedulers.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing

We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artist-reminiscent triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.

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

Acceleration of an algebraic multigrid pressure solver using graph neural networks

arXiv:2606.19251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Solving the pressure-Poisson equation remains the primary computational bottleneck in incompressible unstructured flow solvers primarily due to the inherent sensitivity of traditional linear solvers to mesh irregularities. This work introduces a data-driven algebraic multigrid (AMG) smoother that uses a modified graph convolutional isomorphism network (GCIN). The graph neural network predicts optimal polynomial coefficients to construct a sparse pseudo-inverse operator across diverse grid topologies. The coefficients are optimized to reduce the residual after each V-cycle iteration. By directly capturing the algebraic structure of the system from the sparse coefficient matrix, the proposed method maintains the solver's linearity while adapting to local anisotropies in unstructured grids. Our framework demonstrates significant performance gains by reducing the number of V-cycles required for a given tolerance and delivering wall-clock speedups from 4% to 37% across diverse benchmarks. Notably, the model exhibits robust generalization by maintaining efficiency on meshes up to 128 times larger than those seen in training, and by accelerating the solver's convergence on unseen industry-relevant problems such as the AirfRANS dataset.

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

Discovery under Hypothesis Redundancy: A Geometric Theory of Discovery Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.14386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific discovery saturates when new hypotheses cease to provide independent information, even if the nominal hypothesis space remains large. We study hybrid discovery systems that combine structured local search with LLM-generated non-local proposals and pose the Search Compression Hypothesis: non-local exploration helps only when three geometric conditions co-occur: spectral compression, orthogonal escape from the explored span, and residual signal alignment with the target. We formalize these conditions, derive necessary conditions for hybrid advantage, and test the mechanism in controlled synthetic environments, large-scale A-share factor discovery, and symbolic-regression benchmarks; a public tabular operational sanity check tests the associated budget-allocation implication. Signal-planting and directed-versus-random experiments show that novelty alone is insufficient: random orthogonal jumps expand coverage but do not improve yield without predictive alignment. Across compression sweeps, real factor archives, and LLM-SRBench tasks, hybrid gains concentrate in weakly represented but target-bearing directions and vanish as the hypothesis space approaches full rank. The framework turns LLM-guided discovery from generic novelty search into a diagnostic procedure for deciding when directed non-local exploration is warranted.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

On McDiarmid's Inequality under Dependence via Approximate Tensorization of Entropy

arXiv:2606.12720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We argue that dependent versions of McDiarmid's inequality are a useful but underutilized tool in mathematical statistics, learning theory and theoretical computer science. To make this point, we first highlight that approximate tensorization of entropy (ATE) implies McDiarmid's via the Entropy Method. Second, we derive McDiarmid's inequality for non-isotropic Gaussian random vectors $X \sim \mathcal N(\mu, \Sigma)$ through ATE with a constant of the order of the condition number of $\Sigma$. We both independently obtain this ATE through a simple application of stochastic localization and also discuss how a more general ATE for the Gibbs sampler due to Ascolani et al., 2026 generalizes McDiarmid's-like concentration to strongly log-concave and log-smooth probability measures. We then apply the resulting concentration inequalities to resolve a question on the concentration of $\operatorname{sign}(X)$ posed by Simone Bombari, investigate Erdős-Rényi graphs under dependence and prove a Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for observations from a joint measure fulfilling ATE and continuous marginal CDFs. For the class of strongly log-concave and log-smooth measures, this result improves upon a prior Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for non-i.i.d. observations due to Bobkov and Götze, 2010, by establishing the expected $1/\sqrt{n}$-rate of convergence under weak dependence instead of $n^{-1/3}$.

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

APEX: Automated Prompt Engineering eXpert with Dynamic Data Selection

Large Language Models are highly sensitive to prompt formulation, necessitating automatic prompt optimization to unlock their full potential. While evolutionary algorithms have emerged as the dominant paradigm, they suffer from a critical bottleneck: data efficiency. Current methods treat the development dataset as a static benchmark, wasting significant compute budget on uninformative data. In this work, we introduce APEX (Automatic Prompt Engineering eXpert), a novel framework that optimizes the data usage alongside the prompt search. APEX dynamically stratifies the dataset into Easy, Hard, and Mixed tiers based on the optimization lineage. By prioritizing the Mixed tier, which identifies the data where the LLM has mixed performance, we identify two high-leverage subsets: the addressable frontier for generating informative mutations and the rank-sensitive frontier for distinguishing candidate quality. We evaluate APEX across three diverse benchmarks: IFBench, SimpleQA Verified, and FACTS Grounding. Under a fixed budget of 5,000 evaluation calls, due to its data efficiency, APEX outperforms the initial prompt by an average of 11.2% on Gemini 2.5 Flash and 6.8% on Gemma 3 27B, demonstrating that a data-centric approach is key to efficient and effective prompt optimization.

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

Scaling Human and G2P Supervision for Robust Phonetic Transcription

Expert phonetic annotation is costly, especially for non-standard dialects and atypical speech. A common alternative is using Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) models to auto-generate phonetic labels from text transcripts at scale. We study how automatic phonetic transcription performance scales with human and G2P supervision in English. Using a curated 80-hour benchmark spanning native, non-native and post-stroke speech, we identify a supervision quality threshold: G2P supervision helps only when fewer than 20-30 hours of human annotation are available. Beyond this threshold, it provides no significant benefit and can reduce cross-dialect robustness. What is effective after this threshold is ASR pretraining which we use to achieve a 2.3x reduction in weighted phone feature error rate over prior systems, with strong gains on non-native and aphasic speech. These results suggest that quantity-driven G2P scaling may yield diminishing returns for robust generalization.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure-Based Immunoinformatics Design of a CTB-Adjuvanted Multi-Epitope Mucosal Vaccine Against Helicobacter pylori

Background: Helicobacter pylori coloniz the gastric mucosa of nearly half of the global population and is classified as a Group I carcinogen by the World Health Organization due to its strong association with gastric cancer. The growing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant H. pylori strains significantly compromises current therapeutic strategies, emphasizing the urgent need for effective prophylactic approaches. Research design and methods; In this study, a novel multi-epitope vaccine was designed targeting H. pylori, incorporating epitopes from four key virulence proteins: BabB, SabB, SabA, and VacA. Using an immunoinformatics-guided structural vaccinology approach, B- and T-cell epitopes were predicted, prioritized based on immunogenicity, conservation, population coverage, and non-homology to human proteins, and assembled into the final vaccine construct. To enhance immunogenicity and specifically stimulate mucosal immune responses, the cholera toxin B subunit (CTB) was fused at the N-terminal via an EAAAK linker, a novel application in H. pylori multi-epitope vaccines. The PADRE universal epitope and additional linkers were incorporated to optimize epitope presentation and helper T-cell activation. Results: Comprehensive evaluations of physicochemical, antigenic, allergenic, and toxic properties were conducted, followed by secondary and tertiary structure modeling, refinement, and validation. Conformational B-cell epitopes were mapped, and molecular docking, binding affinity analysis, energy minimization, and molecular dynamics simulations confirmed structural stability and receptor interactions. Codon optimization and in silico cloning predicted efficient expression in Escherichia coli, while immune simulations suggested robust humoral and cellular responses. Conclusions: This study presents a promising multi-epitope vaccine candidate against H. pylori, offering a rational framework for future experimental validation and potential clinical application.

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

Can LLM Coding Agents Reason About Time Series?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for automated decision-making systems in finance, healthcare, or environmental monitoring. Time series data are ubiquitous in these fields, yet hard to process automatically. Can time series be analyzed by LLM agents? We examine three approaches: providing the agent with raw numerical data, using the LLM as a coding agent, or a combination of both. In the coding agent setup, the model iteratively queries the data using Python code. Using two time series understanding benchmarks, we show that agents with code access can outperform models processing raw data by up to 10%. However, even the best performing agent still answers about 22-34% of the questions incorrectly. To get insights into models' strategies and reasoning gaps, we analyze the model outputs with a strong LLM judge. Our analysis reveals that coding agents can select appropriate statistical tests, but often miss important nuances. Meanwhile, models with access to raw data can reach the right conclusions using back-of-the-envelope calculations.

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

Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing

In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.

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

Is Stochastic Gradient Descent Effective? A PDE Perspective on Machine Learning processes

arXiv:2501.08425v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of E, Li and Tai (2017), the underlying structure of such processes can be understood via parabolic PDEs of Fokker-Planck type, which are at the core of our analysis. Even if Fokker-Planck equations have a long history and a extensive literature, almost nothing is known when the potential is non-convex or when the diffusion matrix is degenerate, and this is the main difficulty that we face in our analysis. We identify two different regimes: in the initial phase of SGD, the loss function drives the weights to concentrate around the nearest local minimum. We refer to this phase as the drift regime and we provide quantitative estimates on this concentration phenomenon. Next, we introduce the diffusion regime, where stochastic fluctuations help the learning process to escape suboptimal local minima. We analyze the Mean Exit Time (MET) and prove upper and lower bounds of the MET. Finally, we address the asymptotic convergence of SGD, for a non-convex cost function and a degenerate diffusion matrix, that do not allow to use the standard approaches, and require new techniques. For this purpose, we exploit two different methods: duality and entropy methods. We provide new results about the dynamics and effectiveness of SGD, offering a deep connection between stochastic optimization and PDE theory, and some answers and insights to basic questions in the Machine Learning processes: How long does SGD take to escape from a bad minimum? Do neural network parameters converge using SGD? How do parameters evolve in the first stage of training with SGD?

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

A Benchmark for Omni-Modal Reasoning in Long Videos

Long-form omni-modal video understanding requires integrating vision, speech, and ambient audio with coherent long-context reasoning. Existing video benchmarks often trade off temporal scale, modality coverage, open-ended interaction, and interpretable scoring. To address this gap, we introduce LongShOTBench, a long video understanding benchmark designed around three coupled goals: holistic omni-modal integration, intent-driven open-ended interaction, and rubric-level diagnosis. It builds single- and multi-turn questions from real viewing scenarios, with systematic tasks probing visual, speech, ambient-audio, temporal, and cross-modal reasoning. Each item includes a reference answer and a weighted criterion-level rubric, letting evaluation identify which perceptual facts, temporal links, modality-grounding requirements, and reasoning steps are satisfied or missed. All samples are manually verified to improve grounding, clarity, and rubric reliability. We also introduce LongShOTAgent, a training-free omni-modal evidence-seeking agent coupling full-video preprocessing with targeted retrieval, query-adaptive segment refinement, and explicit claim verification over visual, speech, and non-speech audio evidence. Its iterative search-refine-verify loop exposes intermediate evidence and lets modality-specific specialists re-analyze relevant moments before answering. We evaluate 105 video-capable models spanning open-source omni-modal models, vision-language systems, audio LLMs, agentic pipelines and closed-source APIs. Current MLLMs remain far from saturating LongShOTBench, while our LongShOTAgent is the strongest training-free system, reaching 66.64% overall. By releasing the benchmark, leaderboard, and method, we provide a shared, interpretable testbed for advancing long-form omni-modal video reasoning. Code, data, and the leaderboard are available at https://longshot.cvmbzuai.com/.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection

arXiv:2606.17775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient processing of continuous audio streams remains a key challenge for real-time and resource-constrained systems. This paper introduces a neuromorphic trigger for audio event detection, based on a spiking neural network (SNN) that selectively gates input to downstream models. The proposed trigger acts as a low-cost front-end, identifying salient audio segments and forwarding only these to a more computationally intensive model for tasks such as classification. The trigger is implemented as a lightweight fully connected SNN and evaluated on two representative tasks: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED). For ASD, the trigger achieves a one-second segment-based F1 score of 0.97 on a class-agnostic form of the URBAN-SED dataset, demonstrating high reliability in identifying relevant audio regions. For SED, the trigger is combined with the Dang classifier on the DCASE 2017 Challenge Task 2 dataset, showing a potential $42.6\times$ reduction in FLOPs while reducing the lower bound of the event-based error rate from 0.41 to 0.25. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic triggers as real-time, energy-efficient front-end filters, enabling substantial reductions in computational cost.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

QSignAI: Quantum-Randomness-Seeded Identity Signatures at the Intersection of AI for Science and Science for AI

arXiv:2605.27729v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The 2024-2025 Nobel and Turing awards recognised AI and quantum science simultaneously. Yet no deployed system has brought these streams together for the public. This paper presents QSignAI, a production-deployed platform demonstrating a bidirectional AI-quantum relationship in a real-time event participation system. We address three questions: can quantum-randomness generation via a two-source extractor be embedded in an AI-driven social platform with acceptable latency; can an AI bot make quantum phenomena perceptually legible to general audiences; and does the combined system work in practice? A conversational bot routes each participant's first message through a quantum pipeline comprising a Toeplitz two-source extractor over independent single-qubit Hadamard measurements on SV1 and DM1 simulators, plus a 2-qubit Bell state, producing a unique quantum-randomness-seeded identity signature per participant. The first two questions are answered through system architecture and qualitative deployment evidence from live events; the third through successful production deployment. The current deployment uses cloud quantum simulators; physical QPU randomness is the near-term extension. Measurable benchmarks are identified as priority future work.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Restless bandits with imperfect binary feedback: PCL-indexability analysis and computation

arXiv:2606.11192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study restless bandits with binary latent states and imperfect binary feedback, motivated by opportunistic spectrum access with sensing errors. For the associated belief-state model, we develop a partial conservation laws (PCL)-based analytical and computational framework for establishing indexability and evaluating the Whittle index, building on a verification theorem for real-state discounted restless bandits. The framework analyzes the stochastic dynamics via an associated deterministic skeleton, renewal decompositions, and combinatorics on words. It yields tractable expressions for discounted reward and resource metrics in several threshold regimes, enabling full verification of the PCL-indexability conditions there. For the remaining regime, where a complete analytic verification is not achieved in this paper, we derive efficient numerical schemes for computing the relevant marginal metrics and the marginal productivity (MP) index, which equals the Whittle index when those conditions hold. Extensive computational experiments provide strong evidence that these conditions also hold in that regime across broad parameter ranges and without the stringent parameter restrictions imposed in prior work. The experiments further show that theMP index policy typically outperforms standard benchmark policies, often by a substantial margin.