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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Physics-Informed Neural Network with Squeeze-Excitation-like Attention

arXiv:2606.19853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce SEA-PINN, a novel architecture that incorporates a Squeeze-Excitation-like attention mechanism into physics-informed neural networks to dynamically recalibrate the importance of neurons across layers. A key feature of SEA-PINN is its highly stable initialization. On 17 out of 20 benchmark problems, SEA-PINN exhibit nearly negligible variance and significantly reduced initial loss, establishing a quasi-deterministic and favorable starting point for optimization. Notably, without employing Fourier feature embeddings or periodic activation functions, SEA-PINN attained competitive accuracy (83\% vs. 90\% improvement relative to FNN-PINN on the high-frequency case 7) as compared with TSA-PINN-a model specifically engineered for high-frequency problems via learnable frequencies in sinusoidal activations. Furthermore, integrating SEA-PINN into TSA-PINN boosted performance by 42.49\%. These results underscore SEA-PINN as a lightweight plug-in module that enhances nonlinear representation power, promotes more robust and efficient convergence, and strengthens the overall reliability of physics-informed learning.

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

Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.14941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting models often benefit from historical patterns. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), recent research explored retrieving relevant historical time series segments to enhance forecasting. However, relying solely on time series similarity is often insufficient for retrieval under non-stationarity. To address this, we propose a multimodal approach: a Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting framework, SERAF. Unlike mainstream approaches that depend only on time series similarity, SERAF conducts dual retrieval over the time series and their self-generated textual descriptions. It retrieves two complementary sets of historical patterns and corresponding futures, which are selectively and jointly used to guide future predictions. Experiments across seven real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SERAF in bridging numerical and semantic views of time series compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Stop the Sampler! Classifier-Based Adaptive Stopping for Sampling Kernels

arXiv:2606.16073v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sampling from complex, unnormalized probability densities is a fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. While Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide asymptotic guarantees, they often suffer from slow mixing and high computational costs due to fixed or manually tuned trajectory lengths. In this work, we propose a novel framework that treats trajectory termination as a learnable component of the sampling dynamics. By framing MCMC within the theory of non-acyclic generative flow networks (GFlowNets), we train state-dependent neural classifiers to decide when a trajectory has reached a high-density region and should terminate. We theoretically establish the connection between optimal classifiers and the target density via detailed balance conditions and introduce a multilevel training scheme to facilitate exploration in complex geometries. Experimental results across various benchmark densities demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces average trajectory lengths while improving mode coverage and mixing compared to standard MCMC baselines.

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

Enhancing Pathological VLMs with Cross-scale Reasoning

Pathological images are inherently multi-scale, requiring pathologists to integrate evidence from global tissue architecture at low magnification to cellular morphology at higher magnification for accurate diagnosis. While existing pathological datasets for vision-language model (VLM) include various scales, they often lack an explicit cross-scale reasoning objective. This limitation prevents VLMs from capturing essential cross-scale representations and learning evidence-based reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first cross-scale training and evaluation paradigm that formulates pathology interpretation as multi-magnification reasoning. However, creating such a task reveals a critical challenge: multi-image visual question answering (VQA) is prone to text-only shortcuts, which allow models to guess answers using magnification-dependent artifacts rather than visual evidence. To address this, we propose a leakage-aware curation pipeline that combines adversarial text-only screening with constraint-guided question design. Using this pipeline, we construct Scale-VQA, a high-quality benchmark with 4,685 multiple-choice questions grounded in 2,537 pathology images across multiple magnification levels. Finally, we present ScaleReasoner-R1, a model trained via reinforcement learning to optimize performance on the cross-scale VQA task. ScaleReasoner-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on our cross-scale reasoning benchmark and generalizes to SOTA performance on established single-scale benchmarks. Findings suggest that even the limited cross-scale supervision can significantly improve pathological understanding. The code and demos will be open-sourced.

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

Decision-Weighted Flow Matching for Contextual Stochastic Optimization

arXiv:2606.16790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional generative models are increasingly used as scenario generators for stochastic optimization, but standard training objectives emphasize uniform distributional fit rather than the downstream decisions induced by generated scenarios. This creates an objective mismatch: errors in statistically common regions may have little effect on decision regret, whereas errors in decision-sensitive regions can substantially change the optimal action. We propose Decision-Weighted Flow Matching (DW-FM), a regret-aligned training framework that preserves the simplicity of standard flow matching while reweighting its velocity-regression objective using decision-sensitive endpoint information. Theoretically, we connect downstream regret to pathwise velocity mismatch through a loss-induced decision discrepancy and an adjoint transport argument, yielding an ideal regret-aligned surrogate and practical endpoint-weighted objectives with regret guarantees. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of DW-FM on three CVaR-based contextual stochastic optimization benchmarks spanning synthetic portfolio, semi-real financial, and traffic-CVaR tasks, where DW-FM improves downstream regret over standard baselines.

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

Smol-GS: Compact Representations for Abstract 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present Smol-GS, a novel method for learning compact representations for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our approach learns highly efficient splat-wise features to model 3D space, which capture abstracted cues, including color, opacity, transformation, and material properties. We propose octree-derived positional encoding, which explicitly models spatial locality and enhances representation efficiency. We further apply entropy-based compression to exploit feature redundancy and compress splat coordinates using a recursive voxel hierarchy. This design enables orders-of-magnitude reduction in storage while preserving representation flexibility. Smol-GS achieves state-of-the-art compression performance on standard benchmarks with high-level rendering quality.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Neuromorphic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Efficient Pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems

arXiv:2606.20031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic environmental changes, confined workspaces, and stringent real-time constraints make pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems (RMFS) a challenging problem for conventional search- and rule-based methods, which typically suffer from high computational complexity and long decision latency. While reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful alternative, deploying learned policies with extreme energy efficiency on resource-constrained hardware remains an open challenge. We present SDQN-RMFS, an end-to-end framework that achieves high-fidelity deployment of an RL-trained policy from a full-precision artificial neural network (ANN) through to a neuromorphic chip. By computing only when triggered by sparse events, this framework unlocks ultra-low-power RMFS pathfinding. Our full-stack pipeline operates as follows: an ANN policy is first efficiently trained via a collision-allowing strategy to densify informative trajectories, and then converted into a spiking neural network (SNN) via a hard-label knowledge distillation approach. This effectively addresses the output distribution mismatch, preserving policy capability across the ANN-to-SNN pipeline while substantially reducing inference latency. Hardware experiments demonstrate up to 11,281$\times$ energy savings and a nearly two-fold reduction in latency compared to a high-performance GPU baseline, while maintaining decision quality on par with the original trained policy. These results establish physical neuromorphic inference as a practical and energy-sustainable pathway for large-scale RMFS operations.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RecourseBench: A Modular Framework for Reproducible Algorithmic Recourse Evaluation

arXiv:2606.16113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithmic recourse methods provide counterfactual explanations that inform individuals of the actions required to overturn an unfavorable model decision. Despite rapid methodological progress, principled comparison remains elusive; existing frameworks are often difficult to extend and lack both interoperability and systematic verification that integrated methods faithfully reproduce their originally reported results. We introduce RecourseBench, a unified evaluation framework built around three commitments namely, modularity, reproducibility, and interactivity. The framework decomposes the pipeline into five fully decoupled layers – Data, Preprocessing, Model, Recourse Method, and Evaluation – governed by abstract interfaces and a dynamic registry. To address the reproducibility gap in prior benchmarks, we introduce a four-tier classification system in which every integrated method is validated by an automated test suite against its originally reported results. We further provide an interactive web interface for flexible, configuration-driven comparison across methods, datasets, and model architectures. Our framework currently integrates 28 state-of-the-art recourse methods and, to our knowledge, constitutes the first recourse benchmark to explicitly enforce method-level reproducibility through automated, quantitative testing.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Real-order moments, tail representations, and logarithmic means

arXiv:2606.14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a unified framework for the study of real-order moments of arbitrary random variables. General integral representations are established in terms of cumulative distribution functions and survival functions, covering continuous, discrete, and mixed distributions supported on the whole real line. These formulas extend the classical tail-integral identities for nonnegative random variables and provide a common treatment of positive, fractional, and negative moments. For discrete distributions, explicit series representations are derived in terms of cumulative probabilities, yielding simple criteria for the existence of moments. Applications are presented for the zeta and Skellam distributions, illustrating how tail behavior determines moment finiteness and how moments can be represented geometrically through cumulative distribution functions. In addition, a representation for logarithmic moments is obtained, linking logarithmic means, Laplace transforms, and the classical Frullani identity. The results provide a unified perspective on moment representations and establish useful connections between tail probabilities, distribution functions, Laplace transforms, and moment existence.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Bridging the Morphology Gap: Adapting VLA Models to Dexterous Manipulation via Intent-Conditioned Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606.12109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization in robotic manipulation, yet the vast majority of pre-trained pipelines remain strictly confined to low-DoF parallel grippers. Adapting these rich semantic priors to high-DoF dexterous hands introduces a severe morphology gap, direct end-to-end joint fine-tuning inherently causes catastrophic forgetting of spatial reasoning and acute action manifold collapse due to data scarcity. In this paper, we present InDex, a novel, data-efficient adaptation framework rooted in cross-morphology semantic inheritance. Rather than discarding the pre-trained 1-DoF parallel grasp output, we repurpose it as a continuous, macroscopic virtual grasp intent proxy to sequentialize the control topology. We implement a two-stage decoupled learning architecture: the first stage parameter-efficiently aligns the VLA backbone to predict continuous arm trajectories and the scalar grasp intent; the second stage freezes this spatial backbone and leverages an intent-conditioned denoising diffusion head to decode fine-grained joint articulations for multi-fingered end-effectors. Extensive simulation benchmarks across a suite of multi-stage, contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks demonstrate that InDex effectively masters intricate skills with minimal demonstration data, substantially outperforming monolithic baselines while preserving the robust spatial generalizability of the original VLA prior.

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

ICA Lens: Interpreting Language Models Without Training Another Dictionary

Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become the standard tool for this purpose, but using them as the default first lens often requires training, storing, and evaluating large overcomplete dictionaries. This bottleneck limits rapid exploration and raises a fundamental question: how much interpretable structure is already visible from activation geometry before training another neural dictionary? Our intuition is simple: many interpretable directions are selective on tokens, and these directions should look less Gaussian than random directions. We therefore revisit independent component analysis (ICA), a classical method for finding non-Gaussian directions, as a compact lens for language-model interpretability. We find that ICA has been underestimated for LLM interpretability, because prior uses often relied on off-the-shelf ICA implementations that are brittle on LLM activations and lacked systematic tools for inspecting and evaluating the recovered directions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ICALens, the first practical workflow for stable, efficient, and auditable ICA analysis of LLM representations. It combines an optimized GPU-parallel FastICA pipeline with LLM-specific stability recipes and better fitting diagnostics, enabling efficient and reliable layer-wise analysis. Across GPT-2 Small, Gemma 2 2B, and Qwen 3.5 2B Base, ICALens efficiently recovers compact, human-interpretable directions without per-layer gradient-based dictionary training. On SAEBench, ICA is competitive with public SAEs in sparse probing and outperforms them in targeted probe perturbation under small-to-medium budgets. These results suggest that ICA should not be viewed as a weak baseline, but as an efficient and complementary first lens for exploring language-model representations.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Initiation of Superradiance from Different Collective Spin States

arXiv:2606.14949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superradiance is an extensive cooperative spontaneous emission phenomenon. Some atomic collective spin states exhibit it. However, distinct initial states differ in their decay dynamics. Dicke states with different numbers of excitations have their peak emission intensity shifted in time depending on the number of excitations. Emission intensity in atomic coherent states depends on their polarization. Some specific states undergo a squeezing controlled crossover, making the emission character dependent on the amount of squeezing in the state. We present detailed results on the superradiant dynamics of a representative selection of Dicke states. For large N, we are able to predict fairly accurately the pulse profile in each case using the mean field approximation, an approach based on the Fokker Planck Equation. We also present results on the intensity correlation function of the emission.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Microscopic exceptional points in the post-selected open Jaynes–Cummings model

arXiv:2606.14982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phenomenological non-Hermitian Hamiltonians track selected signatures of complex reservoir dynamics, while post-selected no-jump effective Hamiltonians derived from microscopic open-system theory reveal the underlying system–reservoir physics. We derive such a Hamiltonian for the open Jaynes–Cummings model using a Moore–Penrose normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ representation that removes the vacuum-sector singularity and diagonalizes the full Hamiltonian by one operator rotation. Starting from a zero-temperature bosonic reservoir, we obtain a Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad master equation under the Born–Markov approximation with full Bohr-frequency resolution. We use partial Bohr-frequency resolution to build a consistent post-selected no-jump Hamiltonian near exceptional points, where decay rates become comparable to Rabi frequencies and remove the scale separation behind full resolution. The normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ form of the resulting non-Hermitian Jaynes–Cummings Hamiltonian reveals the effects of Lamb-shifted detuning, diagonal loss imbalance, and reservoir-modified coupling. Our microscopic exceptional-point analysis recovers the experimentally reported single-excitation exceptional point for unequal independent losses and identifies regimes absent from the standard phenomenological model; for example, equal correlated losses with orthogonal channel phase produce a second-order exceptional point at the same loss-to-coupling ratio in every excitation sector.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligence

While LLMs have substantially advanced text-to-code synthesis, many real programming tasks specify intent through visual artifacts such as screenshots, charts, documents, vector drawings, videos, and interactive states. These tasks require models to connect visual perception to executable programs, because correctness depends not only on syntax but also on layout, geometry, data semantics, editability, interaction behavior, and domain-specific constraints that apply after execution. This survey examines Multimodal Code Intelligence, covering systems that generate, edit, refine, execute, or reason with code under visually grounded inputs and outputs. We first formulate the field by the role that code plays in each task, distinguishing code as a rendered artifact, an editable symbolic structure, a scientific representation, an intermediate reasoning trace, or an executable policy or tool interface. We then organize benchmarks and methods into four domains: Graphical User Interface, Scientific Visualization, Structured Graphics, and Frontier Tasks and Frameworks. This taxonomy connects mature artifact-generation problems to emerging agentic and unified settings and allows us to compare how different tasks treat evidence of correctness. Looking ahead, we argue that future research may benefit from four verification-centered directions. Multi-signal validation can combine complementary evidence of correctness, multi-state verification can test behavior across execution trajectories, cross-task transfer testing can probe reusable visual-code skills, and verifiable agent traces can reveal whether agent actions are grounded in visual evidence. Together, these directions may move multimodal code generation from single-output imitation toward evidence-grounded executable systems.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

LoRDO: Distributed Low-Rank Optimization with Infrequent Communication

arXiv:2602.04396v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed training of foundation models via $\texttt{DDP}$ is limited by interconnect bandwidth. While infrequent communication strategies reduce synchronization frequency, they remain bottlenecked by the memory and communication requirements of optimizer states. Low-rank optimizers can alleviate these constraints; however, in the local-update regime, workers lack access to the full-batch gradients required to compute low-rank projections, which degrades performance. We propose $\texttt{LoRDO}$, a principled framework unifying low-rank optimization with infrequent synchronization. We first demonstrate that, while global projections based on pseudo-gradients are theoretically superior, they permanently restrict the optimization trajectory to a low-rank subspace. To restore subspace exploration, we introduce a full-rank quasi-hyperbolic update. $\texttt{LoRDO}$ achieves near-parity with low-rank $\texttt{DDP}$ in language modeling and downstream tasks at model scales of $125$M–$720$M, while reducing communication by $\approx 10 \times$. Finally, we show that $\texttt{LoRDO}$ improves performance even more in very low-memory settings with small rank/batch size.

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

Training-Free Metrics for Synthetic Object Detection Data: A Proxy for Detector Performance

With the recent advent of image generative models, synthetic data are increasingly being used to supplement limited real datasets for training computer vision models. However, not all synthetic datasets improve performance equally, and their effectiveness can only be assessed by training a downstream model, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This problem is pronounced in the task of object detection, where the required annotations are much more dense due to bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a pre-computable metric family, dubbed Conditional-Composition Domain Match (CCDM), which serves as a proxy for the relative utility of candidate synthetic training sets for downstream detection. Experiments on the VisDrone-DET dataset show that the CCDM metric families achieve a Spearman correlation of 1.0 with the downstream performance of YOLOv8, clearly outperforming existing metrics for synthetic image evaluation.

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

Understanding Cross-Modal Contributions in Continual Vision-Language Models: A Theoretical Perspective

Continual vision-language models are commonly addressed through sequential fine-tuning; however, although this paradigm enables adaptation to new environments (tasks), it inherently emphasizes the contribution of previously learned environments (tasks) at the expense of the stability required to preserve previously acquired knowledge. While existing approaches have adequately studied continual learning and catastrophic forgetting in vision-language models (VLMs), the theoretical understanding of modality-specific contributions across a sequence of environments remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a new theoretical perspective to understand the cross-modal (vision-language) contributions to consecutive environments. We empirically evaluate our theoretical findings on large VLMs and demonstrate their effectiveness in capturing environment-level cross-modal contributions. Our analysis provides deeper insights into continual VLMs, highlighting their contribution robustness to varying task orders and inter-task similarities, and their improved generalization performance.

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

Quality Perceptions and Intended Engagement in Response to AI-Generated and AI-Assisted News

arXiv:2409.03500v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in news production raises important questions about how audiences perceive and respond to AI-generated journalism. This preregistered survey experiment (N = 599, German-speaking Switzerland) examines (i) perceptions of article quality (measured as credibility, readability, and expertise) across news excerpts that were human-written, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated, and (ii) self-reported intentions to engage following disclosure of AI involvement. Participants rated two short news excerpts before learning how they had been produced. Articles across all conditions were evaluated similarly in perceived quality. After disclosure, participants in the AI-assisted and AI-generated conditions reported a higher willingness to continue reading their assigned articles compared to the control group, but future willingness to read AI-generated news did not differ across conditions. Overall, the findings suggest that readers assess AI-generated and human-written news comparably in quality, while disclosure of AI use can momentarily increase curiosity or interest without yet changing longer-term reading intentions.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Bridging Functional Correctness and Runtime Efficiency Gaps in LLM-Based Code Translation

While large language models (LLMs) have greatly advanced the functional correctness of automated code translation systems, the runtime efficiency of translated programs has received comparatively little attention. With the waning of Moore's law, runtime efficiency has become increasingly important for program quality, alongside functional correctness. Our preliminary study reveals that LLM-translated programs often run slower than human-written ones, and this issue cannot be remedied through prompt engineering alone. Therefore, our work proposes SwiftTrans, a code translation framework comprising two key stages: (1) Multi-Perspective Exploration, where MpTranslator leverages parallel in-context learning (ICL) to generate diverse translation candidates; and (2) Difference-Aware Selection, where DiffSelector identifies the optimal candidate by explicitly comparing differences between translations. We further introduce Hierarchical Guidance for MpTranslator and Ordinal Guidance for DiffSelector, enabling LLMs to better adapt to these two core components. To support the evaluation of runtime efficiency in translated programs, we extend existing benchmarks, CodeNet and F2SBench, and introduce a new benchmark, SwiftBench. Experimental results across all three benchmarks show that SwiftTrans achieves consistent improvements in both correctness and runtime efficiency.

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

Amortizing Maximum Inner Product Search with Learned Support Functions

arXiv:2603.08001v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Maximum inner product search (MIPS) is a crucial subroutine in machine learning, requiring the identification of a vector taken within a database (the keys) that best aligns with a given query. We propose amortized MIPS: a regression-based approach that trains neural networks to directly predict MIPS solutions, amortizing the cost of repeatedly solving MIPS for queries drawn from a known distribution over a fixed key database. Our key insight is that the MIPS value function is the support function of the set of keys, a well-studied convex function whose gradient yields the optimal key. This motivates two complementary amortized models: SupportNet, an input-convex neural network trained to regress the support function, and KeyNet, a vector-valued network that directly regresses the optimal key. SupportNet can serve as a cluster router, steering queries toward relevant database partitions, while KeyNet can be used as a drop-in replacement for the original query, fed directly to off-the-shelf indexing pipelines. Our experiments on the BEIR benchmark show that, for document embeddings, learned \SupportNet{}s and \KeyNet{}s significantly improve IVF match rates when accounting for compute effort, whether measured in FLOPs, number of probes, or wall-clock time. Our code is available at: https://github.com/apple/ml-amips.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Probabilistic Salary Prediction with Graph Attention Networks and a Mixture Density Network

arXiv:2606.11663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate salary prediction is critical for bridging the information gap between employers and job seekers in modern labor markets. Existing approaches predominantly yield a single point estimate and treat job attributes such as location, occupation, and industry as independent categorical features, ignoring both the inherent uncertainty and multi-modality of real-world compensation data and the rich hierarchical and semantic-similarity relationships that govern pay norms. In this paper we propose GAT-MDN, a unified framework that addresses both limitations simultaneously. For each of the three attribute domains we construct a domain-specific graph whose edges encode (i) hierarchical parent-child containment and (ii) weighted similarity links derived from a pre-trained Sentence-Transformer. Parallel Graph Attention Networks (GATs) with edge-feature-aware attention learn rich, context-sensitive node representations from these multi-relational graphs. A priority-based hierarchical selection module then assembles a composite feature vector that gracefully handles missing or coarse attributes, and a Mixture Density Network (MDN) head maps this vector to the parameters of a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), yielding a full conditional salary distribution. Extensive experiments on a real-world Dutch job-posting dataset of over 1 million records demonstrate that GAT-MDN significantly outperforms a non-graph MLP-MDN baseline in both Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) and Mean Squared Error (MSE).

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

When Should Agent Trust Be Conditional? Characterizing and Attacking Skill-Conditional Reputation in Agent Swarms

arXiv:2606.14200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open platforms increasingly route tasks among heterogeneous LLM agents–differing in base model, scaffold, and tool stack–whose competence varies sharply by skill: an agent excellent at one skill may be useless at another. The standard reputation approach summarizes each agent by a single global trust score, but that scalar is the wrong object here, because routing every task to the globally most-trusted agent leaves the value of specialization unclaimed. We study skill-conditional trust R(i | k)–the trust to place in agent i for a task requiring skill k, rather than one score per agent–and pose three falsifiable questions: when is conditioning worth it, how much cross-skill evidence should be borrowed, and whether that borrowing is safe. A controlled phase-diagram analysis answers the first two: conditional trust wins only in a specific regime–high agent heterogeneity, sparse per-skill evidence, and correlated skills–and the coupling strength beta that buys this data efficiency is dual-use, because the same cross-skill borrowing is also a laundering channel. On a public benchmark of 14 genuinely heterogeneous AppWorld agents, real pools land inside the beneficial regime–a small but genuine gain, with the per-skill best agent genuinely changing across skills. We then show that an attacker with cheap evidence in one skill and none in a target skill hijacks the conditional router, driving routing regret from 0 to 0.94 on a pool our zero-cost Conditional Information Value Test (CIVT) rates GREEN–while the ungated trust verdict it contaminates reads -0.06 instead of the honest +0.19. A zero-evidence gate bounds the attack but does not eliminate it; we characterize the residual cost under an explicit budget. We do not claim Sybil-resistance–we quantify the trade-off.

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

Questioning the Coverage-Length Metric in Conformal Prediction: When Shorter Intervals Are Not Better

arXiv:2601.21455v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conformal prediction(CP) has become a cornerstone of distribution-free uncertainty quantification, conventionally evaluated by its coverage and interval length. This work critically examines the sufficiency of these standard metrics. We demonstrate that the interval length might be deceptively improved through a counter-intuitive approach termed Prejudicial Trick(PT), while the coverage remains valid. Specifically, for any given test sample, PT probabilistically returns an interval, which is either null or constructed using an adjusted confidence level, thereby preserving marginal coverage. While PT potentially yields a deceptively lower interval length, it introduces practical vulnerabilities: the same input can yield completely different prediction intervals across repeated runs of the algorithm. We formally derive the conditions under which PT achieves these misleading improvements and provide extensive empirical evidence across various regression and classification tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric interval stability which helps detect whether a new CP method implicitly improves the length based on such PT-like techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/benben-cd/PT-Conformal-Prediction.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Sharp log-Sobolev inequalities on finite cyclic groups

arXiv:2606.02847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Let $\mathbb Z_n$ be the cyclic group equipped with the uniform probability measure $\pi$, and let $A_{\psi_n}$ be the Laplacian with word length \[ \psi_n(k) = \min(k,n-k). \] We prove the sharp log-Sobolev inequality \[ Ent_{\pi}(f^2) \le 2\pi(f A_{\psi_n} f), \qquad f:\mathbb Z_n \to [0,\infty), \] for every $n \ge 4$. The proof is inspired by the recent work of Frank and Ivanisvili[FrankIvanisvili2026] on a sharp log-Sobolev inequality for nearest-neighbor simple random walk. We use their cubic-majorant reduction, which turns the problem into a 3rd moment estimate; the new point is a blockwise 3rd moment estimate adapted to the word-length multiplier. The same 3rd moment argument also recovers the log-Sobolev inequality for Poisson-semigroup on the circle, first proved by Weissler[Weissler1980]. The same sharp inequalities were also obtained recently by Yao[Yao2026] by a different method.

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

Explainable Flood Segmentation on Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery: A Comparative Study of CNN and Transformer Architectures

Rapid and accurate flood prediction is essential for disaster response and mitigation planning. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors in satellites are well-suited for this purpose because they operate independently of weather and daylight conditions. Although SAR-based data enable all-weather flood monitoring, distinguishing flooded land from permanent water remains a significant challenge, particularly when flooding is defined strictly as inundated land. This study provides a comprehensive comparison of convolutional neural network (CNN) and vision transformer architectures for multi-class flood segmentation using Sentinel-1 SAR imagery, specifically trained to separate flooded land from permanent water bodies and land. Three state-of-the-art (SOTA)CNN-based models, U-Net, U-Net++, and DeepLabV3 with ResNet-34 backbone, and three SegFormer variants (b0,b1,b2) were evaluated in two benchmark datasets, the ETCI NASA dataset and SenFloods11, using scene-based data splits to ensure a realistic assessment of spatial generalization. The results demonstrate that SegFormer-b2 significantly outperforms the U-Net baseline on the ETCI dataset (higher flood IoU across all 7 test scenes in the Wilcoxon signed-rank test), while after fine-tuning on Sen1Floods11, the advantage narrows to within the range of scene variability and is concentrated in spatially fragmented flood events. The study includes both qualitative and quantitative explainability techniques to visually comprehend model decisions and systematically assess prediction reliability. Qualitative analysis reveals that SegFormer-b2 produces more spatially coherent Grad-CAM activations focused on flood-relevant features, while U-Net generates more informative uncertainty estimates along flood boundaries.