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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Full $\Gamma-$expansion for the level-two large deviation rate functionals of non-reversible one-dimensional diffusions with periodic boundary conditions

arXiv:2606.17859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the diffusion process \begin{equation*} dX_{\epsilon}(t) = \mss b(X_{\epsilon}(t)) \, dt + \sqrt{2\, \epsilon\, \mss a(X_\epsilon(t))} \, dW_{t}, \end{equation*} on the one-dimensional torus $\bb T = [0,1)$. Here $\epsilon$ is the temperature, $W_{t}$ a Brownian motion on $\bb T$ and $\mss a$, $\mss b$ functions of class $C^{2}(\bb T)$ satisfying further conditions. Denote by $\mss P(\bb T)$ the set of probability measures on $\bb T$ equipped with the weak topology, and by $\ms I_{\epsilon}\colon \mss P(\bb T)\to [0,+\infty)$ the level two large deviation rate functional of the diffusion $X_{\epsilon}(\cdot)$. We derive a full $\Gamma-$expansion of $\ms I_{\epsilon}$, as $\epsilon \to 0$, expressing it as \begin{equation*} \ms I_{\epsilon} = \frac{1}{\epsilon} \;\ms J^{(-1)} \; +\; \ms J^{(0)} \;+\; \sum_{p=1}^{\widehat{\mf q}}\frac{1}{\theta^{(p)}_{\epsilon}}\;\ms J^{(p)}\,, \end{equation*} where $\ms J^{(-1)}$, $\ms J^{(0)}$, $\ms J^{(p)} \colon \mss P(\bb T)\to [0,+\infty]$ represent rate functionals, independent of $\epsilon$, and $\theta^{(p)}_{\epsilon}$ are the time-scales at which the Markov process $X_{\epsilon}(\cdot)$ exhibits a metastable behaviour.

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

Frozen Multimodal Embeddings for Personality and Cognitive Ability Assessment in Asynchronous Video Interviews

Predicting psychological traits from asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) is a challenging multimodal learning problem because labeled datasets are limited while each response contains high-dimensional visual, acoustic, and verbal signals. This paper presents our solution for the ACM Multimedia AVI Challenge 2026, which evaluates two tasks: Track~1 predicts self-reported HEXACO personality traits from personality-related interview responses, and Track~2 classifies cognitive ability levels from structured AVI responses. We treat the problem as a small-sample representation learning task. Instead of fine-tuning large pretrained models, we use frozen multimodal encoders, including CLIP for visual features, Whisper for acoustic features and transcripts, and RoBERTa, E5, and DeBERTaV3 for textual representations, followed by low-capacity downstream models. For Track~1, our trait-specific regression and late-fusion system achieves an average validation MSE of 0.2696, improving over the official baseline of 0.3334. Ablation results show a three-step improvement from a global model (0.3189), to per-trait modeling (0.2871), to per-trait late fusion (0.2696), corresponding to a 19.1\% relative MSE reduction over the official baseline. For Track~2, a compact subject-attribute baseline reaches 0.5781 accuracy, while our multimodal ensemble reaches 0.5313, both above the official baseline of 0.4062. We interpret this result as evidence of possible subject-attribute shortcuts in the validation split rather than robust cognitive inference from AVI content. Overall, our findings suggest that AVI-based psychological assessment benefits from trait-specific multimodal modeling, but cognitive ability prediction requires careful control of dataset shortcuts.

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

Where Did It Go Wrong? Process-Level Evaluation of Web Agents with Semantic State Tracking

arXiv:2606.15673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web agents act through long interaction sequences, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only terminal success, discarding all process information and offering little guidance on improvement. In this work, we conduct a process-level analysis of web agents. We introduce WebStep, a benchmark of 1,800 task instances with controlled difficulty and automatic semantic state tracking. Each website exposes a deterministic semantic MDP alongside the GUI: the agent operates on the interface, while the environment records high-level states and transitions in the background, enabling fine-grained analysis without manual annotation. Based on the semantic trajectory, we first show that process metrics reveal differences invisible to outcome evaluation: three agents whose success rates cluster within 31-33% diverge in exploration reach versus execution accuracy. Then, decomposing by skill characterizes the nature of these differences, exposing opposite per-skill rankings hidden within the same website: e.g., on Housing, OpenAI CUA outperforms Qwen3.5 by 23.7% on commit actions yet underperforms it by 15.6% on filtering, pinpointing a concrete skill to improve even within a domain. Bifurcation analysis further localizes the decisive error that loses the task and shows that this error is agent-specific rather than shared. Finally, these differences widen as tasks grow harder: success rate is similar on easy tasks but separates sharply as exploration becomes more demanding. Our process-level analysis opens a new avenue in web agent evaluation, providing fine-grained and actionable insight into where and how each agent should be improved.

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

Emergence of Hierarchical Emotion Organization in Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly power conversational agents, understanding how they model users' emotional states is critical for ethical deployment. Inspired by emotion wheels, i.e., a psychological framework that argues emotions organize hierarchically, we analyze probabilistic dependencies between emotional states in model outputs. We find that LLMs naturally form hierarchical emotion trees that align with human psychological models, and larger models develop more complex hierarchies. We also uncover systematic biases in emotion recognition across socioeconomic personas, with compounding misclassifications for intersectional, underrepresented groups. Human studies reveal striking parallels, suggesting that LLMs internalize aspects of social perception. Beyond highlighting emergent emotional reasoning in LLMs, our results hint at the potential of using cognitively-grounded theories for developing better model evaluations.

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

Global Geometry Is Not Enough for Vision Representations

A common assumption in representation learning is that globally well-distributed embeddings support robust and generalizable representations. This focus has shaped both training objectives and evaluation protocols, implicitly treating global geometry as a proxy for representational competence. While global geometry effectively encodes which elements are present, it is often insensitive to how they are composed. We investigate this limitation by testing the ability of geometric metrics to predict compositional binding across a diverse suite of vision encoders. We find that standard geometry-based statistics exhibit near-zero correlation with compositional binding. In contrast, functional sensitivity, as measured by the input–output Jacobian, reliably tracks this capability. We further provide an analytic account showing that this disparity arises from objective design, as existing losses explicitly constrain embedding geometry but leave the local input–output mapping unconstrained. These results suggest that global embedding geometry captures only a partial view of representational competence and establish functional sensitivity as a critical complementary axis for modeling composite structure.

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

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Reroute, Don't Remove: Recoverable Visual Token Routing for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) project images into hundreds to thousands of visual tokens, making decoder inference expensive in both attention computation and KV-cache memory. Existing visual-token reduction methods largely follow a rank-and-remove paradigm: they score visual tokens, keep a compact subset, and permanently discard the rest. We show that this irreversible action is fragile because visual-token importance changes across decoder depth; tokens ranked low at one stage may become relevant in later layers, especially for grounding-sensitive queries. We propose Reroute, a training-free plug-in that replaces removal with recoverable routing. At each routing stage, selected vision tokens pass through decoder blocks, while deferred tokens bypass the stage and re-enter the candidate pool at the next routing decision. Reroute reuses existing attention-score ranking rules and stage-wise schedules, preserving the theoretical TFLOPs and KV-cache budget class of the pruning method it augments. Across FastV, PDrop, and Nüwa variants on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen backbones, reroute improves grounding under aggressive token reduction while maintaining general VQA performance. These results suggest that VLM token reduction should not be viewed only as irreversible pruning, but also as recoverable routing. The code can be found here: https://github.com/elmma/mllm-reroute/

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

On the convergence of doubly stochastic Markov chains

arXiv:2606.24584v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We characterize the asymptotic behavior of time-homogeneous doubly stochastic Markov chains. Our investigation revolves around understanding the dynamics of products of doubly stochastic matrices, which in turn allows us to fully characterize three distinct behaviors: cyclicity, convergence towards a special equilibrium matrix, and divergence. Notably, we introduce a novel and comprehensive sufficient condition for the convergence of an infinite product of doubly stochastic matrices.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP

arXiv:2606.13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al. (2024) has shown that refusal in safety fine-tuned chat models is mediated by a single linear direction in the residual stream, recoverable by a difference-in-means (DiM) of harmful and harmless activations. We compare DiM-based interventions (activation addition and directional ablation) with two interventions derived from Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) – nullspace projection and counterfactual flipping – on five open-weight chat models, asking whether INLP can match DiM at steering refusal and whether its richer parameterisation yields more tweakable interventions. INLP counterfactual flipping is competitive with DiM directional ablation on refusal suppression, while nullspace projection is consistently weaker. Restricting INLP to the leading directions of the extracted subspace preserves most of the suppression effect at near-baseline perplexity, giving a tunable capability. Geometrically, the two INLP interventions land in qualitatively different regions of activation space: nullspace projection collapses transformed activations between the harmful and harmless clusters, while counterfactual flipping moves them into the opposite cluster, suggesting that the model encodes the absence of a concept differently from its opposite – an intriguing distinction that warrants further investigation in future work.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DLDN-Bench: A Benchmark Framework for Deep Learning de Novo Peptide Sequencing in Proteomics

De novo peptide sequencing is an essential approach for analyzing mass spectrometry data because it enables the identification of novel peptides without relying on protein sequence databases. Recent advances in deep learning have substantially improved the performance of de novo sequencing methods, but the rapid emergence of new models has led to heterogeneous evaluation practices and limited comparability. To address this, we introduce DLDN-Bench, a benchmark framework including a set of benchmark datasets derived from human muscle biopsy mass spectrometry data retrieved from PRIDE and annotated through consensus across multiple widely used database search engines. Using these datasets, we systematically benchmark recent deep learning-based de novo sequencing tools alongside traditional approaches. Performance is assessed using established metrics, including precision and coverage relative to a pseudo-ground truth defined by cross-engine agreement. To demonstrate the utility of DLDN-Bench, we benchmark four recent deep learning models and make all results publicly available. This benchmark framework provides a standardized basis for comparing state-of-the-art methods and offers an extensible resource for evaluating future tools in de novo peptide sequencing.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned

arXiv:2603.25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations. Despite growing real-world deployment, existing evaluations rely almost exclusively on success rate, whether the robot reaches its goal, which conceals trajectory quality, collision behavior, and robustness to environmental change. We present a real-world evaluation of five state-of-the-art VNMs (GNM, ViNT, NoMaD, NaviBridger, and CrossFormer) across two robot platforms and five environments spanning indoor and outdoor settings. Beyond success rate, we combine path-based metrics with vision-based goal-recognition scores and assess robustness through controlled image perturbations (motion blur, sunflare). Our analysis uncovers three systematic limitations: (a) even architecturally sophisticated diffusion and transformer-based models exhibit frequent collisions, indicating limited geometric understanding; (b) models fail to discriminate between different locations that are perceptually similar, however some semantics differences are present, causing goal prediction errors in repetitive environments; and (c) performance degrades under distribution shift. We will publicly release our evaluation codebase and dataset to facilitate reproducible benchmarking of VNMs.

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

Depth-Width tradeoffs in Algorithmic Reasoning of Graph Tasks with Transformers

Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a transformer that can implement the task. Recent work has begun to explore this problem for graph-based tasks, showing that for sub-linear embedding dimension (i.e., model width) logarithmic depth suffices. However, an open question, which we address here, is what happens if width is allowed to grow linearly, while depth is kept fixed. Here we analyze this setting, and provide the surprising result that with linear width, constant depth suffices for solving a host of graph-based problems. This suggests that a moderate increase in width can allow much shallower models, which are advantageous in terms of inference and train time. For other problems, we show that quadratic width is required. Our results demonstrate the complex and intriguing landscape of transformer implementations of graph-based algorithms. We empirically investigate these trade-offs between the relative powers of depth and width and find tasks where wider models have the same accuracy as deep models, while having much faster train and inference time due to parallelizable hardware.

14.
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.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Rotational Vacuum Friction of Nonabsorbing Particles

arXiv:2606.24723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A nonabsorbing particle rotating in vacuum can lose angular momentum only by converting mechanical energy into electromagnetic radiation. Here, we develop a quantum theory of rotational vacuum friction for small lossless particles and show that axial symmetry qualitatively changes the leading dissipation channel. At zero temperature, the frictional torque scales as $M\propto\Omega^7$ with rotation frequency $\ Omega$ in anisotropic particles due to the emission of correlated photon pairs whose frequencies sum to $2\Omega$, while a contribution to the torque linear in $\ Omega$ is found at finite temperature. In contrast, axisymmetric particles are protected against photon-assisted friction regardless of temperature.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer with all-to-all connectivity

Quantum computers require both high-fidelity operations and large qubit numbers to surpass classical capabilities1. Trapped-ion platforms have demonstrated the highest gate fidelities of any modality2–6 but scaling to larger qubit numbers while preserving performance has remained a central challenge. We report on Quantinuum Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture7. Helios features 137Ba+ hyperfine qubits8,9, all-to-all connectivity enabled by a rotatable ion storage ring connecting two quantum operation regions by a junction10,11, speed improvements from parallelized operations12 and a new software stack with real-time compilation of dynamic programs13. Averaged over all operational zones in the system, we achieve average infidelities of 2.5(1) × 10−5 for single-qubit (1Q) gates, 7.9(2) × 10−4 for two-qubit (2Q) gates and 3.3(5) × 10−4 for state preparation and measurement (SPAM), none of which are fundamentally limited and probably able to be improved. These component infidelities are predictive of system-level performance in both random Clifford circuits and random circuit sampling (RCS), the latter demonstrating that Helios operates well beyond the reach of classical simulation and establishes a new frontier of fidelity and complexity for quantum computers14. A new quantum computer, Quantinuum Helios, which is a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor built on the QCCD architecture, demonstrates performance well beyond classical capabilities and provides a path for scaling up quantum computing.

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

FlowFake: Liquid Networks for Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.19579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfakes generated by neural text-to-speech and voice-cloning systems threaten speaker verification and public discourse at scale. The core challenge is cross-dataset generalization: detectors trained on one synthesis pipeline collapse on unseen forgeries. We argue that this failure is primarily because of structural synthetic speech artifacts which are multi-timescale trajectory anomalies. Though every existing detector aggregates a fixed-window frame statistics, this misaligns the architecture with the signal. We propose FlowFake, a Liquid Time-Constant (LTC) architecture whose hidden state evolves via a learned ODE, with per-neuron adaptive time constants simultaneously resolving spectral (10ms) and prosodic (2s) cues. At only 34K parameters FlowFake achieves formal BIBO stability and O(dt^4) integration error. On a four-dataset cross domain benchmark (ASVspoof2019-LA, FakeOrReal, InTheWild, MLAAD), FlowFake reaches 75.29% on ASVspoof2019 trained only on FakeOrReal and 79.97% trained only on MLAAD. It outperforms RawGAT-ST and Whisper-DF on every evaluated pair and matching SSL Wav2vec2 (300x larger) at 0.01% of its parameter count. The source code is available on : https://github.com/GhostRider2023/FlowFake

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

Non-frontal face recognition using GANs and memristor-based classifiers

Face recognition systems have advanced significantly through deep learning techniques, delivering high performance and robustness in complex scenarios. However, these approaches incur substantial computational overhead, limiting their in situ applicability in resource-constrained platforms such as drones, where they can address challenges including non-frontal facial imagery. Memristor-based neuromorphic systems have emerged as a compelling approach for edge AI applications, combining biologically inspired processing with efficient and scalable computation. In this work, we propose a facial recognition framework that addresses non-frontal pose variations by integrating lightweight generative adversarial network (GAN)-based pose frontalisation with memristor-based neuromorphic recognition. The experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of combining adversarial learning with memristive technology, achieving up to 96% identification accuracy. The proposed approach alleviates the computational bottlenecks of conventional AI and offers a scalable, efficient solution for face recognition in dynamic real-world environments.

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

Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM): Structural Prevention of Objective Interference Collapse via Heterogeneous External Grounding with Inward-Only Gradient Flow

arXiv:2606.18688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are a leading approach to world model representation learning. We identify a failure mode in JEPA-based world models grounded against two qualitatively distinct external signals: physical dynamics (sparse, high-magnitude, constraint-satisfying gradient corrections) and social-behavioral dynamics (diffuse, distribution-matching corrections). We term this Objective Interference Collapse (OIC): we argue that joint learning in a shared latent space causes the dominant channel to systematically collapse the subordinate channel's representational subspace, in a manner not resolvable by loss weighting alone. We propose Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM), designed to structurally prevent OIC through a partitioned latent space (physical subspace Z_p, behavioral subspace Z_b) with inward-only gradient flow. A Physical Grounding Channel updates only Z_p via VICReg-style alignment to physical measurements; a Social-Behavioral Grounding Channel updates only Z_b via alignment to trajectories from an emergent multi-agent simulation. An Inter-Channel Interface Module couples the subspaces at the task level without cross-subspace gradients. An Asymmetric Grounding Adherence Loss penalizes rollout drift with a hard hinge for physical violations and a soft KL for behavioral divergence. A Generative Rendering Layer is architecturally isolated from the latent world model. We present three theoretical results: the partition removes the gradient-interference pathway implicated in OIC; each grounded subspace inherits anti-collapse guarantees from its alignment objective; and generative isolation is necessary under a stated assumption on the generative objective's geometry. This manuscript establishes the problem formulation and architecture; experimental validation is ongoing and will be reported in a future revision.

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

Taming Curvature: Architecture Warm-Up for Stable Transformer Training

arXiv:2606.16768v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training billion-parameter Transformers is often brittle, with transient loss spikes and divergence that waste compute. Even though the recently developed Edge of Stability (EoS) theory provides a powerful tool to understand and control the stability of optimization methods via the (preconditioned) curvature, these curvature-controlling methods are not popular in large-scale Transformer training due to the complexity of curvature estimation. To this end, we first introduce a fast online estimator of the largest (preconditioned) Hessian eigenvalue (i.e., curvature) based on a warm-started variant for power iteration with Hessian-vector products. We show theoretically, and verify empirically, that the proposed method makes per-iteration curvature tracking feasible at billion parameter scale while being more accurate. Using this tool, we find that training instabilities coincide with surges in preconditioned curvature and that curvature grows with depth. Motivated by these observations, we propose architecture warm-up: progressively growing network depth to carefully control the preconditioned Hessian and stabilize training. Experiments on large Transformers validate that our approach enables efficient curvature tracking and reduces instabilities compared to existing state-of-the-art stabilization techniques without slowing down convergence.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Towards Federated Long-Tailed Graph Learning: An Energy-Guided Dual Decoupling Approach

arXiv:2606.24237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated Graph Learning facilitates collaborative graph modeling across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, real-world data categories frequently exhibit long-tailed distributions. Such statistical scarcity severely degrades performance in two ways: it biases the global model toward majority classes, and it structurally isolates minority nodes by submerging them in heterophilic, head-dominated neighborhoods. While existing methods attempt topology-agnostic statistical compensations, they often fail under data scarcity. Instead of recovering tail nodes, they overfit the structural noise from adjacent dominant classes, leading to representation degradation. To address these limitations, we propose FedEPD, a framework built on a dual decoupling paradigm that separates topological purification from semantic recalibration. Specifically, FedEPD utilizes distribution-aware Dirichlet energy pruning to filter spatial heterophilic edges. It then overcomes Non-IID distribution shifts by extracting robust global prototypes from topologically central nodes, which are incorporated into local representations via a spatial low-pass prototype injection. Furthermore, a two stage alternating optimization strategy strictly protects majority decision boundaries while improving minority accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedEPD achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed benchmarks, yielding absolute improvements of up to 4.97% in Accuracy and 5.48% in Macro-F1.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

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

Relighting as a Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that separate illumination from scene properties while preserving dense geometry, material, and photometric cues. We use this task as a probe of visual priors: unlike recognition tasks that reward invariance, relighting tests whether visual features retain the information needed for light transfer. Through a controlled generative relighting framework, we find that strong semantic encoders can degrade relighting quality, exposing a semantic–photometric trade-off between abstraction and physical fidelity. We introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances this trade-off by fusing dense, pixel-aligned visual features into a latent-intrinsic relighting model and refining it with self-supervision on unlabeled real image pairs. ALI improves relighting quality, especially on glossy, metallic, and transparent materials, and demonstrates that generative relighting is an effective tool for quantifying what visual encoders encode about the physical world.

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

ZeroSyl: Simple Zero-Resource Syllable Tokenization for Spoken Language Modeling

Pure speech language models aim to learn language directly from raw audio without textual resources. A key challenge is that discrete tokens from self-supervised speech encoders result in excessively long sequences, motivating recent work on syllable-like units. However, methods like Sylber and SyllableLM rely on intricate multi-stage training pipelines. We propose ZeroSyl, a simple training-free method to extract syllable boundaries and embeddings directly from a frozen WavLM model. Using L2 norms of features in WavLM's intermediate layers, ZeroSyl achieves competitive syllable segmentation performance. The resulting segments are mean-pooled, discretized using K-means, and used to train a language model. ZeroSyl outperforms prior syllabic tokenizers across lexical, syntactic, and narrative benchmarks. Scaling experiments show that while finer-grained units are beneficial for lexical tasks, our discovered syllabic units exhibit better scaling behavior for syntactic modeling.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Super-Heisenberg Non-Equilibrium Quantum Sensing with Waveguide-Coupled Emitters

arXiv:2606.11975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We explore an array of quantum emitters as non-equilibrium probes, coupled to a one-dimensional photonic waveguide, aiming to estimate its properties such as wave number which encodes the waveguide frequency and dispersive characteristics. By considering transient dynamics following initial excitation, we show that the quantum Fisher information (QFI) can be significantly enhanced through careful emitter positioning. For two-emitter probes, optimal spacing stabilizes populations and coherences in the single-excitation subspace, suppressing super radiant decay and extending both the magnitude and longevity of QFI. Randomized emitter configurations also reveal that vanishing waveguide-mediated cross decay maximizes both achievable sensitivity and the temporal duration over which information about the parameter remains accessible. Extending to multipartite probes, we demonstrate that the maximum QFI and its temporal integral scale with system size, exceeding the Heisenberg limit for all positioning strategies. Our results highlight the potential of waveguide-coupled emitter arrays as versatile quantum sensors, where collective radiative dynamics can be harnessed to achieve tunable, long-lived, and enhanced precision.