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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Random Grover Search

arXiv:2606.11759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grover's algorithm achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search given a global oracle for the target set. In many applications, however, the target set is specified as the intersection of multiple constraint sets. Constructing a global oracle for the intersection can be costly, whereas the individual constraint oracles are often much simpler to implement. We study a randomized Grover search algorithm that directly uses these constraint oracles. At each iteration, one of the corresponding Grover operators is selected at random. For the two-operator case with uniform sampling, we prove that the success probability approaches one after \[ \Theta \left(\frac\pi4\sqrt{\frac{N}{r}}\right) \] iterations, where $r$ is the size of the intersection. Thus, the algorithm achieves the same asymptotic query complexity as standard Grover search but without requiring a global oracle. We then generalize the analysis to arbitrary sampling distributions and an arbitrary number of Grover operators through an auxiliary operator that approximates the expected Grover evolution, while retaining the same asymptotic complexity. We further show that highly biased sampling distributions can still achieve near-unit success probability, enabling cheaper Grover operators to be used more frequently. Finally, we prove asymptotic optimality and support the theoretical results with numerical simulations.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Why heritage sites are at risk in a warming world — and how to save them

As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently. As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently.

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

EMS: Multi-Agent Voting via Efficient Majority-then-Stopping

arXiv:2604.02863v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Majority voting is the standard for aggregating multi-agent responses into a final decision. However, traditional methods typically require all agents to complete their reasoning before aggregation begins, leading to significant computational overhead, as many responses become redundant once a majority consensus is achieved. In this work, we formulate efficient multi-agent voting as a reliability-aware agent scheduling problem and propose Efficient Majority-then-Stopping (EMS) to improve reasoning efficiency. EMS first estimates a Task-Conditioned Reliability Ordering (TCRO) for each agent by retrieving its historical consensus evidence on semantically similar queries, and then invoking agents in descending reliability order. Next, Adaptive Incremental Voting (AIV) terminates the process once the current leading answer cannot be overturned by any possible votes from the remaining agents, and returns this answer. Finally, Reliability History Updating (RHU) updates only the invoked agents according to their consensus with the final decision. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks show that EMS preserves the accuracy of Majority Voting while reducing the average number of invoked agents by 35% and token consumption by 44%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/fuyu66/EMS.

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

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

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

SleepMaMi: A Universal Sleep Foundation Model for Integrating Macro- and Micro-structures

arXiv:2602.07628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While the shift toward unified foundation models has revolutionized many deep learning domains, sleep medicine remains largely restricted to task-specific models that focus on localized micro-structure features. These approaches often neglect the rich, multi-modal context of Polysomnography (PSG) and fail to capture the global macro-structure of a full night's sleep. To address this, we introduce SleepMaMi , a Sleep Foundation Model engineered to master both hour-long sleep architectures and fine-grained signal morphologies. Our framework utilizes a hierarchical dual-encoder design: a Macro-Encoder to model full-night temporal dependencies and a Micro-Encoder to capture short-term characteristics from biosignals. Macro-Encoder is trained via Demographic-Guided Contrastive Learning, which aligns overnight sleep patterns with objective subject metadata, such as age, sex and BMI to refine global representations. Micro-Encoder is optimized via a hybrid Masked Autoencoder (MAE) and multi-modal contrastive objective. Pre-trained on a massive corpus of $>$20,000 PSG recordings (158K hours),SleepMaMi outperforms or matches state-of-the-art existing foundation models across a diverse suite of downstream tasks, demonstrating superior generalizability and label-efficient adaptation for clinical sleep analysis.

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

DualGauge: Automated Joint Security-Functionality Benchmarking of Specification-Only Code Generation by LLMs and Coding Agents

arXiv:2511.20709v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based coding agents are now used to generate code from natural-language specifications, yet ensuring such code is both functionally correct and secure remains a challenge. We present DualGauge, the first fully automated framework for jointly evaluating correctness and security of specification-only code generation, supported by DualGauge-Bench, a language-agnostic benchmark of 307 coding tasks each paired with functional and security tests derived from the same specification. Evaluating 10 representative LLMs across Python, C++, and JavaScript, we find that functional correctness substantially overestimates reliable code generation: even the strongest model remains below 15% joint security-functionality success in every language. Common model-side factors–scale, extended thinking, quantization, instruction tuning, and code specialization–do not reliably improve joint performance, suggesting secure-and-correct code generation does not simply emerge from stronger coding capability. Evaluation of 3 leading agentic coding systems (Codex, OpenHands, and Claude Code) shows that iterative scaffolding provides no advantage over direct (LLM-based) generation on specification-only tasks. A qualitative audit reveals failures concentrate at the output contract boundary and in guards that exist but are insufficient–patterns that only joint benchmarking reliably exposes.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Computational Design of Optimal Sequences for Targeted Hypermutagenesis Using Recombination-Coupled Diversity-Generating Retroelements

Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) are natural systems that accelerate evolution via targeted hypermutation at adenines. We previously developed DGRec, a system combining DGRs and recombineering for programmable mutagenesis in Escherichia coli. We here address two important issues with DGRec: the dependence of mutagenesis efficiency on the dgrRNA secondary structure and the variability of the reverse-transcription biases with sequence context and position. First, we introduce and validate a method to recode non-functional templates, i.e. with low mutagenesis efficiency, into highly functional ones through synonymous mutations. Second, we develop a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to predict DGRec mutational profiles for any given template sequence. By integrating this LSTM model with our recoding method, we establish a comprehensive workflow for customized directed evolution, enabling researchers to precisely fine-tune DGRec in vivo mutagenesis to their engineering needs.

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

Calibrated Triage, Not Autonomy: Confidence Estimation for Medical Vision-Language Models

A vision-language model can answer a question about a medical image fluently and confidently while barely using the image, leaning instead on language priors. In medicine this is the failure that matters most, because the answer looks trustworthy and is not, and the only protection is a confidence score reliable enough to tell the system when to abstain. We ask a deployment question rather than an accuracy one: how much imaging work a model can safely handle alone, and which confidence signal makes that possible. We evaluate seven confidence estimators across five open-weight LVLMs and three medical visual-question-answering datasets spanning broad clinical imaging, radiology, and pathology, with every probe trained only on natural images and applied without adaptation. Recast as bounded selective prediction (automate a case only when confidence clears a threshold, defer the rest), the comparison is cautionary. The standard metrics are poor guides: discrimination barely separates the methods, and the weak calibration of a cheap self-report is cheaply removed by off-domain temperature scaling without changing deployable yield. What distinguishes a usable estimator is the high-confidence region a clinician acts on: the weakest baselines are confidently wrong on 41 to 45 percent of their errors against 1 to 4 percent for the best probe, and no estimator is reliably best across domains or models. Safe handoff is governed at two levels: base-model competence sets a ceiling, so a well-calibrated score recovers roughly a third of radiology cases at a 20 percent error tolerance but almost none of pathology; the confidence layer then decides how much of that ceiling is reachable. The usable role today is calibrated triage, not autonomy: automate the cases a calibrated score marks safe, route the rest to a clinician. We release all outputs, correctness judgments, and confidence scores, with code.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. To systematically eliminate background interference, FiCoP first employs an object-centric disentanglement step to isolate the target from macro-level environmental noise. Building upon this localized region, our core methodological innovations are twofold. Firstly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning and text-guided semantic injection. Secondly, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that leverages a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior. This generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

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

A Temporal Planning Framework for Disruption Aware Dynamic Route Optimization in Heterogeneous Railway Systems

arXiv:2606.14582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient route optimization play a vital role in ensuring both safety and punctuality in railway operations. It is very crucial particularly in heterogeneous multi-gauge railway networks with varying train speed, stopping pattern, infrastructure compatibility constraints increase coordination complexity. In single-track systems these challenges are further intensify due to all trains to share the same track and requires frequent track switching.Stochastic disruptions events including blocked tracks, blocked trains, engine failure and speed slowdowns introduces additional unpredictability in operations and deviate the timetable. However, existing studies predominantly focuses on high-level timetabling, omitting operational details such as track switching coordination. As a result leaving decision to human operators, increasing safety risks into railway operations. This study proposes a framework based on temporal planning for dynamic route optimization and disruption management in heterogeneous railway systems. The framework formulates railway operations as a temporal planning problem using PDDL 2.1 with explicitly modeling gauge compatibility constraints and diverse disruption scenarios. It generates conflict-free timestamped operational plans specifying both optimized schedules and executable action sequences. To evaluate the proposed framework, we developed a benchmark problem set with 200 instances using up to 1,000 track points and 120 trains. Two state-of-the-art temporal planners and a plan validator were employed to assessed the framework. The experimental results demonstrate that the framework effectively generates temporal operational plans for heterogeneous railway systems and handles multi-gauge constraints, disruptions, and reduces dependence on manual decision making.

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

DeepSWIP: Quotient-WMC Counterfactuals for Neural Probabilistic Logic Programs

arXiv:2606.20526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic systems such as DeepProbLog combine neural perception with probabilistic logic, but standard inference is associational. Counterfactual reasoning additionally requires a causal semantics for interventions and evidence. We introduce DeepSWIP, a single-world counterfactual semantics for DeepProbLog programs. Using neural materialization, we reduce fixed-context neural predicates to ordinary ProbLog choices, apply Single World Intervention Programs (SWIPs), and compute counterfactuals by weighted model counting (WMC) over a single transformed program. Under finite grounding and unique-supported-model assumptions, DeepSWIP is exact relative to the learned materialized FCM. The standard quotient-WMC form of ProbLog conditionals identifies active neural probabilities and explains intervention cleaning, calibration sensitivity, and rare-evidence instability. Experiments on MPI3D confirm the transformation against a DeepTwin construction against 12,000 queries, as predicted and a 2.14$\times$ inference speedup from avoiding the Twin's endogenous duplication. A SUMO HOV experiment shows that neural calibration degradation biases plug-in estimates, while a correctly scoped randomized-policy AIPW estimator removes most first-order bias for population mean and ATE estimands. Code is at https://github.com/saibib/deep_SWIP.

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

Not all Jensen-Shannon Divergence Estimators are Equal

arXiv:2606.16411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Jensen-Shannon divergence is widely reported as a scalar measure of fidelity for synthetic tabular data. Yet, in practice, it is estimated from finite samples using protocols that are often underspecified. This creates a measurement problem. Although the population divergence is well defined, the empirical value depends on the estimator family, sampling protocol, calibration, dimensionality, and class balance. We show that different protocols can yield non-comparable values: marginal-based estimators ignore dependencies in the joint distribution and can severely underestimate divergence, while classifier-based estimators capture joint structure but exhibit strong estimator dependence. We systematically study this behavior across controlled settings with reference divergences and real-world synthetic tabular benchmarks. Our analysis reveals dependence blindness in marginal estimators, prior-shift bias under class imbalance, and estimator sensitivity in high dimensions. To address prior shift, we derive a closed-form posterior correction for classifier-based Jensen-Shannon estimation. Our results show that empirical Jensen-Shannon divergence values are inherently protocol-dependent, making explicit specification of the estimation procedure necessary for meaningful comparison. We provide practical guidelines and an open-source tool for estimator-aware Jensen-Shannon evaluation.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Approximating optimal decoding of quantum LDPC codes with narrow frontiers

arXiv:2606.20513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Frontier decoder, a pruned dynamic-programming decoder for sparse quantum decoding problems. Frontier processes error variables in a chosen order, merges prefixes with the same residual syndrome and logical label, and approximates logical-coset posterior masses by retaining only a narrow scored frontier. Without pruning, the recursion is exact ordered inference with exponential complexity. In the code-capacity setting, the decoder reaches thresholds close to optimal for the surface code and the color code. In the circuit-level noise model, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small average retained list size: less than 100 for the gross code $[[144,12,12]]$ at a physical error rate of $0.001$. When the list size is constant, the decoder has linear complexity, suggesting the possibility of low-latency implementations.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Flowing to Normality and the Fate of the Single Ring Theorem

arXiv:2606.15791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random non-hermitian matrix ensembles with double-sided rotation invariance obey, in the limit of large matrix size, the Single Ring Theorem, which states that the support of the mean eigenvalue distribution in the complex plane is either a disk or an annulus. In contrast, rotational-invariant random normal matrix ensembles can have mean eigenvalue densities supported over any number of concentric annuli in the complex plane. In this paper we introduce and investigate, both analytically and numerically, a non-hermitian matrix model which flows from a generic matrix distribution obeying the Single Ring Theorem to a distribution of normal matrices by tuning a parameter which penalizes non-normality. We observe numerically breakdown of the Single Ring Theorem as the model flows towards normality, and determine the critical value of the parameter at which the transition occurs. We also study in detail the behavior of the singular values of these matrices under the flow. These singular values form a Fermi gas confined to the positive half-line. In particular, we find that at small values of the flow parameter, the interparticle spacings in the gas exhibit Wigner-Dyson repulsion, whereas for asymptotically large values of the flow parameter, at the normal matrix endpoint of the flow, the spacing statistics is Poissonian. The flow interpolates continuously between these two types of statistics. However, this change in statistics is not related directly to breaking of the Single Ring Theorem, which occurs very early-on along the flow, in the regime of Wigner-Dyson statistics. Finally, we introduce a certain ensemble of random permutations associated with the gas, and make a conjecture on how to use it in order to reconstruct approximately the average density of complex eigenvalues from that of the singular values in the large-$N$ limit.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in Next-Generation LLM Agent Systems: A Cross-Provider Empirical Extension

arXiv:2605.29874v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Do next-generation LLM agents inherit the cooperative biases documented in their predecessors, or does scale and provider diversity reshape equilibrium behaviour in competitive multi-agent settings? Willis et al. established a benchmark for this question using evolutionary game theory and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD), finding consistent cooperative biases in ChatGPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. We extend this benchmark to four frontier models released in 2025-2026 - Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.4 Mini - applying the identical protocol across three prompting styles (Default, Prose, Self-Refine) and four population compositions (balanced and biased, with and without noise). Cooperative bias persists across providers (H1): ten of twelve model-prompt combinations favour cooperative equilibria in balanced noiseless conditions. Cross-provider divergence is substantial (H3): Gemini 2.5 Flash reaches up to 77% aggressive equilibria under biased conditions, while GPT-5.4 Mini reaches 70% cooperative equilibria under Self-Refine. Support for aggressive capability parity is partial (H2): Self-Refine raises ICD in all models and Gemini 3.1 Pro Refine achieves the highest ICD in the dataset (0.925), but Default and Prose prompts show no systematic narrowing. Evidence on noise robustness is directionally positive but not robustly confirmed (H4): with n=500 Moran iterations per condition, average noise sensitivity is about 6 percentage points for Claude Sonnet 4.6 versus 13 pp for Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but this cross-study gap is not statistically significant once the predecessor's unreported sampling error is propagated. Provider identity, rather than model generation, is the strongest correlate of equilibrium outcomes; noise remains a universal challenge regardless of model size or vintage.

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

TMASC: Transmasculine Attitude and Speech Corpus

作者:

We introduce the Transmasculine Attitudes and Speech Corpus (TMASC), a multimodal corpus of 196 transmasculine individuals, including questionnaire responses and 66 audio recordings. The questionnaire includes items exploring the vocal health of transmasculine individuals. The audio recordings include cough and throat-clearing samples, a reading passage, and additional session-specific questions. This paper outlines the development of this corpus and the data collection procedures. To illustrate the utility of this corpus, we present three case studies demonstrating how this crowd-sourced multimodal corpus can be used to support transmasculine individuals. These include the integration of perceptual and acoustic data, the identification of group-level characteristics, and the calibration of acoustic measurements.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stationary measures for higher spin vertex models on a strip

作者:

arXiv:2309.04897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a higher spin vertex model on a strip with fused vertex weights. This model can be regarded as a generalization of both the unfused six-vertex model on a strip arXiv:2212.09111 and an 'integrable two-step Floquet dynamics' model introduced in arXiv:1711.08884. We solve for the stationary measure using a fused version of the matrix product ansatz and then characterize it in terms of the Askey-Wilson process. Using this characterization, we obtain the limits of the mean density along an arbitrary down-right path. It turns out that all these models share a common phase diagram, which, after an appropriate mapping, matches the phase diagram of open ASEP. This provides evidence for the universality of this phase diagram.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Physics-Constrained Neural Networks for Improved Short-Term Weather Forecasting: A Case Study over the South Pacific

arXiv:2606.17659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study introduces enhancements to physics-constrained neural networks (PCNNs) that improve the accuracy and stability of hybrid short-term weather forecasting models. Building on the WeatherGFT architecture, three innovations are proposed. First, an upgraded numerical solver, combining a fifth-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory scheme (WENO-5), a beta-plane approximation, and subgrid-scale viscosity, permits a fourfold increase in the integration time step to 1200 s while reducing the daily mean squared error by up to 26%. Second, a unified autoregressive hybrid block replaces the original chain of 24 specialised modules, eliminating overfitting to specific lead times. Third, the physical core is integrated with two state-of-the-art neural backbones, resulting in PI-PredFormer and PI-IAM4VP. Evaluation on the WeatherBench South Pacific subset from 2000 to 2004 shows that these hybrids reduce root mean squared error at 1-12 h lead times by 8-22% compared to purely neural counterparts, while better preserving physical consistency. These results demonstrate that incremental refinement of hybrid components offers a practical route toward more accurate and efficient short-range weather forecasting.

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

Locally Gentle State Certification for High Dimensional Quantum Systems

arXiv:2602.04550v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard approaches to quantum statistical inference rely on measurements that induce a collapse of the wave function, effectively consuming the quantum state to extract information. In this work, we investigate the fundamental limits of locally-gentle quantum state certification, where the learning algorithm is constrained to perturb the state by at most $\alpha$ in trace norm, thereby allowing for the reuse of samples. We analyze the hypothesis testing problem of distinguishing whether an unknown state $\rho$ is equal to a reference $\rho_0$ or $\epsilon$-far from it. We derive the minimax sample complexity for this problem, quantifying the information-theoretic price of non-destructive measurements. Specifically, by constructing explicit measurement operators, we show that the constraint of $\alpha$-gentleness imposes a sample size penalty of $\frac{d}{\alpha^2}$, yielding a total sample complexity of $n = \Theta(\frac{d^3}{\epsilon^2 \alpha^2})$. Our results clarify the trade-off between information extraction and state disturbance, and highlight deep connections between physical measurement constraints and privacy mechanisms in quantum learning. Crucially, we find that the sample size penalty incurred by enforcing $\alpha$-gentleness scales linearly with the Hilbert-space dimension $d$ rather than the number of parameters $d^2-1$ typical for high-dimensional private estimation.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Learning Arbitrary Lindbladians with Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.18188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study ansatz-free Lindbladian learning, the problem of reconstructing the generator of an open quantum system without prior knowledge of its Hamiltonian or dissipator structures. This problem exhibits two distinct information-theoretic precision limits: Hamiltonian components unmasked by dissipation are Heisenberg-limited, while the remaining Lindbladian components are subject to the quadratically worse standard quantum limit. Existing approaches that attain these optimal scalings strongly rely on pre-specified structure of interaction and noise, leaving the ansatz-free setting an open problem. In this work, we present the first standard-quantum-limited algorithm for learning arbitrary sparse Lindbladians. Under an additional physically motivated regularity condition, our framework also learns the Hamiltonian component disjoint from the dissipator at the Heisenberg limit, without prior knowledge of either the Hamiltonian or dissipator supports. Our main technical ingredient is a recursive random stabilizer-code construction that suppresses the strongest Lindbladian terms while preserving sensitivity to weaker unknown ones. These results establish a scalable framework for characterizing unknown open quantum systems, with quantum error correction serving as a key learning primitive.

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

GPO: Learning from Critical Steps to Improve LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2509.16456v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in various domains, showing impressive potential on different tasks. Recently, reasoning LLMs have been proposed to improve the reasoning or thinking capabilities of LLMs to solve complex problems. Despite the promising results of reasoning LLMs, enhancing the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs still remains a significant challenge. While existing optimization methods have advanced the LLM reasoning capabilities, they often treat reasoning trajectories as a whole, without considering the underlying critical steps within the trajectory. In this paper, we introduce Guided Pivotal Optimization (GPO), a novel fine-tuning strategy that dives into the reasoning process to enable more effective improvements. GPO first identifies the `critical step' within a reasoning trajectory - a point that the model must carefully proceed to succeed at the problem. We locate the critical step by estimating the advantage function. GPO then resets the policy to the critical step, samples the new rollout and prioritizes the learning process on those rollouts. This focus allows the model to learn more effectively from pivotal moments within the reasoning process to improve the reasoning performance. We demonstrate that GPO is a general strategy that can be integrated with various optimization methods to improve reasoning performance. Besides theoretical analysis, our experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks show that GPO can consistently and significantly enhance the performance of existing optimization methods, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability in improving LLM reasoning by concentrating on pivotal moments within the generation process.

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

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Which Directions Matter? Sparse Design for Affine Robust Optimization

arXiv:2606.14648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust machine learning and optimization rely on the uncertainty model choice. We investigate which uncertainty directions a model must cover when defined by a finite dictionary and a budget constraint. Selecting a subset forms an atomic uncertainty set with a closed form support function, yielding tractable robust programs for affine objectives. We propose a data driven selection rule based on a coverage objective over evaluation directions, including gradients, adversarial perturbations, or shifts observed on held out data. We prove this objective is monotone and submodular, supporting a greedy method with a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee and a matching hardness barrier. We also provide a certificate bounding the loss from the selected subset and a radius calibration rule with out of sample control.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

DRIVE: Distributional and Retrieval-Augmented Bidding with Value Evaluation

arXiv:2606.14192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Auto-bidding is a core component of real-time advertising systems, where decisions must optimize long-term performance under budget and cost constraints, while online exploration is prohibitively risky. Offline reinforcement learning and, more recently, Transformer-based sequence modeling have shown promise for learning bidding policies from logged data, but their unimodal and purely parametric formulations often collapse multiple effective bidding strategies into suboptimal averaged actions and perform unreliably under sparse or long-tail traffic. To mitigate these limitations, we propose DRIVE (Distributional and Retrieval-Augmented Bidding with Value Evaluation), a unified Transformer-based framework that decouples candidate action generation from decision making for offline auto-bidding. DRIVE combines distributional action modeling, retrieval-augmented candidate generation from high-quality historical decisions, and value-based evaluation to select the most promising bid at inference time. Extensive experiments on AuctionNet and additional offline reinforcement learning benchmarks demonstrate that DRIVE consistently improves bidding performance and generalizes well across multiple Transformer-based methods.

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

NVMOS: Non-Verbal Vocalization Quality Assessment in Speech

arXiv:2606.15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent. Existing speech quality assessment methods typically focus on overall naturalness, while non-verbal TTS evaluations mainly examine whether a target NV appears with the correct type and position. However, the perceptual quality of NV events themselves remains underexplored. To address this gap, we construct an NV-MOS dataset containing outputs from multiple NV-TTS systems and naturally occurring NV samples, with ratings collected from three acoustic experts on a perceptual quality scale. We further analyze audio-capable multimodal large language models such as Gemini and find clear inconsistencies between their scores and expert ratings. These results suggest that general-purpose multimodal models cannot reliably replace human judgments for NV quality assessment. We then propose NVMOS, to our knowledge the first model that can reliably predict the perceptual quality of NV events in speech. Experimental results show that, with a local NV-event focusing module, NVMOS reaches expert-level or stronger agreement with human MOS.