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

Mitigating Anchoring Bias in LLM-Based Agents for Energy-Efficient 6G Autonomous Networks

arXiv:2606.18272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents an autonomous agentic resource negotiation framework designed to enable zero-touch network slicing in 6G architectures using Large Language Model (LLM) agents. While LLMs offer powerful reasoning capabilities, we demonstrate that such agents inherently suffer from anchoring bias, rigidly adhering to initial heuristic proposals and causing severe network over-provisioning. To systematically mitigate this cognitive bias, we propose a novel randomized anchoring strategy modeled via a Truncated 3-Parameter Weibull distribution. This mathematically bounded approach seamlessly integrates with burst-aware Digital Twins (DTs) employing Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) to rigorously guarantee strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) tail-latencies. To validate our methodology, we introduce and prove the Bimodal Constraint-Avoidance Utility Theorem, demonstrating that while feasible negotiations follow classical convex bounds, highly constrained scenarios undergo a phase transition governed by an inverse rational decay envelope. Empirical results generated using a locally hosted 1B-parameter model (\texttt{otel-llm-1b-it}) confirm these dual-regime bounds. Our cognitive de-biasing successfully dismantles rigid negotiation patterns, forcing agents into active exploration to safely ride SLA boundaries and boost system energy savings up to 25\%. Crucially, the lightweight 1B LLM achieves sub-second inference latencies (0.95s mean), ensuring our multi-agent framework is compatible with the operational timescales of the O-RAN non-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller (non-RT RIC)\footnote{Our source code is available for non-commercial use at https://github.com/HatimChergui.

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

Reassessing High-Performing LLMs on Polish Medical Exams: True Competence or Bias-Driven Performance?

Large language models (LLMs) in medicine are mainly evaluated using multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), which can overestimate real clinical ability due to guessing strategies and answer biases. To address these limitations, we introduce an expanded and more challenging benchmark based on Polish medical exams, adding over 15,000 questions, two new domains, and four structural modifications that reduce MCQA-specific artifacts and better test reasoning. We evaluate 21 LLMs and show that evaluation design strongly affects results. Under our harder setup, the best model (Qwen3.5-122B) drops by 28.4 and 31 pp on English and Polish exams, respectively. Despite low evidence of data contamination, standard MCQA scores do not reliably reflect true medical competence. To facilitate further research, we make our benchmark publicly available.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness

arXiv:2603.21396v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept – a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying this capability in open-weights models. First, we find that it is behaviorally robust: models detect injected steering vectors at moderate rates with 0% false positives across diverse prompts and dialogue formats. Notably, this capability emerges specifically from post-training; we show that preference optimization algorithms like DPO can elicit it, but standard supervised finetuning does not. We provide evidence that detection cannot be explained by simple linear association between certain steering vectors and directions promoting affirmative responses. We trace the detection mechanism to a two-stage circuit in which "evidence carrier" features in early post-injection layers detect perturbations monotonically along diverse directions, suppressing downstream "gate" features that implement a default negative response. This circuit is absent in base models and robust to refusal ablation. Identification of injected concepts relies on largely distinct later-layer mechanisms that only weakly overlap with those involved in detection. Finally, we show that introspective capability is substantially underelicited: ablating refusal directions improves detection by +53%, and a trained bias vector improves it by +75% on held-out concepts, both without meaningfully increasing false positives. Our results suggest that this introspective awareness of injected concepts is robust and mechanistically nontrivial, and could be substantially amplified in future models. Code: https://github.com/safety-research/introspection-mechanisms.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The Unsteady Return of Command-Following: Recovery and Instability of Bedside Motor Command-Following After Acute Brain Injury

Background/Objective: Following a verbal command marks the bedside transition from unresponsiveness to overt recovery of consciousness after acute brain injury. Its timing across phenotypes, stability once present, and dependence on sedation are uncharacterized at scale. Methods: Retrospective cohort of adults with acute brain injury, first intensive care unit stay, MIMIC-IV. Command-following was the Glasgow Coma Scale motor response "Obeys Commands." Among patients not following commands at admission, cumulative incidence was estimated with death or hospice and discharge without recovery as competing events. Instability was quantified as transient first recovery and threshold crossings; examinations were tagged for concurrent sedation. Principal findings were externally validated in the multicenter eICU Collaborative Research Database. Results: Of 13,900 brain-injured patients with three or more motor examinations, 5,498 (39.6%) were not following commands at admission. The cumulative incidence of first command-following was 43.5% by 24 hours and 65.0% by 14 days, ranging at 14 days from 36.9% in anoxic injury to 77.2% in ischemic stroke (anoxic versus ischemic stroke at 72 hours, difference 0.41; adjusted P = .002). Among 3,573 patients who recovered, the first recovery was transient in 22.2%, and 62.4% crossed the threshold repeatedly. Non-following was strongly associated with sedation, consistent with an arousal-dependent examination. In eICU, the 14-day incidence was 64.8%, and transient first recovery was 22.7%, closely matching the primary cohort. Conclusions: After acute brain injury, overt bedside command-following returns early but unsteadily, with phenotype-dependent timing, threshold fluctuation, and strong dependence on sedation. A single charted observation is an unreliable index of the underlying state.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology

An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics. An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics.

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

RATS! Patches Talk Through Registers: Emergent Parts in Register Attention Transformers

When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" – they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.

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

Stochastic trace estimation with tensor train random vectors

arXiv:2606.15679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic trace estimation is a standard tool for approximating the trace of a large-scale matrix available only through matrix-vector products. However, in tensor-structured settings, unstructured Gaussian or Rademacher test vectors may be prohibitively expensive to store and compute with, while cheaper rank-one tensor-product vectors can require sample complexities that grow exponentially with the tensor order. This work studies Gaussian random tensor train vectors as a structured alternative for stochastic trace estimation. We show that, with a suitable choice of the tensor train rank, random tensor train vectors recover dimension-independent guarantees for the Girard–Hutchinson estimator. In particular, a median-of-means variant with tensor train rank $r \geq d-1$ achieves the same dependence on the accuracy $\varepsilon$ and failure probability $\delta$ as the classical estimator based on unstructured Gaussian vectors. We further prove an oblivious subspace injection result for sketches formed from independent Gaussian random tensor train vectors: tensor train rank $r\geq d-1$ and $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2}(k+\log(1/\delta)))$ samples suffice for a $k$-dimensional target subspace. Finally, we investigate the use of such sketches within the Nystr\"{o}m++ framework. We show that the resulting estimator can achieve the desired $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ sample complexity under an additional spectral-tail condition. These results provide clarififcation on both the potential and the limitations of random tensor train vectors in stochastic trace estimation.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Policy-driven Conformal Prediction for Trustworthy QoT Estimation

arXiv:2606.12501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Conformal QoT, a policy-driven framework that combines statistically guaranteed QoT estimation with operational decision policies, enabling reliable lightpath-feasibility predictions under domain shift and improving accuracy from 92\% to 99.6\% on open datasets.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Cross-modal Consistency Guidance for Robust Emotion Control in Auto-Regressive TTS Models

While Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems enable emotional control via natural-language instructions, expressiveness, naturalness, and speech quality degrade when the target emotion conflicts with the textual semantics. We propose a Cross-modal Consistency Guided Classifier-Free Guidance (CCG-CFG) method with dynamic scales based on the degree of inconsistency between the text emotion and the explicit speech emotion, replacing the dropout condition with the text emotion. We also distill the CCG-CFG guidance signal using a hard-sample mining strategy, improving the TTS model's emotional alignment capability. Evaluations on five emotional corpora and two TTS benchmarks show that our approaches applied to CosyVoice2 achieve up to a 12% absolute improvement in emotion-recognition accuracy and a 10% relative improvement in subjective scores, outperforming baselines including HierSpeech++, Qwen3-TTS, and original CosyVoice2, while preserving intelligibility, naturalness, and high speech quality.

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

Direct Fisher Score Estimation for Likelihood Maximization

arXiv:2506.06542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the problem of likelihood maximization when the likelihood function is intractable but model simulations are readily available. We propose a sequential, gradient-based optimization method that directly models the Fisher score based on a local score matching technique which uses simulations from a localized region around each parameter iterate. By employing a linear parameterization to the surrogate score model, our technique admits a closed-form, least-squares solution. This approach yields a fast, flexible, and efficient approximation to the Fisher score, effectively smoothing the likelihood objective and mitigating the challenges posed by complex likelihood landscapes. We provide theoretical guarantees for our score estimator, including bounds on the bias introduced by the smoothing. Empirical results on a range of synthetic and real-world problems demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing benchmarks.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Decay of correlations and zeros for the hard-core model

arXiv:2603.17858v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In a recent paper the last author proved that absence of complex zeros of the partition function of the hard-core model near a parameter $\lambda>0$ implies a form of correlation decay called strong spacial mixing. In this paper we investigate the reverse implication. We introduce a strengthening of strong spatial mixing that we call very strong spatial mixing (VSSM). Our main result is that if VSSM holds at a parameter $\lambda>0$ for a family of graphs, this implies that the partition function has no zeros near that parameter for each graph in the family. We also demonstrate that a closely related variant of very strong spatial mixing does not imply zero-freeness. As a consequence of our main result, we moreover obtain that VSSM implies spectral independence. Our proof relies on transforming the problem to the analysis of an induced non-autonomous dynamical system given by Möbius transformations.

12.
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.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FOUNDv2: Learning Unified User Quantized Tokenizers for User Representation

arXiv:2508.00956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: User representation learning serves as a fundamental pillar for personalized services on large-scale web platforms. Despite its importance, conventional continuous embedding methods face significant challenges, including the lack of a unified paradigm for multi-source data integration, prohibitive storage overhead due to low information density, and the lack of multi-scale modeling granularity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FOUNDv2, a comprehensive user representation scheme centered on the Unified User Quantized Tokenizer U2QT) framework. FOUNDv2 transforms heterogeneous user data into a standardized discrete token space through a robust two-stage architecture. Specifically, the framework first extracts compact feature representations and subsequently employs a multi-view RQ-VAE to discretize them into storage-efficient tokens using shared and source-specific codebooks. To empower these representations with predictive intelligence, we further design multi-scale alignment objectives to capture both fine-grained behavioral dependencies and macro-temporal periodicity. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that FOUNDv2 consistently outperforms task-specific baselines while achieving substantial reductions in storage and computational costs. Finally, the large-scale deployment of FOUNDv2 on Alipay validates its practical scalability and efficiency across diverse industrial scenarios. The main code is available at: https://github.com/chuanhe1999/FOUNDv2.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Kolmogorov Regression for Robust Diffusion Policies

作者:

arXiv:2606.18186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finite-dimensional (FD) diffusion policies exhibit temporal drift owing to discretization artifacts that degrade long-horizon performance (when deployed on physical systems). We introduce a backward Kolmogorov equation that lifts diffusion policies to a Cameron-Martin space – a subset of the Hilbert space. Essentially, replacing stochastic score matching with a deterministic boundary-value PDE problem. Our core innovation thrives on Gaussian measure theory whereupon the diffusion noise covariance operator is realized from a colored noise distribution which prescribes a notion of regularity on samples from the model at inference time. We train the diffusion model with a derived precision-weighted Cameron- Martin loss and a Kolmogorov residual is introduced as a PDE diagnostic during inference. These substitutions yield (i) convergence guarantees where the bound's constants depend on the effective rank of the kernel rather than action dimension, (ii) improved trajectory regularity via spectral weighting, and (iii) a deterministic failure detector without reward signals. Validation across two application domains demonstrates substantial improvements: on the PushT manipulation benchmark, the Cameron-Martin loss achieves a 17% improvement in maximum episode reward (0.95 vs. 0.78 for MSE) and 67.6% reduction in inter-step drifts during inference via the introduced residual magnitude. Similarly, on a 6-station manufacturing line with constant work-in-process (CONWIP) flow control, we achieve 28.4% lower RMSE than classical LSTM baselines; a high starvation-event recall (1.0 in test cycles), and effective bottleneck identification (Precision@1 = 1.0 in test set, 13x signal-to-noise ratio). We then certify the dispatch policies with Hamilton-Jacobi reachability theory which reduces deadlock events by 96% compared to uncontrolled dispatch over 100 simulated runs (351 events prevented).

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bootstrapped Monitoring: Leveraging Transparent Reasoning to Oversee Stronger AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trusted monitoring is a cornerstone of AI control. However, as frontier models grow more capable, the increasing capabilities gap between trusted and untrusted models may render trusted models unreliable monitors. We introduce bootstrapped monitoring, a protocol that addresses this by inserting a stronger, intermediate untrusted model with transparent chain-of-thought reasoning into the oversight chain. The untrusted monitor ($U_m$) evaluates the agent's actions, while a weaker trusted model ($T$) oversees $U_m$'s reasoning to detect collusion. We evaluate bootstrapped monitoring on multi-turn software engineering tasks (BashArena) across multiple agents and monitors. Bootstrapped monitoring substantially improves catch rates over trusted-only monitoring, even when the untrusted monitor actively colludes with the agent, provided we have access to its raw chain-of-thought. Our results suggest that bootstrapped monitoring can extend the useful lifetime of trusted models in control as AI capabilities advance.

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

Editorial Alignment: A Participatory Approach to Engaging Editorial Expertise in LLM-mediated Knowledge Dissemination

arXiv:2606.20258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The emergence of LLM-driven information services is reshaping the conditions under which public knowledge institutions operate, threatening to absorb the editorial function these institutions exist to exercise. While LLMs offer powerful new affordances for knowledge dissemination, editorial authority is challenged by pretrained LLMs that arrive already aligned with the values and dissemination strategies of their commercial developers. This paper investigates editor participation in re-aligning LLM interfaces to editorial standards through design workshops, in a case study where we design and implement an LLM-enabled encyclopedia interface with a Nordic public knowledge institution. We introduce editorial alignment as a design practice within Participatory AI, framing AI alignment as a design process and positioning the editorial standard as a design artefact that translates editorial practice and values into alignment objectives for technical implementation. Last, we discuss how editorial alignment can create space for ongoing participation and give editors agency in LLM-mediated knowledge dissemination.

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

Hidden Ghost Hand: Unveiling Backdoor Vulnerabilities in MLLM-Powered Mobile GUI Agents

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown greater promise for human-interaction. However, due to the high fine-tuning cost, users often rely on open-source GUI agents or APIs offered by AI providers, which introduces a critical but underexplored supply chain threat: backdoor attacks. In this work, we first unveil that MLLM-powered GUI agents naturally expose multiple interaction-level triggers, such as historical steps, environment states, and task progress. Based on this observation, we introduce AgentGhost, an effective and stealthy framework for red-teaming backdoor attacks. Specifically, we first construct composite triggers by combining goal and interaction levels, allowing GUI agents to unintentionally activate backdoors while ensuring task utility. Then, we formulate backdoor injection as a Min-Max optimization problem that uses supervised contrastive learning to maximize the feature difference across sample classes at the representation space, improving flexibility of the backdoor. Meanwhile, it adopts supervised fine-tuning to minimize the discrepancy between backdoor and clean behavior generation, enhancing effectiveness and utility. Extensive evaluations of various agent models in two established mobile benchmarks show that AgentGhost is effective and generic, with attack accuracy that reaches 99.7\% on three attack objectives, and shows stealthiness with only 1\% utility degradation. Furthermore, we tailor a defense method against AgentGhost that reduces the attack accuracy to 22.1\%. Our code is available at \texttt{anonymous}.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Connecting Speech to Words through Images

How can we learn the mapping between written words and their spoken counterparts in the absence of explicit textual supervision? We present a visually grounded method for building a vocabulary of spoken words using only images and their spoken descriptions. First, image captioning systems are used to build a vocabulary of written words representing salient visual concepts in the images. For each word, we then find utterances whose image captions contain that word. Then we use an unsupervised word discovery technique to align these utterances to locate instances of the target word. The result is spoken word segments that are linked to written words – all accomplished without any text supervision. In spoken word retrieval and keyword spotting experiments, the proposed approach outperforms a strong neural baseline while being more interpretable. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in English and motivate future work on low-resource languages without transcripts.

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

Does the Judge Prefer English? Evaluating Language-Switching Invariance in LLM-as-a-Judge

作者:

Large language models (LLMs) are now widely used as automatic judges for open-ended instruction-following evaluation. This practice is convenient, scalable, and often more semantically aware than reference-based metrics, but it also introduces a new reliability question: does a judge evaluate the quality of an answer, or does it also react to the language in which the comparison is presented? We propose Judge-LS, a lightweight meta-evaluation protocol that transforms LLMBar response-pair items into English, Chinese, and Chinese-English language-switched variants. A reliable judge should preserve its preference under label-preserving language transformations and should not prefer a language when two answers are translation-equivalent. We evaluate four API-accessible judges on the full 419-item LLMBar benchmark, producing 13,408 successful pairwise judgments. Across models, Chinese and language-switched presentations induce 10.7–14.4% preference flips relative to English, and all judges achieve their highest accuracy in English. However, translation-equivalent tie probes do not reveal a systematic English preference: most probes are judged as ties, and non-tie decisions more often favor Chinese. We add confidence intervals, paired significance tests, and an automatic transformation audit with a sensitivity analysis that excludes mechanically flagged high-risk variants. The experiment requires no model training, uses only API calls, and is feasible on modest local hardware.

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

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Who Drifted: the System or the Judge? Anytime-Valid Attribution in LLM Evaluation Pipelines

作者:

arXiv:2606.15474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous evaluation of LLM products relies on a strong LLM judge treated as ground truth: a cheap monitor scores every interaction and a team is paged when the score drifts down. But the judge is itself a model behind an API, and a silent version bump or scoring-prompt update changes how it scores – so every drift alarm is ambiguous between a worse product and a changed judge. We resolve the ambiguity with a fixed, human-labeled anchor set that the current judge re-scores at a steady interleave, a second betting e-process on the judge-versus-human gap, and a guard-window rule returning a verdict in {none, system, judge}. We prove anytime-validity, one-way identification (only the judge can move the anchors), an attribution race whose design law is that the anchors must out-run the main process they guard, and process orthogonality. On two real judge changes, a silent version bump is detected as judge drift in 60/60 runs with zero judge-to-system misattribution, and a contaminating strict-prompt change is correctly attributed on 110 of 120 runs at guard width 300 – while the industry-default rolling z-test false-alarms on 75% of drift-free streams. Every experiment replicates on a second domain (TL;DR summarization) with nothing re-tuned, and where the domains differ the differences are the ones the race predicts: the strict-prompt change shifts scores harder there, so the anchors fire faster and attribution becomes perfect (240/240). The monitor runs at approximately 0.64 of the cost of strong-judging every item, or 0.21 in a cheaper-but-deafer regime.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Hidden Degradation Costs in Energy-Cost-Only HEMS Optimisation: Study on Battery and PV Sensitivity

arXiv:2606.16051v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residential battery energy storage systems (BESS) are increasingly deployed alongside photovoltaic (PV) generation to reduce household energy costs under volatile time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. Model predictive control (MPC) is a widely adopted optimisation strategy for home energy management systems (HEMS), typically formulated to minimise net energy cost, subject to physical and operational constraints. However, battery degradation is rarely embedded in the optimisation objective, meaning its cost is unquantified and aggressive; high-cycle-count strategies could incur significant losses once deployed to physical systems. This paper presents a receding-horizon mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) baseline for a UK residential HEMS, using demand data from the REFIT dataset. A 3 by 3 sensitivity study is conducted across three battery sizes and three PV array sizes, with post-hoc degradation cost estimated using the Naumann stress model and rainflow cycle counting. Results show that degradation remains constant for each battery size and can exceed energy cost savings by up to 1,060 %. These results demonstrate that energy-cost-only optimisation systematically underestimates the true system cost, motivating a degradation-aware control formulation.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Iterative Visual Thinking: Teaching Vision-Language Models Spatial Self-Correction through Visual Feedback

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong singleshot spatial grounding, yet lack any mechanism to observe and correct their own predictions. We find that naively prompting a VLM to iterate over rendered visualizations of its predictions causes catastrophic failure: Acc@0.5 on referring expression comprehension collapses from 79.6% to 48.7% (a 31 percentage point drop), revealing a fundamental gap between grounding capability and self-correction ability. We propose Iterative Visual Thinking (IVT), a closed-loop framework in which the model predicts a bounding box, observes the prediction rendered on the image, and iteratively refines through visual feedback. A two-phase training recipe closes the self-correction gap: first, we exploit the base model's own predictions as realistic errors and prompt a teacher VLM to generate corrective reasoning traces, yielding supervised data without human annotation; second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a simple IoU reward to stabilize multi-step refinement. On a mixed benchmark spanning RefCOCOg, Ref-Adv, and Ref-L4 (505 test samples), SFT warm-up with IVT surpasses the single-shot base model on every metric: Acc@0.5 rises to 82.0% (+2.4pp), Acc@0.7 to 74.1% (+3.2pp), and Acc@0.9 to 48.3% (+2.8pp). GRPO further reduces per-step IoU degradation by 5x, stabilizing the refinement trajectory. All training uses only 2,400 samples on a single GPU, demonstrating that spatial self-correction is a learnable capability that can be instilled at modest scale.

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

When Plausible Is Not Realistic: Evaluating Human Mobility in LLM-Based Urban Simulation

LLM-based generative agents are increasingly used in urban simulators, yet it remains unclear whether they reproduce empirically realistic human mobility patterns or merely generate plausible mobility narratives. We introduce a validation framework for evaluating the mobility of generative agents of LLM-based urban simulators against real-world mobility data. For this, we use mobility laws, temporal rhythms, network motifs, semantic activity transitions, and behavioral mobility profiles. Using datasets from the Greater Paris region and Shanghai, we evaluate AgentSociety and CitySim across multiple dimensions of mobility realism. Our analysis reveals a substantial gap between narrative plausibility and empirical mobility realism. Although the simulators capture some high-level semantic activity distributions, they struggle to reproduce core spatial and temporal constraints, including realistic trip-length distributions, origin-destination flows, dwell times, and transition dynamics. We further observe that realistic mobility diversity is unstable across default prompting configurations and may require explicit profile-aware initialization. To support reproducible evaluation, we also contribute scalable and open LLM-driven infrastructure for regional-scale map generation, observability-enhanced simulation, mobility-metric computation, and traffic simulation. Our findings highlight the need for rigorous empirical validation of LLM-based urban simulators and provide practical tools for building more realistic and reproducible urban simulation systems.

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

Characterizing Nash Equilibria in Zero-Sum Games: A Physics-Inspired, Parallelizable Approach with a Linear Number of Gradient Queries

arXiv:2507.11366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study online optimization methods for zero-sum games, a fundamental problem in adversarial learning in machine learning, economics, and many other domains. Traditional methods approximate Nash equilibria (NE) using either regret-based methods (time-average convergence) or contraction-map-based methods (last-iterate convergence). We propose a new method based on Hamiltonian dynamics in physics and prove that it can characterize the set of NE in a finite (linear) number of iterations of alternating gradient descent in the unbounded setting, modulo degeneracy, a first in online optimization. Unlike standard methods for computing NE, our proposed approach can be parallelized and works with arbitrary learning rates, both firsts in algorithmic game theory. Experimentally, we support our results by showing our approach drastically outperforms standard methods.