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

RNN(p) for Power Consumption Forecasting

arXiv:2209.01378v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An elementary Recurrent Neural Network that operates on p time lags, called an RNN(p), is the natural generalisation of a linear autoregressive model ARX(p). It is a powerful forecasting tool for variables displaying inherent seasonal patterns across multiple time scales, as is often observed in energy, economic, and financial time series. The architecture of RNN(p) models, characterised by structured feedbacks across time lags, enables the design of efficient training strategies. We conduct a comparative study of learning algorithms for these models, providing a rigorous analysis of their computational complexity and training performance. We present two applications of RNN(p) models in power consumption forecasting, a key domain within the energy sector where accurate forecasts inform both operational and financial decisions. Experimental results show that RNN(p) models achieve excellent forecasting accuracy while maintaining a high degree of interpretability. These features make them well-suited for decision-making in energy markets and other fintech applications where reliable predictions play a significant economic role.

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

Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference for Dependent Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.15458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variational inference (VI) is a core engine of modern AI, enabling scalable approximate Bayesian learning and uncertainty-aware training of large probabilistic and generative models. In this paper, we propose Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference (SN-VI), a novel framework for modeling complex dependencies among latent variables in posterior approximation, leveraging multivariate spline techniques. Unlike traditional methods that rely on the mean-field assumption, SN-VI preserves intricate latent variable dependencies, providing a flexible and accurate approximation of posteriors with arbitrary shapes. We establish rigorous theoretical guarantees, including the derivation of the lower bound for the variational objective and proof of asymptotic consistency in posterior estimation. To facilitate practical implementation, we develop an algorithm that automatically identifies dependent latent variables and their underlying dependence structure, without requiring manual specification. Simulation studies validate the effectiveness of SN-VI in approximating posterior distributions with bounded support and complex dependencies. The proposed method has been successfully applied to high-dimensional structured data, including computer vision datasets and spatial transcriptomics. In these applications, SN-VI demonstrates improved generative model performance and effectively uncovers coupled biological signals through the learned dependency structure.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Inverted Dirac oscillator

arXiv:2606.15303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Dirac oscillator is obtained from the Dirac Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{D}} = \left( c\vec{\alpha}\cdot \vec{p} + mc^{2}\beta \right)$ by modifying the momentum through a non-Hermitian substitution $\overrightarrow{p} \rightarrow \overrightarrow{p} \pm i\omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$. Despite the non-Hermitian nature of this momentum operator, the full Hamiltonian remains Hermitian due to the presence of the Dirac matrix $\vec{\alpha}$. However, if one instead introduces a Hermitian modification of the form $\vec{p} \rightarrow \vec{p} \pm \omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$, the resulting Hamiltonian is no longer Hermitian. In this case, the system corresponds to an inverted Dirac oscillator $H^{\mathrm{r}}$, where the potential becomes unbounded from below, the energy spectrum becomes continuous, and the eigenfunctions fail to be square-integrable, leading to normalization difficulties. We show that the Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ is a pseudo-$\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric operator, and we introduce an unbounded, non-unitary transformation that establishes a connection between $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ and $H^{\mathrm{D}}$. The purpose of this work is to analyze this relativistic quantum system – known as the Dirac inverted oscillator – which, despite its various applications, admits an exact analytical solution

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The Protective Role of Belonging and Socioeconomic Status in Dropout Intent Among Minority Ethnic Students: A Mixed Methods Study

Improving minority ethnic student retention is a global higher education priority. This mixed-methods study investigated how institutional belonging and socioeconomic status interact to shape dropout intentions among minority university students in the UK (N = 182). Quantitative results revealed that perceived course difficulty and lower subjective socioeconomic status were the strongest predictors of dropout intent. While the interaction between socioeconomic status and difficulty was non-significant, qualitative accounts showed distinct structural vulnerabilities. Financial strain restricted social integration, turning socioeconomic disparities into campus isolation. Conversely, representative curricula, diverse peer networks, and stable cultural in-groups (e.g., religious affiliations, living in the parental home) functioned as essential psychological buffers against academic exhaustion and alienation. Universities must shift from transactional models to sustained structural equity to protect vulnerable student groups.

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

Regional Climate Model Emulation with Diffusion Approaches: What is the Added Value of Generative Machine Learning?

arXiv:2606.14570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emulators provide a cost-effective alternative to regional climate models (RCMs) by capturing their dynamical downscaling function. They link large-scale predictors simulated by global climate models (GCMs) to RCM-simulated high-resolution fields of the target variable, here precipitation. Machine learning methods, typically deep learning, are cheaper than running RCMs in computation time and energy. Among them, generative models are appealing because they can simulate ensembles of local high-resolution fields consistent with the predictors. This ensemble, which we call the uncertainty envelope, remains to be properly assessed for added value. Here, we make three contributions. First, we introduce ParamDiffusion, a new two-stage diffusion-based framework, and compare it with a state-of-the-art diffusion approach. Second, we expand standard validation through a comprehensive framework aligned with climate-science needs, examining specific precipitation events, including extremes. Third, within this framework, we assess the added value of diffusion approaches relative to deterministic methods. We intercompare four deep-learning models: a deterministic model designed to capture the precipitation tail; a parametric probabilistic model based on it; a recently proposed diffusion approach; and ParamDiffusion, which couples the parametric model with a diffusion model. Our results show that diffusion-based approaches reproduce climatological precipitation statistics with high skill, including distributional tails and spatially compounded extremes, while generating spatially detailed fields. However, none of the assessed models consistently accounts for the most extreme RCM-simulated events within its uncertainty envelope. Diffusion models are therefore promising for probabilistic RCM emulation, but progress is still required before they can reliably represent high-impact precipitation extremes.

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

Source-Grounded Data Generation for Text-to-JSON Learning

From financial filings to clinical records, legacy industries rely heavily on long, unstructured documents to store high-value information. Reliably extracting this information into structured, machine-readable representations is a key prerequisite to making the contents accessible to automated systems. JSON is a natural target for such structured extraction, yet constructing reliable and scalable text-to-JSON training data remains challenging. To address this gap, we propose STAGE (Spreadsheet-grounded Text-to-JSON Artifact GEneration), a source-grounded data generation pipeline that constructs reports and JSON schema by using LLMs for scalable synthesis while validating ground-truth values against the underlying spreadsheet. Evaluations on STAGE-Eval, our source-grounded benchmark with an 851-example test set, show that STAGE produces stronger training data than existing approaches. This improves Qwen3-4B exact match from 31.37% to 74.27% and value accuracy from 45.46% to 90.69%.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Extremal representations of functions of matrices and applications to multivariate prediction

arXiv:2606.19359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by two seminal results of multivariate prediction theory by Helson and Lowdenslager and by Wiener and Masani we prove extremal representations of functions of matrices and derive their prediction-theoretic consequences. We also sketch a way to obtain matricial inequalities from our results. The main goal of the paper is the computation of the infimum of a set of values of the form $tr(A \Delta A^*)$, where $\Delta$ is a given non-negative Hermitian $n \times n$ matrix and the choices for $A$ exhauste a certain set of $n \times n$ matrices. In particular, we focus on norm-bounded unit spheres with certain types of properties of unitary invariance, what allows an application of the theory of majorization.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

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

Leptomeningeal Collateral Detection on DSA via Vessel-Graph Neural Networks

Leptomeningeal collaterals (LMCs) are an important prognostic factor in acute ischemic stroke. Existing automated methods rely on CT angiography (CTA), but individual LMCs are often too small to be resolved on CTA, limiting these methods to coarse collateral scoring. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) visualizes individual collaterals at superior resolution, yet current assessment remains subjective, relying on manual grading scales that suffer from poor inter-rater agreement. We present a framework that formulates collateral detection as the classification of individual vessel segments on a graph derived from DSA. A hybrid graph-pixel architecture combines a topology-aware graph branch with a dense pixel branch, fused in a shared node-probability space. In a five-fold cross-validation setting, the fused model achieves a PR-AUC of 0.434, outperforming the graph-only (0.403) and pixel-only (0.362) baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first method to enable the individualization of LMCs in DSA, allowing for precise per-vessel quantitative assessment. This integration shifts DSA assessment toward objective evaluation, supporting future biomarker and pattern discovery for individual LMCs.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Age as a moderator of a brief alcohol intervention among injury patients in Northern Tanzania

Background: Alcohol use is a leading modifiable risk factor for injury in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, young people ([≤]24 years) experience greater alcohol-related harm despite drinking less frequently than adults. Punguza Pombe kwa Afya Yako (PPKAY) is a culturally adapted, brief intervention for injury patients in Tanzania. This study examined whether age moderates its effectiveness. Methods: We conducted an exploratory secondary analysis of baseline and 3-month data from the PPKAY randomized trial among injury patients aged [≥]18 years at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, Tanzania. Eligible participants reporting alcohol use before injury, AUDIT [≥]8, or positive breathalyzer were randomized to usual care or PPKAY with SMS boosters. The primary outcome was binge drinking days. Count outcomes were analyzed using negative binomial regression with robust SEs and continuous outcomes using mixed-effects models. Effect modification was assessed using a three-way interaction (Time x intervention x Age). Results: Among 543 participants (mean age 36.8 years; 16.2% aged 18–24), age moderated the intervention effect for drinking days (IRR = 0.27, 95% CI 0.07 – 0.98; p = 0.046) and drinks consumed (IRR = 0.17, 95% CI 0.04 – 0.77; p = 0.021). The intervention reduced 4 drinking days (95% CI -7.1 to -0.8) and 27.5 drinks (95% CI -42.8 to -12.2) among young people, while adults showed reductions in both arms, without intervention-specific effect. Conclusion: The effects of ED-based brief alcohol interventions are not uniform, varying across both age groups and alcohol-related outcomes. We found a greater responsiveness in drinking frequency and quantity reported among young people.

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

On the Benefits of Weight Normalization for Overparameterized Matrix Sensing

arXiv:2510.01175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While normalization techniques are widely used in deep learning, their theoretical understanding remains relatively limited. In this work, we establish the benefits of (generalized) weight normalization (WN) applied to the overparameterized matrix sensing problem. We prove that WN with Riemannian optimization achieves linear convergence, yielding an exponential speedup over standard methods that do not use WN. Our analysis further demonstrates that both iteration and sample complexity improve polynomially as the level of overparameterization increases. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first characterization of how WN leverages overparameterization for faster convergence in matrix sensing.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Verifiable Environments Are LEGO Bricks: Recursive Composition for Reasoning Generalization

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with verifiable environments has emerged as a powerful approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While prior research demonstrates that scaling environment quantity improves RL performance, existing manual or individual construction methods suffer from linear scaling limits, thereby hindering scalable reasoning generalization. This paper introduces RACES (Recursive Automated Composition for Environment Scaling), a framework that conceptualizes verifiable environments as composable building blocks that can be recursively assembled. The key insight is that when the codomain (output type) of one environment matches the domain (input type) of another, they can be automatically fused into a new verifiable environment, enabling recursive composition. RACES is implemented with 300 individual environments and defines a set of composition operators (\textsc{SEQUENTIAL}, \textsc{PARALLEL}, \textsc{SORT}, and \textsc{SELECT}) that induce diverse reasoning patterns. Extensive experiments show that RL training on these composite environments consistently enhances reasoning generalization. Specifically, RACES improves DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B by an average of 3.1 points (from 48.2 to 51.3) and boosts Qwen3-14B performance from 58.8 to 61.1 on six benchmarks, which are unseen during the construction of training environments. Moreover, RACES achieves performance comparable to training on 300 individual environments using only 50 base environments, demonstrating significant efficiency in environment utilization.

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

Rethinking Air-Ground Collaboration: A Progressive Cross-Task Benchmark and Socialized Learning Framework

Air-ground collaborative perception is crucial for robust visual understanding in real-world dynamic environments. However, existing studies typically formulate collaboration as single-task cross-view fusion, overlooking the functional dependencies among localization, target association, and fine-grained parsing. In addition, the heterogeneous nature of aerial and ground views introduces substantial geometric, scale, and occlusion discrepancies, making uniform feature sharing vulnerable to negative transfer. To tackle these issues, we model air-ground perception as a progressive cross-task collaboration task and construct the Air-Ground Progressive Collaboration (AGPC) benchmark, a spatio-temporally aligned benchmark comprising more than 745K raw video frames. Built upon this benchmark, we propose Socialized Co-Perception (SCP), a coarse-to-fine framework that organizes collaboration progressively from aerial global localization to ground target association and identity-aware parsing. Its core module, the Dual-Layer Router (DLR), decouples input-side multi-scale expert selection from output-side task-conditioned modulation, enabling selective cross-view and cross-task interaction while suppressing harmful interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SCP. It achieves a 3.73\% coevolutionary gain and a 7.86\% improvement in average downstream performance. These results show that task-conditioned collaboration is more effective than uniform fusion for heterogeneous air-ground perception. The code is available at https://github.com/g1136639260-spec/AGSCP.

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

RAVA: Retrieval-Augmented Viewpoint Alignment for Subject-Driven Image Generation

Reference-driven image generation has made rapid progress on identity preservation, but reliable viewpoint control across different subjects remains poorly understood. The difficulty is not merely generating a new image of the target subject: the model must infer the implicit viewpoint of one subject and transfer it to another subject using only image-level evidence, without camera poses, depth, or ray-based conditions. In this setting, existing generators conditioned on multiple image references often rely on spurious semantic correlations, which lead to viewpoint drift, part-level structural mismatches, and missing or unsupported target-specific content. We formulate this challenge as cross-subject viewpoint alignment and propose RAVA, a retrieval-augmented framework that supplies explicit geometric evidence before generation. RAVA first learns a cross-instance viewpoint embedding that retrieves target-subject images aligned with the anchor viewpoint, then applies a LogDet-based subset selection strategy to retain a compact reference set that is both view-consistent and structurally complementary. The selected references are finally consumed by a fine-tuned multi-reference image generator. Experiments show that generic semantic embeddings are nearly random for this task, while the proposed retriever substantially improves viewpoint retrieval quality. On cross-subject generation, RAVA consistently outperforms zero-shot baselines and stronger retrieval alternatives under the same generation backbone. These results indicate that cross-subject viewpoint alignment benefits from retrieval-augmented geometric grounding rather than relying on end-to-end generation alone.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Construction of ergodic IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

arXiv:2506.10476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the existence of infinite-volume IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ , with $d \geq 2$, based on a multi-source IDLA protocol. Unlike IDLA aggregates, the laws of the IDLA forests studied here depend on the trajectories of particles, and then do not satisfy the famous Abelian property. Their existence is due to a stabilization result (Theorem 1.1, our main result) that we establish using percolation tools. Although the sources are infinitely many, we also prove that each of them play the same role in the building procedure, which results in an ergodicity property for the IDLA forests (Theorem 1.2).

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

An alternative approach to well-posedness of McKean-Vlasov equations arising in Consensus-Based Optimization

arXiv:2512.19446v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work we study the mean-field description of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO), a derivative-free particle optimization method. Such a description is provided by a non-local SDE of McKean-Vlasov type, whose fields lack of global Lipschitz continuity. We propose a novel approach to prove the well-posedness of the mean-field CBO equation based on a truncation argument. The latter is performed through the introduction of a cut-off function, defined on the space of probability measures, acting on the fields. This procedure allows us to study the well-posedness problem in the classical framework of Sznitman. Through this argument, we recover the established result on the existence of strong solutions, and we extend the class of solutions for which pathwise uniqueness holds.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Developmental Associations Linking Childhood Trauma and Early Cannabis Use to Adolescent DNA Methylation and Psychotic-Like Experiences

Background. Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) index early risk for psychotic disorders and are consistently associated with childhood trauma, yet underlying biological mechanisms remain poorly understood. DNA methylation (DNAm) may capture the biological embedding of early adversity, while adolescent exposures such as cannabis use may modify these processes. We examined epigenome-wide associations of childhood trauma and PLEs, tested the moderating role of early cannabis use, and evaluated DNAm as a potential mediator. Methods. We analysed data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a UK population-based birth cohort. Childhood trauma was assessed prospectively and retrospectively. Epigenome-wide DNAm was measured in peripheral blood at ~17 years using the Illumina 450K array, and PLEs were assessed at 18 using a structured interview. Epigenome-wide association studies were conducted for trauma-DNAm and DNAm-PLEs associations in the final sample (n = 1,457), adjusting for demographic, biological, and technical covariates. Differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were identified using DMRff, followed by functional enrichment analyses. Cannabis use at 15.5 was modelled as a moderator with multiple imputation for missing data. Mediation was tested using the Divide-Aggregate Composite-null Test (DACT). Results. Childhood trauma was associated with widespread DNAm differences, primarily at the regional level, with enrichment in pathways related to cellular stress responses. In contrast, DNAm associated with PLEs was more limited and implicated loci involved in epigenetic regulatory processes. These signatures were largely distinct, and there was no evidence supporting mediation after multiple testing correction. Incorporating cannabis use altered the pattern and extent of DNAm associations, with stronger and more significant signals observed at both CpG and regional levels, although these did not translate into evidence of mediation. Conclusion. Childhood trauma and PLEs show distinct DNAm signatures in adolescence, with trauma-related DNAm reflecting broad stress-related processes and PLE-associated DNAm implicating regulatory mechanisms. We found little evidence that DNAm mediates the trauma-PLE association. Instead, adolescent exposures, particularly cannabis use, may distinctly influence trauma-related epigenetic variation with limited detectable downstream effects on PLEs. These findings support a context-dependent model of epigenetic risk and highlight the need for larger longitudinal studies to clarify causal pathways linking early adversity to psychosis.

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

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

In this paper, we contribute to the debate on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in scientometrics. We argue that moving from a trial-and-error approach to an explainable and actionable use requires a principled understanding of strengths and weaknesses of GenAI as compared with other techniques and with human judgment. To this end, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts, i.e. the meanings attributed to words, and their pragmatic dimension, i.e. their embedding within communicative situations. We leverage this framework to interpret the results of applications of GenAI in scientometrics and to provide guidance to users. Specifically, we conclude that key parameters to be considered are the nature of the task, the level of granularity of the analysis and whether the goal was descriptive, inferential or evaluative. These parameters lead to different strategies for using GenAI and human-machine integration. Finally, we suggest that, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might affect textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production in the age of AI.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Random Schrödinger operators on manifolds and abstract bounds for multiplier-type operators

arXiv:2606.19075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study random Schrödinger operators on closed Riemannian manifolds with Anderson-type potentials. We prove high-probability spectral inclusion bounds showing that eigenvalues remain close to those of the Laplacian, with deviations controlled by a norm of the potential coefficients. Compared with deterministic bounds, this yields a square-root cancellation gain. The proof is based on a general principle showing that randomisation improves operator norm bounds for multiplier-type operators, which we formulate in both discrete and continuous settings.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Phase Transition in Convex Relaxations for Graph Alignment

arXiv:2606.15581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the graph alignment problem for correlated Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (GOE) matrices, where the goal is to recover a hidden vertex permutation given two correlated symmetric Gaussian matrices $(A, B)$ with correlation $1/\sqrt{1+\sigma^2}$. While the maximum likelihood estimator is information-theoretically optimal, its computation, which reduces to a quadratic assignment problem, is intractable. Motivated by this, we analyze convex relaxations based on minimizing $\|AX - XB\|_F$ over the set of doubly stochastic matrices and the unit hypercube. We show that when the correlation parameter satisfies $\sigma = o(n^{-1/2}/\log^4 n)$, the solution of either relaxation $(X^\star)$ concentrates around the ground-truth permutation matrix $(\Pi^\star)$, i.e., $\|X^\star-\Pi^\star\|_F^2 = o(n)$, implying recovery of all but a vanishing fraction of vertices after simple post-processing. Combined with existing lower bounds, our results precisely characterize that $\|X^\star-\Pi^\star\|_F^2$ transitions from $o(n)$ for $\sigma = \tilde{o}(n^{-1/2})$ to $\Omega(n)$ for $\sigma = \tilde{\Omega}(n^{-1/2})$. In doing so, our analysis significantly tightens prior results and extends them beyond doubly stochastic relaxations.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Expanding SPHERE-JEPA: A Family of Statistical Regularizers for the Hypersphere

arXiv:2606.17603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), preventing representation collapse by explicitly enforcing a uniform distribution on the unit hypersphere has proven to be effective. However, current frameworks typically rely on sliced statistical regularizers such as SIGReg (used in LeJEPA) and SUSReg (used in SPHERE-JEPA), which approximate this continuous objective via Monte Carlo sampling along random 1D directions. This stochasticity injects projection variance into the training gradients, destabilizing optimization, and hindering convergence. In this work, we first show that analytically integrating out these random projections natively yields a deterministic Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), bypassing the variance of sliced methods. Motivated by this equivalence, we formulate full-dimensional objectives for MMD, Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD), and Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence directly on the sphere to enforce a uniform distribution. To prevent spatial bias, we equip these tests with rotationally invariant kernels constructed via spectral theory, systematically evaluating two canonical families: smooth exponential decay (Heat) and strict frequency cutoff (Bandlimited) filters. Empirically, removing projection-induced noise results in more stable optimization, faster convergence, and consistent improvements over stochastic sliced regularizers on ImageNet and Galaxy10. Furthermore, we reveal that the choice of the statistical test shapes the geometry of the learned latent space: MMD and KSD favor locally clustered organization suitable for object-centric domains, whereas the continuous KDE-based KL divergence promotes fine-grained instance separation, yielding the strongest results on unclustered procedural texture retrieval.

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

NetCause: Counterfactual Learning for Root Cause Analysis in Large-Scale Networks

arXiv:2606.13543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a learned model capture how faults propagate through a large-scale network and use this knowledge to causally attribute customer impact to its underlying root cause? Existing root cause analysis techniques often rely on static rules, correlation heuristics, or topology-local reasoning, which struggle to generalize in dynamic environments where faults propagate across complex physical and logical dependencies. We present NetCause, a self-supervised learning-based framework that models network incidents as graph-temporal processes and uses counterfactual simulation to rank candidate root causes. This approach produces an interpretable ranking of root cause hypotheses and integrates naturally with operator-defined mitigation and remediation actions. We train the model on over 1,500 incidents collected over six months from a leading cloud provider's production network and evaluate it on 31 expert-labeled incidents. NetCause consistently improves root cause ranking quality in the regime most relevant to operational decision-making, achieving a 16.1% accuracy improvement over a rule-based heuristic baseline. While training is computationally intensive, inference is lightweight, requiring only seconds of GPU runtime per incident (well below typical telemetry collection latencies).

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

Differentiable Thermodynamic Phase-Equilibria for Machine Learning

arXiv:2603.11249v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of phase equilibria remains a central challenge in chemical engineering. Physics-consistent machine learning methods that incorporate thermodynamic structure into neural networks have recently shown strong performance for activity-coefficient modeling. However, extending such approaches to equilibrium data arising from an extremum principle, such as liquid-liquid equilibria, remains difficult. Here we present DISCOMAX, a differentiable algorithm for phase-equilibrium calculation that guarantees thermodynamic consistency at both training and inference, only subject to a user-specified discretization. The method combines discrete enumeration of feasible phase states with masked softmax aggregation in the backward pass, with the propagation of the true equilibrium state in the forward pass, using a straight-through gradient estimator to enable physics-consistent end-to-end learning of neural \gls{gE}-models. We show that this approach bears analogy to statistical thermodynamics, and we evaluate it on binary liquid-liquid equilibrium data where it outperforms existing surrogate-based methods, while offering a general framework for learning from different kinds of equilibrium data.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PersonaDrive: Human-Style Retrieval-Augmented VLA Agents for Closed-Loop Driving Simulation

Closed-loop driving simulators typically populate their environments with non-ego traffic agents that behave largely the same way, produced either by rule-based traffic managers or by learned models trained toward a single behavioral mode. Recent work introduces style variation through post-hoc labels on observational data or LLM-inferred reward weights, but these signals act as proxies for what a style should reward rather than demonstrations of humans explicitly asked to drive in that style. We introduce PersonaDrive, a pipeline that conditions a vision-language-action (VLA) driving agent on retrieved demonstrations from a style-instructed human driving dataset, in which participants drive CARLA leaderboard routes under aggressive, neutral, and conservative instructions on a driver-in-the-loop rig. The pipeline has three stages: (i) offline triplet mining over per-style human driving data using a combined image-text similarity score; (ii) training a lightweight retrieval head that fuses frozen visual features with a small control encoder over per-style databases; and (iii) fine-tuning a single VLA backbone to treat retrieved context points as in-context behavioral demonstrations during waypoint prediction. At inference, the same backbone is conditioned on any style by swapping which per-style database the retrieval head queries, so selecting a style requires no per-style retraining while enabling human-style, style-diverse non-ego agents for closed-loop simulation. On Bench2Drive, PersonaDrive (no style) improves the driving score by 4.6% over SimLingo and 2.5% over HiP-AD, and under style conditioning attains the highest driving score in every style within a roughly 2% band (its weakest style surpassing the strongest baseline, DMW, by 5.4%), while average speed and acceleration rise by 18% and 25% from the conservative to the aggressive instruction.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Robustness Verification of Recurrent Neural Networks with Abstraction Refinement

arXiv:2606.12490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Certified local robustness verification for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is challenging because approximation errors introduced by nonlinear relaxations can propagate through recurrent connections and accumulate over time. As a result, scalable linear bound propagation methods often become overly conservative and fail to certify inputs that are in fact robust, especially when many pre-activation intervals cross zero. We propose an abstraction-refinement framework for RNN verification that partitions such intervals to remove the dominant relaxation error: on each refined branch, ReLU becomes exact, and smooth activations such as tanh and sigmoid admit substantially tighter linear envelopes. To control the combinatorial cost of splitting in long sequences, we introduce a SHAP-guided timestep selection strategy that ranks hidden states by their contribution to the verification objective and refines only the most critical timesteps in temporal order. Experiments on CIFAR10 and MNIST stroke benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in verification success and robustness-margin tightness over abstraction-only baselines, while exposing clear runtime trade-offs between ReLU and tanh models.