Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2510.25740

A mathematical study of the excess growth rate

Authors:

Steven Campbell↗Ting-Kam Leonard Wong↗

arXiv:2510.25740v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The excess growth rate, defined as the gap in Jensen's inequality for the logarithm, is a fundamental functional in portfolio theory. In this paper, we present a mathematical study motivated by information theory. We begin by establishing its properties and showing that it has rich connections with information theoretic concepts such as the Helmholtz free energy, L. Campbell's measure of average code length and large deviations. Our main results consist of three axiomatic characterization theorems of the excess growth rate, in terms of (i) the relative entropy, (ii) the gap in Jensen's inequality, and (iii) the logarithmic divergence that generalizes the Bregman divergence. Furthermore, we study maximization of the excess growth rate and compare it with the growth optimal portfolio. Our results not only provide theoretical justifications of the significance of the excess growth rate, but also establish new connections between information theory and quantitative finance.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14560

Free Heavy-Tailed Lunch for Muon: A Theoretical Justification of Empirical Success

Authors:

Florian H\"ubler↗Thomas Pethick↗Suvrit Sra↗

arXiv:2606.14560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Euclidean optimisation methods with matrix-valued updates, such as Muon and Scion, have recently shown strong empirical performance for training Transformer models, yet their theoretical advantages over Euclidean methods remain poorly understood. We address this gap in the heavy-tailed non-convex regime, where stochastic gradients have bounded $p$-th central moments, $p \in (1,2]$. We show that certain non-Euclidean methods achieve optimal sample complexity under stronger stationarity measures, while Euclidean methods incur additional dimension-dependent costs. As a consequence, for $m \times n$ matrices, Muon finds an $\varepsilon$-stationary point in nuclear norm within $\mathcal{O}\left(\min\{m, n\} \frac{\Delta_1 L}{\varepsilon^2} \left(\frac \sigma \varepsilon \right)^{\frac p {p-1}}\right)$ samples, absorbing heavy-tailed noise without extra dimension dependence, unlike Euclidean methods. We further prove this sample complexity, including its dimension dependence, is optimal for all first-order methods under nuclear-norm stationarity. Experiments on large language models support our theory. Surprisingly, our results suggest that other Schatten geometries beyond the spectral geometry of Muon can perform competitively in certain settings.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2601.21714

E-mem: Multi-agent based Episodic Context Reconstruction for LLM Agent Memory

Authors:

Kaixiang Wang↗Yidan Lin↗Jiong Lou↗Zhaojiacheng Zhou↗Bunyod Suvonov↗Jie Li↗

arXiv:2601.21714v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents towards System~2 reasoning, characterized by deliberative, high-precision problem-solving, requires maintaining rigorous logical integrity over extended horizons. However, prevalent memory preprocessing paradigms suffer from destructive de-contextualization. By compressing complex sequential dependencies into pre-defined structures (e.g., embeddings or graphs), these methods sever the contextual integrity essential for deep reasoning. To address this, we propose E-mem, a framework shifting from Memory Preprocessing to Episodic Context Reconstruction. Inspired by biological engrams, E-mem employs a heterogeneous hierarchical architecture where multiple assistant agents maintain uncompressed memory contexts, while a central master agent orchestrates global planning. Unlike passive retrieval, our mechanism empowers assistants to locally reason within activated segments, extracting context-aware evidence before aggregation. Evaluations on the LoCoMo benchmark demonstrate that E-mem achieves over 54\% F1, surpassing the state-of-the-art GAM by 7.75\%, while reducing token cost by over 70\%.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2504.04739

UST-GNN: A Unified Spatial–Topological Graph Neural Network Framework for Urban Analytics–Demonstrated through a Case Study on Urban Health Prediction

Authors:

Minwei Zhao↗Sanja Scepanovic↗Stephen Law↗Ivica Obadic↗Cai Wu↗Daniele Quercia↗

arXiv:2504.04739v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how social, demographic, environmental, and spatial factors jointly shape urban outcomes is essential for sustainable urban development and evidence-based policy. Traditional statistical approaches often struggle to capture complex non-linear relationships, while many machine learning methods overlook the joint roles of spatial autocorrelation and network topology in urban systems. Recent advances in GeoAI have addressed these challenges only partially, often treating spatial effects, graph structure, evaluation, and interpretability separately. We present UST-GNN, a unified spatial–topological graph neural network framework that integrates neighbourhood connectivity, heterogeneous urban features, and positional/locational embeddings into a single representation. Using the MedSAT dataset, which contains over 150 environmental and socio-demographic variables and six prescription outcomes across 4,835 neighbourhoods in Greater London, UST-GNN outperforms strong statistical, geographically enhanced, and graph Machine Learning baselines, improving out-of-sample $R^2$ by 8.4–13.2\% under strict spatial cross-validation. We further introduce a lightweight principal-component module to interpret learned node embeddings geographically and relate them to policy-relevant covariates. The resulting analyses recover established patterns, offer new perspectives on debated associations, and reveal novel predictors warranting further causal investigation. Together, these findings demonstrate the value of graph-based spatial machine learning for urban health analytics, environmental inequality assessment, and evidence-based urban policy. Beyond predictive gains, UST-GNN provides a unified GeoAI analytical pipeline that can be embedded into urban digital twin workflows for scenario testing, monitoring, and data-informed decision-making for healthier, more sustainable cities.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2507.21164

OCSVM-Guided Representation Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Authors:

Nicolas Pinon↗Robin Trombetta↗Carole Lartizien↗

arXiv:2507.21164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) aims to detect anomalies without labeled data, a necessity in many machine learning applications where anomalous samples are rare or not available. Most state-of-the-art methods fall into two categories: reconstruction-based approaches, which often reconstruct anomalies too well, and decoupled representation learning with density estimators, which can suffer from suboptimal feature spaces. While some recent methods attempt to couple feature learning and anomaly detection, they often rely on surrogate objectives, restrict kernel choices, or introduce approximations that limit their expressiveness and robustness. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that couples representation learning with an analytically solvable One-Class SVM (OCSVM), through a custom loss formulation that directly aligns latent features with the OCSVM decision boundary. The model is evaluated on two tasks: a \deleted{new} benchmark based on MNIST-C, and a challenging brain MRI \deleted{subtle} lesion detection task. Unlike most methods that focus on large, hyperintense lesions at the image level, our approach succeeds to target small, non-hyperintense lesions, while we evaluate voxel-wise metrics, addressing a more clinically relevant scenario. Both experiments evaluate a form of robustness to domain shifts, including corruption types in MNIST-C and texture or population age variations in MRI. Results demonstrate performance and robustness of our proposed model, highlighting its potential for general UAD and real-world medical imaging applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/Nicolas-Pinon/uad_ocsvm_guided_repr_learning.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2604.27457

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

Authors:

Phattharaporn Singkanipa↗Victor Kasatkin↗Daniel A. Lidar↗

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.05368

Biomazon: A Multimodal Dataset for 3D Forest Structure and Biomass Modeling in the Amazon Basin

Authors:

Sayan Mandal↗Rocco Sedona↗Simon Besnard↗Mikhail Urbazaev↗Morris Riedel↗Ehsan Zandi↗Gabriele Cavallaro↗

Accurate, spatially explicit characterization of tropical forest structure is essential for carbon accounting and ecosystem monitoring, yet most ML pipelines predict canopy-top height proxies (e.g., RH95/RH98) or AGBD as separate scalar targets, rather than learning the forest vertical structure as an ordered profile. The community lacks a ML-ready multimodal benchmark for predicting the entire GEDI RH profile jointly with AGBD, or for evaluating methods that enforce physically consistent ordering across RH percentiles. We address this with Biomazon, a 20 m multimodal benchmark dataset over the Amazon Basin that pairs GEDI RH and AGBD targets with multi-sensor predictors (Sentinel-1/2, ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, Copernicus DEM, Dynamic World LULC, and AlphaEarth embeddings) under standardized spatial splits and evaluation protocols. Using a shared encoder-decoder with task-specific heads as a baseline framework, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study of (i) backbone/model scale, (ii) modality contributions, and (iii) the use of auxiliary embeddings under standalone and fusion settings, and we report both single-target and joint-target results to quantify tradeoffs under a unified training protocol. Finally, we contextualize baseline performance through regionally aligned comparisons against existing gridded products, including GEDI L4D RH10-RH98 and AGBD, at matching temporal scale. Biomazon, together with the accompanying protocols and baseline results, establishes a reference benchmark for future work on structurally consistent RH-profile prediction and structure-biomass modeling in tropical forests.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18472

Domain Generalizable Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Models via Regularized Fine-Tuning

Authors:

Sneha Paul↗Zachary Patterson↗Nizar Bouguila↗

Domain adaptation remains a central challenge in 3D vision, especially for multimodal foundation models that align 3D point clouds with visual and textual data. While these models demonstrate strong general capabilities, adapting them to downstream domains with limited data often leads to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we introduce ReFine3D, a regularized fine-tuning framework designed for domain-generalizable tuning of 3D large multimodal models (LMMs). ReFine3D combines selective layer tuning with two targeted regularization strategies: multi-view consistency across augmented point clouds and text diversity through synonym-based prompts generated by large language models. Additionally, we incorporate point-rendered vision supervision and a test-time augmentation mechanism with confidence-based aggregation to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across different 3D domain generalization benchmarks show that ReFine3D improves base-to-novel class generalization by 1.36%, cross-dataset transfer by 2.43%, robustness to corruption by 1.80%, and few-shot accuracy by up to 3.11%, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods with minimal added computational overhead.

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09.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11118

Data-Driven Dynamic Assortment in Online Platforms: Learning about Two Sides

Authors:

Rahul Roy↗Nur Sunar↗Jayashankar M. Swaminathan↗

arXiv:2606.11118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a dynamic assortment problem on a two-sided service platform with incomplete information and heterogeneous customers in a discrete-time setting. In each period, a customer arrives seeking service, and the platform chooses an assortment of sellers to display. The customer then proposes a transaction to at most one seller in the assortment according to a multinomial logit choice model. After a fixed number of periods, sellers review the proposals they have received and each chooses at most one customer according to another multinomial logit choice model, after which the cycle repeats. A key challenge is that the platform does not know the choice-model parameters of either customers or sellers in advance. To our knowledge, this is the first study of a dynamic assortment problem in which both sides' choice parameters are unknown. We develop a data-driven algorithm that learns these parameters while optimizing the platform's objective over time. We evaluate performance using regret, which measures revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant benchmark that knows all parameters and customer arrivals in advance. We show that the algorithm's worst-case regret grows polylogarithmically over time, and we derive a matching lower bound, establishing its rate optimality.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13200

Interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes

Authors:

Zhi-Han Zhang↗Han-Chuan Kou↗Peng Li↗

arXiv:2606.13200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes (ICDZM) in the generalized Creutz ladders using closed quench paths that pass through two critical points successively. By reading out the final zero-mode transfer probability, we find rich ICDZM interference patterns dependent on the quench path. In particular, when the closed path links two topologically nontrivial phases, the ICDZM pattern may either vanish or exhibit period doubling. Within the framework of WKB analysis, this phenomenon is well clarified by the interference phase accumulated in the quench procedure. We also demonstrate that the zero-mode transfer probability can be detected by the deviation of the boundary particle number from its initial fractional value, which arises from the blending of bulk modes in the critical dynamics. As an edge defect, the zero-mode transfer probability captures both the ICDZM oscillation and the known anomalous defect production in a non-closed quench path. These results identify ICDZM and the corresponding edge defect as probes for critical dynamics associated with topological zero modes.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2604.08958

WOMBET: World Model-Based Experience Transfer for Robust and Sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Mintae Kim↗Koushil Sreenath↗

arXiv:2604.08958v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) in robotics is often limited by the cost and risk of data collection, motivating experience transfer from a source task to a target task. Offline-to-online RL leverages prior data but typically assumes a given fixed dataset and does not address how to generate reliable data for transfer. We propose World Model-Based Experience Transfer (WOMBET), a framework that jointly generates and utilizes prior data. WOMBET learns a world model in the source task and generates offline data via uncertainty-penalized planning, followed by filtering trajectories with high return and low epistemic uncertainty. It then performs online fine-tuning in the target task using adaptive sampling between offline and online data, enabling a stable transition from prior-driven initialization to task-specific adaptation. We show that the uncertainty-penalized objective provides a lower bound on the true return and derive a finite-sample error decomposition capturing distribution mismatch and approximation error. Empirically, WOMBET improves sample efficiency and final performance over strong baselines on continuous control benchmarks, demonstrating the benefit of jointly optimizing data generation and transfer.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2410.21803

SimSiam Naming Game: A Unified Approach for Emergent Communication and Representation Learning

Authors:

Nguyen Le Hoang↗Tadahiro Taniguchi↗Tianwei Fang↗Akira Taniguchi↗Masatoshi Nagano↗

Emergent Communication (EmCom) investigates how agents develop symbolic communication through interaction without predefined language. Recent frameworks, such as the Metropolis–Hastings Naming Game (MHNG), formulate EmCom as the learning of shared external representations negotiated through interaction under joint attention, without explicit success or reward feedback. However, MHNG relies on sampling-based updates that suffer from high rejection rates in high-dimensional perceptual spaces, making the learning process sample-inefficient for complex visual datasets. In this work, we propose the SimSiam Naming Game (SSNG), a feedback-free EmCom framework that replaces sampling-based updates with a symmetric, self-supervised representation alignment objective between autonomous agents. Building on a variational inference–based probabilistic interpretation of self-supervised learning, SSNG formulates symbol emergence as an alignment process between agents' latent representations mediated by message exchange. To enable end-to-end gradient-based optimization, discrete symbolic messages are learned via a Gumbel–Softmax relaxation, preserving the discrete nature of communication while maintaining differentiability. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100 show that the emergent messages learned by SSNG achieve substantially higher linear-probe classification accuracy than those produced by referential games, reconstruction games, and MHNG. These results indicate that self-supervised representation alignment provides an effective mechanism for feedback-free EmCom in multi-agent systems.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2605.15824

FashionChameleon: Towards Real-Time and Interactive Human-Garment Video Customization

Authors:

Quanjian Song↗Yefeng Shen↗Mengting Chen↗Hao Sun↗Jinsong Lan↗Xiaoyong Zhu↗Bo Zheng↗Liujuan Cao↗

Human-centric video customization, particularly at the garment level, has shown significant commercial value. However, existing approaches cannot support low-latency and interactive garment control, which is crucial for applications such as e-commerce and content creation. This paper studies how to achieve interactive multi-garment video customization while preserving motion coherence using only single-garment video data. We present FashionChameleon, a real-time and interactive framework for human-garment customization in autoregressive video generation, where users can interactively switch garment during generation. FashionChameleon consists of three key techniques: (i) Instead of training on multi-garment video data, we train a Teacher Model with In-Context Learning on a single reference-garment pair. By retaining the image-to-video training paradigm while enforcing a mismatch between the reference and garment image, the model is encouraged to implicitly preserve coherence during single-garment switching. (ii) To achieve consistency and efficiency during generation, we introduce Streaming Distillation with In-Context Learning, which fine-tunes the model with in-context teacher forcing and improves extrapolation consistency via gradient-reweighted distribution matching distillation. (iii) To extend the model for interactive multi-garment video customization, we propose Training-Free KV Cache Rescheduling, which includes garment KV refresh, historical KV withdraw, and reference KV disentangle to achieve garment switching while preserving motion coherence. Our FashionChameleon uniquely supports interactive customization and consistent long-video extrapolation, while achieving real-time generation at 23.8 FPS on a single GPU, 30-180$\times$ faster than existing baselines.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12808

SymQNet: Amortized Acquisition for Low-Latency Adaptive Hamiltonian Learning

Authors:

Yash Vardhan Tomar↗Dheeraj Peddireddy↗Vaneet Aggarwal↗

arXiv:2606.12808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive Hamiltonian learning is central to calibrating and characterizing quantum devices. In an adaptive controller, choosing the next experiment is itself a computation. Bayesian design rules are recomputed after every posterior update, and that step can take seconds. Across hundreds of shots, those seconds become a significant wall-clock cost for adaptivity. We introduce SymQNet, an amortized reinforcement-learning approach for low-latency adaptive Hamiltonian learning. SymQNet learns a posterior-conditioned acquisition policy offline, then uses a fast policy forward pass online while retaining Bayesian posterior feedback. On transverse-field Ising benchmarks, SymQNet substantially reduces acquisition latency relative to bounded Fisher-information search and bounded two-step Bayesian active learning by disagreement (BALD). At five qubits, it reduces acquisition-only decision latency by $47.1\times$ and $72.6\times$ relative to these online baselines; at twelve qubits, full simulated steps take $1.02$ s for SymQNet versus $13.27$ s for bounded two-step BALD. Overall, we show that learned acquisition can make adaptive Hamiltonian learning practical for repeated low-latency workloads.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15695

When Generator Replay Degrades: Projected Rehearsal Orchestration for Heterogeneous Federated Class-Incremental Learning

Authors:

Thinh T. H. Nguyen↗Khoa D. Doan↗Binh T. Nguyen↗Danh Le-Phuoc↗Kok-Seng Wong↗

arXiv:2606.15695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated class-incremental learning (FCIL) becomes substantially harder when clients observe different label subsets, progress through tasks at different stages, and provide uneven supervision for the same semantic concepts. Existing FCIL methods often preserve old knowledge through input-space synthesis, but they can be fragile under heterogeneous task streams and difficult to transfer across modalities. To alleviate such issues, we propose PRO, a framework that replaces synthetic input replay with projected rehearsal orchestration. To remove external pretraining, we evaluate all methods under the same warmup. After this, PRO maintains compact class-level projected memories on the server and allows clients perform balanced pseudo multi-task training over current examples and old projected memories. To handle stronger representation drift, we further introduce PRO-MAX, which augments PRO with neighborhood-weighted memory alignment while preserving the same server-light principle that the server only aggregates model updates and memory statistics. Across image, text, and graph benchmarks, PRO and PRO-MAX improve retention and final utility under heterogeneous streams while remaining competitive in homogeneous FCIL. Even when baselines are given expanded replay budgets, they degrade under supervision imbalance and stage misalignment, indicating that replay quantity alone does not resolve replay-quality failures. Additional weak-task diagnostics further show that larger replay mismatch is associated with larger downstream degradation, while our method keeps projected memories better aligned with the evolving representation.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16159

Continuous Splatting meets Retinex: Continuous Gaussian Splatting and Implicit Reflectance Modeling for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Authors:

Yuhan Chen↗Yicui Shi↗Guofa Li↗Wenxuan Yu↗Ying Fang↗Guangrui Bai↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Low-light image enhancement aims to recover clear images from low-illumination observations and is crucial for high-level downstream vision tasks. However, existing methods frequently encounter color distortion and structural artifacts when balancing global smooth illumination adjustment and local high-frequency detail recovery. To address these issues, we propose CGS-Retinex as the first low-light image enhancement framework based on explicit-implicit joint modeling. Our framework deeply integrates continuous Gaussian splatting with Retinex theory. Specifically, we represent the image grid as a continuous parameter field and propose a continuous Gaussian renderer to estimate the spatially continuous global illumination distribution. This approach fundamentally eliminates grid artifacts caused by discrete Gaussian sampling. Furthermore, we introduce an implicit neural representation to model reflectance independently. We leverage shallow high-frequency features to guide the network in accurately reconstructing degraded texture details. Within the Retinex framework, we incorporate physics-inspired brightness consistency constraints and illumination smoothness regularization to enable explicit illumination and implicit reflectance to maintain proper exposure and achieve high-fidelity recovery of high-frequency structures and colors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CGS-Retinex significantly suppresses dark-region noise and overexposure while achieving exceptional high-frequency structural fidelity and color restoration by precisely decoupling illumination and texture. This work establishes a novel continuous physical representation paradigm for low-light image enhancement.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11268

LakeFM: Toward a Foundation Model for Aquatic Ecosystems Using Irregular Multivariate Multi-depth Time Series Data

Authors:

Abhilash Neog↗Sepideh Fatemi↗Medha Sawhney↗Kazi Sajeed Mehrab↗Aanish Pradhan↗Bennett J. McAfee↗Emma Marchisin↗Arka Daw↗Robert Ladwig↗Cayelan C. Carey↗Paul Hanson↗Anuj Karpatne↗…

arXiv:2606.11268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding and forecasting lake dynamics is critical for monitoring water quality and ecosystem health across lakes and reservoirs. While machine learning methods have been recently applied to ecological time-series data, existing works assume regular sampling in time and depth, and struggle to generalize across lakes with heterogeneous variables, depths, and observation patterns. To address these limitations, we introduce \textsc{LakeFM}, a foundation model for aquatic systems, pre-trained on large-scale ecological datasets comprising both simulated and observed lakes. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we show that \textsc{LakeFM} learns meaningful representations spanning broader lake-level characteristics, and achieves competitive or often superior-forecasting performance compared to existing time-series foundation and non-foundation models, while producing physically plausible predictions consistent with real-world lake dynamics.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19496

Calibrating Generative Models to Feature Distributions with MMD Finetuning

Authors:

Nathaniel L. Diamant↗Brian L. Trippe↗

arXiv:2606.19496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models can produce individually plausible samples while deviating substantially from a target set in the distribution of key features. For example, a model pretrained on broad drug-like chemical space may generate molecules whose molecular features differ from those of a therapeutic class of interest, such as known antibiotics. Correcting such distributional miscalibration is challenging: direct finetuning on the target set can overfit and does not control which features are matched. To fill this gap, we introduce kernel Calibrating Generative Models (kCGM). kCGM minimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) between generated and target feature distributions using an unbiased score-function estimator, with KL regularization to remain close to the pretrained model. On a target set of 174 antibiotics, direct finetuning sacrifices chemical validity for feature-distribution matching, whereas kCGM improves target feature matching while increasing validity. We further demonstrate kCGM in protein and DNA generation tasks, showing it can adapt autoregressive, continuous-space diffusion, and discrete diffusion models using only feature-level supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/smithhenryd/cgm.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16023

IBAD: Interpretable Behavioral Anomaly Detection on Human Mobility Data

Authors:

Bita Azarijoo↗John Krumm↗Cyrus Shahabi↗

arXiv:2606.16023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human mobility appears highly diverse, yet much of a person's daily mobility can be explained by a small set of recurring behavioral templates, such as commuting, school-centered activities, caregiving, nightlife, or errand patterns. We present \texttt{IBAD} (\underline{I}nterpretable \underline{B}ehavioral \underline{A}nomaly \underline{D}etection), a framework that learns interpretable daily mobility templates and represents each individual as a distribution over mixtures of these templates. Rather than focusing on specific locations, IBAD characterizes activities that individuals perform across locations. This approach first discovers global behavioral templates using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), then employs a hierarchical self-supervised model to learn normal behavior of individuals from their soft behavioral templates. We also introduce a splicing benchmark that creates controlled behavioral mismatches between an individual's historical profile and injected mobility patterns. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that daily behavior can be effectively decomposed into a small number of interpretable templates. Crucially, we show that the learned behavioral archetypes transfer across distinct geographic and demographic contexts. Furthermore, IBAD maintains a robust competitive performance across all settings. For reproducibility purposes, the code is accessible at ~\href{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2511.03211

Retrofitters, pragmatists and activists: Public interest litigation for accountable automated decision-making

Authors:

Henry Fraser↗Zahra Stardust↗

arXiv:2511.03211v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper examines the role of public interest litigation in promoting accountability for AI and automated decision-making (ADM) in Australia. Since ADM regulation faces political and geopolitical headwinds, effective governance will have to rely on the enforcement of existing laws. Drawing on interviews with Australian public interest litigators, technology policy activists, and technology law scholars, the paper positions public interest litigation as part of a larger ecosystem for transparency, accountability and justice with respect to ADM. The paper explores the tactics and strategies of what one participant described as 'retrofitting' old laws to ADM. These go beyond creative legal argumentation, to encompass practices of community-building, collaboration on theories of change, canny selection of clients and causes of action, and the alignment of the interests of stakeholders in litigation. Naturally, the paper also contends with the limits of these strategies, and of the Australian legal system. Where limits are, however, capable of being overcome, the paper presents findings on urgent needs: the enabling institutional arrangements without which effective litigation and accountability will falter. The paper is relevant to law and technology scholars; individuals and groups harmed by ADM; public interest litigators and technology lawyers; civil society and advocacy organisations; and policymakers.

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21.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.25711

On the $d$-rigidity phase transition in random graphs

Authors:

Yuval Peled↗

arXiv:2605.25711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study generic $d$-dimensional rigidity in sparse random graphs. Our main result is that for every $d\ge 2$, the Erdős–Rényi random graph $G\sim G(n,c/n)$ undergoes a $d$-rigidity phase transition at the known, explicit, $d$-orientability threshold $c_d$: If $cc_d$, then $G$ is a.a.s. not independent in the generic $d$-rigidity matroid, and we give a sharp asymptotic estimate for its rank. In addition, the $d$-rigidity closure of $G$ has a giant clique of linear size, which contains all but at most $o(n)$ vertices of the $((d+1)+d)$-core of the graph. More generally, we compute, up to a $1+o(1)$ factor, the generic $d$-rigidity rank of random graphs with a given degree distribution. For example, we show that the uniform $n$-vertex $k$-regular graph a.a.s. has rank $\min(k/2,d)n+o(n).$ Our approach is to estimate the rigidity rank of a random graph from its Galton–Watson local weak limit, using a parameter that we call local flexibility.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17542

Evaluating Large Language Models Abilities for Addressee, Turn-change, and Next Speaker Prediction in Meetings

Authors:

Ryo Fukuda↗Takatomo Kano↗Siddhant Arora↗Marc Delcroix↗Naohiro Tawara↗Atsunori Ogawa↗Yuya Chiba↗Atsushi Ando↗William Chen↗Shinji Watanabe↗

We investigate turn-taking in multimodal multi-party conversations using large language models (LLMs). We construct an evaluation framework for three tasks: addressee detection, turn-change prediction, and next speaker prediction. We compare supervised models trained for these tasks, text-based LLMs, multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs), and human subjects. Experiments on the AMI corpus showed that LLMs outperformed supervised models and humans in next speaker prediction, despite not being trained on the target domain and without access to audio or visual information. An MM-LLM performed better than text-based LLMs on addressee detection and turn-change prediction but remained below human performance, indicating difficulty leveraging raw audio-visual signals. Ablation analyses revealed that conversational context was critical, particularly for next speaker prediction. We observed that human and LLM prediction patterns were similar, and intervals with frequent turn changes were difficult for both.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13566

A Three-Layer Framework for AI in Scientific Discovery

Authors:

Guojun Liao↗

arXiv:2606.13566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current discussions of AI in scientific discovery are often dominated by two visible capabilities: search over existing knowledge and execution through optimization, simulation, and automation. Both are important, but neither fully captures the central act of discovery: the formation and evolution of models. This paper proposes a three-layer view of AI in discovery. Layer 1 is search and retrieval by large language models. Layer 2, as the main innovation of this paper, is model formation through qualitative reasoning: the capacity to recognize when a current framework is structurally inadequate and to understand the problem within a broader representational space, not through trial and error, but through structural insight into what is missing and where it can be found. Layer 3 is execution, optimization, and refinement. The main claim is that Layer 2 is both the most important and the least developed. Search without model formation remains confined to inherited frameworks, while execution without conceptual revision only amplifies an existing formulation. We illustrate Layer 2 reasoning through three case studies: S. S. Chern's intrinsic proof of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the resolution of the Nesterov Accelerated Gradient convergence problem via Lyapunov functions, and the autonomous disproof of the Erdos unit distance conjecture by OpenAI in 2026. Each case exhibits the same structural signature: a framework that had become inadequate, a missing conceptual object, and a resolution found in an unexpected neighboring field.

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24.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19411

Spectral DPPs via NEPv: A Scalable Continuous Relaxation of Determinantal MAP for Diversity-Aware Data Selection

Authors:

Richard Yi Da Xu↗

arXiv:2606.19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning – data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design. Determinantal Point Processes (\operatorname{DPP} s) give a principled, well-calibrated notion of diversity for this task, but their MAP objective – pick a size-$k$ subset $S$ maximizing $\logdet(L_S)$ – is NP-hard, and the standard greedy and sampling algorithms scale superlinearly in the ground-set size $n$. This cost is prohibitive precisely in the data-centric regime where diversity matters most, where $n$ ranges over millions to billions of candidate examples, features, or embeddings. We recast \operatorname{DPP}-MAP as a continuous optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold, and show that its first-order optimality conditions form a Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problem with eigenvector dependency (\operatorname{NEP}v) of a previously unstudied form. This \operatorname{NEP}v\ admits a self-consistent field (\operatorname{SCF}) iteration with a spectral-gap-based local contraction guarantee, giving a principled iterative solver where the diversity objective drives an eigenvector-dependent operator. The resulting algorithm, \OurMethod, requires only matrix-vector products with the kernel and runs in time $O\!\big((ndk+nk^2)\,t\big)$ for a small number of iterations $t$, scaling near-linearly in $n$ and integrating directly with low-rank and feature-map kernels common in ML. This paper focuses on the relaxation, solver, and scaling analysis; full real-data benchmarking is left to a planned empirical study.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18709

LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment

Authors:

Han Chen↗Ming Li↗Chenguang Wang↗Yijun Liang↗Dawei Zhou↗Hong jiao↗Tianyi Zhou↗

Item discrimination is a fundamental psychometric property of educational assessment, which measures whether an item meaningfully distinguishes students with higher proficiency from students with lower proficiency. While various existing works have explored whether large language models (LLMs) can estimate item difficulty, it remains unclear whether they can capture item discrimination. In this work, we evaluate 42 proprietary and open-weight LLMs in zero-shot settings using two complementary approaches: direct discrimination prediction, where models explicitly estimate an item's discrimination value from its content, and response-based Classical Test Theory (CTT) calibration, where LLM answers are treated as synthetic student responses to compute discrimination scores. Our results show that direct prediction yields weak alignment with human-calibrated discrimination: the best-performing model reaches only a Spearman correlation of 0.152. Response-based CTT calibration provides a stronger but still limited signal, with the all-persona synthetic respondent pool reaching a Spearman correlation of 0.241. These findings highlight item discrimination as an open challenge for LLM-based psychometric evaluation: current LLMs contain non-random discrimination-relevant signal, but they do not yet reliably capture how assessment items distinguish human students.

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