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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Efficient upsampling for tensor-network and quantum-state encoded functions

arXiv:2601.03885v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Both tensor trains (TTs) and quantum states provide compressed representations of grid-structured data with potentially exponential compression power. We present a unified framework for upsampling data encoded in vector amplitudes, with efficient realizations in both classical TT and quantum settings. Starting from an \(n\)-core TT or an \(n\)-qubit state on a coarse grid with \(2^n\) points, the construction produces an \((n+m)\)-core TT or \((n+m)\)-qubit state on a finer grid with \(2^{n+m}\) points. In the TT setting, it supports interpolation, quasi-interpolation, augmentation, and synthesis through efficient low-rank contractions, with the added \(m\) cores retaining constant rank. For function-value encodings, the resulting interpolation satisfies an \(\ell^2\)-error bound independent of the number of added grid points, achieves exponential compression at fixed accuracy, and has a logarithmic complexity in the number of grid points. In the quantum setting, the refined state is prepared by a \(\mathrm{poly}(n,m)\)-size circuit using \(\log(p+1)\) ancillas, where \(p\) controls the smoothness of the quasi-interpolant; the corresponding error scales quadratically with the initial grid spacing. We validate our framework for tensor networks in one-, two-, and three-dimensional examples, including functions, derivatives, airfoil masks, and synthetic random fields such as three-dimensional turbulence. In particular, fractal fields can be generated directly in TT format with logarithmic memory and runtime. These results open a practical route to multiscale solvers, generative models, and geometry-aware algorithms on tensor-network and quantum platforms, with potential applications in scientific simulation, imaging, and real-time graphics.

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

Adaptive and Explicit safe: Triggering Latent Safety Awareness in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries. To address this vulnerability, prior works depend heavily on external manual data annotation for safety alignment. However, we observe that LRMs can inherently identify safety risks when being re-presented with original queries alongside their own reasoning trajectories – a capability we term Latent Safety Awareness. To leverage this safety awareness, we first employ Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to explicitly induce safe tags to trigger safety analysis and guidance following the initial reasoning content for unsafe queries, while preserving standard responses for general queries to ensure adaptive triggering. Subsequently, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to further enhance the correctness and stability of the safety analysis and guidance. Notably, responses required for both training stages are entirely generated by models being optimized. With (Safe Trigger) SFT and DPO, experimental results demonstrate significant safety enhancement. For example, the Attack Success Rate (ASR) of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, on average, drops 24.65% and 36.72% on harmful and jailbreak benchmarks, respectively. Finally, our Safe Trigger method exerts almost no negative impact on general performance or user experience.

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

A Mechanistic Understanding of Pronoun Fidelity in LLMs

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the interplay of reasoning, repetition, and bias in this task, prior work relies exclusively on behavioural approaches, which may not reflect a model's internal workings. Therefore, we provide a mechanistic, model-internal perspective on pronoun fidelity, testing whether three mechanisms – group entity binding (G), recency bias (R), and stereotypical bias (S) – are causally implemented across several SOTA language models. Using Boundless Distributed Alignment Search, we find all three coexist as causal subspaces distributed across network depth. No single mechanism fully explains model behaviour, but a combination of the three consistently accounts for 91-99.5%. An attention head analysis further reveals two competing copying routes; group binding and stereotype share a localized concept-level route that retrieves a bound occupation-pronoun unit, while recency uses a distributed token-level route that repeats surface forms. In sum, pronoun fidelity arises from competition between simultaneously active causal subspaces.

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

Machine learning enables roughness-driven inverse design of milling processes

arXiv:2606.16032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interest in applying data-driven approaches in manufacturing has grown significantly, particularly for mapping complex, high-dimensional relationships. The milling process is one area where predictive models can link influential parameters to surface roughness metrics prior to in situ operations. While this approach offers clear advantages, it faces challenges due to limited datasets and robustness issues in inverse design paradigms. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a machine learning (ML)-based framework for the inverse design of the surface milling process, with a focus on surface roughness as the design objective. The framework employs forward training of two ML models, a deep neural network (DNN) and a random forest (RF) ensemble, both developed using a high-fidelity synthetic dataset generated from a computational simulation framework. These trained models are integrated into a Bayesian optimization (BO) procedure to overcome the multiplicity problem arising from the many-to-one mapping inherent in the dataset. The approach identifies top-performing milling process configurations, considering both process and tool parameters, and presents them from the full solution space. The models achieve average relative errors below 5% when compared to reference results, thereby demonstrating the robustness and reliability of the proposed methodology.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Identification of Altered Potassium Channels for Drug Repurposing in Long COVID Patients

Long COVID (LC) is a complex condition characterized by persistent, chronic multisystem manifestations, with a significant proportion of patients exhibiting neurological symptoms. Human ion channels (HICs), particularly potassium channels, are abundantly expressed in the nervous system and linked to key metabolic processes, making them potential candidates for understanding LC pathophysiology and drug repurposing. Meta-analysis of RNA-Seq datasets from COVID-19 recovered and LC patients was performed to identify altered HICs in LC. Differential gene expression analysis, functional enrichment analysis, and weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) were performed to uncover key genes, pathways, and co-expression modules consisting of HICs, lipid metabolism-, and immune signaling-related genes. Drug-gene interaction analysis was performed to identify approved drugs targeting potential HICs. A total of 715 dysregulated genes, including eighteen HICs were identified, among which seven were potassium channels. Three significant modules containing HICs, lipid metabolism-, and immune signaling-related genes were identified and found to be associated with antigen processing and presentation, complement and coagulation cascades, and cytokine-related pathways. Approved drugs targeting KCNA6, KCNJ10, KCNN3, and KCNH4 were identified. With further experimental validation, these dysregulated potassium channels, supported by their co-expression networks and pathway associations, may act as potential candidates for drug repurposing in LC patients.

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

Riemannian MeanFlow for One-Step Generation on Manifolds

arXiv:2603.10718v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Flow Matching enables simulation-free training of generative models on Riemannian manifolds, yet sampling typically still relies on numerically integrating a probability-flow ODE. We propose Riemannian MeanFlow (RMF), extending MeanFlow to manifold-valued generation where velocities lie in location-dependent tangent spaces. RMF defines an average-velocity field via parallel transport and derives a Riemannian MeanFlow identity that links average and instantaneous velocities for intrinsic supervision. We make this identity practical in a log-map tangent representation, avoiding trajectory simulation and heavy geometric computations. For stable optimization, we decompose the RMF objective into two terms and apply conflict-aware multi-task learning to mitigate gradient interference. RMF also supports conditional generation via classifier-free guidance. Experiments on spheres, tori, SO(3), and SE(3) demonstrate competitive one-step sampling with improved quality-efficiency trade-offs and substantially reduced sampling cost.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

MeEvo: Metacognitive Evolution Combined with Natural Evolution for Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2606.14202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) by enabling heuristic generation through reasoning and code synthesis. Existing LLM-based AHD architectures mainly follow two paradigms: Natural Evolution, which uses crossover and mutation to explore heuristic programs, and Metacognitive Evolution, which refines reasoning through reflection. However, Natural Evolution discards reasoning traces, weakening knowledge inheritance and exploitation, while Metacognitive Evolution lacks population-level recombination, limiting exploration and increasing the risk of premature convergence. These limitations reduce search efficiency, stability, and solution quality on complex problems. To address this gap, we propose MeEvo, a dual-layer AHD framework that cyclically couples Natural Evolution and Metacognitive Evolution. Natural Evolution explores heuristic code while recording reasoning traces, fitness values, and errors into a shared history; Metacognitive Evolution then reflects on this history to generate improved heuristics that re-enter the parent pool for the next cycle. This design enables population-driven exploration and reflection-driven refinement to reinforce each other. Experiments on five optimization problems with two LLM backbones show that MeEvo achieves stronger and more stable performance than existing LLM-based AHD architectures, especially on complex constrained tasks.

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

Trait, Not State: The Durability of Reading Identity in Social Highlighting

Prior work on a social web highlighter located individuality in selection – which documents a person chooses to highlight – but measured it cross-sectionally. We ask the temporal question: is a reader's selection signature a trait or a state? We freeze each reader's first six months of highlighting as a profile and track its own-vs-other advantage on their later selections at growing gaps (to 24+ months), with negatives drawn from the same calendar era – so supply drift cannot masquerade as personal drift – at a coarse global level and at a fine level whose negatives and controls come from the reader's own interest neighborhood; the anchor cell reproduces the prior cross-sectional level (+0.188 vs +0.169), validating the harness. Four results. Within the same users, the fine-layer advantage shows no statistically detectable paired decline at any horizon (6-12 month retention R = 1.00 [0.85, 1.18], n = 212; the farthest bin is compatible with a modest decline; the only contrast whose interval excludes zero is the coarse layer at 12-24 months, about 13%). The signal is not reducible to repeated domains (~90% survives excluding all profile sources). Within-person drift is slow (a recent-half profile beats the old half by +0.042). Prospectively, personal profiles – even one built from a reader's earliest documents, median 20 months before evaluation – rank their next reads at roughly 3x the AP of every simple non-personal prior tested. We use "trait" operationally (a stable signature under continued engagement); the scope is heavy, long-tenured readers of one platform, and exposure is not separable from choice.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Target-Side Paraphrase Augmentation for Sign Language Translation with Large Language Models

Sign language translation (SLT) remains constrained by the limited availability of paired sign-video/text corpora and by the heavy-tailed vocabularies typical of real-world datasets. We study a target-side augmentation strategy in which a large language model (LLM) generates controlled paraphrase variants of the reference spoken-language sentence while the sign input remains unchanged. Concretely, we use GPT-4o to produce semantically faithful variants of the training targets and train a Signformer-style pose-based Transformer under a two-stage schedule: pre-training on the augmented corpus followed by fine-tuning on the original references. We evaluate this strategy on three datasets that span complementary challenges: PHOENIX14T (German Sign Language), a real-world corpus with moderate lexical diversity; the Greek Sign Language Dataset with highly controlled, repetitive recordings; and LSA-T (Argentinian Sign Language), a naturalistic corpus with a large vocabulary and severe long-tail sparsity. This range allows us to characterize precisely when and why target-side augmentation is beneficial. On PHOENIX14T, augmentation improves BLEU-4 from 9.56 to 10.33, demonstrating that paraphrastic exposure helps the decoder generalize beyond memorized reference phrasing. The near-saturated GSL baseline and the extremely sparse LSA-T setting reveal the limits of the approach: in both cases, single-reference lexical overlap metrics are insufficient to capture the full picture, motivating a complementary semantic evaluation. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine LLM-generated target-side paraphrases as an augmentation mechanism for SLT, and the first to apply an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation protocol to SLT. This complementary evaluation reveals gains in semantic fidelity that lexical overlap metrics understate.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Manifold GCN: Diffusion-based Convolutional Neural Network for Manifold-valued Graphs

arXiv:2401.14381v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose two graph neural network layers for graphs with features in a Riemannian manifold. First, based on a manifold-valued graph diffusion equation, we construct a diffusion layer that can be applied to an arbitrary number of nodes and graph connectivity patterns. Second, we model a tangent multilayer perceptron by transferring ideas from the vector neuron framework to our general setting. Both layers are equivariant under node permutations and the feature manifold's isometries. These properties have led to a beneficial inductive bias in many deep-learning tasks. Furthermore, they enable novel, more flexible feature designs. Numerical examples on synthetic data and an Alzheimer's classification application on triangle meshes of the right hippocampus demonstrate the usefulness of our new layers: While they apply to a much broader class of problems, they outperform task-specific state-of-the-art networks.

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

Vision-Language Models as Zero-Annotation Oracles in Histopathology

Foreground segmentation is the critical first step of every computational pathology pipeline, yet existing methods rely on hand-tuned heuristics or supervised models that overfit to narrow stain and scanner distributions, failing silently on specialised stains such as Jones silver or Elastica van Gieson. We propose a coarse-to-fine approach that recasts foreground segmentation as a visual perception task and leverages general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) as zero-annotation oracles. Our key insight is that tissue-versus-background discrimination is a natural-image recognition problem, not a histopathological one, so VLMs trained on internet-scale corpora generalise where domain-specific models cannot. We introduce Leica-75, a benchmark of 75 renal transplant whole-slide images spanning three stain families. On Leica-75, our method achieves the highest segmentation quality on out-of-distribution stains (Dice 0.858 +/- 0.027 on Jones, 0.853 +/- 0.041 on EVG) with 7x lower cross-stain variance than the best supervised baseline, while remaining competitive on in-distribution H&E. Few-shot prompting with automatically curated exemplars (Auto-context) rescues hard cases on Stress-32 (n=32), a curated stress-test subset (Dice 0.470 to 0.819 for the 2B model). VLM-based annotation review matches human expert consensus (kappa=0.989 for blur detection; mean precision/recall grading accuracy 0.708 vs. human 0.646 for segmentation mask review). The resulting pseudo-labels are used to distil lightweight student models that are as performant as the teacher model while running for a fraction of the cost. Our framework provides a principled, scalable solution to a persistent infrastructure bottleneck in digital pathology.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Risk-averse mean field games: exploitability and non-asymptotic analysis

arXiv:2301.06930v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we use mean field games (MFGs) to investigate approximations of $N$-player games ($N$pGs) with uniformly symmetrically continuous heterogeneous closed-loop actions. To incorporate agents' risk aversion (beyond the classical expected utility of total costs), we use an abstract evaluation functional for their performance criteria. Centered around the notion of exploitability, we conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the approximation capability of MFGs from the perspective of state-action distributions without requiring the uniqueness of equilibria. Under suitable assumptions, we first show that scenarios in the $N$pGs with large $N$ and small average exploitabilities can be well approximated by approximate solutions of MFGs with relatively small exploitabilities. We then show that $\delta$-mean field equilibria can be used to construct $\varepsilon$-equilibria in $N$pGs. Furthermore, in this general setting, we prove the existence of mean field equilibria. This proof reveals a possible avenue for incorporating penalization for randomized action into MFGs.

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

Learning Permutation Distributions via Reflected Diffusion on Ranks

arXiv:2603.17353v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The finite symmetric group S_n provides a natural domain for permutations, yet learning probability distributions on S_n is challenging due to its factorially growing size and discrete, non-Euclidean structure. Recent permutation diffusion methods define forward noising via shuffle-based random walks (e.g., riffle shuffles) and learn reverse transitions with Plackett-Luce (PL) variants, but the resulting trajectories can be abrupt and increasingly hard to denoise as n grows. We propose Soft-Rank Diffusion, a discrete diffusion framework that replaces shuffle-based corruption with a structured soft-rank forward process: we lift permutations to a continuous latent representation of order by relaxing discrete ranks into soft ranks, yielding smoother and more tractable trajectories. For the reverse process, we introduce contextualized generalized Plackett-Luce (cGPL) denoisers that generalize prior PL-style parameterizations and improve expressivity for sequential decision structures. Experiments on sorting and combinatorial optimization benchmarks show that Soft-Rank Diffusion consistently outperforms prior diffusion baselines, with particularly strong gains in long-sequence and intrinsically sequential settings.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bayesian Optimization for Learning Nonlinear MPC in Autonomous Agent Navigation

arXiv:2606.14763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time autonomous navigation in dynamic, unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robotics. We propose a map-free framework that tightly integrates reactive rolling-horizon planning with nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). At each control cycle, a LiDAR-based Gaussian occupancy representation is constructed and used to generate collision-free trajectories via A* search, which are then tracked by a CasADi/IPOPT MPC formulation incorporating a smooth sigmoid obstacle barrier. To improve robustness to parameter sensitivity, we adopt an offline Bayesian optimization scheme based on Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE), which identifies near-optimal controller parameters with respect to a composite navigation objective. In addition, a Gaussian Process surrogate is used to analyze parameter sensitivity and provide insight into the optimization landscape. The proposed framework is robot-agnostic and is evaluated on the Unitree Go2 quadruped in simulation using Gazebo, followed by deployment on the physical robot. Experimental results show that parameters tuned in simulation transfer effectively to hardware, maintaining comparable performance without additional tuning. The full system achieves up to a 90.0\% navigation success rate when deployed, along with a 38.9\% average improvement in the evaluation metrics across simulated environments.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum iterative approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem

arXiv:2606.11843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, where determining the shortest route among a set of cities becomes computationally prohibitive as the problem size increases. This work explores quantum computing as an alternative approach to address this complexity. Unlike existing methods that primarily rely on quantum annealing, we propose a quantum iterative framework integrating Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) and Grover's search algorithm. Route costs are encoded as quantum phases, enabling QPE to efficiently evaluate them, while Amplitude Amplification, implemented via the Grover-Long algorithm, iteratively refines the solution space toward the optimal route. A proof-of-concept case study on a small-scale TSP instance demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and its potential for scaling to larger optimization problems. Furthermore, under an expectation-based analysis, the algorithm exhibits an expected computational complexity of $O(\frac{m^2\log_2(m)\log_2(1/\epsilon)}{\sqrt{\epsilon}})$ which depends on the error tolerance parameter $\epsilon$. This estimation omits the initialization term, which we expect future refinements to render subdominant to Phase Estimation.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Towards the implementation of a quantum classifier

arXiv:2606.10150v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the use of a quantum circuit as a binary classification model in the context of quantum machine learning. We call this model, binary quantum classifier. First, we describe fundamental concepts of quantum computing and introduce the computational tool used: Qibo, an open-source framework for efficient quantum simulations and quantum hardware control. Then, we describe how to design a binary quantum classifier for the classification of images and small arrays of variables by showing how to input data in the circuit, defining a quantum circuit model Ansatz with trainable parameters and a loss function, and implementing multiple minimizers. We test our quantum classifier with two data sets. The first one is the MNIST data set which is composed of handwritten digits (reduced to only handwritten zeros and handwritten ones for binary classification). We study the behavior of different minimizers by increasing the number of layers of the Ansatz. The second data set represents two different high energy collisions that can occur at colliders such as LHC (CERN). Due to in-time proton-proton interactions known as pile-up, we distinguish two different data sets: "without pile-up" and "with pile-up". These collisions can be represented by images of size 32x32 or by six high-level variables that we call features. By increasing the size of the training data set and the number of layers of the Ansatz, we search for the best minimizer. Splitting the data set in training set and test set, we compute: ROC curve, AUC score, confusion matrices and test set accuracy. For "with pile-up" images, we compare the results obtained with the quantum classifier with a small convolutional neural network. We conclude that is possible to build a binary quantum classifier with a quantum circuit and we highlight its performances and limitations in comparison with classical technologies.

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

Where Did the Variability Go? From Vibe Coding to Product Lines by Regeneration

arXiv:2606.19042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In vibe coding, an emerging AI-driven paradigm, an LLM generates an entire program from a natural language prompt, but what happens to the variability that traditional software engineering carefully builds into code? To answer this question, we conducted an exploratory analysis on 10 vibe coded C/C++ projects, which suggests that there is near-zero in-artifact variability, i.e., at compile and runtime. All variability decisions are resolved at a single new binding time, generation time, the moment the LLM produces the source code. Rather than treating this as a defect to fix, we propose Variability by Regeneration (VbR), to our knowledge the first product-line approach in which the LLM acts as the derivation engine, generating a purpose-built, free of dead code binary for each variant from a declarative specification, while a variant dispatcher transparently routes user requests to the matching binary. We formalise VbR, contrast it with classical SPL derivation, and demonstrate its full pipeline on a wc product family. For SPL engineering, variability in AI-generated software belongs in the specification, not in the code.

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

Rethinking Scaffolding in LLM Tutors: The Interactional Mismatch Between Benchmarks and Real-World Deployments

arXiv:2606.15766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central pedagogical value evaluated in AI tutor benchmarks is scaffolding: guiding students through graduated steps toward a solution. Alignment and evaluation methods for embedding scaffolding behaviour into chatbots, however, rest on an implicit assumption: that students will take up the scaffolding and engage in the conversation. To examine whether this assumption holds, we introduce an evaluation pipeline around two metrics - Chatbot Scaffolding and Student Uptake - and apply them across nine datasets of 9,490 chats, spanning AI tutor benchmarks and real-world deployments of educational chatbots. Our analysis reveals that while benchmarks assume a high-scaffolding, high-student-uptake environment, students in real-world settings exhibit lower levels of uptake overall - frequently bypassing the chatbot's pedagogical framing to drive the interaction toward their own learning goals at little interpersonal cost. We argue that bypassing scaffolding is not necessarily detrimental; rather, it frequently highlights a mismatch between a chatbot's pedagogical framing and the student's learning goals. To meaningfully evaluate the effectiveness of a chatbot's assistance, future benchmarks must move beyond the assumption that students will simply take up the scaffolding, and instead evaluate how these chatbots navigate diverse learning contexts and student-driven interaction patterns.

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

RoTRAG: Rule of Thumb Reasoning for Conversation Harm Detection with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Detecting harmful content in multi turn dialogue requires reasoning over the full conversational context rather than isolated utterances. However, most existing methods rely mainly on models internal parametric knowledge, without explicit grounding in external normative principles. This often leads to inconsistent judgments in socially nuanced contexts, limited interpretability, and redundant reasoning across turns. To address this, we propose RoTRAG, a retrieval augmented framework that incorporates concise human written moral norms, called Rules of Thumb (RoTs), into LLM based harm assessment. For each turn, RoTRAG retrieves relevant RoTs from an external corpus and uses them as explicit normative evidence for turn level reasoning and final severity classification. To improve efficiency, we further introduce a lightweight binary routing classifier that decides whether a new turn requires retrieval grounded reasoning or can reuse existing context. Experiments on ProsocialDialog and Safety Reasoning Multi Turn Dialogue show that RoTRAG consistently improves both harm classification and severity estimation over competitive baselines, with an average relative gain of around 40% in F1 across benchmark datasets and an average relative reduction of 8.4% in distributional error, while reducing redundant computation without sacrificing performance.

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

GRACE: Step-Level Benchmark for Faithful Reasoning over Context

Many reasoning tasks require models to reason over input context, from document-grounded question answering to rule-based deduction. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting produces traces that appear transparent, yet individual steps can silently deviate from the source evidence, even when the final answer is correct. Existing methods detect hallucinations at the response level but fail to identify where in the chain a failure occurs or what type it is. We introduce GRACE, the first human-annotated step-level faithfulness benchmark with a data-driven error taxonomy for context-grounded textual reasoning. GRACE covers CoT traces from 10 models across 4 source datasets, with each step annotated for faithfulness, error category, and natural language explanation. A data-driven taxonomy, discovered bottom-up via unsupervised clustering, organizes failures into two tracks: GRACE-Inference (deductive errors) and GRACE-Grounding (factual grounding errors), with four categories each. The evaluation set is human-annotated and challenging by design. Our experiments reveal substantial headroom for current models. In addition, integrating step-level faithfulness signals into reinforcement learning pipelines improves both downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.

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

Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models

arXiv:2602.16793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.

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

Is Stochastic Gradient Descent Effective? A PDE Perspective on Machine Learning processes

arXiv:2501.08425v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of E, Li and Tai (2017), the underlying structure of such processes can be understood via parabolic PDEs of Fokker-Planck type, which are at the core of our analysis. Even if Fokker-Planck equations have a long history and a extensive literature, almost nothing is known when the potential is non-convex or when the diffusion matrix is degenerate, and this is the main difficulty that we face in our analysis. We identify two different regimes: in the initial phase of SGD, the loss function drives the weights to concentrate around the nearest local minimum. We refer to this phase as the drift regime and we provide quantitative estimates on this concentration phenomenon. Next, we introduce the diffusion regime, where stochastic fluctuations help the learning process to escape suboptimal local minima. We analyze the Mean Exit Time (MET) and prove upper and lower bounds of the MET. Finally, we address the asymptotic convergence of SGD, for a non-convex cost function and a degenerate diffusion matrix, that do not allow to use the standard approaches, and require new techniques. For this purpose, we exploit two different methods: duality and entropy methods. We provide new results about the dynamics and effectiveness of SGD, offering a deep connection between stochastic optimization and PDE theory, and some answers and insights to basic questions in the Machine Learning processes: How long does SGD take to escape from a bad minimum? Do neural network parameters converge using SGD? How do parameters evolve in the first stage of training with SGD?

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Reverse Flow Matching: A Unified Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion and Flow Policies

arXiv:2601.08136v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion and flow policies are gaining prominence in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressive power, yet training them efficiently remains a critical challenge. A fundamental difficulty that distinguishes online RL from standard generative modeling is the lack of direct samples from the target Boltzmann distribution defined by the Q-function. To address this, two seemingly distinct families of methods have been proposed for diffusion policies: a noise-expectation family, which uses a weighted average of noise as the training target, and a gradient-expectation family, which employs a weighted average of Q-function gradients. However, it remains unclear how these objectives are formally related, or whether they can be synthesized into a more general formulation. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, reverse flow matching (RFM), which rigorously addresses the problem of training diffusion and flow models without direct target samples. By adopting a reverse inferential perspective, we formulate the training target as a posterior mean estimation problem given an intermediate noisy sample. Crucially, we introduce Langevin Stein operators to construct zero-mean control variates, deriving a general class of estimators that share the same expectation. We show that existing noise-expectation and gradient-expectation methods are simply two specific instances within this broader class. This unified view yields two key advancements: it extends the capability of targeting Boltzmann distributions from diffusion to flow policies, and it enables the principled combination of Q-value and Q-gradient information to form an effective estimator, thereby improving training efficiency and stability. We instantiate RFM to train a flow policy in online RL and demonstrate improved performance on continuous-control benchmarks compared to diffusion policy baselines.