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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tunneling Dynamics and Time Delay in Electron Transport through Time-Dependent Barriers with Finite-Bandwidth Reservoirs

arXiv:2507.20649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a model system consisting of a tunneling barrier driven by an external harmonic field and coupled to two leads with finite bandwidth. Avoiding Floquet expansions, we derive simple expressions for the time-dependent tunneling current in the adiabatic regime. Our approach relates the barrier modulation to a measurable time delay in the steady-state periodic current. It provides a physically consistent definition of the tunneling time inside the barrier by subtracting the time delay associated with the leads from the total time delay. We find that the tunneling time always vanishes for wide/high barriers. Remarkably, the time delay persists even when the barrier becomes static, i.e., in the limit where the modulation frequency vanishes. This indicates that the time delay obtained through the introduction of an external periodic perturbation actually reflects an intrinsic property of the tunneling dynamics, rather than an effect of the external drive or of a particular system. We apply our results to the analysis of tunneling times in optical experiments and find good agreement with the experimental data.

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

Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Knowing When to Quit: A Principled Framework for Dynamic Abstention in LLM Reasoning

LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold outputs before or after generation, dynamic mid-generation abstention considers early termination of unpromising reasoning traces at each token position. Prior work has explored empirical variants of this idea, but principled guidance for the abstention rule remains lacking. We present a formal analysis of dynamic abstention for LLMs, modeling abstention as an explicit action within a regularized reinforcement learning framework. An abstention reward parameter controls the trade-off between compute and information. We show that abstaining when the value function falls below this reward strictly outperforms natural baselines under general conditions. We further derive a principled and efficient method to approximate the value function. Empirical results on mathematical reasoning and toxicity avoidance tasks support our theory and demonstrate improved selective accuracy over existing methods.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Phase Transitions in Attention: A Bayesian Theory of Copy Head Emergence

arXiv:2606.12058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention is the key mechanism underlying in-context learning in transformers, and attention patterns have been observed empirically to emerge abruptly during training. We present a Bayesian theory of feature learning in attention; we then focus on how the copy subcircuit in the first layer of an induction head is learned by analyzing a single-layer softmax attention network trained on a copy task. We derive a closed-form posterior over the attention matrix and reduce it to a low-dimensional order parameter space. This reduction reveals a phase transition in the amount of training data, which we verify using both Bayesian sampling and standard training with Adam. We contrast our results with linear attention and find that softmax attention exhibits a first-order phase transition while in linear attention an initial second-order phase transition is followed by a smooth, continuous evolution toward the structured attention pattern (crossover). Our work provides a first-principles theoretical account of the abrupt emergence of the copy subcircuit, reminiscent of the one observed in training large language models.

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

The Discrete-Log Clock: How a Transformer Learns Modular Multiplication

arXiv:2606.17399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When small transformers grok modular multiplication, prior work reports that the learned embedding has a "dense" Fourier spectrum requiring all frequencies. This contrasts with modular addition, where only a sparse set of key frequencies suffices. We show this density is an artifact of analyzing in the wrong basis. The natural Fourier transform for multiplication is not the standard additive DFT but the multiplicative character transform, which decomposes functions on the multiplicative group $(\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z})^*$ into its irreducible representations. Applying this transform to a grokked transformer trained on $a \cdot b \bmod 113$, we find the embedding spectrum becomes highly sparse (Gini coefficient 0.58 vs. 0.07 in the additive basis) with only 4 key frequencies carrying significant energy. Furthermore, 96.9% of MLP neurons are cleanly tuned to a single multiplicative frequency, and neuron activation heatmaps reveal 2D-periodic structure when reordered by the discrete logarithm. These results demonstrate the transformer reduces multiplication to addition in discrete-log space, implementing a "Discrete-Log Clock" algorithm analogous to Nanda et al.'s Clock algorithm for addition. The methodology generalizes: matching the analysis basis to the algebraic structure of the task reveals interpretable structure where standard tools see noise.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

OCOO-T : A Simple and Scalable Virtual Cell Model for Transcriptional Perturbation Response Prediction

arXiv:2606.12838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to genetic, chemical and cytokine perturbations is a fundamental challenge in computational biology and AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) modeling, with direct implications for drug discovery and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary cell-state encoders, hierarchical variational autoencoders, dedicated Transformer encoder-decoder modules, or gene-interaction priors to compress high-dimensional expression profiles into latent representations. While effective, these designs increase architectural complexity and may limit scalability and generalizability. This paper introduces OCOO-T, a minimalist flow-matching-based AIVC model for transcriptional perturbation response prediction. OCOO-T utilizes a vanilla Transformer stack that operates directly on continuous gene expression profiles and formulates perturbation response prediction as a continuous-time denoising process. Perturbation embeddings, dosage information, and cell-line/cell-type specificity are integrated through adaptive layer normalization and in-context tokens. Comprehensive evaluations on Tahoe100M, Replogle, and PBMC benchmarks demonstrate that OCOO-T achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse perturbations and cell types while effectively scaling to long transcriptional profiles through patching and depatching of cellular contexts. By leveraging the simplicity of Transformer-based denoising for single-cell omics, OCOO-T provides an effective and scalable framework for in-silico cellular simulation.

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

Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS

arXiv:2606.14987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious behaviors that remain dormant during normal operation but activate upon specific triggers. In this paper, we present a backdoor attack in continual learning used in IoT/CPS systems. To this end, we formalize an IoT/CPS-specific threat model, analyze why continual learning amplifies backdoor persistence in IoT pipelines, and evaluate our technique under varying conditions. Our analysis highlights critical open challenges in securing lifelong learning in IoT/CPS and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, as well as the need for heightened security controls.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Verdict to Process: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Stage Fact Verification

arXiv:2606.13262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent approaches combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with retrieval-augmented reasoning have shown promise for automated fact verification. To process complex claims, these verification pipelines typically execute multi-stage workflows that coordinate tightly coupled modules, including claim decomposition, evidence gathering, and verdict prediction. However, existing methods optimize individual stages in isolation or rely on fixed heuristics, which limits adaptive coordination among stages and can lead to suboptimal outcomes. In this work, we propose ProFact, an agentic reinforcement learning framework for end-to-end optimization of multi-stage fact verification trajectories. ProFact trains a unified policy to coordinate claim decomposition, evidence seeking, answer generation, and verdict prediction. To address the sparse and delayed supervision provided by final veracity labels, ProFact introduces process-aware rewards that provide stage-level learning signals throughout the verification process. Empirical evaluation shows that ProFact consistently outperforms strong baselines in both verification performance and inference efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of process-aware trajectory optimization for multi-stage fact verification.

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

Smoothing Dark Areas in Molecular Latent Diffusion

arXiv:2606.13955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion is a promising framework for scalable 3D molecular generation, but it requires a latent space that remains smooth, valid, and navigable beyond posterior samples. Existing molecular VAEs, however, are typically learned through reconstruction-based objectives, which do not guarantee such a latent space. We show that this leads to dark areas: regions of latent space that are reachable during diffusion sampling but decode to disconnected or chemically invalid molecules. Unlike in image generation, molecular decoding requires strict structural and chemical precision, so even small latent perturbations can produce catastrophic failures. We therefore propose TopVAE, a topology-optimized VAE that reduces dark areas by making the decoder internalize structural and chemical constraints during training, eliminating the need for test-time chemical correction. TopVAE greatly improves off-posterior robustness, and when paired with a standard DiT, achieves $77\%$ lower FCD-3D on QM9, the highest V&C, $52\%$ lower FCD-3D on GEOM-Drugs, and $1.29{\times}$ more stable and connected molecules on zero-shot scaffold inpainting.

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

Q-DICE: Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator

arXiv:2606.11340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As distributed quantum computing (DQC) offers a leading path towards scalable quantum computation, the ability to benchmark distributed algorithms under realistic conditions becomes critical for system co-design. However, without access to physical systems, researchers lack tools to evaluate distribution protocols. We introduce Q-DICE (Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator), a hardware-aware emulation environment for benchmarking distributed quantum circuits on classical simulators and on NISQ-era monolithic hardware. This work provides three core contributions: (1) a programmatic scheme to construct distributed QPU backends, utilizing two novel techniques - QPU slicing and stitching - to facilitate distributed circuit mapping, (2) a methodology for modeling nonlocal link noise using physically motivated Kraus operators and stochastic error channels, and (3) a boundary-aware circuit mapping algorithm enforcing distributed QPU topology constraints during transpilation. Together, these components constitute a distribution-aware compiler and noise-modeling engine that faithfully enforces the physical limitations of distributed quantum hardware within existing execution environments. We validate Q-DICE against a multitude of experimentally demonstrated quantum circuits, including a distributed Grover's search on optically linked trapped-ion hardware, achieving a worst-case fidelity deviation of 4% between simulated and experimental results. These findings demonstrate Q-DICE's capacity to accurately reproduce real distributed quantum system behavior across platforms, streamlining experimentation with distributed quantum algorithms and architectures.

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

Do You Really Need a GPU to Guard Your LLM? CPU-Class Classifiers and Multi-Stage Pipelines for Safety Enforcement at Scale

Safety classifiers that screen LLM inputs for jailbreak attempts have become standard deployment components, yet almost all production systems rely on GPU-based models: fine-tuned transformers and LLM-as-a-judge pipelines. These approaches impose significant per-query latency and infrastructure cost. Very little research has asked whether CPU-based classifiers, such as support vector machines and gradient-boosted trees trained on TF-IDF features, can match their accuracy across the conditions that production deployments encounter. We evaluate five CPU classifier families, Mamba-130M as an SSM-based GPU classifier, and transformer-based GPU models (DeBERTa-v3 and Gemma-2B with LoRA) across nine jailbreak sources and three regimes: in-distribution (D1), out-of-distribution (D2), and adversarially obfuscated (D3). On D1, the best CPU classifier matches the best transformer GPU model at roughly one-fifth the deployment cost. On D2, CPU classifiers fail via confident miscalibration, producing high-confidence false negatives that bypass escalation entirely. On D3, CPU classifiers outperform transformer GPU models by more than 26 percentage points in F1. Based on these complementary failure modes, we design GuardChain, a three-stage safety pipeline (Regex -> CPU -> GPU) that routes each prompt to the cheapest stage capable of a confident decision. The CPU stage alone resolves 80\% of in-distribution prompts at near-peak accuracy, and the GPU stage recovers the out-of-distribution failures. For practitioners deploying LLM safety at scale, this work provides evidence that GPU-class infrastructure is unnecessary for the majority of traffic.

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

Sensory Restoration via Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Unified 2 x 2 Framework and Convergence Roadmap

arXiv:2606.15091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Millions of individuals worldwide suffer from sensory and communication deficits caused by neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, or trauma. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a promising avenue for sensory and motor restoration. However, the scientific literature remains highly fragmented between invasive neuroprosthetics and non-invasive electrophysiological decoders, with a lack of consistent terminology and comparison metrics. This chapter proposes a unified 2 x 2 framework categorizing BCIs along two axes: degree of invasiveness (invasive vs. non-invasive) and signal direction (afferent sensory-IN vs. efferent sensory-OUT). We define and distinguish the paradigms of restoration, substitution, and augmentation. Furthermore, we outline a structural roadmap for the convergence of these modalities over near-, medium-, and long-term horizons, focusing on physical limits and the integrative role of machine learning foundation models.

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

Simplicity Suffices for Parameter Noise Injection in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks. Yet, despite the breadth of existing approaches, it remains unclear which design choices truly matter in practice. In this work, we investigate parameter noise injection for stochastic gradient descent, focusing on two key questions: how to efficiently pair each training example with its own perturbation in mini-batch training, and whether sophisticated noise parameterizations or multi-sample gradient averaging yield meaningful gains over simpler alternatives. To address the first question, we leverage a distributional identity for linear layers that allows per-example noise injection without breaking batched computation. To address the second, we systematically compare several diagonal Gaussian parameterizations against an isotropic baseline across varying noise levels on CIFAR100. Our results consistently show that simple, lightweight strategies, isotropic noise with a single perturbed forward pass per update step, recover most of the benefit of more complex schemes. These findings suggest that simplicity suffices for parameter noise injection, and that practitioners need not resort to elaborate perturbation designs to reap the optimization and generalization benefits of noisy SGD.

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

An Ensemble Deep Learning Approach for Reliable and Scalable Lemon Leaf Disease Classification

Early detection of plant diseases is crucial to plants and for the farmers. Plant diseases reduce fruit yield and quality, and plants are more susceptible to other stresses when they are infected. The lemon leaf disease dataset contains 1354 images. The dataset has 9 classes. Among the 9 classes only one class is for healthy leaf, and the other 8 classes are leaf diseases. The dataset was split into training (70%), testing (15%) and validation (15%) sets after comprehensive preprocessing. Two pretrained models (InceptionV3 and MobileNetV2) were applied and then combined these models using an ensemble technique to boost robustness. Ensemble models showed a promising performance of 99.27% accuracy. Adversarial Training is applied to improve models' ability and ensure reliable predictions under noisy data. Grad-CAM visualization highlights the important regions of leaf images that validate the model prediction with confidence level.

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

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

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.

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

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Measuring Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Rubric, Its Validation, and an Application to Thirteen Vendor Stacks

arXiv:2605.15233v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Public access to pulse-level and control-electronics interfaces in commercial quantum computing has bifurcated. This paper proposes a six-axis rubric for measuring control-plane openness, the layer between gate-level circuit specification and physical control electronics, defined operationally so that the same evidence produces the same grade across vendors. The rubric is validated three ways: a blinded re-grading pass, thirty-nine days after the evidence cutoff, that tests whether the cited evidence and the level definitions alone reproduce the recorded grades; a boundary-case methodology that fixes where each level begins and ends; and a published grading protocol that lets others reproduce and contest any cell. We establish that the rubric measures change rather than describing a snapshot by comparing the catalog against the documented control plane before the February 2025 removal of pulse-level access from IBM hardware, and reporting the cells that moved. The rubric is applied to thirteen commercial vendors across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic modalities as of May 1, 2026, as its first application, and one of the three harms the rubric is designed to detect is demonstrated through a reproduction-access audit of five pre-2025 IBM Qiskit Pulse experiments against the access available on current hardware, carried through to a client-side structural port of the audit's selected target to Rigetti Quil-T. The catalog ships as a separate machine-readable artifact under CC-BY-4.0 with per-cell source URLs (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20163276). The catalog readings will change as vendor policies shift; the rubric is the contribution that survives them.

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

Findings of the MAGMaR 2026 Shared Task

This overview paper presents the results of the shared task for the second workshop on Multimodal Augmented Generation via Multimodal Retrieval (MAGMaR). In this shared task participants submitted systems focused on either (i) video retrieval or (ii) grounded generation of articles given retrieved videos. Teams could submit to either task. For the retrieval task, we had 2 participating teams that submitted a total of 17 systems – all of which beat a baseline derived from the winner of last year's shared task. On the generation side, we had 4 teams submit 16 systems. All teams had at least one generated report that was labeled the best by a human annotator.

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

Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of SAM 3 for Automated ITV Generation from 4DCT Images

Four-dimensional computed tomography (4DCT) captures the full respiratory cycle of thoracic anatomy, yet current Internal Target Volume contouring workflows process each phase in isolation, discarding temporal coherence and leaving contours vulnerable to phase-specific artifacts. We present a lightweight framework that applies parameter-efficient fine-tuning to the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) via low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to align its text-prompted segmentation with the medical domain using only seven annotated 3D CT volumes. Furthermore, the framework incorporates a hard negative mining strategy to improve boundary discrimination in low-contrast thoracic regions. At inference, phase-wise predictions are refined through phase-coherent temporal filtering and spatial connectivity analysis. Since respiratory motion is continuous and periodic, genuine anatomy appears in contiguous blocks of phases, whereas transient artifacts appear sporadically and are thus effectively suppressed. Experiments on pulmonary and cardiac structures yield median Dice scores of 0.968 and 0.910 with 95th-percentile Hausdorff distances of 0.998 mm and 2.931 mm, respectively. The proposed framework effectively eliminates the severe false-positive predictions inherent in the zero-shot inference of the unadapted SAM 3. With only seven annotated volumes, the framework retains over 95% of full-data accuracy, and the entire pipeline is trainable on a single consumer-grade GPU, demonstrating a scalable, data-efficient solution for adaptive radiotherapy.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion for Low-Light Crowd Counting

Crowd counting is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, crowd counting in low-light environments remains largely underexplored, despite its practical importance in the real world. Existing methods mainly focus on well-lit scenes or rely on single-modality Red-Green-Blue (RGB) representations, which often become unreliable under extreme darkness and complex non-uniform illumination. To handle this problem, we construct three new low-light crowd counting benchmarks, which consist of two synthetic datasets, SHA\_Dark and SHB\_Dark, and a real-world benchmark LC-Crowd (Low-light Crowd Dataset). Inspired by Retinex-based physical modeling, we introduce depth and Canny edge cues as complementary geometric and structural priors to enhance the intrinsic reflectance representation under low-light conditions. We propose a Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion module, which formulates RGB appearance, depth geometry, and edge structure cues as nodes in a unified hyper-graph and explicitly captures their high-order complementary relationships via dynamic hyperedge construction and message passing. Furthermore, to adaptively allocate computation in dense prediction, we propose a Deformable Rectangular Sparse Attention (DRSA) module, which concentrates computation on informative regions through anchor-aware estimation and adaptive rectangular window modeling. Based on these designs, we develop a unified Low-Light Counting Network (LCNet) for robust low-light crowd counting. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best overall performance against existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is in the supplementary material. The datasets will be made public upon acceptance.

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

On the Influence of the Feature Computation Budget on Per-Instance Algorithm Selection for Black-Box Optimization

arXiv:2605.04954v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Per-instance algorithm selection (PIAS) takes advantage of complementarity between a set of algorithms by deciding which algorithm to run on a given instance. This decision is based on features of the instances, which, in the context of black-box optimization (BBO), require a part of the optimization budget to be computed. This raises two questions: (a) from which fraction of the budget spent on feature computation does PIAS become worth it for BBO, and (b) which fraction of the budget optimizes the tradeoff between feature accuracy and PIAS performance. To this end, we perform a broad study where PIAS with varying sampling budgets for feature computation is compared to the single best algorithm on a broad range of algorithm selection scenarios. These scenarios consist of two portfolio sizes, three problem sets, 4 dimensionalities, and 10 target budgets. We find that PIAS is viable for the majority of tested scenarios, even when as much as a quarter of the total budget is spent on feature computation. The tradeoff for the fraction of the budget spent on feature computation to maximize the benefit of PIAS is highly dependent on the specific AS scenario. Further, on average 20 percent of PIAS loss to the virtual best solver is explained by the budget spent on feature computation, highlighting the importance of properly accounting for the feature budget.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Conformal calibration and look-elsewhere effect in anomaly detection for new-physics searches

arXiv:2606.13780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learned anomaly detection is reshaping searches for new physics, but it has outrun the statistics used to interpret it. A raw anomaly score has no calibrated meaning, a model that scans many regions inflates the look-elsewhere effect, and the asymptotic significances the field relies on are blind to the background mismodelling that anomaly detectors are especially prone to. We propose a calibration layer, built on conformal prediction, that turns any anomaly score into a defensible significance with distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees. Conformal prediction converts scores into valid local p-values, weighted and Mondrian variants repair the sideband-to-signal-region exchangeability failures that resonant searches suffer, and a Gross-Vitells step carries the result through to a look-elsewhere-aware global significance. The layer does two things at once. It exposes miscalibration that the standard pipeline cannot see, and it corrects it without retraining the detector. On public LHC Olympics data, a classifier develops a substructure-mass correlation that makes sideband-calibrated background p-values anti-conservative. Taken at face value, this manufactures a $\sim 46\sigma$ excess from background sculpting alone, which the label-free weighted correction removes, restoring an honest null. When run as a blind wide-mass bump hunt, the standard asymptotic and unweighted procedures fabricate $\gtrsim10\sigma$ excesses and $\approx5\sigma$ excesses even in signal-free windows, while the conformal layer raises no false alarms and its global false-positive rate is verified on background-only pseudoexperiments. The result is an auditable, detector-agnostic path from an uncalibrated score to a trials-factor-aware significance, ready to be folded into experimental anomaly searches.