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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Non-invasive Detection of Fasciculation Using Surface EMG with a Wavelet-Based Analytical Method (DEWCS)

Objective: Needle electromyography (nEMG) is essential for diagnosing neuromuscular disorders but is invasive and often painful. We employed single-channel bipolar surface EMG (sEMG) analyzed with a novel wavelet-based analytical approach, Detecting and Extracting Elemental Wave Components based on a Wavelet Coefficient Set (DEWCS) and investigated whether fasciculation-related activity could be identified. Methods: In this prospective study, 28 patients undergoing nEMG for suspected neuromuscular disorders and 13 healthy controls were included. Resting-state sEMG was recorded from selected muscles using single-channel bipolar active electrodes at a high sampling rate. DEWCS was used to extract indices reflecting fast- and slow-type motor unit (MU)-related activity. These standardized indices were evaluated against nEMG-detected fasciculation potentials using generalized estimating equation logistic regression to account for within-subject clustering. Diagnostic performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: A total of 67 muscles from 38 participants were analyzed. Indices of fast- and slow-type MU-related activity were significantly associated with fasciculation potentials (slow: OR 5.10, p = 0.0041; fast: OR 2.38, p = 0.0162). The combined model showed excellent discrimination (area under the curve = 0.97), outperforming either index alone. Muscle region had no significant effect. Conclusions: A single-channel bipolar sEMG setup combined with DEWCS detected fasciculation-related activity with promising accuracy. This method may serve as a non-invasive surrogate marker of lower motor neuron involvement. Further validation in larger cohorts is warranted. Significance: This non-invasive sEMG approach may help detect fasciculation-related activity and complement nEMG in neuromuscular diagnostics.

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

LatticeBridge: Rare-Event Sequential Inference for Faithful Structured Sequence Synthesis

Structured sequence generation often requires a model to satisfy several input-derived constraints in a single output. Standard decoding methods may assign high probability to fluent continuations while placing low mass on continuations that realize all required anchors jointly. We study this regime as a rare-event sequential inference problem. LatticeBridge combines a compact prefix language model, instance-compiled surface automata, and a twisted sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) decoder with resampling, multilevel splitting, and a source-support proposal term derived from instance-provided phrases. The constraint representation is compiled from each input instance and does not rely on manually curated lexical classes. On 2,610 attainable validation tasks spanning CommonGen, E2E NLG, and WikiBio, the particle decoder improves exact anchor satisfaction and mean anchor coverage over greedy, beam-filtered, and best-of-k ancestral baselines under a shared proposal model. Since exact anchor satisfaction alone does not rule out unsupported attribute substitutions, the evaluation reports required-anchor coverage, source coverage, source-intrusion diagnostics, overlap, runtime, and particle statistics jointly. The benchmark characterizes the faithfulness-overlap-latency frontier under a fixed proposal model.

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

CAF-Gen: A Multi-Agent System for Enriching Argumentation Structures

Formalizing complex reasoning from natural text is one of the central challenges in computational linguistics. It requires systems to understand not just keywords but also the context and complex reasoning embedded in a text. Current Argument Mining (AM) techniques identify basic claims and premises, yet they often struggle to capture the richer structural information required by advanced schemas such as the Carneades Argumentation Framework (CAF), which incorporates features such as premise types, proof standards, and argument schemes. We address this limitation by introducing CAF-Gen, an automated multi-agent framework designed to enrich shallow argument structures into CAF-compliant argument models. By employing an iterative Creator-Reviewer pipeline, a creator agent's output is validated by a critical agent to ensure structural integrity. This multi-agent collaboration is crucial for mitigating the structural instability typical of single-pass generative models. Our experiments demonstrate that the iterative feedback loop improves the quality of the resulting data and achieves strong alignment with the original annotations, while producing structurally richer models. Our findings show that the multi-agent system can overcome the limitations of single-pass generation, providing a robust methodology for the automated modeling of formal argumentation.

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

VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy

Mobile agents require efficient exploration strategies to map unseen environments and autonomously plan tasks. Traditional methods rely on generating occupancy maps and optimizing the sequence in which unexplored regions are visited. However, in sensor-constrained settings, such as those limited to monocular cameras, generating accurate occupancy maps is challenging. To address this, we propose VANDERER, an exploration framework that leverages a Visual Curiosity Module (VCM) to guide pre-trained diffusion policies using only monocular image data. This curiosity module predicts the outcomes of proposed actions via a navigation world model and evaluates them through a curiosity cost. The cost then guides the diffusion process toward generating actions that maximize exploration. Evaluated across diverse simulated environments, VANDERER consistently outperforms established baselines, exploring an average of 13.4% more area than NoMaD. Our results reveal a direct correlation between visual and geometric curiosity in outdoor environments, demonstrating that VANDERER can effectively leverage this relationship for efficient exploration using sensor-constrained agents.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Optimal Rate Function in Covariant Quantum State Tomography

arXiv:2606.16948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The problem of quantum tomography is to estimate an unknown quantum state $\rho$ from a measurement of $n$ copies of $\rho$. One can ask which tomography protocol, i.e.\ which choice of multi-copy measurement, gives the best possible estimate of $\rho$. To do so, we characterize tomography protocols by their rate function, which governs the exponential rate at which a protocol assigns probability to a particular estimate $\sigma$ of the true state $\rho$. This rate function is a quantum mechanical generalization of the classical relative entropy between the true state and its estimate, and depends on the choice of protocol. It is bounded by the quantum relative entropy, and we show that this bound is sharp: for any $\rho$ and $\sigma$ we construct a family of protocols whose rate functions converge to the quantum relative entropy $D(\sigma\|\rho)$. We consider the family of covariant tomography protocols; these are the basis independent state estimation schemes that assume no prior information about $\rho$ and $\sigma$. Keyl described a specific tomography protocol based on Schur sampling, and conjectured that among all covariant tomography protocols it has the largest possible rate function for all $\sigma$ and $\rho$. We prove this conjecture. The resulting rate function is an annealed version of quantum relative entropy, due to the cost of learning the eigenbasis in covariant quantum state tomography.

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

Mojo: A Promising Tool for Scalable Financial AI Efficiency

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For thirty years, quantitative finance has paid a costly two-language tax: models researched in Python are rewritten in C++ for production, often introducing numerical discrepancies. GPU-accelerated deep learning exacerbates this problem, as nondeterministic floating-point reductions can produce drift in long backtests, challenging regulatory reproducibility and auditability expectations. This article surveys Mojo, Modular's 2026 Python-like systems language, as a structural response for capital markets engineering. While closing the Python-to-C++ performance gap, Mojo uniquely combines native interoperability with the low-level systems control required to construct bit-exact deterministic kernels. Its MLIR compilation infrastructure further allows a single codebase to target scalar, SIMD, multicore, and GPU execution, reducing the translation bottleneck between research and production. We benchmark four core financial AI workloads: Monte Carlo option pricing, LLM sentiment inference, multi-asset backtesting, and portfolio Value at Risk. On Apple Silicon, Mojo demonstrates 20x to 180x speedups over pure Python on directly measured kernels; larger-scale GPU workload results are projections calibrated from published benchmarks. Alongside transparent performance data, we introduce mojo-deterministic, an open-source library of reproducible reduction kernels, and provide a candid assessment of the problems Mojo does and does not yet solve.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Learner-based Concept Drift Detection: Analysis and Evaluation

arXiv:2606.20216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning algorithms deployed for evolving streaming environments must handle the non-stationary data distributions, commonly referred to as concept drift. The presence of concept drift poses a major challenge for many real-world applications because it can severely degrade their predictive performance, hindering their ability to support robust decision-making. Consequently, the timely and efficient detection of drift events is critical for sustaining high accuracy over time. This study examines theoretically the concept drift characteristics and numerous drift detection algorithms across several categories. Furthermore, we evaluate their performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets exhibiting diverse streaming scenarios and drift characteristics, such as abrupt and gradual changes. This study aims to enhance understanding of the complex notion of concept drift characteristics and behavior of drift detectors, along with their applicability to diverse contexts.

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

Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

arXiv:2603.29515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.

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

S-GBT: Smooth Growth Bound Tensor for Certified Robustness Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to word substitution attacks. Most existing defenses focus on first order sensitivity and measure how much the output changes when the input is slightly perturbed. However, they ignore how this sensitivity evolves, which is described by curvature. When gradients vary sharply, models can still fail. This paper introduces the Smooth Growth Bound Tensor (S-GBT), a second order method that bounds the Hessian element-wise, for which we provide formal theoretical proofs on the resulting robustness bounds. A regularization term is added during training to minimize these bounds. This yields tighter certified robustness against word substitution attacks. The change in the output under word substitution is bounded by both a linear term and a quadratic term. S-GBT is derived for two architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The method is integrated directly into the training objective. Its effectiveness is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets. The results show that combining first and second order regularization improves certified robust accuracy by up to 23.4% compared to prior methods, while clean accuracy remains competitive. These findings indicate that controlling both the gradient and its variation is a promising direction for building more robust models.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

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

Graph Reinforcement Learning for Calibration-Aware Quantum Circuit Routing

arXiv:2606.12816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum circuit routing is a key step in compiling programs for noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors. Routes that appear efficient by standard overhead metrics can still lose fidelity when they pass through poorly calibrated couplers. We study a calibration-aware graph reinforcement-learning router that uses same-day IBM Heron r2 calibration data to choose hardware-edge SWAPs. We train the policy with proximal policy optimization and evaluate it with exact simulated fidelity across nine Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) Bench circuits and three calibration snapshots. Across these evaluations, pooled mean exact fidelity is $0.727$, compared with $0.440$ for SABRE-best20 and $0.481$ for target-aware SABRE. Fidelity gains come with higher routed two-qubit counts and are concentrated in the 5q and 8q circuit families; under the fixed tree action graph, all 10q families favor SABRE-best20. Overall, our results show that calibration-aware learned routing can improve fidelity beyond gate-count-driven compilation.

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

Weaving Multi-Source Evidence for Biomedical Reasoning: The BioMedHop Benchmark and BioWeave Framework

Biomedical question answering (QA) increasingly requires reasoning over interacting entities, where supporting evidence is scattered across biomedical knowledge graphs, literature documents, and web-accessible resources. However, existing biomedical QA benchmarks mainly focus on exam-style knowledge, literature comprehension, or short-range multi-hop inference, leaving source-conditioned graph reasoning and evidence topology construction underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BioMedHop, a multi-source graph-grounded benchmark for evaluating biomedical reasoning over structured evidence topologies. BioMedHop contains 10,045 instances across KG, document, web, and hybrid evidence settings, covering shared-neighbor matching, intersection reasoning, path-based reasoning, and counting, with option-based, open-ended, and numeric count renderings. To support this benchmark, we further propose BioWeave, a source-aware reasoning framework that retrieves biomedical KG paths, gathers supporting clues from documents and web sources, assembles them into a unified evidence graph, and verifies answers through entity-level evidence support. Comprehensive experiments show that BioWeave achieves the best overall performance among compared methods on BioMedHop, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by 10.5% in the overall average. Moreover, BioWeave consistently improves different LLM backbones and enables smaller models, such as Qwen3-4B, to achieve reasoning performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Does Deep RL Beat Calibrated Baselines? A Benchmark Study on Adaptive Resource Control

arXiv:2605.26418v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A properly calibrated rule-based autoscaler can beat every one of six mainstream deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms on cost across every workload we test - so when, if ever, does DRL actually help? We study this in RLScale-Bench, a reproducible benchmark and evaluation protocol for DRL on adaptive resource control, where an agent allocates compute to a dynamic workload under cost and service-level constraints. We evaluate PPO, DQN, A2C, SAC, TD3, and DDPG under matched architectures, training budgets, and reward functions against a calibrated rule-based baseline across six workload patterns and five seeds (240 runs), instantiate the benchmark on Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, and probe distribution-shift generalization. Three findings challenge common assumptions: (i) the calibrated controller achieves the lowest cost on all six workloads, though it trails the best RL agents on bursty and flash traffic; (ii) discrete-action algorithms outperform continuous-action ones by one to two orders of magnitude in constraint violations due to action-space mismatch; and (iii) no single algorithm dominates across workloads, with rankings shifting by up to four positions. The bottleneck in RL-based resource control is not algorithm selection but baseline calibration, reward engineering, and realistic evaluation protocols.

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

Learn Temporal Consistency For Robust Satellite Video Detector

Satellite video object detection (SVOD) for oriented and fine-grained objects plays an important role in satellite applications. Most existing SVOD methods only focus on one or a few coarse-grained categories of moving objects and represent objects with horizontal bounding boxes. They have difficulty extracting complete, accurate, and consistent information about objects in whole satellite videos. In this paper, we propose a satellite video object detection framework based on Temporal Consistency Learning (TCL). TCL adeptly detects oriented and fine-grained objects by leveraging the rich temporal contexts within satellite videos. The framework integrates three key modules: temporal and fine-grained feature aggregation (TFA), structure encoding (SE), and temporal consistency constraint (TCC). TFA and TCC modules facilitate consistent representation learning across frames, while the SE module encodes both appearance and structural information for precise fine-grained recognition. Experimental results on the SAT-MTB benchmark dataset demonstrate TCL's superior performance, achieving a new state-of-the-art oriented and fine-grained detection accuracy of 47.7% mAP–a 4.8% improvement over the baseline. Furthermore, our TCL framework readily accommodates existing image-based detectors, leading to enhanced detection accuracies.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Cavity-enhanced superconducting response in an underdoped cuprate

arXiv:2606.18084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Superconductors carry electrical current without resistance when paired electrons condense into a coherent macroscopic quantum state. In underdoped cuprates, evidence suggests that pairing-related correlations and superconducting fluctuations can survive above the temperature at which global coherence is lost, pointing to phase fluctuations as a key limitation on superconductivity in this regime. Motivated by recent demonstrations of cavity-modified collective states in quantum materials, we investigate whether superconducting coherence can be stabilized by engineering the electromagnetic environment of the superconductor. We study an underdoped YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-\delta}$ thin film in a tunable terahertz cavity formed with a semi-transparent gold mirror. From temperature-dependent terahertz transmission measurements, we find that the cavity enhances the superconducting response below the critical temperature, with an increase of the inferred superfluid weight. The effect becomes more pronounced at smaller cavity lengths and is accompanied by an upward shift of the superconducting onset temperature. Calculations based on a cavity-coupled model for phase-fluctuating superconductors capture these trends and support an interpretation in terms of cavity-enhanced phase stiffness. These results showcase the potential of cavity engineering for designing emergent functionalities in correlated systems.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Cutoff for asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A mechanical shuffler consists of $m$ shelves. A deck of $n$ cards, arranged in increasing order, is dealt from the bottom sequentially. Each card is assigned a shelf uniformly at random and placed on the top (bottom) of the existing pile with probability $p$ ($1-p$) independently. We refer to this as asymmetric shelf-shuffle. We find the law $\nu_{n, m}^{(p)}$ of the permutation induced by the asymmetric shelf-shuffle and show that the pair consisting of the number of descents and the number of valleys is a sufficient statistic. This generalizes a result of Diaconis, Fulman, and Holmes (Ann. Appl. Prob., 2013) corresponding to the case $p=1/2$. For $p=1/2$, Chen and Ottolini (ECP, 2025) established the cutoff in the total variation distance near $\lfloor n^{5/4}\rfloor$. We establish the cutoff for the asymmetric shelf shuffle. Let $\nu_n$ be the uniform measure on the set of all permutations $S_n$ of $\{1, \ldots, n\}$. For a fixed $p\neq 1/2$ and $c>0$, we show that \[\operatorname{TV}\left(\nu_{n, \lfloor cn^{3/2}\rfloor }^{(p)}, \nu_n\right)=1-2\Phi\left(-\frac{|2p-1|}{4\sqrt{3}c}\right)+O_{c, p}(n^{-1/2})\;.\] We also establish the cutoff in the separation distance near $m\approx n^{2}$ and in the relative entropy near $m=n^{3/2}$. In both cases, we also obtain the cutoff profile explicitly.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Super-Link Fragility in Asymmetric W-Class States under Quantum Noise

arXiv:2606.12307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The asymmetric three-qubit W-class state $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ defines an isosceles entanglement-network geometry, (a) two vertex-base (VB) links form stronger bipartite connections, (b) while the base-base (BB) link is weaker. This suggests that concentrating entanglement into a super-link may be advantageous for quantum-network tasks. Here, we show that this intuition is incomplete. We analytically compare the bipartite concurrence dynamics of the symmetric |W> state and the asymmetric $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ state, which differ both in entanglement-network geometry and excitation sector under standard noise models. In the absence of noise, the concurrence hierarchy is C_{VB} > C_W > C_{BB}$. Under phase damping, this hierarchy is preserved for all noise strengths and no entanglement sudden death occurs. Under amplitude damping, however, the hierarchy is reordered. The symmetric |W> state becomes the most robust, while the base-base concurrence of $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ vanishes at the finite threshold of parameter $\gamma$. We term this reordering as the Super-Link Fragility Effect. The same structural asymmetry that produces a stronger vertex-base link also makes it more vulnerable to energy dissipation when coupled with multi-excitation amplitudes. Under depolarization, the asymmetry advantage is erased, with $C_W$ and $C_{VB}$ sharing the same sudden-death threshold for some value of the parameter p, while $C_{BB}$ disappears earlier at some other value of the parameter p. The generalized amplitude damping channel continuously connects the damping-dominated regime to the pure-excitation limit, where the initial hierarchy is restored. These results show that entanglement robustness in $W$-class resources is controlled not by initial concurrence alone, but by the joint structure of entanglement-network geometry, excitation sector, and noise symmetry.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Spatial Analysis and Multilevel Determinants of Hypertension in Zambia: Analysis of the 2017 WHO STEPS Survey

Background: Hypertension is the leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor globally, with the fastest-growing burden in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to estimate national hypertension prevalence, map provincial patterns, assess spatial clustering, and identify individual and community-level determinants among Zambian adults using the 2017 WHO STEPS survey. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the 2017 WHO STEPS survey, a nationally representative sample of 4,301 adults aged 18-69 years. Hypertension was defined as systolic BP [&ge;]140 mmHg, diastolic BP [&ge;]90 mmHg, or current antihypertensive use. Spatial autocorrelation was assessed via Moran's I and LISA. Four nested generalised linear mixed models with PSU-level random intercepts identified individual and community-level determinants. Results: Overall weighted hypertension prevalence was 24.0%. Lusaka recorded the highest prevalence (30.2%), followed by Southern (29.9%) and Muchinga (28.3%) provinces; Western Province had the lowest (12.4%). Spatial clustering was statistically significant but modest (Moran's I = 0.0247, p < 0.001). Between-cluster variation reduced from ICC = 5.9% to 1.8% in the full model, indicating geographic differences were largely explained by individual characteristics. Age was the strongest predictor; adults aged 60-69 had nearly sevenfold higher odds than those aged 18-29 (AOR 6.92, 95% CI: 4.95-9.66). Women had lower odds than men (AOR 0.64, 95% CI: 0.52-0.79). Obesity (AOR 2.34), overweight (AOR 1.65), high cholesterol (AOR 1.40), diabetes (AOR 1.35), and single marital status (AOR 1.34) were independently significant. Western Province showed consistently lower odds than Central Province (AOR 0.48). Conclusion: Hypertension affects one in four Zambian adults, driven primarily by age, sex, obesity, dyslipidaemia, and diabetes. Geographically prioritised interventions, including community health worker-led screening programmes in Lusaka and Southern Province, would maximise population-level impact. Population-level salt reduction and alcohol policies represent cost-effective complementary strategies. Longitudinal studies with finer spatial resolution are needed to clarify causal pathways underlying observed geographic clustering and inform SDG Target 3.4 progress.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fundamental Limitations of QAOA on Constrained Problems and a Route to Exponential Enhancement

arXiv:2511.17259v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study fundamental limitations of the generic Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on constrained problems where valid solutions form a low dimensional manifold inside the Boolean hypercube, and we present a provable route to exponential improvements via constraint embedding. Focusing on permutation constrained objectives, we show that the standard generic QAOA ansatz, with a transverse field mixer and diagonal r local cost, faces an intrinsic feasibility bottleneck: even after angle optimization, circuits whose depth grows at most sublinearly with n cannot raise the total probability mass on the feasible manifold much above the uniform baseline suppressed by the size of the full Hilber space. Against this envelope we introduce a minimal constraint enhanced kernel (CE QAOA) that operates directly inside a product one hot subspace and mixes with a block local XY Hamiltonian. For permutation constrained problems, we prove an angle robust, depth matched exponential enhancement where the ratio between the feasible mass from CE QAOA and generic QAOA grows exponentially in $n^2$ for all depths up to a linear fraction of n, under a mild polynomial growth condition on the interaction hypergraph. Thanks to the problem algorithm co design in the kernel construction, the techniques and guarantees extend beyond permutations to a broad class of NP-Hard constrained optimization problems.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Structured Noise Adaptation for Sequential Bayesian Filtering with Embedded Latent Transfer Operators

arXiv:2606.14195v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kalman filters based on the Embedded Latent Transfer Operators (ELTO) emerge as novel statistical tools for sequential state estimation. However, a critical limitation stems from their use of simplified noise models, which fail to dynamically adapt to non-stationary processes. To address this limitation, we introduce an ELTO-based Bayesian filtering approach with a new structured parameterization for the filter's noise model. This parameterization enables structured noise adaptation, which couples the data-driven learning of an optimal time-invariant noise model with dynamic parameter adaptation that responds to changes in dynamics within non-stationary processes. Empirical results show that our structured noise adaptation improves the filter's dynamic state estimation performance in noisy, time-varying environments.

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

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

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\%.

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

Self-CTRL: Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users. This paper describes Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning (Self-CTRL), a method that optimizes for consistency between a LM's self-explanations and behavior on related inputs by updating explanations to better predict behavior or updating behavior to better match explanations. We apply our method in two domains. First, we study a formal probabilistic reasoning task in which LMs must learn to imitate a family of biased samplers and evaluated on their ability to report the associated biases. We find that consistency training improves the correlation between self-reported and behaviorally-measured latent biases from $R^2=0.24$ to $R^2=0.64$ on a set of held-out distributions, matching the generalization of direct ground-truth supervision. Second, we study a constitutional AI domain in which LMs must describe when they will refuse or comply with user requests. Here, Self-CTRL produces rules that faithfully describe the model's behavior on held-out requests, improving the refusal predictions of a third-party auditor model from $36\%$ to $92\%$. In the other direction, behavior updates improve alignment, reducing HarmBench failure rate from $15.0\%$ to $0.5\%$ without substantially increasing refusal on harmless prompts. By aligning explanations and behavior, our work provides a general recipe for training AI models to be safer, more transparent, and more controllable.

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

Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cost signal that constrained-RL algorithms optimize against is almost always reactive: the simulator emits a non-zero cost only after a collision has begun, and the Lagrange multiplier of PPO-Lagrangian grows only after the episode budget has been exceeded. At race speeds, where collisions are instantaneous and irreversible, any safety mechanism that waits for cost to accumulate is structurally too late. We present VLM-Safe-RL, a framework that integrates a frozen vision-language model into the CMDP Lagrangian update as an anticipatory cost term. The framework comprises four contributions: (i) Decoupled Dual-Path CLIP, independent reward/cost paths that respect the CMDP's factorization; (ii) VLM-Lagrange, an augmented multiplier update that incorporates a per-step VLM cost as an anticipatory term; (iii) Confidence Gating, a Bayes-optimal weight derived from a logistic noise model on the CLIP margin; and (iv) VLMPPOLag, the composed algorithm. On Safety-Gymnasium FormulaOne L2, our principal evaluation ($n{=}5$ seeds, $10^{6}$ steps, budget $d_{lim}{=}25$) VLMPPOLag$+$Conf is the only configuration in our default budget comparison that simultaneously retains substantive return ($J_r{\approx}40$) and holds cost within budget on a majority of seeds; the five constraint-aware baselines (PPOLag, CPO, CPPOPID, CPO-CLG, PPOLag-RND) each fail at least one requirement. The mechanism generalizes to held-out MetaDrive Medium (catastrophe rate $41\%{\to}26\%$, 95\% bootstrap CI $[-26,-5]$\,pp) and shows directionally consistent transfer to Bullet Safety-Gym; we report honestly where it does not (MetaDrive Easy/Hard, Qwen2-VL backbone) and trace the Hard failure to a Lagrangian-regulation pathology rather than the VLM signal itself. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use frozen VLM signals as an anticipatory cost term inside the CMDP Lagrangian update.

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

StepGuard: Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration

arXiv:2606.17871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web navigation requires agents to follow natural language goals, interact with web pages, and produce accurate answers. While recent advances leverage vision-language models and reinforcement learning, existing methods still suffer from single-step fragility due to reward misalignment and error propagation. To tackle the reward entanglement, we design Dynamic Dual-Policy Optimization (DDPO), which dynamically switches between a navigation-first mode for exploration and an answer-first mode for question-answering to mitigate reward conflict. To calibrate the single-step error, we propose Confidence-Guided Adaptive Navigation Reflection (CANR), a mechanism that estimates per-step confidence, triggers reflection only when necessary, and uses contrastive rewards to encourage self-correction to calibrate the single-step inaccuracy. With the above as the main components, we finally develop our StepGuard, a new framework of Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves navigation and answer accuracy, setting new state-of-the-art performance on standard web navigation benchmarks.