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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Discrimination-free Insurance Pricing with Privatized Sensitive Attributes

arXiv:2504.11775v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fairness has become an important concern in insurance pricing as insurers increasingly rely on machine learning models to predict expected losses. At the same time, regulatory and privacy constraints often restrict insurers' ability to access or use sensitive attributes such as gender or race. Recent actuarial research addresses fairness in this context through the concept of the discrimination-free premium, which removes both the direct and indirect effects of sensitive attributes while preserving actuarial consistency. However, implementing this approach typically requires access to the sensitive attributes themselves, which may not be available in practice. This paper studies the estimation of discrimination-free insurance premiums when sensitive attributes are observed only in privatized or noise-perturbed form. We consider a multi-party data setting in which insurers observe non-sensitive attributes and outcomes, while a trusted third party holds privatized sensitive attributes generated through a privacy mechanism. Within this framework, we develop statistical methods for estimating discrimination-free premiums using only the privatized attributes. We study two settings of practical relevance: when the privacy mechanism is known and when its noise level is unknown. For both cases, we establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed estimators. Numerical experiments and empirical applications demonstrate that the proposed approach enables fair insurance pricing while respecting privacy and regulatory constraints.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Reranking

LLM-based shopping agents increasingly rely on long purchase histories and multi-turn interactions for personalization, yet naively appending raw history to prompts is often ineffective due to noise, length, and relevance mismatch. We propose MemRerank, a preference memory framework that distills user purchase history into concise, query-independent signals for personalized product reranking. To study this problem, we build an end-to-end benchmark and evaluation framework centered on an LLM-based 1-in-5 selection task, which measures both memory quality and downstream reranking utility. We further train the memory extractor with reinforcement learning (RL), using downstream reranking performance as supervision. Experiments with two LLM-based rerankers show that MemRerank consistently outperforms no-memory, raw-history, and off-the-shelf memory baselines, yielding up to +10.61 absolute points in 1-in-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicit preference memory is a practical and effective building block for personalization in agentic e-commerce systems.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Impact of Network Constraints on Fault-Tolerant Distributed Quantum Computing

arXiv:2606.17495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As we move towards scalable and modular quantum computing, quantum data centres become imperative. Existing analyses typically treat network constraints in isolation or through simplified models, leaving the interplay between error correction operations and communication resources underexplored. In this work, we present an end-to-end simulation framework that jointly models surface-code operations, internal QPU connectivity, and realistic network constraints including finite entanglement generation rates, limited communication qubits, and bandwidth contention, producing execution latency, from which logical error rate estimates are obtained. The framework is modular by design, allowing individual components such as routing heuristics, scheduling policies, and network topologies to be independently replaced. Numerical evaluation reveals distinct operating regimes in which the optimal resource allocation and code distance selection shift depending on the network characteristics. These results point to tradeoffs in the design of distributed quantum computing architectures that are not visible when computation and communication are modeled separately.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

The Target ALS Global Natural History Study: Cross-platform proteomics to accelerate biofluid biomarker and drug target discovery in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal, rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease of motor neurons for which therapeutics are limited. Improved biomarkers are imperative to improve patient care and therapeutic development. Here, we employed 35-plex isobaric tandem mass tag labeling based on isobutyl-proline reporter group (TMTpro) to perform unbiased proteomic analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma from control (n= 28, n= 31) and sporadic ALS (sALS) (n= 39, n= 41), from the Target ALS Global Natural History Study (TALS GNHS). We identified 2,875 proteins in CSF and 1,118 proteins in plasma and identified known and novel differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) between controls and sALS, some of which were orthogonally validated using immunoassay. Comparison of TMTpro-MS and Olink proximity extension assay proteomics revealed common and non-overlapping differentially expressed proteins illustrating strengths unique to each platform. This initial cross-sectional proteomic study of biofluids from the TALS GNHS, with unrestricted availability of study results to the research community, highlights the potential of this resource as a potent platform for ALS biomarker discovery.

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

The Impossibility of Eliciting Latent Knowledge

arXiv:2606.12268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced AI systems have extensive knowledge of their environments; in fact, their knowledge may (far) exceed that of their developers or users. Consequently, a desirable property for an AI system is that it is honest – that it accurately reports its beliefs about the world. Designing an AI system to be honest may be difficult, especially if we want to ask it questions about latent variables in the environment – variables which are hidden from the human interacting with it. This gives rise to the problem of eliciting latent knowledge (ELK): the problem of training an AI agent to honestly report its beliefs. In this paper, we make ELK formally precise using Causal Influence Diagrams (CIDs). CIDs can be used to describe the relationship between an agent's training environment and its subjective representation of the world. We use CIDs to formalise the distinction between observable and latent variables, to specify what exactly it means for an agent to be honest, and to formally define goal misgeneralisation. We show that, under certain circumstances, developers can incentivise an agent to honestly answer questions by providing correct feedback during training. However, a natural, but undesirable, way for an agent to generalise is to provide answers which humans would evaluate as true, rather than honest answers. We prove an impossibility theorem stating: There is no feedback-based training strategy that depends only on agent behaviour and with certainty produces an honest agent, even if feedback is perfect during training.

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

Action with Visual Primitives

arXiv:2605.22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. A common design in current architectures maps language instructions and visual observations to actions in a single forward pass. While conceptually simple, this formulation entangles instruction comprehension, spatial scene understanding, and motor control within a single learning objective. As a result, the action expert must implicitly relearn cognitive and perceptual capabilities already present in the pretrained VLM, which can limit both learning efficiency and generalization. We introduce AVP (Action with Visual Primitives), an end-to-end architecture that implements this visual-primitive-centric interface: the VLM infers the next-stage target and emits visual-primitive tokens that condition a flow-matching action expert, with supervision derived from end-effector kinematics. Real-robot experiments on general pick-and-place tasks show that AVP improves the success rate by 37.04% over pi_0.5 and outperforms other recent methods, with consistent gains in data efficiency, spatial-compositional generalization, and object-level transfer.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MambaRaw: Selective State Space Modeling for Efficient 4K Raw Image Reconstruction

In-camera JPEG previews are ubiquitous in raw image formats and provide an sRGB reference at negligible storage cost. Although existing metadata-based reconstruction frameworks can exploit this side information when recovering raw images, their context models often become computationally expensive especially at high resolution, eg, 4K raw image, given that attention mechanisms scale quadratically with feature maps, hindering its practical application. To address these limitations, we propose MambaRaw, a JPEG-conditioned metadata-based raw image reconstruction framework that uses State Space Models (SSMs) to estimate entropy parameters efficiently. Our key contribution comprises a Spatial-Energy Coupled Context Modeling mechanism with two lightweight modules: (1) TileMambaBlock, which performs Mamba-style selective scanning only on information-dense tiles to improve the efficiency; and (2) Energy-Aware Refinement (EAR), an identity-initialized residual module that enhance feature representation to match the long-tail energy distribution of raw signals. Extensive experiments on three camera datasets (Sony, Olympus, Samsung) show consistent improvements over strong metadata-based baselines and set a new state of the art for JPEG-guided raw reconstruction with great efficiency. Notably, at low metadata bitrates, MambaRaw increases PSNR by 1.2–1.4 dB and reduces end-to-end coding latency by about 9%. Code is released at https://github.com/Peizeli1/MambaRaw.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GPO: Learning from Critical Steps to Improve LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2509.16456v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in various domains, showing impressive potential on different tasks. Recently, reasoning LLMs have been proposed to improve the reasoning or thinking capabilities of LLMs to solve complex problems. Despite the promising results of reasoning LLMs, enhancing the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs still remains a significant challenge. While existing optimization methods have advanced the LLM reasoning capabilities, they often treat reasoning trajectories as a whole, without considering the underlying critical steps within the trajectory. In this paper, we introduce Guided Pivotal Optimization (GPO), a novel fine-tuning strategy that dives into the reasoning process to enable more effective improvements. GPO first identifies the `critical step' within a reasoning trajectory - a point that the model must carefully proceed to succeed at the problem. We locate the critical step by estimating the advantage function. GPO then resets the policy to the critical step, samples the new rollout and prioritizes the learning process on those rollouts. This focus allows the model to learn more effectively from pivotal moments within the reasoning process to improve the reasoning performance. We demonstrate that GPO is a general strategy that can be integrated with various optimization methods to improve reasoning performance. Besides theoretical analysis, our experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks show that GPO can consistently and significantly enhance the performance of existing optimization methods, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability in improving LLM reasoning by concentrating on pivotal moments within the generation process.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Broadcast Product: Redefining Shape-aligned Element-wise Multiplication and Beyond

arXiv:2409.17502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Broadcast operations are widely used in scientific computing libraries, yet their mathematical formulation is often implicit and inconsistently represented in machine learning literature. This problem frequently leads to invalid equations when element-wise products are written despite mismatched tensor shapes. In this paper, we formalize such operations by introducing the broadcast product $\boxdot$, which explicitly extends the Hadamard product through shape-aligned element duplication. We provide a rigorous definition of the broadcast product, analyze its algebraic properties, and show how it can be expressed using standard linear algebra. Building on this framework, we formulate least-squares problems and sketch a proof-of-concept broadcast decomposition. As a preliminary illustration, we show that the formalism enables a new family of decompositions with distinct structural properties from conventional tensor decompositions. This work establishes a mathematical foundation for broadcast-aware tensor operations, connecting practical implementations with rigorous tensor analysis.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Geometry of Lightning Self-Attention: Identifiability and Dimension

arXiv:2408.17221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider function spaces defined by self-attention networks without normalization, and theoretically analyze their geometry. Since these networks are polynomial, we rely on tools from algebraic geometry. In particular, we study the identifiability of deep attention by providing a description of the generic fibers of the parametrization for an arbitrary number of layers and, as a consequence, compute the dimension of the function space. Additionally, for a single-layer model, we characterize the singular and boundary points. Finally, we formulate a conjectural extension of our results to normalized self-attention networks, prove it for a single layer, and numerically verify it in the deep case.

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

Rhythm of the Deep: A Computational-Linguistic Test of Duality of Patterning in Sperm Whale Codas

Human language has often been described as combining structure at two levels: lower-level units combine into larger units, which then combine into larger sequences. We test for this design feature, duality of patterning, in sperm whale codas using 1,483 codas from the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Because acoustic similarity can imitate symbolic structure, we treat the problem as computational-linguistic structure discovery from continuous audio rather than as a direct claim about language or meaning. We use a consensus of frozen audio encoders, held-out structural tests, per-statistic nulls, and acoustic-null recoverability gates. The evidence supports a narrow two-tier architecture. At the lower tier, clicks compose into codas not by a stable ordered rule, but by which clicks are present together with their inter-click rhythm. At the upper tier, coda tokens show bout-level sequential dependence, with an NSB second-order transfer-entropy lift of 0.132 bits (p = 0.002). Under tempo scaling, encoder-derived click identity is strongly rate-bound, while coda identity remains substantially more stable, yielding a measurable abstraction gradient across the click-to-coda step. Rhythm-only baselines recover substantial lower-tier structure but fail to reproduce the upper-tier sequential-dependence signal. We do not claim language, semantics, perception, or human-like phonemes. Instead, we report representation-level evidence for a duality-of-patterning-like architecture whose lower tier is rhythmic rather than segmental, and provide a portable null-controlled framework for testing combinatorial structure in induced acoustic token systems.

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

Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM): Agent-Based Finite Element Modeling of Concrete Bridge Barriers

arXiv:2606.12025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite element (FE) modeling of safety-critical infrastructure such as bridge barriers requires high-fidelity nonlinear dynamic analysis, yet the current FE modeling process remains labor-intensive and lacks automation. This paper presents the Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM) framework, a collaborative human-agent protocol that decomposes long-sequence finite element modeling into discrete, visually verifiable checkpoints across geometry generation, boundary condition definition, and material assignment. The framework is demonstrated through a 20-case matrix of reinforced concrete bridge barriers under MASH TL-4 and TL-5 lateral loading conditions, interfacing specialized agents with two widely used commercial FE softwares, i.e., ANSYS and LS-PrePost. Experimental results show that HELM improves the baseline autonomous modeling success rate from 20% to 75%, with agent-level pass rates for geometry and boundary condition tasks approximately doubling. Error analysis reveals that spatial reasoning and algebraic logic limitations constitute the primary failure modes, underscoring the value of structured human-in-the-loop intervention for modeling automation. The complete agent design code and prompts are open-sourced and can be accessed at: https://github.com/SimAgentDev/Ansys-LSPP-AgentKit.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Exact Fourier dimensions of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades on curves of nonvanishing curvature under minimal integrability

arXiv:2606.11758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an exact Fourier-dimension formula for scalar dyadic Mandelbrot cascades pushed forward to fixed C^2 Jordan curves with nonvanishing curvature. Let W be in the minimal Kahane-Peyriere regime, let the scalar dyadic cascade live on T = R/Z, and let gamma map T to R^2 be a fixed C^2 Jordan curve with nonvanishing curvature, parametrized at constant speed. For the push-forward measure mu_gamma, we prove that, almost surely on non-extinction, its Fourier dimension is A_loc(W), the usual local exponent obtained by optimizing over q>1 from the moment expression involving E[W^q]. The upper bound follows from the scalar circle local-dimension theorem, bi-Lipschitz transfer to the fixed curve, and a deterministic curved-support obstruction for Fourier dimension. The lower bound follows from a fixed-curve finite-r annular theorem, which gives summable annular Fourier decay under a single finite moment witness. The main analytic input is a deterministic phase-geometry package for fixed nondegenerate C^2 curves: stationary tubes, derivative bands, and phase-bin coefficient estimates replacing the explicit trigonometric structure available on the unit circle.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Quenched and Annealed CLTs for the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment

arXiv:2510.11846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the asymptotic behavior of random dimer coverings of the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment. We investigate quenched limit theorems for the height function and we extend annealed limit theorems that were recently studied in [arXiv:2507.08560]. We consider more general choices of random edge weights (independence is not assumed) and we distinguish two cases where the random edge weights satisfy the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) under different scalings. For both cases, we prove convergence to the Gaussian Free Field for the quenched fluctuations. For the annealed version, it had been shown in [arXiv:2507.08560], that Gaussian Free Field fluctuations can be dominated by the much larger fluctuations of the random environment. To access quenched fluctuations we analyze the Schur process with random parameters in a way that allows to prove the annealed CLT for the height function for non i.i.d. weights. We consider specific examples where we determine the asymptotic fluctuations.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Unintended Effects of Geographic Conditioning in Large Language Models

Modern conversational AI systems frequently rely on user metadata to localize responses, yet the unintended regional biases introduced by this hidden context remain poorly understood. In this work, we evaluate location leakage: the phenomenon where a model generates geographic references despite receiving a geographically neutral user prompt. Across both creative writing and open-ended Q&A prompts, even state-of-the-art LLMs systematically favor region-specific outputs when exposed to location metadata, with leakage spiking by up to 793 times above baseline (e.g., from 0.04% to 31.7% for Llama 3.1-8B, and 21.3% and 8.8% for Qwen3-8B and Claude Sonnet 4.6, respectively). Our analysis further shows a novel structural conditioning effect: replacing the injected location with the placeholder "Unknown" still elevates leakage by up to 72 times above baseline, demonstrating that the user profile frame itself, independent of any geographic content, acts as a generative conditioning signal.

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

Geometry of critical discrete structures: long-range percolation on the hierarchical lattice and the discrete torus

arXiv:2509.09589v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider (a) balls $\Lambda_n$ of growing volumes in the $d$-dimensional hierarchical lattice, and (b) the $d$-dimensional discrete torus $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ on $n^d$ vertices. Place edges independently between each pair of vertices $x\neq y\in\Lambda_n$ or $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ with probability $1-\exp(-\beta J(x, y) )$ where $J(x, y) \asymp \| x-y \|^{-\alpha}$ for some $0

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

BrainDINO: A Brain MRI Foundation Model for Generalizable Clinical Representation Learning

Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data. Here we show that a single self-supervised representation can generalize across heterogeneous brain MRI endpoints. We trained BrainDINO, a self-distilled foundation model, on approximately 6.6 million unlabeled axial slices from 20 datasets encompassing broad variation in population, disease, and acquisition setting. Using a frozen encoder with lightweight task heads, BrainDINO supported transfer across tumor segmentation, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions classification, brain age estimation, post-stroke temporal prediction, molecular status prediction, MRI sequence classification, and survival modeling. Across tasks and supervision regimes, BrainDINO consistently equaled or exceeded natural-image and MRI-specific self-supervised baselines, with particularly strong advantages under label scarcity. Representation analyses further showed anatomically organized and pathology-sensitive feature structure in the absence of task-specific supervision. Our findings indicate that large-scale slice-wise self-supervised learning can yield a unified brain MRI representation that supports diverse neuroimaging tasks without volumetric pretraining or full-network fine-tuning, establishing a scalable foundation for robust and data-efficient brain imaging analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/mclwu22/BrainDINO

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Design Criteria for SGD Preconditioners: Local Conditioning, Noise Floors, and Basin Stability

arXiv:2511.19716v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$, deriving bounds in which both the convergence rate and the stochastic noise floor are governed by $\mathbf{M}$-dependent quantities: the rate through an effective condition number in the $\mathbf{M}$-metric, and the floor through the product of that condition number and the preconditioned noise level. For nonconvex objectives, we establish a preconditioner-dependent basin-stability guarantee: when smoothness and basin size are measured in the $\mathbf{M}$-norm, the probability that the iterates remain in a well-behaved local region admits an explicit lower bound. This perspective is particularly relevant in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML), where achieving small training loss under stochastic updates is closely tied to physical fidelity, numerical stability, and constraint satisfaction. The framework applies to both diagonal/adaptive and curvature-aware preconditioners and yields a simple design principle: choose $\mathbf{M}$ to improve local conditioning while attenuating noise. Experiments on a quadratic diagnostic and three SciML benchmarks validate the predicted rate-floor behavior.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Fourier Dimensions of Mandelbrot Cascades under Minimal Integrability

Authors:

arXiv:2606.08703v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This note announces exact Fourier dimension formulas for canonical Mandelbrot cascade measures under the minimal Kahane Peyriere integrability condition and records the canonical b adic extension on cubes. In the dyadic interval setting, the theorem is proved in a balanced vector weight model allowing dependence between sibling weights. Almost surely on non extinction, the Fourier, energy, and L2 dimensions all equal the energy exponent. The scalar specialization gives the canonical Mandelbrot Kahane Fourier dimension formula under the minimal integrability condition. On the circle, the endpoint formula is given by the endpoint lower local dimension exponent. For the b adic Mandelbrot cascade on cubes, the Fourier dimension is the minimum of 2 and the energy exponent, with the universal Fourier barrier at dimension two providing the high dimensional obstruction.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Perfect State Transfer on Quotient Graphs in Shunt Decomposition-Based Quantum Walks

arXiv:2606.24440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates perfect state transfer (PST) in discrete-time quantum walks constructed via the shunt decomposition method. The walks are defined on a graph $G$ and its associated quotient graph $G/\pi$, induced by an equitable partition $\pi$. Through the shunt decomposition of $G$, we derive an explicit relation between the shift operator of the parent graph $G$ and that of its quotient graph $G/\pi$. We construct a reflection operator based on the characteristic matrix, which establishes a connection between the transition operator of the parent graph and that of its lower-dimensional quotient graph. We then prove that PST occurs on $G$ if and only if it occurs on $G/\pi$. Furthermore, we express the unitary evolution operator of the quotient graph in terms of Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind, from which we derive explicit criteria for PST. As an application, we establish PST on the cycle graph $C_{n}$ at time $k = n/2$, and lift the result to the parent graph $C_{2n}$ via the equitable partition $\pi$. We further show that if an equitable partition $\pi$ of $G$ induces a quotient isomorphic to $K_n^{\circlearrowleft}$, the complete digraph on $n$ vertices with a loop at every vertex, then PST occurs at step $k = n$, and the walk is periodic at $k = 2n$. This framework is applied to two families of graphs, which are the complete bipartite digraph $K_{n,n}^{\rightleftharpoons}$ and the circulant graph $\operatorname{Circ}(2n, S)$, where $S$ consists of all odd residues modulo $2n$ and $n = 2^s$ for some $s \geq 1$, establishing PST in their respective line digraphs. Collectively, these results also answer the question posed by Godsil and Zhan concerning which shunt decompositions or embeddings of a graph admit PST.

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

Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling

Recent visual generation models have made major progress in photorealism, typography, instruction following, and interactive editing, yet they still struggle with spatial reasoning, persistent state, long-horizon consistency, and causal understanding. We argue that the field should move beyond appearance synthesis toward intelligent visual generation: plausible visuals grounded in structure, dynamics, domain knowledge, and causal relations. To frame this shift, we introduce a five-level taxonomy: Atomic Generation, Conditional Generation, In-Context Generation, Agentic Generation, and World-Modeling Generation, progressing from passive renderers to interactive, agentic, world-aware generators. We analyze key technical drivers, including flow matching, unified understanding-and-generation models, improved visual representations, post-training, reward modeling, data curation, synthetic data distillation, and sampling acceleration. We further show that current evaluations often overestimate progress by emphasizing perceptual quality while missing structural, temporal, and causal failures. By combining benchmark review, in-the-wild stress tests, and expert-constrained case studies, this roadmap offers a capability-centered lens for understanding, evaluating, and advancing the next generation of intelligent visual generation systems.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

TRON: Tracing Rays to Orchestrate a Neural Renderer for 3D Gaussian Reconstructions

We introduce TRON, a rendering framework that combines 3D Gaussian ray tracing with neural rendering to enable realistic and controllable rendering of real-world 3D scenes under novel lighting, dynamic object motion, object insertion, and material editing. Prior approaches that rely solely on physically based rendering (PBR) of Gaussian representations struggle to achieve realistic relighting due to imperfections in reconstructed geometry, material estimates, and light transport estimation. At the same time, neural rendering methods often lack an explicit scene representation, limiting their ability to support interactive editing with fine-grained manipulation. TRON bridges these two paradigms. We use intrinsic decomposition priors from a learned inverse rendering model to regularize the material properties of a Gaussian field, and repurpose a ray tracer to provide radiometric guidance rather than final pixels. By treating this output as a structured 3D scaffold, we empower a lightweight neural renderer to bridge the domain gap between shading-model constrained estimates and photorealistic output. Our key insight is that the combination of explicit 3D knowledge with robust material priors provides speed and controllability, while neural rendering enables the synthesis of photorealistic images. To support real-world scenarios, we train our neural renderer with a multi-stage strategy consisting of large-scale pretraining and targeted fine-tuning on a newly constructed dataset of 2.1M rendered synthetic and real-world frames from 3D reconstructions. TRON outperforms Gaussian-based relighting methods in realism, and prior neural renderers in editability and speed. To the best of our knowledge, TRON is the first method to enable practical interactive applications in captured 3D environments, offering realistic appearance under dynamic geometric, lighting and material conditions.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Field-Theoretic Predictions of {\Psi}-Epistemic Models of Quantum Mechanics

arXiv:2605.12546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: {\Psi}-epistemic models of quantum mechanics imply that the quantum state does not correspond to physical reality, but instead reflects the observer's knowledge of the underlying quantum system. The epistemic view of the quantum state has the potential to shed light on several foundational problems of quantum theory and has attracted considerable attention in the literature. On the other hand, the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem demonstrated that broad classes of {\psi}-epistemic models must lead to predictions that deviate from those of quantum mechanics. Although the original theorem involved entangled joint measurements on composite systems, alternative no-go theorems involving measurements on single quantum systems were developed shortly thereafter. Experimental investigations of the deviations predicted by {\psi}-epistemic models from quantum mechanics are still ongoing. So far, such tests have been performed within the framework of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and predominantly rely on quantum information based measurement procedures. In this work, we show that {\psi}-epistemic models can give rise to deviations from standard quantum field-theoretic predictions through modifications of polarized scattering cross sections and decay widths. Our results do not require a relativistic formulation of ontological models or of the Harrigan-Spekkens criterion; the essential assumption is merely that measurements implemented through relativistic processes can still be represented within the ontological framework by well-defined response functions and probabilities. The present work constitutes a proof-of-principle study demonstrating that particle physics tests of the ontological status of the quantum state are possible and that {\psi}-epistemic models may exhibit experimentally distinguishable signatures in particle phenomenology.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Agentic Retrieval and Reinforcement Learned Equation Chains: A Controlled Generation Framework for Complex and Novel Physics Word Problems

Generating high-quality Physics Word Problems (PWPs) that are novel, complex, and solvable remains a challenging and underexplored problem in educational content generation. Existing approaches, many adapted from Math Word Problem (MWP) generation, often produce ambiguous, unsolvable, or structurally simple questions with limited linguistic diversity. We introduce ARVRE (Agentic Retrieval Value Reinforced Equation-chain), a two-stage framework for generating diverse and mathematically valid PWPs. In the first stage, a form of offline temporal-difference learning is used to construct valid chains of physics equations, while an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework dynamically selects topic-specific concepts and vocabulary. This design enables explicit control over problem structure and difficulty. In the second stage, a Large Language Model (LLM) converts the equation chain and retrieved concepts into a natural-language physics question. By grounding generation in valid equation chains, our method preserves mathematical correctness while promoting linguistic diversity and contextual richness. Human and automated evaluations demonstrate that ARVRE generates PWPs that are more complex, novel, and solvable than those produced by existing approaches. These results highlight the potential of combining reinforcement learning, retrieval, and LLMs for reliable generation of educational physics content.