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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

TriFlow: Generating Artist-Like 3D Mesh Topology via Nearest-Vertex Vector Fields

We present TriFlow, a new generative approach for producing compact 3D meshes with artist-like triangle topology directly from input geometry conditions such as signed distance fields. Our key insight is to represent mesh topology as a nearest-vertex vector field (NVF) defined over the surface, where each point encodes its association to the nearest triangle vertex in the local barycentric frame. We train a latent flow-matching model to synthesize this field, enabling topology generation conditioned on the input geometry. To extract a coherent mesh, we cluster surface regions using the generated NVF and guide a constrained quadric error metric (QEM) mesh simplification with topology-aware optimization. This yields output meshes that closely match the input geometry while exhibiting structured, artist-like connectivity. Experiments demonstrate that TriFlow achieves stronger generalization and significantly improved topology quality compared to state-of-the-art learning-based approaches, alongside 90% lower Chamfer Distance and an 8x speedup.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions

arXiv:2605.05983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones. However, current approaches to fine-tuned SVs suffer from two limitations. First, they require careful selection of steering factors on a per-SV basis to balance steering effectiveness and generation quality at inference time. Second, they operate as full-sequence SVs (FSSVs), which can sacrifice generation quality regardless of factor selection due to excessive intervention on the model generation process. To address the first limitation, we propose joint training of steering factors and directions, such that post-hoc factor selection is no longer required. Using neural network scaling theory, we find that moderately large initialization sizes and learning rates for steering factors are essential for stability and efficiency of joint training. To tackle the second limitation, we draw inspiration from representation fine-tuning and introduce Prompt-only SV (PrOSV), an SV that intervenes only on a few prompt tokens. Our empirical results show that PrOSV outperforms traditional FSSVs on AxBench when using our joint training scheme. We also find that PrOSV achieves a better tradeoff between general model utility and adversarial robustness than FSSV.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

A mathematical study of the excess growth rate

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

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Order-Based Bayesian Network Modeling of Early Detection and Post-Diagnosis Control for Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Type 2 Diabetes

Patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (T2D) are at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in this population. Early detection and glycemic control within the first year after diagnosis reduce CVD risk. However, gaps remain in how to operationalize early detection of T2D using Electronic Health Record (EHR) data and quantify its relationship with subsequent CVD risk using longitudinal observations. We developed a probabilistic graph model to analyze the interdependencies between early detection of T2D, post-diagnosis glycemic control, and CVD occurrence. Using a temporally structured Bayesian Network (BN) learned from EHR data of 9,450 primary care patients between 2017 and 2023, we quantified probabilistic dependencies between demographics, diagnostic delay surrogates, glycemic control, and post-diagnosis CVD occurrence. Percentile based thresholds defined risk groups, where individuals with predicted probabilities in the bottom decile ([≤] 10th percentile) were classified as low risk, and those in the top decile ([≥] 90th percentile) as high risk. Results demonstrated heterogeneity in predicted risks across glycemic and cardiovascular outcomes. Predicted probability of developing CVD within the first year after T2D diagnosis ranged from a mean of 5.2% in the low-risk group to 28.9% in the high-risk group, while predicted probabilities of mean Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) [≥] 8% during the first year post-diagnosis ranged from 1.6% in low-risk to 55.1% in high-risk group. Patients with HbA1c at diagnosis [≥] 8% had higher predicted probabilities of first-year post-diagnosis mean HbA1c [≥] 8% (53.3% vs. 1.9%) and high HbA1c coefficient of variation (18.7% vs. 3.1%) compared with those with HbA1c [≤] 6.5%. Incorporating early clinical outcomes refined later risk predictions, with long-term CVD risk reaching 33.5% among high-risk individuals. The proposed model achieved predictive performance comparable to conventional machine learning approaches while providing interpretable relationships for risk stratification in primary care populations.

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

The Machine Learning Approach to Moment Closure Relations for Plasma: A Review

arXiv:2511.22486v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The requirement for large-scale global simulations of plasma is an ongoing challenge in both space and laboratory plasma physics. Any simulation based on a fluid model inherently requires a closure relation for the high order plasma moments. This review compiles and analyses the recent surge of machine learning approaches developing improved plasma closure models capable of capturing kinetic phenomena within plasma fluid models. We survey two methodological families: neural-network surrogates (from multilayer perceptrons to Fourier neural operators, the latter recently reproducing both linear and non-linear Landau damping online within a fluid solver) and equation-discovery methods such as sparse regression; and organise the studies by whether they are tested offline against reference data or online within a time-evolving solver. We outline the challenges associated with machine-learning closures, including off-diagonal pressure-tensor accuracy, generalisation beyond the training distribution, and stable integration into large-scale simulations, and the directions future research might take to address them.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

AoiZora: Topology-Aware Auto-Parallel Optimization for Inference of Diffusion Transformers

arXiv:2606.17566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video diffusion has quickly grown into a key generative serving workload, yet producing each clip demands many denoising iterations over large spatio-temporal latents, which puts low-latency inference out of reach on a single device. A denoising step is therefore typically distributed across multiple accelerators, and TPU sub-slices have become an attractive and practical fabric for doing so. Current auto-parallel systems, however, search almost exclusively over logical device meshes and disregard how a chosen sharding is actually laid out on the physical TPU interconnect – an oversight that leaves large, topology-dependent performance on the table. We address this gap with AoiZora, a compiler-mediated topology planner built for low-latency video diffusion inference on TPU sub-slices. Its guiding principle is to reconnect logical sharding with physical placement by drawing on different points in the compilation flow: AoiZora first eliminates weak sharding candidates from inexpensive pre-compilation IRs, then compiles only the ones that survive and orders their physical placements using compiled HLO together with a topology-aware communication model. The winning plan is realized along the ordinary compiler path, leaving model code, compiler lowering, collective kernels, and network routing entirely intact. On TPU v5e sub-slices, AoiZora reduces Wan 2.1 one-step denoising latency by as much as 1.42x relative to existing solutions.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.

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

LLM-based Embeddings: Attention Values Encode Sentence Semantics Better Than Hidden States

Sentence representations are foundational to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. While recent methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive sentence representations, most rely on final-layer hidden states, which are optimized for next-token prediction and thus often fail to capture global, sentence-level semantics. This paper introduces a novel perspective, demonstrating that attention value vectors capture sentence semantics more effectively than hidden states. We propose Value Aggregation (VA), a simple method that pools token values across multiple layers and token indices. In a training-free setting, VA outperforms other LLM-based embeddings, even matches or surpasses the ensemble-based MetaEOL. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when paired with suitable prompts, the layer attention outputs can be interpreted as aligned weighted value vectors. Specifically, the attention scores of the last token function as the weights, while the output projection matrix ($W_O$) aligns these weighted value vectors with the common space of the LLM residual stream. This refined method, termed Aligned Weighted VA (AlignedWVA), achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free LLM-based embeddings, outperforming the high-cost MetaEOL by a substantial margin. Finally, we highlight the potential of obtaining strong LLM embedding models through fine-tuning Value Aggregation.

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

Given, When, Then, Again: Mining Subscenario Refactoring Candidates in Behaviour-Driven Test Suites with ML Classifiers and LLM-Judge Baselines

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) test suites accumulate duplicated step subsequences. Three published refactoring patterns are available (within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario invocation, cross-organisational shared higher-level step), but no prior work automates which recurring subsequences are worth extracting or which mechanism applies. Objective. Rank recurring step subsequences ("slices") by refactoring suitability (extraction-worthy), pre-map each to one of the three patterns, and quantify prevalence across the public BDD ecosystem. Method. Every contiguous L-step window (L in [2, 18]) in a 339-repository / 276-upstream-owner Gherkin corpus is keyed by paraphrase-robust cluster identifiers and counted under three scopes. SBERT / UMAP / HDBSCAN clustering recovers paraphrase-equivalent slices. Three authors label a stratified 200-slice pool against a written rubric. An XGBoost extraction-worthy classifier trained under 5-fold cross-validation is compared with a tuned rule baseline and two open-weight Large Language Model (LLM) judges. Results. The miner produces 5,382,249 slices collapsing to 692,020 recurring patterns. Three-author Fleiss' kappa = 0.56 (extraction-worthy) and 0.79 (mechanism). The classifier reaches out-of-fold F1 = 0.891 (95% CI [0.852, 0.927]), outperforming both the rule baseline (F1 = 0.836, p = 0.017) and the better LLM judge (F1 = 0.728, p = 1.5e-4). 75.0%, 59.5%, and 11.7% of scenarios carry a within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario, and cross-organisational shared-step candidate, respectively; the figures are stable under a sweep of the classifier decision threshold. Conclusion. Paraphrase-robust subscenario discovery yields a corpus-wide census of BDD refactoring candidates; pipeline, classifier predictions, labelled pool, and rubric are released under Apache-2.0.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology

Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and biological information. Here we introduce MixTIME, a multimodal foundation model that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to integrate pathology foundation models trained across distinct modalities: image only (UNIv2), image text (CONCHv1.5), and image transcriptomic (STPath) representations for pixel-level and slide-level prediction of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) protein expression from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) whole-slide images. MixTIME employs a learnable router to dynamically weight expert contributions and is trained with a distribution- and tendency-aware loss function. Benchmarked on two datasets of different scales, MixTIME achieves state-of-the-art performance across 17 protein markers as measured by correlation metrics. The predicted mIF profiles substantially enhance downstream tasks, including spatial domain identification, survival prediction, and AI-assisted pathology report generation validated by expert pathologists from multiple institutes across the world. Furthermore, MixTIME enables longitudinal tracking of protein expression dynamics across clinical time points and reveals protein gene interaction patterns linked to drug resistance and immune suppression in tumor microenvironments. Collectively, MixTIME provides a scalable framework for multimodal biomarker discovery and clinical translation in computational pathology.

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

Matrix phase-space representations for gaussian boson sampling

arXiv:2503.12749v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce coherent matrix phase-space distributions. These use conservation laws and symmetries to improve the accuracy and speed of quantum phase-space representations. As an example, this is applied to validation of low-loss Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) quantum computational advantage experiments, where classical generation of the random photon-number counts is exponentially hard. Large improvements in sampling errors are demonstrated compared to previous methods. Matrix phase-space representations also provide a large numerical speed-up, due to their (at worst) quadratic scaling, compared to other methods for validating total count probabilities of large-scale, low-loss GBS networks.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive Model-Predictive Control of a Soft Continuum Robot Using a Physics-Informed Neural Network Based on Cosserat Rod Theory

arXiv:2508.12681v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic control of soft continuum robots (SCRs) holds great potential for expanding their applications, but remains a challenging problem due to the high computational demands of accurate dynamic models. While data-driven approaches like Koopman-operator-based methods have been proposed, they typically lack adaptability and cannot reconstruct the full robot shape, limiting their applicability. This work introduces a real-time-capable nonlinear model-predictive control (MPC) framework for SCRs based on a domain-decoupled physics-informed neural network (DD-PINN) with adaptable bending stiffness. The DD-PINN serves as a surrogate for the dynamic Cosserat rod model with a speed-up factor of up to 44,000. It is also used within an unscented Kalman filter for estimating the model states and bending compliance from end-effector position measurements. We implement a nonlinear evolutionary MPC running at 70 Hz on the GPU. In simulation, it demonstrates accurate tracking of dynamic trajectories and setpoint control with end-effector position errors below 3 mm (2.3\% of the actuator's length). In real-world experiments, the controller achieves similar accuracy and accelerations up to 3.55 m/s2.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Denoising Implicit Feedback for Cold-start Recommendation

arXiv:2606.19658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Implicit feedback is widely used in recommender systems due to its accessibility and generality, yet it usually presents noisy samples (e.g., clickbait, position bias). Meanwhile, recommenders inevitably face the item cold-start problem due to the continuous influx of new items. We identify that cold items are more prone to noisy samples due to the aforementioned factors, and researchers often overlook the significance of denoising implicit feedback for cold items. Previous denoising studies usually identify noisy samples based on heuristic patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigate noise through sample selection or re-weighting. However, these methods have limited adaptability and are ineffective in cold-start scenarios. To achieve denoising implicit feedback for cold-start recommendation, we propose a model-agnostic denoising method called DIF. First, user preferences for content remain stable, which allows us to infer pseudo-labels indicating whether a user is interested in a cold item through content-similar warm items. Furthermore, to improve pseudo-label accuracy, we model the confidence of pseudo-labels based on the content similarity between the cold item and warm items, and then aggregate multiple pseudo-labels for each sample. Finally, we explicitly estimate the uncertainty of the noisy sample label by considering its relative entropy and the cold-start status of the item, which adaptively guides the role of pseudo-labels to correct the noisy labels at the sample level. DIF's superiority is supported by both theoretical justification and extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The method has been deployed on a billion-user scale short video application Kuaishou and has significantly improved various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.

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

Memory-Efficient Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Safety-Critical Control in Adversarial Spacecraft Proximity Operations

arXiv:2606.17414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) require controllers that guarantee safety under thrust constraints while minimizing fuel expenditure. Input-constrained control barrier functions (ICCBFs) provide a control method for nonlinear systems with actuation constraints that construct a forward-invariant safe set. Previous work has shown that learning class-$\mathcal{K}$ functions defining the ICCBF recursion via meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) yields a robust, non-greedy approach to safety-critical control in RPO. This paper extends that framework further by investigating the performance of three recurrent network architectures (Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Selective State Space Model (Mamba)) and two training algorithms (Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor Critic (SAC)) to identify the best setup for tuning ICCBF class-K functions via meta-RL. In addition to cooperative test cases, performance is evaluated in the presence of adversarial behavior where the target spacecraft behaves in a way that worsens the safety of the chaser spacecraft. Results indicate that state space models such as Mamba when used with PPO achieve superior task completion, safety, and fuel-savings compared to other architectures, across all cooperative and uncooperative scenarios tested.

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

Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers

arXiv:2606.12507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubrics have emerged as an alternative to RLVR in open-ended domains where a single ground-truth final answer is not available. Existing rubric-based training methods rely on an LLM verifier that scores each rollout against rubrics. This introduces substantial training-time overhead, exposes optimization to verifier-specific biases, and reduces rubric feedback to a sparse end-of-trajectory signal. We propose Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation (RGSD), a verifier-free training method in which the base policy, conditioned on the rubric, serves as the teacher for the unconditioned student. RGSD distills the rubric-conditioned teacher distribution into the student token-by-token, replacing sparse trajectory-level rewards with dense per-token learning signals and removing the LLM judge from the training loop entirely. Across Qwen-2.5 (3B, 7B) and Qwen3-Thinking (4B, 8B) models on medical and science domains, RGSD achieves rubric satisfaction comparable to judge-based GRPO while using one on-policy rollout per prompt and no training-time verifier calls. Ablations show that raw rubrics provide a stronger teacher enrichment signal than self-generated reference responses, while a stronger GRPO judge can outperform RGSD in some settings, positioning RGSD as a complementary verifier-free alternative when verifier cost or reliability is the bottleneck.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Marginal Advantage Accumulation for Memory-Driven Agent Self-Evolution

arXiv:2606.20475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In batch-style trace distillation, the same memory operation may receive contradictory feedback across different batches. Existing methods lack a cross-batch, operation-level evidence accumulation mechanism, making it impossible to distinguish stably effective operations from accidental hits. This paper formalizes the requirement as two structural conditions, alignability and comparability, and proposes Marginal Advantage Accumulation (MAA). MAA constructs differential signals to make them comparable across batches, accumulates signed evidence per operation via EMA, and ensures cross-batch traceability through semantic identity merging. As a post-processing architecture, MAA achieves the best results in 14 out of 16 settings across 4 benchmarks and 4 target models, consistently outperforming existing batch-level distillation baselines and matching or surpassing online alternatives in most settings, while reducing optimization-phase token consumption by approximately 75%.

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

A tensor network approach for chaotic time series prediction

arXiv:2505.17740v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Making accurate predictions of chaotic time series is a complex challenge. Reservoir computing, a neuromorphic-inspired approach, has emerged as a powerful tool for this task. It exploits the memory and nonlinearity of dynamical systems without requiring extensive parameter tuning. However, selecting and optimizing reservoir architectures remains an open problem. Next-generation reservoir computing simplifies this problem by employing nonlinear vector autoregression based on truncated Volterra series, thereby reducing hyperparameter complexity. Nevertheless, the latter suffers from exponential parameter growth in terms of the maximum monomial degree. Tensor networks offer a promising solution to this issue by decomposing multidimensional arrays into low-dimensional structures, thus mitigating the curse of dimensionality. This paper explores the application of a previously proposed tensor network model for predicting chaotic time series, demonstrating its advantages in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency compared to conventional echo state networks. Using a state-of-the-art tensor network approach enables us to bridge the gap between the tensor network and reservoir computing communities, fostering advances in both fields.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Trajectory-Level Redirection Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies bring natural language into closed-loop robot control, enabling robots to execute manipulation tasks directly from text instructions. The same interface gives text a recurring role in control because the prompt is reused at every replanning step, and each prompt-conditioned action changes the future observations on which the policy acts. Existing VLA attacks study adversarial prompts that elicit targeted low-level actions or make such actions persist across changing images. We identify a stronger trajectory-level failure mode: a prompt that still $appears$ to specify the intended task but redirects the final physical outcome. We mathematically formalize this setting as $command-preserving trajectory redirection$, a prompt-only threat model in which the attacker chooses one prompt before the episode, all policy and environment components remain fixed, and the prompt must stay close to the benign instruction while omitting target words and correction language. To find such prompts, we introduce an on-policy prompt search method that uses rollouts to discover perturbations whose closed-loop behavior tracks a target task while satisfying the command-preserving constraints. Experiments in simulation and on hardware show that near-benign prompt perturbations can redirect VLA rollouts to attacker-specified targets. These results expose a trajectory-level vulnerability in VLA instruction grounding: text that appears to preserve the intended command can still give an adversary control over the robot's final physical outcome. Project website: https://vla-redirection-attack.github.io/

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

On the Limits of LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Novelty Assessment

arXiv:2606.12071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used to generate and judge scientific ideas. This makes novelty evaluation a central problem. Full idea evaluation is difficult because it often requires judging a method, its feasibility, and its empirical promise. We therefore study a cleaner upstream object: the research question (RQ). RQ generation is a prerequisite for scientific ideation, and RQs can be compared against questions pursued in real papers. We introduce RQ-Bench, a benchmark built from recent arXiv papers. For each paper, we reconstruct author-anchored RQs from its cited background, gaps, and contributions. These RQs are not the only valid questions for the same background. They are author-anchored reference points for testing novelty judgments. We evaluate model-generated RQs with standalone LLM judging, comparative LLM judging, and human expert evaluation. LLM judges consistently rate model-generated RQs as highly novel, producing a novelty mirage; in comparative evaluations, this preference becomes even stronger. Domain experts, however, reach the opposite conclusion and prefer the author-anchored reference questions. We further find that many generated RQs are narrow or source-bound, a dimension that LLM judges often miss unless explicitly tested. Overall, the contradictory novelty evaluations between LLM judges and human experts raise a serious concern about the reliability of using LLMs to assess the scientific novelty of research questions.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.

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

Whose hotel does the AI recommend? An algorithm audit of reputation signals in LLM-assisted hotel selection

Travelers increasingly ask large language model (LLM) assistants which hotel to book, making these systems gatekeepers of property visibility – yet what moves their recommendations is undocumented. We conduct a pre-specified algorithm audit using a randomized choice-based conjoint: across personas, prompt templates, and twelve open-weight and proprietary models, assistants choose among five hotels whose guest rating, review volume and recency, management response, chain affiliation, price, eco-certification, and list position are independently randomized. We estimate the average marginal component effect of each signal on the probability of recommendation. Guest rating and price dominate (a top rating raises selection by 31.6 percentage points; a high price lowers it by 30.0), reproducing human valence-and-price primacy but over-weighting eco-certification and ignoring management response. List position – a content-free artifact – shifts recommendations causally, worth about \$12 per night. Stated reasons track revealed weights imperfectly. The findings ground generative engine optimization and the accountability of AI infomediaries in causal evidence.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis, and AI agents that automate geospatial workflows remain unvalidated: no benchmark evaluates agents operating through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. It comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories, covering municipality analysis, multi-turn conversation, spatial reasoning, cross-indicator synthesis, error handling and recovery, ranking, comparison, multilingual understanding, habitat analysis, and task rejection. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable API serving three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate seven LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama 4 Scout) under three temperature-1.0 seeds, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. We find: (1) Claude Sonnet 4 leads at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, with no other model above 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11x lower cost ($0.011/case); (3) comparison tasks remain universally unsolved (0% on close-value comparisons), exposing systematic reasoning limits; and (4) structured tool calling against a real API is more discriminative than general-purpose GIS benchmarks, with accuracies 25-35 points lower. We further show extensibility by integrating BigEarthNet V2 land cover for Portugal alongside Spanish CO2 and erosion indicators. The benchmark, harness, and self-hostable API are publicly available.

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

PERRY: Policy Evaluation with Confidence Intervals using Auxiliary Data

arXiv:2507.20068v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models, can improve the accuracy of OPE methods. Unfortunately, such auxiliary datasets may also be biased, and existing methods for using data augmentation within OPE lack principled uncertainty quantification. In high stakes domains like healthcare, reliable uncertainty estimates are important for ensuring safe and informed deployment of RL policies. In this work, we propose two methods to construct valid confidence intervals for OPE with data augmentation. The first provides a confidence interval over $V^{\pi}(s)$, the policy value conditioned on an initial state $s$. To do so we introduce a new conformal prediction method suitable for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with continuous state spaces, extending prior work to higher-dimensional settings. Second, we consider the more common task of estimating the average policy performance over all initial states, $V^{\pi}$; we introduce a method that draws on ideas from doubly robust estimation and prediction powered inference. Across simulators spanning inventory management, robotics, healthcare, and a real healthcare dataset from MIMIC-IV, we find that our methods can effectively leverage auxiliary data and consistently produce confidence intervals that cover the ground truth policy values, unlike previously proposed methods. Our work enables a future in which OPE can provide rigorous uncertainty estimates for high-stakes domains.