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

Quantum statistical enhancement of collective behaviour in a bosonic active Ising model

arXiv:2606.18091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collective behaviour such as flocking (the collective motion of a spontaneously formed group along a common direction) or aster formation (the binding of opposing flocks, inhibiting each others motion) are intriguing emergent phenomena in active systems with local alignment rules. Until recently, their occurrence was mainly studied for classical systems, a prime example being the active Ising model (AIM), which translates the main ingredients of flocking and aster formation (i.e., alignment and self-propulsion) to a lattice framework. Here we introduce and study a one-dimensional (1D) quantum lattice variant of the AIM, based on ideal bosons with a spin degree of freedom. We find that both the collective behaviours of the 1D classical model, flocking and aster formation, are markedly enhanced by the bosonic quantum statistics. This contrasts with a recent quantum generalization of the AIM based onto hard-core bosons [Khasseh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 248302 (2025)], where flocking, but neither its quantum-statistical stabilization nor aster states were observed as a consequence of interactions. Moreover, we investigate the competition of this quantum statistical stabilization of collective phases with their suppression by the quantum fluctuations induced by a transverse external magnetic field.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languages

Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP. We aim to bridge this gap by introducing AfriSUD, the first large-scale collection of syntactically annotated treebanks for nine diverse African languages spanning major language families and regions across Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies (SUD) framework, our community-led effort provides high-quality, native-speaker verified data that capture typological key features such as agglutination and tone. We evaluate a range of models on AfriSUD for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing including non-transformer baselines, multilingual pretrained encoders, and LLMs. Our results reveal a significant syntax gap, where models still show clear limitations across the nine languages, suggesting that existing architectures may not fully capture the structural diversity of African-language syntax.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Speaking in Self-Assessing Tongues: On the Verbalized Confidence of LLMs in Machine Translation

The rapid rise in popularity of large language models (LLMs) for translation calls for a thorough study of the reliability of their confidence in their own outputs. Unlike many generation tasks, translation errors and confidence levels can be useful at different levels of granularity (tokens, words, or spans). Unsupervised approaches based on internal signals like predicted probabilities can be misleading because they reflect certainty among alternatives rather than correctness. In addition, they require access to such internal signals. Here, we devise five verbalized methods of extracting an LLM's per-token confidence without those shortcomings and compare their reliability with that of the model's internal signals of certainty. We evaluate reliability using two forms of alignment: fine-grained error detection and calibration. For both, internal and verbalized methods perform similarly, although results vary by model. Interestingly, we find little to no correlation between internal and verbalized methods.

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

AI for Social Good: An Investigation of the Causal Relationship Between Environmental Regulations and Their Effects on Air Pollution in London, UK

arXiv:2606.15257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Air pollution regulation is central to urban public health governance, but estimating its effects is difficult because policies are implemented non-randomly and pollution trajectories are shaped by meteorology, socioeconomic change, temporal trends, and overlapping interventions. This study develops an uncertainty-aware Bayesian deep learning framework to estimate the aggregate effect of air pollution regulations on PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations in London from 2010 to 2020. The framework integrates daily PM$_{2.5}$ observations from Inner London monitoring stations, meteorological covariates, annual socioeconomic indicators, month-of-year and day-of-week indicators, and daily regulation status data for 32 policy measures. A Bayesian LSTM captures temporal dependencies in environmental and socioeconomic covariates, Bayesian embedding layers represent temporal and regulation status inputs, and a regulation status prediction branch supports propensity score-based adjustment for non-random policy implementation. Regulatory effects are estimated by comparing observed PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations with counterfactual predictions under a hypothetical no-regulation scenario, with uncertainty summarized across repeated Bayesian training runs and bootstrap resampling. Results show that London's regulations were associated with an average PM$_{2.5}$ reduction of 1.88 $\mu$g/m$^3$, a relative reduction of 12.35%, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.64-2.12 $\mu$g/m$^3$. Estimated effects were limited before 2013, became clearer from 2013 to 2017, and were strongest in 2018 and 2019. The findings suggest that sustained and cumulative regulatory interventions contributed to measurable improvements in London's air quality. This study demonstrates how uncertainty-aware causal AI can support environmental accountability, public health protection, and evidence-based governance for environmental decision-making.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Polynomial-Time Mistake-Bounded Language Generation

arXiv:2606.16077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this note, we introduce a polynomial-time version of the mistake-bounded language generation (MBLG) framework due to Kleinberg, Peale, and Reingold (2026). We observe that the family of parities of variables, and the family of conjunctions of literals, are polynomial-time MBLG. Our main result states that the family of monotone Boolean functions with polynomially-many maxterms is polynomial-time MBLG. This family includes all monotone Boolean functions, computable by polynomial-size decision trees. Our technique can be presented as a new combinatorial game about writing numbers on a board.

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

Multiscale Hypersonic Boundary Layer Reconstruction via Spectral Binning and Subdomain-wise Conditional Diffusion

arXiv:2606.15023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a multiscale probabilistic reconstruction framework for hypersonic Couette flow, where near-wall states are inferred from limited top-wall observations using conditional diffusion model. The boundary layer is divided into overlapping wall-normal subdomains, and a single height- and Mach-conditioned Elucidating Diffusion Model (EDM) is trained jointly for M=6,7,8 to sample velocity, density, pressure, and temperature fields conditioned on a top-wall boundary slice. A soft overlap inpainting strategy assembles subdomain predictions into full-volume reconstructions while maintaining inter-subdomain continuity and small-scale variability. To improve the spectral fidelity of the generated fields, we introduce a novel bounded binned spectral power (BSP) loss that preserves high-wavenumber content while remaining numerically stable across the diffusion noise schedule. Validation against direct numerical simulation data shows that the model recovers instantaneous structures, spectra, statistical profiles, correlations, and wall quantities across all training Mach numbers, while providing spatially structured uncertainty estimates. The reconstructed Mach-conditioned profiles also collapse under the Trettel-Larsson transformation, indicating consistency with compressibility scaling. These results establish the domain decomposed conditional diffusion model with a bounded binned spectral loss as an effective probabilistic surrogate for near-wall reconstruction in hypersonic wall-bounded turbulence.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic epidemic model with varying infectivity and waning immunity: the law of large numbers with unbounded infectivity

arXiv:2606.11845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the large population limit of our epidemic model with infection age dependent infectivity and progressive immunity waning, under the assumption that the supremum in $t$ of the random infectivity function has a finite expectation, while the previous proofs assumed that this supremum admits a deterministic upper bound.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Weibull Weight-Scale Parameter Evolution under AdamW Training Dynamics

作者:

arXiv:2606.19367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building on a two-parameter Weibull framework for diagnosing transformer weight distributions, we study why the Weibull weight-scale parameter $\lambda$ grows, overshoots, and then relaxes during AdamW training. We derive a leading-order three-force decomposition of the squared weight norm from the AdamW update: an alignment force measuring the correlation between weights and the adaptive update direction, an injection force from adaptive step magnitude, and a decay force from decoupled weight decay. On self-trained Pythia-70M models with ground-truth optimizer moments, alignment dominates the rise phase, contributing 88-94% of the absolute force budget across four random seeds and remaining robust to super-weight removal. Near saturation, alignment and decay approach balance, explaining the transition from weight-scale growth to relaxation. These force dynamics directly govern the squared-norm component underlying $\lambda(t)$; the remaining RMS-to-Weibull reconstruction offset is measurable and decomposes into bridge and integration components, totaling approximately 5-6% in densely sampled regions. To extend the analysis to real models where optimizer moments are unavailable, we introduce a spline displacement method that recovers the alignment force from sparse checkpoints with approximately 92-94% accuracy, about twice the naive two-point baseline. We further observe that the peak value of $\lambda(t)$ varies with training-data coherence in our experiments, suggesting a data-dependent component of weight-scale growth that we leave to a controlled follow-up study. Code and data are available at https://github.com/tiexinding/NPM-Weibull-public.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Finite-Sample Bounds for Expected Signature Estimation under Weak Dependence

arXiv:2605.20541v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expected signature uniquely determines the law of a random rough path under a moment-growth condition, yet finite-sample bounds for estimating its truncations from a single long dependent trajectory remain unavailable. We study a strictly stationary stochastic process equipped with a geometric rough-path lift, observed in non-overlapping blocks of equally-spaced samples, and prove a non-asymptotic mean-squared error (MSE) bound for the block-averaging estimator of its truncated expected signature. Under moment and stationarity assumptions together with a direct covariance-decay condition on block signatures – strictly weaker than $\alpha$-mixing and applicable to long-range-dependent processes – the error separates into a discretization term and a fluctuation term, with rates determined respectively by path regularity and dependence strength. A levelwise rough-factorial variance analysis keeps finite-truncation constants explicit and yields an optimal allocation rule under a fixed observation budget. We verify the assumptions for independent-coordinate fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes in three regimes: short-range (Hurst $1/41/2$. Monte Carlo experiments show empirical slopes steeper than the guaranteed upper-bound rates.

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

Pareto LoRA: Mitigating Modality Imbalance in Unified Multimodal Models via Pareto-Optimal Gradient Integration

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for integrating multimodal understanding and generation within a single autoregressive transformer. However, during multimodal instruction tuning, these models often exhibit pronounced modality imbalance: language gradients dominate optimization, thus leading to lower image generation quality, especially under parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA. In this work, we systematically analyze modality imbalance in LoRA-based fine-tuning of UMMs for interleaved text-image generation. We show that vision modality performance degrades substantially more than text modality performance when compared to unimodal counterparts, and that modality-specific gradients can differ by orders of magnitude across various tasks and layers. Motivated by this observation, we reformulate the multimodal instruction tuning as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose Pareto LoRA, a Pareto-optimal gradient integration strategy that balances the text and image objectives by modulating the gradient direction and strength. Experiments on the CoMM benchmark with Emu2 demonstrate that Pareto LoRA consistently improves multimodal generation balance, achieving up to 44.9% gains in perceptual image quality over vanilla LoRA while maintaining comparable text performance.

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

Position: Modular Memory is the Key to Continual Learning Agents

arXiv:2603.01761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining and increased test-time compute. Despite surpassing human performance in several domains, these models remain fundamentally limited in continuous operation, experience accumulation, and personalization, capabilities that are central to adaptive intelligence. While continual learning research has long targeted these goals, its historical focus on in-weight learning (IWL), i.e., updating a single model's parameters to absorb new knowledge, has rendered catastrophic forgetting a persistent challenge. Our position is that combining the strengths of In-Weight Learning (IWL) and the newly emerged capabilities of In-Context Learning (ICL) through the design of modular memory is the missing piece for continual adaptation at scale. We outline a conceptual framework for modular memory-centric architectures that leverage ICL for rapid adaptation and knowledge accumulation, and IWL for stable updates to model capabilities, charting a practical roadmap toward continually learning agents.

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

Adaptive Weighted Averaging

arXiv:2606.12763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of selecting the largest among $n$ unknown values $x_1,\dots,x_n$ given only a single unbiased estimate $y_i$ for each $x_i$. We design strategies that are simultaneously admissible (not uniformly dominated by any other strategy) and also never worse than a given baseline such as uniform random selection. We provide an application to stochastic optimization, where we obtain online-to-batch conversion bounds with a desirable "no-compromise" guarantee: they are never worse than standard random iterate selection, and yet can be significantly better in benign settings.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying framework for quantum simulation algorithms for time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics

arXiv:2411.03180v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, there has been growing interest in simulating time-dependent Hamiltonians using quantum algorithms, driven by diverse applications, such as quantum adiabatic computing. While techniques for simulating time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics are well-established, time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics is less explored and it is unclear how to systematically organize existing methods and to find new methods. Sambe-Howland's continuous clock elegantly transforms time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics into time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics, which means that by taking different discretizations, existing methods for time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics can be exploited for time-dependent dynamics. In this work, we systemically investigate how Sambe-Howland's clock can serve as a unifying framework for simulating time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics. Firstly, we demonstrate the versatility of this approach by showcasing its compatibility with analog quantum computing and digital quantum computing. Secondly, for digital quantum computers, we illustrate how this framework, combined with time-independent methods (e.g., product formulas, multi-product formulas, qDrift, and LCU-Taylor), can facilitate the development of efficient algorithms for simulating time-dependent dynamics. This framework allows us to (a) resolve the problem of finding minimum-gate time-dependent product formulas; (b) establish a unified picture of both Suzuki's and Huyghebaert and De Raedt's approaches; (c) generalize Huyghebaert and De Raedt's first and second-order formula to arbitrary orders; (d) answer an unsolved question in establishing time-dependent multi-product formulas; (e) and recover continuous qDrift on the same footing as time-independent qDrift. Thirdly, we demonstrate the efficacy of our newly developed higher-order Huyghebaert and De Raedt's algorithm through digital adiabatic simulation.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Interaction and non-Hermiticity controlled transmission in extended Su-Schrieffer-Heeger models

arXiv:2606.15245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the transport characteristics of an extended version of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model with next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) interactions and non-Hermitian onsite energies. We observed that transport in such a system is significantly modified by the NNN interaction and the non-Hermitian terms. The transmission coefficient exhibits oscillatory behavior as the strength of the NNN interaction varies in a fixed-length chain. Moreover, the transmission coefficient also shows oscillation with system size for a fixed strength of the NNN interaction. We find that novel oscillatory behavior of the transmission coefficient, arising form the NNN interaction, is a unique feature of such a model and has not been reported previously. The presence of the non-Hermitian terms also enhances/reduces the transmission coefficient depending on the values of the other system parameters like intra-, inter- and NNN hopping. It appears from our study that both the NNN interaction and the non-Hermiticity introduce significant changes in the transport properties of the extended SSH chain, which are not observed in the standard Hermitian nearest-neighbour variant of the SSH model.

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

Anomalies in Multivariate Time Series Benchmarks Are Mostly Univariate

arXiv:2606.02670v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many recent multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) models incorporate cross-channel modeling, under the implicit assumption that the structure of anomalies may be spread across multiple channels. We evaluate this assumption on eight widely used public benchmarks by introducing a per-segment diagnostic framework that flags, for each labeled anomaly, whether at least one channel deviates individually from its normal history, whether the cross-channel correlation structure changes, or both. The framework shows that no cross-channel rupture occurs without an accompanying univariate deviation across a range of reasonable thresholds. A complementary metric also reveals that on six of the eight benchmarks, at least half of the labeled anomaly segments deviate univariately on 89% to 100% of their timesteps, reaching 100% on three of these datasets. To verify that our framework captures cross-channel structure when present, we construct synthetic data of phase-shifted sinusoidal channels with shared noise. Each anomalous segment is altered through one of two channel-wise corruptions that preserve the per-channel marginal distribution while breaking cross-channel structure, and our framework correctly characterizes these segments as cross-channel-only. On these data, channel-dependent (CD) models successfully exploit the cross-channel signal whereas channel-independent (CI) ones fail. The CI/CD comparison of a recent SOTA detector on real benchmarks further confirms that CD modeling brings no measurable gain. We conclude that current MTSAD benchmarks are unsuitable for validating cross-channel modeling capabilities, and we call for the development of more structurally diverse evaluation sets. The code for this study is publicly available.

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

LOKI: Memory-Free Null-Space Constrained Lifelong Knowledge Editing

arXiv:2606.19679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong knowledge editing aims to efficiently and sequentially update language models over time, as new knowledge becomes available or when the model makes mistakes, while preserving acceptable performance on past knowledge. One unresolved challenge is that existing methods modify a fixed set of layers for all new knowledge samples, reducing flexibility and increasing catastrophic forgetting. Another is requiring access to previous knowledge and extensive pre-processing to obtain data statistics. To address these challenges, we introduce LOKI, a novel approach that uses dynamic layer selection based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion and projects gradient updates onto the null-space of the model weights, bypassing the requirement for previous knowledge access. We show that LOKI achieves superior performance to existing approaches across a wide variety of experiments, achieving up to a 14\% improvement in average accuracy.

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

Does Text Actually Help? Uncovering and Resolving Text Collapse in Multimodal Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal time series forecasting, which pairs numerical sequences with domain-relevant textual reports, promises to inject world knowledge into forecasting pipelines. However, we uncover a critical failure mode in existing frameworks that we term text collapse: the text branch converges to a content-independent transformation, contributing negligible discriminative signal regardless of the input description. We argue that text collapse is a consequence of a fundamental asymmetry in time series forecasting: the numerical input is strongly autocorrelated with the output, making the numerical backbone inherently dominant, while the text branch, despite carrying complementary and often critical information, is insufficiently utilized, leading to its systematic underexploitation. To address this, we propose REST-TS (Residual-Exclusive Supervision for Text in Time Series), which turns the asymmetry into a design principle: the numerical backbone produces its own independent numerical forecast, and the text branch is exclusively supervised to predict the structured components of the residual, the prediction gap that numbers cannot explain. Because no numerical pathway can reduce these losses, the text branch must extract genuine content from the input description. Evaluated across diverse real-world domains and backbone architectures, REST-TS achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently demonstrates greater text-branch utilization than existing frameworks, providing strong empirical evidence that supervising the text branch on the residual compels it to extract genuine content from the input.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

On-site interactions in quantum thermal machines: efficiency, rectification and entanglement beyond local and global master equations

arXiv:2606.14593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in experimental techniques have opened new routes for harnessing non-equilibrium dynamics in mesoscopic quantum systems. In this context, we study the impact of on-site interactions on the transport properties of a continuous quantum thermal machine composed of two coupled oscillators connected to two thermal reservoirs. In the weak system-reservoir coupling regime, where a long-standing debate concerns which reduced description should be preferred, we first show that the Redfield master equation (RME) provides an accurate and unifying framework that interpolates between two well-known limits: the local and global master equations. By relying on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), a numerically exact stochastic method, we then explore the full parameter space and show that interactions can be leveraged to tune the efficiency of the thermal machine at high temperatures (while leaving it essentially unchanged at low temperatures), induce non-reciprocal transport under asymmetric reservoir couplings, and generate steady-state entanglement within the junction. We derive expressions for system-bath correlators, such as heat and particle currents, consistently across different frameworks. Our work features on-site interactions to enhance the versatility of quantum thermodynamic junctions and clarifies the role of non-Markovianity and non-linearities in quantum transport.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Last-Iterate Convergence of Optimistic Multiplicative Weight Update

arXiv:2606.11773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) and Optimistic Multiplicative-Weights Update (OMWU) are two very popular algorithms to solve convex/concave saddle-point problems, where OMWU is the non-Euclidean, entropic version of OGDA. It is known since the '80s that the last iterate of OGDA asymptotically converges to a saddle point in smooth problems. On the other hand, it is unknown if OMWU has the same property. In this paper, I show that OMWU converges asymptotically for smooth convex-concave saddle-point problems, with a small enough constant learning rate. The result does not require uniqueness, strict complementarity, an error bound, or initialization near a solution. The main new ingredient is a boundary argument showing that every cluster point satisfies the inactive-coordinate KKT inequalities. The boundary argument was discovered with assistance from ChatGPT and is documented in the appendix.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimising Entanglement Distillation Policies

arXiv:2606.14908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement distillation is a fundamental operation in quantum information processing used to obtain higher-fidelity entangled pairs from a supply of less entangled quantum states using local operations aided by classical communication (LOCC). In a physically relevant setting, where states with an initial fidelity of $f_0$, probabilistically generated over multiple, $m$, memory pairs distributed between two parties, Alice and Bob, are pairwise distilled, the optimal policy identifies the system-configuration dependent sequence of entanglement generation and distillation operations that need to be performed in order to minimize the expected time to reach some target fidelity $f_T>f_0$. Here, we formulate and systematically analyze this task as a Markov decision problem and using a value iteration algorithm, obtain optimal deterministic policies that minimize the expected waiting time required to reach a target fidelity. Our results show that the expected waiting time under the optimal policy decreases with increasing generation probability $p$ and number of quantum memories $m$ - as expected. In contrast, it exhibits non-monotonic behavior with respect to $f_0$ for a fixed fidelity gap, $(\Delta f = f_T-f_0)$. While the optimal policy consistently outperforms baseline policies such as the greedy, nested and entanglement pumping policies, its relative advantage is regime-dependent, being determined by the system parameters ($p,f_0,f_T,m$), and exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the fidelity gap $\Delta f$. Our results highlight the value of formulating entanglement distillation as a Markov decision problem, enabling the systematic design of policies that achieve target fidelity thresholds for quantum information tasks in realistic resource-constrained settings.

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

Factorized Neural Operators Decompose Dynamic and Persistent Responses

arXiv:2606.16900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical systems often exhibit heterogeneous mechanisms, where rapidly evolving dynamics coexist with persistent structures. Capturing such multiscale physical behavior remains challenging for existing neural operators, which typically rely on single dominant inductive bias and therefore couple distinct physical responses into a shared representation. We introduce the Unified Green's Function Framework across domains and propose the Factorized Neural Operators (FaNO), which decompose spectral representations into equivariant dynamic responses and invariant persistent responses, leading to better interpretability and generalization. Mechanistically, we show that the two operator branches spontaneously specialize into distinct physical roles that remain consistent across scales and domains: the equivariant branch captures rapidly varying transient dynamics, whereas the invariant branch extracts coherent persistent structures. This factorized mechanism of FaNO improves prediction accuracy, parameter efficiency and cross-scale generalization across physical systems and domains. In particular, it maintains consistent predictions under long-horizon autoregressive rollout, cross-resolution extrapolation and physical-regime shifts. These findings suggest that scalable physical modeling may benefit from moving beyond single-inductive-bias formulations toward factorized operator representations that better reflect the heterogeneous organization of physical systems, accelerating the reliable deployment of machine learning for scientific computing and discovery.

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

AmchiBias: Measuring Stereotypical Bias in Goan Identity Groups with a Minimal Pair Dataset in English and Konkani

Socio-cultural stereotypical bias is an important consideration in the development and deployment of NLP systems. It is however often considered only at the national level, despite rich subnational socio-cultural structures. We present AmchiBias, the first benchmark for measuring socio-cultural stereotypical bias for the Indian state of Goa with its unique historically multicultural setting. It covers various Goan identity groups and comprises 313 minimal pairs across eight sociodemographic dimensions in both English and Devanagari Konkani. We then evaluate stereotypical bias in five multilingual encoder models on this benchmark. We find near-chance scores in Konkani, reflecting language incompetence for general multilingual models and a lack of Goan cultural competence for Indian language models. Queried in English, models with a stronger Indian language coverage show higher bias for pan-Indian groups than hyperlocal Goan groups. This suggests the English signal reflects pan-Indian pretraining associations rather than genuine Goan cultural knowledge. Our findings highlight a critical gap in low-resource multilingual NLP evaluation for hyperlocal community identities.

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

Iterative Visual Thinking: Teaching Vision-Language Models Spatial Self-Correction through Visual Feedback

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong singleshot spatial grounding, yet lack any mechanism to observe and correct their own predictions. We find that naively prompting a VLM to iterate over rendered visualizations of its predictions causes catastrophic failure: Acc@0.5 on referring expression comprehension collapses from 79.6% to 48.7% (a 31 percentage point drop), revealing a fundamental gap between grounding capability and self-correction ability. We propose Iterative Visual Thinking (IVT), a closed-loop framework in which the model predicts a bounding box, observes the prediction rendered on the image, and iteratively refines through visual feedback. A two-phase training recipe closes the self-correction gap: first, we exploit the base model's own predictions as realistic errors and prompt a teacher VLM to generate corrective reasoning traces, yielding supervised data without human annotation; second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a simple IoU reward to stabilize multi-step refinement. On a mixed benchmark spanning RefCOCOg, Ref-Adv, and Ref-L4 (505 test samples), SFT warm-up with IVT surpasses the single-shot base model on every metric: Acc@0.5 rises to 82.0% (+2.4pp), Acc@0.7 to 74.1% (+3.2pp), and Acc@0.9 to 48.3% (+2.8pp). GRPO further reduces per-step IoU degradation by 5x, stabilizing the refinement trajectory. All training uses only 2,400 samples on a single GPU, demonstrating that spatial self-correction is a learnable capability that can be instilled at modest scale.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Mean-Field Games with Average Reward

arXiv:2606.16759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study inverse reinforcement learning for discrete-time, infinite-horizon mean-field games (MFGs) under an average-reward criterion. Expert demonstrations are assumed to arise from a stationary mean-field equilibrium under an unknown reward, and the goal is to recover a policy explaining the observed behaviour via the maximum causal entropy principle. We formulate the inverse problem by enforcing consistency with the expert mean-field term and long-run feature expectations, treating two reward classes within a unified occupation-measure framework. For finite-dimensional linear rewards, we give a convex dual reformulation with an explicit log-partition objective, and prove smoothness and curvature properties justifying constant-step-size gradient descent. For infinite-dimensional RKHS rewards, we develop a Lagrangian relaxation whose inner-maximising policy is characterised by a soft Bellman equation. The main obstacle is the absence of a discount-factor contraction. We resolve this by introducing a minorisation-based sub-stochastic kernel that yields a strict contraction of the soft Bellman operator. We establish Fréchet differentiability and Lipschitz smoothness of the log-likelihood score, leading to a gradient ascent algorithm with convergence guarantees. Two numerical examples, a malware-spread MFG and an RKHS-based consumer-choice model, show that the recovered policies closely match expert behaviour.

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

Temporal Straightening for Latent Planning

arXiv:2603.12231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning good representations is essential for latent planning with world models. While pretrained visual encoders produce strong semantic visual features, they are not tailored to planning and contain information irrelevant – or even detrimental – to planning. Inspired by the perceptual straightening hypothesis in human visual processing, we introduce temporal straightening to improve representation learning for latent planning. Using a curvature regularizer that encourages locally straightened latent trajectories, we jointly learn an encoder and a predictor of a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world model. We show that reducing curvature this way makes the Euclidean distance in latent space a better proxy for the geodesic distance and improves the conditioning of the planning objective. We demonstrate empirically that temporal straightening makes gradient-based planning more stable and yields significantly higher success rates across a suite of goal-reaching tasks. Our code is available at https://agenticlearning.ai/temporal-straightening.