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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Microscopic exceptional points in the post-selected open Jaynes–Cummings model

arXiv:2606.14982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phenomenological non-Hermitian Hamiltonians track selected signatures of complex reservoir dynamics, while post-selected no-jump effective Hamiltonians derived from microscopic open-system theory reveal the underlying system–reservoir physics. We derive such a Hamiltonian for the open Jaynes–Cummings model using a Moore–Penrose normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ representation that removes the vacuum-sector singularity and diagonalizes the full Hamiltonian by one operator rotation. Starting from a zero-temperature bosonic reservoir, we obtain a Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad master equation under the Born–Markov approximation with full Bohr-frequency resolution. We use partial Bohr-frequency resolution to build a consistent post-selected no-jump Hamiltonian near exceptional points, where decay rates become comparable to Rabi frequencies and remove the scale separation behind full resolution. The normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ form of the resulting non-Hermitian Jaynes–Cummings Hamiltonian reveals the effects of Lamb-shifted detuning, diagonal loss imbalance, and reservoir-modified coupling. Our microscopic exceptional-point analysis recovers the experimentally reported single-excitation exceptional point for unequal independent losses and identifies regimes absent from the standard phenomenological model; for example, equal correlated losses with orthogonal channel phase produce a second-order exceptional point at the same loss-to-coupling ratio in every excitation sector.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Safe Exploration via Policy Priors

arXiv:2601.19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative policies (e.g., obtained from offline data or simulators) as priors. Our approach, SOOPER, uses probabilistic dynamics models to optimistically explore, yet pessimistically fall back to the conservative policy prior if needed. We prove that SOOPER guarantees safety throughout learning, and establish convergence to an optimal policy by bounding its cumulative regret. Extensive experiments on key safe RL benchmarks and real-world hardware demonstrate that SOOPER is scalable, outperforms the state-of-the-art and validate our theoretical guarantees in practice.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Roleplaying, Do Models Believe What They Say?

Language models can state that "the Earth orbits the Sun" and, when role-playing Aristotle, assert the opposite. Recent work argues that persona adoption is fundamental to how language models operate, with models constantly selecting the most appropriate persona for a given context. Does such role-playing merely change the model's outputs, or does it also affect what the model internally represents as truthful? We study this question with linear truth probes, applying them to LLMs role-playing historical personas whose likely beliefs differ from modern consensus. For each persona, we compare false claims the persona would likely have endorsed (*era-believed*) with topic-matched false claims they would not have endorsed (*era-false*). Across prompting, in-context learning, and supervised fine-tuning, persona induction suppresses era-believed statements less than equally false alternatives, yet they remain classified as false overall. Role-play therefore shifts what these models say more than what they internally represent as true. We contrast this with models trained on harmful advice that exhibit Emergent Misalignment (EM). Across three model families (Qwen 2.5 14B, Qwen 3 8B, and Llama 3.3 70B), their false claims move substantially toward the true region of probe space, are defended under challenge roughly half the time versus about a sixth for role-play, and are used in downstream reasoning. Role-play and Emergent Misalignment thus are points on a spectrum of belief internalization, where role-play changes what a model says with little representational change, while Emergent Misalignment shifts the internal representation of false claims without fully marking them as true.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Spotlight: Synergizing Seed Exploration and Spot GPUs for DiT RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.19004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) is prohibitively expensive, requiring thousands of high-end GPUs. Existing works explore two directions to reduce cost: seed exploration improves training convergence by selecting high-contrast samples, yet adds compute to the critical path; spot GPUs offer 69–77\% lower cost, yet sit idle during training because DiT rollouts finish nearly simultaneously, which prevents LLM-style pipelining of rollout with training. Spot preemptions further break Sequence Parallelism (SP) groups, fragmenting GPU topology. We present Spotlight, the first system that harvests spot GPUs for DiT RL post-training. Spotlight rests on two key insights we devise: (1)~we show that exploration can tolerate stale model weights because exploration that uses the model weights from the previous iteration preserves the relative ranking of random seeds, allowing exploration to run on idle spot GPUs during training. (2)~SP reconfiguration can reuse on-node state, reducing group recovery from minutes to sub-second launches. Built on these insights, Spotlight introduces three techniques: a bandit-based exploration planner that maximizes reward variance within the training time budget, elastic sequence parallelism that reconfigures SP groups on the fly via persistent schedulers and intra-node weight copying, and a preemption-aware pull-based request scheduler that balances load and commits in-flight state upon preemption. We implement Spotlight on the open-source RL platform ROLL and evaluate it on Qwen-Image post-training. Spotlight reaches the same target validation score $4\times$ faster than baselines, reducing total cost by $1.4$-$6.4\times$ while achieving superior image quality on DeepSeek-OCR and Geneval datasets with resolution $512\times512$ and $1280\times1280$.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Quantizing Time-Series Models As Dynamical Systems: Trajectory-Based Quantization Sensitivity Score

arXiv:2606.13300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Trajectory-based Quantization Sensitivity Score (TQS), a metric that reframes post-training quantization (PTQ) through the lens of dynamical-systems stability. By modeling the network's rollout as a discrete-time dynamical system, TQS characterizes how quantization-induced errors propagate and amplify over the rollout horizon. Unlike conventional PTQ methods, where sensitivity analysis is often coupled to the quantization procedure, TQS enables a priori sensitivity estimation decoupled from quantizer selection and bit-width assignment. This separation allows for quantization budget planning even for black-box or compiled networks with fused operators. Building on this, we present TQS-PTQ, a flexible mixed-precision framework that requires no calibration data or costly second-order approximations. Our experiments show that a dynamical-systems perspective provides a robust, high-performing pathway for low-precision deployment in resource-constrained settings.

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

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

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

Approximate Next Policy Sampling: Replacing Conservative Target Policy Updates in Deep RL

arXiv:2605.05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy. That distribution over states is unknown and cannot be sampled for the purposes of training the value function. Conservative updates solve this problem, but at the cost of shrinking the policy update. This paper explores an alternative solution, Approximate Next Policy Sampling (ANPS), which addresses the problem by modifying the training distribution rather than constraining the policy update. ANPS is satisfied if the distribution of the training data approximates that of the next policy. To demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of ANPS, we introduce Stable Value Approximate Policy Iteration (SV-API). SV-API modifies the standard approximate policy iteration loop to hold the target policy fixed while an iteratively updated behavioral policy gathers relevant experience. It only commits to a new policy once a convergence criterion has been met. If certain stability criteria are met, the update is guaranteed to be safe; otherwise, it remains no less safe than standard approximate policy iteration. Applying SV-API to PPO yields Stable Value PPO (SV-PPO), which matches or improves performance on high-dimensional discrete (Atari) and continuous control benchmarks while executing substantially larger target policy updates. These results demonstrate the viability of ANPS as a new solution to this classic challenge in RL.

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

A Tutorial on World Models and Physical AI

作者:

arXiv:2606.12783v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World modeling is emerging as a central principle for building intelligent systems capable of prediction, reasoning, and decision making. A central distinction can be drawn between explicit world models, which learn structured dynamics for rollout-based reasoning and planning, and implicit world models, which encode predictive structure within scalable learned representations. These complementary paradigms provide a foundation for physical AI in domains such as robotics and autonomous driving, enabling intelligence beyond reactive control under real-world constraints. Recent foundation models further suggest a pathway toward unified systems integrating perception, prediction, and action. Despite rapid progress, major challenges remain in hierarchical reasoning, long-horizon planning, and autonomous goal formation, which are critical for advancing toward artificial general intelligence. This tutorial presents a coherent framework in which diverse world modeling approaches are unified through shared predictive structure and differentiated by how such structure is represented and exploited.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

CellTosg2Sequence: A Unified Text-Omics-Signaling-Graph Large Language Model for Single-Cell Analysis

bioRxivLaTeXUnicodeabstract — In single-cell (sc)-based scientific discovery, text-formatted biomedical prior knowledge and signaling graphs are essential for annotating and interpreting numeric sc-omics data and for generating novel testable hypotheses. A major limitation of existing single-cell large language models (scLLMs) is that they rely on numeric expression data with gene names as the only textual signal, while comprehensive biomedical priors – cellular localization, gene function, disease associations, and signaling interaction patterns – remain absent from the model input. We introduce CellTosg2Sequence, a textual-prior- and signaling-graph-augmented cell-omics-sentence language model. A lightweight heterogeneous graph encoder maps a curated 62,507-node biomedical knowledge graph (KG) into compact virtual tokens that are prepended to each cell sentence, allowing the language model to condition on biological structure with minimal sequence-length overhead. We train CellTosg2Sequence with a three-stage objective: Stage I anchors the KG channel under autoregressive language-model pretraining, leveraging Qwen2.5-32B's own language reasoning for rapid KG alignment; Stage II aligns labels via supervised fine-tuning with KG-anchored InfoNCE; Stage III applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with an ontology-hierarchy reward, enabling free-generation cell-type prediction that generalizes beyond the closed training vocabulary. Across multiple benchmarks and ablation experiments, CellTosg2Sequence outperforms strong baselines. All results are achieved with lightweight LoRA training and a single unified checkpoint.

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

PLATE: Plasticity-Tunable Efficient Adapters for Geometry-Aware Continual Learning

arXiv:2602.03846v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a continual learning method for pretrained models that requires no access to old-task data, addressing a practical barrier in foundation model adaptation where pretraining distributions are often unavailable. Our key observation is that pretrained networks exhibit substantial geometric redundancy, and that this redundancy can be exploited in two complementary ways. First, redundant neurons provide a proxy for dominant pretraining-era feature directions, enabling the construction of approximately protected update subspaces directly from pretrained weights. Second, redundancy offers a natural bias for where to place plasticity: by restricting updates to a subset of redundant neurons and constraining the remaining degrees of freedom, we obtain update families with reduced functional drift on the old-data distribution and improved worst-case retention guarantees. These insights lead to \textsc{PLATE} (Plasticity-Tunable Efficient Adapters), a continual learning method requiring no past-task data that provides explicit control over the plasticity-retention trade-off. PLATE parameterizes each layer with a structured low-rank update $\Delta W = B A Q^\top$, where $B$ and $Q$ are computed once from pretrained weights and kept frozen, and only $A$ is trained on the new task. The code is available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/PLATE.

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

EXPO-SQL: Execution-based Clause-level Policy Optimization for Text-to-SQL

Text-to-SQL enables users to query databases using natural language by generating executable SQL queries. Recent methods have increasingly adopted Large Language Models based reinforcement learning (RL) to leverage execution feedback for training. However, existing RL methods assign uniform query-level rewards to all clauses in a SQL query, treating correct and incorrect clauses equally. This coarse-grained reward design leads to insufficient learning signals for correct SQL generation. To address this issue, we propose EXPO-SQL (EXecution-based clause-level Policy Optimization for Text-to-SQL) which provides fine-grained supervision through clause-level rewards. To assign clause-level rewards, our method identifies erroneous clauses by analyzing execution results, including error messages and clause-wise incremental execution. Experiments on widely-used Text-to-SQL benchmarks demonstrate that EXPO-SQL significantly outperforms existing supervised fine-tuning, prompting, and RL-based methods through fine-grained clause-level learning. Our code is available at https://github. com/jhn25/EXPO-SQL.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Real-time pseudo entropy and modular-Hamiltonian correlations

arXiv:2606.14208v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pseudo entropy is a complex-valued generalization of entanglement entropy defined from a reduced transition matrix. We study the pseudo entropy associated with a real-time transition matrix between an initial pure state and its unitary time evolution. For a subsystem $A$, we show that the short-time behavior of real-time pseudo entropy is governed by the correlation between the physical Hamiltonian $H$ and the modular Hamiltonian $K_A=-\log\rho_A$ of the initial reduced state, $ S_A(t,0)=S_A(0)-it \langle K_A(H-\langle H\rangle)\rangle + \mathcal{O}(t^2)$. For Hermitian dynamics, the initial imaginary response is controlled by the symmetrized covariance of $H$ and $K_A$ with an overall minus sign, while the initial real response is governed by their commutator. Thus the imaginary part of real-time pseudo entropy is not merely a branch artifact: it is a time-oriented modular response generated by the correlation between microscopic time evolution and subsystem coarse graining. We clarify the relation of this result to the known first law of pseudo entropy, derive an all-order expression in a Schmidt-diagonal model, recover thermal pseudo entropy as a special case, illustrate the covariance/commutator decomposition in a two-qubit model, and confirm the covariance response in transverse-field Ising-chain quenches, including a finite-size study of a modular susceptibility near the Ising critical region. We discuss how this amplitude-level oriented response can be related to ordinary entropy production, and also give a concrete $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric toy-model illustration of the non-Hermitian extension.

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

Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2511.14427v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective contact-rich manipulation requires robots to synergistically leverage vision, force, and proprioception. However, Reinforcement Learning agents struggle to learn in such multisensory settings, especially amidst sensory noise and dynamic changes. We propose MultiSensory Dynamic Pretraining (MSDP), a novel framework for learning expressive multisensory representations tailored for task-oriented policy learning. MSDP is based on masked autoencoding and trains a transformer-based encoder by reconstructing multisensory observations from only a subset of sensor embeddings, leading to cross-modal prediction and sensor fusion. For downstream policy learning, we introduce a novel asymmetric architecture, where a cross-attention mechanism allows the critic to extract dynamic, task-specific features from the frozen embeddings, while the actor receives a stable pooled representation to guide its actions. Our method demonstrates accelerated learning and robust performance under diverse perturbations, including sensor noise, and changes in object dynamics. Evaluations in multiple challenging, contact-rich robot manipulation tasks in simulation and the real world showcase the effectiveness of MSDP. Our approach exhibits strong robustness to perturbations and achieves high success rates on the real robot with as few as 6,000 online interactions, offering a simple yet powerful solution for complex multisensory robotic control. Website: https://msdp-pearl.github.io/

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Beyond the Autoregressive Horizon: A Comprehensive Survey of Diffusion Models, World Modelling, and State Space Models for Code

arXiv:2606.23690v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) language models have driven significant progress in automated software engineering, enabling powerful code generation and assistance systems. However, the next-token prediction paradigm introduces structural limitations for code reasoning, including restricted global planning, challenges in maintaining long-range dependencies, and limited grounding in program execution semantics. Noting the heavy skewness of existing literature towards AR models, we discuss emerging paradigms that could potentially overcome the logic and scaling bottlenecks of next-token prediction by unlocking next-generation architectural capabilities for code intelligence. Specifically, we discuss the potential of Diffusion Models, which generate code via holistic denoising that captures long-range syntactic constraints often missed by AR models. We also discuss Code World Models (CWMs), which simulate execution states to support reasoning, and State Space Models (SSMs), which provide linear-time efficiency for massive contexts. By connecting these developments with findings from cognitive neuroscience, we outline directions for developing "System 2" code generation agents.

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

FitText: Evolving Agent Tool Ecologies via Memetic Retrieval

arXiv:2605.02411v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A semantic gap separates how users describe tasks from how tools are documented. As API ecosystems scale to tens of thousands of endpoints, static retrieval from the initial query alone cannot bridge this gap: the agent's understanding of what it needs evolves during execution, but its tool set does not. We identify this retrieval interface, not planning, as the binding constraint on end-to-end agent performance, and introduce FitText, a training-free framework that makes retrieval dynamic by embedding it directly in the agent's reasoning loop. FitText treats retrieval as test-time evolution of hypotheses: the agent generates natural-language pseudo-tool descriptions (revisable beliefs about the tool it needs), refines them iteratively using retrieval feedback, and explores diverse alternatives through stochastic generation. Memetic Retrieval adds evolutionary selection pressure over candidate descriptions, guided by a tool memory that avoids redundant search. On ToolRet (three domains), FitText's reformulation strategies improve NDCG@5 by 2.7 to 10.6 points over static query retrieval across all base models; on StableToolBench (16,464 APIs) with GPT-5.4-mini, Memetic reaches an 84.3% pooled pass rate, a 26.7-point absolute gain over static query retrieval.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Conditional squeezing induced by a two-level system: arbitrary-time Magnus coefficients in the quantum Rabi model

arXiv:2508.03506v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a systematic Magnus expansion treatment of the quantum Rabi model beyond the Rotating Wave Approximation. We show that at the second order of Magnus series, the second-order evolution operator contains a term that induces conditional squeezing of the field mode depending on the state of the atom, in addition to the energy shifts. We analyze the scaling behavior of the conditional squeezing coefficient for $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ $5^2S_{1/2}\rightarrow5^2P_{1/2}$ transition line and show that the slow envelope of the squeezing coefficient is maximized at half-detuning cycles, and that it scales with $\frac{4g^2}{\omega_0|\Delta|}$. We also show that the quadrature squeezing angle suggests a possible route towards quantum non-demolition readouts, while further investigation is required for a full first-order suppression. We then connect our work to the well-studied AC-Stark shift and Bloch-Siegert shift using the effective Hamiltonian theory. Finally, we show how the energy shifts and the conditional squeezing arise, as a whole $\mathrm{SU}(1,1)$ algebra, and how they can be disentangled as individual unitary evolutions.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

On the Addressability Problem on CSS Codes

arXiv:2502.13889v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent discoveries in asymptotically good quantum codes have intensified research on their application in quantum computation and fault-tolerant operations. This study focuses on the addressability problem within CSS codes: we ask what circuits might implement logical gates on strict subsets of logical qubits. With some notion of fault-tolerance, we prove several impossibility results: for CSS codes with non-zero rate, one cannot address a logical $H$, $HS$, $SH$, or $\mathsf{CNOT}$ to any non-empty strict subset of logical qubits using a circuit made only from 1-local Clifford gates. Furthermore, we show that one cannot permute the logical qubits in a code purely by permuting the physical qubits, if the rate of the code is (asymptotically) greater than 1/3 and the distance is at least 3. We can show a similar no-go result for $\mathsf{CNOT}$s and $\mathsf{CZ}$s between two such high-rate codes, albeit under a more restrictive assumption on the circuit, which we call "global" (though recent addressable CCZ gates use global circuits). This work pioneers the study of distance-preserving addressability in quantum codes, mainly by considering automorphisms of the code. This perspective offers new insights and potential directions for future research. We argue that studying this trade off between addressability and efficiency of the codes is essential to understand better how to do efficient quantum computation.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Invariant Graph Representations for Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs Under Distribution Shifts

arXiv:2405.19062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs (CTDGs) enable fine-grained modeling of evolving relational systems. However, most existing CTDG representation learning methods are tailored to in-distribution settings and exhibit limited robustness under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. Although recent causal approaches learn invariant representations via interventions, they are primarily designed for static or discrete-time graphs and become computationally prohibitive for CTDGs due to the combinatorial explosion of structural and temporal variations. To address these challenges, we propose CIR, a framework grounded in a novel structural causal model termed the ICCM. To avoid exhaustive interventions, we leverage the Normalized Weighted Geometric Mean (NWGM) to efficiently approximate interventional predictions. We further instantiate ICCM within a practical deep learning architecture that jointly captures invariant structural and temporal patterns through dedicated subgraph extractors, and maintains an environment memory bank to model distributional shifts across evolving contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIR consistently outperforms existing methods under diverse OOD scenarios.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Nanostructure modelling with early fault tolerant quantum computers

arXiv:2606.06442v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semiconductor nanostructures are central to many developing technologies. Notably, double quantum dots are especially important for semiconductor spin-qubit architectures, quantum sensing applications, and quantum-dot solar cells. Accurate modelling is highly desirable but conventional methods can struggle when dynamics involve more than two interacting electrons. In this work, we present a quantum simulation framework capable of addressing multi-electron double quantum dots. We adopt an efficiently scaling 1$^st$ quantised representation of the system and develop algorithms based on both Trotterisation and Qubitisation. Incorporating insights from classical simulations enables us to produce resource estimates that are more realistic than those obtained from theoretical error bounds. Using a standard surface code model with physical noise at $10^{-3}$, our results indicate that the ground-state energy of four electrons in a double quantum dot can be estimated in approximately 22 hours using 226k physical qubits, or an eight-electron system in 3.3 days with 314k qubits (with runtimes falling dramatically when more qubits are available). We anticipate that incorporating recent advances in surface code architectures may reduce these costs significantly further. Our results suggest that early fault-tolerant quantum computers may become valuable tools for designing mature-era quantum technologies.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

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

Active Learning with Low-Rank Structure for Data Selection

arXiv:2606.16045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the data selection problem, the objective is to choose a small, representative subset of data that can be used to efficiently train a machine learning model. Sener and Savarese [ICLR 2018] showed that, given an embedding representation of the data and suitable geometric assumptions, heuristics based on $k$-center clustering can be used to perform data selection. This perspective was further explored by Axiotis et. al. [ICML 2024], who proposed a data selection approach based on $k$-means clustering and sensitivity sampling. However, these methods rely on the assumption that the dataset exhibits intrinsic geometric structure that can be effectively captured by clustering, whereas many modern datasets instead possess global algebraic structure that is better exploited by low-rank approximation or principal component analysis. In this paper, we introduce a new data selection framework based on low-rank approximation and residual-based sampling, formulated through the lens of row subset selection and loss-preserving coreset construction. Given an embedding representation of the data satisfying mild regularity conditions, which can be interpreted as algebraic or angular notions of Lipschitz continuity, we show that it is possible to select a weighted subset of $\tilde{O}\left(k + \frac{1}{\varepsilon^2}\right)$ data points whose average loss approximates the average loss over the full dataset within a $(1+\varepsilon)$ relative error, up to an additive $\varepsilon \Phi_k$ term, where $\Phi_k$ denotes the optimal rank-$k$ approximation cost of the embedding matrix. We complement these theoretical guarantees with empirical evaluations, demonstrating that on a range of real-world datasets, our data selection approach achieves improved performance over prior strategies based on uniform sampling or clustering-based sensitivity sampling.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Optimal Couplings of Levy Processes in the Class of Immersion Couplings

arXiv:2606.24290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the optimal coupling problem for Levy processes on R^d with respect to the quadratic cost. For any two such processes with finite second moments, we prove that the optimal Levy coupling constructed in Kang and Lim (2025), which was previously shown to be optimal among Feller couplings, is in fact optimal among the larger class of immersion couplings. The proof makes use of a characterization of immersion couplings, which is equivalent to the classical martingale preservation definition but more convenient for our purposes. The construction is based on two fundamental ingredients: the existence of an optimal coupling within the class of Levy couplings, and a dual formulation of the associated optimization problem. While both results were previously established in Kang and Lim (2025), we provide here simpler and more transparent proofs relying only on optimal transport between infinitely divisible measures and a generalized minimax principle. These arguments are self-contained and may be of independent interest.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

When Calibration Fails the Vulnerable Hospital: Federated Conformal Risk Control via Risk-Curve Shrinkage

arXiv:2606.20115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees on segmentation quality by calibrating a prediction-set threshold on held-out data. In federated deployments, the standard approach pools calibration scores across sites into a single threshold. We provide the first quantification, on real multi-institutional brain tumor data (FeTS-2022, 1,251 subjects, 20 institutions), showing that this naive pooled CRC protects the average hospital but violates coverage at 40% of individual institutions, with the worst site exceeding the target false-negative rate by 7.8 percentage points. The naive alternative, per-site local CRC, largely restores coverage but inflates prediction sets by 83x, rendering them clinically useless. We propose a shrinkage-based federated CRC protocol: each site transmits only its empirical risk curve (G scalars) to a server, which computes a shrinkage-regularized threshold per site. A single hyperparameter n0 smoothly trades worst-case coverage for prediction-set efficiency; leave-one-site-out sensitivity analysis identifies n0=19, achieving 2.7/20 violations at 2.0x stretch. We further show that direct Lagrangian optimization of coverage budgets fails, concentrating risk on vulnerable hospitals, and that the finite-sample correction term is essential: removing it triples violations. The marginal CRC guarantee is preserved by construction under the stated site-mixture assumption; per-site coverage is validated across four targets with three seeds. No patient-level images, masks, or per-volume scores leave any site.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

When AUC Misleads: Polarization-Aware Evaluation of Deepfake Detectors under Domain Shift

Recent advances in generative AI, such as diffusion models and face-swapping tools, have enabled the creation of highly realistic deepfakes, leading to real-world harms including financial fraud and non-consensual explicit content. In response, deepfake detection has become an active research area, with recent methods increasingly focusing on improving generalization to unseen manipulations. This is typically evaluated using the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) measured separately across multiple datasets. However, such an evaluation fails to reflect real-world scenarios where detectors face a mixture of data sources and varying artifact types. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel metric, Cross-dataset AUC (Cross-AUC) that averages per-domain AUCs with a measure of prediction polarization for taking into account the robustness to domain shift. The polarization extent is quantified by the Wasserstein Distance between class score distributions. Cross-AUC not only assesses the generalization capabilities of deepfake detectors under domain shifts more realistically, but it is also interpretable as it better explains the reason behind a drop in performance. Experiments performed on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate its practical relevance.