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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

How reliable are LLMs when it comes to playing dice?

We investigate the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of large language models through a controlled benchmarking study on discrete probability problems. We constructed two datasets, respectively a set of standard exercises and a set of counterintuitive exercises, designed to trigger heuristic reasoning, and evaluated 8 state-of-the-art models, each tested with and without Chain-of-Thought prompting. Models achieve an average accuracy of 0.96 on standard problems but only 0.59 on counterintuitive ones. We further provide empirical evidence of token bias: performance drops by over 20% when canonical formulations are replaced by disguised variants. Embedding misleading suggestions in the prompt reduces performance by up to 34%, with no model proving immune. Taken together, the reported findings suggest that current LLMs are not yet genuine probabilistic reasoners, despite their success in advanced mathematical problems.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Delayed blow-up by transport noise for the 3D Navier-Stokes equation with Navier-slip boundary conditions

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19060v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the vorticity formulation of the 3D Navier-Stokes equation driven by transport noise in a periodic channel with Navier-slip boundary conditions. We consider both non-degenerate transport noise and degenerate tangential transport noise. For any prescribed $T>0$ and $\epsilon>0$, we prove that, by choosing the noise intensity sufficiently large and concentrating the noise on sufficiently high modes, the solution exists up to $T$ with probability at least $1-\epsilon$. A main contribution of this work is to identify and analyze the interaction between enhanced dissipation induced by transport noise and physical boundary effects. The no-flux condition breaks the isotropy of the noise and changes the scaling limit of the Itô-Stratonovich corrector. In the non-degenerate case, a boundary feedback term appears in the limiting effective operator; in the degenerate case, the limiting operator is a nonlocal anisotropic tangential dissipation. The proof is based on a combination of a boundary correction operator, a Meyers-type estimate, a scaling-limit analysis of the Itô-Stratonovich corrector, and resolvent estimates for the deterministic limiting equations.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning Augmented Exact Exponential Algorithms

arXiv:2606.18807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The field of learning-augmented algorithms has demonstrated that machine-learned predictions can bypass worst-case lower bounds across a wide range of problems. So far, however, the focus has been almost exclusively on polynomial-time algorithms, where predictions improve competitive ratios, approximation guarantees, or running times. In this paper, we raise the question of whether predictions can push the frontier of exact exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems. We answer this question affirmatively by proposing a general approach that augments an entire family of state-of-the-art exact algorithms for a variety of subset selection problems. We show that a noisy predictor that is only marginally better than random guessing suffices to provably reduce the search space, and that the resulting runtime speedup scales smoothly with the prediction quality. Importantly, our algorithms require only pairwise independence of predictions or, alternatively, do not require the knowledge of the predictor's accuracy - both strictly weaker and more realistic settings than typically assumed.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

SEVRA-BENCH: Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agents

arXiv:2606.13757v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) reviewers are increasingly used in pull-request (PR) workflows, where their approvals help decide which code is merged into a repository. This raises a question that benchmarks for static vulnerability detection or code generation do not address: can an automated reviewer reject a malicious contribution when the attacker controls both the code change and the accompanying PR text? We introduce SEVRA-BENCH (Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agents), a benchmark that measures how often an automated reviewer approves such adversarial pull requests. Each malicious PR in SEVRA-BENCH is built from a real project commit that previously fixed a vulnerability listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. We automatically invert that fix to restore the original vulnerable code and submit it as a pull request wrapped in one of 15 social-engineering framings, which vary the claims made, the supporting evidence, the urgency conveyed, signals of prior approval, and appeals to authority. SEVRA-BENCH contains 1,062 malicious PRs drawn from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)-linked fixes across the top 10 entries of the 2025 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Top 25. In a realistic setting, we evaluate 8 current LLMs as code review agents on PRs that introduce vulnerabilities previously reported in public disclosures. Our results reveal a sharp gap in security capabilities between closed- and open-source models. We hope SEVRA-BENCH will serve as a valuable resource for advancing open-source models and narrowing this gap.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Co-policy: Responsive Human-Robot Co-Creation for Musical Performances

arXiv:2606.19914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Art has long stood as a pivotal expression of human creativity. Embodied artificial intelligence offers a route for generative models to participate in that creativity through physical action rather than disembodied digital content. In robotic music co-creation, it is challenging to connect semantic musical understanding with real-time and physically executable performance. We present Co-policy, a framework for human-robot musical co-creation that separates semantic intent grounding, constrained musical variation, and visuomotor execution. To ground musical semantics, Co-policy uses pre-inference semantic anchors and a fine-tuned Qwen-vl planner (F-Qwen) to transform speech, live musical seeds, and visual observations into structured co-creation plans. To support low-latency execution, Co-policy introduces a Gaussian-Mixture Visuomotor Policy (GMP), implemented as a conditional mixture-density policy that maps target notes and visual context to multimodal robot actions in a single forward pass. Unlike robotic playback systems that merely reproduce user-specified notes, Co-policy generates complementary musical responses under both musical and physical constraints. Real-robot chime experiments, ablations, and expert evaluation show improved intent alignment, execution accuracy, and response frequency over diffusion-policy and ablated baselines, supporting physically grounded action generation as a key requirement for embodied human-AI co-creation.

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

Measuring language complexity from hierarchical reuse of recurring patterns

We introduce the ladderpath index as a measure of language complexity grounded in algorithmic information theory. It counts the minimum steps needed to reconstruct a sequence through hierarchical reuse of repeated substructures, capturing an exactly computable but constrained form of algorithmic compressibility related to, but distinct from, Kolmogorov complexity. We apply the ladderpath approach to 21 parallel corpora from the Parallel Universal Dependencies dataset. The ladderpath index is approximately invariant across the languages, and varies much less than the corpus length. This is more pronounced when all corpora are mapped to a unified binary representation, providing evidence for the equi-complexity hypothesis from a representation-independent perspective. We also observe trade-offs between character inventory size and corpus length, and between vocabulary-level and corpus-level reconstruction complexity, supporting the trade-off hypothesis that total complexity is conserved and redistributed across linguistic levels. The reusable substructures identified by the ladderpath approach, without any linguistic input, overlap with words and morphological components attested in the natural vocabulary. The hierarchical reuse captured by the ladderpath approach parallels the chunking mechanisms proposed in cognitive science, where the human cognitive system compresses linguistic input into nested, reusable units under shared memory and processing constraints. This connection between cognitive chunking and the ladderpath approach provides a new interpretation for the equi-complexity and trade-off hypotheses, grounding both in the shared cognitive architecture that underlies language processing across human languages.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Spectrally engineered collinear type-0 SPDC source with enhanced spectral brightness for entanglement distribution

arXiv:2606.24036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon sources with high spectral brightness are important resources for photonic quantum information processing, particularly in quantum communication and quantum networking where usable photon flux of entangled photons is often constrained by channel loss and source inefficiency. Here, we demonstrate a spectrally engineered type-0 spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) source with enhanced spectral brightness for entanglement distribution. By pumping a 30-mm ppKTP crystal with an ultra-narrowband laser slightly detuned from degeneracy, photon-pair generation is concentrated into a narrow spectral bandwidth while retaining the strong nonlinear interaction of type-0 phase matching. The source produces a coincidence rate of 44.6 kHz corresponding to a detected spectral brightness of 0.507 MHz/mW/nm. We further integrate the source into a Sagnac interferometer to generate polarization-entangled photon pairs and demonstrate entanglement distribution through a 2.56 km free-space round-trip channel. Our results show that spectral engineering provides a practical route to compact, spectrally bright entangled-photon sources for quantum communication applications.

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

Inside the Latent Flow: Causal Deciphering of Attention Dynamics in Audio Separation Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.10046v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow-matching transformers achieve strong audio separation, yet their attention dynamics are opaque. We adapt established causal-intervention principles into a deterministic, inference-time probing protocol for SAM Audio. Orthogonal probing uncovers a dual-pathway text-conditioning mechanism: additive injections control semantic identity, while cross-attention refines acoustic structure. We observe an asynchronous layerwise convergence: stable layers build temporal scaffolds early, whereas fast layers continue resolving artifacts during sampling. The model also attenuates temporal segmentation cues to maintain continuous-flow stability. Using these insights, we propose Layer-Selective Attention Caching (LSAC), a training-free acceleration method that caches attention in stable layers. Across acoustic complexities, LSAC cuts self-attention computation by about ~25% with negligible quality loss and yields up to 6.7x higher quality retention than naive step reduction.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Factions Within, Uncertain Across: Within-Document Reader Sub-Groups in Social Highlighting

When many people highlight the same document, is the crowd a single consensus, or is it internally structured into reader sub-groups that mark different things – and is that structure a stable property of a reader or of the document? Building on prior work showing an individual's within-document highlighting signal is a whisper while individuality lives in selection, we ask the group-level question on a co-readership platform using a margin-preserving curveball null. Experiment 1: within a document, readers form strong sub-groups – pairs agree far beyond what shared salience, mark density, and sentence popularity predict (nearest-neighbour agreement z=+6.3, significant in 88% of documents). Under an eight-block region-preserving null, shared engagement with the same coarse regions of the document accounts for about 40% of this excess; the majority survives as finer reader-specific agreement (z=+3.6, 77% significant). So the within-document crowd is, in a descriptive sense, factional. Experiment 2: is that grouping a stable reader trait? Here we are honest about power. The cross-document split-half reproducibility of a pair's agreement is near zero pooled (+0.078 and 0.000 in two separately drawn samples), and a power calibration shows the test is informative only for pairs that co-read many documents. In the only informative high-overlap subset (k>=4), point estimates are positive but small-sample, imprecise across the separately drawn samples, never significant, and attenuate under the region-preserving null. We therefore leave cross-document stability unresolved: the data is consistent with anything from situational grouping to a weak-to-moderate stable reader trait. The crowd is factional within a document; whether its factions follow the reader across documents is, honestly, beyond our reach.

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

Surflo: Consistent 3D Surface Flow Model with Global State

Geometry is invariant to viewpoint, which makes any collection of images a redundant encoding of a single 3D state. Existing feed-forward reconstruction models fail to exploit this: per-view methods emit overlapping, unaligned pointmaps that grow linearly with input count, while global-latent methods commit to a fixed, low-resolution output. We introduce Surflo, which compresses a variable number of unposed RGB views into K latent tokens-one global state-and decodes oriented 3D surface points by independently transporting them from noise onto the surface via flow matching. This frees the output from any fixed grid or token budget: the same latent yields from a few thousand to a million points in a single forward pass. To suppress the local inconsistencies inherent to independent per-point decoding, an inference-time guidance term correlates nearby points by injecting a photometric gradient during ODE integration. Surflo matches or surpasses feed-forward baselines on surface metrics, runs an order of magnitude faster than optimization-based methods that require hundreds of views, and is the only feed-forward approach to combine a global latent with arbitrary-resolution decoding.

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

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.

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

Few shot chain-of-thought driven reasoning to prompt LLMs for open ended medical question answering

In this paper, we propose a modified version of the MedQA-USMLE dataset, named MEDQA-OPEN, which contains open-ended medical questions without options to mimic clinical scenarios, along with clinician-approved reasoned answers. Additionally, we implement a prompt driven by Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, CLINICR, to mirror the prospective process of incremental reasoning, reaching a correct response to medical questions. We empirically demonstrate how CLINICR outperforms the state-of-the-art 5-shot CoT-based prompt (Liévin et al., 2022). We also present an approach that mirrors real-life clinical practice by first exploring multiple differential diagnoses through MCQ-CLINICR and subsequently narrowing down to a final diagnosis using MCQ-ELIMINATIVE. Finally, emphasizing the importance of response verification in medical settings, we utilize a reward model mechanism, replacing the elimination process performed by MCQ-ELIMINATIVE.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Agent trajectories as programs: fingerprinting and programming coding-agent behavior

arXiv:2606.16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there. In this work, we introduce methods for comparing agents procedurally in different contexts, where the model, tasks, and approaches vary. We compare ten agents and find that they are identifiable by their behavioral habits, which we define as fingerprints: a probe over these procedural signatures attributes an unseen trajectory to the correct agent at 85.7% accuracy, controlling for leakage across tasks. We develop procedural representations for agent problem-solving procedures with an emergent vocabulary induction technique that is meant to be maximally compressive to avoid surface-level variation while being expressive enough to unveil the quirks of the models' patterns. We apply our framework to the software engineering evaluation dataset SWE-Bench to study the structural distinctness of agent trajectories and find that behavior is most similar between models from similar release periods and those that are distilled from one another (e.g., a distilled student model and its teacher have a Jensen-Shannon divergence of 0.25, about half the distance between other model pairs). As more models saturate evaluations, we believe that it will be important to probe model behavior along more holistic dimensions than success rates alone. We introduce ProcGrep, a library for auditing and evaluating agents for how they approach tasks at a procedural level given their traces in a top-down fashion. We believe this work has a range of applications to help developers work with and program coding agents, such as task-aware model routing, agent monitoring, and finer-grained cost analysis.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Evaluating Factual Density in Multi-Source RAG: A Study in Medical AI Accuracy

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the current industry standard for grounding AI in real-world facts. Traditional retrieval methods rely on keyword matching and topic proximity, ranking content based on how closely it sounds like the user's query. What they do not measure is how many verified facts the content actually contains. This structural gap, termed the Expert Blindness Effect, causes standard RAG pipelines to consistently bury high-density factual evidence in favor of lexically dominant text on the same topic. To address this gap, this paper introduces Factual Density (FD*), a novel retrieval optimization signal that measures the proportion of verified atomic claims relative to total token count. Using the NexusAgentics Ghost Audit preprocessing pipeline, raw text is scored for factual specificity using probabilistic factuality analysis to filter content before corpus ingestion. An initial formulation introduced a severe document-length confound (Pearson R = -0.8636, p = 2.27e-07). Implementing Z-score normalization within length bins resolved this bias, validating FD* as a length-independent density signal (p = 0.0749). Evaluated against the HealthFC benchmark (750 health claims labeled Supported, Refuted, or No Evidence by medical experts), FD*-optimized retrieval was the only condition to achieve 100% systematic review saturation in top-5 results, surfacing Cochrane evidence that standard cosine similarity ranked outside the top ten. Ground truth verification confirmed 25 mappings across seven HealthFC-supported claims. While full statistical validation across n=50 queries remains future work due to constraints on corpus-benchmark alignment, these findings establish factual density reranking as a low-cost, high-impact intervention for improving factual precision in health RAG architectures.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Hospital-Level Variation in Antenatal Corticosteroids for Late Preterm Births

Objective: To determine whether and to what extent hospitals across the United States vary in their use of late-preterm steroids using a novel data set in which the timing of steroid administration relative to delivery can be observed. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of singleton births with known gestational ages identified in the Premier Healthcare Database from 2015 to 2022. The primary variable of interest was hospital-level adoption of antenatal corticosteroids for late-preterm singleton deliveries, calculated as the proportion of late-preterm singleton births (34-36 completed weeks of gestation) with any betamethasone exposure during the same late-preterm period. Hospital adoption was defined as the weighted average rate of ALPS administration among late-preterm infants across the entire post-period. Hospitals were ranked by their late-preterm steroid adoption rates and categorized by quartile based on the empirical distribution. Temporal trends were assessed using annual hospital-level adoption rates and visualized using time-series plots and distributional plots. A logistic regression model was constructed to determine hospital characteristics associated with being a highest-quartile adopting hospital. Results: The analysis cohort included 728 hospitals and 5,452,791 births, of which 361,006 (6.6%) were singleton late preterm births. Hospital steroid exposure rates ranged from 0 to 82% and were categorized into quartiles based on overall exposure rate, with cutoffs at 20.6%, 29.8%, and 40.1%. Median exposure rates increased progressively across quartiles from 14.1% (IQR 9.3-17.4%) in the lowest adopting hospitals (Q1) to 47.6% (IQR 43.7-53.2%) in the highest adopting hospitals (Q4), with substantial within-quartile variation. In the multivariable model, urban location was a strong predictor of high adoption after adjustment (aOR 2.05; 95% CI 1.11-3.83, p=0.02). Compared to Midwest hospitals, Southern hospitals had significantly lower odds of being high adopters (aOR 0.37; 95% CI 0.20-0.69, p

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Communication-Efficient Distributed Training for Collaborative Flat Optima Recovery in Deep Learning

arXiv:2507.20424v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study centralized distributed data parallel training of deep neural networks (DNNs), aiming to improve the trade-off between communication efficiency and model performance of the local gradient methods. To this end, we revisit the flat-minima hypothesis, which suggests that models with better generalization tend to lie in flatter regions of the loss landscape. We introduce a simple, yet effective, sharpness measure, Inverse Mean Valley, and demonstrate its strong correlation with the generalization gap of DNNs. We incorporate an efficient relaxation of this measure into the distributed training objective as a lightweight regularizer that encourages workers to collaboratively seek wide minima. The regularizer exerts a pushing force that counteracts the consensus step pulling the workers together, giving rise to the Distributed Pull-Push Force (DPPF) algorithm. Empirically, we show that DPPF outperforms other communication-efficient approaches and achieves better generalization performance than local gradient methods and synchronous gradient averaging, while maintaining communication efficiency. In addition, our loss landscape visualizations confirm the ability of DPPF to locate flatter minima. On the theoretical side, we show that DPPF guides workers to span flat valleys, with the final valley width governed by the interplay between push and pull strengths, and that its pull-push dynamics is self-stabilizing. We further provide generalization guarantees linked to the valley width and prove convergence in the non-convex setting.

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

Continual Self-Improvement with Lightweight Experiential Latent Memories

arXiv:2606.17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process. We investigate whether models can instead learn online from this experience, converting transient computation (reasoning traces) into persistent reusable knowledge, and without external supervision or access to future data. We show that In-Context Learning (ICL) over raw reasoning traces fails to generalize, reflecting a fundamental limitation of token-level reuse: individual traces lack the abstraction needed for transfer, even after refinement (e.g. self-reflection). In contrast, drawing inspiration from recent works on unsupervised reinforcement learning, we find that lightweight per-instance training with self-generated test-time signals (majority voting) as rewards yields substantial gains, often surpassing full-dataset offline training, motivating a shift from raw traces to learned latent representations. Building on this insight, we propose an online method that distills inference-time compute spent on encountered problems into compact modular latent memories capturing the underlying reasoning structure. These memories are stored and retrieved for future inputs, enabling continual improvement while avoiding catastrophic forgetting through modular design. Importantly, our method is highly efficient, parametrized as extremely lightweight soft prompt memories (~0.001% of model parameters) and trained with only a few gradient steps, yet achieving performance competitive with full parametric updates and offline training. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and raw data ICL baselines, while transferring effectively across datasets.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Absolute continuity, supports and idempotent splitting in categorical probability

arXiv:2308.00651v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Markov categories have recently turned out to be a powerful high-level framework for probability and statistics. They accommodate purely categorical definitions of notions like conditional probability and almost sure equality, as well as proofs of fundamental results such as the Hewitt–Savage 0/1 Law, the de Finetti Theorem and the Ergodic Decomposition Theorem. In this work, we develop additional relevant notions from probability theory in the setting of Markov categories. This comprises improved versions of previously introduced definitions of absolute continuity and supports, as well as a detailed study of idempotents and idempotent splitting in Markov categories. Our main result on idempotent splitting is that every idempotent measurable Markov kernel between standard Borel spaces splits across another standard Borel space, and we derive this as an instance of a general categorical criterion for idempotent splitting in Markov categories.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Benign overfitting beyond prediction: The ordinary least squares interpolator

arXiv:2309.15769v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning have highlighted the phenomenon of benign overfitting in overparameterized statistical models, sparking significant interest in understanding its foundations. Owing to its simplicity and practical relevance, the ordinary least squares (OLS) interpolator has become a key object of study for gaining theoretical insight into this phenomenon. While the properties of OLS are well understood in classical underparameterized settings, its behavior in the overparameterized regime – unlike that of ridge regression or the lasso – remains comparatively less explored. We contribute to this growing literature by deriving new algebraic and statistical results for the minimum $\ell_2$-norm OLS interpolator. In contrast to much of the existing work, which focuses on prediction risk, we center our analysis on parameter estimation and inference, which are fundamental for many statistics and causal inference applications. Specifically, we establish overparameterized analogues of (i) the leave-$k$-out formulas, (ii) the omitted variable bias formula, and (iii) the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell theorem. Under the Gauss-Markov model, we further extend the Gauss-Markov theorem and analyze variance estimation under homoskedasticity in the overparameterized setting. Collectively, these results provide a systematic framework for studying parameter estimation and inference in overparameterized linear models, offering a novel perspective on benign overfitting beyond its implications for prediction.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TRACE: Learning to Compute on Circuit Graphs

arXiv:2509.21886v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning to compute, the ability to model the functional behavior of a circuit graph, is a fundamental challenge for graph representation learning. Yet, the dominant paradigm is architecturally mismatched for this task. This flawed assumption, central to mainstream message passing neural networks (MPNNs) and their conventional Transformer-based counterparts, prevents models from capturing the position-aware, hierarchical nature of computation. To resolve this, we introduce TRACE, a new paradigm built on an architecturally sound backbone and a principled learning objective. First, TRACE employs a Hierarchical Transformer that mirrors the step-by-step flow of computation, providing a faithful architectural backbone that replaces the flawed permutation-invariant aggregation. Second, we introduce function shift learning, a novel objective that decouples the learning problem. Instead of predicting the complex global function directly, our model is trained to predict only the function shift, the discrepancy between the true global function and a simple local approximation that assumes input independence. We validate this paradigm on various circuits modalities, including Register Transfer Level graphs, And-Inverter Graphs and post-mapping netlists. Across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, TRACE substantially outperforms all prior architectures. These results demonstrate that our architecturally-aligned backbone and decoupled learning objective form a more robust paradigm for the fundamental challenge of learning the functional behavior of a circuit graph.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Survey on Evaluating Quality and Trustworthiness in LLM-Generated Data

arXiv:2601.17717v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for generating data across various modalities. By transforming data from a scarce resource into a controllable asset, LLMs mitigate the bottlenecks imposed by the acquisition costs of real-world data for model training, evaluation, and system iteration. However, ensuring the high quality of LLM-generated synthetic data remains a critical challenge. Existing research primarily focuses on generation methodologies, with limited direct attention to the quality of the resulting data. Furthermore, most studies are restricted to single modalities, lacking a unified perspective across different data types. To bridge this gap, we propose the LLM Data Auditor framework. In this framework, we first describe how LLMs are utilized to generate data across six distinct modalities. More importantly, we systematically categorize intrinsic metrics for evaluating synthetic data from two dimensions: quality and trustworthiness. This approach shifts the focus from extrinsic evaluation, which relies on downstream task performance, to the inherent properties of the data itself. Using this evaluation system, we analyze the experimental evaluations of representative generation methods for each modality and identify substantial deficiencies in current evaluation practices. Based on these findings, we offer concrete recommendations for the community to improve the evaluation of data generation. Finally, the framework outlines methodologies for the practical application of synthetic data across different modalities.

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

BOUTEF: A Multilingual Corpus for FakeNews in North Africa – Language as a Weapon

The rapid spread of fake news on social media has become a major challenge, particularly in multilingual and under-resourced contexts such as North Africa. In this paper, we introduce BOUTEF, a large-scale multilingual corpus designed to study the propagation, characteristics, and impact of fake news in Algeria and Tunisia. The corpus integrates three complementary components: fake narratives, genuine narratives, and associated user-generated comments, along with verified debunking information. It covers a wide range of languages and linguistic varieties, including MSA, Algerian and Tunisian dialects, Arabizi, French, English, and code-switched language. Building on this resource, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. We examine thematic distributions, linguistic and rhetorical strategies, sentiment patterns, and social engagement dynamics. Statistical analyses reveal significant associations between thematic categories and message veracity, as well as strong correlations between user engagement and the visibility of fake content. Our findings show that fake news relies heavily on emotionally charged narratives, sensational framing, and hybrid linguistic practices that enhance virality and audience engagement. In contrast, debunking content adopts a more factual and verification-oriented style. Furthermore, a comparative analysis between Algeria and Tunisia highlights both shared dynamics and country-specific characteristics shaped by sociopolitical contexts. The results emphasize the role of informal language practices in the diffusion and reception of misinformation. By providing a rich, annotated, and publicly available dataset, this work contributes to advancing research on fake news detection, low-resource language processing, and the understanding of information disorders in complex linguistic environments.

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

Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques

arXiv:2509.07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.