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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stability of the $k$-Plane Transform on Measures and Hölder-Type Comparisons of Wasserstein Metrics

arXiv:2605.00375v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We establish stability estimates for the $k$-plane transform on finite positive Radon measures, with emphasis on Fourier and Wasserstein metrics. We first introduce a metric on $k$-plane transform data and prove a bi-Lipschitz stability estimate showing that this metric is equivalent to a generalized Fourier metric obtained by augmenting the Fourier distance between centered normalized measures with separate barycenter and total mass difference terms. Building on a Hölder-type comparison between Fourier and Wasserstein metrics due to Carrillo and Toscani, we extend this comparison to positive Radon measures under uniform bounds on centered moments of order slightly larger than $2$. This yields Hölder-type stability for the $k$-plane transform in a generalized $2$-Wasserstein metric and, in particular, a $W_2$-stability estimate for centered probability measures. We also compare the $2$-Wasserstein distance with its max-sliced analogue. For centered probability measures with uniformly bounded moments of order slightly larger than $2$, we prove a two-sided Hölder-type comparison between these distances. We then extend the result to positive Radon measures by applying it to centered normalized measures and adding separate barycenter and mass terms. Finally, for absolutely continuous compactly supported probability measures with bounded densities, we prove a strong equivalence between the $2$-Wasserstein distance of the measures and the $(k/2-1)$-order Sobolev norm of the $k$-plane transform data of the difference of their densities.

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

Building Customer Support AI Agents at 100M-User Scale: An Evaluation-Driven Framework

The rapid rise in LLM capabilities has made AI agents increasingly viable across a broad range of tasks. Among the most promising applications is building production-ready customer-facing agents, a challenge that demands coordinated excellence in evaluation methodology, context engineering, training, and online measurement. Yet these critical pillars are typically developed in isolation, creating blind spots that only surface after deployment. In this paper, we present a unified framework that bridges offline development with online impact for customer support AI agents at Nubank, a company with 100M+ users. Our approach integrates several key components: (1) structured context engineering tailored to customer support agents, (2) systematic human-in-the-loop prompt iteration, (3) rigorous LLM judge evaluation with measured inter-rater agreement and GEPA optimization for consistency, and (4) ideation-to-production validation. A central insight is that evaluation-pipeline quality directly determines iteration velocity. We present results from five production deployments spanning distinct domains: card delivery, debt management, credit-limit support, card management, and product explanation. These deployments deliver consistent customer-satisfaction gains while substantially accelerating iteration. In our card-delivery deployment, large-scale A/B testing yields a 37 percentage-point improvement in AI transactional Net Promoter Score and a 29 percentage-point gain in self-service rate over prior agent variants, alongside a strong correlation between offline simulation metrics and online outcomes, demonstrating that eval-driven development reliably predicts production impact. On most use cases, AI satisfaction reaches within a few percentage points of expert human agents.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

RoboSSM: Scalable In-context Imitation Learning via State-Space Models

arXiv:2509.19658v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context imitation learning (ICIL) enables robots to learn tasks from prompts consisting of just a handful of demonstrations. By eliminating the need for parameter updates at deployment time, this paradigm supports few-shot adaptation to novel tasks. However, recent ICIL methods rely on Transformers, which have computational limitations and tend to underperform when handling longer prompts than those seen during training. In this work, we introduce RoboSSM, a scalable recipe for in-context imitation learning based on state-space models (SSM). Specifically, RoboSSM replaces Transformers with Longhorn – a state-of-the-art SSM that provides linear-time inference and strong extrapolation capabilities, making it well-suited for long-context prompts. Through diverse experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of applying SSMs to ICIL, achieving improved generalization to both unseen and long-horizon tasks than Transformer-based ICIL methods by handling longer contexts at test-time. These results show for the first time that SSMs are an efficient and scalable backbone for ICIL. Our code is available at https://github.com/youngjuY/RoboSSM.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A BART-based approach with hierarchical strategy for Vietnamese abstractive multi-document summarization

In this technical report, we focus on solving the challenge of Vietnamese multi-document abstractive summarization, introduced in the International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) 2022. We choose to follow the popular hierarchical approach, i.e. condensing each document followed by aggregation and summarization. We propose a novel yet simple strategy to shorten documents that is driven by the golden summary, thus ensuring high correlation between stages of the hierarchical approach. Our method achieves a ROUGE2-F1 score of 0.2468 on the VLSP's public test set, and can produce fluent and concise summaries. Additionally, we utilize external sources for extra data, which greatly enhances the quantity of data for Vietnamese multi-document summarization. The additional data is made available for the community.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Revealing Hidden Vulnerabilities in Autoencoders through Gradient Signal Restoration

Adversarial robustness of deep autoencoders (AEs) has received less attention than that of discriminative models, although their compressed latent representations induce ill-conditioned mappings that can amplify small input perturbations and destabilize reconstructions. Existing white-box attacks for AEs, which optimize norm-bounded adversarial perturbations to maximize reconstruction damage, often converge to suboptimal perturbations, thereby potentially overstating AE robustness. We show that this limitation is linked to vanishing adversarial loss gradients during backpropagation through ill-conditioned layers, associated with near-zero singular values in their intermediate weight matrices. To address this, we propose GRILL (Gradient Signal Restoration in Ill-Conditioned Layers), a framework designed to mitigate gradient degradation and improve the reliability of adversarial robustness evaluation in encoder-decoder architectures. GRILL is designed to mitigate adversarial gradient degradation during optimization, enabling attacks to better approximate high-distortion perturbations under fixed norm constraints. Through extensive experiments across multiple AE architectures, under both sample-specific and universal attacks, as well as standard and adaptive attack settings, we show that GRILL significantly increases attack effectiveness, thereby exposing vulnerabilities hidden by existing attack limitations. Beyond AEs, we provide preliminary evidence that modern multimodal encoder-decoder architectures exhibit similar vulnerabilities.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Optical metasurfaces for general vision processing on the edge

作者:

Large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models achieve notable performance in computer vision but require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on edge devices1,2. Optical neural networks (ONNs) promise reduced latency and energy consumption by making use of the inherent parallelism of light3. However, present ONNs struggle to scale and are confined to simple tasks, owing to the challenges of replicating exact algebraic operations of digital models using physical (analogue) systems. This work introduces a new paradigm that directly embeds core computer vision principles, including similarity-based recognition, attention-guided perception and detail–context fusion, into a large-scale optical metasurface. By unifying optical physics with these computer vision fundamentals, we develop a photonic–electronic engine that overcomes scalability and generality barriers, enabling high-accuracy, general-purpose computer vision at the edge. The resulting system combines a 41-million-parameter optical metasurface front end with a co-designed, ultraefficient 87,000-parameter digital back end, outperforming many digital models with tens of millions of parameters across object detection, segmentation, 3D reconstruction and video understanding. We build a deployable prototype and demonstrate real-time edge visual processing in natural scenes. This work represents a path towards practical optical computing for general vision tasks in complex natural environments, enabling a new paradigm for low-energy, low-latency, real-time on-device vision intelligence. By embedding core computer vision principles into a large-scale optical metasurface, an efficient vision processing system using far fewer parameters is demonstrated to outperform many digital models and enables deployment on edge devices.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Multicluster measles outbreak with a substantial proportion of modified cases in Tokyo, Japan, January-May 2026

Tokyo experienced a measles outbreak (260 cases) in early 2026 despite elimination status. Adults aged 20-39 years were most affected, and 38% of cases were modified measles, increasing with prior vaccination. Although incidence rose until April, the effective reproduction number; R(t) fell below 1, consistent with outbreak control. Multiple clusters were identified, but many cases lacked epidemiological links, suggesting that modified measles is less likely to be considered in differential diagnosis. Intensive contact tracing and surveillance contributed to limiting transmission.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Shrinking Lifespan of LLMs in Science

arXiv:2604.07530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling laws describe how language model capabilities grow with compute and data, but say nothing about how long a model matters once released. We introduce time-to-peak and lifespan as measures of model obsolescence and use them to characterize the scientific adoption trajectories of 62 LLMs across more than 108k citing papers (2019-2025), separating active adoption from background citation to recover per-model trajectories that citation counts cannot resolve. We find that a model's longevity is shaped more by when it was released than by its characteristics: release year predicts time-to-peak and lifespan more strongly than architecture, openness, or scale. LLM adoption follows an inverted-U curve (rising after release, peaking, and then declining), but this pattern is rapidly compressing. Each successive release year is associated with a 27% shorter time-to-peak and a 23% shorter lifespan ($p < 0.001$), robust to minimum-age thresholds and controls for model size. These adoption-side dynamics are invisible to scaling laws and suggest that specialization on any single model may be a depreciating investment, with costs falling on reproducibility and migration.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Configurable Clinical Information Extraction with Agentic RAG: What Works, What Breaks, and Why

arXiv:2606.19602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Patient contexts span hundreds of heterogeneous documents and thousands of structured data points, yet the document-level metadata that AI systems need for retrieval and triage is absent or incomplete. Standard retrieval-augmented generation fails on this data, mishandling temporal reasoning, cross-document dependencies, and missing metadata. We deploy ACIE (Agentic Clinical Information Extraction) at University Medicine Essen: an on-premise agentic RAG pipeline that reasons over complete patient contexts and grounds every answer in source passages for clinician verification. We quantify the metadata gap, trace the architectural decisions it shaped, and evaluate extraction alongside an independent retrospective lymphoma registry study, in which nuclear-medicine physicians verify every extracted value against its cited sources. Across 7,326 judgments, clinicians accepted 96.5\% of extractions, with per-type acceptance ranging from 80\% to 99\%.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Ouroboros-Spatial: Closing the Data-Model Loop for Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning remains a persistent challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Existing approaches largely rely on large-scale, statically curated datasets, where all training samples are treated uniformly regardless of the model's evolving capabilities. This static paradigm is inherently data-inefficient: training capacity is often spent on samples that are either trivial or overly difficult for the model at its current stage. To address this limitation, we propose Ouroboros-Spatial, a self-evolving training framework in which the model plays dual roles as a proposer and a solver. In each iteration, a frozen proposer generates spatial question-answer (QA) pairs from 3D scene metadata and raw video frames, together with executable code for deriving reliable ground truth. A learnable solver is then fine-tuned on the accepted samples, and its per-sample prediction confidence is used as a difficulty signal. This signal is fed back to the proposer in the next iteration, guiding it to generate questions better matched to the solver's current capabilities. Through this closed-loop design, the training distribution co-evolves with model ability, reducing redundant trivial examples while filtering out ambiguous or uninformative samples with limited learning value. Across six spatial reasoning benchmarks, Ouroboros-Spatial substantially improves Qwen3-VL-4B and Qwen3-VL-8B while using an order of magnitude fewer training examples than recent large-scale curated datasets. On VSI-Bench, it yields absolute gains of 9.9 and 6.8 points for the 4B and 8B models, respectively, enabling both to outperform a wide range of strong open-source and proprietary baselines.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines: TRUST

arXiv:2606.18832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Counterfactual explanations are widely used to provide algorithmic recourse in high-stakes decision-making systems. Most existing methods seek the smallest change to an input that flips a model's decision. However, decision-makers often rely not only on predicted labels but also on confidence thresholds and risk margins. Counterfactuals that barely cross a decision boundary can be fragile and unstable under noise or model variation. In this paper, we propose Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines (TRUST), a framework in which users explicitly specify the desired prediction confidence for recourse. Rather than generating counterfactuals and evaluating confidence afterward, TRUST directly searches for minimal changes that satisfy a user-defined confidence target, enabling comparison of recourse options in terms of cost, confidence, and robustness. We instantiate TRUST using a Probabilistic Tsetlin Machine (PTM) combined with Bayesian optimization. The probabilistic clause-based structure of PTM links prediction confidence to the stability of decision rules. We show that counterfactuals satisfying the same rules can still differ substantially in reliability depending on how securely they satisfy those rules, revealing whether decisions are supported by robust or fragile clause activations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that target-confidence counterfactuals produce more robust and interpretable recourse than conventional boundary-based approaches. Across multiple benchmarks, TRUST achieves perfect robustness while maintaining low recourse cost, including an L2 distance of 0.10 on the Haberman dataset at 0.92 confidence. By explicitly controlling confidence and exposing rule-level stability, TRUST provides actionable recourse for high-stakes decision support.

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

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

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

From 2D Grids to 1D Tokens: Reforming Shared Representations for Multimodal Image Fusion

Multimodal image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from different modalities into a fused image that preserves rich local details while maintaining globally consistent appearance. Existing approaches build shared representations on 2D feature grids, which excel at modeling local structures but offer limited leverage over image-level global appearance factors. To balance these objectives, we introduce a compact 1D token interface based on a frozen pretrained image tokenizer for modeling non-local appearance/base factors. Rather than using the tokenizer as a reconstruction backbone, our design uses the 1D token space as a global carrier while retaining the 2D spatial pathway for local structure restoration. Specifically, we introduce Selective Token Editing (STE), which sparsely updates/replaces a small set of critical tokens, providing a lightweight mechanism to steer global appearance coherence while keeping the fusion backbone unchanged and avoiding extra losses. Experiments on four commonly used benchmarks show that our method achieves the best overall performance, with consistent, multi-metric improvements in both global coherence and local fidelity. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/1D-Fusion-Project-Page/

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Adaptable Method for Crystal Design across Diverse Constraints and Objectives with Pretrained Property Predictors

arXiv:2410.08562v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advanced crystal design can accelerate materials discovery across applications from photovoltaics to spintronics. Practical design must satisfy multiple properties and physical constraints, yet existing machine-learning-based approaches to such design often depend on large datasets, retraining, or task-specific generators. Here, we show that direct predictor-guided gradient optimization enables data-efficient, constraint-rich crystal design by combining off-the-shelf predictors with site-wise element masks, template initialization, and task-specific losses. In perovskites, it outperformed generative and Bayesian baselines under three targets – band gap, formation energy, and tolerance factor – and two hard constraints. DFT assessment further showed band-gap targeting competitive with a leading generative model despite using predictors trained on roughly one-tenth of the data. By flexibly combining pretrained predictors with application-oriented masks and custom losses, the same framework supported half-metal design. Such modularity could help researchers and engineers translate diverse application requirements directly into optimized candidate crystals with minimal computational cost.

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

Multi-agent Framework for Time-Sensitive Complementary Collaboration in Minecraft

arXiv:2606.15684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present TickingCollabBench, a Minecraft-based multi-agent benchmark for a novel class of time-sensitive complementary collaboration tasks. Our benchmark reflects four core characteristics of real-world collaboration: agent heterogeneity, mandatory collaboration, dynamic environments, and strict real-time constraints with failure risks. To enable this, we develop the TickingCollab framework, which supports the generation of diverse dynamic environments and abstracts Minecraft's primitive APIs to enable declarative YAML task specifications for composing these events. Building on this, we design a feasibility-aware automated benchmark generation pipeline, where an LLM drafts structurally diverse task configurations and feasibility verifier filters out invalid ones using approximate constraints. Evaluations demonstrate that lang latency and inherent difficulty of coordinating under partial observability and agent heterogeneity cause LLMs to frequently fail under dynamic environments and fall significantly short of a global-knowledge oracle.

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

A Minimal Model of Bounded Trade-Off Screening in Multi-Attribute Choice

arXiv:2606.13201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human decision-making often involves choosing between multi-attribute alternatives, yet classical models assume fully compensatory utility aggregation despite evidence that people reject options with poor performance on critical attributes. We propose a bounded trade-off reasoning framework in which decisions are governed by a screening process that evaluates the balance between gains and losses across attributes. The model introduces a trade-off tolerance parameter that controls acceptable imbalance and can vary across contexts. Through simulation, we show that this mechanism produces preference patterns that differ from standard utility-based models and captures context-dependent variation in trade-off behavior. These results establish bounded trade-off screening as a plausible computational mechanism for multi-attribute choice and generate testable predictions for future behavioral studies.

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

Reasoning for Mobile User Experience with Multimodal LLMs: Task, Benchmark, and Approach

arXiv:2606.13192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: User experience (UX) centered on usability, perceived consistency, and functional clarity is fundamental to real-world user interfaces (UI). The application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in the field of user interfaces is evolving rapidly, such as visual element grounding, graphical user interface (GUI) agents, and design-to-code generation. However, research efforts on evaluating UX based on UI screenshots are still immature. To address this, we propose UXBench, a novel multimodal benchmark consisting of 2,000 VQA data samples designed to assess MLLMs' ability to perform UI-based reasoning. UXBench includes 8 tasks based on real-world UI screenshots that require fine-grained diagnosis of UX issues across layout relationships, visual hierarchy, and content consistency. Our extensive evaluation of mainstream MLLMs shows that they remain fundamentally limited in their capacity for UI-based reasoning. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area. To bridge this gap, we propose UI-UX, an MLLM based on Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking foundation model and enhanced via reinforcement learning with two key innovations: a reward routing mechanism that dynamically balances perceptual understanding and logical reasoning during inference, and an asymmetric transition reward that suppresses redundant or insufficient reasoning steps. Experiments demonstrate that UI-UX achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on UXBench, attaining an accuracy of 0.7963 – surpassing Claude-4.5-Sonnet's 0.6550 – while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse UI tasks and maintaining low inference latency.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Approximation Properties of Evolutionary Dynamics in Continuous-Time Finite State Space Games

arXiv:2606.11193v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This thesis studies the convergence of finite-population stochastic evolutionary dynamics to their deterministic mean-field limit in continuous-time finite state space games. We first develop refined ergodic theorems for Markov chains with a single positive-recurrent class, guaranteeing the existence of a unique invariant distribution and almost-sure convergence of time averages. Next, we prove that the mean-field model, described by a system of Lipschitz-continuous ordinary differential equations, admits a unique solution that depends continuously on its initial condition and that constitutes the almost-sure limit for the empirical distributions with fixed policy. Furthermore, we show that every Mixed Stationary Nash Equilibrium of the mean-field game is approximated by a Nash equilibrium of the corresponding $N$-player game within an error $\epsilon$ for sufficiently large $N$. We finally demonstrate, by Kurtz's theorem, that the empirical state-policy distribution converges in probability to the mean-field trajectory. Numerical simulations conducted in MATLAB confirm the theoretical $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2})$ convergence rate in both models across a range of population sizes.

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

Graph Regularized Non-negative Reduced Biquaternion Matrix Factorization for Color Image Recognition

Non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (NRBMF) uses the product of reduced biquaternion (RB) matrices to incorporate the non-negativity constraints of color image pixels into the factorization process. However, NRBMF mainly focuses on reconstruction accuracy and does not explicitly exploit the local geometric structure of image data, which may limit the discriminative ability of the obtained low-dimensional coefficient representations. To address this issue, we propose a graph regularized non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (GNRBMF) model for color image recognition. The proposed model incorporates a graph Laplacian regularizer into the reduced biquaternion coefficient matrix, encouraging nearby samples in the original space to have similar coefficient representations. Meanwhile, GNRBMF retains the non-negativity property of NRBMF in the reduced biquaternion algebra. To solve the optimization problem, a component-wise alternating projected gradient algorithm is derived, and its convergence properties are analyzed. Experimental results on three color image datasets show that the proposed GNRBMF model achieves competitive or superior recognition performance compared with several methods in most tested settings.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

CIAN: Multi-Stage Framework for Event-Enriched Image Captioning via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Event-enriched image captioning describes not only visible content but also the broader context of events, including timing, location, and participants, capabilities missing in most pixel-bound models. We propose the Contextual Image-Article Narrator (CIAN), a multi-stage framework that enriches captions with external narratives. CIAN retrieves relevant articles using SigLIP, summarizes them to guide a Narrative Generation stage with a LoRA-fine-tuned Qwen model, and applies N-Gram-based Refinement for fluency and coherence. On the OpenEvents-V1 benchmark, CIAN achieves high retrieval performance (mAP 0.979) and improves caption quality, increasing CIDEr from 0.030 to 0.094. These results highlight the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented reasoning combined with linguistic refinement for generating context-aware, human-like captions.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Quantum Transition State

arXiv:2606.10266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The transition state – the critical configuration separating reactants from products – is the central organizing concept of chemical reaction rate theory, yet for nearly a century it has been thought to have no exact quantum counterpart: the recrossing-free, one-way flux through a transition state appears to demand simultaneous knowledge of position and momentum, in conflict with the uncertainty principle. We show this obstruction is illusory and construct the quantum transition state directly from the exact quantum flow. Its stable and unstable invariant manifolds intersect in a unique bounded trajectory – the quantum transition-state trajectory – anchoring a moving dividing surface that each reactive characteristic crosses exactly once, yielding a one-way flux of the standard quantum probability current. The geometric framework underlying classical transition-state theory thus survives intact in exact quantum mechanics, in a fundamentally quantum form.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists. We study LLM decision-making in a travel-assistant context by presenting models with choice dilemmas and analyzing their responses using multinomial logit models to derive implied willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. These WTP values are subsequently compared to human benchmark values from the economics literature. In addition to a baseline setting, we examine how model behavior changes under more realistic conditions, including the provision of information about users' past choices and persona-based prompting. Our results show that while meaningful WTP values can be derived for larger LLMs, they also display systematic deviations at the attribute level. Additionally, they tend to overestimate human WTP overall, particularly when expensive options or business-oriented personas are introduced. Conditioning models on prior preferences for cheaper options yields valuations that are closer to human benchmarks. Overall, our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of using LLMs for subjective decision support and underscore the importance of careful model selection, prompt design, and user representation when deploying such systems in practice.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

The Value Axis: Language Models Encode Whether They're on the Right Track

We investigate whether language models internally track the value of their current trajectory, defined as the likelihood that their ongoing strategy will achieve their goals. Using synthetic, in-context reinforcement learning data, we construct a "value" axis for Qwen3-8B. We find that activations along this axis distinguish between high vs. low verbalized confidence, rollouts without and with backtracking, and correct vs. corrupted code. Steering towards high value causally suppresses self-correction and reduces explanatory verbosity, while steering towards low value induces backtracking and exploration. We demonstrate that direct preference optimization (DPO) can increase the internal value of rewarded behaviors (e.g. use a certain word), causing the model to act more confidently after exhibiting them. Finally, we apply the value axis to study in-the-wild settings. For example, we find that Qwen assigns low value to politically sensitive chat queries after post-training and that supervised fine-tuning increases internal confidence within the training domain. Our results suggest that language models linearly encode an estimate of expected goal success that modulates their confidence in pursuing a direction.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Exact Linear Attention

作者:

arXiv:2605.18848v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation error. We identify and address two key limitations of prior linear attention – gradient explosion and token attention dilution – by imposing kernel constraints that ensure non-negativity, discriminability, and geometric interpretability. Several kernel functions are proposed, including the Hadamard Exp Kernel, Summation Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, and Subtraction Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, each tailored for specific attention behaviors. Beyond the core attention formulation, the paper presents three engineering innovations: (1) a Hyper-Link structure that replaces traditional residual connections to mitigate gradient degradation; (2) a Memory Lobe module based on bidirectional linear attention, which captures "transformation flow" across layers to implement qualitative memory and an implicit reinforcement learning paradigm; and (3) a routing-score-based bias mechanism for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to improve interpretability and semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that ELA achieves up to 6x faster decoding speed and 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage compared to full attention, while maintaining comparable or superior training performance. The proposed memory module accelerates convergence and enhances generalization. Furthermore, we extend the linear attention principle to vision models, yielding YOLO-LAT, which attains up to 4.3x GPU inference speedup and 7.9x parameter reduction with competitive detection accuracy. These results underline the broad applicability of exact linear attention for scaling Transformer models to ultra-long sequences and efficient visual tasks.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Efficient time-series prediction on NISQ devices via time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine

arXiv:2602.21544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We proposed a time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine (TD-QELM) for efficient time-series prediction on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. By encoding multiple past inputs simultaneously, TD-QELM achieves shallow circuit depth independent of sequence length, thereby, mitigating noise accumulation and reducing computational complexity. Experiments using the NARMA benchmark on both noiseless simulations and IBM's 127-qubit processor demonstrate that TD-QELM consistently outperforms conventional quantum reservoir computing in prediction accuracy and noise robustness. These results highlight TD-QELM as a practical and scalable framework for time-series learning on current NISQ hardware.