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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

arXiv:2605.29640v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DN-Hypo-Pipeline: An AI-Driven Workflow for Hypothesis Generation via Large Language Models and Scientific Explanations

arXiv:2606.08532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A scientific hypothesis is the first step in research and undergoes experimental validation, yet it also reflects a deep understanding of and reasoning about scientific phenomena. We introduce DN-Hypo-Pipeline, an AI-powered workflow based on large language models, designed to support structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation by leveraging scientific explanations as prior knowledge. This pipeline assists researchers in deriving novel hypotheses from existing literature. Given the explanandum (i.e., the conclusion) of a research paper, it identifies underlying laws, theories, and principles, and reconstructs a new, yet-to-be-verified explanation for the observed phenomenon. We evaluated DN-Hypo-Pipeline in the field of data science modeling using three highly cited papers. Statistical inference, supported by both LLM-as-judge assessment and human expert evaluation, demonstrates that our pipeline is more effective than direct generation methods. Additionally, we validated the two highest-scoring generated hypotheses by developing corresponding novel algorithms, which outperformed the baseline models presented in the original papers. Beyond application in data science, DN-Hypo-Pipeline provides a theoretical framework that not only encompasses theory-guided data science modeling methods but also reveals a more fundamental structure of the modeling process. Moreover, this approach is essentially a generalization of theory-guided modeling, offering potential for extension to other domains and across a broader range of scientific disciplines.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CacheRL:Multi-Turn Tool-Calling Agents via Cached Rollouts and Hybrid Reward

We present CacheRL, a system for training small agent foundation models that achieves 92 percent process accuracy on multi-step tool-calling tasks, approaching GPT-5's 94 percent while requiring 100 times less compute. Our approach addresses three challenges in practical agent training: transferring tool-calling knowledge from large models at scale, enabling reinforcement learning without costly live tool execution, and learning robustly from noisy cached environments. CacheRL introduces three key innovations. First, a hybrid thinking trajectory pipeline augments agent trajectories with LLM-generated reasoning traces, producing training examples that teach models not only what tools to call but also why. Second, the CacheAgentLoop eliminates live execution costs through a three-tier fuzzy cache while preserving trajectory fidelity using token-level masking. Third, a cache-tier-aware reward dynamically adjusts answer-quality weights to avoid penalizing models for cache-induced limitations. Through iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), CacheRL improves Qwen3-4B-Thinking's validation reward from 0.43 to 0.78. On public agentic tool-calling benchmarks, our model achieves competitive performance against frontier models such as GPT-5. Ablation studies show that removing knowledge transfer reduces performance by 41 percent, while cache-aware rewards contribute a 17 percent improvement. Interestingly, reinforcement learning improves training stability but yields limited gains beyond strong supervised fine-tuning, suggesting that data quality and reward design play a more important role than complex optimization methods in building practical small agent models.

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

Formal Verification of Learned Multi-Agent Communication Policies via Decision Tree Distillation

arXiv:2606.19632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables agents to develop coordination strategies through emergent communication, but neural policies lack the formal safety guarantees required for safety-critical robotic deployment in drone swarms and autonomous vehicle fleets. We present the first end-to-end framework for safety verification of learned multi-agent communication policies through policy abstraction: neural policies are distilled into interpretable decision trees, then formally verified, with empirical validation confirming that verified safety properties transfer to original networks. Our four-stage pipeline consists of domain-specific feature extraction from agent observations, decision tree distillation achieving 97.9% +/- 1.2% fidelity to neural policies, automated translation to PRISM probabilistic model checker specifications with complete feature-to-state-variable correspondence, and compositional verification of Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) properties via pairwise decomposition with union-bound aggregation and empirical neighbor modeling. Evaluating Vector-Quantized Variational Information Bottleneck (VQ-VIB) policies for multi-drone coordination with 5-7 agents, we verify 18 temporal logic properties across safety, liveness, and cooperation, achieving 88.9% property satisfaction with all five safety thresholds satisfied (0.3% collision probability vs. 1% threshold). Monte Carlo validation of original neural policies confirms that verified safety properties transfer with

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

Global Offshore Wind Infrastructure: Deployment and Operational Dynamics from Dense Sentinel-1 Time Series

The offshore wind energy sector is expanding rapidly, increasing the need for independent, high-temporal-resolution monitoring of infrastructure deployment and operation at global scale. While Earth Observation based offshore wind infrastructure mapping has matured for spatial localization, existing open datasets lack temporally dense and semantically fine-grained information on construction and operational dynamics. We introduce a global Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) time series data corpus that resolves deployment and operational phases of offshore wind infrastructure from 2016Q1 to 2025Q1. Building on an updated object detection workflow, we compile 15,606 time series at detected infrastructure locations, with overall 14,840,637 events as analysis-ready 1D SAR backscatter profiles, one profile per Sentinel-1 acquisition and location. To enable direct use and benchmarking, we release (i) the analysis ready 1D SAR profiles, (ii) event-level baseline semantic labels generated by a rule-based classifier, and (iii) an expert-annotated benchmark dataset of 553 time series with 328,657 event labels. The baseline classifier achieves a macro F1 score of 0.84 in event-wise evaluation and an area under the collapsed edit similarity-quality threshold curve (AUC) of 0.785, indicating temporal coherence. We demonstrate that the resulting corpus supports global-scale analyses of deployment dynamics, the identification of differences in regional deployment patterns, vessel interactions, and operational events, and provides a reference for developing and comparing time series classification methods for offshore wind infrastructure monitoring.

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

MoCA-Agent: A Market-of-Claims Code Agent for Financial and Numerical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial and tabular question answering requires more than fluent reasoning: answers must be grounded in the exact facts, formulas, units, signs, and scales that support them. A single misread cell or incorrect operation can silently produce a plausible but wrong result. We introduce \textsc{MOCA-Agent}, a market-of-claims code agent that replaces free-form multi-agent debate with claim-level verification. The system decomposes each question into typed atomic claims, asks specialist trader agents to buy or sell those claims, clears their orders into confidence-weighted accept/reject decisions, and synthesizes an executable Python program from market-supported evidence. A code-aware verifier then checks the program for execution, structural consistency, and common financial reasoning errors, with at most one market-aware repair round. Across ten public benchmarks spanning financial numerical reasoning, general tabular reasoning, ESG question answering, and multimodal chart reasoning, \textsc{MOCA-Agent} achieves strong performance using a fixed Qwen3.6-27B backbone, including $78.3\%$ on FinQA, $76.0\%$ on FinanceMath, $71.2\%$ on MultiHiertt, $86.9\%$ on ESGenius, and $85.6\%$ average on FinChart-Bench. These results show that aggregating evidence at the level of atomic claims, rather than whole answers, improves robustness in high-stakes numerical reasoning.\footnote{The code and data are available: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/MoCA-Agent.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Impact of Connectivity on Laplacian Representations in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603.08558v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning compact state representations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has proven crucial for addressing the curse of dimensionality in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Existing principled approaches leverage structural priors on the MDP by constructing state representations as linear combinations of the state-graph Laplacian eigenvectors. When the transition graph is unknown or the state space is prohibitively large, the graph spectral features can be estimated directly via sample trajectories. In this work, we prove an upper bound on the approximation error of linear value function approximation under the learned spectral features. We show how this error scales with the algebraic connectivity of the state-graph, grounding the approximation quality in the topological structure of the MDP. We further bound the error introduced by the eigenvector estimation itself, leading to an end-to-end error decomposition across the representation learning pipeline. Additionally, our expression of the Laplacian operator for the RL setting, although equivalent to existing ones, prevents some common misunderstandings, of which we show some examples from the literature. Our results hold for general (non-uniform) policies without any assumptions on the symmetry of the induced transition kernel. We validate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations on gridworld environments.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

New Identity for Cayley's First Hyperdeterminant with Applications to Symmetric Tensors and Entanglement

Authors:

arXiv:2512.03093v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article, a new formula for computing Cayley's first hyperdeterminant in terms of the Levi-Civita symbol is given. It is then shown that this formula can be used to compute the hyperdeterminant of symmetric tensors in polynomial time with respect to their order (assuming fixed side length). Applications to quantifying the entanglement of states of bosonic quantum systems are then discussed. Additionally, in order to obtain the fast calculation of the hyperdeterminant on symmetric tensors, generalized elimination and duplication matrices are defined and their explicit formulas are derived.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Models vs. Traditional Clinical Calculators for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction

Background: Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) remain the leading global cause of mortality, responsible for approximately 31% of all deaths worldwide in 2021. Traditional risk calculators, including Framingham, ASCVD, SCORE, and SCORE2, have long constituted the cornerstone of primary prevention strategies; however, they were derived predominantly from high-income European and North American populations, thereby limiting their predictive accuracy in diverse epidemiological contexts, particularly among Hispanic/Latino communities. Machine learning (ML) offers an alternative to capture the non-linear interactions inherent in biomedical data. Objective: The present study develops and validates ML-based models for cardiovascular mortality prediction using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999-2018 dataset, and systematically compares their discriminative performance against eleven conventional clinical CVD risk calculators. Materials and Methods: A dedicated software platform, "CardioPrediQ," was designed to integrate multiple CVD calculators with ML-based risk assessment. A cohort of 12,847 participants with 16 predictor variables was derived from NHANES. Six algorithms (Logistic Regression, Cox Proportional Hazards, Gradient Boosting, AdaBoost, Random Forest, and Extra Trees) were trained in combination with six class-balancing strategies, yielding 36 model configurations. All models were trained on a stratified 70/30 split and calibrated using the Saerens prior probability adjustment method. Performance was evaluated using AUC-ROC, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and a weighted composite score. DeLong's test was employed to assess the statistical significance of AUC differences between the best-performing ML model and each conventional calculator. Results: Gradient Boosting with 2:1 oversampling and Saerens calibration achieved the best overall performance (AUC = 0.8934; composite score = 0.7904), outperforming all traditional calculators in composite ranking. The top six positions were occupied exclusively by ML and statistical models. The mean age of cardiovascular decedents was 67.43 years compared with 47.74 years among survivors. DeLong's test confirmed statistical superiority over six traditional CVD calculators (p < 0.05), whereas the difference against the top-performing calculators (ASCVD, HEARTS Caribbean, ASCVD Colombia, SCORE2, HEARTS North America) did not reach statistical significance. Age dominated feature importance at 41.2% relative weight, followed by systolic blood pressure (18.7%). Saerens calibration reduced the Brier score from 0.1286 to 0.1158, substantially improving probability calibration. Conclusions: ML models demonstrated superior composite performance over traditional calculators. The statistical equivalence with the highest-performing conventional calculators in the NHANES cohort is context-dependent and validates the methodological pipeline. The CardioPrediQ platform addresses the critical need for integrated, scalable CVD risk assessment tools, which is particularly relevant for Latin American populations where calculator validation remains limited. These findings support the integration of calibrated ML-based risk prediction into clinical practice while underscoring the importance of probability calibration for informed clinical decision-making.

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

PI-Hunter: Automated Red-Teaming for Exposing and Localizing Prompt Injections

arXiv:2606.12737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into agentic systems that interact with external tools and environments, introducing new security risks such as indirect prompt injection attacks through untrusted external sources. Existing defenses mainly focus on blocking malicious content at inference time, and current red-teaming methods primarily optimize attack success. As a result, developers have limited visibility into how latent prompt injections emerge and propagate through agents. We propose PI-Hunter, an automated agentic auditing framework for proactive vulnerability exposure in LLM agents. PI-Hunter constructs realistic source-aware test cases and iteratively evolves them through feedback-driven exploration to induce agents to retrieve and reveal latent malicious instructions embedded within external environments. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, agent architectures, attacks, and defenses demonstrate that PI-Hunter substantially improves vulnerability exposure and attack-surface coverage over strong automated red-teaming baselines, while remaining effective under existing prompt injection defenses.

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

Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

arXiv:2602.00845v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner

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

Learning Geometric Representations from Videos for Spatial Intelligent Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.05833v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at 2D semantic understanding but lack intrinsic 3D awareness, resulting in representations that fail to maintain geometric and spatial consistency across video frames. Given the scarcity of large-scale 3D data, we present GeoVR, a novel framework that learns geometric representations using purely 2D video sequences. This approach effectively restructures the semantic latent space within MLLMs to unlock spatial intelligence. Rather than employing superficial feature mixing, GeoVR reshapes the internal representations of the MLLM by distilling geometry knowledge from pre-trained 3D foundation models. This is accomplished through a multi-objective learning strategy driven by four complementary geometric targets: (1) estimating inter-frame camera poses to embed varying viewpoint dynamics, (2) regressing dense depth maps to anchor physical distances, (3) predicting a metric scale factor for real-world calibration, and (4) distilling multi-scale 3D features to align the intermediate feature space. Guided by these explicit physical and geometric constraints, the model's internal representations naturally develop strong 3D awareness. Extensive experiments on spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GeoVR achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing a new paradigm for endowing foundation models with spatial intelligence.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Exact Linear Attention

Authors:

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.

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

The Tao of Agency: Autotelic AI, Embedded Agency and Dissolution of the Self

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most artificial intelligence systems are built on the assumption that goals are exogenous and specified by the designer. Exploring what happens when an agent begins generating its own goals opens the field of autotelic AI. Agents are expected not merely to pursue objectives but to discover them. In this article, we trace its consequences through intrinsic motivation, resource-driven priors, causal-interventional learning, homeostasis, and embeddedness; the last of which is found to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for autotelic agency. Embeddedness individuates the agent at the cost of revealing that the individuation is non-unique, such that the same dynamics admit many valid partitions, each defining a different candidate self. The deepest problem with autotelic AI is therefore not how the agent generates goals, but how it generates and relativizes the self to which the goals are assigned. The agent must believe in its own boundary in order to act, and see through that boundary in order to understand. We consolidate these developments into a single framework and extend it along three directions: a quantum formulation in which the agent-environment cut becomes physical, a philosophical reading against non-dual contemplative traditions, and a concrete LLM-based agentic instantiation.

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

CMIP-Forge: An Agentic System that Retrieves, Computes, and Self-Reviews Climate Science

arXiv:2606.17076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) has generated thousands of peer-reviewed publications documenting model configurations, evaluation procedures, emergent constraints, and projection uncertainties. As the community transitions toward CMIP7, efficiently extracting and operationalizing this unstructured knowledge alongside live data analysis represents a critical bottleneck. Here we present CMIP-Forge, a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and autonomous analysis system that bridges the gap between scientific literature and Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data archives. The system pairs a curated corpus of 6,581 CMIP6-related open-access publications (101,828 indexed chunks) with an agentic pipeline in which a tool-augmented worker plans and executes Python workflows over live climate data, while a panel of independent reviewer models audits its methodology end to end. CMIP-Forge introduces a multi-layered Defense-in-Depth architecture that enforces physical and methodological invariants through executable mechanisms: Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) static analysis, audited scientific primitives, and an autonomous adversarial peer-review protocol. We demonstrate the system's capabilities through end-to-end autonomous research pipelines spanning atmospheric teleconnections, ocean dynamics, regional extremes, and global warming projections. An agentic analysis system grounded in peer-reviewed literature, constrained by automated code guardrails, and audited by an independent adversarial review loop can complete complex climate-research workflows autonomously. The same experiments expose concrete failure modes of the review loop (sycophantic regression, REVISE verdicts that are never resolved, and the submission of stub code for review), each diagnosable from the immutable telemetry and provenance record released with the article.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of a symptom-based severity score anchored to health-related quality of life post-COVID-19 within the population-based EPILOC cohorts

Purpose Because simple symptom counts treat all symptoms as equally important and may not adequately capture the HRQoL impact of heterogeneous post-COVID-19 symptoms, we aimed to develop an HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score providing an interpretable measure of post-COVID-19 disease burden. Methods Baseline data from the population-based EPILOC and EPILOC Omicron surveys (adults aged 18-65 years) were used to develop a symptom-based severity score anchored to physical and mental HRQoL assessed with the SF-12. A two-stage modelling approach was applied to identify HRQoL-relevant symptoms and to derive symptom-specific weights for physical and mental component scores, incorporating 30 ordinal symptom severity variables. Symptom-specific weights were extracted to compute physical, mental, and composite severity scores. Score interpretation was examined using external reference measures, including EPILOC case status, self-reported health recovery, and functional consequences. Results A total of 19,004 participants (mean age 44.3 years, 59.6% female) were included. Sixteen symptoms contributed to the physical and eleven to the mental HRQoL score, with a limited subset accounting for most of the HRQoL loss. Severity scores were heavily right-skewed, with 50.6% of participants showing no measurable HRQoL impairment. Higher scores correlated with lower self-reported recovery, and increased probability of rehabilitation use and health-related changes in working time, supporting convergent and criterion-related validity. Conclusions This study introduces a transparent, HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score that measures graded post-COVID-19 burden beyond simple symptom counts. The score may be particularly suited for longitudinal assessment of recovery trajectories.

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

When English Isn't the Best Teacher: Source Language Effects in Cross-Lingual In-Context Learning

Cross-lingual transfer in multilingual NLP has been widely explored in supervised fine-tuning contexts, where factors like data availability and linguistic similarity largely determine transfer quality. As the field shifts toward few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), it is often presumed that insights from fine-tuning carry over unchanged. Yet this assumption has not been rigorously evaluated, leaving open the question of how to choose source languages for cross-lingual ICL. We conduct a broad empirical study of cross-lingual transfer in ICL spanning seven tasks, six models, and a typologically diverse set of languages. We further analyze language confusion, a key obstacle for generative tasks in cross-lingual ICL. Our results show that conventional fine-tuning-based expectations do not consistently apply in the ICL regime and point to alternative heuristics for selecting source languages effectively.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When in Doubt, Plan It Out: Committed Small Language Model Deliberation for Reactive Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16995v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies often degrade in unfamiliar environments because they lack explicit deliberation. We propose Plan, Align, Commit, Think (PACT), a hybrid architecture that combines a fast, reactive RL policy with a slow, deliberative Small Language Model (SLM) planner. PACT invokes the SLM asynchronously to generate and validate candidate action plans. Once a plan is verified through simulation as safe, feasible, and complete, it is executed directly, bypassing the RL policy without retraining or modifying it. Evaluated on three FrozenLake configurations of increasing difficulty, PACT outperforms all baselines while relying on a 2B-parameter SLM backbone, suggesting that deliberative planning and reactive execution are more powerful in concert than either is alone in these settings.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Fair Online Resource Allocation

arXiv:2606.18679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the problem of fair online resource allocation, motivated by applications such as refugee resettlement and airline scheduling, where agents arrive sequentially and must be assigned to facilities with limited capacities. We introduce a model that maximizes the overall welfare subject to resource constraints and a Lipschitz fairness requirement, which ensures that similar agents arriving in the same batch receive similar expected outcomes. We first analyze the offline problem, proving that the value of the optimal fair allocation is at least an $\Omega(1/\gamma)$ fraction of the optimal unfair allocation, where $\gamma$ is the fairness coefficient, thereby bounding the price of fairness. For the online setting, we propose an algorithm based on dual mirror descent that enforces fairness constraints within batches while estimating optimal dual variables. We prove that this algorithm achieves sublinear regret relative to the optimal offline fluid benchmark. Finally, we validate our theoretical results using real-world data from the Refugee Economies Programme, demonstrating the algorithm's performance and examining the trade-offs between welfare maximization and fairness enforcement.

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

Sharp Transitions for Subsystem Complexity

arXiv:2510.18832v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The circuit complexity of time-evolved pure quantum states grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time. This behavior has been proven in certain models, is conjectured to hold for generic quantum many-body systems, and is believed to be dual to the long-time growth of black hole interiors in AdS/CFT. Achieving a similar understanding for mixed states remains an important problem. In this work, we study the circuit complexity of time-evolved subsystems of pure quantum states. We find that for greater-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time, similarly to that of the full state. However, for less-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity rises and then falls, returning to low complexity as the subsystem equilibrates. Notably, the transition between these two regimes occurs sharply at half system size. We use holographic duality to map out this picture of subsystem complexity dynamics and rigorously prove the existence of the sharp transition in random quantum circuits. Furthermore, we use holography to predict features of complexity growth at finite temperature that lie beyond the reach of techniques based on random quantum circuits. In particular, at finite temperature, we argue for an additional sharp transition at a critical less-than-half subsystem size. Below this critical value, the subsystem complexity saturates nearly instantaneously rather than exhibiting a rise and fall. This novel phenomenon, as well as an analogous transition above half system size, provides a target for future studies based on rigorous methods.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Invariants of Sequential Circuits and Generalized Non-Abelian Statistics

arXiv:2606.11527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-invertible symmetries in quantum many-body systems generally give rise to sequential unitary circuits that move symmetry defects. In this paper, we investigate invariants defined by sequences of such circuits, which move non-invertible defects and generate a Berry phase evaluated on quantum states with defects. We show that this Berry phase generally defines an invariant under local deformations, provided that the sequential circuits preserve the locality of those deformations. This invariant also rules out a short-range-entangled state that preserves the non-invertible symmetry, thereby signaling the 't Hooft anomaly of a non-invertible symmetry purely in terms of unitary operators acting on a state. We then apply this framework to loop excitations in three spatial dimensions and identify a new loop excitation in the (3+1)D $\mathbb{D}_4$ topological order, which we dub a non-Abelian fermionic loop. Using the invariant of sequential circuits, we characterize the statistics of non-Abelian fermionic loops. In addition, we find a new (3+1)D mixed topological order with a single non-Abelian fermionic loop, whose long-range entanglement is protected by an invariant of sequential circuits.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Examining the Usage of Generative AI Models in Student Learning Activities for Software Programming

arXiv:2511.13271v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT has created new opportunities and challenges for computing education. Existing research has primarily focused on GenAI's ability to complete educational tasks and its impact on student performance, often overlooking its effects on knowledge gains. In this study, we investigate how GenAI assistance compares to conventional online resources in supporting knowledge gains across different proficiency levels. We conducted a controlled user experiment with 24 undergraduate students of two different levels of programming experience (beginner, intermediate) to examine how students interact with ChatGPT while solving programming tasks. We analyzed task performance, conceptual understanding, and interaction behaviors. Our findings reveal that generating complete solutions with GenAI significantly improves task performance, especially for beginners, but does not consistently result in knowledge gains. Importantly, usage strategies differ by experience: beginners tend to rely heavily on GenAI toward task completion often without knowledge gain in the process, while intermediates adopt more selective approaches. We find that both over-reliance and minimal use result in weaker knowledge gains overall. Based on our results, we call on students and educators to adopt GenAI as a learning rather than a problem solving tool. Our study highlights the urgent need for guidance when integrating GenAI into programming education to foster deeper understanding.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

The Long Delay to Arithmetic Generalization: When Learned Representations Outrun Behavior

arXiv:2604.13082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Grokking in transformers trained on algorithmic tasks is characterized by a long delay between training-set fit and abrupt generalization, but the source of that delay remains poorly understood. In encoder-decoder arithmetic models, we argue that this delay reflects limited access to already learned structure rather than failure to acquire that structure in the first place. We study one-step Collatz prediction and find that the encoder organizes parity and residue structure within the first few thousand training steps, while output accuracy remains near chance for tens of thousands more. Causal interventions support the decoder bottleneck hypothesis. Transplanting a trained encoder into a fresh model accelerates grokking by 2.75 times, while transplanting a trained decoder actively hurts. Freezing a converged encoder and retraining only the decoder eliminates the plateau entirely and yields 97.6% accuracy, compared to 86.1% for joint training. What makes the decoder's job harder or easier depends on numeral representation. Across 15 bases, those whose factorization aligns with the Collatz map's arithmetic (e.g., base 24) reach 99.8% accuracy, while binary fails completely because its representations collapse and never recover. The choice of base acts as an inductive bias that controls how much local digit structure the decoder can exploit, producing large differences in learnability from the same underlying task.

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

AI SciBrief as a Gateway to Research: A Framework for Onboarding Students into New Research Areas

Students at all levels of higher education face a significant barrier in the form of information overload, which often paralyzes the initial stages of the research process and suppresses motivation. In response, this article introduces a pedagogical framework that leverages AI SciBrief, a platform powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) designed to automatically generate digests of scientific trends. We describe how this multidisciplinary tool - with initial coverage in finance, medicine, and education - can be integrated into the curriculum to overcome this "entry barrier." The framework provides concrete methodologies for utilizing these digests to facilitate topic selection for term papers, accelerate literature reviews for dissertations, and enable postgraduate students to continuously monitor emerging trends. We conclude that AI SciBrief functions as a "gateway to research" effectively reducing students' cognitive load and empowering them to transition more rapidly from information searching to knowledge creation.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Surrogate Assisted Pedestrian Protection Design via a Foundation Model Orchestrated Workflow

arXiv:2606.17577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven engineering workflows face particular challenges in crash safety design: unlike aerodynamics, crash events involve highly nonlinear contact dynamics, material nonlinearity, and discrete state transitions that are difficult to capture with data-driven surrogate models. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first foundation model–orchestrated workflow for crash safety design that enables surrogate-assisted exploration for pedestrian protection, reducing evaluation time from hours per CAE simulation to seconds. The workflow integrates four components: (1) a surrogate trained on CAE crash simulations to predict pedestrian leg injury metrics from design parameters, achieving an average $R^2=0.87$ and providing distribution-free conformal prediction intervals; (2) multiobjective evolutionary search (NSGA-II) to discover diverse feasible parameter sets under user-specified constraints; (3) a morphing-based geometry generator that maps parameters to topology-preserving 3D shapes; and (4) a natural-language interface in which an LLM orchestrates the workflow and a vision–language model supports semantic comparison of generated designs. In an automotive front-bumper case study, the workflow produces 35 distinct safety-compliant alternatives from a single exploration, a process that would require weeks with conventional CAE iteration. These results suggest that foundation models can serve as integration layers between ML surrogates and physics-based simulation, helping bring AI capabilities to safety-critical engineering domains.