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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

IoT-Zoo: A Container-Based Framework for Heterogeneous IoT Device Profiles and Reproducible Traffic Capture

arXiv:2606.15653v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The validation of networking and security solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) requires realistic and reproducible experimental data. However, existing platforms often achieve scalability by replicating a limited set of device types, which restricts profile diversity and fails to capture the heterogeneity of real-world IoT environments. In this paper, we present IoT-Zoo, a container-based testbed designed to support reproducible experimentation through heterogeneous, dataset-driven IoT device profiles. Built upon Containernet, IoT-Zoo automates the deployment of multi-domain scenarios and supports real application protocols such as MQTT and RTSP. The platform provides a single-command interface for environment provisioning and automated traffic capture (PCAP), enabling the generation of consistent traffic baselines and reducing the operational effort required to evaluate networking and security solutions.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CREDENCE: Claim Reduction for Decomposition & Enhanced Credibility – Semantic Metrics and Convergence Analysis

Decomposing compound sentences into atomic, verifiable claims is a prerequisite for reliable automated fact-checking. Prior work has relied on token-overlap (Jaccard) metrics that systematically underestimate decomposition quality for paraphrastic claims, and has lacked formal termination analysis for the repair loop. We present Credence, a revised claim decomposition and evaluation framework addressing both shortcomings. Our contributions are: (1) Semantic-F1: we use BGE-large cosine similarity fidelity metric that resolves Jaccard's penalisation and improves downstream fact-checking accuracy; (2) Convergence theorems: we formally characterise four properties of the repair pipeline, establishing that rule-based repair is monotone and finitely terminating under an oracle parser assumption; LLM-based self-repair is provably non-monotone and requires an early-exit guard; (3) Three evaluation benchmarks spanning social-media, encyclopaedic, and news domains for cross-domain generalisation measurement; (4) Multi-model benchmarking across four decomposer models (3.8B-12B) and a closed API model. Experiments on SocialClaimSplit, WikiSplitBench, and ClaimDecompBench show that Semantic-F1 outperforms Jaccard-F1 by +15-32pp. EPR ranges from 0.94 to 1.00 on SocialClaimSplit and WikiSplitBench, while ClaimDecompBench includes lower base EPR cases (down to 0.824) due to harder news-domain constructions, and rule-repair reduces the Atomicity Violation Rate (AVR) by 47-100% relative to the base model without degrading fidelity.

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

Learning-Based Decision Making for Combustion Phasing Control in Multi-Fuel CI Engines with Latent Fuel Reactivity Estimation

arXiv:2606.18393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression-ignition engines offer fuel flexibility but introduce uncertain, time-varying fuel reactivity, represented by cetane number (CN), which complicates cycle-to-cycle combustion-phasing control. This work formulates CA50 regulation under latent CN variation as a partially observable sequential decision problem and systematically evaluates controllers with increasing temporal and representational capacity, including LinUCB, history-augmented contextual bandits, observation-only DDPG, recurrent DDPG, and a proposed GRU-guided RL framework. A Gaussian-process surrogate trained on experimental multi-fuel engine data provides a controlled and reproducible evaluation environment. Results show that myopic and fixed-history bandit methods degrade under CN variation, observation-only RL suffers from latent-state aliasing, and generic recurrence is insufficient when CN evolves rapidly. The proposed framework learns a compact GRU-based representation of fuel reactivity from combustion history and conditions both actor and critic on this estimated signal rather than oracle CN. By training the policy on the same imperfect fuel-reactivity information available at deployment, the controller avoids train-deploy inconsistency in conventional online estimate-then-control pipelines. Across unseen CN trajectories, the policy achieves stable CA50 regulation with mean absolute tracking error below 0.25{\deg} CA at the training setpoint, while producing smooth, physically consistent SOI and glow-plug-power actuation. These results show that combustion control under latent, continuously evolving fuel dynamics requires more than standalone estimation or generic recurrence. By aligning fuel-reactivity inference with control policy learning, the proposed framework enables reactivity-aware decision-making using the same estimated state available during deployment.

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

From Specification to Execution: AI Assisted Scientific Workflow Management

arXiv:2606.18425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific workflow management systems (WMS) support scalable and reproducible execution of complex pipelines, but workflow design, implementation, and debugging remain largely manual and require significant expertise. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) show promise for workflow generation from natural language, but often rely on direct code synthesis, which limits transparency, reproducibility, and integration with workflow systems. We present an AI-assisted approach to scientific workflow management that combines specification-driven workflow generation, automated debugging, and distributed execution. The method introduces a structured specification phase that separates workflow intent, design, and implementation, allowing validation prior to code generation. We also develop an LLM-based debugging agent that diagnoses and resolves failures across multiple system layers. To support distributed execution and user interaction, we integrate Pegasus, a widely used WMS, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, providing a unified interface for workflow submission, monitoring, and control. We evaluate the approach using a federated learning workflow for medical imaging, chosen for its parallel, iterative, and dependency-intensive structure. The system generated and executed large-scale workflows with thousands of jobs, reduced debugging effort, and allowed non-expert users to construct workflows with expert-level design patterns. These results indicate that end-to-end AI-assisted workflow generation and execution is feasible, and point toward AI-driven platforms for managing the scientific workflow lifecycle.

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

The Theory of Mind Utility: Formal Specification of a Mentalizing Mechanism

arXiv:2606.12721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring others' beliefs requires more than reading surface signals; it requires tracking who told them what, in what order, and how credibly. The Theory of Mind Utility (ToM-U) formalizes this epistemic state inference problem at the computational level of analysis, specifying what mentalizing computes and why without commitment to algorithmic or neural implementation. ToM-U achieves this by constructing Local Epistemic World Models (LEWMs) – directed typed graphs that represent agents, state nodes, and the epistemic relationships among them – and evaluating discrete candidate LEWMs against observed behavior until one achieves sufficient confidence. Five formal definitions specify the LEWM structure, agent node properties including ordered information access history, a bounded proliferation mechanism for recursive mentalizing, three inference procedures, and a residue function that captures the structured trace left by failed mentalizing attempts. ToM-U differs from Bayesian Theory of Mind and adjacent formal accounts, which presuppose rather than derive belief states, and from simulation theory and theory-theory, which lack a formal apparatus for epistemic state inference. The architecture generates directional, falsifiable predictions about mentalizing failure that follow from structural properties of the model rather than auxiliary assumptions, and positions ToM-U as a domain-agnostic mechanism upstream of goal inference and other downstream social cognitive processes.

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

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

How long does it take to train an Elephant Random Walk

Authors:

arXiv:2509.15049v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how conditioning on the first $k$ steps, which we think of as training, affects the long-term behavior of the Elephant Random Walk. When the elephant is conditioned to be at position $k$ at time $k$, the first return time to the origin scales as $k^{(4-4p)/(3-4p)}$ in the diffusive regime, and grows exponentially in the critical regime. We loosely interpret this as a measurement of the rate at which the elephant forgets its training.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

INDEQS: Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS

arXiv:2606.19138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDE) provide a powerful continuous-time framework for forecasting time series, but standard graph-based extensions typically learn spatial structure purely from data, even in settings where a directed graph structure is known a priori. We introduce Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS (INDEQS), a graph-based NCDE forecasting method that incorporates prior knowledge of a directed graph at distinct architectural positions. INDEQS separates inner mixing of hidden states across graph nodes from outer mixing between vector field and control, and offers both a lightweight graph-constrained variant and a more expressive variant, learning additional graph connections from data via adaptive graph convolutions. To systematically study when graph informedness is beneficial in forecasting, we devise a continuous advection simulation on directed graphs, yielding synthetic spatio-temporal datasets with known ground-truth flow structure. We then evaluate INDEQS on two real-world tasks: river discharge forecasting on a hydrological network and traffic flow prediction on PeMS08. Across these synthetic and real-world benchmarks, outer informedness consistently improves mean absolute error over an uninformed NCDE with comparable parameter count, particularly on larger graphs, while inner informedness offers a more parameter-efficient alternative when strict adherence to a known adjacency is desired. A comparison of discrete convolutional and continuous-time decoders further shows that continuous decoders yield better accuracy and greater temporal flexibility on real-world tasks. An implementation of INDEQS and the advection simulation is available at https://github.com/Mitchi1/indeqs.

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

Segment-Level Mandarin Chinese Speech-Based Cognitive Impairment Detection via an Autoencoder with Contrastive Learning

\noindentBackground and Objective: Speech has emerged as a low-cost and non-invasive digital biomarker with considerable potential for cognitive impairment detection. However, limited labeled data and cross-dataset variability remain major challenges for robust speech-based screening systems. \par\noindentMethods: We developed a segment-level representation learning framework for speech-based cognitive impairment detection. Speech recordings were divided into short segments and converted into spectrogram representations. To improve robustness under limited-data conditions, offline and online augmentation strategies were combined with autoencoder-based representation learning and contrastive objectives to enhance discriminative latent representations. \par\noindentResults: Experiments conducted on four independent Mandarin Chinese speech datasets demonstrated stable and competitive performance in both binary and three-class classification tasks, with particularly notable improvements in the clinically challenging three-class setting. Ablation studies further supported the effectiveness of the proposed framework. \par\noindentConclusions: The findings suggest that segment-level speech representation learning may provide a scalable and practical approach for cognitive impairment screening in resource-constrained clinical settings.

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

Calibration Drift Under Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Budgets Induce Overconfidence in Large Language Models

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve accuracy and reliability, but its effect on calibration is not fully understood. We show that this picture is incomplete: in some settings, increasing the reasoning budget beyond a task-specific threshold can cause models to become systematically overconfident, assigning high confidence to incorrect answers. We call this phenomenon Calibration Drift Under Reasoning (CDUR) and study it both theoretically and empirically. We define reasoning budget B and analyze conditions under which Expected Calibration Error ECE(B) follows a non-monotonic pattern: it first decreases as reasoning corrects errors, then increases as longer reasoning produces internally consistent but incorrect explanations. We propose a Hypothesis Lock-In model based on autoregressive generation to explain this behavior. We evaluate Llama-3.1-8B and Llama-3.3-70B on 47 reasoning-trap questions across four reasoning budgets and three seeds (1,368 API calls; 574 valid responses). The 8B model shows non-monotonic calibration behavior, while results for the 70B model are limited to baseline evaluation and are inconclusive for budget-dependent effects. We introduce CABStop, a calibration-aware stopping rule that halts reasoning when confidence diverges from an auxiliary accuracy estimate. These results suggest that increasing reasoning depth does not always improve reliability and should be monitored carefully.

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

Process-Verified Reinforcement Learning for Theorem Proving via Lean

arXiv:2606.20068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) typically has relied on a single binary verification signal, symbolic proof assistants in formal reasoning offer rich, fine-grained structured feedback. This gap between structured processes and unstructured rewards highlights the importance of feedback that is both dense and sound. In this work, we demonstrate that the Lean proof assistant itself can serve as a symbolic process oracle, supplying both outcome-level and fine-grained tactic-level verified feedback during training. Proof attempts are parsed into tactic sequences, and Lean's elaboration marks both locally sound steps and the earliest failing step, yielding dense, verifier-grounded credit signals rooted in type theory. We incorporate these structured rewards into a GRPO-style reinforcement learning objective with first-error propagation and first-token credit methods that balances outcome- and process-level advantages. Experiments with STP-Lean and DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5 show that tactic-level supervision outperforms outcome-only baselines in most settings, delivering improvements on benchmarks such as MiniF2F and ProofNet. Beyond empirical gains, our study highlights a broader perspective: symbolic proof assistants are not only verifiers at evaluation time, but can also act as process-level reward oracles during training. This opens a path toward reinforcement learning frameworks that combine the scalability of language models with the reliability of symbolic verification for formal reasoning.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

VISUALSKILL: Multimodal Skills for Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents (CUAs) approach human-level performance on standardised benchmarks but still struggle on long-horizon tasks and unseen software. Existing skill libraries address this with reusable skills, but represent the skill artifact as text only, despite the visual nature of GUI interaction. We propose VISUALSKILL: a hierarchical multimodal skill, tailored to each target application and organised as a central index over per-topic files, which the agent consumes through a load_topic MCP tool that fetches the relevant topic's text and figures on demand. We construct each skill with a two-stage pipeline that combines authored documentation with live-application UI exploration. On two CUA benchmarks, CUA-World and OSExpert-Eval, a Claude Code CLI agent backed by Claude Opus 4.6 reaches an average score of 0.456 with VISUALSKILL, a +15.3 point absolute lift over the no-skill baseline (0.303). Against a matched text-only skill that is generated from the same source content and differs from VISUALSKILL only in modality, VISUALSKILL yields a further +8.3 point absolute gain over the matched text-only skill (0.373 vs. 0.456), providing direct evidence that retaining visual figures in the skill artifact, rather than verbalizing them away, helps the agent both identify UI elements and verify workflow state after each action. Our code is available at https://github.com/XMHZZ2018/VisualSkills.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MoVerse: Real-Time Video World Modeling with Panoramic Gaussian Scaffold

We present MoVerse, a real-time video world model that creates an interactively navigable scene from a single narrow-field-of-view image. This setting is challenging because the input observes only a small fraction of the environment, while interactive roaming requires a complete surrounding world, persistent geometry, controllable camera motion, and temporally coherent high-fidelity observations. MoVerse addresses this problem by separating world construction from observation rendering. It first expands the input into a gravity-aligned 360$^\circ$ panorama with topology-aware diffusion, closing the missing field of view before 3D reasoning. It then lifts the panorama into a persistent 3D Gaussian scaffold using panoramic geometry-aware residual prediction, yielding a dense and directly renderable spatial memory. Finally, a Gaussian-conditioned video renderer translates scaffold renderings along user-specified camera trajectories into photorealistic video. To make this renderer practical for interaction, we train a bidirectional diffusion teacher for high-quality conditional rendering and distill it into a causal autoregressive student for bounded-latency streaming. This design combines the controllability and long-range consistency of explicit 3D representations with the perceptual quality of generative video models. MoVerse supports real-time scene roaming at 8~FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX~4090 GPU, demonstrating a practical path toward single-image world creation with interactive video output.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Cellfm-datasets: A Unified Data Infrastructure for Single-Cell and Spatial Transcriptomics Foundation Model Pretraining

Large-scale cell foundation models are increasingly limited not only by model architecture, but also by the data infrastructure required to repeatedly sample sparse transcriptomic profiles from out-of-core cohorts. AnnData/H5AD has become a standard exchange format for single-cell and spatial omics analysis, yet its HDF5-backed layout is not designed for high-frequency random mini-batch loading under multi-worker and distributed pretraining. We present Cellfm-datasets, a data infrastructure artifact that converts H5AD cohorts into a self-describing compressed sparse row (CSR) memmap layout and exposes the resulting corpus through Hugging Face Dataset and IterableDataset interfaces. The artifact stores a shared gene vocabulary, per-sample metadata, optional spatial coordinates, observation metadata, manifests, and checksums, and reconstructs sparse cell or group records at runtime without dense expansion. A unified sampling abstraction supports random-cell groups, manifest-defined biological regions, and coordinate-based spatial blocks, with deterministic sharding across distributed ranks and data-loader workers. Spatial demonstrations on P14 mouse brain transcriptomics sections illustrate region- and block-level sampling over real anatomical structures. In controlled benchmarks on a public heterogeneous ModelScope scRNA-seq subset, Cellfm-datasets reached 60,571 +/- 1,734 samples/s in single-core random loading, scaled to approximately 160,000 samples/s with eight workers, and maintained near-constant process-private memory while reading up to one million cells. By moving sparse single-cell and spatial corpora from model-specific loader code into reusable, validated, and framework-native dataset artifacts, this design may reduce the engineering burden of reproducible cell foundation model pretraining and make repeated training runs, model comparisons, and mixed-modality data reuse easier to standardize.

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

A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Instrument for Measuring Regional Human Mobility: The Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE)

arXiv:2603.21639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurately estimating human mobility in peripheral regional economies presents a fundamental measurement challenge: physical ground-truth sensors are sparse, behavioral intent signals are heterogeneous, and environmental friction introduces systematic bias into demand inference. We introduce the Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE), a multi-modal sensor fusion architecture that addresses this challenge by integrating physical instrumentation (Edge-AI cameras), digital intent signals (route search impression metrics), behavioral records (90,350 spending records, 97,719 standardized survey responses), and meteorological data across four geographically distributed nodes in Fukui, Japan. The primary measurement-science contribution is the design, deployment, and cross-node validation of the DHDE as a sparse-sensor compensation instrument: a heterogeneous sensor fusion architecture that anchors non-stationary digital intent signals to concurrent physical ground-truth counts, correcting for systematic bias introduced by meteorological planning friction. The instrument is implemented as an ensemble inference pipeline (Random Forest and Ordinary Least Squares with Newey-West robust inference), calibrated across 397 daily observations and validated by chronological holdout replication across four geographically distinct node types. The primary OLS specification achieved an in-sample explanatory power of R2 = 0.810 and a chronological out-of-sample predictive performance of R2 = 0.683. Results identify an Under-Vibrancy Paradox where macro-regional visitor satisfaction correlates positively with crowd density (Spearman rank correlation rs = +0.150, p = 0.002). We estimate an annual proxy gap of 865,917 intent-implied visits, corresponding to JPY 11.96 billion (USD 72.6 million) in foregone revenue.

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

Contrastive Learning for Seismic Horizon Tracking with Domain-Specific Priors

Unsupervised 3D seismic horizon tracking faces a key limitation: signal-based propagators provide accurate trace-level alignment but often fail near faults, whereas texture-driven deep models are more robust to discontinuities, typically at the cost of labeled data requirements and reduced trace-level precision. We propose a self-supervised fusion of both paradigms in which signal-derived local horizon correspondences act as domain-specific priors to train a texture-based deep learning model. Specifically, we estimate reliable trace-to-trace flows from reflector slopes and use them to form positive pairs in a contrastive objective, while restricting training to high-confidence neighborhoods, optionally augmented with a fault mask. The objective is not to infer ambiguous correspondences close to discontinuities, but to preserve horizon identity across them. As a result, the network learns voxel-wise embeddings that preserve local signal continuity while enabling horizon propagation beyond discontinuities through similarity search. Experiments on the public F3 dataset and a faulted synthetic dataset achieve lower mean absolute error (MAE) than unsupervised baselines and competitive performance against a semi-supervised method using a single labeled slice.

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

Self-CTRL: Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users. This paper describes Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning (Self-CTRL), a method that optimizes for consistency between a LM's self-explanations and behavior on related inputs by updating explanations to better predict behavior or updating behavior to better match explanations. We apply our method in two domains. First, we study a formal probabilistic reasoning task in which LMs must learn to imitate a family of biased samplers and evaluated on their ability to report the associated biases. We find that consistency training improves the correlation between self-reported and behaviorally-measured latent biases from $R^2=0.24$ to $R^2=0.64$ on a set of held-out distributions, matching the generalization of direct ground-truth supervision. Second, we study a constitutional AI domain in which LMs must describe when they will refuse or comply with user requests. Here, Self-CTRL produces rules that faithfully describe the model's behavior on held-out requests, improving the refusal predictions of a third-party auditor model from $36\%$ to $92\%$. In the other direction, behavior updates improve alignment, reducing HarmBench failure rate from $15.0\%$ to $0.5\%$ without substantially increasing refusal on harmless prompts. By aligning explanations and behavior, our work provides a general recipe for training AI models to be safer, more transparent, and more controllable.

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

On the Study of Biometric Spoofing Detection using Deep Learning

Biometric systems are increasingly deployed in security applications; however, they remain vulnerable to spoofing attacks, in which attackers exploit counterfeit biometric data to gain unauthorized access. This research evaluates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art machine learning models, MobileNetV2, DenseNet-121, Inception-v3, and Spoof Trace Disentanglement (STD) in detecting spoofing attacks within facial recognition systems. Using the CelebA-Spoof dataset, the study evaluates model effectiveness using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 Score. Cross-dataset validation is carried out on the MSU-MFSD dataset to assess generalizability. The results show MobileNetV2 as the most efficient model, achieving 92% accuracy while balancing computational effectiveness, making it appropriate for real-life applications. Inception-v3 shows moderate robustness, while DenseNet-121 and STD struggle with generalization. The findings highlight the need for advances in domain adaptation and hybrid architectures to enhance biometric security systems.

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

Global Geometry Is Not Enough for Vision Representations

A common assumption in representation learning is that globally well-distributed embeddings support robust and generalizable representations. This focus has shaped both training objectives and evaluation protocols, implicitly treating global geometry as a proxy for representational competence. While global geometry effectively encodes which elements are present, it is often insensitive to how they are composed. We investigate this limitation by testing the ability of geometric metrics to predict compositional binding across a diverse suite of vision encoders. We find that standard geometry-based statistics exhibit near-zero correlation with compositional binding. In contrast, functional sensitivity, as measured by the input–output Jacobian, reliably tracks this capability. We further provide an analytic account showing that this disparity arises from objective design, as existing losses explicitly constrain embedding geometry but leave the local input–output mapping unconstrained. These results suggest that global embedding geometry captures only a partial view of representational competence and establish functional sensitivity as a critical complementary axis for modeling composite structure.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

From Memorization to Parameter Interference: How Overtraining Experts Harms Model Merging

arXiv:2506.14126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep learning is increasingly characterized by the use of open-weight foundation models that can be fine-tuned on specialized datasets. This has led to a proliferation of expert models and adapters, often shared via platforms like HuggingFace and AdapterHub. Model merging has recently emerged as an effective way to leverage these existing resources, enabling the composition of capabilities from different model checkpoints. A natural pipeline has thus formed to harness the benefits of transfer learning and amortize sunk training costs: models are pre-trained on general data, fine-tuned on specific tasks, and then multiple checkpoints are merged to obtain a more capable model. A prevailing assumption is that improvements at one stage of this pipeline propagate downstream, leading to gains at subsequent steps. In this work, we challenge that assumption by examining how expert fine-tuning affects model merging. We show that long fine-tuning of experts that optimizes for their individual performance leads to degraded merging performance across vision and language modalities, multiple model scales, and both fully fine-tuned and LoRA-adapted models. We trace this degradation to the memorization of a small set of difficult examples that dominate late fine-tuning steps. This causes negative parameter interference and encodes knowledge that is forgotten during merging. Finally, we demonstrate that task-dependent aggressive early stopping strategies can significantly improve model merging performance.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States

Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource. We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1

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

Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning for Fair and Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

arXiv:2606.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of generative artificial intelligence with wireless communication and signal processing systems has opened new avenues for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in future 6G networks. This work proposes a diffusion soft actor-critic (Diffusion-SAC) approach that leverages offline reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to optimize trajectory and scheduling control in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. While offline RL methods, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), can learn from static datasets, they often struggle to generalize in low-data or dynamic conditions. To address this, we combine the robustness of CQL with the generative power of diffusion models, enabling expressive and signal-aware policy learning that generalizes beyond behavior policies. Applied to a UAV-assisted wireless network, the proposed framework minimizes transmission energy and improves fairness among devices. Simulations show that Diffusion-SAC outperforms standard offline RL baselines, achieving more stable convergence and higher rewards even with limited datasets. The method enhances data efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and increases throughput by more than 35 % compared to existing algorithms, demonstrating its potential for robust policy learning in next-generation wireless control systems.

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

Agent Economics: An Entropy-Controlled Pluralistic Alignment Framework for Preventing Artificial Hivemind in Autonomous Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2606.09039v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study proposes the Behavioral Protocol Framework (BPF), an entropy-controlled pluralistic alignment framework designed to address two critical challenges in autonomous agent economies: the hivemind effect arising from excessive strategic convergence among agents and the lack of transparency in autonomous decision-making processes. The proposed BPF consists of three core modules: Mentalizing-based Social Intelligence (MbSI) grounded in Theory of Mind (ToM), Pluralistic Alignment (PA), and a Verifiable Execution Kernel (VEK). These modules are organically integrated within a closed-loop architecture that governs the entire lifecycle of agent behavior, from decision-making and execution to verification and feedback. To evaluate the proposed framework, a simulation environment implemented in Python and a Streamlit-based user interface will be developed. Through empirical experimentation, the study aims to examine whether the entropy-control mechanism of the PA module can effectively preserve strategic diversity among agents and mitigate collective convergence, while the VEK module provides a comprehensive and transparent audit trail of the decision-making process. The anticipated results are expected to demonstrate that the proposed framework can simultaneously enhance the stability, efficiency, and trustworthiness of autonomous agent economies. Consequently, this research offers a practical approach for developing robust, transparent, and accountable agent-native economic systems.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Efficient certification of intractable quantum states with few Pauli measurements

arXiv:2511.07300v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient verification of quantum computational resources is crucial as experiments advance toward fault-tolerance. Universal quantum computation can be achieved by consuming resource states through simple Pauli measurements, yet a significant gap remains between states that are easy to certify and those required for universality. We focus on Clifford-enhanced Product States, a class of resource states obtained by applying Clifford circuits to a product of single-qubit, potentially magic, states. While essential for universal computation, the certification of such states has previously relied on query oracles that are \#P-hard to implement, leaving their efficient, oracle-free verification an open challenge. In this work, we demonstrate that such classically intractable resource states can be efficiently verified using only Pauli measurements. Our protocol achieves sample- and time-efficiency in both i.i.d.\ and adversarial settings. This work fills a gap in Pauli-based certification, providing a new practical pathway to verify resource states that drive universal Pauli-based quantum computation.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

The FBSDE approach to sine-Gordon up to $6\pi$

arXiv:2401.13648v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a stochastic analysis of the sine-Gordon Euclidean quantum field $(\cos (\beta \varphi))_2$ on the full space up to the second threshold, i.e. for $\beta^2 < 6 \pi$. The basis of our method is a forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE) for a decomposition $(X_t)_{t \geqslant 0}$ of the interacting Euclidean field $X_{\infty}$ along a scale parameter $t \geqslant 0$. This FBSDE describes the optimiser of the stochastic control representation of the Euclidean QFT introduced by Barashkov and one of the authors. We show that the FBSDE provides a description of the interacting field without cut-offs and that it can be used effectively to study the sine-Gordon measure to obtain results about large deviations, integrability, decay of correlations for local observables, singularity with respect to the free field, Osterwalder-Schrader axioms and other properties.