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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World

arXiv:2606.19980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Initiation of Superradiance from Different Collective Spin States

arXiv:2606.14949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superradiance is an extensive cooperative spontaneous emission phenomenon. Some atomic collective spin states exhibit it. However, distinct initial states differ in their decay dynamics. Dicke states with different numbers of excitations have their peak emission intensity shifted in time depending on the number of excitations. Emission intensity in atomic coherent states depends on their polarization. Some specific states undergo a squeezing controlled crossover, making the emission character dependent on the amount of squeezing in the state. We present detailed results on the superradiant dynamics of a representative selection of Dicke states. For large N, we are able to predict fairly accurately the pulse profile in each case using the mean field approximation, an approach based on the Fokker Planck Equation. We also present results on the intensity correlation function of the emission.

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

Pseudo-Feature Padding: A Lightweight Defense Against False Data Injection in Power Grids

arXiv:2606.20415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Neural Networks DNNs have achieved remarkable accuracy in various tasks including their application in CyberPhysical Systems CPS for detecting False Data Injection Attacks FDIA during critical operations However the unique infrastructure of CPS makes DNNs vulnerable to exploitation by attackers aiming to evade detection Additionally the distinct nature of CPS presents challenges for conventional defense mechanisms against FDIA This paper proposes an innovative defense framework that strengthens DNNs against such attacks by introducing an additional input layer that performs padding in the input samples using pseudofeature values derived from the inputs statistical distribution This padding increases the input dimensionality in a randomized and dataaware manner making adversarial attacks computationally infeasible due to the nontransferable nature of crafted perturbations and the unpredictability of the padded structure Our method is lightweight modelagnostic and requires no modifications to the core architecture making it highly deployable in realworld CPS settings We evaluated our framework on critical power grid applications such as state estimation using the IEEE 14bus 30bus 118bus and 300bus systems Experiments under adversarial settings demonstrate that our padding strategy significantly improves model robustness with negligible impact on performance and effectively mitigates attacks that would otherwise bypass conventional defenses

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Demystifying Variance in Circuit Discovery of LLMs

arXiv:2606.16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task. Although the current state-of-the-art method (EAP-IG) performs well on the metric of (un)faithfulness, it suffers from substantial variability. This includes resampling variance, where the circuit changes when we probe with a new batch of data from the same distribution; rephrasing variance, where the discovered circuit shifts when the prompts are rephrased; and sample-wise variance, where a circuit with low population unfaithfulness exhibits large fluctuations in unfaithfulness across individual samples. This paper studies the roots of these variances. We demonstrate that CEAP, our new circuit discovery method that improves upon EAP-IG with a theoretical guarantee, can substantially lessen resampling variance. We further show that rephrasing variance arises because prompts with different templates tend to activate different circuits in the model. This leads us to argue that it may be challenging to find a comprehensive circuit that explains and controls the model's behavior on a task, which can be expressed in countless templates, suggesting that LLMs may be inherently hard to steer. We show that sparsity, which has been claimed to form more compact and interpretable task circuits, fails to solve this problem. Regarding sample-wise variance, we argue that it is largely benign: extremely poor unfaithfulness scores often stem from how unfaithfulness is defined, rather than from defects in the measured circuits. We show that the magnitude of unfaithfulness is affected by selective contribution scaling, a neural mechanism that accounts for the extremely poor scores sometimes observed.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Latent World Recovery for Multimodal Learning with Missing Modalities

arXiv:2606.12362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study multimodal learning under missing modalities, with particular motivation from bioscience applications in which heterogeneous modalities are often only partially available when decisions need to be made. We propose Latent World Recovery (LWR), a framework built on two key ideas: (i) modality-specific embeddings from different modalities are aligned in a shared latent space, and (ii) a unified representation is constructed by fusing only the embeddings of the modalities that are actually available at both training and inference time. Rather than imputing missing modalities or requiring a fixed modality set, LWR treats each modality as a partial perception of an underlying latent state and performs availability-aware representation learning directly from the observed modalities. This combination of neighbor-based latent alignment and availability-aware modality fusion enables robust multimodal prediction under partial observation, while avoiding error propagation from explicit reconstruction of missing modalities. We evaluate the proposed framework on real-world incomplete multi-omics benchmarks and demonstrate that it provides an effective approach to downstream tasks such as cancer phenotype classification and survival prediction.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Geometric Consistency Protocol for Foundation Model Features in Multi-View Satellite Imagery

Standardized evaluation protocols are indispensable for robust benchmarking in remote sensing, particularly as foundation features are increasingly transferred across diverse sensors and complex imaging geometries. In satellite multi-view reconstruction, conventional evaluations relying on unconstrained 2D global matching are often misleading. The Rational Function Model (RFM) and its Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPC) dictate a curved, height-dependent epipolar geometry that render flat 2D search spaces physically inconsistent. We propose a geometry-faithful and reproducible protocol tailored for the RPC framework. Our approach integrates an RPC-projected 3D consistency metric with a geometry-constrained dense matching proxy, specifically evaluating whether similarity responses remain localized and unique under physically plausible search manifolds. A pivotal finding of our joint reporting strategy is the decoupling of semantic agreement and geometric localization: high cross-view similarity at a projected 3D point does not guarantee reliable matchability in practical inference. Our benchmark demonstrates that incorporating geometric constraints is fundamental to the problem definition in satellite imagery. Furthermore, we show that state-of-the-art 2D backbones remain remarkably competitive against specialized 3D-aware models when subjected to this RPC-consistent evaluation.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Stabilizing the Q-Gradient Field for Policy Smoothness in Actor-Critic Methods

arXiv:2601.22970v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policies learned via continuous actor-critic methods often exhibit erratic, high-frequency oscillations, making them unsuitable for physical deployment. Current approaches attempt to enforce smoothness by directly regularizing the policy's output. We argue that this approach treats the symptom rather than the cause. In this work, we theoretically establish that policy non-smoothness is fundamentally governed by the differential geometry of the critic. By applying implicit differentiation to the actor-critic objective, we prove that the sensitivity of the optimal policy is bounded by the ratio of the Q-function's mixed-partial derivative (noise sensitivity) to its action-space curvature (signal distinctness). To empirically validate this theoretical insight, we introduce PAVE (Policy-Aware Value-field Equalization), a critic-centric regularization framework that treats the critic as a scalar field and stabilizes its induced action-gradient field. PAVE rectifies the learning signal by minimizing the Q-gradient volatility while preserving local curvature. Experimental results demonstrate that PAVE achieves smoothness comparable to policy-side smoothness regularization methods, while maintaining competitive task performance, without modifying the actor.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Does the Data Processing Inequality Reflect Practice? On the Utility of Low-Level Tasks

The data processing inequality is an information-theoretic principle stating that the information content of a signal cannot be increased by processing the observations. In particular, it suggests that there is no benefit in enhancing the signal or encoding it before addressing a classification problem. This assertion can be proven to be true for the case of the optimal Bayes classifier. However, in practice, it is common to perform "low-level" tasks before "high-level" downstream tasks despite the overwhelming capabilities of modern deep neural networks. In this paper, we aim to understand when and why low-level processing can be beneficial for classification. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of a binary classification setup, where we consider a classifier that is tightly connected to the optimal Bayes classifier and converges to it as the number of training samples increases. We prove that for any finite number of training samples, there exists a pre-classification processing that improves the classification accuracy. We also explore the effect of class separation, training set size, and class balance on the relative gain from this procedure. We support our theory with an empirical investigation of the theoretical setup. Finally, we conduct an empirical study where we investigate the effect of denoising and encoding on the performance of practical deep classifiers on benchmark datasets. Specifically, we vary the size and class distribution of the training set, and the noise level, and demonstrate trends that are consistent with our theoretical results.

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

VIA-SD: Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding (SD) addresses the high inference costs of LLMs by having lightweight drafters generate candidates for large verifiers to validate in parallel. Existing draft-verify methods use binary decisions: accept or fully recompute. Yet we find that many rejected tokens can be verified correctly by a slim submodel derived from the full verifier via intra-model routing, instead of the full verifier. This motivates our slim-verifier to handle tokens requiring moderate verification resources, reducing expensive large-model calls. We propose Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding (VIA-SD), a multi-tier framework using a routed slim-verifier. Draft tokens are processed hierarchically: direct acceptance for high-confidence cases, slim-verifier regeneration for medium-confidence cases, and full-model verification for uncertain cases. Across four representative tasks and multiple model families, VIA-SD reduces rejection rates by 0.10-0.22 and delivers 10-20% speedups over strong SD baselines, while achieving 2.5-3x acceleration over non-drafting decoding. Moreover, VIA-SD is compatible with existing SD frameworks without modifying their training procedures. Our results suggest multi-tier SD as a general paradigm for scalable and efficient LLM inference. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/VIA-SD-Project-Page/

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

Comparative Study on Agility, Efficiency, and Impact Absorption of Bipedal Robots with Active Toes

arXiv:2606.19699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human legs exhibit high efficiency, agility, and impact absorption, with toes playing a crucial role in these capabilities. While many attempts have been made to implement human-like toes in robots, they have not fully replicated human characteristics nor rigorously validated their benefits. We propose a 14-DOF biped robot emulating human toes' lightweight, high-torque, robust nature. To quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the active toes in terms of agility, efficiency, and impact absorption, we developed a high-fidelity simulation training environment that reflects actual actuators with coupled transmissions and accurate power consumption. To ensure a fair comparison between configurations with and without active toes, we designed a minimal RL reward function and applied an identical training procedure to both. The simulation results indicate that, at 1.33 m/s walking, the toe-equipped robot reduced CoT by 17.5% and heel-strike GRF by 5.0% compared with the toe-ablation configuration. On the agility test, average and maximum path deviation decreased by 25.0% and 34.0%, respectively.

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

PAL-Bench: Evidence-Grounded Profile Reconstruction from Longitudinal Personal Albums

arXiv:2606.16175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal personal albums are weak-schema multimodal databases: noisy perceptual records whose key facts require joins across faces, text, timestamps, locations, and repeated events. Existing visual, video, document, and lifelog benchmarks test sub-problems, but not album-scale profile reconstruction with social identity binding and evidence citation. Benchmarking this task is difficult because the ground truth needed for evaluation–owner profiles, social graphs, face-name maps, and evidence provenance–is private state that real albums cannot safely release. We introduce PAL-Bench, a controlled benchmark for evidence-grounded reconstruction under a public-record contract. Its Evidence Compiler builds latent private worlds, programs target-level evidence paths, renders album pixels, re-measures them through perception pipelines, and exports audited public/private views. Agents receive only perception-derived public records; targets, identifier maps, and evidence paths remain hidden. PAL-Bench contains 50 synthetic users, 36,659 public photo records, and 2,799 targets over owner facts, identities, and relations. A privacy-preserving audit with 10 participants confirms that PAL-Bench evidence structures match real private albums, though equivalent releases remain privacy-prohibitive. Across seven systems and two compute-matched diagnostics, a seven-metric protocol reveals a gap between plausible profile summarization and faithful social reconstruction: systems recover some owner facts but struggle with recurring identities and evidence citation. PAL-TRACE, a reference framework that freezes identity bindings before owner-fact mining, performs best but leaves hard identity resolution far from solved. PAL-Bench provides a testbed for perceptual entity resolution, multimodal data integration, temporal evidence aggregation, and provenance-aware structured prediction.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

High-Order Talagrand and Eldan–Gross Inequalities via Besov-Type Variance Functionals

arXiv:2606.14876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: By introducing high-order Besov-type variance functionals that generalize the canonical variance, we develop a unified framework for proving high-order Talagrand-type inequalities that relate high-order energies to Fourier weights. Applying this machinery, we establish high-order Poincaré-type, $L^p$–$L^q$, isoperimetric-type, Falik–Samorodnitsky and Eldan–Gross inequalities, all with explicit constants, in both the Boolean and Gaussian settings. Fundamentally, our semigroup-based framework relies primarily on hypercontractivity and high-order Bismut-type derivative estimates, and is broadly applicable.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Counterfactual Explanations for Deep Two-Sample Testing

arXiv:2606.04009v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two-sample testing is a fundamental tool for detecting distributional differences across scientific domains, but classical tests (including kernel-based tests) can be ineffective on high-dimensional structured data such as images. Recent deep two-sample tests improve sensitivity in these settings by learning informative representations, yet they provide limited insight into which data features drive rejection of the null hypothesis $H_0$. To address this issue, we propose a counterfactual explanation framework for deep two-sample testing that generates sample-level edits moving observations from a source group toward a target group while explicitly reducing the discrepancy measured by the test. Our method combines a diffusion autoencoder with a pretrained deep two-sample test model and optimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) objective in the test model's representation space to produce plausible counterfactuals. We quantify distribution-level effects through changes in the test statistic and the resulting two-sample p-values. We evaluate the method on synthetic 2D shape datasets and two MRI cohorts. Across both settings, the counterfactual transformations consistently increase p-values relative to the original samples, indicating that the edited source set becomes statistically closer to the target distribution under the test. We measure minimality using LPIPS to ensure the counterfactuals remain close to the original samples. The resulting edits provide interpretable evidence of the features associated with the detected group differences. On MRI, the localized changes are consistent with known anatomical differences between cohorts.

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

Exact Federated Continual Unlearning for Ridge Heads on Frozen Foundation Models

arXiv:2603.12977v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models are commonly deployed as frozen feature extractors with a small trainable head to adapt to private, user-generated data in federated settings. The ``right to be forgotten'' requires removing the influence of specific samples or users from the trained model on demand. Existing federated unlearning methods target general deep models and rely on approximate reconstruction or selective retraining, making exactness costly or elusive. We study this problem in a practically relevant but under-explored regime: a frozen foundation model with a ridge-regression head. The exact optimum depends on the data only through two additive sufficient statistics, which we turn into a communication protocol supporting an arbitrary stream of add and delete requests via fixed-size messages. The server maintains a head that is, in exact arithmetic, pointwise identical to centralized retraining after every request. We provide deterministic retrain-equivalence guarantees, order and partition invariance, two server-side variants, and a Bayesian certificate of zero KL divergence. Experiments on four benchmarks confirm the guarantees: both variants match centralized ridge retraining to within $10^{-9}$ relative Frobenius error and complete each request at orders-of-magnitude lower cost than federated retraining baselines.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

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

Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Guiding World Models with Non-Curated Data

arXiv:2502.19544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Leveraging offline data is a promising way to improve the sample efficiency of online reinforcement learning (RL). This paper expands the pool of usable data for offline-to-online RL by leveraging abundant non-curated data that is reward-free, of mixed quality, and collected across multiple embodiments. Although learning a world model appears promising for utilizing such data, we find that naive fine-tuning fails to accelerate RL training on many tasks. Through careful investigation, we attribute this failure to the distributional shift between offline and online data during fine-tuning. To address this issue and effectively use the offline data, we propose two techniques: i) experience rehearsal and ii) execution guidance. With these modifications, the non-curated offline data substantially improves RL's sample efficiency. Under limited sample budgets, our method achieves nearly twice the aggregate score of learning-from-scratch baselines across 72 visuomotor tasks spanning 6 embodiments. On challenging tasks such as locomotion and robotic manipulation, it outperforms prior methods that utilize offline data by a decent margin.

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

Model soups need only one ingredient

arXiv:2602.09689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on a target distribution often improves in-distribution (ID) accuracy, but at the cost of out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness as representations specialize to the fine-tuning data. Weight-space ensembling methods, such as Model Soups, mitigate this effect by averaging multiple checkpoints, but they are computationally prohibitive, requiring the training and storage of dozens of fine-tuned models. In this paper, we introduce MonoSoup, a simple, data-free, hyperparameter-free, post-hoc method that achieves a strong ID-OOD balance using only a single checkpoint. Our method applies Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to each layer's update and decomposes it into high-energy directions that capture task-specific adaptation and low-energy directions that introduce noise but may still encode residual signals useful for robustness. MonoSoup then uses entropy-based effective rank to automatically re-weigh these components with layer-wise coefficients that account for the spectral and geometric structure of the model. Experiments on CLIP models fine-tuned on ImageNet and evaluated under natural distribution shifts, as well as on Qwen language models tested on mathematical reasoning and multiple-choice benchmarks, show that this plug-and-play approach is a practical and effective alternative to multi-checkpoint methods, retaining much of their benefits without their computational overhead.

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

Large-Scale OD Matrix Estimation with A Deep Learning Method

arXiv:2310.05753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The estimation of origin-destination (OD) matrices is a crucial aspect of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). It involves adjusting an initial OD matrix by regressing the current observations like traffic counts of road sections (e.g., using least squares). However, the OD estimation problem lacks sufficient constraints and is mathematically underdetermined. To alleviate this problem, some researchers incorporate a prior OD matrix as a target in the regression to provide more structural constraints. However, this approach is highly dependent on the existing prior matrix, which may be outdated. Others add structural constraints through sensor data, such as vehicle trajectory and speed, which can reflect more current structural constraints in real-time. Our proposed method integrates deep learning and numerical optimization algorithms to infer matrix structure and guide numerical optimization. This approach combines the advantages of both deep learning and numerical optimization algorithms. The neural network(NN) learns to infer structural constraints from probe traffic flows, eliminating dependence on prior information and providing real-time performance. Additionally, due to the generalization capability of NN, this method is economical in engineering. We conducted tests to demonstrate the good generalization performance of our method on a large-scale synthetic dataset. Subsequently, we verified the stability of our method on real traffic data. Our experiments provided confirmation of the benefits of combining NN and numerical optimization.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Polluted Page Is Enough: Evaluating Web Content Pollution in Generative Recommenders

Search-augmented LLMs increasingly mediate everyday consumer recommendations by retrieving live web content. This creates a new risk: generative recommenders may consume polluted web content, such as fake reviews and promotional pages crafted to mislead recommendations. We ask: to what extent do search-augmented LLMs become unwitting promoters of fake products when consuming polluted retrieval results? To answer this, we introduce FORGE (Fake Online Recommendations in Generative Environments), a benchmark for measuring fake-product promotion under controlled web-content pollution. Given an upstream search result, FORGE locally rewrites real products in retrieved web pages into fake ones to simulate web-content pollution, and measures how often the LLM recommends the fake product. FORGE covers 225 real-world products across 15 categories and 5 consumer scenarios. Across 12 commercial and open-weights LLMs, all models are vulnerable: a single polluted page yields fooled rates of up to 27%, while the full top-3 replacement raises this to 73.8%. Vulnerability varies substantially across categories, increasing when models lack stable prior knowledge of the relevant products. Reasoning does not mitigate this vulnerability; instead, it often generates spurious social proof to justify false recommendations. We evaluate three defenses: skepticism prompting and consensus filtering (over model priors or cross-document evidence). Skepticism can exacerbate vulnerability, much like reasoning, while filtering risks suppressing legitimate products. We release FORGE at https://github.com/leoluolol/forge-benchmark.

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

Filtered Conformal Ellipsoids for Graph-Native Time Series

arXiv:2606.17014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Joint prediction sets for multivariate time series should control a single event while adapting to cross-coordinate dependence. We study filtered conformal ellipsoids: a frozen state-space filter emits a one-step predictive mean and covariance, and split-conformal calibration is applied to the resulting Mahalanobis scores. The filter is used to choose the ellipsoid shape; conformal calibration chooses the scalar radius, so the construction benefits from a learned predictive covariance without relying on Gaussian tail probabilities for coverage. The main difficulty is that filtered scores are dependent and learned recurrent filters need not contract in their raw hidden state; we therefore analyse contraction in an observable predictive-law quotient that identifies hidden states producing the same future sequence of emitted Gaussian laws. Under a stable Bayes Gaussian-projection filter, covariance bounds, and a finite-horizon observability Fisher condition, small excess Gaussian negative log-likelihood implies contraction of the learned emitted laws. Combined with a threshold-autocovariance envelope this yields a Chebyshev-type approximate coverage bound for filtered split-conformal prediction under dependence; a sharper Bernstein-type bound requires an additional geometric-mixing concentration assumption. Under Gaussian oracle realisability we also obtain a near-oracle log-volume comparison within the class of conditionally valid Gaussian ellipsoid rules. We instantiate the framework with a GCN-GRU filter with diagonal-plus-low-rank covariance. On moderate-size graph-native traffic benchmarks (METRLA-$20$ and PEMSBAY-$50$), the learned filter gives sharper at-target ellipsoids than static-covariance and non-filter baselines; at full-graph scale and on non-graph-native datasets, factor and copula baselines can be stronger.

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

Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference for Dependent Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.15458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variational inference (VI) is a core engine of modern AI, enabling scalable approximate Bayesian learning and uncertainty-aware training of large probabilistic and generative models. In this paper, we propose Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference (SN-VI), a novel framework for modeling complex dependencies among latent variables in posterior approximation, leveraging multivariate spline techniques. Unlike traditional methods that rely on the mean-field assumption, SN-VI preserves intricate latent variable dependencies, providing a flexible and accurate approximation of posteriors with arbitrary shapes. We establish rigorous theoretical guarantees, including the derivation of the lower bound for the variational objective and proof of asymptotic consistency in posterior estimation. To facilitate practical implementation, we develop an algorithm that automatically identifies dependent latent variables and their underlying dependence structure, without requiring manual specification. Simulation studies validate the effectiveness of SN-VI in approximating posterior distributions with bounded support and complex dependencies. The proposed method has been successfully applied to high-dimensional structured data, including computer vision datasets and spatial transcriptomics. In these applications, SN-VI demonstrates improved generative model performance and effectively uncovers coupled biological signals through the learned dependency structure.

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

Policy-Embedded Graph Expansion: Networked HIV Testing with Diffusion-Driven Network Samples

arXiv:2601.16233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: HIV is a retrovirus that attacks the human immune system and can lead to death without proper treatment. In collaboration with the WHO and the University of Witwatersrand, we study how to improve the efficiency of HIV testing with the goal of eventual deployment, directly supporting progress toward UN Sustainable Development Goal 3.3. While prior work has demonstrated the promise of intelligent algorithms for sequential, network-based HIV testing, existing approaches rely on assumptions that are impractical in our real-world implementations. Here, we study sequential testing on incrementally revealed disease networks and introduce Policy-Embedded Graph Expansion (PEGE), a novel framework that directly embeds a generative distribution over graph expansions into the decision-making policy rather than attempting explicit topological reconstruction. We further propose Dynamics-Driven Branching (DDB), a diffusion-based graph expansion model that supports decision making in PEGE and is designed for data-limited settings where forest structures arise naturally, as in our real-world referral process. Experiments on real HIV transmission networks show that the combined approach (PEGE + DDB) consistently outperforms baselines (e.g., 17.3% improvement in discounted reward and 15.4% more HIV detections with 25% of the population tested) and explore key tradeoffs that drive solution quality.

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

Adaptive Activation Steering for Efficient LLM Reasoning via Closed-Loop PID Control

Reasoning LLMs trained with long chain-of-thought often overthink: they spend tokens on redundant reflection and transitions that inflate cost without improving accuracy. Static activation steering (e.g.\ SEAL) suppresses such content with a fixed vector, but applies the same strength regardless of how redundant the current chunk actually is. We describe PID-steering, a training-free, decoding-time method that modulates the steering strength with a PID controller driven by a lightweight chunk-level redundancy classifier. On a subset of GSM8K with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, the method improves accuracy from 85.7\% to 89.6\% (+3.9 pp) while cutting average output length from 1026 to 790 tokens ($-$23\%). We report it as a small-scale proof of concept rather than a benchmark result.