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Letter to the Editor
Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily
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Letter to the Editor
arXiv:2602.09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for fast inference by querying it on new test observations. Because NPE is estimated under the training data distribution, it is susceptible to misspecification when observations deviate from the training distribution. Many robust SBI approaches address this by modifying NPE training or introducing error models, coupling robustness to the inference network and compromising amortization and modularity. We introduce minimum-distance summaries, a plug-in robust NPE method that adapts queried test-time summaries independently of the pretrained NPE. Leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a distance between observed data and a summary-conditional predictive distribution, the adapted summary inherits strong robustness properties from the MMD. We demonstrate that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently with random Fourier feature approximations, yielding a lightweight, model-free test-time adaptation procedure. We provide theoretical guarantees for the robustness of our algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks, demonstrating substantial robustness gains with minimal additional overhead.
arXiv:2606.20513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Frontier decoder, a pruned dynamic-programming decoder for sparse quantum decoding problems. Frontier processes error variables in a chosen order, merges prefixes with the same residual syndrome and logical label, and approximates logical-coset posterior masses by retaining only a narrow scored frontier. Without pruning, the recursion is exact ordered inference with exponential complexity. In the code-capacity setting, the decoder reaches thresholds close to optimal for the surface code and the color code. In the circuit-level noise model, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small average retained list size: less than 100 for the gross code $[[144,12,12]]$ at a physical error rate of $0.001$. When the list size is constant, the decoder has linear complexity, suggesting the possibility of low-latency implementations.
Large instruction-following models are powerful but costly to deploy, particularly in finance, where labelled data are limited by confidentiality and expert annotation cost. We present an efficient framework for financial sentiment analysis through distillation with synthetic data, transferring knowledge from a large instruction-tuned teacher to compact student models. The framework is designed for low-resource conditions, where a small set of real examples are collected and labelled by hand. The framework then clusters the examples and uses the clusters to select seeds for generating synthetic examples via structured few-shot prompting. Experiments show that clustering-based seed selection yields more representative synthetic data than random sampling, enabling compact models to achieve strong performance with minimal supervision. Notably, on a more complex and noisy text domain, the compact model trained on the complete synthetic-seed corpus even outperforms the teacher model, while remaining competitive on formal text. The framework provides a practical route toward resource-efficient domain adaptation in financial NLP with minimal human labelling effort.
Central nervous system injury causes motor deficits through derangement of excitatory, inhibitory, and/or neuromodulatory inputs to motoneurons, the three fundamental components of motor commands. Typically, study of pathologic neural control in humans is restricted to only one of the three. Chardon et al. (2024) presented a fundamentally new approach to comprehensively study all components by reverse engineering motor unit firing patterns. We apply their framework to motor unit firing patterns from 89 people with multiple sclerosis (MS) and 34 controls to study excitatory, inhibitory, and neuromodulatory contributions to pathologic motor output. Disruptions to all components are plausible in MS, a disease hallmarked by heterogeneity in nearly all aspects. Accordingly, we found abnormalities in MS for all three components. Notably, neuromodulation included both high and low extremes. Our results suggest that pathophysiology of motor commands in MS varies among patients, a finding fundamentally different from other studied populations showing relative consistency.
arXiv:2606.15172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthesizing realistic time series with generative models has wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios. Despite recent progress, most existing methods are trained under the assumption of abundant training data, which substantially limits their effectiveness in data-scarce settings. In this paper, we propose TimeMoDE, a novel framework that integrates Diffusion Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts to exploit both domain adaptability and diffusion-stage awareness for time series generation under data scarcity. It is pre-trained on a large-scale collection of multi-domain datasets to extract domain-agnostic temporal representations and domain-specific information benefiting generalization during fine-tuning. We propose Domain Prompts to condition expert assignment for indistinguishable noised tokens, mitigating the limitations of capturing inter-dataset relationships. Moreover, we incorporate diffusion timestep signals to equip the experts with awareness of time series degradation variations, facilitating adaptive calibrate to stage-dependent denoising requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeMoDE outperforms existing methods under diverse low-data settings. It establishes an innovative paradigm for advanced time series few-shot generation.
With large language models (LLMs) increasingly applied to mathematical reasoning, formal proof assistants such as Lean can be leveraged to verify reasoning outputs with machine-checkable rigor, enabling use cases such as answer selection in test-time scaling with K sampled candidate answers. However, employing Lean requires that LLM outputs, originally in natural language, first be formalized. Existing Lean-based answer-selection work uses an autoformalization model to generate a formal statement in Lean for each candidate answer independently, incurring a significant computational cost. We propose BASE, a base-and-edit pipeline that formalizes a single base candidate per problem and derives the remaining K-1 statements by editing the answer expression in place. To facilitate this, we train a rewriter model LEANSCRIBE to localize the answer in the base formalization and generate a reusable edit function for the other K-1 candidates. BASE simultaneously improves selection accuracy and reduces formalization cost - a Pareto improvement that holds on all 12 (dataset, solver) configurations across four benchmarks and three solvers, cutting autoformalizer calls by about 5x at K=8, with the reduction expected to become larger as K grows. Code is available at https://github.com/ucr-rai/base-and-edit.
Memory is not merely the storage of data; it is the scaffolding of reality. When biological memory fades, the world does not simply turn black; it regresses into an unrecognizable chaos. Echoes of the Prior is an interactive installation that attempts to visualize this subjective phenomenology of forgetting. By inducing controlled synaptic decay within a Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction model, we create an artistic analogy for the erosion of the brain's predictive priors. We position the Neural Network not as a tool for engineering, but as a cognitive proxy - a silicon brain whose structural degeneration evokes the disorienting, poetic, and terrifying experience of losing one's grip on the world. Ultimately, we offer this framework as a catalyst, inviting the wider community to explore the uncharted potential of neuromorphic aesthetics in visualizing the fragility of intelligence. Interactive demo see https://decart-4d.github.io/.
arXiv:2606.01963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study local pure coordination games on finite social networks, continuing the framework of Hutchcroft, Rospuskova, and Tamuz. They showed that low inefficiency in local coordination forces the underlying graph to be amenable, with a square-root loss in the amenability parameter. We improve this loss in the binary unbiased setting. Using Shapley values of a mutual-information game associated with the players' local outputs, we prove that if the average disagreement is at most $\varepsilon$, then the graph is $(O(\varepsilon\log(1/\varepsilon)),r)$-amenable. This gives a sharper quantitative converse between local coordination and graph amenability.
arXiv:2606.18485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.
Training automated pronunciation assessment often relies on labeled learner errors or non-native corpora that are costly to collect. We propose a lightweight framework trained only on native speech resources, operating unsupervised or lightly calibrated with a small set of scored utterances. At inference, learner speech is discretized with an SSL encoder and a K-means codebook. A token language model trained on native sequences computes surprisal where higher surprisal indicates phonotactic deviation. We add a transcript-guided Text2DUnit–DTW module that predicts native token sequences from reference text and aligns them to acoustic tokens to derive error-sensitive features. Surprisal and alignment features are fused via simple regression. On SpeechOcean762, PCC improves from 0.60 to 0.66 with transcript guidance, near supervised baselines. Cross-dataset evaluation on L2-ARCTIC shows consistent gains.
In this work, we aim to develop effective data synthesis techniques that autonomously synthesize multimodal training data for enhancing MLLMs in solving complex real-world tasks. To this end, we propose Collective Adversarial Data Synthesis (CADS), a novel and general approach to synthesize high-quality, diverse and challenging multimodal data for MLLMs. The core idea of CADS is to leverage collective intelligence to ensure high-quality and diverse generation, while exploring adversarial learning to synthesize challenging samples for effectively driving model improvement. Specifically, CADS operates with two cyclic phases, i.e., Collective Adversarial Data Generation (CAD-Generate) and Collective Adversarial Data Judgment (CAD-Judge). CAD-Generate leverages collective knowledge to jointly generate new and diverse multimodal data, while CAD-Judge collaboratively assesses the quality of synthesized data. In addition, CADS introduces an Adversarial Context Optimization mechanism to optimize the generation context to encourage challenging and high-value data generation. With CADS, we construct MMSynthetic-20K and train our model R1-SyntheticVL, which demonstrates superior performance on various benchmarks.
arXiv:2606.19947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable quantum control in the presence of decoherence requires policies that combat the effect of environmental noise on the controlled dynamics. Open quantum systems under continuous monitoring generate classical measurement records whose drift depends on the noise experienced by the system; the records of two evolutions sharing the same decoherence channels differ only in this drift, so Girsanov's theorem yields a closed-form, differentiable estimator of the KL divergence between their trajectory distributions. We instantiate this estimator with two physically motivated reference measures, yielding two regularizers that both drive the system toward states where the effects of decoherence are minimal: the Wiener KL (KL_W), which is empirically more effective under certain conditions on the noise model, and the drift-variance regularizer (R_DV), which works for all noise models. Both are qualitatively distinct from existing penalties on control fluence or smoothness: they penalize the observable consequences of control on the decoherence channels rather than the control amplitude itself. The regularizers outperform unregularized gradient-based and reinforcement-learning baselines across a range of open quantum systems – including single- and multi-qubit benchmarks and a multi-qubit chain calibrated to a published snapshot of the IBM Kingston processor – along several axes of evaluation: final-state fidelity, robustness to mismatch in the assumed noise model (gains grow from +17 pp at training noise to +27 pp under 2.5x noise mismatch), and occupation of forbidden states. The regularizers reduce infidelity by up to 50%, with ~16% gains on the calibrated IBM Kingston chain.
arXiv:2606.17413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Space-based monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is essential for constraining the global carbon budget. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) estimates column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO2 (XCO2) using high-resolution spectra. However, current operational retrieval algorithms are computationally expensive and do not properly quantify uncertainties. We present a novel deep learning framework that addresses these challenges. Due to the difficulties of ground-truth data for real satellite observations, we develop and validate our approach using a high-fidelity simulation dataset. This dataset, created to support OCO-2 uncertainty quantification (UQ), incorporates realistic forward model errors. Our architecture encodes spectral bands using a multi-branch neural network and estimates posteriors of the full CO2 column or desired summaries thereof using two scalable UQ methods: Laplace approximations and normalizing flows. Our approach has five key advantages relative to operational "full-physics" solvers: (1) Amortization: Inference is orders of magnitude faster, enabling real-time processing of massive data streams; (2) Model error robustness: By training on simulations that explicitly include model discrepancies, our method accounts for systematic errors often neglected by standard inversions; (3) Point estimate accuracy: We achieve superior predictive accuracy compared to baseline methods; (4) Improved UQ: The probabilistic outputs yield better-calibrated uncertainty estimates; and (5) Non-Gaussian posteriors: When utilizing normalizing flows, our framework successfully models complex, asymmetric posterior distributions, overcoming the limitations of the Gaussian assumption. These results suggest that simulation-based deep learning is a viable path toward next-generation operational processing systems.
arXiv:2606.14463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic (NeSy) models integrate neural networks and symbolic reasoning for robust and interpretable AI. State-of-the-art NeSy models require that the symbolic component is expressed in a differentiable way, often complicating the use of approximate inference. We propose EM-NeSy which casts probabilistic NeSy learning as an instance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the expectation step, we compute the posterior over the neurally predicted symbols conditioned on the label via probabilistic inference. In the maximization step, we update the neural parameters based on this posterior using gradient descent only through the neural component. This formulation unlocks the full potential of the EM algorithm for NeSy learning. It allows NeSy to extend naturally to approximate reasoning without any additional modifications or differentiability requirements of the symbolic component. Furthermore, it recovers the standard end-to-end gradient-based NeSy setting under exact inference. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability and computational efficiency of EM-NeSy.
To address the challenge that current dialogue policy planning methods struggle to dynamically adapt to diverse user characteristics, this paper proposes a User Portrait based Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation (UP-NRPA) online framework with Large Language Models. In contrast to conventional approaches dependent on model training and require offline reinforcement learning policy models for user groups, UP-NRPA enables dynamic customization of dialogue strategies through an adaptive mechanism. This is achieved by leveraging real-time user feedback alongside personality, preferences, and objectives mapped from the current user portrait, thereby adapting to user characteristics without offline reinforcement learning. In collaborative and non-collaborative dialogue benchmarks, UP-NRPA demonstrated considerable benefits, achieving an impressive 100% success rate in multiple dialogue tasks. Particularly in negotiation tasks, the sale-to-list ratio (SL) increased by 56.41%. This demonstrates that UP-NRPA can adapt to diverse user needs without requiring a training mechanism, enabling the dialogue system to adapt to user characteristics.
We introduce GRACE-DS, a Guarded Reward-guided Agent Correction Environment in Data Science for pre-deployment evaluation of LLM-powered AutoML agents. GRACE-DS is a set of evaluation metrics in an isolated environment that can be applied to tabular ML tasks specific to a particular organization. It exposes agents to realistic workflow stages, from planning and data inspection through feature engineering, model development, validation, and code repair to final submission, while hidden executable validators measure not only final predictive performance but also leakage avoidance, reproducibility, protocol validity, correction behavior, and reward alignment. The strongest structured regime, flexible iterative interaction (our approach), achieves higher end-to-end normalized hidden-test quality than single-shot generation, unstructured interaction, and restart-based baselines, while also improving protocol-valid completion. Validated across more than 7,000 episodes, these results establish GRACE-DS as a robust platform for assessing the capacity of LLM-based AutoML agents to execute machine learning workflows under production-like conditions and in accordance with organization-specific requirements.
arXiv:2602.10132v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Development and operation of commercially viable fusion energy reactors such as tokamaks require accurate predictions of plasma dynamics from sparse, noisy, and incomplete sensors readings. The complexity of the underlying physics and the heterogeneity of experimental data pose formidable challenges for conventional numerical methods, and highlight the promise of modern data-native approaches. A major obstacle in realizing this potential is, however, the lack of curated, openly available datasets and standardized benchmarks. Existing fusion datasets are scarce, fragmented across institutions, facility-specific, and inconsistently annotated, which limits reproducibility and prevents a fair and scalable comparison of AI approaches. In this paper, we introduce TokaMark, a structured benchmark to evaluate AI models on real experimental data collected from the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST). TokaMark provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to unify access to multi-modal fusion data and standardize evaluation protocols. The benchmark includes a curated list of 14 tasks spanning a range of physical mechanisms, exploiting a variety of diagnostics and covering multiple operational use cases. A baseline model is provided to facilitate transparent comparison and validation within a unified framework. By establishing a unified benchmark, TokaMark aims to accelerate progress in data-driven AI-based plasma modeling, contributing to the broader goal of achieving sustainable and stable fusion energy. The dataset, benchmark, documentation, and tooling are open-sourced under https://github.com/UKAEA-IBM-STFC-Fusion-FMs/tokamark_baseline.
arXiv:2605.08934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be objectively verified, compared, or composed. We introduce compositional interpretability, a category-theoretic framework grounded in the principles of compositionality and minimum description length. Compositional interpretations are pairs of syntactic and semantic mappings that must commute to enforce consistency between a model's decomposition and its observed behaviour. We deconstruct explanation quality into measures of faithfulness and complexity to cast interpretability as a constrained optimisation problem, and introduce compressive refinement to systematically restructure models into simpler parts without altering their function. Finally, we derive a parsimony criterion under which syntactic compression theoretically guarantees more concise, human-aligned explanations. Our framework situates prominent mechanistic methods as subclasses of refinement, and clarifies why their compressibility heuristics tend to align with human interpretability. Our work provides a measurable, optimisable blueprint for automating the discovery and evaluation of mechanistic explanations.
arXiv:2606.08008v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the pathwise behavior of the three-dimensional attractive one-point interaction diffusion whose law was constructed by Cranston, Koralov, Molchanov and Vainberg, corresponding to the singular Schrödinger Hamiltonian \[ \frac12\Delta+\frac{\beta}{2}\delta_0, \qquad \beta>0. \] We identify a local stochastic differential equation satisfied by the process away from the origin and use it to construct a natural submartingale whose increasing component in the Doob-Meyer decomposition is supported on the set of times at which the process visits the origin. In particular, we show that the process visits the origin with positive probability and that the law conditioned on avoiding the origin is three-dimensional Wiener measure.
arXiv:2604.12497v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Organizations increasingly deploy AI as a low-cost prediction layer in customer-facing decision processes, including demand sensing, service-quality monitoring, product testing, and market research, but AI-generated signals are unevenly reliable across tasks, products, and customer segments. Firms therefore still need scarce human validation (labels, audits, survey responses, or follow-up measurements) to anchor AI outputs to ground truth. Because human ground truth is itself noisy, varying across labelers and even across repeated judgments, the firm must collect and average several human labels per task, which makes human validation costly. We study how to allocate a limited human-validation budget across many AI-assisted tasks when reliability is heterogeneous and unknown before deployment. We cast this within tuned prediction-powered inference. Each human label both sharpens the AI-assisted estimate and reveals the task's rectification difficulty, the variance that remains after the AI prediction is optimally used as a control variate. If difficulties were known, the optimal allocation would follow a Neyman square-root rule; because they are unknown, we propose a policy based on upper confidence bounds that learns them online and steers validation toward tasks where AI is least reliable. We prove that the policy's terminal efficiency loss relative to the oracle allocation vanishes as the budget grows. In synthetic experiments and a real digital-twin survey with 68 tasks and over 2000 respondents, it closes most of the gap to the oracle when reliability is heterogeneous, outperforming uniform and epsilon-greedy allocation; on the survey data it also outperforms explore-then-commit pilot designs and cuts uniform's 10–12% gap to 2–6%. The value of AI depends not only on model accuracy but also on the operational policy that targets human oversight where AI errors matter most.
arXiv:2606.07157v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many efforts to ensure frontier AI models are safe rely on monitoring their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. If models become able to perform sufficiently complex reasoning internally, without explicit thinking tokens, this would undermine such oversight. We measure how well frontier models reason without CoT across a suite of over 30,000 questions spanning 43 benchmarks in domains including math, coding, puzzles, causality, theory-of-mind, and strategic reasoning. To compare models against humans, we estimate the $50\%$-task-completion time horizon (TH): the human time required for tasks a model completes with $50\%$ success rate. We complement this with a $50\%$ reasoning token horizon: the minimum number of o3-mini reasoning tokens needed for tasks a model solves with $50\%$ success rate. We find that the no-CoT $50\%$ TH of frontier models has been doubling roughly every year over the past six years, with GPT-5.5's TH reaching over 3 minutes and reasoning token horizon exceeding 1,500 tokens. Our median estimates predict that frontier no-CoT THs could exceed 7 minutes by 2028, and 25 minutes by 2030, though these projections carry substantial uncertainty. We recommend frontier developers track this explicitly.
arXiv:2603.01761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining and increased test-time compute. Despite surpassing human performance in several domains, these models remain fundamentally limited in continuous operation, experience accumulation, and personalization, capabilities that are central to adaptive intelligence. While continual learning research has long targeted these goals, its historical focus on in-weight learning (IWL), i.e., updating a single model's parameters to absorb new knowledge, has rendered catastrophic forgetting a persistent challenge. Our position is that combining the strengths of In-Weight Learning (IWL) and the newly emerged capabilities of In-Context Learning (ICL) through the design of modular memory is the missing piece for continual adaptation at scale. We outline a conceptual framework for modular memory-centric architectures that leverage ICL for rapid adaptation and knowledge accumulation, and IWL for stable updates to model capabilities, charting a practical roadmap toward continually learning agents.
Do language models (LMs) offer insights into human language learning? A common argument against this idea is that because their architecture and training paradigm are so vastly different from humans, LMs can learn arbitrary inputs as easily as natural languages. We test this claim by training LMs to model impossible and typologically unattested languages. Unlike previous work, which has focused exclusively on English, we conduct experiments on 12 languages from 4 language families with two newly constructed parallel corpora. Our results show that while GPT-2 small can largely distinguish attested languages from their impossible counterparts, it does not achieve perfect separation between all the attested languages and all the impossible ones. We further test whether GPT-2 small distinguishes typologically attested from unattested languages with different NP orders by manipulating word order based on Greenberg's Universal 20. We find that the model's perplexity scores do not distinguish attested vs. unattested word orders, while its performance on the generalization test does. These findings suggest that LMs exhibit some human-like inductive biases, though these biases are weaker than those found in human learners.
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