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01.
Science (Express) 2026-05-06

A 481-meter-high landslide-tsunami in a cruise ship–frequented Alaska fjord | Science

作者: 未知作者

Early in the morning of 10 August 2025, a >64 × 10 6 m 3 landslide struck Tracy Arm fjord in Alaska. The landslide was preconditioned by glacial retreat caused by climate change. The resulting 481 m runup megatsunami followed an initial 100-m-high breaking wave traveling >70 m s −1 . The landslide was preceded by several days of microseismicity, which increased in rate and magnitude until ~1 hour before failure. The landslide produced globally observed long-period seismic waves equivalent in size to a M5.4 earthquake. A long-period (~66 s) global seismic signal, produced by a landslide-induced seiche trapped within the fjord, persisted for up to 36 hours, the second time a days-long seiche has been thus observed. With fjord regions increasingly visited by cruise ships, and climate change making similar events more likely, this unanticipated, near-miss event highlights the growing risk from landslides and tsunamis in coastal environments.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

arXiv:2604.10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (breadth) against refining promising ones (depth), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear. We argue that the optimal strategy depends on the model's diversity profile, the spread of probability mass across solution approaches, and that this must be characterized before any exploration strategy is adopted. We formalize this with a framework decomposing reasoning uncertainty, deriving when depth-based refinement outperforms parallel sampling, and validate it across three model families at both inference and training. Our central finding is that the diversity regime dictates the strategy: low-diversity aligned models benefit from depth-based refinement with lightweight intrinsic signals, whereas high-diversity base models are often harmed by it, and instead need breadth or stronger signals to compensate.

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

Evaluating deep learning models for fault diagnosis of a rotating machinery with epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty

arXiv:2412.18980v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainty-aware deep learning (DL) models recently gained attention in fault diagnosis as a way to promote the reliable detection of faults when out-of-distribution (OOD) data arise from unseen faults (epistemic uncertainty) or the presence of noise (aleatoric uncertainty). In this paper, we present the first comprehensive comparative study of state-of-the-art uncertainty-aware DL architectures for fault diagnosis in rotating machinery, where different scenarios affected by epistemic uncertainty and different types of aleatoric uncertainty are investigated. The selected architectures include sampling by dropout, Bayesian neural networks, and deep ensembles. Moreover, to distinguish between in-distribution and OOD data in the different scenarios two uncertainty thresholds, one of which is introduced in this paper, are alternatively applied. Our empirical findings offer guidance to practitioners and researchers who have to deploy real-world uncertainty-aware fault diagnosis systems. In particular, they reveal that, in the presence of epistemic uncertainty, all DL models are capable of effectively detecting, on average, a substantial portion of OOD data across all the scenarios. However, deep ensemble models show superior performance, independently of the uncertainty threshold used for discrimination. In the presence of aleatoric uncertainty, the noise level plays an important role. Specifically, low noise levels hinder the models' ability to effectively detect OOD data. Even in this case, however, deep ensemble models exhibit a milder degradation in performance, dominating the others. These achievements, combined with their shorter inference time, make deep ensemble architectures the preferred choice.

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

Representing Piecewise-Linear Functions by Functions with Minimal Arity

arXiv:2406.02421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Any continuous piecewise-linear function $F\colon \mathbb{R}^{n}\to \mathbb{R}$ can be represented as a linear combination of $\max$ functions of at most $n+1$ affine-linear functions. In our previous paper [``Representing piecewise linear functions by functions with small arity'', AAECC, 2023], we showed that this upper bound of $n+1$ arguments is tight. In the present paper, we extend this result by establishing a correspondence between the function $F$ and the minimal number of arguments that are needed in any such decomposition. We show that the tessellation of the input space $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ induced by the function $F$ has a direct connection to the number of arguments in the $\max$ functions.

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

The Query Channel: Information-Theoretic Limits of Masking-Based Explanations

arXiv:2604.16689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masking-based post-hoc explanation methods, such as KernelSHAP and LIME, estimate local feature importance by querying a black-box model under randomized perturbations. This paper formulates this procedure as communication over a query channel, where the latent explanation acts as a message and each masked evaluation is a channel use. Within this framework, the complexity of the explanation is captured by the entropy of the hypothesis class, while the query interface supplies information at a rate determined by an identification capacity per query. We derive a strong converse showing that, if the explanation rate exceeds this capacity, the probability of exact recovery necessarily converges to one in error for any sequence of explainers and decoders. We also prove an achievability result establishing that a sparse maximum-likelihood decoder attains reliable recovery when the rate lies below capacity. A Monte Carlo estimator of mutual information yields a non-asymptotic query benchmark that we use to compare optimal decoding with Lasso- and OLS-based procedures that mirror LIME and KernelSHAP. Experiments reveal a range of query budgets where information theory permits reliable explanations but standard convex surrogates still fail. Finally, we interpret super-pixel resolution and tokenization for neural language models as a source-coding choice that sets the entropy of the explanation and show how Gaussian noise and nonlinear curvature degrade the query channel, induce waterfall and error-floor behavior, and render high-resolution explanations unattainable.

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

Dual-Network PINNs for Optimal Control: A Reproducible Benchmark on the Mass-Spring-Damper System

arXiv:2606.15271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a transparent and reproducible benchmark study of a direct dual-network Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) formulation for the optimal control of a mass-spring-damper system. The classical linear-quadratic optimal control problem is solved by two independent classical methods – Pontryagin's Minimum Principle with single shooting, and direct transcription through trapezoidal collocation – and recast as a constrained optimization problem solved by two feedforward neural networks: a state network whose boundary conditions are enforced exactly through a composite cubic-and-mask ansatz, and an unconstrained control network. The composite loss combines the physics residual at the collocation points with a trapezoidal approximation of the cost functional, weighted by a single scalar hyperparameter. On the benchmark considered, the PINN reproduces the classical optimal cost to four significant digits, satisfies the terminal state constraints exactly by construction, and produces pointwise state and control errors that fall within the spread of the two classical references. Training is approximately two orders of magnitude slower than classical shooting on this benchmark, which is honestly reported. The contribution is methodological clarity rather than methodological novelty: the formulation and the accompanying Google Colab implementation are intended to lower the barrier to entry for practitioners exploring PINN-based optimal control without prior exposure to adjoint methods or two-point boundary value problems.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Split-Evolution Quantum Phase Estimation for Particle-Conserving Hamiltonians

arXiv:2604.14921v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a hardware demonstration and resource analysis of split-evolution quantum phase estimation (SE-QPE) on a Quantinuum System Model H2 quantum computer. SE-QPE is a modification to canonical QPE for particle-conserving Hamiltonians in which controlled time evolution is replaced by CSWAP-based interference between a target register and a reference register. For factorizations of time evolution with a shared eigenbasis, SE-QPE preserves the phase-register outcome distribution of canonical QPE and, unlike with compute–uncompute substitutions, it remains compatible with non-exact eigenstates. The substitution removes controlled-simulation overhead and enables parallel evolution on two registers, reducing the depth of each phase-kickback block. Resource analysis for Trotterized double-factorized chemistry Hamiltonians shows that the substitution becomes increasingly favorable at higher phase powers and combining QPE and SE-QPE implementations can be a useful option. Over a range of FeMoco active spaces, SE-QPE reduces time evolution resources, with asymptotic reductions of about 33% in CX count, 25% in $T$ count, and an asymptotic depth ratio of $3/N$ for CX layers. On Quantinuum H2-2, a four-qubit model ethylene demonstration with explicit inverse QFT and repeated phase-kickback steps up to 8 phase bits yields distinct energies and shows the auxiliary registers provide useful error detection filters.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

The Geometry of Allostery: A Laplacian Minor Hierarchy for Many-Body Protein Communication

Quantifying how cooperative, many-body relationships drive allostery in protein networks remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop the Laplacian minor hierarchy, a mathematical framework that characterizes the geometric invariants of a protein network. Lower-order minors yield standard metrics including the partition function and effective distances, whereas higher-order minors define novel topological measures: cooperation indices, each bounded between zero and one, that characterize pathway correlations at increasing levels of complexity, the third-order minor determines whether allosteric pathways are correlated or uncorrelated, and the fourth-order minor quantifies how distinct pathways communicate through intermediary residues. We apply this framework to analyze the evolutionary adaptation of the PSD95pdz3 domain from Class I to Class II ligand specificity via mutations G330T and H372A. The cooperation index demonstrates a distinct evolutionary hierarchy: the G330T mutation establishes distributed pathway couplings that the H372A mutation subsequently exploits, whereas H372A alone produces minimal global changes. Furthermore, the fourth-order analysis identifies His317 as a critical intermediary node bridging the class-switching (330-372) and class-bridging (330-400) allosteric pathways. These results demonstrate that allosteric dependencies emerge only when mutations accumulate in specific combinations, with a hierarchical organization of pathways structured around position 330 and intermediary nodes His317 and Phe400. Rather than predicting allosteric mechanisms, this framework provides a mechanistic explanation for why and how allostery emerges during protein evolution.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Action with Visual Primitives

arXiv:2605.22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. A common design in current architectures maps language instructions and visual observations to actions in a single forward pass. While conceptually simple, this formulation entangles instruction comprehension, spatial scene understanding, and motor control within a single learning objective. As a result, the action expert must implicitly relearn cognitive and perceptual capabilities already present in the pretrained VLM, which can limit both learning efficiency and generalization. We introduce AVP (Action with Visual Primitives), an end-to-end architecture that implements this visual-primitive-centric interface: the VLM infers the next-stage target and emits visual-primitive tokens that condition a flow-matching action expert, with supervision derived from end-effector kinematics. Real-robot experiments on general pick-and-place tasks show that AVP improves the success rate by 37.04% over pi_0.5 and outperforms other recent methods, with consistent gains in data efficiency, spatial-compositional generalization, and object-level transfer.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Enhancing Pathological VLMs with Cross-scale Reasoning

Pathological images are inherently multi-scale, requiring pathologists to integrate evidence from global tissue architecture at low magnification to cellular morphology at higher magnification for accurate diagnosis. While existing pathological datasets for vision-language model (VLM) include various scales, they often lack an explicit cross-scale reasoning objective. This limitation prevents VLMs from capturing essential cross-scale representations and learning evidence-based reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first cross-scale training and evaluation paradigm that formulates pathology interpretation as multi-magnification reasoning. However, creating such a task reveals a critical challenge: multi-image visual question answering (VQA) is prone to text-only shortcuts, which allow models to guess answers using magnification-dependent artifacts rather than visual evidence. To address this, we propose a leakage-aware curation pipeline that combines adversarial text-only screening with constraint-guided question design. Using this pipeline, we construct Scale-VQA, a high-quality benchmark with 4,685 multiple-choice questions grounded in 2,537 pathology images across multiple magnification levels. Finally, we present ScaleReasoner-R1, a model trained via reinforcement learning to optimize performance on the cross-scale VQA task. ScaleReasoner-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on our cross-scale reasoning benchmark and generalizes to SOTA performance on established single-scale benchmarks. Findings suggest that even the limited cross-scale supervision can significantly improve pathological understanding. The code and demos will be open-sourced.

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

LoRDO: Distributed Low-Rank Optimization with Infrequent Communication

arXiv:2602.04396v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed training of foundation models via $\texttt{DDP}$ is limited by interconnect bandwidth. While infrequent communication strategies reduce synchronization frequency, they remain bottlenecked by the memory and communication requirements of optimizer states. Low-rank optimizers can alleviate these constraints; however, in the local-update regime, workers lack access to the full-batch gradients required to compute low-rank projections, which degrades performance. We propose $\texttt{LoRDO}$, a principled framework unifying low-rank optimization with infrequent synchronization. We first demonstrate that, while global projections based on pseudo-gradients are theoretically superior, they permanently restrict the optimization trajectory to a low-rank subspace. To restore subspace exploration, we introduce a full-rank quasi-hyperbolic update. $\texttt{LoRDO}$ achieves near-parity with low-rank $\texttt{DDP}$ in language modeling and downstream tasks at model scales of $125$M–$720$M, while reducing communication by $\approx 10 \times$. Finally, we show that $\texttt{LoRDO}$ improves performance even more in very low-memory settings with small rank/batch size.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Steady-State Noise Signatures of Lindbladian Exceptional Points

arXiv:2606.13377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points (EPs) are non-Hermitian degeneracies at which two or more eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenvectors coalesce. In open quantum systems, exceptional points can arise in the Lindbladian governing the dissipative dynamics. Their signatures have so far been mainly identified in finite-time observables, such as transient currents, while steady-state average currents generally provide no direct evidence of the underlying exceptional-point structure. In this work, we demonstrate that signatures of Lindbladian EPs can nevertheless be accessed in the steady-state regime through current noise. We derive general expressions for current correlation functions within a Lindblad master-equation framework and show, in particular, how exceptional points affect their behaviour as a function of the time delay. We illustrate these results with the paradigmatic example of two interacting qubits coupled to two reservoirs, where the steady-state noise clearly distinguishes overdamped, underdamped, and critical regimes. Our results establish current correlation functions as a steady-state probe of Lindbladian EPs in open quantum systems.

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

Toten: Knowledge-Based Ontological Tokenization Of Physical Quantities And Technical Notation In Brazilian Portuguese

Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization is statistically efficient for vocabulary compression, but semantically blind to structured technical entities, fragmenting physical quantities, numbers, units, and symbolic expressions into lexically arbitrary subwords. We present TOTEN, a knowledge-based ontological tokenization framework that replaces statistical derivation with declarative classification grounded in a formal ontology of engineering entities (OEE). We formalize TOTEN as the triple : the ontology gathers types, structural principles, composition relations, and preservable invariants; the classification function maps raw text into typed regions; and the instantiator family yields a self-descriptive structured representation. Robustness derives from deterministic coupling with three external oracles: Pint (dimensional), Unicode Character Database (typographic), and RSLP (Portuguese morphology). Intrinsic evaluation covers four properties verifiable by construction – ontological atomicity, dimensional equivalence, typographic robustness, and numerical reconstruction – over an internal, physically validated benchmark (EngQuant, N=800) and four Brazilian Portuguese external corpora (N=1771 eligible cases). We also report detection recall, distinguishing coverage from conditional atomicity. Against eight state-of-the-art baselines, TOTEN achieves unit ontological atomicity in all contrasts and numerical reconstruction of 0.775-0.904 on external corpora, vs. 0.627-0.703 for the best baseline (Quantulum3); on EngQuant, 0.780 vs. 0.340. Differences are statistically significant (McNemar with Holm correction). Spearman correlation between internal and external rankings confirms concurrent validity of the control benchmark. Dimensional equivalence shows statistical parity with Pint, the oracle from which the system inherits dimensional authority.

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

Separable Neural Architectures as Physical World Models: from Mathematical Theory to Applications

arXiv:2606.14934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work introduces the Separable Neural Architecture (SNA), a function representational class combining neural approximation with tensor decomposition. The SNA decouples localized coordinate functions (atoms) from global interactions governed by a sparse, low-rank interaction object. This architecture possesses a compact and smooth inductive bias well-suited for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). When viewed as a Galerkin trial space under the variational SNA (VSNA) framework, the formulation satisfies classical variational guarantees under Lax-Milgram: well-posedness, quasi-optimality, convergence, and stability. In high-dimensional spatiotemporal–parametric PDEs, the VSNA mitigates the curse of dimensionality by scaling algebraically rather than exponentially. Exploiting an entirely factorized, tensor-native alternating least squares (ALS) optimization framework reduces this cost to linear in dimension. The VSNA is validated across elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic systems, demonstrating close alignment with predicted algebraic and spectral scaling rates. We showcase the SNA as a "solve once, query anywhere" physical world model via two engineering case studies: a 7D parametric manufacturing simulation and an experimental thermal-to-property inversion pipeline for Inconel 718. The VSNA executes a 1,000,000-query Monte Carlo sweep in 102s on a standard laptop CPU, yielding a 150,000x speedup over a full-grid finite element baseline hosted on an NVIDIA A100 GPU. It further enables real-time generative inverse-mode reconstructions under 100ms. These results demonstrate that the SNA serves as a compact mathematical substrate for continuous parameter manifolds to enable real-time inversion, optimization loops, and rapid uncertainty propagation.

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

From Physics to Representation: Audio Learning with Synthetic Pre-training via Procedural Generation

arXiv:2606.14791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning advances audio representation for multimedia analysis. However, prevailing data-centric approaches rely on massive real-world corpora, increasing training costs, curation burdens, and privacy barriers. To address this, we present AudioPG, a procedural synthesis framework eliminating real audio recordings during pre-training. AudioPG trains a Transformer-based masked autoencoder on waveforms generated on-the-fly from basic acoustic primitives and composition rules. The encoder transfers effectively to real audio benchmarks, achieving 90.60% accuracy on ESC-50, 0.546 mAP on FSD50K, 88.17% on UrbanSound8K, and 97.03% on Speech Commands V2. Notably, pre-training completes in under 20 minutes on a single GPU. Latent space analysis reveals physical factors, including fundamental frequency and relative intensity, emerge in orthogonal subspaces, making representations linearly decodable. These results establish procedural synthesis as an efficient, interpretable pre-training signal when large-scale corpora are unavailable. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Freyliu0516/audioPG.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Fast When, Careful Who: Dual-Process Multiparty Turn-Taking with Diffusion Augmentation

Reliable turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems. However, most existing methods are designed for two-speaker interaction and struggle with realistic multiparty audio containing overlap and rapid speaker changes. We study multiparty turn-taking on the VoxConverse dataset and propose an audio-only two-stage pipeline that separates when to trigger a turn boundary from whether the floor is actually transferring. A fast trigger scans the audio and proposes candidate end-of-turn times, while a lightweight verifier runs only at those times to decide \textsc{Hold} or \textsc{Shift} and support next-speaker prediction. We report results in the full multiparty setting and a controlled dyadic top-2 projection for comparability. We also investigate diffusion-based, label-preserving background-audio mixing as a data augmentation strategy. Results show improved shift detection over a baseline, with further improvements from diffusion augmentation.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Tamed Feynman-Kac diffusion processes: Killing-branching intertwine

arXiv:2605.07824v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Relaxation to equilibrium of a drifted Brownian motion is quantified by a transition probability density function, whose main (multiplicative) entry is an inferred Feynman-Kac kernel of the Schr\"{o}dinger semigroup operator. Although seemingly devoid of a natural probabilistic significance (except for its explicit path integral definition), the pertinent kernel relaxes to equilibrium as well. The implicit Feynman-Kac potential ${\cal{V}}(x)$, continuous, confining and bounded from below, may take negative values. If positive, ${\cal{V}}(x)$ can be interpreted as the killing rate of the decaying diffusion process. In case of relaxing F-K kernels the killing effects are tamed (often overcompensated). The taming inavoidably appears in conjunction with the existence of the negativity subdomains of ${\cal{V}}(x)$ in $R$. If locally ${\cal{V}}(x) < 0$, its sign inversion $- {\cal{V}}(x)$ can be interpreted as the branching (cloning, alternatively bifurcation) rate in the course of the other wise free random motion. The arising killed diffusion processes with branching, we interpret as the possible path-wise background of tamed (relaxing) Feynman-Kac diffusions. We present acomputer-assisted path-wise arguments, towards a consistency of the killing/branching taming scenario, for a number of nonlinear model systems in one space dimension. Special attention is paid to Feynman-Kac potential shapes in the double well form, where an analytic access to eigenvalues and eigenfunctions is scarce. Throughout the paper the dynamics refers to the positive real time. Since the Newton-type equations of motion for admissible classical trajectories have a Euclidean form (due to the sign inverted force term), we give a brief resume of a couple of their explicit solutions, without recourse to the Euclidean time intuitions, and the instanton lore of related quantum model systems.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On a class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks

arXiv:2504.14767v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A step-reinforced random walk is a discrete-time stochastic process with long-range dependence. At each step, with a fixed probability $\alpha$, the so-called positively step-reinforced random walk repeats one of its previous steps, chosen randomly and uniformly from its entire history. Alternatively, with probability $1-\alpha$, it makes an independent move. For the so-called negatively step-reinforced random walk, the process is similar, but any repeated step is taken with its direction reversed. These random walks have been introduced respectively by Simon (1955) and Bertoin (2024) and are sometimes refered to the self-confident step-reinforced random walk and the counterbalanced step-reinforced random walk respectively. In this work, we introduce a new class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks for which we prove the strong law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. In particular, our work provides a unified treatment of the elephant random walk introduced by Schutz and Trimper (2004) and the positively and negatively step-reinforced random walks.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Judge-Aware Ranking Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models without Ground Truth

arXiv:2601.21817v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on open-ended tasks without ground-truth labels is increasingly done via the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm. A critical but under-modeled issue is that judge LLMs differ substantially in reliability; treating all judges equally can yield biased leaderboards and misleading uncertainty estimates. More data can make evaluation more confidently wrong under misspecified aggregation. We propose a judge-aware ranking framework that extends the Bradley-Terry-Luce model by introducing judge-specific discrimination parameters, jointly estimating latent model quality and judge reliability from pairwise comparisons without reference labels. We establish identifiability up to natural normalizations and prove consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator, enabling confidence intervals for score differences and rank comparisons. Across multiple public benchmarks and a newly collected dataset, our method improves agreement with human preferences, achieves higher data efficiency than unweighted baselines, and produces calibrated uncertainty quantification for LLM rankings.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

CASR: A Robust Cyclic Framework for Arbitrary Large-Scale Super-Resolution with Distribution Alignment and Self-Similarity Awareness

Arbitrary-Scale SR (ASISR) remains fundamentally limited by cross-scale distribution shift: once the inference scale leaves the training range, noise, blur, and artifacts accumulate sharply. We revisit this challenge from a cross-scale distribution transition perspective and propose CASR, a simple yet highly efficient cyclic SR framework that reformulates ultra-magnification as a sequence of in-distribution scale transitions. This design ensures stable inference at arbitrary scales while requiring only a single model. CASR tackles two major bottlenecks: distribution drift across iterations and patch-wise diffusion inconsistencies. The proposed SSAM module aligns structural distributions via superpixel aggregation, preventing error accumulation, while SARM module restores high-frequency textures by enforcing correlation-guided consistency and preserving self-similarity structure through correlation alignment. Despite using only a single model, our approach significantly reduces distribution drift, preserves long-range texture consistency, and achieves superior generalization even at extreme magnification.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Evaluating Universal Machine Learning Force Fields Against Experimental Measurements

arXiv:2508.05762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Universal machine learning force fields (UMLFFs) promise to revolutionize materials science by enabling rapid atomistic simulations across the periodic table. However, their evaluation has been limited to computational benchmarks that may not reflect real-world performance. We introduce UniFFBench, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring the MinX dataset – a diverse collection of 1,500+ mineral systems spanning 85 elements, extreme thermodynamic conditions (0–5000 K, 0–1000 GPa), and structural complexity, including partial occupancy and disorder. This diversity, combined with experimental reference values for validation, enables assessment of UMLFF generalization across chemical space and conditions substantially beyond typical training scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art UMLFFs reveals a substantial ``reality gap'': models achieving impressive performance on computational benchmarks often fail when confronted with experimental complexity. Even the best-performing models exhibit higher density prediction error than the threshold required for practical applications. We observe disconnects between simulation stability and mechanical property accuracy, with prediction errors correlating with training data representation rather than the modeling method.

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

A Stationary (and Therefore Compatible) Representation is All You Need

arXiv:2606.12488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning compatible representations aims to learn feature representations that can be used interchangeably over time whenever a model undergoes updates. In this paper, we demonstrate that stationary representations learned by d-Simplex fixed classifiers imply compatibility as in its formal definition. This result establishes a foundation for future works and can be directly exploited in practical learning scenarios. We address the challenge of learning compatibility using $d$-Simplex fixed classifiers when the model is sequentially fine-tuned. Learning according to a d-Simplex fixed classifier with the cross-entropy loss aligns feature distributions at the first-order statistics. Consequently, it may not fully capture higher-order dependencies in the representation between model updates. To address this issue, we demonstrate that training the model using a $d$-Simplex fixed classifier through a convex combination of the cross-entropy loss and a contrastive loss not only captures higher-order dependencies, but is also equivalent to learning with the cross-entropy under the compatibility constraints. We confirm our findings with extensive experiments also considering a new scenario where a pre-trained model is sequentially fine-tuned and occasionally replaced with an improved model. We show that stationary representations enable uninterrupted retrieval services (without reprocessing gallery images) while improving performance during model updates and replacements, achieving state-of-the-art. Code at https://github.com/miccunifi/iamcl2r.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

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

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