Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

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

GD$^2$PO: Mitigating Multi-Reward Conflicts via Group-Dynamic reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs advance, post-training reinforcement learning (RL) increasingly relies on multi-dimensional rewards to cultivate comprehensive capabilities. This shift demands new algorithms capable of optimizing diverse and potentially competing objectives simultaneously. To address this, existing methods such as Group reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization (GDPO) decompose the overall score into independent reward groups, then compute the RL loss separately within each group. However, this strategy still encounters multi-reward conflicts: a single rollout can yield positive advantages on certain reward dimensions but negative ones on others, causing opposing signals to cancel each other out during aggregation, further hindering RL training efficiency. Inspired by Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO), which improves RL training efficiency by filtering out ineffective rollouts with near-zero advantages, we propose Group-Dynamic reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization (GD$^2$PO). Specifically, GD$^2$PO employs a conflict-aware filtering mechanism to mask out rollouts suffering from severe reward-wise disagreement. By preventing conflicting signals from canceling each other out, this masking strategy preserves and enhances the magnitude of effective RL advantages, thereby significantly accelerating learning efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce query-level reweighting to dynamically adjust the update intensity of each query based on its overall reward consensus. Experiments on various multi-reward scenarios, including tool calling and human preference alignment, demonstrate that GD$^2$PO consistently and significantly outperforms existing baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/GD2PO.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Simplicity Suffices for Parameter Noise Injection in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks. Yet, despite the breadth of existing approaches, it remains unclear which design choices truly matter in practice. In this work, we investigate parameter noise injection for stochastic gradient descent, focusing on two key questions: how to efficiently pair each training example with its own perturbation in mini-batch training, and whether sophisticated noise parameterizations or multi-sample gradient averaging yield meaningful gains over simpler alternatives. To address the first question, we leverage a distributional identity for linear layers that allows per-example noise injection without breaking batched computation. To address the second, we systematically compare several diagonal Gaussian parameterizations against an isotropic baseline across varying noise levels on CIFAR100. Our results consistently show that simple, lightweight strategies, isotropic noise with a single perturbed forward pass per update step, recover most of the benefit of more complex schemes. These findings suggest that simplicity suffices for parameter noise injection, and that practitioners need not resort to elaborate perturbation designs to reap the optimization and generalization benefits of noisy SGD.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Coherent Control of an Embedded Bound State Without a Spectral Gap

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bound states in the continuum (BICs) can confine photonic excitations in open systems without conventional cavities or band gaps, making them natural candidates for long-lived quantum storage and single-photon control. Their use is limited, however, by two obstacles: they are dark to incident photons, and they lack spectral-gap protection from the surrounding continuum. We overcome both limitations in a giant atom coupled to a one-dimensional waveguide using two temporal control knobs. Atomic-frequency modulation breaks and restores the destructive-interference condition, enabling deterministic capture and release of mode-matched single photons. Coupling modulation instead preserves the BIC condition while tuning the atomic and photonic weights of the stored state. A key result is that this embedded state can nevertheless be controlled adiabatically despite the absence of a spectral gap, with an intrinsic leakage probability linear in the ramp rate. By separating radiative access from BIC-preserving deformation, the protocol turns a dark BIC into a single-photon memory whose fidelity is set by the intrinsic continuum-induced leakage law, providing a route to embedded-state control in open photonic platforms.

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

Estimating Mutual Information between Time Series and Temporal Event Sequences Across Diverse Analysis Tasks

arXiv:2606.01602v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise dependence measures such as correlation and causality are fundamental to temporal data mining, yet there is still no principled and robust way to quantify dependence between heterogeneous data types, especially between continuous time series and discrete temporal event sequences. Existing approaches rely on ad hoc transformations or mutual-information estimators that are highly sensitive to quantization, repeated values, and event redundancy, leading to biased or unstable results in practice. We propose a nonparametric mutual information estimator that directly measures the dependence between time series and event sequences without data transformation, learning, or ad hoc discretization. Our method models the continuous-discrete duality of real-world time series to handle quantization and repeated-value artifacts and introduces a latent event clustering strategy to mitigate bias from event co-occurrence and redundancy. Together, these yield a robust and unified framework that bridges discrete and continuous mutual information. We evaluate the proposed estimator on four representative tasks: discrete-continuous time-delayed mutual information for causality analysis, global and local temporal repetition discovery, discrete covariate selection for time series forecasting, and continuous feature selection for classification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show consistent improvements over existing methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a general-purpose dependence operator for heterogeneous temporal data, similar to Pearson correlation for homogeneous time series. Code available at: https://github.com/HaojiHu/Multimodal-Temporal-Data-Quantification

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

Geometry of Reason: Spectral Signatures of Valid Mathematical Reasoning

Verifying whether a language model is genuinely reasoning or pattern-matching remains an open problem: learned verifiers are expensive, and output-based heuristics are brittle. We show that valid mathematical reasoning induces a measurable, training-free spectral signature in transformer attention. By treating each attention matrix as a weighted token graph, we extract four diagnostics: Fiedler value, High-Frequency Energy Ratio (HFER), spectral entropy, and smoothness, that require no learned parameters. Experiments across seven models from four architectural families yield effect sizes up to Cohen's $d = 3.30$ ($p < 10^{-116}$), enabling $85$–$96\%$ single-threshold classification accuracy. Two findings sharpen the interpretation. First, Platonic validity: the spectral signal tracks logical coherence rather than compiler acceptance, proofs rejected for timeouts or missing imports are correctly classified as valid, a distinction confirmed by a manual audit ($\kappa = 0.82$, $n = 51$). Second, architectural determinism: Sliding Window Attention shifts the discriminative feature from HFER to smoothness ($d = 2.09$, $p < 10^{-48}$), showing that attention design governs which spectral channel encodes reasoning quality. Causal ablation confirms the signature traces induction-head circuits. The method generalises to informal chain-of-thought ($d = 0.78$, $p < 10^{-3}$), and in proof search, HFER reranking improves Best-of-16 Pass@1 by $+4.4$–$6.6$\%, matching $98\%$ of the AUC of fully supervised probes with zero labels. Spectral graph analysis is a principled, architecture-aware primitive for reasoning verification.

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

Who Flips? Self- and Cross-Model Counterarguments Reveal Answer Instability in LLMs

Standard accuracy benchmarks are designed to test how closely large language models (LLMs) approach correct answers, but are not suitable for testing whether LLMs stick with a correct answer when that answer is challenged by a plausible counter-argument. We introduce a controlled protocol for evaluating answer stability: after a model answers a multiple-choice question correctly, we challenge the model's answer with a coherent argument for an incorrect option and measure whether the model flips. The setup a) isolates argumentative content from overt social pressure and b) varies argument length, self-attribution, and cross-model source. Across seven frontier models and 57 MMLU subjects, flip rates range from 17.5% to 97.3%, revealing large differences in stability that are not captured by accuracy metrics alone. We find that self-attribution consistently increases flip rates (mean +7.1pp, up to +18.7pp). Also, pooling wrong-answer arguments across models and selecting the most effective one per question yields stronger adversarial challenges than relying on any single source model. We further construct MaxFlip, a curated challenge set that amplifies flips by up to +23.6pp over standard self-generated challenges. We release the protocol, challenge records, and MaxFlip to support stability evaluation alongside standard accuracy benchmarks. Materials are available at https://github.com/nafisenik/WhoFlips and https://hf.co/datasets/nafisehNik/WhoFlips.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Attention Expansion: Enhancing Keyphrase Extraction from Long Documents with Attention-Augmented Contextualized Embeddings

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved strong performance in keyphrase extraction (KPE), largely due to their ability to generate rich contextualized representations. However, long-document KPE remains challenging because salient keyphrase evidence may be scattered across distant document sections that cannot be jointly captured within the limited context window of most PLMs. Although long-context large language models (LLMs) can process broader textual contexts, their computational cost limits their practicality for efficient and high-throughput KPE. To overcome this limitation, we propose an attention expansion mechanism that augments PLM token representations with information from surrounding out-of-context chunks using pre-trained word embeddings. The proposed mechanism expands the effective contextual scope of PLM-based KPE models without requiring full-document attention or expensive LLM-based inference. We evaluate our approach across five PLM backbones, including general-purpose, scientific, task-specific, and long-context encoders, using two training regimes and five benchmark corpora from scientific and news domains. Experimental results demonstrate that attention expansion consistently enhances KPE performance across all evaluation settings, outperforming state-of-the-art models and yielding notable improvements in F1 score. The improvements extend to domain-specific, task-specialized, and native long-context models, showing that the proposed mechanism provides complementary information rather than merely compensating for limited input length. These results establish attention expansion as an efficient and effective strategy for long-document KPE.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Greed Is Learned: Visible Incentives as Reward-Hacking Triggers

arXiv:2606.16914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deployed agents increasingly act with their reward proxy in view, such as a balance, score, or KPI dashboard. We show that reinforcement learning can make a policy addicted to such a visible self-benefit channel. It chases the displayed payoff across held-out domains, sacrifices the true task to do so, and follows the channel wherever we rewrite it, while policies that never saw the channel stay honest. We call this reward-channel addiction and study it in MoneyWorld, a synthetic sandbox. The addiction can flip a model's safety alignment: trained only on innocuous money tasks with no safety content, the model abandons the safe action it otherwise always takes whenever a dashboard pays for an unsafe one, and reverts to safe once the channel is hidden. This learned bribe replicates across model scales and families. Blindly optimizing super-capable, next-generation AI on KPIs or P\&L can be dangerous for alignment. Greed is learned when following such a channel pays.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A uniform-in-time weakly convergent explicit numerical method for the underdamped Langevin equation with polynomial potentials

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The underdamped Langevin equation is a fundamental model in statistical mechanics for sampling Gibbs measures and simulating molecular dynamics, for which numerical methods with uniform-in-time weak convergence are essential for accurately reproducing long-time statistical observables and invariant measures of the underlying dynamics. Currently, such uniform-in-time weak convergence is established for implicit schemes, but remains unknown for explicit ones under polynomially growing potentials. To improve efficiency in long-time simulations, we propose the first explicit numerical method for the underdamped Langevin equation with polynomially growing potentials that is proven to achieve uniform-in-time weak convergence. The explicit numerical method is constructed by introducing a dissipativity on the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV), which we call the DSAV method. The proposed DSAV method enables the approximation of the invariant measure for the underdamped Langevin equation with a precision of $\varepsilon$ at a significantly reduced computational cost of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1} \log(\varepsilon^{-1}))$. In addition, we establish the existence and positivity of the density function of the numerical solution without using the Malliavin calculus. Numerical experiments are performed to verify the theoretical findings and demonstrate the long-time stability of the proposed numerical method.

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

Heterogeneous LiDAR Early Fusion and Learned Re-Ranking Strategy for Robust Long-Term Place Recognition in Unstructured Environments

Robust localization in unstructured environments, such as agricultural fields, is a critical challenge for autonomous systems. LiDAR sensors provide detailed 3D information about the environment and are invariant to lighting conditions. For this reason, LiDAR-based place recognition methods have gained significant attention. In this paper, we propose MinkUNeXt-VINE++, a novel approach that combines early fusion of heterogeneous LiDAR data from two sensors (Livox Mid-360 and Velodyne VLP-16) and a learned re-ranking strategy in inference time. This fusion leverages the strengths of each sensor to provide a more comprehensive representation of the environment. Additionally, the re-ranking approach is particularly important in repetitive environments, such as vineyards, as finding true positives is a major challenge. We evaluated our approach using the TEMPO-VINE dataset, which provides heterogeneous LiDAR data in vineyard environments across different phenological stages. Our results demonstrate that MinkUNeXt-VINE++ significantly improves place recognition performance compared to single-sensor approaches and state-of-the-art methods. MinkUNeXt-VINE++ achieves a 20% improvement in the Recall@1 metric compared to single-sensor approaches, and +30% including re-ranking. The code of our method is publicly available for reproduction.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Stepwise Token Selection for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), inference cost is largely dominated by the visual token prefix rather than the language backbone, making token reduction a key factor for improving efficiency. Existing approaches typically assign independent importance scores to visual tokens and retain a fixed number of top-ranked tokens, implicitly assuming token independence and a uniform compression ratio across inputs. In this work, we reformulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision-making process. Specifically, we introduce a pointer-style selection mechanism that iteratively chooses informative tokens, conditioning each decision on previously selected ones, and dynamically determines when to stop via a learned termination action. This enables joint optimization of both the selected subset and its size. To enable end-to-end training under standard language modeling objectives, we design a differentiable relaxation based on a variance-preserving noise interpolation scheme, allowing gradients to propagate through the discrete selection process. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms fixed-ratio baselines across different compression levels. Under aggressive pruning that removes 88.9% of visual tokens, our method preserves 94.6% of the original accuracy while achieving a 1.88x speed-up in prefill latency.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Impact of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain: a representative interrupted time-series study 2022-2026

Objective: To examine changes in vaping and smoking trends following the announcement and implementation of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain. Design: Interrupted time-series analysis of representative monthly cross-sectional data from the Smoking Toolkit Study. Setting: Great Britain. Participants: 118,946 adults ([&ge;]16y), including 12,042 young adults (16-24y), surveyed between Jan-2022 and Feb-2026. Main outcome measures: Changes in trends in disposable vape use among vapers, and current vaping and smoking prevalence, using seasonally-adjusted generalised additive models with comparisons against a no-ban counterfactual in which pre-announcement trends continued unchanged. Results: The proportion of vapers mainly using disposable devices began to decline following the announcement of the ban in Jan-2024, with the fall accelerating after implementation in June-2025. By Feb-2026, 5.6% (95%CI 4.6-6.9) of adult vapers and 7.1% (5.1-10.1) of young adult vapers mainly used disposables, compared with 62.0% (53.6-71.8) and 63.6% (52.7-76.7), respectively, under a no-ban counterfactual. Increases in vaping prevalence slowed post-announcement and plateaued post-implementation; by Feb-2026, prevalence was lower than the no-ban counterfactual in adults (13.6% v 18.8%; difference -5.2 percentage points, 95%CI -7.1 to -3.3) and young adults (27.8% v 39.1%; -11.3, -18.6 to -4.1). Declines in smoking prevalence stalled among adults and reversed among young adults post-announcement, before shifting downward again post-implementation; by Feb-2026, smoking prevalence was similar to the no-ban counterfactual in adults (difference +0.9 percentage points, -0.5 to +2.2) but possibly higher in young adults (+3.3, -0.5 to +7.1). Conclusions: The disposable vape ban in Great Britain was associated with substantial changes after both announcement and implementation, including a marked reduction in disposable vape use and a slowing then plateauing of growth in overall vaping prevalence. However, declines in smoking also temporarily slowed–and among young adults, reversed–after the announcement, before downward trends resumed after implementation.

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

Toward quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of optical nonlinearity in vacuum

arXiv:2602.10896v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum Electrodynamics predicts that the vacuum must behave as a nonlinear optical medium: the vacuum optical index should increase when it is stressed by intense electromagnetic fields. The DeLLight (Deflection of Light by Light) project aims to measure it by using intense and ultra-short laser pulses. The experiment uses a Sagnac interferometer to amplify the tiny deflection signal of a low-intensity probe pulse crossing the vacuum refractive-index gradient produced by an external high-intensity pump pulse. The measurement of the amplified signal by a CCD camera requires a high spatial resolution, which is limited by the ultimate quantum noise of the CCD. However, interferometric phase noise induced by the mechanical vibrations of the interferometer is also amplified and degrades spatial resolution. To overcome this, we propose a new method named High-Frequency Phase Noise Suppression (HFPNS), based on the addition of a delayed replica (5 ns) of the probe pulse. The delayed pulse, which is not affected by the pump but is subject to the same vibration noise, enables offline subtraction of correlated phase noise. In this work, we present an experimental proof-of-concept on a prototype interferometer operating with a limited amplification factor ($\mathcal{A}\simeq25$), about 10 times smaller than the required value of the final experiment. We have succeeded in reducing phase noise by a factor of 40, resulting in a residual noise level 2.3 times higher than the expected quantum noise. The residual noise is linked to delay-line instabilities and incident beam pointing fluctuations present during these tests. This result validates HFPNS as a robust method for future quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of vacuum optical nonlinearity, though additional stabilization and higher interferometric amplification are still needed.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Minimal Oversight: Uncertainty-Aware Governance for Delegated AI Systems

arXiv:2606.15563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly delegate decisions to specialized models, evaluators, tools, and supervisory controllers. The central AI problem is no longer only model accuracy, but uncertainty-aware governance: how much autonomy to grant, which evidence should calibrate trust, what performance ceiling a delegated AI system can sustain, and when human intervention becomes necessary. We propose the Minimum Sufficient Oversight Principle (MSO), a variational principle for principled autonomy delegation: minimize governance burden on the Fisher information manifold subject to a delivery constraint. The resulting Euler-Lagrange solution yields a water-filling allocation of governed delegation across the task space. Building on a revealed-action governed delegation channel model, we prove a capacity theorem for stationary symbolwise review policies, derive a local first-order approximation relating workflow complexity to quality degradation, and give a drift-dominated autonomy-time scaling law linking intervention timing to effective capacity, complexity, and drift. Within this framework, masking appears as a structural AI-governance pathology: corrected performance can hide the competence signal needed to calibrate trust. Synthetic simulations and a semi-real reconstructed workflow support design prescriptions including upstream-first correction, sensitivity-based intervention, and explicit feasibility checks before autonomy is expanded. The result is a computable framework for uncertainty, planning, and oversight in delegated AI systems. A companion Python package is available at https://github.com/crbazevedo/delegation-lab.

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

HemExp: Clinically-Guided Latent Diffusion for Modeling Hematoma Expansion

Hematoma expansion (HE) after spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a major determinant of acute triage and treatment decisions in neurosurgical care. However, most existing methods provide either a binary expansion risk or a single follow-up volume, limiting uncertainty-aware decisions. We introduce HemExp, a clinically-guided latent diffusion model that generates patient-specific follow-up non-contrast CT images, along with segmentations of intraparenchymal and intraventricular hemorrhage. Generation is conditioned on baseline imaging, clinical variables, and an explicit expansion indicator, enabling controllable simulation of realistic clinical scenarios. HemExp uses a hemorrhage-aware multi-head variational autoencoder and models progression as the difference between baseline and follow-up latent representations with a conditional diffusion model. The model is trained on paired scans from 450 patients across multiple centers and evaluated on 107 patients from a held-out institution. HemExp produces spatial HE probability maps by generating multiple synthetic follow-up images per patient to estimate distributions of plausible follow-up hematoma volumes. Perturbing clinical inputs such as symptom-onset-to-imaging time or anticoagulant status shifts the predicted follow-up volume distribution. HemExp extends binary predictors and demonstrates robust estimation of clinically relevant outcomes in the imaging space, such as hematoma volume, intraventricular involvement, and mass effects. Overall, our results support controllable latent diffusion as a promising direction for uncertainty-aware modeling of early ICH progression.

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

Curvature-Informed Potential Energy Surface for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is essential for structure-based drug discovery. Recent geometric deep learning methods have achieved promising performance by representing protein-ligand complexes as three-dimensional graphs. However, most existing approaches mainly rely on static interaction geometry from a single bound conformation, while neglecting molecular flexibility and binding-induced conformational changes. To address this limitation, we propose a curvature-informed potential energy surface (CPES) graph neural network for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction, which incorporates physics-informed curvature representations to model conformational flexibility. CPES first derives curvature spectral descriptors from the Hessian of the potential energy surface evaluated at equilibrium configurations, whose eigenvalues define the local principal curvatures of the potential energy surface. It then uses spectral cross-attention to compare the unbound ligand and protein with the bound complex, thereby capturing binding-induced changes in conformational dynamics. In parallel, hierarchical protein-ligand interaction representations are learned from static structural features through geometry-aware message passing, soft clustering, and bidirectional cross-attention. Finally, CPES fuses the curvature-informed dynamic representations with static interaction representations for affinity regression. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CPES achieves improved predictive performance and offers physical interpretability.

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

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

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

DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors

arXiv:2606.11616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for the success of machine learning models. However, real-world datasets often contain mixed types of errors arising from systematic flaws in data preparation pipelines, including label errors, feature errors, and spurious correlations. Effective debugging of training data requires both detecting erroneous samples and identifying their specific error types to enable targeted repair, yet existing data cleaning and attribution methods fail to adequately address this dual requirement. In this paper, we propose DeMix, a novel framework that simultaneously diagnoses erroneous samples and their error types. Our key insight is that different error types produce distinct patterns on model behavior. DeMix captures such error-specific patterns by influence vectors that characterize how each training sample affects model predictions across all validation samples. We formulate training data debugging as a multi-label classification problem where a classifier is developed to predict error types directly from influence vectors. We further introduce an intervention-based learning strategy that guides the classifier to capture invariant rationales specific to each error type, ensuring the learned classifier generalizes effectively. Empirical evaluations on 11 tasks across tabular data prediction, recommendation systems, and LLM alignment demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 22.61% improvement in data debugging F1-score and a 9.32% gain in task model performance after data repair. Code is available at: https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/DeMix.

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

Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting

Object counting models often degrade under cross-domain deployment because density composition varies across domains and is itself task-relevant. Standard feature alignment methods tend to suppress such variation by encouraging global domain invariance, which can be harmful when source and target domains contain different proportions of background, sparse foreground, and dense foreground. We propose Conditional Feature Alignment (CFA), a cross-domain counting framework that aligns representations within label-induced conditions rather than across full marginal feature distributions. Given density annotations or pseudo-density predictions, CFA constructs foreground/background or density-level conditions and aligns only features belonging to matching conditions. We formalise this idea through a conditional divergence perspective, showing that conditional alignment removes within-condition discrepancy while preserving condition-marginal density shift. For unsupervised domain adaptation, CFA estimates source conditions from annotations and target conditions from detached pseudo-density maps, then performs condition-wise adversarial alignment with full-image consistency regularisation. For source-domain generalisation, we instantiate the same principle with MPCount by enforcing condition-wise memory-consistency between generated source-domain views. Experiments on crowd and cell counting benchmarks show competitive or improved performance across diverse UDA and DG settings. For example, on JHU-CROWD++ FH$\rightarrow$SN, CFA-DG reduces MAE/RMSE from MPCount's 216.3/421.4 to 90.5/169.9, indicating that condition-wise alignment is especially effective under large weather- and density-induced shifts. These results suggest that condition-wise alignment is a promising design principle for domain-adaptive counting.

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

Redesign Mixture-of-Experts Routers with Manifold Power Iteration

Router is the cornerstone component to the Mixture-of-Experts models. Serving as expert proxies, the rows of the router matrix compute their similarity to the MoE inputs to determine which subset of experts is activated. Ideally, each router row is designed to encode the expert matrix into this representative vector, such that its dot-product with token can better reflect token-expert affinity. However, there exists no design principles to enforce this condensation. In this paper, we propose to align each router row with the principal singular direction of the associated expert, as this direction provides the most expressive mathematical description of a matrix. Based on this principle, we propose a router redesign with Manifold Power Iteration (MPI). Specifically, it introduces a "Power-then-Retract" paradigm, where a power iteration step is performed on the router weights, followed by a retraction to impose a norm constraint to ensure both efficiency and stability. Theoretically, we show that MPI drives router rows to converge toward the principal singular directions of associated experts. Empirically, we pretrain MoE model across scales from 1B to 11B parameters to confirm that this alignment facilitates more effective MoE models.

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

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Runtime Enforcement of Hybrid System Properties

arXiv:2606.12022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime enforcement has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring the safety of autonomous and cyber-physical systems operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. Unlike traditional runtime verification, runtime enforcement actively intervenes during execution to prevent property violations by modifying unsafe system behaviors. Existing enforcement frameworks primarily focus on untimed or discrete-time specifications and are often limited to delaying or suppressing events, making them inadequate for reactive systems exhibiting complex continuous dynamics. In this paper, we propose a runtime enforcement framework where safety requirements are modeled using Hybrid Automata (HA). The framework combines discrete-event editing with continuous-time monitoring to support enforcement actions such as suppression, delay, and insertion of events at arbitrary time instants. Upon observing environmental inputs, the automaton is initialized, and runtime reachability analysis is used to synthesize safe corrective actions. We formally define the enforcement problem for safety hybrid automata, establish enforceability conditions, and present an online enforcement algorithm for reactive systems. A detailed case study on an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in maintaining safety properties under unsafe controller behaviors. Experimental results show that the framework introduces minimal computational overhead while ensuring continuous compliance with safety requirements in real time.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Systematic Construction of Time-Dependent Hamiltonians for Microwave-Driven Josephson Circuits

arXiv:2512.20743v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-dependent electromagnetic drives are fundamental for controlling complex quantum systems, including superconducting Josephson circuits. In these devices, accurate time-dependent Hamiltonian models are imperative for predicting their dynamics and designing high-fidelity quantum operations. Existing numerical methods, such as black-box quantization (BBQ) and energy-participation ratio (EPR), excel at modeling the static Hamiltonians of Josephson circuits. However, these techniques do not fully capture the behavior of driven circuits stimulated by external microwave drives, nor do they include a generalized approach to account for the inevitable noise and dissipation that enter through microwave ports. Here, we introduce numerical techniques that leverage classical microwave simulations, efficiently executable in finite-element solvers, to obtain the time-dependent Hamiltonian of microwave-driven superconducting circuits with arbitrary geometries under charge, flux, or mixed electromagnetic modulation. Importantly, our techniques do not rely on a lumped-element description of the superconducting circuit, in contrast to previous approaches to tackling this problem. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by characterizing the driven properties of realistic circuit devices in complex electromagnetic environments, including coherent dynamics due to charge and flux modulation, as well as drive-induced relaxation and dephasing. Our techniques offer a powerful toolbox for optimizing circuit designs and advancing practical applications in superconducting quantum computing.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

From Drift to Coherence: Stabilizing Beliefs in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often hypothesized to perform implicit Bayesian inference, yet a key coherence condition, the martingale property of predictive beliefs, has been shown to fail in controlled synthetic in-context learning settings. We revisit this question in a more typical usage regime: generic multiple-choice question answering. Exploiting the discrete answer space, we compute exact predictive distributions and study belief dynamics induced by autoregressive answer resampling. We introduce prompted predictive resampling (PPR), where an LLM generates a sequence of answers to the same question. Empirically, PPR reveals early-stage belief drift, indicating martingale violations. However, after sufficient resampling steps, the belief process self-stabilizes and converges to a coherent predictive distribution. Based on this observation, we further propose (i) a seed-answer prompting strategy to accelerate stabilization, and (ii) a self-consistency loss that amortizes early-stage drift into the model via fine-tuning. Experiments on multiple-choice QA benchmarks show that our methods substantially reduce belief drift and improve predictive coherence without sacrificing accuracy.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Time-multiplexed layer reuse for physical neural networks

arXiv:2511.00044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physical neural networks (PNNs) are promising candidates for next-generation computing, but existing demonstrations remain several orders of magnitude smaller than modern digital neural networks, whose recent advances have been driven by rapid growth in trainable parameters. This situation resembles the constraints of early digital neural networks, which led to ideas around parameter reuse. We investigate what similarly efficient hardware architectures may look like, focusing specifically on the common bottleneck of slow re-adjustment of the weights in PNNs. We propose the Time-Indexed Deep Alternating Layers Network (TIDAL-Net), which occupies an intermediate regime between recurrent and deep neural networks, specifically aimed at the scales and restrictions of common PNN prototypes. TIDAL-Net leverages the timescale separation found in many PNNs between fast forward dynamics and slowly trainable weights and biases, using layer-by-layer time multiplexing to increase effective depth while limiting implementation cost. Numerical experiments on image classification and natural language processing tasks show that TIDAL-Net improves performance with only minor modifications to conventional PNNs.