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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Mean-field BSDEs with non-Lipschitz coefficients and double mean reflections

arXiv:2510.11228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The present paper is devoted to the study of mean-field backward stochastic differential equations (MFBSDEs) with double mean reflections whose generators are not Lipschitz continuous. With the help of the Skorokhod problem and some a priori estimates for MFBSDEs, we establish the existence and uniqueness results for doubly mean reflected MFBSDEs.

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

Comparative Performance Analysis of NIST PQC Standards: From STM32 Software Limitations to FPGA-SoC Acceleration

arXiv:2606.15744v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a significant threat to classical public-key cryptographic systems, necessitating the transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). This study investigates the implementation challenges of NISTstandardized signature schemes on resource-constrained embedded hardware. We present a comparative analysis of SPHINCS+ and CRYSTALS-Dilithium on an ARM Cortex-M4 (STM32F407G) microcontroller. Our findings reveal that SPHINCS+ is practically unusable in this software-only environment, with impractical execution times. Furthermore, the reference Dilithium implementation failed to execute entirely on the MCU due to severe RAM and timing constraints. To overcome these hardware limitations, we integrated a hardware-accelerated Dilithium core onto a Xilinx Zynq-7000 ZedBoard SoC. By implementing a specialized Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) accelerator in the FPGA fabric, we achieved successful execution with performance rates for key generation and signature generation at millisecond levels. These results demonstrate that while pure software PQC is non-viable for standard microcontrollers, a hardware-software codesign approach provides the necessary efficiency for quantumresistant embedded systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

UniDDT: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Decoupled Diffusion Transformer

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have emerged as a critical direction for general-purpose multimodal intelligence, integrating understanding and generation into a single framework. However, existing UMMs face prominent challenges: (1) the inherent learning conflicts between visual understanding and generation tasks, leading to suboptimal modeling in both tasks; (2) different understanding and generation visual spaces impeding scalability; (3) over-reliance on task-specific data that neglects the duality of text-image understanding and generation. To address these challenges, we propose UniDDT, which leverages a Noisy ViT encoder along with an LLM to unify semantic encoding for visual generation and understanding tasks, while employing a separate diffusion decoder to decouple diffusion decoding from text decoding. With this Noisy ViT encoder, UniDDT is able to leverage the latent space as a unified visual representation, enabling seamless compatibility between understanding and generation tasks. Thus, the scalability within the generation tasks and the semantic expressiveness within understanding tasks can be balanced. Also, we construct dual data structures from the same image-text pairs, fostering interdependence between the generation and understanding data to exploit their inherent duality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniDDT achieves effective unification of multimodal understanding and generation with enhanced semantic consistency and scalability. For visual generation tasks, our UniDDT achieves 0.87 GenEval score and 86.9 DPG overall score. For multimodal understanding tasks, our UniDDT achieves 1699.5 score on MME benchmark and 76.5 overall score on SEEDbench.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Bridging Day and Night: Unsupervised Cross-Domain Re-Identification with Synergistic Prompt and Prototype Learning

Cross-domain day-night re-identification (ReID) is fundamentally challenged by the substantial visual appearance discrepancies between daytime and nighttime scenes. Existing fully supervised methods rely heavily on labor-intensive annotations, which are costly and exhibit limited generalization across domains. In this work, we investigate unsupervised day-night ReID and propose a novel framework that synergistically combines prompt learning and prototype-based representation learning to associate identities across domains without requiring manual labels. Our approach follows a progressive two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, we exploit the vision-language model to generate instance-specific textual prompts in an annotation-free manner. We employ an instance-level alignment mechanism to embed visual features and textual prompts into a unified semantic space, aligning unlabeled day/night images with learnable prompts via instance-aware dynamic-bias adaptation. In the second stage, we construct domain-specific prototype memory banks and introduce two complementary modules: i) an intra-domain identity association module to enhance feature discriminability within each domain, and ii) a cross-domain prototype matching module to reliably identify positive and negative prototype pairs, thereby establishing robust identity correspondences across day and night. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method. Under the unsupervised setting, our framework attains Rank-1 accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art fully supervised methods.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Daily briefing: Iron-Age human bones were made into tools before interment

作者:

Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools. Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools.

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

Acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable governing lung-nodule AI: kernel-driven measurement instability and noise-driven detection fragility, invisible to DICOM metadata

AI governance for medical imaging is formalizing: the 2026 ACR-SIIM Practice Parameter recommends local acceptance testing and ongoing drift monitoring, and the ACR Assess-AI registry monitors AI outputs using DICOM metadata for context. We argue that a necessary, currently unmonitored layer sits beneath output metrics: whether incoming studies remain within the acquisition envelope a model was validated on. Using a LUNA16-trained MONAI RetinaNet lung-nodule detector, we test whether acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable. On real paired CT differing only in reconstruction kernel (NLST B30f vs B80f), kernel alone shifted AI-measured diameter and flipped a Fleischner size category in 5.2% (8 of 155) of nodules at fixed patient and acquisition, while detection confidence was unchanged (Wilcoxon p=0.22). Under controlled LIDC-IDRI perturbations the effects dissociated by axis: the noise axis degraded detection confidence (p=5.9e-32, concentrated in nodules under 6 mm) but not measurement, while the frequency/kernel axis corrupted measurement (p=8.6e-13) but not detection. A 4-feature pixel fingerprint recovered reconstruction identity (patient-level AUC about 0.95 on real CT, 0.995 on a QIBA phantom) where the ConvolutionKernel DICOM tag was uninformative (identical labels across reconstructions). The kernel axis transported across four manufacturers (leave-one-vendor-out AUC 0.94-0.98, matching the within-vendor ceiling). Acquisition state thus maps to distinct AI failure modes, frequency content to measurement reliability and noise to detection sensitivity, and is not recoverable from metadata. Acquisition-aware, input-side validation is the missing layer for the acceptance-testing and drift-monitoring requirements now entering imaging-AI accreditation.

07.
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.

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

SCOPE-FL: A Strategy-proof Chain-based Optimal pareto efficient Federated Learning System

arXiv:2606.18384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) enables scalable collaborative model training across distributed devices while preserving data privacy. However, existing HFL client selection mechanisms suffer from a fundamental strategic inefficiency. By prioritizing stability over Pareto efficiency (PE), they produce suboptimal resource allocations, and without strategy proofness (SP), participants are incentivized to misrepresent their true preferences, both failures degrading system overall welfare in the Pareto sense in practice. To address it, we propose SCOPE-FL (Strategy-proof Chain-based Optimal pareto efficient Federated Learning), a synchronous HFL framework that formulates client selection as a two-sided school choice problem solved through the Top Trading Cycle (TTC) algorithm that simultaneously guarantees PE and SP. For reward distribution, SCOPE-FL employs a scalable Shapley value approximation based on One-Round Reconstruction (OR), ensuring compensation proportional to each client's contribution. The entire mechanism executes via blockchain smart contracts, providing the tamper-proof environment required for the SP guarantees to hold in practice. A comprehensive evaluation on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 demonstrates that SCOPE-FL outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, including DA, IAS, and other methods across model accuracy, convergence rate, and reward efficiency, while achieving communication latency comparable to DA and blockchain overhead significantly lower than DA at scale.

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

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.

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

daVinci-kernel: Co-Evolving Skill Selection, Summarization, and Utilization via RL for GPU Kernel Optimization

GPU kernel optimization represents a paradigm where functional correctness is assumed and execution efficiency is the objective. We present daVinci-kernel, a reinforcement learning framework that couples skill discovery with skill exploitation through a dynamically evolving skill library. daVinci-kernel jointly trains three agents sharing one LLM backbone: a Skill Selection Agent that retrieves relevant techniques via BM25 and LLM reranking, a Policy Agent that generates multi-turn CUDA/Triton kernels conditioned on selected skills, and a Skill Summary Agent that distills successful rollouts into reusable skills. Candidate skills are added only after execution-based verification confirms reproducible speedups. All three agents share a single LLM backbone, are initialized via a structured SFT cold start on diversity-filtered data, and are then jointly optimized end-to-end with multi-turn REINFORCE and per-agent advantage estimation. On KernelBench, daVinci-kernel-14B achieves 37.2%, 70.6%, and 32.2% on Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 under the Fast$_1$ threshold, outperforming the strongest prior RL-trained model, Dr.Kernel-14B.

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

Think Less, Act Early: Reinforced Latent Reasoning with Early Exit in Vision-Language-Action Models

Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to bridge perception and action. While effective, this paradigm suffers from high computational costs and error propagation in multi-step tasks. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Variable Alignment VLA (AVA-VLA), a novel Latent Reasoning VLA framework that models reasoning as a sequence of unobservable latent variables, bypassing the need for explicit text generation. However, latent trajectories are inherently susceptible to noise interference and misalignment with downstream objectives. To address this, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning-based Denoising mechanism that treats latent state generation as a sequential decision process, optimizing reasoning trajectories via task-level rewards. Furthermore, we incorporate an Early-Exit Strategy that adaptively terminates reasoning based on state confidence, enabling a dynamic trade-off between depth and efficiency. Extensive experiments on embodied decision benchmarks demonstrate that AVA-VLA achieves a 6x inference speedup over explicit CoT methods while attaining a 98.3% average success rate on LIBERO, improving both efficiency and long-horizon stability over full-reasoning baselines.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Evaluation of EEG Foundation Models for Event-Based Burst-Suppression Detection in ICU

arXiv:2606.20074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Burst suppression (BS) is a clinically relevant electroencephalographic (EEG) pattern used to monitor sedation depth and brain activity in critically ill patients, particularly during induced coma in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Automatic burst detection remains challenging because BS patterns vary substantially between patients and annotated datasets are scarce. Recently, EEG Foundation Models (FMs) have shown promise across several downstream EEG applications, but their usefulness for BS detection remains unexplored. We present the first study to evaluate EEG FMs for burst detection in reduced-montage ICU EEG without patient-specific calibration. We compare REVE-base, LUNA-large and LuMamba-Tiny with an adaptive thresholding baseline and a task-specific EEGNet baseline. Additionally, we complement conventional EEG window-based classification with event-based burst detection evaluation. This helps assessing clinically whether burst episodes are correctly detected, reducing the impact of expected annotation variability. The best model, REVE-base, achieved the highest event-based F1-score ($0.868 \pm 0.167$) and reduced burst-per-minute error by 52.1% and 36.2% compared to EEGNet and adaptive thresholding respectively, supporting FMs for scalable EEG monitoring in ICU. Ablation experiments showed that full fine-tuning was the most effective adaptation strategy with respect to frozen-backbone training, two-step fine-tuning, and LoRA-based adaptation, improving event-based F1-score over frozen-backbone training by up to $+0.102$ for LUNA-large. With reduced labeled datasets, pretrained REVE-base outperformed random initialization by $+0.723$ event-based F1 points at 25% of the cohort, demonstrating the benefit of pretraining FM representations when adapted to burst detection with limited labeled data.

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

A graph neural network surrogate model for mesh-based crashworthiness prediction of vehicle panel components

arXiv:2503.17386v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Crashworthiness is a key performance measure in the design of safety-critical vehicle panel components such as B-pillars. Finite element (FE) simulations are widely used to evaluate crash responses but remain computationally expensive for large-scale, nonlinear impact scenarios, particularly when integrated into iterative design and optimisation processes. Although machine learning-based surrogate models have been developed for rapid crashworthiness analysis, they exhibit limitations in detailed representation of complex 3-dimensional components. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising solution for processing data with complex structures. However, existing GNN models often lack sufficient accuracy and computational efficiency to meet industrial demands. This paper proposes Recurrent Graph U-Net (ReGUNet), a graph-based surrogate model for crashworthiness analysis of vehicle panel components. By representing FE meshes in graph form, the model naturally accommodates complex irregular structural geometries. Its hierarchical architecture improves computational efficiency and accuracy, while the introduction of recurrence enhances stability of temporal predictions over multiple time steps. A side-impact case study of hot-stamped steel B-pillars with varying geometries is used to generate training dataset. The trained model demonstrates high accuracy in predicting the dynamic deformation behaviour and crashworthiness indicators of previously unseen component designs. ReGUNet achieves over a 52% reduction in the average deformation prediction error relative to baseline methods, together with markedly improved computational efficiency. ReGUNet provides rapid and reliable crashworthiness assessments, which in turn accelerates the design cycle of vehicle panel components.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Understanding LLMs in Title-Abstract Screening: From Disagreements to Recommendations

arXiv:2606.17588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several studies have examined the use of large language models (LLMs) for title-abstract screening in systematic reviews (SRs), reporting mixed accuracy. However, questions of reliability remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we go beyond quantitative LLM-human agreement metrics and qualitatively investigate how and why LLMs fail. We also propose actionable recommendations. We analyzed disagreements between LLMs and researchers across six software engineering SRs and over 1,000 primary study papers. For each SR, papers were screened independently by human experts and LLMs in zero-shot mode, resulting in Kappa values ranging from 0.52 to 0.77. Qualitative analysis suggests that human-LLM disagreement results from recurring, identifiable causes, such as boundary ambiguity in key terms, keyword overemphasization, and incorrect topic inference. Based on these findings, we propose recommendations such as validating semantic understanding before deployment, running multiple LLMs, and focusing validation efforts on borderline cases. Future studies are needed to validate the impact of our recommendations, and community efforts are needed to develop normative guidelines on LLM usage in SRs.

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

Cross-lingual Embedding Clustering for Hierarchical Softmax in Low-Resource Multilingual Speech Recognition

We present a novel approach centered on the decoding stage of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) that enhances multilingual performance, especially for low-resource languages. It utilizes a cross-lingual embedding clustering method to construct a hierarchical Softmax (H-Softmax) decoder, which enables similar tokens across different languages to share similar decoder representations. It addresses the limitations of the previous Huffman-based H-Softmax method, which relied on shallow features in token similarity assessments. Through experiments on a downsampled dataset of 15 languages, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving low-resource multilingual ASR accuracy.

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

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

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

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

PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a prosody-to-language translation mechanism to stabilize large language model reasoning and enables on-demand invocation of external knowledge tools for empathetic dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PRISM achieves consistent improvements in empathy, prosodic appropriateness, and text response generation quality across objective and subjective metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Bxzfrm/PRISM.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

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

Performance Gap Analysis between Latin and Arabic Scripts HTR

Recent studies have shown that handwritten text recognition (HTR) systems perform worse on Arabic-script datasets than on Latin-script data. However, the reasons for this gap are still not well understood due to the lack of controlled comparisons. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of Arabic and Latin scripts HTR using a unified CRNN model for line-level HTR across nine datasets (including KHATT (Arabic), Muharaf (Arabic), NUST-UHWR (Urdu), PHTD (Persian), IAM (English), READ-2016 (German), and others) and di ferent training sizes (K in {100, 500, 1000, 2000, ..., Kfull}). Our results show the performance gap remains: it is large in low-resource settings, decreases with more data, but remains even at full scale, with a consistent difference of 5-7 CER points. We show that annotation quality matters, as many datasets contain labeling errors. Cleaning reduces error rates and narrows the gap, but does not eliminate it. In addition, we find that a fixed number of training samples provides less effective coverage in Arabic due to higher visual variability, requiring more data to learn similar representations. We compare recognition across datasets in terms of the number of text lines and the number of characters, showing an equivalence trade-off. We compare character frequency distributions across scripts and show that Arabic is significantly more heavy-tailed than Latin. Our error analysis reveals that around 30 percent of substitution errors in Arabic datasets (e.g., KHATT) are caused by confusion between visually similar characters, compared to about 15 percent in Latin-script datasets such as IAM.

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

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

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

The Impossibility of Eliciting Latent Knowledge

arXiv:2606.12268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced AI systems have extensive knowledge of their environments; in fact, their knowledge may (far) exceed that of their developers or users. Consequently, a desirable property for an AI system is that it is honest – that it accurately reports its beliefs about the world. Designing an AI system to be honest may be difficult, especially if we want to ask it questions about latent variables in the environment – variables which are hidden from the human interacting with it. This gives rise to the problem of eliciting latent knowledge (ELK): the problem of training an AI agent to honestly report its beliefs. In this paper, we make ELK formally precise using Causal Influence Diagrams (CIDs). CIDs can be used to describe the relationship between an agent's training environment and its subjective representation of the world. We use CIDs to formalise the distinction between observable and latent variables, to specify what exactly it means for an agent to be honest, and to formally define goal misgeneralisation. We show that, under certain circumstances, developers can incentivise an agent to honestly answer questions by providing correct feedback during training. However, a natural, but undesirable, way for an agent to generalise is to provide answers which humans would evaluate as true, rather than honest answers. We prove an impossibility theorem stating: There is no feedback-based training strategy that depends only on agent behaviour and with certainty produces an honest agent, even if feedback is perfect during training.

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

LLM-WikiRace Benchmark: How Far Can LLMs Plan over Real-World Knowledge Graphs?

arXiv:2602.16902v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce LLM-Wikirace, a benchmark for evaluating planning, reasoning, and world knowledge in large language models (LLMs). In LLM-Wikirace, models must efficiently navigate Wikipedia hyperlinks step by step to reach a target page from a given source, requiring look-ahead planning and the ability to reason about how concepts are connected in the real world. We evaluate a broad set of open- and closed-source models, including Gemini-3, GPT-5, and Claude Opus 4.5, which achieve the strongest results on the easy level of the task and demonstrate superhuman performance. Despite this, performance drops sharply on hard difficulty: the best-performing model, Gemini-3, succeeds in only 23\% of hard games, highlighting substantial remaining challenges for frontier models. Our analysis shows that world knowledge is a necessary ingredient for success, but only up to a point, beyond this threshold, planning and long-horizon reasoning capabilities become the dominant factors. Trajectory-level analysis further reveals that even the strongest models struggle to replan after failure, frequently entering loops rather than recovering. LLM-Wikirace is a simple benchmark that reveals clear limitations in current reasoning systems, offering an open arena where planning-capable LLMs still have much to prove. Our code and leaderboard available at https:/llmwikirace.github.io.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Recovering Stranded Discrimination in Knowledge Tracing: Per-Item Bias Correction via Empirical-Bayes Shrinkage

arXiv:2606.14123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deployed knowledge-tracing models are typically frozen after training, yet systematic per-item logit bias arises, from limited per-item expressivity in backbone architectures and from post-deployment shifts in item properties, degrading prediction quality. Global post-hoc calibrators such as Platt scaling, temperature scaling, and isotonic regression improve probability estimates but leave discriminative ability, as measured by AUC, unchanged. This AUC invariance is a structural consequence of monotone score-only transforms; recovering the stranded discrimination requires conditioning on item identity. We propose SLC (State-space Logit Correction), which converts binary observations to Gaussian pseudo-observations via Laplace/IRLS, applies empirical-Bayes shrinkage through a Kalman smoother, and fits an offset-Platt link. The state-space formulation also yields a detectability bound that characterizes the Bernoulli information floor, explaining why temporal tracking provides no benefit at current data densities. Across four datasets, five backbones, and three seeds, SLC improves AUC on all four datasets and NLL on three, with the advantage concentrating on sparse items. Cross-domain controls suggest that the same phenomenon can arise beyond education when the deployed backbone leaves entity-level bias.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Kareus: Joint Reduction of Dynamic and Static Energy in Large Model Training

arXiv:2601.17654v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The computing demand of AI is growing at an unprecedented rate, but energy supply is not keeping pace. As a result, energy has become an expensive and contended resource that requires explicit management and optimization. Although recent works have made significant progress in large model training optimization, they focus on optimizing either dynamic or static energy consumption. We find that fine-grained kernel scheduling and frequency scaling jointly and interdependently impact both dynamic and static energy consumption. Based on this finding, we design Kareus, a training system that pushes the time-energy tradeoff frontier by optimizing both aspects. Kareus decomposes the intractable joint optimization problem into local, partition-based subproblems. It then uses a multi-pass multi-objective optimization algorithm to find execution schedules that push the time-energy tradeoff frontier. Compared to the state of the art, Kareus reduces training energy by up to 28.3% at the same training time, or reduces training time by up to 27.5% at the same energy consumption.