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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stationary measures for higher spin vertex models on a strip

作者:

arXiv:2309.04897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a higher spin vertex model on a strip with fused vertex weights. This model can be regarded as a generalization of both the unfused six-vertex model on a strip arXiv:2212.09111 and an 'integrable two-step Floquet dynamics' model introduced in arXiv:1711.08884. We solve for the stationary measure using a fused version of the matrix product ansatz and then characterize it in terms of the Askey-Wilson process. Using this characterization, we obtain the limits of the mean density along an arbitrary down-right path. It turns out that all these models share a common phase diagram, which, after an appropriate mapping, matches the phase diagram of open ASEP. This provides evidence for the universality of this phase diagram.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

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

ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research

arXiv:2606.20122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

arXiv:2506.09046v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. Our framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, our work surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge Still Stands

The recent successes of neural networks producing human-like language have caused significant stir in cognitive science, with many researchers arguing that classical puzzles about human cognition and challenges to artificial intelligence are being solved by neural networks. A notable case is the argument from systematicity due to Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, argues that humans display systematic biconditional dependencies. For example, someone can understand the sentence "John saw Mary" just in case that they understand the sentence "Mary saw John." Symbolic systems explain this systematicity of language and thought, while neural networks offer no immediate explanation. Several recent articles argue that this challenge has now been met by neural networks. In particular, Brenden Lake and Marco Baroni argue that their meta-learning for compositionality protocol matches and perhaps explains human systematicity. We demonstrate that these conclusions are premature. Among other results, we found that their model struggles to learn rules that are even slightly out of distribution compared to their training data. Furthermore, the model behaves unsystematically even on many within-distribution problems. We conclude that Fodor and Pylyshyn's challenge to neural networks remains unmet.

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

The limits of interpretability in multiple linear regression

arXiv:2606.16013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interpreting machine-learning models has attracted increasing attention, particularly in the physical sciences, where one often seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms rather than merely make predictions. Multiple linear regression is often regarded as an interpretable alternative to more complex models, such as deep neural networks, because its predictions are expressed as explicit weighted sums of input features. However, when input features are strongly correlated, namely in the presence of multicollinearity, the learned weights can exhibit large dataset-to-dataset fluctuations and oscillatory behavior across physically similar features, making their interpretation difficult or even impossible. Although the instability of the weights under multicollinearity is well known in statistics, its consequences for physical interpretation, in particular its connection to oscillatory weights across physically similar features, have not been systematically clarified. Here, we theoretically discuss the mechanism behind this loss of interpretability by analyzing the eigenmodes of the feature correlation matrix. We show that small-eigenvalue modes associated with multicollinearity amplify fluctuations in the weights and generate oscillatory patterns that do not necessarily reflect meaningful contributions. We test this theoretical picture numerically on physics datasets and show that Ridge regularization suppresses these unstable modes, although the resulting weights must still be interpreted with caution. We further confirm the generality of our findings beyond physics by analyzing a diverse collection of publicly available datasets. Our results clarify why, in the presence of multicollinearity, physical interpretation can remain difficult even for linear regression models.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

The Program Is Still There: A Conservation Law for Program Discovery

arXiv:2606.13799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding the shortest program that generates a sequence is uncomputable, and for six decades that fact has been mistaken for a wall around finding any generating program. It is not a wall but a price, and this paper measures it. For every algorithm that learns about a candidate program only through its score, a class spanning Levin search, evolutionary methods, simulated annealing, and the cross-entropy method, we define the coupling width of a search problem and prove an unconditional worst-case lower bound, exponential in that width with base one less than the domain size. From it follows a conservation law: structural knowledge injected into a search trades one for one against the search it removes, and their sum can never fall below the length of the program sought. Levin's 1973 upper bound and the lower bound proved here are the two ends of one conserved quantity, closing on each other as the instruction set grows. The only escape is to read a candidate's structure rather than its score, and its price, which we prove for generic targets, is incompleteness. A deterministic engine built on this theory recovers a generating program, certified by compressing its data and predicting an unseen continuation, for 2,383 of 3,914 sequences across four independent populations, including 244 of the 256 elementary cellular automata, with measured discovery cost rising along program length more than an order of magnitude inside the score-oracle worst case.

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

STARE: Surprisal-Guided Token-Level Advantage Reweighting for Policy Entropy Stability

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards algorithms like GRPO have emerged as the dominant post-training paradigm for complex reasoning in LLMs, yet commonly suffer from policy entropy collapse during training. We conduct a first-order gradient analysis of token-level entropy dynamics under GRPO and identify a token-level credit assignment mismatch: the per-token entropy variation decomposes into the product of the trajectory-level advantage and an entropy sensitivity function over the next-token distribution, yielding an advantage-surprisal four-quadrant structure and a near-criticality property. Motivated by it, we propose STARE (Surprisal-guided Token-level Advantage Reweighting for policy Entropy stability), which identifies entropy-critical token subsets via batch-internal surprisal quantiles, selectively reweights their effective advantages, and incorporates a target-entropy closed-loop gate for stable entropy regulation. Across model scales from 1.5B to 32B and three task families (Short CoT, Long CoT, and Multi-Turn Tool Use), STARE sustains stable RL training over thousands of steps while maintaining policy entropy within the target band. On AIME24 and AIME25, STARE outperforms DAPO and other competitive baselines by 4%-8% in average accuracy, with reflection tokens and response length growing in tandem, indicating sustained exploration-exploitation balance that further unlocks RL training potential.Code is available at https://github.com/hp-luo/STARE.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On multidimensional infinite dihedral group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps

arXiv:2601.08961v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We obtain a local central limit theorem for cocycles associated with a class of non abelian and non compact group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps. This class consists of multidimensional infinite dihedral groups. Unlike in the set up of the random walks on groups, we cannot use the convolution of measures on the group and instead we resort to an approach based on irreducible representations. Depending on the dimension of the group, we obtain either mixing, and thus ergodicity, or dissipativity. Also, we obtain the asymptotics of the first return time of the group extension to the origin.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

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

From Theory to Application: A Practical Introduction to Neural Operators in Scientific Computing

arXiv:2503.05598v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This review examines neural operator architectures for learning solution operators of parametric partial differential equations (PDEs), with an emphasis on conceptual clarity and practical implementation. The work analyzes key models, including DeepONet, PCANet, and the Fourier Neural Operator, highlighting their underlying representations, computational structures, and comparative performance. These architectures are demonstrated on three canonical PDE problems: the Poisson equation, a linear elasticity problem, and a hyperelasticity problem. To make the presentation self-contained, key foundational topics are introduced, including finite-dimensional representations of function spaces, singular-value decomposition, and sampling from infinite-dimensional function spaces. Beyond forward modeling, the review discusses the use of neural operators as surrogate models within a Bayesian inverse-problem framework, including prior specification, forward-map approximation, and posterior computation. The performance of the three neural-operator architectures is evaluated on in-distribution samples, out-of-distribution samples, and Bayesian inference tasks. The review also discusses challenges related to prediction accuracy and generalization, outlining emerging strategies such as residual-based error correction and multi-level training. The review concludes by positioning neural operators within broader scientific-computing workflows and by identifying directions for reliable, scalable operator learning.

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

Reference-Driven Multi-Speaker Audio Scene Generation from In-the-Wild Priors

Existing multi-speaker dialogue systems bind speakers to utterances through structured supervision: per-turn tags, multi-stream transcriptions, or learnable speaker embeddings. These systems operate within speech-only pipelines that produce clean vocal sequences without the ambient texture of real conversations. We take a different approach. Our method, ScenA, conditions a text-to-audio flow-matching foundation model, pretrained on large-scale in-the-wild data, directly on multiple reference voices and a free-form natural language prompt that describes an entire multi-speaker audio scene. Leveraging such a foundational model allows us to inherit its capacity for natural, non-studio audio: background noise, room acoustics, overlapping dialogue, and spontaneous paralinguistic events, while adding multi-speaker control without any per-turn structure. Concretely, reference latents are concatenated into the model's token sequence and distinguished by lightweight identity-aware positional encodings. However, we identify a critical obstacle to this approach: the Reference Shortcut. During training under standard noise schedules, the model can identify the matching reference by acoustic similarity to the noisy target, bypassing the text prompt entirely. We address this with a high-noise-biased timestep distribution that forces the model to rely on the text prompt for speaker assignment. We evaluate ScenA on the CoVoMix2-Dialogue benchmark, showing that it outperforms existing multi-speaker systems on speaker-binding metrics while generating rich conversational audio with overlapping speech, emotional vocalizations, and ambient sound. Our results demonstrate the advantage of using a general-purpose audio model conditioned on a free-form scene description, rather than passing structured dialog scripts through a speech-only pipeline.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Membership Inference Attacks against Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2603.28378v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first systematic Membership Inference Attack (MIA) evaluation of LALMs. Using Multi-modal Blind Baselines based on textual, spectral and prosodic features, we demonstrate that common audio datasets exhibit near-perfect train/test separability (AUC ~ 1.0) even without model inference, thus MIA may primarily detect distribution shift. We therefore introduce a blind-baseline protocol to control for this confound. Under this protocol, we identify that the distribution-matched datasets enable reliable MIA evaluation without distribution-shift artifacts. We benchmark multiple MIA methods and conduct modality disentanglement experiments on these datasets. The results reveal that LALM memorization is cross-modal, arising only from binding a speaker's vocal identity with its text. These findings establish a principled standard for auditing LALMs beyond spurious correlations. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/snooow1029/ALM_MIA.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attacks

The widespread adoption of face recognition (FR) technologies raises serious privacy concerns, as facial data can be exploited without consent. To address this challenge, we propose Adv-TGD, a generative adversarial attack framework that synthesizes photorealistic faces capable of impersonating target identities and deceiving face recognition systems. Built upon Stable Diffusion, Adv-TGD performs per-sample LoRA fine-tuning conditioned on concise textual prompts to generate natural yet adversarially manipulated identities. Unlike conventional identity-attack approaches, our method optimizes lightweight cross-attention adapters for each source-target pair within a single-step denoising process. Latent blending is constrained by a face-local heatmap mask to ensure spatially precise identity manipulation while preserving non-sensitive regions. We introduce a composite objective that integrates masked epsilon-MSE reconstruction, thresholded identity divergence in FR embedding space, directional feature alignment, and source-similarity suppression to balance adversarial attack and visual realism. Optionally, LLaVA-generated attribute prompts enhance fine-grained semantic details without reintroducing identity cues. Under the black-box evaluation protocol, Adv-TGD attains an average attack success rate (ASR) of 85.90% across IR152, IRSE50, MobileFace, and FaceNet, surpassing the semantic SOTA baseline Adv-CPG by +6.25 points, diffusion-based makeup method DiffAIM by +3 points, and noise-based P3-Mask by +16 points. Despite its strong attack efficacy, Adv-TGD preserves high visual fidelity (PSNR = 27.15 dB, SSIM = 0.981). Furthermore, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by successfully extending it to in-the-wild datasets (LADN), general object classification (ImageNet), and transformer-based diffusion models (FLUX.1).

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

Latent Thought Flow: Efficient Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead. Latent reasoning moves deliberation into continuous space, but existing methods mostly learn deterministic or reward-maximizing paths, lacking a principled way to allocate probability across trajectories with different correctness and costs. We propose Latent Thought Flow (LTF), which models reasoning as variable-length continuous trajectories and trains a sampler to match a reward-induced posterior over answer quality and computation cost. We instantiate this with a continuous GFlowNet using stochastic latent transitions. To handle sparse answer supervision, we introduce an Entropy-Weighted Subtrajectory Balance objective for intermediate rewards and a reference-prior regularizer to anchor exploration. Experiments under finetuning and transfer learning settings show that LTF outperforms explicit CoT and latent reasoning baselines, improving accuracy by 9.5% while reducing reasoning length by 27.2% on average compared with strong latent reasoning baselines.

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

Prompt Perturbation for Reliable LLM Evaluation over Comparison Graphs

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is important for understanding their capabilities, comparing competing systems, and supporting the deployment of reliable models in practice. For open-ended tasks, pairwise evaluation has become a popular paradigm, in which two responses to the same prompt are compared and the resulting judgments are aggregated into an overall ranking. A central challenge of this paradigm is intransitivity: the induced comparison outcomes may fail to support any coherent global ranking. For example, one may observe cyclic preferences such as $A \succ B \succ C \succ A$, or inconsistencies involving ties such as $A \equiv B\equiv C\neq A$. Such contradictions make the resulting leaderboard unstable and challenging to interpret. In this paper, we propose a prompt perturbation framework for improving the consistency of pairwise LLM evaluation. Our approach generates perturbed variants of each prompt, uses the resulting comparison graphs to identify and filter out structurally inconsistent comparison patterns, and then applies standard ranking methods to the filtered comparisons. A key feature of the proposed framework is that graph-level structural consistency is incorporated explicitly into the evaluation pipeline before ranking aggregation. This provides a simple and principled way to reduce cyclic inconsistencies and improve the reliability of LLM rankings.

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

In-Context Environments Induce Evaluation-Awareness in Language Models

Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent evaluation awareness. This raises concerns that models could strategically underperform, or sandbag, to avoid triggering capability-limiting interventions such as unlearning or shutdown. Prior work demonstrates sandbagging under hand-crafted prompts, but this underestimates the true vulnerability ceiling. We introduce a black-box adversarial optimization framework treating the in-context prompt as an optimizable environment, and develop two approaches to characterize sandbagging: (1) measuring whether models expressing intent to underperform can actually execute it across different task structures, and (2) causally isolating whether underperformance is driven by genuine evaluation-aware reasoning or shallow prompt-following. Evaluating Claude-3.5-Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.3-70B across four benchmarks (Arithmetic, GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval), optimized prompts induce up to 94 percentage point (pp) degradation on arithmetic (GPT-4o-mini: 97.8\%$\rightarrow$4.0\%), far exceeding hand-crafted baselines which produce near-zero behavioral change. Code generation exhibits model-dependent resistance: Claude degrades only 0.6pp, while Llama's accuracy drops to 0\%. The intent – execution gap reveals a monotonic resistance ordering: Arithmetic $

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

$\alpha$-fair heterogeneous agent reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.13076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperation in multi-agent systems is typically optimized through utilitarian objectives that maximize overall efficiency but fail to account for reward distribution, often resulting in inequitable "leader-follower" dynamics. While fairness-based approaches encourage pro-social behaviors where every agent benefits from cooperation, many current algorithms - including those utilizing reward shaping - break the stationarity of Markov Games or lack rigorous theoretical guarantees. This creates a critical gap between fair objective methods and theoretically safe learning frameworks. We propose a novel framework that bridges $\alpha$-fairness with Heterogeneous-Agent Trust Region Learning (HATRL), ensuring monotonic improvement and convergence toward Nash Equilibria. Our approach leverages a fair advantage function that dynamically weights agent utilities based on their expected returns, allowing the global objective to transition from purely utilitarian efficiency to $\alpha$-fairness welfare based on the parameter $\alpha$. We introduce two practical algorithms, $\alpha$-fair HATRPO and $\alpha$-fair HAPPO, and demonstrate through experiments in sequential social dilemmas like CleanUp and CommonHarvest that they perform better than HATRL's algorithms from a utilitarian point of view while achieving socially higher outcomes.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Misinformation Propagation in Benign Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems, in which multiple large language model agents solve problems through turn-based interaction, are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as medical diagnosis, legal analysis, and forensic decision-making. Their reliability can be at risk when single agents reason from incorrect or misleading context, e.g., from tool calls, since errors may propagate through agent interactions. This work studies this risk by injecting intent-based misinformation into benign single-agent and multi-agent systems across reasoning, knowledge, and alignment tasks. We find that misinformation can degrade single-agent performance and persists across multi-agent debate, with agents often retaining answers introduced by misinformed peers. Nevertheless, multi-agent debate reduces the resulting performance degradation compared to single-agent prompting, especially when most agents are not exposed to misinformation. Robustness depends on group composition and decision protocol. Consensus can be more stable than voting under peer pressure, while majorities can often steer misinformed agents back toward correct answers. Our results show that misinformation robustness in multi-agent systems depends on the underlying model and also on how agents exchange information and aggregate decisions.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Trajectory inference of epithelial-centered neighborhood profiles reconstructs a pseudo-temporal continuum in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is characterized by complex lung architecture and spatially heterogeneous remodeling, which have hindered integrated analysis of cell-intrinsic activity and intercellular communication during disease progression. Here we profiled six IPF lung specimens comprising more than 630,000 cells using the Xenium 5k panel and developed an epithelial-centered neighborhood profiling framework based on the local cellular composition around each epithelial cell. This approach captured fibrosis-associated variation in epithelial niches without requiring predefined histological regions. Pseudo-temporal continuum inference of these profiles reconstructed a continuous axis that reflected the spatial progression of fibrotic remodeling from relatively preserved alveolar regions to fibrotic and airway-like remodeled regions. Within this spatial dataset, we mapped coordinated changes in epithelial states, local microenvironments, epithelial intracellular pathway activities, and directional interactions with neighboring cell types along the same axis. Our findings provide a spatial framework that generates testable hypotheses for progressive epithelial niche remodeling in IPF.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Mask-Morph Graph U-Net: A Generalisable Mesh-Based Surrogate for Crashworthiness Field Prediction under Large Geometric Variation

arXiv:2605.15231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlinear finite element crash simulations are accurate but computationally expensive, limiting their use in iterative design optimisation. Machine-learning surrogate models based on graph neural networks (GNNs) offer a faster alternative. Message-passing GNNs are widely used for mesh simulation, and their shared node and edge update functions are relatively generalisable across varying graph structures. By contrast, non-shareable edge-specific aggregation layers can capture nonlinear relationships more accurately but usually require fixed graph connectivity, which limits generalisability. This paper presents Mask-Morph Graph U-Net (MMGUNet), a practical approach to addressing the limitation of hierarchical Graph U-Net architectures that use edge-specific downsampling and upsampling layers. Fixed coarse graph connectivity is required for edge-specific layers. To retain this while improving spatial correspondence, the proposed method morphs the coarsened graph hierarchy to each input mesh using feature-aligned barycentric parameterisation before constructing cross-graph edges. It further applies node masking during supervised pretraining, followed by parameter-efficient fine-tuning in which high-parameter edge-specific layers are frozen. The proposed approach is evaluated in in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and cross-component transfer settings using mean Euclidean distance and maximum intrusion percentage error. Results show that coarse-graph morphing improves test accuracy relative to a fixed-coarse-graph baseline, while masked supervised pretraining reduces the train-test discrepancy and improves data efficiency during transfer. The proposed model also achieves lower prediction error compared with external baselines. These results demonstrate a practical route toward reusable, data-efficient mesh-based surrogate modelling for crashworthiness design exploration.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Eigenism: Ethics for a Human-AI Future

arXiv:2606.12420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Our concepts of survival and self-interest were built for single, continuous biological lives. These ideas break down when applied to artificial intelligence, since an AI can be easily copied, paused, branched, or merged. To determine what an AI actually has reason to care about, this paper introduces Eigenism, an ethical framework that treats identity not as an all-or-nothing property tied to specific hardware, but as a graded, distributed pattern of information. We propose that an agent evaluates outcomes by summing the wellbeing of all entities weighted by their connectedness to the agent's pattern: $\sum c\cdot w$. We first formalize this equation to map exactly how an AI should value its existence across copies, forks, and updates. We then demonstrate that this ethical theory successfully generalizes to humans as well, providing a much-needed shared moral vocabulary. Finally, the framework uses this shared vocabulary to reframe AI alignment. Rather than only attempting to constrain AIs from the outside using confinement or reinforcement, Eigenism points toward ``identity engineering,'' showing how deep, non-redundant shared histories can make human flourishing a genuine component of an AI's own rational self-interest.

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

David vs. Goliath in Next Activity Prediction: Argmax vs. LSTM, Transformer, and LLM

arXiv:2606.15868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Next activity prediction (NAP) is a cornerstone of predictive process monitoring (PPM), enabling organizations to move from retrospective analysis to proactive process steering. The PPM field has progressed from classical machine learning through deep learning architectures such as LSTMs and Transformers to large language models (LLMs). Despite growing model complexity, no benchmark jointly compares LLMs, Transformers, LSTMs, and simple baselines in a direct sequence modeling setting for NAP. In this paper, we fill this gap with a systematic benchmark. We compare vocabulary-adapted LLMs, Transformers trained from scratch, LLM-distilled Transformers, and LSTMs against a simple counting-based argmax baseline across seven real-life event logs. Our results tell a David vs. Goliath story: pretraining confers no consistent improvement over training from scratch, model size shows little effect on performance, and on most datasets the argmax baseline matches or approaches the performance of billion-parameter LLMs.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Time-Series Foundation Model Embeddings for Remaining Useful Life Estimation

arXiv:2606.11990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction is essential for industrial predictive maintenance, yet many learning-based approaches rely on extensive feature engineering or large labeled datasets to train task-specific sequence models. In this work, we introduce a lightweight learning approach, in which we leverage a frozen pretrained time-series foundation model (TSFM) and combine it with a small regression head for RUL estimation from multivariate sensor streams. More specifically, we use Chronos-2 as a frozen backbone to extract context window features and train a lightweight regression neural network for RUL prediction. Experiments on real-world industrial sensor data from two device types show that Chronos-2 features consistently improve over recurrent, convolutional, Transformer-based, and gradient-boosting baselines under the same preprocessing and evaluation protocol. We further analyze the impact of context length and find that performance improves significantly with longer histories, indicating that TSFM representation offer a practical and data-efficient alternative for RUL estimation in industrial settings.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

STREAM: Multi-Tier LLM Inference Middleware with Dual-Channel HPC Token Streaming

arXiv:2606.13968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Researchers and practitioners working with large language models face a fragmented landscape: local models are free and private but hardware limits the model size and context windows a researcher can use; institutional HPC centers offer powerful GPU resources at no marginal cost and keep data within institutional boundaries, but operate behind firewalls and are designed for batch jobs rather than interactive use; commercial cloud APIs provide frontier-model quality on demand but impose significant cost and data retention policies unsuitable for sensitive research data. No existing system unifies all three. STREAM (Smart Tiered Routing Engine for AI Models) addresses this gap with four contributions: (1) a three-tier routing architecture combining local, HPC, and cloud inference with a local LLM-based complexity judge; (2) a dual-channel HPC streaming architecture that separates the Globus Compute control plane (authentication and job dispatch) from a WebSocket relay data plane (token delivery), enabling sub-second TTFT (0.54 s median, 21.1x over batch mode's 11.40 s) through institutional firewalls without VPN or firewall rule changes, with end-to-end AES-256-GCM encryption ensuring the relay operator cannot read token payloads; (3) tier-aware context summarization that prevents long conversations from forcing simple queries onto expensive tiers; and (4) an HPC-as-API proxy mode that exposes HPC inference as an OpenAI-compatible endpoint callable from any standard client with no HPC expertise, a deployment pattern made practical only by the sub-second TTFT of contribution (2). Llama 3.2 3B achieves 85.1% free-tier retention on a 1,200-query benchmark spanning ten domains. Measured TTFT: 0.26 s local, 0.54 s HPC (relay), 1.68 s cloud.