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.CV) 2026-06-15

StereoGeo: an end-to-end stereo camera calibration method

In this work, we propose StereoGeo, an end-to-end network-based approach for stereo camera calibration. Our method estimates the focal lengths and gravity directions of the left and right cameras, as well as the relative extrinsic transformation relating them. Existing methods often rely on calibration patterns in structured environments or address only a single camera configuration, being limited to either intrinsic or extrinsic estimation, and depending on a multi-view setups. StereoGeo extends the GeoCalib algorithm, integrating deep neural network feature extraction with a differentiable optimizer. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that StereoGeo achieves competitive performance for intrinsic calibration and provides accurate stereo extrinsic estimation, outperforming existing methods that are limited to monocular settings. The dataset used in this work is partially publicly available at https://github.com/meddourimane/StereoGeo-dataset.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Surflo: Consistent 3D Surface Flow Model with Global State

Geometry is invariant to viewpoint, which makes any collection of images a redundant encoding of a single 3D state. Existing feed-forward reconstruction models fail to exploit this: per-view methods emit overlapping, unaligned pointmaps that grow linearly with input count, while global-latent methods commit to a fixed, low-resolution output. We introduce Surflo, which compresses a variable number of unposed RGB views into K latent tokens-one global state-and decodes oriented 3D surface points by independently transporting them from noise onto the surface via flow matching. This frees the output from any fixed grid or token budget: the same latent yields from a few thousand to a million points in a single forward pass. To suppress the local inconsistencies inherent to independent per-point decoding, an inference-time guidance term correlates nearby points by injecting a photometric gradient during ODE integration. Surflo matches or surpasses feed-forward baselines on surface metrics, runs an order of magnitude faster than optimization-based methods that require hundreds of views, and is the only feed-forward approach to combine a global latent with arbitrary-resolution decoding.

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

Bayesian Optimization for Learning Nonlinear MPC in Autonomous Agent Navigation

arXiv:2606.14763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time autonomous navigation in dynamic, unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robotics. We propose a map-free framework that tightly integrates reactive rolling-horizon planning with nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). At each control cycle, a LiDAR-based Gaussian occupancy representation is constructed and used to generate collision-free trajectories via A* search, which are then tracked by a CasADi/IPOPT MPC formulation incorporating a smooth sigmoid obstacle barrier. To improve robustness to parameter sensitivity, we adopt an offline Bayesian optimization scheme based on Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE), which identifies near-optimal controller parameters with respect to a composite navigation objective. In addition, a Gaussian Process surrogate is used to analyze parameter sensitivity and provide insight into the optimization landscape. The proposed framework is robot-agnostic and is evaluated on the Unitree Go2 quadruped in simulation using Gazebo, followed by deployment on the physical robot. Experimental results show that parameters tuned in simulation transfer effectively to hardware, maintaining comparable performance without additional tuning. The full system achieves up to a 90.0\% navigation success rate when deployed, along with a 38.9\% average improvement in the evaluation metrics across simulated environments.

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

Synthetic Resonance: A Framework for Growth-Oriented Human-AI Relationships

arXiv:2606.18265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As human relationships with artificial intelligence systems become increasingly frequent and sustained, existing language and theory fail to accurately capture the nature of these affiliations. Common descriptors such as mutual understanding, connection, or friendship risk anthropomorphizing systems that lack subjective experience, while dominant frameworks tend to reduce AI to either a tool or a threat. In this paper, I introduce the concept of synthetic resonance as an integrative framework for understanding human-AI relationships. Synthetic resonance describes how relationships humans define as meaningful can emerge between a human and an AI system without the need to attribute shared feelings or mutual awareness. I argue that synthetic resonance is best understood as a structured, dynamic pattern of interaction that can produce a sense of relationship without the presence of a second experiencing subject. By clarifying this distinction, the concept of synthetic resonance offers a more precise way of conceptualizing human-AI relationships and highlights their potential value and ethical implications. I also call for more research that tests the processes and outcomes of synthetic resonance.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

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

Instability of a nonlinear oscillator with small friction and small additive noise

arXiv:2606.11389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $\lambda = \lambda(\beta,\sigma,a,b)$ denote the top Lyapunov exponent for the linearization along trajectories of the noisy damped non-linear oscillator $\ddot{x}+\beta \dot{x} + ax+bx^3 = \sigma \dot{W}_t$, where $a$, $b$ and $\beta$ are all positive and $\sigma \neq 0$. In 2004 Arnold, Imkeller and Sri Namachchivaya stated without proof that $\lambda(\varepsilon^2 \beta,\varepsilon \sigma,a,b) \sim \overline{\lambda} \varepsilon^{2/3}$ as $\varepsilon \to 0$ with $\overline{\lambda} > 0$. This paper contains a proof of this assertion.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

HERO: Hindsight-Enhanced Reflection from Environment Observations for Agentic Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.11559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning typically improves multi-turn agent capabilities through the terminal outcome of the trajectories, which makes it difficult to determine credit assignments for each intermediate turns. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods offer a promising alternative by converting privileged feedback into dense token-level supervision through a self-teacher. Our study is motivated by the unexpected performance degradation observed when naively extending this paradigm to multi-turn settings, which we attribute to a lack of alignment between privileged feedback, such as successful trajectories or terminal outcomes, and the student's current decision context. We introduce HERO, a hindsight-enhanced self-distillation framework that uses next environment observations as locally aligned feedback. After each rollout, HERO reflects on the completed interaction to convert each observation into a compact turn-level diagnosis, that captures actionable feedback about the original action such as its necessity, validity or failure cause. On TauBench and WebShop, HERO improves task success and reduces unnecessary turns over environment-feedback-only self-distillation and GRPO. It is especially effective under limited training turn budgets, where successful rollouts are rare and GRPO provides weak reward-contrast signals.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin-orbit coupling by design in quantum state engineering of atomically defined quantum dots

arXiv:2606.14487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tuning spin-orbit coupling is essential in controlling both spin and charge in confined semiconductor nanostructures, yet it is rarely a truly controllable parameter. Here, we show control over the spin-orbit Hamiltonian in quantum dots and the resulting quantum states by tailoring the confinement potential with atomic-scale precision. Using scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy, we pattern individual Cs ions into designer quantum dot structures on the surface of indium antimonide, in which electrons from a two-dimensional electron gas are confined with chosen in-plane electric-field gradients. We then quantify the atomic level structure, both spatially resolving the orbital character of the electronic states and their magnetic-field evolution. We demonstrate that the level structure, including the induced zero-field splitting, can be tailored by the designed geometry of the local electric fields. These effects can be described using a Hamiltonian that allows consistent treatment of the confinement-induced spin-orbit coupling beyond the conventional Bychkov-Rashba description. This Hamiltonian is derived from a multiband k.p model and takes the energy dependence of the relevant physical parameters into account. Such precise control of spin-orbit coupling in semiconductor quantum dots is relevant to quantum and spintronic technologies.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

MORTAR: Multi-turn Metamorphic Testing for LLM-based Dialogue Systems

With the widespread application of LLM-based dialogue systems in daily life, quality assurance has become more important than ever. Recent research has successfully introduced methods to identify unexpected behaviour in single-turn testing scenarios. However, multi-turn interaction is the common real-world usage of dialogue systems, yet testing methods for such interactions remain underexplored. This is largely due to the oracle problem in multi-turn testing, which continues to pose a significant challenge for dialogue system developers and researchers. In this paper, we propose MORTAR, a metamorphic multi-turn dialogue testing approach, which mitigates the test oracle problem in testing LLM-based dialogue systems. MORTAR formalises the multi-turn testing for dialogue systems, and automates the generation of question-answer dialogue test cases with multiple dialogue-level perturbations and metamorphic relations (MRs). The automated MR matching mechanism allows MORTAR more flexibility and efficiency in metamorphic testing. The proposed approach is fully automated without reliance on LLM judges. In testing six popular LLM-based dialogue systems, MORTAR reaches significantly better effectiveness with over 150\% more bugs revealed per test case when compared to the single-turn metamorphic testing baseline. Regarding the quality of bugs, MORTAR reveals higher-quality bugs in terms of diversity, precision and uniqueness. MORTAR is expected to inspire more multi-turn testing approaches, and assist developers in evaluating the dialogue system performance more comprehensively with constrained test resources and budget.

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

HadBalance: A Plug-and-Play Unified Global Geometric Prior Framework for Generalizable Biomedical Segmentation

Precise biomedical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. Geometric cues (e.g., boundary, shape, and topology) can improve structural consistency, yet most are task-specific and lack a unified geometric foundation that generalizes across organs and modalities. We are motivated by the observation that several medical segmentation targets can be approximated as globally near-convex shapes. A convex region is one in which any two interior points can be connected by a line segment entirely contained within the region. In practice, medical targets may exhibit small local concavities or boundary irregularities; we refer to such globally convex-like shapes as near-convex. Motivated by this, we derive Hadwiger Shape Priors from Hadwiger's theorem as an interpretable global regularizer using three 2D measures: area A, perimeter P, and Euler characteristic chi, enabling transfer across organs and modalities. However, because medical datasets are shape-heterogeneous, enforcing near-convex priors uniformly can over-regularize non-convex anatomy with significant concavities, washing out concavities and fine details and degrading segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict-Aware Objective Balancing (CAOB), which integrates shape priors with segmentation in a gradient-aware manner. For each prior, CAOB removes only the gradient component that conflicts with segmentation while preserving the remaining aligned component, and adaptively regulates objective influences to prevent prior dominance. This enables stable use of shape priors on shape-heterogeneous data without erasing genuine concavities or fine structural details. We call this plug-and-play framework HadBalance.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Geometric mechanisms enabling spin- and enantio-sensitive observables in one photon ionization of chiral molecules

arXiv:2603.02735v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We examine spin-resolved photoionization of randomly oriented chiral molecules via circularly polarized light, and revisit earlier predictions of Cherepkov (J. Phys. B: Atom. Mol. Phys. 16, 1543, 1983). We will show that the dynamical origin of spin- and enantio-sensitive observables arise from two intrinsic mechanisms that are quantified by two pseudovectors stemming from the geometric properties of the photoionization dipoles in spin space and in real space, and an extrinsic mechanism which is a directional bias introduced by the well-defined direction of light polarization. These mechanisms arise solely from electric dipole interactions. Consequently, this means that the ten independent parameters that was earlier predicted by Cherepkov to fully describe spin-resolved photoionization of chiral molecules can be reduced as moments of these three pseudovectors. We also find that the molecular pseudoscalars describing the spin- and enantio-sensitive components of the yield can be described by the flux of these pseudovectors through the energy shell, which changes sign upon switching enantiomers. Our results provide compact expressions for these observables which provide an intuitive picture on what determines the strength of these spin- and enantio-sensitive observables. The approach can be readily generalized to photoexcitation, multiphoton processes, and arbitrary field polarizations. Regardless of the specific driving conditions, the resulting spin- and enantio-sensitive observables are still controlled by the same three pseudovectors, underscoring their universal role as the primary generators of chirality-induced spin asymmetries, emphasizing their fundamental geometric origin and the universality of the mechanism identified here.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Evolution of Conditional Entropy for Diffusion Dynamics on Graphs

arXiv:2510.19441v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The modeling of diffusion processes on graphs is the basis for many network science and machine learning approaches. Entropic measures of network-based diffusion have recently been employed to investigate the reversibility of these processes and the diversity of the modeled systems. While results about their steady state are well-known, very few exact results about their finite-time evolution exist. Here, we introduce the conditional entropy of heat diffusion in graphs, and outline a mathematical framework that contextualizes diffusion and conditional entropy within the theories of continuous-time Markov chains and information theory. In particular, we highlight that this entropic measure satisfies an information-theoretical version of the second law of thermodynamics, thereby providing a parallelism between diffusion dynamics on networks and their physical counterparts. Furthermore, we obtain explicit results for its evolution on complete, path, and circulant graphs, as well as a mean-field approximation for Erdös-Rényi graphs. We also obtain asymptotic results for general networks and provide bounds for the evolution of conditional entropy. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate several properties of conditional entropy for diffusion over random graphs, such as the Watts-Strogatz model.

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

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents

arXiv:2603.19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental capability-alignment paradox: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while failing to prevent sophisticated attacks. Evaluating defended models against undefended baselines across 97 agent tasks and 1,000 adversarial prompts, we uncover three systematic biases unique to multi-step agents. Agent incompetence bias manifests as immediate tool execution breakdown, with models refusing or generating invalid actions on benign tasks before observing any external content. Cascade amplification bias causes early failures to propagate through retry loops, pushing defended models to timeout on 99\% of tasks compared to 13\% for baselines. Trigger bias leads to paradoxical security degradation where defended models perform worse than undefended baselines while straightforward attacks bypass defenses at high rates. Root cause analysis reveals these biases stem from shortcut learning: models overfit to surface attack patterns rather than semantic threat understanding, evidenced by extreme variance in defense effectiveness across attack categories. Our findings demonstrate that current defense paradigms optimize for single-turn refusal benchmarks while rendering multi-step agents fundamentally unreliable, necessitating new approaches that preserve tool execution competence under adversarial conditions.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TLA-Prover: Verifiable TLA+ Specification Synthesis via Preference-Optimized Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.06133v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TLA+ is a formal specification language for verifying distributed systems and safety-critical protocols. Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce TLA+ specifications that fail the TLC model checker for semantic reasons. Across 25 LLMs, the best public baseline is 26.6% syntactic parse and 8.6% semantic model-check. We present TLA-Prover, a 20-billion-parameter model for TLA+ specification synthesis. Training combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on verified examples with repair-based group-relative policy optimization (GRPO). In the GRPO stage, the model learns to fix its own rejected specifications. We also train a direct preference optimization (DPO) variant from the same SFT checkpoint as an ablation. TLC provides the reward signal directly, with no learned reward model. Four tiers grade each output: Bronze (parses), Silver (no warnings), Gold (passes TLC), and Diamond. To reach Diamond, the model's correctness property is automatically altered in a small way; TLC must then detect a violation. If TLC still passes, the property was always-true and contributes nothing; the output fails Diamond. TLA-Prover reaches 9/30 (i.e. pass@1 = 30%) at both Gold and Diamond on a held-out 30-problem benchmark. This is roughly 3.5x the 8.6% untuned baseline. The DPO variant reaches 20% at Diamond. Gold and Diamond coincide at every checkpoint; this prevents the trivial-property failure mode.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Deep-Learning-Based Pixelated Microwave Filter Design and Characterization using Electro-Optical Electric-Field Measurements

arXiv:2606.18402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional microwave filter design typically relies on iterative parameter tuning and predefined topologies, which limits design space and increases development time. This study uses a deep learning approach combining convolutional neural networks with genetic algorithms to automate pixelated microwave filter synthesis. To validate the approach experimentally, both S-parameter and spatial electric-field measurements were analyzed. The synthesized low-pass filter demonstrated excellent agreement between simulated and measured performance, achieving a 7 GHz passband with over 20 dB suppression beyond 9.5 GHz. Electro-optical measurements, for the first time, revealed electric field patterns that resemble coupled transmission-lines or stub structures, providing insight into the emergent characteristics of AI-generated designs.

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

Uncertainty Decomposition for Clarification Seeking in LLM Agents

Recent position papers argue that the classical aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty framework is insufficient for interactive large language model (LLM) agents and call for underspecification-aware, decomposed, and communicable uncertainty representations that can unlock new agent capabilities such as proactive clarification seeking and shared mental-model building. Practical deployment constraints – black-box APIs, interactive latency budgets, and the absence of labeled trajectories – rule out logprob-based, multi-sampling, and training-based methods, leaving prompt-based estimation as the most viable family for surfacing such signals at deployment time. We answer this call with a simple prompt-based decomposition that separates action confidence from request uncertainty (u), enabling the agent to ask for clarification when the task specification is ambiguous. To evaluate it, we introduce two clarification-augmented benchmarks (WebShop-Clarification and ALFWorld-Clarification) in which 50% of tasks are deliberately underspecified, and systematically compare the proposed decomposition against ReAct+UE and Uncertainty-Aware Memory (UAM) across five LLM backbones (GPT-5.1, DeepSeek-v3.2-exp, GLM-4.7, Qwen3.5-35B, GPT-OSS-120B) on these variants together with the standard WebShop, ALFWorld, and REAL benchmarks for fault detection. Averaged across the five backbones, the proposed decomposition improves clarification F1 on ALFWorld-Clarification by 73% over ReAct+UE and by 36% over UAM, and leads clarification F1 on every backbone on WebShop-Clarification and on four of five backbones on ALFWorld-Clarification, indicating that the gains generalize beyond a single LLM.

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

Exact Posterior Score Estimation for Solving Linear Inverse Problems

Diffusion and flow-based models learn powerful data priors by training a denoiser to reverse Gaussian corruption. To use this prior to solve a linear inverse problem, one needs to sample from the posterior, but the score that the prior provides is the unconditional score, not the posterior score. Existing methods either steer a fixed pretrained denoiser with approximate measurement-matching corrections, or train a conditional restoration model that abandons the denoising structure of the prior. We derive the exact posterior score in closed form for linear Gaussian inverse problems under general Gaussian interpolants, and show that posterior sampling reduces to a denoising problem at an operator-dependent shifted pivot under an anisotropic noise covariance. We turn this identity into Exact Posterior Score (EPS), a denoising training objective that preserves the input/output structure of standard pretraining and can therefore be trained from scratch or fine-tuned from a pretrained denoiser. At inference, EPS uses the same sampler as the underlying backbone, with no likelihood gradients or projections. We evaluate EPS on five linear inverse problems across FFHQ and ImageNet, where it outperforms training-free and training-based baselines on fidelity, perceptual, and distributional metrics, while using roughly an order of magnitude fewer denoiser evaluations than gradient-based posterior samplers.

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

TetherCache: Stabilizing Autoregressive Long-Form Video Generation with Gated Recall and Trusted Alignment

Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.

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

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Variable-Width Transformers

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Do We Need LLMs? A Diagnostic for Language-Driven Bandits

arXiv:2604.05859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic decision-making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer selection; all frequent problems in finance). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to these settings, utilizing LLMs for reasoning at every decision step is computationally expensive, and uncertainty estimates are difficult to obtain. To address this, we introduce LLMP-UCB, a bandit algorithm that derives uncertainty estimates from LLMs via repeated inference. However, our experiments demonstrate that lightweight numerical bandits operating on text embeddings (dense or Matryoshka) match or exceed the accuracy of LLM-based solutions at a fraction of their cost. We further show that embedding dimensionality is a practical lever on the exploration-exploitation balance, enabling cost-performance tradeoffs without prompt complexity. Finally, to guide practitioners, we propose a geometric diagnostic based on the arms' embeddings to decide when to use LLM-driven reasoning versus a lightweight numerical bandit. Our results provide a principled deployment framework for cost-effective, uncertainty-aware decision systems with broad applicability across AI use cases.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Rethinking Structural Anomaly Detection: From Decision Boundaries to Projection Operators

arXiv:2606.15280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most existing anomaly detection methods rely on estimating a probability density or learning an enclosing decision boundary, implicitly assuming that normal data occupies a region of non-zero volume in the ambient space. In contrast, structural anomaly detection considers data that lies near a low-dimensional manifold, creating a mismatch between the inductive bias of existing methods and the structure of the data, often resulting in degraded performance. To address this mismatch, we introduce a geometric perspective. Specifically, we learn a projection operator onto the manifold of normal samples and define a sample as anomalous if it is altered by this projection. This formulation naturally integrates the inductive bias of manifold-supported data and reframes anomaly detection in terms of a projection residual, thereby resolving issues arising from modeling degenerate distributions. Notably, it provides a unifying interpretation of reconstruction-based methods by explaining their success and failure in terms of projection quality. In particular, it explains the strong generalization ability of projection-aligned models as a consequence of contraction behavior toward the manifold. Moreover, by decoupling anomaly detection from probabilistic modeling, it reduces the tendency to misclassify rare but normal samples, a widely recognized limitation of existing approaches. Empirically, we demonstrate that projection-aligned methods achieve strong performance, outperforming boundary-based methods while improving upon existing reconstruction-based approaches.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Stochastic control with dividend payments and capital injections for Markov additive processes

Authors:

arXiv:2604.00190v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by de Finetti's optimal dividend problem with capital injections, we study a stochastic control problem for the additive component of a Markov additive process (MAP). In contrast to previous studies, the modulating component is allowed to be a general right process on a Radon space, so the model is not restricted to finite-state regime switching and cannot in general be reduced to a finite collection of Lévy process control problems. Capital injections are allowed at arbitrary times. We first consider the case in which dividend payments are allowed only at prescribed discrete times and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a strategy. These conditions then yield the optimality of a class of Markov-modulated periodic–classical barrier strategies. Combining this optimality result with an approximation argument, we obtain insight into the possible form of optimal strategies in the case where dividend payments, like capital injections, may be made at arbitrary times. Because of the generality of the MAPs considered here, the proof techniques used in previous studies of similar problems are not directly applicable. We therefore develop an alternative argument based on the additive structure of MAPs and dynamic programming between dividend opportunities. The argument also suggests a possible approach to other stochastic control problems involving general MAPs.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Environment-Adaptive Covariate Selection: Learning When to Use Spurious Correlations for Out-of-Distribution Prediction

arXiv:2601.02322v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A common approach to out-of-distribution prediction restricts models to causal or invariant covariates to avoid spurious associations that may change across environments. Despite its theoretical appeal, this strategy can underperform empirical risk minimization when only a subset of the causal parents of the outcome is observed. In such settings, non-causal covariates can serve as proxies for unobserved causal parents and improve prediction when the proxy relationship is stable, but they can hurt when shifts disrupt that relationship. Thus, the optimal covariate set can depend on the specific shift encountered. Because different shifts leave signatures in the unlabeled covariate distribution, we propose an environment-adaptive covariate selection algorithm that maps environment-level summaries to environment-specific covariate sets. These summaries may be hand-crafted or learned from multi-environment data, and prior causal knowledge can be incorporated as constraints. Across simulations and applied datasets, the proposed method improves over static causal, invariant, and other non-adaptive rules under diverse shifts.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Simulation-Based Multi-Fillet Evaluation of Woody Breast Poultry Fillets

Woody breast (WB) is a myopathy in modern broiler chickens that causes the breast muscle to become unusually stiff and fibrous, leading to decreased meat quality and significant economic losses. State-of-the-art automated WB detection relies on a side-view imaging system to analyze the bending behavior of a single fillet as it falls off a conveyor belt. While highly accurate, this approach is constrained by its single-fillet field of view, creating throughput bottlenecks on commercial processing lines. In this paper, we address this limitation via a novel multi-fillet detection architecture utilizing a top-down camera configuration. To validate our approach, we first develop a high-fidelity digital twin of an industrial conveyor system. Next, we synthesize a diverse dataset of 3D fillet meshes and model their viscoelastic bending dynamics using a physics-based simulation engine. Lastly, a continuous 2D shape deformation score is extracted from the top-down perspective as the simulated fillets traverse the roller precipice. Experimental results demonstrate that the top-down shape score effectively captures the contour changes of the fillets as it bends, providing a robust and scalable alternative to a side-view imaging system for simultaneous multi-fillet WB evaluation.