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

FOUNDv2: Learning Unified User Quantized Tokenizers for User Representation

arXiv:2508.00956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: User representation learning serves as a fundamental pillar for personalized services on large-scale web platforms. Despite its importance, conventional continuous embedding methods face significant challenges, including the lack of a unified paradigm for multi-source data integration, prohibitive storage overhead due to low information density, and the lack of multi-scale modeling granularity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FOUNDv2, a comprehensive user representation scheme centered on the Unified User Quantized Tokenizer U2QT) framework. FOUNDv2 transforms heterogeneous user data into a standardized discrete token space through a robust two-stage architecture. Specifically, the framework first extracts compact feature representations and subsequently employs a multi-view RQ-VAE to discretize them into storage-efficient tokens using shared and source-specific codebooks. To empower these representations with predictive intelligence, we further design multi-scale alignment objectives to capture both fine-grained behavioral dependencies and macro-temporal periodicity. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that FOUNDv2 consistently outperforms task-specific baselines while achieving substantial reductions in storage and computational costs. Finally, the large-scale deployment of FOUNDv2 on Alipay validates its practical scalability and efficiency across diverse industrial scenarios. The main code is available at: https://github.com/chuanhe1999/FOUNDv2.

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

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.

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

Bioacoustic Geolocation: Species Sounds as Geographic Signals

arXiv:2505.18726v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can we determine someone's geographic location solely from the sounds they hear? Are acoustic signals enough to localize within a country, state, or even city? In this work, we tackle the challenge of global-scale audio geolocation, with a particular focus on wildlife and natural sounds. We posit that bioacoustic signals contain informative geolocation cues because of well-defined geographic ranges of species. To test this hypothesis, we benchmark image geolocation and soundscape mapping methods, design oracles and species-centric baselines, and propose a hybrid approach that combines species range prediction with retrieval-based geolocation. We further ask whether geolocation improves with species-diverse recordings and spatiotemporal aggregation across neighboring samples. Finally, we extend our study to multimodal geolocation with case studies from movies that combine both audio and visual content. Our results highlight the potential of incorporating bioacoustic signals into geospatial tasks, motivating future work on species recognition and audio geolocation.

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

Depth-Width tradeoffs in Algorithmic Reasoning of Graph Tasks with Transformers

Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a transformer that can implement the task. Recent work has begun to explore this problem for graph-based tasks, showing that for sub-linear embedding dimension (i.e., model width) logarithmic depth suffices. However, an open question, which we address here, is what happens if width is allowed to grow linearly, while depth is kept fixed. Here we analyze this setting, and provide the surprising result that with linear width, constant depth suffices for solving a host of graph-based problems. This suggests that a moderate increase in width can allow much shallower models, which are advantageous in terms of inference and train time. For other problems, we show that quadratic width is required. Our results demonstrate the complex and intriguing landscape of transformer implementations of graph-based algorithms. We empirically investigate these trade-offs between the relative powers of depth and width and find tasks where wider models have the same accuracy as deep models, while having much faster train and inference time due to parallelizable hardware.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Tensor network manifolds and Riemannian fundamental theorem for tensor networks

arXiv:2606.14613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tensor networks provide a powerful framework for efficiently representing high-dimensional data and many-body quantum states. Endowing tensor networks with a Riemannian manifold structure provides a natural setting for numerical optimization and analysis. A central feature of tensor networks is their gauge freedom, whose characterisation (captured by so-called fundamental theorems) underlies both their intrinsic structure and the design of numerical algorithms. In this work, we study the interaction between the Riemannian manifold structure and the gauge freedom for several families of tensor networks. Using group actions and Riemannian submersions, we establish a Riemannian fundamental theorem for the tensor network families studied.

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

Nothing from Something: Can a Language Model Discover 0?

AI systems based on artificial neural networks are being developed with aspirations of pushing the boundary of human mathematical knowledge. A key question for these systems is how much they can reach beyond their training data. Mathematical discovery requires a strong form of out of distribution generalization; the ability to hypothesize genuinely new - and potentially logically more powerful - mathematical structures. It has been hypothesized that language abilities support such generalizations in human cognition. In this work, we use simple arithmetic as a case study for examining how modern AI models could expand their mathematical horizons, evaluating whether these models can independently discover the concept of "zero". We show that We show that (1) language models of a GPT-2 size are unable to perform this generalization at test time regardless of language pretraining, but (2) models can improve substantially after training on tens or hundreds of examples of zero. Additionally, we find that language pretraining reduces the number of required examples by approximately $50\%$, showing that language abilities can scaffold mathematical discovery in neural models.

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

From Specification to Execution: AI Assisted Scientific Workflow Management

arXiv:2606.18425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific workflow management systems (WMS) support scalable and reproducible execution of complex pipelines, but workflow design, implementation, and debugging remain largely manual and require significant expertise. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) show promise for workflow generation from natural language, but often rely on direct code synthesis, which limits transparency, reproducibility, and integration with workflow systems. We present an AI-assisted approach to scientific workflow management that combines specification-driven workflow generation, automated debugging, and distributed execution. The method introduces a structured specification phase that separates workflow intent, design, and implementation, allowing validation prior to code generation. We also develop an LLM-based debugging agent that diagnoses and resolves failures across multiple system layers. To support distributed execution and user interaction, we integrate Pegasus, a widely used WMS, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, providing a unified interface for workflow submission, monitoring, and control. We evaluate the approach using a federated learning workflow for medical imaging, chosen for its parallel, iterative, and dependency-intensive structure. The system generated and executed large-scale workflows with thousands of jobs, reduced debugging effort, and allowed non-expert users to construct workflows with expert-level design patterns. These results indicate that end-to-end AI-assisted workflow generation and execution is feasible, and point toward AI-driven platforms for managing the scientific workflow lifecycle.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Exit-and-Join Dynamics for Decentralized Coalition Formation

作者:

arXiv:2606.19683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies coalition formation as a decentralized dynamical process driven by unilateral exit-and-join decisions. Agents evaluate local moves using the Aumann-Dreze value, so payoffs are computed within the agent's current coalition rather than through a globally negotiated coalition structure. The resulting model links cooperative payoff allocation with noncooperative best-response behavior: a terminal partition is precisely a coalition structure with no admissible, individually profitable exit-and-join deviation. We establish equilibrium characterizations, identify conditions under which the dynamics admit scalar Lyapunov or exact-potential representations, and analyze how switching and acceptance costs shape local stability. Numerical experiments test finite-time stabilization, cost sensitivity, and a special convex-game benchmark.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LLM4RTL: Tool-Assisted LLM for RTL Generation

arXiv:2606.15500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have facilitated impressive progress in software engineering, code generation, tooling, and systems. Concurrently, a significant body of research has developed which explores a growing variety of methods and systems for applying LLMs to hardware and chip design (e.g., systems for RTL code generation based on functional description). However, when it comes to open Verilog/RTL code-generation, we need high-quality training samples to build specialized and more effective LLM systems through fine-tuning or low-rank adaptation. Here, we propose a ``judge-renew-check-renew-check'' (JRCRC) pipeline which updates a current public dataset using a hierarchy of state-of-the-art commercial LLM models differing in their costs and capabilities in RTL code generation. This approach achieves a cost-effective mechanism for filtering and refining code-generation samples into a higher-quality training dataset. Our experiments also identify some common weaknesses of LLMs in rule-based reasoning and logic, and consequently, in RTL code-generation. Having identified these weaknesses, we develop an architecture for incorporating pre-processing tools to dynamically assist the LLMs in inferring logical relationships from tabular data formats. With our tools-assisted architecture for RTL code generation, we achieve significant overall performance gains in the VerilogEval benchmark and outperform many state-of-the-art methods. Our LLM4RTL system achieves performance comparable to that of GPT-4O using a significantly much smaller LLM.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Toward 360-Degree Indoor Panorama Editing via Tuning-Free Diffusion Model with Refocusing Cross-Attention

Zero-shot text-guided diffusion has significantly advanced image editing; however, its practical usability remains constrained by three persistent challenges: prompt brittleness that requires meticulous prompt engineering, spillover edits that unintentionally affect non-target regions, and failures on small or cluttered objects caused by limited fine-grained supervision in training data. We propose FocusDiff (Target-Aware Refocusing for Tuning-Free Diffusion Editing), a tuning-free framework for precise and region-specific image manipulation based on refocusing cross-attention. Given a target region obtained through automated segmentation or manual selection, FocusDiff applies selective blurring to non-edit areas to guide attention toward the masked region while accurately transferring the object's identity, structure, and appearance to the edited output. Integrated context-preserving modules further ensure background fidelity and global coherence, enabling accurate edits from simple text prompts in a single pass. We also extend FocusDiff to 360-degree indoor panorama editing and demonstrate its effectiveness within virtual reality environments. Extensive experiments on our localized editing benchmark LIMB, comprising 30 multi-object images and 100 annotated examples including challenging small-object cases, show that FocusDiff outperforms existing zero-shot editors in text-image alignment and background preservation, achieving superior precision, photorealism, and usability. The project page is available at https://vdkhoi20.github.io/FocusDiff.

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

Running hardware-aware neural architecture search on embedded devices under 512MB of RAM

arXiv:2606.14824v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This document proposes a novel approach to hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS) that considers the resources available on the computing platform running it, enabling its execution on various embedded devices. The presented HW NAS produces tiny convolutional neural networks (CNNs) targeting low-end microcontroller units (MCUs), typically involved in the Internet of Things (IoT) or wearable robotics, opening new use cases. A gateway could run it to tailor CNNs' architecture on the acquired data without using external servers, ensuring privacy. The proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art results in the human-recognition tasks on the Visual Wake Word dataset, a standard TinyML benchmark, on several embedded devices.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Continual Learning with Support Boundary Experience Blending

Continual learning (CL) seeks to mitigate catastrophic forgetting when models are trained with sequential tasks. A common approach, experience replay (ER), stores past exemplars but only sparsely approximates the data distribution, yielding fragile and oversimplified decision boundaries. We address this limitation by introducing Support Boundary Data (SBD), generated via differential-privacy-inspired noise into latent features to create boundary-adjacent representations that implicitly regularize decision boundaries. Building on this idea, we propose Experience Blending (EB), a framework that jointly trains on exemplars and SBD through a dual-model aggregation strategy. EB has two components: (1) latent-space noise injection to generate support boundary data, and (2) end-to-end training that jointly leverages exemplars and SBD. Unlike standard experience replay, SBD enriches the feature space near decision boundaries, leading to more stable and robust continual learning. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet1K demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements of 10%, 6%, 13%, 2%, respectively.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Lattice surgery for near-term experimental logical qubit entanglement creation in planar architectures

arXiv:2606.15190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the era of early fault-tolerant quantum computing, basic demonstrations of entanglement operations between a few logical qubits are at the frontier of recent developments in quantum computing. In this work, we describe in detail, at both the logical and physical qubit levels, a logical teleportation protocol between two surface code logical qubits based on lattice surgery. We address several aspects of the teleportation protocol pertinent to superconducting qubit architectures. We explore the modularity constraints in the number and location of stabilizer readouts and compare variants of the teleportation protocol in this regard. Additionally, we investigate potential performance improvements related to in-sequence decision logic and the optimal size of the interface region between two surface code patches on a superconducting chip. Based on our simulations, we show possible near-term improvements in lattice surgery protocols that facilitate fault-tolerant quantum computing in superconducting circuit architectures.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models

Latent reasoning models (LRMs) replace explicit chain-of-thought with continuous thoughts. Recent work treats observable latent-state patterns, such as BFS-like frontiers and decodable arithmetic computation, as evidence for internal reasoning mechanisms. Evaluating two LRMs (Coconut and CODI) against controls lacking the proposed recurrence or curriculum, we find these patterns also appear in the controls and do not always causally affect behavior. Causal interventions reveal that latent-thought utilization is not binary but graded, scaling with a thought's causal effect on model behavior. Geometric analyses reveal this effect concentrates in low-rank directions whose step-to-step geometry grows more structured as their behavioral influence increases. Latent thoughts should therefore be treated as hidden computation, not hidden explanation: decodability, attention, or static structure alone cannot establish mechanism. LRM interpretability thus requires matched controls and causal tests.

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

It's About Time: Temporal References in Emergent Communication

Emergent communication enables agents to develop bespoke languages that improve communication efficiency. Despite the known importance of temporal structure in natural language, there is no existing evidence of temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential factors for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. A minimal change in agent architecture, using a different batching method, allows the emergence of temporal references. This modified design is compared with the standard architecture in a temporal referential games environment, which emphasises temporal relationships. The analysis shows that over 95% of the agents with the modified batching method develop temporal references, without changes to their loss function. We consider temporal referencing necessary for future improvements to the agents' communication efficiency, enabling future agents to use a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. These insights provide the basis for incorporation of temporal references into other emergent communication settings, and investigation of other aspects of language.

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

Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Models

arXiv:2511.05963v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers replace recurrence with a memory that grows with sequence length and self-attention that enables ad-hoc lookups over past tokens. Consequently, they lack an inherent incentive to compress history into compact latent states with consistent transition rules. This often leads to learning solutions that generalize poorly. We introduce Next-Latent Prediction (NextLat), which extends standard next-token training with self-supervised predictions in the latent space. Specifically, NextLat trains a transformer to learn latent representations that are predictive of its next latent state given the next token. Theoretically, we show that these latents provably converge towards belief states, compressed information about the history necessary to predict the future. This simple auxiliary objective injects a recurrent inductive bias into transformers while leaving their architecture, parallel training efficiency, and inference unchanged. NextLat effectively encourages transformers to form compact internal world models with coherent belief states and transition dynamics – crucial properties not guaranteed by standard next-token prediction alone. Empirically, across benchmarks in world modeling, reasoning, planning, and language modeling, NextLat demonstrates significant gains over standard next-token prediction and other baselines in downstream accuracy, representation compression, and lookahead planning. Furthermore, NextLat enables variable-length self-speculative decoding, accelerating inference by up to 3.3x in language modeling. NextLat offers a simple yet effective paradigm for learning compact, predictive representations in transformers that generalize better. Our code is available at https://github.com/JaydenTeoh/NextLat.

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

DART: A design-aware microfluidic chip paradigm for real-time live-cell image analysis

High-throughput microfluidic live-cell imaging generates rich single-cell data. Yet semi-automated procedures for locating regions of interest (RoIs), each containing one cell population, and removing surrounding microfluidic structures from recorded images, scale with the number of RoIs. This prevents real-time image analysis and delays time-to-insight by hours to days. We introduce the Design-Aware and Real-Time capable (DART) paradigm for microfluidic cultivation chips, which aligns the CAD blueprint with the physical chip and thereby enables throughput-independent localization of all RoIs and fully automated image processing across diverse RoI geometries and chip layouts. DART establishes this alignment through embedded fiducial markers and deep-learning-based marker detection. We validate DART using the Swiss Army Knife chip, which combines eight structurally distinct RoI designs across 1164 RoI locations. DART localizes all RoIs in five minutes, removes microfluidic structures from raw microscopy images in 40 ms, and performs fully automated image analysis, including cell segmentation, in under 1.1 s per image. Together, these capabilities establish DART as an end-to-end hardware-software paradigm with real-time-capable analysis that paves the way toward closed-loop and outcome-driven smart microscopy.

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

FACTR 2: Learning External Force Sensing for Commodity Robot Arms Improves Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.12406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires force sensitivity, but many robot arms lack dedicated force sensors due to their high cost. We present Neural External Torque Estimation (NEXT), a data-driven method that estimates external joint torques without needing any dedicated force sensors. NEXT trains in 1 minute from only 10 minutes of free-motion data, yet achieves estimates comparable to dedicated joint-torque sensors. NEXT enables force-feedback teleoperation on low-cost arms and improves policy learning through Force-Informed Re-Sampling Training (FIRST), which up-samples pre-contact and contact segments during behavior cloning. Across five long-horizon tasks, FIRST outperforms prior force-aware policies by over 17% in task progress. Together, NEXT and FIRST bring force-aware teleoperation and policy learning to off-the-shelf robots without additional sensing hardware. Video results and code are available at https://jasonjzliu.com/factr2

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MBABench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

arXiv:2605.22664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Kuramoto Attention: Synchronizing Self-Attention on the Torus

We introduce Kuramoto attention, a self-attention layer in which each hidden coordinate is an angle. The layer scores tokens by gated cosine similarity, attends over previous phase states, and updates each token by the tangent component of the attention-weighted circular mean. Because the values are the raw phase states, this update is exactly the Kuramoto coupling term $\sum_u A_{t,u}\sin(\theta_u-\theta_t)$, with the attention matrix acting as an adaptive, content-dependent coupling kernel. Equivalently, the gated score is a learned metric on the torus that selects which tokens couple, and the update pulls each token toward the circular mean of the tokens it selects, tightening their phase agreement. The same two ingredients, an invariant similarity score and an on-manifold mean, define such a layer on any compact group; the torus is the abelian case, where both are closed-form. The softmax weights solve an entropy-regularized phase-retrieval problem, and rotary position enters as a position-dependent phase drift in the score. On enwiki8 character-level language modeling, the layer trains as a functional language model whose bits-per-character stays close to a strong matched RoPE+SwiGLU transformer: within $0.02$ BPC at one million parameters ($1.637\pm0.010$ versus $1.616\pm0.004$) and level on the median at five million ($1.448$ versus $1.452$ over five seeds) with the transformer ahead on the mean ($1.468$ versus $1.456$). These experiments establish that the constrained geometric structure is a viable language model at this scale; the structure itself, and its synchronization reading, is the contribution. Ablations isolate the load-bearing components, and the result gives a compact bridge between self-attention and phase synchronization.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Zero-Shot Cross-City Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Self-Supervised versus Supervised Representations

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined. When training and evaluation data are geographically mixed, models may implicitly rely on city-specific cues, masking failure modes that would occur under real-world domain shifts when generalizing to new locations. In this work, we formulate zero-shot cross-city transfer as a controlled representation-level stress test for end-to-end autonomous driving and ask how visual pretraining affects transfer behavior under geographic domain shift. We conduct a comprehensive study by integrating self-supervised backbones I-JEPA, DINOv2, and MAE into planning frameworks. We evaluate performance under strict geographic splits on nuScenes in the open-loop setting and on NAVSIM in the closed-loop evaluation protocol. Our experiments reveal a substantial generalization gap when transferring models across cities with different road topologies, traffic conventions, and visual environments. In open-loop evaluation, a supervised backbone exhibits severe degradation when transferring between cities, yet some domain-specific self-supervised methods can substantially reduce both displacement and collision degradation. In closed-loop evaluation, self-supervised pretraining improves average out-of-distribution PDMS in several single-city training settings. Our results provide empirical evidence that representation learning influences the robustness of cross-city planning and motivate zero-shot geographic transfer as an important stress test for evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving systems.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

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

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.

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

Structured Noise Adaptation for Sequential Bayesian Filtering with Embedded Latent Transfer Operators

arXiv:2606.14195v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kalman filters based on the Embedded Latent Transfer Operators (ELTO) emerge as novel statistical tools for sequential state estimation. However, a critical limitation stems from their use of simplified noise models, which fail to dynamically adapt to non-stationary processes. To address this limitation, we introduce an ELTO-based Bayesian filtering approach with a new structured parameterization for the filter's noise model. This parameterization enables structured noise adaptation, which couples the data-driven learning of an optimal time-invariant noise model with dynamic parameter adaptation that responds to changes in dynamics within non-stationary processes. Empirical results show that our structured noise adaptation improves the filter's dynamic state estimation performance in noisy, time-varying environments.