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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Numbers Already Carry Their Own Embeddings

arXiv:2606.14108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Adelic operation-preserved embeddings (AOE), a training-free representation that captures both a number's real value and its modular (p-adic) signatures. This construction preserves additive and multiplicative structure by design, turning numerical input into embeddings that "speak in the language of mathematics." Unlike prior approaches that rely on task-specific retraining, AOE is plug-and-play and drops seamlessly into existing architectures. On algebraic combinatorics benchmarks, it delivers consistent gains including the first-ever perfect accuracy on the Weaving Pattern task-while suggesting a principled path forward for overcoming the long-standing "number problem" in AI.

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

The Geometry of Phase Transitions in Generative Dynamics via Projection Caustics

arXiv:2606.13191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous-state generative samplers, including diffusion and flow-matching models, evolve through continuous reverse-time dynamics, yet their samples often undergo abrupt qualitative changes: trajectories commit to modes, semantic alternatives collapse, and small perturbations in narrow time windows can produce large downstream effects. This paper develops a geometric account of such phase-transition-like behaviour. We view denoising as gradient descent on a free energy landscape and show that sharp transitions arise near projection caustics, where the nearest-point projection onto the data support ceases to be unique. Motivated by this perspective, we introduce the Critical Boundary Detector (CBD), as practical diagnostics for score-direction instability. Across toy models, standard diffusion models, and latent text-to-image diffusion models, CBD localises mode commitment, predicts intervention-sensitive windows, and supports targeted control in geometrically sensitive regions. Our results connect geometry of data and dynamics of diffusion generation.

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

deFOREST: Fusing Optical and Radar satellite data for Enhanced Sensing of Tree-loss

arXiv:2510.14092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper we develop a deforestation detection pipeline that incorporates optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A crucial component of the pipeline is the construction of anomaly maps of the optical data, which is done using the residual space of a discrete Karhunen-Lo\'{e}ve (KL) expansion. Anomalies are quantified using a concentration bound on the distribution of the residual components for the nominal state of the forest. This bound does not require prior knowledge on the distribution of the data. This is in contrast to statistical parametric methods that assume knowledge of the data distribution, an impractical assumption that is especially infeasible for high dimensional data such as ours. Once the optical anomaly maps are computed they are combined with SAR data, and the state of the forest is classified by using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We test our approach with Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (Optical) data on a $92\,km \times 92\,km$ region in the Amazon forest. The results show that both the hybrid optical-radar and optical only methods achieve high accuracy that is superior to the recent state-of-the-art hybrid method. Moreover, the hybrid method is significantly more robust in the case of sparse optical data that are common in highly cloudy regions.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Relativistic Locality from Electromagnetism to Quantum Field Theory

arXiv:2412.11532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electromagnetism is the paradigm case of a theory that satisfies relativistic locality. This can be proven by demonstrating that, once the theory's laws are imposed, what is happening within a region fixes what will happen in the contracting light-cone with that region as its base. The Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations meet the same standard. We show that this standard can also be applied to quantum field theory (without collapse), examining two different ways of assigning reduced density matrix states to regions of space. Our preferred method begins from field wave functionals and judges quantum field theory to be local. Another method begins from particle wave functions (states in Fock space) and leads to either non-locality or an inability to assign states to regions, depending on the choice of creation operators. We take this analysis of quantum field theory (without collapse) to show that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is local at the fundamental level. We argue that this fundamental locality is compatible with either local or global accounts of the non-fundamental branching of worlds, countering an objection that has been raised to the Sebens-Carroll derivation of the Born Rule from self-locating uncertainty.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Masked and Predictive Self-Supervised Foundation Models for 3D Brain MRI

Self-supervised foundation models have shown strong promise in medical imaging. However, existing MRI foundation-model studies have primarily emphasized segmentation and dense prediction tasks, while systematic investigation of self-supervised foundation models for MRI-based disease detection remains limited. In this work, we investigate two major self-supervised pretraining paradigms for MRI-based disease detection: reconstruction-based learning via Masked Autoencoders (MAE) and predictive representation learning via Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). We study the role of auxiliary objectives by introducing a novel spectral-domain reconstruction loss for MAE to enhance sensitivity to fine-grained anatomical structure, and by integrating variance–covariance regularization (VCR) within our JEPA framework to encourage decorrelated latent representations. Our models are pretrained on heterogeneous single-contrast MRI volumes in a contrast-agnostic setting, without modality concatenation. Across five downstream disease detection tasks, our results highlight the importance of self-supervised objective design for medical foundation model pretraining, demonstrating that the downstream benefit of each objective is determined by its relevance to the task's structure. Specifically, spectral regularization yields the largest improvements when the downstream discriminative signal is characterized by strong high-frequency anatomical structures, while covariance regularization is most beneficial when discriminative information spans multiple decorrelated feature dimensions. MAE with spectral-domain supervision consistently achieves superior downstream performance for MRI-based disease detection. These findings suggest that self-supervised objectives in medical imaging encode specific biases, and their downstream benefit is fundamentally conditioned on the task's structure.

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

Mathematical Basis for Analyzing Superconducting Phase Transitions Using Catastrophe Theory

arXiv:2606.11810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish a rigorous mathematical bridge from quantum many-body path integrals to the cusp catastrophe model by Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction, which provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing superconducting phase transition using the catastrophe theory. First, it is proved that, near the critical point the infinite-dimensional effective action is diffeomorphic to a finite-dimensional catastrophe. Secondly, starting from Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional, the Euler-Lagrange partial differential equation can be reduced to the cusp catastrophe model. Thirdly, the fermionic imaginary-time path integral to the cusp catastrophe is derived through the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation, Matsubara frequency expansion, and Grassmann algebra. Furthermore, we connect this framework with the adsorption potential theory we proposed, elucidating the catastrophic topological nature of the electron pairing mechanism in high-temperature superconductivity. The precise microscopic derivation of the adsorption potential from first-principles electronic structure calculations would strengthen the predictive power of the theory.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Tox21mer, A transformer foundation model for Tox21 high-throughput concentration-response curves data

The U.S. Tox21 collaboration has generated a large reference library of high-throughput concentration-response assays. Here we present Tox21mer, a 43.5-million-parameter transformer that encodes each Tox21 concentration-response curve together with assay metadata into a 768-dimensional representation. Tox21mer was pretrained on ~2.5 million curves from 102 assay protocols and 6,727 compounds using masked-response reconstruction as the primary objective, with low-weight auxiliary supervision on assay outcome and AC50. To evaluate the learned representation, we trained lightweight probes on frozen embeddings from concentration-response curves of held-out compounds. The representation supported a macro-F1 of 0.985 for three-class outcome prediction (agonist, antagonist, inactive), a binary F1 of 0.994 for active/inactive prediction, and an R2 of 0.87 for log10(AC50). The learned embeddings formed coherent groupings by curve-class category. A masked-only pretraining variant retained near-baseline probe performance, indicating that the representation is learned largely from the self-supervised objective rather than from auxiliary labels. Ablation analyses further showed that predictive performance depends mainly on curve-level response-value distributions conditioned on assay context, with limited reliance on detailed within-curve ordering. Tox21mer thus provides a reusable foundation representation for Tox21 concentration-response data that can support extrapolation to untested compounds through integration with chemical features or distillation into chemistry-only student models for large-scale external screening.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Battery-Explicit Thermodynamic Witnesses of Bell Post-Quantumness

arXiv:2605.09149v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a battery-explicit thermodynamic witness of post-quantum Bell correlations. In each round, a single supplied excitation is routed into an explicit two-level battery if and only if a Bell-game condition is satisfied. The routing operation is implemented by an energy-preserving controlled SWAP, with all logical control registers taken to be degenerate. Thus the correlation resource does not create energy; it only determines the probability that the supplied excitation reaches the battery. The construction is first formulated for finite two-player XOR games. For any such game, the mean battery charge is exactly the game success probability multiplied by the battery gap. Optimizing over local, quantum, or nonsignalling behaviours therefore turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, or nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. For the CHSH game, Tsirelson's bound becomes a strict quantum ceiling on the mean battery charge, while a PR-box behaviour reaches the single-excitation cap. The witness is trusted-module rather than device-independent: it assumes calibrated Hamiltonians, correct classical wiring, and a trusted energy-preserving battery module. We also discuss a reversible-controller implementation, finite-statistics certification from work data, robustness to imperfect battery readout, and cyclic bookkeeping showing that no positive net work is obtained once fuel restoration and memory erasure are included.

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

ProCUA-SFT Technical Report

Training computer-use agents (CUAs) – models that interact with graphical desktops through screenshots and keyboard/mouse actions – requires large-scale, diverse trajectory data collected in full desktop environments. The largest public resource, AgentNet (22.5K human trajectories), leads to negative transfer when used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT): continuing training UI-TARS 7B on AgentNet causes OSWorld success rate to fall from 26.3% to 8-10%. We present ProCUA-SFT, a dataset of 3.1M step-level SFT samples distilled from 93K synthetic trajectories across 2,484 application combinations. The dataset is produced by a fully automated pipeline that (i) synthesizes grounded tasks on live desktops seeded with real-world content – 912 spreadsheets from SpreadsheetBench, approximately 10K permissively-licensed presentations from Zenodo10K, and multi-application OSWorld configs – and (ii) verifies each task's feasibility through binary precondition checking before rollout. A single VLM (Kimi-K2.5) serves as goal generator, precondition judge, and trajectory executor, eliminating planner-actor capability gaps. Each trajectory is expanded into step-prefix samples that exactly reproduce the context layout seen at inference time. Fine-tuning UI-TARS 7B on ProCUA-SFT for one epoch yields 45.0% on OSWorld – an 18.7 percentage-point improvement over the base model and over 35% above AgentNet-trained counterparts. A subset of ProCUA was incorporated into the training data for the Nemotron 3 Nano Omni model, contributing to its computer-use capabilities.

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

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

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

MotionVLA: Vision-Language-Action Model for Humanoid Motion

Generating realistic humanoid motion from scene images and text involves both low-frequency pose semantics and high-frequency physical dynamics. However, many existing methods tokenize motion with a single shared codebook, forcing heterogeneous motion signals into the same quantization space. Our frequency-domain analysis of human motion data reveals a clear mismatch between single-codebook quantization and motion statistics: five DCT coefficients capture 93% of joint-position energy but only 37% of joint-velocity energy, which can bias quantization toward pose statistics and under-represent high-frequency velocity components. A second challenge lies in adapting a standard autoregressive model to effectively model high-frequency physical signals in motion sequences. Therefore, we propose DSFT, a dual-stream frequency tokenizer that separates motion into Base and physical streams and compresses them independently with DCT truncation and BPE. Furthermore, we present MotionVLA, a Qwen3.5-based model that arranges Base and physical tokens in a unified sequence, where Phys tokens are predicted after Base tokens. Experiments on HumanML3D and MBench show that, despite using a lightweight 2B backbone, MotionVLA reduces the Diversity gap to real data by over 50% on HumanML3D and improves Motion-Condition Consistency by 3.8% on MBench, supporting frequency-aware dual-stream decoupling as an effective formulation for autoregressive motion generation. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/MotionVLA. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/MotionVLA.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Quality Adaptive Angular Margin Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

arXiv:2606.11915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a quality-adaptive angular-margin learning framework that improves feature generalization by enforcing intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Our framework, titled QLung, introduces a no-reference audio quality margin derived from spectral entropy and root-mean-square energy, which adaptively scales angular margins based on recording quality. To this end, we propose a log-scaled angular margin that stabilizes training under severe class imbalance. We also use an angular classifier that normalizes features and class weights, ensuring margin penalties are applied consistently on the unit hypersphere. Our approach improves in-distribution performance on the ICBHI dataset by 2.46\% over the cross-entropy baseline, and most significantly, achieves the strongest out-of-distribution performance on the SPRSound dataset compared to prior state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/QLung.

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

Frozen Multimodal Embeddings for Personality and Cognitive Ability Assessment in Asynchronous Video Interviews

Predicting psychological traits from asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) is a challenging multimodal learning problem because labeled datasets are limited while each response contains high-dimensional visual, acoustic, and verbal signals. This paper presents our solution for the ACM Multimedia AVI Challenge 2026, which evaluates two tasks: Track~1 predicts self-reported HEXACO personality traits from personality-related interview responses, and Track~2 classifies cognitive ability levels from structured AVI responses. We treat the problem as a small-sample representation learning task. Instead of fine-tuning large pretrained models, we use frozen multimodal encoders, including CLIP for visual features, Whisper for acoustic features and transcripts, and RoBERTa, E5, and DeBERTaV3 for textual representations, followed by low-capacity downstream models. For Track~1, our trait-specific regression and late-fusion system achieves an average validation MSE of 0.2696, improving over the official baseline of 0.3334. Ablation results show a three-step improvement from a global model (0.3189), to per-trait modeling (0.2871), to per-trait late fusion (0.2696), corresponding to a 19.1\% relative MSE reduction over the official baseline. For Track~2, a compact subject-attribute baseline reaches 0.5781 accuracy, while our multimodal ensemble reaches 0.5313, both above the official baseline of 0.4062. We interpret this result as evidence of possible subject-attribute shortcuts in the validation split rather than robust cognitive inference from AVI content. Overall, our findings suggest that AVI-based psychological assessment benefits from trait-specific multimodal modeling, but cognitive ability prediction requires careful control of dataset shortcuts.

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

Enhancing CVRP Solver through LLM-driven Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2602.23092v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), a fundamental combinatorial optimization challenge, focuses on optimizing fleet operations under vehicle capacity constraints. While extensively studied in operational research, the NP-hard nature of CVRP continues to pose significant computational challenges, particularly for large-scale instances. This study presents AILS-AHD (Adaptive Iterated Local Search with Automatic Heuristic Design), a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize CVRP solving. Our methodology integrates an evolutionary search framework with LLMs to dynamically generate and optimize ruin heuristics within the AILS method. Additionally, we introduce an LLM-based acceleration mechanism to enhance computational efficiency. Comprehensive experimental evaluations against state-of-the-art solvers, including AILS-II and HGS, demonstrate the superior performance of AILS-AHD across both moderate and large-scale instances. Notably, our approach establishes new best-known solutions for 8 out of 10 instances in the CVRPLib large-scale benchmark, underscoring the potential of LLM-driven heuristic design in advancing the field of vehicle routing optimization.

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

CEVAR: Centerline Embedding Extraction for Endovascular Aneurysm Repair

Long-term mortality rates after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) remain elevated due to post-EVAR rupture caused by loss of seal in stent graft sealing zones. Structured CT review using centerline measurements improves detection, but current workflows require manual centerline editing and expert operators. We propose a transformer framework for automated, protocol-driven sealing zone assessment that combines 3D centerline tracking with embedding-based geometric prediction. Two state-of-the-art image-to-graph models are evaluated for aorto-iliac centerline extraction from follow-up CT and for measurement of stent position, vessel diameters, and seal lengths according to EVAR4C protocol. Across the full test set and a challenging no-contrast subset, the proposed fully automatic method outperforms the commercial semi-automatic workflow.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Frequency-dependent cognitive effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) improves levodopa-induced motor complications and cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but stimulation frequency may differentially shape outcomes. This is evident for axial and gait symptoms, which may respond differently to lower-frequency stimulation. Whether frequency-dependent effects extend to cognition remains unclear. Objective: To investigate the cognitive effects of DBS at distinct frequencies in PD. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (PROSPERO - CRD42024618253). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for studies assessing cognitive outcomes under different stimulation frequencies. Eight cognitive domains were defined: verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility, executive control, working memory, attention, processing speed, episodic memory, and time processing. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were performed, with effect sizes expressed as Hedges' g. Results: Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria, the majority (n = 31) involving STN-DBS. Twenty-one STN-DBS studies, including 355 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HFS ([≥] 130 Hz), lower frequencies (4-80 Hz) were associated with better verbal fluency (g = 0.27) and cognitive flexibility (g = 0.38), with consistent effects across sensitivity and leave-one-out analyses. Accuracy-based executive control measures also favored lower-frequency stimulation. OFF-stimulation comparisons showed a concordant pattern. Evidence for other targets (PPN and NBM) was limited. Conclusions: Lower-frequency STN-DBS was associated with modest benefits in specific cognitive domains compared with HFS. These findings highlight the need for future research to determine how frequency interacts with stimulation location and symptom-specific networks to shape cognitive and cognitive-motor outcomes in PD.

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

Beyond Scalar Scores: Exploring LLM-based Metrics for Clinical Significance Evaluation in Radiology Reports

Reliable evaluation of generated radiology reports requires strict clinical accuracy, as omitted critical findings or mischaracterized radiographic observations can directly affect patient care. Existing metrics obscure this requirement by reducing report quality to a medically ungrounded scalar. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich medical knowledge, they likewise struggle to draw a reliable boundary between clinically significant errors and harmless variation. We study this boundary using ReEvalMed benchmark as testbed and evaluate metric-level clinical significance from detecting true clinical errors ("Discrimination") and tolerating insignificant variations ("Robustness"). Across 8 LLM evaluators under one-pass and two-pass settings, we identify a widespread discrimination bias: models effectively detect errors but also over-penalize harmless rephrasings. To mitigate this, we synthesize 4k report pairs and train lightweight interpretable metrics on Qwen3-8B and MedGemma-4B. Our trained metric sharpens the clinical significance boundary, surpassing 32B-scale medical LLMs and remaining competitive with proprietary models. Crucially, the more costly two-pass setting fails to consistently improve overall performance and mainly trades discrimination for robustness. These findings suggest one-pass trained metrics as the practical choice for cost-sensitive deployment, with two-pass inference reserved for settings where D-R balance is critical. We will release the dataset and metric.

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

EKF-Based Depth Camera and Deep Learning Fusion for UAV-Person Distance Estimation and Following in SAR Operations

arXiv:2602.20958v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) frameworks aid human search tasks by detecting and recognizing specific individuals, then tracking and following them while maintaining a safe distance. A key safety requirement for UAV following is the accurate estimation of the distance between camera and target object under real-world conditions, achieved by fusing multiple image modalities. As part of the system for automatic people detection and face recognition using deep learning, in this paper we present the fusion of depth camera measurements and monocular camera-to-body distance estimation for robust tracking and following. Deep learning based filtering of depth camera data and estimation of camera-to-body distance from a monocular camera are achieved with YOLO-pose, enabling real-time fusion of depth information using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. The proposed subsystem, designed for use in drones, estimates and measures the distance between the depth camera and the human body keypoints, to maintain the safe distance between the drone and the human target. Our system provides an accurate estimated distance, which has been validated against motion capture ground truth data. The system has been tested in real time indoors, where it reduces the average errors, RMSE and standard deviations of distance estimation up to 15,3% in three tested scenarios. Based on the test results, the EKF fusion-based approach increases the depth detection range by reducing the errors outside the optimal depth camera working range. It also shows improved robustness and precision in challenging conditions, such as reflections and poor visibility, making it suitable for SAR.

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

QUIVER: Cost-Aware Adaptive Preference Querying in Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization

arXiv:2605.04267v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive multi-objective optimization systems face a budget allocation dilemma: one can spend resources on expensive objective evaluations or on eliciting decision-maker preferences that identify the relevant region of the Pareto set. Moreover, preference elicitation itself spans modalities with different information content and cognitive burden, ranging from cheap, noisy pairwise preference statements (PS) to richer but costlier indifference adjustments (IA). We study cost-aware optimization under an unknown scalarization and introduce QUIVER (Query-Informed Value Estimation for Regret), a surrogate-assisted evolutionary multi-objective optimizer that adaptively chooses between objective evaluations and heterogeneous preference queries. At each step, QUIVER selects the next action by maximizing the expected decision-quality improvement per unit total cost. Across DTLZ and WFG benchmarks under synthetic decision-maker models, QUIVER achieves the lowest final utility regret on challenging WFG problems (utility regret of 2.14 on WFG4, 2.82 on WFG9: a 25% improvement over baselines), outperforming all single-modality baselines. We analyze how the optimal mix of PS and IA adapts to problem difficulty: on easy problems (DTLZ2), QUIVER selects 80\% PS queries; on hard problems (WFG9), it shifts to 35% IA queries. This adaptive modality selection demonstrates cost-aware preference learning in action.

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

LLM Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial cross-lingual variation in mathematical reasoning performance, but it remains unclear whether these differences reflect language-specific parameters or a shared mechanism that manifests differently by language. We present a cross-lingual mechanistic analysis of mathematical reasoning in LLMs, enabling us to localize and compare model parameters that support mathematical reasoning across languages. We find that the extracted math-associated parameters exhibit partial cross-lingual overlap, with the strongest overlap concentrated in intermediate model layers. We further observe that English consistently produces the largest set of math-relevant parameters, whereas lower-resource languages reveal smaller sets of relevant parameters. These results suggest that math-related behavior in multilingual LLMs is neither fully language-invariant nor fully language-specific, but instead exhibits partial cross-lingual parameter overlap with systematic language-dependent differences.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

arXiv:2606.12603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous long-horizon sidewalk navigation is essential for micro-mobility applications such as robotic food delivery and assistive electronic wheelchairs. Unlike autonomous driving on the road, long-horizon sidewalk navigation requires precise maneuvering through unpredictable sidewalk terrains and pedestrians, with a lightweight perception stack as minimal as a single monocular RGB camera. While imitation learning (IL) from demonstrations offers a practical solution, the resulting autopilot policy often suffers from compounding errors, a lack of social compliance on sidewalks, and deficiencies in counterfactual reasoning to handle complex situations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlowPilot, a mapless navigation policy that achieves robust and efficient long-horizon navigation performance using only a monocular RGB camera. We first propose to use anchored flow matching as an action representation for policy pre-training on large-scale robot fleet data and to capture the diverse, complex, multimodal distribution of sidewalk navigation behaviors. To bridge the gap between imitation and alignment, we further design a human-in-the-loop preference learning scheme to tune the policy on a small amount of human intervention data. It strengthens the model's counterfactual reasoning and social compliance on sidewalks. We evaluate FlowPilot through extensive simulation and real-world experiments in diverse sidewalk environments. FlowPilot achieves 42% success rate and 66% route completion in simulation, while FlowPilot-HP further improves real-world robustness and social compliance, reducing IR by 40.0% and NIR by 52.1% relative to the base model.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Revisiting Chebyshev Polynomial and Anisotropic RBF Models for Tabular Regression

arXiv:2602.22422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smooth-basis models such as Chebyshev polynomial regressors and radial basis function (RBF) networks are well established in numerical analysis. Their continuously differentiable prediction surfaces suit surrogate optimisation, sensitivity analysis, and other settings where the response varies gradually with inputs. Despite these properties, smooth models seldom appear in tabular regression, where tree ensembles dominate. We ask whether they can compete, benchmarking models across 55 regression datasets organised by application domain. We develop an anisotropic RBF network with data-driven centre placement and gradient-based width optimisation, a ridge-regularised Chebyshev polynomial regressor, and a smooth-tree hybrid (Chebyshev model tree); all three are released as scikit-learn-compatible packages. We benchmark these against tree ensembles, a pre-trained transformer, and standard baselines, evaluating accuracy alongside generalisation behaviour. The transformer ranks first on accuracy across a majority of datasets, but its GPU dependence, inference latency, and dataset-size limits constrain deployment in the CPU-based settings common across applied science and industry. Among CPU-viable models, smooth models and tree ensembles are statistically tied on accuracy, but the former tend to exhibit tighter generalisation gaps. We recommend routinely including smooth-basis models in the candidate pool, particularly when downstream use benefits from tighter generalisation and gradually varying predictions.

25.
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 $k$.