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

Large-scale semantic mapping of learner agency and autonomy reveals what measurement and generative AI research overlook

arXiv:2606.10881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learner agency and autonomy are foundational to personal development, yet a pervasive "jingle-jangle" fallacy (i.e. identical terms denoting different constructs, distinct terms denoting identical ones) has substantially hindered cumulative knowledge. Treating meaning as a phenomenon constituted through use in linguistic practice, we extracted 8,954 definitions and 2,700 scale items from over 14,000 publications, to investigate how researchers actually used learner agency and autonomy with a semantic analysis pipeline. The definitional landscape of two constructs resolves into three dimensions: regulation and control of learning (task), intrinsic motivation and internal decision-making (person), and social-relational action (sociocultural), thereby empirically quantifying the jingle-jangle fallacy. Existing scales, however, systematically underrepresent the sociocultural dimension. Critically, current generative AI research in education concentrates on learning regulation and control, narrowing the behavioral repertoire that AI-mediated learning environments are designed to cultivate. Beyond conceptual clarification, this work carries direct implications for conceptualization, measurement, and practice towards supporting the multidimensional learner agency and autonomy.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Do Data-Driven Systems Exhibit the Capability to Infer?

arXiv:2606.11769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The European AI Act is the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), setting out extensive obligations, particularly for so-called high-risk and general-purpose AI systems. A key distinguishing feature of AI systems under the AI Act is the capability to infer. Since the AI Act does not clearly define what inference is, there is a gray area for certain data-driven systems. A specific example is credit scoring systems, which are listed by Annex III of the AI Act. At the same time, however, these are often implemented using statistical models for which it is unclear whether they have the capability to infer and thus fall under the AI definition of the AI Act at all. Motivated by statistical learning theory, this work develops a framework for grading different levels of the capability to infer. Based on the AI Act and the Commission Guidelines on the definition of an artificial intelligence system, we analyze which levels constitute sufficient capability to infer within the meaning of the AI Act and where further regulatory clarity is needed. We illustrate the framework by creating two realistic credit scoring workflows and show whether and where inference occurs in them. Our analysis illustrates that not only individual models but the entire data processing workflow must be considered. It also shows that the involvement of human experts during development can have significant influence on the capability to infer. Code can be found at https://github.com/fraunhofer-iais/inference-framework-creditscorecards.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

InstructTime++: Time Series Classification with Multimodal Language Modeling via Implicit Feature Enhancement

arXiv:2601.14968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most existing time series classification methods adopt a discriminative paradigm that maps input sequences directly to one-hot encoded class labels. While effective, this paradigm struggles to incorporate contextual features and fails to capture semantic relationships among classes. To address these limitations, we propose InstructTime, a novel framework that reformulates time series classification as a multimodal generative task. Specifically, continuous numerical sequences, contextual textual features, and task instructions are treated as multimodal inputs, while class labels are generated as textual outputs by tuned language models. To bridge the modality gap, InstructTime introduces a time series discretization module that converts continuous sequences into discrete temporal tokens, together with an alignment projection layer and a generative self-supervised pre-training strategy to enhance cross-modal representation alignment. Building upon this framework, we further propose InstructTime++, which extends InstructTime by incorporating implicit feature modeling to compensate for the limited inductive bias of language models. InstructTime++ leverages specialized toolkits to mine informative implicit patterns from raw time series and contextual inputs, including statistical feature extraction and vision-language-based image captioning, and translates them into textual descriptions for seamless integration. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of InstructTime++.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum codes and optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs via the MP construction

arXiv:2606.14253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we employ MP codes whose defining matrices are $\tau$-optimal defining ($\tau$-OD) matrices to construct new quantum codes and quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs. Specifically, we report the following results: We establish a unified $\tau$-monomial decomposition theorem for invertible self-adjoint matrices over finite fields of arbitrary characteristic, which generalizes the result in "Quantum codes using the $\tau$-OD MP construction" where the characteristic was required to be odd. Based on this theorem, we prove the existence of $\tau$-OD matrices over $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ for any characteristic and demonstrate that there exist several new infinite families of $\tau$-OD matrices over $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ of characteristic $2$. As an application of MP codes involving $\tau$-OD matrices, we construct several infinite families of quantum codes with flexible parameters. Within this framework, we present $222$ record-breaking quantum codes that surpass the best-known records maintained in Grassl's database. We propose two effective schemes for constructing optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs via MP codes. Accordingly, we construct four new infinite families of optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs with flexible parameters. Notably, we report an interesting phenomenon by exhibiting $30$ optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs derived from our framework; that is, there exist quantum codes that are not only optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs but also, according to Grassl's database, best-known, optimal, or record-breaking quantum codes. To the best of our knowledge, the new discovery that quantum codes are simultaneously optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs and record-breaking quantum codes has not been previously reported in the literature.

05.
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.

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

RACL: Reasoning-Agent Control Layers for Continuous Metaheuristic Learning

arXiv:2606.20142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces RACL, a Reasoning-Agent Control Layer for metaheuristics. RACL places a reasoning agent above an existing optimizer. The agent does not replace the optimizer and does not modify business constraints. Instead, it controls the optimizer's internal search behavior by observing operational memory, reasoning over past behavior, formulating bounded hypotheses, testing interventions, evaluating outcomes, applying guardrails, consolidating useful policies and explaining its decisions. The experiment uses vehicle routing as a testbed, but the contribution is not a new routing solver, a particular ALNS configuration or a specific set of routing rules. The contribution is the RACL method: a way for a reasoning agent to discover, validate, consolidate and explain algorithmic control rules for a metaheuristic. In the current experimental setting, RACL improves or ties the Operational Memory Policy in 21 of 21 feasible cases and improves or ties a non-reasoning Stagnation-Triggered Policy in 18 of 21 feasible cases, with an average RACL vs STP cost delta of -0.641%. In the Sevilla-9/10 runtime sample, RACL improves average cost by -8.337% versus Fixed and -1.605% versus STP without showing material computational overhead. During the proof-of-concept, Codex was used as an in-the-loop reasoning agent observing executions, interpreting logs and proposing live bounded interventions. The policy proxy was later used only to make quantitative evaluation reproducible.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Fast When, Careful Who: Dual-Process Multiparty Turn-Taking with Diffusion Augmentation

Reliable turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems. However, most existing methods are designed for two-speaker interaction and struggle with realistic multiparty audio containing overlap and rapid speaker changes. We study multiparty turn-taking on the VoxConverse dataset and propose an audio-only two-stage pipeline that separates when to trigger a turn boundary from whether the floor is actually transferring. A fast trigger scans the audio and proposes candidate end-of-turn times, while a lightweight verifier runs only at those times to decide \textsc{Hold} or \textsc{Shift} and support next-speaker prediction. We report results in the full multiparty setting and a controlled dyadic top-2 projection for comparability. We also investigate diffusion-based, label-preserving background-audio mixing as a data augmentation strategy. Results show improved shift detection over a baseline, with further improvements from diffusion augmentation.

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

ParkingTransformer: LLM-Enhanced End-to-End Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parking

arXiv:2606.17082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous parking has emerged as a critical task within the realm of autonomous driving. However, existing methods suffer from black-box characteristics, lacking high-level semantic understanding and interpretability, which impedes the realization of seamless long-distance autonomous parking from the road to the target spot. To address these limitations, we propose ParkingTransformer, a novel framework that leverages multi-view perception and the scene understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). By combining trajectory queries with LLMs implicit state features, our method interacts directly with historical information and raw sensor data to output planning trajectories, eliminating the need for dense Bird's-View (BEV) representations. To compensate for the inadequate spatial reasoning ability of LLMs, we introduce 3D positional encoding to explicitly inject spatial geometric awareness. Furthermore, a fixed-window streaming mechanism is designed for historical information processing, significantly improving long-term temporal processing efficiency and inference speed. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy is employed to progressively enhance trajectory precision. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted on the CARLA simulator and real-world vehicle platforms. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 61.32 in CARLA simulator and an average success rate of 88.70% in real-world experiments, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Guidelines for the Annotation and Visualization of Legal Argumentation Structures in Chinese Judicial Decisions

This Guideline presents a systematic and operationalizable annotation framework for representing legal argumentation structures in judicial decisions. Grounded in theories of legal reasoning and argumentation, the framework aims to reveal the logical organization of judicial reasoning and provide a reliable foundation for computational analysis. At the element level, the Guideline distinguishes between the non-propositional layer and the propositional layer. The non-propositional layer consists of two elements: Issue and Non-argumentative Component. At the propositional level, the Guideline defines four proposition types: General Normative Judgment, Particular Normative Judgment, General Factual Judgment, and Particular Factual Judgment. At the relational level, five relation types are defined to represent argumentative structures: Support, Attack, Joint, Match, and Identity. These relations capture positive and negative argumentative connections, conjunctive reasoning structures, correspondences between legal norms and case facts, and identity or semantic equivalence between propositions. The Guideline further specifies formal representation rules and visualization conventions for both basic and nested structures, enabling consistent visualization of complex argumentation patterns. In addition, it establishes a standardized annotation workflow and consistency control mechanisms to ensure the reproducibility and reliability of annotated data. By providing a clear conceptual model, formal representation rules, and practical annotation procedures, this Guideline supports large-scale analysis of judicial reasoning and future research in legal argument mining, computational modeling of legal reasoning, and AI-assisted legal analysis.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Low-Regularity Semigroup Sewing Lemma via Quotient Structures

arXiv:2606.16164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a low-regularity Sewing theory for the semigroup coboundary $\hat\delta=\delta-a$ associated with a strongly continuous semigroup $S$. Unlike the ordinary low-regularity Sewing problem, the semigroup setting has an intrinsic algebraic non-uniqueness below the threshold $1$, in the sense that solutions are canonical only modulo semigroup cocycles. Accordingly, the natural target is a quotient space rather than an increment space. We identify this quotient structure and construct the corresponding semigroup Sewing map. The construction uses a frozen terminal-time transform, which rewrites semigroup defects, for each terminal time, as ordinary low-regularity Sewing problems on a frozen simplex. This reduction, however, does not by itself produce a genuine semigroup increment; the main additional step is to prove that the frozen solution classes are compatible as the terminal time varies and hence assemble into a canonical quotient class for $\hat\delta$. This yields canonical classes for $0

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A uniform-in-time weakly convergent explicit numerical method for the underdamped Langevin equation with polynomial potentials

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The underdamped Langevin equation is a fundamental model in statistical mechanics for sampling Gibbs measures and simulating molecular dynamics, for which numerical methods with uniform-in-time weak convergence are essential for accurately reproducing long-time statistical observables and invariant measures of the underlying dynamics. Currently, such uniform-in-time weak convergence is established for implicit schemes, but remains unknown for explicit ones under polynomially growing potentials. To improve efficiency in long-time simulations, we propose the first explicit numerical method for the underdamped Langevin equation with polynomially growing potentials that is proven to achieve uniform-in-time weak convergence. The explicit numerical method is constructed by introducing a dissipativity on the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV), which we call the DSAV method. The proposed DSAV method enables the approximation of the invariant measure for the underdamped Langevin equation with a precision of $\varepsilon$ at a significantly reduced computational cost of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1} \log(\varepsilon^{-1}))$. In addition, we establish the existence and positivity of the density function of the numerical solution without using the Malliavin calculus. Numerical experiments are performed to verify the theoretical findings and demonstrate the long-time stability of the proposed numerical method.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bridging Modality Disconnect in Self-Reflection via Closed-Loop Visually Grounded Verification

In the era of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enhancing multimodal reasoning capabilities remains a critical challenge, particularly in handling ambiguous or complex visual inputs, where initial inferences often lead to hallucinations or logic errors. Existing VLMs often produce plausible yet ungrounded answers, and even when prompted to "reflect", their corrections may remain detached from the image evidence. To address this, we propose the MIRROR framework for Multimodal Iterative Reasoning via Reflection On visual Regions. By embedding visual reflection as a core mechanism, MIRROR is formulated as a closed-loop process comprising draft, critique, region-based verification, and revision, which are repeated until the output is visually grounded. To facilitate training of this model, we construct **ReflectV**, a visual reflective dataset for multi-turn supervision that explicitly contains reflection triggers, region-based verification actions, and answer revision grounded in visual evidence. Experiments on both general vision-language benchmarks and representative vision-language reasoning benchmarks show that MIRROR improves correctness and reduces visual hallucinations, demonstrating the value of training reflection as an evidence-seeking, region-aware verification process rather than a purely textual revision step.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Fast LLM-Based Semantic Filtering: From a Unified Framework to an Adaptive Two-Phase Method

arXiv:2606.08090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating a natural-language yes/no predicate over a document corpus under an accuracy target - the semantic filter - is a cornerstone of LLM-based data processing. Calling the LLM on every document (the oracle) is prohibitive, so cascades pair the oracle with a fast proxy. As deployed today, they leave four limitations on the table. (1) Each cascade family - model-free clustering, prebuilt small-LLM proxies, online-trained proxies - commits to a single representation and pipeline, and wins on only a narrow query regime. (2) The strongest online proxy invests in a custom training scheme on a bi-encoder over dense embeddings, missing the token-level evidence richer predicates require. (3) The proxy is trained against binary yes/no labels, wasting the LLM's per-document confidence at the boundary documents it most needs to learn. (4) Existing calibrations add a uniform safety margin, conflating genuine proxy uncertainty with small-sample noise and inflating cascade cost. We address these by (1) composing families adaptively - model-free clustering first, online proxy only when needed, with oracle calls shared across phases; (2) replacing the cosine bi-encoder with a hybrid of off-the-shelf token-aware models; (3) training the proxy with the oracle's per-document confidence as a soft label; and (4) a calibration that adds the safety margin only where the labeled sample is sparse. We are also the first to use the oracle's per-document confidence for three purposes: a query-level difficulty compass, a lower bound on the minimum oracle calls any proxy-based cascade can make, and the proxy's soft training label. At a 90% accuracy target on three 10K-document corpora, our methods are 1.6-2.0x faster than the best prior method per corpus and meet the target on 95% of queries; the BER-derived lower bound indicates a further ~4-20x of headroom for future work.

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

Generating Natural and Expressive Robot Gestures through Iterative Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback using LLMs

arXiv:2606.18747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive gestures are essential for natural and effective communication, complementing speech when verbal cues alone are insufficient (e.g., pointing). For social robots such as the humanoid Pepper, producing natural and expressive movements is critical for improving human-robot interaction (HRI) and long-term acceptance. However, generating gestures remains challenging due to reliance on expert-authored animations, resulting in rigid behaviors that are impractical for dynamic and diverse environments. Alternatively, machine learning approaches often struggle to capture perceived naturalness, becoming increasingly challenging with more degrees of freedom. Consequently, producing expressive robot gestures requires a system that can adapt to the environment while adhering to social norms and physical constraints. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable dynamic code generation, offering new opportunities for runtime gesture synthesis from natural language. In this paper, we integrate ChatGPT into the humanoid robot Pepper to generate co-speech gestures aligned with conversational output. While this baseline enables flexible gesture generation, the resulting motions are often perceived as stiff and unnatural. To address this limitation, we introduce an iterative reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) system that finetunes gesture generation based on user evaluations, leveraging an iterative user study to compare Pepper's generated gestures. Our results show that RLHF improved the LLM's co-speech generative capabilities, producing more expressive, relevant and fluid movements.

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

Beyond Perplexity: UTF-8 Validity in Byte-aware Language Models

Byte-level tokenization enables language models to handle any Unicode input, but models can generate invalid UTF-8 sequences when encountering rare or unseen characters. We investigate the relationship between training scale and UTF-8 generation reliability with a 355M parameter model trained on 80B tokens from a balanced multilingual corpus of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. We introduce multiple evaluation protocols that isolate UTF-8 structural validity from language modeling. UTF-8 validity convergence lags perplexity by a roughly a factor of two: perplexity stabilizes after 2.1B tokens, but UTF-8 validity requires 4.2B tokens. In context-free generation, rare characters achieve higher structural validity than common characters, suggesting over-specialization of frequent character representations. Through experiments, we observed that reliable UTF-8 generation is a distinct capability requiring evaluation beyond perplexity.

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

Skill-3D: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic 3D Spatial Reasoning

This paper explores agentic 3D spatial understanding, i.e., MLLM agents performing 3D reasoning through tool use. Existing methods often misuse tools and exhibit biased tool preferences under 3D scenarios, leaving the agentic paradigm with only marginal gains over non-agentic strategies. We reveal that 3D spatial reasoning tasks are heterogeneous across scenes, while these agents apply a uniform tool-use strategy to all scenes rather than selecting tools according to the specific scene and task. To address this, we propose Skill-3D, a framework that learns self-evolving scene-aware skills. Specifically, Skill-3D identifies the task scene and records the agent's tool-use trajectory into a Scene Memory, where successful trajectories from similar scenes are aggregated and distilled into a reusable scene-aware skill, with failed ones attached to the skill as lessons. During training, once a similar scene recurs, the corresponding skill is injected to guide the agent, producing new trajectories whose successes and failures further refine the skill, forming a loop in which the memory and the skill library co-evolve. Experiments show that Skill-3D substantially improves tool utilization in 3D spatial reasoning (from 39% to 78% on VSI-Bench), driving the agent toward correct and sufficient tool use. For instance, it improves Gemini-3-Flash by 67% on MMSI-Bench. Furthermore, we conduct agentic post-training over skill-guided trajectories, which boosts Qwen3-VL-8B by 60% on VSI-Bench.

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

Intrinsic Computational Functionalism and Simulated Consciousness

arXiv:2606.15348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A common objection to artificial or simulated consciousness is that a simulated brain is no more conscious than simulated water is wet. We address this from the perspective of Intrinsic Computational Functionalism (ICF): if consciousness is computationally constituted, it depends not on externally imposed descriptions but on the computational structures a system physically realizes in virtue of its own causal-dynamical organization. In previous work we developed Canonical Functionalism as a mathematically precise special case of this anti-interpretivist program, identifying functional states by their complete future input-output roles under a fixed interface. Here we argue that this input-output construction, though important, is incomplete: as a behavioral boundary case of ICF, it makes lookup tables and unfolded systems that preserve the same boundary behavior canonically equivalent. A consciousness-relevant canonical representation must instead include internal mechanisms, interventions, and joint readouts belonging to the relevant intrinsic organization. We therefore define a mechanism-enriched canonical structure and use it to formulate Intrinsic Causal-Computational Realization (ICCR), a realization relation preserving physical implementation, intrinsic state individuation, transition structure, intervention profiles, and the relevant agent-body-world boundary. The central result is conditional: if conscious properties are invariants of intrinsic causal-computational organization, then any system satisfying ICCR realizes the same consciousness-relevant properties, whether biological, artificial, or simulated. We discuss objections including biological naturalism and integrated information theory. We conclude that to deny consciousness to a simulation, one must identify a consciousness-relevant intrinsic causal-computational structure that the simulation fails to realize.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques

arXiv:2509.07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.

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

Learning universal approximations for partial differential equations with Physics-Informed Broad Learning System

arXiv:2606.19754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Partial differential equations (PDEs) play a central role in modeling complex physical, biological, and engineering systems. While traditional numerical solvers are robust, they often incur prohibitive computational costs due to mesh dependencies, whereas recent Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but frequently suffer from slow convergence and optimization instability. To bridge this gap, this article proposes the Physics-Informed Broad Learning System (PIBLS), a novel backpropagation-free framework that reformulates PDE solving as a direct least-squares optimization. We improved an algorithm within this framework to handle nonlinear PDEs efficiently and provide a rigorous mathematical proof establishing the universal approximation property of PIBLS for these equations. Experiments on linear and nonlinear PDEs demonstrate that PIBLS is one to three orders of magnitude faster than conventional PINNs while achieving significantly higher solution accuracy. This framework provides a computationally efficient paradigm for scientific machine learning, offering a practical, high-speed alternative for real-time simulation and design optimization tasks.

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

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Far Can Chord-Symbol Time-Series Adaptation Carry Genre Identity? Capabilities and Boundaries in Multi-Genre Chord-Symbol Modeling

Authors:

arXiv:2606.07334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This report treats chord-symbol sequences as an interpretable, controllable time series for genre-local harmonic modeling. The frozen Music Transformer base - released as a pop-jazz fine-tune endpoint but verified in this revision weight-identical to the pop-only Phase-0 baseline, so all gains are measured over a pure-pop prior (see Changes in v2) - is extended to eleven target genres: blues, bossa nova, Bach chorales, country, electronic, folk, funk, gospel, hip-hop, R&B/soul, and rock. The main evaluation compares LoRA, IA3, BitFit, prefix tuning, and full fine-tuning over 11 genres and 3 seeds, a complete 165-cell grid. All five methods improve over the frozen base on held-out chord prediction (macro gains +2.89 to +3.61 percentage points); LoRA and IA3 score highest, but pairwise Wilcoxon tests with Holm and Benjamini-Hochberg correction do not support a decisive winner. A matched-data-size control sharpens this: at a common corpus size IA3 stays on top while LoRA drops to last, so the small method gaps are partly data-driven rather than representational. A control-token baseline is also strong, and wrong-genre adapters often beat the frozen base, suggesting the adaptation effect is largely lightweight conditioning over a reusable harmonic base rather than genre-specific adapter memory. Further diagnostics (rank sweeps, wrong-genre rotation, a base-checkpoint ablation that v2 reinterprets as a same-weights control, chord-only genre classification, output-distribution statistics, real-song evaluation, duplicate analysis) support a bounded conclusion: chord-symbol adaptation reliably improves genre-local harmonic prediction, but chord symbols alone do not carry complete genre identity. Perceived genre authenticity and musical quality are left to controlled listener evaluation.

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

Simulation-Augmented Multi-Step Split Conformal Prediction for Aggregated Forecasts

arXiv:2606.16356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study uncertainty quantification for aggregated forecasting tasks such as annual totals and year-over-year growth rates. We propose SA-MSCP, a simulation-augmented multi-step split conformal method that generates future paths from cross-validated residuals using a block bootstrap and constructs prediction intervals from empirical quantiles. Experiments show that SA-MSCP improves empirical coverage over a simulated-path baseline for aggregated and growth-rate targets. Our results demonstrate that simulation-enhanced conformal calibration is an effective and general framework for uncertainty quantification in aggregated time-series forecasting.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Dressed Floquet scars from protected zero modes in a Rydberg chain

arXiv:2606.15605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this Letter, we present an approximate analytic construction of two zero quasienergy quantum many-body scars in a periodically driven model of Rydberg atoms on a ring, which persist over a range of driving amplitudes and frequencies for finite sizes. An index theorem protects an exponentially large number (in system size) of exact zero energy modes of the Floquet Hamiltonian in this setting. Unlike most of these zero modes which continuously change with drive parameters, these two quantum many-body scars retain the memory of particular states. They can be expressed as {\it dressed versions} of two contrasting states, the Rydberg vacuum and a unitarily rotated variant of a volume-law scar [Ivanov and Motrunich, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 134}, 050403 (2025)], respectively. We provide an analytic understanding of their existence using a Floquet perturbation theory and show their resilience beyond the perturbative regime using exact diagonalization in finite systems. Our study provides insight into the structure of protected zero modes in interacting Floquet settings.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Additivity and chain rules for quantum entropies via multi-index Schatten norms

arXiv:2502.01611v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The primary entropic measures for quantum states are additive under the tensor product. In the analysis of quantum information processing tasks, the minimum entropy of a set of states, e.g., the minimum output entropy of a channel, often plays a crucial role. A fundamental question in quantum information and cryptography is whether the minimum output entropy remains additive under the tensor product of channels. Here, we establish a general additivity statement for the optimized sandwiched Rényi entropy of quantum channels. For that, we generalize the results of [Devetak, Junge, King, Ruskai, CMP 2006] to multi-index Schatten norms. As an application, we strengthen the additivity statement of [Van Himbeeck and Brown, 2025] thus allowing the analysis of time-adaptive quantum cryptographic protocols. In addition, we establish chain rules for Rényi conditional entropies that are similar to the ones used for the generalized entropy accumulation theorem of [Metger, Fawzi, Sutter, Renner, CMP 2024].

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

Gaze Heads: How VLMs Look at What They Describe

How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/