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

An Agentic Retrieval Framework for Autonomous Context-Aware Data Quality Assessment

arXiv:2606.13692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data quality assessment is a critical prerequisite for effective data analytics and data-driven decision-making, yet it remains a challenging task due to the inherently context-dependent nature of data quality. Existing approaches often rely on static rules or manual assessment strategies, limiting their adaptability to diverse usage scenarios and constraining automation at scale. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, offer new opportunities for automating data quality assessment, but raise concerns related to reliability, grounding, and execution safety. In this paper, we propose a unified agentic-retrieval framework for autonomous context-aware data quality assessment. The framework interprets natural-language descriptions of intended data usage, derives context-aware assessment strategies, and generates executable validation logic through a multi-agent workflow. To ensure operational reliability, the framework introduces a feasibility validation stage that evaluates the realism and executability of generated assessment specifications before execution, enabling iterative refinement when necessary. Accepted validation logic is executed deterministically to guarantee reproducible and auditable results. We implement the proposed framework as an end-to-end prototype and evaluate it across multiple usage scenarios applied to the same dataset. The results demonstrate that assessment outcomes adapt meaningfully to different intended uses, while feasibility-gated execution reduces unrealistic or non-executable rule generation. The proposed approach provides a practical foundation for deploying autonomous yet controlled data quality assessment in modern data-driven environments.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Stable and Steerable Sparse Autoencoders with Weight Regularization

arXiv:2603.04198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices. To improve stability, we studied weight regularization by adding L1 or L2 penalties on encoder and decoder weights, and evaluate how regularization interacts with common SAE training defaults. On MNIST, we observe that L2 weight regularization produces a core of highly aligned features and, when combined with tied initialization and unit-norm decoder constraints, it dramatically increases cross-seed feature consistency. For TopK SAEs trained on language model activations (Pythia-70M-deduped), adding a small L2 weight penalty increased the fraction of features shared across three random seeds and roughly doubles steering success rates, while leaving the mean of automated interpretability scores essentially unchanged. Finally, in the regularized setting, activation steering success becomes better predicted by auto-interpretability scores, suggesting that regularization can align text-based feature explanations with functional controllability.

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

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

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

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Numerically Optimizing Shortcuts to Adiabaticity: A Hybrid Control Strategy

arXiv:2604.01301v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Achieving fast, excitation-free quantum control is a vital challenge in modern quantum technologies. In many cases, shortcuts to adiabaticity enable fast adiabatic-like protocols, yet determining control parameters that satisfy practical constraints is often challenging in complex systems. Here, we combine an analytical shortcut to adiabaticity approach with several numerical optimization methods to boost the performance of the protocol. As a proof-of-principle for this hybrid approach, we study a particularly intricate control problem, the separation of two trapped ions. We show that this analytical-numerical approach, along with the physical insight gained through the variety of suboptimal solutions, leads to the exploration of new solutions in a complex landscape that yield improvements of up to 3 orders of magnitude. Moreover, this improvement comes with no additional cost from an experimental point of view.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Precomputing Multi-Agent Path Replanning Using Temporal Flexibility

arXiv:2601.04884v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Executing a multi-agent plan can be challenging when an agent is delayed, because this typically creates conflicts with other agents. So, we need to quickly find a new safe plan. Replanning only the delayed agent often does not yield an efficient plan, and sometimes cannot even yield a feasible one. On the other hand, replanning other agents may lead to a cascade of changes and delays, and it is computationally expensive. We show how to efficiently replan a single delayed agent by tracking and using the temporal flexibility of other agents while avoiding cascading delays. This flexibility is the maximum delay that the agent can take without changing the order with agents other than the initially delayed agent, or further delaying other agents. Our algorithm, FlexSIPP, precomputes all possible plans for the delayed agent and returns the changes to the other agents within the given scenario. We demonstrate our method in a real-world case study of replanning trains in the densely-used Dutch railway network and in the MovingAI MAPF benchmark set. Our experiments show that FlexSIPP provides effective solutions relevant to real-world adjustments, and within a reasonable timeframe.

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

Beyond the Blood Draw: Explainable Machine Learning for Non-Invasive Dysglycemia Risk Screening

arXiv:2606.16056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dysglycemia, encompassing both prediabetes and diabetes, affects huge numbers of adults worldwide, yet many of them remain undiagnosed. We developed and validated machine-learning (ML) models for non-invasive screening of dysglycemia risk that require no laboratory tests. Pooling data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2017–2023 (n=14,352), we trained six ML models with stratified 5-fold cross-validation and compared them with two established clinical risk scores. LightGBM achieved the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC=0.820, 95% CI: 0.806–0.835), outperforming the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (0.745) and American Diabetes Association Risk Test (0.783). SHAP analysis identified age, race/ethnicity, and waist-to-height ratio as the most influential predictors. Subgroup analyses confirmed consistent performance across demographic strata (AUC: 0.735–0.832). These results demonstrate the feasibility of explainable, laboratory-free dysglycemia screening for deployment in community settings and self-tracking health applications.

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

Searching for Synergy in Shared Workspace Human-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2606.18413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated AI agents are increasingly capable, yet many scientific and professional tasks require human judgment and contextual expertise. We study shared-workspace human-AI teams, where AI agents and human collaborators must coordinate responsibilities before submitting a final answer. Using the Collaborative Gym environment with DiscoveryBench tasks, we examine when adding simulated human collaborators improves performance and when process loss turns additional collaborators into coordination overhead. Across 1,482 sessions, adding relevant collaborators can lower performance when teams lack structure to coordinate their contributions. We then evaluate scaffolding that combines shared group memory with simulated human-in-the-loop (HITL) gates, where selected actions require approval from a designated simulated participant. This scaffolding yields higher mean performance, most clearly in three-person teams, with clearer responsibility signals and stronger routing of expertise to team actions. Overall, how human-AI teams coordinate and integrate expertise matters as much as the capability available to them.

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

From Mechanistic to Compositional Interpretability

arXiv:2605.08934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be objectively verified, compared, or composed. We introduce compositional interpretability, a category-theoretic framework grounded in the principles of compositionality and minimum description length. Compositional interpretations are pairs of syntactic and semantic mappings that must commute to enforce consistency between a model's decomposition and its observed behaviour. We deconstruct explanation quality into measures of faithfulness and complexity to cast interpretability as a constrained optimisation problem, and introduce compressive refinement to systematically restructure models into simpler parts without altering their function. Finally, we derive a parsimony criterion under which syntactic compression theoretically guarantees more concise, human-aligned explanations. Our framework situates prominent mechanistic methods as subclasses of refinement, and clarifies why their compressibility heuristics tend to align with human interpretability. Our work provides a measurable, optimisable blueprint for automating the discovery and evaluation of mechanistic explanations.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Architectures for Multi-Horizon Behavioural Forecasting for Mobile Health

arXiv:2606.14604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wearable devices and smartphones generate rich behavioural time series that can support proactive health interventions, yet systematic comparisons of modern forecasting architectures for these data are lacking. In particular, it remains unclear how models generalise across populations, how different architectures respond to participant-level fine-tuning and how forecasting accuracy degrades across multi-day horizons. We benchmark six deep learning architectures, two zero-shot Foundation Models (FM) and statistical baselines on three public datasets encompassing over 800 participants, reporting per-feature metrics for step counts, screen time and sleep duration across 1-8 day horizons. We further conduct a per-feature personalisation study across all six architectures and assess FM transferability across dataset sizes and temporal granularities. Our key findings are: (i) no single architecture dominates, PatchTST leads among trained models while the three runners-up (TCN, MLP, Transformer) show no meaningful performance difference; (ii) the FM TimesFM matches or exceeds trained models zero-shot, especially in low-data regimes and (iii) participant-level fine-tuning reduces per-feature RMSE by 16-60\%, with sleep benefiting most and step counts least. These results provide practical guidance on architecture selection, FM applicability and personalisation strategies for mobile health forecasting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to jointly evaluate modern deep learning, FMs and personalisation for multi-horizon behavioural forecasting from wearables.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Afrispeech Semantics: Evaluating Audio Semantic Reasoning in Spoken Language Models Across Domains and Accents

Audio language models (ALMs) are increasingly used for speech-based understanding, yet their ability to perform semantic reasoning beyond transcription, Text-to-Audio Retrieval, Captioning, and Question-Answering accuracy remains insufficiently benchmarked. In particular, the effects of accent variation, domain shift, and semantic over-inference on audio reasoning are poorly understood. We evaluate audio language models across five semantic and paralinguistic reasoning tasks: entailment, consistency, plausibility, accent drift, and accent restraint. Collectively, these tasks assess a model's ability to reason over spoken audio as the primary evidence source, including whether a textual hypothesis can be inferred, contradicted, or left undetermined by the audio, whether statements align or conflict with spoken content, whether claims are plausible given the discourse, and whether model predictions remain stable or appropriately constrained across accent variation. These findings highlight critical limitations in current audio reasoning evaluations and hope to provide guidance for more robust and equitable ALM design and assessment

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

Energy-Modulated Time-Asymmetric Spontaneous Collapse: Forward-Backward Dynamics from Stochastic Ito Reversal and Bright Solitons

arXiv:2606.06452v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a rigorous theoretical framework for symmetry breaking and quantum irreversibility arising from stochastic Ito field reversal within a cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (CQ-NLSE) formalism. Starting from three physically motivated considerations, forward and backward nonlinear stochastic differential equations are derived via the Ito calculus. Kinematic time-reversal is shown to be fundamentally incompatible with the Ito stochastic structure, yielding the universal asymmetry-coupling parameter of 2/3. An energy-driven collapse operator proportional to the product of noise strength, local probability density, and excitation energy squared is introduced, amplifying the collapse in high-density, high-excitation regions. Exactly bright soliton solutions are obtained for a quasi-one-dimensional BEC of attractive Li-7 atoms, with forward and backward amplitude ratio of 1.870. Heat map analysis of the parameter planes reveals that the forward collapse operator grows monotonically in time while the backward counterpart decays, achieving a ratio approximately 1030, sharply distinguishing this framework from conventional symmetric collapse models.

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

Low-Latency Real-Time Audio Game Commentary System via LLM-Based Parallel Text Generation

We present a low-latency real-time audio game commentary system that generates spoken commentary directly from live gameplay video. In this end-to-end setting, a key bottleneck is accumulated waiting time; conventional pipelines capture frames, generate text, and synthesize speech sequentially for each utterance, and do not request the next generation until speech playback has completed. This strict sequentiality causes long and unnatural silence between utterances. To address this latency bottleneck, our system runs text generation in parallel with speech playback and buffers multiple candidate utterances ahead of time, enabling immediate synthesis at playback boundaries. Experiments on fast-paced game videos show that our parallel design reduces the mean inter-utterance silence from 9.6 seconds to 0.3 seconds compared to sequential baselines. It also improves similarity to professional speaking–silence timing patterns by over 40 %, and a user study with 120 experienced game players confirms significantly improved perceived speaking rhythm. Our demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/pmrRUlvav8M.

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

LiFT: Local Search via Linear Programming for Overfitting-Controlled Transformers

This paper proposes a Linear Programming (LP)-based local search framework for fine-tuning pretrained transformer models with explicit control against overfitting. The approach formulates transformer fine-tuning as a bilevel optimization-based regularization problem, in which model parameters and regularization hyperparameters are jointly updated. Information collected during initial warm-up iterations, including validation gradients and training Hessian information, is used to construct a local descent direction by solving an LP that minimizes a scaled directional derivative while preserving training optimality. This validation-aware descent direction enables focused local updates of both parameters and regularization hyperparameters, reducing overfitting without requiring repeated full retraining cycles. The resulting method, termed Linear Programming-based Fine-Tuning (LiFT) for transformers, differs from conventional fine-tuning by systematically identifying task-specific updates rather than relying on heuristic or grid-based hyperparameter selection. Experiments on GPT-2 Small fine-tuned on WikiText-2 demonstrate that LiFT enables effective adaptation through selective tuning of transformer blocks and regularization parameters, yielding consistent improvements in test perplexity across multiple layer configurations and regularization settings, with particularly pronounced gains in overfitting-prone scenarios. Beyond empirical performance, LiFT establishes a principled connection between transformer fine-tuning, bilevel optimization, local search, and regularization theory.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Experimental straintronics in nanotube quantum dots

arXiv:2606.12180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are narrow ribbons of graphene with atomically precise edges and a single quantum transport channel, at experimentally-relevant dopings. This makes them ideal systems to harness quantum transport straintronics (QTS), i.e. using mechanical strain to control accurately quantum transport. We present QTS data from three single-wall carbon nanotube quantum dot (SWCNT-QD) transistors over a broad range of in-situ tunable and reversible uniaxial strain ($\Delta\varepsilon_mech\approx$ 0 to 3 %). We first present the nanofabrication of the suspended SWCNT transistors whose channel lengths are $\approx$ 30 nm. The channels are strained by moving gold clamps holding firmly the nanotubes. We present detailed charge transport data, $dI/dV_{B} - V_{B} - V_{G}$ and $dI/dV_{B} - V_{B} - \Delta\varepsilon_mech$, showing a large mechanical-gating effect of the SWCNT-QDs. The precise reversibility of the data, and their agreement with QTS theory, confirms that the tubes are strained elastically. We demonstrate that the mechanical control of the QD doping is not due to capacitive-gating effects, but to quantitatively predictable bandstructure changes including a strain-tunable bandgap. This precise mechanical control of the doping and bandgap of SWCNT-QDs could find applications in qubits, condensed matter physics, and homojunction molecular transistors.

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

Central Limit Theorems for Stochastic Gradient Descent Quantile Estimators

arXiv:2503.02178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops asymptotic theory for quantile estimation via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate. The quantile loss function is neither smooth nor strongly convex. Beyond conventional perspectives and techniques, we view quantile SGD iteration as an irreducible, periodic, and positive recurrent Markov chain, which cyclically converges to its unique stationary distribution regardless of the arbitrarily fixed initialization. To derive the exact form of the stationary distribution, we analyze the structure of its characteristic function by exploiting the stationary equation. We also derive tight bounds for its moment generating function (MGF) and tail probabilities. Synthesizing the aforementioned approaches, we prove that the centered and standardized stationary distribution converges to a Gaussian distribution as the learning rate $\eta\rightarrow0$. This finding provides the first central limit theorem (CLT)-type theoretical guarantees for the quantile SGD estimator with constant learning rates. We further propose a recursive algorithm to construct confidence intervals of the estimators with statistical guarantees. Numerical studies demonstrate the effective finite-sample performance of the online estimator and inference procedure. The theoretical tools developed in this study are of independent interest for investigating general SGD algorithms formulated as Markov chains, particularly in non-strongly convex and non-smooth settings.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Extreme value theory for geometric Brownian motion and pricing of short maturity options

作者:

arXiv:2505.08036v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the limiting distribution of geometric Brownian motion conditional on its running maximum taking large values. The Freidlin-Wentzell large deviations theory predicts that the conditional distribution of the sample paths converge weakly to a deterministic exponential curve. We complement this result by showing that the conditional sample paths in fact converge in strong sense, and obtain quantitative bounds on the rate of convergence. As an application of our results to financial mathematics, we obtain new closed form asymptotic formulae for the fair price of barrier options with general path dependent payoff in the short maturity limit, with quantitative error estimates. We provide exact formulae for Asian and lookback style payoffs.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

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

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

作者:

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

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

Hybrid Iterative Neural Low-Regularity Integrator for Nonlinear Dispersive Equations

arXiv:2605.04853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HIN-LRI, a hybrid framework that augments a classical numerical solver with a neural operator trained to correct the solver's structured truncation error. A base low-regularity integrator provides a consistent first-order approximation to nonlinear dispersive PDEs, while a lightweight neural network, operating on a low-dimensional latent manifold, learns the residual defect that analytical methods cannot close. An explicit time-step scaling on the neural correction ensures that its Lipschitz contribution remains $\mathcal{O}(\tau)$, yielding a Gronwall stability factor bounded uniformly in the step size and independent of the spatial resolution. The network is trained end-to-end through a solver-in-the-loop objective that unrolls the full iteration and penalises trajectory error in a Bourgain-type norm, aligning learning with multi-step solver dynamics rather than isolated one-step targets. Under stated assumptions, the global error satisfies $C(\varepsilon_{net}+\delta)\,\tau^\gamma\ln(1/\tau)$, where $\varepsilon_{net}$ measures the network approximation quality and $\delta$ the training shortfall. Experiments on three dispersive benchmarks with rough data show that HIN-LRI improves accuracy over analytical integrators, splitting methods, and neural PDE surrogates, with stable spatial refinement, effective out-of-distribution transfer, and modest online overhead.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DLDN-Bench: A Benchmark Framework for Deep Learning de Novo Peptide Sequencing in Proteomics

De novo peptide sequencing is an essential approach for analyzing mass spectrometry data because it enables the identification of novel peptides without relying on protein sequence databases. Recent advances in deep learning have substantially improved the performance of de novo sequencing methods, but the rapid emergence of new models has led to heterogeneous evaluation practices and limited comparability. To address this, we introduce DLDN-Bench, a benchmark framework including a set of benchmark datasets derived from human muscle biopsy mass spectrometry data retrieved from PRIDE and annotated through consensus across multiple widely used database search engines. Using these datasets, we systematically benchmark recent deep learning-based de novo sequencing tools alongside traditional approaches. Performance is assessed using established metrics, including precision and coverage relative to a pseudo-ground truth defined by cross-engine agreement. To demonstrate the utility of DLDN-Bench, we benchmark four recent deep learning models and make all results publicly available. This benchmark framework provides a standardized basis for comparing state-of-the-art methods and offers an extensible resource for evaluating future tools in de novo peptide sequencing.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago

Plague is among the most devastating diseases in human history1. However, early strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis lacked virulence factors that are required for the bubonic form until around 3,800 years ago2,3. Consequently, the morbidity and mortality of early plague strains remain unclear. Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years). We further note functional differences, including in the ypm superantigen locus, which is also present in present day Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. The new strains diverge ancestrally to known Y. pestis and constrain the timing of its emergence, indicating that this happened before approximately 5,700 years ago. These findings show that plague outbreaks happened earlier than previously thought and were indeed lethal. We contend that the occurrence of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer communities well outside the sphere of Late Neolithic Europe challenges the notion that higher population densities and lifestyle changes during the Neolithic agricultural transition were prerequisites for plague epidemics. Analyses of ancient DNA from hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia around 5,500 years ago indicate that highly virulent Yersinia pestis emerged earlier than previously estimated, far from the next known cases of infection in Late Neolithic Europe.

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

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

arXiv:2605.03460v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail in the financial domain, which exhibits unique characteristics. We propose a general 2 x 2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain-where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical-as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.

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

Near-Optimal Regret for Distributed Adversarial Bandits: A Black-Box Approach

arXiv:2602.06404v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study distributed adversarial bandits, where $N$ agents cooperate to minimize the global average loss while observing only their own local losses. We show that the minimax regret for this problem is $\tilde{\Theta}(\sqrt{(\rho^{-1/2}+K/N)T})$, where $T$ is the horizon, $K$ is the number of actions, and $\rho$ is the spectral gap of the communication matrix. Our algorithm, based on a novel black-box reduction to bandits with delayed feedback, requires agents to communicate only through gossip. It achieves an upper bound that significantly improves over the previous best bound $\tilde{O}(\rho^{-1/3}(KT)^{2/3})$ of Yi and Vojnovic (2023). We complement this result with a matching lower bound, showing that the problem's difficulty decomposes into a communication cost $\rho^{-1/4}\sqrt{T}$ and a bandit cost $\sqrt{KT/N}$. We further demonstrate the versatility of our approach by deriving first-order and best-of-both-worlds bounds in the distributed adversarial setting. Finally, we extend our framework to distributed linear bandits in $R^d$, obtaining a regret bound of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{(\rho^{-1/2}+1/N)dT})$, achieved with only $O(d)$ communication cost per agent and per round via a volumetric spanner.

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

SDS-LoRA: Overcoming Anisotropic Gradient Scaling in Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.16454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient adaptation of large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by parameterizing weight updates with low-rank matrices. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of the LoRA parameterization from a geometric perspective. Specifically, we show that when a full fine-tuning gradient is backpropagated to the low-rank matrices, it undergoes anisotropic scaling driven by their singular values. We argue that this phenomenon is undesirable because it distorts the full fine-tuning gradient by skewing it toward dominant singular directions while suppressing others. Our analyses demonstrate that anisotropic gradient scaling reduces the effective rank of the low-rank matrices' gradients and results in suboptimal alignment between the full fine-tuning gradient and its low-rank approximation in LoRA, thereby exacerbating the gap to full fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose a new low-rank parameterization, SDS-LoRA, which structurally decouples singular values from the backward pass. Our method ensures that the full fine-tuning gradient backpropagates only through the orthonormal bases of the low-rank matrices' subspaces, independent of their scales. Convergence analysis demonstrates that while LoRA's convergence rate degrades with the condition number of the low-rank matrices, SDS-LoRA remains independent of it. Experimental results across natural language and vision benchmarks show that SDS-LoRA improves loss convergence and reduces the gap to full fine-tuning, significantly enhancing adaptation performance.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Essential Subspace Merging for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2606.19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.