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Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 56237 artiklar

Redefining Instance Matching: A Unified Framework for Part-Aware Matching in Panoptic Segmentation Evaluation
arXiv:2605.31094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Panoptic Quality (PQ) metric is the standard for jointly evaluating instance and semantic segmentation. However, its original definition relies on a One-to-One matching between predicted and ground truth segments, which is only straightforward when the IoU threshold exceeds 0.5. Below 0.5, multiple matching strategies emerge in a poorly explored problem space. We systematically elucidate this space by recasting segment matching as a constrained bipartite assignment problem. Independently bounding the prediction- and ground-truth-side degrees yields four matching strategies: One-to-One, Many-to-One, One-to-Many, and Many-to-Many. We show that the first three are well-defined within the PQ framework, while Many-to-Many falls outside it. These strategies become relevant when instances are fragmented, adjacent objects are difficult to delineate, or annotations are noisy. Central to our framework is a vertex-based accounting of TP, FN, and FP, anchored to ground truth and predicted segments rather than to matching edges. We further show that the framework extends naturally to part-aware panoptic segmentation, and we explore part-aware evaluation on biomedical data. Across configurable case studies we report how different combinations of thresholds and matching strategies behave in practice. We release a unified open-source package built on Panoptica. It exposes Voronoi-based region-wise analysis, part-aware evaluation, and Area Under Threshold Curve computations as configurable options.
Can Aerial VLA Models Cooperate? Evaluating Closed-Loop Air-Ground Coordination with CARLA-Air
arXiv:2605.31066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent aerial vision-language-action (VLA) models show promising single-UAV capabilities, such as tracking moving objects and navigating to language-specified landmarks. However, it remains unclear whether these capabilities can transfer to air-ground cooperation, where a UAV and a UGV must act jointly in a shared, closed-loop physical world. We study this question with CARLA-Air, a single-process air-ground evaluation environment that unifies CARLA and AirSim inside one Unreal Engine runtime. By sharing the same world state, physics tick, and sensing pipeline, CARLA-Air enables physically consistent UAV--UGV interaction and precise measurement of simulation-timestamp alignment and effective coordination latency. Using CARLA-Air, we evaluate representative aerial VLA and planning baselines on two complementary diagnostic tasks: moving-platform landing and occlusion-recovery escort. The results show that current aerial VLA models can often track or follow a ground partner, but struggle to convert this single-agent competence into stable cooperative behavior. State prompting provides limited benefit, and naive bidirectional interaction fails to consistently improve performance and can amplify errors for most baselines. These findings suggest that, under the tested text-based cue interfaces, zero-shot cooperative air-ground VLA requires three components beyond the current paradigm: explicit partner-state grounding, low-latency action coordination, and team-level objective alignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/louiszengCN/CarlaAir.
Fighting Numerical Hallucinations via Data-centric Compilation for Online Financial QA
arXiv:2605.31064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced online data services, particularly in the domain of financial question answering (FinQA). However, such systems remain susceptible to numerical reasoning hallucinations, which critically undermine reliability in high-stakes financial applications. Although retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been widely adopted to ground responses in external knowledge, it introduces three persistent challenges: noise sensitivity, calculation fragility, and an auditability crisis. Existing model-centric approaches, which primarily focus on optimizing either the retriever or generator in isolation, still struggle to address these issues in an integrated manner. In this work, we pioneer a data-centric paradigm and propose a novel framework, the Data-centric Reasoning Compiler (DCRC). The framework operates through three cohesive phases: (1) adversarial data construction, which synthesizes training examples with controlled noise to teach robustness; (2) multi-stage training that cultivates a Data-centric Structuring Agent (DSA) capable of explicit evidence auditing and program synthesis; and (3) a compile-and-execute inference process, where the DSA transforms user queries and retrieved documents into verifiable, executable reasoning programs. This data-driven framework ensures faithful numerical reasoning by design. We conduct extensive experiments on established offline benchmarks and further validate our framework through deployment in a real-world online financial QA system.
A Focus of Attention-Based Virtual Training Platform for Pre-Prosthetic Myoelectric Skill Acquisition: A Proof-of-Concept Study
arXiv:2605.31332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in myoelectric prosthetic technology have substantially increased the functional potential of modern devices. Accordingly, heightened control demands have led to the acknowledgement of pre-prosthetic training as a key stage in the acquisition of myoelectric skills. Existing training paradigms largely emphasize internal muscle activation while external, goal-directed outcomes required for effective real-world use are often neglected. We address this gap by introducing a virtual pre-prosthetic training platform that integrates EMG-driven cursor with animated hand gestures, enabling the delivery of both muscle-level and functional-level feedback. In this proof-of-concept study, participants were assigned to one of two focus of attention (FoA) protocols, each incorporating both feedback types but differing in whether internal or external FoA was emphasised. Participants successfully acquired and retained myoelectric skill across both protocols, but distinct performance characteristics and learning strategies emerged, indicating that both FoAs contribute meaningfully to learning and that their timing may play an important role. External FoA was positively associated with retention, suggesting that it may strengthen the link between training and skill acquisition. Together, the results demonstrate the feasibility of an FoA-based virtual training platform for pre-prosthetic applications and indicate that it can provide a foundation for designing training protocols that better prepare users for prosthetic use.
FML-bench: A Controlled Study of AI Research Agent Strategies from the Perspective of Search Dynamics
arXiv:2605.17373v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI research agents accelerate ML research by automating hypothesis generation, experimentation, and empirical refinement. Existing agent strategies range from greedy hill-climbing to tree search and evolutionary optimization, yet which strategy choices drive performance remains unclear. Answering this question requires a benchmark that separates agent strategy (e.g., search topology) from execution infrastructure (e.g., code editor), so that performance differences are attributable to strategy rather than infrastructure, and that provides process-level metrics beyond final scores to analyze exploration behaviors. Existing benchmarks offer limited support. We propose FML-Bench, a benchmark of 18 fundamental ML research tasks across 10 domains that separates agent strategy from execution infrastructure and defines 12 process-level behavioral metrics. Evaluating six representative agents, we find that: (1) strategy complexity alone does not guarantee strong performance: a simple greedy hill-climber nearly matches the best-performing tree-search agent, both well above the remaining agents; (2) our analysis suggests this pattern relates to improvement opportunity structure: greedy search tends to be more effective when opportunities are dense, while tree-search and evolutionary strategies tend to be more effective when opportunities are sparse; an adaptive agent built on this insight switches to broader exploration upon detecting improvement stagnation and outperforms the other six agents, lending initial support to this observation; and (3) process-level analysis reveals that early convergence and directionally focused exploration are significantly associated with final performance, while solution diversity and compute cost are not. Our benchmark is available at: https://github.com/qrzou/FML-bench.
AdaptR1: Reinforcement Learning Based Adaptive Interleaved Thinking in Multi-hop Question Answering
arXiv:2605.31062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, this approach often leads to ``over-thinking,'' where models generate unnecessarily long reasoning traces for simple queries and incur avoidable inference cost. While recent work has explored adaptive reasoning, existing methods typically make a single query-level decision about whether to reason. This overlooks the dynamic nature of multi-step tasks, where the need for explicit reasoning varies across intermediate stages. To address this limitation, we introduce AdaptR1, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based framework for adaptive interleaved thinking in multi-hop Question Answering (QA). Unlike previous approaches that require Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for cold-start initialization, AdaptR1 uses a fully RL-based strategy with a quality-gated efficiency reward to dynamically allocate reasoning budgets at each step. Under the Graph-R1 setting, AdaptR1 reduces average think tokens by 69.71\%, with a 90.35\% reduction on HotpotQA, while maintaining performance comparable to or better than standard baselines. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that overthinking in multi-hop reasoning is not uniformly distributed but occurs predominantly during the initial planning stages, highlighting the effectiveness of step-wise adaptive budget allocation.
Size, Shape, and Material matter: All-optical Mie void sensor for complex nanoplastic mixtures
arXiv:2605.31320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The fragmentation of plastic debris and the direct release of nanoplastics have emerged as a pressing ecological concern. Once dispersed, these enduring particles infiltrate food webs, accumulate within organisms, and bind toxic co-contaminants, posing long-term risks to ecosystems and human health. Despite growing awareness, the detection and characterization of nanoplastics remain highly challenging due to their minute size. Moreover, obtaining additional critical information, such as the particle shape or material composition, further exacerbates these detection hurdles. Conventional analytical techniques capable of providing more detailed information often demand substantial experimental and lab-bound effort, costly instrumentation, and lengthy measurement times. Here, we introduce a novel photonic sensing platform based on nanoscale voids that enables the simultaneous material- and morphology-sensitive detection of particles below 500 nm. Arrays of voids embedded in a high-refractive-index material act in parallel as both sorting elements and direct color reporters. Spherical and elongated particles are selectively trapped in circular and elliptical voids, while polymer types such as PS, PMMA, and PET are distinguished via the specific color signatures arising from their refractive index contrasts. This approach offers a cheap and scalable route toward rapid optical identification of nanoplastics in complex environmental and biological settings. Its compatibility with quick, high-throughput analysis positions it as a promising tool for real-time monitoring and comparative studies of heterogeneous nanoplastic populations.
Financially Guided Deep Portfolio Optimization
arXiv:2605.28853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Portfolio optimization in real-world financial markets is notoriously difficult due to non-stationarity, noisy data, and high transaction costs. Standard predict-then-optimize methods first forecast returns and then solve for weights, compounding prediction errors and often failing under regime shifts. We propose an end-to-end framework that directly optimizes differentiable surrogates of key financial metrics - Sharpe ratio, Omega ratio, Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), and Risk Parity - allowing neural networks to learn portfolio weights via backpropagation. Our expanding-window walk-forward procedure, applied to 50 S&P 500 stocks from 2007 to 2023, incorporates realistic bid-ask spread costs and rebalances quarterly. On the challenging out-of-sample test period (2022-2023), the best model - an AttentionLSTM with the Omega-CVaR-RiskParity loss - achieves an annualized Sharpe of 0.29 and a total compounded return of +7.86%, while the S&P 500 delivers -4.52% total return and an annualized Sharpe of -0.02. This outperforms the S&P 500 by 12.38 percentage points (a relative improvement of over 270%), while keeping tail risk (CVaR) nearly unchanged. The framework consistently outperforms the equal-weight portfolio, S&P 500, and traditional methods (MVP, HRP, NCO), demonstrating that embedding financial objectives directly into model training yields robust, economically meaningful outperformance even in adverse market conditions.
Echoes in Filter Bubble: Diagnosing and Curing Popularity Bias in Generative Recommenders
arXiv:2605.16825v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, Generative Recommenders (GRs), characterized by a unified end-to-end framework, have exhibited astonishing potential in transforming the recommendation paradigm. Despite their effectiveness, we recognize that GRs are still susceptible to the long-standing issue of popularity bias that has pervaded the recommendation community. Although a few studies have attempted to extend traditional debiasing methods to GRs, their effectiveness is marginal, and the fundamental reason why GRs suffer from popularity bias remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, this study focuses on two core aspects in GRs: the optimization of generative framework and the item tokenization based on semantic index. Based on theoretical analyses, we identify that the severe popularity bias emerges from the confluence of a token-level optimization flaw and the undifferentiated property of item tokenization. Accordingly, this study develops a novel generative recommender system, called Ghost, by designing the asymmetric unlikelihood optimization and the skeleton-founded tokenization. Extensive empirical evaluations across three datasets, alongside multiple SOTA baselines, reveal that Ghost substantially alleviates popularity bias and promotes fairer recommendations, while incurring slight degradation to the overall recommendation utility.
Thinking Fast, Thinking Wrong: Intuitiveness Modulates LLM Counterfactual Reasoning in Policy Evaluation
arXiv:2604.10511v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored. We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn from economics and social science, each grounded in peer-reviewed evidence and classified by intuitiveness -- whether the empirical finding aligns with (obvious), is unclear relative to (ambiguous), or contradicts (counter-intuitive) common prior expectations. We evaluate four frontier LLMs across five prompting strategies with 8,000 experimental trials and analyze the results using mixed-effects logistic regression. Our findings reveal three key results: (1) a chain-of-thought (CoT) paradox, where chain-of-thought prompting dramatically improves performance on obvious cases but this benefit is substantially attenuated on counter-intuitive ones (interaction OR = 0.278, $p < 0.001$); (2) intuitiveness as the dominant factor, with case-level variance exceeding that of model choice or prompting strategy (ICC = 0.671); and (3) a knowledge-reasoning dissociation, where citation-based familiarity is unrelated to accuracy ($p = 0.84$), suggesting models possess relevant knowledge but fail to reason with it when findings contradict intuition. We frame these results through the lens of dual-process theory (System 1 vs. System 2) and argue that current LLMs' "slow thinking" achieves only partial inhibition of intuitive priors -- producing the form of deliberative reasoning without fully delivering its substance.
Attention Asymmetry in AI Layoff Discourse on X: A Computational Analysis of Capital vs Labour Amplification
arXiv:2605.29367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When workers lose jobs to AI-driven restructuring, two very different conversations happen on X (formerly Twitter) at the same time. Tech executives and AI researchers talk about productivity, transformation, and opportunity. Laid-off workers and labour critics talk about job loss, uncertainty, and fear. This paper asks a simple question: which conversation gets more reach? We report three studies using two collection methods and 763 tweets from 20 named public accounts. Study 1 used keyword-based collection (n=392) and found no significant difference between corpora (p=0.891), revealing that keyword search is too noisy for this task. Study 2 used account-based collection (n=96) and found a 3.12x mean amplification advantage for capital discourse over labour discourse (p=0.000003, Cohen's d=0.555). Study 3 combined both methods (n=763) and confirmed the finding at 4.18x mean and 10.77x median amplification ratio (p<0.000001). Critically, after normalising for follower count, the asymmetry persists at 2.69x (p=0.000009, Cohen's d=0.491), demonstrating that the effect is not simply a consequence of capital accounts having larger audiences. The finding is robust across all tested amplification metric weightings. We introduce the Amplification Ratio and Amplification Normalisation Index as simple metrics for measuring platform-level discourse inequality. A cross-platform replication on Reddit (n=647 posts) did not replicate the finding, suggesting the asymmetry may be specific to X's account-based amplification architecture. We discuss the methodological implications for cross-platform discourse analysis.
From Meta-Thought to Execution: Cognitively Aligned Post-Training for Generalizable and Reliable LLM Reasoning
arXiv:2601.21909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current LLM post-training methods optimize complete reasoning trajectories through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by outcome-based Reinforcement Learning (RL). While effective, a closer examination reveals a fundamental gap: this approach does not align with how humans actually solve problems. Human cognition naturally decomposes problem-solving into two distinct stages: first acquiring abstract strategies (i.e., meta-knowledge) that generalize across problems, then adapting them to specific instances. In contrast, by treating complete trajectories as basic units, current methods are inherently problem-centric, entangling abstract strategies with problem-specific execution. To address this misalignment, we propose a cognitively-inspired framework that explicitly mirrors the two-stage human cognitive process. Specifically, Chain-of-Meta-Thought CoMT focuses supervised learning on abstract reasoning patterns without specific executions, enabling acquisition of generalizable strategies. Confidence-Calibrated Reinforcement Learning (CCRL) then optimizes task adaptation via confidence-aware rewards on intermediate steps, preventing overconfident errors from cascading and improving execution reliability. Experiments across four models and ten benchmarks show 2.10% and 3.86% improvements in-distribution and out-of-distribution respectively over standard methods, while remaining highly robust to variations in teacher model selection, optimization methods, and symbolic perturbations.
Localizing Memorized Regions in Diffusion Models via Coordinate-Wise Curvature Differences
arXiv:2605.26756v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion models can unintentionally memorize training samples, raising concerns about privacy and copyright. While recent methods can detect memorization, they often rely on global or model-specific signals and provide limited insight into where memorization appears within a generated image. We provide a geometric characterization of local memorization as a coordinate-wise variance collapse. However, such collapse can also arise from intrinsic data constraints rather than overfitting. To isolate overfitting-driven memorization, we propose curvature-difference methods that subtract the curvature of an underfitted baseline, either the unconditional model or a less-trained version of itself. We further derive a score-difference proxy that provides a geometric explanation for the widely used score-difference-based detection metric. Experiments on Stable Diffusion, evaluated against ground-truth memorization masks, show that our method outperforms the prior attention-based localization method. Code is available at https://github.com/Gwangho99/mem-curv-diff.
Dynamics of Stochastic Momentum with Sparse Updates in High Dimensions
arXiv:2605.28961v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing theory of momentum assumes that gradients arrive at every parameter at a roughly constant rate, an assumption violated in practice by heavy-tailed data distributions and modern architectures. We theoretically analyze the dynamics of two tractable models of momentum under sparse updates: a least squares model with sparse inputs and a logistic regression model with a rare class. Both admit exact closed-form second-moment dynamics whose high-dimensional limits we characterize across three scaling exponents for sparsity, batch size, and momentum decay. The phase structure on both problems is governed by the ratio of two intrinsic timescales: a momentum retention timescale (how many active updates the buffer survives) and a learning timescale (how many active updates it takes to reduce the squared error). When learning is much slower than retention, the limit matches SGD; when learning is faster, the system is unstable; where the timescales coincide, we recover classical heavy-ball dynamics. The oscillatory dynamics occur at different momentum values for different token sparsity, creating a spectral conflict for global momentum across token frequencies.
From Historical Patches to Repair Plans: Outcome-Conditioned Reasoning for Repository-Level Program Repair
arXiv:2601.23257v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Repository-level automated program repair (APR) requires long-horizon reasoning over interdependent decisions. However, most LLM-based approaches reconstruct repair reasoning independently for each issue, failing to reuse successful patterns from prior repairs, even though real-world repositories contain many related issues with shared structure or constraints. Existing methods typically rely on forward exploration, which operates under outcome uncertainty, incurs substantial inference-time overhead, and can drift from the final correct patch. We propose Conditional Reasoning Distillation (ConRAD), which leverages in-repository resolved issues by reconstructing repair reasoning backward from verified patches and distilling outcome-consistent, stage-wise repair reasoning plans. Injected at inference time, these plans guide fault localization and patch generation, replacing open-ended exploration with constrained inference without fine-tuning or search. On SWE-Bench Lite, ConRAD improves Pass@1 by 10.4\% (GPT-4o), 8.6\% (DeepSeek-V3), and 10.3\% (GPT-5), demonstrating a scalable inference-time alternative to forward exploration for long-horizon APR.
Learning to Extrapolate to New Tasks: A Relational Approach to Task Extrapolation
arXiv:2605.30132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern learning systems excel at interpolation but struggle to generalize to unseen tasks outside the training distribution's support. This failure occurs even in simple settings, such as handling task parameters beyond the training range, and persists despite advances in foundation models. To this end, we develop the Relational Task Extrapolator (RTE), an algorithm designed to enable systematic extrapolation to novel tasks. The key observation is that extrapolation is inherently relational: extrapolating to unseen tasks requires learning how tasks transform into one another. If a model learns the transformation between tasks A and B during training, it can apply that same transformation to relate known tasks to unseen ones at test time. RTE operationalizes this idea by decomposing each target task into a known anchor task and a transformation linking the anchor and target. It then learns a relational operator, mapping an anchor-transformation pair to predictions for the target task. We instantiate RTE across multiple task extrapolation regimes in function prediction, e.g. where target tasks use out-of-range parameters (parameter extrapolation), have greater compositional depth (length extrapolation), and/or recombine function primitives in unseen ways (compositional extrapolation). We further extend RTE to sequence prediction, integrating it into fine-tuning algorithms for foundation models. Across empirical studies, we find that RTE substantially outperforms existing approaches on extrapolation to novel, unseen tasks.
Solving Integer Linear Programming with Parallel Tempering
arXiv:2605.29366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Integer Linear Programming (ILP) serves as a versatile framework for modeling a wide range of combinatorial optimization problems, typically addressed by sophisticated exact solvers or heuristics. While learning-based approaches have recently shown their effectiveness, they suffer from poor generalization to out-of-distribution instances and inherent dependence on external solvers. In this work, we propose a solver-free, sampling-based optimization framework for ILP that directly explores discrete feasible regions without training or external solvers. Exploiting the linear structure of ILP, we employ a Locally-Balanced Proposal to construct a transition kernel, thereby avoiding the gradient approximation. To overcome the highly multimodal nature of ILP energy landscapes, we integrate Parallel Tempering. In addition to standard temperature tempering, we introduce penalty tempering, which modulates constraint barriers while preserving the objective landscape over feasible solutions. Empirically, our method consistently outperforms SCIP across all four benchmarks, matches or exceeds Gurobi on two of four tasks within a 200-second budget, and is substantially more robust to distribution shift than learning-based methods. Furthermore, on MIPLIB 2017 instances, our framework remains competitive with classical solvers without any problem-specific tuning.
KYA: A Framework-Agnostic Trust Layer for Autonomous Systems with Verifiable Provenance and Hierarchical Policy Composition
arXiv:2605.25376v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: KYA (Know Your Agents) is an open-source, framework-agnostic trust and governance layer for autonomous systems, composed of five primitives: (1) a four-gate inbound apply pipeline; (2) an only-tighten composition algebra over a three-channel multi-tenant hierarchy; (3) KYP (Know Your Principal), a schema-level unification of trust scoring across human users, AI agents, and service accounts; (4) auditable interaction-multiplier amplification over an AIVSS-shaped additive baseline; and (5) two-axis delegation attribution: a static premium for risky delegates and a runtime debit for actual delegate misbehavior in multi-agent fan-out. Together these span three pillars (trust, governance, and evidentiary assurance), making an autonomous system's actions authorized, policy-conforming, and post-hoc verifiable: where observability answers how long, how much, and what path, KYA answers was it authorized, did it conform, and can it be verified; it composes with observability rather than replacing it. It ships native adapters for 15+ agent frameworks. On a 4 by 9 cross-backend matrix all 36 cells pass; the pure-function scorer runs sub-millisecond at p99 and the system sustains ~ 1,800 ops/sec at 20 concurrent workers with HMAC chain integrity preserved end-to-end. KYA detects 89% of 1,200 adversarial probes from PyRIT and Garak, including the recently-published topology-guided multi-agent attack. The system is available under Apache 2.0 as the veldt-kya package on PyPI.
Algorithms with Polynomially-Improved Approximation Factors for the $2 \rightarrow q$ Norm, and Applications
arXiv:2605.25303v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The $2 \rightarrow q$ norm of a matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$ is defined as $\lVert X \rVert_{2 \rightarrow q} = \sup_{\lVert v \rVert_2 = 1} \lVert Xv \rVert_q$. We give polynomial-time multiplicative approximation algorithms for this norm when $q > 2$ (i.e. in the hypercontractive setting). This problem either directly captures or is closely related to long-standing open problems in combinatorial optimization and hardness of approximation (e.g. Small Set Expansion), quantum information (e.g. Best Separable State), and algorithmic statistics. Very little is known about what approximation factors we can achieve for this problem in polynomial time, even though such approximations have significant downstream consequences. Barak, Brand\~{a}o, Harrow, Kelner, Steurer, and Zhou showed that no polynomial-time algorithm can achieve an approximation factor better than $2^{\sqrt{\log n}}$, assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis (FOCS'12). On the other hand, a simple spectral algorithm gives a $d^{1/4}$-approximation as a baseline. We give, to the best of our knowledge, the first polynomial-time approximation algorithm beating this baseline by polynomial factors. For the important special case of $q = 4$ it achieves a $d^{1/8}$-approximation. All previous algorithms required additional assumptions on $X$, or only surpassed the baseline for small values of $n$. Moreover, we construct sum-of-squares certificates for the $2 \rightarrow q$ norm. This directly implies improved algorithms for robust mean and covariance estimation, robust regression, and clustering, when the data only satisfies a bound on its $q$-th moment.
EASE Configuration Facilitates A Reproducible Science of LLM Social Simulations
arXiv:2605.30258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed to simulate social interactions, yet many of the existing simulators remain ad hoc and monolithic. This lack of architectural standardization prevents reproducible research and complicates downstream evaluation. We advance a rigorous science of LLM-based multi-agent simulation by modularizing core components into Environments, Agents, Simulation engines, and Evaluation metrics (EASE). We demonstrate the utility of EASE configuration by wrapping it in an experimental study schema for orchestrating workflows centered around answering explicit research questions in generated scenarios. We contribute SiliSocS, an open-source, research-ready Silicon Society Sandbox implementing a study-structured EASE configuration to enable highly configurable and reproducible LLM-based social simulations. Using SiliSocS and EASE, we present three case studies, showcasing the system's comprehensive assessment of existing questions, ability to dive deeper into complex questions, and elaboration of existing studies, respectively. Together, these case studies highlight the limitations of current modeling approaches and isolate the impacts of design choices on key results.
Bridging Classification and Reconstruction: Cooperative Time Series Anomaly Detection
arXiv:2605.26193v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has long been a hot research topic in data mining due to its various applications. Recent studies challenge the effectiveness of popular deep learning methods for TSAD, suggesting their failure in detecting subtle and prolonged anomalies. Outlier Exposure (OE) and Masked Autoencoder (MAE) emerge as two promising paradigms (classification and reconstruction) for solving the above problems. However, OE-based methods are constrained by poor generalization, while MAE-based methods are limited by masking misalignment issues. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework, CoAD, which unifies the two paradigms to leverage their complementary strengths while mitigating their respective weaknesses. In this framework, the classification module generates probability-informed soft masks for the reconstruction module, which in turn alleviates the generalization problem of the classification module. This cooperative design enables CoAD to effectively detect subtle and complex anomalies that are often overlooked by existing methods. Additionally, the classification module is carefully designed to resolve issues related to improper classification granularity and the neglect of frequency information. Extensive experiments on high-quality benchmark datasets, conducted under rigorous evaluation protocols, demonstrate that CoAD significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art deep learning and traditional data mining methods, highlighting the potential of deep learning in TSAD. Moreover, CoAD is lightweight and substantially faster than existing SOTA methods, demonstrating its practical value for large-scale, real-time applications.
Tiny Brains, Giant Impact: Uncovering the Keystone Neurons of LLM with Just a Few Prompts
arXiv:2605.24846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) display strong comprehensive abilities, yet the internal mechanisms that support these behaviors remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we show that across a wide range of open-weight Transformers, a subset of neurons remains consistently highly activated during inference across tasks of multiple capability dimensions. By probing along the cross-task activation strength, an extremely sparse subset is isolated, whose removal causes a collapse in model behavior, which we term keystone neurons. Our analysis reveals that keystone neurons are a stable and intrinsic neuron subset of the model that is largely established during pretraining. The parameters associated with these neurons are tightly calibrated during the training process, and their precise values are critical for the capabilities of the model. Building on these insights, we propose a supervised fine-tuning approach that updates only keystone neurons, achieving task gains comparable to or even better than full-parameter fine-tuning while better preserving performance in other capability dimensions, despite modifying a much smaller number of parameters.
Iterative Reduced-Rank MMSE Estimation of Sparse Range Profiles from Non-Contiguous Radar Transmission Spectra
arXiv:2605.29364v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ongoing demand for radio spectrum by commercial wireless services has steadily increased pressure on the frequency bands traditionally reserved for radar. This paper addresses the joint problem of designing non-contiguous radar transmission spectra and estimating the range profile from the resulting reduced measurement set. Transmission spectra are constructed using a Marginal Fisher Information (MFI) criterion that removes blocks of frequencies contributing least to estimation accuracy. To process the underdetermined signals acquired from the resulting sparse measurement vector, an iterative Reduced-Rank Minimum Mean-Square Error (RRMMSE) estimator is proposed. The estimator starts with a single-target hypothesis and grows the active target subspace one range bin at a time, updating the a~priori target covariance matrix in each iteration using both the largest estimated reflection coefficient and its posterior error variance. This avoids inversion of the full $M{\times}M$ covariance matrix that would be required by a one-step MMSE and concentrates the rank of the estimator on the support of significant scatterers. The Bayesian Cram\'er--Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) on the per-bin reflection coefficient is derived for the non-contiguous spectrum measurement model, and the computational complexity of the proposed estimator is shown to scale as $\Order(G^2 M K^2)$, where $G$ is the number of detectable scatterers, $M$ is the number of range bins, and $K$ is the number of preserved spectral samples. Simulations using $50\%$ and $75\%$ spectrally occupied MFI-designed spectra confirm that the algorithm recovers sparse range profiles with Mean-Square Error (MSE) close to the fully filled baseline when the number of significant scatterers is not larger than the rank of the sparse sensing matrix.
Is RISC-V Ready for Machine Learning? Portable Gaussian Processes Using Asynchronous Tasks
arXiv:2604.00736v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Gaussian processes are widely used in machine learning domains but remain computationally demanding, limiting their efficient scalability across emerging hardware platforms. The GPRat library addresses these challenges using the HPX asynchronous many-task runtime system. In this work, we extend GPRat to enable portability across multiple hardware architectures and evaluate its performance on representative x86-64, ARM, and RISC-V chips. We conduct node-level strong scaling and problem size scaling benchmarks for Gaussian process prediction and hyperparameter optimization to assess single-core performance, parallel scalability, and architectural efficiency. Our results show that while the x86-64 Zen 2 chip achieves a 58% single-core performance advantage over the ARM-based Fujitsu A64FX, superior parallel scaling allows the 48-core ARM chip to outperform the 64-core Zen 2 by 9% at full node utilization. The evaluated SOPHON SG2042 RISC-V chip exhibits substantially lower performance and weaker scalability, with single-core performance lagging by up to a factor of 14 and large-scale parallel workloads showing slowdowns of up to a factor of 24. For problem size scaling, ARM and x86-64 systems demonstrate comparable performance within 23%. These findings highlight the growing competitiveness of purpose-built ARM chips. Furthermore, they underscore the importance of wide-register vectorization support and improvements to the memory subsystem for upcoming RISC-V platforms, especially when targeted by many-task runtimes.
Extreme Optical Field Confinement and Enhancement in a Plasmonic Picopatch within a Nanoparticle-on-Mirror Resonator
arXiv:2605.22780v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Plasmonic resonances in metallic nanogaps can confine light into nanometric regions, but reaching modes of volume $\approx 1$ nm$^3$ remains challenging. We present a detailed theoretical analysis of the optical modes of an experimentally-motivated nanoresonator configuration that contains a picopatch formed by the lifting of a few gold atoms in the gap of a Nanoparticle-on-Mirror (NPoM) structure. Classical simulations indicate that the plasmonic modes associated with the picopatch geometry can confine light to extremely small regions and are highly sensitive to the picopatch size and shape, enabling broad tunability. Furthermore, these modes can couple strongly with other nanocavity modes of the structure, as identified from a clear anti-crossing behavior of the polaritonic resonances. Remarkably, up to $\approx 2000$-fold electric field enhancement inside the picopatch and tiny effective mode volumes approaching $\approx 1$ nm$^3$ are obtained. Further, changing the morphology of the picopatch does not modify the qualitative findings, and increasing the absorption losses in the classical simulations, to mimic quantum (non-local) effects in the metal permittivity, decreases the electric field enhancement only moderately. Compared to the standard picocavities formed by single-atom protrusions, picopatches are an intriguing alternative to reach extreme optical field confinement and enhancement in plasmonic cavities.