arXiv:2605.15582v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern deep learning models for change detection (CD) often struggle to explicitly represent task-relevant semantic differences. This paper proposes the Latent Difference Guidance (LDGuid) framework that explicitly learns and injects semantic differences into CD models. LDGuid deploys adversarial autoencoding to implement a difference embedding (DE) module. The DE module is pretrained via the information bottleneck method, restricting it to learn only task-relevant differences between pre- and post-event samples. The learned latent difference is then used as an explicit guidance signal in the CD model. We validate LDGuid by integrating it into U-Net, BIT, and AERNet baselines for CD and evaluating it on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, SVCD, and CaBuAr datasets. Experimental results show that LDGuid enhances segmentation performance across all benchmarks, with particularly remarkable gains in challenging settings affected by spectral noise. The results further highlight the ability of LDGuid in incorporating domain knowledge, such as task-specific spectral indices. Our findings suggest that semantic difference learning can drastically enhance the robustness of CD in remote sensing.
Science Journals
arXiv:2605.15519v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Visual active search (VAS) has been introduced as a modeling framework that leverages visual cues to direct aerial (e.g., UAV-based) exploration and pinpoint areas of interest within extensive geospatial regions. Potential applications of VAS include detecting hotspots for rare wildlife poaching, aiding search-and-rescue missions, and uncovering illegal trafficking of weapons, among other uses. Previous VAS approaches assume that the entire search space is known upfront, which is often unrealistic due to constraints such as a restricted field of view and high acquisition costs, and they typically learn policies tailored to specific target objects, which limits their ability to search for multiple target categories simultaneously. In this work, we propose DiffVAS, a target-conditioned policy that searches for diverse objects simultaneously according to task requirements in partially observable environments, which advances the deployment of visual active search policies in real-world applications. DiffVAS leverages a diffusion model to reconstruct the entire geospatial area from sequentially observed partial glimpses, which enables a target-conditioned reinforcement learning-based planning module to effectively reason and guide subsequent search steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffVAS excels in searching diverse objects in partially observable environments, significantly surpassing state-of-the-art methods on several datasets.
arXiv:2605.15983v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We formulate the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) as optimal search over the reachability graph of a Timed Transition Petri Net with Resources, using relative-delay tokens so that scheduling decisions correspond to transition firings in the induced state space. We solve the resulting problem with $A^*$ guided by a heuristic that combines Critical Path and resource-based lower bounds, and prove that it is consistent under our token-based time semantics. Experiments on the PSPLIB benchmarks show that the approach outperforms strong exact Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MIP) baselines (SCIP, CBC) in both success rate and solve time. Per-instance analysis shows that heuristic search and MIP degrade along independent axes, resource tightness for $A^*$ and formulation size for MIP, with resource strength mediating which solver benefits from scale.
arXiv:2605.16213v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sorting is a fundamental operation across numerous computational domains. Traditionally, this process involves transferring data from main memory to a processing unit for sorting, followed by writing the sorted data back to memory. This conventional approach incurs substantial latency and energy overheads due to the extensive data movement between memory and processing components. To mitigate these overheads, this paper introduces novel architectures for executing sorting operations directly within the memory fabric, eliminating the need for off-chip data transfer. To our knowledge, this work represents the first exploration of in-memory sorting using 6T SRAM. The proposed architecture is designed to operate on data represented in the standard weighted binary radix format commonly used in digital systems. The proposed architecture achieves a significant 3.4x reduction in latency compared to memristor-based IMC sorting.
arXiv:2605.16098v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is vulnerable to data poisoning attacks due to its distributed nature. Although recent GAN-based data poisoning methods have indicated the potential of using generative AI to generate seemingly legitimate poisoned data, the inherent consistency of GAN outputs can still reveal a sign of data poisoning. In this paper, we propose a diffusion-based data poisoning framework against FL systems, which leverages a Poisoning-Oriented Conditional Diffusion Model (PCDM) to enable fine-grained control over the local generation of poisoned data while ensuring both attack effectiveness and stealthiness. Our PCDM incorporates an adjustable poisoning vector within the global context to precisely control the generation of poisoned data, with theoretical guarantees on attack performance. Furthermore, it employs a novel jumping diffusion strategy for lightweight and efficient poisoned data generation. We conduct the most systematic and broad experimental evaluation for FL poisoning attacks against various defenses, including advanced Byzantine robust aggregation mechanisms, on four open datasets: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and a real-world wireless-specific dataset VRAI. Our results demonstrate that PCDM is less likely to exhibit statistical anomalies compared with the state-of-the-art methods while more effectively degrading global FL performance, which poses a significant risk to data security in FL.
arXiv:2605.15583v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose a method of estimating a 3D human pose from a single view without 3D supervision. The key to our method is to leverage the 2D diffusion priors of motion diffusion models (MDMs) pre-trained on large 2D human pose datasets. Specifically, we extend multi-view ancestral sampling of diffusion models to the task of 2D-3D lifting of human pose. To this end, we newly propose a conditional multi-view ancestral sampling (cMAS) that optimizes the 3D pose such that its multi-view projections follow the manifold in 2D MDM noise space, while conditioning the 3D pose to match the given 2D poses and anatomical constraints of humans. Experiments on the Yoga dataset demonstrate that our method achieves better cross-domain performance compared to state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised 3D pose estimation methods, including extreme human poses where 3D supervision is unavailable. Code is available at: https://github.com/asaa0001/c-MAS.
arXiv:2604.24135v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The Fr\'echet distance is a popular distance measure between trajectories or curves in space, or between walks in graphs. We study computing the Fr\'echet distance between walks in the $d$-dimensional grid graphs, i.e. $\mathbb{Z}^d$ where points share an edge if they differ by one in one coordinate.
We give an algorithm, that for two simple paths on $n$ vertices, $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximates the Fr\'echet distance in time $\widetilde{O}((\frac{n}{\varepsilon})^{2-2/d} +n)$. We complement this by a near-matching fine-grained lower bound: for constant dimensions $d \geq 3$, there is no $O((\varepsilon^{2/d}(\frac{n}{\varepsilon})^{2-2/d})^{1-\delta})$ algorithm for any $\delta>0$ unless the Orthogonal Vector Hypothesis fails. Thus, our results are tight up to a factor $\varepsilon^{2/d}$ and $\log(n)$-factors. We extend our results to imbalanced lower and upper bounds, where the curves have $n$ and $m$ vertices respectively, and also obtain near-tight bounds.
Driemel, Har-Peled and Wenk [DCG'12] studied \emph{realistic assumptions} for curves to speed up Fr\'echet distance computation. One of these assumptions is $\lambda$-low density and they can compute a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation between $\lambda$-low dense curves in time $\widetilde{O}( \varepsilon^{-2} \lambda^2 n^{2(1-1/d)})$. By adapting our lower bound, we show that their algorithm has a tight dependency on $n$ and a tight dependency on $\varepsilon$ as $d$ goes to infinity. A gap remains in terms of $\lambda$.
arXiv:2605.16211v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Traditional scientific modeling typically begins with fixed, instance-wise effective equations and then carries out equation-specific analysis and computation, a procedure that becomes exceptionally challenging in complex applications such as multiscale systems. We propose an alternative paradigm by learning mesoscopic dynamics within a mathematically constrained hypothesis class. Building upon a generalized Onsager principle, we introduce a unified framework encompassing both dissipative and conservative mesoscopic dynamics. We establish uniform and a priori theoretical guarantees, including global well-posedness, asymptotic stability, unique factorization identifiability, and discrete energy dissipation, applicable to all spatio-temporal evolution equations within this hypothesis class prior to all learning stages. Data from each problem instance is then used to guide the identification of members within our hypothesis class, giving rise to accurate, robust and interpretable dynamical models. We empirically validate this framework on both data from continuum PDE models as a check, and on data arising from microscopic chain models for which exact meso-scale models are unknown. The proposed approach not only acts as an effective dynamics learner, but also offers vital interpretable diagnostics of the underlying physics.
arXiv:2605.15933v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We first show how the cohomology of some Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand (BGG) sequences that are important for the numerical analysis of partial differential equations, can be obtained through the construction of a long exact sequence connecting cohomology groups. Then we explain the extension of this result to the non-injective/surjective case through the systematic use of short exact sequences of complexes and their associated long exact sequences of cohomology groups. Finally an interpretation in terms of spectral sequences is given.
arXiv:2605.15585v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models can generate executable code for educational animations, but the resulting renders often exhibit visual defects, including element overlap, misalignment, and broken animation continuity. These defects cannot be reliably detected from the code alone and become apparent only after execution. We formalize this problem as render-feedback-aware constrained code generation: given a natural language specification, the model must generate executable code whose rendered output satisfies structured quality criteria that can be evaluated only after rendering. To address this problem, we introduce OmniManim, a render-feedback-aware educational animation generation framework built around a shared scene state, explicit visual planning, structured post-render diagnostics, and localized repair. Within OmniManim, the Vision Agent is a task-specific visual planning module: it predicts sparse keyframe layouts with coarse-to-fine bounding-box denoising and optimizes an interpolation-aware objective to reduce intermediate-frame failures induced by downstream animation interpolation. We further construct two datasets, ManimLayout-1K and EduRequire-500, and provide a reproducible evaluation protocol covering executability, instructional quality, visual quality, and efficiency. On EduRequire-500, OmniManim improves measured render quality over both single-model baselines and existing multi-agent frameworks. Systematic ablation studies further verify that explicit visual planning, especially its coarse spatial prior, bounding-box refinement, and interpolation-aware optimization, is central to these gains.
arXiv:2605.16207v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Effective tutoring requires distinguishing optimal, valid but suboptimal, and incorrect student solutions, a distinction central to intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) but untested for LLM-based tutors. As LLMs are increasingly explored as conversational complements to ITS, evaluating their diagnostic precision is essential. We present a benchmark of seven LLM feedback agents in propositional logic using knowledge-graph-derived ground truth across 10,836 solution--feedback pairs and three feedback conditions. Models achieved near-ceiling performance on optimal steps but systematically over-rejected valid but suboptimal reasoning and over-validated incorrect solutions, precisely where adaptive tutoring matters most. These failures persisted across models regardless of solution context, suggesting architectural rather than informational limits. Moreover, accurate diagnosis did not reliably produce pedagogically actionable feedback, revealing a gap between diagnostic judgment and instructional effectiveness. Our findings suggest that LLMs are better suited for hybrid architectures where KG-grounded models handle diagnosis while LLMs support open-ended scaffolding and dialogue.
arXiv:2605.16206v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present fully kinetic two-dimensional, three-velocity-component (2D3V) PIConGPU simulations of a three-beam direct-drive interaction with a 15 $\mu$m solid-density cryogenic hydrogen cylinder, establishing a predictive numerical baseline for the operational DRACO ($\tau=30$ fs) and upcoming PENELOPE ($\tau=150$ fs) laser facilities at HZDR. The simulations resolve charge-separation fields on the order of 3 TV/m and reveal a robust kinematic bifurcation of the accelerated population into a fast (1-5 MeV) ion beam and a slower bulk (1-100 keV) flow. We demonstrate analytically and numerically that the charge-separation front ($v_{hb}$) is an intrinsically non-quasi-neutral electrostatic double layer that lies outside the closure assumptions of radiation-hydrodynamic models. A simple $2v_{hb}$ reflection scaling derived directly from the front trajectory tracks the centroid of the constant-energy fast-ion band under the impulsive 30 fs driver and the time-varying upper edge of the swept fast-ion band under the sustained 150 fs driver, across both intensities ($a_{0}=12.7$ and 22.0), establishing this non-thermal mechanism as the dominant acceleration pathway. We then scan an external axial magnetic field from 0 T to 10 kT. Laboratory-achievable 20 T fields leave all macroscopic observables unchanged; fields at the kT scale progressively magnetise the MeV hot-electron population, quench the laser-driven charge-separation mechanism, suppress the fast-ion band, and more than double the net-inward compression time of the short-pulse driver-while extending the outer target envelope. A geometric equivalence argument maps these kT-scale results onto larger-diameter cryogenic hydrogen jets.
arXiv:2605.16205v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Deploying compound LLM agents in adversarial, partially observable sequential environments requires navigating several design dimensions: (1) what the agent sees, (2) how it reasons, and (3) how tasks are decomposed across components. Yet practitioners lack guidance on which design choices improve performance versus merely increase inference costs. We present a controlled study of compound LLM agent design in CybORG CAGE-2, a cyber defense environment modeled as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Reward is non-positive, so all configurations operate in a failure-mitigation mode. Our evaluation spans five model families, six models, and twelve configurations (3,475 episodes) with token-level cost accounting. We vary context representation (raw observations vs. a deterministic state-tracking layer with compressed history), deliberation (self-questioning, self-critique, and self-improvement tools, with optional chain-of-thought prompting), and hierarchical decomposition (monolithic ReAct vs. delegation to specialized sub-agents). We find that: (1) Programmatic state abstraction delivers the largest returns per token spent (RPTS), improving mean return by up to 76% over raw observations. (2) Distributing deliberation tools across a hierarchy degrades performance relative to hierarchy alone for all five model families, reaching up to 3.4$\times$ worse mean return while using 1.8-2.7$\times$ more tokens. We call this destructive pattern a deliberation cascade. (3) Hierarchical decomposition without deliberation achieves the best absolute performance for most models, and context engineering is generally more cost-effective than deliberation. These findings suggest a design principle for structured adversarial POMDPs: invest in programmatic infrastructure and clean task decomposition rather than deeper per-agent reasoning, as these strategies can interfere when combined.
arXiv:2605.16198v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We examine one particular dimension of AI governance: how to monitor and audit AI-enabled products and services throughout the AI development lifecycle, from pre-deployment testing to post-deployment auditing. Combining principles from formal methods with SoTA machine learning, we propose techniques that enable AI-enabled product and service developers, as well as third party AI developers and evaluators, to perform offline auditing and online (runtime) monitoring of product-specific (temporally extended) behavioral constraints such as safety constraints, norms, rules and regulations with respect to black-box advanced AI systems, notably LLMs. We further provide practical techniques for predictive monitoring, such as sampling-based methods, and we introduce intervening monitors that act at runtime to preempt and potentially mitigate predicted violations. Experimental results show that by exploiting the formal syntax and semantics of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), our proposed auditing and monitoring techniques are superior to LLM baseline methods in detecting violations of temporally extended behavioral constraints; with our approach, even small-model labelers match or exceed frontier LLM judges. Our predictive and intervening monitors significantly reduce the violation rates of LLM-based agents while largely preserving task performance. We further show through controlled experiments that LLMs' temporal reasoning shows a pronounced degradation in accuracy with increasing event distance, number of constraints, and number of propositions.
arXiv:2605.16197v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This position paper argues that safety and alignment cannot be achieved by constraining an external system: they must emerge from the co-regulatory design of the human--AI cognitive system as a whole ("AI as Part of Self"). Contemporary AI increasingly participates in attention allocation, reasoning, synthesis, and decision-making, shaping the very cognitive processes through which humans form beliefs, make decisions, and constitute their sense of self. Humans and AI occupy complementary epistemic roles under mutual constraint, forming a symbiotic cognitive unit whose co-regulation -- not the external control of either party alone -- is the proper locus of alignment. We identify the risks of unstructured delegation: deskilling, automation bias, transfer of epistemic authority, and oracle-style centralization of knowledge. Drawing on System~0 cognition theory, we further show that AI operates prior to conscious deliberation, shaping the pre-attentive infrastructures through which agency and trust are negotiated -- a level that conventional oversight cannot reach. We conclude with design principles for cognitive co-regulation addressed to ML engineers and governance bodies. The goal of this work is to guide human cognition toward resilience and epistemic agency at the foundation of human selfhood.
arXiv:2507.02032v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: One of the forthcoming major challenges in particle physics is the experimental determination of the Higgs trilinear self-coupling. While efforts have largely focused on on-shell double- and single-Higgs production in proton-proton collisions, off-shell Higgs production has also been proposed as a valuable complementary probe. In this article, we design a hybrid neural simulation-based inference (NSBI) approach to construct a likelihood of the Higgs signal incorporating modifications from the Standard Model effective field theory (SMEFT), relevant background processes, and quantum interference effects. It leverages the training efficiency of matrix-element-enhanced techniques, which are vital for robust SMEFT applications, while also incorporating the practical advantages of classification-based methods for effective background estimates. We demonstrate that our NSBI approach achieves sensitivity close to the theoretical optimum and provide expected constraints for the high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider. While we primarily concentrate on the Higgs trilinear self-coupling, we also consider constraints on other SMEFT operators that affect off-shell Higgs production.
arXiv:2605.15603v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling approach to offline RL by enabling value learning on imagined on-policy trajectories. However, it often suffers from compounding errors due to repeated model inference on self-generated states. While geometric horizon models (GHM) alleviate this issue through direct prediction over a discounted infinite-horizon future, they remain challenged in accurately modeling distant future states. To this end, we introduce universal horizon models (UHM), a generalization of GHM that directly predicts future states under arbitrary horizons. Leveraging this flexibility, we propose a scalable value learning method that employs a winsorized horizon distribution to stabilize training by capping excessively large horizons. Experimental results on 100 challenging OGBench tasks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms competitive baselines, particularly on tasks with highly suboptimal datasets and those requiring long-horizon reasoning. Project page: https://rllab-snu.github.io/projects/UHM/
arXiv:2605.15604v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern language models often need to optimize a primary accuracy objective while also accommodating secondary behavioral preferences, such as verbosity, agreeableness, or the level of technical expertise in its response. In practice, a base model may exhibit a desired behavior very rarely or not at all. Thus, endowing the model with a target behavior creates a sparse behavioral reward bottleneck. To address such multi-objective problems, we introduce Vector-Steered Policy Optimization (VSPO) which employs a steering vector associated with the target behavior to control the behavior intensity of the generated rollouts. VSPO is obtained by modifying GRPO to sample rollouts with varying steering intensities. This process can be interpreted as an on-policy latent self-distillation procedure where the model internalizes its steering vector. By varying steering intensities, VSPO upsamples rare behaviors and enriches rollout diversity, which alleviates the sparse reward issue and provably accelerates the policy optimization. Through comprehensive theory and experiments, we establish that VSPO has favorable properties compared to vanilla reward shaping and other alternative approaches. Specifically, under a bandit abstraction, VSPO provably achieves better iteration complexity than reward-shaped GRPO when the steering-induced distributions are sufficiently aligned with the target behavior. We evaluate VSPO across multiple reasoning benchmarks, including MATH and MMLU-Pro, for four target behaviors: explanation expertise, confidence expression, robustness to misleading context, and response verbosity. Our results show that VSPO consistently improves the control along target behavior while maintaining or improving task accuracy compared with reward shaping, teacher-trace distillation, and guidance-based baselines.
arXiv:2508.03810v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Neural Network (NN) architectures that break statistical independence of parameters have been proposed as a new approach for simulating local quantum field theories (QFTs). In the infinite neuron number limit, single-layer NNs can exactly reproduce QFT results. This paper examines the viability of this architecture for perturbative calculations of local QFTs for finite neuron number $N$ using scalar $\phi^4$ theory in $d$ Euclidean dimensions as an example. We find that the renormalized $O(1/N)$ corrections to two- and four-point correlators yield perturbative series which are sensitive to the ultraviolet cut-off and therefore have a weak convergence. We propose a modification to the architecture to improve this convergence and discuss constraints on the parameters of the theory and the scaling of N which allow us to extract accurate field theory results.
arXiv:2605.16196v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate a bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system over block-fading channels, focusing on the scenario where the sensing and communication receivers (Rxs) are co-located. Under the assumption of unknown channel state information (CSI) at the Rx, two schemes are considered: pilot sensing (PS) and data-aided sensing (DAS). The communication rate-sensing distortion functions for both schemes are characterized. For the DAS scheme, a closed-form asymptotic expression for the sensing distortion is derived by using random matrix theory (RMT). The asymptotic performance analysis explicitly quantifies the significant gains of the DAS scheme, revealing a strict $3$ dB effective SNR improvement in the low-SNR regime and a strictly faster performance scaling rate in the high-SNR limit compared to the PS scheme.
arXiv:2605.16194v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM agents routinely serve as first (and sometimes only) readers of academic papers, skimming for sub-claims, extracting reproducibility steps, and generalizing scope. Standard prose papers produce recurring failures in this role: sub-claims that cannot be cited at sub-paper granularity, scope overextension beyond what the paper tests, and figure commands buried in codebases rather than the paper itself. We propose `paper.json`, a companion JSON file that travels with the PDF and addresses each failure with a lightweight convention: stable claim IDs (C1), an explicit does-not-claim list (C2), exact per-figure shell commands (C3), and stable definition IDs (C5). A fifth convention (C4) holds that minimum viable compliance, hand-written JSON alongside the PDF, is achievable in under an hour for a finished paper without touching the human-readable output. C1, C2, C3, and C5 are open invitations: an agent that reads a compliant paper and acts on it produces evidence for or against them. This paper is itself compliant: `uv run validator.py paper.json --against paper.typ` passes. Repo: https://github.com/arquicanedo/paper-json
arXiv:2605.15607v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve high pass rates on code generation benchmarks, yet whether they can transfer this ability to languages absent from pretraining remains poorly understood. We introduce PyLang, a minimal imperative language absent from all pretraining corpora, and evaluate frontier models zero-shot and fine-tuned Qwen3 (4B, 8B, 32B) on 352 problems. We find that fine-tuning quickly teaches syntax but fails to transfer semantic competence: Python outperforms PyLang by up to 19% across all configurations, and no intervention (multi-task learning, preference tuning, code infilling, or latent-space objectives) closes the gap. An LLM judge reveals that frontier models select an identical algorithm to Python 80% of the time, yet cannot translate it into a working PyLang implementation., and CKA analysis confirms that fine-tuned models converge to nearly identical internal representations across languages (CKA > 0.97) while diverging at the output stage. We term this the implementation fidelity gap: models possess language-agnostic algorithmic understanding but cannot express it in an unfamiliar language. Our findings highlight the need for training methods that decouple reasoning from language-specific realization.
arXiv:2511.15887v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Our ability to interpret others' mental states through nonverbal cues (NVCs) is fundamental to our survival and social cohesion. While existing Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmarks have primarily focused on false-belief tasks and reasoning with asymmetric information, they overlook other mental states beyond belief and the rich tapestry of human nonverbal communication. We present Motion2Mind, a framework for evaluating the ToM capabilities of machines in interpreting NVCs. Leveraging an expert-curated body-language reference as a proxy knowledge base, we build Motion2Mind, a carefully curated video dataset with fine-grained nonverbal cue annotations paired with manually verified psychological interpretations. It encompasses 222 types of nonverbal cues and 397 mind states. Our evaluation reveals that current AI systems struggle significantly with NVC interpretation, exhibiting not only a substantial performance gap in Detection, as well as patterns of over-interpretation in Explanation compared to human annotators.
arXiv:2605.15608v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Decoder-only transformers compute the conditional probability of the next token from a sequence of past observations. This paper derives, from first principles, inference architectures that solve the same prediction problem - and in doing so, recovers transformer-like layer operations as a consequence of optimal control theory. The framework is developed for two model classes: a nonlinear model of discrete-valued processes, directly motivated by the transformer, and a linear Gaussian model as a tractable baseline. For both model classes, the prediction objective is reformulated as an optimal control problem whose solution yields an explicit inference algorithm, the dual filter, with a layer structure that mirrors the layer structure of a decoder-only transformer. Numerical experiments provide a comparison of the optimal control to attention weights from a trained transformer. These experiments reveal that when the embedding dimension is insufficient, the transformer implicitly exploits non-Markovian structure.
arXiv:2605.16193v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human opinions and survey responses, but their ability to reproduce population responses across cultures remains limited. Existing persona-based prompting methods typically rely on sociodemographic or personality traits, which are only indirect proxies for the values that shape human responses. We propose a value-based persona construction method that derives textual descriptors from survey responses capturing core cultural dimensions. By sampling value profiles from target populations and aggregating LLM responses across personas, we obtain population-level predictions grounded in observed value distributions. We further introduce a calibration procedure that improves response diversity while preserving estimated opinions. We show that our approach reduces prediction error across countries, with the largest improvements observed in underrepresented populations. This substantially narrows the performance gap between countries aligned with dominant LLM priors and those that are less represented in training data, while also yielding response distributions that closely match human diversity.