arXiv:2506.06570v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As robotic systems become increasingly integrated into real-world environments, ranging from autonomous vehicles to household assistants, they inevitably encounter diverse and unstructured scenarios that lead to failures. While such failures pose safety and reliability challenges, they also provide rich perceptual data for improving system robustness. However, manually analyzing large-scale failure datasets is impractical and does not scale. In this work, we introduce the problem of unsupervised discovery of failure taxonomies from large volumes of raw failure logs, aiming to obtain semantically coherent and actionable failure modes directly from perceptual trajectories. Our approach first infers structured failure explanations from multimodal inputs using vision language reasoning, then clusters them in the resulting semantic reasoning space, discovering recurring failure modes rather than isolated episode-level descriptions. We evaluate our method across robotic manipulation, indoor navigation, and autonomous driving domains, demonstrating that the discovered taxonomies are consistent, interpretable, and useful in practice. In particular, we show that structured failure taxonomies guide targeted data collection for offline policy refinement and enhance runtime failure monitoring systems. Website: https://mllm-failure-clustering.github.io/
Science Journals
arXiv:2607.17623v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Methods for large-area, precise monitoring across natural environments are of growing interest due to pressing needs for sustainable management of rapidly increasing anthropogenic activities. Established approaches involve sparse spatial sampling and/or sequential measurements, while emerging techniques exploit miniaturized electronics or passive optical methods. Various constraints in scalability, costs, robustness, operational range and other factors create a need for alternatives. Here, we introduce a concept that overcomes many of these limitations through the combined use of chemically induced light emission and chemically responsive optical filter elements in millimeter-scale systems that we refer to as functional pixie dust (fPD) sensors, designed specifically for monitoring natural water systems during nighttime to eliminate background optical interference and to enhance remote analysis. These floating devices act as Lagrangian tracers to follow surface flows and to simultaneously measure the concentrations of key chemical species along their trajectories. Optimized designs exploit environmentally compatible constituent materials that are also degradable through natural processes to benign end products, thereby eliminating the need for recovery. Spatially and spectrally resolved ratiometric measurement schemes ensure robust operation and ability to address practical requirements in range, operational lifetime, time response and sensitivity. Demonstrations include distributed measurements of pH, Hg2+, and NO2-, each of relevance to industrial discharge, toxic metal contamination, and nitrogen-rich runoff, adapted for static concentration gradients, flow-driven transport conditions, and outdoor aquatic settings. The results establish a framework for environmental sensing using degradable, self-powered microsystems capable of scalable deployment and remote readout.
arXiv:2607.16636v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language-action models, world models, and agentic planners each advance physical intelligence, yet their composition lacks a common execution abstraction, shared state, semantic verification, and persistent experience across heterogeneous embodiments. We present PhyAgentOS, a runtime foundation delivering scheduling, verification, memory, benchmarking, and safety as system-level services. Its Session-Centered Runtime treats a session, not an action, as the minimum unit of scheduling, compatibility preflight, supervised execution, evidence collection, and acceptance. To decouple cognition from physical execution, the cognition-physics boundary is a file system: the State-as-a-File protocol materializes cross-layer state as Markdown with YAML, yielding inspectable, versionable records without code dependencies between Agent and Runtime layers. These views form a unified cognitive state space aligning intent, capabilities, environment, execution, and experience. The SessionVerifier distinguishes execution termination from semantic task completion via evidence-grounded verdicts of success, failure, or replan. Verified outcomes are consolidated through epistemic memory into reusable knowledge and corrective lessons, closing a trial-and-error loop without retraining. Benchmarking reuses the deployment session and verification path, so results trace to real execution. Layered safety constrains both policy-driven and agent-driven execution: preflight, action bridges, SafetyGuard, heartbeat monitoring, and target-local constraints. Validation is progressive: games test cognitive planning, simulation adds dynamics and control, real robots add hardware noise, with the cognitive layer held constant. PhyAgentOS is benchmarked on Optimus-67, StarDojo, and DST-Dojo, validated on 19+ simulated and physical embodiments, and gains on LIBERO, Calvin, and RoboCasa365 across multiple VLA models.
arXiv:2506.07691v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a cornerstone of mechanistic interpretability. Existing training methods inherit the Block Training paradigm from LLM pre-training, which introduces destructive gradient noise in instruct models due to attention leakage from unrelated contexts. Using GSNR analysis, we theoretically characterize this issue and propose Finetuning-aligned Sequential Training (FAST), a sequential training paradigm specifically designed for instruct models. FAST aligns SAE training with the data distribution and activation patterns of instruct models, substantially improving both reconstruction fidelity and feature interpretability. Experimental results show that FAST achieves higher GSNR, a significantly lower log-scaled MSE of 0.6468 compared to the baseline's 5.1985, and a near-zero Delta Loss (-0.51\% to 0.37\%). Moreover, on Llama-3.2-3B-it, FAST produces 21.1\% high-quality features, substantially outperforming baseline methods that achieve 7.0\% and 10.2\%. We further find that intervening on special token activations through SAEs can improve generation quality, revealing new opportunities for fine-grained control. Our codes are available as open source at https://github.com/Geaming2002/FAST.
arXiv:2506.14121v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Face super-resolution (FSR) under limited computational budgets remains challenging. Existing methods often treat all facial pixels equally, leading to suboptimal resource allocation and degraded performance. CNNs are sensitive to high-frequency facial features such as contours and outlines, while Mamba excels at capturing low-frequency attributes like facial color and texture with lower complexity than Transformers. Motivated by this, we propose FADPNet, a Frequency-Aware Dual-Path Network that decomposes facial features into low- and high-frequency components for dedicated processing. The low-frequency branch employs a Mamba-based Low-Frequency Enhancement Block (LFEB) that integrates state-space attention with squeeze-and-excitation to restore global interactions and emphasize informative channels. The high-frequency branch uses a CNN-based Depthwise Position-aware Attention (DPA) module to refine structural details, followed by a lightweight High-Frequency Refinement (HFR) module for further frequency-specific refinement. These designs enable FADPNet to achieve a strong balance between FSR quality and efficiency, outperforming existing methods. Codes will be available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/FADPNet.
arXiv:2506.18109v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Polygon resonators are promising candidates for nanomechanical applications due to their compact architecture and high force sensitivity. Here, we develop a polygon-specific analytical model for perimeter modes by coupling the flexural motion of the polygon sides to tether torsion governed by a stress-modified Timoshenko-Gere (TG) equation. The model captures finite-wavelength torsional phase accumulation beyond the conventional short-tether approximation, revealing tether-length-dependent resonances and bending-torsion hybridization. Comparisons with finite-element-method (FEM) simulations show good agreement in the quasi-one-dimensional regime, while identifying the onset of deviations associated with neglected torsional deformation of the polygon sides. The model therefore provides a useful analytical tool for interpreting and optimizing high quality factor (Q) polygon resonators for cavity optomechanics and precision sensing.
arXiv:2607.17600v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Chiral metasurfaces conventionally rely on structural or extrinsic symmetry breaking, while nonlinear circular dichroism is usually treated as a resonantly enhanced consequence of an already chiral linear response. Here, we show that chirality can instead be induced by the nonlinear susceptibility of an otherwise achiral resonant metasurface. We study a membrane metasurface composed of circular holes in a square lattice made of a cubic nonlinear material such as crystalline silicon. Under normal incidence, the structure is linearly achiral and supports high-Q quasi-guided resonances exhibiting identical responses to left- and right-circularly polarized light. Using quasi-normal-mode expansion and temporal coupled-mode theory extended to the nonlinear regime, we demonstrate that a relative rotation between the principal axes of the cubic nonlinear susceptibility tensor and the metasurface axes produces unequal third-harmonic generation for opposite circular polarizations. We formulate the resulting effect of nonlinear circular dichroism without geometrical chirality in terms of helicity phase-matching criteria and discuss why such a mechanism is forbidden for second-harmonic generation in materials with second-order nonlinearity. The resulting nonlinear circular dichroism reaches 99.5% and follows a simple dependence on the relative angle, switching from fourfold to eightfold periodicity when resonances at the harmonic frequency are additionally excited. Our results establish nonlinearity-induced chirality as a fundamentally new route to chiral photonic responses without geometrical symmetry breaking, opening opportunities for nonlinear chiral optics in planar CMOS-compatible metasurfaces.
arXiv:2607.16528v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study hierarchical domain generalization as a problem of extrapolation from finite observed regions to an entire instance space, replacing i.i.d. sampling with arbitrary domain hierarchies. We show that the central obstruction is not only the complexity of the hypothesis class, but the train/test domain partition through which evidence is revealed. In particular, no matter how small the class or how large the training size, some partition makes generalization fail for some target. These results suggest that modern generalization theory must treat domain structure as a first-class object.
arXiv:2607.17737v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce skew CRT codes and the poly-skew metric with associated error model, and we provide a decoding algorithm for this family of codes under the poly-skew metric.
arXiv:2503.06942v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: A typical real-time ad-serving funnel comprises ad targeting, conversion modeling (e.g., click-through rate prediction), budget pacing (bidding), and auction processes. While there is a wealth of research and articles on ad targeting and conversion modeling, budget pacing,a crucial component,lacks a systematic treatment specifically tailored for engineers in existing literature. This book aims to provide engineers with a practical yet relatively comprehensive introduction to budget pacing algorithms within the digital advertising domain.
arXiv:2506.18150v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables computation directly on encrypted data and privacy-preserving neural inference in the cloud. Existing solutions focus on models with dense inputs (e.g., CNNs and MLPs). Recommendation models (e.g., DLRM) pose a different challenge: sparse categorical inputs require private lookups into large embedding tables, which must be implemented using FHE's restrictive operators. Naive lookups incur significant communication and memory costs; prior work proposes compressing embedding tables at the expense of introducing large server-side compute costs (i.e., indicator function) and revealing embedding-table structure. We present HE-LRM, a performance optimized solution for executing recommendation with FHE. First, we develop an embedding compression technique using client-side digit decomposition that achieves 56$\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art. Next, we propose a multi-embedding packing strategy that enables ciphertext SIMD-parallel lookups across multiple tables. We integrate HE-LRM into the open-source Orion FHE framework to demonstrate end-to-end encrypted DLRM inference. We evaluate HE-LRM on UCI (health prediction) and Criteo (click prediction), achieving inference latencies of 24 seconds on UCI and 228 to 489 seconds, respectively, on a single-threaded CPU. Finally, we show how GPU and ASIC FHE acceleration can reduce end-to-end latencies to seconds and even sub-seconds. Our code can be found at https://github.com/baahl-nyu/orion/tree/criteo-helrm.
arXiv:2506.20463v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is transforming the educational landscape by augmenting learning paradigms. However, state-of-the-art GenAI systems driving this transformation are predominantly developed and controlled by a small number of private companies; there is little clarity about their data retention practices and limited user control over inputs and outputs. In the context of education, end-users lack the awareness of how to safely adopt GenAI in learning. This raises significant concerns, particularly when proprietary or personally identifiable educational information may be shared with external GenAI platforms. In response to these concerns, universities are developing their own usage guidelines and policies to balance innovation with academic integrity, privacy, and security. Our research seeks to understand these emerging guidelines, with a particular focus on the privacy and security implications of integrating GenAI tools into academic environments - an area that has received little attention to date. We conducted an in-depth qualitative analysis of GenAI-usage guidelines from 43 universities across 12 countries. Our findings reveal several key challenges, including barriers faced by universities in deploying privacy measures and adopting existing security frameworks. These insights lay the groundwork for designing more robust, privacy-aware GenAI guidelines for higher education.
arXiv:2507.05515v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are facing the challenges of understanding and following multimodal assembly instructions, particularly when fine-grained spatial reasoning and precise object state detection are required. In this work, we explore LEGO Co-builder, a hybrid benchmark combining real-world LEGO assembly logic with programmatically generated multimodal scenes. The dataset captures stepwise visual states and procedural instructions, allowing controlled evaluation of instruction-following, object detection, and state detection. We introduce a unified framework and assess leading VLMs such as GPT-4o, Gemini, and Qwen-VL, under zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We also evaluated the framework using a reasoning-focused model, GLM-4.1-thinking. Our results show that while object detection achieved high performance (98.16% with fine-tuned InstructBLIP), fine-grained scene understanding and assembly state detection remain challenging: Fine-tuned MiniGPT-v2 reached only 37.52% F1 for identifying theme entities, and even advanced models such as GPT-4o achieved just 40.54% F1 on state detection. This highlights gaps in fine-grained visual understanding among existing models. We release the benchmark, codebase, and generation pipeline to support future research on multimodal assembly assistants grounded in real-world workflows.
arXiv:2507.05876v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large-scale training for distributed Machine Learning can cause congestion at bottleneck switch ports, leading to model staleness through update losses. This is particularly detrimental for asynchronous Distributed Reinforcement Learning (DRL) training, as stale updates are known to degrade convergence performance in asynchronous settings. This paper presents \textit{Shesha}, an in-network DRL accelerator engine, which \textit{opportunistically aggregates} asynchronously generated model updates \textit{on the fly} while they traverse the data plane queue. This aggregation operation motivates an alternative queue design, which we prototype and envision for future Top-of-Rack switches. We further present corresponding host-side transmission control in the face of possible congestion, taking advantage of in-network accelerator feedback. A quantification of model staleness, denoted Age-of-Model (AoM), together with a formal verifier allows us to reason on system-wide AoM objectives in multi DRL-cluster scenarios. Shesha shows significant reductions in model staleness and queue congestion, improving overall convergence behavior for asynchronous DRL workloads.
arXiv:1911.11966v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: With the advent of a new round of the Industrial Revolution, the Industrial Internet will carry the convergence of heterogeneous network and the dynamic reconfiguration of industrial equipment. In order to further provide higher performance of network capabilities, the Industrial Internet has experienced unprecedented growth while facing enormous challenges from the actual needs of industrial networks. The typical scenarios in industrial applications, combined with the technical advantages of mobile edge computing, are described in view of the low latency, high bandwidth and high reliability demanded by the Industrial Internet in the new era. The key technologies of mobile edge computing for the Industrial Internet have been outlined in this treatise, whose feasibility and importance are demonstrated by typical industrial applications that have been deployed. As combined with the development trend of the Industrial Internet, this paper summarizes the existing work and discusses the future research direction of key technologies of mobile edge computing for the Industrial Internet.
arXiv:2607.16781v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We consider a fourth order singularly perturbed boundary value problem with two small parameters, in one dimension, under the assumption of analytic input data. We show that the solution may be decomposed into a smooth part, two different width boundary layers, and a negligible remainder. We provide estimates for arbitrary order derivatives of each term of the decomposition, which are explicit in the differentiation order and the singular perturbation parameters, and are needed for proving the convergence of high order numerical methods, such as the $p/hp$ versions of the Finite Element Method. We also provide classical differentiability results, which show that the solution will be analytic, if the data are analytic, but negative powers of the singular perturbation parameter(s) show up once we start differentiating.
arXiv:2103.06579v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Aiming at the local overload of multi-controller deployment in software-defined networks, a load balancing mechanism of SDN controller based on reinforcement learning is designed. The initial paired migrate-out domain and migrate-in domain are obtained by calculating the load ratio deviation between the controllers, a preliminary migration triplet, contains migration domain mentioned above and a group of switches which are subordinated to the migrate-out domain, makes the migration efficiency reach the local optimum. Under the constraint of the best efficiency of migration in the whole and without migration conflict, selecting multiple sets of triples based on reinforcement learning, as the final migration of this round to attain the global optimal controller load balancing with minimum cost. The experimental results illustrate that the mechanism can make full use of the controllers' resources, quickly balance the load between controllers, reduce unnecessary migration overhead and get a faster response rate of the packet-in request.
arXiv:2607.17391v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As hyperscale and colocation AI data centers continue to expand, the electric grid is increasingly required to support large, concentrated loads, with individual facilities ranging from 500 MW to 2 GW. Current projections estimate that approximately 50 GW of AI data center capacity will require grid connectivity in the United States by 2030. While prior research has extensively examined the environmental and operational impacts of AI data centers, as well as their potential role as grid-interactive assets, limited attention has been given to the challenges associated with their scalable deployment through engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) processes. This manuscript addresses this gap by proposing a phased development framework for AI data center expansion. The approach is designed to enable developers to meet aggressive time-to-market objectives while navigating multi-year constraints associated with interconnection approvals and lead times associated with the procurement of component equipment. A modular construction architecture is presented, along with a detailed analysis of integrated energy systems and the role of hybrid on-site generation in supporting incremental capacity growth. Electromagnetic transient simulations (EMT) are used to evaluate system performance, demonstrating that a combination of on-site natural gas generation and grid-forming energy storage can reliably support data center operations during early and intermediate deployment phases. The study further examines the transition to full grid interconnection, including the capability of the data center to operate in islanded mode during grid disturbances. Finally, the manuscript compares grid-forming control strategies for system reconnection and restoration under varying conditions.
arXiv:2607.16955v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy knowledge distillation transfers reasoning from large teachers to compact students, but existing approaches suffer three compounding failure modes: (i) cold-start collapse, where a fresh student assigns near-zero mass to teacher-preferred tokens; (ii) state-agnostic divergence scheduling, where time-only forward/reverse-KL interpolation ignores the student's coverage state; and (iii) binary reward sparsity, where pass/fail signals discard information from partially correct traces.
We present CADENCE, a unified framework with a targeted fix for each. Its DRIFT mechanism schedules a per-token convex mixture of forward-KL and reverse-KL surrogate objectives on student-sampled trajectories (per-token surrogates, not sequence-level KL gradient estimators). Six components extend it: (A) COVA, a coverage-adaptive $\beta$ schedule accelerating the forward-to-reverse transition; (B) FTB, a forking-token boost concentrating gradient at high-entropy positions via a globally-normalized entropy reference; (C) CCD, a dense reward adding numerical-proximity partial credit for incorrect-but-close traces; (D) LAP, brevity-preferential correct-rollout reinforcement; (E) EMR, an entropy-matching calibration regularizer; (F) BSD, a bootstrapped self-distillation phase.
On GSM8K and MATH-500 (corrected 512-token protocol, 5 seeds, reported std), CADENCE distills a 0.5B student from a 1.5B teacher to 69.8 $\pm$ 0.5% GSM8K pass@1 (from 48.7% pretrained; 63.2% of the teacher gap closed) and to 72.1 $\pm$ 0.4% with a 3B teacher (76.2% closed), beating the strongest matched-compute label-using baseline (DRIFT+binary reward) by +4.4 $\pm$ 0.7 points. All experiments run on a single Apple Mac Studio (M-series, 64GB unified memory), showing principled distillation reaches strong reasoning quality without datacenter-scale hardware.
arXiv:2607.17963v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Ontology extension refers to the process of enriching an existing ontology in response to emerging requirements, making it more complete. This task is a resource-intensive and error-prone process. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance on generating ontologies from scratch, but current approaches rarely tie ontology extension explicitly to requirements or reusable core models, and offer limited, systematic evaluation of LLM outputs. This paper introduces OntoExtend, a requirements-driven framework for ontology extension with LLMs. It uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over relevant input ontologies and requirements in the form of competency questions to propose grounded extensions. We evaluate OntoExtend on 39 CQs from two use cases: a public EU-project ontology, Onto-DESIDE, and an industrial ontology from Bosch. The generated fragments show few structural issues, satisfy all functional evaluation tests, and are rated by ontology engineers as requiring minor to moderate revision before integration. These results suggest that OntoExtend is useful as a drafting assistant for requirement-driven ontology extension in real world scenarios, while remaining sensitive to CQ specificity and modelling profile.
arXiv:2103.06611v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: With the mass deployment of computing-intensive applications and delay-sensitive applications on end devices, only adequate computing resources can meet differentiated services' delay requirements. By offloading tasks to cloud servers or edge servers, computation offloading can alleviate computing and storage limitations and reduce delay and energy consumption. However, few of the existing offloading schemes take into consideration the cloud-edge collaboration and the constraint of energy consumption and task dependency. This paper builds a collaborative computation offloading model in cloud and edge computing and formulates a multi-objective optimization problem. Constructed by fusing optimal transport and Policy-Based RL, we propose an Optimal-Transport-Based RL approach to resolve the offloading problem and make the optimal offloading decision for minimizing the overall cost of delay and energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce the cost and significantly outperforms existing optimization solutions.
arXiv:2506.00625v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The imbalanced distribution of long-tailed data presents a significant challenge for deep learning models, causing them to prioritize head classes while neglecting tail classes. Two key factors contributing to low recognition accuracy are the deformed representation space and a biased classifier, stemming from insufficient semantic information in tail classes. To address these issues, we propose permutation-invariant and head-to-tail feature fusion (PI-H2T), a highly adaptable method. PI-H2T enhances the representation space through permutation-invariant representation fusion (PIF), yielding more clustered features and automatic class margins. Additionally, it adjusts the biased classifier by transferring semantic information from head to tail classes via head-to-tail fusion (H2TF), improving tail class diversity. Theoretical analysis and experiments show that PI-H2T optimizes both the representation space and decision boundaries. Its plug-and-play design ensures seamless integration into existing methods, providing a straightforward path to further performance improvements. Extensive experiments on long-tailed benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of PI-H2T.
arXiv:2607.16696v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern database systems widely support per-transaction isolation levels as a practical means of balancing consistency guarantees and performance. Yet, it remains largely unclear whether their concurrency control protocols correctly enforce the intended isolation guarantees under such mixed-isolation settings. In this paper, we address this semantic conformance question by developing \ourframework, a formal semantic framework for mixed isolation levels. We demonstrate its applicability by establishing the semantic conformance of two concurrency control protocols, one combining two isolation levels and the other three.
arXiv:2607.17499v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The evolution of e-commerce has fundamentally transformed how users search for products, shifting from simple text-based keyword queries to complex multimodal interactions that seamlessly combine product images, natural language descriptions, and mixed-intent instructions. However, existing approaches face a critical dilemma: single-modal specialist models, deployed independently for text retrieval, visual search, and voice recognition, operate in isolation and cannot handle cross-modal queries, while general-purpose vision-language models lack the domain-specific knowledge necessary for fine-grained product understanding, user behavior modeling, and commercial intent reasoning. In this work, we present Pailitao-MMSearch, one native e-commerce multimodal search foundation model designed to bridge this gap. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1)HybSID (Hybrid Semantic ID);(2)a two-stage continual pre-training strategy; and (3)a hybrid reasoning post-training pipeline. Built upon Qwen and deployed on Taobao's Pailitao multimodal search platform, Pailitao-MMSearch achieves substantial improvements in online A/B testing, including up to +13.61\% in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) and +8.21\% in transaction volume compared to traditional multi-modal search pipeline, demonstrating the effectiveness of our native e-commerce multimodal search large language models.
arXiv:2607.16573v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Two critiques of connectionist cognition converge on one missing capacity. In The Algebraic Mind, Marcus isolated three components any architecture must support -- operations over variables, structured representations, and individuals distinct from kinds -- showed perceptrons support none, and left neural implementation as conjecture. In Brain-Mind, Thagard made binding the single mechanism assembling perception, emotion, consciousness, and self, but rested it on circular convolution, a lossy algebra that degrades under the recursion his account of self and emotion demands.
We argue one substrate answers both. VaCoAl is a hyperdimensional architecture built on one primitive, XOR-and-shift over GF(2), on primitive-polynomial linear-feedback shift registers; PyVaCoAl is its extended realization, adding a multi-stage rescue circuit, million-dimensional scale, and a Rescue-Rate phase transition (SRAM-CAM hardware and low-power claim remain future work). Binding, Bind(R,F) = R $\oplus$ shift(F), is exactly reversible and non-commutative: it fills Marcus's open register algebra (Pillar 1), supports compositional bundling at fixed dimension (Pillar 2), and separates individuals from kinds (Pillar 3), while removing the depth-degradation that afflicts convolution at Thagard's deepest recursions.
We make three scoped claims. Capability: exact reversible binding at O(N) yields compositional generalization with post-hoc auditability no lossy or learned substrate offers. Necessity: two independent cognitive-architecture programs and a biological circuit (dentate gyrus-CA3) requiring the same reversible-compositional algebra is evidence, by convergent evolution not biomimicry, that it is substrate-independent. Position: we do not claim to surpass LLMs; the substrate is orthogonal, supplying the reversible, auditable, multi-hop relational reasoning statistical embeddings structurally lack.