Forskningsradar

Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 56229 artiklar

Learning Disentangled Representations for Generalized Multi-view Clustering
arXiv:2605.15640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-View Clustering (MVC) has gained significant attention for its ability to leverage complementary information across diverse views. However, existing deep MVC methods often struggle with view-distribution entanglement during cross-view fusion, which hampers the quality of the shared latent space and leads to suboptimal Figures. To address this issue, we propose the Generalized Multi-view Auto-Encoder (GMAE), a framework designed to preserve cross-view complementarity through disentangled representation learning. Specifically, GMAE employs dual-path autoencoders to decouple source features into view-specific and view-common embeddings, facilitating the discovery of clearer clustering structures. We further construct cross-view adversarial discriminators to guide view-specific encoders in capturing more discriminative features. By strategically modulating mutual information, GMAE effectively aligns distributions and prevents representation collapse, ensuring the generation of robust, non-trivial embeddings. Comprehensive experiments on 13 benchmark datasets demonstrate that GMAE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both complete and incomplete MVC tasks. Our code implementation is available at the repository: https://github.com/obananas/GMAE.
Adapting Foundation Vision-Language Models to Medical Diagnosis via Query-Driven Expert Bridging
arXiv:2505.21698v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language foundation models achieve promising performance in natural image classification, yet their direct application to medical imaging is limited by severe domain shifts, resolution mismatches, and the multi-label nature of clinical diagnosis. Training dedicated medical foundation models from scratch, however, is costly and data-intensive. Here, we propose MedBridge, a lightweight adaptation framework that opens a new direction in domain-gap mitigation by jointly combining domain alignment, resolution preservation, and multi-label reasoning via complementary VLM experts for medical image diagnosis. Specifically, MedBridge transforms pretrained VLMs into multi-view query encoders that inject a compact set of learnable query tokens into intermediate layers, enabling non-destructive domain alignment while preserving fine-grained pathological cues via multi-view high-resolution sampling. These query tokens further act as routing signals for a mixture-of-experts, dynamically integrating heterogeneous foundation models for multi-label reasoning without requiring a shared representation space. We evaluated MedBridge on five chest radiograph benchmarks in three key adaptation tasks. MedBridge demonstrates superior performance in both cross-domain generalization (out-of-distribution transfer) and in-domain specialization (same-distribution tuning) settings, yielding a significant 6-15% AUC improvement over state-of-the-art adaptation methods for multi-label thoracic disease diagnosis. Furthermore, MedBridge is model-agnostic and demonstrates broad extensibility across eight diverse VLMs (e.g., CLIP, LLaVA, Qwen-VL, MedGemma), highlighting its ability to flexibly adapt arbitrary foundation models into a powerful medical diagnostic tool. Our code will be released upon acceptance.
GQA-{\mu}P: The maximal parameterization update for grouped query attention
arXiv:2605.15290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hyperparameter transfer across model architectures dramatically reduces the amount of compute necessary for tuning large language models (LLMs). The maximal update parameterization ({\mu}P) ensures transfer through principled mathematical analysis but can be challenging to derive for new model architectures. Building on the spectral feature-learning view of Yang et al. (2023a), we make two advances. First, we promote spectral norm conditions on the weights from a heuristic to the definition of feature learning, and as a consequence arrive at the Complete-P depth and weight-decay scalings without recourse to lazy-learning. Second, we consider a modified spectral norm that preserves the valid scaling law of network weights when weight matrices are not full rank. This enables (to our knowledge, the first) derivation of {\mu}P scalings for grouped-query attention (GQA). We demonstrate the efficacy of our theoretical derivations by showing learning rate transfer across the GQA repetition hyperparameter as well as experiments regarding transfer over weight decay.
An $L^{\#}$ Based Algorithm for Active Learning of Minimal Separating Automata
arXiv:2605.15294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A DFA separates two disjoint languages $L_1$ and $L_2$ if it accepts every word in $L_1$ and rejects every word in $L_2$. Algorithms for active learning of small separating DFAs have many applications, e.g., for learning network invariants, learning contextual assumptions in compositional verification, learning state machines from large amounts of log data, and learning bug pattern descriptions. We propose a simple active learning algorithm, inspired by $L^{\#}$, that learns a minimal separating DFA for disjoint languages $L_1$ and $L_2$ if one exists. Experiments show that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing active learning algorithms on both randomly generated and industrial benchmarks.
Security Analysis of a Communication Protocol: MQTT
arXiv:2605.15804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper analyzes the security of the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). The main objective consists of identifying vulnerabilities and proposing security improvements. Adopting a hybrid methodology, a theoretical review was combined with an experimental demonstration in a simulated Smart Home environment. Eavesdropping, Tampering, Denial of Service (DoS), and Brute Force attacks were executed and analyzed. The results evidenced critical risks due to the absence of robust encryption and authentication. Finally, mitigation strategies and best practices are proposed to strengthen MQTT implementations.
ChronoEarth-492K: A Large Scale and Long Horizon Spatiotemporal Hyperspectral Earth Observation Dataset and Benchmark
arXiv:2605.15666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) provides dense spectral information for the Earth's surface, enabling material-level understanding of land cover and ecosystem dynamics. Despite recent progress in hyperspectral self-supervised learning (SSL), existing datasets remain temporally shallow, limiting the development of long-horizon spatiotemporal modeling. To address this gap, we introduce ChronoEarth-492K, the first large-scale, temporally calibrated hyperspectral SSL dataset built upon NASA's EO-1 Hyperion mission, the world's longest continuous hyperspectral archive up to date (2001-2017). ChronoEarth-492K comprises 492,354 radiometrically harmonized patches across 185,398 global locations over 17 years, with 28,786 sites containing multi-temporal sequences ($\geq 3$ observations) that enable both short- and long-horizon temporal analysis. Building on this foundation, we establish the ChronoEarth-Benchmark, a unified evaluation suite spanning static, short-horizon, and long-horizon temporal tasks, constructed from six open-source geospatial products covering land cover, crop type, forest dynamics, and soil properties. We further introduce a standardized evaluation protocol and report extensive baseline results across state-of-the-art hyperspectral foundation models. Together, ChronoEarth and benchmark provide the first large-scale, temporally grounded platform for systematic spatiotemporal hyperspectral representation learning.
A Unified Perturbation Framework for Analyzing Leaderboard Stability and Manipulation
arXiv:2605.15761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation leaderboards such as LMArena play a central role in benchmarking large language models by aggregating pairwise human preferences into model rankings, yet the robustness of these rankings remains poorly understood. We present a unified perturbation framework for analyzing Bradley-Terry leaderboards under structured data modifications using influence-based approximations. Our framework studies three match-level perturbations -- Drop, Add, and Flip -- together with player removal, and evaluates their effects on top-k membership, global ranking consistency via Kendall's tau, and confidence-interval-based uncertainty. Across Chatbot Arena and six additional pairwise-comparison datasets, we show that modern leaderboards are non-robust across all three objectives: sub-1% targeted perturbations can change the top-ranked model, degrade Kendall's tau, and alter confidence intervals. Beyond robustness auditing, we show that the same influence scores enable efficient targeted perturbations, promoting or demoting specific models and reducing target-model uncertainty with fewer actions than previous manipulation and active-sampling baselines. By summarizing these effects with normalized dataset-level robustness scores, our framework provides a practical and helpful tool for auditing leaderboard stability and motivating more robust evaluation protocols.
Breakeven complexity: A new perspective on neural partial differential equation solvers
arXiv:2605.15399v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural surrogate solvers of partial differential equations (PDEs) promise dramatic speedups over numerical methods, especially in scenarios requiring many solves. However, current accuracy-based evaluations do not fully consider two central issues: (1) neural solvers incur substantial up-front costs for data generation, training, and tuning; and (2) classical solvers can also generate low-fidelity solutions at a sufficiently low simulation cost. To explicitly account for these realities and fully incorporate end-to-end costs, we propose an evaluation framework centered on breakeven complexity, a metric that counts the forward solves before a learned solver is cost-effective relative to an error-equivalent traditional solver. To evaluate this measure, we apply scaling laws to determine how much training budget to allocate to data generation and discuss how to achieve smooth error-matching in diverse settings. We evaluate the breakeven complexity of multiple neural PDE solvers on three PDEs on 2D periodic domains from APEBench and a novel benchmark of flows past multiple obstacles generated by the GPU-native PyFR code. Among other findings, our results suggest that neural PDE solvers become more effective as problems get harder in terms of cost, dimension, rollout, physics regime (e.g. higher Reynolds number), etc.
Beyond Partner Diversity: An Influence-Based Team Steering Framework for Zero-Shot Human-Machine Teaming
arXiv:2605.15400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While AI agents are rapidly advancing from isolated tools to interactive collaborators, data-driven human-machine teaming (HMT) methods remain costly in their reliance on human interaction data across domains, teammates, and team sizes. Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) addresses this bottleneck by simulating diverse partner populations to approximate how unseen partners might behave. However, partner coverage alone is insufficient as team settings scale and communication becomes degraded. To remedy this deficiency, we propose Influence-Based Team Steering (IBTS), a framework that uses influence shaping to incentivize agents to discover diverse, high-performing team interaction patterns and further steers ongoing trajectories toward stronger learned coordination modes. We assess IBTS on Overcooked-AI in both two-agent and three-agent settings, allowing us to test whether learned coordination structure transfers beyond dyadic interaction. Our evaluation includes simulated partners, synthetic partner-style variation, and, to our knowledge, the first 30-subject Overcooked-AI HMT study involving two real human teammates and one machine teammate. Across these evaluations, IBTS improves team performance against competing baselines, highlighting the need for scaled ZSC to combine sparse-reward coordination mechanisms with partner-variation coverage rather than relying on diversity alone.
Beyond Controlled Noise: Achieving Symmetric FHE through Dynamic Position Shifting
arXiv:2605.15774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) schemes often suffer from prohibitive computational overhead and complex noise management. In this paper, we propose a novel symmetric FHE through a mechanism of plaintext fragmentation and dynamic interposition. Our approach is built upon a modular encryption foundation, c = mk + rp, which is naturally additive but typically limited by exponential noise growth during multiplication. To resolve this, we introduce an interposition framework where the plaintext is partitioned into multiple fragments across distinct logical positions. We introduce a dual-regulator system to govern the multiplication process; exponent regulators (t_i) redirect the product of fragments to a new target position, preventing the accumulation of secret key exponents, while coefficient regulators (d_i) normalize the resulting scalars. Security is established through a binding mechanism where exponents and coefficients are mutually dependent, shielding the secret key k from algebraic manipulation and substitution attacks.
Understanding CDCL Solvers via Scalability Studies and Proofdoors
arXiv:2605.15506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over the past several decades, CDCL SAT solvers have proven remarkably effective on large industrial formulas, despite SAT being NP-complete and widely believed to be intractable. While considerable empirical research has been done on solver performance over benchmarks like the SAT competition, as well as scaling studies on random and crafted families, surprisingly little effort has gone into systematic scaling studies over industrial instances. To address this gap, we collect a large benchmark of Bounded Model Checking (BMC) instances (76,600+ across 766 families) and perform a systematic scaling study of solver performance. We observe a spectrum: some families scale linearly, others polynomially or exponentially. Building on this foundation, we study the structural parameters that have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. We first show that previously proposed parameters -- clause-variable ratio, treewidth, and community structure -- fail to discriminate between the linear and exponential regimes. By contrast, the recently proposed \emph{proofdoor} parameter explains this phenomenon well. Informally, a proofdoor is a sequence of interpolants between chunks of a formula, where each interpolant represents the solver's memoization of reasoning effort on chunks it has already analyzed. In support of the proofdoor hypothesis, we make three key contributions. First, we empirically show that CDCL solvers do compute small proofdoors for linearly-scaling BMC instances. Second, we show that for exponentially-scaling instances, sampled proofdoors scale exponentially and are typically not incrementally absorbed. Third, we show that scrambling linearly-scaling instances yields larger proofdoor sizes relative to pre-scrambling, relating poor branching order to larger proofdoor sizes and drop in solver performance.
Learning with Conflicts of Interest
arXiv:2605.15504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial, social, and political factors often prevent the interests of the owners of ML systems and services and their users from being perfectly aligned. ML systems often produce biased information that can influence users to make decisions that are not in their best interest. Current solution approaches require ML systems to implement protocols to mitigate their biases. However, ML system owners usually do not have any incentive to implement these protocols and often argue that it limits their freedom of expression or business. We believe that a successful solution to this problem must recognize the conflict of interest between the ML systems and their users, and use this information to protect users against information that adversely influences their decisions while allowing users to safely benefit from these systems. To this end, we propose a game-theoretic framework that models the interaction between ML systems and users with conflicts of interest. We present scalable algorithms with theoretical guarantees that maximize the amount of desired information and actions and minimize the amount of biased and manipulative actions in interaction with ML systems.
Data-driven complete basis set limit estimates from a minimal auxiliary basis
arXiv:2605.15927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum chemistry calculations are often performed using atom-centered basis sets which are chosen to balance accuracy and cost. While they are systematically improvable, the total energy converges slowly with basis set size towards the complete basis set (CBS) limit. Common extrapolation methods require several intermediate-quality calculations to afford an estimate of the CBS energy. We propose combining a pairwise interaction model with a minimal complementary auxiliary basis set (CABS) baseline to estimate the CBS energy from a single quantum chemistry calculation in a minimal basis set via Kernel-Ridge-Regression (KRR), which is more efficient than both direct and $\Delta$-machine learning. We show that KRR on standard molecular representations can be improved by approximating atom-wise local kernels using Chebyshev polynomials which allows us to train KRR models efficiently on moderate compute resources, further enabling a data-driven approach towards CBS combining physical baselines capturing leading order effects with data-efficient machine learning models.
Second-order moment equivalence of twisted Gaussian Schell model beams and orbital angular momentum eigenmodes
arXiv:2605.15408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that the covariance matrix of any cylindrically symmetric coherent orbital angular momentum (OAM) eigenmode with quantum number $\ell$ takes a universal form depending only on $\langle r^2\rangle$, $\langle k_r^2\rangle$, and $\ell$, independently of the radial profile, and that this form is identical to the covariance matrix of a twisted Gaussian Schell-model (TGSM) beam.} More specifically, both matrices share the same pattern of zero and nonzero entries, with the off-diagonal blocks proportional to $\ell$ and the TGSM twist parameter $u$, respectively. This result holds for an arbitrary radial profile and provides direct term-by-term identification of parameters between the two sets of beams. We work out the correspondence in detail for three important families: Laguerre--Gaussian (LG), Bessel--Gaussian, and perfect vortex beams (PVBs), and derive the conditions under which each coherent OAM mode maps onto a physically realizable TGSM beam. {Because the covariance matrix governs second-moment evolution under arbitrary ABCD (symplectic) transformations, any two beams sharing the same covariance matrix are second-order indistinguishable at every propagation plane. In particular, the matched TGSM and coherent OAM beams share identical beam-width evolution, far-field divergence, and $M^2$ beam-quality factor.} In particular, the well-developed TGSM propagation toolbox applies directly to the second-order moment evolution of the three coherent families. We further show that within each beam family the covariance matrix uniquely determines the beam parameters, with exact uniqueness established for LG modes. Additional results include cross-family second-moment equivalence conditions and a proof that PVB modes form a complete orthonormal basis in the limit $w\to 0$.
Tadpole: Autoencoders as Foundation Models for 3D PDEs with Online Learning
arXiv:2605.15284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Tadpole, a novel foundation model for three-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs) that addresses key challenges in transferability, scalability to high dimensionality, and multi-functionality. Tadpole is pre-trained as an autoencoder on synthetic 3D PDE data generated by an efficient online data-generation framework. This enables large-scale, diverse training without storage or I/O overhead, demonstrated by scaling to an equivalent of hundreds of terabytes of training data. By autoencoding single-channel spatial crops, Tadpole learns rich and transferable representations across heterogeneous physical systems with varying numbers of state variables and spatial resolutions. Although pre-trained solely as an autoencoder, Tadpole can be efficiently applied for multiple downstream tasks beyond reconstruction, including dynamics learning and generative modeling. For dynamics learning, we propose a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that integrates low-rank adaptation, latent-space transformations, and reintroduced skip connections, achieving accurate temporal modeling with a minimal number of trainable parameters. Tadpole demonstrates strong fine-tuning performance across various downstream tasks, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness as a foundation model for 3D PDE learning. Source code and pre-trained weights of Tadpole are available at https://github.com/tum-pbs/tadpole
Designing Dense Satellite Clusters for Distributed Space-based Datacenters
arXiv:2605.15335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent proposals for datacenters in sun-synchronous Low Earth Orbit rely on a large number of compute satellites formation-flying in dense clusters. Designing such satellite clusters requires optimizing the satellites' orbital geometry under several safety and operational constraints applied throughout the cluster's entire orbit. These constraints include guaranteeing a minimum inter-satellite spacing, obstruction-less solar power for every satellite, and that each satellite have a stable set of nearest neighbors with which it can maintain inter-satellite links (ISLs). In this work, we propose two main cluster orbital designs, parametrized by the minimum inter-satellite spacing $R_{min}$ and the cluster radius $R_{max}$: a planar cluster, and a 3D cluster. We show by construction and numerical analysis that both cluster orbital designs are consistent with the inter-satellite spacing, unobstructed sun-vector, and inter-satellite line of sight constraints. The proposed planar architecture is the most efficient packing of satellites in a plane for given $R_{min}$ and $R_{max}$ values, and our 3D architecture allows for the number of datacenter satellites to scale proportional to $(R_{max}/R_{min})^3$, an improvement over all previous LEO datacenter cluster designs. Finally, for a given satellite cluster, we formulate and solve an integer optimization problem that maps a VL2-like Clos network datacenter switching fabric onto the satellites and their corresponding set of feasible ISLs. We confirm that for both the planar and 3D architectures, there are sufficiently many permanently unobstructed ISLs within the cluster to replicate the switching fabric of terrestrial datacenters. We also examine the tradeoff between the number of ISLs each satellite can simultaneously sustain, and the corresponding number of cluster satellites that must be dedicated as aggregation and intermediate switches.
Sparsity Moves Computation: How FFN Architecture Reshapes Attention in Small Transformers
arXiv:2605.09403v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Architectural choices inside the Transformer feedforward network (FFN) block do not merely affect the block itself; they reshape the computations learned by the rest of the model. We study this effect in one-layer Transformers trained on digit addition with carry, modular arithmetic, and histogram counting. Comparing dense FFNs, gated linear units (GLUs), mixture-of-experts (MoE), and MoE-GLUs, we find that sparse MoE routing can shift computation from FFN to attention, with the strongest ablation-visible effect on carry-based addition. We decompose this redistribution into reduced per-token FFN capacity and sparse partitioning across experts. Critically, frozen random routing nearly matches learned routing, suggesting that redistribution is driven largely by architectural sparsity rather than router-learned specialization. As a secondary finding, GLU-style multiplicative gating rotates task-relevant Fourier structure out of the per-neuron basis and into distributed subspaces, making neuron-level interpretability less informative while preserving structured computation. We validate these conclusions with random-routing, narrow-FFN, and top-2 MoE controls, plus parameter-matching, activation-function, and width-scaling analyses. Together, these results show that local FFN design choices can have nonlocal consequences for Transformer computation.
On the Essence of Lagrange's Equations
arXiv:2605.15498v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: From a new perspective, this paper rederives Lagrange's equations. By applying the chain rule of differentiation, the intrinsic relationship between the momentum theorem and the kinetic energy theorem is first established. Subsequently, expressing the differential form of energy conservation in an arbitrary coordinate system and performing suitable differential operations yields Lagrange's equations. Generalized forces and generalized displacements are shown to be component representations of forces and displacements in a chosen coordinate system. Consequently, the essence of Lagrange's equations is identified as the transformation of the kinetic energy theorem into the momentum theorem via the chain rule for composite functions, thereby revealing how energy conservation constructs momentum conservation.
Bounded-Rationality, Hedging, and Generalization
arXiv:2605.15340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A learner does not only fit data; it also determines how strongly the training sample may shape its output and how much distortion it can hedge. We study this relation as a bounded-rational decision problem whose primitive object is the induced channel from samples to outputs. The learner's response law determines which changes in this channel are cheap or costly, and therefore induces both a lower tradeoff curve between training loss and sample dependence and a matched upper certificate curve. When the response law is represented by an $f$-divergence regularizer, these curves live in the regularizer's native information geometry, with KL as the special case corresponding to Shannon mutual information. We show how the hedge and the two curves can be recovered from black-box behavior by observing responses to scaled losses and local loss perturbations. In learning, population loss is empirical loss plus the distortion induced by the particular training sample. The recovered hedge gives a practical certificate when it covers that distortion. Thus generalization is treated as a testable hedging property of the learner's own response law.
Inductive inference of gradient-boosted decision trees on graphs for insurance fraud detection
arXiv:2510.05676v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph-based methods are becoming increasingly popular in machine learning due to their ability to model complex data and relations. Insurance fraud is a prime use case, since fraudulent claims are often the result of organised criminals that stage accidents or the same persons filing erroneous claims on multiple policies. One challenge is that graph-based approaches struggle to find meaningful representations of the data because of the high class imbalance present in fraud data. In addition, insurance graphs are heterogeneous and dynamic, given the changing relations among people, companies and policies. As a result, gradient-boosted tree approaches on tabular data still dominate the field. Therefore, we present a novel inductive graph gradient boosting machine (G-GBM) for supervised learning on heterogeneous and dynamic graphs. G-GBM combines the class-imbalance robustness of gradient boosting with heterogeneous graph information encoded through interpretable path-level feature concatenations, while preserving access to the original tabular feature space. In addition, the explicit representation of neighbourhood information enables transparent SHAP-based explanations at the metapath and feature level. We demonstrate G-GBM for insurance fraud detection on an open-source and a real-world, proprietary dataset, and find that G-GBM performs on par or better than the state-of-the-art. The associated insurance fraud dataset is publicly released to facilitate reproducibility.
Neurosymbolic Object-Centric Learning with Distant Supervision
arXiv:2506.16129v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neurosymbolic learning can use symbolic rules to provide supervision for latent concepts from weak labels, but it commonly assumes that the entities referenced by these rules are already specified. Object-centric models decompose images into slot-like representations; however, such slots are not necessarily aligned with the predicates required for symbolic reasoning. We investigate object-centric neurosymbolic learning under distant supervision, where the object-level arguments of a logic program are learned directly from images using only global task labels. We introduce DeepObjectLog, a probabilistic neurosymbolic model that integrates a slot-based perceptual encoder with a probabilistic logic layer. The encoder predicts objectness and class probabilities for candidate object representations, while the logic layer marginalizes over latent objectness and class assignments to compute the likelihood of the observed label. This formulation provides a differentiable task-level learning signal for object-centric perception without requiring per-object labels, masks, bounding boxes, or heuristic set matching. Evaluations across diverse visual reasoning tasks demonstrate that DeepObjectLog achieves superior out-of-distribution generalization to compositional, object-count, and rule shifts compared to neural object-centric and standard neurosymbolic baselines.
Probabilistic Seasonal Streamflow Forecasting Across California's Sierra Nevada Watersheds with Agentic AI
arXiv:2605.16178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate seasonal runoff forecasts are critical for managing California's reservoirs and water supply for millions of its residents. Winter snow accumulation provides a strong source of predictability of snowmelt-based runoff in the spring and summer months, but progressive hydroclimatic changes in the Sierra Nevada are altering its timing and volume. These changes reduce the skill of statistical forecasts trained on historical data, highlighting the need for improved forecasting systems that can capture the changing dynamics of snowmelt. Here we demonstrate that a collaborative workflow between an agentic AI assistant and an automated code-mutation system, both powered by large language models, can accelerate the development of competitive seasonal runoff forecasting systems. In our framework, the AI agent discovers relevant datasets, synthesizes domain knowledge from prior forecasting competitions and the scientific literature, and explores the space of model architectures, while the code-mutation system refines each of the solutions explored by the agent through Monte Carlo Tree Search over the code space. The resulting system forecasts monthly Full Natural Flow (FNF) at 1- to 6-month lead times across 23 Sierra Nevada watersheds using an adaptive ensemble of three XGBoost quantile regression sub-models with physics-informed feature engineering. Evaluated against California's operational Bulletin 120 forecasts over 2021-2025, the agent-evolved model achieves superior skill for early-season cumulative April-July runoff predictions, reducing watershed-averaged quantile forecast error by up to 29%, and offering a new paradigm for AI-driven scientific model development in the geosciences.
Multi-Turn Neural Transparency: Surfacing Neural Activations Improves User Calibration to LLM Behavioral Drift
arXiv:2605.15455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chatbot behavior is often opaque to users, as responses can shift unpredictably across a conversation, drifting toward sycophancy, toxicity, or other unsafe responses. This can leave users vulnerable, either being misled by overly agreeable AI or manipulated by a harmful chatbot that no longer behaves as intended. To address this, we introduce multi-turn neural transparency, an interface that surfaces an LLM's internal neural activations in real time to help users anticipate and recognize how behaviors change across turns. We construct behavioral vectors for six personality traits using methods from mechanistic interpretability, identifying directions in activation space that correlate with trait expression ($R^2 \geq 0.9$) via contrastive system prompts, and visualize trait expression using a sunburst and drift panel that updates at each turn. In a randomized controlled study (N = 246), participants predicted trait expression from a system prompt alone, then rated observed behavior after interacting with the chatbot for both assistant and role-play personas. We find that participants without visualization struggled to accurately evaluate traits (RMSE $\approx$ 0.6-0.7), while the inclusion of neural transparency significantly improved both anticipation and evaluation compared to no visualization (d = -0.34 to -0.49). The multi-turn dynamic visualization additionally outperformed the static single-turn visualization on holistic evaluation of model behavior (d = -0.32). Transparency also reduced overconfidence: participants without visualization grew more confident despite no gain in accuracy. These findings suggest that surfacing internal model representations to everyday users is a meaningful step toward more transparent and informed human-AI interaction.
LEAP: Trajectory-Level Evaluation of LLMs in Iterative Scientific Design
arXiv:2605.15341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed in autonomous laboratories, under the assumption that their domain priors and reasoning over iterative feedback let them converge on good designs in fewer iterations than feedback-only baselines. Current iterative scientific design benchmarks, however, score only outcome snapshots at fixed horizons. This leaves the learning trajectory unmeasured, even though the trajectory is what captures learning efficiency, where each iteration saved is a real saving in cost and time. Motivated by this, we examine three evaluation choices that change the conclusions one draws about LLM learning efficiency in iterative scientific design: what to measure, what baseline to compare against, and what to ground against. We introduce LEAPBench, Learning Efficiency in Adaptive Processes, a 55-task framework that pairs a best-so-far area under the curve (AUC) trajectory metric with a classical Bayesian-optimization reference and an audit grounded in published literature. Applied to eight contemporary LLMs, switching from final-outcome to trajectory scoring changes the best-model decision on 53% of tasks at matched horizons, and exposes efficiency gains overlooked by outcome-based scoring. LLMs do not outperform a classical Bayesian baseline. On 16 biology tasks where the oracle's reward signal is aligned with configurations from the published-best design, domain-aware prompting leads to LLM choices that match the published-best's approximately 10 percentage points less often than domain-agnostic prompting at iteration 30. The pattern is sharpest on 6 tasks where the literature-typical and published-best configurations diverge, and domain-agnostic prompting matches the published-best more often on all 6. The trajectory metric also doubles as a tractable training target. Offline reinforcement learning with the metric as a reward improves performance on 14 of 21 held-out tasks.
LAPS: Improving Incremental LiDAR Mapping using Active Pooling and Sampling for Neural Distance Fields
arXiv:2605.15496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural distance fields offer a compact and continuous representation of 3D geometry, making them attractive for incremental LiDAR mapping. However, their online optimization is vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting, where new observations can degrade previously reconstructed geometry. Replay-based training is commonly used to address this issue, but existing methods typically rely on passive replay buffers and uniform sampling, which can waste memory on redundant observations and under-train poorly constrained regions. We propose LAPS, a replay management framework for incremental neural mapping that improves both replay retention and replay allocation during online updates. LAPS combines reliability-based active pooling to retain reliable historical samples under limited memory with uncertainty-guided active sampling to focus optimization on under-constrained regions. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that LAPS consistently improves reconstruction completeness while maintaining competitive geometric accuracy. On Oxford Spires, it improves recall by 4.66 pp and F1-score by 3.79 pp over PIN-SLAM on the Blenheim Palace 05 sequence. We release our open source implementation at: https://github.com/dongjae0107/LAPS.