Forskningsradar

Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 65136 artiklar

SafeLens: Deliberate and Efficient Video Guardrails with Fast-and-Slow Screening
arXiv:2605.17610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid growth of online video platforms and AI-generated content has made reliable video guardrails a key challenge for safety and real-world deployment. While most videos can be screened through fast pattern recognition, a small subset requires deeper reasoning over temporally complex content and nuanced policy constraints. Existing approaches typically rely on large vision-language models applied uniformly across all inputs, resulting in high inference costs and inefficient allocation of computation. We propose SafeLens, a video guardrail framework that introduces a fast-and-slow inference architecture for efficient and accurate content moderation with variable computational cost across inputs. Additionally, we construct a high-quality dataset by applying influence-guided filtering to the SafeWatch Dataset, retaining only 2.4% of the original data. To further address limitations of training-time scaling, we enable test-time reasoning by augmenting the filtered data with structured Chain-of-Thought traces. Across real-world and AI-generated video benchmarks, SafeLens achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong open-source video guardrails (e.g., SafeWatch-8B, OmniGuard-7B) and closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4, Gemini-3.1-pro) while significantly reducing inference cost, demonstrating that efficient design serves to be more effective than scaling data or model size alone.
PH-Dreamer: A Physics-Driven World Model via Port-Hamiltonian Generative Dynamics
arXiv:2605.18303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models built on recurrent state space architectures enable efficient latent imagination, yet remain physically unstructured, producing dynamics that violate conservation and dissipative principles. We introduce a unified Port-Hamiltonian framework that remedies this through three synergistic mechanisms. First, we embed implicit physical priors into recurrent transitions by modeling projected latent evolution as action controlled energy routing governed by flow and dissipation, biasing the projected PH phase space toward a more compact and physically structured representation. Second, we develop a kinematics aware energy world model that estimates the Hamiltonian and power balance from proprioceptive observations, providing an explicit physical signal for thermodynamic reasoning. Third, leveraging these energy gradients, we establish an energy guided Actor-Critic that uses Lagrangian multipliers to regularize policy optimization toward lower energy and smoother control. Across visual control benchmarks, this paradigm not only attains superior asymptotic returns but also elevates internal simulator fidelity by establishing a tighter, lower variance alignment between imagined and real rewards, all while reducing latent phase space volume by 4.18-8.41%, energy consumption by up to 7.80%, and mean squared jerk by up to 9.38%.
Teachers' Vocal Expressions and Student Engagement in Asynchronous Video Learning
arXiv:2605.17463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Asynchronous video learning, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), offers flexibility but often lacks students' affective engagement. This study examines how teachers' verbal and nonverbal vocal emotive expressions influence students' self-reported affective engagement. Using computational acoustic and sentiment analysis, valence and arousal scores were extracted from teachers' verbal vocal expressions, and nonverbal vocal emotions were classified into six categories: anger, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. Data from 210 video lectures across four MOOC platforms and feedback from 738 students collected after class were analyzed. Results revealed that teachers' verbal emotive expressions, even with positive valence and high arousal, did not significantly impact engagement. Conversely, vocal expressions with positive valence and high arousal, such as happiness and surprise, enhanced engagement, while negative high-arousal emotions, such as anger, reduced it. These findings offer practical insights for instructional video creators, teachers, and influencers to foster emotional engagement in asynchronous video learning.
Canonical Regularisation of Wide Feature-Learning Neural Networks
arXiv:2605.18180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wide neural networks in the feature-learning regime drive modern deep learning, and yet they remain far less studied than their kernel-regime counterparts. We consider a critical yet under-explored difference between these two regimes: the regulariser and prior implied by gradient flow training. This canonical regularisation property is well-studied in kernel regime networks -- of all the infinite global minima, gradient flow selects exactly the vanishing ridge solution -- and underpins the celebrated NN-GP correspondence, precisely allowing the modelling of noise during training. However, we prove ridge regularisation biases gradient flow in feature-learning regime networks, even in the infinitesimal limit of vanishing regularisation. Over training, ridge distorts the inductive bias of the network, with a particular damage done to pretrained networks where the implicit prior is informative. We resolve this by axiomatising the canonical regulariser as a regime-agnostic function-space energy and lift, which uniquely identifies ridge in the kernel regime, and crucially generalises to the feature-learning regime. By studying the Riemannian geometry of feature-learning networks, we derive geodesic ridge from our framework, generalising ridge to the feature-learning regime. Correspondingly, we prove the canonical function-space prior is a Riemannian Gibbs Process, generalising the more familiar Gaussian Process. As a practical contribution, we propose arc ridge as a minimax-robust, scalable surrogate to geodesic ridge, revealing a deep relationship between early stopping and canonical regularisation across learning regimes. Finally, we demonstrate the consequences of our theory empirically on both image processing and NLP transfer-learning problems.
Forward-Learned Discrete Diffusion: Learning how to noise to denoise faster
arXiv:2605.18204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models with strong performance across many domains. For efficiency, however, discrete diffusion typically parameterizes the generative (reverse) process with factorized distributions, which makes it difficult for the model to learn the target process in a small number of steps and necessitates a long, computationally expensive sampling procedure. To reduce the gap between the target and model distributions and enable few-step generation, we propose Forward-Learned Discrete Diffusion (FLDD), which introduces discrete diffusion with a learnable forward (noising) process. Rather than fixing a Markovian forward chain, we adopt a non-Markovian formulation with learnable marginal and posterior distributions. This allows the generative process to remain factorized while matching the target defined by the noising process. We train all parameters end-to-end under the standard variational objective. Experiments on various benchmarks show that, for a given number of sampling steps, our approach produces a higher quality samples than conventional discrete diffusion models using the same reverse parameterization.
The Expressive Power of Low Precision Softmax Transformers with (Summarized) Chain-of-Thought
arXiv:2605.18079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing expressivity results for transformers typically rely on hardmax attention, high precision, and other architectural modifications that disconnect them from the models used in practice. We bridge this gap by analyzing standard transformer decoders with softmax attention and rounding of activations and attention weights, while allowing depth and width to grow logarithmically with the context length. As an intermediate step, we construct hardmax transformers with ternary activations and well-separated attention scores that simulate Turing machines using Chain-of-Thought (CoT). This lets us convert the constructions to equivalent softmax transformers without the unrealistic parameter magnitudes or activation precision that prior approaches would require. Using the same technique, we analyze a recently proposed summarized CoT paradigm and show that it simulates Turing machines more efficiently, with model size scaling logarithmically in a space bound rather than a time bound. We empirically test predictions made by our results on a Sudoku reasoning task and find better alignment with learnability than for prior high-precision results. Our code is available at https://github.com/moritzbroe/transformer-expressivity.
Detecting nonclassicality in randomly-displaced copies of a squeezed state
arXiv:2605.18708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We address a fundamental question: Can one determine whether a received signal is squeezed when each copy arrives with a different displacement/amplitude? We introduce an interaction Hamiltonian that converts quadrature squeezing into number squeezing. Using this conversion, we test whether the copies satisfy $g^{(2)}(0)<1$. The Hamiltonian itself does not create nonclassicality; it only transfers it from quadrature squeezing to number squeezing. This allows us to identify squeezing even when individual copies have random displacements.
Decouple then Converge: Handling Unknown Unlabeled Distributions in Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning
arXiv:2406.13187v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While long-tailed semi-supervised learning (LTSSL) has attracted growing attention in many real-world classification tasks, existing LTSSL algorithms typically assume that labeled and unlabeled data share nearly identical class distributions. When this assumption is violated, these methods can perform poorly because they rely on biased model-generated pseudo-labels. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective approach called DeCon for LTSSL with unknown unlabeled class distributions. Specifically, DeCon decouples learning into two specialized branches: a standard branch that focuses on head classes and a balanced branch that focuses on tail classes. During training, the two branches interact and gradually converge, allowing them to complement each other and ultimately achieve strong performance across all classes. Despite its simplicity, we show that DeCon achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of standard LTSSL benchmarks, e.g., an averaged 2.7\% absolute increase in test accuracy against existing algorithms when the class distributions of labeled and unlabeled data are mismatched. Even when the class distributions are identical, DeCon consistently outperforms many sophisticated LTSSL algorithms. Furthermore, we conduct extensive ablation analyses to tease apart the factors that are the most important to the success of DeCon. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Gank0078/DeCon}.
AASIST3: KAN-Enhanced AASIST Speech Deepfake Detection using SSL Features and Additional Regularization for the ASVspoof 2024 Challenge
arXiv:2408.17352v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems, which identify speakers based on their voice characteristics, have numerous applications, such as user authentication in financial transactions, exclusive access control in smart devices, and forensic fraud detection. However, the advancement of deep learning algorithms has enabled the generation of synthetic audio through Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Voice Conversion (VC) systems, exposing ASV systems to potential vulnerabilities. To counteract this, we propose a novel architecture named AASIST3. By enhancing the existing AASIST framework with Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, additional layers, encoders, and pre-emphasis techniques, AASIST3 achieves a more than twofold improvement in performance. It demonstrates minDCF results of 0.5357 in the closed condition and 0.1414 in the open condition, significantly enhancing the detection of synthetic voices and improving ASV security. \textbf{The new version of the model is publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/lab260/Spectra-AASIST3}{\underline{HuggingFace (2026)}}}
Federated Naive Bayes with Real Mixture of Gaussians and Institutional Governance Regularization for Network Intrusion Detection
arXiv:2605.18647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning for intrusion detection rests on a flawed premise: that every participating institution contributes equally to the shared model. In practice, a financial institution with mature security controls and low vulnerability exposure produces fundamentally different data than a government agency running with weaker controls and higher exposure. Treating their local models as equivalent discards information that organisations already collect through standard risk management audits. Four governance indicators from the CRISC framework of ISACA, specifically control maturity (CMM), proportion of implemented controls (KCI), risk indicator activation frequency (KRI), and mean vulnerability score (CVSS), are combined here into an Institutional Coherence Index (ICC). This index enters a Nelder-Mead federated weight optimizer as a regularization prior, guiding weight assignment toward institutional quality without imposing any fixed allocation. Each node trains a hybrid local classifier combining Categorical and Gaussian Naive Bayes. The server combines local distributions as a real Mixture of Gaussians, preserving each node's statistical identity rather than collapsing it into a global parameter vector. Validation on NSL-KDD (2009), CIC-IDS2017 (2017), and UNSW-NB15 (2015), under seven Dirichlet heterogeneity levels, shows that the ICC-regularized proposal outperforms size-proportional federated averaging in all three datasets: F1-macro 0.9135 vs. 0.9076 (+0.0059), 0.7556 vs. 0.6771 (+0.0785), and 0.2110 vs. 0.2060 (+0.0050). Statistical significance holds in 70 of 94 configurations (McNemar, p < 0.05). In all three cases, the optimizer assigned the highest weight to the institutionally most mature node and the lowest to the least mature, without any explicit ordering constraint.
TabH2O: A Unified Foundation Model for Tabular Prediction
arXiv:2605.18383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present TabH2O, a foundation model for tabular data that performs classification and regression in a single forward pass via in-context learning. TabH2O builds on the TabICL architecture with several key modifications: (1) unified training, a single model handles both classification and regression via a dual-head architecture, eliminating the need for separate models and reducing total pretraining cost; (2) single-stage pretraining, training stability improvements (bounded scalable softmax, inter-stage normalization, learnable residual scaling, logit soft-capping) eliminate the need for multi-stage curriculum learning, enabling training with full-length sequences from the start; and (3) noise-aware pretraining, synthetic datasets include explicit noise dimensions to teach the model robustness to irrelevant features. We evaluate TabH2O v1 (29.2M parameters) on the TALENT benchmark (300 datasets), where it achieves an average rank of 2.55 out of 6 evaluated methods, outperforming tuned CatBoost (4.07), H2O AutoML (4.18), and LightGBM (5.08), competitive with TabPFN v2.6 (2.74), and behind TabICL v2 (2.12), while placing in the top-3 on 81% of the testing datasets across classification and regression tasks.
UxSID: Semantic-Aware User Interests Modeling for Ultra-Long Sequence
arXiv:2605.09040v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modeling ultra-long user sequences involves a difficult trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. While current paradigms rely on either item-specific search or item-agnostic compression, we propose UxSID, a framework exploring a third path: semantic-group shared interest memory. By utilizing Semantic IDs (SIDs) and a dual-level attention strategy, UxSID captures target-aware preferences without the heavy cost of item-specific models. This end-to-end architecture balances computational parsimony with semantic awareness, achieving state-of-the-art performance and a 0.337% revenue lift in large-scale advertising A/B test.
VISOR: A Vision-Language Model-based Test Oracle for Testing Robots
arXiv:2605.10408v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Testing robots requires assessing whether they perform their intended tasks correctly, dependably, and with high quality, a challenge known as the test oracle problem in software testing. Traditionally, this assessment relies on task-specific symbolic oracles for task correctness and on human manual evaluation of robot behavior, which is time-consuming, subjective, and error-prone. To address this, we propose VISOR, a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based approach for automated test oracle assessment that eliminates the need of expensive human evaluations. VISOR performs automated evaluation of task correctness and quality, addressing the limitations of existing symbolic test oracles, which are task-specific and provide pass/fail judgments without explicitly quantifying task quality. Given the inherent uncertainty in VLMs, VISOR also explicitly quantifies its own uncertainty during test assessments. We evaluated VISOR using two VLMs, i.e., GPT and Gemini, across four robotic tasks on over 1,000 videos. Results show that Gemini achieves higher recall while GPT achieves higher precision. However, both models show low correlation between uncertainty and correctness, which prevents using uncertainty as a correctness predictor.
Random Access Expectation in DNA Storage and Fountain Codes
arXiv:2605.10919v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by DNA data storage, we study the expected number of coded symbols drawn from a linear code until a desired information symbol can be decoded - the random access expectation. We focus on generator matrices with a type of symmetry, conjectured in prior work to be optimal, which we call fully symmetric. We point out an equivalence between binary fully symmetric codes and LT codes. Using this observation, we analyze the random access expectation of binary fully symmetric codes under a peeling decoder, in the large blocklength limit. Under these assumptions, the random access expectation, normalized by the number of information symbols, is at least $\pi/4 \approx 0.7854$, while a value of $\approx 0.7869$ is achievable.
UAM: A Dual-Stream Perspective on Forgetting in VLA Training
arXiv:2605.15735v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision--language--action (VLA) models are typically built by fine-tuning a pretrained vision--language model (VLM) on action data. However, we show that this standard recipe systematically erodes the VLM's multimodal competence, a side effect we call the embodiment tax. But do VLAs have to forget? Inspired by the two-stream organization of biological vision, we trace this degradation to a structural bottleneck: current VLAs ask a single encoder to support both language-grounded semantics and control-relevant visual features, whereas biological vision separates recognition and visuomotor control into distinct pathways. Building on this view, we propose the Unified Action Model (UAM), which adds a parallel Dorsal Expert, an analog of the brain's dorsal pathway. To make the Dorsal Expert an effective second pathway and reduce the control-learning burden on the VLM, we initialize it from a pretrained generative model and train it with a mid-level reasoning objective that predicts visual dynamics. This design allows us to train the whole VLA end-to-end on action data alone: with no parameter freezing, no gradient stopping, and no auxiliary VL co-training, UAM retains over $95\%$ of the underlying VLM's multimodal capability and at the same time achieves the highest average success rate among baselines on a variety of manipulation tasks that probe out-of-distribution generalization, including unseen objects, novel object--target compositions, and instruction variation. Together, these results suggest that semantic preservation in VLAs can emerge from architectural separation itself, rather than being enforced by frozen weights or auxiliary data replay, and that this preserved semantic capability can naturally transfer from VLMs to semantic generalization in actions.
DL-Driven Optimization for ISAC System Equipped With Pinching and Movable Antennas
arXiv:2605.17629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is considered to be a promising technology for future wireless systems due to its ability to provide communication and sensing services using shared hardware and spectrum resources. Moreover, the introduction of recently developed pinching antennas (PAs) and movable antennas (MAs) has the potential to further improve the performance gains of ISAC. Therefore, our goal is to study the optimization of the sum-rate for an ISAC system equipped with PAs and MAs, capable of satisfying minimal sensing requirements. To achieve it, we derive a closed-form solution for the optimal sensing receive combiner, and show that it is determined by other optimization variables. For these other variables (i.e., the positions of the transmit PAs, the positions of the users' MAs, the communication precoding matrices, and the sensing transmit beamformer), we propose a deep learning (DL) network that finds their optimal values. To train the network in an unsupervised manner, we formulate a loss function consisting of the objective function, as well as the penalty terms related to the constraints for the PAs and MAs positions. Simulation results show that using PAs and MAs in ISAC systems provides a larger sum-rate compared to ISAC systems with only fixed antennas, and that this performance advantage is increased with the maximum transmit power. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the communication performance of the considered system is a bit more affected by the sensing signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) threshold compared to the sensing performance.
SparseSAM: Structured Sparsification of Activations in Segment Anything Models
arXiv:2605.17633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) achieves strong open-vocabulary segmentation, but its ViT-based image encoders dominate inference latency and memory. Existing activation compression methods, such as token merging, reduce the token length to process, yet introduce non-trivial runtime overhead and encounter catastrophic quality drop under high compression. Other methods applying Sparse Attention focus on attention alone, leaving the MLP fully dense and capping achievable speedup. We propose SparseSAM, a (i) training-free structured sparsification framework that jointly accelerates attention and MLP layers while preserving token identity. SparseSAM introduces (ii) Stripe-Sort Attention, which uses a deterministic Z-order permutation to transform dense attention into static hardware-friendly sparse patterns, eliminating dynamic masking overhead. SparseSAM further introduces a (iii) Residual-Consistency MLP that routes only informative tokens through the MLP while propagating remaining tokens through the residual pathway. Across four segmentation benchmarks, SparseSAM loses only 0.004 mIoU at a 0.4 density and 0.021 mIoU at 0.3, a 2.10x reduction in accuracy loss versus token merging advances, while achieving 2x faster inference and 2.8x memory reduction.
Generalization analysis with deep ReLU networks for metric and similarity learning
arXiv:2405.06415v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While metric and similarity learning has been extensively studied from several theoretical perspectives, a rigorous understanding of its generalization performance is still lacking. In this paper, we investigate the generalization behavior of metric and similarity learning by exploiting the specific structure of the true metric (i.e., the target function). In particular, by deriving the explicit form of the true metric for metric and similarity learning with the hinge loss, we construct a structured deep ReLU neural network as an approximation of the true metric, whose approximation ability depends on the network complexity. Here, the network complexity is characterized by the network depth, the number of nonzero weights, and the number of computational units. Based on the hypothesis space consisting of such structured deep ReLU networks, we establish excess risk bounds for metric and similarity learning by carefully controlling both the approximation error and the estimation error. An explicit excess risk rate is derived by choosing the proper capacity of the constructed hypothesis space. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first generalization analysis that provides explicit excess risk bounds for metric and similarity learning. In addition, we investigate properties of the true metric for metric and similarity learning under more general loss functions. Experiments show that the proposed model is empirically competitive and better captures the underlying similarity structure.
Joint Communication and Sensing with Bipartite Entanglement over Bosonic Channels
arXiv:2501.15675v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider a joint communication and sensing problem over an optical link in which a low-power transmitter simultaneously communicates with a receiver and identifies the range of a defect producing a backscattered signal. We model the system as a lossy thermal-noise bosonic channel, in which the target location, modeled as a beamsplitter, affects the timing of the backscattered signal. Motivated by the envisioned deployment of entanglement-enabled quantum networks, we allow the transmitter to exploit shared entanglement to assist both sensing and communication. Since entanglement is known to enhance sensing, as demonstrated in Quantum Illumination (QI), and to increase communication rates through entanglement-assisted communication, the transmitter faces a trade-off in allocating its entanglement resources between the two tasks. Our main result is a characterization of these trade-offs in the form of an achievable rate/error-exponent region, which can outperform time-sharing and demonstrates a quantum advantage.
Temporal Decay of Co-Citation Predictability: A 20-Year Statute Retrieval Benchmark from 396M Ukrainian Court Citations
arXiv:2605.17639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Co-citation structure is widely assumed to provide stable retrieval signal in legal information systems. We test this assumption longitudinally by constructing UA-StatuteRetrieval, a benchmark that measures co-citation predictability across 20 annual snapshots (2007-2026) of 396 million codex citations from 101 million Ukrainian court decisions. Using a leave-one-out protocol over the full bipartite citation graph, we find that Adamic-Adar MRR declines 33% on a fixed set of articles (from 0.43 to 0.29) and 47% under a train/test temporal split (from 0.51 to 0.27) confirming genuine temporal decay rather than compositional shift or evaluation artifact. The decay is non-uniform: criminal procedure maintains stable co-citation patterns (MRR ~0.40), while civil law degrades from 0.35 to 0.15, coinciding with the 2017 judicial reform. Hub articles (>100K citations) resist decay, but mid-frequency articles (1K-10K) -- the practical retrieval frontier lose half their predictability. A BM25 text baseline decays even faster (31%), and embedding drift analysis with E5-large reveals a 4.3% semantic shift in how articles are cited, providing a mechanistic explanation for the observed decay. The benchmark is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/overthelex/ua-statute-retrieval.
MARQUIS: A Three-Stage Pipeline for Video Retrieval-Augmented Generation
arXiv:2605.17640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation from videos requires systems to retrieve relevant audiovisual evidence from large corpora and synthesize it into coherent, attributed text. Current approaches struggle at both ends: retrieval methods fail on complex, multi-faceted queries that cannot be captured by a single embedding, while generation methods lack the high-level reasoning needed to synthesize across multiple videos and face memory constraints over long, multi-video contexts. We present MARQUIS: a three-stage pipeline that addresses these limitations through (1) query expansion, fusion, and reranking, (2) calibrated structured evidence extraction, and (3) article generation from extracted evidence, optionally controlled by an RLM. On the MAGMaR2026 shared task, we improve retrieval performance from 0.195 to 0.759 (nDCG@10). For article generation, ITER-QA-BASE improves average human score from 3.09 to 3.83 over the CAG baseline, while MARQUIS-RLM achieves a human score of 3.30 and the strongest citation recall among non-QA systems.
Concatenated Codes for Short-Molecule DNA Storage with Sequencing Channels of Positive Zero-Undetected-Error Capacity
arXiv:2602.12800v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the amount of reliable information that can be stored in a DNA-based storage system with noisy sequencing, where each codeword is composed of short DNA molecules. We analyze a concatenated coding scheme, where the outer code is designed to handle the random sampling, while the inner code is designed to handle the random sequencing noise. We assume that the sequencing channel is symmetric and choose the inner coding scheme to be composed by a linear block code and a zero-undetected-error decoder. As a byproduct, the resulting optimal maximum-likelihood decoder land itself for an amenable analysis, and we are able to derive an achievability bound for the scaling of the number of information bits that can be reliably stored. As a result of independent interest, we prove that the average error probability of random linear block codes under zero-undetected-error decoding converges to zero exponentially fast with the block length, as long as its coding rate does not exceed some critical value, which is known to serve as a lower bound to the zero-undetected-error capacity.
Sequential Structure in Intraday Futures Data: LSTM vs Gradient Boosting on MNQ
arXiv:2605.17724v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper compares gradient boosting and long short-term memory (LSTM) architectures for intraday directional prediction in Micro E-Mini Nasdaq 100 futures (MNQ). Motivated by recent foundation-model research on financial candlestick data, including the Kronos architecture, we test whether five-minute OHLCV bar sequences contain exploitable sequential predictive structure at the scale of a single instrument dataset. Using 944 trading days from 2021-2025, four model configurations are evaluated under strict expanding-window walk-forward validation across three out-of-sample periods. The target variable is whether the session close exceeds the 10:30 AM open by more than ten points. No configuration produces statistically significant out-of-sample accuracy above the 51.8% base rate. Combined OOS accuracies range from 50.00% to 50.89% across gradient boosting variants, while the LSTM achieves 50.59%. Permutation tests yield p-values of 0.135 for the best gradient boosting model and 0.515 for the LSTM, indicating no statistically significant predictive edge. Feature importance instability across walk-forward folds suggests noise fitting rather than stable structural signal capture. The results indicate that four years of single-instrument five-minute OHLCV data are insufficient for reliable sequential ML-based intraday forecasting. The primary contribution is a documented evaluation of a Kronos-inspired architecture on a constrained real-world dataset, providing an empirical lower bound on data scale requirements for sequential financial ML.
Mitigating Conversational Inertia in Multi-Turn Agents
arXiv:2602.03664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models excel as few-shot learners when provided with appropriate demonstrations, yet this strength becomes problematic in multiturn agent scenarios, where LLMs erroneously mimic their own previous responses as few-shot examples. Through attention analysis, we identify conversational inertia, a phenomenon where models exhibit strong diagonal attention to previous responses, which is associated with imitation bias that constrains exploration. This reveals a tension when transforming few-shot LLMs into agents: longer context enriches environmental feedback for exploitation, yet also amplifies conversational inertia that undermines exploration. Our key insight is that for identical states, actions generated with longer contexts exhibit stronger inertia than those with shorter contexts, enabling construction of preference pairs without environment rewards. Based on this, we propose Context Preference Learning to calibrate model preferences to favor low-inertia responses over highinertia ones. We further provide context management strategies at inference time to balance exploration and exploitation. Experimental results across eight agentic environments and one deep research scenario validate that our framework reduces conversational inertia and achieves performance improvements.
Feasibility and Single Parameter Scaling of Extinctions in Large Ecological Communities
arXiv:2511.04327v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multispecies ecosystems modelled by generalized Lotka-Volterra equations exhibit stationary population abundances, where large number of species often coexist. Understanding the precise conditions under which this is at all feasible and what triggers species extinctions is a key, outstanding problem in theoretical ecology. Using standard methods of random matrix theory, I show that distributions of species abundances are Gaussian at equilibrium, in the weakly interacting regime. One consequence is that feasibility is generically broken before stability, for large enough number of species. I further derive an analytical expression for the probability that $n=0,1,2,...$ species go extinct and conjecture that a single-parameter scaling law governs species extinctions. These results are corroborated by numerical simulations in a wide range of system parameters.