arXiv:2605.18295v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust pedestrian safety is crucial to the next-generation of intelligent transportation systems. Such systems rely on active pedestrian localization and predictive collision alerts. Pedestrian localization can be supported by Ultra-Wideband technology and Bluetooth 6.0, which offer high-precision ranging and low-latency communication, making them promising candidates for vehicular collision warning systems. This paper assesses the localization accuracy of these technologies for pedestrian alerting and benchmarks their performance against Global Navigation Satellite Systems. Experimental evaluations performed in this paper focused on key performance metrics, including localization accuracy and robustness to environmental conditions. Preliminary results suggest that Ultra-Wideband and Bluetooth 6.0 can serve as viable alternatives or complements to Global Navigation Satellite Systems in certain scenarios, improving situational awareness and enabling timely pedestrian alerts.
Science Journals
arXiv:2605.18292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a method that learns a regionally stable recurrent neural network model from a set of input-output data generated by an unknown dynamical system. Relying on generalized sector conditions on the deadzone activation function, we first derive sufficient conditions that guarantee forward invariance on a compact set of the state space for any inputs from a given set. Such regional properties lead to less conservative conditions compared to variants that offer a global form of stability, and are in line with the system data that is only observed regionally. Our learning method derives conditions for regional stability using a barrier function approach, leading to models equipped with a certificate of regional stability in a subset of the state space and for a given input set. We illustrate our theoretical result with a numerical example and compare it to methods that impose a global form of stability, which fail to identify the system, and with a method that imposes no stability constraints at all, which does not guarantee a stable behavior within any state or input set.
arXiv:2605.17928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer Learning, a technique where a model/agent can use the knowledge/expertise that it gained from one task and exploit that to solve another closely-related task, is often used in tackling problems in deep learning. Through this project, we explore transfer learning in the purview of deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, we want to use transfer learning to achieve the fast lap times in OpenAI's Car racing environment by training the agent on one circuit, and racing it on other customized target environments by zero-shot transfer or by additional fine-tuning. In addition, we compare the performance of model-based and model-free approaches, and observe that model-based approaches dominate in performance and converge faster than model-free approaches in this environment. We observe that transfer learning in most setups not only boosts the performance on the target domain, but also shows high performance ability during learning.
arXiv:2605.17925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimization problems in real-world applications across the medical and engineering domains often involve potential risks when evaluating candidate solutions. Safe optimization aims to perform optimization while suppressing unsafe solution evaluations in such situations. For continuous search spaces, there exist safe optimization methods based on evolutionary computation. However, the algorithm development of safe optimization methods for binary search spaces has not been adequately addressed. In this study, we incorporate additional mechanisms for safe optimization into a binary optimization method, the adaptive stochastic natural gradient method (ASNG) with a family of Bernoulli distributions. For safety functions that must be kept non-negative during optimization, the proposed method, safe ASNG, estimates the Lipschitz constants with respect to the Hamming distance by constructing surrogate models of safety functions based on discrete Walsh functions. Then, safe ASNG computes a safe region that consists of safe solutions around the previously evaluated safe solutions. By projecting newly generated solutions to their nearest neighbors within the safe region, safe ASNG suppresses unsafe solution evaluations. Experimental results on benchmark problems on binary domains confirm that, while the comparative methods fail to suppress unsafe solution evaluations, safe ASNG achieves efficient optimization while effectively suppressing unsafe solution evaluations.
arXiv:2605.17915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Surgical Video Question Answering (VideoQA) provides a promising paradigm for dynamic intraoperative interpretation, enabling real-time decision support and context-aware retrieval in clinical environments. Nevertheless, existing approaches are predominantly restricted to images or short clips, limiting their ability to model long-range procedural dynamics and causal dependencies across extended surgical workflows. To address this challenge, we propose SurgLQA, a unified long-horizon VideoQA framework for scalable surgical reasoning. This framework incorporates Faithful Temporal Consolidation (FTC), which leverages intrinsic temporal cues to construct compact long-range representations while preserving fine-grained temporal fidelity. Further, we develop Temporally-Grounded Multi-Policy Scaling (TMS), an adaptive test-time inference paradigm that strategically adjusts policy-level reasoning capacity within temporally grounded contexts. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we restructured a long-duration colonoscopy VideoQA benchmark, Colon-LQA, and conducted extensive experiments on Colon-LQA and REAL-Colon-VQA. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves consistent performance gains in long-range reasoning with temporally grounded inference. Code link: https://github.com/RascalGdd/SurgLQA.
arXiv:2605.17902v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stochastic-process-based degradation modeling is a core approach for estimating the distribution of remaining useful life (RUL); however, the selection of an appropriate stochastic process has not been sufficiently addressed. Existing model selection methods mainly rely on the statistical fit of the observed health indicator (HI) trajectory, but this approach may select a model that is inconsistent with the underlying degradation mechanism when the observation window is short or the signal is highly noisy. To address this issue, this paper proposes Literature-Anchored Stochastic Trajectory Retrieval-Augmented Generation (LAST-RAG). The proposed method uses both the observed HI trajectory and domain-specific context, and hierarchically conditions the candidate degradation model space based on theoretical and mechanical evidence retrieved from a local evidence bank. In addition, Rule-based Confidence Reasoning with Uncertain State (RCRUS) is introduced to prevent candidate models from being prematurely eliminated when hierarchical decisions are uncertain. Simulation-based experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms statistical, prognostic, and uncertainty-aware baselines in both Wiener/gamma family classification and detailed degradation model classification. Ultimately, this study reframes degradation model selection from a purely statistical goodness-of-fit problem into a knowledge-conditioned decision-making problem that integrates observed data with domain knowledge.
arXiv:2605.18109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In real home deployments, household agents must often operate from a complete household scene and a situated household request, rather than from a clean task specification. Such requests require agents to identify task-relevant entities, recover intended task conditions, and resolve ordering constraints from the surrounding scene context. We formalize this capability as full-scene household reasoning: given a complete household scene and a situated household request, an agent must infer executable task structure before producing a grounded skill-level action sequence. This setting is challenging because complete household scenes contain substantial task-irrelevant information, making direct complete-scene prompting inefficient and error-prone. In practical deployment, this challenge is further amplified by privacy and local compute constraints, which favor compact open-weight models with limited long-context reasoning ability. We propose TaskGround, a training-free and model-agnostic Ground-Infer-Execute framework that grounds complete scenes into compact task-relevant scene slices, infers executable task structure, and compiles it into grounded skill-level action sequences. To evaluate this setting, we introduce FullHome, a human-validated evaluation suite of 400 household tasks spanning diverse home-scale environments and both goal-oriented and process-constrained requirements. On FullHome, TaskGround improves task success rates by large margins across both proprietary and open-weight models. Notably, it makes Qwen3.5-9B competitive with GPT-5 under direct complete-scene prompting while reducing total input-token cost by up to 18x. Our results identify executable task-structure inference as a central bottleneck in full-scene household reasoning and show that structured grounding can make compact local models substantially more effective for practical household deployment.
arXiv:2605.17762v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Music search at the scale of Amazon Music presents a unique challenge: queries frequently deviate from indexed metadata due to misspellings, transpositions, and phonetic variations, yet the retrieval system must operate under strict millisecond-level latency constraints. Our existing learning-to-retrieve system, the High Confidence Index (HCI), learns query-entity associations from customer behavior, relying on continual ``exploration'' to choose candidates. Traditional n-gram matching enables this exploration but suffers from poor semantic robustness and high noise, limiting the system's ability to learn from long-tail queries. In this work, we present a \textbf{robust neural sparse retrieval system} designed to maximize exploration efficiency. We adapt a state-of-the-art \textbf{inference-free} sparse retrieval architecture to the music domain, combining it with an effective \textbf{domain-specific granular subword tokenization strategy}. Our approach utilizes short-length token constraints (max 3 chars) to enforce the learning of surface-form robustness over lexical memorization. By pre-computing the neural embeddings and term expansions during the offline indexing phase, online processing is reduced to minimal tokenization and IDF weighting, achieving effectively zero latency overhead for query encoding. Evaluations on a 6M-document production corpus show an aggregate \textbf{91.4\%} recall@10 (vs. \textbf{57.7\%} for trigrams) at comparable throughput. Simulation of the HCI feedback loop demonstrates improved exploration efficiency, with \textbf{+0.8\%} higher stabilized recall than production trigrams. Ablation studies indicate that our sparse training methodology drives the performance gains, while domain-specific pretraining provides a cost-effective alternative to large-scale general-purpose pretraining.
arXiv:2605.17857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI creates new opportunities for programming education, but many existing systems remain overly directive, producing lengthy explanations and premature solutions that can overwhelm K-12 novices. In this paper, we present a participatory design study of how an adaptive tutorial system, SocratiCode, evolved toward a Socratic tutoring model for beginner programming instruction. Drawing on weekly learner feedback, we iteratively refined the system over a four-week study with two K-12 students learning Python. Across iterations, the system shifted from flexible tutorial generation toward a more dialogic form of support characterized by guided questioning, reflection prompts, misconception checks, incremental hints, and mandatory pauses for learner input. Our preliminary observations suggest that this Socratic shift improved explanation clarity, supported problem-solving engagement, and better aligned instruction with novice learners' needs, especially when combined with human guidance. We argue that generative AI in K-12 programming education may be most effective not as an answer engine, but as a Socratic, adaptive learning companion embedded within a human-guided instructional framework.
arXiv:2605.18576v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A critical challenge in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) integration is resolving the tension between eliminating batch effects and maintaining biological fidelity. While recent evidence indicates that batch effects manifest heterogeneously across genes, most existing methods process the transcriptome uniformly, frequently resulting in over-correction and loss of subtle biological signals. To address this, we present scHelix, a dataset-adaptive framework that fundamentally changes how features are processed by explicitly partitioning genes into domain-invariant Anchors and domain-sensitive Variants at the input level. scHelix utilizes a dual-stream sparse diffusion encoder equipped with stop-gradient graph caching to efficiently learn multi-scale structural representations. The core of our approach is a novel asymmetric Align-Refine-Fuse protocol: the unstable Variant stream is first aligned to the robust topology of the Anchor stream, followed by a conservative refinement phase where the Anchor stream absorbs denoised details via bounded residual gating. This divide-and-conquer architecture prevents shortcut learning and ensures robust batch removal without compromising the integrity of biological clusters. Extensive benchmarking demonstrates that scHelix outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
arXiv:2605.17852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This letter investigates computing-accessibility-aware cooperative 3D deployment of multiple UAVs for task completion enhancement, termed CA3D. We first provide a theoretical analysis showing that computing accessibility is the key mechanism linking UAV deployment to delay-constrained task completion, and that UAV inter-spacing creates a fundamental tradeoff between computing-resource accessibility and task completion. We then develop a cooperative 3D deployment design that jointly balances accessible computing capacity, task completion probability, and redundant UAV overlap. Simulation results under heterogeneous computing node capacities show that CA3D consistently outperforms Random, Fixed, and Greedy deployment baselines under both hotspot and random ground user (GU) distributions. Under the hotspot GU distribution, CA3D achieves nearly full task completion, improving the task completion probability by about 3.3x over Random deployment when the number of UAVs is 8. Under a more challenging random GU distribution, CA3D still achieves about 35% higher task completion probability than the best baseline when the number of UAVs is 12. These results demonstrate that computing-accessibility-aware cooperative 3D deployment improves not only task completion but also robustness to GU distribution changes.
arXiv:2605.17800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rearranging densely packed tabletop objects is challenging when parallel-gripper picks are infeasible without sufficient clearance around an object. This work studies the problem characteristics for practically motivated settings with uniformly sized blocks placed at planar tabletop grid locations. Since purely prehensile removal can become infeasible, a directional knock primitive is therefore introduced and the optimal knock-pick variant of the problem is formulated. The work proposes a series of abstractions wherein minimal constraining gadgets are covered to identify the necessary knocks. Utilizing a maximum-weight perfect matching on a graphical abstraction yields efficient polynomial-time computation of the optimal plan that minimizes the number of actions. Experiments are reported for increasing grid sizes in synthetic settings as well as in IsaacSim. The theoretical observations provide a promising stepping stone towards rigorously building efficient manipulation strategies that interleave prehensile and non-prehensile actions.
arXiv:2605.17780v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning-based methods have become the de facto standard for industrial defect detection. However, their data-hungry nature and inherent "black-box" characteristics often lead to performance bottlenecks and limited trustworthiness in real-world applications. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel knowledge-guided loss function that seamlessly integrates model interpretability into the training process without incurring any additional inference cost. Our method operates in two phases: first, a primary classification network is trained, and its explanations, in the form of saliency maps, are generated as prior knowledge. Second, a multi-task learning framework is established, where the main task performs classification, and an auxiliary task imposes consistency between the saliency maps of the final model and the primary model. This consistency is enforced by a dedicated knowledge-guided loss term, effectively acting as a powerful regularizer to steer the model towards robust feature representations. Extensive experiments on multiple public defect datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently enhances the performance of baseline models in terms of accuracy and AP. Moreover, visual analysis reveals that the proposed method yields more concentrated and human-intelligible saliency maps. This work presents a simple yet effective paradigm for bridging the gap between model performance and interpretability, paving the way for more reliable and high-performing vision systems in industrial quality inspection.
arXiv:2605.17692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that the training problem of a deep linear neural network under the squared loss admits an exact convex reformulation in a lifted space over a generalized completely positive cone. The reformulation has the same optimal value as the original nonconvex problem and is linear in the lifted variables, with all nonconvexity encoded in the cone constraint. Its ambient lifted dimension depends only on the input and output dimensions, independent of the network depth and the number of data points, and the bottleneck width enters only through scalar constraints. The construction proceeds by reducing the multilayer parameterization to a bilinear factorization, lifting it to a rank-constrained semidefinite program, expressing the rank constraint via a complementarity condition, and applying a completely positive lifting. While the resulting formulation is computationally intractable in general, it gives an exact conic representation of the nonconvexity induced by linear factorization and connects linear neural network training with copositive programming.
arXiv:2605.18624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning-based malware detectors are widely deployed in antivirus and endpoint detection systems, yet their reliance on static features makes them vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. This paper investigates whether a malware sample can be intentionally misclassified as a specific benign software category, not merely as "not malware", by adding a small number of Win32 API imports characteristic of that selected category, without removing any existing imports or retraining the detector. We propose a framework centered on a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) whose decoder is strictly additive. It can introduce new API calls but never remove existing ones, preserving malware functionality by design. For each malware sample, the framework automatically identifies which benign category it most closely resembles and uses that as the evasion target. A knowledge-distilled differentiable proxy enables gradient-based training against the non-differentiable ensemble detector. Experiments on a six-class dataset of binary Win32 API import vectors extracted from 3,799 Windows executables (five benign categories, one malware class) show that, against a detector achieving 87.5% malware recall, adding just 20 API imports reduces recall to 30%. At k=20, among samples that evaded detection, 99% are classified as the intended target category. The CVAE outperforms both a frequency-based baseline and random selection at every tested injection size (k = 5 to 50). Validation on real PE files submitted to VirusTotal confirms that the attack transfers to commercial static detection engines, with an average 54.5% reduction in flagging engines. These findings expose a concrete vulnerability in API-based malware classifiers and demonstrate that targeted evasion into a chosen benign category is achievable with minimal, functionality-preserving modifications.
arXiv:2605.17669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The preservation and interpretation of cultural heritage increasingly rely on digital technologies, among which Knowledge Graphs (KGs) stand out for their ability to structure vast amounts of data. However, the construction and expansion of these KGs often face challenges due to the diverse and complex nature of cultural heritage information. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for extending KG resources in the domain of cultural heritage, which we applied to French data. First, we introduce a new knowledge graph in the domain of French cultural heritage, WJoconde, which is distinguished by its multimodality as it integrates both textual and image information of the entities. We further introduce three variants of WJoconde to facilitate downstream research, such as Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC). We also built a comprehensive benchmark for KGC methods on our dataset. Second, we propose a new framework for extending cultural heritage KGs using multi-modal approaches leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which includes automated data extraction from unstructured resources combined with a special validation pipeline for grounding the output of both models, to further extend WJoconde. Our results show that by integrating the rich text and image information in cultural heritage data, we can efficiently enhance KGs with high reliability. We open-source all code and benchmark datasets with text and images, as well as the original data with an interactive access point
arXiv:2605.18094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the Compositional Geometry Routing Problem (CGRP), a unified superclass of traditional routing problems that covers point-only, line-only, area-only, and arbitrary hybrid task geometries, providing a broad abstraction for real-world routing scenarios. Beyond standard point-based routing, CGRP with non-point tasks can be inherently asymmetric, tightly coupled travel routes with the intrinsic path, and enlarges the action space with numerous feasible yet often irrelevant options, thereby posing significant challenges for both representation learning and decision-making. To address these challenges, we propose DiCon, a differential attention-assisted solver with contrastive learning, as a plug-and-play framework that tackles the problem from two complementary angles. First, we introduce a differential attention mechanism that actively suppresses the probability mass on less competitive candidate actions. Second, we design a double-level contrastive learning objective to promote robust global instance representations and regularize geometry-aware task representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiCon achieves strong performance, broad versatility, and superior generalization across diverse CGRP instances with different compositions.
arXiv:2605.17642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular data generation considers a large table with multiple columns -- each column comprised of numerical, categorical, or sometimes ordinal values. The goal is to produce new rows for the table that replicate the distribution of rows from the original data -- without just copying those initial rows. The last 4 years have seen enormous progress on this problem, mostly using computational expensive methods that employ one-hot encoding, VAEs, and diffusion. This paper describes a new approach to the problem of tabular data generation. By employing copula transformations and modeling the distribution as a kernel density estimate we can nearly match the accuracy and leakage-avoidance achievements of the previous methods, but with almost no training time. Our method is very scalable, and can be run on data sets orders of magnitude larger than prior state-of-the-art on a simple laptop. Moreover, because we employ kernel density estimates, we can store the model as a coreset of the original data -- we believe the first for generative modeling -- and as a result, require significantly less space as well. Our code is available here: \url{https://github.com/tabkde/tabkde-main}
arXiv:2605.18068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Residual error propagation remains a fundamental problem in recurrent models, where small prediction inaccuracies compound over time and degrade long-horizon performance. Accurately modeling the correlation structure of such residuals is critical for reliable uncertainty quantification in probabilistic multivariate timeseries forecasting. While recent time-series deep models efficiently parametrize time-varying contemporaneous correlations, they often assume temporal independence of errors and neglect spatial correlation across the observed network. In this paper, we introduce Teger, a structured uncertainty module that overcomes the spa- tial and temporal limitations of error-correlated autoregressive forecasting. Teger proposes a spatial curvature-aware graph rewiring mechanism explicitly strengthening information-bottleneck edges identified by discrete Forman curvature. The component is integrated into a low-rank-plus-diagonal covariance head, preserving tractable inference via the Woodbury identity. Teger is backbone-agnostic, requiring only the latent state produced by any autoregressive encoder. We provide theoretical evidence of Teger, and experimentally evaluate it on LSTM, Transformer, and xLSTM backbones across four real-world spatio-temporal datasets, showing consistent improvement in Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS). We further provide a formal theoretical analysis connecting curvature-aware rewiring to (i) oversquashing alleviation, (ii) improved spectral connectivity, (iii) reduced effective resistance, and (iv) improved covariance calibration bounds
arXiv:2605.18014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spectroscopy requires high-precision wavelength discrimination but typically requires bulky, alignment-sensitive instrumentation. To address this, we present a compact computational spectrometer built from a single germanium PN photodiode. The system exploits optoelectronic chromatic dispersion (OED), a phenomenon whereby wavelength-dependent absorption depth produces carrier diffusion delays that encode spectral information as measurable RF amplitude and phase signatures in the photodiode output. We extract DC voltage, RF amplitude, and RF phase across 15 modulation frequencies (0.1-1.5 MHz), forming a 31-dimensional feature vector per optical input. Spectral reconstruction was formulated as a high-dimensional inverse problem and solved using five machine learning models, utilizing group-wavelength splitting and k-fold cross-validation to prevent spectral leakage and ensure unbiased evaluation. Across the C- and L-bands, single-wavelength reconstruction using Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) achieves an accuracy of 0.178 nm on a wavelength-grouped, held-out test set spanning seven optical power levels. Five-fold cross-validation yields a robust Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of (0.342 +/- 0.117) nm, confirming excellent generalization under wavelength and power variations. For dual-wavelength inputs, GPR yields accuracies of 0.362 nm for the swept wavelength and 0.434 nm for the fixed wavelength. This is the first spectral reconstruction method exploiting a multi-frequency OED feature space from a single photodiode. By merging the physics of OED with data-driven learning, this work enables alignment-free, on-chip-compatible spectrometers suitable for portable optical sensing, smartphone-integrated diagnostics, and field-deployable environmental monitoring.
arXiv:2605.17985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a new method for compressing physics foundation models (PFMs) which is a new trend in AI for Science. While model compression is essential for reducing memory use and accelerating inference in large foundation models, it remains under-explored for PFMs, where preserving physical fidelity is crucial. The challenge lies in the functional nature of physics data, where partial derivatives encode spatiotemporal dynamics and exhibit high sensitivity to compression. Conventional compression methods ignore this structure, often causing severe performance degradation or failure. To address this, we introduce a sensitivity-aware fidelity-enforcing compression framework that explicitly models loss-aware layer sensitivity in the output function space during compression. This provides a new route to compressing scientific foundation models while preserving accuracy and physical fidelity. Experiments show substantial gains over existing methods across multiple models and datasets, achieving significantly higher compression ratios while maintaining accuracy, in some cases by orders of magnitude. More broadly, the work potentially leads to a new subfield of efficient, deployable, and sustainable scientific foundation models in AI for Science.
arXiv:2605.18660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as collaborative assistants, yet dominant NLP evaluation practices remain centered on aggregate metrics such as accuracy and fluency. These approaches often overlook behaviors that are critical in human-facing settings (e.g., consistency across multiple turns and iterative refinement). In this paper, we examine limitations of current NLP evaluation practices and introduce TCR, a structured framework for evaluating human--AI interaction using educational LLM assistants as an illustrative example. TCR emphasizes dimensions such as transparency, consistency, and refinement. We further present structured evaluation prompts and illustrative interaction examples demonstrating how structured evaluation can complement aggregate metrics and LLM-as-a-judge approaches. Our work highlights the need for more human-centered evaluation practices for interactive LLM systems.
arXiv:2605.18673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Major deployed generative AI advertising systems preserve a visible boundary between commercial content and AI-generated responses. Yet empirical research shows that ads woven directly into large language model (LLM) outputs often go undetected by users. We argue that generative AI fundamentally changes advertising: rather than placing products into discrete slots, it enables interventions on the generative process itself, which induce commercial influence through less observable channels. This reframes generative AI advertising as a problem of trustworthy intervention rather than content placement. We introduce a taxonomy organized by influence tier, corresponding to interventions on progressively more latent variables: product mentions, information framing, behavioral redirection, and long-term preference shaping; and show how these tiers instantiate across modalities and system architectures, including retrieval-augmented generation and agentic pipelines where upstream decisions can sharply constrain downstream outcomes. Both major deployed systems and designed mechanisms concentrate on the most observable and easiest-to-govern tier, while the forms of commercial influence most consequential for user autonomy remain poorly understood and lack frameworks for detection, measurement, or disclosure. The central challenge is whether commercial influence in generative systems can be made trustworthy, i.e., attributable, measurable, contestable, and aligned with user welfare.
arXiv:2605.17952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Counting objects in an image is a task applicable across many domains. For instance, crowd counting, inventory counting, and cell counting have been the focus of recent research. The major challenges in estimating the count of objects include overlapping objects, object scale issues, occlusions, and varying lighting conditions. In this report, we explore the problem of counting machine washer parts. Our technique is an extension of FamNet with an additional loss component, trained on the given dataset. We compare to three baseline methods: a traditional image processing pipeline, instance segmentation, and density map estimation. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms by computing the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) between the true object counts and the model outputs. Our approach achieves a performance of 1.96 MAE.
arXiv:2605.17930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While the approximation properties of single-layer Transformer architectures have been studied in recent works, a rigorous theoretical understanding of the multi-layer setting remains limited. In this work, we establish that multi-layer Transformers possess fundamentally different approximation capabilities from single-layer ones: for certain retrieval tasks, any single-layer Transformer requires least $\Omega (\varepsilon^{-k})$ parameters to achieve precision $\varepsilon$, where $k$ grows linearly with sequence length $T$, whereas a two-layer Transformer with a single head per layer achieves the same approximation precision with at most $O (\varepsilon^{-1})$ parameters. To understand this separation, we identify two structural mechanisms underlying multi-layer approximation. Specifically, softmax attention can only efficiently retrieve the token attaining the maximum attention score, incurring exponential-in-length parameter cost for $k$-th largest retrieval with $k \geq 2$. Moreover, the parameter cost of decoding coupled information scales with the size of the retrieved token set. Motivated by these findings, we propose InfoFlow, a framework for multi-layer Transformers. The framework tracks an information set of accessible input positions at each token and layer, assigning an explicit approximation rate to each mode of information propagation. This abstraction recovers known approximation bounds, remains consistent with experimental observations on trained networks, and yields concrete predictions in settings where direct theoretical analysis is currently intractable. Our results provide a principled framework for reasoning about the approximation efficiency of multi-layer Transformers.