arXiv:2605.14311v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-Time Scaling (TTS), which samples multiple candidate actions and ranks them via a Critic Model, has emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist GUI agents. Its efficacy thus hinges on the critic's fine-grained ranking ability. However, existing GUI critic models uniformly adopt binary classification. Our motivational analysis of these models exposes a severe entanglement: scores for valid actions and plausible-but-invalid distractors become indistinguishable. We attribute this failure to two structural defects: Affordance Collapse--the hierarchical affordance space is compressed into 0/1 labels; and Noise Sensitivity--binary objectives overfit to noisy decision boundaries. To resolve this, we introduce BBCritic (Beyond-Binary Critic), a paradigm shift grounded in the Functional Equivalence Hypothesis. Through two-stage contrastive learning, BBCritic aligns instructions and actions in a shared Affordance Space, recovering the hierarchical structure that binary supervision flattens. We also present BBBench (Beyond-Binary Bench), the first GUI critic benchmark that pairs a dense action space with a hierarchical four-level taxonomy, enabling fine-grained ranking evaluation. Experimental results show that BBCritic-3B, trained without any extra annotation, outperforms 7B-parameter SOTA binary models. It demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability across platforms and tasks, supporting our methodological view: GUI critique is fundamentally a metric-learning problem, not a classification one.
Science Journals
arXiv:2605.14309v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine unlearning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is typically performed at the image or instance level, making it difficult to precisely remove target knowledge without affecting unrelated semantics. This issue is especially pronounced since a single image often contains multiple entangled concepts, including both target concepts to be forgotten and contextual information that should be preserved. In this paper, we propose an interpretable concept-level unlearning framework for VLMs, which constructs a compact task-specific concept vocabulary from the forgetting set using a multimodal large language model. In addition to modality alignment, visual representations are decomposed into sparse, nonnegative combinations of semantic concepts, providing an explicit interface for fine-grained knowledge manipulation. Based on this decomposition, our method formulates unlearning as concept-level optimization, where target concepts are selectively suppressed while intra-instance non-target semantics and global cross-modal knowledge are preserved. Extensive experiments across both in-domain and out-of-domain forgetting settings demonstrate that our method enables more comprehensive target forgetting, better preserves non-target knowledge within the same image, and maintains competitive model utility compared with existing VLM unlearning methods.
arXiv:2604.16149v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State-of-the-art multimodal journey-planning algorithms, such as ULTRA, have recently been adapted to account for delays. In this work, we extend this approach to be more memory-efficient, faster, and accurate. We also adapt this framework to other state-of-the-art algorithms, like CSA and RAPTOR. We demonstrate a speedup of 1.9-4.2x over existing algorithms in the single-objective search (earliest arrival time). In the bicriteria setting, we achieve competitive speedup results but greater accuracy. We also find that our method scales much better as the delay buffer Delta increases.
arXiv:2605.15552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) are a widely used data structure for efficient Boolean function representation. Context-Free-Language Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (CFLOBDDs) are a recently introduced hierarchical data structure that can, in the best case, exhibit exponential compression over BDDs and double-exponential compression over decision trees. Roughly speaking, a CFLOBDD is a finite, acyclic, non-recursive hierarchical finite-state machine (HFSM) (with some additional restrictions). In this paper, we investigate the role of \emph{linear structure} in CFLOBDDs -- a property that connects them to Nested-Word Automata (NWAs) and Visibly Pushdown Automata (VPAs) -- and examine whether CFLOBDDs actively exploit this structure beyond their well-studied hierarchical properties. We demonstrate that linear structure, in conjunction with hierarchical structure, plays a crucial role in enabling CFLOBDDs to achieve efficient function compression. Furthermore, we show that removing linearity from CFLOBDDs leads to a significant blowup in representation size, resulting in degraded performance in the domain of quantum-circuit simulation.
arXiv:2605.15533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video editing poses a significant challenge. While a series of tuning-free methods circumvent the need for extensive data collection and model training, they often underutilize the rich information embedded within noisy latent, leading to unsatisfactory results. To address this, we propose a \textit{tuning-free, instruction-based} video editing framework. We approach video editing from the perspective of noisy latent: we design a Structural Noise Initialization Strategy (SNIS) to secure a superior editing starting point by assigning higher noise levels to edited regions (to facilitate content change) and lower noise levels to unedited regions (to maintain content consistency). We introduce a Noise Guidance Mechanism (NGM), which leverages the video prior in the generative model and effectively integrates rich information within the noisy latent to guide the denoising process, thereby preserving unedited content and overall visual coherence. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves better visual quality and state-of-the-art performance.
arXiv:2605.15625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce ColPackAgent, an agent framework that autonomously runs Monte Carlo simulations of colloidal packing through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool server and an agent skill, whether as a standalone agent or inside an existing agent system. By harnessing the MCP server and agent skill, ColPackAgent executes a structured workflow for colloidal packing simulations, which are central to studies of phase behavior, self-assembly, and materials design. Without dedicated simulation tools and workflow instructions, general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) agents tend to describe such workflows rather than execute them reliably. The MCP server exposes a custom-built colpack Python package that wraps HOOMD-blue hard-particle Monte Carlo, and the skill encodes a four-stage workflow contract. ColPackAgent can carry out the workflow interactively with human feedback, autonomously from an end-to-end prompt, or as autoresearch following a provided program file. We demonstrate the system in different modes with several colloidal packing simulation examples such as cube particles in 3D, a binary system of disks and capsules in 2D, and the 2D hard-disk freezing transition using autoresearch. We also compare model performance on this workflow across a panel of LLMs with 17 stage-specific prompts. This benchmark provides a stage-level check of how reliably different models follow the setup, planning, and analysis workflow. Together, these results show that pairing a domain Python package with MCP tools and a portable agent skill provides a practical route for turning a simulation toolkit into an agent-assisted research workflow.
arXiv:2605.14230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The security of networked control systems (NCS) is receiving increasing attention from both cyber-security and system-theoretic perspectives. The former focuses on classical IT security goals such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability of process data, while the latter investigates tailored attacks (and detection schemes), including covert and zero-dynamics attacks. Confidentiality in control systems can, for instance, be achieved by securely outsourcing the evaluation of the controller to third-party platforms, such as cloud services. The underlying technology enabling such secure computation often is homomorphic encryption (HE). Recent works in encrypted control have proposed modifications to underlying HE schemes to achieve not only confidentiality but also resilience to certain types of integrity attacks. While extensions in this direction are desirable in principle, we show that the integrity problem in encrypted control cannot be solved by public-key HE schemes alone due to their inherent malleability. In other words, the same homomorphisms that enable encrypted control in the first place can be leveraged not only constructively but also destructively. More precisely, we demonstrate that NCS are vulnerable to covert attacks, even when encrypted control is employed. Remarkably, this remains possible without knowledge of an unencrypted model. Yet, resilience to such attacks can still be achieved through complementary techniques. We present an approach based on verifiable computation that integrates with modern homomorphic cryptosystems and is asymptotically secure while incurring no communication overhead.
arXiv:2605.15689v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-grained image recognition classifies subcategories such as bird species or car models. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) models are accurate, they are often too resource-intensive for deployment on constrained devices. Knowledge distillation addresses this by transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. A key challenge is selecting the right teacher, as it heavily impacts student performance. This paper introduces a teacher selection metric, \textbf{Ratio 1-2}, based on teacher prediction ratios. Extensive analysis of over one thousand experiments across 3 students, 8 teachers, and 8 datasets under 4 training strategies demonstrates that our metric improves teacher selection by 18\% over previous methods, enabling small student models to achieve up to 17\% accuracy gains. Experiment codebase is available at: \href{https://github.com/arkel23/FGIR-KD-Teacher}{https://github.com/arkel23/FGIR-KD-Teacher}.
arXiv:2605.15528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) swarms are emerging as intelligent underwater networks, where each node must sense, communicate, process local data, and make decisions under severe acoustic constraints. Persistent underwater target tracking is a typical task with moving targets, changing communication topology, intermittent acoustic links, and limited observation for each AUV. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a natural candidate for distributed tracking, yet existing studies still lack a unified open-source platform for evaluating different MARL algorithms under six-degree-of-freedom AUV dynamics. In addition, policies trained with raw geometric states and low-level force actions often struggle to represent task phases, observation reliability, link quality, and local cooperation roles. This paper addresses these issues by developing an open-source MARL-AUV platform that integrates DI-engine with a six-degree-of-freedom underwater AUV target-tracking simulator. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first open platform that connects a public MARL training framework with physically modeled AUV swarm-based tasks, and provides a unified experimental protocol for fair training, testing, and comparison of representative RL and MARL algorithms. Based on this platform, we propose STG-MAPPO, a Semantic Task Graph-enhanced variant of Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization. STG-MAPPO builds semantic policy inputs from tracking diagnostics, task phases, observation confidence, link availability, neighbor tracking quality, and local role advantage. A compact semantic task graph links communication-constrained network states to decentralized actor decisions, and a velocity-level action abstraction maps high-level cooperative decisions to executable six-degree-offreedom AUV control inputs.The code is available at https://github.com/dasjsaj/MARL-AUV.
arXiv:2605.15527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we present an accurate numerical method for the time-harmonic Maxwell's equations for bi-periodic multilayered media with quasi-periodic incident waves using the Method of Fundamental Solutions in conjunction with a periodization scheme. Following an approach used in acoustic scattering problems, the electric and magnetic fields in each layer are expressed as a sum of near and distant interactions. The near interaction comprises interactions between the unit cell and its nearest neighboring copies, while the distant interaction is approximated by proxy source points placed on spheres surrounding the unit cell. Imposing continuity of tangential components at the layer interface, quasi-periodicity conditions on the walls of the unit cell, and Rayleigh-Bloch expansion for the radiation condition yields a system of equations for the unknown coefficients, which can be solved by Schur complement and a backward-stable solver. The scheme is verified with known solutions and exhibits exponential convergence close to $10^{-14}$ for both single and multiple interfaces. An example with 39 interfaces is presented to demonstrate the solver's performance. The paper provides promising results for extending this method to a fast and accurate boundary integral equation solver for many cutting-edge applications involving a large number of layers in electromagnetics and optics.
arXiv:2605.10810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce an automatically generated benchmark for predicting hidden text in technical papers. A paper supplies visible context $X$ and a hidden continuation $Y$; the evaluated model writes an auxiliary forecast string $Z$, and a separate scorer assigns next-token probability to $Y$ both with and without conditioning on $Z$. This gives a label-free test of whether $Z$ transmits information about the continuation, compared against controls where $Z$ is recent context rather than a forecast. Our main testbed is equation-suffix prediction: the predictor sees context and the first part of a displayed equation, then forecasts the rest. The task mixes surface-level arXiv/TeX text modeling with reasoning-sensitive inference; the suffix is one of many roughly equivalent continuations, so the benchmark is read statistically rather than item-by-item. On 1363 equation continuations from 138 recent physics and mathematics papers, forecasts from GPT-5.5, Opus 4.7, and GPT-5.4 nano all improve clipped likelihood over the context control under both Qwen3-8B and Kimi K2.6 scorers, distinguishing model families and reasoning-effort settings without human labels. To emulate shortcuts where $Z$ further primes the scorer rather than making a useful forecast, we also fine-tune the scorer on context-only prompts and apply it to held-out papers as a stronger control. GPT-5.5 forecasts still beat this fine-tuned control; GPT-5.4 nano forecasts do not. Longer prose/TeX continuations show positive but noisier lift over controls, concentrated near the beginning of the target. These results support cross-model likelihood scoring as a static benchmark and as a setup for probing shortcut vulnerabilities before reinforcement learning or model-selection optimization is applied.
arXiv:2605.15848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational interfaces powered by large language models (LLMs) are widely used for ideation and analysis, yet their linear structure limits exploration of alternatives and management of long-running interactions. We present CanvasConvo, a conversational interface concept that transforms linear chat into a branching conversation tree embedded in a spatial canvas. CanvasConvo enables users to explore what-if scenarios by branching directly from conversational content, supporting parallel development of alternative directions. These branches are visualized on a canvas while remaining integrated with a familiar chat interface, allowing users to switch between linear and non-linear interaction. Features such as timeline-based navigation, automatic tagging and summarization, and context-aware controls (e.g., goals, reusable prompts) support structured interaction and continuity. We evaluated CanvasConvo in a 5-7 day field study with 24 participants. Our findings highlight how non-linear conversational structures support exploratory workflows and different interactions in LLM-based work.
arXiv:2605.15510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization-based formulation framework for robot design optimization using kinematic structure-level evaluation metrics. In the proposed framework, classical computation is used to evaluate design-dependent metrics while the resulting combinatorial selection problem is formulated in a structure compatible with quantum annealing-based optimization. A robotic hand is adopted as a representative case study, as its performance is determined by both the individual kinematic characteristics of each finger and interaction terms. The proposed formulation incorporates individual design rewards, overlap workspace interactions, one-hot constraint, and structural dependency penalties into a unified quadratic model. A 27-variable robotic hand design problem is constructed, and simulated annealing is used as a classical baseline to verify the feasibility of the formulation. Quantum annealing is further performed to examine the applicability of the proposed formulation to annealing-based hardware execution. The results show that feasible design combinations satisfying both one-hot selection and pairwise constraints can be obtained, with the observed objective-value range becoming narrower as the number of reads increases. In addition, the formulation process is discussed for other robotic systems. The proposed framework provides a generalized approach for transforming kinematic structure-based robot design problems into combinatorial optimization problems.
arXiv:2605.15835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated plankton image recognition is increasingly used in aquatic ecosystem monitoring, but deployed classifiers inevitably encounter unseen taxa and non-target particles. Open-set recognition methods are usually evaluated with sample-level metrics such as AUROC, AUPR, and FPR@95% unknown-recall operating points, whereas ecological monitoring depends on community-level estimates of taxon abundance and diversity. This study examines the mismatch between these objectives using controlled pseudo-communities and three datasets spanning marine zooplankton imaged by ZooScan, marine phytoplankton imaged by IFCB, and freshwater plankton imaged by an in-situ camera. We define Open-Set Community Distortion (OSCD), a Bray-Curtis-style error over known taxa plus an unknown bin, with directional components distinguishing known-taxon overestimation from underestimation. Closed-set classifiers achieved high known-class accuracy, but unknown samples were often absorbed with high confidence and in structured ways. Sample-level OOD metrics were not sufficient to select ecological operating points: for MSP, FPR@95% unknown-recall thresholds produced large test-community OSCD on all three datasets mainly because true known taxa were over-rejected into the unknown bin. Community-aware threshold calibration reduced MSP OSCD relative to fixed 95% known recall on SYKE-ZooScan 2024 and SYKE-IFCB 2022; on ZooLake the fixed-recall baseline was already close to the community-aware threshold, and the best community-level method was a prototype-distance variant rather than MSP. The benefit of community-aware calibration therefore depends on validation-community representativeness and the gap between fixed recall and the community optimum. These results show that open-set plankton recognition should be evaluated as an ecological measurement problem, not only as a sample-level detection task.
arXiv:2605.15840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the fluorescence and relaxation dynamics of Cs atoms embedded in a cryogenic argon matrix using spectroscopy measurements combined with diatomic-in-molecule (DIM) simulations. The data reveal complex emission spectra, large Stokes shifts, and slow relaxation effects, indicating strong host-guest interactions and substantial lattice reorganization. Although the spectra are superimposed on a broad background, possibly due to low-symmetry, defect-related, or grain-boundary trapping sites, the main spectral structure is consistent with two dominant trapping environments that give rise to two triplet absorption features with distinct fluorescence behavior of the doublet and singlet components. Polarization measurements further suggest that these sites may differ in symmetry, although a unique structural assignment remains difficult
arXiv:2605.15481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: InGaP-on-insulator, with its intrinsically high $\chi^{(2)}$ optical nonlinearity, has emerged as an efficient and bright integrated photonic platform for frequency conversion and on-chip entanglement generation, but high waveguide propagation loss in the visible wavelength range has limited its overall performance. Here, we identify the dominant loss mechanism through mode-profile analysis and effectively mitigate the loss using a surface treatment method. Statistical analysis of the resonator quality factor and propagation loss reveals the optimal ring radius that maintains a strong nonlinear interaction while suppressing significant bending related loss, resulting in loss as low as 0.49 dB/cm (4.31 dB/cm) at 1560 nm (780 nm). The method provides a 3.5--4$\times$ linear performance enhancement, enabling a second-harmonic generation efficiency of $3.01\times10^{5}$ %/W and a photon-pair generation rate of $11.7,\mathrm{MHz}/\mu\mathrm{W}$ and coincidence-to-accidental ratio as high as 10,000. The quasi-phase matching condition is experimentally verified, and nonlinear conversion is systematically characterized across the entire parameter space. This work establishes a scalable pathway for classical and quantum photonics in a low-loss, highly nonlinear, and wafer-scale integration platform.
arXiv:2605.15509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Isaac Lab provides massive parallel UAV simulation, OmniSafe and safe-control-gym provide constrained-RL benchmarks, and CBFKit provides control-barrier-function synthesis tooling, no existing framework unifies these capabilities for end-to-end safety-constrained training. ParallelCBF is the first framework to unify (i)~tensor-parallel UAV environments, (ii)~hard-gate CBF safety filters, (iii)~sharded BC-to-RL pipelines, and (iv)~first-class operational auditability -- pre-registration, watchdog registries, failure forensics, and dataset audits as composable APIs rather than user-implemented scripts. We release ParallelCBF v0.1.0 under Apache~2.0 with a four-layer composable API, a CPU PyTorch reference implementation of a dual-barrier (squared / linear-predictive) CBF, property-based safety invariance tests across vectorized batch sizes that complete in 1.67~s for the full 39-test suite, and a 31{,}415-episode behavior-cloning collection campaign whose curriculum mix, per-bucket yields, and dataset SHA-256 are auditable through the framework's own \texttt{ops} primitives. We report a representative end-to-end pipeline execution in which the framework's auditability layer halted a downstream training stage that did not meet pre-registered convergence criteria, preventing silent propagation of a degraded checkpoint -- an architectural property we argue is necessary, not merely useful, for reproducible empirical robotics research. The framework is installable via \texttt{pip install parallelcbf}; source and release artifacts are available at https://github.com/xiaoyang-123-cell/ParallelCBF.
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.
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.
arXiv:2605.15875v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affine Body Dynamics (ABD) within the Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) framework provides accurate simulation of extremely stiff solids exhibiting near-rigid behavior, with strict non-penetration guarantees. However, IPC's globally coupled barrier constraints hinder scalable execution across multiple GPUs and compute nodes. We propose a distributed formulation of ABD using a consensus-based ADMM scheme. Each compute node solves its local ABD subproblem in parallel, followed by a global consensus step that enforces consistency among shared boundary bodies. The proposed method preserves IPC-level robustness and global consistency under distributed execution. Experiments demonstrate stable convergence, non-penetration, and efficient scaling on large-scale scenes across multiple nodes.
arXiv:2605.15879v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The available potential energy (APE) of a fluid can be defined locally in space, providing useful insights into both the energetics and dynamics of stratified flows ranging from three-dimensional turbulence to planetary scale circulations. Here we develop a framework for considering the multi-scale evolution of the local APE using a spatial filtering, or coarse-graining, approach. Evolution equations for the APE at scales larger, and smaller, than the filtering scale are derived -- including the cross-scale APE flux term. These results can be paired with existing frameworks for coarse-grained kinetic energy, offering the potential for examining a complete energy cycle that accounts for conversions between both spatial scales and energy reservoirs. An illustrative example of the application of this approach to a simulation of two-dimensional Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is provided.
arXiv:2603.27043v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the Mandarin-English Language Interview (MELI) Corpus, an open-source resource of 29.8 hours of speech from 51 Mandarin-English bilingual speakers. MELI combines matched sessions in Mandarin and English with two speaking styles: read sentences and spontaneous interviews about language varieties, standardness, and learning experiences. Audio was recorded at 44.1 kHz (16-bit, stereo). Interviews were fully transcribed, force-aligned at word and phone levels, and anonymized. Descriptively, the Mandarin component totals ~14.7 hours (mean duration 17.3 minutes) and the English component ~15.1 hours (mean duration 17.8 minutes). We report token/type statistics for each language and document code-switching patterns (frequent in Mandarin sessions; more limited in English sessions). The corpus design supports within-/cross-speaker, within/cross-language acoustic comparison and links acoustics to speakers' stated language attitudes, enabling both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The MELI Corpus will be released with transcriptions, alignments, metadata, scans of labelled maps and documentation under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
arXiv:2605.15887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust aggregation is the core operation in Byzantine-tolerant federated learning. To ensure the quality of aggregation independently of data distribution or attacks, validity conditions are needed. They provide geometric guarantees of where the output of the aggregation must lie. The widespread convex validity requires the output to lie in the convex hull of the honest vectors. Although this guarantee is strong in theory, it is poorly suited to modern federated learning systems, as it has dimension-dependent resilience and excludes many practical aggregation rules. We introduce the minimum enclosing ball (MEB) validity condition for robust aggregation, as well as its multiplicative relaxation, $c$-MEB validity, where $c$ is a constant. We show that exact MEB validity still suffers from limited resilience, while relaxed $c$-MEB validity is achievable if a majority of clients is honest, i.e. $n>2t$. We give an optimal MinMax-MEB rule for the relaxed condition with the bound $c<\sqrt{2}$ and prove explicit relaxed-MEB guarantees for standard aggregators including minimum-diameter averaging, medoid and geometric median. Finally, we relate MEB validity to convex, relaxed-convex and box validity studied in prior literature, thus providing a systematic map of geometric validity conditions for Byzantine-robust aggregation. Our results show that relaxed MEB validity connects validity conditions in distributed computing and Byzantine-tolerant aggregation rules, and offers a practical alternative to convex validity.
arXiv:2605.15890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a communication-efficient optimally structured gradient coding scheme to jointly address straggler resilience and communication efficiency in heterogeneous distributed learning. By establishing a unified framework that simultaneously optimizes gradient coding and quantization, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize residual error subject to an unbiasedness constraint. We rigorously establish the joint global optimum by deriving a closed-form code structure coupled with an optimal bit allocation strategy, while simultaneously proposing a low-complexity bit allocation algorithm that efficiently yields near-optimal performance. We provide rigorous convergence analysis for convex and smooth functions. Experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that our joint design significantly accelerates convergence and enhances communication efficiency compared to existing baselines.
arXiv:2605.15892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots are increasingly present in human spaces, such as for conducting deliveries in hospitals, interacting with visitors at museums, and stocking items in warehouses. To ensure the seamless integration of robots into these spaces, a new role in human-robot interaction is emerging - the robot wrangler, namely an individual who is responsible for setting up, overseeing, and troubleshooting the robot. To understand the needs of this stakeholder, we conducted a scoping review that uncovered a typology of robot wrangling across the research literature, and discovered that wrangling is an umbrella term that collapses a highly complex and heterogeneous space of activities, often rendering this labor difficult to characterize and support. To further clarify and understand robot wrangling, we then reflected on our own firsthand and imagined experiences as robot wranglers within our own respective domains. Guided by the scoping review and our reflections, we devise a series of design implications for supporting wranglers directly as individuals and as members of a wider service ecology.