arXiv:2607.06316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In non-convex markets, a competitive equilibrium may fail to exist. This turns out to be an important issue in real-world non-convex auction markets, such as electricity markets, as it complicates pricing and requires the auctioneer to resort to out-of-market discriminatory side payments to sustain an equilibrium. We investigate whether the introduction of convex financial trading induces a smoothing effect, mitigating the issues arising from non-convexities. We develop a two-stage non-convex market model (a forward market followed by a spot market) in which convex financial traders participate in the forward market. Our model predicts that financial trading reduces the magnitude of side payments required to support the cleared allocation. To test the prediction of our model, we examine the introduction of a transaction fee on financial traders in 2020 by PJM, the US's largest electricity market. We show that the substantial decline in financial trading volume caused by this policy coincided with a significant increase in side payments, in line with our theoretical predictions.
Science Journals
arXiv:2607.06521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum sensing is a promising technology capable of demonstrating clear advantage over comparable classical techniques for precise measurement. One application of quantum sensing is in function estimation, which can be done using a network of entangled quantum sensors, allowing for measurements with greater optimal sensitivity than unentangled sensing protocols. In cases where quantum sensor networks will be used to measure data that should remain private (e.g., biomedical data), it is imperative that these protocols include a privacy mechanism to hide sensitive information. In this work, we show that entangled sensor networks are vulnerable to certain privacy-violating attacks. To mitigate these attacks, we introduce secure sensing protocols endowed with differential privacy. We reconcile differential privacy with retaining Heisenberg-limited scaling, and introduce several protocols achieving varying balances between the two. We show that our main protocol, an $n$-node network sensing protocol that injects noise directly into the sensing Hamiltonian, exhibits a tradeoff between the desirable $O(1/n^2)$ Heisenberg scaling of the mean-squared error of the function estimate and the level of privacy attainable. Under assumptions on the network (a common source of randomness and a constant fraction of honest parties), we show that this protocol is locally implementable and achieves $(O(1), \delta)$-differential privacy for arbitrarily small $\delta$ while retaining Heisenberg scaling of the mean-squared error. We prove that our protocols are resilient to attacks by broad classes of classical and quantum adversaries, and find advantages in the privacy-utility tradeoff when using quantum techniques.
arXiv:2603.18359v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural Audio Codecs (NACs) are widely adopted in modern speech systems, yet how they encode linguistic and paralinguistic information remains unclear. Improving the interpretability of NAC representations is critical for understanding and deploying them in sensitive applications. Hence, we employ Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose dense NAC representations into sparse, interpretable activations. In this work, we focus on a challenging paralinguistic attribute-accent-and propose a framework to quantify NAC interpretability. We evaluate four NAC models under 16 SAE configurations using a relative performance index. Our results show that DAC and SpeechTokenizer achieve the highest interpretability. We further reveal that acoustic-oriented NACs encode accent information primarily in activation magnitudes of sparse representations, whereas phonetic-oriented NACs rely more on activation positions, and that low-bitrate EnCodec variants show higher interpretability.
arXiv:2607.05891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coreset selection aims to identify a small and highly representative subset of a massive dataset for efficient model training. The problem remains challenging even in the few-shot knowledge distillation (KD) setup, where a full-scale pre-trained teacher informs the student network. Typical sample selection strategies often struggle to surpass the random selection baseline. In this paper, we showcase few-medoids, an embarrassingly simple coreset selection strategy that chooses the samples closest to the centroid (average image) of each class. We present extensive KD experiments on four datasets, covering a wide range of image classification problems, and three teacher-student model pairs, comprising both convolutional and transformer networks. Although the proposed method is embarrassingly simple, our empirical results indicate that few-medoids is able to consistently surpass the random selection baseline, as well as the other coreset selection strategies. We therefore consider that few-medoids can be used as a drop-in replacement for commonly-used baselines (e.g. herding or k-center Greedy), in future research on coreset selection. To reproduce the reported results, we publicly release our code at https://github.com/CemilAndreiDilmac/Few-Shot-KD-Coreset.
arXiv:2607.06393v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We give faster exponential-time randomised approximation algorithms for counting problems where polynomial-time approximation is unavailable and exact exponential-time counting remains expensive. For general \(n\)-vertex graphs, our independent-set counter runs in \(O^{\ast}(1.1869^{n})\) time, improving the previous \(O^{\ast}(1.2041^{n})\) general-graph bound. For \(n\)-variable \#\textsc{2-SAT}, we obtain an \(O^{\ast}(1.2373^{n})\)-time approximation algorithm, narrowly below Wahlstr{\"o}m's currently cited \(O^{\ast}(1.2377^{n})\) variable-parameter exact bound. The new algorithmic point is to take the square root after decomposition. For a single bounded unweighted self-reduction with \(f(x)\) positive leaves and recursion-compatible upper bound \(b(x)\), an enumerate-or-sample estimator gives an \((\varepsilon,\delta)\)-approximation in \[ O^{\ast}\!\left(\sqrt{b(x)}\,\varepsilon^{-2}\log \tfrac1\delta\right) \] time. After preprocessing decomposes an input into many bounded cores, the combined estimator pays \[ O^{\ast}\!\left(\sqrt{\sum_i b_i(x_i)}\,\varepsilon^{-2}\log \tfrac1\delta\right), \] rather than estimating the cores separately at cost \(\sum_i \sqrt{b_i(x_i)}\). The same conversion improves the bases for counting maximal cliques, minimal separators, and perfect matchings in subcubic graphs. Bounded unweighted self-reductions provide the formal language; at the level of counting classes, the resulting unweighted formulation has the same Karp closure as TotP. With explicit recursion-tree access, the framework yields black-box quantum speed-ups.
arXiv:2607.05994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-Object Interaction (HOI) video generation aims to synthesize realistic videos of humans manipulating diverse objects, serving as a promising avenue for AI-driven live streaming e-commerce. A primary obstacle in this domain lies in the complexity of modeling fine-grained physical dynamics and the intricate spatial-temporal coordination between human hands and objects. Existing approaches to this problem typically rely on dense temporal guidance, e.g., frame-wise hand-object pose sequences, to strictly control the interaction process. However, such dense guidance incurs high annotation costs and affects motion synthesis diversity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SparseCtrl-HOI, a novel sparse temporal control framework for HOI video generation. It requires only a few keyframes that capture interaction states at designated timestamps. Specifically, we employ a Time-Controlled Rotary Positional Embedding (TiRoPE) mechanism to temporally anchor these keyframes while preserving their spatial integrity. Subsequently, to govern the dynamics across intermediate frames, we propose a Motion Prior Injection Module that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to extract high-level motion priors. This empowers the model to hallucinate logically and physically plausible transitions. Furthermore, we build SparseHOI-5K, a high-quality and richly annotated dataset for HOI video generation with sparse temporal control. Comprehensive evaluations confirm that our method substantially reduces annotation overhead while synthesizing superior live-streaming e-commerce videos. Both our code and dataset are publicly available at https://mpi-lab.github.io/SparseCtrl-HOI.
arXiv:2501.10538v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The practical success of deep learning has led to the discovery of several surprising phenomena. One of these phenomena, that has spurred intense theoretical research, is ``benign overfitting'': deep neural networks seem to generalize well in the over-parametrized regime even though the networks show a perfect fit to noisy training data. It is now known that benign overfitting also occurs in various classical statistical models. For linear maximum margin classifiers, benign overfitting has been established theoretically in a class of mixture models with very strong assumptions on the covariate distribution. However, even in this simple setting, many questions remain open. For instance, most of the existing literature focuses on the noiseless case where all true class labels are observed without errors, whereas the more interesting noisy case remains poorly understood. We provide a comprehensive study of benign overfitting for linear maximum margin classifiers. We discover a phase transition in test error bounds for the noisy model which was previously unknown and provide some geometric intuition behind it. We further considerably relax the required covariate assumptions in both the noisy and noiseless cases. Our results demonstrate that benign overfitting of maximum margin classifiers holds in a much wider range of scenarios than was previously known and provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms.
arXiv:2604.20394v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We establish nearly optimal upper and lower bounds for approximating decision tree splits in data streams. For regression with labels in the range $\{0,1,\ldots,M\}$, we give a one-pass algorithm using $\tilde{O}(M^2/\epsilon)$ space that outputs a split within additive $\epsilon$ error of the optimal split, improving upon the two-pass algorithm of Pham et al. (ISIT 2025). Furthermore, we provide a matching one-pass lower bound showing that $\Omega(M^2/\epsilon)$ space is indeed necessary. For classification, we also obtain a one-pass algorithm using $\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon)$ space for approximating the optimal Gini split, improving upon the previous $\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$-space algorithm. We complement these results with matching space lower bounds: $\Omega(1/\epsilon)$ for Gini impurity and $\Omega(1/\epsilon)$ for misclassification (which matches the upper bound obtained by sampling). Our algorithms exploit the Lipschitz property of the loss functions and use reservoir sampling along with Count--Min sketches with range queries. Our lower bounds follow from careful reductions from the INDEX problem.
arXiv:2606.01256v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper introduces a distribution-free framework for constructing post-detection confidence sets for changepoints after stopping a sequential change detection procedure. It is well known that conformal test martingales can be used to sequentially detect changes in distribution, but by themselves provide no inference for the time at which a proclaimed change occurred. Past work on post-detection inference requires pre- and post-change classes of distributions to be known, but this paper accomplishes localization of the changepoint without any distributional assumptions. We establish finite-sample coverage guarantees (conditional on correct detection). We provide non-asymptotic bounds on the conditional expected size of the confidence sets. Under suitable asymptotic regimes, we prove that the conditional expected size of the confidence set remains uniformly bounded and demonstrate strong empirical performance on simulated and real data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first general distribution-free framework for sequential changepoint localization with valid post-detection coverage.
arXiv:2504.20342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reflexion is an AI-powered prototype designed to explore structured emotional self-reflection. By integrating emotion detection, layered reflective prompting, and metaphorical storytelling generation, Reflexion was intended to support users in autonomous emotional exploration beyond basic sentiment categorization. Grounded primarily in expressive writing, cognitive restructuring, and self-determination theory, the system was designed to organize reflection as a progressive pathway from surface-level emotional recognition toward value-aligned action planning. Its final action-planning layer is additionally informed by broader questions of agency and empowerment, which remain future directions rather than fully implemented mechanisms in the current prototype. Informal design feedback indicated that some reviewers found the layered interaction model understandable and potentially useful; no empirical efficacy claims are made. As an early prototype, Reflexion documents one direction in theory-informed affective computing.
arXiv:2506.09276v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents a state representation framework for Markov decision processes (MDPs) that can be learned solely from state trajectories, requiring neither reward signals nor the actions executed by the agent. We propose learning the minimum action distance (MAD), defined as the minimum number of actions required to transition between states, as a fundamental metric that captures the underlying structure of an environment. MAD naturally enables critical downstream tasks such as goal-conditioned reinforcement learning and reward shaping by providing a dense, geometrically meaningful measure of progress. Our self-supervised learning approach constructs an embedding space where the distances between embedded state pairs correspond to their MAD, accommodating both symmetric and asymmetric approximations. We evaluate the framework on a comprehensive suite of environments with known MAD values, encompassing both deterministic and stochastic dynamics, as well as discrete and continuous state spaces, and environments with noisy observations. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed approach not only efficiently learns accurate MAD representations across these diverse settings but also significantly outperforms existing state representation methods in terms of representation quality.
arXiv:2607.06054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Off-the-shelf TTS systems are poorly adapted to Taiwanese Mandarin. Their accent defaults to other Mandarin variants, their tokenizers over-segment common Taiwanese text, and their pronunciation degrades at code-switching boundaries where Chinese and English alternate within one utterance. These problems share one root: the text side lacks adaptation to the Taiwanese context. We address the text side from the bottom up. PangolinTokenizer, a byte-level BPE tokenizer trained on Taiwan-context data, reaches the lowest token rate (0.485 tokens/character) with the smallest vocabulary among nine tokenizers. Barbet, a billion-parameter Traditional-Chinese language model trained on PangolinTokenizer, serves as the text-semantic frontend and ranks first among comparable public models on a 14-task evaluation. BlueMagpie-TTS attaches Barbet to the pretrained acoustic stack of VoxCPM2 through a learned bridge, keeping the acoustic stack fixed. On a 1000-sentence Taiwan-localized test set, it lowers CER from 11.45% to 4.81% and WER from 14.83% to 5.36%, relative reductions of 58.0% and 63.9%. In a blind listening study on 500 of these sentences with ten listeners, 65.6% of majority votes prefer BlueMagpie-TTS.
arXiv:2607.06056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social pressure -- the awareness of being observed by others -- is a fundamental driver of prosocial behavior in human societies. Yet it is typically assumed that only direct neighbors exert vigilance pressure on an individual, despite empirical evidence that social influence persists to at least three degrees of separation. Here we show that extending the reach of social vigilance beyond direct neighbors substantially promotes cooperation. We couple a Prisoner's Dilemma on one layer of a multiplex network to a vigilance cascade on the other, with influence decaying geometrically with network distance. Extending vigilance to just the second circle of influence shifts the critical temptation for defection by nearly 30\% in sparse networks. Extending to four circles raises this threshold by over 50\%. The $L=1\to2$ transition already accounts for most of the gain, consistent with the decay coefficients of social influence reported in controlled experiments. The effect is strongest in sparse topologies, requires that the vigilance and game layers be aligned, and reproduces directly on a real social network of physicians; in dense, hub-dominated networks the gain instead depends sharply on how fast influence decays with distance, switching between weak and strong cooperation as the decay rate crosses a threshold. Our results strongly suggest that even modest expansions of social awareness -- such as those enabled by online social platforms -- can substantially reshape the landscape of cooperative behavior in human populations.
arXiv:2602.22600v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training selects for behavior, not circuitry: many weight configurations can implement the same function. Studying any single trained neural network thus risks describing accidents of one training run rather than the computation itself. This work shifts focus from what transformers happen to do to what they must do by extracting algorithmic cores, compact subspaces that are necessary and sufficient for a task and that recur across independently trained models. Here, Algorithmic Core Extraction (ACE) is introduced to isolate these subspaces, causally validate them, and recover the algorithms they implement across settings ranging from synthetic tasks to large-scale pretrained models. Markov-chain transformers embed three-dimensional cores in nearly orthogonal subspaces yet recover identical transition spectra. Modular-addition transformers form compact cyclic cores at grokking that later inflate under continued regularization, redundantly distributing the same computation across many functionally equivalent modes. This functional redundancy is found to accelerate the transition from memorization to generalization, yielding an inverse scaling law for grokking time. In six language models spanning more than two orders of magnitude in scale (GPT-2 Small/Medium/Large, LLaMA-3.1, Gemma-2, and Qwen2.5), subject-verb agreement is governed by a single, steerable axis that aligns across architectures. Flipping this axis inverts grammatical number throughout open-ended generation. Together these results suggest that beneath the apparent complexity of trained transformers lies a simpler, shared computational structure, and that targeting invariants rather than parameterizations may offer a more tractable path to mechanistic understanding and control. Code: https://github.com/joshseth/cores
arXiv:2607.05536v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Randomized smoothing has emerged as a scalable technique for certifying the adversarial robustness of classifiers. However, its application to regression remains under-explored and faces unique challenges. Existing regression certificates rely on probabilistic acceptance regions and fail to exploit the local geometry of the function. In this work, we present a novel framework for certified robust regression that addresses these limitations. We derive a prediction-centered certificate that guarantees the stability of the smoothed model's prediction and ensures practical computability at test time. We investigate several alternatives for constructing these certificates by explicitly incorporating means, variances, and gradients. In particular, we demonstrate on the MNIST rotation task that utilizing gradient information yields significantly tighter robustness certificates compared to the current state-of-the-art, alpha-smoothing.
Reward-Density Heuristic for Dynamic Multi-Vehicle Routing: Performance and Computational Efficiency
arXiv:2607.06066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and its variants represent some of the most practically consequential optimization challenges in modern logistics and urban mobility. In this study, we address a dynamic, online variant combining elements of the VRP and the Orienteering Problem (OP), in which a fleet of vehicles must maximise cumulative reward collected within a fixed time horizon while continuously replanning as new tasks arrive. We propose and evaluate a reward-density heuristic for dynamic multi-vehicle assignment, referred to as the Efficiency heuristic. We evaluate this formulation across two application domains: autonomous drone task allocation and urban taxi dispatch, across multiple fleet sizes and task scales. The proposed method is compared with four classical construction heuristics and three metaheuristic algorithms (Adaptive Large Neighbourhood Search, Genetic Algorithm, and Simulated Annealing), all evaluated under identical conditions. Across all tested configurations, the Efficiency heuristic matches the solution quality of the best metaheuristic algorithms while requiring two to three orders of magnitude less planning time, establishing Pareto dominance over all competing methods on the reward-versus-compute frontier. These findings suggest a practical design principle for real-time allocation and dispatch systems: in dynamic, time-constrained routing environments, carefully designed greedy heuristics can match the output of sophisticated search procedures at a fraction of the computational cost, making them preferable for online deployment.
arXiv:2607.06068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While CRDTs provide decentralized replication and eventual consistency, Byzantine-resilient deployments require mechanisms for deciding which updates should be trusted and therefore contribute to the reconstructed state. In practice, the trust relationships underlying these decisions may evolve over time as participants join or leave, identities change, and governance rules are revised. However, the information used to make trust decisions is typically managed outside the replicated state itself. This paper introduces a dual-CRDT architecture composed of a \emph{Trust CRDT} and a \emph{Data CRDT}. The Trust CRDT stores and evolves governance information, while the Data CRDT is reconstructed according to the trust configuration derived from the Trust CRDT. Governance therefore becomes replicated state rather than an externally managed artifact. Building upon deterministic reconstruction and Byzantine trust filtering, the proposed model allows trust relationships and governance rules to evolve through ordinary CRDT updates. The resulting architecture provides a recursive governance model in which governance rules determine their own future evolution while simultaneously governing application data. The approach is implemented as a prototype on top of Melda and melda-sec and should be viewed as an initial exploration of decentralized trust governance and evolution for Byzantine-resilient CRDT systems.
arXiv:2607.05411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Higher education institutions are increasingly expected to ensure that both students and staff develop Generative AI (GenAI) literacies. In response, they are introducing professional development programs and embedding GenAI skills within student curricula. However, current educational frameworks typically assume a linear progression of GenAI literacy, implying that foundational technical understanding must precede creative application. This paper challenges such an assumption through a psychometric analysis of a taxonomy-based self-assessment instrument (n = 158). We applied Rasch measurement theory and Guttman ordering to map the latent perceived order of difficulty of GenAI skills across students, academics, and professional staff. Results reveal a fundamental divergence in perceived competence profiles: while academics follow a more traditional linear path, students exhibit an "inverted" profile, frequently mastering high-level creation tasks before acquiring foundational conceptual understanding. Furthermore, the correlation of skill difficulty between students and academics was weak (r = 0.188). We argue that this "skill bypass" creates a fragile sense of fluency, where high self-efficacy in prompting masks low literacy in AI mechanics. These findings challenge the "one-size-fits-all" curricula and provide the empirical basis for diagnostic-driven, modular interventions that foster genuine human-AI synergy.
arXiv:2607.05416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a new method for structural sequence analysis grounded in Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT). At its core is the Ladderpath approach, which extracts nested and hierarchical relationships among repeated substructures in linguistic sequences -- an instantiation of AIT's principle of describing data through minimal generative programs. These structures are then used to define three distance measures: a normalized compression distance (NCD), and two alternative distances derived directly from the Ladderpath representation. Integrated with a $k$-nearest neighbor classifier, these distances achieve strong and consistent performance across in-distribution, out-of-distribution (OOD), and few-shot text classification tasks. In particular, all three methods outperform both gzip-based NCD and BERT under OOD and low-resource settings. These results demonstrate that the structured representations captured by Ladderpath preserve intrinsic properties of sequences and provide a lightweight, interpretable, and training-free alternative for text modeling. This work highlights the potential of AIT-based approaches for structural and domain-agnostic sequence understanding.
arXiv:2607.06077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photonic time crystals (PTCs) host momentum bandgaps, or k gaps, that enable parametric amplification and lasing of seeded fields. In nonlinear PTCs, Kerr saturation dynamically suppresses the exponential growth, reshaping k-gap amplification into an active, spatially homogeneous k gap soliton train. Here, we show that a localized perturbation on this unstable background then nucleates a transient spatiotemporal excitation: the breathing k gap event. Unlike Peregrine breathers emerging from modulational instability on a planewave background, this event extracts energy from competing host k gap solitons and remains sustained by their interaction. We identify this process as an instability on instability mechanism intrinsic to nonlinear k gap dynamics. The event is robust against noise and disorder, and can be deterministically reshaped into collective breathing patterns by periodic and phase engineered seeding. These results establish k gap engineering as a route to generating and controlling extreme spatiotemporal waves in photonic time varying media.
arXiv:2607.06429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The simulation of high-frequency acoustic wave propagation in unbounded domains with local heterogeneous materials and high-contrast interfaces poses significant challenges to numerical methods. The volume-surface integral equation (VSIE) method is an attractive approach as it automatically satisfies the radiation condition at infinity via Green's functions, handles heterogeneous materials via Newton potentials, and models scattering at high-contrast interfaces via surface integral operators. However, its effectiveness in practical simulations has been limited by high computational costs, sensitivity to sharp interfaces, and insufficient computational verification. This study extends the applicability of VSIE by deriving integral formulations for nested heterogeneous materials with parameter jumps at interfaces. We also develop extensive benchmarks against coupled finite-element and boundary-element methods to verify the VSIE's accuracy and mesh convergence. The various benchmarks using open-source software demonstrate the effectiveness of VSIE for large-scale acoustic simulations.
arXiv:2607.06087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents an approach and application of optimization of spatial packaging of interconnected systems with physical interactions (SPI2) in three-dimensional component placement problems. To enable its application for an automotive use case, SPI2 must support both initial design generation, including component alignment, and robust system-level coordination, requiring improved solution reliability and tractable computational cost. To address these requirements, the proposed methodology improves convergence rate and solution quality by enhancing numerical robustness in gradient-based optimization while reducing computational load. Existing SPI2 approaches are extended through the addition of alignment capabilities, enabling the representation of port-to-port alignments between components. Furthermore, the applicability of SPI2 is expanded by treating component placement locations as design variables, allowing for penalty-based coordination to ensure design feasibility and enabling integration within system-level optimization. The approach is validated using a multi-objective optimization framework based on Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II), applied to a combined powertrain optimization and battery chassis integration problem. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the SPI2 in a system-level design context. The results show a twofold application of SPI2 in an automotive use case: first, as a tool for initial design generation, and second, as part of a system-level design coordinator that outperforms a discretized exhaustive search while requiring lower computational cost.
arXiv:2607.05436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid scaling of over-parameterized machine learning architectures, particularly LLMs, raises a profound crisis: do these systems exhibit genuine intelligence, or are they merely sophisticated statistical pattern matchers? Classical flat Euclidean statistics cannot differentiate continuous interpolation from the autonomous discovery of novel causal laws. To resolve this, we introduce Statistically Meaningful Geometry (SMG), a framework modeling over-parameterized learning systems as infinite-dimensional non-parametric Orlicz fiber bundles. We prove that under persistent out-of-distribution (OOD) stimuli governed by unmodeled causal mechanisms, continuous optimization fails. Unmodeled variance is rejected by the visible horizontal base manifold, leaking into the unobservable vertical fiber space and generating an accumulation of Active Acausal Tension. Driven by the statistical manifold's non-linear curvature, this tension inevitably strikes a conjugate focal boundary ($T_{\text{crit}} = \pi^2 / K_{\text{max}}$), triggering localized volumetric collapse and a catastrophic matrix singularity ($[G_f]^{-1} \to \infty$). We demonstrate this geometric breakdown acts as the strict non-equilibrium trigger for a Gauge Symmetry Break (GSB). The system purges hidden tension from unobservable gauge redundancies, spontaneously crystallizing a new, mathematically independent horizontal coordinate axis. This non-parametric phase transition registers as a discrete $+1.0$ integer step-jump in observable Structural G-Entropy. By decoupling parameter charts and subjecting emergent axes to a Minimal Energy Path Criterion and a Causal Invariance Filter, we distinguish genuine discovery from malignant hallucinations. Ultimately, SMG provides a parameter-free, falsifiable dashboard to mathematically certify true intelligence, transforming AI for Science into an engine of autonomous paradigm shifts.
arXiv:2511.06229v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper focuses on dynamic origin-destination matrix estimation (DODE), a crucial calibration process necessary for the effective application of microscopic traffic simulations. The fundamental challenge of the DODE problem in microscopic simulations stems from the complex temporal dynamics and inherent uncertainty of individual vehicle dynamics. This makes it highly challenging to precisely determine which vehicle traverses which link at any given moment, resulting in intricate and often ambiguous relationships between origin-destination (OD) matrices and their contributions to resultant link flows. This phenomenon constitutes the credit assignment problem, a central challenge addressed in this study. We formulate the DODE problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and propose a novel framework that applies model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Within our proposed framework, the agent learns an optimal policy to sequentially generate OD matrices, refining its strategy through direct interaction with the simulation environment. This approach was evaluated through a toy experiment on the Nguyen-Dupuis network and a case study utilizing an actual highway subnetwork spanning Santa Clara and San Jose. Experimental results show that the proposed method consistently improves calibration performance relative to the strongest conventional baseline, reducing link-flow MSE by 23.7% in the toy experiment and by 59.2-88.3% in the real-world case study. By reframing DODE as a sequential decision-making problem, our approach addresses the credit assignment challenge through a learned policy and provides a novel framework for calibration of microscopic traffic simulations.
arXiv:2607.06094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Faults on a cyber-physical system (CPS) are too rare and unrepresentative to characterise, or even to select a model on, so detection must instead model normal behaviour; the standard point-adjusted evaluation, however, rewards detectors that never do. CPS normal behaviour is the union of many imbalanced, curved, thin-fringed operating regimes rather than a single blob; we state this structure as ten assumptions (A1-A10), abbreviated Massive, Implicit, Imbalanced Multimodality (MIIM). We model the normal law with a jointly learned latent representation plus explicit Gaussian-mixture mode clustering, scored in the latent rather than by a global density or a reconstruction residual, and evaluate under a deliberately fair protocol: raw point-wise metrics with no point adjustment, a trivial-detector difficulty split, prevalence-matched F1, and train-normal-only calibration. On three real CPS datasets (WADI, HAI, SKAB), the detector wins both the combined column and the difficult correlation/dynamics-fault column on all three, reaching difficult-subset AUROC 0.831 on HAI, 0.726 on WADI, and 0.610 on SKAB. The margin is largest on the two multimodal datasets the MIIM assumptions target and slimmest on the near-unimodal one, tracking multimodality as the thesis predicts, and it holds against three deep detectors (USAD, TranAD, GDN) re-computed with the same raw metrics, all of which collapse on the difficult subset. The methodological contributions are the MIIM assumption set, the difficulty-stratified fair protocol, and a latent-only score that drops reconstruction because a flexible decoder rebuilds the hard faults faithfully.