arXiv:2607.01835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While a looming atmospheric CO$_2$ overshoot calls for immediate carbon sequestration, delays associated to Enhanced Weathering (EW) carbon dioxide removal are being investigated. Topsoil acidity is already known to delay EW carbon sequestration, but subsoil acidity remains underexplored. Using century-long agricultural liming of formerly acidic heathland as a proxy for EW, this study provides empirical evidence of subsoil-imposed delays. Below such limed terrain, we observed a downward-progressing front of topsoil-produced alkalinity that still requires 30-100 years to penetrate the approximately 5 m thick acidic sandy unsaturated zone and reach the groundwater table. Subsoil acidity thus may cause beyond-reasonable delays, prohibiting EW as a viable short-term carbon capture strategy even on topsoils made non-acidic by preceding liming. When planning EW schemes, the amounts of stored acidic cations in top- and subsoil, as well as the rate and composition of infiltrating water, controlling the duration of the delay, require careful assessment.
Science Journals
arXiv:2607.01851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large 3D foundation models such as MASt3R achieve state-of-the-art stereo reconstruction but are computationally demanding for deployment under strict hardware constraints -- a critical limitation in domains such as planetary exploration, where onboard computing is severely restricted. We study how far such models can be compressed through knowledge distillation, using lunar stereo reconstruction as a challenging and practically relevant case study. Starting from a 688M-parameter MASt3R teacher fine-tuned on lunar imagery, we distill its dense geometric predictions into a family of lightweight students spanning different encoder types (CNN vs ViT), decoder widths and depths, and training strategies. To bridge the dimensional mismatch between teacher and student, we propose a structured SVD-based initialization that projects the teacher's decoder weights into the student's smaller latent space, yielding a warm start that significantly improves convergence and final performance. Based on our results on lunar data, we can obtain a distilled student that retains most of teacher's reconstruction accuracy while reducing the model size up to 7 times, and even outperforms a baseline trained directly with sparse ground-truth annotations. Beyond compression, our study highlights both principles and practical insights for distilling geometric foundation models: a convolutional encoder underperforms transformer-based alternatives (though pretraining availability remains a confounding factor), preserving encoder capacity is more critical than maintaining a large decoder, feature-level distillation consistently outperforms output-only supervision, and SVD-based initialization improves optimisation stability. These findings provide practical guidelines for deploying 3D reconstruction models in resource-constrained environments.
arXiv:2607.01867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The use of LLMs in software development has become increasingly widespread on tasks such as code generation and summarization. Reports from large technology companies showed that around 20% to 30% of their code are generated by LLMs. However, there remains skepticism about the practical usage of LLM-generated code and comments, such as concerns on more time for debugging the generated code and the unnaturalness of the generated comments. In this paper, we study the code and comments detected as likely to be generated by LLMs and their characteristics, the differences between company- and community-maintained repositories, and how likely bugs are associated with LLM-generated code. We conduct extensive experiments on active company- and community-maintained repositories from 2021 to 2025 using various tools and techniques that detect code and comments generated by LLMs. Based on our detector-based proxy analysis, the results suggest that code detected as likely to be generated by LLMs decreased over time and appeared frequently in test cases, while that of comments remains relatively stable. Proxy results further suggest that code detected as likely to be generated by LLMs shows substantial intra-repository code clones, whereas comments exhibit a relatively low proportion of grammatically correct sentences. In addition, the company-maintained repositories show a higher percentage of code and comments detected as likely to be generated by LLMs, and only a small percentage of the human-labelled bugs are detected as being likely associated with LLM-generated code.
arXiv:2607.01870v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to locate and segment objects that blend into their surroundings, presenting challenges due to weak edge cues and ill-defined boundaries. Traditional COD models rely on hand-designed architectures and multi-scale feature fusion, which are often guided by intuition rather than systematic search. This paper introduces CamoNAS, a frequency-aware multi-resolution Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework for COD. CamoNAS automatically searches both cell-level operations and network-level downsampling paths, forming a hierarchical search space tailored to detect camouflaged objects. Additionally, it adopts an RGB frequency dual-stream architecture, where a learnable wavelet transform complements the RGB spatial stream. CamoNAS achieves state-of-the-art performance on four COD benchmarks (CAMO, COD10K, NC4K, CHAMELEON), highlighting the effectiveness of NAS for COD. Our code is available at https://github.com/rendaweiSIMIT/CamoNAS.
arXiv:2607.01907v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semi-supervised generative adversarial networks (SSL-GANs) can exploit large unlabeled datasets while retaining a classifier in the discriminator, but their training is often unstable. This paper proposes a population-based evolutionary training strategy in which discriminator learning is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. Instead of aggregating the supervised and unsupervised components of the SSL objective into a single scalar loss, the method maintains a population of discriminators ranked by Pareto dominance, enabling the exploration of different trade-offs between classification accuracy and real/fake discrimination. This formulation aims to improve both roles of SSL-GANs: learning accurate classifiers and training generators capable of producing realistic samples. We analyze several variants, including an elitist strategy and a mono-objective ablation, to assess the role of multi-objective selection. Experiments on MNIST with limited labels show improved training robustness compared to SSL-GAN and CE-SSL-GAN state-of-the-art baselines, while the elitist variant consistently achieves the highest classification accuracy.
arXiv:2607.01592v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Objective. Gold-standard depth-of-interaction (DOI) calibration using collimated gamma-ray irradiation is time-consuming and impractical for system-level calibration of detector arrays. This work investigates an efficient DOI and energy calibration method for detector panels using uncollimated irradiation, with gamma rays incident nearly parallel to the crystal depth direction. Approach. The 511-keV photopeak location in a dual-ended readout PET detector block was evaluated as a function of crystal depth using collimated and uncollimated $^{22}$Na irradiation. A $4\times4$ dual-ended readout PET detector panel was then assembled. Three detector blocks were calibrated using the gold-standard method, and two uncollimated-irradiation DOI calibration approaches--a physics-informed model and a multilayer perceptron (MLP)--were compared against it. Finally, the full panel was calibrated for DOI and energy using the MLP-based approach. Main Results. The median relative RMSE between second-order polynomial fits from collimated and uncollimated irradiation was 1%, showing that uncollimated irradiation can provide reliable estimates when accurate DOI calibration parameters are available. Compared with gold-standard DOI calibration, the physics-informed and MLP-based approaches achieved RMSEs of 0.38-0.58 mm and 0.36-0.61 mm, respectively. The MLP-based approach provided better DOI resolution estimates and was therefore used for full-panel calibration. After saturation correction, the panel achieved a mean energy resolution of 15.6% and a DOI resolution of 2.0 mm. Significance. The proposed MLP-based calibration requires only a single uniform 511-keV irradiation, making it simple to implement and suitable for in situ calibration of DOI-capable PET detector arrays.
arXiv:2607.01601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large scale document deduplication must preserve semantic equivalence while remaining efficient over massive corpora. We present SemHash LLM, a multi granularity framework that unifies semantic projection hashing, attention weighted MinHash, contrastive boundary learning, and selective LLM based adjudication. The method combines character, token, and document level signals through gated fusion, then applies a cascaded filtering pipeline for efficient candidate reduction. Semantic projection hashing learns compact binary codes in distilled LLM embedding space, while attention weighted Min- Hash suppresses boilerplate and emphasizes informative content. Adaptive decision boundaries and uncertainty estimation further improve robustness across template pollution, short text perturbation, containment, and viral fragments. Experiments show that SemHash LLM achieves strong duplicate detection quality with less than one percent neural verification cost.
arXiv:2607.01913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Organizations increasingly make strategic decisions about AI systems whose behaviour, failure modes, and institutional effects cannot be fully known at design time. This technical report reframes strategic red teaming as a board-level governance discipline for testing the assumptions under which AI-enabled strategies are approved, funded, and supervised. The report proposes a six-component model for strategic red teaming in AI governance: an explicit assumption register, an adversarial mandate, independence criteria, evidence grading, a board-facing decision record, and a follow-up mechanism for unresolved findings. The model is intended to make strategic uncertainty inspectable before it becomes operational exposure. It treats red teaming not as penetration testing, scenario theatre, or generic risk review, but as structured adversarial testing of the claims on which governance decisions depend. The contribution is conceptual and design-oriented. It does not claim empirical validation, regulatory endorsement, or legal sufficiency. Instead, it provides a candidate governance artefact for organizations that need to connect AI strategy, accountability, oversight, and evidence. The report also defines limitations and a minimum validation protocol for future empirical testing in organizational settings.
arXiv:2607.01929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in agentic program repair have significantly improved issue resolution by enabling iterative repository exploration. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on sequential, text-based code navigation, which fundamentally limits their ability to reason over large-scale long-horizon repositories with complex and long-range dependencies. As issue-resolution agents traverse repositories through fragmented textual observations, structural information such as module organization, call relationships, and dependency chains must be repeatedly reconstructed across interaction steps, often leading to exploration drift and incomplete localization. We present DUALVIEW, a dual-modal structural scaffolding framework that brings visual reasoning into repository exploration for issue-resolution agents. DUALVIEW represents repository structure through four complementary graph views: Module Coupling Graph (MCG), Function Call Graph (FCG), Class Hierarchy Graph (CHG), and Program Dependence Graph (PDG), and exposes them through a queryable interface with visual and textual responses. Rather than reconstructing repository structure from a sequence of textual observations, agents can directly reason over persistent visual representations of code dependencies, enabling more effective exploration and understanding of long-horizon codebases. We evaluate DUALVIEW on SWE-bench Pro and Verified. Results show that DUALVIEW consistently improves issue-resolution performance across different agent architectures and model families. Further ablation studies demonstrate that the gains arise not only from textual structural information but also from visual externalization of repository dependencies, which better supports long-horizon repository exploration.
arXiv:2607.01667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced video understanding, achieving precise temporal and cross-modal alignment in audiovisual video captioning remains a formidable challenge. Most existing approaches suffer from modality detachment and temporal incoherence, failing to accurately bind auditory events to visual entities or capture complex causal dynamics. To address these deficiencies, we propose TCA-Captioner, a framework specifically engineered to enhance Temporal and Cross-Modal Alignment for audiovisual video captioning. We first introduce the Observer-Checker-Corrector (OCC) framework, an iterative refinement strategy that generates high-fidelity, meticulously grounded training data. Leveraging a curated high-density human interaction dataset, TCA-Captioner is optimized to model sophisticated audiovisual interactions. Furthermore, we present TCA-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark utilizing a Decoupled Evaluation Protocol to isolate and quantify model proficiency in audiovisual binding and temporal relational reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TCA-Captioner sets a new standard for temporally-coherent and synchronized audiovisual narratives.
arXiv:2607.01675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Segmentation of biomarkers in medical images is frequently viewed as a first step towards medical image analysis in any bioinformatics or biomedical application. Despite progress, existing methods still struggle to capture information at multiple scales and to perform upsampling effectively across different datasets. These shortcomings often result in suboptimal generalization capabilities. Recently, architectures belonging to the Nested-UNet family excel in capturing multiscale contextual information and upsample them effectively. In this work, We propose a novel Nested-UNet architecture that effectively captures multi-scale contextual information. It includes inner and outer attention units to enhance focus during upsampling, along with channel-wise feature recalibration using squeeze-and-excitation modules, leading to improved segmentation performance. Additionally, the architecture integrates an edge-aware loss to emphasize boundary accuracy by assigning greater importance to edge regions. Tested extensively on three publicly available benchmark datasets. Our method demonstrates a generalization performance superior to existing Nested-UNet methods. Code: https://github.com/saadwazir/histosegplusplus
arXiv:2607.01678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication increasingly dominates the cost of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, especially under data-parallel and sharded training schemes, where gradient synchronization and parameter reconstruction overhead increase with model size and system scale. Existing communication-reduction methods either sparsify raw gradients, which can be unstable for modern Adam-style optimizers at high sparsity, or quantize communication, whose savings are fundamentally bounded by bit width and often incur additional runtime overhead. We present SCAPE, a communication-efficient distributed optimizer for LLM training that exploits the stability of AdamS's first-moment to enable aggressive sparsification without loss of LLM quality. Instead of constructing masks from raw gradients, SCAPE derives them from first-moment-based statistics, partitions mask generation across workers to align with optimizer sharding, and delays mask usage by one step so that mask synchronization can overlap with computation. SCAPE also reconstructs the quantities required for second-moment updates from a single synchronized sparse buffer, avoiding an additional collective. We implement SCAPE in Megatron-LM and evaluate its convergence by pre-training GPT-345M on OpenWebText and Llama-500M on SlimPajama-6B using 32 NVIDIA GH200 GPUs on TACC Vista. In both models, SCAPE preserves training stability, validation loss, and downstream task accuracy under 90\% and 99\% sparsity. For Llama-500M, SCAPE reduces end-to-end pre-training wall-clock time by up to 43.3\% while maintaining model quality comparable to dense AdamW and AdamS. For Llama-1.8B, SCAPE achieves up to 3.26$\times$ speedup per step compared to dense AdamS.
arXiv:2607.01679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adversarial attacks on cybersecurity classifiers pose a dual threat: degrading predictions and destabilising the SHAP-based explanations that security analysts rely on to understand and triage alerts. We extend our prior MLP conference study to Random Forest and XGBoost across four tabular security datasets (phishing URLs, UNSW-NB15, NF-ToN-IoT, HIKARI-2021), evaluating five attacks including three black-box methods applicable to non-differentiable tree models. We introduce the Explainability Stability Index (ESI), a scalar metric computed from TreeSHAP attribution drift under adversarial perturbation, reported on the same [0,1] scale as the Robustness Index (RI). A key finding is that gradient-based black-box attacks (ZOO) produce degenerate results against XGBoost (apparent RI ~0.98) due to piecewise-constant prediction surfaces, while score-based Square Attack reveals genuine vulnerability (RI ~0.36). These degenerate perturbations still drive substantial attribution drift: XGBoost ESI ~0.06-0.16 despite near-perfect ZOO robustness, versus 0.14-0.29 for RF, showing that prediction robustness and explanation stability are distinct axes requiring joint measurement. A two-axis framework (gradient dependence, query efficiency) explains the observed attack ranking and yields practical guidance for tree ensemble evaluation. A step-size ablation explains a counterintuitive PGD anomaly on z-score normalised tabular data.
arXiv:2607.01238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in speech synthesis have shifted from phoneme representations to direct grapheme modeling. While phonemes address the one-to-many mapping between text and acoustics, they rely on grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) systems that fail to capture speaker-specific acoustic variation. Prior work demonstrates that grapheme-based models outperform phoneme-based systems at scale, but not in low-resource settings. In this paper, we propose SPARCLE, a speaker-aware grapheme representation model that enriches characters with their precise acoustic realizations. SPARCLE is trained with a contrastive objective to align graphemes with corresponding Wav2Vec2 acoustic representations while conditioned on speaker identity. The resulting model serves as a replacement to G2P systems for downstream text-to-speech (TTS) tasks. We demonstrate that SPARCLE improves generation quality, reducing word error rates by half in extreme low-resource settings compared to standard grapheme-based models.
arXiv:2607.01250v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sociotechnical alignment concerns the social desirability of AI behavior and is thus inherently normative, not merely technical. While NLP research increasingly addresses its technical aspects, it often leaves underspecified what such "social desirability" entails. We argue that this reflects a fundamental gap: the absence of a systematic way to specify how sociotechnical alignment defines, justifies, and evaluates socially desirable AI behavior. To address this gap, we introduce a human-centered framework for specifying sociotechnical alignment. We draw on social-scientific accounts of sociobehavioral desirability to ground the basis for behavioral desirability judgments and use this framework to analyze how alignment is specified in practice. Our systematic literature review identifies recurring patterns: normative concepts grounding desirability judgments are often unspecified or conflated with alignment targets for (desired) system behavior, target populations are underdefined, and design choices are rarely theoretically justified. These findings point to a lack of conceptual specificity that limits cumulative progress. We therefore offer recommendations that link social-scientific frameworks to alignment design choices, supporting more conceptually precise approaches to sociotechnical alignment.
arXiv:2607.01470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical protocol-execution tasks -- checking a lab value, applying a threshold, placing a correctly structured FHIR order -- are natural candidates for RL from world feedback: once clinical SMEs encode decision logic into a verifier, that verifier grades unlimited rollouts without per-episode annotation. But applying RL requires a sound feedback channel and sufficient base capability. We audit MedAgentBench v1/v2, find a 41.7\% silent-finish ceiling that makes inaction the RL dominant strategy, and construct \textbf{MedAgentBench-v3 (MAB-v3)} (508 tasks, 8.9\% ceiling). Training Qwen3-8B exposes two structural barriers: a \emph{capability ceiling} (10/20 task types have 0\% base performance, zero gradient) and a \emph{format-knowledge barrier} (3/20 types require exact clinical codes undiscoverable by exploration). Pure RL reaches 18.2\% pass@1 vs.\ 34.1\% for rule-based SFT; the 15.9~pp gap is attributable entirely to these barriers. A decision/format-knowledge/lookup taxonomy predicts RL learnability and prescribes the fix: SFT to inject codes, RL to learn conditionals.
arXiv:2607.01383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-subject personalized image generation requires the precise rendering of all requested reference identities and their specified interactions based on a guiding prompt. However, state-of-the-art models still struggle with this process, frequently omitting subjects, failing to preserve reference appearances, or misattributing interactions. Furthermore, existing metrics designed primarily for single-subject fidelity cannot reliably capture these errors, suffering severe degradation in ranking separability and failing to align with human preference as the subject count increases. To address this gap, we introduce Multi-subject Interaction Benchmark and Evaluator (MIBE), a unified framework comprising a Multi-subject Interaction Benchmark (MIB) and a Multi-subject Interaction Evaluator (MIE). MIB systematically covers diverse relation types and scene complexities through a decoupled data regime. This consists of a 60K-pair VLM-labeled Silver Set for scalable metric training and a 4K-pair double-blind Human Evaluation Gold Set covering a diverse range of state-of-the-art generators, with the Silver Set reaching 95.1% cross-VLM preference agreement. To demonstrate the utility of this benchmark, we present MIE, a lightweight, reference-conditioned evaluator trained exclusively on the Silver Set with a dual-head ranking and diagnosis objective. MIE exhibits strong cross-generator generalization on the Gold Set, achieving 0.922 overall pairwise accuracy against human preference, including 0.982 on seen generators and 0.884 on unseen generators. By outperforming a broad spectrum of baseline metrics, including CLIP and DINO variants, MIE demonstrates that diagnostic supervision can preserve ranking separability and human alignment where traditional evaluators collapse.
arXiv:2607.01388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step symbolic reasoning is essential for robust financial analysis, yet most benchmarks neglect intermediate reasoning steps. FINCHAIN introduced verifiable Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation but is limited to English. FINESSE-Bench includes a Russian block but relies on multiple-choice questions without step-level supervision. We present RusFinChain, the first Russian-language symbolic benchmark for verifiable CoT reasoning in finance. It spans 17 domains, 172 topics, and comprises 5,280 parameterized examples from executable Python templates, ensuring contamination-free evaluation. Each example includes a gold-standard reasoning chain with intermediate numeric values for automatic verification. We also introduce enhanced metrics: Fuzzy Numeric Alignment and Soft-Attention Alignment. We evaluate 8 open-weight LLMs on a stratified sample, generating 8,100 responses. Results reveal a substantial reasoning gap: models achieve Hard F1 of ~0.65 for step alignment, but only ~29% of final answers are correct. Our fuzzy and soft metrics show stronger correlation with final-answer correctness (Spearman rho approx 0.48) than the original ChainEval (rho approx 0.38-0.46), demonstrating superior diagnostic power. We release dataset, code, and evaluation framework to foster verifiable financial AI for the Russian-speaking community.
arXiv:2607.01936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning causal models from high-dimensional data is a significant challenge, particularly in real-world settings where violations of core assumptions lead to causal identifiability issues. Although massive amounts of prior knowledge are available, and contain valuable causal information, effectively integrating this knowledge into the causal discovery process remains an open problem. We introduce CausalSTeward (CAST), a novel human-in-the-loop framework for interactively assembling large causal models. CausalSteward is a multi-agent collaborative system that tackles high-dimensional causality through a divide-and-conquer approach where large clusters of variables are iteratively partitioned and then separately analyzed. Our framework fuses prior knowledge with a data-driven approach by using tailored tools such as retrieval augmented generation and conditional independence tests. Finally, we use this work to examine the capabilities and limitations of causal reasoning in multi-agent frameworks, and how the human-in-the-loop can contribute to accurate and trustworthy results.
arXiv:2607.01938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulating fast and dynamically moving targets in unstructured 3D environments remains challenging for embodied AI. Existing visual-language-action models and world models struggle with accurate 3D geometry and physically meaningful forecasting. We propose PhysMani, a framework that couples a physics-principled 3D Gaussian world model with a future-aware action policy model. The world model learns a divergence-free Gaussian velocity field via online optimization for fast and physically grounded future dynamics prediction. The policy model integrates the predicted 3D scene future dynamics through a learnable token based cross-attention module. We introduce PhysMani-Bench, a dynamic manipulation benchmark with 16 tasks, and demonstrate a superior success rate over strong baselines in both simulation and real-world robot experiments.
arXiv:2607.01689v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging aims to combine existing single-task solutions into a multi-task solution without additional data-driven fine-tuning.~Most existing approaches achieve this using geometric properties of local solution spaces. However, such geometric views provide limited guidance for scoring how statistically useful each task-specific update direction is across tasks during merging. To address this, we formulate model merging from a new perspective of probabilistic inference under a product-of-experts (PoE) scenario where each single-task solution defines an energy-based expert model (EBM) over the merged parameters. We show that several existing model merging methods arise as special cases of our framework under energy designs that impose implicit Gaussian assumptions on directional residuals between merged and task-specific models. Empirically, we find that these residuals are often heavy-tailed which exposes a mismatch with the imposed light-tailed Gaussian structures. We address this with a heavy-tailed PoE design based on Cauchy experts, which better captures the observed residual behavior while admitting a provably convergent inference procedure. Experiments across multiple tasks and architectures show significant improvements over state-of-the-arts baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/MinhLong210/PoE-EBM-Merging.git.
arXiv:2607.01538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models (LMs) raise an intriguing alternative to vector-based retrieval: conditioning on an in-context corpus and directly generating a relevant answer. However, prior work has largely focused on proprietary systems or the smaller-scale reranking task, leaving corpus-scale in-context retrieval largely unexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic study of in-context retrieval on two scales practical retrievers demand: million-token corpora and length-generalization far beyond training-time sizes. We first introduce BlockSearch, a 0.6B LM retriever whose architectural and training modifications improve over prior LM baselines and length-generalize up to 10 times beyond its training regime. Nevertheless, retrieval still collapses under more extreme extrapolation. We trace this failure to an attention dilution effect: as the corpus grows, irrelevant documents dominate the softmax denominator, reducing the normalized mass on the gold document even when its pre-softmax score stays high. Motivated by this analysis, we introduce length-aware adjustments to the attention softmax and document-level sparse attention. With these modifications, at the million-token scale, our model matches dense retrieval on widely studied benchmarks (e.g, MS MARCO and NQ), while outperforming the concurrent model MSA despite being 7 times smaller. Furthermore, it significantly outperforms dense retrieval on tasks requiring entirely different notions of similarity, such as LIMIT, achieving a 3 times higher score. Together, our results position in-context retrieval a promising alternative to classical retrieval while emphasizing attention control under extreme context growth as a new challenge.
arXiv:2607.01696v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parametrized PDEs with density-valued solutions are often difficult to approximate with classical linear reduced-order models, especially in transport-dominated regimes. We introduce an optimal-transport-based reduced-order modeling that represents each density by the Kantorovich potential transporting a fixed reference density to the target density, and then maps these potentials to transport signatures using a weighted Laplacian associated with the reference measure. This embeds the density-valued solution map in a Hilbert space while preserving control of the induced transport maps and Wasserstein error. We treat the signature map as a continuous matrix indexed by parameters and space, construct a low-rank skeleton decomposition using a maximal-volume criterion, and learn the parameter-to-coefficient map with a neural network for efficient non-intrusive online evaluation. The reconstructed solution is obtained by pushing forward the reference density, so mass preservation is built into the method. We prove a mean-squared Wasserstein error bound separating low-rank approximation, discretization, sampling, and learning errors, and demonstrate the method on a two-dimensional continuity equation, where transport signatures yield substantially lower-rank structure than the original density snapshots.
arXiv:2607.01965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural TTS systems can sound natural across languages, but naturalness does not guarantee the preservation of sound contrasts that distinguish words from their grammatical forms. Standard metrics like MOS do not test for this. We propose a classifier-based framework that audits TTS output against language-specific phonological patterns using human speech as a benchmark. Testing Assamese advanced tongue root (ATR) vowel harmony with Meta's MMS TTS, we show that a classifier trained on human speech transfers to synthesized speech with minimal loss. The faithfulness audit reveals that [+ATR] mid vowels are realized as [-ATR] in 1/3 tokens despite an underlying [+ATR] specification, a bias absent in human speech. At the word level, predicted ATR labels classify harmony more accurately than transcription labels, indicating a gap between intended and produced phonology. The framework offers task-specific diagnostics and generalizes to other phonological contrasts with measurable acoustic cues.
arXiv:2607.01966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-voltage load forecasting is an important component in current and future energy systems with a high degree of electrification and decentralized generation. However, current forecasting methods require significant manual effort, often lack uncertainty estimation and proper peak prediction, and they are often not adequately evaluated in terms of grid requirements. In the present study, we provide an extensive evaluation of short-term net load forecasts of 200 real-world low-voltage feeders with a focus on the rapidly evolving time series foundation models. Our study compares Chronos-Bolt, Chronos-2 and TabPFN-TS to six baseline models and demonstrates superior performance, in particular for Chronos-2. An ablation study, in which weather covariates are omitted, shows that time series foundation models adapt to increased uncertainty, despite the importance of weather information. A novel application-oriented metric links the model's forecasting capabilities in peak prediction to the trade-off in grid asset planning and operation between cost reduction and minimizing the risk of failure.