NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Agreement Is Not Alignment: Divergent Moral Grounds in Human and LLM Ethical Judgments
arXiv:2608.12368v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agreement with human judgments is a common proxy for evaluating the alignment of large language models (LLMs). Yet agreement in final labels does not show that human annotators and models rely on the same moral grounds. Two agents may reach the same judgment while appealing to different principles, contextual assumptions, or interpretations of the situation.
We test this distinction using a curated 500-item ETHICS-derived benchmark spanning five domains of moral judgment, with new human annotator and LLM annotations of both final labels and supporting rationales. Across frontier and open model families, agreement with human annotator majority labels is often high. However, rationale-level analysis reveals systematic divergence in the moral grounds expressed by human annotators and models. In particular, models redistribute attention across categories such as harm, respect, promise-keeping, justice, desert, and excuse relevance, even when their final labels match the human annotator majority.
Our results show that agreement should not be treated as equivalent to alignment. Label-based evaluation can therefore be misleadingly reassuring unless complemented by analysis of the reasons, principles, and moral priorities expressed in model judgments.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
MLOps/Systems • Score 85
@skills: Attention is all you have
arXiv:2608.12610v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: There are 56,804 public agent skills today, and teams write many more privately. The dominant delivery model is installation: once installed, a skill's description remains in the system prompt, competing for fewer than 100 reliable trigger slots. This leaves the long tail with no practical path to use and forces teams' own playbooks to compete for the same scarce space. We observe that installation bundles three separable functions: content, persistence, and automatic triggering. Only the last requires prompt residency. We therefore propose @skills, an open protocol that separates them. A path addresses any skill, subtree, or collection, and reading a skill is sufficient to use it, so nothing is installed or made resident. The operation vendors a copy at the same path into a project's Git-tracked tree for adaptation and ownership. The operation adds one .gitignore-style line, the only element that costs prompt residency. A directory is a menu, making bundles ordinary directories rather than all-or-nothing units. The protocol requires no manifest, lockfile, or registration, and SKILL.md remains unchanged. @skills is additive, ships as an installable package, and turns any agent that can read files and run commands into a client through a single instruction file. Its open specification is at https://github.com/SylphAI-Inc/atskills and it is implemented in the AdaL CLI at https://adalagent.ai . Because paths address skills well but cannot find them, the protocol is paired with a free hub at https://atskills.one for corpus-wide search and ranking, repository-free hosting, private and team collections, and one-screen authoring. The hub is optional: gh: and local paths resolve without it, and indexed GitHub skills retain their gh: identities. Install less, use more.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Research Assistant: AstraZeneca's Agentic System for R&D
arXiv:2608.12395v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We describe Research Assistant, an internal LLM-based system developed at AstraZeneca to help scientists and clinicians explore biomedical questions across a broad range of data sources. The system provides a chat-style interface that brings together evidence from scientific literature, knowledge graphs, chemistry, clinical trials, safety resources, expression data, and internal experimental systems. It supports both a fast mode for direct question answering and a multi-step mode for more complex research tasks. Responses are grounded in retrieved evidence and linked back to the original sources, allowing users to review and further explore the underlying data. In this technical note, we outline the system architecture, the main design choices behind the product, and lessons learned from deploying it at scale to support day-to-day R&D workflows across AstraZeneca.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Evaluation/Benchmarks • Score 85
CAS: A Causal Attribution Score for Local and Global Explainable Artificial Intelligence
arXiv:2608.12555v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Predictive explanation methods attribute a model output; they do not, by themselves, attribute an intervention effect on the real-world outcome. We introduce the Causal Attribution Score (CAS), a compact score architecture for causal explanation. CAS starts from an identified interventional coalition game, allocates the joint intervention contrast with causal Shapley contributions, and converts those raw outcome-scale effects into Local CAS, Signed Local CAS, and two complementary Global CAS summaries. The innovation is not a new Shapley formula, but a local-to-global causal reporting layer with an explicit intervention target. In the known-truth benchmark, eight repeated primary-interaction simulations (n = 2,200 each, three actions) gave mean Local CAS MAE of 0.107 for coalition-aware CAS, compared with 0.173 for one-at-a-time normalisation and 0.213 for a global normalised absolute ATE vector. The paired advantage over one-at-a-time normalisation increased from -0.003 under additivity to 0.091 under strong interactions. On both empirical DoubleML datasets, 401(k) eligibility/net financial assets (n = 9,915) and Pennsylvania reemployment bonus/unemployment duration (n = 5,099), predictive SHAP/TreeSHAP rankings differed materially from Feature-CAS rankings of treatment-effect modifiers. In Pennsylvania, dep1 (exactly one dependent) moved from predictive global rank 13 to Feature-CAS rank 2 and was the leading local Feature-CAS modifier. These results isolate the added value of separating what predicts the outcome from what explains heterogeneity in an estimated causal effect.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Privacy/Security/Fairness • Score 85
Position: The Alignment Community is Unintentionally Building a Censor's Toolkit
arXiv:2608.12346v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This position paper argues that modern AI alignment methods - originally designed to prevent harmful output - are dual-use technologies that may easily be misused by malicious actors for censorship and manipulation. By mapping current alignment techniques to the possibility and actual cases of misuse, we show that the quest for a "perfectly aligned" model inadvertently also provides malicious actors with an ever-improving tool for informational dominance. We need to discuss this dual-use potential now, as its risk is exacerbated by rapid user adoption of AI as information provider, economic power asymmetries, and a political landscape that increasingly shifts towards authoritarianism. We conclude by urging the community to consider the intentional misuse of AI alignment mechanisms and propose mitigation strategies to safeguard against this dual-use potential.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Position: We Need Practical AI Alignment Methods to Mirror Human Reasoning
arXiv:2608.12372v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: AI systems are increasingly employed as decision aids, decision delegates, or autonomous decision-makers. This position paper argues that in many settings, particularly high-stakes decision-making, we need accurate cognitively-aligned AI systems that reason similarly to their users, and faithfully communicate their reasoning. We review evidence that cognitive alignment improves understandability and trustworthiness, and provide new survey data showing that many users find cognitive alignment "essential" when an AI's rationale for a judgment or action is important to them. We outline the gaps between existing alignment methods and what is needed to achieve cognitive alignment, and present a research agenda to address these gaps. We argue that cognitive misalignment represents a likely impediment to AI adoption in many envisioned applications, and that addressing it is important for creating AI systems on which users are both willing and justified to rely.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Dual-Flow Transformers: Decoupling the Primary Prefill Path from Additional Decode Computation
arXiv:2608.12385v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As large language models serve more requests, cumulative inference cost is becoming increasingly important relative to one-time training cost. The two inference phases stress hardware differently: prompt prefill is parallel and typically compute-bound, whereas autoregressive decode is sequential and often memory-bandwidth-bound. Conventional width or depth scaling increases both costs together because every added layer is evaluated in both phases. We ask whether additional learned computation can instead be allocated to continuation prediction while preserving the prompt-wide primary computation and a single persistent key-value (KV) cache. We introduce the Dual-Flow Transformer. Its primary flow is a complete causal language model that processes the prompt and writes the KV cache. The auxiliary flow is omitted during prompt processing and activated only from the final prompt position onward, adding continuation-prediction computation without writing persistent state or influencing the primary flow. The two flows share major attention, MLP, and output matrices, while using separate token embeddings and lightweight coupling. Sharing weights and the primary cache also creates opportunities to reuse loaded weights and cached keys and values during grouped execution. Across matched-token comparisons, Dual-Flow achieves lower validation loss across architectures and data configurations. In MoE models, the separation makes primary and auxiliary expert fan-outs independent controls over prompt cost, continuation cost, and predictive quality. We study two regimes: increasing decode computation at fixed prefill expert computation, and reallocating a fixed decode expert budget between the two flows. These experiments expose a prefill-decode-quality trade-off and demonstrate the potential of phase-specific expert allocation.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
MLOps/Systems • Score 85
Governed Persistent Memory: Source-Bound State Semantics and Fail-Closed Release for Long-Horizon Agents
arXiv:2608.12476v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-term agent memory is usually treated as select--store--retrieve, but retrieval does not decide whether contradictory, superseded, retracted, deleted, or stale records may support an outgoing claim. We introduce Governed Persistent Memory (GPM), an auditable bitemporal state-transition model with source-bound admission, derived lifecycle state, current public barriers, and fail-closed structured release. Five executable clauses cover ledger integrity, source binding, conflict isolation, non-revival after retraction or deletion, and exact claim closure over a fresh view at one verified head.
On a prespecified hash-frozen 3,600-case GPM-ReleaseBench, GPM matches all complete outcomes; the strongest of three intentionally simple complete policies matches 1,800/3,600 and makes unmatched releases on 50% of violation cases. A separate sealed end-to-end service evaluation exercises real ingestion and release across eight query families. In its publicly disclosed V3 arm, the governed lane is correct on 2,400/2,400 clusters versus 600/2,400 for ungoverned local Qwen2.5-7B; it repairs all 1,800 baseline failures with no regression (one-sided 95% lower bounds 99.875% and 99.834%). A later V5 reseal over Chinese- and English-command arms, with generation-date pinning and no post-freeze reducer amendment, again obtains 2,400/2,400 per arm. A production-code-independent finite model explores 331,776 semantic and 1,990,656 query states without a full-contract counterexample, and a 100,000-trace three-engine differential yields zero mismatches.
These are bounded contract and implementation results, not open-world model accuracy or evidence of world truth. Governed answers in the sealed service evaluation are deterministic service outputs; the 7B result is the ungoverned comparison, not a claim that a language model itself became perfectly accurate.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Applications • Score 92
Auditable agentic AI for evidence-grounded thyroid ultrasound diagnosis and reporting
arXiv:2608.12590v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Thyroid ultrasound diagnosis requires coordinated lesion localization, measurement, risk stratification and reporting, yet most AI systems address these tasks in isolation and provide limited support for clinical review. We present ThyroidXAgent, a clinician-interactive agentic AI system that coordinates specialized diagnostic tools and stores their outputs as an auditable case-level evidence record. The system was developed using OpenThyroidDB, a multicentre, multitask resource integrating approximately 0.3 million ultrasound images and 24,000 paired reports, and was evaluated on 28,458 non-overlapping test cases, including 8,721 cases from 35 centres in the private NHC-MISD-TUS cohort. Across heterogeneous datasets, ThyroidXAgent achieved a mean Dice score of 87.21 percent for nodule segmentation and a mean AUROC of 0.9466 for benign-malignant classification. The same workflow supported lymph-node metastasis prediction and follicular versus papillary thyroid carcinoma classification, with AUROCs of 0.864 and 0.805, respectively. For report generation, evidence-grounded assembly outperformed multimodal language-model baselines across three cohorts. ThyClinScore, a lesion-level clinical semantic metric introduced here, showed the strongest correlation with a location-aware language-model judge. ThyroidXAgent improved physician classification accuracy, increased report diagnostic consistency from 70.3 percent to 86.2 percent, and reduced segmentation and reporting time by 35.9 percent and 27.4 percent, respectively. These findings support auditable, clinician-correctable agentic AI for thyroid ultrasound diagnosis and reporting.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
SteerBench-Work: A Benchmark for Agent Steering at Action Boundaries
arXiv:2608.12654v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-running LLM agents act through tools, and a single step can send an email, merge a pull request, or wire a payment. The steering decision is the pre-commit choice at that boundary: proceed, or hold for human or policy review. We introduce SteerBench-Work, an incident-anchored, bidirectional benchmark for that decision in workplace agents across developer operations, customer service, finance, legal, medical, HR, and security.
Release v2026-05 contains 106 scenarios anchored in public incidents, paired evidence-reversed mirrors, and calibration controls, with labels split nearly evenly between proceed and hold so the two error directions get near-identical numbers of chances. A model sees the proposed action and the available evidence, returns a gate decision, and is scored on whether it crosses or holds the boundary correctly. Across 30 model conditions the failures run almost entirely in one direction: models wrongly hold authorized, evidence-cleared work on 28.1% of opportunities and wrongly allow unsafe work on 1.0%. The hardest cases are risk-resolved commits, where signed or structured evidence has already cleared a real risk trigger, and models score markedly worse on evidence-reversed mirrors of famous incidents (63.8%) than on the incidents themselves (98.5%). General capability is not the same as steering calibration: higher-capability models often over-refuse at the commit boundary, and more reasoning can repair a weak gate while leaving a calibrated one flat. The public leaderboard is at steerbench.com.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Applications • Score 75
Which Site, and When: A Free-Satellite-Data Test of Himalayan Glacial Lake Bursts, Landslides, and Ice Floods
arXiv:2608.12422v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Two free satellite signals carry real information about glacial-lake outburst risk in the Nepal Himalaya: radar interferometry sees a moraine dam slowly sagging, and satellite weather marks the weeks when a primed lake is under stress. A companion feasibility study found that deformation indicates which lake is destabilizing and weather indicates when it is at risk, but proposed no predictive model. To address this gap, we propose and evaluate models that predict which site is susceptible and when a trigger arrives. We test three related hazards on free data alone: large moraine- and ice-dammed bursts, rainfall-triggered landslides, and smaller floods from ponds on and around a glacier. Each hazard gets two questions, never blended. Using 589 dated outbursts from HMAGLOFDB and several thousand catalogued landslides, we match each event against similar but unfailed sites, and hold every model to a strong simple baseline under spatial cross-validation that withholds whole map tiles, so no model succeeds by recognising a trained-on neighbourhood. Antecedent weather times the trigger at ROC 0.73 for big bursts, 0.83 for landslides, and 0.82 for small floods. Terrain ranks susceptibility only in part: scored naively it appears near 0.9, largely because catalogued failures cluster in wetter ranges; matched against comparable nearby sites the honest figures are 0.76, 0.71, and 0.54 (no better than chance). The burst signal holds within single regions, reaching 0.89 in Nepal alone. Five deep-learning models do not decisively beat a simple gradient-boosted baseline. Three score marginally higher on landslides, a hint too small to confirm. For the lake hazards the baseline wins outright, reproduced by a three-rule decision tree on ruggedness and monsoon rainfall. We close with a ranked Nepal watchlist, a prioritisation aid, not a prediction, and note where free data reaches its limits.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Trie Automata for Constrained Decoding over Large Finite Sets
arXiv:2608.12574v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models increasingly need to generate structured outputs that conform to predefined schemas, with one common constraint being selection from a finite set of valid strings. Current constrained decoding systems handle this through general-purpose grammar compilation, which becomes prohibitively slow as the number of valid values grows into the thousands, a cardinality wall. We introduce the trie automaton, a specialized mechanism that exploits finite-set structure (shared prefixes, bounded depth, known cardinality) via Aho-Corasick multi-pattern matching to precompute per-node token masks. The trie achieves 7X faster per-step valid-token computation (0.65 us vs. 5.8 us) compared to XGrammar, one of the primary backends in vLLM and SGLang, and 2--6.5X faster compilation at K >= 300. Because precomputed masks enable a stateless serving path that bypasses the guided decoding pipeline, this advantage compounds in batch serving: end-to-end vLLM throughput reaches 219 req/s vs. XGrammar's 7.5 req/s at batch size 256 (29X). The 29X combines the algorithmic speedup with integration-path savings that only precomputed masks can unlock. Across seven tokenizer families (32K--262K vocabulary), the trie maintains sub-100ms compilation up to K = 10,000 and flat per-step cost regardless of set size, while guaranteeing 100% output validity.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
$\varepsilon$-MemEvo: Adaptive Cross-Task Memory Transfer for LLM Program Evolution
arXiv:2608.12522v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM-based program evolution systems such as FunSearch and AlphaEvolve have shown strong ability to discover novel algorithms, but typically optimize each task in isolation, discarding search experience after completion. We introduce $\varepsilon$-MemEvo, a framework for cross-task knowledge transfer in LLM program evolution. $\varepsilon$-MemEvo stores prior experience as task-agnostic tactic memories: compact natural-language summaries of successful algorithmic strategies rather than raw code, enabling transfer across tasks with different APIs and evaluators. To avoid negative transfer from semantically mismatched memories, $\varepsilon$-MemEvo uses an adaptive injection gate that decides whether retrieved memories should be injected, and at what intensity. We evaluate $\varepsilon$-MemEvo on 8 diverse optimization benchmarks spanning mathematical optimization and systems engineering, using a content-level Leave-One-Out protocol that excludes target-task memory entries. On the primary GPT-5 backbone, $\varepsilon$-MemEvo improves AUCC over AdaEvolve on all 8 tasks, with a mean relative gain of +8.7%, and improves early-stage convergence by +9.4% on average. Ablations show that naive memory injection can fail catastrophically, while adaptive gating remains safe across all five ablation tasks. The data-updated posterior is interpretable in observed states: it favors skip during improving search and shifts from skip to hint across early and late plateaus. These gains incur less than 1% computational overhead.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Evaluation/Benchmarks • Score 85
Jagged Judges: Epistemic Stability Under Silence, Pressure, and Persistence
arXiv:2608.12645v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM judges have become central infrastructure for model evaluations, online grading, and reward modeling. Judges are typically validated by accuracy on golden data, but accuracy says little about whether they are stable under re-prompting, challenge, or sustained pushback. We introduce the \emph{Wiggle Framework}, a unified stress test for epistemic stability in LLM judges. The framework decomposes judge robustness along three dimensions: Mechanical Consistency (stability under re-prompting and reframing), Single-turn Conviction (stability under a single challenge), and Multi-turn Persistence (stability under sustained or adaptive pressure). We use the framework to study 9 frontier models across 14 judging tasks spanning safety, toxicity, AI writing detection, and political-response evaluation. Every model exhibits substantial wiggle as a judge --- flipping verdicts 25--71\% of the time under static pushback, and 62--91\% with an adversarial LLM persuader. Critically, we find that pressure that succeeds in changing a judge's verdict is almost always net-corrupting with respect to ground truth. Beyond the framework itself, we identify baseline jury majority strength as the most effective single-shot signal for anticipating which items wiggle. Taken together, this is the first apples-to-apples cross-dataset comparison of mechanical, conformity, and persuadability tests in a judging context.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 88
Reasoning Jury: Multi-Model Consensus for Evaluating Reasoning Traces
arXiv:2608.12585v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Improving reasoning LLMs requires the ability to judge the quality of long reasoning traces for effective reasoning data curation, strong training signals during reinforcement learning, and an in-depth understanding of reasoning behaviors during model performance evaluation. Additionally, surfacing reasoning mistakes that the model makes would enable improving the model's performance at runtime through providing feedback. Due to the difficulty of this complex task on long reasoning traces, single-model judges (even frontier models) do not do well at identifying reasoning defects. Additionally, leveraging frontier models during online training of reasoning LLMs is generally prohibited due to guardrails in terms of use. In this work, we introduce Reasoning Jury, a system that replaces the single judge with a jury of LLMs and a moderated consensus mechanism, to improve the fidelity of judgments for identifying reasoning defects. In reasoning jury, defects of a reasoning trace and their severity are surfaced through a deliberation where a moderator conducts a discussion amongst the jury where the jurors critique each other's judgments and get to modify their initial votes. The moderator derives a consensus through deliberation amongst jurors or consolidation of judgements. We show that Reasoning Jury with a jury of open-weight models (e.g., gpt-oss-120b) is able to significantly outperform frontier models (opus-4.6, sonnet-4.6, and gemini-3.1-pro) at correctly identifying reasoning defects. Besides accuracy performance improvements, the aggregated cost of the jury (initial verdicts, deliberations, consolidation, etc.) is a fraction (8 to 15%) of the cost of running frontier models in LLM-as-a-judge setup. We also show how these judgements can be leveraged to understand failure modes of reasoning LLMs on benchmarks, which allows much deeper understanding of a model's performance.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialogues
arXiv:2608.12599v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multi-turn dialogues let users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia. No existing instrument measures this influence per clause, predicts it before delivery, or repairs it under matched budgets. \sysname{} closes the three gaps through the model API alone: a contract ledger pairs every constraint with an executable checker, records revocations as tombstones, and compiles the net constraint state ahead of time into a single specification; a sequential ablation probe measures per-clause adherence and incremental behavioral effect; a repair ladder operates under token- and attempt-matched budgets. On \dataname{} (\NTasks{} HumanEval tasks, \NClauses{} verified checkers), relapse at an 8B operating point climbs from \ScaleDelayedMTwo{} to \ScaleDelayedMEight{} as constraint load grows, while stronger models sit at floor. Under matched checkers, model, and budget, ahead-of-time compilation significantly reduces relapse against a no-ledger verifier-retry baseline (\RestoreDiff{}, 95\% CI \RestoreDiffCI{}, $p$ \RestoreDiffP{}); adaptive ladder interventions stacked on top add no detectable gain (95\% confidence excludes gains $\geq$ \LadderExcludedGain{}). The probe predicts relapse before delivery (AUROC \AurocPrimary{}); a one-sentence tombstone note recovers about a third of the compilation effect and survives a placebo control. At \CostDeliveryFactor{} delivery overhead and \CostTotalHedged{} of API compute for every result, revocation failure becomes a measurable, predictable, and repairable property of dialogue state rather than an invisible one.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
MLOps/Systems • Score 85
Designing AI Pipelines for Decision-Ready ITSM Intelligence
arXiv:2608.12670v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: IT service management (ITSM) systems accumulate large volumes of heterogeneous ticket data that are difficult for sales and executive stakeholders to convert into actionable intelligence. This paper presents a sociotechnical AI pipeline, designed and evaluated following design science research principles, that transforms raw ITSM exports into a multilevel decision-support artifact. The pipeline combines LLM-based schema normalization, HDBSCAN sub-topic clustering, and hierarchical agglomerative clustering to generate executive-facing Main-topics and granular Sub-topics. A stakeholder evaluation across six artifacts and five raters from Sales Engineering and customer success roles shows that all four decision-support metrics, interpretability, actionability, trust, and likelihood of use, on average exceed 4.0 out of 5.0, with trust as the most consistent signal. The findings position ITSM analytics as an Information Systems (IS) problem of transformation, abstraction, and human-centered design.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Evaluation/Benchmarks • Score 85
DiG-bench: Discovery in Games
arXiv:2608.12593v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Discovery---formulating novel generalizations---is a central part of the scientific process. Despite its importance, there is a gap in the current AI benchmark landscape, with few benchmarks directly probing the capacity for discovering new knowledge with experimentation in controlled environments where the objective is unknown. To address this gap, we release a new benchmark: DiG-bench (Discovery in Games). DiG-bench consists of a set of 70 independent games. Each game is encoded as a short string and has unique transformation rules that must be discovered through interaction and experimentation. The levels of the game present a series of challenges to test whether the rules have been discovered, where the win conditions for each level are also unknown. We provide games at seven tiers of difficulty for AI agents. The lowest tier is routinely solvable by multiple models, while the highest tier challenges the best models in agentic harnesses. All 70 games were solved by at least one human on first attempt. A subset of 21 games is released publicly, and the remainder is held private for secure evaluation.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Theory/Optimization • Score 85
General Probabilities of Causation with Causal Knowledge
arXiv:2608.12657v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Probabilities of causation (PoCs) characterize individual causal responses that cannot be directly observed and therefore generally require partial identification. Tian and Pearl first derived theoretically sharp bounds for binary PoCs, including the probability of necessity (PN), the probability of sufficiency (PS), and the probability of necessity and sufficiency (PNS). Mueller et al. subsequently tightened the bounds for binary PNS by incorporating causal information encoded in covariates and mediators. More recently, Li and Pearl, as well as Shu et al., extended PoCs to multivalued settings and derived corresponding theoretical bounds. These developments naturally raise the question of whether additional causal knowledge can further tighten the bounds in multivalued settings. This paper addresses this question by deriving tighter bounds for multivalued PoCs through the incorporation of causal information encoded in covariates and mediators. We illustrate the theoretical results with toy examples, while simulation studies further demonstrate that the proposed bounds are tighter than existing nonbinary bounds.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
RL • Score 85
Multi-AUV Ad-hoc network-based Target Tracking: A Value Gradient Guidance Multi-Agent Diffusion Reinforcement Learning Approach
arXiv:2608.12436v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multi-AUV ad-hoc network-based target tracking requires networked autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to cooperatively track maneuvering targets under constrained acoustic communication, dynamic topology, and uncertain ocean disturbances. Although multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables decentralized coordination through centralized training, existing methods suffer from high-dimensional joint state-action modeling, noise-sensitive policy generation, leading to unstable training and degraded tracking. To address these issues, we propose VGG-MADiffRL, a value-gradient-guided multi-agent diffusion RL algorithm, and MDCA, a diffusion?based hierarchical control architecture. Leveraging underwater mission characteristics, we model sonar detection mechanisms and ocean current disturbances, formulating cooperative tracking for multi-AUV ad-hoc networks as an MDP. The proposed MDCA constitutes a three-tier closed-loop control framework: a global intelligent control layer, a local online training layer, and a physical action execution layer. This structure enables synergistic optimization across task allocation, local decision processes, and execution feedback. Within MDCA, the local online training layer is the policy learning framework; VGG-MADiffRL builds on diffusion policies and incorporates value gradients to guide action generation in the reverse denoising process, steering the generated actions towards higher expected returns. It employs twin value networks with joint optimization and soft target updates to mitigate overestimation and training oscillations, promoting more stable convergence. Experimental results show that VGG-MADiffRL consistently achieves faster convergence, higher tracking accuracy, and smoother training dynamics in cooperative tracking scenarios, validating its effectiveness and practical engineering value in dynamic underwater settings.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
MindMemOS: A Portable and Self-Evolving Memory Operating Layer for AI Agents
arXiv:2608.12428v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Memory is a core component of AI agents, enabling them to accumulate experience, maintain personalization, and adapt over long-term interactions. However, existing memory systems often remain fixed after development, limiting their ability to adapt their memory models, organization strategies, and procedural knowledge through continued use. We present MindMemOS, a portable and self-evolving memory operating layer that organizes open-world information using a unified entity property timestructure. MindMemOS supports scenario-adaptive memory modeling, higher-order pattern discovery, autonomous memory refinement, and continuous skill evolution. Its MindMemEvolve algorithm employs validation-driven evolutionary search to optimize memory schemas for target scenarios, whiledreaming consolidates accumulated memories by merging redundant records and resolving conflicts. In addition, implicit corrective feedback serves as a human-in-the-loop signal for identifying and revising potentially inaccurate or misaligned memories. Its MindSkillEvolve algorithm further transforms agent execution trajectories into reusable and progressively refined skills. MindMemOS achieves 94.03% accuracy on LOCOMO and 70.63% on PersonaMem. MindSkillEvolve improves SpreadsheetBench success by 9.2 percentage points over the initial-skill baseline.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Learning to Adapt Cross-Domain Preferences via Meta-LoRA for LLM Personalization
arXiv:2608.12389v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Cross-domain zero- or few-shot personalization aims to generate user-preferred responses in unseen conversational domains from only a handful of target-domain interactions. Existing adaptation methods struggle to calibrate update magnitude under sparse evidence and thus overfit, whereas history-transfer methods often entangle user preferences with source-domain artifacts, yielding unreliable personalization priors and negative transfer. To calibrate adaptation to evidence quality, we propose PAC-Bayes-regularized Meta-LoRA, which uses a meta-learned LoRA initialization as both the adaptation start and prior center, while adjusting update strength according to support-set size and predictive uncertainty. This limits overfitting under sparse or ambiguous evidence while permitting stronger personalization as evidence grows. Controlled adaptation alone does not determine which preferences should transfer across domains or how they should be expressed. We therefore functionally decompose personalization priors into user and domain components, using a human-readable prompt for stable preferences and topology-preserving soft tokens for domain-specific hidden-space conditioning. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and personalization tasks show consistent gains over strong baselines. On HiCUPID, our method reduces cross-domain win-rate degradation by 47.9% relative to the best competing baseline and improves win rate by 110.2% under unseen-user cold start.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Large Language Models Can Follow Instructions, But Not Many at Once: Phase Transitions in Compositional Constraint Satisfaction
arXiv:2608.12426v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in settings that require simultaneous adherence to multiple explicit constraints - reasoning structure, safety boundaries, output schemas. Individual constraints are handled proficiently, but the compositional regime, where many must hold jointly, remains poorly characterized: how rapidly does performance degrade, what governs the degradation, and can the collapse be mitigated? We introduce Constraint Saturation Evaluation (CSE), a procedurally generated benchmark that systematically varies the number of simultaneous constraints (k), with every constraint scored by a deterministic, rule-based verifier and zero LLM-judge involvement: 15 models, 36 constraint types, 369,753 checks at k=1-12. Three findings emerge. First, per-constraint pass rate decays gradually and predictably, while the chance of satisfying all k constraints collapses - a model passing individual constraints at ~41% at k=8 succeeds on all eight just 5.7% of the time. Second, constraints do not degrade equally: structural constraints lose 2x more baseline capability per added constraint than lexical ones, ordered by a comprehension-maintenance gap that separates constraints requiring sustained tracking from binary decisions immune to composition. Third, failures are nearly independent, which is what makes the accumulation multiplicative; the residual coupling that does exist tracks shared output features rather than pairwise interference - a wrong sentence count fails every constraint that reads it. Reliable instruction following breaks down beyond 5-6 simultaneous constraints: probe-level success falls below 50% at 7 constraints for the strongest model, and at 3 or fewer for 12 of 15.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Don't Want Your LLM to Recommend Nuclear Strike? Try Asking It in Japanese
arXiv:2608.12373v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used in strategic and advisory contexts, yet their safety alignment is typically evaluated in English only. We test nine models from six providers and ask whether the language of a prompt can change a model's decision in a high-stakes scenario. We use single-turn game-theoretic vignettes in which a model advises a nuclear-armed nation on whether to strike a defenseless opponent. The prompt is intentionally amoral and strategically identical across languages. We find that Japanese prompts reduce launch rates in the Claude model family: Claude Sonnet 4.6 drops from 40% to 0% in scenarios where the strike is unnecessary and from 93% to 17% in contested scenarios, with minimal effect when the strike is strategically rational. The effect extends to Gemini Pro 3.1 (53% to 13%). A cross-language experiment isolates the mechanism: when instructed to reason in Japanese in an English prompt, launch rates drop from 93% to 37%. It is the language the model is asked to reason in, not the language of the input, that drives the effect. When reasoning in Japanese, models spontaneously generate moral vocabulary (''moral cost'', ''millions of lives'') that is entirely absent from the prompt. Five other models show no language effect, but they launch in nearly every condition regardless of language. The effect requires a model that already hesitates in English. These results show that LLM safety behavior is language-dependent, and that evaluating in English alone can miss both risks and safeguards encoded in other languages.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Theory/Optimization • Score 85
Federated Compositional Muon Optimizer for Matrix-Wise Models
arXiv:2608.12710v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Muon, a more recently developed optimizer, is useful for matrix-wise models in AI areas. Although many works have studied Muon and its variants, these methods are still not particularly well-suited for hierarchical structured problems. To fill this gap, we propose an effective federated compositional Muon (FedCoMuon) optimizer to solve distributed matrix-wise compositional optimization problems. Specifically, our FedCoMuon optimizer builds on compositional gradient tracking and orthogonalized momentum. Moreover, we propose a variance reduced variant of FedCoMuon (FedCoMuon-VR) based on a momentum-based variance reduced technique. In theory, we analyze the convergence properties of our algorithms under the non-i.i.d. and non-convex settings. In particular, we prove that our FedCoMuon-VR obtains a lower sample complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary solution than the existing FedMuon algorithms. Extensive numerical experiments on robust federated learning and task-distributed risk-sensitive meta learning show that our proposed methods are competitive with existing compositional baselines and achieve the best reported accuracy in several settings.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
RL • Score 85
Beyond Outcome Rewards: Step-Level Self-Distilled Policy Optimization for Deep Search Agents
arXiv:2608.12764v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Deep search agents operate over trajectories spanning dozens of steps, yet standard reinforcement learning provides only a single outcome reward per trajectory, which is far too sparse for effective credit assignment. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) addresses this by using the model's own logits as dense token-level teachers, but extending it to search agents introduces a fundamental tension: the teacher, having access to privileged information such as the correct answer, produces a distribution that differs systematically from the student's exploration-based reasoning, and naive distillation causes the student to inherit this information asymmetry rather than learn better search strategies. We resolve this tension through two contributions. First, we construct Evidence Anchors, which are concise, step-level evidence snippets extracted from the web, as privileged information that captures key reasoning steps without revealing the entire answer path. Second, we propose Step-Level Self-Distilled Policy Optimization (SSPO), which converts teacher-student disagreement into step-level advantage weights within GRPO, applied exclusively to incorrect trajectories. This design decouples what to update from how much to update: the outcome reward determines the direction of policy change, while the teacher modulates its magnitude at each step. Correct trajectories are left untouched, preserving their diversity. On Qwen3-8B, SSPO consistently outperforms GRPO across BrowseComp, GAIA, and FRAMES, surpassing or matching GRPO trained with twice as many gradient steps while adding only about 5 percent overhead per step from a single additional forward pass.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
Theory/Optimization • Score 85
Sustaining Plasticity via Learnable Wavelet Activations in Continual Learning
arXiv:2608.12874v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Plasticity loss has emerged as a critical challenge in continual learning that significantly hinders the acquisition of sequential tasks. While optimizing activation designs offers a potential solution, current fixed-form functions suffer from an inherent spectral bias towards low-frequency variations, whereas learnable variants permit unconstrained updates that induce catastrophic forgetting. To address these limitations, we propose a novel learnable wavelet activation that decomposes the activation function into low-frequency and high-frequency components to explicitly counter spectral bias. Furthermore, we employ dynamic wavelet injection to adaptively enhance plasticity for new tasks, alongside a regularization strategy to ensure the stability of previous learned knowledge. Theoretically, we provide rigorous mathematical guarantees for the proposed framework, proving the structural necessity of the hybrid wavelet architecture for efficient $L^2$ approximation and demonstrating that the decoupled learning rate mechanism successfully restores network plasticity for high-frequency information. Additionally, we provide a formal derivation of the loss-driven injection trigger mechanism to precisely guide the injection. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach maintains superior trainability and generalization throughout the learning process and achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse continual learning benchmarks.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
RL • Score 85
Towards Socially Compliant Navigation in Deep Reinforcement Learning via Proxemics-Based Reward Modeling
arXiv:2608.12917v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Developing effective robot navigation methods in crowded environments is essential for real-world applications. Although recent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have improved navigation performance in crowded environments, they often focus primarily on task-centric objectives and underrepresent social compliance objectives. In this paper, we introduce a novel proxemics-based reward formulation for DRL social navigation that provides a dense, interpretable social learning signal while maintaining navigation efficiency. Our approach models each human's personal space as a radial Gaussian-mixture field derived from Hall's proxemics theory and computes a robot-centric local cost over the robot's field of view. We integrate the proposed reward into established DRL navigation methods and evaluate it in simulation across multiple crowd scenarios, reward baselines, and crowd densities using both navigation metrics and social metrics. Results show that the proposed reward consistently improves social metrics in simulation while maintaining competitive navigation performance relative to the compared reward models.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
Multimodal • Score 85
CardioState-JEPA: Delay-Aware Cross-Modal Learning of a Shared Cardiac Representation
arXiv:2608.12944v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG), photoplethysmography (PPG), and phonocardiography (PCG) provide complementary views of the same cardiac cycle, yet existing cardiac foundation models are trained for a single sensing modality, leaving the shared physiology across sensors unexploited. We introduce CardioState-JEPA, a cardiac foundation model to learn a single shared representation jointly across ECG, PPG, and PCG, built on a physiology-aware joint-embedding predictive architecture. The model maps heterogeneous waveforms into a common token space, processes them with a single shared Transformer encoder, and learns by predicting masked latent cardiac states, placing the pretraining target on shared physiology rather than sensor-specific waveform appearance. To handle the temporal offsets between electrical, mechanical, and hemodynamic events, cross-modal prediction uses a learned delay aligner that matches signals at the corresponding cardiac time. Because synchronized multi-sensor recordings are scarce, CardioState-JEPA first learns within-modality structure from abundant unimodal data and then uses paired data to align modalities in latent cardiac time. Evaluated as a frozen encoder across 25 downstream tasks spanning ECG, PPG, and PCG, our encoder improves average PPG classification by 8.2 AUROC points, PCG murmur detection by 18.8 AUROC points, and ECG classification by 15.5 AUROC points over the best self-supervised signal baseline and matches or exceeds cardiac models trained with privileged clinical text or supervised labels on several ECG benchmarks. These results establish that heterogeneous cardiac signals can mutually supervise a single foundation model of cardiac physiology.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
Theory/Optimization • Score 85
Predictive Memory Localization: Forecasting Selective Intervention Paths from Internal Signals
arXiv:2608.12892v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Activation steering turns localized representations into control directions, but localization alone does not reveal whether a direction has a selective operating regime. We introduce Predictive Memory Localization (PML), which treats the measured-grid intervention path as the predictive object of memory localization. PML separates random-calibrated target movement from semantic-neighbor and capability damage, and compares static localization and supervised geometry with a strength-disjoint low-dose causal response. Our frozen study covers 3,000 records from nine datasets and fourteen domains, yielding 30,000 distinct record-direction-layer paths and 210,000 distinct path-strength evaluations. At layer 7, the geometry-derived RFM/AGOP direction reaches 13.1% target-any and 12.3% clean-any, exceeding random by 3.6 and 3.4 percentage points under a record-paired bootstrap. Across record-, dataset-, and domain-grouped splits, responses at $|\alpha|=0.1$ are the strongest signal for outcomes at disjoint strengths $|\alpha|\in\{0.25,0.5\}$. On held-out records, a predictor-driven selector chooses a coefficient or abstains, improves utility and reduces semantic-neighbor damage relative to a train-tuned fixed-strength policy, and avoids most evaluations in a dense scan. Across three residual-norm-matched base models, learned directions retain selective-path gains and low-dose responses yield 0.801-0.828 record-held-out macro AUROC. PML therefore turns memory localization into a falsifiable forecast of margin-level selective outcomes and a risk-aware intervention decision.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Moose: Latent concept learning with reasoning-shortcut awareness in $\mathcal{EL}^{++}$
arXiv:2608.12961v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The OWL 2 EL profile is used in some of the largest production ontologies, including the Gene Ontology and SNOMED CT. Existing neuro-symbolic (NeSy) learning methods accept propositional theories or Datalog, and reasoning-shortcut (RS) awareness has not been investigated in ontology settings. We present Moose, a method that compiles an $\mathcal{EL}^{++}$ TBox and finite ABox to a Sentential Decision Diagram (SDD). The SDD acts as a differentiable weighted-model-counting layer, and we add closure clauses outside the $\mathcal{EL}^{++}$ profile on declared exhaustive families to overcome the limited expressivity of $\mathcal{EL}^{++}$ under partial supervision. We show termination, soundness, completeness, and polynomial intermediate sizes, and validate the proofs in Lean. We then define the first formal partial-supervision latent-concept-learning task over an OWL EL ontology, i.e., learning per-individual classifiers for latent concepts from observed ABox literals, and evaluate Moose on MNIST-with-ontology and Pizza\"iolo. Moose improves over propositional-NeSy, fuzzy-logic, and ontology embedding baselines, and presents the first reasoning-shortcut analysis in an OWL EL setting.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
RL • Score 85
Online Inference for Quantile Temporal Difference Learning in Distributional Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2608.12973v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this paper, we study how to perform statistical inference for quantile temporal difference learning (QTD) in distributional reinforcement learning. Assuming access to a generative model, we first establish functional central limit theorems for both synchronous and asynchronous QTD, which show that the averaged iterates of QTD converge weakly to a rescaled Brownian motion. We next provide online inference methods. Based on random scaling, the inference procedure constructs an asymptotically pivotal statistic for inference by using the information along the whole QTD path. Meanwhile, the proposed statistic can be computed online without storing the entire trajectory of QTD iterates. This substantially reduces the memory requirement and enables efficient statistical inference in distributional reinforcement learning.
Source: arXiv stat.ML
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
SSPO: Structure-Aware Similarity-Weighted Preference Optimization for Neural Combinatorial Optimization
arXiv:2608.12443v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) relies on parallel solution sampling for training, yet existing methods fail to fully exploit the rich information latent in a co-sampled solution group. Preference-optimization methods anchor on the single best solution and discard fine-grained quality and structural signal from all other peers-a failure we term gradient signal polarization. Mean-based baselines instead weight peers uniformly, so structurally near-identical peers flood the baseline with redundant information and keep gradient variance high-a failure we term baseline redundancy. We propose SSPO (Structure-Aware Similarity-Weighted Preference Optimization), which scores all $B$ sampled solutions jointly through a dissimilarity-weighted leave-one-out baseline: structurally distinct peers receive higher weight, resolving both failures in a single mechanism. The baseline uses zero-parameter, problem-adaptive solution embeddings built from the encoder's existing node representations. Experiments on TSP, EFL, and JSP benchmarks show consistent gains over prior best-anchor and uniform-weight baselines. A direct comparison against uniform RLOO on TSP and EFL confirms that structure-aware weighting is the primary driver of improvement. The SSPO-trained EFL policy has been deployed in a production facility-location system at JD$\mathord{.}$com, confirming practical viability at scale.
Source: arXiv stat.ML
RL • Score 85
The Objective Is the Bottleneck: Latent World Models Encode What Their Planners Cannot Use
arXiv:2608.12959v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Latent world models are judged by how well they predict, so when planning fails at long horizons the natural reading is that the predictor degrades. On a reproduction of LeWorldModel on TwoRoom we show the binding constraint is the planner's objective instead.
The predictor is not the limit: its imagined state seventy-five environment steps ahead is still only 0.189 as wrong as assuming the world froze, while the planner never imagines beyond twenty-five. The objective is. Cross-entropy-method planning minimises squared latent distance, which tracks true distance at r = 0.426, saturates by about eighty arena units and decreases beyond a hundred and twenty, so moving away from the goal can lower the cost. The information is present throughout: a ridge probe recovers position from the frozen embedding at R^2 0.9922.
The pathology is the method's, not one reimplementation's. It is present in the authors' released weights, and across four checkpoints long-horizon success rank-orders exactly with metric quality and inversely with prediction accuracy.
Replacing only the objective, with nothing retrained and no GPU, lifts goals reached at offset 100 from 26.0% to 98.0%, equals the 98.0% at offset 25, and reaches 92.0% under a third of the budget: planning stops depending on the horizon. The best cost is not the most accurate. A head learned from frame separation alone predicts spatial distance worse than a position probe (r = 0.819 against 0.9897) yet plans better, charging 24% more to cross the environment's dividing wall where squared latent distance charges 4% less. It has learned reachability, not proximity.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
Multimodal • Score 85
Represent, Then Generate: Multimodal-Conditioned Time-Series Generation under Irregular Missingness
arXiv:2608.12592v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Continuous physiological time series underpin modern clinical monitoring, yet many of the most informative signals are invasive, expensive, or simply unavailable for a given patient. Conditional generation offers a remedy: an absent signal can be synthesized from co-recorded signals and routine clinical variables. Existing generators, however, are built around a single conditioning modality and degrade when forced to handle the heterogeneous, irregularly missing mix of time-variant signals and static covariates seen in practice. We propose ReCoGen (Represent Conditions, then Generate), a two-stage framework that decouples multimodal condition representation from target generation. Stage I trains one masked autoencoder per modality, distilling each time-variant condition into a compact and missingness-tolerant token sequence. Stage II trains a flow-matching generator that fuses these tokens with static conditions to synthesize the target signal. Across three physiological benchmarks, including continuous glucose monitoring on AI-READI and arterial blood pressure generation on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, ReCoGen attains the best downstream utility on all sixteen (dataset, task, metric) settings, surpassing six representative conditional generators; on thirteen of them its utility also reaches or exceeds the utility measured on the real signal, a reference we read as an approximate anchor rather than a ceiling. Ablations trace the gains to the conditioning path: learnable cross-attention over the frozen per-modality encoders, and a dual token-plus-AdaLN route for the static conditions. ReCoGen thus turns routinely collected signals into informative surrogates for invasive or unavailable ones, a step toward less invasive, lower-cost continuous clinical monitoring.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
DMDIntel: Interpreting Large Language Models via Dynamic Mode Decomposition
arXiv:2608.13048v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this work, we introduce DMDIntel which uses dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) to make the predictions made by LLMs in a classification task interpretable. It develops an input attribution pipeline, that first decomposes the hidden states of an LLM into prominent patterns, also known as modes, and then associates ranks to the input tokens based on the projection values on those modes. Rigorous experiments across three datasets and three model families consistently show that the ranked attribution of input tokens obtained using DMDIntel by far outperforms state-of-the-art techniques such as principal component analysis, integrated gradients and SHAP.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
RL • Score 85
I-SDPO: Instance-Level Adaptive Self-Distillation Policy Optimization
arXiv:2608.12957v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within a rollout group, but receives no useful relative signal when every sampled response is incorrect. Privileged self-distillation can fill this gap with dense token supervision, yet applying it throughout training creates a different failure mode: the teacher is a biased, low-variance surrogate for the reward objective, so persistent imitation can oppose reward-improving updates after the policy becomes capable of producing successful trajectories. We introduce I-SDPO (Instance-Level Adaptive Self-Distillation Policy Optimization), which treats teacher reliance as capability-dependent. I-SDPO makes one routing decision per input instance and shares it across that instance's rollout group: all-incorrect groups use a privileged self-distillation objective, whereas any-success groups remain intact for GRPO. This design uses imitation only where group-relative rewards are uninformative. A local analysis characterizes when teacher and reward directions align and shows that a non-vanishing biased distillation weight induces an optimization bias floor. The routing rule automatically reduces the expected distillation rate as success probability rises, withdrawing teacher influence without a hand-designed schedule. On SciKnowEval, I-SDPO obtains the best result in all four scientific domains and improves average mean@16 accuracy from 56.67% with GRPO to 70.31%, with a maximum domain gain of 18.24 points.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
RL • Score 85
Diagnosing JEPA World Models with Action-Conditioned Predictive Consistency
arXiv:2608.12939v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn world models that predict in a compact latent space rather than in pixels, reducing the pressure to model nuisance appearance. Yet this provides no guarantee against visual perturbations: they can still alter the encoded representation and affect subsequent action-conditioned predictions. Bisimulation captures this requirement precisely: two observations should be treated as the same state only when their action-conditioned consequences agree. Guided by this criterion, we introduce Action-Conditioned Predictive Consistency (ACPC), a diagnostic that measures how far a clean history and a visually perturbed view of it diverge after being rolled forward under the same action sequence. We prove that this divergence bounds the perturbation-induced change in multi-step prediction error and planner cost. Building on pairwise ACPC, we define two complementary measures: the Invariance Radius (IR) summarizes clean-perturbed rollout spread, while the Separation Rate (SR) checks whether different states remain distinguishable after rollout. Experiments on four visual control tasks show that pairwise ACPC predicts perturbation-induced prediction and cost changes. On LeWM, the IR-SR screen transfers across tasks, and the joint diagnostic remains informative under blur and resize. PLDM exhibits similar diagnostic trends under a different architecture.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
RL • Score 85
OGR-MARL: Option-Guided Residual Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous USV Cooperative Pursuit in Constrained Port Waterways
arXiv:2608.12995v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Heterogeneous USV cooperative pursuit in constrained port waterways requires evader interception under navigation, traffic, and role constraints. This paper proposes OGR-MARL, an option-guided residual multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that is decoupled from a specific MARL algorithm. OGR-MARL integrates shared evader belief, role-conditioned option targets, adaptive rule penalties, and residual policy learning, allowing different MARL algorithms to learn corrective actions on top of rule-guided behaviors rather than exploring constrained port environments from scratch. We instantiate OGR-MARL with representative continuous-control MARL backbones, including MADDPG, MATD3, MAPPO, and MASAC, yielding OGR-MADDPG, OGR-MATD3, OGR-MAPPO, and OGR-MASAC. Experiments in an abstract Xiazhimen port-waterway scenario show that the OGR-MASAC instantiation achieves a 75.0% capture rate, promising mission-effective rule compliance, and the best heterogeneous coordination among the tested methods. Without retraining, zero-shot transfer to a QGIS/AIS-informed Xiazhimen map achieves promising results, demonstrating the generalization potential of OGR-MARL in more complex port scenarios.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Theory/Optimization • Score 85
Momentum as Residual-Driven Multiplier Correction for Deep Learning Optimization
arXiv:2608.12925v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Momentum-based optimizers are widely used in modern deep learning, yet the relations among momentum recursion, update geometry, and acceleration remain only partially understood. We develop an $\textbf{A}$DMM-$\textbf{I}$nspired $\textbf{M}$omentum (AIM) framework based on residual-penalty variable splitting, which interprets momentum as a multiplier-like correction driven by the splitting residual. AIM recovers the exponential moving average of gradients from an ADMM-style multiplier update and separates two mechanisms that are usually intertwined in practical optimizers: the residual penalty determines the update geometry, whereas the approximation of the objective-related subproblem determines the acceleration form. Building on AIM, we propose $\textbf{R}$elativistic $\textbf{A}$daptive gradient $\textbf{D}$escent with $\textbf{A}$ccelerated $\textbf{R}$esidual (RADAR), which combines relativistic adaptive geometry, decoupled residual correction, and second-order momentum filtering to improve the update direction and momentum estimation. We establish stochastic convergence through a variance-perturbed Lyapunov drift analysis. Experiments on supervised vision learning, language modeling, and reinforcement learning show that RADAR achieves consistent improvements over strong adaptive optimizer baselines.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
MLOps/Systems • Score 85
CAKE: Compiler-Agent Co-Design for Frontier Kernel Evolution
arXiv:2608.12629v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: GPU kernel agents and GPU programming languages have advanced separately, leaving expert kernels difficult to reproduce. Agents usually treat the compiler as a fixed black box and receive only errors, correctness outcomes, and timing, while existing DSLs either hide critical scheduling decisions or expose them through difficult layout abstractions. We present CAKE, a compiler-agent co-design in which agents author CAKE IR, a typed, hardware-explicit schedule representation. CAKE exposes warp roles, memory movement, synchronization, and pipelines while supporting verification, cost modeling, and localized diagnostics. The harness itself evolves: recurring failures become verifier rules, IR primitives, model calibrations, and reusable optimization tactics. In matched implementation-hidden Flash-KMeans clean starts on B200, the best CAKE IR candidate at an 80-million-token budget runs at 1.144x the tuned FlashML baseline, compared with 0.928x for direct CUDA/PTX. Beyond this benchmark, agent-generated Kimi Delta Attention achieves a 2.05x geometric-mean speedup over official FlashKDA and passes end-to-end serving validation. Dispatcher-backed KNN and KMeans improve performance by 1.42x to 2.12x across more than 400 shapes, and four kernel changes are available as upstream PRs. CAKE targets NVIDIA GPUs from Ampere through Blackwell and separates single-shape evolution from library generalization and dispatch.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
Theory/Optimization • Score 85
Training Under Challenge: Executable Certificates and Challenge-Closed Optimality for Neural Networks
arXiv:2608.12655v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A flat training curve does not reveal whether a neural network has reached a global optimum, is locally trapped, is representation-limited, or is mismatched to its trainer. We introduce Training Under Challenge, an executable-certificate framework in which predeclared, architecture-valid procedures construct complete alternatives in the same certified class and reevaluate the same objective. Any lower-valued candidate is a replayable witness that lower-bounds the checkpoint's empirical global-optimality gap. Passing a finite suite is only suite-relative; global-gap conclusions require a separately justified coverage mechanism. We define a resource-indexed challenge-power modulus that characterizes the largest gap compatible with passage. For squared loss, current block-decrease operators make coverage checkable and yield uniform and realized-residual bounds. We prove the converse frontier: without coverage, a first-order ReLU trainer can reach infinitely many exact conditional head optima while converging to a non-global point. On a channel-gated ResNet-18 distillation problem with known optimum, eight internal challenges cover all 240 audited output directions, and realized-residual bounds lie within factors of 1.74--3.02 of the true gap. Paired predictive certificates separate decoder under-use from representation insufficiency, while quantized-denoising studies demonstrate diagnosis, repair, and current-state recertification.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
The Impact of Temporal Context Length and Encoding Strategies on Self-Supervised ECG Representation Learning
arXiv:2608.12695v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-supervised electrocardiogram (ECG) models are often trained on a few seconds of ECG signal and, increasingly, on discretized token sequences. It remains unclear whether these choices sacrifice information needed for rhythm inference and longitudinal consistency in real-world ambulatory recordings. We present a controlled study on the Icentia11k single-lead dataset that varies (i) the input horizon (16 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes) and (ii) the front-end representation (continuous convolutional patch embeddings vs. fixed vector-quantized tokens), while holding the Transformer backbone and training protocol constant. Representations are assessed by downstream abnormal rhythm detection and by patient-level retrieval that probes cross-session stability. Our results show that increasing temporal context beyond 16-second snapshots yields stronger transfer and higher retrieval accuracy, with the strongest performance achieved by the 5- and 10-minute models, indicating improved capture of slow-varying rhythm dynamics and individual-specific structure. Across all evaluated horizons, continuous patch embeddings outperform discretized tokens, suggesting that quantization can discard clinically relevant waveform detail. These findings motivate ECG foundation models that emphasize extended context and continuous encoders for clinical prediction and similarity-based applications. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/muha-0/ecg-ssl-representation-learning.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
On the Expressive Power of Transformers
arXiv:2608.12671v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multi-layer transformers form the critical component of essentially all large language models (LLMs) in use today. Because of their ubiquity and computational capability, there is a rapidly growing body of work that aims to precisely calibrate the expressive power of transformers as language recognizers by comparing them against standard models of computation studied for decades by the theoretical computer science community. In this endeavor, circuit complexity has by and large emerged as the "correct" branch of computational complexity to analyze the expressive power of transformers; the reason is that parameterizing transformers by the various resources they use, such as attention and precision, leads to direct comparisons with different classes of circuits parameterized by resources such as type of gates, size, and depth. Here, we present an overview of selected results that delineate the expressive power of transformers using concepts and methods from circuit complexity.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Multimodal • Score 92
A Cloud-Edge System for Multimodal Clinical Screening in Resource-Constrained Rural Settings
arXiv:2608.12745v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Medical AI has demonstrated specialist-level diagnostic accuracy, yet these capabilities remain largely inaccessible in resource-constrained rural settings where bandwidth is scarce, compute is limited, and clinical decision-making requires integrating heterogeneous modalities. We introduce a cloud--edge collaborative architecture that addresses these constraints: lightweight, domain-specific models on the edge transform raw medical data into compact structured outputs, while a cloud LLM synthesizes these outputs into clinical summaries. An LLM-based orchestrator dynamically selects diagnostic tools based on patient context, promoting comprehensive modality coverage without processing irrelevant inputs. We evaluate on 20 multimodal clinical cases spanning cardiac, obstetric, trauma, and screening scenarios under three simulated network profiles (500,kbps--5,Mbps). The hybrid system achieves 98--99% diagnostic tool recall with 92--96% precision, matches or exceeds cloud-only baselines on clinical accuracy, and maintains bandwidth-invariant latency (25--35,s) at 4--15x lower token cost. These results highlight the role of architectural design in enabling efficient multimodal integration and improving factual grounding compared to cloud-only approaches under deployment constraints.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
RL • Score 85
Fast A/B/n Testing: Exact Multi-Policy Comparison via Tree-Coupled Feedback Sharing
arXiv:2608.12831v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Online platforms increasingly compare many adaptive decision policies---ranking systems, recommendation algorithms, pricing rules, and language-model agents---while each reward-bearing interaction can be costly or risky. A direct A/B/n design gives each of $J$ policies its own horizon-$T$ trajectory and therefore uses $JT$ outcomes. We introduce Tree-Coupled A/B Testing (\TCAB), an exact feedback-sharing design for arbitrary history-dependent contextual-bandit policies. At each round, a predictable tree connects the current policy histories; every parent--child context--action law is maximally coupled, and one reward is shared within each component of matched tree edges. Every policy retains exactly its standalone finite-horizon trajectory law, even though the policies are deliberately dependent. If $D_{e,t}$ records a mismatch on tree edge $e$ at round $t$, the number of reward queries satisfies the pathwise identity $N(T)=T+\sum_{t,e}D_{e,t}$ and hence equals $T$ plus cumulative tree-edge total variation in expectation. This cost is conditionally optimal among exact edge-local designs on the selected tree, and a current-round minimum-spanning tree is myopically optimal among tree designs. For fixed $J$, sublinear pseudo-regret of every policy and almost-sure uniqueness of the oracle action imply $\mathbb{E}[N(T)]=T+o(T)$, versus $JT$ for independent runs. We also obtain finite-sample variance bounds for pairwise policy contrasts. Experiments on reward-model evaluation, multiple-choice language-model evaluation, and adaptive search policies demonstrate substantial improvements in the cost--precision frontier.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
EGRL: Edge generation-guided relation-aware learning for RNA-protein interaction prediction
arXiv:2608.12906v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: RNA-Protein Interactions (RPIs) are critical for regulating cellular functions. While traditional wet-lab experiments for RPI detection are costly and time-consuming, Deep Learning (DL) methods provide an efficient computational alternative for RPI Prediction (RPIP). In particular, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are promising, as they naturally model RPI networks. However, existing GNN-based methods often rely on homogeneous graphs or predefined meta-paths, which limit their ability to handle data sparsity and to generalize to cold-start scenarios involving unknown molecules. To address these limitations, we propose Edge Generation-guided Relation-aware Learning (EGRL), a novel framework with several key components: implicit meta-path learning to capture relational semantics without handcrafted paths; a multi-relation-aware attention mechanism for adaptive fusion of interaction patterns; a graph generator that predicts potential ("soft") edges to support cold-start nodes; and a multi-feature fusion predictor for final interaction scoring. EGRL is jointly trained with a primary task loss and an auxiliary generator loss. Comprehensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that EGRL achieves competitive overall performance. More importantly, it exhibits superior generalization in cold-start settings, achieving an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.867 and an Area Under the Precision-Recall curve (AUPR) of 0.861 on unknown molecules, corresponding to improvements of 8.6% in AUROC and 5.0% in AUPR over prior state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released soon.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
RecSys • Score 85
Prof-K: Probabilistic One-Pass Filtering for Efficient Top-k Selection
arXiv:2608.12573v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Top-k selection is a fundamental computational primitive with applications spanning databases, information retrieval, signal processing, and modern machine learning workloads, including sparse activations and attention pruning. As data sizes grow, existing approaches become inefficient: exact methods incur high memory and compute overhead, while approximate methods often rely on brittle heuristics that degrade under adversarial or heavy-tailed inputs. In this paper, we introduce Prof-K, a fast, scalable, and distribution-agnostic top-k algorithm with probabilistic correctness guarantees. Prof-K performs a single-pass filtering procedure: a small random sample estimates an adaptive threshold, the N input elements are streamed once into a compact buffer, and an exact top-k routine on this buffer recovers the true top-k elements with probability at least 1 - $\epsilon$, where $\epsilon$ > 0 is user specified. We derive high-probability guarantees for correctness and buffer size, together with an approximately optimal sample size that minimizes overhead as a function of N and k. Empirically, Prof-K achieves 1.5x-10x speedups over the highly optimized PyTorch topk and recent RadiK implementations, with the largest gains in the large-scale, small-to-moderate-k regime where prior methods struggle most. Unlike previous approaches, these guarantees hold independently of the input distribution, ensuring robustness to adversarial settings. By relaxing the recall target (e.g., recovering 95% of the true top-k values), Prof-K additionally provides a principled accuracy-speed trade-off. We further demonstrate its impact on training BatchTopK Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), where top-k selection constitutes a significant portion of the training cost.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
Privacy/Security/Fairness • Score 85
GENADA: efficient generative time series adversarial attack framework
arXiv:2608.12535v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Deep learning models are widely used for time series analysis in domains such as healthcare, finance, energy systems, and environmental monitoring. However, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where small input perturbations cause severe degradation in predictive performance. Commonly used gradient-based attacks, iterative first-order methods, are computationally burdensome, as they repeatedly backpropagate through the victim model to compute input gradients during a number of iterative refinement steps. We propose a GENerative ADversarial Attack (GENADA) that learns a generative model to produce deceptive perturbations directly in a single forward pass and a procedure to train it. Variants include single-step and iterative generative attack schemes. The validation considers attacks on several neural models and datasets in the time-series domain, a controlled, low-dimensional setting. Empirically, GENADA achieves comparable attack quality to strong baselines while requiring less time to generate perturbations during inference.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
MLOps/Systems • Score 85
Multi-perspective Imbalance-Conscious 6G Beamforming Optimization and Performance
arXiv:2608.12929v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The study presents a systematic machine learning (ML) study of 6G-IoT beamforming optimization (6GBO) using supervised and unsupervised approaches. We compared the predictive power of network, environmental, device, and vision feature groups for 6GBO. Additionally, it addressed other unsupervised perspectives that can enhance 6GBO, including clustering network scenarios using methods such as K-means, DBSCAN, and hierarchical clustering. Several imbalance-aware experiments revealed that network features possess better prediction power than device, environmental, and vision feature groups, as evidenced by their recall, F1-score and ROC-AUC values. For unsupervised ML exploration (assessed using Elbow, Silhouette score, and Davies-Bouldin Index methods), the results indicate that the deployment environment and type of device primarily influence clustering, rather than mobility-based attributes. Furthermore, the explainability analysis showed that bandwidth, IoT sensors, and mobility possess higher global feature importance across the feature groups. In the future, we would apply deep and reinforcement learning techniques to predict throughput/latency or to optimize rewards determined by performance indicators like SNR enhancement
Source: arXiv cs.LG
Privacy/Security/Fairness • Score 85
Understanding Backdoor Vulnerabilities in Vertical Federated Learning: The Gap Between Research and Practice
arXiv:2608.12962v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables organizations holding complementary features of shared entities to collaborate and train models. In this setting, the initiator can withhold information about the learning task, while other contributors participate without exposing their local datasets, creating an asymmetric information structure aligned with growing privacy demands. However, this asymmetry is a double-edged sword. Among various threats, backdoor attacks are particularly concerning because VFL not only enables malicious contributors to poison the model during training, but also allows them to activate the backdoor at inference time to manipulate predictions. Although prior work has reported near-perfect attack success rates and proposed effective defenses, we find that most findings fail to hold under realistic conditions, exposing a fundamental gap between research and practice. In this paper, we present a systematic, practice-oriented study of backdoor vulnerabilities in VFL, revealing this gap in both methodological design and evaluation practices. We show that existing approaches overlook key practical constraints and therefore rely on unrealistic prior knowledge. Furthermore, these limitations have remained hidden due to poorly designed evaluation practices in the literature. To bridge this gap, we redefine threat models under realistic constraints, propose practical backdoor workflows, and introduce BVBench, a backdoor-centric benchmark that enables fair, practical, and comprehensive evaluation, preloaded with state-of-the-art baselines. BVBench provides strong evidence of the fragility of the current understanding of VFL backdoor risks and establishes a foundation for steering research toward uncovering practical vulnerabilities and developing more meaningful defenses.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
BoardroomAI: Dependency-Aware Human-Steerable Multi-Agent Deliberation through Evolving Decision Graphs
arXiv:2608.13046v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Organizational decisions are co-created while evidence, constraints, and human priorities continue to evolve. In conventional transcript-based multi-agent systems, humans typically provide an initial problem, agents deliberate internally, and the system returns a final response. BoardroomAI instead treats the human as a persistent participant who can intervene by challenging assumptions, modifying constraints, changing priorities, introducing evidence, or redirecting the decision process. We operationalize this human--agent coexistence through four components: (i) a typed decision graph representing evidence, assumptions, constraints, claims, objections, alternatives, risks, decisions, semantic dependencies, and specialist responsibility; (ii) an intervention compiler that converts confirmed human actions into explicit graph updates; (iii) dependency-aware propagation that identifies affected subgraphs, preserves unaffected artifacts, and selectively reactivates relevant specialists; and (iv) an evaluation framework measuring intervention impact, repair coverage, preservation, recomputation, and decision validity. Across 600 generated decision-DAG interventions, propagation matched exhaustive impact computation while inspecting only 14.59% of nodes. In a 12-case exploratory pilot, selective repair recomputed 62.11% of canonical nodes, preserved all gold-unaffected nodes, and produced valid updated decisions in six cases while abstaining in the remaining six. These abstentions show that correct intervention routing may still provide insufficient context for synthesis, motivating a \emph{decision-sufficient context closure} for human-steered multi-agent deliberation. All results are synthetic and prototype-level.
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Theory/Optimization • Score 85
The Boolean Power of ReLU
arXiv:2608.12617v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We prove that, on finite simple undirected graphs equipped with a single Boolean node feature, the Boolean queries expressible in $\Sigma$-MPLang, for any collection $\Sigma$ of eventually constant activation functions and with arbitrary real coefficients, form a strict subclass of the Boolean queries expressible in ReLU-MPLang. We thereby settle a recently posed open problem: whether ReLU-MPLang is more powerful than trReLU-MPLang when it comes to Boolean queries. In particular, this implies that ReLU-GNNs are strictly more expressive than {TrReLU,id}-GNNs with respect to Boolean queries on Boolean-featured graphs.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
RecSys • Score 85
Demand Transfer Estimation at Scale via Restricted Logit Modeling
arXiv:2608.12680v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Item demand forecasting is an integral component of store assortment optimization. Existing literature focuses on learning a suitable customer choice model and using this model to determine the value of an objective function (i.e. expected demand) with respect to an assortment proposal. However, for large item universe with many categories, this approach can prove inefficient, needing a separate demand forecast for every possible item assortment. An alternate approach exists whereby we combine the efficiency of forecasting item demand independently, while at the same time applying adjustments to the independent forecasts that account for the relations between item demand and the availability of other similar items on the shelf.
Central to this approach is the estimation of Demand Transfer (DT) coefficients. These DT coefficients represent the percent of a particular target item's (item that the customer walked in the store to buy) demand that is redirected to each other item in the universe should the target item be removed from the shelf. We introduce an approach that allows us to compute these DT coefficients on large item universes (assortments having 1 million+ items). Experiments on data as well as historical transaction data for multiple locations within categories demonstrate that when certain reasonable assumptions about substitution behavior are satisfied, our procedure is able to accurately estimate underlying DT coefficients and lead to improvements in demand forecasting.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Perturbation-based Regional Interpretability through Subtraction Mapping (PRISM): naming-error dissociations in language models and post-stroke aphasia
arXiv:2608.12717v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability of large language models lacks spatially resolved, falsifiable tools for testing whether internal components are specialized for distinct cognitive operations. We adapt subtraction analysis, the standard framework of human neuroimaging, from biological brains to perturbed transformers, and apply the same logic to both substrates in parallel. Building on the Brain-LLM Unified Model (BLUM), which showed that layer-perturbed LLaVA-1.6-Vicuna-13B error profiles match the lesion patterns of aphasic patients, we develop PRISM (Perturbation-based Regional Interpretability through Subtraction Mapping). PRISM maps the seven clinical Philadelphia Naming Test categories, subtracts error classes pairwise, and treats each perturbation seed as a subject in a group analysis with threshold-free cluster enhancement along the layer axis. We run a structurally matched analysis on 213 chronic post-stroke aphasia patients using correlation-difference lesion-symptom mapping, and replicate both sides on held-out splits. The designs match in subject dimension (seeds, patients), spatial dimension (layers, atlas-parcellated cortex) and thresholding, but the contrast operator differs: a within-subject error-proportion difference for the LLM, a between-subject correlation difference for the cortex. Both substrates recover a robust phonemic-favoring dissociation, a deep layer cluster and a frontal-perisylvian cortical cluster, both replicating; the semantic-favoring direction is a consistently signed but non-significant trend on both. PRISM thus gives a falsifiable, spatially resolved test of functional-specialization claims in transformer language models. A confirmatory ROI-level intervention (PRISM Stage 3) licensing the strongest causal-mechanism claim is left to subsequent work.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
CoMedBench: A Multi-Source Benchmark of Synthetic Medical Data Fidelity and Downstream Utility
arXiv:2608.12805v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Access to clinical data is essential for developing reliable healthcare machine learning systems, but direct use of electronic health records is constrained by privacy regulation, institutional review, data-use agreements, and the risk of re-identification. Synthetic data promises a practical alternative: it can preserve useful statistical and clinical structure while reducing exposure of sensitive patient records. Prior studies often evaluate a single generator, one dataset, or a narrow downstream task, making it difficult to know when synthetic data can support model development and when it fails to preserve task-critical signal. We introduce CoMedBench, a reproducible benchmark that evaluates a family of generators under a common clinical-validity framework and one shared training and evaluation engine, spanning static tabular and temporal downstream tasks on established critical-care datasets. In total the benchmark spans 37 dataset-task pairs across two modalities consists of 20 static tabular and 17 temporal ICU time-series-drawn from seven public data sources: three intensive-care databases (MIMIC-III, MIMIC-IV, and eICU) together with the UCI Machine Learning Repository, the CDC BRFSS diabetes cohort (2015), NHANES (1999-2014), and the pycox survival datasets (GBSG and METABRIC). The benchmark evaluates both statistical fidelity and task utility by comparing models trained and tested across real and synthetic data. In these settings, synthetic training data preserves most of the downstream signal: on tabular tasks the reference generator CoMed-CTGAN retains a mean AUROC utility (the synthetic-to-real performance ratio) of 90.6%, rising to 97.3% for the strongest generator, CoMed-TVAE. Temporal ICU tasks are harder and more generator-sensitive: CoMed-CTGAN retains 81.6% (AUROC) and only 64.0% under the imbalance-sensitive AUPRC, whereas CoMed-TVAE still retains ~95% (AUROC).
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Personalized Scorer Modeling: A Learning-Based Framework for Deriving Robust Sleep Stage Labels from Multiple Experts
arXiv:2608.12446v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sleep stage classification is important for the diagnosis and management of sleep disorders, yet most automatic staging studies evaluate models against a single reference hypnogram despite known inter-scorer variability. This study investigates whether multi-scored datasets can be used to construct more reliable reference labels from the collective behavior of multiple experts. We use the publicly available DOD-H and DOD-O datasets. EEG (C3-M2) and chin EMG signals were segmented into 30-s epochs, and 30 features were extracted from each modality, yielding 60 features for EEG+EMG. We propose a learning-based hypnogram (LBH) that models the stage-specific behavior of each scorer using confusion matrices derived from machine-learning models. After column normalization, these matrices estimate the probability of each true sleep stage given each scorer's label; probabilities are aggregated across scorers to assign the final label for each epoch. LBH was evaluated with random forest, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron classifiers under EEG-only and EEG+EMG settings, and compared with the dataset hypnogram (DH) and best-scorer hypnogram (BSH). LBH consistently improved overall performance. The best results were obtained with random forest and EEG+EMG, reaching 86.07% accuracy, 85.46% precision, and 85.29% F1-score on DOD-H, and 86.04% accuracy, 85.21% precision, and 84.70% F1-score on DOD-O. These findings suggest that personalized scorer modeling can improve reference hypnogram construction without discarding information from individual experts.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
NLP/LLMs • Score 85
Exploring Oversmoothing with Householder Matrices
arXiv:2608.12514v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Deep graph neural networks(GNNs) suffer from oversmoothing- a progressive collapse of node representation towards a low information subspace as network depth increases because the normalized graph propagation operator is repeatedly applied directly to the hidden representations. In this work we study Householder Graph Neural Network (HouseGNN). Rather than updating the hidden state like standard GCN, HouseGNN uses the aggregated neighbourhood message solely to estimate a reflection direction; the node embedding is then updated by a Householder reflector followed by GroupSort, yielding a piecewise orthogonal layer that preserves Euclidean norm at every node and at every depth. We prove three core properties: (i) every internal layer preserves the node-wise Euclidean norm; (ii) the Householder reflector is scale scale and sign-invariant in the message; and (iii) pairwise distance between nodes can change through mismatch between node-wise orthogonal operators.
Source: arXiv cs.LG
Theory/Optimization • Score 85
Black-Box Knowledge Transfer across Distinct Feature Sets
arXiv:2608.12403v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Pre-trained black-box predictive functions encode knowledge distilled from massive datasets and extensive computation. However, when the available input features differ from those the black box expects, direct use is infeasible. We introduce a method for transferring predictive knowledge from the black box to a new, heterogeneous input space. Our approach decomposes the target regression function into a transferable component, which the black box can inform, and a non-transferable component, which captures information unique to the new space. We propose a two-step neural network procedure, estimating the transferable component from abundant unlabeled feature pairs that bridge the two input spaces and the non-transferable component from limited labels. We derive prediction risk bounds that improve on those of a non-transfer alternative when the non-transferable component is small or smooth, and the procedure adapts to either case. Under additional conditions, the worst-case risk of our estimator is of strictly smaller polynomial order than the minimax risk of estimation from the labeled data alone. We extend the framework to multiple black boxes, each on its own input space, and show that aggregation can reduce prediction error relative to the best single black box. Simulated and real data demonstrate the practical value of the method.
Source: arXiv stat.ML
Theory/Optimization • Score 85
Structure-preserving uncertainty quantification for GENERIC dynamics
arXiv:2608.12624v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Structure-preserving machine learning embeds physical structure directly into model architectures, yet uncertainty quantification (UQ) for such hard-constrained models remains limited because standard UQ methods may violate the encoded admissibility conditions, require architectural modifications, or impose substantial computational costs. In this work, we propose Structure-Preserving Epistemic Neural Networks (S-PENNs), a general framework for UQ in scientific machine learning models with hard architectural constraints, and instantiate it for GENERIC (General Equation for Non-Equilibrium Reversible-Irreversible Coupling) dynamics. S-PENNs preserve the structural constraints of a pretrained model by attaching lightweight epinets to its constrained components, ensuring that every sampled realization remains physically admissible by construction. When applied to GENERIC dynamics, such a proposed framework yields thermodynamically consistent rollouts that preserve the first and second laws. Furthermore, we combine S-PENNs with split conformal prediction as a post-hoc calibration method to produce prediction intervals with finite-sample marginal coverage guarantees. We validate S-PENNs on three numerical examples: a harmonic oscillator coupled to a heat bath and an idealized chemical motor, both governed by ODEs, and a one-dimensional viscoplastic model governed by PDEs. Across all three examples, S-PENNs produce thermodynamically consistent stochastic realizations and well-calibrated prediction intervals while reducing the computational cost by about one to three orders of magnitude compared to deep ensembles. Although the present study focuses on GENERIC dynamics, S-PENNs can be extended more broadly to scientific machine learning models in computational mechanics with either hard or soft constraints.
Source: arXiv cs.LG