Neural networks acquire internal representations through learning. In this work, we formulate stochastic gradient descent (SGD) as a Markovian stochastic process and derive a Fisher-information flow speed limit that bounds the rate at which trainable parameters can acquire information about data-generating parameters. The resulting inequality decomposes the upper bound on the information flow into drift and noise contributions, thereby quantifying the roles of deterministic learning forces and SGD-induced fluctuations from an information-theoretic perspective. We verify the bound in analytically tractable basis-function linear regression, where the information budget predicted by the bound reproduces the ordering and characteristic time scales with which different data-generating parameters are encoded in the learned parameters. These results establish Fisher-information speed limits as a quantitative framework for understanding which properties of the data-generating process are acquired, in what order, and how rapidly they can be encoded in the trainable parameters.
Frontier large language models (LLMs) have been reported to read, edit and write the weights of small neural networks, raising the prospect of auditing clinical prediction models from their files alone. Public demonstrations, however, mixed reading raw weights with running code. We separated these conditions in internally pre-specified simulation experiments. Tanh networks of 105 to 38,401 weights were trained on simulated cohorts of patients with subarachnoid haemorrhage, each with a planted relationship or none, and one network was trained on labels that under-recorded deaths in a subgroup. GPT-6 Astra and four other GPT models answered single prompts under a default or an explicit system instruction, either with the weights in the prompt and no tools, or with a calculation-only tool that exposed the weights (white box) or only the network's predictions (black box). Without tools, Astra recovered planted relationships in 353-weight networks but became unreliable at 3,457 weights, and under the default instruction it declined 11 of 12 audit and repair tasks as unidentifiable; the explicit instruction removed these refusals. With the tool, it recovered the planted relationship in all 29 runs on networks of up to 38,401 weights, raised no false alarm in 15 runs on null networks, and found the biased subgroup in 6 of 6 runs. Black-box access performed as well as white-box access, and other GPT-6 models read as accurately. A well-designed script matched the comparator models on the audit and the best LLM repair. For auditing these networks, what mattered was computation and elicitation, not access to the weights.
Yizhak Y. Elboher, Avraham Raviv, Amihay Elboher, Zhouxing Shi, Hillel Kugler, Guy Katz
Formal verification of deep neural networks (DNNs) faces a fundamental scalability challenge: verifying robustness is NP-hard and state-of-the-art tools often time out on modern architectures. We propose PAreto VErification, or PAVE: by augmenting DNNs with early exits (EEs) and verifying exit-by-exit, we solve a large fraction of robustness queries---roughly 80% in our evaluation---in a small fraction of the time required for direct verification. The key insight is that many inputs in a robustness neighborhood exit at an early layer. Verifying this early-exit behavior is often a tractable problem,allowing verification to terminate long before the full network is analyzed. EEs can be added without modifying the base network, and incur at most a 0.3% accuracy change across our tested architectures. We formalize the novel robustness property for EE networks, prove it is Fixed-Parameter Tractable under a trace stability condition (which commonly holds in practice), and present a sound and complete verification algorithm. Two sound optimizations --- break (early termination when the winner dominates) and continue (skipping the inner loop when no runner-up can win) --- reduce SAFE-case verification time by up to 10x. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 with networks from 600K to 33M parameters demonstrate that PAVE enables solving queries that were not solved otherwise, including formal verification of ResNet-18 on CIFAR-100.
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) reparameterizes a weight matrix $W$ as a product of two low-rank factors, but the Jacobian $J_G$ of the generator mapping the factors to the weight matrix is rank-deficient, so the factor-space preconditioner $J_G^* F_t J_G$ induced by any $W$-space preconditioner $F_t$ is singular, and consequently the standard chain rule cannot be uniquely inverted to map a preconditioned $W$-space direction back to a factor-space update. Therefore, we introduce FILO, a unified Fisher-geometric framework for low-rank adaptation that enables factor updates without directly inverting this singular operator and casts existing LoRA optimizers by their factor-space inversion strategy and $W$-space preconditioner $F_t$. Existing methods occupy four families along these axes: factor-space adaptive updates, block-diagonal surrogates for $J_G^* J_G$, Frobenius-residual pseudoinverse methods, and Riemannian manifold methods. Within this design space, a gradient-statistics-aware $F_t$ paired with a closed-form factor-space solve at $O((m+n)r)$ memory remains underexplored. We instantiate FILO as FILO-Adafactor by adopting the Adafactor diagonal Kronecker preconditioner $H_t$ on $W$ and selecting from the resulting factor-space solution family the element minimizing an $H_t$-weighted imbalance between the two factor contributions. By construction, the induced weight update is the closest LoRA approximation to the preconditioned $W$-space direction under the $H_t$-weighted norm. Across GPT-2 on E2E, Mistral-7B and Qwen2-7B on GLUE, ARC, and GSM8K, and diffusion-model personalization, FILO-Adafactor and its momentum variant are competitive with or improve over a representative set of LoRA optimizers while keeping peak GPU memory at the LoRA optimizer level.
Masked diffusion models generate text by reversing a stochastic masking process. Unlike autoregressive LLMs, which generate text one token at a time, they can reveal many tokens in parallel, at the price of an error, since tokens revealed together are drawn independently. We show that this trade-off maps onto the statistical physics of driven many-particle systems. (i) For any data, the error of parallel generation is the entropy production of the generation process relative to the reversed masking process. (ii) For Markov data, generation is a random sequential adsorption process with labelled gaps, which we solve exactly for any number of steps. (iii) For many steps, the error becomes the dissipation of a slowly driven system: the unmasking schedule plays the role of the driving protocol, the number of steps that of its duration, and the error is set by a thermodynamic metric that we obtain in closed form from the mutual information between tokens. Optimal schedules are geodesics of this metric. The exact solution shows how correlations in the text shape both the error and the quality of the output. The longer the correlations, the more the error concentrates at the start of generation. Schedules that start with small steps then gain more, both in path error and in perplexity, and need fewer steps to reach their asymptotic behaviour.
Decomposing surface electromyography (EMG) into the spike trains of individual motor neurons is a long-standing inverse problem and a key step toward motor-neuron-driven neural interfaces such as prosthetics and exoskeletons. The standard approach, independent component analysis (ICA) of the multichannel signal, assumes that the mixing from neurons to electrodes is stationary in time. This assumption fails during movement, when volume-conductor deformation makes the mixing time-varying, and current decomposition algorithms are correspondingly restricted to isometric contractions. We introduce HarmonICA, a quasi-time-invariant ICA formulation in which a static linear separator is preceded by a learned, low-rank, time-varying invertible transformation. The separator is trained with an independence loss on the uncompensated projection, and the transformation with a stationarity loss on the recovered source. Gradients are not shared between the two, so source extraction remains a classical linear-ICA problem while non-stationary distortion is absorbed by the transformation. The closed-form inverse of the transformation enables per-spike subtraction with a time-varying template during sequential peel-off. On a public simulated benchmark of dynamic high-density EMG with ground-truth spike trains, the method outperforms five adaptive ICA baselines at every recall threshold, recovering more units at a higher accuracy.
We propose a deep neural-operator framework for a general class of probabilistic models. Under global Lipschitz conditions on the operator over the entire Euclidean space-and for a broad class of probabilistic models-we establish a universal approximation theorem with explicit network-size bounds for the proposed architecture. The underlying stochastic processes are required only to satisfy integrability and general tail-probability conditions. We verify these assumptions for both European and American option-pricing problems within the forward-backward SDE (FBSDE) framework, which in turn covers a broad class of operators arising from parabolic PDEs, with or without free boundaries. Finally, we present a numerical example for a basket of American options, demonstrating that the learned model produces optimal stopping boundaries for new strike prices without retraining.
Recent innovations in medical imaging have markedly improved brain tumor identification, surpassing conventional diagnostic approaches that suffer from low resolution, radiation exposure, and limited contrast. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is pivotal in precise and accurate tumor characterization owing to its high-resolution, non-invasive nature. This study investigates the synergy among multiple feature representation schemes such as local Binary Patterns (LBP), Gabor filters, Discrete Wavelet Transform, Fast Fourier Transform, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and Gray-Level Run Length Matrix alongside five learning algorithms namely: k-nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, Support Vector Classifier (SVC), and probabilistic neural network (PNN), and CNN. Empirical findings indicate that LBP in conjunction with SVC and CNN obtained high specificity and accuracy, rendering it a promising method for MRI-based tumor diagnosis. Further to investigate the contribution of LBP, Statistical analysis chi-square and p-value tests are used to confirm the significant impact of LBP feature space for identification of brain Tumor. In addition, The SHAP analysis was used to identify the most important features in classification. In a small dataset, CNN obtained 97.8% accuracy while SVC yielded 98.06% accuracy. In subsequent analysis, a large benchmark dataset is also utilized to evaluate the performance of learning algorithms in order to investigate the generalization power of the proposed model. CNN achieves the highest accuracy of 98.9%, followed by SVC at 96.7%. These results highlight CNN's effectiveness in automated, high-precision tumor diagnosis. Code: https://github.com/asifrahman557/BrainTumorDetection
Jisheng Dang, Kai Wei, Ronghao Lin, Bimei Wang, Hong Peng, Wei-Shi Zheng, Bin Hu, Qi Tian 等 9 位作者
Omni-modal models can answer questions about video, but their predictions rarely show which participant, event, or interval supports an answer. Moreover, answer-level supervision alone does not teach a model to interpret structured video evidence. To systematically mitigate this issue, we present THG-Omni, a human-centric graph-supervision framework that links Segment Anything Model~3 participant tracks with temporally grounded Qwen3-VL annotations. Candidate semantic claims are checked against the source video and available audio before they are used to construct training questions, while track geometry provides explicit spatial and temporal supervision. The resulting questions teach an omni-modal reasoning model to interpret participant attributes, actions, affect, interactions, and their timing from a structured graph. At inference, THG-Omni uses a predicted graph constructed from the evaluation video. Experiments on IntentBench show consistent improvements over the unadapted backbone across social reasoning, emotion understanding, and deception perception. On NExT-QA, THG-Omni achieves 89.54\% accuracy with the matched graph, compared with 85.10\% without graph input. Further validation experiments show that compact graph input achieves 78.22\% accuracy, compared with 78.02\% using the full graph and 77.58\% without graph input. A complementary diagnostic demonstrates that the predicted graph preserves evidence useful for answering questions even without the source video and audio. Together, these findings show that THG-Omni improves human-centric video reasoning while grounding its evidence in identifiable participants and events. Our codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/review-n94hhfcwp5666/
Kimberly Mai, Cate Heine, Vinith M. Suriyakumar, Ashia C. Wilson
Advances in generative AI have driven a surge in synthetic non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM), prompting a series of legal reforms. These reforms rely on legal definitions where technical operationalization is ambiguous, such as whether a depicted person is identifiable, whether a model is capable of or intended for abuse generation, and whether an abusive image can be traced to the model that produced it. Drawing on the law of England and Wales and the United States, we examine the relevant law alongside the technical research needed to operationalize it. From this, we develop a research agenda of open problems at this technical-legal interface, spanning the interpretation of existing law, the prevention of harm before an AI tool is deployed, and enforcement of offenses. These are problems the technical community is well placed to solve, and where progress is vital to real-world protection.
Shahbaz Siddeeq, Muhammad Waseem, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Mika Saari, Jussi Rasku, Pekka Abrahamsson
Vibe coding is an AI-assisted software development approach in which developers express intent in natural language and large language models generate code. To our knowledge, no review has synthesized academic and practitioner sources under a common protocol. We conducted a multivocal literature review of publications from January 2022 to 9 September 2026, identified through searches in October 2025 and September 2026. After assessing source quality and credibility, we analyzed 266 sources (76 peer-reviewed, 190 grey) across eight research questions: 146 were direct, 93 adjacent, and 27 background. Presence and outcome findings receive reporting-support and evidence-strength labels, respectively. The second author conducted twelve checks; pre-reconciliation agreement was low in several, but substantial for the final directness rule and moderate for the outcome fields, which were checked in full. Sources describe a generation-evaluation-revision loop, with developer work shifting from writing code toward directing, supervising, and validating. Productivity is reported in 109 of the 159 sources contributing to the outcome question, of which 22 provide assertions only; these counts indicate reporting, not effect size. Most comparable sources report short-term productivity gains and long-term maintainability costs, but both receive Weak evidence-strength labels because some comparable sources report opposing directions. Short-term quality and defects are labeled Weak. Long-term productivity, long-term quality, and short-term reproducibility are labeled Moderate. Prototyping is reported more often than production use, and user-interface work more often than data and machine-learning work, but task-domain evidence is sparse. Future work should evaluate safeguards, session-level dynamics, long-term maintainability, and production use.
Trevisan and Vadhan [TV, FOCS'00] constructed (seedless) extractors for distributions samplable by poly-size circuits that have very high min-entropy, under the very strong complexity theoretic hardness assumption that $\mathsf{E}=\mathsf{DTIME}(2^{O(n)})$ requires size $2^{Ω(n)}$ circuits that have oracle access to $Σ_6^{\text{P}}$. In this paper we give three new explicit constructions of extractors for samplable distributions. First, we construct an extractor that extracts one bit, with constant error, for min-entropy $k=O(\log n)$, which matches the non-constructive probabilistic argument. This result uses hardness for nondeterministic circuits, and achieves the same parameters as the recent extractor of Oh and Shaltiel [OS, STOC'26] under an incomparable hardness assumption. In contrast to the extractor of [OS26], our extractor (and, similarly, the constructions below) also works for the more general class of distributions samplable with postselection (a model introduced by [BGDM, FOCS'23] that generalizes samplable and recognizable sources). Second, we construct an extractor that extracts almost all the entropy, with polynomially small error, for min-entropy $k=n^α$, where $α>0$ is an arbitrary constant. This result also uses hardness for nondeterministic circuits, and significantly improves upon the recent extractor of [Shaltiel, FOCS'25] which required a much stronger assumption. This extractor is also \textit{multiplicative}: a stronger notion suggested in [AASY, Comp. Complexity'16; Shaltiel, CCC'25] to make extractors for samplable distributions suitable for selecting keys for cryptographic protocols. Third, we construct an extractor that extracts almost all the entropy, with polynomially small error, for min-entropy $k=\mathrm{polylog}(n)$. This result uses hardness for circuits that have oracle access to $Σ_2^{\text{P}}$.
Head pose estimation is important for human computer interaction and driver monitoring, but many image based methods remain too costly for resource constrained deployment. We propose STAG-Net, a structure-aware attention over landmark groups for lightweight head Pose estimation that estimates head pose from facial landmarks using movement aware selection, spatial clustering, compact DeepSet encoders, self attention, and a global geometry descriptor. We develop variants using FaceMesh and Face Alignment Network landmarks and evaluate them under cross dataset and subject independent protocols on 300W-LP, AFLW2000, and BIWI. STAG-Net achieves the lowest mean absolute error among all compared landmark based methods in every evaluated setting. On BIWI frames with valid detections, the FAN variant also records the lowest overall error among all compared methods, reaching $3.51^\circ$ under cross dataset evaluation and $2.39^\circ$ under subject independent evaluation. The regressors use only 0.012 to 0.043 million parameters and 24.1 to 83.6 thousand FLOPs, about three orders of magnitude fewer FLOPs than FSA-Net. Despite including landmark extraction and regression, the FaceMesh pipeline reaches 322.9 frames per second on a Tesla T4 GPU, nearly twice the 164.5 frames per second of the fastest measured image based baseline, and 111.0 frames per second on CPU. After normalization by dataset size, STAG-Net processes training samples seven to eight times faster than FSA-Net and more than one hundred times faster than HopeNet and TokenHPE, while complete training finishes within 28 minutes. These results show that STAG-Net combines leading landmark based accuracy with substantially lower training and inference cost.
Francisco Pereira, Justine Sherry, Pratiksha Thaker
In 2003, Clark et al. proposed the "Knowledge Plane", a layer of intelligent agents that share rich information about network state in order to collaboratively manage the Internet across administrative boundaries. The technology of the day lacked the two capabilities it demanded most: reasoning and unstructured communication. Thus, automated network management has remained largely confined to single domains, while interdomain problems are still resolved by human operators on the phone. We argue that agentic large language models can finally unlock the potential of the Knowledge Plane, but that doing so will require solving new research problems that arise particularly in this decentralized, multi-agent, coopetitive setting that have received limited attention in the literature thus far.
Germain Vivier-Ardisson, Michaël E. Sander, Axel Parmentier, Mathieu Blondel
Knapsack and Top-k operators are useful for selecting discrete subsets of variables. However, their integration into neural networks is challenging as they are piecewise constant, yielding gradients that are zero almost everywhere. In this paper, we propose a unified framework casting these operators as dynamic programs, and derive differentiable relaxations by smoothing the underlying recursions. On the algorithmic side, we develop efficient parallel algorithms supporting both deterministic and stochastic forward passes, and vector-Jacobian products for the backward pass. On the theoretical side, we prove that Shannon's negative entropy is the unique separable regularization choice that yields permutation-equivariant operators, and characterize regularizers inducing sparse selections. On the experimental side, we demonstrate our framework on a benchmark on learning to predict Knapsack solutions, an extension of discrete VAEs, and a constrained dynamic assortment RL problem.
Jinyoung Park, Sanghyeok Lee, Omar Zia Khan, Hyunwoo J. Kim, Joo-Kyung Kim
Multi-hop question answering requires retrieval agents to construct a connected evidence path across reasoning turns rather than retrieve isolated relevant evidence for a single query. However, in existing GraphRAG methods, retrieval and reinforcement learning are often optimized with mismatched signals: retrieval is driven by local semantic relevance, while outcome-level reinforcement learning assigns the reward by assessing the final answer without identifying which retrieval actions progress the reasoning path. We introduce HyperGraphPro, a progress-aware hypergraph RAG framework that focuses on evidence-path progress as the shared objective for retrieval and policy optimization. For retrieval, HyperGraphPro reranks candidate hyperedges using query-conditioned structural distinctiveness, combining entity-query relevance with a local-vs-global hypergraph incidence signal to favor entities that are informative in the current graph neighborhood. For policy optimization, HyperGraphPro augments uniform trajectory-level reward assignment with stepwise progress-aware policy optimization, which assigns step-level rewards according to the coverage of answer-guided target hyperedges. Experiments on multi-hop question answering benchmarks demonstrate that HyperGraphPro consistently improves reasoning accuracy over existing GraphRAG methods.
Conditional generative surrogates in high-energy physics, such as models that predict reconstructed jets from partons, are often evaluated on $1\text{D}$ marginal divergences among other metrics. Taken alone these metrics can reward conditional collapse. On a CMS simulation benchmark, a sampler that ignores the conditioner beats a trained Mixture Density Network (MDN) on all four target marginals under both KL and Wasserstein-1, and cannot be stably separated from a Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) model on two of the four. We instead score the models with the Continuous Ranked Probability Skill Score (CRPSS) from forecast verification, taking the exact marginal as the reference. We show how global skill depends on the evaluation spectrum, and we also report it within bins of a conditioning variable, where that dependence largely goes away. We then introduce a data-driven $k$-Nearest-Neighbor ($k$-NN) extrapolation that estimates the best CRPS the conditioning information allows. Both models agree with this estimate on all four targets, which suggests that current architectures have reached the information available in the conditioner, at least as far as these per-target scores can tell.
Goal interpretation is to translate a natural language instruction into a formal symbolic goal that a planner can execute. It is critical for embodied agents because any error here propagates to every downstream planning and action step. Doing it well requires both generating suitable candidates and reliably selecting among them. We present a two-stage generate-then-rank approach to Goal Interpretation in the Embodied Agent Interface (EAI). First, supervised fine-tuning adapts a Large Language Model (LLM) to EAI's output convention. Second, Candidate-Output Ranking from Errors (CORE) learns preferences over complete outputs from the model's own generated alternatives. We conducted experiments on the household scenes of the Embodied Agent Interface Benchmark. Multiple open source LLMs including DeepSeek-V3 chat, DeepSeek-Reasoner, and Qwen2.5-7B and Qwen2.5-72B were evaluated. The proposed method outperformed the baseline models including LLMs with simple prompting, chain-of-thought, and knowledge graph based approaches.
A language model that learns a new fact by fine-tuning can repeat it but cannot reason with it: taught that a person is a citizen of a new country, it still cannot say, without chain-of-thought, who the head of state of that person's country is. This two-hop curse is widely treated as a reasoning deficit, and the strongest knowledge editors answer it with synthesized reasoning data. We show that the reasoning is intact and the writing is wrong. Fine-tuning writes a new fact as an answer to be said, whereas the second hop reads the bridge ("that person's country") as an entity, from the middle layers on: patching the model's own representation of the entity into the bridge at those layers largely restores the second hop, yet after fine-tuning the bridge there is no closer to the new entity than before the edit. We therefore propose read-equivalent writing (Legible): one loss term makes the bridge phrase, at the layer where the second hop finishes reading it, match the model's own reading of the new entity, and keeps the same relation's other subjects unchanged. Phrases and targets come from the edited model itself, and no multi-hop training data is used. Across Qwen2.5, Llama-3 and Qwen3, Legible (I) composes learned facts more often than the model composes its own knowledge, on MQuAKE's two-hop-curse questions; (II) reaches 1.8-2.6x the bridge accuracy of CaKE, whose reasoning data composes no better than plain fine-tuning, and has the best average over composition, accuracy and locality against four families of writers; and (III) lifts the curse on RippleEdits, on the benchmark of Balesni et al., who named the curse, and at 14B.
It was recently shown (arXiv:2610.09618) that the infimum of the approximation ratios of deterministic constant-round LOCAL algorithms for minimum dominating set on planar graphs is 7. The $(7+\varepsilon)$-approximation given there runs in $T_0+O((c_0/\varepsilon)^κ)$ rounds with $κ=\ln 3/\ln(24/23)\approx 25.81$, and it is asked there whether this exponent can be substantially reduced. We replace the heaviest-edge star selection in its clustering step by a random-centre rule: every part becomes a centre independently with probability $p$, and every non-centre joins its heaviest centre neighbour. For planar graphs this gives $κ<5.89$ with $p=3/8$ and $κ<6.7$ with $p=1/2$. For every proper minor-closed class of density $a$, the new exponent is never worse, and with about $\frac12\log_2 a$ fair coins per part and level it is smaller by a factor that tends to $8$ as the density grows. The planar bounds hold verbatim on the torus, the projective plane and the Klein bottle. We then turn to the dependence on $\varepsilon$. On paths, every deterministic $r$-round algorithm for fractional domination, and every randomized one that always outputs a dominating set, has (expected) ratio at least $1+1/(r+4)$. So these approximations need $Ω(1/\varepsilon)$ rounds on every minor-closed class that contains all paths. For fractional domination on paths of known length this is tight up to an additive constant. On forests and on outerplanar graphs, with no bound on the degree, $O(1/\varepsilon)$ rounds suffice, so there the optimal number of rounds is $Θ(1/\varepsilon)$. The planar level bounds, the bounds on paths and the deterministic bound on forests are machine-checked in Lean 4 with Mathlib. Other methods reach ratio $7+\varepsilon$ in fewer rounds against the integral optimum (arXiv:2610.31203) and ratio $7$ in a constant number of rounds (arXiv:2611.02057).
Dohoon Kim, Junho Park, Hyunwoong Bae, Seyoon Kim, Taesup Moon
As LLMs are increasingly asked questions about a user's personal experiences, retrieval must distinguish memories by time, place, person, and event. Current personal-memory pipelines rely on frozen dense embedding models to embed memories for retrieval, but we find that these models do not capture the four axes well. Swapping a memory's date or place barely shifts its embedding, and a trained projection on top of the frozen embedding does not recover the missing signal. The problem lives inside the model, where each axis is encoded by a distinct attention-head pattern. Guided by these findings, we propose Axis-LoRA, a per-axis adapter that places four LoRA branches inside the embedding model and combines them via a per-query gate. Across three standard embedding models evaluated on LongMemEval, ATM-Bench, and LoCoMo, Axis-LoRA improves 4-benchmark mean R@10 by $+1.28$ to $+1.56$~pp while training only a small fraction of the base parameters on a small axis-counterfactual training set. Code is available at https://github.com/dohoonkim-ai/axis-lora.
In this paper, we consider the problem of Gaussian approximation for the online linear regression task. We derive the corresponding rates for the setting of a constant stepsize and study the explicit dependence of the convergence rate on the problem dimension $d$ and quantities related to the design matrix. When the number of iterations $n$ is known in advance, our results yield a normal approximation rate of order $\sqrt{\log{n}/n}$, provided that the sample size $n$ is large enough.
We estimate the integral curve of an unknown vector field from noisy tangent vector field on a known compact Riemannian manifold. We consider two sampling settings: independent observations at random locations that have already been collected, and a fixed response budget that allows subsequent locations to be chosen using pilot information. Under suitable regularity assumptions, the passive kernel estimator has curve error of order $n^{-2/(d+3)}$ in probability, with sample size $n$ and manifold dimension $d$. Its functional central limit theorem has a limit characterized by a linear stochastic differential equation. For active sampling, an independent pilot directs one new batch of measurements to neighborhoods of the target curve. Under localization, smoothness and design conditions, this concentration yields expected maximum curve error of order $N^{-1/2}$, including the pilot in the total response budget $N$. Both methods provide simultaneous geodesic confidence tubes with asymptotically exact coverage under mild conditions. Simulations show narrower active tubes in most reported settings, with improved small-sample coverage in some three-dimensional examples. Ocean-drifter observations illustrate mean-flow reconstruction on the sphere, and a canopy-flow LDA application uses retrospective active sampling to quantify lateral and vertical departures of local mean streamlines.
Linear Complementarity Problems (LCPs) with sufficient matrices form a well-studied class of problems, dating back from the foundational works of Cottle and Dantzig (1968). LCPs capture convex quadratic programs, and admit reductions from problems such as discounted stochastic games or mean-payoff games. While the original approach for solving these problems was based on pivoting methods, in their 1991 book, Kojima, Megiddo, Noma, and Yoshise introduced an interior point method (IPM) with running time that is polynomial in the input size, but which depends linearly on a certain parameter called the handicap number of the matrix. Despite the ensuing rich literature on sufficient LCP IPMs, the linear dependence on the handicap number has not been improved since then. We present an IPM whose running time depends on the square root of the handicap number. The algorithm can decrease the duality gap by a constant factor in $O\left(\min\left\{\sqrt{n} (1+κ),n^{9/8}\sqrt{1+κ}\right\}\right)$ iterations. Curiously, this can already be achieved using standard Newton updates. We analyze the IPM in a norm defined by a local weighting, where centralizing Newton steps quadratically converge to the central path, without any dependence on the handicap number. The weights arise from a characterization by Rump (Linear Algebra and Its Applications, 1997, 1998, 2003) of the sign-real spectral radius and its relation to sufficiency; another ingredient of our proof is a new operator norm characterization of the handicap number. Moreover, the connection to Rump's work also enables us to show coNP-completeness of testing sufficiency, and approximation hardness of the handicap number.
Jing Zhang, Bastien Bergere, Jonas Leite, Emilie Bollache, Mikaël Laredo, Alban Redheuil, Nadjia Kachenoura
Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac MRI enables non-invasive assessment of left atrial (LA) scar, an imaging marker associated with atrial fibrillation ablation outcome. However, automatic scar segmentation is hindered by low contrast, the thin atrial wall, scarce labels, and extreme class imbalance. Conditional diffusion offers iterative mask generation, but its suitability for sparse 3D LA scar segmentation remains unclear. To address this gap, we propose Conditional Mask Diffusion (CMDiff), which predicts clean masks using a dynamic-encoder-conditioned 3D sinusoidal UNet. We compared CMDiff with a deterministic baseline on identical cases in five-fold cross-validation of 60 scar-labelled public LASCARQS subjects, with 48 training and 12 held-out cases per fold. CMDiff achieved a scar DSC of 0.47 $\pm$ 0.08, HD95 of 12.89 $\pm$ 6.39 mm, and ASD of 1.91 $\pm$ 0.96 mm, compared with deterministic baseline values of 0.51 $\pm$ 0.08, 10.86 $\pm$ 5.39 mm, and 1.58 $\pm$ 1.03 mm, respectively. Under the same implementation, clean-mask prediction performed substantially better than the noise-prediction configuration evaluated in this study. Thus, CMDiff was technically feasible but did not improve segmentation performance: DSC was lower, and both HD95 and ASD were higher. Direct mask diffusion therefore provides an analytical alternative, but not a competitive performance advance for this task. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/jizhang02/CMDiff.
Boshuai Ye, Peng Liang, Maryam Tavassoli Sabzevari, Arif Ali Khan
Empirical quantum-software papers often claim that one compiler produces smaller circuits, one optimizer is more reliable, or one ansatz achieves better solution quality. Such comparisons depend on benchmark scope, circuit construction, compilation, sampling, backends, noise models, optimizer choices, and resource budgets. Existing testing, benchmarking, and reproducibility methods help assess programs and experiments but do not directly audit whether the reported comparison is supported by the evidence available in the paper and artifact. We present CLAIMSTAB-QC, a source-bounded framework that records baselines, metric, relation, and admissible evidence; locks the audit design before outcomes are computed; and reports a scoped relation outcome or an explicit evidence boundary. Strict scalar-directional comparisons are classified as Sustained, Unresolved, or Not preserved within the locked audit scope. We examine 455 comparative claims from 119 quantum-software papers. A materialization gap emerges: 175 claims can be represented for audit planning, 79 become scalar-directional planning records, and 53 yield lockable audit or diagnostic designs, but only 8 expose enough matched evidence to audit the original comparison without proxy reconstruction. Among these 8, 2 are Sustained, 4 Unresolved, and 2 Not preserved. Controlled diagnostics over 24 benchmark-relevant quantum-workload comparisons further show that simpler checks can preserve apparent directions despite weaker support under locked designs. These results indicate that performance orderings should be reported with matched evidence sufficient to audit their stated scope.
Translating language into humanoid motion requires coordinating body parts, determining motion duration, and producing references suitable for robot execution. We introduce PartiGen, a part-aware latent diffusion framework that incorporates anatomical structure into a shared whole-body motion representation. Part-specific attention processes anatomically masked frame features, and its outputs are fused to combine local limb information with whole-body context. Conditioned on text and motion history, the model generates motion primitives autoregressively. Forward-kinematics supervision encourages kinematic consistency, while a learned end-of-sequence predictor selects a frame-level endpoint after generation. On HumanML3D retargeted to the Unitree G1, PartiGen achieves a segment-level FID of 3.165, a 16.8% reduction over TextOp, and improves R@1 by 1.4 percentage points. In the duration study with 16-frame primitives, endpoint prediction reduces mean absolute duration error from 12.471 to 3.080 frames compared with a fixed-length cutoff. We further evaluate robot execution using a pretrained, frozen GRIT tracker: 409 of 500 generated references (81.8%) pass the posture-based stability screen in MuJoCo. Following simulation screening and manual selection, 26 of 27 attempted motions are judged successful on the real G1.
Small language models are often trained under tight data budgets, where the choice of pretraining corpus may matter as much as model size or training recipe. We compare two contrasting corpora at matched 10-million- and 37-million-word budgets: the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the BabyLM 2026 strict pretraining corpus. For each corpus, we train teacher models, distilled 58-million-parameter Baby-Llama students, and no-distillation student ablations, using the same model families, training recipes, and evaluation protocol across corpora. Across BLiMP, BLiMP Supplement, EWoK, Entity Tracking, and COMPS, the corpora produce different skill profiles rather than a single quality ranking. BabyLM 2026 is consistently stronger on linguistic acceptability benchmarks, while Britannica is often stronger on Entity Tracking, a synthetic state-tracking task. The contrast appears across teacher and student models and at both budgets, with the cleanest cross-seed replication in the distilled student comparison. Targeted controls show that the central contrast persists after matching training exposure and at a longer diagnostic context; direct teacher ensembling also does not reproduce the 10M Britannica student's Entity Tracking behavior. Entity Tracking magnitudes nevertheless remain sensitive to training dynamics. For this corpus pair, corpus choice can therefore produce different relative skill profiles at small scale, motivating multi-benchmark evaluation when comparing pretraining data.
Michael Poppel, Markus Baumann, Sebastian Wölckert, Claudia Linnhoff-Popien, Jonas Stein
Trainable-frequency quantum models train the prefactors of their encoding gates so that the circuit's frequencies can move onto the target's. From the unit start of prior work, training rarely reaches a target more than one resolution step away. We show that the target-driven part of the prefactor gradient is a weighted sum of slopes of the overlap $\sin u/u$, where $u$ is the model-target frequency distance scaled by the window half-width. This gives each frequency a reach: under gradient flow, an isolated real frequency whose coefficient adapts optimally reaches its target from within half a step, for every target at least one step from zero frequency; with a fixed coefficient, a phase-dependent barrier can stop it. A ternary prefactor grid places a model frequency within half a step of every band frequency, with logarithmically many encoding gates. Single-frequency circuits trained with Adam and jointly trained amplitudes behave as predicted: inside the first side lobe, a frequency starts toward its target exactly when in phase with it in 98% of runs, and only 11 of 768 frequencies starting beyond the lobe reached their target. With several frequencies, the grid start raised successful fits on synthetic targets from 69% to 84% against the best random start. With many target frequencies, least squares on the fixed grid fits near-perfectly, but the circuit does not reach the coefficients; training the prefactors narrows this shortfall, but with 8 and 24 target frequencies, training the fixed grid ten times longer fitted better. On real series, training the frequencies improved held-out $R^2$ at equal budget by 0.010--0.045 on four of seven series, but a classical screen did not separate these from the others. A classical model with independently trainable frequencies shows the same dependence on the start; our results describe how to train such models, not an advantage of the circuit.
Sign language production (SLP) aims to generate appropriate sign language motion from spoken language text. However, current 3D SLP methods suffer from noisy supervision and weak text conditioning. Specifically, these methods typically rely on pseudo-3D motion data fitted from single-view frontal videos, which introduces severe self-occlusion and loses fine-grained hand details, ultimately degrading downstream production. To overcome these limitations, we propose a comprehensive framework that jointly integrates multi-view 3D motion data and optimizes the text-conditioning pathway. First, we introduce How2Sign-MV3D, a high-fidelity dataset constructed via a novel cross-view curation pipeline that fuses multi-view estimates to resolve occlusions and filter non-signing segments. Second, we design a robust SLP model incorporating a sign-aware spatio-temporal VQ-VAE (ST-VQVAE) for joint body-hand tokenization, a pseudo-gloss adapter, and keyframe-aware retrieval to enhance text-to-motion alignment. Evaluated on the How2Sign benchmark, our framework reduces body and hand DTW-PA-JPE by 32.8% and 20.9% respectively compared to the state-of-the-art. Finally, we release two new high-quality 3D datasets, ASLCitizen-3D and MM-WAuslan-MV3D, alongside SGNify-MV as a multi-view video benchmark to support broader community research.