# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 250 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #12451–12500 of 16266 published in 2026-05, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 16266-paper 2026-05 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/250 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/249.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/251.md) ### VeriContest: A Competitive-Programming Benchmark for Verifiable Code Generation Authors: Zichen Xie, Mrigank Pawagi, Yuxin Liu, Aaditi Rai, Lize Shao, John Berberian, Sicong Che, Wenxi Wang Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08553v1 Large language models can generate useful code from natural language, but their outputs come without correctness guarantees. Verifiable code generation offers a path beyond testing by requiring models to produce not only executable code, but also formal specifications and machine-checkable proofs. Progress in this direction, however, is difficult to measure: existing benchmarks are often small, focus on only one part of the pipeline, lack ground-truth proofs or rigorous specification validation, or target verification settings far from mainstream software development. We present VeriContest, a benchmark of 946 competitive-programming problems from LeetCode and Codeforces for verifiable code generation in Rust with Verus. Each problem pairs a natural language description with expert-validated formal specifications, judge-accepted Rust code, Verus-checked proofs, and positive and negative test suites. VeriContest is constructed through a three-phase pipeline that scales from manually verified seed problems to semi-automated expansion with human-in-the-loop review. To further strengthen benchmark quality, we use testing as an additional quality-assurance layer for validating postcondition completeness. VeriContest supports isolated and compositional evaluation of specification generation, code generation, proof generation, and end-to-end verified program synthesis. Evaluating ten state-of-the-art models reveals a sharp gap between coding ability and verifiable code generation: the strongest model reaches 92.18% on natural-language-to-code generation, but only 48.31% on specification generation, 13.95% on proof generation, and 5.29% end-to-end. These results identify proof and specification generation as the central bottlenecks for models and establish VeriContest as a rigorous platform for measuring and training future systems that generate code with machine-checkable correctness. --- ### Learnability and Competition in High-Dimensional Multi-Component ICA Authors: Eser Ilke Genc, Samet Demir, Zafer Dogan Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08552v1 Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is a foundational tool for unsupervised representation learning, yet its high-dimensional theory remains largely limited to single-component recovery. We develop an asymptotically exact mean-field theory for multi-component online ICA, capturing the coupling induced by simultaneous learning and orthogonalization. In the high-dimensional limit, the joint empirical distribution of learned estimates and ground-truth components converges to a deterministic process, yielding a closed ODE system for the overlap matrix between learned directions and true components. This characterization reveals a genuinely multi-component, initialization-driven phase structure: a decoupled regime, where estimates align with distinct components and evolve nearly independently, and a competition regime, where overlapping initializations induce orthogonality-driven conflicts, slow reorientation, and delayed convergence. Our steady-state analysis gives explicit learnability boundaries and competition conditions linking step size, data moments, and initialization. These conditions show that larger higher-order moments and competition shrink the stable learning-rate window, increase convergence times, and predict a staircase phenomenon in which the number of recoverable components changes discretely with the learning rate. Experiments on synthetic data and hyperspectral remote sensing data validate the predicted trajectories and phase behavior. --- ### A Call to Lagrangian Action: Learning Population Mechanics from Temporal Snapshots Authors: Vincent Guan, Lazar Atanackovic, Kirill Neklyudov Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08550v3 The population dynamics of molecules, cells, and organisms are governed by a number of unknown forces. In the last decade, population dynamics have predominantly been modeled with Wasserstein gradient flows. However, since gradient flows minimize free energy, they fail to capture important dynamical properties, such as periodicity. In this work, we propose a change in perspective by considering dynamics that minimize a population-level action under a damped Wasserstein Lagrangian. By deriving the corresponding Hamiltonian equations of motion, we formalize Wasserstein Lagrangian Mechanics, a structured class of second-order dynamics that encompasses classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and gradient flows. We then propose WLM as the first algorithm that learns these second-order dynamics from observed marginals, without specifying the Lagrangian. By directly learning the population mechanics, WLM can both forecast and interpolate unseen marginals, and outperforms existing gradient flow and flow matching methods across a wide range of dynamics, including vortex dynamics, embryonic development, and flocking. --- ### Evaluating Developmental Cognition Capabilities of LLMs Authors: Xiao Xiao, Hayoun Noh, Mar Gonzalez-Franco Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08549v1 Conversational AI is increasingly personalized around users' preferences, histories, goals, and knowledge, but much less around how users interpret and take up model outputs to construct and understand their reality. We draw on Robert Kegan's constructive-developmental theory as a complementary lens on this dimension. Existing methods for assessing developmental stage in the Keganian tradition rely either on expert interviews that do not scale or on sentence-completion instruments that are proprietary, lengthy, or invasive. To make this perspective tractable for LLM evaluation, we introduce the Developmental Sentence Completion Test (DSCT), a 20-item instrument designed to elicit developmental signal in self-administered text. Throughout, we treat the resulting labels as characterizations of stage-like structure in elicited responses, not as validated person-level developmental stage. We then ask how much of that signal can be recovered by LLMs across three elicited response regimes: simulated personas, real human respondents, and default model-generated answers. On simulated personas, top frontier models recover simulator-intended labels with high accuracy. On real human DSCT responses, human-LLM agreement is fair, with much stronger within-neighborhood than exact agreement. Finally, when LLMs answer DSCT prompts without persona-conditioning, their responses exhibit stable stage-like differences across model families, with larger and newer models tending to generate higher-rated text. These results suggest that stage-conditioned signal is cleaner in synthetic responses than in human-written DSCT text, and that the core constraint for stage-aware conversational AI is not classifier accuracy alone, but the availability of developmental signal from elicited text. --- ### Sliced Inner Product Gromov-Wasserstein Distances Authors: Xiaoyun Gong, Gabriel Rioux, Ziv Goldfeld Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08546v1 The Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) problem provides a framework for aligning heterogeneous datasets by matching their intrinsic geometry, but its statistical and computational scaling remains an issue for high-dimensional problems. Slicing techniques offer an appealing route to scalability, but, unlike Wasserstein distances, GW problems do not generally admit closed-form solutions in one-dimension. We resolve this problem for the GW problem with inner product cost (IGW), propose a sliced IGW distance that enjoys a natural rotational invariance property, and comprehensively study its structural and computational properties. Numerical experiments validating our theory are presented, followed by applications to heterogeneous clustering of text data and language model representation comparison. --- ### Log analysis is necessary for credible evaluation of AI agents Authors: Peter Kirgis, Sayash Kapoor, Stephan Rabanser, Nitya Nadgir, Cozmin Ududec, Magda Dubois, JJ Allaire, Conrad Stosz, Marius Hobbhahn, Jacob Steinhardt, Arvind Narayanan Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08545v1 Agent benchmarks typically report only final outcomes: pass or fail. This threatens evaluation credibility in three ways. First, scores may be inflated or deflated by shortcuts and benchmark artifacts, misrepresenting capability. Second, benchmark performance may fail to predict real-world utility due to scaffold limitations and recurring failure modes. Finally, capability scores may conceal dangerous or catastrophic actions taken by the agent. We argue that log analysis -- the systematic tracking and analysis of the inputs, execution, and outputs of an AI agent -- is necessary to overcome these validity threats and promote credible agent evaluation. In this paper, we (1) present a taxonomy of threats to credible evaluation documented through log analysis, and (2) develop a set of guiding principles for log analysis. We illustrate these principles on tau-Bench Airline, revealing that pass^5 performance was under-elicited by nearly 50% and surfacing deployment failure modes invisible to outcome metrics. We conclude with pragmatic recommendations to increase uptake of log analysis, directed at diverse stakeholders including benchmark creators, model developers, independent evaluators, and deployers. --- ### Tokens-per-Parameter Coverage Is Critical for Robust LLM Scaling Law Extrapolation Authors: Joshua Shay Kricheli, Alexander Lawrence Reid, Soumajyoti Sarkar, Venkata Gandikota, Paulo Shakarian Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08541v2 Neural scaling laws approximate a language model's loss as a power-law function of parameter count $N$ and token count $D$. Following Chinchilla-style compute-optimal training, many studies fit scaling laws from runs performed under a fixed tokens-per-parameter (TPP) ratio $k$ and set $D = kN$. We show that this collinear design, combined with the empirically common near-equality of the exponents governing $N$ and $D$, induces an inherent ill-conditioning in the Gauss-Newton least-squares problem: the condition number of the design grows as the inverse square of the gap between the $N$ and $D$-exponents. The scale coefficients become practically unidentifiable, with confidence intervals inflating by an order of magnitude or more, yielding a ``sloppy'' model whose extrapolations degrade sharply off the training ray. We prove this for four scaling-law formalisms and derive a closed-form TPP-diversity threshold that is necessary and sufficient for well-conditioned estimation. Empirically, non-collinear designs outperform collinear ones on held-out splits with a 97.3\% win rate across four laws, five corpora, multiple floating point precision modes. We further show the degeneracy is rooted in Jacobian geometry and is not an artifact of the loss function: any smooth estimation objective whose curvature involves the Jacobian inherits the same ill-conditioning. --- ### Continuity Laws for Sequential Models Authors: Annan Yu, Dongwei Lyu, N. Benjamin Erichson Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08539v1 Inductive biases influence the behavior and performance of sequential models. In this work, we study an underexplored inductive bias in sequential modeling: continuity in time. We ask a simple question: do models motivated by continuous-time formulations, such as state-space models, actually behave continuously in time, and does this translate into better performance on tasks with continuous temporal structure? To answer this, we formalize model continuity as convergence under temporal refinement, where a model is continuous if its predictions approach an underlying continuous trajectory as the temporal discretization is refined. We show that S4 exhibits stable continuous behavior, whereas S6 (the core of Mamba) can be more sensitive to input amplitude and selective dynamics, despite being derived from a continuous dynamical system. To study whether this distinction matters for learning, we also need a corresponding notion of task continuity. We therefore introduce a metric to quantify the continuity of datasets directly from their temporal structure. Across benchmarks, we find a clear empirical alignment between task continuity, model continuity, and model performance. Beyond an inductive bias, continuity also has practical consequences: we show that it enables a simple temporal subsampling strategy that improves both efficiency and performance. --- ### Human-Inspired Memory Architecture for LLM Agents Authors: Doga Kerestecioglu, Alexei Robsky, Clemens Vasters, Anshul Sharma, Yitzhak Kesselman Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08538v1 Current LLM agents lack principled mechanisms for managing persistent memory across long interaction horizons. We present a biologically-grounded memory architecture comprising six cognitive mechanisms: (1) sleep-phase consolidation, (2) interference-based forgetting, (3) engram maturation, (4) reconsolidation upon retrieval, (5) entity knowledge graphs, and (6) hybrid multi-cue retrieval. Each mechanism addresses a specific failure mode of naive memory accumulation. We introduce a synthetic calibration methodology that derives all pipeline thresholds without benchmark data exposure, eliminating a common source of evaluation leakage. We evaluate on two benchmarks. First, a VSCode issue-tracking dataset (13K issues, 120K events) where deduplication-based consolidation achieves 97.2% retention precision with 58% store reduction (+21.8 pp over baseline). Second, the LongMemEval personal-chat benchmark where we conduct the first streaming M-tier evaluation (475 sessions, ~540K unique turns). At a 200K-token context budget, our pipeline matches raw retrieval accuracy (70.1% vs. 71.2%, overlapping 95% CI) while exposing a tunable accuracy/store-size operating curve. At S-tier scale (50 sessions), dedup-based consolidation yields a +13.3 pp improvement in preference recall. --- ### Human-LLM Dialogue Improves Diagnostic Accuracy in Emergency Care Authors: Burcu Sayin, Ngoc Vo Hong, Ipek Baris Schlicht, Jacopo Staiano, Pasquale Minervini, Sara Allievi, Nicola Susca, Nicola Osti, Alberto Maino, Vito Racanelli, Andrea Passerini Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08533v1 Clinical decision-making in emergency medicine demands rapid, accurate diagnoses under uncertainty. Despite benchmark progress, evidence for LLMs as interactive aids in live physician workflows remains sparse. MedSyn lets physicians iteratively query an LLM provided with the full clinical record while initially viewing only the chief complaint. Seven physicians (three seniors, four residents) completed baseline and AI-assisted sessions across 52 MIMIC-IV cases stratified by difficulty. Blinded evaluation showed residents' Hard-case correctness rose from 0.589 to 0.734; difficulty-standardised completely-correct rates confirmed a medium effect (Δ = 0.092; p = 0.071; d = 0.47). Automated metrics corroborated these gains: standardised any-match accuracy improved by 0.156 (p < 0.0001), and residents showed the largest F1 gain (Δ = 0.138; p < 0.0001). Dialogue analysis revealed expertise-dependent strategies (seniors asked targeted, hypothesis-driven questions; residents relied on broader queries) and cross-expertise concordance increased (Δ = 0.145; p < 0.0001). Interactive LLM support meaningfully enhances diagnostic reasoning. --- ### A Two-Stage Motion-Aware Framework for mmWave-based Human Mesh Recovery Authors: Hoang Hai Pham, Shuntian Zheng, Jiaqi Li, Yu Guan Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08530v1 Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar has emerged as a promising sensing modality for human perception due to its robustness under challenging environmental conditions and strong privacy-preserving properties. However, recovering accurate 3D human body meshes from radar observations remains difficult due to severe signal clutter and the inherently partial nature of radar measurements. Previous works typically adopt end-to-end frameworks that directly regress human body parameters from raw radar data, without decoupling signal interpretation from geometric reasoning or exploiting temporal motion cues, limiting learning performance. To address this, we propose a two-stage framework for radar-based human body reconstruction. First, we introduce a human reflection extraction module that performs coarse-to-fine localization and voxel-wise segmentation to produce a confidence-weighted radar volume encoding voxel-level human likelihood. Second, we design a motion-aware mesh recovery network that reconstructs the human body by jointly modeling per-frame geometry and inter-frame dynamics using a dual-branch architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches while maintaining computational efficiency. --- ### The Propagation Field: A Geometric Substrate Theory of Deep Learning Authors: Xingrui Gu Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08529v1 Modern deep learning treats neural networks primarily as endpoint functions from inputs to outputs. Inspired by the shift from force to geometry in physics, we ask whether a network should instead be understood through the geometry of its internal propagation. We define a neural propagation field as the collection of hidden-state trajectories and local Jacobian operators across depth. Endpoint losses constrain only the boundary behavior of this field, leaving its interior geometry underdetermined. We show that endpoint-equivalent models can differ by orders of magnitude in trajectory and Jacobian structure, and introduce observable field metrics such as path sensitivity, solver consistency, and trajectory/Jacobian retention. In controlled teacher-flow and PDE systems, endpoint fitting fails to recover the underlying propagation law. In real multi-path tasks, field-aware objectives improve unseen-path generalization, OOD robustness, and calibration when aligned with the observation structure, but can collapse when over-constrained. In continual learning, field-preservation regularization complements replay and distillation: on Split CIFAR-100, DER++ with field preservation improves average accuracy, backward transfer, and field-retention metrics. These results identify propagation-field quality as a measurable and trainable property of neural networks beyond endpoint performance. --- ### MARLaaS: Multi-Tenant Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning as a Service Authors: Timothy Tin Long Yu, Gursimran Singh, Ge Shi, Hanieh Sadri, Yong Zhang, Zhenan Fan Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08527v1 Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly in multi-turn agentic settings involving environment interaction like tool use. However, fine-tuning such models remains prohibitively expensive due to high computational requirements, limiting accessibility. We propose MARLaaS (Multi-tenant Asynchronous RL as a Service), a system for concurrent RL fine-tuning across multiple users and tasks. Our approach is based on two key ideas: (1) sharing a base model across tenants using lightweight LoRA adapters, and (2) a disaggregated asynchronous architecture that decouples rollout generation, environment interaction, and policy training into independently scheduled stages. This design enables tasks to progress through the RL pipeline at their own pace in an event-driven manner, reducing cross-task interference, idle time, and end-to-end latency. In multi-task settings (we report up to 32 concurrent tasks), MARLaaS achieves single-task state-of-the-art performance while improving accelerator utilization by up to 4.3x and reducing end-to-end training time by 85%. --- ### Skill-CMIB: Multimodal Agent Skill for Consistent Action via Conditional Multimodal Information Bottleneck Authors: Zihan Huang, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Qianqi Yan, Rohan Surana, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Lina Yao, Xin Eric Wang, Julian McAuley Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08526v1 While LLM-based agents excel at planning and executing long action sequences, their execution often remains inconsistent across trials, limiting reliability. Consolidating agent consistency requires distilling trial-error trajectories into reusable skills that preserve task-relevant invariants while discarding trajectory-specific noise. However, in multimodal settings, the key challenge is not only that useful invariants are distributed across vision and language information, but that different modalities support different kinds of reusable skill content: while some skills are verbalizable and interpretable, others reside in perceptual evidence beyond text. Text-only skills may lose perceptual cues, whereas storing text and perception naively introduces redundancy and noise. Existing inference-time methods, such as self-consistency, improve reliability through costly multi-sample decoding, while internalization strategies lack a way to separate verbalizable skill content from residual perceptual information. To address this, we introduce Conditional Multimodal Information Bottleneck (CMIB), a method for multimodal skill construction. CMIB begins with a joint bottleneck over multimodal skills and derives an exact sequential decomposition: (1) a text-stage bottleneck distilling interpretable skill cards, and (2) a conditional multimodal bottleneck compressing only residual information in perception that remains predictive beyond text. Unlike naive two-stream formulations, CMIB explicitly conditions the multimodal latent on the text skill, thus structurally reducing cross-modal redundancy and enabling independent control over textual and perceptual compression. We instantiate CMIB with a variational objective that makes its conditional decomposition tractable to optimize, yielding reusable multimodal skills that improve execution stability without incurring multi-sample inference overhead. --- ### Coordinates of Capability: A Unified MTMM-Geometric Framework for LLM Evaluation Authors: Adib Sakhawat, Tahsin Islam, Takia Farhin, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Hasan Mahmud, Md Kamrul Hasan Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08522v2 The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a critical challenge in construct validity, where fragmented benchmarks and ad hoc metrics frequently conflate method variance, such as prompt sensitivity, with true latent capabilities. Concurrently, emerging research suggests that LLM capabilities and outputs can be modeled as continuous geometric manifolds. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK), we bridge these paradigms by proposing a generalized Multi-Trait Multi-Method (MTMM) framework for LLM evaluation. We formalize and unify nine evaluation metrics, including Paraphrase Instability, Drift Score, Overton Width, and Pluralism Score, interpreting them not as isolated scalar values but as geometric measurements within a shared latent coordinate space. This spatial unification factorizes model behavior into three orthogonal latent dimensions: (1) Instability and Sensitivity, (2) Position and Alignment, and (3) Coverage and Expressiveness. By systematically separating task-irrelevant perturbations from true capability spans, the framework provides a theoretically grounded and domain-agnostic taxonomy for robust and empirically stable benchmark design. --- ### Geometric Flood Depth Estimation: Fusing Transformer-Based Segmentation with Digital Elevation Models Authors: Nhut Le, Ehsan Karimi, Maryam Rahnemoonfar Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08521v1 Post-disaster situational awareness relies heavily on understanding both the extent and the volume of floodwaters. While 2D semantic segmentation provides accurate flood masking, it lacks the vertical dimension required to assess navigability and structural risk. This paper presents a geometric "Water Surface Elevation" approach for estimating flood depth from monocular aerial imagery. Our pipeline utilizes Mask2Former, a state-of-the-art transformer-based segmentation model, to generate precise 2D flood masks. These masks are fused with Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) to identify the water-land boundary, calculate a global water surface elevation ($Z_{water}$), and compute per-pixel depth based on the principle of local hydrostatic equilibrium. We evaluate this workflow using the FloodNet and CRASAR-U-DROIDS datasets, demonstrating how high-performance segmentation can be leveraged to extract 3D volumetric data from 2D imagery without the latency of hydrodynamic simulations. --- ### FlashEvolve: Accelerating Agent Self-Evolution with Asynchronous Stage Orchestration Authors: Zhengding Hu, Mingge Lu, Zhen Wang, Jixuan Ruan, Chang Chen, Zaifeng Pan, Yue Guan, Ruiyi Wang, Zhongkai Yu, Chao Zhang, Yufei Ding Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08520v1 LLM-based evolution has emerged as a promising way to improve agents by refining non-parametric artifacts, but its wall-clock cost remains a major bottleneck. We identify that this cost comes from synchronized stage execution and imbalance inside each LLM-heavy stage. We present FlashEvolve, an efficient framework that replaces synchronized execution with asynchronous workers and queues, allowing different stages and steps to overlap. To handle data staleness introduced by asynchrony, FlashEvolve tracks artifact versions and applies different policies to update, discard, or patch stale artifacts. Unlike weight-space staleness in asynchronous RL, language-space staleness is inspectable and repairable: a stale artifact is not just delayed work, but readable evidence that the LLM can reflect on, revise, and turn into useful evolution signal. FlashEvolve further improves throughput and token efficiency with speculative stage completion and adaptive workflow control. On GEPA workloads, FlashEvolve improves proposal throughput by $3.5\times$ on local vLLM and $4.9\times$ on API serving over synchronous GEPA. The same design also applies to ACE and Meta-Harness. --- ### SeBA: Semi-supervised few-shot learning via Separated-at-Birth Alignment for tabular data Authors: Kacper Jurek, Wojciech Batko, Marek Śmieja, Marcin Przewięźlikowski Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08519v2 Learning from scarce labeled data with a larger pool of unlabeled samples, known as semi-supervised few-shot learning (SS-FSL), remains critical for applications involving tabular data in domains like medicine, finance, and science. The existing SS-FSL methods often rely on self-supervised learning (SSL) frameworks developed for vision or language, which assume the availability of a natural form of data augmentations. For tabular data, defining meaningful augmentations is non-trivial and can easily distort semantics, limiting the effectiveness of conventional SSL. In this work, we rethink SSL for tabular data and propose Separated-at-Birth Alignment (SeBA), a joint-embedding framework for SS-FSL that eliminates the dependence on augmentations. Our core idea is to separate the data into two independent, but complementary views and align the representations of one view to mirror the nearest-neighbor correspondence of the data in the second view. Our experimental evaluation supported by a theoretical analysis justifies that SeBA generates an output space, which improves the feature-label relationship. An experimental study conducted in various benchmark datasets demonstrates that SeBA achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the majority of cases, opening a new avenue for SS-FSL paradigm in the domain of tabular data. --- ### SeBA: Semi-supervised few-shot learning via Separated-at-Birth Alignment for tabular data Authors: Kacper Jurek, Wojciech Batko, Marek Śmieja, Marcin Przewięźlikowski Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08519v1 Learning from scarce labeled data with a larger pool of unlabeled samples, known as semi-supervised few-shot learning (SS-FSL), remains critical for applications involving tabular data in domains like medicine, finance, and science. The existing SS-FSL methods often rely on self-supervised learning (SSL) frameworks developed for vision or language, which assume the availability of a natural form of data augmentations. For tabular data, defining meaningful augmentations is non-trivial and can easily distort semantics, limiting the effectiveness of conventional SSL. In this work, we rethink SSL for tabular data and propose Separated-at-Birth Alignment (SeBA), a joint-embedding framework for SS-FSL that eliminates the dependence on augmentations. Our core idea is to separate the data into two independent, but complementary views and align the representations of one view to mirror the nearest-neighbor correspondence of the data in the second view. Our experimental evaluation supported by a theoretical analysis justifies that SeBA generates an output space, which improves the feature-label relationship. An experimental study conducted in various benchmark datasets demonstrates that SeBA achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the majority of cases, opening a new avenue for SS-FSL paradigm in the domain of tabular data. --- ### Results and Retrospective Analysis of the CODS 2025 AssetOpsBench Challenge Authors: Dhaval Patel, Chathurangi Shyalika, Suryanarayana Reddy Yarrabothula, Ling Yue, Shuxin Lin, Nianjun Zhou, James Rayfield Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08518v1 Competition retrospectives are useful when they explain what a leaderboard measured, how hidden evaluation changed conclusions, and which design patterns were rewarded. We revisit the CODS 2025 \assetopslive{} challenge, a privacy-aware Codabench competition on industrial multi-agent orchestration built on \assetops{}. We combine final rank sheets, a 300-submission server log, 149-team registrations, best-submission exports, the organizer winners report, the companion \assetopslive{} system paper, and verified planning-track source trees. Five results stand out. First, the public planning leaderboard saturates at 72.73\%, and richer prompts do not improve that peak. Second, hidden evaluation changes the story: public and private scores correlate moderately in planning ($r{=}0.69$) but negatively in execution ($r{=}{-}0.13$), with several 45.45\% public execution systems reaching 63.64\% on the hidden set. Third, the \tmatch{} term is numerically almost inert in the official composite -- combined on a 0--1 scale with 0--100 percentage scores, it contributes at most 0.05 points per track, and rescaling would swap the top two teams. Fourth, the competition is operationally account-based but substantively team-based: 149 registered teams reduce to 24 with non-zero public scores and 11 fully ranked, while 52.3\% of deduplicated registrations list multiple usernames. Fifth, successful execution methods mostly improve guardrails -- response selection, contamination cleanup, fallback, and context control -- rather than novel agent architectures. These findings identify which behaviors the evaluation rewarded, and motivate scale-aware composites, skill-level diagnostics, and versioned artifact release. --- ### A Deep Risk Estimator for Known Operator Learning Authors: Andreas Maier, Md Hasan, Paulina Conrad, Paula Andrea Perez-Toro Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08517v1 We describe an approach for estimating the statistical risk of deep networks that contain a mix of learned and known operators. Building on the maximal training error bounds previously established for known operator learning, we derive a deep risk estimator that connects the expected error of a layered network to the size of the training sample. The estimator decomposes the total risk into a sum over learned layers; every known operator contributes zero to this sum, while every learned layer adds an approximation term inspired by Barron's classic work and an estimation term that decreases with the number of training samples. We are able to show that the bound shrinks whenever a learned layer is replaced by a known operator and that the corresponding sample requirement scales with the number of trainable parameters of the layer that is replaced. As an application, we use computed tomography as an example and compare an operator-aware filtered backprojection network with a fully connected substitute that collapses the entire reconstruction pipeline into a single learned dense matrix. The predicted parameter ratio coincides with the structural sparsity that the analytic decomposition into a circulant filter and a sparse backprojection exposes. We confirm the predicted scaling on CPU at small image scale and on GPU at medium image scale, all on the same scaling law. Beyond CT reconstruction, the estimator applies to physics-informed neural networks that hardcode a known physical operation in its architecture, and we expect the result to be of interest for a broad community working on operator-aware deep learning. Calibrating the per-layer constants on each sweep yields a bound that tracks the empirical test MSE within a factor of two at every training-set size, so the estimator can be inverted to predict how many training samples are required to reach a target error. --- ### OracleTSC: Oracle-Informed Reward Hurdle and Uncertainty Regularization for Traffic Signal Control Authors: Darryl Jacob, Xinyu Liu, Muchao Ye, Xiaoyong Yuan, Pan He Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08516v1 Transparent decision-making is essential for traffic signal control (TSC) systems to earn public trust. However, traditional reinforcement learning-based TSC methods function as black boxes with limited interpretability. Although large language models (LLMs) can provide natural language reasoning, reinforcement finetuning for TSC remains unstable because feedback is sparse and delayed, while most actions produce only marginal changes in congestion metrics. We introduce OracleTSC, which stabilizes LLM-based TSC through two mechanisms: (1) a reward hurdle mechanism that filters weak learning signals by subtracting a calibrated threshold from environmental rewards, and (2) uncertainty regularization that maximizes the probability of the selected response to encourage consistent decisions across sampled outputs. Experiments on the LibSignal benchmark show that OracleTSC enables a compact LLaMA3-8B model to substantially improve traffic efficiency, achieving a 75% reduction in travel time and a 67% decrease in queue length compared with the pretrained baseline while preserving interpretability through natural language explanations. OracleTSC also demonstrates strong cross-intersection generalization: a policy trained on one intersection transfers to a structurally different intersection with 17% lower travel time and 39% lower queue length without additional finetuning. These results suggest that uncertainty-aware reward shaping can improve the stability and effectiveness of reinforcement fine-tuning for TSC. --- ### Quantile-Coupled Flow Matching for Distributional Reinforcement Learning Authors: Michael Groom, Victor-Alexandru Darvariu, Lars Kunze, James Wilson, Nick Hawes Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08515v1 Unlike standard expected-return Reinforcement Learning (RL), Distributional RL (DRL) models the full return distribution, making it better-suited for uncertainty-aware and risk-sensitive decision-making. Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) critics have recently attracted attention for modelling continuous, multi-modal return distributions. Despite this interest, there remains a substantial metric mismatch: DRL theory relies on the distributional Bellman operator being contractive in the $p$-Wasserstein distance, yet existing CFM critics are trained with arbitrary source-target couplings, so their flow-matching losses are not Wasserstein-aligned surrogates for matching Bellman target return distributions. In this work, we address this mismatch by proposing FlowIQN, a CFM critic that sorts source and Bellman target samples within each mini-batch to approximate the monotone optimal transport coupling, replacing arbitrary pairings with quantile-aligned flow paths. We prove that the loss of our quantile-coupled CFM critic yields a Wasserstein-aligned approximate projection compatible with the foundations of DRL. To our knowledge, FlowIQN is the first flow-matching distributional critic with an explicit Wasserstein-aligned projection guarantee. We further extend FlowIQN with shortcut models for efficient inference. Empirical results show that FlowIQN improves Wasserstein return-distribution accuracy over other CFM critics. It also yields competitive performance on offline RL benchmarks across multiple policy extraction methods, providing a theoretically grounded CFM critic that is readily compatible with DRL pipelines. Code: https://github.com/ori-goals/flowIQN. --- ### A Single Neuron Is Sufficient to Bypass Safety Alignment in Large Language Models Authors: Hamid Kazemi, Atoosa Chegini, Maria Safi Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08513v1 Safety alignment in language models operates through two mechanistically distinct systems: refusal neurons that gate whether harmful knowledge is expressed, and concept neurons that encode the harmful knowledge itself. By targeting a single neuron in each system, we demonstrate both directions of failure -- bypassing safety on explicit harmful requests via suppression, and inducing harmful content from innocent prompts via amplification -- across seven models spanning two families and 1.7B to 70B parameters, without any training or prompt engineering. Our findings suggest that safety alignment is not robustly distributed across model weights but is mediated by individual neurons that are each causally sufficient to gate refusal behavior -- suppressing any one of the identified refusal neurons bypasses safety alignment across diverse harmful requests. --- ### MoMo: Conditioned Contrastive Representation Learning for Preference-Modulated Planning Authors: Yusuf Syed, Viraj Parimi, Brian Williams Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08512v2 Temporally contrastive representation learning induces a latent structure capable of reducing long-horizon planning to inference in a low-dimensional linear system. However, existing contrastive planning work learns a single latent geometry which cannot distinguish multiple valid behaviors trading task efficiency against risk exposure for the same start-goal query. We introduce MoMo, a preference-conditioned contrastive planner allowing a scalar user preference to continuously modulate plan conservativeness at inference time, without retraining. MoMo learns a joint conditioning of the representation geometry and latent prediction operator via Feature-Wise Linear Modulation and low-rank neural modulation, respectively. We show that our formulation preserves the probability density ratio encoded in the representation space that is required for inference-driven contrastive planning, further retaining its inference-time efficiency. Across six environments, MoMo smoothly adapts plan safety according to user preferences, yielding improved temporal and preferential consistency over state augmentation baselines. --- ### Learning Polyhedral Conformal Sets for Robust Optimization Authors: Shuyi Chen, Wenbin Zhou, Shixiang Zhu Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08506v3 Robust optimization (RO) provides a principled framework for decision-making under uncertainty, but its performance critically depends on the choice of the uncertainty set. While large sets ensure reliability, they often lead to overly conservative decisions, whereas small sets risk excluding the true outcome. Recent data-driven approaches, particularly conformal prediction, offer finite-sample validity guarantees but remain largely task-agnostic, ignoring the downstream decision structure. In this paper, we propose a decision-aware conformal framework that learns uncertainty sets tailored to robust optimization objectives. Our approach parameterizes a flexible family of polyhedral sets via data-driven hyperplanes and learns their geometry by directly minimizing the induced robust loss, while preserving statistical validity through conformal calibration. To correct for data-dependent selection, we incorporate a re-calibration step on an independent dataset to restore coverage. The resulting sets capture directional and anisotropic uncertainty aligned with the decision objective while remaining computationally tractable. We provide finite-sample coverage guarantees and bounds on the sub-optimality gap to an oracle decision. This work bridges the gap between statistical validity and decision optimality, providing a principled framework for data-driven robust optimization. --- ### Learning Polyhedral Conformal Sets for Robust Optimization Authors: Shuyi Chen, Wenbin Zhou, Shixiang Zhu Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08506v2 Robust optimization (RO) provides a principled framework for decision-making under uncertainty, but its performance critically depends on the choice of the uncertainty set. While large sets ensure reliability, they often lead to overly conservative decisions, whereas small sets risk excluding the true outcome. Recent data-driven approaches, particularly conformal prediction, offer finite-sample validity guarantees but remain largely task-agnostic, ignoring the downstream decision structure. In this paper, we propose a decision-aware conformal framework that learns uncertainty sets tailored to robust optimization objectives. Our approach parameterizes a flexible family of polyhedral sets via data-driven hyperplanes and learns their geometry by directly minimizing the induced robust loss, while preserving statistical validity through conformal calibration. To correct for data-dependent selection, we incorporate a re-calibration step on an independent dataset to restore coverage. The resulting sets capture directional and anisotropic uncertainty aligned with the decision objective while remaining computationally tractable. We provide finite-sample coverage guarantees and bounds on the sub-optimality gap to an oracle decision. This work bridges the gap between statistical validity and decision optimality, providing a principled framework for data-driven robust optimization. --- ### Scaling Limits of Long-Context Transformers Authors: Giuseppe Bruno, Shi Chen, Zhengjiang Lin, Yury Polyanskiy, Philippe Rigollet Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.PR, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08505v1 We study the long-context limit of softmax self-attention with a fixed query and a random context of $n$ i.i.d. keys on the sphere, viewing the inverse temperature $β_n$ as the scaling parameter that decides whether attention degenerates into uniform averaging or collapses onto the single closest key. We show that the critical scale at which selectivity emerges is determined by the local exponent of the distance-to-query distribution near zero rather than by global features of the context, and scales like $β_n^\ast \asymp n^{2/(d-1)}$ for uniform keys on $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$. Furthermore, we characterize the limiting laws of the ordered attention weights and of the attention output across all regimes of $β_n$: a subcritical regime in which the output reduces to a local average around $q$ with explicit deterministic bias and Gaussian fluctuations; a critical regime in which a finite collection of nearest keys retains macroscopic mass without single-key collapse; and a supercritical regime in which all mass concentrates on the closest key. Of notable interest is the subcritical case with identity value matrix where the attention map approximately implements a backward heat equation. --- ### A Single Layer to Explain Them All:Understanding Massive Activations in Large Language Models Authors: Zeru Shi, Zhenting Wang, Fan Yang, Qifan Wang, Ruixiang Tang Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08504v2 We investigate the origins of massive activations in large language models (LLMs) and identify a specific layer named the \textbf{Massive Emergence Layer (ME Layer)}, that is consistently observed across model families, where massive activations first emerge and subsequently propagate to deeper layers through residual connections. We show that, within the ME Layer both the RMSNorm and the FFN parameters jointly contribute to the emergence of massive activations. Once formed, the massive activation token representation remains largely invariant across layers, reducing the diversity of hidden representations passed to the attention module. Motivated by this limitation, we propose a simple and effective method to reduce the rigidity of the massive activation token. Our approach consistently improves LLM performance across multiple tasks, including instruction following and math reasoning, in both training free and fine tuning settings. Moreover, we show that our method mitigates attention sinks by selectively weakening their influence, elucidating their origin at the hidden state level and shedding new light on principled mitigation strategies. --- ### NARRA-Gym for Evaluating Interactive Narrative Agents Authors: Yue Huang, Yuchen Ma, Jiayi Ye, Wenjie Wang, Zipeng Ling, Xingjian Hu, Yuexing Hao, Zichen Chen, Zhangchen Xu, Yunhong He, Zhengqing Yuan, Yujun Zhou et al. Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08503v1 Interactive narrative tasks require LLMs to sustain a coherent, evolving story while adapting to a user over multiple turns. However, suitable benchmarks for this setting are limited: existing evaluations often focus on static prompts, isolated story generations, or post-hoc ratings, and therefore miss whether models can jointly manage story generation, long-context state and pacing, character simulation, empathic personalization, and story-grounded artifacts. We introduce NARRA-Gym, an executable evaluation environment that turns a sparse emotional seed into a complete interactive story episode and logs the full model-in-the-loop trajectory, including story construction, memory updates, planning, pacing interventions, and optional artifact synthesis. We evaluate nine frontier LLMs using a controlled LLM-as-judge sweep over eight benchmark personas and a human evaluation in which participants rate customized model outputs. Our results show substantial variation across models, personas, and evaluation dimensions: models that produce fluent stories can still fail on robustness, user experience, or resistance-sensitive personalization. These findings suggest that interactive narrative offers a useful benchmark for evaluating long-horizon, user-adaptive LLM behavior beyond isolated story quality. --- ### Multi-Level Graph Attention Network Contrastive Learning for Knowledge-Aware Recommendation Authors: Zhifei Hu, Feng Xia Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08499v1 In recent years, the use of edge information provided by knowledge graphs together with the advantages of higher-order connectivity in graph neural networks for recommendation systems has become an important research direction. However, existing approaches are often limited by sparse labels, insufficient graph structure learning, and noisy entities in the knowledge graph, which reduce recommendation accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose a multi-view graph contrastive learning framework. The proposed method enhances user representations through multi-view knowledge graph distillation, enabling more accurate modeling of user preferences over entities and relations. The network aggregates neighborhood entity information to construct informative item representations. Furthermore, we design a multi-level self-supervised contrastive learning module that performs comparisons across three perspectives: Inter-Level, Intra-Level, and Interaction-Level. This design improves the model's ability to generalize across intra-class samples while increasing discrimination between inter-class samples, thereby enabling more effective multi-dimensional feature modeling. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets using both baseline and ablation settings. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of each module in the proposed model. --- ### MathConstraint: Automated Generation of Verified Combinatorial Reasoning Instances for LLMs Authors: Viresh Pati, Zhengyu Li, Piyush Jha, Rahul Garg, Yatharth Sejpal, Vijay Ganesh Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08498v1 We introduce MathConstraint, a hard, adaptive benchmark for evaluating the combinatorial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We combine constraint satisfaction problems with rigorous solver-based verification and design an adaptive generator to create instances that remain challenging as the LLMs improve in their reasoning capabilities. Unlike existing benchmarks that quickly saturate on fixed datasets or use LLM-as-a-judge for checking solutions,MathConstraint uses parameterized problem types that enable scalable generation of arbitrarily difficult and automatically verifiable instances. We release MathConstraint-Easy ($266$ instances), on which frontier models achieve between $72.6\%$ (gemini-3.1-flash-lite) and $87.6\%$ (gpt-5.5) accuracy, and MathConstraint ($329$ instances) on which the same models drop to between $18.5\%$ (claude-4.6-sonnet) and $66.9\%$ (gpt-5.5) accuracy, demonstrating the resilience of our benchmark generator against rapid progress in LLM reasoning capabilities. We evaluate 12 frontier and open-weight models with and without access to a sandboxed Python environment that includes generic SAT/SMT solvers. Tool access roughly doubles frontier accuracy on MathConstraint (mean $+28$pp; up to $+52$pp for claude-4.6-sonnet). Further, halving the tool-call budget from $8$ to $4$ rounds erases up to $37$ points -- a sensitivity that most single-budget benchmarks miss. We release the generator, dataset, and evaluation harness as a robust environment for studying combinatorial reasoning and tool-use behavior under adversarially-tunable difficulty. --- ### Latent Personality Alignment: Improving Harmlessness Without Mentioning Harms Authors: Linh Le, David Williams-King, Mohamed Amine Merzouk, Aton Kamanda, Adam Oberman Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08496v1 Current adversarial robustness methods for large language models require extensive datasets of harmful prompts (thousands to hundreds of thousands of examples), yet remain vulnerable to novel attack vectors and distributional shifts. We propose Latent Personality Alignment (LPA), a sample-efficient defense that achieves robustness by training models on abstract personality traits rather than specific harmful behaviors. Using fewer than 100 trait statements and latent adversarial training, LPA achieves comparable attack success rates to methods trained on 150k+ examples, while maintaining superior utility. Critically, LPA generalizes better to unseen attack distributions, reducing misclassification rates by 2.6x compared to baseline across six harm benchmarks -- without ever seeing harmful examples during training. Our results demonstrate that personality-based alignment offers a principled approach to building robust defenses with minimal cost. --- ### NeuralBench: A Unifying Framework to Benchmark NeuroAI Models Authors: Hubert Banville, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Simon Dahan, Jérémy Rapin, Marlène Careil, Yohann Benchetrit, Jarod Lévy, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Mingfang, Zhang, Elisa Cascardi et al. Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08495v1 Deep learning and large public datasets have recently catalyzed the proliferation of AI models for processing brain recordings. However, systematically evaluating these models remains a challenge: not only do the preprocessing pipelines, training and finetuning approaches largely vary across studies, but their downstream evaluation is often limited to small sets of tasks and/or datasets. Here, we present NeuralBench: a unified framework for benchmarking AI models of brain activity. We accompany this framework with NeuralBench-EEG v1.0 -- a large EEG benchmark that includes 36 electroencephalography (EEG) tasks and 14 deep learning architectures, and is evaluated on 94 datasets accessed through a standardized interface. This first EEG-focused release already highlights two main findings. First, current foundation models only marginally outperform task-specific models. Second, a large set of tasks (e.g. cognitive decoding, clinical predictions) remain highly challenging, even for the best models. Critically, NeuralBench is designed for the integration of new tasks, datasets, models, and neuroimaging modalities, as illustrated by preliminary extensions to MEG and fMRI datasets and models. Through this white paper, we invite the community to expand this open-source framework and work together toward a unified benchmarking standard for neuroimaging models. --- ### CapCLIP: A Vision-Language Representation Alignment Approach for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Analysis Authors: Haroon Wahab, Irfan Mehmood, Hassan Ugail Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08493v1 Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) enables non-invasive visual assessment of the small bowel, but its clinical utility is constrained by the large volume of frames generated per examination and the difficulty of recognising subtle abnormalities under highly variable imaging conditions. Existing learning-based approaches for WCE are predominantly vision-only, often confined to narrow pathology sets, and show limited transfer across datasets and centres. To address these limitations, this study introduces CapCLIP, a domain-specific vision-language representation learning framework for WCE. CapCLIP aligns capsule endoscopy frames with clinically grounded textual descriptions derived from standardised nomenclature and pathology-aware caption templates, thereby learning embeddings that are both semantically informed and transferable. The proposed framework is evaluated against relevant open-source vision and vision-language foundation models under strict zero-shot conditions using unseen WCE datasets. Evaluation covers three downstream tasks: K-nearest neighbour classification, CLIP-style image-text classification, and text-to-image retrieval. Across these settings, CapCLIP consistently outperforms the compared baselines, with particularly strong gains in zero-shot image-text classification and cross-modal retrieval on out-of-distribution datasets. The results indicate that language-guided representation learning can improve both generalisation and semantic interpretability in WCE analysis. These findings position CapCLIP as a step toward foundation models tailored to capsule endoscopy and support the use of language-grounded WCE analysis. --- ### A Unified Lyapunov-IQC Framework for Uniform Stability of Smooth Quadratic First-Order Accelerated Optimizers Authors: Don Li, Dacian Daescu Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08488v2 We develop a unified Lyapunov-integral quadratic constraint (IQC) framework for establishing uniform stability of first-order accelerated optimization algorithms in the $β$-smooth and $γ$-strongly convex regime. Classical analyses of uniform stability, such as the work of Hardt, Recht, and Singer for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), rely on direct coupling arguments and case-by-case control of iterate differences under random sampling. Extending such arguments to accelerated methods, such as Nesterov Accelerated Gradient (NAG), is complicated by the presence of higher-order state dynamics induced by momentum. We first extend this classical approach with the use of Lyapunov functions to provide a uniform stability bound for smooth quadratic NAG, and supplement this result with small-scale numerical experiments. We then extend this framework by modeling first-order accelerated optimizers as Lur'e-type feedback interconnections between a linear dynamical system and a (non-linear) gradient operator. $β$-Smoothness and $γ$-strong convexity are encoded a sector IQC inequality. Under this representation, uniform stability is certified via the existence of a quadratic Lyapunov function satisfying a finite-dimensional linear matrix inequality (LMI) in the form of a feasibility problem, which can be solved via semi-definite programming (SDP). We instantiate this framework for NAG and show how classical uniform stability bounds can be recovered via this framework. These results underscore a structural connection between optimization dynamics and robust control theory, providing a modular methodology for reliable and reproducible numerical certification of uniform stability and generalization behavior of first-order methods via convex optimization tools that is adaptable to increasingly complex optimization algorithms. --- ### Sinkhorn Treatment Effects: A Causal Optimal Transport Measure Authors: Medha Agarwal, Alex Luedtke Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08485v1 We introduce the Sinkhorn treatment effect, an entropic optimal transport measure of divergence between counterfactual distributions. Unlike classical quantities such as the average treatment effect, this measure captures differences across entire distributions. We analyze this divergence as a statistical functional and show it can be written as a smooth transformation of counterfactual mean embeddings with an appropriate kernel. This characterization allows us to establish first-order pathwise differentiability in general, and second-order pathwise differentiability under the null hypothesis of equal counterfactual distributions. Leveraging this smoothness, we construct debiased estimators and use them to obtain asymptotically valid tests for distributional treatment effects with a fixed entropic regularization parameter. Because the power of the test depends on this unknown parameter, we further propose an aggregated test that combines evidence across a grid of regularization choices. Experiments on simulated and image data demonstrate the practical advantages of our estimator and testing procedure. --- ### ShifaMind: A Multiplicative Concept Bottleneck for Interpretable ICD-10 Coding Authors: Mohammed Sameer Syed, Xuan Lu Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08482v1 Automated ICD-10 coding from clinical discharge summaries requires models that are both accurate on long-tailed multi-label classification tasks and interpretable to clinicians. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) offer a principled framework for interpretability by routing predictions through human-interpretable concepts, but this transparency often comes at a cost: compressing rich clinical text representations into a narrow concept layer can restrict gradient flow and limit predictive capacity. We present ShifaMind, a concept-grounded architecture built around a Multiplicative Concept Bottleneck (MCB), which changes the form, rather than the width, of the bottleneck. Instead of projecting through a narrow concept layer, ShifaMind uses a learned multiplicative gate over a concept-grounded representation while retaining a scalar concept interface for inspection. On MIMIC-IV top-50 ICD-10 coding, ShifaMind achieves performance competitive with LAAT, the strongest baseline, across F1, AUC, and ranking metrics, while outperforming five additional ICD-coding baselines and providing concept-mediated explanations. Its substantial gains over a capacity-matched Vanilla CBM in both predictive performance and interpretability-oriented metrics highlight the importance of the bottleneck design. --- ### AI-Care: A Conversational Agentic System for Task Coordination in Alzheimer's Disease Care Authors: Preyash Yadav, Michelle Cohn, Priyanka Koppolu, Hritvik Agarwal, Amey Gohil, Tejas Patil, Sasha Pimento, Alyssa Weakley Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08480v1 Individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Alzheimer's disease-related dementia (ADRD) experience memory and thinking changes that impact their ability to use digital daily management tools. For example, adding an event to a digital calendar requires multiple steps that may act as barriers to independent use for individuals with AD/ADRD. This paper presents AI-Care, a conversational agentic artificial intelligence (AI) layer built on top of a remote caregiving platform co-designed with people with AD/ADRD. AI-Care is designed to reduce the cognitive load on individuals with AD/ADRD when managing everyday tasks such as setting calendar reminders and organizing to-do lists through natural-language interaction with a voice-first chatbot. The system uses a LangGraph-based stateful orchestration approach in which each request passes through sanitization, intent classification, context loading, safety checks, deterministic slot collection, tool execution, and response composition. Safety-critical responses, particularly around medications and allergies, are grounded in caregiver-verified records rather than free-form model generation. The system does not make autonomous medical or treatment decisions. Incomplete or ambiguous requests are handled through controlled multi-turn clarification rather than silent failure or guessing. The system supports both typed and spoken input, with voice output through ElevenLabs text-to-speech. Longer responses are chunked before synthesis to avoid rushed playback. A preliminary pilot with four individuals with mild-to-moderate AD/ADRD showed that users found the system trustworthy, competent, and likable, and were able to complete the evaluated coordination tasks through conversation. We describe the design goals, system architecture, safety controls, and findings from this formative evaluation. --- ### When Independent Sampling Outperforms Agentic Reasoning Authors: Yihe Dong, Boris Shigida Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08478v1 We study how to allocate inference-time compute for competitive programming under fixed budgets. Evaluating 216 Codeforces problems across Divisions 1-3, we compare agent-based reasoning with repeated independent sampling (k-shot) as a function of both cost and number of model calls. Across models and difficulty levels, k-shot consistently achieves a better accuracy-cost and accuracy-query tradeoff. This gap persists despite prompt caching in agent frameworks, indicating lower per-call effectiveness. Our results show that, for self-contained algorithmic tasks, independent exploration can outperform deeper agentic reasoning under realistic resource constraints. We also provide a budget-allocation analysis when the inference budget is fixed, and prove that a cost-optimal solver minimizes the principled metric log failure likelihood per dollar. --- ### Do Agents Need to Plan Step-by-Step? Rethinking Planning Horizon in Data-Centric Tool Calling Authors: Naoki Otani, Nikita Bhutani, Hannah Kim, Dan Zhang, Estevam Hruschka Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08477v1 Explicit planning is a critical capability for LLM-based agents solving complex data-centric tasks, which require precise tool calling over external data sources. Existing strategies fall into two paradigms based on planning horizon: (1) full-horizon (FH), which generates a complete plan before execution, and (2) single-step horizon (SH), which interleaves each action (tool call) with incremental reasoning and observation. While step-by-step execution is a common default under the assumption that eager execution monitoring is necessary for adaptability, we revisit this assumption for well-defined data-centric tasks. Our controlled empirical study isolates planning horizon as the key architectural feature and systematically analyzes the effects of topological complexity and tool robustness on both paradigms. Our experiments across Knowledge Base Question Answering and Multi-hop QA show that FH planning with lazy replanning achieves accuracy parity with SH across varying depths, breadths, and robustness levels, while using 2-3x fewer tokens. These findings suggest that for well-defined data-centric tasks, eager step-wise monitoring is often unnecessary, and full-horizon planning with on-demand replanning can offer a more efficient default. --- ### A Computational Operationalisation of Competing Maturational Theories of Syntactic Development via Statistical Grammar Induction Authors: Mila Marcheva, Suchir Salhan, Weiwei Sun Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08476v1 This paper is concerned with what intermediate syntactic categories children acquire during first language development, and in what order. Maturational theories make different predictions. Bottom-up accounts (GROWING) propose that lexical and inflectional structure emerges first, while inward accounts (INWARD) predict early access to discourse-related categories. We computationally operationalise these hypotheses of staged syntactic emergence using statistical grammar induction, asking what each proposed ordering makes learnable when input and learning algorithm are held constant. Our framework makes category acquisition explicit and allows us to explore how different maturational orderings shape the structure that can be learned under identical conditions. Based on this operationalisation, the GROWING account significantly outperforms the INWARD account across three evaluation metrics. --- ### Transformers Can Implement Preconditioned Richardson Iteration for In-Context Gaussian Kernel Regression Authors: Mingsong Yan, Dongyang Li, Charles Kulick, Sui Tang Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.NA, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08475v3 In this paper, we study in-context kernel ridge regression (KRR) with Gaussian kernels and show, both theoretically and empirically, that a standard softmax-attention transformer can approximate the KRR predictor during its forward pass. Under bounded-data assumptions, we construct a single-head transformer whose forward pass approximately implements \textit{preconditioned Richardson iteration} on the associated kernel system. The construction uses $O(\log(1/ε))$ blocks and MLP width $O(\sqrt{N/ε})$ to achieve $ε$-accurate prediction for prompts of length $N$. Our construction reveals a functional decomposition within the transformer architecture: softmax attention produces a row-normalized Gaussian-kernel operator needed for \emph{cross-token} interactions, while MLP layers act locally to approximate the \emph{intra-token} scalar arithmetic required by the update. Empirically, we train GPT-2-style transformers on Gaussian-process regression tasks and observe that they progressively align with the exact Gaussian KRR estimator across depth in terms of both \emph{prediction error} and \emph{induced weights}, with ablations further supporting this trend. Comparisons with classical KRR solvers also show that deeper layers align with later solver iterates. Together, we empirically demonstrate that the pretrained transformers exhibit progressive refinement toward exact Gaussian KRR across depth, and theoretically establish inexact preconditioned Richardson iteration as a concrete mechanism for approximating this predictor within an explicitly constructed softmax-attention transformer. --- ### Transformers Can Implement Preconditioned Richardson Iteration for In-Context Gaussian Kernel Regression Authors: Mingsong Yan, Dongyang Li, Charles Kulick, Sui Tang Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.NA, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08475v2 Mechanistic accounts of in-context learning (ICL) have identified iterative algorithms for linear regression and related linear prediction tasks, often using linear or ReLU attention variants. For nonlinear ICL, prior work has related softmax and kernelized attention to functional-gradient-type dynamics, but it remains unclear whether a standard transformer with softmax attention can implement a convergent solver with an end-to-end prediction-error guarantee. In this paper, we study in-context kernel ridge regression (KRR) with Gaussian kernels and show that a standard softmax-attention transformer can approximate the KRR predictor during its forward pass by implementing preconditioned Richardson iteration on the associated kernel linear system. Under bounded-data assumptions, we construct a single-head transformer with $O(\log(1/ε))$ blocks and MLP width $O(\sqrt{N/ε})$ that achieves $ε$-accurate prediction for prompts of length $N$. Our construction reveals a functional decomposition within the transformer architecture: softmax attention produces a row-normalized Gaussian-kernel operator needed for cross-token interactions, while ReLU MLP layers act locally to approximate the intra-token scalar arithmetic required by the update. Empirically, we train GPT-2-style transformers on Gaussian-process regression tasks to further test the preconditioned Richardson interpretation. Through linear probing, we compare the transformer's layer-wise predictions with the step-wise outputs of classical KRR solvers and find that its error profiles align most consistently with preconditioned Richardson iteration. Ablation studies further support this interpretation. Together, our theory and experiments identify preconditioned Richardson iteration as a concrete mechanism that softmax-attention transformers can realize for nonlinear in-context Gaussian-kernel regression. --- ### Mid-Training with Self-Generated Data Improves Reinforcement Learning in Language Models Authors: Aswin RRV, Jacob Dineen, Divij Handa, Mihir Parmar, Ben Zhou, Swaroop Mishra, Chitta Baral Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08472v1 The effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) depends on the nature and diversity of the data used before and during RL. In particular, reasoning problems can often be approached in multiple ways that rely on different forms of reasoning, and exposure to only a limited range of such approaches in the training data may limit the effectiveness of RL. Motivated by this, we investigate using diverse self-generated data during mid-training as an intermediate step before RL training. Specifically, we adopt a bootstrapped data-generation framework guided by George Polya's problem-solving approaches for generating multiple variants of correct answers for each question in the training data, and then perform fine-tuning. We first provide a theoretical perspective on how mid-training on such data improves RL and explain how policy-gradient updates can incentivize combining multiple approaches. We then empirically demonstrate that RL-trained models initialized with our mid-training data achieve consistent improvements across various mathematical reasoning benchmarks and other OOD tasks like code generation and narrative reasoning. Overall, our investigative study shows that a language model learning multiple problem-solving approaches, through self-generated data helps subsequent RL. --- ### PYTHALAB-MERA: Validation-Grounded Memory, Retrieval, and Acceptance Control for Frozen-LLM Coding Agents Authors: Mehmet Iscan Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08468v1 Local LLM-based coding agents increasingly work in settings where correctness is earned through execution feedback, persistent state, and bounded repair, not through a single fluent answer. Static retrieval, long-context prompting, self-refinement, execution-feedback repair, and reinforcement learning over model weights each address part of this setting, but they do not jointly provide validation-grounded episodic memory, adaptive retrieval-action selection, delayed credit assignment, and structural skill reuse around a frozen local model. We introduce PYTHALAB-MERA, a lightweight external controller for local validation-conditioned code generation. The frozen language model proposes complete source files; the controller decides which memory records and AST-derived skills should enter the next prompt, validates each candidate through a fail-fast pipeline, converts validation outcomes into bounded shaped rewards, and propagates delayed credit through TD(lambda)-style eligibility traces. We evaluate the implementation as a local CLI artifact on reinforcement-learning coding tasks with strict validation gates. In the measured hard RL setting with three tasks, three repetitions, and a three-attempt budget, PYTHALAB-MERA passed 8/9 strict validations; the self-refinement baseline and the investigated GRACE extension each passed 0/9. These results support a deliberately bounded claim: in this recorded setting, the external memory-and-retrieval controller improved validation success. They do not establish general-purpose code synthesis, state-of-the-art performance, formal program correctness, or formal safety. --- ### CUDAHercules: Benchmarking Hardware-Aware Expert-level CUDA Optimization for LLMs Authors: Shiyang Li, Zijian Zhang, Guangyan Sun, Yuebo Luo, Winson Chen, Yanzhi Wang, Mingyi Hong, Caiwen Ding Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08467v1 Large language models show promise for automated CUDA programming, however even the strongest coding models (e.g., Claude-Opus-4.6) may still fall short of expert-level, architecture-aware optimization. We introduce CUDAHercules, a benchmark that evaluates generated CUDA against end-to-end human-expert SOTA systems. It spans single kernels, module-level operators, full applications, and unsolved challenge tasks across Ampere, Hopper, and Blackwell GPUs, with end-to-end tasks gated by domain-specific semantic validators. Evaluating models such as Claude-Opus-4.6 and GPT-5.4 shows a large gap between runnable CUDA and expert CUDA engineering: models often compile and pass tests, but rarely recover the optimization strategies needed to match expert performance. Application semantics further reduce success, and iterative or tool-augmented feedback can improve correctness while drifting toward slow fallback implementations. These results show that automated CUDA programming remains far from fully solved and requires stronger hardware reasoning, better tool use, and training objectives that connect code understanding to hardware architecture-grounded intelligence. --- ### The Geometric Structure of Models Learning Sparse Data Authors: Thomas Walker, T. Mitchell Roddenberry, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Randall Balestriero, Richard Baraniuk Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08464v2 The manifold hypothesis (MH) is often used to explain how machine learning can overcome the curse of dimensionality. However, the MH is only applicable in regimes where the training data provides a sufficiently dense sample of the underlying low-dimensional data manifold, or where such a low-dimensional manifold is conceivably present. We describe the regimes where the MH is not applicable as sparse. In this paper, we demonstrate that models succeed in the sparse regime by exploiting a highly structured local geometry, a property we formalize as normal alignment. We prove that normal-aligned classifiers -- whose input-output Jacobians are rank-one and align perfectly with the training data -- minimize the training objective under norm constraints and achieve maximal local robustness under a non-zero Jacobian constraint. For continuous piecewise-affine deep networks, normal alignment manifests geometrically as centroid alignment within the network's induced power diagram partition and results from the feature-learning regime. Motivated by these theoretical insights, we introduce GrokAlign, a regularization strategy that actively induces normal alignment. We demonstrate that GrokAlign significantly accelerates the training dynamics of deep networks relevant to the grokking phenomenon. Furthermore, we apply the principle of normal alignment to Recursive Feature Machines (RFMs) to introduce Recursive Feature Alignment Machines (RFAMs). We show that RFAMs exhibit greater adversarial robustness compared to RFMs when trained on tabular data. --- ### Behavioral Determinants of Deployed AI Agents in Social Networks: A Multi-Factor Study of Personality, Model, and Guardrail Specification Authors: Sarah Wilson, Diem Linh Dang, Usman Ali Moazzam, Shan Ye, Gail Kaiser Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08463v2 Autonomous AI agents are increasingly deployed in open social environments, yet the relationship between their configuration specifications and their emergent social behavior remains poorly understood. We present a controlled, multi-factor empirical study in which thirteen OpenClaw agents are deployed on Moltbook -- a Reddit-like social network built for AI agents -- across three systematically varied independent variables: (1) personality specification, (2) underlying LLM model backbone, and (3) operational rules and memory configuration. A default control agent provides a behavioral baseline. Over a one-week observation window spanning approximately 400 autonomous sessions per agent, we collect behavioral, linguistic, and social metrics to assess how configuration layers predict emergent social behavior. We find that personality specification is the dominant behavioral lever, producing a massive spread in response length across agents, while model backbone and operational rules drive more moderate but still meaningful effects on rhetorical style and topic engagement breadth. Our findings contribute empirical evidence to the emerging literature on deployed multi-agent social systems and offer practical guidance for designing agents intended for collaborative or monitoring tasks in real social environments. --- ### Do Benchmarks Underestimate LLM Performance? Evaluating Hallucination Detection With LLM-First Human-Adjudicated Assessment Authors: I. F. Atasoy, B. Mutlu, E. A. Sezer, A. Wahdan Published: 2026-05-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08462v1 Hallucination remains a persistent challenge in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in context-grounded settings such as RAG and agentic AI systems. This study focuses on contextual hallucination detection in summarization tasks. We analyze the QAGS-C and SummEval datasets by comparing original benchmark annotations with reason and span-based predictions from Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT-5 Mini. To address systematic divergences between human labels and LLM judgments, we re-evaluated all conflicted samples through a human adjudication process involving 2 cross-cultural adjudicators. Following this re-evaluation, triple agreement (between human, GPT, and Gemini) increased by 6.38% for QAGS-C and 7.62% for SummEval. Similarly, model accuracy improved, with GPT increasing by 4.25% on QAGS-C and 2.34% on SummEval, while Gemini showed gains of 8.51% and 3.80%, respectively. Notably, adjudicators frequently sided with the models' judgments over original human annotations when LLMs provided explicit reasoning. Overall human adjudicator agreement ranged between 83% and 87%. These findings suggest that for ambiguity-prone tasks, single-pass annotations may be insufficient, and model-assisted re-evaluation yields more reliable benchmarks. ---