Efficient Tail-Aware Generative Optimization via Flow Model Fine-Tuning
arXiv:2602.16796v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained diffusion and flow models to optimize downstream utilities is central to real-world deployment. Existing entropy-regularized methods primarily maximize expected reward, providing no mechanism to shape tail behavior. However, tail control is often essential:...
TopoFlow: Physics-guided Neural Networks for high-resolution air quality prediction
arXiv:2602.16821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose TopoFlow (Topography-aware pollutant Flow learning), a physics-guided neural network for efficient, high-resolution air quality prediction. To explicitly embed physical processes into the learning framework, we identify two critical factors governing pollutant dynamics: topography...
HiVAE: Hierarchical Latent Variables for Scalable Theory of Mind
arXiv:2602.16826v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM) enables AI systems to infer agents' hidden goals and mental states, but existing approaches focus mainly on small human understandable gridworld spaces. We introduce HiVAE, a hierarchical variational architecture that scales...
Learning under noisy supervision is governed by a feedback-truth gap
arXiv:2602.16829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When feedback is absorbed faster than task structure can be evaluated, the learner will favor feedback over truth. A two-timescale model shows this feedback-truth gap is inevitable whenever the two rates differ and vanishes only...
VAM: Verbalized Action Masking for Controllable Exploration in RL Post-Training -- A Chess Case Study
arXiv:2602.16833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exploration remains a key bottleneck for reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of large language models (LLMs), where sparse feedback and large action spaces can lead to premature collapse into repetitive behaviors. We propose Verbalized Action Masking...
A Residual-Aware Theory of Position Bias in Transformers
arXiv:2602.16837v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer models systematically favor certain token positions, yet the architectural origins of this position bias remain poorly understood. Under causal masking at infinite depth, prior theoretical analyses of attention rollout predict an inevitable collapse of...
Training Large Reasoning Models Efficiently via Progressive Thought Encoding
arXiv:2602.16839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) excel on complex problems but face a critical barrier to efficiency: reinforcement learning (RL) training requires long rollouts for outcome-based rewards, where autoregressive decoding dominates time and memory usage. While sliding-window...
What is the Value of Censored Data? An Exact Analysis for the Data-driven Newsvendor
arXiv:2602.16842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the offline data-driven newsvendor problem with censored demand data. In contrast to prior works where demand is fully observed, we consider the setting where demand is censored at the inventory level and only...
On the Mechanism and Dynamics of Modular Addition: Fourier Features, Lottery Ticket, and Grokking
arXiv:2602.16849v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a comprehensive analysis of how two-layer neural networks learn features to solve the modular addition task. Our work provides a full mechanistic interpretation of the learned model and a theoretical explanation of its...
Position: Why a Dynamical Systems Perspective is Needed to Advance Time Series Modeling
arXiv:2602.16864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series (TS) modeling has come a long way from early statistical, mainly linear, approaches to the current trend in TS foundation models. With a lot of hype and industrial demand in this field, it...
ML-driven detection and reduction of ballast information in multi-modal datasets
arXiv:2602.16876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern datasets often contain ballast as redundant or low-utility information that increases dimensionality, storage requirements, and computational cost without contributing meaningful analytical value. This study introduces a generalized, multimodal framework for ballast detection and reduction...
Construction of a classification model for dementia among Brazilian adults aged 50 and over
arXiv:2602.16887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To build a dementia classification model for middle-aged and elderly Brazilians, implemented in Python, combining variable selection and multivariable analysis, using low-cost variables with modification potential. Observational study with a predictive modeling approach using a...
Beyond Message Passing: A Symbolic Alternative for Expressive and Interpretable Graph Learning
arXiv:2602.16947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become essential in high-stakes domains such as drug discovery, yet their black-box nature remains a significant barrier to trustworthiness. While self-explainable GNNs attempt to bridge this gap, they often rely...
Neural Proposals, Symbolic Guarantees: Neuro-Symbolic Graph Generation with Hard Constraints
arXiv:2602.16954v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We challenge black-box purely deep neural approaches for molecules and graph generation, which are limited in controllability and lack formal guarantees. We introduce Neuro-Symbolic Graph Generative Modeling (NSGGM), a neurosymbolic framework that reapproaches molecule generation...
Multi-Agent Lipschitz Bandits
arXiv:2602.16965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the decentralized multi-player stochastic bandit problem over a continuous, Lipschitz-structured action space where hard collisions yield zero reward. Our objective is to design a communication-free policy that maximizes collective reward, with coordination costs...
A Unified Framework for Locality in Scalable MARL
arXiv:2602.16966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is fundamentally challenged by the curse of dimensionality. A common solution is to exploit locality, which hinges on an Exponential Decay Property (EDP) of the value function. However, existing conditions...
Early-Warning Signals of Grokking via Loss-Landscape Geometry
arXiv:2602.16967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grokking -- the abrupt transition from memorization to generalization after prolonged training -- has been linked to confinement on low-dimensional execution manifolds in modular arithmetic. Whether this mechanism extends beyond arithmetic remains open. We study...
Fail-Closed Alignment for Large Language Models
arXiv:2602.16977v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We identify a structural weakness in current large language model (LLM) alignment: modern refusal mechanisms are fail-open. While existing approaches encode refusal behaviors across multiple latent features, suppressing a single dominant feature$-$via prompt-based jailbreaks$-$can cause...
Discovering Universal Activation Directions for PII Leakage in Language Models
arXiv:2602.16980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern language models exhibit rich internal structure, yet little is known about how privacy-sensitive behaviors, such as personally identifiable information (PII) leakage, are represented and modulated within their hidden states. We present UniLeak, a mechanistic-interpretability...
Dynamic Delayed Tree Expansion For Improved Multi-Path Speculative Decoding
arXiv:2602.16994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-path speculative decoding accelerates lossless sampling from a target model by using a cheaper draft model to generate a draft tree of tokens, and then applies a verification algorithm that accepts a subset of these....
Action-Graph Policies: Learning Action Co-dependencies in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2602.17009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coordinating actions is the most fundamental form of cooperation in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Successful decentralized decision-making often depends not only on good individual actions, but on selecting compatible actions across agents to synchronize behavior,...
Malliavin Calculus as Stochastic Backpropogation
arXiv:2602.17013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish a rigorous connection between pathwise (reparameterization) and score-function (Malliavin) gradient estimators by showing that both arise from the Malliavin integration-by-parts identity. Building on this equivalence, we introduce a unified and variance-aware hybrid estimator...
Transforming Behavioral Neuroscience Discovery with In-Context Learning and AI-Enhanced Tensor Methods
arXiv:2602.17027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery pipelines typically involve complex, rigid, and time-consuming processes, from data preparation to analyzing and interpreting findings. Recent advances in AI have the potential to transform such pipelines in a way that domain experts...
Forecasting Anomaly Precursors via Uncertainty-Aware Time-Series Ensembles
arXiv:2602.17028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Detecting anomalies in time-series data is critical in domains such as industrial operations, finance, and cybersecurity, where early identification of abnormal patterns is essential for ensuring system reliability and enabling preventive maintenance. However, most existing...
Sign Lock-In: Randomly Initialized Weight Signs Persist and Bottleneck Sub-Bit Model Compression
arXiv:2602.17063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sub-bit model compression seeks storage below one bit per weight; as magnitudes are aggressively compressed, the sign bit becomes a fixed-cost bottleneck. Across Transformers, CNNs, and MLPs, learned sign matrices resist low-rank approximation and are...
Spatio-temporal dual-stage hypergraph MARL for human-centric multimodal corridor traffic signal control
arXiv:2602.17068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-centric traffic signal control in corridor networks must increasingly account for multimodal travelers, particularly high-occupancy public transportation, rather than focusing solely on vehicle-centric performance. This paper proposes STDSH-MARL (Spatio-Temporal Dual-Stage Hypergraph based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning),...
AdvSynGNN: Structure-Adaptive Graph Neural Nets via Adversarial Synthesis and Self-Corrective Propagation
arXiv:2602.17071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural networks frequently encounter significant performance degradation when confronted with structural noise or non-homophilous topologies. To address these systemic vulnerabilities, we present AdvSynGNN, a comprehensive architecture designed for resilient node-level representation learning. The proposed...
Adam Improves Muon: Adaptive Moment Estimation with Orthogonalized Momentum
arXiv:2602.17080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient stochastic optimization typically integrates an update direction that performs well in the deterministic regime with a mechanism adapting to stochastic perturbations. While Adam uses adaptive moment estimates to promote stability, Muon utilizes the weight...
MeGU: Machine-Guided Unlearning with Target Feature Disentanglement
arXiv:2602.17088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The growing concern over training data privacy has elevated the "Right to be Forgotten" into a critical requirement, thereby raising the demand for effective Machine Unlearning. However, existing unlearning approaches commonly suffer from a fundamental...
Synergizing Transport-Based Generative Models and Latent Geometry for Stochastic Closure Modeling
arXiv:2602.17089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models recently developed for generative AI tasks can produce high-quality samples while still maintaining diversity among samples to promote mode coverage, providing a promising path for learning stochastic closure models. Compared to other types...