Hidden in the Multiplicative Interaction: Uncovering Fragility in Multimodal Contrastive Learning
arXiv:2604.05834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal contrastive learning is increasingly enriched by going beyond image-text pairs. Among recent contrastive methods, Symile is a strong approach for this challenge because its multiplicative interaction objective captures higher-order cross-modal dependence. Yet, we find...
Enhancing sample efficiency in reinforcement-learning-based flow control: replacing the critic with an adaptive reduced-order model
arXiv:2604.04986v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods suffer from poor sample efficiency. To overcome this limitation, this work introduces an adaptive reduced-order-model (ROM)-based reinforcement learning framework for active flow control. In contrast to conventional actor--critic architectures,...
Shadow Derivatives: The Quiet Propertization of AI Learning
Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) systems learn. In today’s AI markets, durable advantage comes less from any single output than from the learning that accumulates through training, fine-tuning, and downstream feedback loops.[1] Each interaction, correction, and deployment contributes incrementally to improved...
Simulating the Evolution of Alignment and Values in Machine Intelligence
arXiv:2604.05274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model alignment is currently applied in a vacuum, evaluated primarily through standardised benchmark performance. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of alignment on populations of models through time. We focus on...
Territory Paint Wars: Diagnosing and Mitigating Failure Modes in Competitive Multi-Agent PPO
arXiv:2604.04983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Territory Paint Wars, a minimal competitive multi-agent reinforcement learning environment implemented in Unity, and use it to systematically investigate failure modes of Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) under self-play. A first agent trained for...
What oral arguments and opinion authorships can actually tell us
Empirical SCOTUS is a recurring series by Adam Feldman that looks at Supreme Court data, primarily in the form of opinions and oral arguments, to provide insights into the justices’ decision making and […]The postWhat oral arguments and opinion authorships...
CAWN: Continuous Acoustic Wave Networks for Autoregressive Language Modeling
arXiv:2604.04250v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on Transformer self-attention, which scales quadratically with sequence length. Recent linear-time alternatives, like State Space Models (SSMs), often suffer from signal degradation over extended contexts. We introduce the Continuous...
DARE: Diffusion Large Language Models Alignment and Reinforcement Executor
arXiv:2604.04215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as a compelling alternative to dominant autoregressive models, replacing strictly sequential token generation with iterative denoising and parallel generation dynamics. However, their open-source ecosystem remains fragmented across model...
Scaling DPPs for RAG: Density Meets Diversity
arXiv:2604.03240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding generation in external knowledge, yielding relevance responses that are aligned with factual evidence and evolving corpora. Standard RAG pipelines construct context through relevance ranking, performing...
Improving Model Performance by Adapting the KGE Metric to Account for System Non-Stationarity
arXiv:2604.03906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geoscientific systems tend to be characterized by pronounced temporal non-stationarity, arising from seasonal and climatic variability in hydrometeorological drivers, and from natural and anthropogenic changes to land use and cover. As has been pointed out,...
Apparent Age Estimation: Challenges and Outcomes
arXiv:2604.03335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Apparent age estimation is a valuable tool for business personalization, yet current models frequently exhibit demographic biases. We review prior works on the DEX method by applying distribution learning techniques such as Mean-Variance Loss (MVL)...
Researchers waste 80% of LLM annotation costs by classifying one text at a time
arXiv:2604.03684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for text classification across the social sciences, yet researchers overwhelmingly classify one text per variable per prompt. Coding 100,000 texts on four variables requires 400,000 API calls....
Shorter, but Still Trustworthy? An Empirical Study of Chain-of-Thought Compression
arXiv:2604.04120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long chain-of-thought (Long-CoT) reasoning models have motivated a growing body of work on compressing reasoning traces to reduce inference cost, yet existing evaluations focus almost exclusively on task accuracy and token savings. Trustworthiness properties, whether...
RUQuant: Towards Refining Uniform Quantization for Large Language Models
arXiv:2604.04013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing size and complexity of large language models (LLMs) have raised significant challenges in deployment efficiency, particularly under resource constraints. Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a practical solution by compressing models without requiring...
Scalable Variational Bayesian Fine-Tuning of LLMs via Orthogonalized Low-Rank Adapters
arXiv:2604.03388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When deploying large language models (LLMs) to safety-critical applications, uncertainty quantification (UQ) is of utmost importance to self-assess the reliability of the LLM-based decisions. However, such decisions typically suffer from overconfidence, particularly after parameter-efficient fine-tuning...
Extracting and Steering Emotion Representations in Small Language Models: A Methodological Comparison
arXiv:2604.04064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small language models (SLMs) in the 100M-10B parameter range increasingly power production systems, yet whether they possess the internal emotion representations recently discovered in frontier models remains unknown. We present the first comparative analysis of...
Don't Blink: Evidence Collapse during Multimodal Reasoning
arXiv:2604.04207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning VLMs can become more accurate while progressively losing visual grounding as they think. This creates task-conditional danger zones where low-entropy predictions are confident but ungrounded, a failure mode text-only monitoring cannot detect. Evaluating three...
When Adaptive Rewards Hurt: Causal Probing and the Switching-Stability Dilemma in LLM-Guided LEO Satellite Scheduling
arXiv:2604.03562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adaptive reward design for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in multi-beam LEO satellite scheduling is motivated by the intuition that regime-aware reward weights should outperform static ones. We systematically test this intuition and uncover a switching-stability...
AdaptFuse: Training-Free Sequential Preference Learning via Externalized Bayesian Inference
arXiv:2604.03925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models struggle to accumulate evidence across multiple rounds of user interaction, failing to update their beliefs in a manner consistent with Bayesian inference. Existing solutions require fine-tuning on sensitive user interaction data, limiting...
Embedding Enhancement via Fine-Tuned Language Models for Learner-Item Cognitive Modeling
arXiv:2604.04088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learner-item cognitive modeling plays a central role in the web-based online intelligent education system by enabling cognitive diagnosis (CD) across diverse online educational scenarios. Although ID embedding remains the mainstream approach in cognitive modeling due...
MultiPress: A Multi-Agent Framework for Interpretable Multimodal News Classification
arXiv:2604.03586v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the growing prevalence of multimodal news content, effective news topic classification demands models capable of jointly understanding and reasoning over heterogeneous data such as text and images. Existing methods often process modalities independently or...
Profile-Then-Reason: Bounded Semantic Complexity for Tool-Augmented Language Agents
arXiv:2604.04131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents that use external tools are often implemented through reactive execution, in which reasoning is repeatedly recomputed after each observation, increasing latency and sensitivity to error propagation. This work introduces Profile--Then--Reason (PTR),...
Solar-VLM: Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Solar Power Forecasting
arXiv:2604.04145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting plays a critical role in power system dispatch and market participation. Because PV generation is highly sensitive to weather conditions and cloud motion, accurate forecasting requires effective modeling of complex spatiotemporal...
LightThinker++: From Reasoning Compression to Memory Management
arXiv:2604.03679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning, yet their efficiency is limited by the surging cognitive overhead of long thought traces. In this paper, we propose LightThinker, a method that enables LLMs to dynamically...
Neural Operators for Multi-Task Control and Adaptation
arXiv:2604.03449v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operator methods have emerged as powerful tools for learning mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces, yet their potential in optimal control remains largely unexplored. We focus on multi-task control problems, whose solution is a mapping...
Unveiling Language Routing Isolation in Multilingual MoE Models for Interpretable Subnetwork Adaptation
arXiv:2604.03592v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models exhibit striking performance disparities across languages, yet the internal mechanisms driving these gaps remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of expert routing patterns in MoE models, revealing...
Readable Minds: Emergent Theory-of-Mind-Like Behavior in LLM Poker Agents
arXiv:2604.04157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) -- the ability to model others' mental states -- is fundamental to human social cognition. Whether large language models (LLMs) can develop ToM has been tested exclusively through static vignettes, leaving...
BWTA: Accurate and Efficient Binarized Transformer by Algorithm-Hardware Co-design
arXiv:2604.03957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra low-bit quantization brings substantial efficiency for Transformer-based models, but the accuracy degradation and limited GPU support hinder its wide usage. In this paper, we analyze zero-point distortion in binarization and propose a Binary Weights...
Why Attend to Everything? Focus is the Key
arXiv:2604.03260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Focus, a method that learns which token pairs matter rather than approximating all of them. Learnable centroids assign tokens to groups; distant attention is restricted to same-group pairs while local attention operates at...