arXiv:2608.03565v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While modern tabular learners excel at capturing statistical patterns, they frequently operate in a semantic vacuum, treating textual features as discrete symbols, ignoring the rich semantics inherent in feature names or cell entries. We propose CASE (Context-Aware Semantic Embeddings), a novel framework that bridges the gap between the semantic understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the statistical capabilities of tabular learners. Unlike existing methods that embed rows in isolation, CASE utilizes a contextualization strategy: we pre-fill the KV cache of a custom-trained Gemma 3-based Tabular Language Model with a representative sample of rows to establish a persistent anchor of the dataset's semantics. This ensures that generated row embeddings are dynamically contextualized, resolving semantic ambiguities and anchoring representations in domain-specific context. Our experiments across several benchmarks (CARTE, TextTab, and TabArena) demonstrate that CASE substantially improves the performance of tabular learners on semantically rich datasets, particularly in low-data regimes.
arXiv:2607.17679v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This is an invited commentary on the Psychometrika focus article "Fairness Issues and Evaluation in Psychometrics and AI/ML: What Can We Learn from Each Field?" by Ying Cheng (2026, doi:10.1017/psy.2026.10110). Cheng offers a systematic comparison between long-standing test fairness and modern algorithmic fairness. Her mapping of the entire testing workflow onto the AI/ML fairness paradigm, rather than only the final selection stage, is a crucial contribution to interdisciplinary fairness research. This commentary extends her discussion by examining two conceptual issues: the distinction between equality and equity, and the role of causality in fairness research. The focus article and this commentary point to directions for future fairness research across the psychometrics and AI/ML communities.
arXiv:2607.02592v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm by providing supervision on student-generated trajectories. However, existing OPD methods for multimodal reasoning usually rely on a static teacher routing, assigning each sample to a single teacher based on modality or task type. This ignores that visual grounding and abstract reasoning may dominate different decoding steps, making a single teacher insufficient for the full trajectory. To this end, H-OPD is proposed as a confidence-aware heterogeneous multi-teacher OPD framework for multimodal reasoning. By verifying the complementarity of heterogeneous teachers in the same reasoning process, H-OPD replaces task or sample level teacher routing with token-level teacher arbitration along the shared student trajectory. H-OPD employs vision-to-language description transfer to enable text-only teachers to access key visual semantics, and uses a confidence-aware arbitration mechanism to dynamically combine vision-language teacher and text-only teachers at each token. Extensive evaluations over 11 widely-used reasoning benchmarks showcase the superior performance of our method.
arXiv:2606.29315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to act in the real world and augment human decision-making, yet most systems rely on parametric knowledge acquired through imitation, optionally improved by post-training, retrieval, or search over fixed data. This paradigm struggles in novel domains or on complex queries that require information unavailable from prior knowledge alone; knowing the laws of physics, for example, does not by itself enable reliable reasoning or long-horizon actions in a complex physical system. We argue that agents need active experimentation: the ability to gather targeted query-specific evidence, discover general principles of unseen environments, and convert interaction experience into reusable skills. We introduce Hierarchical Experimentalist Agents (HExA), an in-context, experiment-centric self-improvement framework that (1) iteratively designs and refines query-relevant experiments, (2) incrementally distills experience into reusable and composable skills that accelerate experimentation within and across tasks, and (3) integrates experimental evidence to act or answer queries. HExA can work with any LLM including frontier black-box models, and requires no external supervision, oracle solutions, or offline data. We evaluate HExA on multi-step reasoning, interactive partially observable games, and physics law discovery tasks. To further evaluate when active experimentation is necessary, we introduce Interphyre, a set of hard procedural physics tasks where we enable tool-calling and intervention APIs. Current frontier LLMs including GPT-6 Astra fail in these settings: on the most challenging Interphyre tasks, we show that HExA can enable such models to near 100% success. Moreover, HExA improves token efficiency compared to naive agentic and memory baselines and enables generalization via hierarchical skill transfer from easier to harder tasks.
arXiv:2606.21496v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deploying generalist robotic agents in the real world requires transferable skills. Specifically, a policy trained to clone a behavior from object-specific demonstrations must generalize beyond that object, otherwise data collection requirements become intractable. Recently, fine-tuning of pre-trained billion-parameter Vision-Language Models (VLMs), initially on large-scale robot datasets and then on fewer scenario-specific demonstrations, has emerged as the predominant paradigm for designing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. While these policies achieve state-of-the-art manipulation performance in-distribution, they remain brittle to minor spatial, semantic, and task variations. In this work, we address the inability of current models to decouple the declarative (i.e., concepts and entity semantics) from the procedural knowledge (i.e., how to do something) encoded in their parameters, which is a fundamental bottleneck for zero-shot skill transfer to novel objects. To address this, we propose w$^{2}$VLA, a new VLA model with restructured information flow. Rather than feeding all multimodal tokens from the VLM encoder into a large, opaque transformer-based action expert, our approach modulates the robot state sequence with visual, spatial, and skill information in a compositional and interpretable manner. Unlike popular, state-of-the-art VLAs, we show that our modular approach successfully decouples knowledge representations, enabling robust behavior cloning and unprecedented zero-shot skill transfer capabilities across dissimilar, unseen objects.
arXiv:2606.19821v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Key Performance Measurement (KPM) forecasting is essential for proactive network management of 5G and next-generation telecom networks. However, existing machine learning (ML) approaches face significant limitations in scalability and explainability, restricting their effectiveness in real-world deployments. We propose TelcoAgent, a foundation model-based framework that enables accurate, scalable, and explainable forecasting of multiple KPMs across diverse network cells without the need for site-specific training. Specifically, the framework comprises three key components: (i) an automated three-agent pipeline that constructs a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) knowledge graph directly from specification documents, (ii) a scalable, time-series foundation model (TSFM)-based prediction pipeline to deliver accurate, zero-shot forecasting, and finally (iii) a reasoning and explanation pipeline that provides actionable, domain-grounded diagnostics. Evaluated using a 3-month, real-world, city-scale 5G KPM dataset from a U.S.-based network operator, TelcoAgent demonstrates high forecasting accuracy for all 7 considered KPMs per cell across 200 cells, while delivering explainable insights and actionable instructions to address network degradations.
arXiv:2606.19386v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Runtime monitors for autonomous agents commonly threshold an accumulated internal state - a behavioural baseline, a drift statistic, or, in our prior work, a modelled affective state. We previously reported a State Saturation Trap: threshold-on-state triggers over a continuous affect engine become near-constant alarms on SWE-bench debugging agents (Modgil 2026). A post-release audit found the engine received dt=0 between actions, so its exponential decay never operated: the published trap is a pure-accumulator result. We correct the record (erratum, v2) and treat the flaw as an experiment. The key variable it exposes is whether a monitor's dynamics are calibrated in sample time (per observation, as in CUSUM) or wall-clock time (half-lives in seconds, as in affect models and EMA baselines). On fixed-rate streams these coincide; on agent streams, where inter-action time varies by orders of magnitude, they do not. A pre-registered sweep over uniform intervals (dt in {0..600}s) on 20 trajectories shows the wall-clock level trigger has two regimes: at dt<=1s a constant alarm (20/20; median 18 firings); at dt>=60s silent. Every critical dt lies in (1,30]s. A scriptable gpt-5.4-mini agent loop measures latency at median 1.53s (p90 2.33s), inside the trap regime, vindicating the empirical finding under a corrected mechanism. The structure is a property of the calibration class, not the engine: a minimal wall-clock accumulator over the raw error stream reproduces the same cliff, while a sample-time CUSUM over the identical stream is exactly dt-invariant (20/20). A rising-edge trigger with hysteresis fires 0-3 times per trajectory in every condition. We conclude that wall-clock-calibrated leaky-integrator monitors admit no regime in which they act as moment detectors on agent streams; transition detection escapes the trap at every cadence, but does not recover human intervention timing.
arXiv:2605.19666v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate cardiac output (CO) estimation from photoplethysmography (PPG) is promising for unobtrusive hemodynamic monitoring, but remains difficult since CO is jointly determined by cardiac function and vascular tone. Conventional feature-based models use physiologically meaningful PPG descriptors, yet depend on accurate pulse detection and may miss latent temporal relationships. In contrast, fully end-to-end deep learning models learn directly from raw PPG but often underuse established PPG-derived prior information. Here, we introduce the Cross-View Attention Fusion Network (CVAF-Net), a prior-guided dual-view deep learning model for CO estimation from short, fixed-length PPG segments. CVAF-Net processes raw PPG as a temporal view and a feature sequence map (FSM) as a structured prior-guided view, and fuses the two representations through cross-view attention. The model was independently evaluated using 5-, 15-, and 30-s segments from three datasets: simulated pulse waves (3323 subjects), vasoconstriction provocation (79 subjects), and resting/cycling activities (10 subjects), and was compared with multiple machine learning and deep learning benchmarks. CVAF-Net outperformed most benchmark methods and achieved performance comparable to a state-of-the-art Transformer-based model, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.19 L/min (MAPE: 3.95%) on simulated data and high accuracy in real-world settings (minimum MAE: 1.20 L/min). Importantly, CVAF-Net reduced FLOPs by twelvefold compared with the leading Transformer-based model. Plausibility analysis showed physiologically consistent CO estimates, with expected correlations with age ($\rho = -0.274$), heart rate ($\rho = 0.894$), and systemic vascular resistance ($\rho = -0.740$). These findings indicate that CVAF-Net provides an accurate, computationally efficient, and generalizable approach for continuous wearable-based CO monitoring.
arXiv:2605.15350v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic compositional optimization minimizes $F(f(x), x)$ over a compact convex set when the inner map $f$ is available only through noisy samples. We propose Hybrid Momentum Stochastic Frank--Wolfe, a projection-free method for outer functions $F$ that are jointly convex and Lipschitz but not necessarily differentiable, such as maxima, CVaR, and norms. The method tracks the Jacobian and the value of $f$ with momentum, using a Taylor correction for the value, and passes the tracked linearization to a generalized linear minimization oracle. Under finite-variance noise, it attains an expected generalized Frank--Wolfe gap of order $K^{-1/4}$ for non-convex objectives and, when the linearized models minorize the objective, a last-iterate primal error of order $K^{-1/3}$. The analysis extends to heavy-tailed noise without clipping, with separate moment orders for values and Jacobians. With an exact oracle, the method reduces to the deterministic method of Vladarean et al. (2023).
arXiv:2605.09040v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modeling ultra-long user sequences involves a difficult trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. While current paradigms rely on either item-specific search or item-agnostic compression, we propose UxSID, a framework exploring a third path: semantic-group shared interest memory. By utilizing Semantic IDs (SIDs) and a dual-level attention strategy, UxSID captures target-aware preferences without the heavy cost of item-specific models. This end-to-end architecture balances computational parsimony with semantic awareness, achieving state-of-the-art performance and a 0.337% revenue lift in large-scale advertising A/B test.
arXiv:2605.00457v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: New Radio operating in unlicensed spectrum (NR-U) and Wi-Fi employ different contention parameters and channel-occupancy durations, which can produce severe coexistence imbalance. This correspondence develops a fairness-guided deep Q-network (DQN) that adjusts the NR-U transmission opportunity (TXOP) using the observed per-node throughput ratio. Two reward designs, Q1 and Q2, expose complementary operating regimes. Q1 promotes strict per-node throughput balance, whereas Q2 admits a broader inter-radio-access-technology fairness region and rewards throughput improvement in an intermediate fairness band. The policies are compared with the default Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) listen-before-talk (LBT), an adapted multi-armed-bandit method, a utility-fairness-based tabular Q-learning comparator, and a default-referenced fixed-TXOP baseline. Experiments across four priority classes and asymmetric populations report aggregate throughput, user-level Jain fairness, and concave throughput utility over 20 independent trials. The results characterize the cost of strict fairness, efficiency recovery under moderate relaxation, and transfer from symmetric to asymmetric deployments.
arXiv:2604.00333v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Collective behaviors that emerge from interactions are fundamental to numerous biological systems. To learn such interacting forces from observations, we introduce a measure-valued neural network that infers measure-dependent interaction (drift) terms directly from particle-trajectory observations. The proposed architecture generalizes standard neural networks to operate on probability measures by learning cylindrical features, using an embedding network that produces scalable distribution-to-vector representations. On the theory side, we establish well-posedness of the resulting dynamics and prove propagation-of-chaos for the associated interacting-particle system. We further show universal approximation and quantitative approximation rates under a low-dimensional measure-dependence assumption. Numerical experiments on first and second order systems, including deterministic and stochastic Motsch-Tadmor dynamics, two-dimensional attraction-repulsion aggregation, Cucker-Smale dynamics, and a hierarchical multi-group system, demonstrate accurate prediction and strong out-of-distribution generalization.
arXiv:2602.13619v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study parametric change-point detection under local differential privacy, focusing on the offline localization of a single change point in a sequence of independent observations.~In the non-private setting, we derive improved finite-sample accuracy guarantees for a generalized likelihood-ratio estimator using martingale methods.~We establish finite-sample minimax lower bounds in both the non-private and locally private settings, showing that localization accuracy is fundamentally limited by the Chernoff information between the pre- and post-change distributions.~Guided by this, we design locally private CPD algorithms based on aggregated randomized response and binary mechanisms, which maximize the Chernoff information between the induced output distributions in low- and high-privacy regimes, respectively, and derive their finite-sample guarantees. Together, our upper and lower bounds quantify the statistical cost of privacy in change-point localization.~As part of our analysis, we also show that strong data processing inequality coefficients of R\'enyi divergence and Jeffreys--R\'enyi divergence of order infinity can be computed by restricting to pairs of input distributions with a common support of at most two symbols.~We corroborate our results through empirical evaluation on synthetic data.
arXiv:2602.01149v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful approach for accelerating the discovery of thermoelectric (TE) materials, yet many models suffer from limited generalizability. Here we present a robust ML framework for predicting the thermoelectric figure of merit (zT) in half-Heusler (hH) compounds, emphasizing prediction of previously unseen compositions. A principal component analysis (PCA)-based train/test splitting strategy is introduced to generate representative partitions of chemical space. Bayesian hyperparameter optimization is combined with correlation-based k-best feature selection for Random Forest, XGBoost, and Neural Network models, together with the interpretable SISSO symbolic-regression method. Relative to the full set of 118 input features, the optimized feature subsets reduce the test RMSE by 16-27%. SHAP and SISSO analyses identify temperature, A-site dopant concentration, and A-site heat of vaporization as the most important descriptors of zT. The framework is validated through prediction of previously unexplored compositions, recovery of literature-reported optimal zT values for established hH systems, and first-principles calculations for the new compounds CeCoBi and CeIrBi, which exhibit favorable electronic transport properties. The framework is further applied to high-throughput screening of the doped hH chemical space, covering about 2.46 million elemental substitution combinations across 631 thermodynamically screened parent matrices under stability constraints. This screening yields a concise set of promising candidates for future study. Overall, the work establishes a generalizable workflow for reliable data-driven thermoelectric materials discovery.
arXiv:2601.07665v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a principled learning to optimize (L2O) framework for solving fixed-point problems involving general nonexpansive mappings. Our idea is to deliberately inject summable perturbations into a standard Krasnosel'skii-Mann iteration to improve its average-case performance over a specific distribution of problems while retaining its convergence guarantees. Under a metric sub-regularity assumption, we prove that the proposed parametrization includes only iterations that locally achieve linear convergence-up to a vanishing bias term-and that it encompasses all iterations that do so at a sufficiently fast rate. We then demonstrate how our framework can be used to augment several widely-used operator splitting methods to accelerate the solution of structured monotone inclusion problems, and validate our approach on a best approximation problem using an L2O-augmented Douglas-Rachford splitting algorithm.
arXiv:2512.08281v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate and reliable aircraft landing time prediction is essential for effective resource allocation in air traffic management. However, the inherent uncertainty of aircraft trajectories and traffic flows poses significant challenges to both prediction accuracy and trustworthiness. Therefore, prediction models should not only provide point estimates of aircraft landing times but also the uncertainties associated with these predictions. Furthermore, aircraft trajectories are frequently influenced by the presence of nearby aircraft through air traffic control interventions such as radar vectoring. Consequently, landing time prediction models must account for multi-agent interactions in the airspace. In this work, we propose a probabilistic multi-agent aircraft landing time prediction framework that provides the landing times of multiple aircraft as distributions. We evaluate the proposed framework using an air traffic surveillance dataset collected from the terminal airspace of the Incheon International Airport in South Korea. The results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves higher prediction accuracy than the baselines and quantifies the associated uncertainties of its outcomes. In addition, the model uncovered underlying patterns in air traffic control through its attention scores, thereby enhancing explainability.
arXiv:2512.02444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Joining heterogeneous tables requires different forms of correspondence, including exact agreement, syntactic transformation, semantic similarity, and entity-level matching. The appropriate join method is often unknown in advance, while running every candidate method incurs unnecessary cost. We introduce MetaJoin, a label-free framework for adaptive join selection. MetaJoin uses input evidence to choose an initial specialist, then uses specialist-specific output evidence to determine whether that result should be retained, compared with an alternative, escalated, or repaired. This allows join selection to adapt after execution rather than committing to a one-shot routing decision. We also introduce MNN Join, a transformation specialist that searches for string transformations by maximizing mutual-nearest-neighbor coverage between two unaligned columns and uses the same reciprocal structure to validate its output. We evaluate MetaJoin on 670 datasets from six benchmarks. It achieves 0.817 macro row-F1, slightly exceeding a benchmark-level oracle that is given the best standalone specialist for each benchmark (0.812), and outperforms label-free selection policies built from the same specialist portfolio by more than 0.13. Across the 609 datasets in the four transformation-dominant benchmarks, MNN Join outperforms every evaluated transformation baseline. Finally, MetaJoin's accuracy varies by only 0.015 as the controller backbone ranges from 3B to 14B parameters, showing that output validation and repair substantially reduce dependence on the initial routing decision.
arXiv:2511.10383v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continuous-time stochastic processes underlie many natural and engineered systems. In healthcare, autonomous driving, and industrial control, direct interaction with the environment is often unsafe or impractical, motivating offline reinforcement learning from historical data. However, there is limited statistical understanding of the approximation errors inherent in learning policies from offline datasets. We address this by linking reinforcement learning to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and proposing an operator-theoretic algorithm based on a simple dynamic programming recursion. Specifically, we represent our world model in terms of the infinitesimal generator of controlled diffusion processes learned in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. By integrating statistical learning methods and operator theory, we establish global convergence of the value function under sufficiently small generator-approximation error and derive explicit finite-sample guarantees with bounds tied directly to system properties such as smoothness and stability. Our theoretical and proof-of-concept results indicate that operator-based approaches may hold promise for solving offline reinforcement learning using continuous-time optimal control.
arXiv:2510.15714v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Second-order methods make fast progress per iteration, but forming and factorizing the Hessian often dominates their wall-clock time. We study \emph{Split-Client}, a task-parallel design in which a curvature client factorizes Hessians in the background while a gradient client takes cubic-regularized steps with the most recently published matrix, so that curvature cost appears as a delay rather than as blocking time. For delayed exact Hessians, we prove a first-order stationarity bound that depends on the average age of the curvature rather than its maximum, using an overlap count and a weighted Hardy inequality that allows any bounded-error initial matrix; the analysis extends to subsampled and uniformly inexact curvature. Under a fixed-cost model, the resulting wall-clock bound matches the scaling of optimally tuned Lazy Hessian without choosing a reuse period. In experiments on two LIBSVM datasets, an implementation decreases the objective earlier in wall-clock time than Lazy and Vanilla cubic Newton, with the largest gains at intermediate accuracy.