Papers

Weight-space geometry plays a central role in neural network optimization, yet manifold constraints are often applied uniformly across all weight matrices. In this work, we ask whether different transformer modules prefer different manifold geometries. We study Manifold Muon for GPT-2 pretraining and compare layer-wise assignments of Stiefel and DGram constraints across attention and MLP blocks. Our results show a clear asymmetry: constraining attention layers with Stiefel geometry while assigning DGram geometry to MLP layers gives the best performance among the tested configurations, whereas the inverted assignment and all-DGram configuration become unstable under the shared hyperparameter setting. We trace this failure to singular value growth in DGram-constrained attention weights, which can amplify attention logits and induce softmax saturation. These findings suggest that symmetry-aware and geometry-aware optimization for transformers should be module-specific rather than uniform.

Identifying latent dynamical systems from noisy, high-dimensional measurements is a central problem at the intersection of representation learning, system identification, and scientific discovery. We present DYSCO, a multi-view temporal contrastive learning algorithm that jointly recovers latent trajectories and the governing dynamics from such observations, by leveraging multiple independent noisy views of the same underlying process to disentangle signal from noise. By parameterizing the dynamics in a structured functional basis, our framework further enables symbolic recovery of the governing equations within an affine gauge. We offer theoretical guarantees for strong identification up to an affine indeterminacy, extending prior identifiability results to the realistic setting of noisy nonlinear observations. Empirically, we demonstrate accurate recovery of both latent trajectories and flow fields across a diverse set of dynamical regimes (e.g., chaotic, oscillatory, and metastable) under both Gaussian and Poisson observation noise, the latter being particularly relevant for neural recordings.

To better understand Martian Surface, which is needed to enable Rovers navigate Mars with ease, it is necessary to be able to determine the location of mounds. Detecting and studying these morphologies can also help us find evidence of extraterrestrial life, in this case, more specifically, water or signs of life conducive environments. Detection of mounds was done by manually mapping morphological parameters onto Digital Elevation Models. This paper solves the problem by automatically detecting and or predicting mounds on Mars using Neural Network based Semantic Segmentation methodologies. This is done by using supervised semantic segmentation model and generative adversarial approach. A comparison of the approaches shows that adding extra artificially generated data did not improve the result.

A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.

Passive acoustic monitoring holds great promise for ecological inference, yet existing automated tools are typically narrowly trained and non-transferable. We address these limitations with PULSE, a semi-supervised, multi-task framework for Orthoptera bioacoustics, combining weakly-supervised species classification, self-supervised learning on unlabelled field audio, and knowledge distillation from a general-purpose bioacoustic model. Our domain-adapted specialist model outperforms a state-of-the-art general model across all metrics (macro F1: 0.21 vs. 0.07; AUC: 0.74 vs. 0.45; AP: 0.32 vs. 0.19), with active learning further raising F1 to 0.34 and AUC to 0.84. Beyond classification, the learned embeddings encode ecologically meaningful structure, exposed through an interactive visualisation tool for ecological discovery.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) improve complex problem-solving by generating long intermediate reasoning traces, but this substantially increases inference costs. NVFP4 inference offers a promising approach to reduce both computational and memory costs through hardware-supported low-precision execution. However, directly applying NVFP4 to LRMs introduces two practical limitations: reasoning accuracy degrades under quantization, and existing NVFP4 kernels do not fully realize latency benefits in small-batch autoregressive decoding. In this work, we analyze the effect of NVFP4 quantization on token-level uncertainty during reasoning. We show that quantization increases incorrect sampling at low-entropy symbolic tokens, while causing over-concentration on a small set of tokens in high-uncertainty reasoning steps. Based on this observation, we propose ReSET, a reasoning-step entropy-based temperature-scaling method that estimates step-level uncertainty online and adapts the decoding temperature using both token-level and step-level entropy signals. To address the latency gap, we further design a CUDA-core small-$M$ NVFP4 kernel for latency-critical autoregressive decoding. Across reasoning benchmarks and model scales, ReSET improves NVFP4 reasoning accuracy by up to $\sim\!$2 points over the NVFP4 baseline. Our CUDA-core small-$M$ kernel further improves latency-critical decoding, delivering up to $2.5\!\times$ kernel-level speedup over NVFP4 vLLM and approximately $2\!\times$ end-to-end decoding speedup over BF16. Code is available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/ReSET.

This paper proposes a novel loss concept for supervised classification tasks. Rather than enforcing a direct mapping from each input sample to a single assigned label, we define an optimization objective over all classifier outputs as a bimodal Gaussian distribution. This softer target formulation implicitly captures class ambiguity, mitigates overfitting, and encourages the learning of more robust decision boundaries, all without requiring additional label information. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in robustness, with particularly pronounced gains in low-data regimes, while requiring only minimal modifications to standard training pipelines.

Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale. LLM-as-a-judge offers a cheaper alternative, but judge scores carry systematic errors – such as position bias, self-preference, or intransitivity – that can strongly miscalibrate the resulting rankings. We quantify the resulting judge-human disagreement at two complementary levels. At the local level, we estimate per-battle uncertainty from the judge's own score differences by propagating calibrated win probabilities rather than hard labels into the Bradley-Terry procedure. This alone provides a drastic improvement to Elo estimation accuracy, bringing LLM-derived ratings within 17.9 Elo MAE of human-derived ones when averaged over 55 held-out models on LMArena. At the global level, we apply split conformal prediction to the residual gap between LLM-derived and human-derived Elo ratings across held-out models, producing prediction intervals with distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees that account for irreducible LLM-human disagreement. Together, these two layers yield a low-cost evaluation tool that provides developers with calibrated Elo estimates and honest uncertainty bounds, without access to large-scale human annotations.

Large language models (LLMs) are used for technical troubleshooting, where problem descriptions are often incomplete and multiple causes can explain the same symptoms. Effective diagnosis requires acquiring discriminative evidence and selecting the explanation best supported by it. Yet reasoning or interaction alone may not prevent premature commitment to an incorrect hypothesis. We introduce LLM-as-an-Investigator, an evidence-first methodology for interactive problem diagnosis that reduces premature commitment while distinguishing competing causes. We implement it through the Solution Investigator Agent (SIA), which orchestrates three complementary reasoning behaviours through a shared investigation state: a Diagnostic Reasoner that conducts and reassesses the diagnostic interview, a Hypothesis Investigator that maintains and updates competing hypotheses, and a Counterfactual Investigator that challenges current explanations and guides discriminative follow-up questions. Final selection uses cited dialogue evidence and a separate verification step, while explicit hypothesis and evidence records make the diagnosis traceable and preserve unresolved alternatives. We construct a structured corpus from 303 technical forum threads across mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic domains. A source-grounded pipeline separates the initial problem, pre-solution clarifications, and reported outcome, while a user simulator answers diagnostic questions without access to the reference solution. We compare SIA with direct, reasoning-based, interactive, and search-based baselines, including adaptations of ReAct and Tree of Thoughts. Evaluation distinguishes final diagnostic quality from hypothesis coverage and oracle potential, while ablations and paired stress tests assess component contributions and robustness to plausible but misleading user hypotheses.

Optimal transport (OT) has been shown to detect hallucinations in neural machine translation (NMT) by measuring the geometric distance between cross-attention distributions and a reference distribution, without any supervision. We extend this analysis to all six decoder layers of the Fairseq DE-EN model ($N=3{,}414$), showing that Wass-to-Unif and Wass-to-Data are complementary detectors specialised across hallucination types, that detection is concentrated in layers L1–L4 with L5 anti-predictive for subtler types, and that hallucinated translations lack the exploratory attention phase present in correct translations from the first decoding step. We further evaluate whether the geometric signal transfers to abstractive summarization faithfulness detection: our unsupervised OT detector on AggreFact ($N=1{,}116$) achieves $57.2\%$/$57.6\%$ balanced accuracy on CNN/XSum – above chance but substantially below supervised MiniCheck-Flan-T5-L($69.9\%$/$74.3\%$). This gap is principled: unlike NMT hallucinations, unfaithful summaries can attend correctly to source tokens while misrepresenting their content, a failure mode invisible to concentration-based OT metrics by construction. Structural experiments on T5-base confirm consistent decoder organisation across depth, with Layer~3 showing peak concentration and Layer~12 being most critical for generation quality. Together, the results establish OT on cross-attention as a reliable detector when the failure mode is source disengagement, a principled interpretability tool regardless of task, and fundamentally limited when faithfulness failures occur downstream of attention.

Reward models (RMs) are a key component of reinforcement learning from human feedback, enabling the alignment of large language models with human values such as helpfulness and harmlessness. However, these alignment goals can conflict, leading to interference when optimised jointly. We refer to this conflict as alignment tension and investigate how it manifests in RMs. To this end, we train RMs optimised for helpfulness, harmlessness, and a combined helpful-harmless objective, and compare their behaviours and internal representations. We find that mixed-objective RMs frequently underperform their single-objective counterparts, suggesting substantial interference between alignment goals. Using activation-based interpretability methods, we identify neurons associated with helpfulness and harmlessness and show that they causally promote their corresponding behaviours while often suppressing the opposing one. At the same time, we find that a substantial fraction of neurons are shared across objectives. These shared neurons exert a disproportionate influence on model behaviour and encode incompatible representations. Our findings provide mechanistic evidence for how alignment objectives are represented and interact within RMs, offering new insights into the challenges of multi-objective alignment and motivating the development of more disentangled and controllable alignment methods.

Deep learning has become the dominant paradigm in Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR), yet progress is obscured by a comparability crisis. Results are often reported using inconsistent datasets, custom data processing, and varying evaluation protocols, making state-of-the-art claims fragile. We address this with a large-scale, open-source benchmark that integrates 30 diverse datasets under standardized processing, unified model interfaces, and a shared cross-subject evaluation protocol. Evaluating 17 representative architectures across 4760 training runs, we jointly measure predictive performance alongside on-device latency, peak memory, and model size on an Android reference device. Our results reveal that the WHAR state of the art is distributed rather than dominated by a single architecture. While CNN-HAR achieves the highest mean macro-F1, top-performing models cluster tightly, indicating contemporary architectures have converged near a predictive performance ceiling. When accounting for deployment efficiency, compact neural models, such as TinierHAR, and classical Random Forests define the practically relevant Pareto frontier, whereas larger recurrent and hybrid models incur high hardware costs without corresponding performance gains. Consequently, while predictive performance has plateaued, substantial potential for future progress remains in optimizing deployment efficiency and improving adaptation to domain shifts. We release our full framework to support transparent reuse and extension.

Continuous-state generative samplers, including diffusion and flow-matching models, evolve through continuous reverse-time dynamics, yet their samples often undergo abrupt qualitative changes: trajectories commit to modes, semantic alternatives collapse, and small perturbations in narrow time windows can produce large downstream effects. This paper develops a geometric account of such phase-transition-like behaviour. We view denoising as gradient descent on a free energy landscape and show that sharp transitions arise near projection caustics, where the nearest-point projection onto the data support ceases to be unique. Motivated by this perspective, we introduce the Critical Boundary Detector (CBD), as practical diagnostics for score-direction instability. Across toy models, standard diffusion models, and latent text-to-image diffusion models, CBD localises mode commitment, predicts intervention-sensitive windows, and supports targeted control in geometrically sensitive regions. Our results connect geometry of data and dynamics of diffusion generation.

Transfer learning is usually studied as a consequence of distribution shift. This paper identifies an orthogonal failure mode in which the data distribution is fixed and the loss changes. This setting is called loss shift. A loss determines which information in \(X\) is Bayes-relevant, and two losses may therefore require different representations even under the same joint law \(P(X,Y)\). The idea is formalized using Bayes quotients, which allow losses to be ordered by refinement. In the Bayes-quotient formulation, strict refinement gives an immediate qualitative obstruction. A source-minimal representation for a coarser loss is insufficient for a strictly finer target loss. For finite-output log loss, this obstruction becomes an exact quantitative identity. The excess risk is the conditional information about \(Y\) discarded by the representation. Experiments in controlled, learned, synthetic-image, and real-image settings show the predicted effect, i.e., classification-equivalent representations can have different optimal log-loss performance under a fixed data distribution.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence. Furthermore, this is especially limiting on resource-constrained platforms with hard memory budgets, motivating us to formulate storage-budgeted memory management, the task of keeping an already constructed memory store within a fixed budget while preserving information useful for future interactions. To this end, we then propose MemRefine, an LLM-guided framework that, since surface similarity poorly reflects factual value, uses similarity only to propose candidate pairs and defers delete, merge, and preserve decisions to an LLM judge based on factual content, iterating until the budget is met. Across multiple memory frameworks and long-term conversation benchmarks, MemRefine consistently meets target budgets while preserving downstream performance and outperforming rule-based baselines under tight budgets.

Interactive LLM agents increasingly work with users across tasks, yet remembering a previous correction does not ensure that the agent changes its behavior in the future. In a diagnostic constructed from anonymized real-world agent interactions, agents using Mem0 still violate 57.5% of applicable preference checks. We introduce TellOnce, a drop-in personalization layer that turns conversational corrections into persistent, scoped, and revisable behavioral rules without updating the underlying agent model. TellOnce identifies which requirements should persist, determines when they apply, reconciles subsequent feedback with existing rules, and prepares reusable checks when reliable verification is possible. We evaluate whether learned corrections improve future behavior by freezing the learned state and testing on subsequent tasks without additional user corrections. Across three models on ClawArena and MemoryArena, TellOnce achieves the lowest preference violation rate in all six settings, reducing violations relative to PGMem by 19.3-42.3 percentage points on ClawArena and 3.0-22.9 points on MemoryArena, while maintaining broadly comparable task performance. On SWE-Together, TellOnce further improves task quality on new coding tasks by learning from feedback received during earlier tasks. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TellOnce_exp, and the deployable skill at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

Learned representations are commonly evaluated through predictive performance, calibration, robustness, uncertainty estimation, and behavior under distribution shift. Yet these criteria do not determine whether the representation itself remains sufficient for organizing observations relevant to an explanatory task. We develop VER (Vigilance Explicative et Representationnelle; explanatory and representational vigilance) around a narrower question: can a system detect when its current representation becomes explanatorily insufficient without confusing insufficiency with ordinary error, missing data, uncertainty, or distribution shift? The current VER framework follows seven stages: TRACE, EVIDENCE, INSUFFICIENCY, REGIME HYPOTHESES, TRANSITION ASSESSMENT, VIGILANCE, and PROBE. It treats structured residuals as signals rather than verdicts, distinguishes data insufficiency from representation insufficiency, preserves multiple hypotheses under non-identifiability, allows a legitimate NON-DETERMINED outcome, and requires a discriminating Probe before stronger conclusions are drawn. It also separates variation, drift, adaptation, and representational transition, and introduces Present Enrichment before attributing explanatory value to history. Two paired thought experiments and a falsifiable benchmark are proposed. VER is not claimed to be empirically validated here; its contribution is an explicit architecture designed for auditability and for selecting observations that discriminate among competing explanations.

Block Attention Residuals (Block AttnRes) by replace fixed additive residuals with a learned softmax over earlier depth-source representations, surfacing cross-layer routing as an inspectable tensor in the forward pass. This is a tempting interpretability target: information flow normally inferred indirectly is now directly observable. We ask whether such exposure suffices for mechanistic interpretation. We probe two same-scale ($0.6$B) Block AttnRes checkpoints under identical routing-ablation interventions: a vanilla Qwen3 inference-wrapped through a deterministic recency-bias schedule that the codebase admits as a routing-equivalent loading path, and a Block AttnRes Qwen3 trained from scratch with routing as part of optimisation. The wrapped baseline's routing weights are content-independent and reproduce the schedule's analytic prediction. The trained AttnRes checkpoint instead exhibits three localised routing motifs: an embedding-source pathway through early-layer MLP, a current-state pathway through early-layer attention and MLP, and an older-history pathway through late-layer attention. Beyond this stratification, we find a sharp dissociation between average routing mass and causal importance: in both sublayers, the largest mass slice is not the largest causal contribution, and one source family carries appreciable mass with no detectable causal role under intervention. Architectural exposure of routing is therefore necessary but not sufficient for mechanistic interpretation: structured depth routing emerges only when routing has been part of training, and even then, descriptive routing summaries should be treated as candidate hypotheses to be tested by causal interventions, not as evidence of mechanism in their own right.

We propose a robust feature-weighted jump model for time-dependent clustering. A penalty is used to encourage smoothness of transitions over time, while robustness is achieved through the use of a Tukey's biweight loss function. An additional parameter controls the variability of feature weights across states, allowing the model to assign state-specific relevance to each feature. We illustrate in simulation how the method accurately recovers the true cluster sequence and reliably identifies relevant features, outperforming competing approaches, particularly in the presence of outliers. We conclude with two empirical applications, one on the number of conflict-related homicides in Kosovo in the period 1998-2000, and another on macroeconomic performance of twelve European countries in the period 1949-2024.

Pixel-bin image sensors are becoming the default choice for smartphone cameras due to their resolution vs light-gathering trade-off. However, their larger inter-color separation compared to the Bayer color filter array (CFA) makes them challenging to demosaic. Furthermore, existing deep learning-based demosaicing methods are CFA-specific, requiring multiple individual models that take up precious onboard resources and demand larger development and maintenance efforts. In this work, we propose a modular unified architecture for demosaicing various pixel-bin sensors that provides higher image quality while being extensible and lightweight. Additionally, to enable plug-and-play operation, we introduce a learning-free CFA-identification module to detect the CFA type of raw data accurately.

Recently, Antoniadis et al. (ICLR 2025) proposed a framework for incorporating predictions to approximate NP-hard selection problems. Despite its simplicity, this approach tightly matches theoretical lower bounds, making its generalization highly compelling. We address an open question raised in the work of Antoniadis et al., concerning the extension of this approach to other important problems outside the class of selection problems, such as scheduling. We develop a learning-augmented algorithm for the makespan minimization problem on unrelated machines, denoted by $R\|C_{\max}$. By using predictions of heavy job assignments, we achieve a polynomial-time $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation for accurate predictions that smoothly degrades to a worst-case 2-approximation as the error increases. We conclude our work with an empirical analysis of our method.

Retrieval-augmented and agentic workloads repeatedly prefill recurring predictable structured inputs (which we call "spans") such as documents and code files. Yet, prefix caching in engines such as vLLM cannot reuse their KV entries unless they share identical prefixes with another request, while Position-Independent Caching (PIC) implementations within production-grade inference servers typically either require substantial server code changes or keep KV state outside the server, incurring host-to-device transfer overhead. We present Minimalistic PIC (MiniPIC): a minimal, flexible and fast vLLM design built from two ingredients: positional-encoding-free KV cache and user-controlled cache-reuse primitives. MiniPIC stores unrotated K vectors in the KV cache, applies RoPE to K tiles inside attention using per-request logical positions, and exposes three user-facing and token-level primitives: block-aligned padding, span separator (SSep), and prompt depend (PDep), that modify hashing behavior and effective block-level causal attention structure. With fewer than 100 lines of core-engine changes plus a custom attention backend, these primitives are sufficient to realize multiple PIC methods, including Block-Attention, EPIC, and Prompt Cache, within the same running vLLM instance, while natively integrating with KV cache CPU offload implementations. On 2WikiMultihopQA, MiniPIC with interleaved scheduling improves prefill throughput by 49% over baseline vLLM, reduces cached-span time-to-first-token by up to two orders of magnitude, preserves the linear prefill scaling of uncached spans, and incurs only 5.7% worst-case overhead.

Reinforcement learning has rapidly emerged as a key component in the training of reasoning and coding models, yet it remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. We study how and through what underlying processes capabilities are acquired or enhanced via reinforcement learning post-training. Our analysis, based on controlled math reasoning experiments with Qwen-2.5-1.5B, reveals two core mechanisms: strategy selection and strategy improvement. Our results highlight the role of SFT data and reinforcement learning data in activating these mechanisms, in particular showing how supervising the model on diverse reasoning strategies can enable strategy selection and how increasing difficulty in reinforcement learning data can enable strategy improvement. Taken together, our results provide mechanistic insight into RL training and suggest practical interventions to continue scaling reasoning capabilities.

Spatio-Temporal forecasting is crucial in diverse fields, such as transportation, climate, and energy. Urban spatio-temporal data exhibits temporal mirage: similar short-window inputs have divergent future trends, and vice versa. Existing spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) cannot effectively identify such mirages. We argue that the core reason lies in the short-window inputs that have incomplete period observation, heterogeneous global spatial correlation, and cross-period superposition causality. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel Multi- Period Pattern Pre-training (MP3), a plug-and-play pre-training plugin for distinguishing temporal mirages. MP3 presents two core innovations: (1) The multi-period pattern learning is designed to learn multi-period patterns from long time series. Specifically, multi-period temporal modeling leverages edge convolution to identify different multi-period patterns. Multi-period spatial modeling uses a bottleneck project and a global memory bank to capture heterogeneous global spatial relations efficiently. Cross-period pattern interaction employs a causality-enhanced Transformer to capture dependencies across different period patterns. (2) This plugin can seamlessly integrate into existing STGNN backbones to strengthen their forecasting performance. The experiment on five STGNN baselines across five real-world datasets (including a large-scale dataset CA) verify the effectiveness, superior scalability and strong adaptability of MP3, which brings consistent and robust performance improvements across all evaluated baselines. On average, MP3 reduces the MAE 4.7% and the RMSE 5.0%. The code can be available at https://github.com/YAN-outlook/MP3.

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning through continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing approaches are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to analyze mechanistically. We introduce SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework that addresses both challenges with two discrete boundary tokens: <swi> enters latent reasoning and </swi> exits it. These discrete anchors make policy ratios well-defined for standard on-policy RL while providing natural intervention points for mechanistic analysis. We train SWITCH with a visible-to-latent curriculum and Switch-GRPO, which propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence approaches at similar model scales. Mechanistic analysis reveals that (i) <swi> implements a localized, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artifact; (ii) the latent step performs problem-specific, causally important computation; and (iii) this computation is concentrated in a single hidden-state transition upon entering latent mode. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning can be both effectively optimized with on-policy RL and directly analyzed mechanistically, enabling us to study how RL reshapes internal reasoning computation. Code is available at https://github.com/LARK-AI-Lab/SWITCH.

We revisit the fairness notion of disparate impact for synthetic data generation (SDG), that assesses whether the utility of generated records is the same across sensitive groups. Our approach departs from existing work on fair SDG, that address the problem of correcting for undue biases in the observed distribution, hence redefining SDG as learning a distribution that is not that of the real data. By contrast, non-disparate impact is notably achieved when the synthetic and real distributions are the same. We expose reasons why SDG may fail to reach that solution and discuss why approximation and estimation errors occur and can be disparate across groups. We notably look into the expressive power of SDG methods relative to distribution complexity, sampling errors due to group proportions, and estimation errors induced by differential privacy mechanisms. We illustrate cases of disparate impact on both artificial and real-world data, focusing on SDG methods that rely on probabilistic graphical models. We also introduce a strategy of learning group-wise SDG models, that constitutes a simple baseline for analyzing and in some settings mitigating cases of disparate impact.

Large language models are increasingly deployed in citation-augmented settings, yet the effect of citation presence on model behavior independent of factual content remains poorly understood. We introduce AuthorityBench, a 220,564-prompt multi-domain benchmark that isolates how citation-based authority signals influence epistemic behavior in LLMs. The benchmark uses a fully balanced 2x2 factorial design crossing claim veracity with citation veracity, the first to do so, across four domains (general knowledge, science, law, and medicine), with controlled variation over 40 prompt templates, four venue prestige tiers, and a country-coded author name dataset. Evaluating seven models on 12 structured research questions, we find that citation presence, whether real or fabricated, consistently increases hallucination rates relative to a no-citation baseline. The effect is strongest when fabricated citations accompany true claims, raising hallucination rates by 3 to 22 percentage points and reaching 35 to 77% in the general knowledge domain, while legal claims are comparatively robust and venue prestige and author demographics show negligible impact. All datasets and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/floating-reeds/AuthorityBench

Scale buys interpolation; structure buys certifiable transfer. A world model's average error does not say whether a particular rollout can be trusted, or for how long. For equivariant latent world models we give a predictability certificate: a computable region spanning configuration, horizon, and resolution. Under exact equivariance, rollout error is invariant over the monoid generated by k primitive symmetries and is certified from the k generators (Theorem A); universal orbit-flatness over equivariant targets characterizes equivariance at the function level (Lemma 2), so an unconstrained architecture cannot certify the property by construction. Approximate orbit-transfer defects propagate by the finite-time Lyapunov spectrum (Theorem B): expanding channels give a logarithmic horizon $T_j(\epsilon)\sim\log(1/\epsilon)/\lambda_j$, neutral channels accumulate recurrent defect linearly, and contracting channels accumulate a bounded nonzero floor. Exact conserved charge values are certified to all horizons only at zero defect; with one-step defect $\eta$, charge-value error grows at most as $T\eta$. Empirically, on a 40-dimensional learned model a $\mathbb{Z}_N$-equivariant network recovers the full Lyapunov spectrum ($R^2=0.98$-$0.99$) where dense and recurrent baselines fail. A cone/adapted-metric certificate reads an a-priori horizon off the model's own Jacobian, tight on uniformly hyperbolic dynamics and self-abstaining elsewhere; the resulting horizon improves a budgeted re-observation decision. For public non-equivariant world models the tangent spectrum gives a training-free candidate horizon, paired with a held-out divergence cross-check that abstains or corrects when the learned loop over-promises.

Emotion significantly influences cognition, enhancing memory and learning under certain conditions. Drawing on this principle, emotion-augmented deep learning investigates how affective states can improve neural network architectures and learning paradigms, achieving better generalization than non-emotional models. However, existing methods often rely solely on objective neurophysiological factors, neglecting the role of subjectivity in emotion. To bridge this gap, the present study introduces Emotional Regulation, a novel framework for modeling emotion in deep learning through artificial subjective experience. The method employs pre-training based on affective stimuli, balancing non-emotional and emotionally-influenced responses in downstream task optimization. Extensive experimentation was conducted in image classification, pre-training ResNet and ViT architectures on four emotional datasets, using CIFAR-10 and -100 as target benchmarks. Results reveal improvements over the aforementioned backbones, providing evidence of Emotional Regulation as a promising method for defining emotion-augmented deep learning through artificial subjective experience. Furthermore, the proposed approach overcomes the related work in image classification based on CIFAR, revealing Emotional Regulation as the new state-of-the-art in emotion-augmented deep learning for large-scale vision datasets. The study also enforces evidence of the impact of affective states in improving machine learning tasks' optimization, encouraging further investigation on emotion-inspired architectures.

Cooperation in multi-agent systems is typically optimized through utilitarian objectives that maximize overall efficiency but fail to account for reward distribution, often resulting in inequitable "leader-follower" dynamics. While fairness-based approaches encourage pro-social behaviors where every agent benefits from cooperation, many current algorithms - including those utilizing reward shaping - break the stationarity of Markov Games or lack rigorous theoretical guarantees. This creates a critical gap between fair objective methods and theoretically safe learning frameworks. We propose a novel framework that bridges $\alpha$-fairness with Heterogeneous-Agent Trust Region Learning (HATRL), ensuring monotonic improvement and convergence toward Nash Equilibria. Our approach leverages a fair advantage function that dynamically weights agent utilities based on their expected returns, allowing the global objective to transition from purely utilitarian efficiency to $\alpha$-fairness welfare based on the parameter $\alpha$. We introduce two practical algorithms, $\alpha$-fair HATRPO and $\alpha$-fair HAPPO, and demonstrate through experiments in sequential social dilemmas like CleanUp and CommonHarvest that they perform better than HATRL's algorithms from a utilitarian point of view while achieving socially higher outcomes.