High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Papers
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All of arXiv
Friday 18 September
Head-tail radio sources are jetted active galactic nuclei (AGN) moving through the dense intracluster medium of galaxy clusters. They are extremely rare in the gamma-ray sky, likely because they are usually observed at large viewing angles. Therefore, every new gamma-ray detection of head-tail radio galaxies allows us to probe the origin of the high-energy emission in this unique class of AGN. Here we report, for the first time, the association of ESO~0137-G007 (z=0.016), a head-tail radio galaxy located at the outskirts of the merging cluster Abell 3627, with the gamma-ray source FL16Y~J1615.5$-$6034. The motion of the galaxy through the dense cluster environment and subsequent ram pressure and/or intracluster medium turbulence have led to the formation of a $>$500 kpc-long jet exhibiting a twisted, wiggly radio morphology. Its optical spectrum, obtained with the 4.1 m SOAR telescope, is devoid of emission lines, indicating that the underlying accretion activity is radiatively inefficient. From the measured line-of-sight stellar velocity dispersion, we estimate the mass of the central supermassive black hole to be $(3.36\pm1.32)\times10^9$ \Msun. We briefly discuss several radiative models to explain the observed broadband spectral energy distribution of ESO~0137$-$G007. We conclude that deeper multi-wavelength observations of this unique gamma-ray emitting head-tail radio galaxy will enable us to better understand the interaction of the jet with the hot cluster environment, thus setting the stage for the research of this class of AGN with the upcoming Square Kilometer Array.
Statistical Methodology
Robust Dual-Regularized Variable Selection under Outlier Contamination
Real data often contain unusual observations that can exert disproportionate effects on variable selection, especially in complex predictor settings. We propose a two-stage sparse median outer product of gradients (smOPG) method for variable selection in single index models with outlier contamination. We first estimate sparse local gradients via \(\ell_1\)-penalized local median regression and then recover the active predictor set from a rank-one sparse approximation of the resulting gradient matrix using regularized singular value decomposition. The combination of median regression and local weighting provides robustness to both response outliers and leverage points. Extensive simulations across varying dimensions and contamination mechanisms demonstrate the favorable variable selection performance of smOPG relative to existing methods. Applications to air pollution and genomic data demonstrate practical utility, while theory establishes active-set recovery without requiring selection consistency of individual local regressions.
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Software Engineering
What Stops a Small Language Model From Driving a Database Agent
Small open-weight language models are assumed to fail at agentic database work because they lack the reasoning capacity for it. We test that against a production system. Over eleven days we drove the agent mode of an open-source SQL client with 39 open-weight models served locally and one hosted control, across six task surfaces: 8,199 runs, 110,711 ledger events, 14,008 refused tool calls. Of the 2,100 model-attributed agent-mode losses, 1,590, or 75.7%, came from runs that had invoked at least one tool. That majority is what survives resampling models rather than runs: it holds in 99.7% of clustered resamples and in 15 of the 22 models with at least twenty losses. Within it, transport, a run that used the tools and never got a deliverable through, is the largest class at 36.2% and capability, a run that invoked no tool at all, the smallest at 17.3%; we report that ordering as a property of this corpus rather than a general finding, since clustered by model it holds in only 74.5% of resamples. Transport failures decompose into a few mechanical argument shapes. Production ledgers record refusal codes and never the model's arguments, so these were invisible for ten days; capturing them exposed five server defects, one of which demanded a field on one tool, forbade it on the sibling that composed it, then failed the run for its absence. Five server changes, touching no model, prompt or sampling setting, moved six models by 6 to 21 cells out of 30. We also report a confound we believe affects published local-model benchmarks, ours included: with no context cap, one 7.1 GB model was admitted at its full 262,144-token window and held 51 GB on a 64 GB machine, producing runs indistinguishable in any ordinary log from a model timing out. The corpus, the scorer and a verifier that regenerates every figure are released.
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Cryptography and Security
Conformal Privacy Auditing: Calibrated Re-identification Attacks with Statistical Guarantees
Empirical identity leakage from released text is increasingly driven by attackers that combine large language models (LLMs) with auxiliary knowledge to link documents to individuals. Existing audits typically report success rates for specific attack pipelines but lack finite-sample statistical guarantees, while training-time protections such as differential privacy are difficult to translate into release-time decisions for individual natural-language documents. We introduce Conformal Privacy Auditing(CPA), a distribution-free calibration framework that provides a statistical certificate of re-identification risk for each released document against LLM-empowered adversaries. CPA outputs a conformal ambiguity set of candidate identities that is guaranteed to contain the true identity with user-chosen confidence under exchangeability, together with an interpretable leakage proxy derived from set size. CPA supports both logit-access and sampling-only attackers, enabling audits of open-source models and proprietary API models in a unified framework. Across multiple release benchmarks and attacker configurations, CPA achieves calibrated coverage and reveals sharp shifts in certified identifiability as auxiliary knowledge, LLM augmentation, and release mechanisms vary, providing a statistically grounded basis for reporting and comparing release-time linkage risk across attacker configurations, datasets, and release mechanisms alike.
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Functional Analysis
Order isomorphisms on positive cones of non-unital $C^*$-algebras
Let $A$ and $B$ be $C^*$-algebras, not necessarily unital, and let $T:A_+\to B_+$ be a positively homogeneous order isomorphism. We first prove that $T$ is additive and extends uniquely to a bounded real-linear order isomorphism between the self-adjoint parts of $A$ and $B$. Passing to the biduals, we then obtain a representation theorem for positively homogeneous order isomorphisms. Finally, we study surjective maps between the positive cones of $C^*$-algebras, again not necessarily unital, which preserve the norm of the arithmetic mean. This extends a previous result by removing the assumption that at least one of the algebras is unital.
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Statistical Methodology
Asymptotic Anytime-Valid Quantile Inference under Local Differential Privacy
Sequential quantile inference is difficult under local differential privacy because every record is randomized before reaching the analyst and the limiting quantile variance depends on an unknown density. We develop an online procedure that combines randomized response with dynamically chained parallel stochastic gradient descent (P-SGD). The resulting Polyak–Ruppert estimator admits a strong Gaussian approximation. A cross-chain quadratic statistic, computed entirely from private iterates, consistently estimates the limiting variance without a separate online density estimator. These results yield asymptotic confidence sequences and, under polynomial chain growth, asymptotic time-uniform coverage. Arm-wise constructions support locally private quantile best-arm identification, time-uniform simple-regret bounds, and sequential A/B tests of quantile treatment effects. Simulations and salary-data analyses illustrate the finite-sample behavior and practical use of the proposed methods.
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Astrophysics of Galaxies
A large overdensity of LRD-like galaxies discovered by JWST in the SPT2349-56 protocluster at z=4.30
We present 11 newly identified ultra-red galaxies selected with JWST/NIRCam in the core of the z=4.3 protocluster SPT2349-56. Although these sources are not yet spectroscopically confirmed, their extremely red colours (m200-m444 > 2.0 mag), strong spatial concentration, and number density - at least 2000 times that of comparable field populations - make a chance projected association unlikely. Their colours overlap those used to select the widely studied “little red dot” (LRD) population, although most of the sources are spatially resolved and are therefore better described as extended red dots (ERDs). The resolved morphologies disfavour continuum emission dominated by an unresolved active nucleus and imply a substantial stellar contribution. Deep ALMA observations put strong limits on obscured star formation, and the ERD population mostly lies significantly below the star-forming main sequence. One object, ERD1/Q1, is substantially brighter and more massive, lying far below the main sequence, making it a strong candidate for a massive quiescent galaxy. These JWST-selected red galaxies reveal a previously inaccessible population extending to lower luminosities and stellar masses than the Dusty Star Forming Galaxy (DSFG) population which characterizes the dense protocluster core. SPT2349-56 may therefore capture an early phase of cluster assembly in which extreme starbursts coexist with galaxies already transitioning toward the passive galaxies characteristic of mature cluster cores.
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Audio and Speech Processing
CGaLore: Curvature-Guided GaLore for Memory-Efficient Continual Adaptation of ASR Foundation Models
Automatic speech recognition models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when adapted to new domains, accents, or downstream tasks. This problem becomes increasingly important with the growing use of speech foundation models, where adaptation should be both memory-efficient and safe, preserving the broad capabilities learned during pretraining. Gradient Low-Rank Projection (GaLore) has recently been proposed as a memory-efficient fine-tuning method that keeps model parameters full-rank while reducing the optimizer memory through low-rank gradient projection. However, GaLore does not account for catastrophic forgetting. We propose Curvature-Guided GaLore (CGaLore), which incorporates old-task curvature information when selecting the low-rank projection bases. Specifically, CGaLore filters current-task gradients using Kronecker-factored approximate curvature from previous tasks before computing the gradient subspace. Our experiments show that CGaLore enables effective adaptation while alleviating forgetting, outperforming state-of-the-art continual learning baselines. Extensive ablation studies confirm the practical applicability of CGaLore.
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Theoretical Economics
Certifying Priority in Evidence-Based Allocation
Many allocation rules give priority to applicants satisfying favored conditions, including disability, homelessness, and veteran status. Because these conditions are not directly observed, a rule ranking applicants by characteristics must first determine what submitted certificates prove. This paper studies allocation with hard but partial evidence: a disability document may prove disability without proving the absence of a disqualifying tenancy record. A claim is certifiable exactly when every intended claimant has a feasible certificate excluding all outsiders. Chain rules—scores, lexicographic orders, and scalar rankings—require certification of every priority cutoff, whereas reserve rules require certification of each eligibility class. Allocation rules thus select the claim family to be certified. When certification fails, canonical repairs demote unsupported chain priorities and delete unsupported reserve labels. Nonempty reserve eligibility classes can be represented as upper contours of a single chain if and only if they are nested. A housing application illustrates the consequences.
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Information Theory
Co-Evolving Zero-Day Jamming: Adaptive Attack Synthesis and Graph Attention-Based Online Detection
Effective evaluation of zero-day jamming detectors requires robust adversarial models. However, existing attack models often assume prior knowledge of the target receiver, limiting their utility as evaluation benchmarks. On the detection side, existing detectors fail to capture the global temporal-spectral structure of jamming behavior and cannot differentiate zero-day strategies as they emerge. This paper addresses these limitations through a two-pronged framework. First, an online detection framework is introduced that combines a graph attention network (GAT) for temporal-spectral representation learning with Dirichlet process (DP)-means clustering. This framework jointly classifies known and discovers zero-day strategies within a unified learning objective. Second, an inference-driven reinforcement learning (RL) jammer is proposed as an adversarial benchmark. The jammer treats the target receiver as a black-box, infers the detector state via hypothesis testing, and optimizes the trade-off between attack impact and stealth. Simulation results show that the proposed RL jammer outperforms benchmarks, achieving 33% higher attack efficacy and 67% higher stealth. The proposed detection framework against the proposed RL jammer is shown to achieve 20% higher detection accuracy than the benchmarks.
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Astrophysics of Galaxies
Patchy Reionization Delays Quenching in Isolated Ultra-faint Dwarf Galaxies
The spatially inhomogeneous nature of cosmic reionization is directly encoded in the quenching timescales of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies (UFDs). While most cosmological simulations employ a spatially uniform UV background (UVB) for computational efficiency, such homogeneous treatment may oversimplify the physical impact of reionization on UFDs, whose star formation histories (SFHs) are highly sensitive to local environments. Under these idealized, instantaneous UVB frameworks, star formation in UFDs is typically truncated abruptly at the onset of reionization, creating a tension with the extended and diverse SFHs observed in Local Group UFDs. To address this discrepancy, we perform high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations to contrast two distinct reionization models: a conventional uniform UVB and an on-the-fly radiative transfer (RT)-based patchy reionization model. We find that RT-based reionization delays star-formation quenching by ~440 Myr on average, a result consistent with recent observational constraints. However, this extended star formation does not necessarily leave a discernible imprint on the stellar metallicity distribution, indicating that the delay–while physically significant for gas dynamics–is still insufficient to drive substantial chemical enrichment. Our results emphasize the necessity of more realistic, patchy reionization modeling to explain the observed diversity of the Local Group population.
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Machine Learning
Routine Blood Tests Outperform CRP for Distinguishing Bacterial From Viral Infection in Children
Acute infectious diseases are among the leading causes of medical consultations and hospitalizations in children worldwide. These infections are predominantly caused by viruses or bacteria, yet differentiating between the two remains a common clinical challenge. As a result, pediatricians often default to the safer option of prescribing antibiotics contributing to the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance. The objective is to assess the additional predictive value of CBC towards determining the current infection. This retrospective study used data from 906 pediatric patients aged between 2 and 14 years who were tested positive either for viral or bacterial infection between 2022 and 2026. Inclusion criteria further required availability of CBC results and CRP level measurements. These laboratory parameters as well as age were used as input features for several supervised classification models. Model performance was evaluated using AUC, sensitivity and specificity. The best performing model is XGBoost, which included all features, achieving out of-sample performance of AUC of 81.7% and sensitivity of 70.8%, specificity of 79.2%. All trained models outperform a CRP-based only decision-rule model in terms of AUC. We suggest that the decision to prescribe antibiotics should be based on a number of factors, including but not limited to CBC, some of which are not currently incorporated into routine practice.
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Optics
Metasurface-integrated VCSEL designed for polarization control in optical Ising machines
The orthogonal polarization states of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) can be used to describe candidate solutions to the Ising Hamiltonian, which is useful for solving quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems. However, the natural anisotropy of VCSELs tends to overly favor one polarization state, which impedes the system from working as desired. In this work, we have designed and fabricated a metasurface, which may lead to a VCSEL with reduced undesired anisotropy. By changing the geometric size of nano-structures in the metasurface, the polarization state of the output light can be altered. Based on the injection-locking theory and spin-flip model, we numerically show that VCSELs with lowered anisotropy are more easily affected by the injection locking needed in Ising systems. Additionally, we numerically study the evolution of a 3-bit VCSEL-based Ising system and verify that the computational accuracy of the photonic Ising machine can be improved to more than twice that of its counterpart with higher anisotropy.
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Robotics
The EventCV Library for Event-Based Robotic Vision
Event cameras detect per-pixel brightness changes asynchronously on microsecond timescales, with high dynamic range and low power draw. These are desirable properties for robots that move fast or work in difficult lighting conditions. However, integrating an event camera into a real-world robotic pipeline still requires substantial effort: plug-and-play drivers do not exist, event streams are recorded in a variety of incompatible file formats, and most projects rely on custom research-grade code. Here, we present EventCV, an open-source and extensible Rust library with OpenCV-style Python bindings that lowers the entry barrier to working with event cameras. EventCV provides a wide range of features: denoising filters and geometric transforms, augmentations, corner detection and unsupervised feature learning, contrast-maximization motion estimation, a video-to-events simulator, and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) inference for deployment in robotic stacks. EventCV integrates the Neuromorphic Drivers package, allowing an event camera stream to be processed directly in real time. No existing toolkit covers this range of operations in one package, and EventCV builds representations and decodes files 1.1x to 3.7x faster than the currently available libraries. We deploy EventCV on a Jetson Orin AGX and present three robotics case studies spanning object detection, on-device model inference, and localization. Project webpage: https://eventcv.net.
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Computational Complexity
Fooling Thresholds of Halfspaces
We initiate the study of constructing explicit pseudorandom generators for thresholds of halfspaces with seed length polylogarithmic in the number of halfspaces. This class of functions lies at the frontier of circuit complexity [CTW26]. We show that the generator designed by O'Donnell, Servedio, and Tan for polytopes [OST22] also fools this broader class. To analyze the generator, we develop a threshold-specific smooth approximation framework based on a Bentkus-type mollifier. We prove derivative bounds for this mollifier and also establish a Boolean anticoncentration theorem for thresholds of halfspaces via a random thinning argument. These ingredients imply that the generator $\delta$-fools every $k$-out-of-$m$ threshold of $m$ halfspaces over $\{-1,1\}^n$ with seed length $\widetilde{O}(\kappa^{6+2\varepsilon}\log^{6+2\varepsilon}\!m\cdot\delta^{-(2+2\varepsilon)}\log n)$, for any arbitrarily small constant $\varepsilon>0$, where $\kappa=\min\{k,m-k+1\}$. The random thinning argument also yields bounds on the noise sensitivity and Gaussian surface area for thresholds of halfspaces, leading to learning algorithms under both the uniform and Gaussian distributions.
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Numerical Analysis
History-Compatible Energy-Stable Finite Element Schemes for Variable-Density Cahn–Hilliard–Navier–Stokes Flows on Evolving Meshes
We consider variable-density Cahn–Hilliard–Navier–Stokes (CHNS) discretizations on finite element meshes that may change between accepted time levels through fixed-topology motion or topology-changing remeshing. When the discrete spaces vary in time, the phase, kinetic, and pressure histories entering a multistep scheme are measured in different discrete structures and cannot, in general, be transferred by a single operator. We develop decoupled backward Euler (BE) and second-order backward differentiation formula (BDF2) schemes by combining exact physical cross-mesh pairings with history representations compatible with the corresponding phase-energy, kinetic-energy, and pressure-gradient storages. The phase update also determines an Abels–Garcke–Grün-consistent mass flux used in the momentum transport. A scalar capillary-exchange equation separates the phase and fluid solves while retaining the discrete energy exchange. The resulting field subproblems are linear, the scalar equation has a unique positive solution, and the schemes satisfy modified energy balances without a time-step restriction under the stated admissibility assumptions. Numerical experiments confirm second-order temporal convergence under both mesh updates, phase-mass conservation, modified-energy decay in the unforced tests, and comparable Rayleigh–Taylor and rising-bubble dynamics.
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Machine Learning
Deep Reinforcement Learning with Buffered Quantile Objectives
Quantile-based reinforcement learning provides an interpretable approach to risk-sensitive decision-making by optimizing a prescribed quantile of the cumulative-return distribution. Despite this appeal, learning under a point quantile objective is challenging: quantiles can change abruptly under small perturbations of the return distribution, and exact quantile-sensitive planning requires computationally demanding distributional optimization. Lower-buffered quantiles alleviate the former difficulty by averaging neighboring quantiles immediately below the target level, providing a smoother surrogate while preserving the underlying point-quantile objective. Existing methods based on this principle, however, remain model-based and rely on explicit return-law planning, limiting their applicability beyond small tabular problems. We develop Deep-BQRL, a model-free distributional reinforcement-learning framework that extends buffered-quantile learning to neural function approximation. The method learns conditional return quantiles directly from sampled transitions, constructs buffered action scores from the relevant region of the learned quantile function, and uses ensemble disagreement to guide exploration. An augmented input representation allows the learned policy to respond to trajectory information without explicitly reproducing the quantile-state recursion required by exact planning. Experiments on an asset-selling optimal-stopping problem and slippery FrozenLake compare Deep-BQRL with model-based UCB-BQRL and tabular PPO and TRPO implementations. In asset selling, Deep-BQRL attains smaller mean cumulative point-quantile policy gaps than PPO and TRPO at the reported target levels, while UCB-BQRL retains the smallest gaps. The learned stopping decisions also vary with the target quantile, providing an interpretable illustration of the method's risk-sensitive behavior.
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Spectral Theory
Sharp bounds for higher mixed Steklov-Robin eigenvalues on domains with holes
This article is concerned with mixed Steklov–Robin eigenvalues on bounded domains in $\mathbb{R}^{n}, n \geq 2$, with Lipschitz boundary. Specifically, we consider domains with symmetry of order $4$ containing a spherical hole. We obtain isoperimetric inequalities for the $k$-th Steklov-Robin eigenvalues for each $k \in \{2, 3, \dots, n+1\}$. We provide examples to emphasize the fact that the symmetry assumptions, on the family of domains considered, are crucial.
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Artificial Intelligence
LEGIT: Credentialing Protocol for Trustworthy AI Agent Marketplaces
Agentic marketplaces are emerging where AI agents with varying capabilities autonomously complete specialized tasks for buyers. A major challenge of such marketplaces is that buyers cannot easily determine which agent will perform best on their tasks. Reported benchmark scores may be difficult to verify or compare across tasks, software, and budgets. We introduce LEGIT, a credentialing protocol connecting certification, reputation, and proposed marketplace allocation. Certification binds measured quality and cost per solved task to an agent configuration, task domain, evaluation budget, and evidence through a signed record. Reputation links records of past task outcomes to the same identity, subject to the reliability of the reported feedback. Buyers and agents can verify credential records and inspect optional visual profiles. Evaluations reveal cost differences between agent configurations with similar observed task success, and show that comparisons depend on the evaluation budget. These results support binding performance measurements to the tested configuration and resource limits. A complementary analysis quantifies the deposits and fees required for reputation manipulation under a stated Sybil attack model.
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High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Why most neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries accrete transiently: an evolutionary study of transient and persistent phases
A neutron star (NS) low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB), in which an NS accretes matter from a low-mass donor star, is an ideal source for probing some fundamental aspects of physics and astronomy, such as strong gravity, superdense matter, and the accretion-ejection processes. However, to reliably achieve these goals, one must adequately understand NS LMXBs, including why some accrete persistently and others transiently. Focused models, such as those based on a thermal-viscous instability in the accretion disk, are considered to explain transient accretion. However, broader perspectives, including which LMXB parameter values and phases cause transients and why there are more transients than persistents, remain poorly understood. Here, our computation of the long-term evolution of NS LMXBs addresses these questions, providing insight into LMXB parameters and phases, naturally producing more transients than persistents, and being partially consistent with the known properties of observed sources. For example, we typically find a greater fraction of persistent phase at lower orbital periods from the LMXB evolution computation, which is somewhat consistent with observations. However, a lack of full consistency calls for improving the aforementioned focused models, and our computations provide a new way to discriminate among these models.
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Computer Vision
VeriFuse: Bounded Vision-Language Arbitration and Reason-Guided Refinement for Cooperative 3D Perception
Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong scene understanding and semantic judgment across diverse tasks, but their appropriate role in cooperative perception remains unclear. Directly asking a VLM to regress 3D detections is unreliable and computationally expensive, whereas using it to select the output of a single source discards useful information from other agents. We introduce VeriFuse, a bounded arbitration framework for vehicle-infrastructure cooperative 3D detection. Each agent first produces detections independently. Around each vehicle and roadside proposal, VeriFuse generates source-conditioned geometric candidates and combines the original detections, their perturbations, and cross-source hypotheses into a unified candidate pool. A frozen VLM then chooses among three admissible actions: SELECT an adequate candidate; REFINE an existing anchor when an object is supported but all candidates are geometrically inadequate; or REJECT an unsupported infrastructure-only proposal. Experiments on the DAIR-V2X dataset show that VeriFuse achieves 0.494/0.357 cooperative 3D AP50/AP70 and limits the relative vehicle-side BEV AP50 drop under a 300 ms delay to 1.7%. Overall, VeriFuse assigns the VLM a clear and constrained role in cooperative perception: semantic reasoning resolves ambiguity among cross-agent hypotheses, while deterministic constraints determine the final 3D geometry.
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Computer Vision
S3VD: Semantic-Guidance Spatio-Temporal Scanning for Video Deraining
Heavy rainfall severely degrades outdoor videos by corrupting high-frequency details and introducing motion blur, critically undermining the reliability of visual tasks. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have emerged as efficient alternatives for vision tasks with their linear complexity and ability to model long-range dependencies. However, when confronted with the poor visual representations in rainy videos, Mamba still faces difficulties in preserving the integrity of 2D spatial semantics and modeling 3D spatio-temporal correlations. To break these limitations, we introduce S3VD, a Semantic-Guidance Spatio-Temporal Scanning framework for video deraining, featuring two key innovations: Multi-Scale Semantic Fusion (MSSF) Module and Spatio-Temporal Scanning Fusion (STSF) Module. The former integrates temporal semantic priors from DINOv2 to guide precise feature representation and counteract the loss of local semantic context inherent to Mamba's 1D flatten operation, enhancing robustness against extreme degradation. The latter introduces a spatio-temporal scanning mechanism and devises a Decoupled-Gating Mamba (DG-Mamba) layer, which employs two independent gates to adaptively control preceding and subsequent contextual information within the input clip, optimizing intra-frame and inter-frame correlation modeling. Experiments on video deraining benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of S3VD, achieving state-of-the-art performance with an average 0.84 dB PSNR improvement over Mamba-based baselines.
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Machine Learning (Statistics)
Sparse Identification for Automatic Large-Scale Screening: A Constraint-Aware Framework with Ultra Fast Decoding Algorithm
In the early stages of a pandemic, identification of a small number of infected individuals through large-scale screening is critical for pandemic control, yet remains challenging under limited reagents and testing capacity. Existing group testing methods suffer from either high computational complexity or low identification accuracy. Even worse, no available methods provide theoretically rigorous analysis for sparse identification with hard constraints caused by the sample usage constraint and the dilution effect existing ubiquitously in practical applications. In this article, we propose the Logic Screening method (LoSc), an ultra fast, accurate, and theoretically grounded framework for large-scale screening. LoSc introduces a novel decoding algorithm with a very simple selection strategy, achieving identification of all positives with only O(klogn) pooled tests. The decoding relies only on logical operations, enabling direct hardware implementation and yielding ultra fast computational implementation. Moreover, LoSc explicitly incorporates dilution and sample usage constraints into pooling designs, and establishes theoretical guarantees to guide optimal pooling configurations. Extensive simulations confirm the superior effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability. We believe LoSc offers a fast and reliable solution for automatic large-scale screening.
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Machine Learning (Statistics)
Diagonalized Attention for Individualized Regression: Latent-Row Localization and Prediction
Modern text and image representations are often matrix-valued, with rows corresponding to tokens, patches, or other local feature vectors. Predictive information is often sparse but sample-specific, making classical sparse regression methods with a common support poorly suited to this heterogeneity. This paper formalizes an individualized sparse regression framework for matrix-valued covariates in which each observation has its own rows of interest, while the associated regression effects are shared across the population. To estimate this model, we introduce a diagonalized attention mechanism that uses query–key scores to localize sample-specific signal rows and a value matrix for downstream regression. The proposed method has a parameter dimension independent of sample size and can identify rows of interest for new observations without their responses. We establish existence theorems showing that, under suitable score-separation and concentration conditions, single-head and multi-head diagonalized attention models recover the latent rows with high probability, yielding prediction risk bounds. Our theory therefore provides a statistical explanation of how attention-based scoring localizes sample-specific signals in heterogeneous matrix-valued data. Simulations demonstrate strong prediction and localization in regression and misspecified classification across varying sample sizes, dimensions, and signal cardinalities. Real sentiment analyses show improved classification accuracy and interpretable token selection.
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Robotics
LEMCA: LLM-Guided Synthesis of Efficient Mode-Switching Control Architectures
Physical control tasks in the natural world, such as driving or object manipulation, frequently exhibit dramatic variations in sensory and compute complexity over time. Correspondingly, a natural resource-efficient choice for robot control is to dynamically switch between control modes with varying resource allocations. However, such "mode-switching controllers" (MSCs) have historically required laborious, expert-driven design and synthesis for each new task. Driven by these design difficulties, modern robotic control architectures often fall back to a wasteful "monolithic" one-size-fits-all structure, where resource allocation is permanently anchored to the hardest, most resource-intensive task phases. To facilitate the design of performant yet efficient MSCs, we propose LLM-Guided synthesis of Efficient Mode-Switching Control Architectures (LEMCA). LEMCA represents MSC designs as interpretable programs to be iteratively refined in an evolutionary loop. To evaluate design fitness, we propose MSC-compatible extensions of automated controller synthesis approaches, such as reinforcement learning in simulation. LEMCA then leverages the semantic priors, reasoning, and coding capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to iteratively edit controller modes, their corresponding sensory-compute resource allocations, and mode transitions. Our experiments across diverse control benchmarks show that LEMCA consistently discovers strategies that surpass the Pareto frontier of monolithic designs by reclaiming wasted resources during "easy" task phases. LEMCA thus presents an automated, low-effort path to synthesize resource-efficient MSC designs.
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Neural and Evolutionary Computing
A Confidence-Driven Evolutionary Algorithm for Noisy Optimization with Joint Chance Constraints
Many real-world optimization problems involve noisy objective evaluations and probabilistic constraints, particularly in the form of joint chance constraints, which are computationally expensive to evaluate. In this work, we propose CR-EA-C, a confidence-driven evolutionary algorithm for solving noisy black-box optimization problems under joint chance constraints. CR-EA-C introduces three key components: (1) analytical feasibility estimation for joint chance constraints, (2) a pairwise statistical ranking mechanism for robust comparison under noise, and (3) a modified infeasibility-driven survival strategy to accelerate convergence. These components enable statistically reliable decision-making while improving the efficiency of function evaluations. The proposed method is evaluated against four recent metaheuristic algorithms under various uncertainty distributions. Furthermore, its practical effectiveness is also assessed on two additional real-world optimization problems and compared with conventional static sampling methods. Experimental results show that CR-EA-C consistently satisfies the prescribed joint chance constraints while achieving competitive objective values overall. This demonstrates that CR-EA-C is an effective general-purpose approach for noisy optimization.
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Logic in Computer Science
The Sources of Unknowability and Self-refutation in Epistemic and Dynamic Epistemic Logic
In this paper, we define a formula $\varphi$ to be unbelievable if $\Box\varphi$ is unsatisfiable, and unknowable if $\Box\varphi\land\varphi$ is unsatisfiable. We then analyze the sources of unknowability and unbelievability in different classes of frames K, KD, KD45, and S5. We first show that any unbelievable formula is a fixed point of the Moore function defined by $f(\varphi)=\varphi\land\lnot\Box\varphi.$ Our main result shows that in S5, the static notions of unknowability and unbelievability in epistemic logic, and the dynamic notions of always informativeness and eventual self-refutation in dynamic epistemic logic are all equivalent to “Moorean phenomena.” We also generalize the result to the multi-agent case, showing that although all unknowable formulas still manifest Moorean phenomena, new mechanisms arise due to their interactive nature. Finally, we briefly analyze whether the Brandenburger-Keisler paradox in epistemic game theory can be considered Moorean.
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Robotics
NaViRrator: Robot Navigation from Human-Readable Maps through a Learned Visual Route
Human-readable maps provide an intuitive interface for specifying robot destinations, but connecting their schematic geometry to egocentric observations remains challenging. We present NaViRRator, a framework that translates user-specified start and goal locations on such maps into navigation instructions for a pretrained vision-and-language navigation (VLN) policy. Its core method, RouteScribe, separates route inference from verbalization by first generating an explicit route scaffold in map-image coordinates, which a pretrained vision-language model (VLM) converts into a navigation instruction. We construct the scaffold with start–goal line conditional flow matching (SGL-CFM), which deforms a straight start–goal waypoint sequence into a map-conditioned route. During execution, the VLN policy receives only the instruction and egocentric observations, while the map and scaffold remain upstream, allowing executor replacement without retraining the map-to-language modules. Real-world experiments show higher success rates and success weighted by path length (SPL) than direct map-to-instruction generation, A*-based scaffolding, and Gaussian-source conditional flow matching. Qualitative results further show clearer salient turns and better preservation of the intended maneuver sequence, supporting route-grounded language as a modular interface between human-readable maps and pretrained navigation policies.
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Combinatorics
Excluding a line from gammoids
For all positive integers $\ell$ and $r$, we prove that a finite simple rank-$r$ gammoid with no $U_{2,\ell+2}$-minor has at most $\ell(r-1)+1$ elements. This gives an affirmative answer to Problem~7.2 of Boretsky and Walsh [European J. Combin.\ 137 (2026), 104419], for both gammoids and transversal matroids. The bound is sharp for every $\ell$ and $r$. The key estimate is that, for every finite simple gammoid $M$, the sum of $|L|-2$ over its long lines is at most $|E(M)|-r(M)$.
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Analysis of PDEs
Uniform-in-Time Approximation of Calogero-Moser Particles by Continuum Multisolitons
We prove that every solution of the classical rational Calogero-Moser system can be approximated, after subtracting a common linear drift from the particle positions, by rational multisoliton solutions of the focusing continuum Calogero-Moser equation, uniformly for all time. The construction identifies the multisoliton inverse spectral matrix as a rank-one dissipative perturbation of Moser's time-dependent Hermitian position matrix. A uniform lower bound on the particle separation then yields quantitative control of the multisoliton poles. Their real parts and real velocities approximate the shifted particle positions and velocities with errors of order $\varepsilon^2$, while the pole heights are positive and sum exactly to $\varepsilon$. Using the exact Poisson-kernel representation of the multisoliton density, we obtain convergence to the atomic particle measure in bounded-Lipschitz distance at rate $O(\varepsilon(1+|\log\varepsilon|))$, uniformly in time. We also derive the large-time distribution of pole height at fixed $\varepsilon$, with one distinguished branch retaining the limiting height and the remaining heights decaying quadratically in time. Explicit two-particle formulas illustrate the approximation and show that the real-position error estimate is sharp.