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arXiv cs.CL

Semantic Conditional Similarity (SCS): A Formal Mathematical Framework

arXiv:2611.08778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) operates on document pairs, returning a single scalar per comparison. In a multi-document setting where several sources may have contributed to one or more targets, pairwise STS cannot disentangle each source's marginal semantic contribution from their shared vocabulary. In this paper, Semantic Conditional Similarity (SCS) is introduced as a conditional form of STS that computes similarity between two documents after eliminating semantic elements shared with a third via set-theoretic operations. SCS makes four contributions: 1) it introduces directionality, partitioning pairwise relations into lateral (inter-source) and vertical (source-to-target) classes; 2) conditioning induces role-dependent asymmetry by extending the comparison domain from unordered pairs to ordered, conditioned triples of a target, a reference, and a conditioning document; 3) SCS introduces inter-document conditioning by subtracting shared content from a third document, complementing the intra-document conditioning in recent C-STS work; and 4) the set-theoretic decomposition achieves threshold-free partitioning of shared and residual content, requiring no arbitrary similarity cutoff. Although developed for the $n \to 1$ configuration, the framework extends to $1 \to n$ via vertical role reversal and to $m \to n$ via independent composition of source- and target-side conditioning. With the established $1 \to 1$ case, these span the full spectrum of document cardinality. SCS scores should be interpreted ordinally, as rankings of marginal contributions rather than absolute measurements. The broader implication is that metric space axioms commonly assumed in similarity formalizations constrain expressiveness in role-differentiated multi-document settings, and that extending the domain to conditioned triples can recover information that pairwise-symmetric comparisons suppress.

arXiv cs.CL

Structuring Survey Histories for LLM Digital Twins: A Controlled Study of Background, Decision Procedure, and Evaluation Profiles

arXiv:2611.08730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based digital twins aim to predict how individuals would respond in new settings from representations of their prior responses. Existing evidence that compression of survey histories need not reduce predictive accuracy suggests that representation structure, rather than information volume alone, may be an important design choice. We study BDE, a fixed representation that organizes each respondent's survey history into Background, Decision procedure, and Evaluation. We evaluate it on Twin-2K-500 (Toubia et al., 2025) by predicting each respondent's held-out answers on 17 tasks. In a paired evaluation with 100 respondents, a fully inferred BDE profile improves overall accuracy over the raw survey transcript by 1.27 percentage points (pp) on gpt-5.4-nano (p < 0.01) and 1.19 pp on gpt-5.4-mini (p < 0.001). Three analyses then examine the schema, extraction depth, and component composition. Against a length-matched free-form profile written from the same transcript by the same extractor, BDE improves pricing accuracy on both simulators (2.15 pp on nano, p < 0.01; 1.38 pp on mini, p < 0.05), while its overall advantage is significant only on nano (1.05 pp, p < 0.05). Allowing deeper inference during extraction yields no statistically significant gain on either simulator. By contrast, adding Evaluation to a Background--Decision procedure profile improves overall accuracy by 1.44 pp on nano (p < 0.001) and 1.22 pp on mini (p < 0.001). These results indicate that the advantage over raw transcripts is not explained by compression or length alone, and attribute it primarily to profile composition rather than deeper extraction.

arXiv cs.AI

Transporting the Past: An Optimal Transport View of Backtracking Counterfactuals

arXiv:2611.08682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study backtracking counterfactual inference for Structural Causal Models (SCMs) through the lens of optimal transport. In SCMs, a factual observation generally induces a posterior distribution over exogenous variables, making counterfactual inference inherently distributional. We introduce two complementary frameworks that transport this posterior onto the set of exogenous configurations satisfying a desired counterfactual query. The first constructs a natural pointwise projection and is suitable when the transported exogenous distribution can be used directly. The second enforces mutual independence among counterfactual exogenous variables, so that the transported variables remain interpretable as genuine exogenous noises of the same SCM. We show that both frameworks are consistent with the original backtracking counterfactual principle, and we propose marginal, penalty-based, and hard-constrained solvers for finite-posterior settings. Synthetic experiments on non-bijective SCMs illustrate the geometry of the problem and reveal trade-offs among transport cost, counterfactual constraint satisfaction, and preservation of exogenous independence.

arXiv cs.LG

What Are LLM Agents Actually Learning on Low-Budget Molecular Optimization Benchmarks?

arXiv:2611.08522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work reports large gains for LLM agents on low-budget molecular optimization. We measure the contributions of online optimization, retrievable task information, and permissive oracle landscapes. On PMO at 50 oracle calls, a GPT-4o mini agent's sum AUC falls from 14.44 to 4.85 after task names and curated reference compounds are hidden. An identity-blinded condition that states only the oracle form (e.g., similarity to a hidden reference) scores 5.39, while a deterministic retrieval-only baseline with no LLM reaches 12.16 (84% of the full agent). A full 23-task 2x2 ablation and a three-seed replication on eight tasks support this interpretation. On a protein-targeted benchmark with an AutoDock Vina composite oracle, a single-edit random walk is a strong lower bound; across three seeds it obtains composite 0.636 +/- 0.008 and docking improvement -1.11 +/- 0.04 kcal/mol. As a positive control, a retrieval-free population agent exceeds REINVENT at a matched 50-call AUC budget, with its strongest result at 100 calls. These results motivate two inexpensive sanity checks: retrieval-safe PMO prompts and a random-walk floor for docking-based optimization.

arXiv cs.LG

A Night at the LLM Zoo: Data Conditioned Flow Matching for Generating Pretrained LLM Weights

arXiv:2611.07103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A challenge to Weight Space Learning as it expands from task specific and vision models to Large Language Models (LLMs) is the absence of a well curated and analyzed LLM population. To address this, we train such a model zoo for application to Weight Space Generation by systematically varying the data mixture composition between web text, books, mathematics, coding, and French across populations of 51M, 124M, and 355M parameter GPT-2 Models, each tier with count N = 100. We analyze these populations by cosine similarity, functional diversity, Leave-One-Mixture-Out modeling, and variance decomposition. We show that the zoo contains diverse models whose variation is structured by training mixture composition. We embed the training mixture composition to condition a Flow Matching model of complete pretrained LLM weights in Gram-PCA compressed weight space. By demonstrating zero-shot generalization to held out mixtures, measuring Continuous Ranked Probability Score skill, as well as finding minimal changes in downstream test-set perplexity and general capability benchmark scores, we show that our generator generalizes on the simplex of data mixtures to produce models that perform similarly to those in the zoo ex nihilo. Finally, we produce all source code and artifacts to support the continued expansion of Weight Space Learning and Generation into the LLM domain.

arXiv cs.CV

A Proxy-Based Method for Measuring Racial Disparities in~Text-to-Image~Generators

arXiv:2611.07132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an automated method for auditing text-to-image generators for representational bias against ground-truth demographic benchmarks. Our approach adapts the racial proxy variables used in U.S. antidiscrimination law to provide a fine-grained comparative analysis of variations in racial representation in generated images. We classify each generated image by race and then compare the model's distribution to publicly available demographic benchmark data to identify patterns of over- and under-representation. We also measure skin tone using CIELAB values and calculate cosine similarity amongst groups of images in order to capture biases that don't show up in demographic comparisons such as differences in image quality across races and skin tones. We report on experiments testing three models (Imagen 4 Fast, Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large Turbo, and Flux Schnell) using three categories of proxies (geographic, occupational, and surname) and 50 variants within each category. We find notable variation across the models as well as by proxy category. For example, Imagen 4 Fast overrepresents white classified images more than the other models tested and produces images with lighter, more homogeneous skin tones. Imagen 4 Fast also had the largest representational disparity for Black demographics among surname and geographical prompts. Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large Turbo produces results that overall diverge most from census data but yield the most diverse range of skin tones. Our method yields a generalizable and legally-grounded auditing tool that surfaces detailed information about model outputs without relying on implicit normative definitions of fairness.

arXiv cs.CV

ArtiVidRM: Verifiable Artifact-as-Rubric Reward Modeling for Explicit Quality Articulation in Video Generation

arXiv:2611.07301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become an effective approach for improving video generation, but its success depends heavily on reliable reward models. Existing methods either map videos directly to opaque scalar scores or generate free-form rationales that are not explicitly optimized as the basis of the final judgment. We propose ArtiVidRM, a verifiable, artifact-as-rubrics video reward model that follows an observe-then-score paradigm. It first identifies visible generation artifacts and organizes them into a structured artifact list, then uses these artifacts as explicit rubrics for quality assessment. This intermediate representation grounds each score in concrete video-level evidence, making the reward more interpretable and informative for optimization. We further introduce a multi-reward reinforcement learning strategy to jointly optimize artifact prediction and quality assessment. The reward decomposes into complementary objectives that evaluate artifact prediction quality, including semantic coverage and prediction efficiency, together with a pairwise preference objective that supervises quality ranking through score differences. By jointly optimizing the intermediate artifact representation and the downstream preference prediction, the model learns to produce informative artifact lists while improving the accuracy of video quality assessment. Experiments show that ArtiVidRM achieves state-of-the-art performance on video preference benchmarks, provides effective signals for video diffusion optimization, and enables artifact-guided refinement of closed-source video generators.

arXiv cs.DC

Beyond Proof of Possession: A Relational Theory of Authority

arXiv:2611.07159v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proof-of-Possession (PoP) establishes that an executor controls an artifact (key, token, credential, or capability), but such control alone determines neither the executor's relational profile nor the causal history of an execution occurrence. We separate PoP from Proof of Relationship (PoR), the semantic property that one execution occurrence validly continues another, and from authorization, which is occurrence-sensitive. The foundational change is in the semantic domain of authorization: from holders and authority-bearing artifacts to execution occurrences situated in causal histories. We give authorization models an observation-based occurrence verdict and a separate transition-admissibility relation; kernel inclusion yields a partial order on observation-kernel classes. Building on Provenance Identity Continuity (PIC) and Proof-of-Continuity (PoC), we classify executors by authorization-relevant equivalence relations whose quotients form relational profile spaces, with positive predicates over profile transitions forming a distributive lattice. This adds relational attenuation to authority attenuation: along a valid causal history, $C_{i+1}\subseteq C_i$ and $\rho_{i+1}\Rightarrow\rho_i$. We prove dual monotonicity, combined closure, and origin relational closure. Two occurrences of the same authenticated executor, with the same profile and possession evidence, need not be authorization-equivalent, and within a valid PIC lineage a deputy's independent authority cannot be imported outside the origin context. Finally, we prove that the executor-dependent decision factors through the relational profile and is invariant under sound mechanisms establishing it: successor-side PoP is a possible evidence mechanism, not a necessary premise of authorization. Under explicit Witness Assumptions, a boundary-witnessed checkpoint construction realizes the premises without successor-side PoP.

arXiv cs.AI

BlockLock: Reproducible LLM Inference with Fixed Batch Geometry

arXiv:2611.06977v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reproducible LLM inference requires that a request produces the same output regardless of the other requests in the batch. Existing solutions pay for this in different ways: batch-invariant kernels constrain every operator, and isolating prefill with fixed-shape decode ({our CoRun-style baseline}) gives up shared prefill compute and pads decode. We present BlockLock, which keeps shared batched prefill and pins only the numerical path of the protected request: it fixes the geometry that the request sees, with {two modes: BlockLock-Rows uses fixed-width rows and retains batched decode of all requests; BlockLock-Pack uses terminal-anchored packing with an isolated dummy segment, then extracts the protected request's KV state for target-only decode. Under a stated per-deployment contract, both modes preserve the target's output bitwise when its companions change.} Across five {dense} models (Qwen3-8B/14B, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and Gemma-3-4B/12B-IT) and three single-GPU deployments (NVIDIA A6000, A100, and H100), we evaluate our approach on both tinyBenchmarks and BFCL{; we also include initial tensor-parallel experiments on two NVIDIA A6000 GPUs. Both modes preserve target sequences and Top20-logit bits in the reported tests.} At equal delivered work, {BlockLock-Rows} reduces latency by 53.5--55.0\% and improves throughput by 115.2--122.2\% relative to vLLM Batch-Invariant; compared with batch-invariant kernels, it needs no custom kernel implementations and constrains only the protected requests.

arXiv cs.AI

Closed-Loop Agent Evaluation: Layered Measurement and Self-Calibration

arXiv:2611.07051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Once an agent is live, teams want to know whether it is doing its job, not just whether it throws errors. Yet most evaluation is one-off: a benchmark run, a look at traces, a single score. Its conclusions neither check themselves nor reach the agent. We propose closed-loop evaluation, an evaluation method for deployed agents. It models evaluation as performance estimation under biased raters and censored outcomes, and it requires every level's conclusion to trace back to atomic data and to be computed by versioned rules. The method covers four levels of analysis (span, trace, conversation and engagement), measures along a spine of Execution, Substance, Trajectory and Results, treats Conduct as a constraint throughout, and uses Provenance and Adjudication components to certify the evidence and the evaluators. Evaluator agents generated by an Agent Factory carry these components, each with a domain knowledge pack and an adapter harness. Two loops close the evaluation: an inner loop audits the evidence, rules and metrics themselves, and an outer loop uses per-component regression checks to drive agent improvement. We also give a pipeline that runs this process automatically. Using the business-analysis agent SharpInsight as a case and porting the method to public conversation data, we show how problems differ across levels and how evidence-and-rule judgment is more reliable than holistic scoring (ICC 0.86 vs. 0.81; kappa 0.81 vs. 0.63).

arXiv cs.AI

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Epigraph-Form Guided Exploration

arXiv:2611.07066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discovering cooperative behavior in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is challenging due to the combinatorial complexity of joint state-action spaces, which hinders the emergence of coordinated behaviors from trial-and-error alone. Intrinsic rewards are often used to aid discovery, but naively combining them with team objectives can distort the learning signal, compromising task performance. In this paper, we propose EFXPLORER, a constrained exploration framework that maximizes exploration objectives subject to a constraint that preserves established task performance. We solve the resulting problem using an epigraph reformulation that introduces adaptive exploration budgets. This approach separates intrinsic rewards from task objectives and regulates exploration through task feasibility. To further encourage diverse and temporally extended exploration, we incorporate a successor distance-based intrinsic reward that captures long-horizon dependencies. Empirically, our method outperforms strong baselines and induces novel cooperative strategies across SMAX, VMAS, and MPE benchmark suites.

arXiv cs.CL

Familiar letters, not related languages, let unseen languages into a shared space of meaning

arXiv:2611.06006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hundreds of languages have written text but almost no translations, and whether a model learning one from untranslated text builds on a related language or familiar letters is unclear: they usually coincide. Here we show that familiar letters, not a related language, let an unseen language into a shared space of meaning. GlyphMind, a tokenizer-free vision transformer that reads text as pixels and lets any sentence be shown in any script, was pretrained to align translations across 27 writing systems. Adapted on untranslated Lao, a language and script it had never seen, it retrieved English translations seven times as often as the strongest simple baseline. Rewritten in unfamiliar letters, Lao did not enter although its close relative Thai was in pretraining; Santali, which had none, entered in Devanagari, familiar from Hindi, but not in its own script. Transliteration into familiar scripts may thus open multilingual models to languages without translations.

arXiv cs.LG

Finite-Time Convergence and Regret Guarantees for Neural Reinforcement Learning in POMDPs

arXiv:2611.07069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is computationally challenging due to the curse of long-range dependence on history. Fortunately, recent studies have shown that a range of POMDPs that satisfy the filter stability assumption can be well approximated by a superstate Markov Decision Process (MDP) based on a truncated history in a finite-memory window, with a value gap that decays with the window length. However, existing finite-time convergence analyses on such superstate MDP surrogates are either limited to over-simplified linear function approximation or rely on an i.i.d. sampling oracle that is violated by POMDP trajectories, both of which severely limit the applicability of these theoretical results in practice. This motivates us to bridge the gap by investigating RL in POMDPs with nonlinear neural value function approximation. Our main contributions are threefold: i) We first establish a new finite-state MDP point-wise approximation error bound, which lays the foundation for our RL algorithm design and analysis in POMDPs; ii) By applying Temporal-Difference (TD) learning to POMDP-generated superstate transitions and targeting the Bellman fixed point of the superstate MDP, we prove a finite-time critic error bound with nonlinear neural value function approximation; and iii) By combining the neural critic function approximation error bound with the policy mirror descent framework, we obtain a finite-time sublinear regret against the optimal POMDP value. To the best of our knowledge, such a finite-time sublinear regret based on neural function approximation is the first in the literature for finite-memory POMDPs. Our numerical experiments also verify our theoretical results.

arXiv cs.AI

Formalizing inverse problems in the age of AI: possibilities, pitfalls, and an invitation

arXiv:2611.06962v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proof assistants such as Lean check mathematical proofs down to the axioms, and AI agents have recently made writing such proofs cheap. We describe AutoIP, a Lean library in which classical linear regularization theory, together with the functional analysis it rests on, has been autoformalized by AI agents. A machine-checked proof certifies only the formal statement it proves, so the remaining human task is to confirm that each formal statement says what was intended. We organize the library around this task: a reviewer compares the formal statements with their natural-language counterparts and never needs to read a proof. Our experience is that the risks lie in the statements rather than in the proofs, and that simple automated tests on the statements can expose problems even in the established literature. We illustrate this with a textbook theorem whose hypothesis is more restrictive than asserted. We invite the inverse problems community to extend and build on the library.

arXiv cs.DC

Full Provenance on the COSS Causal Axis: An Event-Level Closure of Causal Attribution and Confused-Deputy Exclusion

arXiv:2611.07164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Provenance Identity Continuity (PIC) represents an authority-use event as an operation/resource behavior situated in a causal lineage, $(o,r,\ell)\in O\times R\times L$. We make the causal occurrence itself primitive: a represented security-relevant causal graph $(E,\to_c)$ in which each occurrence has a unique causal history, so the consistent event-lineage space is canonically isomorphic to $E$. The modeled execution has one causal partial order; distinct lineages are distinct causal histories inside it and may share a root while diverging into incomparable branches. PIC's $O\times R\times L$ is the authority-behavior projection of this space, and Causally Ordered Security-State (COSS) continuity generalizes it to an arbitrary behavior product over the same causal execution. On this semantics we prove an architecture-independent confused-deputy exclusion theorem. PIC continuation requires $C(e')\subseteq C(e)$ on every ordinary causal edge, so descendants are bounded by their ancestors; at an ordinary join, authority available on only one incoming branch cannot be resurrected, even when branches share a common root. Non-conservative combination must be an explicit authorized composition or relaxation event. With protected-effect mediation, an effect caused by request $q$ through an ordinary authority segment can exercise only authority in $C(q)$, so a confused-deputy state is contradictory. The result holds for any system whose protected request-to-effect causes are faithfully represented and whose ordinary authority transport satisfies PIC. We revisit Rajani, Garg, and Rezk: their value, control-flow, and initial-heap attacks are different witnesses of causal ancestry, so full provenance is an evidence mechanism for recovering edges of the causal graph, not the foundation of the PIC theorem. Finally we lift it to the COSS product of heterogeneous security-state coordinates.

arXiv cs.CL

Holistic Parallel Supervision for Expressive Speech to Speech Translation

arXiv:2611.06010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Expressiveness is central to speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), yet existing datasets rarely align source and target speech jointly in content, prosody, timing, and speaker identity. Consequently, current systems often rely on indirect conditioning or transfer mechanisms. To obtain this supervision, we introduce a training-data construction strategy that combines professional dubbing, which provides human-performed correspondence in content, prosody, and timing, with multilingual voice conversion to reduce speaker mismatch. We evaluate this supervision using existing expressive S2ST systems and DirectS2ST, an end-to-end method developed in this work that predicts the complete target-speech representation directly from source speech. Experiments on English-German and English-Spanish show that holistic parallel supervision improves expressive realization across all evaluated systems. DirectS2ST exhibits the largest gains in content, prosody, timing, speaker similarity, and human-rated expressiveness. To our knowledge, this work provides the first systematic investigation of holistic parallel supervision for expressive S2ST.

arXiv cs.CV

Householder Motion Embedding: Noise Modulation for Motion-Controllable Video Generation

arXiv:2611.07294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models for video generation have achieved remarkable success, yet precise motion control under explicit user guidance remains challenging. Recent noise-warping methods introduce temporal correlations by warping the noise according to the user-provided motion signal. However, standard spatial warping generally disrupts the noise's i.i.d. Gaussian structure, requiring distribution correction, such as Jacobian-based correction, but at a substantial computational overhead. We propose Householder Motion Embedding (HME), which encodes the motion signal into the noise through a sequence of Householder reflections that together form an orthogonal transformation applied to each location's channel vector. HME exactly preserves the spatial Gaussian structure within each frame while introducing cross-frame correlations that promote temporally consistent video. HME is agnostic to the network architecture and integrates directly into standard video diffusion fine-tuning pipelines. Experiments on different scenarios show that HME matches or outperforms the state of the art, while achieving a 2.7x speedup over noise warping. These results demonstrate that channel-space Householder transformations offer a principled and efficient alternative to noise warping for motion-controllable video generation.

arXiv cs.CL

Information-Matched Auditing of Conversational Emotion-Shift Forecasting: A Leakage-Safe Evaluation Protocol

arXiv:2611.05895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Comparisons in conversational emotion-shift forecasting are easily distorted when a learned model receives rich features but its transition baseline is given a noisy or unavailable current-emotion label, when hyperparameter budgets differ, or when target-turn information enters the representation. We present an information-matched, leakage-safe auditing protocol that closes these gaps with an explicit commitment point, executable causality tests, equal four-configuration validation searches, and seed-dialogue-aware inference. Applying it to six causal model families on four text corpora and two feature-source sensitivity configurations shows that a deployable train-only current-emotion classifier feeding the transition baseline yields a different verdict than an oracle diagnostic where both sides receive gold current emotion. Under the deployable condition, learned models improve over the predicted-label baseline on all four primary corpora; DailyDialog gains are large and survive a 72-comparison Holm correction (best ROC-AUC gain = +0.167, adjusted p=.0144). Under matched gold information, the baseline remains competitive on IEMOCAP and stronger on MELD, while every model retains a large DailyDialog advantage. We additionally report precision-recall AUC, calibration, a strictly utterance-local feature control, same-person self-shift forecasting, and a future-access dose-response test. An eight-item leakage checklist accompanies the protocol. Code, raw seed predictions, and reporting artifacts are available from the corresponding author upon request.