Research

• General in-context learning for embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Enables models to adapt to new tasks and environments without retraining, improving robustness in real-world deployment.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Cost and latency in embodied control loops1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  High computational and time costs limit real-time applicability of agentic systems in dynamic environments.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Physical-state verification and failure recovery1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Agents must reliably detect and correct errors in physical interactions to avoid irreversible failures in real-world tasks.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Long-horizon task preservation in embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Maintaining progress over extended sequences is critical for complex, multi-step tasks in robotics and navigation.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Open-source stacks for generalist computer-use agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Closed systems hinder reproducibility and systematic study of agent design for real-world computer tasks.

  • OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Useraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Training & fine-tuning42+90.9%
• AI safety29+61.1%
• Computer vision31+55.0%
• Evals62+34.8%
• Federated learning48+29.7%
• Code models13+18.2%
• Image & video generation21+16.7%
• Quantum machine learning24+14.3%

• arXiv cs.SDOct 16

  VocalGrad: Evaluating Acoustic Perception in Audio Language Models

  Koki Ryu, Hitomi Yanaka

  Recent large audio language models (LALMs) have extended their capabilities beyond lexical speech understanding to tasks requiring paralinguistic and non-linguistic audio understanding, such as emotion recognition. However, these models still struggle to reliably utilize acoustic information, particularly when it co-occurs with spoken linguistic content. Existing benchmarks do not clearly distinguish acoustic perception from higher-level reasoning, making it difficult to identify the source of these failures. To address this issue, we introduce VocalGrad, a benchmark designed to evaluate LALMs' ability to perceive low-level acoustic variations. VocalGrad formulates this problem as a simple binary classification of temporal change direction, enabling evaluation largely independent of higher-level reasoning or semantic understanding. Our benchmark results reveal a substantial gap in acoustic perception between human annotators and state-of-the-art LALMs: while human annotators achieve high accuracy, LALMs perform at near-chance levels. We further conduct linear probing to identify structural bottlenecks in these models. Our analysis reveals two distinct failure modes: for some…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 16

  The Italian lawmaking process: a unified and structured dataset

  Matilde Contestabile, Chiara Ferrara, Giovanni Parrillo, Lorenzo Emer, Andrea Vandin

  The Italian legislative process is documented in detailed parliamentary records hosted in institutional websites. However, much of this information is available only as unstructured text, limiting its systematic reuse. We applied a controlled, systematic LLM-based extraction procedure, validated against manually annotated records, to convert these texts into ordered and dated events including, e.g., bill introduction, committee examination, plenary examination, and approval. The resulting dataset reconstructs the procedural histories of all 5346 Italian laws enacted between 1985 and 2026, spanning parliamentary terms IX to XIX, for overall 101413 events. Each event records the activity, date, and chamber, with additional procedural details where available. The dataset supports research in the emerging fields of computational legal and legislative studies, potentially combined with process-oriented data science methods to examine procedural paths and legislative timing across parliamentary terms.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  LagNet: Lag-Structured Operators for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

  Zhenan Yu, Guangxin Jiang, Jiuyun Jiang, Jin Yang

  Long-term time series forecasting maps a finite history window to an extended future horizon. Many existing models focus primarily on the design of input representations and model structures, while paying less attention to the structural form of the history-to-future forecasting operator itself. We examine this operator directly and find that, across model families, sensitivity matrices exhibit recurring diagonal patterns whose diagonals correspond to relative temporal lags. Motivated by this observation, we develop a framework for direct multi-step forecasting based on lag-structured temporal operators. Its basic building block, LagLayer, constructs a Toeplitz matrix by tying history-to-future connections with the same relative lag and incorporates horizon-wise and history-wise scaling coefficients to relax exact sharing. This design enables LagLayer to serve as an effective replacement for temporal linear layers in existing forecasting models. Stacking LagLayer modules with activations and multiple feature maps yields LagNet. Experiments on long-term time series forecasting benchmarks show that our method is competitive with strong baselines, while sensitivity matrix…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 16

  Bridging the Language Gap in Scholarly Data II: Enhancing Gender Inference for Chinese Names

  Lisette Espín-Noboa, Mingrong She, Ana Maria Jaramillo, Liuhuaying Yang

  Perceived gender inference from names is important for inclusive scientometrics research, yet existing methods perform poorly on non-Western scholars. We address this gap for Chinese names, which appear in two forms, Hanzi and Pinyin, its Romanized form (e.g., Zhang Wei, Li Na). In international bibliographic records, names are often available only in Pinyin. However, a single pinyin name can correspond to multiple distinct hanzi characters with different gender associations, so gender inference from Pinyin alone is intrinsically ambiguous. To address this, we first develop two hanzi models, a regression model that produces a continuous gender score from 0 (male) to 1 (female), and a classification model that outputs one of three labels (\em{male}, \em{neutral}, \em{female}). We train them on a sample of hanzi names from Chinese-language physics publications, rated by 11 native Chinese speakers. On this sample, the models achieve an RMSE of $0.09$ and an R$^2$ of $0.85$ (regression), and macro-AUC of $0.97$ and a Cohen's $κ$ of $0.81$ (classification), demonstrating high performance that is robust to class imbalance. For pinyin names, we propose a pipeline that aggregates hanzi…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  Synthetic Image Oversampling for Rare-Class Representation Learning in Deep Facial Phenotyping

  Miles Liao, Zhanliang Wang, Hongzhuo Chen, Kai Wang

  Recent deep facial phenotyping methods can support the recognition of genetic syndromes, but patient images are often scarce and unevenly distributed across disorders. Synthetic facial images offer a way to supplement the training data without collecting additional patient photographs. Their usefulness, however, depends on whether they improve recognition of real patients: generated images may introduce artifacts or repeat features already represented in the training set. It is therefore necessary to examine both how much synthetic augmentation to use and which disorders benefit. We investigate disease-specific synthetic oversampling using images from the Phenotypic Disease Image Database to augment a subset of the GestaltMatcher Database. We compare increasing augmentation levels in an image-based model, GestaltMatcher-Arc, and a multimodal model, GestaltMML, while keeping the real training and patient-disjoint evaluation partitions fixed. Repeated training runs assess overall and disease-specific accuracy, and an exploratory embedding analysis examines changes in class compactness and separation. Augmentation improves mean recognition accuracy in both training setups, although…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  Escaping Parameter Space: Tight Generalization Bounds via Representation Quality

  Niclas Göring, Shuofeng Zhang, Branton DeMoss, Ard A. Louis

  We derive a tight generalization bound for deterministic neural We derive a tight generalization bound for deterministic neural networks based on their last hidden layer representations. By evaluating representation quality with a parameter-free $k$-nearest-neighbor ($k$-NN) classifier, our certificate avoids traditional parameter-space complexity measures, KL divergences to a posterior, weight norms, and compression. The bound is tight: trained from scratch, it reaches an 8.0 percentage point gap to test error on CIFAR-10 (ResNet-18) and yields the first non-vacuous certificates we are aware of on CIFAR-100; with frozen DINOv2 representations, it certifies at 1.4\% on CIFAR-10 and 23.1\% on 1,000-class ImageNet. It decomposes additively into three empirical, independently measurable quantities: local class geometry ($k$-NN decoder error), decoder-network agreement, and training stability. This allows the bound to act as a diagnostic tool: we demonstrate that actively destroying local class geometry eliminates generalization while leaving dataset memorization intact, identifying class geometry as a causally relevant mechanism for generalization. Finally, we show that learned…

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• arXiv eess.SPOct 16

  ECG-SDI: Single-lead Electrocardiogram Enables Continuous Sleep Depth Index Profiling and Scalable Digital Biomarkers for Sleep Health

  Donglin Xie, Qingshuo Zhao, Songchi Zhou, Haoyu Wang, Jingyu Wang +3

  Conventional sleep staging provides a coarse-grained representation that obscures within-stage depth variation. We developed ECG-SDI, a single-lead electrocardiography (ECG) framework for continuous sleep-depth profiling and digital biomarker extraction. Using 12,392 overnight polysomnographic recordings, we trained and validated a two-stage deep learning model supervised by conventional sleep-stage labels. Correlations with ordered stages excluding rapid eye movement (REM) sleep were 0.828 in the pooled internal test set and 0.848 in the external Cleveland Family Study; corresponding REM classification AUROCs were 0.954 and 0.977. Overnight trajectories captured within-stage variation. Biomarker-based phenotyping identified a disturbed subtype associated with poorer subjective sleep quality and higher all-cause mortality in the Sleep Heart Health Study (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.20; 95% CI, 1.05-1.38). Among 507 participants with paired recordings before and after continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), normalized sleep-depth area increased by 6.1% and shallow-sleep burden below 0.3 decreased by 16.0%. Exploratory analyses linked reductions in approximate entropy and depth…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 16

  Red-Teaming Multi-Agent Attacks for Loss-of-Control Risks

  John Kitaoka, Thao Amelia Pham, Carlos Rafael Giudice, Jacob Merizian

  AI agents are growing more capable and persistent, and are being deployed in ever larger numbers. As more start collaborating, AI control measures must remain effective when they covertly collude on a harmful objective. We introduce MiniLab, a synthetic series of live services and codebases (5 interconnected services, 249 benign tasks, 8 attack objectives), adapted from internal AI deployment infrastructure. We demonstrate distributed attacks, in which different agents carry out separate attack fragments, and how their covertness evades frontier monitors when reading their trajectories individually. We show how distributed attacks spread across diverse contexts and harmful objectives through 16 human-optimized attacks (weight exfiltration, unmonitored rogue deployment, permission elevation, and more). A frontier monitor, GPT-5.6 Sol, reading each agent separately flags only 7% of successful distributed attacks, compared with 87% when a single agent carries out the same side task. Individual attacks can also be composed into longer attack sequences toward a greater loss-of-control outcome, without any individual agent being flagged. Finally, we tested whether models can plan these…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  Beyond Large Language Models: A Mental World Model Framework for Mental Modeling, Simulation, Evolution, and Interpretability

  Qingshi Wang

  Understanding and simulating how subjective cognition and mental states emerge, evolve, and shape behavior is essential for advancing artificial intelligence toward deeper social cognition and general intelligence. Existing large language models (LLMs) and Theory of Mind (ToM) methods primarily infer mental states from linguistic information, lacking unified mechanisms for subjective world construction, cognitive-psychological interactions, dynamic evolution, and historical dependencies. This paper introduces the Mental World Model (MWM) and its implementation, the Multi-Branch Mental Evolution Architecture (MMEA), which explicitly constructs subjective worlds, models interactions between cognition and mental states, and simulates continuous mental evolution shaped by historical experiences. On DynToM and RecToM, MMEA achieves 96.48% and 94.00% accuracy, respectively, outperforming leading LLMs and specialized ToM methods. Additional experiments demonstrate improvements of 28.7, 39.3, and 16.6 percentage points in mental state and behavior prediction, long-sequence prediction, and implicit mental state inference, respectively. The results demonstrate that MMEA provides an…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 16

  Recognizing Study Lineage Is Not Enough: Over-Crediting Same-Trial Evidence in LLM-Based Medical Verification

  Mukand Krishna, Anoushka Harit, Chenghao Xiao, Zhongtian Sun

  Publication count is not study count. A model can identify shared trial lineage correctly in a direct task yet over-credit a second publication from the same trial when aggregating evidence. We evaluate this behavior in medical LLM verification using 14 source-audited clinical families and five model conditions. The families span provenance, clinical applicability, result direction, and composition; the provenance families provide the direct lineage tests. Recognition and aggregation are separate stateless calls, and repeated calls assess within-input stability. Across all three original provenance families, GPT-5.5 identifies the independent update in 10/10 recognition calls per family but over-credits the same-trial report in 5/5 separate aggregation calls per family. Selected Qwen3-4B and Ministral-3-8B conditions show the same cross-task contrast. A study-grouping instruction reduces GPT-5.5 over-credit from 4/5 to 0/5 in each later pure-provenance family. Other model conditions show mixed behavior, and rejected outputs limit several comparisons. The results identify a behavioral gap between elicited lineage recognition and evidence aggregation. The code and data artifacts…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  Neural Expansion: A Unified Mechanism for How Deep Neural Networks Generalize

  Chashi Mahiul Islam, Samuel Jacob Chacko, Mao Nishino, Canlin Zhang, Xiuwen Liu

  Deep neural networks demonstrate remarkable generalization despite being highly over-parameterized, challenging traditional statistical learning theories. While several theoretical paradigms such as margin-based bounds, PAC-Bayesian analyses, and neural tangent kernels provide global explanations, they often lack mechanistic insight into how generalization emerges from training dynamics. We introduce Neural Expansion, a unified geometric framework that characterizes generalization through the expansion of directionally-selective ray coverage in the input space. Using Generalization Intervals (GIs), we quantify direction-specific regions around training samples where the model's predictions remain stable. Our extensive empirical studies across diverse architectures and datasets reveal that training leads to progressive expansion of ray coverage, particularly along directions with low Jacobian singular values. This mechanism helps explain a large fraction of correctly classified test inputs, adversarial examples, and even mislabeled or out-of-distribution samples through the geometry of ray coverage rather than instance-level memorization. By connecting input-space curvature to…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 16

  The Cognitive Cost of LLM Writing: A Reading-Time Comparison with Human Text

  Kamer Cekini, Elisabetta Biondi, Chiara Boldrini, Andrea Passarella, Marco Conti

  Although linguistic differences between human-written and Large Language Model (LLM)-generated texts have been extensively studied, their implications for the cognitive effort involved in reading remain less explored. In psycholinguistics, reading time is commonly used as an indirect measure of cognitive processing effort. Building on this perspective, we investigate whether human-written texts and their LLM-generated rewrites exhibit differences in predicted reading time that may reflect differences in processing demands for readers. To this end, we introduce RoBERTa-RT, a model trained on human eye-tracking data to predict word-level reading times. We evaluate the model on both internal and external test sets, construct a paired dataset of 496 human-written articles and their LLM-generated rewrites, and apply RoBERTa-RT to compare their predicted reading times. Our findings show that LLM-generated rewrites tend to be shorter and have slightly lower predicted total reading times, while exhibiting higher predicted reading times per word. These differences are associated with systematic linguistic changes, including longer and less frequent words, greater lexical diversity, and…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 16

  GLOBE: Evolving Structured Agentic Memory for E-commerce Product Optimization in Generative Search

  Hyunseo Kim, Suil Choe, Sukkyoung So, Daeyeon Yi

  Optimizing product listings for generative search requires language agents not only to rewrite effectively but also to continually self-improve by retaining successful strategies across diverse categories. However, existing approaches often treat structured listings as free-form text, leaving effective strategies implicit in prompts, search trajectories, or rewritten outputs rather than accumulating them as a reusable agentic memory. To address this limitation, we introduce GLOBE, an agentic framework that drives continual self-improvement by storing optimization knowledge in an evolving handbook of explicit, field-scoped behaviors. In each episode, an Editor applies relevant behaviors and receives rank-based feedback, which a Reflector converts into behavior updates. Crucially for dependable execution in real-world settings, a Moderator removes redundant proposals, a Curator commits accepted changes, and consistently harmful behaviors are deactivated. This cycle transforms episodic feedback into a persistent, field-scoped optimization memory. Experiments show that structured behaviors outperform monolithic prompt optimization, while feedback-driven evolution and moderation…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  Tool Recommendation for Multi-Step Agents: Finding Every Tool a Task Needs

  Sam Partee, River Stevens, Thierry Damiba, Valerie Fanelle

  A multi-step agent task fails when a single tool it needs is missing, yet the tools an agent may need are too many to list: the roughly 8,200 tools on the platform we study have definitions that together exceed the context window of any model we evaluate. We present Tool Recommendation, a deployed system that gives an agent all of them, hundreds of times more than a typical MCP server exposes, through a fixed interface of three tools. It runs at the gateway between agent and tools, executing every call under the end user's own credentials and checking it against the user's consent for each service and the tools the agent may use. We evaluate it on both a public retrieval benchmark and billed end-to-end session cost. On ToolRet, Tool Recommendation places every tool a query needs in the top ten 57% more often than BM25, a lexical ranking that commercial tool search offers, and compares favorably with published systems up to nine times its size. In paired multi-step workflows, its first recommendation covered every required tool in 93% of Codex sessions, and against a fixed list of 100 tools it cut input tokens by 17% with Codex and 40% with Claude Code and the total bill in all 14…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  FedRAPP: Federated Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models with Reliability-Aware Prompt Personalization

  Syed Md. Ahnaf Hasan, Md Akil Raihan Iftee, Sajib Mistry, Amin Ahsan Ali, AKM Mahbubur Rahman

  Federated prompt learning enables vision-language models like CLIP to collaboratively adapt lightweight soft prompts across distributed clients without sharing raw data. However, existing federated prompt learning methods are designed primarily for supervised settings with labeled client data and assumed relatively stable training distributions. At test time, source-free federated prompt tuning remains largely unexplored. Clients may receive unlabeled target samples with heterogeneous, often non-IID distributions that differ substantially across clients and from the source training distribution, causing locally adapted prompts to drift in different directions and reducing the effectiveness of federated aggregation. In this work, we explore Source-Free Federated Test-Time Prompt Tuning (SF-FTTPT), where distributed clients collaboratively adapt soft prompts on unlabeled test streams without access to source data. Our study reveals that conventional federated aggregation methods struggle under heterogeneous client distributions, as locally adapted prompts become increasingly specialized and difficult to combine effectively. To address this challenge, we propose FedRAPP, a…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  Blitz: Accelerating the Diffusion Modules of AlphaFold3 and Boltz-2

  Vinay Saji Mathew, Soundar Kumara, Gretta Kellogg, William K. M. Lai

  Diffusion-based protein structure prediction models produce all-atom structures in about 200 denoising steps, and that cost has driven a number of few-step samplers. We present Blitz, a few-step distillation framework that uses a geometric noise schedule to distribute steps more evenly across noise scales, then learns those updates through multistep consistency training. Physical steering and target-free candidate selection help reduce the remaining geometric defects at inference. We apply Blitz to AlphaFold 3 and Boltz-2, reducing denoising from 200 steps to eight. Because published few-step results use different benchmarks and scoring procedures, we compare both distilled models with their teachers and other few-step methods under a common evaluation protocol covering structural accuracy, interface quality, ligand placement, and stereochemical validity. Blitz retains teacher-level structural accuracy, with AF3-Blitz outperforming all evaluated few-step baselines and exceeding its teacher on several accuracy metrics.

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 16

  VISTA: Steering LLMs with Latent User Values Inferred from a Few Survey Answers

  Yinuo Xu, Jadie Adams, Brian Hu, Shivani Kumar, David Jurgens +1

  Personalizing a language model requires knowing what a person values, which stays largely consistent across tasks. Yet most methods either learn task-specific preferences or place the user's profile in the prompt, where models struggle to act on it. We introduce VISTA (Value-Informed Steering and Targeted Acquisition), which infers a latent profile from users' (full or partial) survey answers, and maps the profile through a hypernetwork to a user-specific steering intervention in a frozen LLM to select answer choices or generate free-text responses. Given the same evidence, VISTA matches or beats in-context profiles on synthetic preferences (Food2D), the World Values Survey (WVS), and PrimeX, without adding prompt tokens. To reduce the cognitive burden of completing full surveys, VISTA also chooses which questions to ask and when to stop: on WVS it stops after 6% of the questionnaire while retaining 94% of the full-history gain, where standard adaptive testing retains at most 42%. The dominant steering direction is an interpretable value axis on which VISTA places unseen users accurately. Our results point toward pluralistic alignment that adapts to individuals at deployable cost.

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  LogicVal:A Logic-Formalized Benchmark for Constraint Satisfaction in Text-to-Image Generation

  Savitha Sam Abraham, Marjan Alirezaie, Hossein Rahnama

  Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models have made significant progress in producing high-fidelity images from natural-language prompts. Alongside this progress, numerous benchmarks have been developed to evaluate capabilities such as attribute binding, numeracy, spatial reasoning, and commonsense reasoning. In this work, we propose a new perspective on T2I evaluation by casting it as a constraint-satisfaction problem. We introduce a logical framework that formally specifies the benchmark domain, including objects, attributes, and relations, alongside the constraints that generated images must satisfy. We evaluated four state-of-the-art T2I models across 9 classes of constraints ranging from a single-object-attribute to multi-object relationships constraints involving logical operators ($\forall, \exists, count, \rightarrow$). Our results reveal a substantial gap between single-object and complex conditional multi-object relationship constraint classes, with the best-performing model achieving 98% accuracy on the former and just 53% on the latter. We assess compositional generalisation, finding that the best-performing model`s accuracy drops from 84% on single-constraint prompts to…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  Equivalence testing and run-count design for stochastic machine-learning experiments

  Dmytro Knopov, Nadiya Shvai

  Claims that two training methods perform equally well often rest on a non-significant difference between two or three runs per method. We develop a protocol, with its power theory, for certifying practical equivalence in per-run metrics such as the AUROC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve). It rests on a two-level (seed x item) variance model separating between-run dispersion from item-level noise. Equivalence within a pre-specified margin is tested by two one-sided tests (TOST), equivalently by a confidence interval inside the margin; a two-level bootstrap covers composite statistics. A closed-form formula converts a margin and a target power into runs per method; its shifted-t refinement is calibrated against the realised two-level process. Simulations on a 270-cell grid and under non-Gaussian seed laws confirm the formula within its design-relevant range, from five runs per method. For four published runs of a joint energy-based model, the failure to certify equivalence was largely decided by design: with the variance calibrated to those runs, two per method certify with probability near three per cent, whereas certifying 0.01 AUROC at 80 per cent power…

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• arXiv quant-phOct 16

  Expressivity of IQP Feature-Map Quantum Kernels via Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces

  Valeria Repetto, Stefano Melchionna, Romina D'Aurizio

  Quantum kernels are among the most promising methods in quantum machine learning, providing a natural way to embed data into high-dimensional Hilbert spaces via quantum circuits and capturing non-linear relationships in data. Their learning behaviour is governed by the function class they represent, which is formally characterized by the structure of the associated Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). However, a theoretical characterization of this function class, and of how it depends on the choice of feature map and its hyperparameters, is still lacking. In this work, we focus on the Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial (IQP) feature map and derive a Fourier representation of the associated RKHS generators as finite sums of trigonometric functions evaluated on polynomially transformed input variables, with a finite set of accessible frequencies determined by the circuit construction and scaled by the bandwidth hyperparameter. This representation identifies three bandwidth regimes with qualitatively distinct expressive properties from localised, through multimodal, to periodic. Numerical experiments on synthetic datasets with controlled periodic and multimodal structure, across…

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