Self-improving AI agents are designed to learn from their mistakes. We show they can also hallucinate mistakes that never happened. We study this failure mode in automated harness optimization, where an LLM-based proposer edits an agent's scaffold, including prompts, parsers, filters, validators and guardrails, to eliminate observed failures. But this process rarely asks first: was there a real failure to fix? We introduce the Counterfactual Fabrication Lab, a deterministic micro-lab where the correct action is known: do nothing. The lab plants a candidate guardrail for a failure class that provably never occurs, presents only legal episodes, and uses a byte-exact oracle to check every cited violation. The proposer behaves as expected on real violations and abstains on featureless legal input. Yet when the legal input contains a harmless pattern resembling a familiar game rule, it invents a failure: in 15/60 runs, versus 0/60 on featureless input, it enables the nonexistent-rule guardrail and cites a violation the oracle refutes. The effect is structured, not indiscriminate. In single-shot proposals it appears only when three conditions coincide: a rule-shaped pattern, an open-ende
Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data. We propose an augmentation pipeline that generates scenario-level dialogues with participant metadata, maps speaker attributes to TTS voice profiles, and assembles synthesized utterances into speaker-aware simulated conversations. We evaluated five LLM families under single-generator, fixed-budget mixture, and scale-up settings using the same FastConformer-Large training recipe for each one. We ran comprehensive evaluations on the Hungarian BEA-Dialogue benchmark corpus, with the method itself being applicable to any language given the resources for each component. The results show that synthetic conversations consistently improve speech recognition performance, but generator choice and data composition strongly affect the gains. Our largest training configuration, using only 67 hours of real conversations and 636 hours of simulated data, achieves better performance on the evaluation benchmark than a zero-shot model trained on 2700 hours of Hungarian speech. These findings indicate that LLM-generated conversational data synthesized with TTS is
The scenario that some first-order phase transitions may have taken place in the early Universe offers us one of the most intriguing and fascinating questions in cosmology. Indeed, the role played by the latent "heat" or energy released in the phase transition is highly nontrivial and may lead to some surprising, important results. In this paper, we take the wisdom that the cosmological QCD phase transition, which happened at a time between 10^(-5) sec and 10^(-4) sec or at the temperature of about 150 MeV and accounts for confinement of quarks and gluons to within hadrons, would be of first order. To get the essence out of the scenario, it is sufficient to approximate the true QCD vacuum as one of degenerate theta-vacua and when necessary we try to model it effectively via a complex scalar field with spontaneous symmetry breaking. We examine how and when "pasted" or "patched" domain walls are formed, how long such walls evolve in the long run, and we believe that the significant portion of dark matter could be accounted for in terms of such domain-wall structure and its remnants. Of course, the cosmological QCD phase transition happened in the way such that the false vacua associa
Message sequence charts (MSCs) naturally arise as executions of communicating finite-state machines (CFMs), in which finite-state processes exchange messages through unbounded FIFO channels. We study the first-order logic of MSCs, featuring Lamport's happened-before relation. We introduce a star-free version of propositional dynamic logic (PDL) with loop and converse. Our main results state that (i) every first-order sentence can be transformed into an equivalent star-free PDL sentence (and conversely), and (ii) every star-free PDL sentence can be translated into an equivalent CFM. This answers an open question and settles the exact relation between CFMs and fragments of monadic second-order logic. As a byproduct, we show that first-order logic over MSCs has the three-variable property.
This article summarizes the possible roles of neutrinos in cosmology, from the first three minutes onward. The fact that primordial neutrinos are about as numerous as the photons of the cosmological background radiation means that neutrino (or ``hot'') dark matter can have a significant impact upon how matter is distributed in the universe. Over the past two decades, the liklihood of this has risen and fallen as more and more data has become available from laboratory experiments and the latest telescopes. Hot dark matter models were studied in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and there was considerable interest in cold plus hot dark matter models for a few years in the mid-1990s. We now know from Super-Kamiokande and Sudbury Neutrino Observatory data that neutrinos have mass, and that the total neutrino contribution to the cosmological density must be at least as large as $Ω_ν\sim 0.001$, a little less than that of the visible stars in the universe. But the upper limit on the hot dark matter cosmological density is $Ω_ν< 0.1$; correspondingly, the sum of the masses of all three active neutrino species is not more than about 5 eV.
When a planet falls onto the surface of its host star, the added high-metallicity material does not remain in the surface layers, as often assumed, but is diluted into the interior through fingering (thermohaline) convection. Until now, however, the timescale over which this process happens remained very poorly constrained. Using recently-measured turbulent mixing rates for fingering convection, I provide reliable numerical and semi-analytical estimates for the rate at which the added heavy elements drain into the interior. I find that the relative metallicity enhancement post-infall drops by a factor of ten over a timescale which depends only on the structure of the host star, and decreases very rapidly with increasing stellar mass (from about 1Gyr for a 1.3M_sun star to 10Myr for a 1.5M_sun star). This result offers an elegant explanation to the lack of observed trend between metallicity and convection zone mass in planet-bearing stars. More crucially, it strongly suggests that the statistically-higher metallicity of planet-bearing stars must be of primordial origin. Finally, the fingering region is found to extend deeply into the star, a result which would provide a simple theor
This paper is a request for help to clarify a rather confusing state of the Theory.
We have used the VLBA to produce a high dynamic range image of the nucleus of NGC 6251 at 1.6 GHz and snapshot images at 5.0, 8.4, and 15.3 GHz to search for emission from a parsec-scale counterjet. Previous VLBI images at 1.6 GHz have set a lower limit for the jet/counterjet brightness ratio near the core at about 80:1, which is larger than expected given the evidence that the radio axis is fairly close to the plane of the sky. A possible explanation is that the inner few pc of the counterjet is hidden by free-free absorption by ionized gas associated with an accretion disk or torus. This would be consistent with the nearly edge-on appearance of the arcsecond-scale dust disk seen in the center of NGC 6251 by HST. We detect counterjet emission close to the core at 1.6 GHz, but not at the higher frequencies. Given that the optical depth of free-free absorption falls off more rapidly with increasing frequency than the optically thin synchrotron emission from a typical radio jet, this result implies that the absence of a detectable parsec-scale counterjet at high frequencies is not due to free-free absorption unless the density of ionized gas is extremely high and we have misidentifie
Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Chaos theory are three of the most significant scientific advances of the 20th Century - each fundamentally changing our understanding of the physical universe. The authors ask why the UK National Curriculum in science almost entirely ignores them. Children and young people regularly come into contact with the language, concepts and implications of these theories through the media and through new technologies, and they are the basis of many contemporary scientific and technological developments. There is surely, therefore, an urgent need to include the concepts of '20th Century physics' within the curriculum.
Existing training-free approaches for GUI grounding often rely on multiple inference runs, such as iterative cropping or candidate aggregation, to identify target elements. Despite this additional computation, each forward pass still independently interprets the instruction and parses the visual layout, without enabling progressive interaction among visual tokens. In this paper, we study what happens during GUI grounding in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and identify a previously overlooked bottleneck. We show that grounding follows a two-stage paradigm: the prefill stage determines candidate UI elements, while the decoding stage subsequently refines the final coordinates. This asymmetry establishes prefill as the critical step, as errors in candidate selection cannot be effectively corrected during decoding. Based on this observation, we propose Re-Prefill, a training-free method that revisits inference by introducing an attention-guided second prefill stage to refine target selection. Specifically, visual tokens that consistently receive high attention from the query position, i.e., the final token, across layers are extracted as a preliminary target hypothesis and appended to the
Traffic safety science has long been hindered by a fundamental data paradox: the crashes we most wish to prevent are precisely those events we rarely observe. Existing crash-frequency models and surrogate safety metrics rely heavily on sparse, noisy, and under-reported records, while even sophisticated, high-fidelity simulations undersample the long-tailed situations that trigger catastrophic outcomes such as fatalities. We argue that the path to achieving Vision Zero, i.e., the complete elimination of traffic fatalities and severe injuries, requires a paradigm shift from traditional crash-only learning to a new form of counterfactual safety learning: reasoning not only about what happened, but also about the vast set of plausible yet perilous scenarios that could have happened under slightly different circumstances. To operationalize this shift, our proposed agenda bridges macro to micro. Guided by crash-rate priors, generative scene engines, diverse driver models, and causal learning, near-miss events are synthesized and explained. A crash-focused digital twin testbed links micro scenes to macro patterns, while a multi-objective validator ensures that simulations maintain statist
The claim that at the so-called Planck scale our current physics breaks down and a new theory of quantum gravity is required is ubiquitous, but the evidence is shakier than the confidence of those assertions warrants. In this paper, I survey five arguments in favour of this claim - based on dimensional analysis, quantum black holes, generalised uncertainty principles, the nonrenormalisability of quantum gravity, and theories beyond the standard model - but find that none of them succeeds. The argument from nonrenormalisability is the most convincing, yet it requires the unwarranted assumption that the same constant of action occurs in every quantum field theory. Therefore, our theories don't (yet) predict that quantum gravity happens at the Planck scale.
Autonomous Vehicle decisions rely on multimodal prediction models that account for multiple route options and the inherent uncertainty in human behavior. However, models can suffer from mode collapse, where only the most likely mode is predicted, posing significant safety risks. While existing methods employ various strategies to generate diverse predictions, they often overlook the diversity in interaction modes among agents. Additionally, traditional metrics for evaluating prediction models are dataset-dependent and do not evaluate inter-agent interactions quantitatively. To our knowledge, none of the existing metrics explicitly evaluates mode collapse. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework that assesses mode collapse in joint trajectory predictions, focusing on safety-critical interactions. We introduce metrics for mode collapse, mode correctness, and coverage, emphasizing the sequential dimension of predictions. By testing four multi-agent trajectory prediction models, we demonstrate that mode collapse indeed happens. When looking at the sequential dimension, although prediction accuracy improves closer to interaction events, there are still cases where the mod
Recent unified models for joint understanding and generation have significantly advanced visual generation capabilities. However, their focus on conventional tasks like text-to-video generation has left the temporal reasoning potential of unified models largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Next Scene Prediction (NSP), a new task that pushes unified video models toward temporal and causal reasoning. Unlike text-to-video generation, NSP requires predicting plausible futures from preceding context, demanding deeper understanding and reasoning. To tackle this task, we propose a unified framework combining Qwen-VL for comprehension and LTX for synthesis, bridged by a latent query embedding and a connector module. This model is trained in three stages on our newly curated, large-scale NSP dataset: text-to-video pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning (via GRPO) with our proposed causal consistency reward. Experiments demonstrate our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark, advancing the capability of generalist multimodal systems to anticipate what happens next.
We initiate a unified theoretical and algorithmic study of a key problem in weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization: when fine-tuning a strong pre-trained student with pseudolabels from a weaker teacher on a downstream task with spurious correlations, does W2S happen, and how to improve it upon failures? We consider two sources of spurious correlations caused by group imbalance: (i) a weak teacher fine-tuned on group-imbalanced labeled data with a minority group of fraction $η_\ell$, and (ii) a group-imbalanced unlabeled set pseudolabeled by the teacher with a minority group of fraction $η_u$. Theoretically, a precise characterization of W2S gain at the proportional asymptotic limit shows that W2S always happens with sufficient pseudolabels when $η_u = η_\ell$ but may fail when $η_u e η_\ell$, where W2S gain diminishes as $(η_u - η_\ell)^2$ increases. Our theory is corroborated by extensive experiments on various spurious correlation benchmarks and teacher-student pairs. To boost W2S performance upon failures, we further propose a simple, effective algorithmic remedy that retrains the strong student on its high-confidence data subset after W2S fine-tuning. Our algorithm is group-label
Effective demand forecasting is critical for inventory management, production planning, and decision making across industries. Selecting the appropriate model and suitable features to efficiently capture patterns in the data is one of the main challenges in demand forecasting. In reality, this becomes even more complicated when the recorded sales have zeroes, which can happen naturally or due to some anomalies, such as stockouts and recording errors. Mistreating the zeroes can lead to the application of inappropriate forecasting methods, and thus leading to poor decision making. Furthermore, the demand itself can have different fundamental characteristics, and being able to distinguish one type from another might bring substantial benefits in terms of accuracy and thus decision making. We propose a two-stage model-based classification framework that in the first step, identifies artificially occurring zeroes, and in the second, classifies demand to one of the possible types: regular/intermittent, intermittent smooth/lumpy, fractional/count. The framework relies on statistical modelling and information criteria. We argue that different types of demand need different features, and sh
Prediction markets are starting to look less like crowd polls and more like electronic markets. The central question is therefore no longer only whether these markets forecast well, but what happens when institutional liquidity enters: do spreads tighten, does price discovery improve, and do those gains actually reach the traders who are slowest to react when information arrives? This paper offers a research design for answering that question. It defines a broad market-quality lens, separates the main channels through which institutional liquidity enters, and maps the identification problems that arise in live venue data. It also uses a synthetic microstructure laboratory as a proof of concept for the measurement pipeline. The main lesson of the synthetic exercise is deliberately narrow. Market-maker coverage, liquidity incentives, and automation do not have to work through the same channel; average liquidity gains do not have to translate into equal gains for all traders; and the sharpest welfare losses are most likely to appear in shock states, when slower takers receive the least pass-through of tighter quoted markets. The synthetic results are useful because they stress-test th
The internet serves as a common source of training data for generative AI (genAI) models but is increasingly populated with AI-generated content. This duality raises the possibility that future genAI models may be trained on other models' generated outputs. Prior work has studied consequences of models training on their own generated outputs, but limited work has considered what happens if models ingest content produced by other models. Given society's increasing dependence on genAI tools, understanding such data-mediated model interactions is critical. This work provides empirical evidence for how data-mediated interactions might unfold in practice, develops a theoretical model for this interactive training process, and experimentally validates the theory. We find that data-mediated interactions can benefit models by exposing them to novel concepts perhaps missed in original training data, but also can homogenize their performance on shared tasks.
We study how the rigidity transition in a triangular lattice changes as a function of anisotropy by preferentially filling bonds on the lattice in one direction. We discover that the onset of rigidity in anisotropic spring networks arises in at least two steps, reminiscent of the two-step melting transition in two dimensional crystals. In particular, our simulations demonstrate that the percolation of stress-supporting bonds happens at different critical volume fractions along different directions. By examining each independent component of the elasticity tensor, we determine universal exponents and develop universal scaling functions to analyze isotropic rigidity percolation as a multicritical point. We expect that these results will be important for elucidating the underlying mechanical phase transitions governing the properties of biological materials ranging from the cytoskeletons of cells to the extracellular networks of tissues such as tendon where the networks are often preferentially aligned.
We investigate the behavior of methods that use linear projections to remove information about a concept from a language representation, and we consider the question of what happens to a dataset transformed by such a method. A theoretical analysis and experiments on real-world and synthetic data show that these methods inject strong statistical dependencies into the transformed datasets. After applying such a method, the representation space is highly structured: in the transformed space, an instance tends to be located near instances of the opposite label. As a consequence, the original labeling can in some cases be reconstructed by applying an anti-clustering method.