#01Jul 23, 2026
math.OC
Climate-resilient electric vehicle charging infrastructure for sustainable cities: An interpretable causal-ensemble framework for preventive maintenance and low-carbon mobility
Cande Lian, Wentao Zeng, Jiabin Wu and 2 more
Reliable electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure is a cornerstone of sustainable, low-carbon cities, yet urban climate stress such as extreme heat, heavy precipitation, and humidity increasingly raises equipment fault risk and undermines the resilience of urban energy and mobility services. Shifting operation from reactive repair to preventive maintenance depends on accurate, forward-looking fault-risk prediction, a task complicated by the heterogeneous time scales of physical, behavioral, contextual, and historical signals and by forecasting over a multi-week horizon. We develop FGDSE, a feature-governed dynamic stacking ensemble that forms an interpretable decision-support system for climate-resilient charging-asset management. It partitions heterogeneous signals into four feature families, assigns each to a domain expert whose inductive bias matches the data, and adds two deep temporal experts for short-term pulses and long-term degradation; a horizon-wise gating mechanism then learns adaptive weights to forecast daily fault risk over 1 to 30 days. SHAP attribution and an X-learner extend the probabilistic output into causal decision support with post-level treatment effects. On 25 months of data from 13 stations, FGDSE surpasses twelve baselines beyond the ten-day horizon, sustains about 85% macro-recall at 30 days with an AUC decay of only 3.2 points, and reveals a shift of dominance from fault history toward climate stress. It identifies extreme heat as the sole exposure whose causal effect amplifies over time, flagging roughly 30% of posts as heat-sensitive and yielding quantitative thresholds for climate-adaptive maintenance that strengthens urban mobility resilience and sustains low-carbon travel.
#02Jul 23, 2026
cs.LG
Finite-Sample Coverage Audits for High-Recall Candidate Generation: Certification and Learning-Theoretic Design
Martin Anthony, Kaveh Salehzadeh Nobari
An initial high-recall stage in an empirical pipeline decides which items pass to later review, labelling, or modelling, and relevant items it misses are lost to every subsequent stage. We study how many audit labels are needed to certify, with finite-sample validity, that this missed relevant mass is small, and our main results characterise the label complexity of this problem. We first show that no procedure using only labels from inside the candidate set can certify any non-trivial bound on the missed mass: the audit must sample the excluded pool, the only region where unrecovered relevant items can lie. We then prove a matching finite-corpus lower bound. Any valid audit that certifies fewer than $m$ missed relevant items with high probability when none are present, even if adaptive and permitted to label the entire included pool, must inspect on the order of $N_0/m$ excluded-pool labels. Excluded-pool auditing is therefore minimax rate-optimal, not merely convenient, for missed-mass certification in the zero-miss regime. Building on this characterisation, we develop an exact finite-sample toolkit, using binomial and hypergeometric inversion rather than asymptotic approximation, that certifies missed mass, converts it to recall through a two-pool design, certifies pre-specified families of nested candidate generators simultaneously, and produces stress-test certificates against declared perturbation mechanisms. These certificates can be paired with observable review burden to select the least burdensome pre-specified candidate generator meeting a missed-mass target. Every guarantee holds under one discipline: the candidate generator, or the pre-specified family from which it is selected, and the audit rule are fixed before the certification labels are examined.
#03Jul 23, 2026
cs.LG
Zero-Flow Two-Sample Tests
Yakun Wang, Leyang Wang, Song Liu and 1 more
We propose a new approach to two-sample testing for deciding whether two sets of samples are drawn from the same distribution. The test is built on a statistical discrepancy based on the zero-flow criterion, termed zero-flow discrepancy (ZFD). We prove the validity of ZFD and propose a practical testing procedure, termed the zero-flow two-sample test (ZF2ST). The key idea is to learn how samples from the two distributions are locally misaligned and use the resulting directional pattern as evidence of distributional difference. By separating witness learning from hypothesis evaluation, ZF2ST can use flexible neural networks while maintaining valid statistical calibration. We develop both regression-based and power-maximized approaches for learning the witness. Experiments on synthetic and image datasets demonstrate that ZF2ST can achieve strong testing power for structured distributional changes while maintaining well-calibrated type-I error.
#04Jul 23, 2026
cs.LG
Mean-to-Score Discrete Diffusion: Posterior-Mean Denoisers for Score Entropy
Jingyuan Li, Xiaoyi Jiang, Yixuan Jiang and 4 more
Score Entropy Discrete Diffusion (SEDD) parameterizes discrete reverse processes with unconstrained positive score ratios. While positivity guarantees nonnegative reverse jump rates, it does not ensure Bayes realizability: ratios at a noisy state need not be jointly induced by any clean-token posterior under the forward kernel. The score-entropy loss has the correct population optimum but does not enforce this constraint away from it. In a trained pure-uniform SEDD checkpoint, roughly one quarter of complete score vectors violate the coordinate box, while more than half lie inside it yet remain materially incompatible with any valid posterior. Such violations can produce negative pre-normalization weights in finite-step sampling. Projecting raw scores onto the bridge polytope removes all observed negative weights and improves external generative PPL from $203.6$ to $175.1$ without changing the sampler. We introduce \emph{mean-to-score} (M2S), which predicts a clean-token posterior mean and converts it to the score through an exact kernel-dependent linear map. The construction applies to any known coordinate-wise continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) satisfying a mild support condition. For uniform corruption, it maps the probability simplex onto the bridge polytope; for absorbing-mask corruption, the resulting objective recovers MD4 exactly. In a controlled 28.4M-parameter CIFAR-10 comparison, M2S lowers test BPD from $3.173$ to $3.129$ and FID-50k from $\CifarSEDDFID$ to $\CifarMtwoSFID$. A 170M-parameter M2S model trained on about 262B OpenWebText token slots outperforms the evaluated pure-uniform SEDD, GIDD, and Neural CTMC checkpoints at every tested sampling budget, reaching generative PPL $143.3$ at 128 steps versus $183.6$ for the strongest pure-uniform baseline.
#05Jul 23, 2026
quant-ph
Cautious optimism for deep parameterized quantum circuits
Marie Kempkes, Elies Gil-Fuster, Carlos Bravo-Prieto and 5 more
A central challenge in quantum machine learning is understanding the scaling behavior of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). In particular, it remains unclear how their performance on unseen data changes as the number of trainable parameters increases. Prior works have derived formal generalization guarantees for quantum models, but it is well-known that many such results do not fully characterize generalization behavior in practice. In this work, we show that gradient-based PQCs can exhibit improved performance on unseen data as model size increases, displaying the phenomenon of double descent. This contrasts with the traditional view that larger models lead to degraded generalization. We provide analytical results rigorously underpinning this behavior by leveraging add-one-in perturbation techniques and spectral properties of random matrices. We support these results with numerical experiments on re-uploading PQCs across several data sets and training set sizes, consistently observing the predicted double descent behavior. While other obstacles on the path toward practical quantum machine learning remain, our finding that deeper parameterized quantum circuits do not necessarily exhibit degraded performance provides reasons for cautious optimism.