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Paul Bogdan

Publications and source records attributed to Paul Bogdan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Learning Multiscale Dynamics of Nanoparticle Self-Assembly

Nanoparticle self-assembly offers a powerful route to programmable functional materials, but its dynamics remain difficult to understand because they arise from multiscale, many-body, and environment-dependent interactions. Liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy (LPTEM) enables real-time observation of these dynamics, yet extracting the underlying physical laws from highly stochastic trajectories remains a significant challenge. Here we develop a physics-informed, time-varying autoregressive framework that learns multiscale self-assembly dynamics directly from LPTEM videos. Continuous Eulerian fields with local density and orientational order are coarse-grained from individual video frames and evolved by a sparse, nearest-neighbor operator optimized over a constrained matrix manifold. This interpretable approach captures long-time large scale phase transitions by tracking operator volatility over time, and short-timescale local evolution and transport rules. Crucially, we extract the underlying partial differential equations, where expected symmetries naturally emerge, enabling the direct inference of fundamental coefficients. Our framework provides a robust, computationally efficient tool for discovering hidden physical mechanisms from observational data, opening a path toward the predictive design of self-assembled nanostructures.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

From Relevant Memories to Sufficient Evidence: Rethinking Memory Utilization in LLM Agents

Long-term memory enables LLM agents to reuse past experiences, yet retrieving relevant memories does not necessarily provide sufficient evidence for answering a query. Essential information may remain fragmented across memory records, obscured by abstraction, or disconnected from the relations required for reasoning. We identify this relevance-sufficiency gap and propose QEMem, a framework that reformulates memory utilization as the construction of query-specific evidence sets, shifting the focus from individual retrieval relevance to collective evidential support. QEMem integrates three complementary mechanisms: query-guided discovery retrieves evidence across multiple memory granularities; source-grounded reification organizes it into structured ViewCards with explicit evidential roles and source references; and sufficiency-guided refinement selectively recovers missing information. Operating on existing memory stores without modifying memory formation, QEMem achieves 91.43% LLM-judge accuracy on LoCoMo with Claude Opus 4.5, outperforming the strongest evaluated baseline, MemR$^3$, by 7.6 percentage points and NEMORI by 10.7 points under a shared memory store. Further analyses demonstrate improved evidence coverage and strong performance on questions requiring cross-session evidence integration.

cs.AI↗

HilbertGen-3D:Hilbert--Multifractal Conditioning for Topology-Aware 3D Generation

High-fidelity 3D generative modeling underpins game asset creation, medical imaging, and VR/AR environmental design, where geometric structure directly influences perception and decision-making. Diffusion models represent a powerful paradigm for point cloud generation. However, existing approaches rely heavily on local voxel or patch features and often miss global structural organization, and much less work has studied how global conditioning can be used to improve generation quality. In this paper, we introduce HilbertGen-3D, a novel topology-aware conditional diffusion framework based on Hilbert-Multifractal Conditioning (HMC). HMC computes multi-scale voxel measures, serializes them via a 3D Hilbert curve to expose structured spatial dependencies, and estimates the generalized fractal dimensions from scale-dependent partition functions. We encode these signals as global embeddings and multi-scale tokens, and inject them into a diffusion denoiser through an efficient bottleneck fusion module. Across the Chair, Airplane, and Car categories of ShapeNet, our two conditioning variants reduce the absolute deviation of 1-Nearest Neighbor Accuracy (1-NNA) from 50% by up to 8.90 percentage points and increase coverage by up to 5.88 percentage points relative to TopoDiT-3D. This shows that combining local density cues with global Hilbert-multifractal structure provides a simple and effective recipe for high-fidelity and diverse 3D generation.

cs.CV↗

Beyond Final Accuracy: Auditing Communication in LLM Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent communication aims to help agents benefit from one another's information. Yet improvements in system performance leave a fundamental ambiguity: do they reflect effective communication, a favorable agent architecture, or simply additional reasoning? Because communication methods are commonly evaluated within the systems they were designed for, these factors are difficult to disentangle. Final accuracy further merges corrected errors and corrupted answers into a single outcome, obscuring how communication changes decisions. We introduce Independent--Communicate--Revise (ICR), a controlled framework that evaluates communication as answer revision following independent reasoning. ICR fixes initial reasoning trajectories, measures correction and preservation conditional on both agents' initial correctness, and uses a no-message revision control to quantify gains beyond additional reasoning. Across four reasoning benchmarks, our audit of textual and latent communication reveals that similar aggregate accuracy can conceal substantially different revision behaviors. Compared with transmitting answers alone, full reasoning increases correction while reducing preservation on all four benchmarks, so richer messages amplify beneficial and harmful influence alike. Receiver-policy comparisons on MedQA and GPQA-D further show that a structured verification policy shifts every channel toward greater preservation and lower correction, while its effect on selectivity varies across channels and tasks. These findings challenge treating communication quality as an intrinsic property of a channel. ICR therefore recenters evaluation on selective revision, providing a unified framework for examining how message content and receiver policies jointly produce benefits and harms.

cs.AI↗

A Generative Model of Complex Networks Using Graphons and Neural Inverse Operators

Generative graph models are central to understanding and simulating complex networks. However, existing approaches have complementary strengths and limitations. Mechanistic models offer interpretability but rely on instance-specific estimation methods. Deep generative models, on the other hand, offer amortized inference at the cost of interpretability and are largely limited to graph sizes seen during training. Scientific applications motivate a framework that retains the strengths of both paradigms. We bridge them by formulating both the generative model and parameter recovery in function space. A multifractal step graphon extends standard step graphons with a recursive construction that compactly parameterizes complex networks. This formulation admits a neural inverse operator to recover its parameters, enabling inference on unseen graph sizes. We evaluate our model, trained only on synthetic multifractal step graphon realizations, against both paradigms. Against a graph foundation model pretrained on empirical networks, our method achieves the best average performance on three of four metrics in a zero-shot graph-generation benchmark, indicating that the model transfers to real-world graphs. We also apply our method to single-observation networks, a regime largely inaccessible to deep models that require training corpora, where it performs comparably to an instance-specific method that optimizes on each graph. In a multi-subject EEG case study, the inferred parameters track a reversible change in brain state more sensitively than traditional network statistics. Together, these results indicate that mechanistic interpretability and amortized inference can be effectively unified in a generative graph model to enhance our understanding of complex networks.

cs.LG↗

Beyond Feature Reliability: Repeat-Informed Multifractal Curve Regression for Brain-Age Prediction

Brain-age prediction from resting-state fMRI provides a quantitative framework for characterizing age-related changes in spontaneous brain dynamics and for identifying functional signatures. Existing studies have linked fractal and multifractal scaling to age and examined the reliability of individual features. However, prediction repeatability depends on how features fluctuate jointly and how a predictor combines them, which feature-wise reliability assessments do not capture. To address this problem, we propose Repeat-informed Multifractal Curve Regression (RMCR), a structured framework for learning stable age-predictive patterns from multifractal curves. By jointly modeling curve structure and repeat-scan variability, RMCR learns predictive combinations of fluctuation orders that target both accuracy and within-subject consistency. Relative to a matched run-level ridge baseline, RMCR reduces single-run MAE by 6.1% on HCP-A and 7.9% on an external Cam-CAN cohort, and within-visit repeat absolute difference by 18.5% on HCP-A, using a single scan at inference.

cs.LG↗

Discovering What You Can Control: Interventional Boundary Discovery for Reinforcement Learning

When an RL agent's observations contain distractors driven by the same confounders as its true state, observational data alone cannot identify which dimensions the agent controls. In our benchmarks, even state-conditioned observational selectors can collapse when distractors mimic controllable state variables. We propose Interventional Boundary Discovery (IBD), which treats the agent's own action channel as a source of randomized interventions: randomizing actions implements an interventional contrast, and per-dimension two-sample tests with FDR correction produce a binary mask over observation dimensions. Across 12 continuous-control settings with up to 100 distractors, IBD matches oracle return in 11 of 12 settings, while observational baselines including mutual information, state-conditioned forward models, and gradient-based sensitivity often underperform simply passing the full observation to SAC. Code is available at https://github.com/jiaxin26/IBD-RL

cs.LG↗

HyperLabel: Multi-Label Classification via Hypergraph-Based Label Correlation Modeling

Multi-label classification (MLC) requires predicting multiple relevant labels for each instance, where a central challenge is modeling complex label dependencies arising from co-occurrence patterns. Existing approaches are limited in capturing high-order label correlations, relying on implicit learning through contrastive objectives or pairwise attention mechanisms without structural guidance. We propose HyperLabel, an encoder-decoder framework that explicitly models label dependencies through hypergraph neural networks. Our contributions are twofold: (i) We construct a label hypergraph where sample-defined hyperedges naturally encode multi-way co-occurrence patterns, providing explicit structural prior knowledge that captures relationships beyond pairwise interactions. (ii) We propose a unified cross-modal learning approach where HGNN+ performs bidirectional message passing to integrate feature information with label structure, and a shared cross-attention decoder processes both modalities through complementary learning objectives. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that HyperLabel achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly significant improvements on macro-F1 scores (+10.3% on Delicious, +8.2% on Bibtex), validating that explicit hypergraph structure effectively captures complex label relationships. The code is available at https://github.com/iZHpy/Multi-label_hypergraph .

cs.LG↗

Learning Fractional-Order Dynamics from a Single Trajectory

Many real-world processes exhibit long-range dependence, where the current state depends on a slowly decaying trace of past states rather than on the most recent state alone. This paper studies system identification for discrete-time fractional-order linear time-invariant systems from a single observed trajectory of length $t$, a setting that captures such non-Markovian dynamics through the Grünwald--Letnikov difference operator. Unlike Markovian systems, fractional-order systems couple estimation across the entire history, making both statistical analysis and practical identification more challenging. We propose \emph{Fractional-Order Ordinary-Least-Squares Grid-Search (FO-GS)}, a simple two-stage estimator that exploits the diagonal structure of the fractional-difference operator to decouple the identification problem row-wise. Under the stability assumption, we establish high-probability, non-asymptotic error bounds for estimating both the fractional order and the system matrix in the heterogeneous setting, with both estimation errors scaling as \(\mathcal{O}(t^{-1/2})\). Through experiments, we show that \emph{FO-GS} outperforms existing baselines in recovering both the fractional order and the underlying system dynamics.

cs.LG↗

Auditing Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning Trees Outperforms Majority Vote and LLM-as-Judge

Multi-agent systems (MAS) can substantially extend the reasoning capacity of large language models (LLMs). Most MAS frameworks aggregate agent outputs via simple majority voting, discarding the evidential structure of reasoning traces. Majority voting is brittle under confabulation consensus, where agents share correlated biases and converge on the same incorrect rationale. We introduce AgentAuditor, which moves beyond frequency-based aggregation by organizing agent traces into a Reasoning Tree that explicitly represents agreements and divergences in their reasoning. AgentAuditor resolves conflicts by comparing branch-level evidence at critical divergence points, turning global adjudication into efficient, localized verification. We further propose Anti-Consensus Preference Optimization (ACPO), which trains the adjudicator with evidence-verified preference supervision to reduce conformity to misleading majority cues. Across four MAS frameworks and multiple reasoning benchmarks, AgentAuditor consistently improves aggregation performance over majority voting, with gains of up to 5% absolute accuracy while remaining token-efficient.

cs.AI↗

TIER-MoE: Trust-Informed Expert Routing via Conditional Modality Risk for Multimodal Fusion in Biomedical Classification

The promise of multimodal fusion lies in combining complementary sources of evidence, yet more evidence does not always yield a better prediction. Recent multimodal models have advanced fusion through richer cross-modal interaction and sample-adaptive fusion. However, the influence assigned to a modality during fusion does not reveal whether that source is unreliable, redundant, or poorly matched to a specialized expert. To address this limitation, we introduce TIER-MoE, a risk-guided subspace mixture-of-experts model that defines sample-specific modality reliability as the prediction loss its unimodal predictor is expected to incur. This risk is learned from out-of-fold predictions generated by models that were not trained on the corresponding sample. TIER-MoE combines the estimated risk with expert-specific subspace compatibility for sparse modality-expert routing, while an always-active shared path preserves multimodal complementarity. We evaluate TIER-MoE on four public multimodal biomedical datasets spanning Alzheimer's disease status, skin-lesion malignancy, and retinal classification. Results demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in predictive performance and probability calibration, with consistent improvements in Macro-F1 and Brier score and strong zero-shot generalization to an external cohort.

cs.LG↗

MaskAttn-SDXL: Controllable Region-Level Text-To-Image Generation

Diffusion models have achieved strong results in text-to-image generation, but important limitations remain as prompts become more structured and multi-object. On the architecture side, U-Net backbones are efficient and stable, yet their locality makes global coordination harder, while Transformer-based diffusion models improve global interactions but at substantially higher compute and memory cost. In parallel, compositional reliability remains weak: models often mix attributes across objects, violate spatial relations, or omit requested entities, and these errors are not reliably reflected by global metrics such as FID or CLIP-based scores. To address these issues without changing the SDXL pipeline, we propose MaskAttn-SDXL, a plug-in module that injects token-conditioned spatial gating into cross-attention logits before softmax. The gating sparsifies token-to-location interactions to suppress irrelevant bindings while preserving the pretrained backbone and standard sampling process, requiring no external supervision or inference-time editing.

cs.CV↗

Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models

Out of everything the human brain processes, only a small fraction is consciously accessible, in the sense of being available for verbal report, deliberate control, and flexible reasoning. In this paper, we present evidence that an analogous functional distinction has emerged in large language models. Using a new interpretability technique, the Jacobian lens, we identify the representations a model is poised to verbalize at any point in its processing. These representations, which we collectively call the J-space, exhibit the functional properties characteristic of a global workspace: their contents can be reported, deliberately summoned and held, used to carry the intermediate steps of silent reasoning, and passed as arguments to arbitrary downstream computations, while automatic processing such as text parsing and routine inference proceeds without them. The J-space also has structural signatures that global workspace theory associates with conscious access: it carries coherent content only in an intermediate band of layers, holds on the order of tens of concepts at a time, and is broadcast by the model's weights more widely than other representations. These properties make it a practical window into a model's unspoken thinking. In alignment audits, it reveals strategic deliberation, evaluation awareness, and trained-in misaligned dispositions that never appear in the model's outputs. We find that post-training installs the Assistant's point of view in the workspace, and we introduce counterfactual reflection training, which improves behavior by training only what a model would say if interrupted and asked to reflect. These results indicate that language models maintain a small, privileged set of representations bearing some of the functional hallmarks of conscious access, and that decoding these representations sheds light on ongoing cognitive processes.

cs.CL↗

ReM-MoA: Reasoning Memory Sustains Mixture-of-Agents Scaling

Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) architectures improve inference-time scaling by organizing multiple LLM agents into layered reasoning pipelines. However, existing MoA variants fail to sustain gains as depth increases, exhibiting degradation, early plateauing, or saturation. We propose ReM-MoA, a memory-augmented MoA framework that sustains scaling through two mechanisms: (1) a Ranked Reasoning Memory that persistently stores and ranks reasoning traces from all layers using a comparative Reviewer Agent, and (2) a Curated Diversified Memory Routing scheme that exposes different agents to distinct combinations of successful and failed traces, preserving exploration diversity while propagating high-quality reasoning. We further introduce an optional multi-domain Reviewer distillation pipeline that improves ranking quality through frontier-model supervision. Across five reasoning benchmarks spanning math, formal logic, code, knowledge, and commonsense, ReM-MoA consistently outperforms prior MoA variants across both depth and width scaling, and its advantage widens with depth, establishing structured cross-layer reasoning memory as a key missing mechanism for scalable multi-agent inference.

cs.AI↗

RaMem: Contextual Reinstatement for Long-term Agentic Memory

Long-term memory has become increasingly important for LLM agents that operate across extended interactions and evolving task contexts. Recent memory systems have made past experiences more persistent, compact, and retrievable, but retrieval alone does not ensure that a memory provides valid evidence for the current query. When experiences are compressed into reusable fragments, memories from different situations may appear equally relevant if they involve recurring entities or user states. We refer to this failure as context collapse: memories lose the surrounding context needed to judge whether they provide valid evidence for the current query. To address this problem, we propose Contextual Reinstatement for Agentic Memory (RaMem), a framework that turns retrieved memory fragments into contextually verifiable evidence. RaMem operates through four coordinated stages: (i) evidence anchoring grounds each memory in its original episodic conditions, especially event time, mention time, session span, and participants; (ii) recall condition induction derives the evidence conditions implied by the query; (iii) validity-aware retrieval uses these conditions to prioritize context-compatible memories while retaining content-relevant candidates as fallback evidence; and (iv) context-preserved synthesis keeps the selected memories' structured context available to the generator. Experiments on long-term memory benchmarks show that RaMem consistently improves performance over strong memory baselines, with average F1 gains of more than 10% across several backbones.

cs.AI↗

Post-Training Neural Network Pruning using Graph Curvature

This paper provides a fresh view of the neural network (NN) pruning problem through the lens of graph theory. To achieve effective pruning, we aim to identify the main NN data flows and the corresponding NN connections that are most and least important for the performance of the full model. Unlike the standard approach to NN data flow analysis, which is based on information theory, we employ the notion of graph curvature, specifically Ollivier-Ricci curvature (ORC). ORC has been successfully used to identify important graph edges in various domains such as road traffic analysis, biological networks, and social networks. In particular, edges with negative ORC are considered bottlenecks and are therefore critical to the graph's overall connectivity, whereas positive-ORC edges are less essential. We use this intuition for NNs to (1) construct a graph induced by the NN structure and introduce the notion of neural curvature (NC) based on ORC; (2) calculate curvatures based on activation patterns for a set of input examples; and (3) demonstrate that NC can be used to rank edges according to their importance for overall NN functionality. We evaluate our method through pruning experiments on a variety of small and medium size models trained on three image datasets: MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. The results indicate that our method can identify a larger number of unimportant edges compared to existing pruning methods.

cs.LG↗

Non-Markovian Dynamical Systems Modeling of Electroencephalogram-based Brain Activity for Anticipating the Cognitive Fatigue Level

Cognitive fatigue, which transitions from focused attention to inexact responses, can cause catastrophic failures in high-stakes environments, yet current black-box assessment techniques ignore the brain's non-Markovian and time-varying interdependent properties, limiting real-time phase transition detection. We develop a fractional dynamical networks-based machine learning (FDNML) framework using coupled fractional-order differential equations to capture brain signal interdependencies and detect cognitive fatigue transitions in real-time. Multifractal properties of brain activity exhibit distinct generalized fractal dimension signatures across fatigue levels, with Wasserstein distances of 0.10, 0.13, and 0.08 between states 0-1, 1-2, and 0-2, respectively. The framework achieves 93.33% classification accuracy and 95% AUROC, enabling the prevention of performance degradation through early detection of neural state transitions.

cs.HC↗

Uncertainty Quantification in LLM Agents: Foundations, Emerging Challenges, and Opportunities

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) for large language models (LLMs) is a key building block for safety guardrails of daily LLM applications. Yet, even as LLM agents are increasingly deployed in highly complex tasks, most UQ research still centers on single-turn question-answering. We argue that UQ research must shift to realistic settings with interactive agents, and that a new principled framework for agent UQ is needed. This paper presents three pillars to build a solid ground for future agent UQ research: (1. Foundations) We present the first general formulation of agent UQ that subsumes broad classes of existing UQ setups; (2. Challenges) We identify four technical challenges specifically tied to agentic setups -- selection of uncertainty estimator, uncertainty of heterogeneous entities, modeling uncertainty dynamics in interactive systems, and lack of fine-grained benchmarks -- with numerical analysis on a real-world agent benchmark, $τ^2$-bench; (3. Future Directions) We conclude with noting on the practical implications of agent UQ and remaining open problems as forward-looking discussion for future explorations.

cs.AI↗