Tootfinder

Theoretical guarantees for change localization using conformal p-values
Swapnaneel Bhattacharyya, Aaditya Ramdas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08749 https://a…

Theoretical guarantees for change localization using conformal p-values
Changepoint localization aims to provide confidence sets for a changepoint (if one exists). Existing methods either relying on strong parametric assumptions or providing only asymptotic guarantees or focusing on a particular kind of change(e.g., change in the mean) rather than the entire distributional change. A method (possibly the first) to achieve distribution-free changepoint localization with finite-sample validity was recently introduced by \cite{dandapanthula2025conformal}. However, whil…

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

D-LEAF: Localizing and Correcting Hallucinations in Multimodal LLMs via Layer-to-head Attention Diagnostics
Tiancheng Yang, Lin Zhang, Jiaye Lin, Guimin Hu, Di Wang, Lijie Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07864

D-LEAF: Localizing and Correcting Hallucinations in Multimodal LLMs via Layer-to-head Attention Diagnostics
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance on tasks like image captioning and visual question answering, but remain prone to hallucinations, where generated text conflicts with the visual input. Prior work links this partly to insufficient visual attention, but existing attention-based detectors and mitigation typically apply uniform adjustments across layers and heads, obscuring where errors originate. In this paper, we first show these methods fail to accurately local…

The fermionic DGFF and its scaling limit logCFT
David Adame-Carrillo, Wioletta M. Ruszel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03972 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03972

The fermionic DGFF and its scaling limit logCFT
In this paper, we identify the scaling limit of the fermionic discrete Gaussian free field (fDGFF) as a logarithmic conformal field theory (CFT) in two dimensions. We first establish a one-to-one correspondence between the space of local observables of the fDGFF and the space of local fields of the symplectic fermions CFT, a logarithmic CFT with central charge $c = - 2$. This correspondence is meaningful in the sense that, when appropriately renormalised, the fDGFF correlation functions converg…

A Benchmark for Localizing Code and Non-Code Issues in Software Projects
Zejun Zhang, Jian Wang, Qingyun Yang, Yifan Pan, Yi Tang, Yi Li, Zhenchang Xing, Tian Zhang, Xuandong Li, Guoan Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25242

A Benchmark for Localizing Code and Non-Code Issues in Software Projects
Accurate project localization (e.g., files and functions) for issue resolution is a critical first step in software maintenance. However, existing benchmarks for issue localization, such as SWE-Bench and LocBench, are limited. They focus predominantly on pull-request issues and code locations, ignoring other evidence and non-code files such as commits, comments, configurations, and documentation. To address this gap, we introduce MULocBench, a comprehensive dataset of 1,100 issues from 46 popul…

ContractEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Clause-Level Legal Risk Identification in Commercial Contracts
Shuang Liu, Zelong Li, Ruoyun Ma, Haiyan Zhao, Mengnan Du
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03080

ContractEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Clause-Level Legal Risk Identification in Commercial Contracts
The potential of large language models (LLMs) in specialized domains such as legal risk analysis remains underexplored. In response to growing interest in locally deploying open-source LLMs for legal tasks while preserving data confidentiality, this paper introduces ContractEval, the first benchmark to thoroughly evaluate whether open-source LLMs could match proprietary LLMs in identifying clause-level legal risks in commercial contracts. Using the Contract Understanding Atticus Dataset (CUAD),…

Assessing local deformation and computing scalar curvature with nonlinear conformal regularization of decoders
Benjamin Cou\'eraud, Vikram Sunkara, Christof Sch\"utte
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20413

Assessing local deformation and computing scalar curvature with nonlinear conformal regularization of decoders
One aim of dimensionality reduction is to discover the main factors that explain the data, and as such is paramount to many applications. When working with high dimensional data, autoencoders offer a simple yet effective approach to learn low-dimensional representations. The two components of a general autoencoder consist first of an encoder that maps the observed data onto a latent space; and second a decoder that maps the latent space back to the original observation space, which allows to le…

Crystallization in the Winterbottom shape and sharp fluctuation laws
Manuel Friedrich, Leonard Kreutz, Ulisse Stefanelli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05642 https://

Crystallization in the Winterbottom shape and sharp fluctuation laws
We address finite crystallization in two dimensions in the presence of a flat crystalline substrate. Particles interact through short-range two- and three-body potentials favoring local square-lattice arrangements. An additional interaction term of relative strength $β>0$ couples the particles and the substrate. Our first main result proves crystallization for all $β>0$, corresponding to the onset of discrete Winterbottom configurations. The proof relies on a stratification technique from […

Measurement and preparation protocols for quantum field theory on curved spacetimes
Christopher J. Fewster
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21426 https://arxiv.o…

Measurement and preparation protocols for quantum field theory on curved spacetimes
In this conference proceedings contribution, I describe work in progress concerning two problems in the measurement theory of quantum fields. First, it is proved that all local observables can be obtained from local measurement schemes. Second, I describe a protocol for preparing a Hadamard local product state of given Hadamard states relative to the local algebras of specified spacelike separated regions.

A Two-Step Learning Framework for Enhancing Sound Event Localization and Detection
Hogeon Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22322 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22…

A Two-Step Learning Framework for Enhancing Sound Event Localization and Detection
Sound Event Localization and Detection (SELD) is crucial in spatial audio processing, enabling systems to detect sound events and estimate their 3D directions. Existing SELD methods use single- or dual-branch architectures: single-branch models share SED and DoA representations, causing optimization conflicts, while dual-branch models separate tasks but limit information exchange. To address this, we propose a two-step learning framework. First, we introduce a tracwise reordering format to main…