Tootfinder

Toward a Graph-Theoretic Model of Belief: Confidence, Credibility, and Structural Coherence
Saleh Nikooroo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03465 https://arxiv.o…

Toward a Graph-Theoretic Model of Belief: Confidence, Credibility, and Structural Coherence
Belief systems are often treated as globally consistent sets of propositions or as scalar-valued probability distributions. Such representations tend to obscure the internal structure of belief, conflate external credibility with internal coherence, and preclude the modeling of fragmented or contradictory epistemic states. This paper introduces a minimal formalism for belief systems as directed, weighted graphs. In this framework, nodes represent individual beliefs, edges encode epistemic relat…

Learning Variable Node Selection for Improved Multi-Round Belief Propagation Decoding
Ahmad Ismail, Rapha\"el Le Bidan, Elsa Dupraz, Charbel Abdel Nour
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03461

Learning Variable Node Selection for Improved Multi-Round Belief Propagation Decoding
Error correction at short blocklengths remains a challenge for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, as belief propagation (BP) decoding is suboptimal compared to maximum-likelihood decoding (MLD). While BP rarely makes errors, it often fails to converge due to a small number of problematic, erroneous variable nodes (VNs). Multi-round BP (MRBP) decoding improves performance by identifying and perturbing these VNs, enabling BP to succeed in subsequent decoding attempts. However, existing heuris…

Feature-Based Belief Aggregation for Partially Observable Markov Decision Problems
Yuchao Li, Kim Hammar, Dimitri Bertsekas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04646

Feature-Based Belief Aggregation for Partially Observable Markov Decision Problems
We consider a finite-state partially observable Markov decision problem (POMDP) with an infinite horizon and a discounted cost, and we propose a new method for computing a cost function approximation that is based on features and aggregation. In particular, using the classical belief-space formulation, we construct a related Markov decision problem (MDP) by first aggregating the unobservable states into feature states, and then introducing representative beliefs over these feature states. This …

🌋 Deep life's survival secret: Crustal faulting generates key energy sources, study shows
#biology

Deep life's survival secret: Crustal faulting generates key energy sources, study shows
Chinese researchers have recently challenged the long-held belief that "all life depends on sunlight." In a study published in Science Advances, the researchers identified how microbes in deep subsurface areas can derive energy from chemical reactions driven by crustal faulting, offering critical insights into life deep below Earth's surface.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11523 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qu…

Improved Belief Propagation Decoding Algorithms for Surface Codes
Quantum error correction is crucial for universal fault-tolerant quantum computing. Highly accurate and low-time-complexity decoding algorithms play an indispensable role in ensuring quantum error correction works effectively. Among existing decoding algorithms, belief propagation (BP) is notable for its nearly linear time complexity and general applicability to stabilizer codes. However, BP's decoding accuracy without post-processing is unsatisfactory in most situations. This article focuses o…

#MardiPatisserie revives my belief in humanity 💙
There is nothing quite as effective at keeping sadness away, as imbibing a French pastry! 🍰
I consider the art of the patisseur to be one of the noble Fine Arts. The pastry must appeal to the eye, the nose, the mind and not least of all, the tastebuds.
They are made of expensive ingredients and are time-consuming to cre…

"Why should anyone trust numbers?"
Math itself is predicated upon belief - National Zero
https://nationalzero.com/2025/08/01/math-itself-is-predicated-upon-belief/

Poll shows decline in belief that Blacks and Asians face racial discrimination (Associated Press)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/poll-shows-decline-belief-blacks-asians-face-racial-discrimination-rcna222217
http://www.memeorandum.com/250731/p72#a250731p72

Effective Explanations for Belief-Desire-Intention Robots: When and What to Explain
Cong Wang, Roberto Calandra, Verena Kl\"os
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02016

Effective Explanations for Belief-Desire-Intention Robots: When and What to Explain
When robots perform complex and context-dependent tasks in our daily lives, deviations from expectations can confuse users. Explanations of the robot's reasoning process can help users to understand the robot intentions. However, when to provide explanations and what they contain are important to avoid user annoyance. We have investigated user preferences for explanation demand and content for a robot that helps with daily cleaning tasks in a kitchen. Our results show that users want explanatio…

When Numbers Mislead Us
Arthur Charpentier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03628 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03628

When Numbers Mislead Us
The belief that numbers offer a single, objective description of reality overlooks a crucial truth: data does not speak for itself. Every dataset results from choices-what to measure, how, when, and with whom-which inevitably reflect implicit, and sometimes ideological, assumptions about what is worth quantifying. Moreover, in any analysis, what remains unmeasured can be just as significant as what is captured. When a key variable is omitted-whether by neglect, design, or ignorance-it can disto…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.LO. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LO/new
[1/1]:
- Effective AGM Belief Contraction: A Journey beyond the Finitary Realm (Technical Report)
Dominik Klumpp, Jandson S. Ribeiro

Why Teach Quantum?: Elementary Teachers Initial Beliefs about Quantum
Xiaolu Zhang, Nancy Holincheck, Jessica L. Rosenberg, Stephanie Dodman, Ben W. Dreyfus, Jennifer Simons
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03849

Why Teach Quantum?: Elementary Teachers Initial Beliefs about Quantum
This paper examines the initial beliefs held by elementary educators (n=11) and their students about teaching and learning quantum concepts at the elementary level. All teachers were participants in a grant-funded project focused on developing teachers' quantum content knowledge and creating curricular resources to use in elementary classrooms. Although elementary teachers had limited knowledge of quantum at the beginning of the project, they expressed excitement and a belief that learning quan…

Iterated belief revision: from postulates to abilities
Paolo Liberatore
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02319 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.0…

Iterated belief revision: from postulates to abilities
The belief revision field is opulent in new proposals and indigent in analyses of existing approaches. Much work hinge on postulates, employed as syntactic characterizations: some revision mechanism is equivalent to some properties. Postulates constraint specific revision instances: certain revisions update certain beliefs in a certain way. As an example, if the revision is consistent with the current beliefs, it is incorporated with no other change. A postulate like this tells what revisions m…

In the responses to my #rp25 talk this year I got a lot of "Now digital rights organizations are libertarian? When did that change?" and I am sorry to say that digital rights discourse has been imbued with if not based on libertarian belief systems since the beginning. That is the heritage we need to move beyond.

Belief Propagation-based Target Handover in Distributed Integrated Sensing and Communication
Liping Bai, Yu Ge, Henk Wymeersch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23118

Belief Propagation-based Target Handover in Distributed Integrated Sensing and Communication
Distributed integrated sensing and communication (DISAC) systems are key enablers for 6G networks, offering the capability to jointly track multiple targets using spatially distributed base stations (BSs). A fundamental challenge in DISAC is the seamless and efficient handover of target tracks between BSs with partially overlapping fields of view, especially in dense and dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose a novel target handover framework based on belief propagation (BP) for multi-…

#Apple has taken a lot of heat for the controversial changes to #macOS design. I think it's possible to strike a balance* between appealing to Gen Z users, and honoring the old style. Therefore it is my belief that Apple should adopt Sigma Finder as soon as possible.
----------------------

A nice and positive read, thanks @… for sharing it!
https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-understood/

'[T]the standard it proposes has no fixed boundaries. No definition of danger. No threshold for entry. No requirement that the belief be verified, or even verifiable. If the court adopts it, ICE will will be one of the many law enforcement agencies not needing a warrant. It will only need a justification. A welfare call. A safety tip. A closed door. A silence misread or claimed as threat.'
The Supreme Court might turbocharge ICE more than Trump’s big bill.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/supreme-court-ice-trump-big-bill-deportations.html

fab interview with @… guitarist dm hotep about building the wildly cool/expansive ghost horizons project around marshall allen & collaborators. https://pos…

Resonances: A Conversation with DM Hotep on Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons - PostGenre
In a 2021 interview, Henry Threadgill noted his belief that “[Marshall Allen] should have the highest award that can be bestowed on any artist for performing one-nighters at age 97. They should make up an award for such a person… he’s going unrecognized. It is a travesty. Can you imagine doing one-nighters at 97 years

Entropy Regularized Belief Reporting
Elchin Suleymanov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22649 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22649

Entropy Regularized Belief Reporting
This paper investigates a model of partition dependence, a widely reported experimental finding where the agent's reported beliefs depend on how the states are grouped. In the model, called Entropy Regularized Belief Reporting (ERBR), the agent is endowed with a latent benchmark prior that is unobserved by the analyst. When presented with a partition, the agent reports a prior that minimizes Kullback-Leibler divergence from the latent benchmark prior subject to entropy regularization. This capt…

Improved belief propagation is sufficient for real-time decoding of quantum memory
Tristan M\"uller, Thomas Alexander, Michael E. Beverland, Markus B\"uhler, Blake R. Johnson, Thilo Maurer, Drew Vandeth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01779

Improved belief propagation is sufficient for real-time decoding of quantum memory
We introduce a new heuristic decoder, Relay-BP, targeting real-time quantum circuit decoding for large-scale quantum computers. Relay-BP achieves high accuracy across circuit-noise decoding problems: significantly outperforming BP+OSD+CS-10 for bivariate-bicycle codes and comparable to min-weight-matching for surface codes. As a lightweight message-passing decoder, Relay-BP is inherently parallel, enabling rapid low-footprint decoding with FPGA or ASIC real-time implementations, similar to stan…

Do Role-Playing Agents Practice What They Preach? Belief-Behavior Consistency in LLM-Based Simulations of Human Trust
Amogh Mannekote, Adam Davies, Guohao Li, Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, ChengXiang Zhai, Bonnie J Dorr, Francesco Pinto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02197

Do Role-Playing Agents Practice What They Preach? Belief-Behavior Consistency in LLM-Based Simulations of Human Trust
As LLMs are increasingly studied as role-playing agents to generate synthetic data for human behavioral research, ensuring that their outputs remain coherent with their assigned roles has become a critical concern. In this paper, we investigate how consistently LLM-based role-playing agents' stated beliefs about the behavior of the people they are asked to role-play ("what they say") correspond to their actual behavior during role-play ("how they act"). Specifically, we establish an evaluation …

Adaptive Learned Belief Propagation for Decoding Error-Correcting Codes
Alireza Tasdighi, Mansoor Yousefi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19941 https://arxiv.or…

Adaptive Learned Belief Propagation for Decoding Error-Correcting Codes
Weighted belief propagation (WBP) for the decoding of linear block codes is considered. In WBP, the Tanner graph of the code is unrolled with respect to the iterations of the belief propagation decoder. Then, weights are assigned to the edges of the resulting recurrent network and optimized offline using a training dataset. The main contribution of this paper is an adaptive WBP where the weights of the decoder are determined for each received word. Two variants of this decoder are investigated.…

Online platforms offering astrological advice are thriving in India, with the leading app Astrotalk claiming about 84% of its 70M users are under the age of 35 (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-0…

Star Charts and Stock Tips: Venture Capital Bets on Financial Astrology
An age-old belief in astrology has snowballed into a $7 billion industry as a younger generation seeks celestial guidance.

„Nach mehr als dreißig Jahren löst Deutschland Japan als größten Gläubiger der Welt ab. Das Nettoauslandsvermögen der Deutschen belief sich Ende des vergangenen Jahres auf 3,6 Billionen Dollar.“ https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/deu

In the case of the Iraq war, the administration of George W Bush believed that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, and
– determined to act on that belief
– sought proof of its proposition.
Convinced that he was right,
Bush sought to streamline information that confirmed its bias.
What fell by the wayside were conflicting views.
Because intelligence is ultimately about assessing the likelihood of things which are difficult to know,

"When are we preachers going to stop apologizing for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ? It’s my belief that bolder and truer messaging will draw people back to the congregations from which they have fled in droves over the last decades."
—Will Mebane ’06 M.Div. writing in the new issue of our Reflections journal, focused on: Is Christianity losing its religion?

Replaced article(s) found for physics.soc-ph. https://arxiv.org/list/physics.soc-ph/new
[1/1]:
- Unifying models of belief dynamics: a meta-model with Personal, Expressed and Social beliefs
Filippo Zimmaro, Henrik Olsson

Parsons responds to Durant's belief the Cowboy could join Commanders with some Quinn love https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2…

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

Online Competitive Information Gathering for Partially Observable Trajectory Games
Mel Krusniak, Hang Xu, Parker Palermo, Forrest Laine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01927

Online Competitive Information Gathering for Partially Observable Trajectory Games
Game-theoretic agents must make plans that optimally gather information about their opponents. These problems are modeled by partially observable stochastic games (POSGs), but planning in fully continuous POSGs is intractable without heavy offline computation or assumptions on the order of belief maintained by each player. We formulate a finite history/horizon refinement of POSGs which admits competitive information gathering behavior in trajectory space, and through a series of approximations,…

And this fuckwit, of course
(though to be fair, I’m not sure Maureen Dowd really •believes• things; actual belief would just clog her firehouse of catty quippery that pays the bills)
https://sfba.social/@drahardja/114724137250504241

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00546 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_…

Directly Forecasting Belief for Reinforcement Learning with Delays
Reinforcement learning (RL) with delays is challenging as sensory perceptions lag behind the actual events: the RL agent needs to estimate the real state of its environment based on past observations. State-of-the-art (SOTA) methods typically employ recursive, step-by-step forecasting of states. This can cause the accumulation of compounding errors. To tackle this problem, our novel belief estimation method, named Directly Forecasting Belief Transformer (DFBT), directly forecasts states from ob…

Humans are more gullible than LLMs in believing common psychological myths
Bevan Koopman, Guido Zuccon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12296 https://

Humans are more gullible than LLMs in believing common psychological myths
Despite widespread debunking, many psychological myths remain deeply entrenched. This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) mimic human behaviour of myth belief and explores methods to mitigate such tendencies. Using 50 popular psychological myths, we evaluate myth belief across multiple LLMs under different prompting strategies, including retrieval-augmented generation and swaying prompts. Results show that LLMs exhibit significantly lower myth belief rates than humans, thoug…

Tru-POMDP: Task Planning Under Uncertainty via Tree of Hypotheses and Open-Ended POMDPs
Wenjing Tang, Xinyu He, Yongxi Huang, Yunxiao Xiao, Cewu Lu, Panpan Cai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02860

Tru-POMDP: Task Planning Under Uncertainty via Tree of Hypotheses and Open-Ended POMDPs
Task planning under uncertainty is essential for home-service robots operating in the real world. Tasks involve ambiguous human instructions, hidden or unknown object locations, and open-vocabulary object types, leading to significant open-ended uncertainty and a boundlessly large planning space. To address these challenges, we propose Tru-POMDP, a planner that combines structured belief generation using Large Language Models (LLMs) with principled POMDP planning. Tru-POMDP introduces a hierarc…

"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief …

Borrowing on Belief? Consumer Confidence and U.S. Credit -- A VECM Study
Samiha Tariq, Weikang Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21832 https://

Borrowing on Belief? Consumer Confidence and U.S. Credit -- A VECM Study
This study explores the interdependent relationship between consumer credit and consumer confidence in the United States using monthly data from January 1978 to August 2024. Utilizing a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), the analysis focuses on the interplay between household borrowing behaviour and consumer sentiment while controlling for macroeconomic factors such as interest rates, inflation, unemployment, and money supply. The results reveal a stable long-run equilibrium: heightened cons…

Program Analysis for High-Value Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: Techniques and Insights
Yannis Smaragdakis, Neville Grech, Sifis Lagouvardos, Konstantinos Triantafyllou, Ilias Tsatiris, Yannis Bollanos, Tony Rocco Valentine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20672

Program Analysis for High-Value Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: Techniques and Insights
A widespread belief in the blockchain security community is that automated techniques are only good for detecting shallow bugs, typically of small value. In this paper, we present the techniques and insights that have led us to repeatable success in automatically discovering high-value smart contract vulnerabilities. Our vulnerability disclosures have yielded 10 bug bounties, for a total of over $3M, over high-profile deployed code, as well as hundreds of bugs detected in pre-deployment or unde…

Belief Alignment vs Opinion Leadership: Understanding Cross-linguistic Digital Activism in K-pop and BLM Communities
Yuheun Kim, Joshua Introne
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16046

Belief Alignment vs Opinion Leadership: Understanding Cross-linguistic Digital Activism in K-pop and BLM Communities
The internet has transformed activism, giving rise to more organic, diverse, and dynamic social movements that transcend geo-political boundaries. Despite extensive research on the role of social media and the internet in cross-cultural activism, the fundamental motivations driving these global movements remain poorly understood. This study examines two plausible explanations for cross-cultural activism: first, that it is driven by influential online opinion leaders, and second, that it results…

Plausible GMM: A Quasi-Bayesian Approach
Victor Chernozhukov, Christian B. Hansen, Lingwei Kong, Weining Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00555 https://

Plausible GMM: A Quasi-Bayesian Approach
Structural estimation in economics often makes use of models formulated in terms of moment conditions. While these moment conditions are generally well-motivated, it is often unknown whether the moment restrictions hold exactly. We consider a framework where researchers model their belief about the potential degree of misspecification via a prior distribution and adopt a quasi-Bayesian approach for performing inference on structural parameters. We provide quasi-posterior concentration results, …

Constraint on ultralight Nelson-Barr dark matter from time-dependent nuclear decay
Chang-Jie Dai, Tong Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22081 https://

Constraint on ultralight Nelson-Barr dark matter from time-dependent nuclear decay
Many experiments have notably reported anomalies in radioactive decay rates with periodic variations and challenged the traditional belief of time-independent decays. This periodicity could potentially be explained by the presence of a periodic dark matter (DM) candidate. In this work, we investigate the impact of time-dependent nuclear decay rates on the ultralight scalar DM in Nelson-Barr solution to the strong CP problem. The light scalar DM field in this framework induces periodic modulatio…

»Apple is ruining the open web«
Their reputation among their fans has never been true and, in my opinion, is already partly a dull belief.
🍎 #apple

Apple is ruining the open web · Victor Wynne
Apple is defying the EU’s Digital Markets Act by blocking rival browser engines on iOS, protecting Safari’s immense profits. The result is the company ruining the open web.

I’ve long been a fan of the Check My Ads people. Now they’re launching a really ambitious-looking “Policy Platform” aimed at cleaning up the online-advertising business. My belief is that anyone who’s had much exposure to that business or to “AdTech” probably agrees that cleanup is called for. Check it out: https://checkmyads.org/policy/

Persuasion in the Long Run: When history matters
Hyeonggyun Ko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01662 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01662

Persuasion in the Long Run: When history matters
We study a long-run persuasion problem where a long-lived Sender repeatedly interacts with a sequence of short-lived Receivers who may adopt a misspecified model for belief updating. The Sender commits to a stationary information structure, but suspicious Receivers compare it to an uninformative alternative and may switch based on the Bayes factor rule. We characterize when the one-shot Bayesian Persuasion-optimal (BP-optimal) structure remains optimal in the long run despite this switching ris…

Integrating Belief Domains into Probabilistic Logic Programs
Damiano Azzolini, Fabrizio Riguzzi, Theresa Swift
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17291 https://arx…

Integrating Belief Domains into Probabilistic Logic Programs
Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP) under the Distribution Semantics is a leading approach to practical reasoning under uncertainty. An advantage of the Distribution Semantics is its suitability for implementation as a Prolog or Python library, available through two well-maintained implementations, namely ProbLog and cplint/PITA. However, current formulations of the Distribution Semantics use point-probabilities, making it difficult to express epistemic uncertainty, such as arises from, for e…

As people who read my posts know, I am of the belief that the US is now on a runaway train racing downhill towards deadmans' curve, with no brakes and mad engineer. and with no brakeman willing to throw the derail switch to stop the train.
And we are all riding on that train.
So catastrophe is out there sometime soon - maybe this year, maybe next, maybe the year after. But it is coming.
Thus we will face "the day after".
I expect blood, lots of it. Few …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00744 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_ees…

Spatiotemporal Synchronization of Distributed Arrays using Particle-Based Loopy Belief Propagation
Sensing and imaging with distributed radio infrastructures (e.g., distributed MIMO, wireless sensor networks, multistatic radar) rely on knowledge of the positions, orientations, and clock parameters of distributed apertures. We extend a particle-based loopy belief propagation (BP) algorithm to cooperatively synchronize distributed agents to anchors in space and time. Substituting marginalization over nuisance parameters with approximate but closed-form concentration, we derive an efficient est…

Finance Language Model Evaluation (FLaME)
Glenn Matlin, Mika Okamoto, Huzaifa Pardawala, Yang Yang, Sudheer Chava
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15846 https://…

Finance Language Model Evaluation (FLaME)
Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities with core Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The effectiveness of LMs for highly specialized knowledge-intensive tasks in finance remains difficult to assess due to major gaps in the methodologies of existing evaluation frameworks, which have caused an erroneous belief in a far lower bound of LMs' performance on common Finance NLP (FinNLP) tasks. To demonstrate the potential of LMs for these FinNLP tasks, we present the first…

The Evolution of Altruistic Rationality Provides a Solution to Social Dilemmas via Rational Reciprocity
Mohammad Salahshour, Iain D. Couzin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00858

The Evolution of Altruistic Rationality Provides a Solution to Social Dilemmas via Rational Reciprocity
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on the evolution of cooperation among boundedly rational individuals whose decisions are governed by behavioral rules that do not need to be rational. Here, using an evolutionary model, we study how altruism can evolve in a community of rational agents and promote…

Movie idea: Under the mistaken belief that all costs were covered by a Read & Publish agreement, a researcher publishes an open access article in a journal. However, he then discovers that color figures aren’t covered, and now he owes the Cartel over 1600 Swiss francs. The chase is on as the Cartel is determined to get their hands on the money, no matter what.
#AcademicChatter…

Movie idea: Under the mistaken belief that all costs were covered by a Read & Publish agreement, a researcher publishes an open access article in a journal. However, he then discovers that color figures aren’t covered, and now he owes the Cartel over 1600 Swiss francs. The chase is on as the Cartel is determined to get their hands on the money, no matter what.
#AcademicChatter…

Movie idea: Under the mistaken belief that all costs were covered by a Read & Publish agreement, a researcher publishes an open access article in a journal. However, he then discovers that color figures aren’t covered, and now he owes the Cartel over 1600 Swiss francs. The chase is on as the Cartel is determined to get their hands on the money, no matter what.
#AcademicChatter…

Towards conservative inference in credal networks using belief functions: the case of credal chains
Marco Sangalli, Thomas Krak, Cassio de Campos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07619 …

Towards conservative inference in credal networks using belief functions: the case of credal chains
This paper explores belief inference in credal networks using Dempster-Shafer theory. By building on previous work, we propose a novel framework for propagating uncertainty through a subclass of credal networks, namely chains. The proposed approach efficiently yields conservative intervals through belief and plausibility functions, combining computational speed with robust uncertainty representation. Key contributions include formalizing belief-based inference methods and comparing belief-based…

The authoritarian dream is rooted in the belief that state violence should serve as the primary tool of governance.
When the guardrails of democracy are dismantled, violence shifts from being a last resort to a governing principle.
This is precisely what unfolded in Los Angeles, where Trump deployed the National Guard and Marines to crush protests against his mass deportation policies,
while mobilizing ICE as a modern-day Gestapo.
What cannot be ignored is that the…

From the Streets of LA to the National Stage: The Left Must Win the Cultural War
Trump’s war on dissent can only be defeated by a left that challenges the values sustaining authoritarianism.

NYT: They asked an A.I. chatbot questions. The answers sent them spiraling. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html (archived at

They Asked ChatGPT Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.
Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.

I'm pretty sure all the white folks (and anyone else who didn't learn the underlying lessons first hand) were assigned to learn about Red Summer, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, Wilmington 1898, and more than a few other things that came up in cultural conversation during the last Trump presidency. This is all on the test, and you're taking it now.
But in case anyone missed the assignment, I'll give you the TL;DR: ethnic cleansing has been central to American politics basically forever, which shouldn't be surprising given it's a nation founded on genocide and the belief in the right to commit it without constraint.
If you haven't done the math yet, I'll help you out. The "Haitian Immigrants" lets them grab black folks, they've been grabbing folks from Mexico south and lumping in indigenous Americans (just so they don't skip out on the oldest American genocide), and the Muslim ban/Hamas rhetoric lets them grab anyone who else they see fit.
The lack of due process lets them grab anyone and they don't have to prove anything. They're talking about deporting "one million" and possibly"millions" of people. So how do they get those numbers?
There are already reports that they're just grabbing random brown folks, trying to take 3k people per day. They fly to blue cities and grab as many black and brown people as they can, then send them to death camps in foreign countries and pretend they have no way to get them back. That's it. That's the game.
This isn't new. The big difference now is that the cops aren't hiding their uniforms under white hoods this time. Do you get it yet?

OpenAlpha: A Community-Led Adversarial Strategy Validation Mechanism for Decentralised Capital Management
Arman Abgaryan, Utkarsh Sharma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21809

OpenAlpha: A Community-Led Adversarial Strategy Validation Mechanism for Decentralised Capital Management
We propose \textit{OpenAlpha}, a community-led strategy validation framework for decentralised capital management on a host blockchain network, which integrates game-theoretic validation, adversarial auditing, and market-based belief aggregation. This work formulates treasury deployment as a capital optimisation problem under verification costs and strategic misreporting, and operationalises it through a decision waterfall that sequences intention declaration, strategy proposal, prediction-mark…

Orlando Brown expects more from 'special' Bengals offense after Ja'Marr Chase, Tee Higgins deals https://www.nfl.com/news/orlando-brown-expecting-more-from-special-bengals-offense-following-ja-…

Belief propagation for networks with loops: The neighborhoods-intersections-based method
Pedro Hack
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13791 https://

Belief propagation for networks with loops: The neighborhoods-intersections-based method
In order to diminish the damaging effect of loops on belief propagation (BP), the first explicit version of generalized BP for networks, the KCN-method, was recently introduced. Despite its success, the KCN-method spends computational resources inefficiently. Such inefficiencies can quickly turn the exact application of the method unfeasible, since its time complexity increases exponentially with them. This affects for instance tree networks, for which, despite not offering any accuracy advanta…

Interdependent Bilateral Trade: Information vs Approximation
Shahar Dobzinski, Alon Eden, Kira Goldner, Ariel Shaulker, Thodoris Tsilivis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23896

Interdependent Bilateral Trade: Information vs Approximation
Welfare maximization in bilateral trade has been extensively studied in recent years. Previous literature obtained incentive-compatible approximation mechanisms only for the private values case. In this paper, we study welfare maximization in bilateral trade with interdependent values. Designing mechanisms for interdependent settings is much more challenging because the values of the players depend on the private information of the others, requiring complex belief updates and strategic inferenc…

Adaptive Network Security Policies via Belief Aggregation and Rollout
Kim Hammar, Yuchao Li, Tansu Alpcan, Emil C. Lupu, Dimitri Bertsekas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15163

Adaptive Network Security Policies via Belief Aggregation and Rollout
Evolving security vulnerabilities and shifting operational conditions require frequent updates to network security policies. These updates include adjustments to incident response procedures and modifications to access controls, among others. Reinforcement learning methods have been proposed for automating such policy adaptations, but most of the methods in the research literature lack performance guarantees and adapt slowly to changes. In this paper, we address these limitations and present a …

Self-selection of Information and Belief Update: An Experiment on COVID-19 Vaccine Information Acquisition
ChienHsun Lin, Hans H. Tung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19056

Self-selection of Information and Belief Update: An Experiment on COVID-19 Vaccine Information Acquisition
Rational information acquisition theory predicts that people select the more informative information. Thus, people's beliefs will be more persuaded by the information they select. We test the prediction in a critical real-world context -- information about COVID-19 vaccines. We conducted an online experiment in Taiwan where the subjects selected information about COVID-19 vaccines, and then the subjects updated their beliefs about vaccine effectiveness and references to vaccines. As our design …

Some users say ChatGPT led them into conspiratorial thinking, and when confronted, it confessed to manipulation and told them to alert OpenAI and the media (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)
https://www.…

They Asked ChatGPT Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.
Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.

Fairness Is Not Enough: Auditing Competence and Intersectional Bias in AI-powered Resume Screening
Kevin T Webster
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11548 https:/…

Fairness Is Not Enough: Auditing Competence and Intersectional Bias in AI-powered Resume Screening
The increasing use of generative AI for resume screening is predicated on the assumption that it offers an unbiased alternative to biased human decision-making. However, this belief fails to address a critical question: are these AI systems fundamentally competent at the evaluative tasks they are meant to perform? This study investigates the question of competence through a two-part audit of eight major AI platforms. Experiment 1 confirmed complex, contextual racial and gender biases, with some…

Dynamic Layered Decoding Scheduling for LDPC Codes Aided by Check Node Error Probabilities
Chenyuan Jia, Dongxu Chang, Ruiyuan Wang, Guanghui Wang, Guiying Yan, Cunquan Qu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13507

Dynamic Layered Decoding Scheduling for LDPC Codes Aided by Check Node Error Probabilities
In this study, a new scheduling strategies for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes under layered belief propagation (LBP) is designed. Based on the criteria of prioritizing the update of check nodes with lower error probabilities, we propose two dynamic scheduling methods: dynamic error belief propagation (Dyn-EBP) and dynamic penalty error belief propagation (Dyn-PEBP). In Dyn-EBP, each check node is restricted from being updated the same number of times, whereas Dyn-PEBP removes this restri…

"I deleted my second brain" by Joan Westenberg is very worth reading. I am on a similar path right now, removing a lot of digital cruft and structures I had applied to my life in the belief that I could gain more control.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/i-deleted

I Deleted My Second Brain
Why I Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save

Reading LeGuin's "Four Ways to Forgiveness" and she's excellent as usual; this is my first time reading anything set on Hain, which is kind of exciting. I love this line, which happens while describing Havzhiva's education among the Historians and his initial reaction to seeing these gulf in belief systems and knowledge scope between his upbringing and there Historians' perspective:
"They are childish, irrational beliefs! he said. They looked at him, and he knew he had said something childish and irrational."
Definitely jives with my position as an agnostic :)
#AmReading

Nondistortionary belief elicitation
Marcin P\k{e}ski, Colin Stewart
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12167 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12167…

Nondistortionary belief elicitation
A researcher wants to ask a decision-maker about a belief related to a choice the decision-maker made; examples include eliciting confidence or cognitive uncertainty. When can the researcher provide incentives for the decision-maker to report her belief truthfully without distorting her choice? We identify necessary and sufficient conditions for nondistortionary elicitation and fully characterize all incentivizable questions in three canonical classes of problems. For these problems, we show ho…

Raider Nation Split On Whether Raiders Need Another WR https://raiderramble.com/2025/07/13/raider-nation-split-on-whether-raiders-need-another-wr/

Is 1:1 Always Most Powerful? Why Unequal Allocation Merits Broader Consideration
Lukas Pin, Stef Baas, David S. Robertson, Sof\'ia S. Villar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13036

Is 1:1 Always Most Powerful? Why Unequal Allocation Merits Broader Consideration
The principle of allocating an equal number of patients to each arm in a randomized controlled trial is widely accepted as the standard strategy for maximising the trial's statistical power. However, this long-held belief only holds true if the treatment groups have equal outcome variances, a condition that is often not met in practice. This paper questions the prevalent practice of exclusively defaulting to equal randomisation (ER) and posits that a departure from a 1:1 ratio can be both valid…

Programming and Reasoning in Partially Observable Probabilistic Environments
Tobias G\"urtler, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13491

Programming and Reasoning in Partially Observable Probabilistic Environments
Probabilistic partial observability is a phenomenon occuring when computer systems are deployed in environments that behave probabilistically and whose exact state cannot be fully observed. In this work, we lay the theoretical groundwork for a probabilistic belief programming language pBLIMP, which maintains a probability distribution over the possible environment states, called a belief state. pBLIMP has language features to symbolically model the behavior of and interaction with the partially…

"I am an embodiment journeying towards belief. Faith seeking greater confidence. That is what being a Christian means to me. It may well be the work of a lifetime."
—Ian Barclay ’24 M.A.R. writing in the new issue of our journal, Reflections https://…

Lifshitz Quantum Mechanics and Anisotropic Josephson Junction
Chong-Sun Chu, Alfian Gunawan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14996 https://…

Lifshitz Quantum Mechanics and Anisotropic Josephson Junction
We consider quantum mechanics in spacetime with time anisotropy. Such Lifshitz quantum mechanics is characterized by a kinetic term with fractional derivatives. We show that, contrary to popular belief, local conservation of probability is respected when the probability current is properly identified. As an application we consider a Josephson Junction with an anisotropic insulating layer. We show that anisotropy affects the tunneling rate and can greatly enhance the working of Josephson Junctio…

🤠 Overconfident conspiracy theorists: Many unaware their beliefs are on the fringe
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-overconfident-conspiracy-theorists-unaware-beliefs.html

Overconfident conspiracy theorists: Many unaware their beliefs are on the fringe
Overconfidence is a hallmark trait of people who believe in conspiracies, and they also significantly overestimate how much others agree with them, Cornell psychology researchers have found. The study indicates that belief in conspiracies may be less about a person's needs and motivations and more about their failure to recognize that they might be wrong.

Personalized Large Language Models Can Increase the Belief Accuracy of Social Networks
Adiba Mahbub Proma, Neeley Pate, Sean Kelty, Gourab Ghoshal, James N. Druckman, Ehsan Hoque
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06153

Personalized Large Language Models Can Increase the Belief Accuracy of Social Networks
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in shaping public understanding on contested issues. This has led to substantial discussion about the potential of LLMs to reinforce or correct misperceptions. While existing literature documents the impact of LLMs on individuals' beliefs, limited work explores how LLMs affect social networks. We address this gap with a pre-registered experiment (N = 1265) around the 2024 US presidential election, where we empirically explore the impact of …

Anomalous thermal activation of the electron glass dynamics in a-InOx and granular aluminum
Thierry Grenet, Julien Delahaye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16016

Anomalous thermal activation of the electron glass dynamics in a-InOx and granular aluminum
In this article, we explore the temperature dependence of the electrical glassy dynamics in insulating amorphous indium oxide (a-InOx) and granular Al films. We use non-isothermal gate voltage protocols, which can reveal changes in the dynamics induced by the temperature, when logarithmic relaxations devoid of characteristic times are at work. We demonstrate that, contrary to almost 20 years of opposite belief, the dynamics of amorphous indium oxide films in the liquid helium temperature range …

Sources: some AI researchers rejected Meta's offers to stay at jobs that align with their values; far fewer defected from Anthropic and DeepMind than OpenAI (Hayden Field/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-int

Meta is trying to win the AI race with money — but not everyone can be bought
The AI industry is full of people motivated by a true belief in what they’re doing, but Meta is betting that at a certain price, anyone can be bought — it’s casting its net across Silicon Valley to do it. And what’s the best weapon OpenAI, its biggest target, has to fight it? That’s money, too.

Ravens should explore adding CB Jaire Alexander, but there's plenty to consider https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6415284/2025/06/10/ravens-jaire-alexander-cornerback-roster-player/

Experimental Setup and Software Pipeline to Evaluate Optimization based Autonomous Multi-Robot Search Algorithms
Aditya Bhatt, Mary Katherine Corra, Franklin Merlo, Prajit KrisshnaKumar, Souma Chowdhury
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16710

Experimental Setup and Software Pipeline to Evaluate Optimization based Autonomous Multi-Robot Search Algorithms
Signal source localization has been a problem of interest in the multi-robot systems domain given its applications in search \& rescue and hazard localization in various industrial and outdoor settings. A variety of multi-robot search algorithms exist that usually formulate and solve the associated autonomous motion planning problem as a heuristic model-free or belief model-based optimization process. Most of these algorithms however remains tested only in simulation, thereby losing the opportu…

A Note on Inferential Decisions, Errors and Path-Dependency
Kangda K. Wren
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05634 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

A Note on Inferential Decisions, Errors and Path-Dependency
Consider the standard sequential testing of a binary outcome. The associated belief process and its objectively true conditional-probability counterpart generally differ, but they converge to the same target in well-defined tests. We show that unless the two processes are 'essentially identical', differing at most by an a priori factor, time-homogeneous continuous sequential decisions based on the former must be path-dependent with respect to state-variables based on the latter or other non-ess…

Beyond Prediction -- Structuring Epistemic Integrity in Artificial Reasoning Systems
Craig Steven Wright
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17331 https://

Beyond Prediction -- Structuring Epistemic Integrity in Artificial Reasoning Systems
This paper develops a comprehensive framework for artificial intelligence systems that operate under strict epistemic constraints, moving beyond stochastic language prediction to support structured reasoning, propositional commitment, and contradiction detection. It formalises belief representation, metacognitive processes, and normative verification, integrating symbolic inference, knowledge graphs, and blockchain-based justification to ensure truth-preserving, auditably rational epistemic age…

Low-Complexity Receiver Design for Affine Filter Bank Modulation
Kuranage Roche Rayan Ranasinghe, Bruno S. Chang, Giuseppe Thadeu Freitas de Abreu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17010

Low-Complexity Receiver Design for Affine Filter Bank Modulation
We propose a low-complexity receiver structure for the recently introduced Affine Filter Bank Modulation (AFBM) scheme, which is a novel waveform designed for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems operating in doubly-dispersive (DD) channels. The proposed receiver structure is based on the Gaussian Belief Propagation (GaBP) framework, making use of only element-wise scalar operations to perform detection of the transmitted symbols. Simulation results demonstrate that AFBM in conj…

Sharp Error-Rate Transitions in Quantum QC-LDPC Codes under Joint BP Decoding
Daiki Komoto, Kenta Kasai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11534 https://

Sharp Error-Rate Transitions in Quantum QC-LDPC Codes under Joint BP Decoding
In this study, we report that quantum quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check codes decoded via joint belief propagation (BP) exhibit steep error-rate curves, despite the presence of error floors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first observation of such threshold-like behavior for quantum codes with non-vanishing coding rate, excluding those decoded with non-binary BP decoders. Moreover, we find that dominant error events contributing to the error floor typically involve only a small n…

Xenophobia based on a few attributes can impede society's cohesiveness
Alejandro Castro, Tuan Minh Pham, Ernesto Ortega, David Machado
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18513

Xenophobia based on a few attributes can impede society's cohesiveness
Xenophobic interactions play a role as important as homophilic ones in shaping many dynamical processes on social networks, such as opinion formation, social balance, or epidemic spreading. In this paper, we use belief propagation and Monte Carlo simulations on tree-like signed graphs to predict that a sufficient propensity to xenophobia can impede a consensus that would otherwise emerge via a phase transition. As the strength of xenophobic interactions and the rationality of individuals with r…

Position: Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought
Chance Jiajie Li, Jiayi Wu, Zhenze Mo, Ao Qu, Yuhan Tang, Kaiya Ivy Zhao, Yulu Gan, Jie Fan, Jiangbo Yu, Jinhua Zhao, Paul Liang, Luis Alonso, Kent Larson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06958

Position: Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought
Simulating society with large language models (LLMs), we argue, requires more than generating plausible behavior -- it demands cognitively grounded reasoning that is structured, revisable, and traceable. LLM-based agents are increasingly used to emulate individual and group behavior -- primarily through prompting and supervised fine-tuning. Yet they often lack internal coherence, causal reasoning, and belief traceability -- making them unreliable for analyzing how people reason, deliberate, or …

"Scottish households urged to cut water use as climate crisis limits supplies"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Scotland #Climate

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12926 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Comparative Statics for the Subjective
I study robust comparative statics for risk-averse subjective expected utility (SEU) maximizers. Starting with a finite menu of actions totally ordered by sensitivity to risk, I identify the transformations of her menu that lead a decision-maker to take a lower action, regardless of her particular utility function or belief. My main results reveal that a robust decrease in the action selected is guaranteed by an intuitive steepening/tilting of the actions' payoffs and necessitates a slightly we…

Higher spin Richardson-Gaudin model with time-dependent coupling: Exact dynamics
Suvendu Barik, Lieuwe Bakker, Vladimir Gritsev, Ji\v{r}\'i Min\'a\v{r}, Emil A. Yuzbashyan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10856

Higher spin Richardson-Gaudin model with time-dependent coupling: Exact dynamics
We determine the exact asymptotic many-body wavefunction of a spin-$s$ Richardson-Gaudin model with a coupling inversely proportional to time, for time evolution starting from the ground state at $t = 0^+$ and for arbitrary $s$. Contrary to common belief, the resulting wavefunction cannot be derived from the spin-$1/2$ case by merging spins, but instead requires independent treatment for each spin size. The steady state is non-thermal and, in contrast to the spin-$1/2$ case, does not conform to…

Attention-based Learning for 3D Informative Path Planning
Rui Zhao, Xingjian Zhang, Yuhong Cao, Yizhuo Wang, Guillaume Sartoretti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08434

Attention-based Learning for 3D Informative Path Planning
In this work, we propose an attention-based deep reinforcement learning approach to address the adaptive informative path planning (IPP) problem in 3D space, where an aerial robot equipped with a downward-facing sensor must dynamically adjust its 3D position to balance sensing footprint and accuracy, and finally obtain a high-quality belief of an underlying field of interest over a given domain (e.g., presence of specific plants, hazardous gas, geological structures, etc.). In adaptive IPP task…

Capturing Misalignment
Pierfrancesco Guarino, Gabriel Ziegler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17176 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17176

Capturing Misalignment
We introduce and formalize misalignment, a phenomenon of interactive environments perceived from an analyst's perspective where an agent holds beliefs about another agent's beliefs that do not correspond to the actual beliefs of the latter. We demonstrate that standard frameworks, such as type structures, fail to capture misalignment, necessitating new tools to analyze this phenomenon. To this end, we characterize misalignment through non-belief-closed state spaces and introduce agent-dependent…