10.3APJul 8
The Stability of the Backward Problem for Photoacoustic Imaging in Attenuating Media via Carleman EstimatesQihang Chen, Zhiyuan Li, Song Xu
This paper investigates the backward problem in time for photoacoustic tomography (PAT) in attenuating media. It is well-established that photoacoustic imaging in attenuating media can be accurately modeled by spatial fractional-order damping. This inverse problem is ill-posed in the sense of Hadamard. In this work, we construct a novel class of Carleman estimates independent of spatial variables, and by virtue of these estimates, we establish conditional stability estimates for this problem for the first time. Building upon this, we propose a Tikhonov-type regularization functional and derive its associated adjoint system. Furthermore, leveraging the established conditional stability results, we derive the convergence rate of the proposed regularization approach. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our theoretical findings through extensive numerical experiments.
11.4LGJul 8
The Optimal Sample Complexity of Learning Autoregressive Chain-of-ThoughtZhiyuan Li
We prove that, in the realizable PAC setting, the sample complexity of exact-trace learning for full autoregressive Chain-of-Thought traces is upper bounded by the standard multiclass rate of the local next-token class, where this rate is governed by the Daniely--Shalev-Shwartz dimension. Under exact-trace loss, one wrong action makes the whole trace incorrect; nevertheless, for every stopping rule $\mathtt{halt}$ and every pointwise $\mathtt{halt}$-halting local class $\mathrm{H}$, $n_{\mathrm{PAC}}^{\varepsilon,δ}(\operatorname{Roll}_{\mathtt{halt}}(\mathrm{H}))=O((\operatorname{DSdim}(\mathrm{H})+\log(1/δ))/\varepsilon)$, with no dependence on rollout length. The dependence on $\operatorname{DSdim}(\mathrm{H})$ is worst-case optimal, since one-step stopping recovers ordinary multiclass learning of $\mathrm{H}$. The proof introduces parity dimension, a rollout-stable refinement of DS dimension based on even pseudo-cubes. It controls one-inclusion density via a low-coordinate spanning theorem on finite restrictions and, unlike DS dimension itself, does not increase under autoregressive rollout. We also show why this detour is necessary: DS dimension can increase under rollout.