It does appear to be some encoding issue relating to the Unicode "→" (U+2192). Encoded with UTF-8, this is represented by the three bytes 0xE2 0x86 0x92. In the TeX EC encoding, these correspond to "âĘŠ".
I've submitted a replacement to arxiv that fixes the encoding issues (arxiv unfortunately does not support xelatex, which I use extensively). That will appear Tue 0:00 GMT.
In the meantime, I've made a version available at https://www.cs.umd.edu/~dvanhorn/jfp-draft-2016.pdf