Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2504.17731

Synchronization of Quasi-Particle Excitations in a Quantum Gas with Cavity-Mediated Interactions

Authors:

Gabriele Natale ↗Alexander Baumg\"artner ↗Justyna Stefaniak ↗David Baur ↗Simon Hertlein ↗Dalila Rivero ↗Tilman Esslinger ↗Tobias Donner ↗

arXiv:2504.17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Driven-dissipative quantum systems can undergo transitions from stationary to dynamical phases, reflecting the emergence of collective non-equilibrium behavior. We study such a transition in a Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity and develop a cavity-assisted Bragg spectroscopy technique to resolve its collective modes. We observe dissipation-induced synchronization at the quasiparticle level, where two roton-like modes coalesce at an exceptional point. This reveals how dissipation microscopically drives collective dynamics and signals a precursor to a dynamical phase transition.

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02.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:d43e8eca8fd47b40383a8954fbde0c75

Cardiologists perspectives on sociocultural and structural factors shaping cardiovascular genetic testing

Authors:

Ramey ↗H. M ↗Gabriel ↗Morales ↗Romagnoli ↗Williams ↗M. S ↗

Introduction: Genetic testing is increasingly central to the diagnosis and management of cardiovascular genetic conditions. However, use and follow-through vary across patient populations. Examining clinician perspectives on sociocultural and structural factors influencing testing is important for understanding these differences and informing public health genomics research and implementation efforts. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 cardiologists from health systems across the United States who have integrated cardiogenetics in their practice. Interviews explored experiences diagnosing cardiovascular genetic conditions among patients from underrepresented backgrounds, as well as approaches to incorporating social and contextual information into care. Data were coded thematically and analyzed using a framework analysis guided by the Health Equity Implementation Framework and Social Determinants of Health domains. Results: Clinicians described multi-level factors shaping genetic testing practices, including patient-provider interactions, clinical workflows, health system infrastructure, and broader policy contexts. Key themes included challenges communicating complex genetic information across language and literacy differences; patient trust shaped by prior healthcare experiences; fragmented insurance coverage separating genetic testing from genetic counseling; and challenges interpreting variants of uncertain significance, particularly for populations underrepresented in genomic reference databases. Clinicians also described adaptive strategies, such as interdisciplinary collaboration, telehealth, and patient assistance programs, that supported testing in some settings but were often inconsistent or resource-dependent. Conclusion: Among cardiologists using genetic testing, system-level and sociocultural factors shape the feasibility and downstream use of cardiovascular genetic testing. Findings highlight considerations for public health-informed genomic infrastructure that accounts for social context, supports communication, and reduces reliance on individual clinician workarounds, with implications for clinical decision support and related public health genomics initiatives.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11289

i1: A Simple and Fully Open Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Authors:

Boya Zeng ↗Tianze Luo ↗Shu Pu ↗Jucheng Shen ↗Taiming Lu ↗Gabriel Sarch ↗Zhuang Liu ↗

Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.12678

No One Knows the State of the Art in Geospatial Foundation Models

Authors:

Isaac Corley ↗Nils Lehmann ↗Caleb Robinson ↗Gabriel Tseng ↗Anthony Fuller ↗Hamed Alemohammad ↗Evan Shelhamer ↗Jennifer Marcus ↗Hannah Kerner ↗

Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) have been proposed as generalizable backbones for disaster response, land-cover mapping, food-security monitoring, and other high-stakes Earth-observation tasks. Yet the published work about these models does not give reviewers or users enough information to tell which model fits a given task. We argue that nobody knows what the current state of the art is in geospatial foundation models. The methods may be useful, but the GFM literature does not standardize evaluations, training and testing protocols, released weights, or pretraining controls well enough for anyone to compare or rank them. In a 152-paper audit, we find 46 cross-paper disagreements of at least 10 points for the same model, benchmark, and protocol; 94/126 papers with extractable pretraining data use a configuration no other paper uses; and 39% of GFM papers release no model weights. This lack of community standards can be solved. We propose six concrete expectations: named-license weight release, shared core evaluations, copied-versus-rerun baseline annotations, variance reporting, one shared evaluation harness, and data-vs-architecture-vs-algorithm controls. These gaps are a coordination failure, not a fault of any individual lab; the authors of this paper, like many others in the GFM community, have contributed to them. Rather than just critiquing the community, we aim to provide concrete steps toward a shared understanding of how to innovate GFMs.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2501.18322

A Unified Perspective on the Dynamics of Deep Transformers

Authors:

Val\'erie Castin ↗Pierre Ablin ↗Jos\'e Antonio Carrillo ↗Gabriel Peyr\'e ↗

arXiv:2501.18322v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers, which are state-of-the-art in most machine learning tasks, represent the data as sequences of vectors called tokens. This representation is then exploited by the attention function, which learns dependencies between tokens and is key to the success of Transformers. However, the iterative application of attention across layers induces complex dynamics that remain to be fully understood. To analyze these dynamics, we identify each input sequence with a probability measure and model its evolution as a Vlasov equation called Transformer PDE, whose velocity field is non-linear in the probability measure. Our first set of contributions focuses on compactly supported initial data. We show the Transformer PDE is well-posed and is the mean-field limit of an interacting particle system, thus generalizing and extending previous analysis to several variants of self-attention: multi-head attention, L2 attention, Sinkhorn attention, Sigmoid attention, and masked attention–leveraging a conditional Wasserstein framework. In a second set of contributions, we are the first to study non-compactly supported initial conditions, by focusing on Gaussian initial data. Again for different types of attention, we show that the Transformer PDE preserves the space of Gaussian measures, which allows us to analyze the Gaussian case theoretically and numerically to identify typical behaviors. This Gaussian analysis captures the evolution of data anisotropy through a deep Transformer. In particular, we highlight a clustering phenomenon that parallels previous results in the non-normalized discrete case.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19023

Lifecycle-Aware Dynamic Analysis for Secure ML Model Execution

Authors:

Gabriele Digregorio ↗Marco Di Gennaro ↗Francesco Pastore ↗Stefano Zanero ↗Stefano Longari ↗Michele Carminati ↗

arXiv:2606.19023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing reliance on pre-trained Machine Learning (ML) models has introduced new attack surfaces. Recent vulnerabilities demonstrate that malicious behavior can be embedded within model artifacts, often bypassing existing defenses. Current model-scanning solutions primarily rely on static, format-specific rules or known attack signatures, which limit their ability to generalize across frameworks and to detect novel exploitation paths. In contrast, we propose a solution that focuses on the effects an attack has on the host system executing the model and builds on foundational intuitions about ML model execution. In particular, we observe that ML models operate within well-defined lifecycle phases and that, within each phase, interactions with the host system are highly structured and predictable. We translate these intuitions into Moat, a dynamic lifecycle-aware approach for securing ML model execution, and instantiate this design in Re-Moat, our reference implementation. We evaluate Re-Moat across multiple ML frameworks using 77,974 real-world model artifacts from the Hugging Face Hub, 31 Proofs-of-Concept (PoCs) from CVEs, and 334 models from a state-of-the-art dataset, and compare it against state-of-the-art model-scanning solutions. Our results show that our approach detects all evaluated attack classes while maintaining a close-to-zero false-positive rate, validating our intuitions and motivating dynamic analysis for securing ML model execution.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25525

The impact of artificial intelligence on enterprise software user roles

Authors:

Isabel Unger ↗Elizangela Valarini ↗Martin Schrepp ↗Nina Hollender ↗Gabriela Rocha ↗Erik Bertram ↗

arXiv:2606.25525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the nature of work in software development, transforming user roles, workflows, and collaboration patterns across enterprise platforms. This qualitative study investigates how AI alters professional responsibilities within the context of SAP's Business Technology Platform (BTP), combining expert interviews (n=20) and a participatory workshop (n=24). The results reveal substantial shifts in day-to-day tasks and roles in the development domain, characterized by increasing automation of operational tasks, expanding human-AI collaboration, and growing reliance on agentic AI systems. The study further identifies significant implications for existing user-role frameworks, such as the BTP User Type Matrix, which requires adaptation as the workforce is undergoing significant role specific changes. Collectively, these findings highlight a workforce landscape in transition and underscore the need for revised role taxonomies, new governance and oversight functions, and updated design approaches for AI-native enterprise software systems.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25358

Agentic Knowledge Tracing: A Multi-Agent LLM Architecture for Stealth Assessment of Financial Literacy in Serious Games

Authors:

Gabriel Santos ↗Rita Julia ↗Marcelo Nascimento ↗

arXiv:2606.25358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Assessing financial literacy during gameplay without disrupting the learning experience remains a key challenge in serious games for education. We present the Agentic BKT pipeline, a multi-agent large language model architecture for stealth assessment of financial competencies from open-ended gameplay events. The pipeline processes events from a 2D platformer serious game aligned with the OECD/INFE financial literacy framework through four phases: (1) the game captures every player decision as a structured event log; (2) an LLM event classifier labels each action on a four-point rubric validated against three domain experts (Fleiss kappa = 0.624, substantial agreement); (3) four domain-specific agents specializing in risk mitigation, investing, spending, and credit management perform session-level reasoning over behavioral trajectories, feeding per-competency Bayesian Knowledge Tracing that estimates mastery within each domain; and (4) an expert judge agent synthesizes the domain-level estimates into an overall mastery score. Evaluated with 193 K-12 participants across 264 game sessions, the Agentic BKT pipeline yields mastery estimates significantly correlated with learning gain (r = 0.276, p = 0.0001) and post-test scores (r = 0.333, p < 0.0001) while showing no correlation with pre-test scores, providing both convergent and discriminant validity. The multi-agent approach approximately triples the predictive validity of a single-LLM baseline (r = 0.095, not significant) in this study, demonstrating that domain decomposition and session-level reasoning play a central role in capturing the multidimensional nature of financial literacy from gameplay

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2308.06035

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Authors:

Viktor Kewenig ↗Andrew Lampinen ↗Samuel A. Nastase ↗Christopher Edwards ↗Quitterie Lacome D'Elascombe ↗Akilles Rechardt ↗Jeremy I Skipper ↗Gabriella Vigliocco ↗

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19138

INDEQS: Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS

Authors:

Michael Detzel ↗Gabriel Nobis ↗Kristiyan Blagov ↗Juri Schubert ↗Jackie Ma ↗Wojciech Samek ↗

arXiv:2606.19138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDE) provide a powerful continuous-time framework for forecasting time series, but standard graph-based extensions typically learn spatial structure purely from data, even in settings where a directed graph structure is known a priori. We introduce Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS (INDEQS), a graph-based NCDE forecasting method that incorporates prior knowledge of a directed graph at distinct architectural positions. INDEQS separates inner mixing of hidden states across graph nodes from outer mixing between vector field and control, and offers both a lightweight graph-constrained variant and a more expressive variant, learning additional graph connections from data via adaptive graph convolutions. To systematically study when graph informedness is beneficial in forecasting, we devise a continuous advection simulation on directed graphs, yielding synthetic spatio-temporal datasets with known ground-truth flow structure. We then evaluate INDEQS on two real-world tasks: river discharge forecasting on a hydrological network and traffic flow prediction on PeMS08. Across these synthetic and real-world benchmarks, outer informedness consistently improves mean absolute error over an uninformed NCDE with comparable parameter count, particularly on larger graphs, while inner informedness offers a more parameter-efficient alternative when strict adherence to a known adjacency is desired. A comparison of discrete convolutional and continuous-time decoders further shows that continuous decoders yield better accuracy and greater temporal flexibility on real-world tasks. An implementation of INDEQS and the advection simulation is available at https://github.com/Mitchi1/indeqs.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20223

DeepForestVisionV2: Ecology-Driven Taxonomy Expansion for Camera-Trap Monitoring in African Tropical Forests

Authors:

Camera-trap monitoring in African tropical forests increasingly extends beyond closed-canopy interiors to riverbanks, clearings, and park edges. Among available open tools for African forest camera-trap classification, DeepForestVision is the only one providing a matched offline workflow for both photographs and videos, and previous work showed that it outperformed other available baselines on a comparable benchmark. However, it was designed for closed-canopy, ground-level forest interiors and uses a 35-class prediction space that becomes too coarse when deployments encounter arboreal primates, birds, semi-aquatic taxa, or human-associated confounders such as livestock. We present DeepForestVisionV2, an ecology-driven expansion from 35 to 64 prediction classes (61 animal classes plus human, vehicle, and blank) designed to address three recurrent deployment gradients: vertical stratification, scene openness, and anthropogenic interfaces. DeepForestVisionV2 retains the same offline workflow and is trained on 1,535,010 photographs and 243,354 videos from multi-country African tropical-forest projects. Evaluation combines a cross-country cropped-photo validation set, used to assess robustness across sites and camera-trap settings, with three held-out Uganda video benchmarks spanning the targeted gradients. On the validation set, DeepForestVisionV2 reaches 0.86 accuracy, 0.82 macro-F1, and 0.81 balanced accuracy. On the deployment benchmarks, it preserves or improves baseline accuracy despite its harder classification task, while increasing the number of identified taxa from 22 to 29 in forest-interior videos and from 4 to 9 at riverbanks. In the park-edge use case, it raises accuracy from 0.62 to 0.86 and reduces false alarms from 11 to 0. These results show that DeepForestVisionV2 materially improves field utility while preserving robustness across sites, habitats, and camera-trap settings.

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12.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:24225ed15b554591e127268ea0d3c7c8

HTS-Oracle v2: Prospective AI-Guided Discovery and Experimental Validation of Small Molecule Modulators Across Multiple Targets

Authors:

Abdel-Rahman ↗Gabr ↗

High-throughput screening (HTS) remains the cornerstone of early-phase small molecule discovery yet consistently underperforms against immunotherapy targets, yielding validated hit rates below 0.1%. Here we introduce HTS-Oracle v2, which features rigorous cross-validation that ensures honest performance estimates. HTS-Oracle v2 was trained and validated across four clinically significant immune checkpoint targets (CD28, ICOS, LAG-3, and TIGIT) achieving ROC-AUC values of 0.968, 0.969, 0.875, 0.928 respectively under rigorous cross-validation. For prospective experimental validation, HTS-Oracle v2 was applied to an 8,960-compound Enamine Protein Mimetic Library, selecting only 25 compounds per target for experimental testing using temperature-related intensity change (TRIC) technology, a 99.7% reduction in screening burden. HTS-Oracle v2 identified 4, 5, 4, and 6 validated binders from 25 prospectively selected compounds per target, corresponding to validated hit rates of 16%, 20%, 16%, and 24%, respectively. Notably, 67-80% of all experimentally confirmed hits across the full 8,960-compound library were captured within just 25 model-selected compounds per target. For CD28, this represents a 28-fold improvement over HTS-Oracle v1 (239x versus 8.4x), establishing HTS-Oracle v2 as an efficient platform for AI-guided prospective hit discovery across immunotherapy targets.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.18231

Attacking the First-Principle: A Black-Box, Query-Free Targeted Mimicry Attack on Binary Function Classifiers

Authors:

Gabriel Sauger ↗Jean-Yves Marion ↗Sazzadur Rahaman ↗Victor Matrat ↗Vincent Tourneur ↗Muaz Ali ↗

arXiv:2605.18231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Binary function classifiers play a crucial role in maintaining the security and integrity of software systems by detecting malicious code and unauthorized modifications. However, machine learning-based classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can evade detection. In this study, we present Kelpie, a novel framework for executing mimicry attacks, a stronger type of targeted evasion attacks, on binary function classifiers in a black-box, zero-query setting. Unlike previous approaches that rely on querying the target classifier to refine untargeted evasion attacks, Kelpie leverages code transformations that preserve the functionality of malicious payloads while causing them to be misclassified as we want. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Kelpie can successfully execute mimicry attacks against six state-of-the-art binary function classifiers representing different model architectures without requiring direct interaction with them. We further validate our approach with a practical demonstration, involving a keylogger and a wiper concealed within benign-looking functions embedded in an application. This work, to our best knowledge, is the first to demonstrate such a mimicry attack in a black-box, zero-query context, raising important questions about the reliability and security of existing machine learning-based binary function classifiers.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2504.11171

TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation

Authors:

arXiv:2504.11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) – the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output – and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code are open-sourced under a permissive license.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14006

HARBOR: Heading Analysis and Reconstruction from Behavioral Observation and Radar

Authors:

Joao P. A. Dantas ↗Paulo F. Silva Filho ↗Jelton A. Cunha ↗Gabriel Dietzsch ↗

Maritime situational awareness often relies on Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmissions to track vessel movements. However, in operational or conflict scenarios, these data may be unavailable due to signal loss, deliberate deactivation, or intentional spoofing. In such conditions, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery becomes a critical sensing alternative for wide-area maritime monitoring, despite providing only static scene snapshots. This work introduces HARBOR (Heading Analysis and Reconstruction from Behavioral Observation and Radar), a complete pipeline for transforming a single SAR image into predictive motion information without requiring any auxiliary data source at inference time. The method begins with SAR image preprocessing to enhance and segment vessel candidates, followed by automatic detection, size-based classification, and heading estimation using skeleton geometry and local intensity patterns. AIS data are used exclusively during an offline calibration phase to derive vessel-type-dependent motion parameters, which are then applied to generate probabilistic heatmaps of candidate future vessel positions. A case study using real COSMO-SkyMed SAR imagery demonstrates the pipeline on a maritime scene in southern Brazil, showing its ability to extract motion tendencies and generate probabilistic projections of vessel positions in data-denied environments.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25978

Multi-Agent Goal Recognition with Team- and Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning and Factorized Branch-and-Bound

Authors:

Thiago Thomas ↗Gabriel de Oliveira Ramos ↗Felipe Meneguzzi ↗

arXiv:2606.25978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent goal recognition asks an observer to jointly infer which agents act together and what each team is trying to achieve, so the hypothesis space grows combinatorially with the number of team partitions and goals per team. Real applications such as drone surveillance and collaborative robotics expose only the agents' trajectory, which forces the observer to rank team-goal hypotheses from behavior alone. Multi-Agent Goal Recognition with Branch-and-Bound (MAGR-BB) addresses this setting with a shared team- and goal-conditioned policy used as the scoring model inside a factorized branch-and-bound search. On a controlled multi-agent Blocksworld benchmark, MAGR-BB returns the same top-ranked hypothesis as exhaustive search throughout the trajectory while cutting hypothesis materialization by orders of magnitude and reducing cumulative recognition runtime substantially.

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13375

Driven-dissipative entanglement of distant giant atoms

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum interconnects distribute entanglement via controlled light-matter interactions for quantum computing and sensing applications. Many entanglement generation schemes use coherent, reversible interactions that require precisely calibrated pulses to execute. In contrast, driven-dissipative protocols use a continuous-wave drive in the presence of correlated dissipation to stabilize entanglement in protected (dark) states. However, the same dissipation that generates the entanglement also limits its utility once the stabilization protocol ends. Here, we engineer a superconducting system of two giant artificial atoms coupled sequentially to a waveguide, with tunable individual and correlated dissipation enabled by interference between coupling points. Continuously driving the atoms through the waveguide exploits correlated dissipation to generate remote entanglement. We then tune the qubit frequencies in situ to suppress individual dissipation and thereby preserve the entanglement, achieving a Bell-state fidelity F = 0.89 +/- 0.02. This demonstration indicates that the driven dissipation of giant atoms is a viable approach for distributing entanglement across quantum networks.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24855

OpenThoughts-Agent: Data Recipes for Agentic Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic language models dramatically expand the applications of AI yet little is publicly known about how to curate training data for broadly capable agents. Existing open efforts such as SWE-Smith, SERA, and Nemotron-Terminal typically target a single benchmark, leaving open the question of how to train models that generalize across diverse agentic tasks. The OpenThoughts-Agent (OT-Agent) project addresses this gap with a fully open data curation pipeline for training agentic models. We conduct more than 100 controlled ablation experiments to systematically investigate each stage of the pipeline, yielding insights on the importance of task sources and diversity. We then assemble a training set of 100K examples from our pipeline and fine-tune Qwen3-32B on this dataset, which yields an average accuracy of 44.8% across seven agentic benchmarks and a 3.9 percentage point improvement over the strongest existing open data agentic model (Nemotron-Terminal-32B, 40.9%). Moreover, our training data exhibits strong scaling properties, outperforming alternative open datasets at every training set size in compute-controlled comparisons. We publicly release our training sets, data pipeline, experimental data, and models at openthoughts.ai to support future open research on agentic model training.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19199

Forecasting what Matters: Decision-Focused RL for Controlled EV Charging with Unknown Departure Times

Authors:

Giuseppe Gabriele ↗Fabio Pavirani ↗Seyed Soroush Karimi Madahi ↗Chris Develder ↗

arXiv:2606.19199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The recent growth of EV adoption poses challenges for power systems, including increased peak demand and potential grid instability. Smart control of EV charging – e.g., based on reinforcement learning (RL) – can alleviate these issues by learning temporal and contextual patterns from historical data. Yet, in real-world scenarios, key features, such as departure time, often are unavailable. This, in turn, makes it harder for an RL agent to learn and execute an effective charging policy. To mitigate this uncertainty, a trained forecaster can approximate the unknown features from available data. However, since these forecasting models are typically trained for accuracy (rather than their impact on a downstream agent's decision quality), their errors may propagate and hinder the overall performance of a controller that is using the forecasts. To avoid this, we propose a decision-focused RL (DF-RL) framework in which the forecaster is trained end-to-end, i.e., with feedback from the charging policy actions taken by the RL agent. Such joint training of both the forecaster and controller ultimately results in higher-quality actions: our proposed DF-RL method yields superior charging decisions compared to other baselines, achieving up to a 14% improvement in total reward and a 55% reduction of unsupplied energy (i.e., charging that failed to happen because the EV already left), relative to the RL method without departure time forecasting.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2604.21097

Learning to Emulate Chaos: Adversarial Optimal Transport Regularization

Authors:

Gabriel Melo ↗Leonardo Santiago ↗Peter Y. Lu ↗

arXiv:2604.21097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chaos arises in many complex dynamical systems, from weather to power grids, but is difficult to accurately model with data-driven methods such as machine learning emulators. While emulators are promising tools for accelerating simulations and solving inverse problems, they still struggle to learn chaotic dynamics, where sensitivity to initial conditions renders exact long-term forecasts infeasible, especially given noisy data. Recent work instead trains emulators to match the statistical properties of chaotic attractors, but these approaches often rely on handcrafted summary statistics or large, diverse multi-environment datasets. In this work, we propose a family of adversarial optimal transport objectives that can jointly learn high-quality summary statistics and a physically consistent emulator from a single noisy trajectory. We theoretically analyze and experimentally validate a Sinkhorn divergence formulation (2-Wasserstein) and a WGAN-style dual formulation (1-Wasserstein) of our approach. Numerical experiments across a variety of chaotic systems, including ones with high-dimensional spatiotemporal chaos, show that emulators trained using our proposed objectives have significantly improved long-term statistical fidelity.

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12507

Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers

Authors:

MohammadHossein Rezaei ↗Anas Mahmoud ↗Zihao Wang ↗Utkarsh Tyagi ↗Advait Gosai ↗Razvan-Gabriel Dumitru ↗Aakash Sabharwal ↗Bing Liu ↗Yunzhong He ↗

arXiv:2606.12507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubrics have emerged as an alternative to RLVR in open-ended domains where a single ground-truth final answer is not available. Existing rubric-based training methods rely on an LLM verifier that scores each rollout against rubrics. This introduces substantial training-time overhead, exposes optimization to verifier-specific biases, and reduces rubric feedback to a sparse end-of-trajectory signal. We propose Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation (RGSD), a verifier-free training method in which the base policy, conditioned on the rubric, serves as the teacher for the unconditioned student. RGSD distills the rubric-conditioned teacher distribution into the student token-by-token, replacing sparse trajectory-level rewards with dense per-token learning signals and removing the LLM judge from the training loop entirely. Across Qwen-2.5 (3B, 7B) and Qwen3-Thinking (4B, 8B) models on medical and science domains, RGSD achieves rubric satisfaction comparable to judge-based GRPO while using one on-policy rollout per prompt and no training-time verifier calls. Ablations show that raw rubrics provide a stronger teacher enrichment signal than self-generated reference responses, while a stronger GRPO judge can outperform RGSD in some settings, positioning RGSD as a complementary verifier-free alternative when verifier cost or reliability is the bottleneck.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13691

Incentives Of EdTech: A Systematic Review Of EduNLP Research

Authors:

Gabrielle Gaudeau ↗Aoife O'Driscoll ↗Jasper Degraeuwe ↗Andrew Caines ↗Donya Rooein ↗Zeerak Talat ↗

While the Natural Language Processing community has dedicated significant resources in developing educational technologies (EdTech) that support this shift, it remains unclear whose interests are being best served among the stakeholders of education. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of 204 papers published in venues of the Association for Computational Linguistics' Special Interest Group on Building Educational Applications in 2024 and 2025, and validate these against EdTech papers from the wider ACL Anthology. By examining stakeholder inclusion and the prioritisation of research tasks, our findings reveal a critical tension: a push and pull between private-sector incentives and the foundational needs of educational infrastructure. Our analysis reveals that teachers are systematically under-represented as beneficiaries of research (33.3%) despite being the most affected, that real-world deployment remains rare (9.8%), and that ethical engagement tends toward acknowledgement rather than action. Drawing on exemplary papers in our corpus, we offer concrete recommendations for more responsible EduNLP research practices.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16807

Connecting Speech to Words through Images

Authors:

Gabriel Pirlogeanu ↗Dan Oneata ↗Horia Cucu ↗Herman Kamper ↗

How can we learn the mapping between written words and their spoken counterparts in the absence of explicit textual supervision? We present a visually grounded method for building a vocabulary of spoken words using only images and their spoken descriptions. First, image captioning systems are used to build a vocabulary of written words representing salient visual concepts in the images. For each word, we then find utterances whose image captions contain that word. Then we use an unsupervised word discovery technique to align these utterances to locate instances of the target word. The result is spoken word segments that are linked to written words – all accomplished without any text supervision. In spoken word retrieval and keyword spotting experiments, the proposed approach outperforms a strong neural baseline while being more interpretable. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in English and motivate future work on low-resource languages without transcripts.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20560

How Transparent is DiffusionGemma?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM reasoning transparency is a critical affordance for understanding model decisions, mitigating misuse and misalignment, and debugging surprising model behaviors. However, DiffusionGemma performs a larger fraction of its computation in a continuous latent space; does this make its reasoning less transparent? We study this question by decomposing transparency into two components: variable transparency, whether we understand intermediate snapshots of a model's computational state; and algorithmic transparency, whether we can use these snapshots to reconstruct the process by which the model arrived at its outputs. Naively, DiffusionGemma has poor variable transparency: its opaque serial depth, the amount of serial computation that occurs in between interpretable model states, seems at first 28.6X higher than the corresponding autoregressive Gemma 4 model. However, we show that we can map the information flowing between denoising steps through an interpretable token bottleneck with no decrease in downstream performance. Treating these intermediate states as interpretable reduces the opaque serial depth to just 1.1X that of Gemma 4. Algorithmic transparency is harder for diffusion models than for autoregressive models because all token predictions in the canvas can change at every denoising step, giving the model the power to implement complicated distributed algorithms during the denoising process. To begin bridging this gap, we conduct a suite of interpretability case studies, uncovering initial evidence of novel diffusion-specific phenomena such as non-chronological reasoning, token and sequence smearing, and intermediate-context reasoning. Finally, we test monitorability, a key application of transparency that measures whether model outputs are useful for downstream tasks. We find that DiffusionGemma is similarly monitorable to Gemma 4.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17603

Expanding SPHERE-JEPA: A Family of Statistical Regularizers for the Hypersphere

Authors:

L\'eo Nicollier ↗Enric Meinhardt-Llopis ↗Max Dunitz ↗Marc Pic ↗Pablo Mus\'e ↗Gabriele Facciolo ↗

arXiv:2606.17603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), preventing representation collapse by explicitly enforcing a uniform distribution on the unit hypersphere has proven to be effective. However, current frameworks typically rely on sliced statistical regularizers such as SIGReg (used in LeJEPA) and SUSReg (used in SPHERE-JEPA), which approximate this continuous objective via Monte Carlo sampling along random 1D directions. This stochasticity injects projection variance into the training gradients, destabilizing optimization, and hindering convergence. In this work, we first show that analytically integrating out these random projections natively yields a deterministic Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), bypassing the variance of sliced methods. Motivated by this equivalence, we formulate full-dimensional objectives for MMD, Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD), and Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence directly on the sphere to enforce a uniform distribution. To prevent spatial bias, we equip these tests with rotationally invariant kernels constructed via spectral theory, systematically evaluating two canonical families: smooth exponential decay (Heat) and strict frequency cutoff (Bandlimited) filters. Empirically, removing projection-induced noise results in more stable optimization, faster convergence, and consistent improvements over stochastic sliced regularizers on ImageNet and Galaxy10. Furthermore, we reveal that the choice of the statistical test shapes the geometry of the learned latent space: MMD and KSD favor locally clustered organization suitable for object-centric domains, whereas the continuous KDE-based KL divergence promotes fine-grained instance separation, yielding the strongest results on unclustered procedural texture retrieval.

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