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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Geometry of critical discrete structures: long-range percolation on the hierarchical lattice and the discrete torus

arXiv:2509.09589v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider (a) balls $\Lambda_n$ of growing volumes in the $d$-dimensional hierarchical lattice, and (b) the $d$-dimensional discrete torus $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ on $n^d$ vertices. Place edges independently between each pair of vertices $x\neq y\in\Lambda_n$ or $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ with probability $1-\exp(-\beta J(x, y) )$ where $J(x, y) \asymp \| x-y \|^{-\alpha}$ for some $0

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Muse Spark Safety & Preparedness Report

arXiv:2606.12429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muse Spark is the latest large language model developed by Meta. In this report, we first present evaluations for catastrophic risk domains under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework, along with the evidence that informed our launch decision. We then discuss additional considerations, such as Muse Spark's broader content safety and behavioral profile, that are relevant to overall safety but fall outside the catastrophic risk domains governed by the Framework. Our preparedness results covering Chemical and Biological, Cybersecurity, and Loss of Control risks assess Muse Spark's deployment within Meta AI as presenting acceptable levels of residual risks under our Advanced AI Scaling Framework. We conducted a broad set of evaluations targeting dual-use and high-risk capabilities across these catastrophic risk domains. Those evaluations identified elevated risks prior to mitigations, with Chemical and Biological capabilities assessed as likely reaching the "high risk" category under the Advanced AI Scaling Framework before safeguards were applied. We have implemented a multi-layered set of mitigations that address the identified risks, and Muse Spark demonstrates state-of-the-art refusal across a range of benchmarks related to hazardous workflows in chemistry and biology. We therefore release Muse Spark as the underlying model of Meta AI.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A2D2: Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding

arXiv:2606.13565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion models offer a simple and stable likelihood-based framework for sequence generation, recently extended to any-length settings via token insertion. Principled reward-guided fine-tuning for any-length discrete diffusion, however, remains largely unexplored. We introduce Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding (A2D2), a unified framework for reward-guided fine-tuning of any-length discrete diffusion models via joint optimization of the insertion and unmasking policies together with a quality-based inference schedule. We derive the Radon-Nikodym derivative for the joint insertion-unmasking path measures, enabling theoretically guaranteed convergence to the intractable reward-tilted sequence distribution without requiring target samples. Building on this, we establish unmasking and insertion quality as tractable approaches for minimizing decoding error and introduce the Adaptive Joint Decoding (AJD) loss, which provably yields the optimal path measure that generates the reward-tilted distribution. Empirically, A2D2 improves reward optimization while enhancing generation flexibility and accuracy over prior fixed-length fine-tuning and inference-time guidance methods.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Characterizing Cultural Localization in AI-Generated Stories

The global use of artificial intelligence has increased interest in assessing the ability to generate culturally localized content, including stories. Cultural localization in stories often occurs through either templated localization – the use of cultural markers (e.g., names, locations) in a generic narrative – or holistic localization – the variation of plots, values, and themes, in addition to cultural markers. We propose a method to measure the degree to which content was generated through templated localization. Specifically, we identify the lexical tokens that distinguish stories across nationalities and measure the similarity of the narratives that remain after removing them. In stories generated by five models on 125 topics for 193 nationalities, our method is able to detect that only a small subset (9-17%) of the vocabulary accounts for the variation across nationalities and that the narratives that remain after removing them contain repeated multi-word sequences, suggesting the presence of a shared culturally-agnostic narrative template. Finally, we characterize the cultural markers for their stereotypicality and offensiveness, finding that markers from 19 countries, mostly located in the Global South, are on average offensive.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) 2025: Benchmark of Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis in Multimodal PET/CT

Head and neck cancers (HNC) represent a significant global health burden, with accurate tumor delineation being essential for effective radiotherapy planning. The complexity of the oropharyngeal anatomy, combined with the heterogeneous appearance of tumors on imaging, makes manual segmentation time-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. Beyond segmentation, predicting long-term clinical outcomes, such as recurrence-free survival (RFS), and determining human papillomavirus (HPV) status from noninvasive imaging, remain challenging yet clinically valuable goals. The HECKTOR 2025 challenge addresses these needs by establishing a comprehensive benchmark for automated HNC analysis using multimodal PET/CT imaging and electronic health records. Building on previous editions (2020-2022), this challenge features an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising over 1,100 patients from 10 centers worldwide. Participants were tasked with three complementary objectives: (1) segmenting primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and metastatic lymph nodes (GTVn), (2) predicting recurrence-free survival, and (3) classifying HPV status. The challenge attracted 35 registered teams, with 15 final submissions evaluated on a held-out test set. Top-performing algorithms achieved a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 for segmentation, a concordance index of 0.66 for survival prediction, and a balanced accuracy of 0.56 for HPV classification. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the submitted methodologies, evaluates their performance across different lesion characteristics, and discusses their implications for clinical translation in automated oncology workflows and decision support systems.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Generative Modeling on Metric Graphs via Neural Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.16273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce, to our knowledge, the first deep generative modeling framework for probability distributions continuously supported on compact metric graphs. Given source and target measures on a metric graph, our method embeds the graph into a smooth ambient space, solves an entropic Kantorovich problem via a neural semidual parameterization, and projects generated samples back onto the original graph. We study two embedded geometries: an extrinsic Euclidean realization and the intrinsic tropical Abel–Jacobi embedding into the Jacobian torus. In both cases, the resulting generator is graph-supported by construction. We prove that, in the joint limit of increasing neural expressivity, the learned generator converges weakly to a valid transport coupling between the original graph measures. Empirically, across a range of geometrically distinct graphs, our method matches or improves upon heuristic transport baselines based on discrete graph OT, while scaling more favorably. Finally, we demonstrate scalability on real-world urban mobility data by training our model on one million Uber pickup locations in Manhattan, New York City.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Relighting as a Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that separate illumination from scene properties while preserving dense geometry, material, and photometric cues. We use this task as a probe of visual priors: unlike recognition tasks that reward invariance, relighting tests whether visual features retain the information needed for light transfer. Through a controlled generative relighting framework, we find that strong semantic encoders can degrade relighting quality, exposing a semantic–photometric trade-off between abstraction and physical fidelity. We introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances this trade-off by fusing dense, pixel-aligned visual features into a latent-intrinsic relighting model and refining it with self-supervision on unlabeled real image pairs. ALI improves relighting quality, especially on glossy, metallic, and transparent materials, and demonstrates that generative relighting is an effective tool for quantifying what visual encoders encode about the physical world.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Data-driven Lake Water Quality Forecasting for Time Series with Missing Data using Machine Learning

arXiv:2601.15503v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volunteer-led lake monitoring yields irregular, seasonal time series with many gaps arising from ice cover, weather-related access constraints, and occasional human errors, complicating forecasting and early warning of harmful algal blooms. We study Secchi Disk Depth (SDD) forecasting on a 30-lake, data-rich subset drawn from three decades of in-situ records collected across Maine lakes. Missingness is handled via Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), and we evaluate performance with a normalized Mean Absolute Error (nMAE) metric for cross-lake comparability. Among six candidates, ridge regression provides the best mean test performance. Using ridge regression, we then quantify the minimal sample size, showing that under a backward, recent-history protocol, the model reaches within 5% of full-history accuracy with approximately 176 training samples per lake on average. We also identify a minimal feature set, where a compact four-feature subset matches the thirteen-feature baseline within the same 5% tolerance. Bringing these results together, we introduce a joint feasibility function that identifies the minimal training history and fewest predictors sufficient to achieve the target of staying within 5% of the complete-history, full-feature baseline. In our study, meeting the 5% accuracy target required about 64 recent samples and just one predictor per lake, highlighting the practicality of targeted monitoring. Hence, our joint feasibility strategy unifies recent-history length and feature choice under a fixed accuracy target, yielding a simple, efficient rule for setting sampling effort and measurement priorities for lake researchers.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking

Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples. However, large-scale mapping of these settlements is severely constrained not only by the scarcity of annotations but by inherent data quality challenges, specifically high spectral ambiguity between formal and informal structures and significant annotation noise. We address this by introducing a benchmark dataset for Lahore, constructed from scratch, along with companion datasets for Karachi and Mumbai, which were derived from verified administrative boundaries, totaling approximately 900 $km^2$ of urban area. This collection is supplemented by four cities from prior literature across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, with comprehensive data quality assessments provided for each city. We also propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to mitigate the class imbalance and distribution mismatch inherent in standard semi-supervised learning pipelines. Our method integrates a Class-Aware Adaptive Thresholding mechanism that dynamically adjusts confidence thresholds to prevent minority class suppression, and a DINOv2-based unlabeled pool filter that removes out-of-distribution tiles prior to training to reduce covariate shift. Extensive experiments across seven cities spanning three continents, repeated over five random seeds, demonstrate gains of up to +5.9 pp mIoU over state-of-the-art semi-supervised baselines, with both components being architecture-agnostic and adding no inference overhead.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal Toffoli-Depth Multi-Controlled Toffoli Decomposition in 2D Qubit Layout

arXiv:2606.15113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gate is a key primitive in quantum arithmetic, oracle construction, and quantum cryptanalysis. Although recent work has established optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions under all-to-all qubit connectivity, their realization on near-term quantum hardware with restricted qubit connectivity remains largely unexplored. While general-purpose quantum mappers can route arbitrary circuits, they do not explicitly exploit the repeated interaction patterns inherent in MCT decompositions. In our present paper, we study architecture-aware mappings of optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions onto restricted two-dimensional qubit layouts. We begin with a structured geometric placements that preserve the parallelism of state-of-the-art Toffoli and MCT decompositions with no additional depth overhead. We further introduce a motif-based packing framework in which decomposition layers are represented by interaction motifs derived from basic Toffoli gates. By embedding these motifs vertex-disjointly into hardware graphs, we characterize the minimum-size topologies supporting the required qubit resources and derive explicit bounds on the resulting depth overhead under tight qubit budgets. Finally, we compare these bounds with routing-aware placement heuristics and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of embedding different motifs across a range of hardware topologies.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Thinking in Boxes: 3D Editing in Real Images Made Easy

Text and 2D-conditioning interfaces provide weak, ambiguous control over spatial transformations in image editing – particularly under large object motions and camera changes. Prior work has used 3D primitives such as boxes, but only as loose conditioning signals indicating approximate object location rather than specifying the transformation. We instead use 3D boxes as structured specifications: the user provides the input and output boxes of the edit, casting editing as a well-posed geometry problem. This ``thinking in boxes'' interface, where each box face is color-coded to convey 3D orientation, gives precise control over translation, rotation, scaling, and viewpoint changes in real images while preserving scene and object identity, and recovering previously unseen object regions. To ground transformations in scene appearance, we introduce a depth-aligned planar floor as a global reference frame, shaded with depth-aware cues. Conditioned on this structure, an image generator produces consistent results under large transformations. Trained in two stages – on synthetic multi-object scenes and a small set of real-world videos from Objectron – the system generalizes to complex, in-the-wild real images. Our method operates directly on real photographs and substantially outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods on large 3D edits.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Entity Labels Are Not Entity Signals: A Framework for Observable Relevance in Document Re-Ranking

Entity-aware document retrieval uses query-associated entities as ranking signals, assuming that semantically relevant entities are also useful retrieval signals. We show this assumption is insufficient- and explain why. Unlike terms, which are ground-truth observations, entity links are hypotheses produced by an imperfect linker: an entity can be topically central yet provide no discriminative signal if the linker fires indiscriminately across relevant and non-relevant documents. We formalize this as a distinction between Conceptual Entity Relevance (CER)- whether an entity is topically related to a query- and Observable Entity Relevance (OER)- whether its observed presence in a collection discriminates relevant from non-relevant documents. Across four collections and annotation sources including human entity judgments, CER and OER exhibit near-chance agreement ($\kappa \approx 0$), while OER operationalizations agree substantially ($\kappa \approx 0.5$), confirming CER as the systematic outlier. CER-based supervision selects topically plausible but weakly discriminative entities, pruning fewer than 4% of non-relevant documents on some collections. Aligning supervision with OER improves non-relevant pruning by up to 10x and open-world MAP by 0.051 over BM25. Our findings motivate a shift from conceptual to observable notions of entity relevance in entity-aware retrieval.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Improved Knowledge Distillation for Land-Use Image Classification

In the present article, an improved Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework has been proposed for efficient compression of deep convolutional neural networks for land-use image classification task. Motivated by the need to achieve competitive classification accuracy while reducing computational complexity, a teacher-student learning paradigm is adopted in which a VGG16 network transfers knowledge to a lightweight MobileNetV2 model. The proposed framework integrates hard supervision from ground truth labels with a soft supervision strategy that combines Kullback-Leibler divergence and Cosine Similarity losses. Experiments conducted on three land-use datasets show that the proposed KD-based method yields improved performance, and achieves an accuracy of 99.04%, outperforming both baseline student training and single-loss distillation approaches, while retaining substantial model compression.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Elucidating the Design Space of Generative Models for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction

Next-token prediction has produced predictable scaling in language, but the recipe presumes a sequence of tokens with a meaningful order. Single-cell RNA-seq counts have no natural gene ordering, so applying the recipe directly to raw expression fails under an ill-suited left-to-right bias. We instead ask whether a learned latent can supply the structure the recipe needs. We introduce texttt{ExpressionVAE} (eVAE), a discrete-latent perturbation model that compresses each cell into a short sequence of discrete codes through a finite-scalar-quantization (FSQ) bottleneck and trains a perturbation-conditioned discrete prior over those codes. On Replogle and Parse~1M, eVAE sets a new state of the art on every distributional metric and leads on most cell-eval perturbation metrics, with Fr'echet distance and $mathrm{MMD}^2$ roughly $3$ to $20times$ lower than the strongest continuous-latent baseline. Swapping the prior between autoregressive and masked discrete diffusion leaves performance near-identical, isolating the gain to the discrete latent itself rather than the prior family. A decoder-head ablation then exposes a single design axis, the richness of the predictive distribution at inference, that splits the standard metrics into two groups, variance-sensitive and mean-sensitive, which move in opposite directions along the axis. Finally, on a held-out CRISPRi reversion benchmark of $1{,}732$ perturbations under inflammatory cytokine stress, the frozen eVAE encoder outperforms UMAP and differential expression and matches scGPT on perturbation ranking at a fraction of the data.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Cosmological Pseudo-Entropy

arXiv:2606.15227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study pseudo entropy $\mathcal{S}$, a recent generalization of entanglement entropy, for scalar cosmological perturbations in de Sitter space with sound speed $0.024 \leq c_s \leq 1$, and in expanding and contracting FLRW backgrounds with varying equation-of-state parameter $w$. In de Sitter space, $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ grows after horizon exit while $c_s$ controls its onset and saturates at late times. A similar saturation occurs in expanding-accelerating and contracting-decelerating backgrounds. In contrast, expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds show large early-time $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ followed by oscillations after horizon re-entry. This happens because while the squeezing freezes, the squeezing angle doesn't. Unlike entanglement entropy, pseudo entropy possesses an imaginary part, $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$, as well, which can encode the relative phase. $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$ decays to zero in de Sitter and expanding-accelerating cases, but forms dense sub-Hubble oscillation bands in expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds. Compared with entanglement entropy, Krylov complexity, and Nielsen circuit complexity, pseudo entropy captures otherwise hidden phase information; in the unsaturated regime, its slope is $\sqrt{2}$ times that of Nielsen complexity. Unlike circuit complexity, whose saturation bound is $w$-independent, pseudo entropy is sensitive to $w$ during the transition regime, making it a finer information theoretic diagnostic of cosmological dynamics.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Investigation of Intra-Fraction Stability and Inter-Fraction Reproducibility of Deep Inspiration Breath-Hold Across Two Hypofractionated Radiotherapy Regimens in the HYPORT Adjuvant Study.

Background: Deep Inspiration Breath Hold (DIBH) is a widely used respiratory motion management technique for minimizing cardiac dose in left-sided breast radiotherapy. In the Breast HYPORT Adjuvant study, DIBH was employed for cardiac sparing in patients without nodal irradiation using a standardized institutional protocol with the Varian Real-time Position Management (RPM) system. Both moderate-hypofractionation (control arm - 40Gy in 15 fractions) and one-week hypofractionation (experimental arm - 26 Gy in 5 fractions) regimens were delivered using this protocol. This study aimed to evaluate the robustness of DIBH by analyzing intra-fraction stability and inter-fraction reproducibility of breath-hold amplitude across the two treatment regimens. Methods: Respiratory waveforms acquired during each treatment session were analyzed to determine the median breath-hold amplitude and its standard deviation during beam delivery. Intra-fraction stability was assessed from vari- ations within individual treatment sessions, while inter-fraction reproducibility was evaluated relative to the simula- tion waveform amplitude across all treatment sessions. These parameters were compared between the two HYPORT regimens to examine breath-hold consistency during treatment delivery. Moreover, an additional comparison was made between the one-week hypofractionation regimen and the first five fractions of the moderate-hypofractionation regimen to evaluate the effect of treatment duration . Lung volumes from free-breathing and DIBH CT scans were analyzed to assess the effectiveness of patient breath-hold training. Results: Both arms demonstrated an average 1.7-fold increase of air volume in lung during the breath-hold position, confirming the effective implementation of DIBH during treatment planning and delivery. Structured training resulted in increased breath-hold amplitudes, with gains of 22.87% and 24.16% with respect to the first trial session in the experimental and control arms, respectively. Both regimens receive equivalent doses for approximately the same air volume in lung . Despite the different prescription doses in the two arms (26 Gy vs. 40 Gy), the experimental arm achieved an equivalent mean heart dose of 2.91% (75.6 cGy) compared with 2.95% (118.51 cGy) in the control arm, suggesting a similar cardiac preservation protocol adopted during treatment planning. Intra-fraction stability was similar between the control arm and the experimental arm, with median amplitude variations of 1.006 mm (95% CI: [0.998-1.015]) and 1.079 mm (95% CI: [1.067-1.097]), respectively. In contrast, inter-fraction reproducibility improved in the experimental arm, with lower deviation from simulation amplitude (0.44 {+/-} 0.24 mm vs. 0.66 {+/-} 0.25 mm) for the entire treatment schedule. The stability and reproducibility of experimental arm were further compared with the first five fractions of the control arm. The results were similar to those of the experimental arm. Conclusion: In this study, we compared two treatment regimens in terms of intra-fraction stability and inter-fraction reproducibility during DIBH radiotherapy. Both regimens demonstrated comparable intra-fraction stability, indicating effective motion management irrespective of treatment duration. However, the experimental arm showed better inter- fraction reproducibility, suggesting more consistent breath-hold performance throughout the treatment course. Based on stability and reproducibility, a reasonable narrowing of the DIBH gating window may be implemented with minor changes to the institutional protocol. The observed trend highlights the potential for improved consistency with the experimental approach and supports further investigation to better understand the underlying factors and strengthen these findings in future studies.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Static Leaderboards: Predictive Validity for the Evaluation of LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.19704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent benchmarks are growing fast, but no single benchmark touches more than four or five of the dimensions that deployment exposes. This paper aggregates the largest coordinated deep-dive of one MCP-based industrial-agent benchmark to date: fourteen parallel implementation studies covering new asset classes (including a multi-modal visual extension), alternative orchestrations, retrieval strategies, reasoning modes, infrastructure optimizations, and evaluation-methodology probes. Consolidating those studies with seven prior agent benchmarks, we argue that aggregate-score leaderboards systematically underspecify deployed-agent evaluation. Rankings derived from aggregate scores do not transfer to out-of-distribution settings; recent public-to-hidden competition retrospectives provide direct empirical evidence of this rank instability. We propose ranking configurations by predictive validity, the correlation between in-sample and out-of-sample rank, rather than in-sample mean, and report a twelve-tier measurement apparatus that exposes the deployment-relevant dimensions HELM and its agent-era successors collapse. The position is operationalized through three falsifiable out-of-distribution criteria with explicit thresholds; existing evidence partly supports it but is too thin to confirm. We close with a pre-registered pilot design and a field-level vision for what the next generation of agentic benchmarks should report.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Anomalous magneto-optical response at $\mathrm{RuO_2 / WSe_2}$ van der Waals interface

arXiv:2606.20262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ruthenium dioxide ($\mathrm{RuO_2}$) has been proposed as an altermagnetic candidate, although its magnetic ground state remains controversial. Here, we probe weak interfacial magnetic states at the surface of (001)-oriented $\mathrm{RuO_2}$ films using the magnetic proximity effect (MPE) in a van der Waals heterostructure consisting of monolayer tungsten diselenide ($\mathrm{WSe_2}$) atop $\mathrm{RuO_2}$. Temperature-dependent magneto-optical spectroscopy reveals an anomalous excitonic energy shift and a deviation from conventional Varshni behavior below 55 K that are absent in an encapsulated $\mathrm{WSe_2}$ control sample. The anomalous shift reverses sign upon field cooling with opposite magnetic field polarity, indicating a magnetic origin. Polarization-resolved measurements further show a nearly field-independent and fluctuating valley splitting in $\mathrm{WSe_2 / RuO_2}$ in strong contrast to the conventional linear Zeeman splitting observed in the control bare $\mathrm{WSe_2}$ sample. These results suggest that the valley states are governed predominantly by interfacial exchange fields associated with weak surface magnetic states in $\mathrm{RuO_2}$, which do not produce a conventional linear Zeeman response within the applied magnetic field range. Importantly, this approach enables direct optical probing of emergent surface magnetism without introducing an additional ferromagnetic layer, positioning MPE-based optical probing as a tool for investigating weak surface magnetism and offering new possibilities for studying magnetic materials with controversial magnetic states.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Algorithmic Prompt Generation for Diverse Human-like Teaming and Communication with Large Language Models

Understanding how humans collaborate and communicate in teams is essential for improving human-agent teaming and AI-assisted decision-making. However, relying solely on data from large-scale user studies is impractical due to logistical, ethical, and practical constraints, necessitating synthetic models of multiple diverse human behaviors. Recently, agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to emulate human-like behavior in social settings. But, obtaining a large set of diverse behaviors requires manual effort in the form of designing prompts. On the other hand, Quality Diversity (QD) optimization has been shown to be capable of generating diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent behavior. In this work, we combine QD optimization with LLM-powered agents to iteratively search for prompts that generate diverse team behavior in a long-horizon, multi-step collaborative environment. We first show, through a human-subjects experiment, that humans exhibit diverse coordination and communication behavior in this domain. We then present a series of experiments showing that our approach captures behaviors that are difficult to observe without large-scale data collection, and a follow-up user study to show that these generated behaviors are human-like. Our findings highlight the combination of QD and LLM-powered agents as an effective tool for studying teaming and communication strategies in multi-agent collaboration.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Entropy-Gated Latent Recursion

arXiv:2606.16620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling has become the dominant lever for improving language-model reasoning, but existing methods derive rollout diversity from a single source: stochastic token-level sampling. We argue that this single-axis sampling space is fundamentally limiting, and identify a second, fully deterministic and complementary axis: the layer span $L$ at which a frozen model's top decoder layers are recursively re-applied at high-uncertainty tokens. Different choices of $L$ produce distinct rollouts that solve different subsets of problems, with no stochasticity. We instantiate this axis through Entropy-Gated Latent Recursion (EGLR), a training-free decoding procedure that re-applies the top-$L$ layers for at most $K_{\max}$ iterations until the next-token distribution converges. Combined with $T$ temperature samples, EGLR turns a single-axis stochastic rollout pool into an $L\times T$ Cartesian sampling space at almost the same per-rollout cost. We characterize this space across $8$ instruction-tuned models and $6$ math reasoning benchmarks, and show that the $L$-axis is genuinely complementary to temperature: on MATH-500 with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, the joint $L\times T$ oracle reaches $91.6\%$, $+8.2$ percentage points beyond the temperature-only oracle ($83.4\%$) and $+10.4$ points beyond the layer-only oracle ($81.2\%$), confirming that the two axes capture genuinely complementary problems. The expanded rollout pool provides richer per-prompt candidates for any downstream procedure that consumes rollouts, including self-consistency, best-of-$N$ with verifiers, and group-relative RL training (GRPO), opening a new direction for inference-time scaling that does not rely on stochastic noise.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Sex-based Network-Specific Differences in Connectomes: A Krakencoder-Based Analysis

This study examines how deficiencies in one brain connectome modality propagate to the other, using the Krakencoder as a simulation framework. Structural and functional connectomes from 702 healthy participants in the Human Connectome Project were analyzed, with the impact of each of the Yeo-7 functional networks assessed separately. Seven scenarios were considered, each involving the removal of a single network while the remaining networks were preserved. The resulting perturbations in cross-modal predictions were quantified using three complementary metrics: KL divergence on eigenvalue spectra, Frobenius norm, and Wasserstein distance. In addition, the persistence of sex-specific information within the predicted connectomes was evaluated. Across all metrics and both prediction directions, the Default Mode Network produced the largest perturbations, whereas the Somatomotor network yielded the smallest. Sex differences in network-level perturbation signatures were subtle, with the best result being an accuracy of 66.09% from connectomes predicted under network-removal conditions. In contrast, connectomes predicted from intact inputs achieved substantially higher sex classification accuracy, reaching up to 84.76%. These findings confirm that full predicted connectomes retain considerably more sex-discriminative information than perturbation-derived signatures alone.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Automating Low-Risk Code Review at Meta: RADAR, Risk Calibration, and Review Efficiency

arXiv:2605.30208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted coding tools have altered software production. At Meta, significant lines of code per human-landed diff grew by 105.9% year over year and per-developer diff volume rose 51%, with agentic AI responsible for over 80% of that growth. Meanwhile, the share of diffs receiving timely review has declined, exposing a widening gap between code supply and reviewer bandwidth. We ask three questions that progress from feasibility through calibration to impact: (1) can risk-stratified automation operate at scale across diverse organizations, (2) how does tuning the risk threshold affect the trade-off between automation yield and safety, and (3) to what extent does automated review reduce end-to-end latency for AI-generated changes? We deployed RADAR (Risk Aware Diff Auto Review), a multi-stage funnel that classifies each diff by authorship and source type, applies eligibility gates, static heuristics, a machine-learned Diff Risk Score, LLM-based Automated Code Review, and deterministic validation before landing qualifying changes. We evaluate RADAR through telemetry covering 535K+ RADAR-reviewed diffs, observational before-after comparisons for policy changes, and difference-in-differences analysis of efficiency outcomes. RADAR has reviewed 535K+ diffs and landed 331K+. Relaxing the Diff Risk Score threshold from the 25th to the 50th percentile increased the approve rate to 60.31%. The revert rate for RADAR-reviewed diffs is 1/3 that of non-RADAR diffs, and the Production Incident rate is 1/50 that of non-RADAR diffs. RADAR reduces median time to close by over 330% and median diff review wall time by 35%. Risk-aware layered automation can materially reduce review bottlenecks created by AI-driven code growth without compromising production safety.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

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arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RATS! Patches Talk Through Registers: Emergent Parts in Register Attention Transformers

When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" – they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.