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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SwitchBraidNet: Quantisation-Aware Lightweight Architecture for Hybrid Brain-Computer Interface

arXiv:2606.18816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hybrid brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that integrate motor imagery (MI) and steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) provide high-dimensional neural decoding but typically exceed the computational limits of embedded hardware. To address this, we propose SwitchBraidNet, a compact EEG classification architecture designed for low-power deployment. The model employs a dual-path temporal braid to extract multiscale oscillatory features, an adaptive squeeze-and-excitation spatial switch for electrode gating, and a log-variance readout layer for direct band-power encoding. Furthermore, through systematic quantisation-aware training on the OpenBMI dataset, we compared SwitchBraidNet against four established baselines across FP32, FP16, and INT8 precisions. Experimental results demonstrate superior efficiency and performance, achieving MI accuracy of 69.49% (FP16), SSVEP accuracy of 93.48% (FP32), and a hybrid information transfer rate of 64.82 bits/min (FP16). With an INT8 footprint of only 3.03 KB, SwitchBraidNet maintains high accuracy across varying numerical precisions, demonstrating its suitability for low-power embedded BCI deployment.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum sensing through bosonic-fermionic Bell-state transitions in two-photon interference

arXiv:2606.14408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference has become a central resource for quantum sensing and metrology owing to its sensitivity to temporal delay and photon indistinguishability. However, existing HOM-based sensing schemes generally rely on inserting a sample into one arm of the interferometer, making the measurement vulnerable to optical loss, alignment instability, and bandwidth-dependent distortion of the interference profile. Here, we demonstrate a symmetry-controlled quantum sensing scheme based on continuous transitions between symmetric (bosonic-like) and antisymmetric (fermionic-like) Bell states in two-photon interference. By imprinting a geometric phase onto the classical pump beam and transferring it to polarization-entangled photons generated via spontaneous parametric down-conversion, we coherently tune the exchange symmetry of the entangled state without altering the temporal or spectral indistinguishability of the photons. The HOM response evolves continuously from bunching to antibunching with a sine square phase dependence, producing a coincidence modulation of approximately 10 * 10^4 counts s^-1 counts/s. In contrast to conventional HOM sensing, the phase-modulation linewidth remains fixed at pi/2, independent of photon bandwidth. Using a birefringent crystal placed directly in the pump beam, we measure thermo-dispersive birefringence with a resolution of the order of 10^{-6} over a broad temperature range. Our results establish exchange symmetry as a controllable resource for robust quantum sensing and symmetry-engineered photonic quantum information processing.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Invoice Haystack: Benchmarking Document Retrieval and Visual Question Answering Under Strong Visual Homogeneity

Vision Language Models have achieved near-human performance on single-document Visual Question Answering, yet their effectiveness degrades significantly when retrieving information from large collections of visually homogeneous documents. Existing multi-document benchmarks aggregate diverse document types, creating artificial separation in embedding space that does not reflect enterprise document repositories where thousands of records share identical visual templates. We identify this as embedding collapse and introduce Invoice Haystack, a benchmark with 1,500 anonymized invoice images paired with 200 discriminative question-answer pairs, specifically designed to stress-test retrieval under strong visual homogeneity. Invoice Haystack exhibits a mean pairwise cosine similarity of 0.73, compared to 0.38 (DocHaystack) and 0.31 (InfoHaystack) in existing benchmarks, posing a fundamentally more challenging retrieval problem. Addressing the identified challenge, we propose VL-RAG, a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation framework that jointly leverages text and visual embeddings to harness the complementary strengths of both modalities, followed by a VLM-based verification filter for precise document identification. VL-RAG achieves 60.0\% Recall@1 on Invoice Haystack-500, outperforming existing state-of-the-art method by up to an absolute 13.5 percentage points. It further improves retrieval considerably on DocHaystack-1000 (77.1\% vs.\ 75.2\%) and InfoHaystack-1000 (84.5\% vs.\ 80.0\%), establishing the proposed dual-stream fusion as a consistently superior retrieval strategy across both homogeneous and heterogeneous document collections.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Impact of Network Constraints on Fault-Tolerant Distributed Quantum Computing

arXiv:2606.17495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As we move towards scalable and modular quantum computing, quantum data centres become imperative. Existing analyses typically treat network constraints in isolation or through simplified models, leaving the interplay between error correction operations and communication resources underexplored. In this work, we present an end-to-end simulation framework that jointly models surface-code operations, internal QPU connectivity, and realistic network constraints including finite entanglement generation rates, limited communication qubits, and bandwidth contention, producing execution latency, from which logical error rate estimates are obtained. The framework is modular by design, allowing individual components such as routing heuristics, scheduling policies, and network topologies to be independently replaced. Numerical evaluation reveals distinct operating regimes in which the optimal resource allocation and code distance selection shift depending on the network characteristics. These results point to tradeoffs in the design of distributed quantum computing architectures that are not visible when computation and communication are modeled separately.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across natural language processing tasks, yet reliable reasoning remains an open challenge. Although modern LLMs show progress in structured inference, multi-step problem solving, and contextual understanding, their reasoning behavior is often inconsistent and sensitive to prompting strategies, task design, and model scale. This survey provides a systematic analysis of more than 300 recent papers from arXiv, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, Papers with Code, and the ACL Anthology to examine how reasoning capabilities emerge in LLMs and where they fail. We make three main contributions. First, we introduce a structured taxonomy of LLM reasoning research, covering Chain-of-Thought reasoning, multi-hop reasoning, mathematical reasoning, common sense reasoning, visual and temporal reasoning, code and algorithmic reasoning, retrieval-augmented reasoning, tool-augmented and agentic reasoning, and reinforcement learning-based reasoning. Second, we analyze methodological trends across these paradigms, including prompting methods, model architectures, training objectives, reward modeling, and evaluation benchmarks. Third, we synthesize recurring limitations and failure modes, such as reasoning hallucinations, brittle multi-step inference, weak causal abstraction, and poor cross-domain generalization. By organizing a rapidly expanding literature, this survey offers a unified view of the current capabilities and limitations of reasoning in LLMs. We also identify emerging research directions, including meta-reasoning, self-evolving reasoning frameworks, multimodal reasoning, and socially grounded reasoning. Overall, this work aims to serve as a reference for developing more robust, interpretable, and generalizable reasoning systems in future language models.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Adaptive Oscillatory Inductive Bias for Modeling Sharp Prosodic Dynamics in Diffusion-Based TTS

Diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved significant improvements in speech quality. However, modeling sharp prosodic transitions and rapid pitch variations in expressive speech remains challenging. Existing diffusion-based TTS decoders commonly utilize periodic nonlinearities such as Snake activation function to capture harmonic structures, but this activation funcation provides limited adaptability when modeling abrupt amplitude and frequency variations. In this paper, we investigate the role of oscillatory inductive bias in diffusion-based TTS decoders and introduce an adaptive oscillatory nonlinearity that enables controllable periodic modulation while maintaining signal stability through a linear bypass component. We refer the resulting TTS system as OscillaTTS. Experiments on the LJSpeech and Emotional Speech Dataset show consistent improvements across objective and subjective evaluations, indicating improved modeling of expressive prosodic dynamics.

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

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Agentic AI-based Framework for Mitigating Premature Diagnostic Handoff and Silent Hallucination in Healthcare Applications

arXiv:2606.18068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have driven the rise of Agentic AI, showing promise for medical reasoning. However, open-ended conversational agents remain prone to two critical failure modes: premature diagnostic handoff and silent clinical hallucinations that may go undetected before reaching the patient. In this work, we propose a multi-agent framework that addresses both issues by replacing ``LLM-as-a-judge'' routing with deterministic orchestration constraints. The framework incorporates two safety mechanisms. First, a neuro-symbolic state-tracking gate enforces completeness of the OLDCARTS clinical protocol (Onset, Location, Duration, Character, Aggravating/Alleviating factors, Radiation, Timing, and Severity) by blocking diagnostic transitions until all required dimensions are collected. Second, an epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) gate computes semantic entropy (H) across K=5 independent diagnostic samples to identify and intercept divergent outputs before delivery. We evaluate the system using simulated patient agents powered by the llama-3.1-70b-instruct model on 150 test cases. The full architecture achieves 49.3% diagnostic precision, representing an absolute improvement of 11.3 percentage points over an unconstrained baseline. Additionally, we observe a statistically significant negative correlation (r = -0.181, p < 0.05) between OLDCARTS completeness (\sigma) and semantic entropy (H), suggesting that structured information gathering is associated with reduced diagnostic uncertainty.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Two-Phase Bilevel Search for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles

arXiv:2606.18730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP) seeks a minimum cost trajectory for an agent that departs from a static depot, visits a set of moving targets, each within one of their assigned time windows, and returns to the depot. In this article, we study the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles (MT-TSP-MO), a generalization of the MT-TSP where the agent trajectory must avoid moving obstacles. We present a Mixed-Integer Conic Programming (MICP) formulation that can be solved using off-the-shelf solvers, as well as a fast and scalable Two-Phase Bilevel Search (TPBS) algorithm that computes high-quality feasible solutions for the problem. We evaluate our approaches against an existing baseline algorithm on a broad range of problem instances with up to 40 targets and 40 obstacles. The results demonstrate that both the proposed methods significantly outperform the baseline with respect to success rates, solution costs, and computation time.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Systematic Study of Dysarthric Speech Recognition: Spectral Features and Acoustic Models

arXiv:2606.19793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision. Past research has demonstrated improved recognition through the use of hybrid DNN/HMM sequence discriminative training. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of various combinations of acoustic features tailored to different Acoustic Models, offering suitable feature selections for each. The incorporation of Pitch features notably improved recognition performance, especially for sentence recognition tasks involving dysarthric speech. Through a systematic examination of the TORGO database, we have demonstrated the potential to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art Factorized Time Delay Neural Network (F-TDNN) model for recognizing dysarthric speech. Our methods, implemented with the F-TDNN model, resulted in a 4.65\% relative improvement in isolated word recognition and a 4.63\% relative improvement in sentence recognition for dysarthric speech, compared to previous research. This improvement effectively compensates for speech variability, attributable to our deliberate selection of the number of overlapping frames between consecutive training example chunks.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Generative Engine Optimization at Scale: Measuring Brand Visibility Across AI Search Engines

People increasingly get answers straight from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini rather than scrolling search results. Brands that once focused on search engine optimization (SEO) must now optimize for how these engines represent, cite, and recommend them – a shift variously called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI Search Visibility. We treat AEO and AI Visibility as part of GEO, and study how to measure brand visibility across AI engines: what they value when they cite a brand, which sources they rely on, and what content large language models surface. The hard case is everyone outside the already-authoritative top brands – SMEs, D2C brands, creators, and early-stage startups. We analyze 100K+ prompt responses across 100+ brands tracked on Ranqo between March and May 2026. First visibility runs form a clear three-tier brand-stature ladder: global household names (e.g., Stripe, Nike) appear in 73% of relevant AI answers on their first run; established mid-market and regional brands (e.g., Olipop, Klaviyo) in 44%; niche and small brands in just 11% – about 30 percentage points per step. When engines cite sources, about 78% go to corporate websites; among non-corporate sources YouTube leads, ahead of Reddit, editorial media, and Wikipedia. The highest-leverage page is the ranked "best-of" listicle, the most-cited content format at about 21% of all citations. Sentiment is the unstable signal: whether a brand is framed positively or negatively flips about 6.7 times more often than whether it is mentioned at all. These findings provide a first large-scale baseline for measuring GEO: AI brand visibility can be measured, differs by platform, and varies strongly by brand maturity. We close by proposing seven v1.1 protocols to test whether specific recommendations can causally improve AI visibility.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

FoundCause: Causal Discovery with Latent Confounders from Observational Data

arXiv:2606.17516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery from observational data remains challenging due to the need to recover directed structure and latent confounding without interventions. We propose FoundCause, an amortized causal discovery model trained entirely on synthetic data that maps datasets directly to causal graphs in a single forward pass. By learning from large collections of simulated structural causal models, FoundCause captures transferable statistical patterns that generalize beyond individual datasets. The architecture incorporates several key inductive biases for causal discovery. It uses a permutation-invariant transformer encoder with alternating attention over samples and variables to jointly model cross-variable dependence and per-variable distributions. Pairwise statistical features derived from classical asymmetry measures are injected through statistics-conditioned attention, guiding the model toward known causal signals. A factorized decoder separates edge existence from direction, while a triangular refinement module enables reasoning over higher-order causal motifs such as chains and colliders. In addition, a dedicated confounder module based on learnable latent tokens explicitly models hidden common causes, and the model explicitly handles missing data via its masked input representation. To our knowledge, FoundCause is the first amortized causal discovery approach to explicitly model latent confounding. FoundCause outperforms 11 classical non-amortized methods (e.g., PC, GES, NOTEARS-style optimization) and 4 amortized causal discovery methods on 15 real-world datasets, achieving +9.6% improvement in $F_1$, +1.2% in AUROC, and an 18.9% reduction in structural Hamming distance relative to the strongest non-amortized methods, while performing inference in a single forward pass.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

SEED: Semi-supervised Continual MalwarE Detection for Tackling ConcEpt Drift on a BuDget

arXiv:2605.24903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning based malware detectors become obsolete over time due to concept drift in benign and malware applications. Recent methods rely on fully labeled data and use hierarchical contrastive loss (HCL) with active learning to improve robustness against drift by exploiting semantic structure in malware representations. However, obtaining labeled data in the security domain is difficult. Under partially labeled settings, HCL suffers significant performance degradation in detecting unseen malware, especially on datasets such as BODMAS where strong semantic structure may not exist. In this paper, we propose SEED, a semantic-structure-agnostic method for malware detection under limited supervision. SEED combines a tailored binary cross-entropy objective with semi-supervised continual learning and active learning. For partially labeled seen tasks, unlabeled samples are projected into a representation space constructed from previously seen data using singular value decomposition, and paired with suitable labeled samples to encourage representation consistency. For unseen tasks with fully unlabeled data, uncertainty is quantified using cosine distance in representation space, and the most uncertain samples are selected for analyst labeling. We evaluate SEED on both Windows and Android malware datasets. Using only 20% labeled data on seen tasks, SEED achieves average AUT improvements of 40% on BODMAS and 14% on AndroZoo for unseen malware detection compared to HCL* (the semi-supervised adaptation of HCL), while remaining competitive on APIGraph. Finally, we introduce a delayed buffer update strategy to reduce label noise propagation during replay and improve learning stability.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully. Hence, the trade-off between accuracy and computation in an MoE model typically exhibits large discontinuities. We propose Mixture of Slimmable Experts (MoSE), an MoE architecture in which each expert has a nested, slimmable structure that can be executed at variable widths. This enables conditional computation not only over which experts are activated but also over how much of each expert is utilized. Consequently, a single pretrained MoSE model can support a more continuous spectrum of accuracy-compute trade-offs at inference time. We present a simple and stable training recipe for slimmable experts under sparse routing, combining multi-width training with standard MoE objectives. During inference, we explore strategies for runtime width determination, including a lightweight test-time training mechanism that learns how to map router confidence/probabilities to expert widths under a fixed budget. Experiments on GPT-style models, various routing regimes, zero-shot downstream reasoning benchmarks, and continual pre-training adaptation of DeepSeek model show that MoSE matches or improves standard MoE at full width and consistently shifts the compute-quality frontier toward lower inference FLOPs. The code can be found at: https://github.com/tnurbek/mose.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CRUMB: Efficient Prior Fitted Network Inference via Distributionally Matched Context Batching

arXiv:2606.11473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior-fitted networks (PFNs) are a promising class of tabular foundation models that perform in-context learning, whereby the entire labelled training set is supplied as context, and predictions for test queries are produced in a single forward pass. However, the quadratically scaling self-attention mechanism in many PFN architectures makes inference prohibitive for very large training datasets. We propose CRUMB (Clustered Retrieval Using Minimised-MMD Batching), a three-stage inference wrapper that (i) clusters the test queries, (ii) selects a small, distributionally matched training subset for each cluster by greedily minimising the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), and (iii) runs exact PFN inference on each reduced-context batch. CRUMB is architecture-agnostic and requires no retraining. On the 51-dataset TabArena benchmark, evaluated across three PFN architectures (TabPFNv2, TabICLv1, TabICLv2), we show that CRUMB outperforms similar state-of-the-art context selection strategies. We also show that CRUMB is resilient to covariate drift, as the MMD-minimisation step naturally helps align the training context distribution to match the current test batch distributions.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ProMUSE: Progressive Multi-modal Uncertainty-guided Staged Evidential Alzheimer Disease Classification

arXiv:2606.19371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a fatal disorder that destroys memory and cognitive skills in the elderly population. Most treatments for AD are effective in the early stage, leading to an increasing demand for early AD diagnosis. AD diagnosis increasingly relies on multimodal data such as clinical assessments, structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging. However, MRI and PET acquisition remain costly and not universally accessible, making full-modality inference impractical in real-world clinical workflows. We propose ProMUSE, a Progressive Multi-modal Uncertainty Guided Staged Evidential Network that adaptively determines when additional modalities are necessary, helping reduce the overall cost of data acquisition while maintaining accuracy. ProMUSE first performs evidential classification using low-cost clinical data and quantifies uncertainty via a Dirichlet-based subjective logic model. When uncertainty exceeds a learned threshold, ProMUSE progressively incorporates MRI or PET features, fusing modality-wise belief and uncertainty through Dempster-Shafer theory to obtain a calibrated multimodal prediction. This staged acquisition strategy enables accurate diagnosis while minimizing reliance on expensive imaging. Experiments on ADNI, AIBL, and OASIS across CN-AD, CN-MCI, and MCI-AD tasks demonstrate that ProMUSE achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to full-modality baselines while reducing MRI/PET usage by 50-90%, yielding substantial cost savings. These results highlight ProMUSE as a practical, uncertainty-aware, and resource-efficient solution for real-world AD screening.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

STITCH links cellular morphology and gene expression in spatial transcriptomics

In situ spatial (ISS) sequencing can uncover co-variation between cellular morphology and gene expression in vivo. However, a principled and interpretable mathematical representation of morphology has not yet been applied in this context. In particular, current deep learning-based representations of cell images confound a cell's shape with its size. We present an interpretable representation of cellular boundary contours, based on tangent principal component analysis (TPCA) in a Kendall shape manifold, that captures size-independent contour shape features. This approach successfully recovers shape-perturbing genes in an RNAi screen than a previous metric geometry-based approach. We build on TPCA to develop STITCH (Shape-TranscriptomIc Correlation and Harmonization), an approach to reveal covariation between cell morphology with gene expression in ISS datasets. In a Xenium dataset, STITCH outperforms a deep learning-based approach in both recovering the layered organization of keratinocytes and a spatial gradient in nuclear eccentricity. Across samples in a melanoma CosMx dataset, STITCH reproducibly associates elongated and triangular fibroblasts with proximity to malignant cells and myofibroblast-like transcriptional program. Finally, STITCH independently recovers a known link between mesenchymal-like malignant cell states and increased cell area in two melanoma cohorts. STITCH can thus yield interpretable morphology-transcriptome relationships across cell types, patients, and spatial transcriptomics platforms.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EcoBin: A Two-Stage Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Contamination-Aware Waste Classification

Waste classification models have become highly accurate at sorting waste, often exceeding 95% on benchmark datasets. However, these models fail to account for contamination in recyclable waste. We present EcoBin, a two-stage deep convolutional neural network that classifies household waste by its disposal pathway and that explicitly accounts for contamination. The first stage is a base waste classifier built on an EfficientNetV2-S backbone that assigns each of the thirty waste categories in our dataset to one of four disposal pathways. The second stage is a contamination classifier that inspects any item routed toward recycling and overrides the decision to garbage when contamination is detected. Because no public dataset of contaminated recyclables exists, we synthesize one by segmenting images of clean recyclable objects with a U2-Net model and compositing realistic contamination textures onto their surfaces. The first stage achieves 87.42% test accuracy and a 96.13% pathway-adjusted accuracy. Meanwhile, the contamination stage distinguishes clean from contaminated items with a 0.99 ROC-AUC. On a test set of contaminated recyclables, the complete pipeline routes 24 of 25 items correctly, compared with only 1 of 25 for the base classifier alone. A McNemar's test confirms that the improvement contributed by the contamination stage is statistically significant (p < 0.001).

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

Context-Aware Feature-Fusion for Co-occurring Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Object detection in autonomous driving requires precise localization and an inherent understanding of the relational context between co-occurring objects. In extremely complex heterogeneous environments rare classes, small-scale objects, and frequently appearing objects are difficult for standard object detection frameworks to handle. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Context-Centric Feature Fusion (CCFF), which utilizes two attention-based modules, Local Context Fusion Module (LCFM) uses the RoI-to-RoI self-attention mechanism to resolve spatial interactions, mainly considering small and partially obscured objects, while Global Context Attention Module (GCAM) converts the co-occurrence of objects priors by pooling top-K RoI features into a global context attention token, avoiding the computational overhead of pixel-level global pooling. This fusion of local and object-centric global features yields contextualized embeddings that enhance classification results and co-occurring objects detection. Our method is evaluated on two datasets, Cityscapes and BDD100K which demonstrate significant improvement on relational consistency, achieving a Category-level Consistency Strategy (CCS) of 0.973 and 0.969, respectively. Furthermore, our approach produces substantial gains in small object detection (AP_S: 14.1%) and successfully recovers rare classes such as "Train" that are typically lost in large distributions. Our efficiency report shows that the framework processes images in real time with a 0.2 FPS overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/BinayKSingh/CCFF.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Majorana bound states in a hybrid Kitaev ladder with long-range pairing

arXiv:2606.19963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate an inter-leg coupled hybrid Kitaev ladder composed of two parallel superconducting chains with distinct pairing interactions. The upper chain of the ladder hosts conventional $p$-wave pairing, while the lower chain exhibits long-range pairing that decays algebraically with distance. We demonstrate that the mutual influence of long-range pairing exponent, chemical potential, and inter-leg coupling strength gives rise to a rich topological phase diagram characterized by multiple Majorana zero modes and massive Dirac modes. In particular, we show that the inter-leg coupling renormalizes the effective energy scales, leading to a systematic shift of the topological phase boundaries and enabling controlled tuning of the Majorana modes. Furthermore, we identify a transition from a two Majorana zero mode phase to a phase encapsulating four Majorana zero modes, as the long-range pairing exponent is varied. This transition is accompanied by a crossover regime in which Majorana zero modes coexist with massive Dirac modes, reflecting hybridization between edge and bulk excitations. This ladder thus provides a minimal and attractive platform for realizing the impact of a long-range pairing on topological phases. Our results highlight the potential of long-range hybrid systems for engineering tunable topological states relevant for quantum information applications.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Authority, Truth, and Citation Bias: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Benchmark for Studying Epistemic Susceptibility in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in citation-augmented settings, yet the effect of citation presence on model behavior independent of factual content remains poorly understood. We introduce AuthorityBench, a 220,564-prompt multi-domain benchmark that isolates how citation-based authority signals influence epistemic behavior in LLMs. The benchmark uses a fully balanced 2x2 factorial design crossing claim veracity with citation veracity, the first to do so, across four domains (general knowledge, science, law, and medicine), with controlled variation over 40 prompt templates, four venue prestige tiers, and a country-coded author name dataset. Evaluating seven models on 12 structured research questions, we find that citation presence, whether real or fabricated, consistently increases hallucination rates relative to a no-citation baseline. The effect is strongest when fabricated citations accompany true claims, raising hallucination rates by 3 to 22 percentage points and reaching 35 to 77% in the general knowledge domain, while legal claims are comparatively robust and venue prestige and author demographics show negligible impact. All datasets and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/floating-reeds/AuthorityBench

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Grouped Query Experts: Mixture-of-Experts on GQA Self-Attention

arXiv:2606.20945v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-attention is central to Transformer performance and is often the most expensive part of the Transformer at long context lengths because its pairwise token interactions scale quadratically with sequence length. Standard dense attention also applies the same set of attention heads to every token regardless of token difficulty or information content. This uniform activation can waste compute, especially as sequences grow longer and attention cost increases rapidly. We propose Grouped Query Experts (GQE), a mixture-of-experts layer on top of grouped-query attention (GQA). Within each GQA group, a router selects k query-head experts per token while all key-value (KV) heads remain dense and unchanged. Thus, GQE keeps the KV cache benefits of GQA and reduces only the active query-head computation. On a fixed 30B token budget at the 250M parameter scale, GQE matches the all-active GQA baseline in downstream accuracy while activating half the query heads per token.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Beyond Trotterization: Variational Product Formulas for Quantum Simulation

arXiv:2511.15124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a variational alternative to the Trotter-Suzuki decomposition that provides greater control over errors while preserving the unitary structure of time evolution. The variational parameters in our ansatz are derived from a global action principle, where Euler-Lagrange equations govern their optimal dynamics. Unlike conventional wavefunction-based variational methods, our approach specifically targets the time evolution operation and this allows a single set of optimized parameters to be applied to any initial state for a fixed Hamiltonian avoiding costly optimization procedures. Our method outperforms the standard Trotter-Suzuki formulas, typically achieving higher accuracy than higher-order Suzuki schemes. This translates directly to quantum computing applications, where it enables the design of quantum circuits with fewer gates which reduces noise and improves precision. Although we focus on quantum dynamics, the method is broadly applicable to problems involving general time-evolution operators. Applied to various model Hamiltonians, our approach reduces errors by factors of 2 to 5 compared to Trotter-Suzuki decompositions, demonstrating its promise for accurate quantum simulation with improved efficiency. In certain cases, the variational ansatz achieves higher accuracy than more complex higher-order Suzuki formulas while reducing the gate count by nearly half within a single circuit layer. Furthermore, we derive approximate analytical expressions for the variational parameters up to cubic order in time, valid for generic Hamiltonians. These approximations enable long-time quantum simulations with improved accuracy over equivalent Suzuki decompositions, providing ready-to-use evolution formulas that match Suzuki's gate complexity while delivering better performance.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

On the L{é}vy concentration function of Gaussian quadratic forms with applications to second order U-statistics

arXiv:2606.25441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We provide an upper-bound for the L{é}vy concentration function: $$ Q_{S}(\varepsilon):= \sup_{x \in\mathbb{R}}\mathbb{P} (x < S \leq x+\varepsilon) $$ where $S$ is a weighted sum of noncentral chi-square random variables: $$ S:= \sum_{k=1}^\infty \lambda_k (Z_k^2 - 1) + \mu_kZ_k $$ Here, $\{Z_k\}_{k=1}^\infty$ is a sequence of independent standard Gaussian random variables and $\{\lambda_k\}_{k=1}^\infty, \{\mu_k\}_{k=1}^\infty$ are real valued, square summable sequences. Random variables of this type often appear as limiting distributions of second order U-statistics. Our bound is adaptive, in that it recovers (up to constant factors) Gaussian type concentration function estimates if $\|\lambda\|_2$ is negligible compared to $\|\mu\|_2$ and chi-square estimates if $\|\mu\|_{2}$ is negligible compared to $\|\lambda\|_2$. Our bound generalizes existing bounds in various ways. In particular, we make no assumptions regarding the number of nonzero $|\lambda_k|$ or the size of the minimal $|\lambda_k|$, nor do we make any assumptions on the signs of $\lambda_k$. Finally, we apply our bound to some examples of interest, specifically quadratic forms that arise in limit theorems for second-order U-statistics.