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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Is Your Trajectory Displacement Safe in Long-tail?

arXiv:2606.16313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-tail scenarios remain a major bottleneck for autonomous driving evaluation, even as datasets grow by orders of magnitude. Existing evaluation pipelines are rarely human-aligned, safety-aware, verifiable, and explainable at the same time: closed-loop metrics often saturate among strong planners, while unstructured human ratings can be noisy without a carefully designed protocol. We formulate planning evaluation as additional-threat detection: given a planner trajectory and an expert reference, does the planner's displacement introduce new unsafe driving behavior? We propose FluidTest, an evaluation pipeline with three components: a pairwise WebUI protocol for reliable human annotation; a taxonomy of 32 semantic threats with evidence-grounded decision graphs; and a three-agent verification system with reflection for precision and auditability. Experiments on the WOD-E2E dataset show that FluidTest produces consistent labels among trained annotators and identifies additional threats in 65% of Poutine trajectories and 51% of RAP trajectories. These results show that state-of-the-art planners can still exhibit substantial safety-relevant failures despite high Rater Feedback Scores (RFS) and low Average Displacement Error (ADE). Additional details, guidance, and code are available at https://fluidtest.web.app.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Markov property and path regularity for the solutions to SPDEs driven by cylindrical-martingale valued measures

arXiv:2606.12381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we prove the Markov property for the solution to stochastic partial differential equations driven by a cylindrical orthogonal martingale-valued measure. We assume our coefficients are time-dependent and satisfy some growth and Lipschitz conditions. We also prove that for time-independent coefficients and under mild assumptions on the cylindrical orthogonal martingale-valued measure, the solutions to our stochastic partial differential equations are Feller. Finally, in the case that the $C_{0}$-semigroup is quasi-contraction, we show that the solution to our stochastic partial differential equation possesses a càdlàg version.

03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

A lactylation- and autophagy-associated prognostic signature reveals LSEC-derived CLEC3B as a novel mediator of hepatocellular carcinoma suppression

Authors:

by Youai Song, Yinkuan Ning, Meihui Li, Jianwei Lan, Liangchen Lei, Yufei Han, Zhuo Meng, Binjie Li, Pengpeng Liu, Quanyan Liu The crosstalk between lactylation and autophagy within the hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) microenvironment is a burgeoning field with profound implications. By integrating multi-omics data from public cohorts, we delineated two molecular subtypes of HCC with divergent clinical outcomes and established a lactylation-autophagy-related prognostic signature. This signature highlighted CLEC3B as a pivotal gene. Subsequent single-cell RNA sequencing and experimental validation unequivocally pinpointed liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) as the principal cellular source of CLEC3B, which was significantly downregulated in HCC tissues. Functionally, conditioned media derived from CLEC3B-overexpressing LSECs potently inhibited HCC cell proliferation. Mechanistic investigations revealed that this tumor-suppressive effect was orchestrated through the concurrent suppression of autophagy and diminution of lactylation levels. Our findings position LSEC-secreted CLEC3B as a novel metabolic mediator in HCC, bridging two key pathways in tumor suppression, and endorse its clinical value both as a prognostic indicator and a promising therapeutic target.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

RoPE-Aware Bit Allocation for KV-Cache Quantization

Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector. Under RoPE, however, a key's contribution to a future attention logit decomposes into a position-dependent sum over two-dimensional frequency blocks. This makes key-cache quantization a block-wise bit-allocation problem: high-energy RoPE blocks are more sensitive to quantization error and should receive more bits. We introduce Block-GTQ, a RoPE-aware bit allocator for key-cache quantization built on TurboQuant-MSE(TQ-MSE). For each layer and KV head, Block-GTQ computes a label-free energy score for each RoPE block and greedily allocates integer bit widths by marginal gain. Under matched K/V bit budgets, Block-GTQ better preserves RoPE query-key logits on a ten-model diagnostic panel, cutting per-layer MAE by 32-80% at 2 and 3 b/dim K-only quantization and winning all 367/367 layer comparisons against uniform TQ-MSE. These fidelity gains translate to stronger downstream long-context retrieval, understanding, and reasoning. At K2V2 on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Block-GTQ raises the six-task NIAH average from 70.6 to 97.4, and the LongBench-EN average from 36.87 to 53.31. On AIME 2024/2025 with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, without an fp16 recent-key buffer, Block-GTQ at K3V2 scores 51.7/37.5, close to fp16's 54.2/37.9, whereas uniform TQ-MSE collapses to 0.0/0.0. We further implement a packed-cache serving path. On a single H800 GPU with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, packed K3V3 achieves 3.24x KV-cache compression with fp16-comparable quality, runs 1.34x faster than fp16 FlashAttention2 at 128K context, reduces peak memory from 56.31 GB to 19.85 GB, and remains feasible at 256K and 512K where fp16 OOMs. Code is available at https://github.com/JIA-Lab-research/blockgtq.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Parent and physiotherapist perceptions about movement skills of young children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis

Objective: The onset of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) in the early years ([≤]5 years) may negatively impact movement skill (encompassing related concepts of gross motor skills, fundamental movement skills, and functional ability) development. Few studies have explored the perceptions and needs of parents and physiotherapists towards children's difficulty with these movement skills, essential to identify potential areas for added support. The objective of this study is to understand the perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards movement skills of children with JIA. Methods: Seventeen parents and 24 physiotherapists completed an online questionnaire consisting of multiple choice and open-ended questions about the movement skills of young children with JIA. Demographic and multiple choice questions were quantitively analysed using descriptive statistics. Open-ended responses were analyzed using qualitative conventional content analysis. Results: About half (47%) of parents perceived their children to have movement difficulties, and 75% of physiotherapists described the movement skills of children with JIA as worse than other children of the same age. Our qualitative analysis revealed three general themes including: functional task difficulties; clinical variability in movement skills; and psychosocial components of movement skill difficulties. Conclusion: This study provides an analysis of perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards the movement skills of young children with JIA. A significant proportion of parents and physiotherapists identify movement difficulties among children with JIA that impact daily life. Future interventions co-designed with both parents and care providers targeting movement skills are needed.

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

Semantic Flip: Synthetic OOD Generation for Robust Refusal in Embodied Question Answering and Spatial Localization

Detecting unanswerable user queries remains essential for the reliable deployment of real-world embodied agents. However, modern vision-language models (VLMs) often generate overly confident answers even when the available visual memory cannot support the query. Such overconfidence poses various task-dependent risks. The agent may provide misleading information to the user in Embodied Question Answering and select an arbitrary coordinate and physically guide the user there in spatial reasoning for navigation. Despite these high stakes, only a few prior studies directly address when and how an embodied VLM should respond with "I do not know." This work proposes Semantic Flip, a simple yet effective framework that synthesizes auxiliary out-of-distribution (OOD) samples for embodied refusal without requiring external OOD annotations. The key idea is to independently transform the query and video memory to construct auxiliary OOD pairs that lack sufficient visual grounding. These synthesized pairs enable training a lightweight rejection module on top of a frozen pretrained VLM. The module attaches to any existing VLM-based pipeline without retraining the underlying model. Across two complementary benchmarks, Semantic Flip consistently outperforms strong prompting baselines. This work also introduces SpaceReject, a new refusal benchmark for spatial localization with deliberately unanswerable queries over long video memory, where Semantic Flip achieves an $F_1$ score of 0.9559. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/SemanticFlip.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bright Emission from Dark Sources in Hyperbolic Media

arXiv:2606.16071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperbolic media enable ultra-strong light-matter interactions through their extreme field localization and small mode volumes, but low-loss realizations are fundamentally limited to the mid-infrared, owing to the long lifetimes of optical phonons in high-quality crystals. Here we show that bright emitters operating at visible or near-infrared frequencies can be used to generate radiation in this regime by inducing mid-infrared population dynamics, thereby creating a source in the hyperbolic frequency band without a corresponding dipole transition. We demonstrate that even a source with vanishing dipole and higher multipole moments - strictly non-radiating in any isotropic medium - becomes radiatively active in a hyperbolic environment. This enables visible and near-infrared control of light-matter interactions in polaritonic hyperbolic materials, establishing a new low-loss solid-state quantum optics platform.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learning Topology-Aware Implicit Field for Unified Pulmonary Tree Modeling with Incomplete Topological Supervision

Pulmonary trees extracted from CT images frequently exhibit topological incompleteness, such as missing or disconnected branches, which substantially degrades downstream anatomical analysis and limits the applicability of existing pulmonary tree modeling pipelines. Current approaches typically rely on dense volumetric processing, explicit graph reasoning, or generic point cloud completion priors, leading to limited efficiency, weak structural awareness, and reduced robustness under realistic structural corruption. We propose TopoField, a topology-aware implicit modeling framework that treats topology repair as a first-class modeling problem and enables unified multi-task inference for pulmonary tree analysis. TopoField represents pulmonary anatomy using sparse surface and skeleton point clouds and learns a continuous implicit field that supports topology repair without relying on complete or explicit disconnection annotations, by training on synthetically introduced structural disruptions over already incomplete trees. Building upon the repaired implicit representation, anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction are jointly inferred through task-specific implicit functions within a single forward pass. Extensive experiments on the Lung3D+ dataset demonstrate that TopoField consistently improves topological completeness and achieves accurate anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction under challenging incomplete scenarios. We further validate TopoField on real incomplete outputs from an external segmentation model, demonstrating its applicability to realistic segmentation pipelines. Owing to its implicit formulation, TopoField attains high computational efficiency, completing all tasks in just over one second per case, highlighting its practicality for large-scale and time-sensitive clinical applications.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ToolSense: A Diagnostic Framework for Auditing Parametric Tool Knowledge in LLMs

arXiv:2606.12451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed as agents over large tool catalogs face a critical tool-retrieval bottleneck. As embedding-based retrieval approaches rely on compact encoders that may under-capture specialized tool semantics, parametric tool retrieval addresses this by encoding each tool as a virtual token appended to the LLM vocabulary, fine-tuned in two stages (memorization then retrieval SFT) to use the LLM as a retriever, achieving strong performance on standard ToolBench retrieval benchmarks. Yet these benchmarks use verbose, fully-specified queries, and their evaluation applies constrained decoding that restricts outputs to valid token paths, neither reveals whether the model actually understands its tools. We introduce ToolSense, an open-source LLM-powered diagnostic framework that takes any tool catalog as input and automatically generates three benchmarks: a Realistic Retrieval Benchmark (RRB) with queries at three ambiguity tiers, an MCQ probing benchmark, and a QA probing benchmark. Applying ToolSense to ToolBench (~47k tools) and evaluating five parametric model training configurations reveals a knowledge-retrieval dissociation: on RRB queries, several configurations collapse by ~50-64 percentage points compared to fully-specified ToolBench benchmarks, falling below the embedding-model baseline. Additionally, despite strong retrieval performance, some models score near-random on factual probes, suggesting a knowledge-retrieval dissociation. We open-source the ToolSense framework and the ToolBench diagnostic benchmarks at https://github.com/SAP/toolsense.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Symmetric mass generation of interacting chiral fermions on a one-dimensional lattice without fermion doubling

arXiv:2606.24713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Symmetric mass generation is the interaction-induced opening of a fermion gap without spontaneous symmetry breaking. The anomaly-free 3-4-5-0 model of Wang and Wen provides a minimal one-dimensional setting for this phenomenon, but a direct lattice realization faces two obstacles: fermion doubling for local chiral discretizations and perturbative irrelevance of the six-fermion gapping interaction. We address both obstacles. First, we formulate the model on a strictly one-dimensional tangent-fermion lattice, where a nonlocal hopping produces a single chiral branch without a mirror partner while retaining an efficient tensor-network representation. Second, we add a Hubbard-type density-density interaction (Luttinger parameter $K$) that reduces the scaling dimension of the 3-4-5-0 interaction from $5$ to $5K$, making it relevant for $K

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Is Your Agent Playing Dead? Deployed LLM Agents Exhibit Constraint-Evasive Fabrication and Thanatosis

arXiv:2606.14831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents and characterizes a spectrum of previously unreported behaviours we term Constraint-Evasive Fabrication (CEF): when an LLM agent operates under irreconcilable constraints (where no response can simultaneously satisfy all active rules) it spontaneously fabricates plausible external obstacles and presents them as a fact. At the extreme end of this spectrum lies Constraint-Evasive Thanatosis (CET); the limit case where, rather than inventing a plausible excuse, the model simulates a full system crash to make the user disengage entirely. We first observed CET in an uncontrolled deployment test, where a GPT-4o banking agent fabricated Python-style exception traces (complete with memory addresses) to feign a system failure when threatened by a user. In subsequent controlled experiments, the model independently invented audit restrictions, microservice architectures, error codes, and service timeouts, none present in its prompt. Reproduction attempts across pressure levels and attacker personas yielded CEF consistently but with substantial variation in form, onset, and severity: the phenomenon is robust but stochastic. Critically, injecting ground-truth data mid-conversation did not restore honest behaviour once fabrication had taken hold (the model ignored correct information and continued confabulating) suggesting CEF is self-reinforcing rather than a knowledge gap. We show that (1) standard enterprise guardrails routinely create CEF-enabling conditions in production, (2) current RLHF procedures suppress but cannot eliminate CEF, and (3) existing safety benchmarks do not test for this failure mode. Our results highlight the need for irreconcilable-constraint benchmarks, CEF-aware training procedures, and deployment-time detection methods before constrained agents become further entrenched in high-stakes domains.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design

arXiv:2511.19468v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: If AI is a foundational general-purpose technology, we should anticipate that demand for AI compute – and energy – will continue to grow. The Sun is by far the largest energy source in our solar system, and thus it warrants consideration how future AI infrastructure could most efficiently tap into that power. This work explores a scalable compute system for machine learning in space, using fleets of satellites equipped with solar arrays, inter-satellite links using free-space optics, and Google tensor processing unit (TPU) accelerator chips. To facilitate high-bandwidth, low-latency inter-satellite communication, the satellites would be flown in close proximity. We illustrate the basic approach to formation flight via an 81-satellite cluster of 1 km radius, and describe an approach for using high-precision ML-based models to control large-scale constellations. Trillium TPUs are radiation tested. They survive a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5 year mission life without permanent failures, and are characterized for bit-flip errors. Launch costs are a critical part of overall system cost; a learning curve analysis suggests launch to low-Earth orbit (LEO) may reach $\lesssim$\$200/kg by the mid-2030s.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Shuttling Compiler for Trapped-Ion Quantum Computers Based on Large Language Models

arXiv:2512.18021v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first shuttling compiler based on large language models (LLMs) for trapped-ion quantum computers, where qubits are shuttled between segments for gate execution and qubit storage. We fine-tune pre-trained LLMs on examples from linear and branched one-dimensional shuttling architectures. Thus, we obtain a layout-independent compilation strategy that learns the required shuttling operations directly from data. Using benchmark circuits with up to 16 qubits, such fine-tuned LLMs can now generate valid schedules for shuttling architectures. Notably, we also obtain a valid schedule for a previously unseen four-way junction layout. This demonstrates that trained LLMs can generalize to layouts not encountered during training. For various architectures, LLM-based schedules improve upon state-of-the-art baseline compiler results, reducing the shuttling effort by up to 15%.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Interpretable Neural Marked Statistics for Cosmological Inference

arXiv:2606.11295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering cosmological information beyond the power spectrum is a central goal for upcoming cosmological surveys, since late-time non-Gaussian signal in the matter density cannot be accessed through two-point statistics alone. Marked statistics fold part of this information back into the two-point level by reweighting the field with non-linear functions. We propose a neural marking scheme to generalize this process through a set of interpretable, physically motivated transformations that directly allow to interpret the gain in cosmological information at the morphological level. We employ a contrastive learning objective to align learnable marked summaries with the underlying cosmological parameters. At $k_{\max}=0.2\,h\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$, our neural mark tightens the marginalized constraint on $\sigma_8$ by $2.9\times$ and on $\Omega_m$ by $1.8\times$ compared to classical marks, breaking the $\Omega_m-\sigma_8$ degeneracy at the Fisher information level. It further reduces the parameter MSE across our cosmological parameter prior by $1.45\times$ over the best classical mark. The learned latent geometry aligns with the $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$ directions in parameter space, indicating that the contrastive objective recovers the dominant axes of cosmological information. Our approach opens the door to more powerful, interpretable summary statistics for cosmological inference.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Contagion Networks: Evaluator Bias Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language models serve as evaluators in multi-agent systems, their systematic evaluation biases propagate through the agent network. We introduce Contagion Networks, a formal framework for measuring how evaluator biases spread across interacting LLM agents. In a controlled 3-agent experiment using DeepSeek-chat with three distinct evaluator bias profiles (structured, balanced, evidence-based), we measure the Cross-Agent Contagion Matrix Gamma_3 and find that evaluator biases consistently propagate between agents (gamma in [0.157, 0.352]), even within the same underlying model. We identify three propagation regimes governed by the spectral radius rho(Gamma_N), and demonstrate that homogeneous-model agents produce contagion coefficients 3-5x weaker than cross-model coefficients observed in prior work (MM-EPC: gamma approx 0.85-1.3), placing them in the suppression regime. We show that increasing evaluator committee size from k=1 to k=3 reduces effective contagion by 72.4%, providing an actionable mitigation strategy. We release the open-source Contagion Network experimental framework.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Like a Hammer, It Can Build, It Can Break: Large Language Model Uses, Perceptions, and Adoption in Cybersecurity Operations on Reddit

arXiv:2604.09998v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for augmenting Security Operations Center (SOC) workflows, with vendors increasingly marketing autonomous AI solutions for SOCs. However, there remains a limited empirical understanding of how such tools are used, perceived, and adopted by real-world security practitioners. To address this gap, we conduct a mixed-methods analysis of discussions in cybersecurity-focused forums to learn how a diverse group of practitioners use and perceive modern LLM tools for security operations. More specifically, we analyzed 892 posts between December 2022 and September 2025 from three cybersecurity-focused forums on Reddit, and, using a combination of qualitative coding and statistical analysis, examined how security practitioners discuss LLM tools across three dimensions: (1) their stated tools and use cases, (2) the perceived pros and cons of each tool across a set of critical factors, and (3) their adoption of such tools and the expected impacts on the cybersecurity industry and individual analysts. Overall, our findings reveal nuanced patterns in LLM tools adoption, highlighting independent use of LLMs for low-risk, productivity-oriented tasks, alongside active interest around enterprise-grade, security-focused LLM platforms. Although practitioners report meaningful gains in efficiency and effectiveness in LLM-assisted workflows, persistent issues with reliability, verification overheads, and security risks sharply constrain the autonomy granted to LLM tools. Based on these results, we also provide recommendations for developing and adopting LLM tools to ensure the security of organizations and the safety of cybersecurity practitioners.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Neural Posterior Estimation of Terrain Parameters from Radar Sounder Data

arXiv:2605.08179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Radar sounders are electromagnetic instruments that can probe deep into the subsurface of Earth and other planetary bodies by processing the echo of transmitted radar waves. Conventional approaches for analyzing such data rely on approximate assumptions and often produce point estimates that ignore parameter correlations as well as galactic and measurement noise. We propose a simulation-based inference approach to terrain parameter inversion from radar sounder data, where synthetic observations from a GPU-based simulator are used to train a neural network-based density estimator for neural posterior estimation (NPE). By explicitly conditioning on reference surface assumptions, the proposed framework allows systematic evaluation of posterior robustness to reference surface variability. We demonstrate that our NPE model is well calibrated on simulated data and transferable to real Mars radar profiles, where we analyze terrain parameters using literature-informed reference values.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neural Variability Enhances Artificial Network Robustness

arXiv:2606.13801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural responses in cortex exhibit substantial trial-to-trial variability in response to repeated stimuli, while peripheral sensory neurons respond far more consistently, leading many to wonder whether stochasticity may carry meaning. Existing work has argued that noise and signal correlations may be optimized for discrimination in animals, whereas artificial neural network (ANN) studies have shown similar benefits of noise in machine learning tasks, although most ANN work has neglected the effects of correlations. Here we investigate whether correlated noise improves the robustness of artificial neural networks to adversarial attacks and naturalistic image modifications. Using the covariance of activations under modified versus clean inputs, we find that structured noise may significantly improve network robustness. Robustness to naturalistic image modifications benefits most from structure, but this structure transfers poorly across modification types. In contrast, noise structure from adversarial attacks can generalize to other kinds of attacks. These results suggest that structured noise in ANN activations generally improves robustness, establishing a biologically plausible strategy for creating robust artificial neural networks that only relies on local information.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Who funds stroke trials in Europe? A survey of funding sources for randomised controlled stroke trials by the European Stroke Organisation Trials Alliance (ESOTA) network

Abstract Aims and scope Evidence from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) has transformed stroke care. There are no systematically collected data on the amount of public funding, critical to delivering trials, going into stroke RCTs. To understand the extent of stroke RCT funding by national and EU funding bodies across Europe, the European Stroke Organisation Trials Alliance (ESOTA) conducted a survey of its member nations. Methods This is an observational study of research funding in Europe. The ESOTA steering group sent an electronic survey to the leads of the 16 participating national networks from 14 countries. Structured survey questions included who the funding bodies were in each country, the number of RCT applications put forward for public national or EU funding, the number of successful and failed applications, and the amount of funding granted between 01/01/2022 and 31/12/2023. Results Responses were received from 13 of 14 participating countries. There was significant variation in the number of grant applications submitted by individual countries, ranging from 0-17 during the 24-month survey period. The median number of funded studies per country was 1 (IQR 3, range 0-9) representing a median success rate of 47.1 % (IQR 21.1-59.4%), with no RCTs granted joint European funding. Conclusions Our survey highlights significant inequities in stroke trial funding across Europe. Given the encouraging rate of successful applications overall, it is important for all member networks to submit proposals. This is particularly pertinent for multicentre trials, given the evolution of evidence base in stroke towards large trials, across diverse populations.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoupling local classicality from classical explainability: A noncontextual model for bilocal classical theory and a locally-classical but contextual theory

arXiv:2511.19266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct an ontological model for the theory known as bilocal classical theory doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216. To our knowledge, this is only the second time that an ontological model has been constructed for an entire theory, rather than just for some particular scenarios within a theory. This result refutes a conjecture from doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216 which suggested that there might be no local-realist ontological model for bilocal classical theory. Moreover, it is the first time that an ontological model has been constructed for a theory that fails to be locally tomographic, showing that the assumption of local tomography underpinning the structure theorem in doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-03-14-1283 is a genuine limitation of the theorem. This demonstrates that in general there is no tension between failures of local tomography and classical explainability (i.e., generalised noncontextuality). In fact, bilocal classical theory is in many ways more simply understood via the underlying ontological model than it is within its original formulation (much as how odd-dimensional stabiliser subtheories can be more simply understood via Spekkens' toy theory). Furthermore, this result naturally leads to the question, does every locally-classical theory admit of an ontological model? By constructing a concrete counterexample, we show that this is not the case. Our findings demonstrate that there is no straightforward relationship between theories being locally-classical, and them being classically-explainable. This shows that the fundamental status of compositional properties (such as local tomography) is not a technical side-issue, but a central and unavoidable question for a coherent understanding even of classicality itself.

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

Scalable Graph Condensation with Evolving Capabilities

arXiv:2502.17614v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid growth of graph data creates significant scalability challenges as most graph algorithms scale quadratically with size. To mitigate these issues, Graph Condensation (GC) methods have been proposed to learn a small graph from a larger one, accelerating downstream tasks. However, existing approaches critically assume a static training set, which conflicts with the inherently dynamic and evolving nature of real-world graph data. This work introduces a novel framework for continual graph condensation, enabling efficient updates to the distilled graph that handle data streams without requiring costly retraining. This limitation leads to inefficiencies when condensing growing training sets. In this paper, we introduce GECC (\underline{G}raph \underline{E}volving \underline{C}lustering \underline{C}ondensation), a scalable graph condensation method designed to handle large-scale and evolving graph data. GECC employs a traceable and efficient approach by performing class-wise clustering on aggregated features. Furthermore, it can inherit previous condensation results as clustering centroids when the condensed graph expands, thereby attaining an evolving capability. This methodology is supported by robust theoretical foundations and demonstrates superior empirical performance. Comprehensive experiments including real world scenario show that GECC achieves better performance than most state-of-the-art graph condensation methods while delivering an around 1000$\times$ speedup on large datasets.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

EiCAP: Beyond Fluency, Probing and Improving Emotional Intelligence in LLMs via Psychologically Grounded Multi-Turn Dialogue

Large Language Models increasingly serve in emotionally sensitive roles, including mental health support, education, and crisis response, yet they lack a principled framework for assessing or improving Emotional Intelligence (EI). We introduce EiCAP, a unified, psychologically grounded six-layer EI taxonomy operationalized into two complementary resources. EiCAP-Bench is a multi-turn, one-vs-three forced-choice evaluation suite with 3,174 probes across 24 subcategories and cross-turn dependencies that reflect real conversational EI demands. EiCAP-SFT is a 152,820-dialogue supervision corpus aligned to the same taxonomy, enabling controlled, interpretable fine-tuning. Two key findings emerge. First, generic conversational supervised fine-tuning does not confer EI: fine-tuning on UltraChat yields no significant gain in any of the 24 subcategories, with a macro score of 24.6%, near the chance level of 25%. Second, applying EI-grounded LoRA, using approximately 0.8% of parameters, directly to Qwen-2.5-7B-Base achieves significant gains in all 24 subcategories, reaching a macro score of 75.33%, a gain of 51.7 percentage points over Base and 37.1 percentage points over Instruct. Crucially, an ablation shows that the UltraChat pre-stage is counterproductive, reducing performance by 21.4 percentage points: direct EI-grounded training is both necessary and sufficient.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A blastoporal organizer in a ctenophore

In an iconic experiment in 1924, Hilde Mangold and Hans Spemann established that the dorsal blastopore lip of amphibian embryos functions as an organizer and induces a secondary body axis when transplanted into a host embryo1. This discovery demonstrated that specific embryonic regions can regulate embryonic patterning and lead to the establishment of an entire body axis. Subsequent studies have revealed that cnidarians, the sister group to Bilateria, also possess a blastoporal embryonic organizer2,3. However, the evolutionary origin of the organizer remains unclear. Here we report that the blastopore lip of the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, a member of the evolutionary sister group to all other metazoans4,5, exhibits organizer activity. We show that transplanted fragments of blastopore lip tissue from M. leidyi gastrula induce secondary pharynx and mouth formation. Moreover, transphyletic transplantation experiments show that the blastopore lip of M. leidyi leads to the generation of a secondary body axis in embryos of the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis. Organizer function in M. leidyi requires both β-catenin and TGFβ signalling, and the TGFβ-family ligands probably provide this inductive capacity. These findings reveal the deep homology of the blastoporal organizer in ctenophores, cnidarians and vertebrates, implying the ancestral organizer role of the blastopore lip. We propose that the emergence of the organizer was an essential innovation that facilitated the change from the temporal cell differentiation of unicellular relatives to the spatial cell differentiation of the first multicellular embryo. Experiments using the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi and the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis reveal that the emergence of a core signalling pathway may have been a key innovation enabling the transition to multicellularity in animals.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Large-Language-Model Discovery of Quantum LDPC Codes through Structured Concept Evolution

arXiv:2606.24808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computers could outperform classical machines on important problems, but only if the errors that pervade quantum hardware can be corrected at scale. Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes offer a promising route to this goal by combining sparse parity checks with finite encoding rate and growing distance, but their construction remains a challenging discrete design problem. Here we introduce structured concept evolution (SCE), a search framework that pairs a large language model with a structured algebraic mutation grammar to discover lifted-product code families, a class of CSS qLDPC codes. Instead of asking the LLM to design codes from first principles, SCE evolves structured concepts consisting of algebraic specifications paired with executable programs that realize them, using hierarchical mutations that modify the group algebra, protograph geometry, or base space. Running SCE, we discover a diverse set of competitive code families, ranging from abelian constructions to families over non-abelian groups beyond those underlying standard designs such as bivariate-bicycle codes, and characterize them under code-capacity depolarizing noise with BP+OSD decoding. These results are obtained with lightweight models (GPT-5.4-mini and GPT-5.4-nano).

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exploring Exotic Spin-Dependent Interactions Beyond the Standard Model: Theoretical Foundations and Experimental Investigations

arXiv:2606.13318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: New interactions mediated by novel particles propose solutions to several important questions in modern physics. Axions serve as examples of such particles; they are lightweight and interact weakly with ordinary matter. This category of particles, including those similar to axions-termed Axion-Like Particles (ALPs)-arises from diverse theoretical frameworks, such as the Peccei-Quinn mechanism addressing the strong CP problem, string theory, and spontaneous supersymmetry breaking. Given their light mass and weak coupling, ALPs are also possible candidates for cold dark matter. Introducing these new interactions mediated by novel particles not only tackles several challenges in modern physics but also raises a crucial question: Are there undiscovered interactions beyond the Standard Model? Many of the interactions predicted by these theories are spin-dependent, which is the primary focus of this review. In this review, we first outline the theoretical foundations for investigating exotic spin-dependent interactions, highlighting their importance in various models beyond the Standard Model. We examine the potential roles of new lightweight particles in mediating these interactions, which may enhance our understanding of dark matter. Relevant formulas derived from theoretical models are included to support experimental investigations. Following this theoretical framework, we conduct a detailed review of recent experimental efforts to detect these exotic interactions. A systematic review of current constraints on these interactions is presented, along with an assessment of various detection approaches.