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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Achieving High-Quality Portfolio Optimization with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver

Authors:
Zhonggang Lv↗Zhenyuan Ma↗Binglei Wang↗Anbang Wang↗

arXiv:2508.18625v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Portfolio optimization lies at the core of quantitative finance and aims to determine how assets should be allocated to balance expected returns against risk. It can be formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem, which is NP-hard. Quantum computing offers the potential to solve such problems more efficiently than classical methods. In this work, we employ the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to address the portfolio optimization problem. To increase the likelihood of converging to high-quality solutions, we propose using the Weighted Conditional Value-at-Risk (WCVaR) as the cost function and the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) as the optimizer. Our experiments are conducted using both classical simulations and quantum hardware on the Wuyue QuantumAI platform. Together, these results demonstrate that the combination of WCVaR and CMA-ES improves the performance of VQE for portfolio optimization and provides a practical route for applications on NISQ devices.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

C2-Faith: Benchmarking LLM Judges for Causal and Coverage Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Authors:
Avni Mittal↗Rauno Arike↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably assess process faithfulness rather than merely answer plausibility. We introduce C2-Faith, a benchmark built from PRM800K that explicitly decomposes faithfulness into two complementary dimensions: causality (whether each step logically follows from prior context) and coverage (whether essential intermediate inferences are present). Using controlled perturbations, we construct examples with known causal error positions by replacing a single step with a logically inconsistent variant, and with controlled coverage deletions at varying rates, enabling direct measurement against reference labels. We evaluate three frontier LLM judges across three tasks: binary causal detection, causal step localization, and coverage scoring. Our results reveal that judge reliability is highly task-dependent, with no single model dominating across settings. While models often detect that an error exists, they struggle to accurately localize it, indicating a substantial gap between detection and attribution. Moreover, all judges systematically overestimate reasoning completeness, assigning high coverage scores even when substantial portions of intermediate reasoning are missing. These findings expose fundamental limitations of LLM judges in process-level evaluation and highlight the need for more reliable and calibrated methods when using LLMs to assess reasoning quality.

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

SICI: A Semantic-Pragmatic Complexity Index Reveals Regime Shifts in LLM Stance Detection

Authors:
Fuqiang Niu↗Bowen Zhang↗

Prompt-based LLMs are increasingly used for stance detection, but harder examples are not always repaired by clearer instructions, reasoning prompts, retrieval, or debate. We introduce SICI (Stance Inference Complexity Index), a seven-dimensional diagnostic measure of the semantic-pragmatic burden imposed by a target–text pair. Across SemEval-2016 and VAST, SICI predicts LLM accuracy better than surface proxies and shows substantial cross-scorer reliability ($\alpha=0.771$). More importantly, LLM errors change regime as SICI increases: low-complexity examples invite over-attribution, especially Against predictions; intermediate examples form an unstable boundary; and high-complexity examples rapidly concentrate on None. This phase-transition-like structure persists across GPT-3.5, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3, and GPT-4o, although stronger models move the boundaries. A 15-method intervention study further shows that prompting, retrieval, and debate often shift models along the attribution–abstention axis rather than removing the high-complexity bottleneck.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

Authors:
Xiaowen Ma↗Yunpu Ma↗Chenyang Lin↗Sikuan Yan↗Jinhe Bi↗Zixuan Cao↗Yijun Tian↗Volker Tresp↗Hinrich Schuetze↗

arXiv:2506.09046v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. Our framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, our work surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.

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

CRANE: Constrained Reasoning Injection for Code Agents via Nullspace Editing

Authors:
Mingzhi Zhu↗Michele Merler↗Raju Pavuluri↗Stacy Patterson↗

Code agents must both reason over long-horizon repository state and obey strict tool-use protocols. In paired Instruct/Thinking checkpoints, these capabilities are complementary but misaligned. The Instruct model is concise and tool-disciplined, whereas the Thinking model offers stronger planning and recovery behavior but often over-deliberates and degrades agent performance. We present CRANE (Constrained Reasoning Injection for Code Agents via Nullspace Editing), a training-free parameter-editing method that treats the Thinking-Instruct delta as a directional pool of candidate reasoning edits for the Instruct backbone. CRANE combines magnitude thresholding to denoise the delta, a Conservative Taylor Gate to retain edits that are jointly beneficial for reasoning transfer and tool-use preservation, and Graduated Sigmoidal Projection to suppress format-critical update directions. By merging paired Instruct and Thinking checkpoints, CRANE delivers strong gains over either individual model while preserving Instruct-level efficiency: on Roo-Eval it achieves pass1 of 66.2% (+19.5%) for Qwen3-30B-A3B and 81.5% (+8.7%) for Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B; on SWE-bench-Verified it resolves up to 14 additional instances at both scales (122/500 and 180/500); and on Terminal-Bench v2 it improves pass1/pass5 by up to 2.3%/7.8%, reaching 7.6%/17.9% and 14.8%/30.3%, respectively, consistently outperforming alternative merging strategies across all three benchmarks.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The Unsteady Return of Command-Following: Recovery and Instability of Bedside Motor Command-Following After Acute Brain Injury

Authors:
Gorenshtein↗Adiniaev↗Omar↗Barash↗Klang↗Daniel↗

Background/Objective: Following a verbal command marks the bedside transition from unresponsiveness to overt recovery of consciousness after acute brain injury. Its timing across phenotypes, stability once present, and dependence on sedation are uncharacterized at scale. Methods: Retrospective cohort of adults with acute brain injury, first intensive care unit stay, MIMIC-IV. Command-following was the Glasgow Coma Scale motor response "Obeys Commands." Among patients not following commands at admission, cumulative incidence was estimated with death or hospice and discharge without recovery as competing events. Instability was quantified as transient first recovery and threshold crossings; examinations were tagged for concurrent sedation. Principal findings were externally validated in the multicenter eICU Collaborative Research Database. Results: Of 13,900 brain-injured patients with three or more motor examinations, 5,498 (39.6%) were not following commands at admission. The cumulative incidence of first command-following was 43.5% by 24 hours and 65.0% by 14 days, ranging at 14 days from 36.9% in anoxic injury to 77.2% in ischemic stroke (anoxic versus ischemic stroke at 72 hours, difference 0.41; adjusted P = .002). Among 3,573 patients who recovered, the first recovery was transient in 22.2%, and 62.4% crossed the threshold repeatedly. Non-following was strongly associated with sedation, consistent with an arousal-dependent examination. In eICU, the 14-day incidence was 64.8%, and transient first recovery was 22.7%, closely matching the primary cohort. Conclusions: After acute brain injury, overt bedside command-following returns early but unsteadily, with phenotype-dependent timing, threshold fluctuation, and strong dependence on sedation. A single charted observation is an unreliable index of the underlying state.

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07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

THE SILENT STRUGGLE: EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWNS IN HEALTHCARE DELIVERY IN THE NORTHERN REGION OF GHANA

Authors:
Salifu↗Abdulai↗Ibrahim↗

Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centred care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing Semi-Structured interviews with purposively sampled twenty patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted Content Analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinderer patient openness and the quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact on treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environment and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers. Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centered care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing semi-structured interviews with twenty purposively sampled patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted content analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinder patient openness and quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environments and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CellNet – Localizing Cells using Sparse and Noisy Point Annotations

Authors:
Benjamin Eckhardt↗Dmytro Fishman↗Stuart Fawke↗Andrew Curtis↗Bo Fussing↗Constantin Pape↗

Counting living cells is an important step in many biological research workflows. Our collaborators at the Wellcome Sanger Institute study vital genes in humans via large scale saturation genome editing screening, which requires repeatedly counting cells a great number of times. Computer Vision based automation is crucial for high throughput and resource efficiency. In this work, we develop a regression-based deep learning computer vision algorithm to detect and count cells in phase-contrast microscopy images. To reduce annotation effort, which in practice often becomes a bottleneck, we focus on counting cells only using sparse point annotations, which are fast and easy to acquire. By comparison to state-of-the-art 0-shot methods, we show that regression-based counting is a promising alternative in low data regimes. Through developing methods to automatically count living cells in microscopy images, we contribute to valuable research on the human genome. The code is available at https://github.com/beijn/cellnet.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Occ-VLM: Occupancy Grounded Vision Language Model for Indoor Scene Understanding

Authors:
Jianing Li↗Zhou Fang↗Yijiang Liu↗Li Du↗

Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in 3D scene understanding, driving advances in applications such as embodied intelligence and robotic vision. However, existing approaches typically either rely directly on explicit 3D inputs (e.g., point clouds or RGB-D sequences), or introduce an additional 3D geometry encoder to derive 3D-aware visual tokens from 2D images. Such designs structurally decouple 3D geometric perception from the rich 2D semantics learned via vision-language pre-training, hindering the development of a unified 3D vision-language representation. In this work, we propose Occ-VLM, a novel framework for 3D scene understanding that operates purely on posed RGB images and employs a single 2D vision encoder. Specifically, Occ-VLM reconstructs 3D scene occupancy as an auxiliary geometric prior, which is utilized to spatially associate foreground 2D tokens with 3D space. These tokens are then decoded by a Large Language Model (LLM) for unified scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Occ-VLM achieves both accurate geometric perception and robust vision-language reasoning: it attains state-of-the-art performance on multi-view occupancy prediction, while performing on par with 3D-input VLMs on 3D Visual Question Answering (VQA) and 3D dense captioning benchmarks.

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

Coherence-gated quantum devices via real-time weak measurement

Authors:
Priyank Singh↗

arXiv:2604.18662v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Single-photon routers in cavity and circuit QED direct photons by the qubit's energy eigenstate – a projective decision that destroys coherence. We propose a different primitive: coherence-gated routing, where the decision depends on the magnitude of the qubit's quantum coherence, estimated in real time from simultaneous weak measurements of $\sigma_x$ and $\sigma_z$. A photon is accepted if the coherence score $S(T) = \sqrt{\langle\sigma_x\rangle_c^2 + \langle\sigma_y\rangle_c^2}$, extracted from the conditional density matrix via the stochastic master equation, exceeds a tunable threshold $S_{\mathrm{th}}$. Certifying coherence at emission enables two applications conventional heralded sources cannot: (i) a quantum random number generator with min-entropy bounded by Bloch-sphere geometry, $H_\infty \geq -\log_2\!\bigl(\frac{1+\sqrt{1-S_{\mathrm{th}}^2}}{2}\bigr)$, and (ii) a phase-tracked photon source whose two-node coherence certification bounds the matter-matter entanglement fidelity after Bell-state measurement. The estimator is itself a security primitive. Benchmarking seven configurations, we find that underestimating detector efficiency ($\eta_{\mathrm{a}} < \eta_{\mathrm{true}}$) both stabilizes the numerics and suppresses overcertification. We trace this via a purity-monotonicity result, identify a geometric loophole amplifying purity undercertification into coherence overcertification by an order of magnitude ($\sim$40$\times$), and prove two complementary tail bounds: an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck comparison giving $4.5\%$ raw overcertification (empirical $3.7\%$ from $10^6$ trajectories) and an exponential supermartingale establishing structural exponential decay.

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

Sustainable Face Recognition on Low-Power Devices with VQ-VAE Embeddings

Authors:
Christos Chronis↗Georgios Th. Papadopoulos↗Iraklis Varlamis↗

Face recognition has become a cornerstone of modern AI applications, yet conventional approaches often rely on computationally intensive models deployed in cloud environments, leading to increased network traffic, high energy consumption, and a heavy carbon footprint. This work introduces a sustainable, edge-deployable face recognition framework based on Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE), which generates compact and semantically rich latent representations of facial images. By leveraging the compression capacity and reconstruction quality of VQ-VAE embeddings on the edge and combining them with the power of pre-trained face embeddings in a knowledge distillation setup, our system achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art face embedding models while significantly reducing memory and computation requirements on the edge, making it suitable for low-power edge devices. The integration of VQ-VAE compression minimizes network overhead while keeping the matching accuracy high by retaining only the most informative facial features in the latent space. As a result, the reconstructed images preserve the key identity characteristics, improving the robustness and overall performance of the face embeddings.

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12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Post Hoc Localization of Beam F3 Stimulation Targets: An MRI-Derived Geodesic Approach for Refined TMS E-Field Simulations

Authors:
Schramm↗Ten Pas↗Calabro↗Jakubetz↗Szillat↗Koti↗Huang↗Kim↗S. H↗Woletz↗Kirschke↗Hedderich↗…

Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is an established treatment option in major depressive disorder. One of the most common approaches for targeting the dlPFC is the Beam F3 method, which determines the stimulation site (F3Beam) as a function of external cranial measurements. Precise knowledge of the individual stimulation site is essential for imaging-based analyses of TMS effects. However, due to the method's reliance on individual anatomy, retrospective identification of F3Beam targets across cohorts is challenging, limiting the analysis of existing datasets. We developed a scalable method to reconstruct subject-specific F3Beam target locations for e-field simulations based on structural imaging. Methods: High-resolution three-dimensional (3D) T1-weighted MRI was used to generate individual scalp meshes via the ''Simulation of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation'' (SimNIBS) software. Subject-specific anatomical distances and coordinates of interest were measured geodesically using a Python-based script to reconstruct the individual F3Beam targets. Validation included a retrospective comparison between digital geodesic measurements and manual cranial measurements in 20 patients and a prospective comparison with MR-visible scalp markers in 2 healthy controls. To assess the impact of our targeting algorithm on e-field simulations, volumetric e-field maps based on three potential targets (F3Beam, F3MNI, F3Geo) were generated in SimNIBS and compared using voxel-wise statistics in SPM12. Results: Retrospective analysis revealed a systematic bias towards higher in vivo measurements compared to digital geodesic measurements, though deviations in the final distances determining F3Beam (xBeam and yBeam) were minimal ({Delta}xBeam: 0.11 {+/-} 0.08 cm; {Delta}yBeam: 0.14 {+/-} 0.21 cm). Prospective validation demonstrated that F3Beam coordinates better matched in vivo coil positions than group-template-derived targets (F3MNI). Group-level analysis showed method-dependent clustering of coil positions with corresponding voxel-wise e-field differences. Conclusions: Individualized geodesic measurements may enable accurate, scalable and retrospective identification of Beam F3 targets and coil orientations. This approach may yield more accurate e-field simulations than group-template based targeting and provides a practical method for retrospective analysis of existing TMS treatment cohorts. This could be leveraged to identify response predictors or imaging-based biomarkers of treatment response.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

RACL: Reasoning-Agent Control Layers for Continuous Metaheuristic Learning

Authors:
Ant\'on Asla Manz\'arraga↗

arXiv:2606.20142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces RACL, a Reasoning-Agent Control Layer for metaheuristics. RACL places a reasoning agent above an existing optimizer. The agent does not replace the optimizer and does not modify business constraints. Instead, it controls the optimizer's internal search behavior by observing operational memory, reasoning over past behavior, formulating bounded hypotheses, testing interventions, evaluating outcomes, applying guardrails, consolidating useful policies and explaining its decisions. The experiment uses vehicle routing as a testbed, but the contribution is not a new routing solver, a particular ALNS configuration or a specific set of routing rules. The contribution is the RACL method: a way for a reasoning agent to discover, validate, consolidate and explain algorithmic control rules for a metaheuristic. In the current experimental setting, RACL improves or ties the Operational Memory Policy in 21 of 21 feasible cases and improves or ties a non-reasoning Stagnation-Triggered Policy in 18 of 21 feasible cases, with an average RACL vs STP cost delta of -0.641%. In the Sevilla-9/10 runtime sample, RACL improves average cost by -8.337% versus Fixed and -1.605% versus STP without showing material computational overhead. During the proof-of-concept, Codex was used as an in-the-loop reasoning agent observing executions, interpreting logs and proposing live bounded interventions. The policy proxy was later used only to make quantitative evaluation reproducible.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

D3Seg: Dependency-Aware Diffusion for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities

Authors:
Danish Ali↗Ajmal Mian↗Naveed Akhtar↗Ghulam Mubashar Hassan↗

Accurate brain tumor segmentation using multi-parametric MRI is critical for effective treatment planning. However, in clinical settings, complete acquisition of all MRI sequences is not always possible. The absence of certain MRI modalities results in substantial performance degradation in existing segmentation methods, which typically rely on naive feature concatenation or direct fusion strategies. To address this limitation, we propose a novel segmentation model D3Seg which is designed to maintain stable performance under missing-modality settings. D3Seg introduces Multi-hop Modality Graph Fusion (MMGF) to model higher-order inter-modality dependencies, a lightweight diffusion-based imputation mechanism to compensate for missing T1ce and FLAIR feature representations in latent space, and probability-space decision refinement to mitigate dominant-class overconfidence and improve delineation of underrepresented tumor subregions. We evaluate the proposed D3Seg model on BraTS 2023 Glioma as the primary benchmark and further test it on a subset of the external BraTS 2023 Meningioma cohort to assess generalization across tumor pathologies. The results are compared with the state-of-the-art models under different missing-modality conditions. The proposed model achieves approximately 1.5-2.0% Dice improvement on enhancing tumor (ET) and around 1.0% on tumor core (TC) across multiple missing-modality configurations compared to the current state-of-the-art model on BraTS Glioma dataset. Cross-cohort evaluation on BraTS Meningioma dataset demonstrates the generalizability of the proposed model, showing consistent improvements in the challenging TC and ET regions, with approximately 1.5-3.0% and 1.5-6.5% gains respectively across several missing-modality configurations.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Authors:
Artyom Mazur↗Nina Konovalova↗Aibek Alanov↗

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

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

Composed Object Retrieval: Object-level Retrieval via Composed Expressions

Authors:
Tong Wang↗Guanyu Yang↗Nian Liu↗Zongyan Han↗Jinxing Zhou↗Salman Khan↗Fahad Shahbaz Khan↗

Retrieving fine-grained visual content based on user intent remains a challenge in multimodal systems. Although current Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) methods combine reference images with retrieval texts, they are constrained to image-level matching and cannot localize specific objects. To this end, we propose Composed Object Retrieval (COR), a new object-level retrieval task that retrieves target object(s) from candidate objects in a target image and grounds the retrieved result with pixel-level masks. Given a reference object, its mask, a target image, and a retrieval text describing the desired modification, COR requires models to perform composed visual-textual reasoning rather than relying on explicit category names. This setting introduces several challenges, including fine-grained compositional matching, negative-object filtering under visually similar distractors, and flexible single- or multi-object retrieval. We construct COR125K, the first large-scale COR benchmark, containing 125,541 retrieval triplets across 408 categories with base/novel splits for evaluating category-level generalization. We also present CORE, a unified end-to-end model that integrates reference region encoding, adaptive vision-text interaction, and region-level contrastive learning to align composed representations with target objects while suppressing background and distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORE significantly outperforms existing CIR-based pipelines and strong baselines in both base and novel categories, establishing a simple and effective foundation for fine-grained object-level multimodal retrieval. Code will be released publicly at https://github.com/wangtong627/COR.

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

MUZZLE: Adaptive Agentic Red-Teaming of Web Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks

Authors:
Georgios Syros↗Evan Rose↗Brian Grinstead↗Christoph Kerschbaumer↗William Robertson↗Cristina Nita-Rotaru↗Alina Oprea↗

arXiv:2602.09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf. While these agents offer powerful capabilities, their design exposes them to indirect prompt injection attacks embedded in untrusted web content, enabling adversaries to hijack agent behavior and violate user intent. Despite growing awareness of this threat, existing evaluations rely on fixed attack templates, manually selected injection surfaces, or narrowly scoped scenarios, limiting their ability to capture realistic, adaptive attacks encountered in practice. We present MUZZLE, an automated agentic framework for evaluating the security of web agents against indirect prompt injection attacks. MUZZLE utilizes the agent's trajectories to automatically identify high-salience injection surfaces, and adaptively generate context-aware malicious instructions that target violations of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Unlike prior approaches, MUZZLE adapts its attack strategy based on the agent's observed execution trajectory and iteratively refines attacks using feedback from failed executions. We evaluate MUZZLE across diverse web applications, user tasks, and agent configurations, demonstrating its ability to automatically and adaptively assess the security of web agents with minimal human intervention. Our results show that MUZZLE effectively discovers 44 new attacks on 4 web applications with 10 adversarial objectives that violate confidentiality, availability, or privacy properties across different LLMs and agent scaffolds. MUZZLE also identifies novel attack strategies, including 3 cross-application prompt injection attacks and an agent-tailored phishing scenario.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching

Authors:
Xianda Guo↗Pinhan Fu↗Ruilin Wang↗Wenke Huang↗Mang Ye↗Qin Zou↗

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7–3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

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

ROSA-RL: Uncertainty-Aware Roundabout Optimized Speed Advisory with Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Anna-Lena Schlamp↗Jeremias Gerner↗Klaus Bogenberger↗Werner Huber↗Stefanie Schmidtner↗

arXiv:2606.16558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Roundabouts challenge automated driving in mixed traffic, as heterogeneous and non-deterministic human behavior, unknown driving intentions, and high interaction complexity create uncertainty about whether the conflict zone will be blocked or available at the moment of entry. We present ROSA-RL – uncertainty-aware Roundabout Optimized Speed Advisory with Reinforcement Learning. It enables safe and efficient roundabout entry for automated and human-driven vehicles in mixed traffic through probabilistic conflict forecasting. A Transformer-based model predicts conflict zone occupancy over a five-second horizon, capturing multi-agent interactions to anticipate upcoming conflicts and available gaps. The prediction outputs encode uncertainty in future motion and intent, and augment the state of a classical RL framework, enabling uncertainty-aware speed coordination. Evaluated in simulations grounded in real-world data, ROSA-RL can effectively handle uncertainty and outperform a comparable model-based baseline, closing the gap to an ideal setting assuming fully known occupancy while improving traffic efficiency and safety. The source code of this work is available under: github.com/urbanAIthi/ROSA-RL.

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20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Assessing the inference of single-cell phylogenies and population dynamics from CRISPR lineage recordings

Authors:
Julia Pilarski↗

by Julia Pilarski, Tanja Stadler, Sophie Seidel Multicellular organisms develop from a single cell by repeated rounds of cell division, differentiation, and death, which can be represented as a single-cell phylogenetic tree. Genetic lineage tracing allows us to investigate this development by tracking the ancestry of individual cells as populations grow and change over time. However, accurate reconstruction of the cell phylogeny and quantification of the corresponding phylodynamic parameters – cell division, differentiation, and death rates – from this tracking data remains challenging and needs to be systematically evaluated. We perform simulations and assess, using the Bayesian framework, the joint inference of time-scaled cell phylogenies and phylodynamic parameters from CRISPR lineage recordings with random or sequential edits. Principally, we characterize the inference improvements as the recorder capacity increases. We observe more accurate phylogenetic reconstruction from sequential compared to random recordings, but no substantial improvement in phylodynamic inference when using the additional information contained in the order of edits. Overall, we find that CRISPR lineage recordings carry a strong signal on the rates of cell division when appropriate models are used. However, we detect biases in the inferred rates of cell division and death under phylodynamic model misspecification, i.e., when fitting classic memoryless birth-death processes to synchronous cell divisions. Moreover, for scenarios when cells differentiate into distinct types, we demonstrate that Bayesian phylodynamic analysis of sparse end-point measurements can resolve these cell differentiation trajectories by lineage and time. Under prototypical dynamics, we recover cell type-specific division and death rates, and cell type transition rates in over 80% of simulations. Overall, this simulation study explores how much information on cellular development can be extracted from state-of-the-art genetic lineage tracing data using phylogenetic and phylodynamic methodology.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical ODE: Learning Continuous-Time Physical Prototypes for Early Link Failure Detection

Authors:
Jiaen Lv↗Leran Qi↗Shaowei Wang↗

arXiv:2606.14284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Time series prototype learning is fundamentally challenged by observational ambiguity. Discrete architectures fail to resolve this, as they lack the capacity to decouple stochastic noise from continuous dynamics. Furthermore, rigid closed-set assumptions fail to capture unseen diversity. To address these limitations, we propose a hierarchical ordinary differential equation clustering network, which utilizes neural ordinary differential equation to model latent state evolution as a continuous integral curve. This formulation enforces temporal continuity to effectively disentangle smooth feature trends from stochastic noise, while our adaptive hierarchical mechanism autonomously determines the appropriate number of prototypes without rigid prior constraints. Validated on the early link failure detection task with irregularly sampled time series, the proposed method effectively extracts underlying physical prototypes, thereby enabling robust failure detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJ-LNN/Hierarchical-ODE.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Fast and high-fidelity transfer of edge states via dynamical control of topological phases and effects of dissipation

Authors:
Yuuki Kanda↗Yusuke Fujisawa↗Kousuke Yakubo↗Norio Kawakami↗Hideaki Obuse↗

arXiv:2505.16606v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological edge states are robust against symmetry-preserving perturbations and noise, making them promising for quantum information and computation, particularly in topological quantum computation through the braiding operations of Majorana quasiparticles. Realizing these applications requires fast and high-fidelity dynamic control of edge states. In this work, we theoretically propose a high-fidelity protocol for transferring topological edge states by dynamically moving a domain wall between two regions with different topological numbers in one dimension. This protocol fundamentally relies on Lorentz invariance and relativistic effects, because moving the domain wall at a constant speed is described by a mass term with the uniform linear motion in the Dirac equation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol in transferring edge states with high fidelity using a one-dimensional quantum walk with two internal states, which is feasible with current experimental technology. We also investigate how bit-flip and dephasing dissipation to the environment affect transfer efficiency. Remarkably, bit (dephasing) dissipation does not affect the fidelity at the slow (fast) transfer limit, which can be explained by the relativistic effects on the edge states.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Magnetic control of an exciton-polariton condensate in a van der Waals magnet

Authors:
Heng Zhang↗Niloufar Nilforoushan↗Christian Weidgans↗Tobias Inzenhofer↗Marlene Liebich↗Josef Riepl↗Julian Hirschmann↗Imke Gronwald↗Kseniia Mosina↗Zden\v{e}k Sofer↗Ritaj Tyagi↗Jan Wilhelm↗…

arXiv:2506.06010v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quasiparticle condensates are among the most spectacular solid-state manifestations of quantum physics. Coupling macroscopic real-space wavefunctions to additional degrees of freedom, such as the electron spin, would add valuable control knobs for quantum applications. While creating spin-carrying superconducting condensates has attracted enormous attention, man-made condensates of light-matter hybrids known as exciton-polaritons have lacked an analogous spin-based perspective. Here we open a new door by demonstrating magnetically tunable exciton-polariton condensation in the van der Waals magnet CrSBr. Under photoexcitation, CrSBr microwires embedded in an optical cavity show the hallmarks of polariton condensation: a dramatic increase of the emission intensity from an excited laterally confined polariton state by multiple orders of magnitude, spectral narrowing of the emission line, and a continuous shift of the peak energy. Interferometry evidences an increase in spatial and temporal coherence. Owing to the strong coupling between the spin order and excitonic correlation, the energy of the condensate can be tuned by up to 10.5 meV by an external magnetic field of only 2 Tesla. Our results establish CrSBr microcavities as a powerful platform for exploring magnetic control of polariton condensates and mark a significant step toward spin-controlled coherent quantum light sources.

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

MuTRAP: Multi-trigger Trojans Attacking Robot Task Planning Systems

Authors:
Mohaiminul Al Nahian↗Zainab Altaweel↗David Reitano↗Sabbir Ahmed↗Shiqi Zhang↗Adnan Siraj Rakin↗

arXiv:2504.17070v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robots need task planning methods to achieve goals that require more than one action. Recently, large pretrained models have demonstrated impressive performance in task planning. For instance, large language models (LLMs) can generate task plans using action and goal descriptions. Despite the rapid progress of large models in robot intelligence, their security implications remain only partially understood, leaving important gaps in the exploration of potential vulnerabilities in LLM-driven robotic planning systems. To investigate such risks, in this paper, we develop MuTRAP, the first multi-trigger trojan attack specifically designed and targeted for LLM-assisted robot task planners. MuTRAP follows the standard practice of LLM usage in robotics where the backbone LLM is typically frozen and hosted in a central server limiting attacker's reach. In contrast, MuTRAP injects backdoor using a small set of task-specific parameters. In addition, we develop a trigger optimization method for selecting multiple-trigger words that are most effective for different robot applications. For instance, one can use unique trigger word "herical" to activate a specific malicious behavior, e.g., cutting hand on a kitchen robot. Through MuTRAP that demonstrates the vulnerability of current LLM-based planners, our goal is to promote the development of secured robot intelligence. Details and demos are provided in: https://mutrap.github.io/MuTRAP/

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25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Multi-Scale Machine Learning for Antibody-Antigen Binding Affinity Prediction Using Deep Mutational Scanning and Structural Features

Authors:
Sivasubramani↗

Predicting how mutations alter antibody-antigen binding affinity is essential for antibody engineering and vaccine design, yet current methods generalize poorly to unseen complexes. We present a multi-scale machine learning framework integrating 93 descriptors across four modalities: physicochemical, structural, ESM-2 protein language model, and solvent-accessible surface area (SASA)/{Delta}{Delta}G_fold features. Under leave-one-complex-out deep mutational scanning (LOCO-DMS) cross-validation on AbAgym (36,541 mutations, 68 experiments, 13 pathogens), gradient boosting achieved MCC = 0.206; a confidence-stratified ensemble reached MCC = 0.374 (83.5% accuracy, 25.5% coverage). No single modality exceeds the majority baseline alone; only multi-scale fusion succeeds. Boltzmann ceiling analysis shows 45.9% of mutations are near-neutral (|{Delta}{Delta}G| < k_BT), bounding theoretical maximum MCC at 0.473; our method achieves 79.1% of this limit. Five deep learning architectures benchmarked under LOCO-DMS showed self-attention matching gradient boosting (MCC = 0.200). Cross-pathogen transfer failed systematically (mean 46.7%), confirming universal binding predictors remain an open challenge.

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