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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Quality Adaptive Angular Margin Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

arXiv:2606.11915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a quality-adaptive angular-margin learning framework that improves feature generalization by enforcing intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Our framework, titled QLung, introduces a no-reference audio quality margin derived from spectral entropy and root-mean-square energy, which adaptively scales angular margins based on recording quality. To this end, we propose a log-scaled angular margin that stabilizes training under severe class imbalance. We also use an angular classifier that normalizes features and class weights, ensuring margin penalties are applied consistently on the unit hypersphere. Our approach improves in-distribution performance on the ICBHI dataset by 2.46\% over the cross-entropy baseline, and most significantly, achieves the strongest out-of-distribution performance on the SPRSound dataset compared to prior state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/QLung.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MagicSim: A Unified Infrastructure for Executable Embodied Interaction

Robot learning and embodied agents now require simulation to serve as a shared execution substrate linking control, skills, and planning, not only as a renderer, controller testbed, or fixed task environment. Existing pipelines split these layers with "magic" actions, disconnected training environments, or forward-only renders that cannot reproduce, evaluate, and annotate the same episode. We present MagicSim, an embodied interaction infrastructure built around one deterministic batched runtime and a shared Markov decision process (MDP). From YAML-first specifications that decouple contents, placement, behavior, and agent exposure, MagicSim constructs diverse executable worlds spanning task families, interaction regimes, physics, layouts, sensors, avatars, and robot embodiments in one reset-and-step loop. A common execution interface grounds high-level commands through controllers, atomicskills, planner primitives, and asynchronous planning, realizing them as robot actions rather than simulator-side state edits. One task definition supports three capabilities: benchmark and RL evaluation, an autocollect interface that automatically turns commands into grounded trajectories, and agent/VLM-facing interaction. For automatic execution, commands flow through a Command->Skill->Planner->Robot->Record pipeline, while per-environment command, skill, planning, retry, annotation, and episode states advance independently above the shared physics tick. Successful rollouts are saved as structured multimodal trajectories aligning language supervision, action representations, visual/geometric representations, and task-level status with the executed episode. MagicSim thus unifies diverse world construction, embodied execution, task evaluation, automatic rollout generation, and interactive agent interfaces in one planner-in-the-loop runtime.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Reference Fields Transformations in Linearized Quantum Gravity

arXiv:2606.09344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffeomorphism invariance is a central feature of general relativity. Without external reference structures, matter and geometry must be specified relationally, with respect to internal subsystems serving as reference frames. In quantum gravity, these reference systems must themselves be treated as quantum, motivating the use of quantum reference frames. In this work, we address how such a relational description could be formulated within linearized quantum gravity. To this purpose, we introduce quantum reference fields, i.e. sets of four dynamical scalar fields whose stress-energy tensors enter the gravitational constraints. These fields extend the notion of quantum reference frames to local field-theoretic reference systems, allowing matter and gravitational degrees of freedom to be described relationally with respect to physical quantum systems. By generalizing the perspective-neutral construction of quantum reference frames, we show that relational, gauge invariant observables admit reduced descriptions in the perspective of each quantum reference field, and we derive the unitary transformations relating them. The resulting unitary maps implement local quantum coordinate changes between different internal perspectives, and act on the linearized gravitational field with an analogous structure to a linearized diffeomorphism, but with the classical gauge parameter replaced by a physical quantum field. Finally, we construct a relational von Neumann-type measurement scheme, showing how the corresponding reduced observables can be accessed operationally from the perspective of a quantum reference field.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Prompt, Plan, Extract: Zero-Shot Agentic LLMs Workflows for Lung Pathology Extraction from Clinical Narratives

Information extraction from pathology reports is essential for cancer staging, tumor registry population. Yet key data remains embedded in narrative reports, making manual extraction labor-intensive and error-prone. Traditional supervised Natural Language Processing pipelines address this through fully supervised Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction, but require expensive manual annotation and suffer cascading failures when upstream entities are missed. In this study, we developed a zero-shot, agentic workflow, and evaluated five open-source generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to populate 13 College of American Pathologists synoptic fields from lung resection pathology reports. We compared them against a state-of-the-art supervised GatorTron NER-RE baseline using a novel, registry-aligned evaluation framework. The baseline achieved Micro-F1of 0.960, while the best zero-shot model (GPT-OSS-20B) achieved Micro-F1 of 0.893 (recall: 0.949), accurately extracting complex relations like Pathologic Stage without task-specific training. These results suggest that open-source, zero-shot agentic LLMs are a low-cost solution for extracting lung pathology information.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

How Well Do Large Language Models Capture Human Personality?

arXiv:2606.18263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human populations via persona prompting, often under the assumptions that richer persona descriptions improve behavioral fidelity, similarly sized attribute combinations are equally simulatable, and persona definitions generalize across tasks. In this work, we formalize these assumptions and systematically evaluate them across multiple architectures, scales, and simulation settings. We identify a fundamental limitation we term persona manifold collapse, where increasingly expressive persona specifications lead to systematic contraction of representational and behavioral diversity. Across models, increasing persona complexity consistently reduces inter-persona separation in latent space and weakens behavioral differentiation in downstream simulation tasks. These effects persist across multiple analyses as richer personas fail to preserve human subgroup disagreement, performance varies across attribute combinations of similar size, and adding descriptive detail often degrades rather than improves simulation fidelity. Surprisingly, simple Age-Gender personas consistently outperform richly specified Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) across industries, achieving substantially higher downstream prediction accuracy. We find that collapse is not uniform across attributes. Certain combinations remain behaviorally stable and preserve stronger alignment with human responses, forming localized regions we term alignment bridges. Together, our results provide empirical and conceptual foundations for understanding the limits of persona-conditioned simulation, highlighting the need for representation-aware persona construction rather than increasing persona expressivity alone.

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

AgentRivet: an automated system for producing Rivet routines from journal publications

arXiv:2606.13535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Particle physics collider experiments provide Rivet routines as part of the analysis preservation strategy for model-independent measurements. Rivet is a C++ toolkit that allow new theoretical models to be compared to the measurements, thus aiding the development and tuning of Monte Carlo event generators as well as searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. However, analysis coverage is known to be incomplete, with only 39% of measurements having documented and publicly available Rivet routines. In this article, we design and implement an automated workflow based on Large Language Models with the goal of providing the missing routines. This multi-step workflow, referred to as AgentRivet, extracts the physics analysis information from published papers and writes the missing Rivet routines, with intermediate code- and physics- reviews as part of an autonomous quality control. We report the results obtained using commercial Large Language Models, provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, for two recent measurements from the ATLAS and CMS experiments. We find that AgentRivet produces competent Rivet routines with few syntax errors. The physics fidelity of the routines is reasonable and follows the explanations given in the relevant publications. Nevertheless, physics-implementation issues do arise and are investigated using the artefacts produced by AgentRivet. The majority of physics implementation issues arise from subtle-but-ambiguous definitions in the given publication, although some models struggle to implement complex observables even when clear definitions are given.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

What Uncertainties Do We Need for Dynamical Systems?

arXiv:2606.11988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The distinction between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty has received considerable attention in machine learning research, mainly in the context of supervised learning but also in other settings such as generative modeling. In this paper, we offer a machine learning perspective on uncertainty modeling for dynamical systems, which has been studied much less so far. In particular, we ask: what uncertainties do we need for dynamical systems? We discuss sources of uncertainty, clarify their nature (aleatoric or epistemic), and consider how the objectives of representing and quantifying uncertainty vary across different tasks.

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

Reducing the Complexity of Deep Learning Models for EEG Analysis on Wearable Devices

arXiv:2606.12742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wearable healthcare devices are the fastest-growing Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Many automated healthcare services rely on two crucial biological signals, namely ECG and EEG, which reflect the activity of the heart and brain, respectively. Although deep neural networks are considered the primary way to process and analyze these signals, the very tight energy and computational power constraints in wearable devices are far below the computational, energy, and memory bandwidth demands of DNN models, thereby impeding the deployment of deep learning in many practical wearable services. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying state-of-the-art DNN models in resource-constrained wearable devices. Notably, we explore the trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity of DNNs when parameter quantization and electrode reduction methods are used. Our investigation centers on several state-of-the-art DNN models designed for EEG signal analysis, specifically for detecting epileptic seizures. Our findings demonstrate that, when applied judiciously, these techniques can significantly reduce the complexity of the DNNs under consideration with minimal adverse effects on accuracy. These results reveal the explicit trade-offs between accuracy and complexity reduction encountered when adapting DNN-based online EEG analysis for wearable devices.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

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

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

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Pillbox: A Leakage-Aware Foundation-Model Predictor and Lineage-Ceiling Diagnostic for Cancer Drug Response

We present Pillbox, a predictor whose pipeline is audited against the six Asiaee leakage modes with the one residual pathway shown by per-fold ablation to be non-load-bearing on hard splits. Our model combines CpGPT methylation embeddings, CLAMP drug embeddings, and per-fold-fit gene-expression principal components which are fused by Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM)-conditioned graph attention on the STRING v12 protein-protein interaction graph. Then we alpha-ensemble the model against a histogram-based gradient boosting regressor baseline. On GDSC GSE68379 (987 cell lines, 375 drugs) across seeds 42, 7, and 123, the ensemble reaches test R-Squared of 0.78, 0.77, and 0.76 on random, histology-blind, and site-blind splits respectively, with cell-aware lifts above the drug-mean floor of +0.054, +0.060, and +0.037. As a quantitative diagnostic for feature-stack saturation we propose the cross-architecture residual correlation, calibrated against a same-architecture-different-initialization control. On histology-blind splits the cross-architecture value of 0.939 falls short of the same-architecture ceiling of 0.974 by approximately 0.03 in residual correlation, a gap we interpret as the headroom available to architecture choice on top of the current foundation-model representation and consistent with the long-established observation that tissue lineage dominates cell-line drug response. We integrated curated mutation, methylation, and drug-target-expression channels, but these do not improve prediction once foundation-model embeddings are in place. Cross-screen validation against PRISM matches the GDSC-to-PRISM measurement reproducibility ceiling within 0.01 Spearman.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Do We Still Need Humans in the Loop? Comparing Human and LLM Annotation in Active Learning for Hostility Detection

Instruction-tuned LLMs can annotate thousands of instances at low cost. This raises two questions for active learning (AL): can LLM labels replace human labels within the AL loop, and does AL remain necessary when entire corpora can be cheaply labeled? We investigate both on a new dataset of 277,902 German political TikTok comments (25,974 LLM-labeled, 5,000 human-annotated), comparing LLM and human annotation across seven conditions, four encoders, and 10 random seeds. Under a two-question interface that mirrors the human annotation task, LLM annotation at scale outperforms human-supervised classifiers at roughly one-tenth the cost (\$28 for GPT-5.2 Batch API vs. \$316 for Prolific). The advantage holds for both a closed-source (GPT-5.2) and an open-weight (Qwen3.5-122B-10B) LLM, is robust under soft-label evaluation, and is unlocked specifically by the two-question decomposition; a holistic single-prompt baseline only ties with human supervision. AL provides no reliable advantage over random sampling under either LLM annotator. However, error structure varies sharply: only GPT-5.2 under the two-question interface produces classifiers with near-human FP/FN balance, while other LLM variants over-flag border-control and economic competition discourse. We release the dataset and code.

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

Effective Dimension Governs Generalization in Quantum Kernel Vision Models

arXiv:2606.20183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent quantum vision models-quantum vision transformers and quantum convolutional networks-report two striking but unexplained empirical phenomena: (i) ansatze with more, or more uniformly distributed, entanglement generalize better, and (ii) injecting quantum noise can improve test accuracy rather than degrade it. These observations are currently treated as curiosities, discovered by grid search and explained, if at all, by hand. We show that both are manifestations of a single, measurable quantity: the effective dimension $d_eff$ of the (noise-shaped) quantum feature kernel. Working primarily with quantum-kernel vision models-a quantum feature map read out by a kernel classifier-we give a spectral account in which entanglement structure and quantum noise are two knobs that move $d_eff$; in an overfitting regime, contracting $d_eff$ acts as ridge-like regularization. We analyze the mechanism: an exact decomposition of the depolarized kernel $K_p=(1-p)^2K+\tfrac{p(2-p)}{D}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ with $d_eff(K_p)\to1$, a contraction result (and its boundary) for amplitude damping, a kernel-machine capacity bound, and a capacity/alignment risk decomposition; the monotone contraction operative in our entangled experiments is verified empirically, not proven in general. Along the one-parameter depolarizing family the collapse is instead exact by construction; we use it only to confirm the kernel decomposition to machine precision and at up to $12$ qubits, not as evidence for $d_eff$. Amplitude damping contracts $d_eff$ and lifts test accuracy by up to $+13\%$ along an inverted-U sweet spot; the effect's sign flips between the over- and under-fitting regimes; noise injection matches an explicit spectral-filtering frontier. Our results organize two reported anecdotes into a single measurable principle for designing quantum-vision models.

13.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-27

Sequential chemo-immunotherapy followed by standard versus reduced thoracic radiotherapy for older and/or frail stage III non-small-cell lung cancer: A randomized open-label cohort trial

Authors:

by Wei-Xiang Qi, Shuyan Li, Mengdi Wang, Huan Li, Feifei Xu, Lei Yao, Biao Yu, Linlin Chen, Gang Cai, Cheng Xu, Xianwen Sun, Zhiyao Bao, Jiayi Chen, Yi Xiang, Shengguang Zhao Background The appropriateness of concurrent chemoradiotherapy (cCRT) for older or clinically vulnerable stage III unresectable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients remains contentious. Furthermore, the survival implications of de-escalating thoracic radiotherapy (RT) intensity in this population have not been conclusively elucidated. Methods and findings We conducted a phase II randomized, open-label, two-cohort (non-comparative) trial at a tertiary hospital in China (NCT05557552). Between September 30, 2022 and April 30, 2024, we enrolled 56 older and/or frail patients with stage III NSCLC who were ineligible for cCRT. The primary endpoint was the 1-year progression-free survival (PFS) rate estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. Secondary endpoints included objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS), and safety. In the intention-to-treat (ITT) set, which included all 56 randomized patients who received at least one dose of study treatment, the 1-year PFS was 84.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] [70.3%, 98.3%]) in the standard RT group and 70.7% (95% CI [54.3%, 87.1%]) in the reduced RT group. In the per-protocol set (53 patients), the 1-year PFS was 82.9% (95% CI [68.9%, 98.8%]) in the standard RT group and 73.4% (95% CI [58.3%, 92.4%]), with a median follow-up of 24 months. Among 56 patients in the safety analysis set, 71.4% of patients experienced grade 3/4 adverse events (AEs) in the standard RT group and 53.6% in the reduced RT group. One patient (3.6%) in the reduced RT and three patients (10.7%) in the standardized RT experienced grade 5 AEs. The main limitations are the non-comparative design, small sample size, and lack of power to establish non-inferiority or superiority. Conclusion The current study suggested that reduced RT combined with sequential chemo-immunotherapy might be feasible for older/frail patients intolerant to cCRT, showing numerically similar survival outcomes. These exploratory findings warrant confirmation in larger, adequately powered randomized trials. Trial registration The trial had been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on Sep 30, 2022.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05557552

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Resolving the Edge of a Quantum Pyramid

arXiv:2606.14698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standing on the shoulders of giants, we resolve the quantum pyramids conjecture, confirming the globally information-optimal measurement for an ensemble of equiangular equiprobable pure states, as conjectured by Englert and \v{R}eháček (arXiv:0905.0510). We do so by proving the remaining entropy inequalities of Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2506.06700), which certify optimality for obtuse and flat pyramids. For obtuse pyramids, our key contribution is a rigorous proof that local minimizers of the corresponding entropy inequality cannot have three distinct coordinate values. We show that eliminating this family can be reduced to a neat algebraic reciprocal inequality relating branches of the Lambert $W$ function, which may be of independent interest. For flat pyramids, we prove a tight $\ell^p$ inequality for zero-sum vectors that was recently conjectured, proved analytically in dimension $d=3$, and computationally verified for $d\leq 200$ by Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2603.24017). We prove this bound for all $d\geq 2$ via a technique in symmetric inequalities known as the equal variables method.

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

Enhancing Spectral Embedding through Robust and Flexible Knowledge Transfer in Electronic Health Records

arXiv:2606.11570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a spectral-based, unsupervised representation learning framework to derive low-dimensional embeddings for clinical concepts and patients in rare disease cohorts from electronic health records, where data are high-dimensional but sample sizes are limited. To overcome this challenge, we incorporate a knowledge matrix extracted from a broader population that shares a partially overlapping subspace with the rare-disease cohort. Our method departs from existing approaches by relaxing restrictive one-to-one signal-alignment assumptions between the latent data matrix and knowledge matrix, allowing more flexible and realistic forms of structured sharing. We introduce a novel two-step spectral embedding procedure: first, we identify and remove irrelevant components from the knowledge matrix; then, we apply a projection-based method to separately recover shared and heterogeneous components. Simulations and an analysis of a real-world multiple sclerosis cohort show that the proposed method outperforms competing approaches, particularly in challenging scenarios where shared signals are weak and only partially aligned, as is common in rare-disease data.

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

StarOR: Synergizing Tree Search and Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Optimization Modeling

arXiv:2606.15197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization modeling is inherently hierarchical, requiring a precise sequence of symbolic commitments. Traditional learning-based automated optimization modeling methods improve modeling policies through large-scale annotated or curated training data, but are costly to adapt to new problem distributions. Meanwhile, one-shot generation remains brittle in hierarchical modeling, where early symbolic errors can propagate into invalid formulations. Test-time scaling offers a promising alternative by enabling structural exploration with additional instance-level computation; however, existing search-based methods typically rely on a fixed policy, causing repeated rollouts to inherit similar modeling biases and providing limited credit assignment for intermediate decisions. To address these limitations, we propose StarOR, a synergistic search-and-adaptation framework that couples MCTS with Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for optimization modeling. StarOR decomposes the modeling process into four stages and updates a transient LoRA adapter via GRPO at each non-terminal node. By using MCTS-generated siblings as local comparison sets, StarOR transforms search-time exploration into instance-specific policy refinement. Moreover, an unsupervised multi-faceted reward system provides fine-grained feedback for intermediate formulation decisions without ground-truth labels. Experiments across five optimization benchmarks show that StarOR achieves state-of-the-art performance even with a 4B backbone, outperforming existing methods and the frontier LLMs.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dose-efficient Quantum Phase Estimation in Lossy Optical Interferometry

arXiv:2606.14254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical interferometry is a cornerstone technique for precise phase measurements across various fields. In many applications, for example, biological imaging, it often necessitates stringent limits on light intensity to prevent adverse effects on light-sensitive samples, a condition known as dose-limited regimes. Maximizing the precision per dose is therefore crucial. In quantum metrology, quantum correlations enable high precision in phase estimation while adhering to dose constraints. Nevertheless, photon loss, including absorption by a sample, substantially diminishes the benefits of quantum enhancement in interferometry. In this work, we experimentally investigate a dose-efficient approach to quantum phase estimation using sequential strategies in the presence of loss. Performance of sequential strategies with and without control is evaluated through quantum Fisher information (QFI) per dose. Experimental results show that both sequential strategies exceed the classical limit and outperform the parallel strategy using unbalanced N00N states. Notably, the control-enhanced sequential strategy attains superior QFI per dose, approaching the quantum limit. These results highlight the promise of sequential strategy for imaging and sensing in resource-constrained scenarios, marking a significant step toward practical and efficient quantum metrology in lossy environments.

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

Where Does Texture Evidence Live in SAM? Features, Proposal Masks, and Texture Segmentation

Texture segmentation stresses foundation segmentation because meaningful regions are defined by material or repeated appearance rather than object identity. Segment Anything Models (SAMs) often fail by default on such texture-defined partitions, but this failure is ambiguous: the texture evidence may be absent, missing from the proposal bank, or present but selected or assembled incorrectly by an object-centric readout. We ask what texture-relevant evidence is already preserved in frozen SAM before adaptation. We study two frozen evidence spaces: multiscale features, probed with a minimal clustering readout, and the automatic proposal bank, treated as evidence for a supervised consolidation readout. SAM is frozen throughout; we do not fine-tune the backbone or retrain the proposal generator. Across RWTD, STLD, an ADE20K-selected refined-crop complement, and a ControlNet-stitched PTD bridge archive, frozen SAM is not a texture segmenter by default, but its failures are not simple texture blindness. Coarse frozen features preserve texture organization, and proposal banks often contain texture-aligned masks or fragments. Natural scenes more often require assembly and commitment over fragments, while cleaner synthetic cases more often reduce to selecting an already coherent proposal. Default mask failure should therefore be decomposed into representation evidence, proposal-bank support, readout mismatch, and commitment failure.

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

Maximum entropy principle for quantum processes

arXiv:2506.24079v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The maximum entropy principle, as applied to quantum systems, is a fundamental prescript positing that for a quantum system for which we only have partial knowledge, the maximum entropy state consistent with the partial knowledge is a valuable choice as the system's state. An intriguing result is that in case the only prior knowledge is of a fixed energy, the maximum entropy state turns out to be the thermal state, a ubiquitous state in several arenas, especially in statistical mechanics. We extend the consequences of this principle from static quantum states to dynamic quantum processes. We establish that a quantum channel attains maximal output entropy under a fixed energy constraint if and only if it is an absolutely thermalizing channel, where the fixed output is the thermal state corresponding to that energy. Our results have potential implications for understanding the informational and thermodynamic utility of quantum channels under physical constraints. As an application, we examine the consequences for private randomness distillation from fixed energy constrained quantum processes.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

RoSE: Round-robin Synthetic Data Evaluation for Selecting LLM Generators without Human Test Sets

LLMs are powerful generators of synthetic data, which are used for training smaller, specific models. This is especially valuable for low-resource languages, where human-labelled data is scarce but LLMs can still produce high-quality text. However, LLMs differ in how useful their outputs are for training. Selecting the best LLM as a generator is challenging because extrinsic evaluation requires costly human annotations (which are often unavailable for low-resource languages), while intrinsic metrics correlate poorly with downstream performance. We introduce Round robin Synthetic data Evaluation (RoSE), a proxy metric for selecting the best LLM generator without human test sets. RoSE trains a small model on the outputs of a candidate generator (LLM) and then evaluates it on generated synthetic examples from all other candidate LLMs. The final RoSE score is the mean performance of this small model. Across six LLMs, eleven languages, and three tasks (sentiment, topic, intent), RoSE identifies the optimal generator more often than any other intrinsic heuristics. RoSE outperforms intrinsic heuristics and comes within 0.76 percentage points of the optimal generator baseline. This result is measured in terms of downstream performance, obtained by training a small model on the chosen generator's outputs (optimal vs. proxy metric selected) and evaluating it on human-labelled test data. Additionally, RoSE is the only metric to achieve a positive correlation with performance on human test data.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Experimental straintronics in nanotube quantum dots

arXiv:2606.12180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are narrow ribbons of graphene with atomically precise edges and a single quantum transport channel, at experimentally-relevant dopings. This makes them ideal systems to harness quantum transport straintronics (QTS), i.e. using mechanical strain to control accurately quantum transport. We present QTS data from three single-wall carbon nanotube quantum dot (SWCNT-QD) transistors over a broad range of in-situ tunable and reversible uniaxial strain ($\Delta\varepsilon_mech\approx$ 0 to 3 %). We first present the nanofabrication of the suspended SWCNT transistors whose channel lengths are $\approx$ 30 nm. The channels are strained by moving gold clamps holding firmly the nanotubes. We present detailed charge transport data, $dI/dV_{B} - V_{B} - V_{G}$ and $dI/dV_{B} - V_{B} - \Delta\varepsilon_mech$, showing a large mechanical-gating effect of the SWCNT-QDs. The precise reversibility of the data, and their agreement with QTS theory, confirms that the tubes are strained elastically. We demonstrate that the mechanical control of the QD doping is not due to capacitive-gating effects, but to quantitatively predictable bandstructure changes including a strain-tunable bandgap. This precise mechanical control of the doping and bandgap of SWCNT-QDs could find applications in qubits, condensed matter physics, and homojunction molecular transistors.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

EffiNav: Fusing Depth and Vision-Language for Efficient Object Goal Navigation

arXiv:2606.18634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To locate a target object while exploring the unknown environment is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents, with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to field robots. A simplified version of such task is Object Goal Navigation (ObjNav). In ObjNav, successful arrival at the target object provides a basic measure of performance; however, the efficiency of the navigation trajectory is equally important, as it indicates how intelligently the agent explores and how much time remains for subsequent tasks. In unknown environments, the key to efficient navigation lies in deciding where to explore next. While many prior works aim to address this core challenge and achieved promising performance in certain settings, recent training-based models and non-training frameworks still suffer from generalization and efficiency issues respectively, which in the worst cases can lead to excessive exploration of already-visited areas or redundant back-and-forth motion. We evaluate EffiNav on two widely used simulation benchmarks Habitat Matterport 3D (HM3D) and Open-Vocabulary Object goal Navigation (OVON), and further validate its effectiveness on physical robots in real-world settings. We conduct failure analysis on massive simulation episodes. With minimal modification, we also extend EffiNav to a memory-augmented ObjNav task on the GOAT-BENCH dataset, demonstrating its adaptability beyond standard ObjNav settings. Across two standard metrics–Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL), EffiNav matches or outperforms recent baselines, reflecting its efficiency, robustness, and practical applicability. Recognizing the different emphases of the two datasets, the performances reveals this framework is more balanced and generalizable for efficient ObjNav.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Manipulation of Topological Corner States via Subchiral Symmetry

arXiv:2606.17975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Higher-order topological phases provide robust corner modes, but their use requires controllable creation, isolation, and transfer of individual modes and their superpositions. Here we demonstrate, using the two-dimensional Benalcazar-Bernevig-Hughes model as an example, that subchiral symmetry provides a general control principle for manipulating topological corner modes. The conventional chiral symmetry decomposes into four subchiral symmetries, each associated with one zero-energy corner mode. By selectively breaking these subsymmetries with controlled intercell hoppings, we reduce the fourfold corner-state manifold step by step to single isolated modes. We further design adiabatic protocols that transfer either a single corner state or a superposition of two corner states between selected corners, while preserving the relative phase in the latter case. Both numerical simulations and IBM quantum-processor implementations show that the proposed protocols can be executed with high fidelity, establishing subchiral symmetry as a route to programmable higher-order topological state manipulation.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

What Must Generalist Agents Remember?

arXiv:2606.18746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops a formal account of what generalist agents must store in memory in order to act near-optimally across multiple environments and goals. It shows that when two domains share an observational bottleneck but require incompatible optimal actions, any uniformly near-optimal policy must induce distinct memory distributions at that bottleneck. The result yields a separation theorem: sufficiently successful agents cannot rely only on current state observations, but must preserve domain-relevant information in memory. The paper further shows that if an agent's memory contains enough information to estimate values for related goals, then that memory can be used to approximately reconstruct the agent's local transition dynamics. Together, these results characterize memory as the substrate that supports domain disambiguation, transition-model reconstruction, and planning for generalist agents.