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01.
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.

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

Trust-Aware Multi-Agent Traceability: Confidence-Calibrated Knowledge Graphs for Consistent Software Artifact Management

arXiv:2606.17203v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent AI systems are increasingly used to automate software engineering tasks including requirements analysis, architecture design, test generation, and traceability linking. When these agents operate as a sequential pipeline over shared software artifacts, errors and low-confidence decisions made by upstream agents propagate to downstream stages, producing orphaned requirements, contradictory links, and compliance gaps that pose significant risks in safety-critical domains. We propose a trust-aware coordination framework where a shared knowledge graph serves as both centralized semantic memory and a coordination surface through which agents assess and build upon each other's contributions using calibrated confidence scores. Our approach introduces a two-stage traceability link prediction pipeline combining embedding-based retrieval with LLM-based multi-criteria analysis, a traceability seeding mechanism that enables comparison between derivation-time and validation-time confidence, and a consistency protocol governing pipeline interactions through confidence threshold gating, confidence divergence detection, and conflict resolution. We evaluate on an automotive software engineering case study measuring link prediction calibration, protocol effectiveness, threshold sensitivity, and the impact of traceability seeding. Ablation studies confirm that confidence calibration is essential for effective pipeline coordination.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Horizon: An evaluation of quantum computing as a threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum

arXiv:2606.14484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing poses a real, broad-based, but bounded and substantially mitigable threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum. We separate the two quantum algorithms that public discussion routinely conflates: Shor's algorithm breaks the elliptic-curve signatures (ECDSA over secp256k1, BLS over BLS12-381) that authorize spending, whereas Grover's algorithm does not meaningfully threaten proof-of-work mining, which is protected by a merely quadratic speedup, fault-tolerant per-operation costs, a square-root parallelization wall, and difficulty adjustment. Folding hardware scaling, the falling resource requirement, a fault-tolerance readiness lag, and expert surveys into a single Monte-Carlo forecast yields a wide, bimodal arrival distribution for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer: about a one-in-six chance by 2035, near 30% by 2040, and about 60% by 2050. Exposure is concentrated and mostly migratable: of Bitcoin's roughly six million quantum-exposed coins only about 2.3 million are irreducibly at risk, while 50 to 65% of Ether sits at key-revealed accounts that can adopt post-quantum signatures. A timely migration beats even an optimistic 2035 machine, so the binding constraint is governance, not technology. A survey of the top twenty cryptocurrencies finds none fully post-quantum. Reproducible models accompany every quantitative claim.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

EpiBench: Verifiable Evaluation of AI Agents on Epigenomics Analysis

arXiv:2606.13602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce EpiBench, a verifiable benchmark for short-horizon epigenomics analysis. EpiBench evaluates whether agents can make well-defined analysis decisions from realistic workflow states and return deterministically gradable answers. The benchmark includes 106 evaluations across CUT\&Tag/CUT\&RUN, ATAC-seq, ChIP-seq, and DNA methylation workflows. Across 5,088 valid trajectories from 16 model-harness pairs, no system passed a majority of attempts: GPT-5.5 / Pi led at 45.0\% (143/318 attempts; 95\% confidence interval (CI), 36.3–53.7), followed by GPT-5.5 / OpenAI Codex at 39.9\% (127/318 attempts; 95\% CI, 31.6–48.3). Claude Opus 4.8 Max / Pi and GPT-5.4 / Pi each passed 39.0\% (124/318 attempts; 95\% CI, 30.2–47.8 and 31.0–47.0, respectively). Performance varies across assay types, and many failed runs still contain parts of the correct answer. Agents often found the right files and computed useful intermediate results, but failed when the task required deeper, assay-specific scientific judgment.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Tensor network characterization and mitigation of readout errors

arXiv:2606.25974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Readout errors are a major bottleneck to extracting reliable information from near-term quantum processors, especially when spatial correlations are non-negligible. We present a unified tensor-network framework that models the readout process as a matrix product operator (MPO), enabling efficient characterization and mitigation beyond uncorrelated approximations. The MPO model is trained via likelihood optimization on calibration data and applies to multiple tasks, including nonlocal observable estimation, random circuit sampling, and random-measurement protocols, such as classical shadows and learning-based tomography. Experiments on a superconducting processor and numerical simulations up to 20 qubits show that the MPO model captures correlated readout errors that uncorrelated models miss, with a sample cost that grows only near-linearly with system size. When extended to two-dimensional systems, the framework can also be integrated with tensor-network quantum error-correction decoders by performing joint inference over data and readout errors. These results establish tensor-network readout error mitigation as a scalable and versatile approach for noise-aware quantum data processing.

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

Data Bias Mitigation under Coverage Constraints & The Price of Fairness

arXiv:2606.20461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models have been shown to exhibit discriminatory outcomes or degraded performance for individuals at the intersection of multiple sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. This stems in part from two interrelated challenges: the lack of principled measures for quantifying bias (potentially intersectional), and insufficient representation of intersectional subgroups in training data. We extend a recent bias mitigation framework to incorporate coverage constraints that enforce sufficient representation across groups, including intersectional subgroups. Since achieving exactly zero bias for all groups may not be data efficient (meaning it may require large amounts of data), our solution trades small approximation errors in bias for greater data efficiency while satisfying coverage constraints. We also formulate bias mitigation as an integer linear program that optimizes over all mitigation strategies, and characterize the price of fairness, the minimum data modification cost, as a function of fairness tolerance. This is essential both for legal compliance, where regulations may mandate specific fairness thresholds, and for data governance, enabling practitioners to make informed trade-offs between bias reduction and data modification (particularly, data purchasing) costs. We evaluate our techniques on publicly available datasets, demonstrating that bias mitigation via our framework preserves predictive accuracy across multiple classifiers, and that coverage constraints, while motivated by statistical considerations, are essential for preserving downstream ML performance.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Wavelength-Multiplexed 2D Beam Steering via a Passive Diffractive Network

We introduce a wavelength-addressable diffractive optical network that transforms illumination wavelength into a high-dimensional control parameter for arbitrarily programmable 2D beam steering. The proposed passive architecture comprises cascaded spatially optimized diffractive layers, jointly designed using deep learning, to rapidly map distinct wavelengths to predefined/desired output angles. Unlike conventional single-layer dispersive optical elements, which are physically restricted to 1D linear mapping, this framework harnesses complex wavefront transformations to utilize the illumination wavelength as an intrinsic addressing key for arbitrary 2D beam steering, eliminating the need for mechanical scanning or electronic phase control. We numerically demonstrate wavelength-controlled beam steering across 625 wavelength channels spanning 400-750 nm, realizing a 25 x 25 array of independently addressable beam positions with subwavelength positioning accuracy and high channel fidelity. Unlike conventional gratings, which constrain wavelength routing to a linear trajectory, the proposed diffractive network performs nonlocal wavefront transformations, enabling arbitrary wavelength-to-angle mappings across a 2D field of view. We further validate the proposed framework experimentally in both the terahertz and visible spectral regimes, demonstrating wavelength-multiplexed beam steering using 3D fabricated passive diffractive layers at terahertz frequencies and phase-only spatial light modulators in the visible spectrum. This wavelength-addressable diffractive architecture establishes a compact and scalable paradigm for high-speed programmable beam steering, with potential applications in optical communications, routing, imaging, sensing, and emerging photonic information-processing systems.

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

Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes. To address this, a growing body of work has sought to extend masked dLLMs with self-correcting (remasking) capabilities. One appealing subset of these methods does so in a training-free, post-hoc manner based on token confidences, with encouraging early reported results. In this work, we revisit the empirical evaluation of a representative post-hoc remasking method, WINO [Hong et al., 2026], and find that under standard decoding settings (shorter block lengths) it brings little-to-no benefit over confidence-based unmasking alone [Wu et al., 2025]. Extending the evaluation to non-greedy decoding, we find that while confidence-based remasking can mitigate errors introduced by increased stochasticity to some extent, it also exacerbates the diversity collapse previously reported for confidence-based unmasking. Overall, our results show that the benefits of post-hoc confidence-based remasking are highly setting-dependent, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Taxonomy-aware deep learning for hierarchical marine species classification in underwater imagery

Automated classification of marine species from underwater imagery is essential for scalable ocean biodiversity monitoring and conservation policy. Existing approaches struggle with severe domain shift across collection platforms, fine-grained visual similarity between closely related species, and uneven annotation granularity, where many specimens can only be identified to genus or a coarser taxonomic rank. We present a taxonomy-aware deep learning framework that aligns both the training loss and the inference rule with the hierarchical structure of biological classification, combining a taxonomy-weighted loss, minimum-risk Bayesian inference, multi-scale feature encoding, and independent per-rank classification heads. Evaluated on the FathomNet 2025 dataset1 (79 marine classes across seven taxonomic ranks), the system achieves a mean taxonomic distance of 1.581, within 3% of the 1st-place solution (1.535), with the largest gains from metric-aligned inference and simple, decoupled components that generalize better than learned dependencies under distribution shift.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

A Marketplace for AI-Generated Adult Content and Deepfakes

arXiv:2601.09117v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative AI systems increasingly enable the production of highly realistic synthetic media. Civitai, a popular community-driven platform for AI-generated content, operates a monetized feature called Bounties, which allows users to commission the generation of content in exchange for payment. To examine how this mechanism is used and what content it incentivizes, we conduct a longitudinal analysis of all publicly available bounty requests collected over a 14-month period following the platform's launch. We find that the bounty marketplace is dominated by tools that let users steer AI models toward content they were not trained to generate. At the same time, requests for content that is "Not Safe For Work" are widespread and have increased steadily over time, now comprising a majority of all bounties. Participation in bounty creation is uneven, with 20% of requesters accounting for roughly half of requests. Requests for "deepfake" - media depicting identifiable real individuals - exhibit a higher concentration than other types of bounties. A nontrivial subset of these requests involves explicit deepfakes despite platform policies prohibiting such content. These bounties disproportionately target female celebrities, revealing a pronounced gender asymmetry in social harm. Together, these findings show how monetized, community-driven generative AI platforms can produce gendered harms, raising questions about consent, governance, and enforcement.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Probabilistic Agents in Deterministic Audits: Evaluating Multi-Agent Systems for Automated Audits Based on the German IT-Grundschutz

arXiv:2606.25622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The NIS-2 Directive mandates robust Risk Management from thousands of small and medium enterprises. To ensure compliance, companies rely on established standards such as the German IT-Grundschutz (IT-GS) of the Federal Office for Information Security. However, IT-GS certification is resource-intensive and requires a high level of manual effort for documentation, validation, and revision, making scalable implementation difficult and expensive. Building upon our previous conceptual framework, this paper presents the technical implementation and empirical evaluation of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture combined with Hybrid Retrieval Augmented Generation (HybridRAG) for the partial automation of IT-GS certification. We introduce two novel technical contributions to the MAS architecture to enforce the compliance rigor. The Hypothesis-Verification Loop in the Structural Analysis (SA) phase that cross-references agent-inferred dependencies against the Knowledge Graph to reduce hallucinations, and a Decoupled Reasoning Pipeline that separates agent-driven semantic extraction from the deterministic protection need inheritance. We utilize the BSI's "RecPlast GmbH" case study as a human expert-generated reference data set for end-to-end evaluation of the architecture and to quantify Precision, Recall, and F1-scores. The performance of the system is investigated across the phases of SA, Protection Needs Assessment (PNA), Modeling, and IT-GS Check. The empirical results reveal noticeable differences throughout the different steps of IT-GS. While the MAS demonstrates high efficacy in semantic tasks (SA and Modeling), significantly reducing manual effort through automated information extraction, quantitative results reveal limitations in logical reasoning phases (PNA and IT-GS Check) as the probabilistic nature of current LLMs struggles to meet the deterministic rigor required by IT-GS.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients

Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts. However, on questions where every rollout fails-yielding zero advantage and being silently discarded-injecting a stronger teacher's response into the policy gradient breaks the on-policy assumption and induces drift. We introduce Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), inspired by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient. On hard questions, ZPPO constructs two reformulated prompts: a Binary Candidate-included Question (BCQ) pairs one correct teacher response with one incorrect student response as anonymized candidates the student must discriminate, and a Negative Candidate-included Question (NCQ) aggregates the student's wrong rollouts into a single prompt to surface their shared failure modes. A prompt replay buffer recirculates each hard question until it either graduates-the student's mean rollout accuracy on it reaches half- or is FIFO-evicted under finite capacity, amplifying BCQ and NCQ inside the student's current zone of proximal development. On the Qwen3.5 family at four student scales (0.8B-9B) with a 27B teacher, post-trained as vision-language models and evaluated on a 31-benchmark suite (16 VLM, 10 LLM, 5 Video), ZPPO outperforms off/on-policy distillation and GRPO, with the largest gains at the smallest scale.

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

DySink: Dynamic Frame Sinks for Autoregressive Long Video Generation

Autoregressive long video generation often adopts bounded-memory streaming for efficiency, typically combining local windows for short-term continuity with static early-frame sinks as long-range anchors. However, this fixed allocation keeps early frames cached even when the current visual state has substantially diverged from them, while discarding potentially more relevant intermediate history. As a result, the retained long-range context may become less adaptive and bias generation toward outdated cues; in severe cases, RoPE-induced phase re-alignment can homogenize inter-head attention and cause sink collapse, where content regresses toward sink frames. We propose DySink, a retrieval-based framework that maintains a compact memory bank and selects visually relevant historical frames as dynamic frame sinks. DySink couples adaptive retrieval with a sink anomaly gate, which detects excessive inter-head consensus over retrieved context and suppresses collapse-prone context. Experiments on minute-long videos show that DySink consistently improves dynamic degree over strong baselines while also achieving higher temporal quality. The code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/yebo0216best/DySink.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Unscreenable: The Burden, Structure, and Analytic Consequences of "Unable to Assess" Delirium Documentation in the Intensive Care Unit

Objective: To quantify the burden, structure, and downstream analytic consequences of "Unable to Assess" (UTA) delirium documentation in the intensive care unit (ICU). Design: Retrospective cross-sectional and repeated-measures study. Setting: A single US academic medical center (Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV [MIMIC-IV], 2008-2019). Patients: 72,944 adult ICU stays with at least 1 delirium screen. Interventions: None. Measurements and Main Results: Among 610,632 screens, 130,455 (21.4%; 95% CI, 21.0%-21.8%) were recorded as UTA, exceeding the 119,052 (19.5%) scored positive. The UTA fraction rose from 2.0% at a Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS) score of 0 to 97.8% at RASS -4; 22.0% of UTA screens occurred in arousable patients, where UTA was associated with mechanical ventilation (odds ratio [OR], 3.43; 95% CI, 3.17-3.71) and non-English primary language (OR, 3.74; 95% CI, 3.43-4.08). Building the delirium label three ways from the same patients shifted prevalence modestly (32.1% to 30.8%) and prediction (area under the curve, 0.737 to 0.719) but most affected the delirium-mortality association: in a baseline-adjusted model the OR was 4.12 (95% CI, 3.88-4.36) under complete-case handling and fell to 2.16 (95% CI, 2.06-2.27) when UTA was recoded as negative. UTA was recoverable from the observed clinical state (area under the curve, 0.95). Conclusions: In this ICU cohort, Unable to Assess was the most common recorded delirium result other than Negative, exceeding positive screens; recoding it as negative roughly halved the apparent delirium-mortality association by relabeling deeply sedated, high-mortality patients. Delirium datasets should preserve and report UTA, whose concentration among arousable non-English-speaking patients is a measurable equity target.

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

Computational references are not experiments: pre-registered validation of machine-learned sodium-cathode voltages

arXiv:2606.23725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learning screens for battery materials are trained and judged almost entirely against computed reference voltages, and those references carry their own systematic errors. We report a case in which this matters quantitatively: our own screening stack (a graph-network voltage screen, a prior-art triage layer, and a local PBE+U bench) fails pre-registered validation against experiment-anchored literature values. Verdict thresholds, failure modes, and the primary metric were committed before analysis. On an operator-audited set of known Na-ion cathodes (n = 6 after one documented exclusion; verdict unchanged at n = 7), the raw held-out mean absolute error was 0.67 V, the pre-registered conservative metric, the upper 95% confidence bound of the cross-validated bias-corrected error, was 1.09 V, and the residual was strongly voltage-dependent (r = -0.94), so no additive calibration is valid. On the two compounds where prediction, database reference, and experiment could all be compared, the Materials Project PBE+U reference sat about 0.54 V below measurement: the reference, not the model, dominated the error. A prior-art screen found at least 70% of the targeted Na substitution space already published. We retire the screen, bound what "verified" means for our DFT ledger, and pre-register a calibration audit of it against four benchmark Li couples.

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

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

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

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

The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports

Authors:

AI-assisted clinical documentation tools increasingly summarize, standardize, and reformat radiology reports using large language models (LLMs). We present a controlled measurement of the resulting information degradation. Using 450 chest X-ray reports from the Indiana University dataset, we generate synthetic versions via three realistic LLM rewriting tasks: EHR summarization, standardized rewriting, and teaching case preparation. We measure entity erosion (via medical NER), hedging collapse (loss of clinical uncertainty language), and cross-modal alignment degradation (via BiomedCLIP image-text similarity). Our central finding is a dissociation between information loss and cross-modal fidelity. EHR summarization is the most destructive at the content level, eroding 51.4% of clinical entities and 43.7% of hedging language, yet it preserves image-text alignment almost entirely (a 2.5% drop). The two tasks meant to produce cleaner training data, standardized rewriting and teaching case preparation, do the reverse: they preserve more entities (26.8% and 29.3% eroded) but cause 14.9-16.5% alignment drops, six to seven times those of EHR summarization. We term this the slop paradox: rewriting that makes clinical text look cleaner for multimodal training is precisely what pulls it away from the image. Contrary to our pre-specified hypothesis, rare pathologies were not preferentially degraded: across nine rare-versus-common comparisons, no difference survived multiple-comparison correction, and nominal differences ran in the opposite direction (common > rare), so contamination is invisible to condition-specific monitoring. The dominant determinant of degradation is the type of AI rewriting task, not the clinical content. These findings bear on multimodal medical AI dataset construction and the governance of AI-assisted clinical documentation.

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

InternVideo3: Agentify Foundation Models with Multimodal Contextual Reasoning

Recent progress in foundation models has shifted toward agentic behavior involving multi-step reasoning and tool use. However, open-source efforts largely focus on text-dominant settings, leaving long-horizon multimodal tasks underexplored. This gap is evident in video tasks requiring sustained temporal understanding and iterative interaction. We present InternVideo3, a framework enhancing these capabilities via Multimodal Contextual Reasoning (MCR). MCR treats understanding as a closed-loop process over a shared, evolving context containing observations, instructions, reasoning, tool actions, and memory. This frames long-video understanding as evidence accumulation and verification. To ensure efficiency, we introduce Multimodal Multi-head Latent Attention (M^2LA), a token-preserving reparameterization compressing KV-cache states while retaining the full token stream. Our staged training includes continued pretraining, short-to-long supervised fine-tuning, rule-based reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation. Experiments show InternVideo3 achieves strong performance on benchmarks like Video-MME, MLVU, and EgoSchema. We further instantiate the model as a video agent with retrieval tools, demonstrating robust evidence-grounded behavior. Our results suggest that efficient context handling and closed-loop reasoning are vital for adapting open multimodal models toward long-horizon visually grounded agency.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Split-Evolution Quantum Phase Estimation for Particle-Conserving Hamiltonians

arXiv:2604.14921v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a hardware demonstration and resource analysis of split-evolution quantum phase estimation (SE-QPE) on a Quantinuum System Model H2 quantum computer. SE-QPE is a modification to canonical QPE for particle-conserving Hamiltonians in which controlled time evolution is replaced by CSWAP-based interference between a target register and a reference register. For factorizations of time evolution with a shared eigenbasis, SE-QPE preserves the phase-register outcome distribution of canonical QPE and, unlike with compute–uncompute substitutions, it remains compatible with non-exact eigenstates. The substitution removes controlled-simulation overhead and enables parallel evolution on two registers, reducing the depth of each phase-kickback block. Resource analysis for Trotterized double-factorized chemistry Hamiltonians shows that the substitution becomes increasingly favorable at higher phase powers and combining QPE and SE-QPE implementations can be a useful option. Over a range of FeMoco active spaces, SE-QPE reduces time evolution resources, with asymptotic reductions of about 33% in CX count, 25% in $T$ count, and an asymptotic depth ratio of $3/N$ for CX layers. On Quantinuum H2-2, a four-qubit model ethylene demonstration with explicit inverse QFT and repeated phase-kickback steps up to 8 phase bits yields distinct energies and shows the auxiliary registers provide useful error detection filters.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

A Unified Josephson Dynamics Perspective for Single-Cavity BECs: From Self-Trapping to Dynamical Phase Transitions

Authors:

arXiv:2606.25364v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) strongly coupled to a single optical cavity, effectively described by a mean-field Dicke model supplemented with interatomic nonlinearities. Here, we propose a unified theoretical framework demonstrating that macroscopic quantum self-trapping (MQST) natively emerges between two internal atomic energy levels within a single cavity. By deriving the dimensionless semiclassical Josephson equations (SJE) governing this purely internal-state architecture, we analytically determine the critical nonlinear threshold and intrinsic phase shift mechanism for the phase transition. Based on this framework, we present two approaches for manipulating quantum phase transitions: dynamic in-situ tuning via photon pumping and inducing non-equilibrium dynamical phase transitions (DPT) via real-time parameter quenches. Furthermore, we rigorously prove that the effective charging energy driving this system scales exactly as one-quarter of the effective spin-dependent interaction energy – the precise parameter governing recent spin-orbit coupled (SOC) BEC experiments. Incorporating realistic $^{87}$Rb atomic parameters, we substantiate that these single-cavity MQST and transition dynamics are highly feasible for observation under current state-of-the-art cold-atom technologies.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Gradient-based inverse lithography for EUV masks via the waveguide method and a physics-informed neural operator

arXiv:2606.25753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gradient-based inverse lithography technology~(ILT) for extreme ultraviolet~(EUV) masks is presented. A novel framework treats the differentiable waveguide method and the recently proposed waveguide neural operator~(WGNO) as end-to-end physics engines, recovering the permittivity of the absorber of the mask through automatic differentiation of the full forward diffraction model. Numerical experiments on realistic 2D and 3D absorbers of the mask (TaBN, La, U) at $\lambda{=}11.2$~nm show that the considered ILT methods make it possible to obtain a mask structure that achieves the desired field on the wafer.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Understanding Key Features of Time Series Foundation Models from Epidemic Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Seasonal influenza infects millions of people and causes substantial morbidity and mortality in the United States each year, making accurate short-term forecasting a core public-health need. Reliable forecasts of epidemic time series can inform vaccination timing, hospital staffing, and resource allocation, yet the comparative behavior of modern forecasting architectures on infectious-disease surveillance data remains insufficiently characterized. We address this gap through a systematic evaluation of regional influenza forecasting using influenza-like illness surveillance and influenza-associated hospitalization time series under both temporal and spatial generalization settings for 1-4-week-ahead prediction. We compare classical neural network architectures, numerical transformer-based models, pretrained time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasting approaches. Across tasks, we demonstrate that a mixture-of-experts model that fuses multiple pretrained forecasters achieves the strongest overall performance, indicating that heterogeneous pretrained representations provide complementary predictive information. Our results further show that numerical transformer-based models produce reliable forecasts, while pretraining provides the largest gains at longer horizons, particularly when the pretraining domain is mechanistically aligned with influenza dynamics. In contrast, LLM-based time series methods underperform relative to numerical forecasters in this setting. Finally, we examine hospitalization information as both an auxiliary covariate and a pretraining source. Hospitalization signals provide complementary improvements in selected settings and clarify when additional surveillance streams enhance the robustness of multi-horizon forecasting. These findings provide actionable guidance on model selection, pretraining strategy, and auxiliary-signal use for influenza preparedness.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

T2S: A Rehearsal-Based Approach for Extraction-Resistant Model Watermarking

arXiv:2606.11698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model watermarking safeguards AI model intellectual property by embedding distinctive knowledge that induces unique behavioral signatures. The primary technical challenge lies in ensuring watermark robustness against various post-processing attacks on the watermarked model. Model extraction attacks emerge as the most severe threat, where adversaries exploit prediction outputs to train surrogate models that illegally replicate the original model's functionality. In this work, we propose a rehearsal-based watermark embedding framework to enhance the robustness of model watermarks against model extraction attacks. By simulating the extraction process, our method leverages the loss of a simulated stolen model on a trigger set as a training signal to fine-tune the watermark knowledge within the target model. This fine-tuning step encourages the watermark to be embedded in a way that boosts transferability, thereby increasing its chances of persisting and remaining detectable in stolen models. Comprehensive experiments conducted under diverse settings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the robustness of model watermarks against both model extraction and subsequent watermark removal attacks.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

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

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