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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Explicit Context-Driven Neural Acoustic Modeling for High-Fidelity RIR Generation

arXiv:2509.15210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications. A key element in sound simulation is the room impulse response (RIR), which characterizes how sound propagates within a given space. Recent studies have applied neural implicit methods to learn RIR using context information collected from the environment, such as scene images. However, these approaches do not effectively leverage explicit geometric information from the environment. To further exploit neural implicit models with direct geometric features, we present MiNAF, which queries a rough room mesh at given locations and extracts distance distributions as an explicit representation of local context. Our approach demonstrates that incorporating explicit local geometric features can better guide the model in generating more accurate RIR predictions. Through comparisons with conventional and state-of-the-art methods, we show that MiNAF performs competitively across various evaluation metrics.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Training-Free Metrics for Synthetic Object Detection Data: A Proxy for Detector Performance

With the recent advent of image generative models, synthetic data are increasingly being used to supplement limited real datasets for training computer vision models. However, not all synthetic datasets improve performance equally, and their effectiveness can only be assessed by training a downstream model, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This problem is pronounced in the task of object detection, where the required annotations are much more dense due to bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a pre-computable metric family, dubbed Conditional-Composition Domain Match (CCDM), which serves as a proxy for the relative utility of candidate synthetic training sets for downstream detection. Experiments on the VisDrone-DET dataset show that the CCDM metric families achieve a Spearman correlation of 1.0 with the downstream performance of YOLOv8, clearly outperforming existing metrics for synthetic image evaluation.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Extrema of microscopically slowed-down Gaussian fields

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a family of Gaussian fields whose covariance structure exhibits an inhomogeneous, microscopic slowdown and it interpolates between a $\log$ profile (for a certain interpolation parameter $\alpha=0$) and a $\log\log$ profile (when the interpolation parameter is $\alpha=1/2$). We consider both one dimensional such objects (which we call {\it Branching Brownian Motions in a cooling environment}) as well as higher dimensional, spatial fields. We identify the correct centering of the maximum at time $T$ and prove tightness of the recentered maximum. While the exponent in the first-order growth varies linearly with $\alpha$, giving a leading order of $T^{1-\alpha}$, the second-order correction exhibits a phase transition at $\alpha=1/3$.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Vernier: Probing Representational Misalignment Behind Lexical Gaps in Causal Reasoning

Authors:

Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged. We ask whether this lexical gap reflects information loss in the placeholder view or a misaligned read-out from a representation that still carries answer-relevant content. Vernier uses a paired-view weight update as an instrument and then inspects the mechanism left after the gap closes. In the working regimes, the evidence favours representational misalignment. A variable-name probe becomes more accurate on the placeholder view, and activation patching on Qwen-7B, Qwen-14B, and Llama-3.1-8B shows that the decision-token representation can transfer answer identity between views. The update that realigns the views is counterfactual augmentation over original and placeholder prompts, while the answer-subspace KL mainly sharpens intermediate answer-belief agreement. Success is bounded by model family, scale, and task. CRASS transfer is reliable across Qwen scales and Llama, e-CARE remains weak, and preliminary non-causal rename tasks show a similar qualitative pattern.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

No Hidden Prompts Needed! You Can Game AI Peer Review with Presentation-Only Revisions

As AI-generated reviews move from experimental tools into peer-review infrastructure, most robustness concerns have focused on explicit attacks such as hidden instructions and prompt injection. We study a harder and more policy-relevant failure mode: no hidden text, no prompt injection, and no changes to methods, experiments, figures, equations, proofs, or numerical results. The attacker modifies only presentation-level content, such as the abstract, contribution framing, related work, discussion, and narrative structure. We introduce adversarial repackaging: a closed-loop attack that uses AI-reviewer feedback to search for presentation-level revisions while keeping the scientific evidence fixed. Across three mainstream AI reviewers, adversarial repackaging achieves a 75.1% attack success rate and a mean score gain of +1.21/10. The effect is not explained by ordinary prose polishing. We also reveal that strategies that change how the reviewer interprets the paper, such as related-work repositioning and analytical discussion expansion, substantially outperform surface edits such as local polishing, table formatting, and algorithm boxes. Our analysis reveals two deeper structural failure modes. First, AI reviewers are easier to impress than to convince: highlighting strengths reliably increases perceived merit, while attempts to dissolve weaknesses frequently backfire. Second, AI reviewers can confuse the appearance of addressing a limitation with actually resolving it, allowing unchanged evidence to be reinterpreted as stronger scientific contribution. These results show that the deployment risk is not only malicious hidden instructions, but the emergence of paper presentation itself as an optimization surface. We release a contamination-free rolling benchmark and attack framework for testing whether AI reviewers remain anchored to scientific content under presentation-only edits.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroQubit: a lightweight, honesty-first de-novo design platform for geroscience-native small molecules with calibrated uncertainty

Authors:

Computational molecule generation has outpaced its own credibility. We present GeroQubit, a GPU-free de-novo design platform that organizes candidates along a target x tissue x hallmark model and reports every signal alongside its measured baseline. We treat our tissue aging-signature readout as a mechanistic structural prior that we explicitly disclose is not validated against lifespan, and we surface efficacy only through a structure-to-lifespan k-NN whose weak but real signal (leave-one-out rho ~ 0.145) is wrapped in empirically-calibrated conformal intervals (90% target, 90.3% measured coverage). On a held-out retrospective recovery of ~1,940 ChEMBL binders against decoys, the score reaches ROC-AUC 0.945 with ~20x enrichment at 1% (BEDROC 0.91) and survives a scaffold-disjoint split - yet we report that it collapses to near-random (AUC 0.62) on genuinely novel chemotypes. Molecules are assembled reaction-first, so every candidate carries a verified synthetic route and atom-level synthon provenance; ADMET is handled as a multi-objective Pareto problem. We frame the disclosed weak signals and the hard-case failures not as flaws but as the honest, decision-useful output the field's own critics demand.

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

JetParticle-JEPA: An Efficient Self-Supervised Representation Learning method for Jet Tagging in High-Energy Physics

arXiv:2606.14813v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jet tagging at the Large Hadron Collider increasingly relies on deep learning models trained on massive simulated datasets, leading to high computational costs and limited robustness to detector mismodeling. We introduce JetParticle-JEPA (JP-JEPA), a self-supervised Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture that learns physically meaningful jet representations directly from continuous particle clouds without tokenization or reconstruction of raw inputs. Built on a Particle Transformer backbone, JP-JEPA predicts latent representations of masked particles while preserving fine-grained kinematic correlations. On the JetClass benchmark, JP-JEPA achieves performance comparable to fully supervised state-of-the-art methods on the full dataset, surpasses supervised baselines in low-label regimes, and significantly outperforms existing SSL approaches. On Top Quark and Quark-Gluon Tagging benchmarks, it remains on par with supervised methods. The learned representations also exhibit strong robustness to missing detector information and improved uncertainty behavior, highlighting JP-JEPA as a promising foundation-model framework for robust and data-efficient jet physics at the LHC.

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

CrossMaps: Confidence-Aware Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping for Rover Navigation

arXiv:2606.16935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rovers rely on perception to maintain spatial maps that encode both objects and sensor quality (e.g., range reliability, lighting artifacts, data density), guiding data fusion, embedding updates, and navigation under partial observability. To study these coupled perception-navigation processes, we present CrossMaps, a real-time confidence-aware open-vocabulary semantic mapping pipeline that constructs language-queryable maps from RGB-D data. Building on VLMaps-style approaches, CrossMaps integrates multi-scale CLIP embeddings with confidence-aware fusion and a dual-memory architecture consisting of Short-Term Memory (STM) and Long-Term Memory (LTM). The STM aggregates noisy visual observations using geometric, semantic, and temporal confidence cues, while confident and coherent cells are promoted to the LTM as persistent semantic landmarks. Designed for deployment with a Jetson Orin-powered UGV alongside SLAM, CrossMaps runs in real time and produces semantic heatmaps that can be queried with natural language to guide rover navigation.

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

Toward Training-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection in 3D Medical Images: A Batch-Based Approach Using 2D Foundation Models

Authors:

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) is attractive for medical imaging because clinical systems must handle heterogeneous acquisition protocols, changing patient populations, and pathologies for which annotated training data may be unavailable. Most existing zero-shot anomaly detection methods are designed for 2D images, and their direct extension to 3D medical volumes is limited by the scarcity of large-scale volumetric foundation models or by the difficulty of utilizing volumetric context. We propose CS3F, a training-free batch-based framework for ZSAD in 3D medical images using 2D foundation models. Each volume is decomposed along multiple anatomical axes and encoded slice-wise by a 2D vision transformer. These are then converted into localized volumetric tokens by pooling neighboring slice features. Anomaly scores are obtained from cross-subject mutual similarity: tokens that lack close analogues in other subjects are assigned higher anomaly scores. To reduce the attenuation of focal lesion signals caused by depth pooling, we introduce a coarse-to-fine tokenization strategy that enables fine-resolution volumetric scoring without exhaustive matching. CS3F is evaluated on brain MRI across metastases, glioma, and stroke, as well as validated on lung CT to test generalizability beyond atlas-aligned brain MRI. The results show that frozen 2D foundation models can support anomaly localization in 3D medical images, and that the benefit of fine tokenization depends strongly on lesion contrast and imaging modality.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Knowledge Graph Enhanced Memory-Augmented Retrieval for Long Context Modeling

Long-context language modeling requires not only extending context windows but maintaining coherent understanding of entity states and relationships across thousands of tokens – a challenge that semantic similarity alone cannot address. KGERMAR addresses this by constructing dynamic, context-specific knowledge graphs from input text during inference, enabling domain-adaptive retrieval that leverages both semantic similarity and explicit entity relationships. The framework performs real-time entity and relation extraction to build contextual knowledge graphs, then integrates graph-structural embeddings with textual semantics through a multi-component memory architecture. Three memory banks – contextual, semantic, and structural – are maintained with retrieval signals fused via learned weights to capture both surface-level semantics and deeper relational patterns. Evaluated on SlimPajama (84.7K training examples), WikiText-103 (4,358 examples), PG-19 (100 examples), and Proof-pile (46.3K examples), KGERMAR achieves up to 8.5\% lower perplexity and 2–2.5x better memory efficiency than memory-augmented baselines across context lengths from 1K to 32K tokens, with superior in-context learning performance across five NLU tasks. The dynamic knowledge graph construction approach advances memory-augmented language modeling by enabling domain-specific knowledge representation that adapts to input contexts rather than relying on fixed knowledge bases.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Proper and improper mixed states serve as different prior beliefs for quantum state retrodiction

arXiv:2502.10030v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A mixed quantum state can be taken as capturing an unspecified form of ignorance; or as describing the lack of knowledge about the true pure state of the system ("proper mixture"); or as arising from entanglement with another system that has been disregarded ("improper mixture"). These different views yield identical density matrices and therefore identical predictions for future measurements. But when used as prior beliefs for inferring the past state from later observations ("retrodiction"), they lead to different updated beliefs. This is a purely quantum feature of Bayesian agency. Based on this observation, we establish a framework for retrodicting on any quantum belief and we prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the equivalence of beliefs. We also illustrate how these differences have operational consequences in quantum state recovery.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neither Parallel Nor Sequential: How DiffusionGemma Actually Commits Tokens

arXiv:2606.14620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open diffusion language models are marketed as parallel, non-autoregressive decoders, yet the order in which a shipped checkpoint actually commits its tokens is almost never measured. We instrument DiffusionGemma 26B, a masked discrete-diffusion mixture-of-experts model built on Gemma 4, hooking its sampler's accept step to record which canvas positions commit, when, and at what confidence. Across a 686-prompt, six-regime probe suite we find that its decoding is neither parallel nor block-autoregressive: it follows a partial left-to-right commit bias whose apparent strength depends almost entirely on the granularity at which you look. Order is weak token by token and strengthens smoothly as the analysis is coarsened, so the model's "block size" turns out to be an artifact of the measuring ruler rather than the architecture. The model commits in large simultaneous batches, leaving much of the within-batch order genuinely undefined rather than merely unobserved. The behaviour is regime-dependent: structured JSON is committed in essentially arbitrary order, and a position's commit confidence tracks correctness on mathematical reasoning but carries no signal on factual recall. Commitment is aggressive, finishing in a short late burst well inside the step budget, while task accuracy matches the model's autoregressive Gemma-4 sibling. Beyond these findings, our central contribution is methodological: measuring decoding order honestly demands handling trailing-EOS padding, within-regime confounding, commit non-monotonicity, block-size sensitivity, and large commit-batch ties, each of which can otherwise manufacture a decoding-order result that is not really there.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Once-for-All: Scalable Simultaneous Forecasting via Equilibrium State Estimation

arXiv:2606.13285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Equilibrium State Estimation (ESE), a novel paradigm for simultaneous prediction, where multiple interacting systems require separate yet coordinated forecasts. Such scenarios often arise in real-world settings such as economics and healthcare modeling. Unlike existing approaches that predict one system at a time, ESE forecasts all systems in a single pass. It first estimates the equilibrium state across systems, then generates holistic forecasts based on the difference between the current state and the estimated equilibrium. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including currency exchange and COVID-19 spread modeling, demonstrate that ESE is at least as accurate as state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while being significantly faster. In addition, ESE integrates seamlessly with conventional predictors, combining their accuracy with its exceptional efficiency and delivering a 10-70x speedup. With linear-time complexity, ESE scales far better than SOTA methods as the number of systems increases. Moreover, it remains accurate under diverse perturbations, establishing ESE as a fast, generalizable, robust, and scalable multi-prediction method.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neural ARFIMA model for forecasting BRIC exchange rates with long memory

arXiv:2509.06697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Exchange rate forecasting remains a challenging problem, particularly for emerging economies, where the observed time series exhibit pronounced long-memory dependence, nonlinear dynamics, and sensitivity to macro-financial drivers. Classical models such as ARFIMA capture long-range persistence but fail to adequately represent nonlinear relationships, while modern machine learning approaches often neglect the underlying long-memory structure in macroeconomic series. To address this gap, we propose a Neural AutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (NARFIMA) model that integrates ARFIMA-based long-memory modeling with neural networks for nonlinear function approximation, while incorporating exogenous macroeconomic and uncertainty indicators. The framework provides a unified approach for capturing persistence, nonlinear dynamics, and external shocks. We establish asymptotic stationarity of the NARFIMA process and develop conformal prediction intervals for distribution-free uncertainty quantification. Empirical results for BRIC exchange rates show that NARFIMA consistently outperforms a broad range of forecasting benchmarks across multiple horizons, underscoring the importance of explicitly modeling long-memory dependence in exchange rate dynamics. The `narfima' R package provides an implementation of our approach.

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

Graph-based Target Back-Propagation for Context Adaptation in Multi-LLM Agentic Systems

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose Graph-based Target Back-Propagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target–output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

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

OmniBioTwin: A System-of-Twinned-Systems Framework for Health Digital Twins

arXiv:2606.11264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Health digital twins (HDTs) promise patient-specific modeling and decision support but current approaches remain structurally fragmented: monolithic models that address a single organ or task lack cross-scale fidelity, while system-level twins lack generalizable architectural frameworks. We propose OmniBioTwin, a System-of-Twinned-Systems (SoTS) framework that organizes HDTs as modular computational entities coupled through explicit interaction operators within a multi-layer network architecture. The framework comprises seven coordinated layers - spanning data integration, autonomous twin modeling, cross-scale coupling, temporal synchronization, and human-in-the-loop decision support. We demonstrate OmniBioTwin by instantiating a multiscale twin for glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) signaling pathways in Alzheimer's disease, illustrating how molecular, cellular, and organ-level twins can be composed and coupled within a unified system.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Latent Gaussian Splatting for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking

arXiv:2602.23172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Capturing 4D spatiotemporal scene structure is crucial for the safe and reliable operation of robots in dynamic environments. However, existing approaches typically address only part of the problem: they either provide coarse geometric tracking via bounding boxes or detailed 3D occupancy estimates that lack explicit temporal association and instance-level reasoning. In this work, we present Latent Gaussian Splatting (LaGS) for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking (4D-POT). We revisit the underlying representation and model 3D features as a sparse set of feature-bearing Gaussians. These act as dynamic, volume-oriented keypoints that enable spatially continuous, distance-weighted aggregation of multi-view features before being splatted into a voxel grid for decoding. This point-centric formulation enables flexible, data-dependent receptive fields and long-range spatial interactions that are difficult to capture with local and dense voxel-based operators. A hierarchical Gaussian representation further enables multi-scale reasoning by combining global context from coarse super-points with fine-grained detail from higher-resolution streams. Extensive experiments on Occ3D nuScenes and Waymo demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for 4D-POT. We provide code and models at https://lags.cs.uni-freiburg.de/.

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

Private Prediction via PAC Privacy

arXiv:2601.14033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning models are increasingly served behind APIs. This renders private prediction, i.e., privatizing a model's outputs rather than its parameters, a natural privacy target: model outputs are lower-dimensional and far more stable to training-data changes than weights. While differential privacy (DP) cannot effectively exploit this as it calibrates noise to worst-case sensitivity that is intractable to bound for non-convex models, we argue that PAC privacy is a natural fit for private prediction. It is instance-based, and calibrates noise to a black-box function's empirical stability to control mutual-information (MI) leakage. The missing ingredient is efficient, adaptive composition. Serving predictions means answering a long stream of adaptively chosen queries from untrusted users; existing composition either fails under adaptivity, grows quadratically, or reverts to input-independent, DP-like noise. We close this gap with a new adversarial composition result via adaptive noise calibration and prove that MI accumulates only linearly under adaptive and adversarial querying. Experiments across modalities show that prediction stability enables high utility even at a tiny per-query budget: on CIFAR-10, we achieve 87.79% accuracy with a per-query MI budget of $2^{-32}$. This enables serving one million queries while provably bounding membership-inference success to 51.08% – the same guarantee as $(0.04, 10^{-5})$-DP. Further, in the presence of auxiliary public data, the large volume of PAC-private predictions enables us to distill a publishable model that can be queried without limit. Concretely, 210,000 private labels on an ImageNet subset distill into a student reaching 91.86% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with membership inference success bounded by 50.49%, comparable to $(0.02, 10^{-5})$-DP.

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

ARTEMIS: Agent-guided Reliability-aware Temporal Mask Evolution for Imperfectly Supervised Video Polyp Segmentation

Imperfectly supervised video polyp segmentation (VPS) aims to learn dense, temporally consistent masks from inexpensive supervision, including weak annotations (points, scribbles) and semi-supervision with few densely labeled frames. This setting is clinically valuable but challenging due to weak contrast, ambiguous boundaries, motion blur, and specular highlights, compounded by sparse pixel-level guidance. While SAM2 can generate dense masks from sparse inputs, direct pseudo-labeling often yields geometry-degraded masks with boundary leakage, underutilizes temporal consistency, and ignores reliability. To address these issues, we propose ARTEMIS, a unified framework for imperfectly supervised VPS driven by agent-guided reliability-aware temporal mask evolution. ARTEMIS initializes coarse masks from available supervision: SAM2 converts points/scribbles, while dense labels serve as reliable anchors. A debate-and-judge vision-language agent selects reliable temporal anchors under weak supervision, which are propagated bidirectionally with SAM2 to refine unreliable or unlabeled frames. Finally, ARTEMIS trains the segmenter using temporal reliability-aware robust learning, incorporating reliability-guided reference selection, a Reference Prototype Transport Module, and reliability-aware robust loss. These components assess mask reliability, evolve anchors over time, transport target identity across frames, and down-weight noisy supervision instead of discarding difficult samples. Experiments on SUN-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB-612 under scribble, point, and limited-label settings demonstrate that ARTEMIS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/wangtong627/ARTEMIS.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Reference-guided immune recovery matching prioritizes traditional Chinese medicine ingredients

Therapeutic prioritization from single-cell transcriptomes requires a target that is closer to treatment response than disease-signature reversal. In immune diseases, post-treatment recovery may follow patient- and cell-type-specific trajectories rather than a simple return along the pretreatment disease axis. We developed ImmuneNavi, a healthy-reference-anchored recovery-matching workflow for ranking traditional Chinese medicine ingredients from paired PBMC data. The workflow maps heterogeneous PBMC cohorts to a common healthy immune coordinate system, constructs patient-cell-type disease and recovery states, and processes ITCM treated-control profiles into a fixed ingredient perturbation bank. Patient and ingredient states are represented in matched gene, pathway and transcription-factor views, allowing the model to combine local transcriptional direction with more stable program-level features. A matcher trained on one paired treatment cohort preserved recovery-aligned ingredient rankings in independent PBMC cohorts without redefining the feature space, candidate set or preprocessing procedure. This provides a reusable transcriptomic pipeline for moving from paired immune-state measurements to prioritized natural-product candidates for experimental follow-up.

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

Taming Curvature: Architecture Warm-Up for Stable Transformer Training

arXiv:2606.16768v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training billion-parameter Transformers is often brittle, with transient loss spikes and divergence that waste compute. Even though the recently developed Edge of Stability (EoS) theory provides a powerful tool to understand and control the stability of optimization methods via the (preconditioned) curvature, these curvature-controlling methods are not popular in large-scale Transformer training due to the complexity of curvature estimation. To this end, we first introduce a fast online estimator of the largest (preconditioned) Hessian eigenvalue (i.e., curvature) based on a warm-started variant for power iteration with Hessian-vector products. We show theoretically, and verify empirically, that the proposed method makes per-iteration curvature tracking feasible at billion parameter scale while being more accurate. Using this tool, we find that training instabilities coincide with surges in preconditioned curvature and that curvature grows with depth. Motivated by these observations, we propose architecture warm-up: progressively growing network depth to carefully control the preconditioned Hessian and stabilize training. Experiments on large Transformers validate that our approach enables efficient curvature tracking and reduces instabilities compared to existing state-of-the-art stabilization techniques without slowing down convergence.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

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

Cross-Lingual Learning within Arabic Script for Low-Resource HTR

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) with limited labeled data remains a challenging problem, particularly for Arabic-script languages. Although modern sequence-based recognizers perform well in high-resource settings, their accuracy degrades sharply as training data becomes scarce. Arabic-script languages share a common writing system with substantial character overlap, motivating cross-lingual learning as a strategy to mitigate data scarcity. We conduct a controlled line-level study of cross-lingual joint training for Arabic-script HTR under low-resource regimes (number of samples K = 100, 500, 1000 labeled lines) on Arabic (KHATT), Urdu (NUST-UHWR) and Persian (PHTD). CRNN and Vision Transformer-based HTR-VT models are trained on the union of multiple related Arabic-script datasets to mitigate the data scarcity and are evaluated on individual target languages. Both architectures benefit from cross-language training under low-resource conditions. CRNN remains more effective under extremely limited target-language data, whereas the benefits of cross-language training for HTR-VT become less consistent as larger amounts of target-language data become available. On Persian (PHTD), joint training achieves a Character Error Rate (CER) of 9.99 , surpassing previously reported results despite not using the full available training data. On an additional Urdu dataset (UNHD), joint training reduces CER from 17.20 to 14.45.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Many-body chirality of topological stabilizer states

arXiv:2606.20472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A defining feature of chirality is the distinction between a system and its mirror image. Despite extensive experimental observations of chiral phases and theoretical advances, a quantum-information theoretic characterization of chirality based solely on the entanglement structure of many-body quantum states remains elusive. Here, we introduce the notion of many-body chirality by formulating it as an obstruction to transforming a quantum state into its complex conjugate through finite-depth local operations. We rigorously establish many-body chirality for stabilizer realizations of $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ anyon theories, proving that complex conjugation can be implemented by local quantum channels if and only if the underlying anyon data are mirror invariant. This reveals forms of chirality that evade conventional diagnostics, including examples with vanishing modular commutator, vanishing chiral central charge, and commuting-projector realizations. We further show that this obstruction is intrinsically four-partite, while invisible to tripartite entanglement structure. Finally, we prove that $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ states with $d>2$ possess intrinsic many-body imaginarity: their complex phase structure cannot be removed by finite-depth local unitaries. Remarkably, this includes states that are not many-body chiral.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Efficiently Representing Algorithms With Chain-of-Thought Transformers

The increasing popularity of reasoning models – language models that output a series of reasoning or thought tokens before producing an answer – is justified, in part, by theoretical results showing that chain-of-thought (CoT) transformers can simulate Turing machines, and thus perform arbitrary computation. However, the Turing machine, while suitable for complexity-theoretic analysis, is not convenient, intuitive, or efficient for discussing algorithms. Algorithms are typically designed and analyzed at a higher level of abstraction, captured by the Word RAM model with random-access memory and unit-cost operations on $\bigO(\log n)$-bit words. As a result, Word RAM algorithms can be substantially more efficient than their Turing machine counterparts, raising the question: Can CoT transformers efficiently simulate Word RAM algorithms? For instance, can they sort $n$ items in $\bigO(n \log n)$ steps or run Dijkstra's algorithm in $\bigO(E + V \log V)$ steps? We answer affirmatively, up to poly-logarithmic overhead. We first establish this for finite-precision transformers with poly-logarithmic width and rightmost unique hard attention, then strengthen the result to two more practical settings with finite width and log-precision: continuous CoT, where reasoning takes the form of vectors rather than tokens, and a hybrid architecture in which transformer layers sit atop a recurrent (linear RNN) layer. In all three cases, we find that CoT can efficiently simulate any Word RAM algorithm with only a poly-logarithmic overhead in $n$. This overhead reduces to log-square when the Word RAM has a ``flat'' instruction set, and only logarithmic for multiplication-free flat instructions – in stark contrast to known CoT simulations of Turing machines, which require quadratic overhead over Word RAM.