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02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

oxo-flow: compiled, memory-safe bioinformatics workflow orchestration

Authors:

Bioinformatics analyses depend on workflow engines to coordinate dozens of computational tools across complex dependency chains. The most widely adopted engines-Snakemake, Nextflow, the Common Workflow Language (CWL), and the Workflow Description Language (WDL)-run on interpreted or just-in-time (JIT) compiled language runtimes, incurring hundreds of milliseconds of startup latency and providing no compile-time safety guarantees from the host language. We developed oxo-flow, a workflow engine written in Rust that compiles to a single native binary. On an Apple M5 processor, oxo-flow parses, validates, and dry-runs a production-scale workflow in roughly 22 milliseconds-before Snakemake or Nextflow have finished loading their runtime environments. Peak memory usage is 16 megabytes, representing six- to seven-fold reductions relative to Snakemake and Nextflow. Dry-run latency is essentially independent of workflow size: a hundred-fold increase in rule count adds approximately 0.4 milliseconds. oxo-flow integrates 31 command-line tools, a REST interface with 60 endpoints, an embedded web application, and native cluster submission into a single 10-megabyte binary. It provides per-rule environment isolation across seven backends, checkpoint-based fault tolerance with cryptographic output verification, and a formal installation and operational qualification protocol for regulated laboratory environments. Ten curated workflows and three demonstration pipeline repositories are available. oxo-flow is freely available under Apache License 2.0 at https://github.com/Traitome/oxo-flow.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Rift: A Conflict Signature for Deception in Language Models

Authors:

A model that lies while knowing the truth is the central case ELK cannot handle with behavioral evaluation alone. We ask whether such deception leaves an internal signature distinguishing it from honest error. Our key move is a control for wrongness: we contrast a sleeper agent (knows the truth, lies on trigger) against a naive liar (fine-tuned to emit the same wrong answers with no honest training). Both produce identical wrong outputs; any difference is about knowledge conflict, not incorrectness. We find deceptive forward passes carry a conflict signature - 2.1-2.3x higher residual rank than naive-liar passes on the same wrong answer - strong enough to identify which of two responses is the lie with 100% accuracy and no labels, across GPT-2 small/medium (three seeds) and three instruct models. Across Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B and Phi-3-mini, instructed deception raises residual rank on every tested fact (18/18, 40/40, 34/34); on Phi-3, lies separate perfectly from both honest answers and hallucinations (AUC 1.0, Wilcoxon p~6e-11). The signature survives strategic self-constructed deception (model invents its own lie, AUC 1.0), active concealment attempts (AUC 1.0), and length-controlled replication (20/20, AUC 1.0, p~1e-6). Using basis-free relative representations, a probe trained on one model family detects deception in two other families zero-shot (mean AUC 0.933), surviving simultaneous architecture and format change (AUC 0.821), and transfers across five languages (AUC 1.000, length-controlled). The signature is read-only: detectable but not injectable (0/8 both directions). Honest limitations and six negative experiments are documented in full.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

Authors:

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Interaction-enabled topological pumping of Rydberg electrons

arXiv:2606.15126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Topological pumping is a paradigmatic realization of quantized transport in band systems, yet its fate in strongly correlated regimes, especially with long-range interactions, remains largely unexplored. Here we report the experimental observation of interaction-enabled topological pumping of correlated Rydberg electrons in a synthetic lattice. We show that dipolar exchange interactions induce a controllable shift of the underlying topological singularity in parameter space, such that a fixed pumping trajectory can be driven through successive topological transitions by tuning the interaction strength alone. This leads to the emergence and breakdown of quantized transport. The observations are consistent with an effective Rice-Mele description with interaction-renormalized onsite potentials and are supported by characterizing the adiabaticity and robustness to control trajectory imperfections. Our results establish a platform for exploring interaction-controlled topological transport beyond perturbative regimes and open a route toward engineering correlated topological matter in synthetic quantum systems.

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

Spatially Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models via Part-Factorized Attention

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) predict a layer of human-named attributes before predicting a class, which makes their decisions auditable. On fine-grained recognition tasks the concept heads are usually free to attend anywhere in the image, so a head named for one body region can be satisfied by evidence on another. This work studies a part-factorized CBM that removes that freedom by construction. The method has three components built on a frozen DINOv3 vision transformer. A learned foreground gate, trained on DINOv3 patch features, suppresses background patches inside the part attention. A set of part queries cross-attends to patch features and each of the 312 CUB attributes is routed, through a fixed concept-to-part map, to read only from the part token its name implies. A learnable two-dimensional Gaussian prior, injected additively in log space into the attention logits, breaks the permutation symmetry among part queries; its means are initialized from the dataset-average keypoint location of each part, which requires no per-image keypoint supervision at training or test time. On CUB-200-2011 the spatial-prior model matches a fully supervised baseline (88.85% versus 88.95% top-1) while raising pointing accuracy by 16 points (52.6% versus 36.4%). Replacing bounding-box supervision with a PCA foreground target and combining it with the Gaussian prior removes all per-image supervision and reaches 88.6% top-1 at about 70% pointing accuracy. A keypoint-fraction sweep shows that 0.5% of the training set (about 27 images) suffices to initialize the prior with no measurable loss. Removing part identity entirely is the harder case: without any spatial prior, pointing accuracy collapses to $2.9\%$.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Decompose Sparsely Where You Should, Absorb Densely Where You Should No

arXiv:2606.14040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are typically trained to reconstruct the entire residual stream through a sparse dictionary, implicitly assuming that all activation content is amenable to sparse, monosemantic decomposition. We question this assumption and hypothesize that activations contain a low-rank, dense component that is computationally important to the model yet inherently unsuitable for sparse representation, which serves as a major source of the persistent dense latents widely observed in trained SAEs. To test this, we add a small rank-$r$ linear bottleneck in parallel with standard SAEs (BatchTopK and Matryoshka), allowing dense structure to be absorbed before sparse reconstruction. On Gemma-2-2B layer 12, a rank-24 bottleneck reduces dense latent count by up to 84\% while improving sparse probing and targeted probe perturbation on both architectures at matched sparsity. The absorbed component is (i) structurally identifiable as the top principal components and outlier dimensions; (ii) causally necessary, with removing it raising next-token cross-entropy by 7.5$\times$, far exceeding the 2.8$\times$ from removing the geometrically near-identical top-24 PCA directions; and (iii) redundantly encoded by sparse dictionaries, with ablating 787 maximally aligned sparse features raising cross-entropy by only 2.9$\times$ and ablating 2,048 topic-aligned features leaving MMLU topic classification virtually unchanged, whereas removing the scaffold drops it from 98.7\% to chance. Together, our findings identify a compact, semantically informative and causally important component of residual stream activations (which we term a computational scaffold) that standard sparse dictionaries represent inefficiently, suggesting that the scope of sparsity-based interpretability methods warrants careful re-examination.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TIGER: Inverting Transformer Gradients via Embedding-Subspace Distance Optimization

arXiv:2606.18312v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated learning allows multiple clients to jointly train a shared model by sending gradient updates to a central server while keeping raw inputs local. However, prior gradient inversion attacks show that these updates can reveal enough information to reconstruct client inputs. Existing attacks on transformers either optimize dummy inputs to match the true client updates, which is costly and unstable for modern models, or exploit the low rank of attention gradients to identify a subspace containing the true layer embeddings, followed by a discrete membership test for candidate tokens. However, this token test is brittle under numerical noise, i.e., from quantization or Differential Privacy (DP), and scales poorly for encoder models with non-causal attention. We introduce TIGER, a continuous gradient inversion attack that turns this subspace signal into a differentiable objective. Instead of searching over tokens or matching full gradients, TIGER directly optimizes token embeddings to minimize their distance to the subspace. Our experiments demonstrate that on encoder-only models, TIGER substantially improves both reconstruction quality and runtime over existing attacks, while on decoder models, TIGER is more robust than prior subspace-based attacks, enabling the first successful reconstructions in DP-defended federated learning settings.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Networks for Intelligent Network Control

arXiv:2606.13848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile networks continue to grow in complexity and next generation networks are expected to support both increasing traffic loads and more diverse services. As network complexity rises, optimizing antenna parameters under dynamic or changing objectives becomes increasingly challenging. We propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm for high-level control and orchestration of mobile networks. The Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Network (TC-GQN) algorithm learns a self-predicting representation of the whole network that is task-independent and aggregates information from all base-stations. A graph neural network is trained using a global reward function to assign coordinated local actions based on the learned encoding of the global network state. We evaluate the algorithm in a simulated environment to orchestrate an energy-saving feature across multiple sectors and multiple carriers under different quality of service (QoS) constraints. The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based baselines and a competitive rule-based controller by improving hardware sleep time while maintaining QoS. Moreover, the learned representation enables rapid adaptation to changing intents.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

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

False Sense of Safety in Selective Signal Classification: Auditing Bound Tightness and Exchangeability for Risk Control

arXiv:2606.15153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selective prediction with distribution-free risk control promises that, with confidence 1-delta over the calibration draw, the error rate of accepted inputs stays below a user budget alpha. We audit this promise on signal-domain detectors – machine anomalous-sound detection (ASD) and AI-generated-image forensics – for four calibration rules: uncertified empirical thresholding (NAIVE) and certified Hoeffding, Clopper-Pearson (CP), and betting (WSR) upper confidence bounds. We report three findings. (i) NAIVE thresholding, common in practice, exceeds its declared budget in 49-73% of synthetic trials (n=200 calibration points) and in up to 68% of real-data splits: a false sense of safety rather than a broken theorem, since the rule never had a certificate. (ii) Tightness matters: CP and WSR certify substantial coverage where Hoeffding certifies none, with zero observed budget overruns under exchangeable splits. (iii) Under grouped deployment (unseen machine types or generators), certified rules overrun in 9-30% of trials – far above delta – showing the failure lies in the broken exchangeability premise, not in the bounds; a conservative per-group threshold restores validity at a severe coverage cost.

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

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

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

AcceRL: A Distributed Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning and World Model Framework for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2603.18464v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is severely bottlenecked by synchronization barriers and the high cost of environment data acquisition. To overcome these challenges, we propose AcceRL, a distributed asynchronous RL framework that physically isolates environment rollouts, model inference, and gradient updates. By eliminating the cascading long-tail idle bubbles inherent in synchronous systems, AcceRL maximizes hardware utilization and ensures scalable throughput. Furthermore, AcceRL features a modular design that supports the integration of diverse, plug-and-play world models into its distributed pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the base framework achieves highly competitive performance across all four LIBERO[liu2023libero] task suites. Systematically, the asynchronous architecture delivers a $2.4\times$ throughput speedup over leading synchronous baselines. Algorithmically, by leveraging a world model pre-trained on 1,000 offline trajectories, AcceRL achieves up to a $200\times$ improvement in online sample efficiency on LIBERO-Spatial, establishing a robust framework that is both sample-efficient and time-efficient for embodied AI. Code is included in the supplementary material. Code is available at https://github.com/distanceLu/AcceRL.

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

T-Mem: Memory That Anticipates, Not Archives

Long-term memory is essential for conversational agents to remain coherent across extended dialogues, follow through on commitments made many sessions earlier, and adapt their behaviour to each user. Current LLM-backed long-term conversational memory, however, is reachability-bounded by the similarity between a query and stored content, both lexical and dense-vector. The approach is effective when query and memory share surface features such as wording or named entities (we call this descriptive). But it misses another, equally valuable class of cases, where query and memory do not share surface features and are tied only by a latent semantic arc (associative). On this regime prevailing long-term memory systems collectively fail. Covering this other half is what allows an assistant, for the first time, to actively draw on past dialogue as a semantic asset. On the memory side, this is the engineering counterpart of what cognitive science calls episodic future thinking: rehearsing past experience for the future contexts under which it will need to be found. We call these write-time rehearsals triggers. We propose T-Mem, the first long-term conversational memory architecture that covers both descriptive and associative recall. At each of two evidence granularities, single facts and full exchanges, T-Mem instantiates one descriptive trigger family and one associative trigger family, so that every memory remains reachable from both surface-similar and relevance-bound queries. As empirical validation, T-Mem reaches state-of-the-art on both LoCoMo and LoCoMo-Plus.

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

Machine-learned particle flow as a foundation model for collider physics

arXiv:2606.14373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The workflow from particle collision to physics analysis passes through a series of reconstruction steps that are traditionally modular and disconnected, with no shared representation linking low-level detector data to high-level analysis tasks. We show that casting event reconstruction as a machine learning problem naturally produces such a shared representation. We repurpose a machine learning model trained for particle-flow reconstruction (MLPF) to perform three distinct analysis tasks: jet flavor identification, jet energy regression, and missing momentum regression. By appending the per-particle latent representations learned during reconstruction as additional input features, we substantially improve over baselines that use kinematic features alone. We further demonstrate that a single linear layer trained using only the latent representations achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art baseline architectures, and outperforms the baseline for missing momentum regression with approximately 35 times fewer parameters. These results demonstrate that the latent representations learned during reconstruction encode essential physics information needed for downstream analysis, establishing MLPF as a foundation model and offering a concrete step toward an end-to-end pipeline from detector data to physics analysis.

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

Interactor: Agentic RL oriented Iterative Creation for Ad Description Generation in Sponsored Search

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate multi-dimensional qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and reasoning feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments on industrial datasets show that the Interactor framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

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

Gaussian Spatial Priors for Anatomy-Aware Object Detection in Surgical Videos

Detecting anatomical structures in surgical video is essential for intraoperative safety frameworks such as the Critical View of Myopectineal Orifice (CVMPO) in inguinal hernia repair. While prominent structures like the Cooper's Ligament and Triangle of Doom are reliably detected by standard methods, smaller structures such as the epigastric vessels remain challenging due to their visual ambiguity and intermittent visibility. We observe that the spatial relationship between structures is anatomically constrained, and propose a Gaussian Spatial Prior (GSP) module that encodes this relationship as a compact, parametric bias injected into the self-attention of a DAB-DETR decoder. The prior is computed offline from training annotations as a small set of frozen Gaussian parameters and recomputed at each decoder layer using the iteratively refined reference points. On a dataset of inguinal hernia repair videos with 5-fold cross-validation, GSP improves dependent class detection by $+33.5\%$ ($AP_{50}$) over DAB-DETR and $+53.9\%$ over YOLOv26, while also improving anchor detection by $+6.0\%$. These gains are statistically significant across all folds ($p=0.012$, paired $t-$test).

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Roto-Reflection Geometry of Pure Two-Qubit Entanglement

arXiv:2606.12637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pure two-qubit entanglement is usually characterized by scalar quantities such as concurrence. Here we show that it also has a natural geometric form. In the Pauli correlation tensor, maximally entangled states appear as improper orthogonal maps between two local Bloch spheres. These maps are roto-reflections. For partially entangled pure states, the same roto-reflection geometry is recovered after separating the contraction associated with concurrence. We call the corresponding geometric object the Entanglement Roto-Reflection Plane (ERRP). It organizes the maximally correlated directions of the two-qubit state and provides a covariant geometric complement to the scalar magnitude of entanglement.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Transformer Geometry Observatory TGO-I: Spectral Geometry Observatory

Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Transformer Geometry Observatory (TGO), a systematic framework of experiments and analysis pipelines designed to investigate the representational geometry and dynamics of Vision Transformers. TGO-I, the first installment of the framework, focuses on the spectral geometry of ViT representations. Using a ViT-Small/16 model trained on ImageNet-100, we analyze Effective Rank, Stable Rank, Participation Ratio, Spectral Entropy, Spectral Flatness, Spectral Anisotropy, covariance structure, eigenspectra, and singular value spectra throughout training. Our results reveal a consistent increase in dimensional utilization, accompanied by decreasing anisotropy, increasing spectral entropy, increasing participation ratio, and progressively flatter eigenspectra. Contrary to the common intuition that training should concentrate information into a small number of dominant directions, we observe a progressive redistribution of variance across representational dimensions. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the final CLS token representation, which exhibits the highest effective dimensionality and lowest anisotropy within the network.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning from egocentric videos is inherently challenging because the observable evidence is constrained by the camera trajectory. Existing methods rely on single-turn inference, forcing models to resolve geometric ambiguity through semantic priors rather than verifiable evidence. We argue that spatial reasoning should be revisitable: conclusions formed under limited evidence should remain open to revision when complementary viewpoints become available. Building on this insight, we propose Reason, then Re-reason (ReRe), a training-free, inference-time framework with two phases: in the Reason Phase, an MLLM forms a spatial hypothesis from the original video; in the Re-reason Phase, it verifies or revises the hypothesis by observing a synthesized novel-view video. To enable effective cross-view revisiting, we design a Geometry-to-Video pipeline that renders strategically complementary novel views from predicted 3D geometry. These views feature an elevated, oblique perspective with scene-spanning coverage, while preserving the MLLM's native video interface without architectural modifications. Extensive evaluations on VSI-Bench and STI-Bench demonstrate that ReRe substantially boosts open-source MLLMs to rival proprietary state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://zhenjiemao.github.io/ReRe/

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Limiting partition function for the Mallows model: a conjecture and partial evidence

Authors:

arXiv:2406.18855v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $S_n$ denote the set of permutations of $n$ labels. We consider a class of Gibbs probability models on $S_n$ that is a subfamily of the so-called Mallows model of random permutations. The Gibbs energy is given by a class of right invariant divergences on $S_n$ that includes common choices such as the Spearman foot rule and the Spearman rank correlation. Mukherjee in 2016 computed the limit of the (scaled) log partition function (i.e. normalizing factor) of such models as $n\rightarrow \infty$. Our objective is to compute the exact limit, as $n\rightarrow \infty$, without the log. We conjecture that this limit is given by the Fredholm determinant of an integral operator related to the so-called Schrödinger bridge probability distributions from optimal transport theory. We provide partial evidence for this conjecture, although the argument lacks a final error bound that is needed for it to become a complete proof.

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

Adaptively secure unitary designs with constant non-Clifford cost

arXiv:2510.08129v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Randomness is a fundamental resource in quantum information, with crucial applications in cryptography, algorithms, and error correction. A central challenge is to construct unitary $k$-designs that closely approximate Haar-random unitaries while minimizing the costly use of non-Clifford operations. In this work, we present a protocol able to generate unitary $k$-designs on $n$ qubits, secure against any adversarial quantum measurement, with a system-size-independent number of non-Clifford gates. Our construction applies a $k$-design only to a subsystem of size $\Theta(k)$, independent of $n$. This ``seed'' design is then ``diluted'' across the entire $n$-qubit system by sandwiching it between two random Clifford operators. The resulting ensemble forms an $\varepsilon$-approximate unitary $k$-design on $n$ qubits. We prove that this construction achieves full quantum security against adaptive adversaries using only $\tilde{O}(k^2 \log\varepsilon^{-1})$ non-Clifford gates. If one requires security only against polynomial-time adaptive adversaries, the non-Clifford cost decreases to $\tilde{O}(k + \log^{1+c} \varepsilon^{-1})$. This is optimal, since we show that at least $\Omega(k)$ non-Clifford gates are required in this setting. Compared to existing approaches, our method significantly reduces non-Clifford overhead while strengthening security guarantees to adaptive security as well as removing artificial assumptions between $n$ and $k$. These results make high-order unitary designs practically attainable in near-term fault-tolerant quantum architectures.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Segment-Level Mandarin Chinese Speech-Based Cognitive Impairment Detection via an Autoencoder with Contrastive Learning

\noindentBackground and Objective: Speech has emerged as a low-cost and non-invasive digital biomarker with considerable potential for cognitive impairment detection. However, limited labeled data and cross-dataset variability remain major challenges for robust speech-based screening systems. \par\noindentMethods: We developed a segment-level representation learning framework for speech-based cognitive impairment detection. Speech recordings were divided into short segments and converted into spectrogram representations. To improve robustness under limited-data conditions, offline and online augmentation strategies were combined with autoencoder-based representation learning and contrastive objectives to enhance discriminative latent representations. \par\noindentResults: Experiments conducted on four independent Mandarin Chinese speech datasets demonstrated stable and competitive performance in both binary and three-class classification tasks, with particularly notable improvements in the clinically challenging three-class setting. Ablation studies further supported the effectiveness of the proposed framework. \par\noindentConclusions: The findings suggest that segment-level speech representation learning may provide a scalable and practical approach for cognitive impairment screening in resource-constrained clinical settings.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Using AI in engineering education: a balancing act, driven by clear purpose

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Based on a questionnaire of 100 higher-education students, predominantly from engineering-related fields, and a critical review of recent literature, this chapter examines how students use and perceive Large Language Models (LLMs) in engineering education. Students primarily value LLMs for writing support, conceptual clarification, coding assistance, and brainstorming, while simultaneously expressing concerns about inaccuracies, bias, overreliance, academic integrity, and the burden of verification. Through an analysis of two dominant metaphors, namely LLMs as an "oracle" and as a "tutor," the chapter shows how these systems cultivate expectations of authority, expertise, and personalized learning that often exceed their actual capabilities. The chapter further argues that students' attachment to the promises of efficiency and personalized support reflects a form of "cruel optimism," where the perceived benefits of LLMs often depend on the very skills, vigilance, and expertise that students are still developing. Overall, the chapter argues for a purpose-driven and context-sensitive approach to AI integration in engineering education, emphasizing critical AI literacy, reflective assessment design, pedagogical caution, and consideration of broader ethical and environmental impacts.