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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fast Adiabatic Quantum Gates via Hyperfine Intermediate States

arXiv:2606.11655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The appeal of adiabatic quantum computing lies in its intrinsic robustness against various technical imperfections, making it attractive for many quantum information applications. However, it faces a fundamental challenge: accelerating the adiabatic operations while preserving adiabaticity within the qubit coherence time. In this article, we propose an electromagnetically induced transparency-based adiabatic CNOT gate protocol which harnesses atomic hyperfine intermediate states (HISs) to speed up the adiabatic evolution. The HISs, naturally-existed in two-photon transitions, often need to be suppressed due to their significant decay errors. In contrast, this paper introduces a novel method that utilizes appropriately chosen HISs not only to enhance the adiabaticity in STAY pathway but also to accelerate the population transfer in TRANSFER pathway. Through pulse optimization, we achieve adiabatic gate fidelities exceeding 0.9991 within 0.3903 {\mu}s in realistic Cs atomic setups. To demonstrate the generality of protocol we further assess the impact of decays from multiple HIS and extend our model to arbitrary number of states, providing a practical route toward fast and robust adiabatic quantum gates in Rydberg-atom platforms.

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

Enhanced Evolutionary Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning for Reliable and Efficient Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

arXiv:2510.21127v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite rapid advancements in sensor networks, conventional battery-powered sensor networks suffer from limited operational lifespans and frequent maintenance requirements that severely constrain their deployment in remote and inaccessible environments. As such, wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) with mobile charging capabilities offer a promising solution to extend network lifetime. However, WRSNs face critical challenges from the inherent trade-off between maximizing the node survival rates and maximizing charging energy efficiency under dynamic operational conditions. In this paper, we investigate a typical scenario where mobile chargers move and charge the sensor, thereby maintaining the network connectivity while minimizing the energy waste. Specifically, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously maximizes the network node survival rate and mobile charger energy usage efficiency across multiple time slots, which presents NP-hard computational complexity with long-term temporal dependencies that make traditional optimization approaches ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose an enhanced evolutionary multi-objective deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which integrates a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based policy network for temporal pattern recognition, a multilayer perceptron-based prospective increment model for future state prediction, and a time-varying Pareto policy evaluation method for dynamic preference adaptation. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms existing approaches in balancing node survival rate and energy efficiency while generating diverse Pareto-optimal solutions. Moreover, the LSTM-enhanced policy network converges 25% faster than conventional networks, with the time-varying evaluation method effectively adapting to dynamic conditions.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

iSAGE: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation via Sparse Point Supervision

Semantic segmentation in remote sensing requires costly pixel-level annotations, and nearly every problem demands a new dataset since models rarely transfer across sensors, platforms, or geographies. Existing human-in-the-loop frameworks expand sparse clicks into dense supervision via auxiliary machinery (pseudo-labels, propagation, CRFs, foundation-model prompts, auxiliary heads), all operating on the model's predictive distribution. A confidently wrong pixel is indistinguishable from a confidently correct one in that distribution by construction, so no rule reading it can separate the two; the distinguishing signal is external to the model. This paper hypothesizes that expert clicks targeting confident model errors, not arbitrary pixels, suffice to match dense supervision, with no expansion machinery. iSAGE (Iterative Sparse Annotation Guided by Expert) realizes this hypothesis on an integrated open-source platform, where an error-weighted loss amplifies the gradient at each click and the annotation record itself is the dataset, extensible, correctable, and auditable. Experiments use a minimum-effort regime: at most one labeled pixel per class per frame. On BsB Aerial, iSAGE recovers 97.2% of dense supervision (74.79% mIoU on 0.040% of pixels) with contrasting class dynamics: amorphous classes (permeable areas) saturate from the seed, while small classes (cars) require late-iteration effort. On ISPRS Vaihingen (external benchmark), iSAGE reaches 76.78% mIoU with 0.011% of pixels, matching the dense baseline (76.65%) and exceeding all published methods. Under the same pipeline, four output-reading mechanisms (oracle entropy across budgets 1–100x, pseudo-labels across thresholds 0.90–0.99, CRF-based propagation, uniform random) plateau 7.4 to 14.5 pp below iSAGE. Across 31 surveyed methods, iSAGE is the only iterative human-in-the-loop framework operating without auxiliary machinery.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Vulcan: Instance-specialized, Verifiable Systems Heuristics Through LLM-driven Search

arXiv:2512.25065v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Systems resource management tasks rely primarily on hand-designed heuristics. However, growing hardware heterogeneity and workload diversity require heuristics specialized to particular deployment instances, making manual design expensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we explore how to synthesize systems heuristics using LLMs. The main challenge is ensuring that generated heuristics execute safely, integrate correctly with the surrounding system, and still achieve strong performance. We propose Vulcan, a framework that identifies LLM-friendly interfaces that isolate core decision logic from the rest of the implementation. With Vulcan, LLM-generated code is restricted to simple stateless decision functions, while trusted runtime abstractions provide rich derived statistics for meaningful policy exploration without system-integration bugs. To ensure execution safety, LLMs synthesize heuristics in a restricted language, Anvil, that guarantees important properties by construction. We evaluate Vulcan across three well-studied domains and demonstrate up to 4.9x higher savings for spot-VM scheduling, up to 2x lower miss ratios for cache eviction, and up to 10% higher application performance for tiered-memory systems, while ensuring execution safety throughout.

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

Learning to Annotate Delayed and False AEB Events: A Practical System for Extreme Class Imbalance and Asymmetric Label Noise

arXiv:2606.19186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) optimization relies on accurately annotated real-world trigger events, particularly rare but critical delayed and false AEB triggers that expose system deficiencies. However, these minority samples comprise less than 5% of thousands of daily triggers, making manual annotation prohibitively expensive at scale. We present the first automated AEB annotation framework to address this problem. During development, we identified two fundamental challenges that severely impair delayed/false trigger annotation accuracy: (1) Extreme class imbalance where delayed/false triggers are overwhelmed by true triggers; (2) Asymmetric label noise where mislabeled majority samples (true triggers) suppress minority samples (delayed/false triggers) learning. To overcome these challenges, we propose two key innovations: (1) Specific data augmentation that synthesizes realistic samples by manipulating focal target attributes, transplanting ego-vehicle dynamics, and masking non-focal agents; (2) noise suppression using stable hardness estimation and probe-guided adaptive threshold to clean mislabeled true trigger samples. Crucially, we deploy our model as a practical annotation system with full-stack architecture, efficiently identifying critical delayed/false triggers from thousands of daily AEB events. Production results demonstrate 80% improvement in recall of delayed/false triggers and 50% reduction in manual workload. Beyond immediate gains, the system enables continuous self-improvement through accumulated high-quality annotations, establishing a necessary data foundation for on-vehicle AEB system optimization

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

Dimensionality Reduction of QAOA Parameter Space with Kernel PCA for Max-Cut

arXiv:2606.23718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a leading variational algorithm for combinatorial optimization on near term quantum devices. As circuit depth increases, the number of optimization parameters grows, making the search landscape increasingly nonlinear and difficult to optimize. Previous studies have shown that optimal QAOA parameters often lie on a low dimensional manifold that can be approximated using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) at shallow circuit depths. However, the effectiveness of PCA decreases at higher depths because the underlying parameter manifold becomes increasingly nonlinear. In this work, we investigate Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) with a radial basis function kernel as a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique for QAOA parameter optimization. The model is trained using 200 graphs from each of 3 graph families, namely Erdos-Renyi, Barabasi-Albert, and Watts-Strogatz, with graph sizes ranging from 7 to 10 nodes. Performance is evaluated on 30 test graphs containing 12 nodes at circuit depths 1, 2, 4, and 8. Experimental results demonstrate that KPCA consistently outperforms PCA at deeper circuit depths across all graph families. At depth 8, KPCA achieves approximation ratios above 0.86, while PCA declines to approximately 0.81 to 0.83. Both methods reduce the number of quantum circuit evaluations by more than 93 percent relative to unrestricted QAOA optimization. These findings suggest that nonlinear kernel methods more effectively capture the structure of the QAOA parameter manifold and provide a practical approach for scaling variational quantum optimization to deeper circuits.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

REVEAL++: Differentiable Phenotypic Grouping for Vision-Language Retinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Risk

arXiv:2606.19522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The retina offers a noninvasive window into neurodegenerative disease, capturing subtle structural patterns associated with a risk of future cognitive decline. Vision-language alignment frameworks such as REVEAL have shown that pairing retinal fundus images with structured clinical risk narratives improves early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A key design choice in these approaches is the use of phenotypic grouping, where individuals with similar risk profiles are treated as multi-positive pairs during contrastive learning. However, existing methods operationalize phenotypic similarity as a discrete construct, relying on hard group assignments that impose rigid supervision and decouple group formation from representation learning. We propose a continuous formulation of phenotypic structure within contrastive learning. Rather than assigning samples to fixed clusters, we model inter-subject similarity as a differentiable weighting function derived from intra-modality embedding similarities in both retinal images and risk profiles. These weights define soft multi-positive relationships through a continuous aggregation operator, enabling graded supervision that reflects the spectrum nature of disease risk. We further introduce a soft-target contrastive objective that jointly learns cross-modal alignment and phenotypic structure in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on UK Biobank retinal imaging data for incident AD prediction, the proposed framework consistently outperforms discrete group-based contrastive learning and standard vision-language baselines. By treating phenotypic similarity as a learnable, continuous signal rather than a fixed grouping rule, our approach provides a principled and robust foundation for population-scale neurodegenerative risk modeling from multi-modal retinal and clinical data.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

PCRAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Transforming Noisy clinical conversations into Structured Pre-Consultation Medical Records and Reusable Clinical Data Resources

In primary care and outpatient settings, clinically important patient information is often embedded in fragmented, ambiguous, repetitive, and noisy communication between physicians and patients. This limits physicians ability to obtain a clear preconsultation overview of symptoms, history of present illness, and visit intent, while also preventing real world clinical dialogues from being reused in hospital information systems and medical artificial intelligence applications. To address this challenge, we developed PCRAgent, a centrally coordinated multi agent framework for preconsultation clinical information organization. Guided by physician inquiry logic, PCRAgent identifies, extracts, corrects, and standardizes patient-reported information from noisy consultations. Its coordinated modules including error detection, semantic editing, output control, contextual memory, and intent recognition enable robust parallel handling of spelling errors, repetitions, grammatical inconsistencies, medical ambiguities, and non-medical interference. A traceable edit list records intermediate corrections and context, allowing iterative refinement without redundant modifications. PCRAgent generates two complementary outputs. One is a PreConsultation Clinical Report for rapid physician review. The other is a Structured Clinical Conversation Dataset for hospital data construction and downstream AI applications. In evaluations using 220000 strongly perturbed consultations, PCRAgent maintained high robustness, achieving a clinical information accuracy of 4.99 out of 5 and key element completeness of 5 out of 5, outperforming GPT4o. Expert review of Chinese and English dialogues confirmed high clinical accuracy of 4.85 out of 5 and high safety of 4.79 out of 5. Multicenter validation in real-world outpatient workflows further demonstrated practical utility. These findings indicate that PCRAgent can efficiently transform noisy and unstructured consultations into physician ready reports and AI ready structured data, improving outpatient efficiency, reducing cognitive burden, ensuring information completeness, supporting precise decision-making, and enabling high-quality reuse of clinical data.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Upper airway disease in primary ciliary dyskinesia: Clinical management and factors influencing decision-making, a multicentre analysis

Background Upper airway disease is common in primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), but management evidence is limited. We aimed to describe management practices and identify factors influencing management decisions. Methods Using data from the Ear-Nose-Throat (ENT) Prospective International Cohort of patients with PCD (EPIC-PCD) and an ENT-specialist survey across participating centres, we described management practices recorded at routine follow-up. We assessed clinical factors associated with practices via mixed-effects logistic regression models. In a subgroup of patients, we assessed factors associated with initiation or discontinuation of practices. Results We included 579 patients: median age 15 years, 46% female. Nasal rinsing (54%) and nasal corticosteroids (22%) were most frequently prescribed. Among 466 patients with available data, 47 had grommets (10%) and 42 hearing aids (9%). Nasal corticosteroids and rinsing were more frequently prescribed in patients with polyps (odds ratio [OR] 3.74, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.80-7.76; OR 3.39, 95% CI 1.37-8.37) or turbinate hypertrophy (OR 1.89, 95% CI 1.03-3.47; OR 2.89, 95% CI 1.55-5.38), and upper airway nebulisation in patients with frequent nasal symptoms (OR 2.86, 95% CI 1.11-7.39). Management practices differed between centres, as seen also by the specialists survey responses. In 177 patients with multiple visits, initiation of nasal rinsing was associated with frequent nasal symptoms (OR 3.18, 95% CI 1.24-8.18) and turbinate hypertrophy (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.20-8.59). Conclusion Upper airway disease management in PCD varies and is partly guided by symptom burden and clinical findings. This variation across centres highlights the need for care standardisation and PCD-specific management guidelines.

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

Adaptive Identification and Modeling of Clinical Pathways with Process Mining

arXiv:2512.03787v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clinical pathways are specialized healthcare plans that model patient treatment procedures. They are developed to provide criteria-based progression and standardize patient treatment, thereby improving care, reducing resource use, and accelerating patient recovery. However, manual modeling of these pathways based on clinical guidelines and domain expertise is difficult and may not reflect the actual best practices for different variations or combinations of diseases. We propose a two-phase modeling method using process mining, which extends the knowledge base of clinical pathways by leveraging conformance checking diagnostics. In the first phase, historical data of a given disease is collected to capture treatment in the form of a process model. In the second phase, new data is compared against the reference model to verify conformance. Based on the conformance checking results, the knowledge base can be expanded with more specific models tailored to new variants or disease combinations. We demonstrate our approach using Synthea, a benchmark dataset simulating patient treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infections with varying COVID-19 complications. The results show that our method enables expanding the knowledge base of clinical pathways with sufficient precision, peaking to 95.62% AUC while maintaining an arc-degree simplicity of 67.11%.

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

Full-resolution MLPs Empower Medical Dense Prediction

Dense prediction is a fundamental requirement for many medical vision tasks such as medical image restoration, registration, and segmentation. The most popular vision model, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), has reached bottlenecks due to the intrinsic locality of convolution operations. Recently, transformers have been widely adopted for dense prediction for their capability to capture long-range visual dependence. However, due to the high computational complexity and large memory consumption of self-attention operations, transformers are usually used at downsampled feature resolutions. Such usage cannot effectively leverage the tissue-level textural information available only at the full image resolution. This textural information is crucial for medical dense prediction as it can differentiate the subtle human anatomy in medical images. In this study, we hypothesize that Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are superior alternatives to transformers in medical dense prediction where tissue-level details dominate the performance, as MLPs enable long-range dependence at the full image resolution. To validate our hypothesis, we develop a full-resolution hierarchical MLP framework that uses MLPs beginning from the full image resolution. We evaluate this framework with various MLP blocks on a wide range of medical dense prediction tasks including restoration, registration, and segmentation. Extensive experiments on six public well-benchmarked datasets show that, by simply using MLPs at full resolution, our framework outperforms its CNN and transformer counterparts and achieves state-of-the-art performance on various medical dense prediction tasks.

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

Achieving Heisenberg limit under noisy conditions with quantum Zeno dynamics and dynamical decoupling

arXiv:2606.13205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Zeno dynamics (QZD) and dynamical decoupling (DD) are useful tools that enable the effective suppression of noise in quantum systems. We consider the problem of when (i) noise can be suppressed and (ii) Heisenberg limit (HL) can be achieved in quantum metrology, and prove necessary and sufficient conditions for when QZD and DD are useful for achieving these two goals. We also show that in the Markovian regime, there are scenarios where preventing errors using QZD/DD may enable HL to be achieved where current QEC methods may not. Finally, we demonstrate that the combination of both techniques can allow individually imperfect QZD and DD strategies to saturate HL.

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

SemanticXR: Low Power and Real-time Queryable Semantic Mapping with an Object-Level Device-Cloud Architecture

Semantic mapping is a core service that enables grounded interactions in emerging Extended Reality (XR) applications such as AI assistants and spatial object search. Deploying this capability on mobile XR devices requires a system that is open-vocabulary, real-time, and low-power. Existing approaches are compute-intensive and assume server-class resources. Cloud offloading offers a practical path, but no existing system splits semantic mapping across the device-cloud boundary or manages its communication, execution, and memory footprint. We present SemanticXR, the first device-cloud system for real-time, open-vocabulary semantic mapping and querying under XR power, bandwidth, and memory constraints. Our key insight is to elevate semantically identifiable objects to first-class units of communication, execution, and memory across the device and server. On the server, object-level parallelism and geometry downsampling improve mapping latency, while object-level depth-mapping co-design reduces upstream bandwidth. On the device, an object-level sparse local map with incremental updates and update prioritization enables network-robust querying with bounded memory and downstream bandwidth. Object-level configurable resource usage vs. quality trade-offs let applications and the system adapt mapping to application requirements and operating conditions, respectively. Against a device-cloud baseline with the same perception models, object-level organization improves server-side mapping latency by 2.2X at equal semantic quality. Depth-mapping co-design maintains upstream bandwidth under 2.5 Mbps. On the device, SemanticXR sustains sub-100 ms query latency for up to 10,000 objects even under network drops, supports tens of thousands of objects within 500 MB, and scales downstream bandwidth with map changes, not total scene size. The system adds only 2% device power during normal operation.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FlowBank: Query-Adaptive Agentic Workflows Optimization through Precompute-and-Reuse

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are increasingly powerful, but current agentic workflow optimization paradigms make an unsatisfying trade-off. Task-level methods spend substantial offline compute yet deploy only a single workflow, leaving complementary candidates unused, while query-level methods synthesize a new workflow per query at substantial inference cost. Our motivating analysis shows these paradigms are more complementary than competing: workflows discovered during offline search often solve different subsets of queries, and many queries handled by expensive query-level generation can already be solved by cheaper precomputed workflows. This suggests a different objective: rather than searching for one universally best workflow or regenerating one per instance, we should build a compact bank of reusable, complementary workflows and select among them adaptively at inference time. Doing so requires solving three coupled problems: generating complementary rather than redundant candidates, compressing them into a small deployable portfolio, and assigning each query to the right workflow under a performance-cost trade-off. To this end, we present FlowBank, a three-stage framework for portfolio-based agentic workflow optimization. Diversifying proposes DiverseFlow to steer search toward under-covered queries and produce a high-coverage candidate pool. Curating proposes CuraFlow to compress this pool into a compact portfolio with minimal redundancy. Matching casts deployment as edge-value prediction on a query-workflow bipartite graph and routes each incoming query to the portfolio member with the best predicted utility. Across five benchmarks, FlowBank achieves the highest average score among the evaluated methods while remaining cost-competitive, improving over the strongest automated and handcrafted baselines by 4.26% and 14.92% relative, respectively.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Segmentation and Classification of Pap Smear Images for Cervical Cancer Detection Using Deep Learning

Cervical cancer remains a significant global health concern and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women. Early detection through Pap smear tests is essential to reduce mortality rates; however, the manual examination is time consuming and prone to human error. This study proposes a deep learning framework that integrates U-Net for segmentation and a classification model to enhance diagnostic performance. The Herlev Pap Smear Dataset, a publicly available cervical cell dataset, was utilized for training and evaluation. The impact of segmentation on classification performance was evaluated by comparing the model trained on segmented images and another trained on non-segmented images. Experimental results showed that the use of segmented images marginally improved the model performance on precision (about 0.41 percent higher) and F1-score (about 1.30 percent higher), which suggests a slightly more balanced classification performance. While segmentation helps in feature extraction, the results showed that its impact on classification performance appears to be limited. The proposed framework offers a supplemental tool for clinical applications, which may aid pathologists in early diagnosis.

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

See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View

arXiv:2606.20045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly. This formulation makes it difficult to assess a critical capability of aerial embodied agents, namely whether a UAV can accurately ground a visible target and translate vision-language evidence into precise 3D motion once the target enters its field of view. To address this limitation, we introduce UAV-VLN-FOV, a target-visible navigation task that isolates the see-and-reach stage and enables a more diagnostic evaluation of terminal reaching ability. We further propose 3DG-VLN, a vision-language waypoint prediction framework guided by dynamic 3D direction cues to enhance fine-grained visual grounding and spatial direction alignment for precise target reaching. Specifically, 3DG-VLN adaptively processes high-resolution front-view and downward-view observations to preserve fine-grained visual and geometric details for target grounding. It also updates the target-relative direction online during closed-loop navigation, allowing the agent to maintain spatial alignment with the target and reduce accumulated direction drift. To support this task, we construct a dedicated high-resolution benchmark which contains 2,717 trajectories with target-oriented high-level instructions, high-resolution front-view and downward-view egocentric observations, and continuous 3D waypoint annotations. Experiments show that 3DG-VLN outperforms competitive UAV-VLN baselines, achieving a 13.82\% improvement in success rate. Real-world trials further demonstrate the potential of 3DG-VLN for practical see-and-reach navigation. The source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/xuefanfu/3DG-VLN.

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

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

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

Code Correctness Signals in LLM Hidden States: Pre-Generation Probing and Repair Geometry

arXiv:2606.14530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models encode rich information in their hidden states. This work asks whether code correctness is legible in the hidden states of Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, before it generates and as it repairs a failed attempt, studied on 444 LiveCodeBench tasks. It reports two findings connected by a single confound-control tool: residualization. First, the correctness of the model's first-attempt code is linearly decodable from the prompt-final hidden state, with a leakage-free held-out AUC of 0.931 +/- 0.008 across 50 outer splits. After the linear effect of prompt length is removed from each hidden state dimension, the probe still reaches 0.911 +/- 0.010, well above a prompt-length baseline of 0.754 +/- 0.014. Second, on 236 cleaned cases where the model attempts to repair a failed first attempt, the hidden state shift from the failing attempt to its repair carries a statistically detectable contrastive direction, significant on both a magnitude and a split-half test against label-shuffled nulls. This direction does not survive a conditional residualization against repair-context covariates that differ between successful and failed repairs, marking it as a correlate of repair success driven by the repair context rather than an isolated repair-comprehension feature. The probe layer is selected by nested cross-validation, and the same residualization approach that upholds the pre-generation correctness result overturns the repair-direction interpretation. The contribution is as much methodological as empirical: a diagnostic honest enough to report a negative result alongside a positive one.

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

OBCache: Optimal Brain KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size. Existing cache eviction methods address this by exploiting attention sparsity, yet they typically rank tokens heuristically using accumulated attention weights without considering their true impact on attention outputs. We propose Optimal Brain Cache (OBCache), a principled framework that formulates cache eviction as a layer-wise structured pruning problem. Building upon the Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) theory, OBCache quantifies token saliency by measuring the perturbation in attention outputs induced by pruning tokens, with closed-form scores derived for isolated keys, isolated values, and joint key-value pairs. Our scores account not only for attention weights but also for information from value states and attention outputs, thereby enhancing existing eviction strategies with output-aware signals. Experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that replacing the heuristic scores in existing works, which estimate token saliency across different query positions, with OBCache's output-aware scores consistently improves long-context accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/DreamSoul-AI/OBCache.

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

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.

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

Filtered ANN as a Phase Transition: When Selectivity-Estimation Error Causes Plan Regret

arXiv:2606.16341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A filtered approximate-nearest-neighbor (ANN) query returns the k nearest vectors among those satisfying an attribute predicate P of selectivity s. The best execution strategy – pre-filter, post-filter, or in-filter – changes with s, so a system must estimate s and choose. We model this as an argmax over a landscape with phases (regions where each strategy wins) separated by boundaries, and show that selectivity-estimation error produces plan regret – recall lost versus the oracle strategy – only in the critical regions around those boundaries. The regret is a wedge of log-width equal to the multiplicative estimation error epsilon and height equal to the local cliff |V'(s*)| epsilon; the flip-margin 1/|V'(s*)| is the condition number of a sibling cardinality-estimation study reappearing as the local boundary theory. The two phase boundaries follow from independent mathematics: order statistics place the post-filter cliff at s ~ k/K, and site percolation places the in-filter cliff at s_c ~ 0.83/M for graph degree M (corpus-size independent). Criticality exists only under a constrained budget B < sqrt(k n). Under pre-registered decision rules we confirm, on synthetic sweeps and real SIFT1M, that regret concentrates ~290x at the boundary and that the regret curves obey a finite-size scaling collapse onto one universal wedge across two decades of corpus size. A real approximate index does not mis-locate the boundary, but a biased cost model opens a persistent miscalibration band that estimation-error robustness cannot fix. The contribution is a characterization, not a new index. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

22.
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 $2.9\%$.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entanglement Detection by Approximate Entanglement Witnesses

arXiv:2402.14755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable is known to be computationally difficult. We develop an approach to this problem based on approximations of convex polytopes in high dimensions. By showing that a convex polytope constructed from a finite number of hyperplanes approximates the Euclidean ball arbitrarily well in high dimensions, we find evidence that a finite set of approximate entanglement witnesses is potentially sufficient to determine the entanglement of a state with high probability.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

MRMU: A New Paradigm for Mendelian Randomization by Accounting for Measured Covariates and Unmeasured Confounders

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a powerful approach for causal inference, however, its reliability is frequently compromised by unadjusted covariates and unmeasured confounders, such as unmeasured pleiotropy and sample structure. To address these challenges, we introduce MRMU, a novel paradigm for the MR framework. Unlike traditional single-variable or multivariable MR methods, MRMU selects instrumental variables only from the exposure of interest and estimates one exposure effect at a time, while jointly accounting for measured covariates and unmeasured confounders. This design improves the reliability of MR analyses. In simulations and real data, MRMU achieved better type I error control, higher statistical power, and more accurate effect estimation than existing MR methods. Applying to coronary artery disease (CAD), MRMU identified robust cardiometabolic risk factors, including LDL-C, APOB, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and smoking initiation, with consistent evidence across multiple CAD datasets. In contrast, traits such as HDL-C, height, and educational attainment, which were found to be significant by existing MR methods, were no longer supported by MRMU. MRMU further supported blood pressure-related traits, rather than lipid traits, as the more relevant pathway linking urate to CAD. Finally, by integrating large-scale plasma proteomics data, MRMU identified candidate CAD drug targets beyond established HMGCR- and PCSK9-related pathways, highlighting its utility for therapeutic target prioritization.