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

Self-Generated Error Training for Token Editing in Diffusion Language Models

Authors:

Token-to-token (T2T) editing lets LLaDA2.1 revise committed tokens during block-diffusion decoding. The released recipe trains this editor on random vocabulary corruptions, but at inference the editor sees the model's own fluent, high-confidence draft errors instead. We study this training-inference mismatch and propose self-generated T2T, which performs a no-gradient draft pass, fills masked positions with predicted tokens, and supervises recovery in a second pass under these self-generated corruptions. We implement the update as a short LoRA continued-pretraining pass on LLaDA2.1-mini and evaluate on several benchmarks under the official Q-Mode T2T procedure with unchanged inference parameters. The method generally improves accuracy while reducing T2T edit intensity, mitigating failure modes such as final-digit transcription errors after otherwise correct reasoning and excessive self-correction before short factual answers.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Squeezing Enhancement in Lossy Multi-Path Atom Interferometers

arXiv:2409.04091v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper explores the sensitivity gains afforded by spin-squeezed states in atom interferometry, in particular using Bragg diffraction. We introduce a generalised input-output formalism that accurately describes realistic, non-unitary interferometers, including losses due to velocity selectivity and scattering into undesired momentum states. This formalism is applied to evaluate the performance of one-axis twisted spin-squeezed states in improving phase sensitivity. Our results show that by carefully optimising the parameters of the Bragg beam splitters and controlling the degree of squeezing, it is possible to improve the sensitivity of the interferometer by several dB with respect to the standard quantum limit despite realistic levels of losses in light pulse operations. However, the analysis also highlights the challenges associated with achieving these improvements in practice, most notably the impact of finite temperature on the benefits of entanglement. The results suggest ways of optimising interferometric setups to exploit quantum entanglement under realistic conditions, thereby contributing to advances in precision metrology with atom interferometers.

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

BAFIS: Dataset + Framework to assess occupational Bias and Human Preference in modern Text-to-image Models

Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity and transform the production of creative content. However, existing research indicates that image generation models are significantly influenced by biases. This work investigates the inherent biases and language-induced biases present in text-to-image models within the context of occupation-related image generation, complementing established metrics with human preference feedback. We present a comprehensive evaluation of five current text-to-image models: Midjourney v6.1, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, DALL-E 3, Playground v2.5, and FLUX.1-dev , focusing on gender and ethnicity bias, image quality, and prompt alignment. To facilitate this evaluation, we developed the "Battle-Arena for Fair Image Synthesis" (BAFIS), a platform designed to collect human feedback on bias in generated images. Furthermore, we created a dataset comprising 21,140 synthetic images generated using multilingual prompts, which serves as a basis for our analysis. We further place our results within a broader social context by comparing them to official statistics from the German Federal Employment Agency. Our findings reveal systematic biases in text-to-image models, with established evaluation metrics in partial correlation with subjective user ratings. Thus, our research emphasizes the need for including human preferences to develop fairer and more inclusive text-to-image models.

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

Auditing Reward Hackability in Code RL Training Environments

arXiv:2606.16062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We measure the rate at which code RL environments accept incorrect solutions as correct. On a 49-task sample of SWE-bench Verified, 28.5% of tasks have test suites weak enough that a Docker-verified incorrect patch passes them. On 20 R2E-Gym tasks across 6 repositories, the same pipeline at single-shot exploit generation yields 25.0%. A random-effects meta-analysis over 134 frontier model submissions to SWE-bench Verified finds, within the same human-rated difficulty stratum, model Pass@1 is +14.14 percentage points higher on flagged-hackable tasks than on robust ones (95% CI [+11.80, +16.48]; one-sided p < 10^-6; I^2 = 0%; 123 of 134 models positive). We then describe a procedure for hardening the broken tasks. An inline LLM judge with a Docker gold-sanity gate runs each generated test against the gold solution before the judge is consulted. On the 11 broken tasks in the audit, the gate flags 65 of 105 decisive LLM-generated tests as failing on the gold patch itself, a 61.9% per-augmentation defect rate the LLM judge alone misses. With diversity-biased retry, the loop converges 9 of 11 tasks to a gated upgrade.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Machine-Learned Comorbidity Index

arXiv:2606.17450v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional comorbidity scores (e.g., Charlson and Elixhauser) are widely used for risk adjustment and patient stratification, but they have two key limitations: (i) they are largely mortality-centric and do not align well with other clinical outcomes, and (ii) their linear, rule-based structure cannot capture nonlinear, outcome-specific risk relationships. We propose a Machine-Learned Comorbidity Index (MLCI) that maps diagnosis codes to a single scalar by maximizing the normalized Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (nHSIC) between the learned score and multiple clinical outcomes. MLCI captures nonlinear risk-outcome dependence and is supported by a theory that characterizes when a unified, informative admission-level ordering can be achieved across outcomes. Empirical results on multiple benchmark electronic health record (EHR) datasets show that MLCI outperforms strong baselines across multiple evaluation metrics.

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

From Simulation to Real-World: An In-Field 6D Pose Dataset and Baseline for Robotic Strawberry Harvesting

Robotic strawberry harvesting requires precise 6D pose estimation; however, collecting 6D pose ground truth in real agricultural fields is inherently challenging. Existing 6D pose estimation methods have therefore relied solely on synthetic data that lacks scene-level realism, leaving their performance under real agricultural field conditions unquantified. In this work, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first real-world 6D pose ground truth dataset of strawberries collected in actual agricultural fields (12,040 images). We also introduce a synthetic dataset rendered in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, featuring scene-level realism and domain randomization. Nevertheless, our experiments reveal that a significant sim-to-real gap persists, underscoring the necessity of real agricultural field data for reliable evaluation. We further quantify the sim-to-real gap through baseline 6D pose estimation results across backbone encoders, serving as a reference for future work. The real-world dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

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

Rethinking Backdoor Adversarial Unlearning through the Lens of Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.14078v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing studies reveal that current backdoor defenses exhibit limited robustness and often fail against specific types of attacks. More concerningly, prevailing safety tuning strategies tend to provide only superficial safety protection, as they fall short of completely eliminating the backdoor effects. In this work, we present a novel formulation of backdoor learning and unlearning as a sequential, three-stage process from a continual learning perspective. Within this framework, we formally define complete backdoor unlearning and further derive the necessary conditions for achieving it based on the mechanism of catastrophic forgetting. Guided by these insights, we propose Blind Inversion-Backdoor Adversarial Unlearning (BI-BAU), which formulates the generation of adversarial examples satisfying the unlearning conditions as a blind inversion problem. We solve this by integrating the bi-level optimization process of adversarial training into an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm framework to optimize the maximum a posteriori (MAP) objective. Furthermore, BI-BAU is extended to untargeted adversarial scenarios with unknown target classes, as well as to multi-modal contrastive learning tasks, enhancing its applicability to real-world deployment scenarios where pre-trained models may be compromised. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits general applicability across a wide spectrum of backdoor attacks and can effectively and thoroughly eliminate the backdoor effects from a backdoor model.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

On McDiarmid's Inequality under Dependence via Approximate Tensorization of Entropy

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We argue that dependent versions of McDiarmid's inequality are a useful but underutilized tool in mathematical statistics, learning theory and theoretical computer science. To make this point, we first highlight that approximate tensorization of entropy (ATE) implies McDiarmid's via the Entropy Method. Second, we derive McDiarmid's inequality for non-isotropic Gaussian random vectors $X \sim \mathcal N(\mu, \Sigma)$ through ATE with a constant of the order of the condition number of $\Sigma$. We both independently obtain this ATE through a simple application of stochastic localization and also discuss how a more general ATE for the Gibbs sampler due to Ascolani et al., 2026 generalizes McDiarmid's-like concentration to strongly log-concave and log-smooth probability measures. We then apply the resulting concentration inequalities to resolve a question on the concentration of $\operatorname{sign}(X)$ posed by Simone Bombari, investigate Erdős-Rényi graphs under dependence and prove a Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for observations from a joint measure fulfilling ATE and continuous marginal CDFs. For the class of strongly log-concave and log-smooth measures, this result improves upon a prior Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for non-i.i.d. observations due to Bobkov and Götze, 2010, by establishing the expected $1/\sqrt{n}$-rate of convergence under weak dependence instead of $n^{-1/3}$.

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

AREAL-DTA: Dynamic Tree Attention for Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Large Language Models

arXiv:2602.00482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training for large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive, as it generates many rollout sequences that frequently share long token prefixes. Existing RL frameworks usually process these sequences independently during policy training, i.e., repeatedly recomputing identical prefixes in both the forward and backward passes of policy gradient computation, leading to substantial inefficiencies in computation resources and memory usage. Although prefix sharing naturally induces a tree structure over rollouts, packed tree-mask approaches scale poorly in RL settings. In this paper, we introduce AReaL-DTA, which efficiently exploits prefix sharing in RL training. AReaL-DTA employs a depth-first search (DFS)-based execution strategy that dynamically traverses the rollout prefix tree during both forward and backward computation, materializing only a single root-to-leaf path at a time. To further improve scalability, AReaL-DTA incorporates a load-balanced distributed batching mechanism that dynamically constructs and processes prefix trees across multiple GPUs. On $\tau^2$-bench, AReaL-DTA improves training throughput by up to $8.31\times$ over dense training and up to $1.70\times$ over sparse training. Our code is available at https://github.com/areal-project/AReaL/tree/feat/dta.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Forecasting what Matters: Decision-Focused RL for Controlled EV Charging with Unknown Departure Times

arXiv:2606.19199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The recent growth of EV adoption poses challenges for power systems, including increased peak demand and potential grid instability. Smart control of EV charging – e.g., based on reinforcement learning (RL) – can alleviate these issues by learning temporal and contextual patterns from historical data. Yet, in real-world scenarios, key features, such as departure time, often are unavailable. This, in turn, makes it harder for an RL agent to learn and execute an effective charging policy. To mitigate this uncertainty, a trained forecaster can approximate the unknown features from available data. However, since these forecasting models are typically trained for accuracy (rather than their impact on a downstream agent's decision quality), their errors may propagate and hinder the overall performance of a controller that is using the forecasts. To avoid this, we propose a decision-focused RL (DF-RL) framework in which the forecaster is trained end-to-end, i.e., with feedback from the charging policy actions taken by the RL agent. Such joint training of both the forecaster and controller ultimately results in higher-quality actions: our proposed DF-RL method yields superior charging decisions compared to other baselines, achieving up to a 14% improvement in total reward and a 55% reduction of unsupplied energy (i.e., charging that failed to happen because the EV already left), relative to the RL method without departure time forecasting.

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

An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives

arXiv:2601.14764v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular declarative reasoning and problem solving approach in symbolic AI. Its rule-based formalism makes it inherently attractive for explainable and interpretive reasoning, which is gaining importance with the surge of Explainable AI (XAI). A number of explanation approaches and tools for ASP have been developed, which often tackle specific explanatory settings and may not cover all scenarios that ASP users encounter. In this survey, we provide, guided by an XAI perspective, an overview of types of ASP explanations in connection with user questions for explanation, and describe their coverage by current theory and tools. Furthermore, we pinpoint gaps in existing ASP explanations approaches and identify research directions for future work.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Structured Representation Learning with Locally Linear Embeddings and Adaptive Feature Fusion

arXiv:2606.18469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neuroscientific research has revealed that the brain encodes complex behaviors by leveraging structured, low-dimensional manifolds and dynamically fusing multiple sources of information through adaptive gating mechanisms. Inspired by these principles, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that encourages the disentanglement of dynamics-specific and reward-specific features, drawing direct parallels to how neural circuits separate and integrate information for efficient decision-making. Our approach leverages locally linear embeddings (LLEs) to capture the intrinsic, locally linear structure inherent in many environments, mirroring the local smoothness observed in neural population activity, while concurrently deriving reward-specific features through the standard RL objective. An attention mechanism, analogous to cortical gating, adaptively fuses these complementary representations on a per-state basis. Experimental results on benchmark tasks demonstrate that our method, grounded in neuroscientific principles, improves learning efficiency and overall performance compared to conventional RL approaches, highlighting the benefits of explicitly modeling local state structures and adaptive feature selection as observed in biological systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Do LLMs Reliably Identify Correct Information Units in Aphasic Discourse?

Correct Information Units (CIUs) are central to discourse assessment in aphasia because they quantify communicative informativeness rather than linguistic form alone. However, CIU scoring is time intensive and requires trained raters. This study examined whether instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can reliably perform token-level CIU classification from aphasic discourse transcripts. Sixteen picture-description transcripts elicited with the Cat Rescue stimulus were annotated for CIU status according to Nicholas and Brookshire (1993). The sample spanned four severity strata: control, mild, moderate, and severe aphasia. Four publicly available instruction-tuned LLMs were benchmarked under zero-shot and two few-shot prompting conditions across five stratified random seeds. Performance was evaluated against consensus human labels using accuracy, precision, recall, F1, and Cohen's kappa. Zero-shot prompting was insufficient across models. In contrast, few-shot prompting yielded substantial gains and produced competitive performance for three viable models. Mean few-shot F1 scores ranged from 0.776 to 0.817 across Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, and Mistral-7B, with no significant differences between fixed global and per-chunk local example selection. Phi-3-mini was unstable and did not yield reliable performance. Viable models showed high recall but lower precision, suggesting systematic over-classification of tokens as CIUs. Performance also varied by discourse severity, with the weakest results in more severe aphasia. Few-shot LLM prompting can support automated CIU identification without gradient-based task training, but agreement with human annotation remains insufficient for fully autonomous use. These findings support LLM-based CIU scoring as a promising human-in-the-loop component of discourse assessment systems.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Authors:

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to&nbsp;7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Neural quantum states for entanglement depth certification from randomized Pauli measurements

arXiv:2512.13121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement depth quantifies how many qubits share genuine multipartite entanglement, but certification typically relies on tailored witnesses or full tomography, both of which scale poorly with system size. We recast entanglement-depth and non-$k$-separability certification as likelihood-based model selection among neural quantum states whose architecture enforces a chosen entanglement constraint. A hierarchy of separable neural quantum states is trained on finite-shot local Pauli outcomes and compared against an unconstrained reference model trained on the same data. When all constrained models are statistically disfavored, the data certify entanglement beyond the imposed limit directly from measurement statistics, without reconstructing the density matrix. We validate the method on simulated six- and ten-qubit datasets targeting GHZ, Dicke, and Bell-pair states, and demonstrate robustness for mixed states under local noise. Finally, we discuss lightweight interpretability diagnostics derived from trained parameters that expose coarse entanglement patterns and qubit groupings directly from bitstring statistics.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex

Mitochondria regulate cellular processes through direct and indirect interactions with other organelles. A well-studied example has been contact with the endoplasmic reticulum at mitochondrial-associated endoplasmic reticulum membranes1, which control pathways including redox and calcium homeostasis2,3. Recent studies have also reported direct mitochondria–nuclear membrane contacts in cancer cells and yeast that promote pro-survival signalling4,5. Here we identify direct interactions between mitochondria and nuclear pores. Using two unbiased proteomic screens, GST pulldown and BioID, we found that VDAC1 was the top mitochondrial candidate that interacts with the filamentous nuclear pore protein RANBP2. In vitro RANBP2 CRISPR knockout,&nbsp;RANBP2 truncation&nbsp;or site-directed mutagenesis of RANBP2–VDAC1 interacting amino acids resulted in reduced mitochondria–nucleus proximity and decreased nuclear ATP and phosphocreatine levels. This was accompanied by a decline in the levels of the nuclear phosphoproteome and downregulation of pathways involved in histone modification, cellular differentiation and transcriptional regulation in vitro. Moreover, deletion of the RANBP2 C-terminal domain in vivo in mice resulted in embryonic lethality due to cardiac and neural crest differentiation defects. Collectively, these results describe a mechanism by which mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex, a phenomenon critical for regulation of nuclear energetics and cellular differentiation. Undoubtedly, additional roles of this interaction remain to be revealed. Mitochondria interact directly with the nuclear pore complex via VDAC1–RANBP2&nbsp;binding to sustain nuclear ATP levels.

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

MedAI: Evaluating TxAgent's Therapeutic Agentic Reasoning in the NeurIPS CURE-Bench Competition

arXiv:2512.11682v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Therapeutic decision-making in clinical medicine constitutes a high-stakes domain in which AI guidance interacts with complex interactions among patient characteristics, disease processes, and pharmacological agents. Tasks such as drug recommendation, treatment planning, and adverse-effect prediction demand robust, multi-step reasoning grounded in reliable biomedical knowledge. Agentic AI methods, exemplified by TxAgent, address these challenges through iterative retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). TxAgent employs a fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B model that dynamically generates and executes function calls to a unified biomedical tool suite (ToolUniverse), integrating FDA Drug API, OpenTargets, and Monarch resources to ensure access to current therapeutic information. In contrast to general-purpose RAG systems, medical applications impose stringent safety constraints, rendering the accuracy of both the reasoning trace and the sequence of tool invocations critical. These considerations motivate evaluation protocols treating token-level reasoning and tool-usage behaviors as explicit supervision signals. This work presents insights derived from our participation in the CURE-Bench NeurIPS 2025 Challenge, which benchmarks therapeutic-reasoning systems using metrics that assess correctness, tool utilization, and reasoning quality. We analyze how retrieval quality for function (tool) calls influences overall model performance and demonstrate performance gains achieved through improved tool-retrieval strategies. Our work was awarded the Excellence Award in Open Science. Complete information can be found at https://curebench.ai/.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

BSViT: A Burst Spiking Vision Transformer for Expressive and Efficient Visual Representation Learning

Spiking Vision Transformers (S-ViTs) offer a promising framework for energy-efficient visual learning. However, existing designs remain limited by two fundamental issues: the restricted information capacity of binary spike coding and the dense token interactions introduced by global self-attention. To address these challenges, this work proposes BSViT, a burst spiking-driven Vision Transformer featuring a Dual-Channel Burst Spiking Self-Attention (DBSSA) mechanism. DBSSA encodes queries with binary spikes and keys with burst spikes to enhance representational capacity. The value pathway adopts dual excitatory and inhibitory binary channels, enabling signed modulation and richer spike interactions. Importantly, the entire attention operation preserves addition-only computation, ensuring compatibility with energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware. To further reduce spike activity and incorporate spatial priors, a patch adjacency masking strategy is introduced to restrict attention to local neighborhoods, resulting in structure-aware sparsity and reduced computational overhead. In addition, burst spike coding is systematically integrated across the network to increase spike-level representational capacity beyond conventional binary spiking. Extensive experiments on both static and event-based vision benchmarks demonstrate that BSViT consistently outperforms existing spiking Transformers in accuracy while maintaining competitive energy efficiency.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

WormSORT: A detection-based multiple object tracking model for individual silkworms in breeding environments

Authors:

by Hongkang Shi, Linbo Li, Shiping Zhu, Haibo He, Minghui Zhu, Jianfei Zhang Variety breeding has long been a cornerstone of high-quality agriculture, and recent advances in artificial intelligence have opened new avenues for accelerating biological breeding. In this study, we applied multiple object tracking (MOT) technology to silkworm breeding to achieve efficient, non-invasive, and dynamic individual monitoring. Unlike pedestrian or vehicle tracking, silkworms pose unique challenges for MOT due to their small size, dense distribution, and high inter-individual similarity, which complicate accurate tracking and behavioral analysis. To address these issues, we propose WormSORT, an enhanced tracking method based on a tracking-by-detection framework with an optimized data association strategy. A pre-trained detection model identifies silkworms in each frame, and deep feature vectors are extracted using a re-identification network. Identity association is first performed using Intersection over Union (IoU) matching, followed by deep feature similarity for unmatched cases, improving both tracking accuracy and reliability. To further enhance tracking stability, we introduce a candidate input padding mechanism, including IoU padding and feature padding, ensuring that high-confidence unmatched trajectories and detections remain involved in the matching process. To validate the proposed tracking strategy, we constructed two multiple silkworm tracking (MST) datasets: MST-50, containing approximately 50 individuals over 1000 frames, and MST-100, containing approximately 100 individuals over 1200 frames. Experimental results demonstrate that WormSORT outperforms existing methods, including DeepSORT, StrongSORT, OCSORT, ByteTrack, and BotSORT, achieving superior tracking performance. This study provides a valuable reference for silkworm tracking and behavioral analysis, contributing to the advancement of high-quality silkworm rearing and management.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Conformalized Quantum DeepONet Ensembles for Scalable Operator Learning with Distribution-Free Uncertainty

arXiv:2605.00330v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Operator learning enables fast surrogate modeling of high-dimensional dynamical systems, but existing approaches face two fundamental limitations: quadratic inference complexity and unreliable uncertainty quantification in safety-critical settings. We propose Conformalized Quantum DeepONet Ensembles, a framework that addresses both challenges simultaneously. By leveraging Quantum Orthogonal Neural Networks (QOrthoNNs), we reduce operator inference complexity from O(n^2) to O(n), enabling scalable evaluation over fine discretizations. To provide rigorous uncertainty quantification, we combine ensemble-based epistemic modeling with adaptive conformal prediction, yielding distribution-free coverage guarantees. A key challenge in ensembling is that naive parallelism scales hardware resources linearly with the number of models. We resolve this by using Superposed Parameterized Quantum Circuits (SPQCs), which compress multiple ensemble members into a single circuit and enable simultaneous multi-model execution. Experiments on synthetic partial differential equations and real-world power system dynamics demonstrate that our approach achieves accurate predictions while maintaining calibrated uncertainty under realistic quantum noise. These results establish a practical pathway toward scalable, uncertainty-aware operator learning in quantum machine learning.

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

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effects of interaction range on the mean-field dynamics of Bose polarons

arXiv:2606.20020v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the three-dimensional Bose polaron problem in the regime of finite range interactions and competing length scales. Working in the reference frame of the impurity, we study both static and out of equilibrium properties of the system, in particular the transfer of momentum between the impurity and the host gas. We find that relaxation dynamics can occur via damped oscillations of the impurity velocity with simple dependence on the interaction strength. Furthermore, the equilibration process is sensitive to the type of the impurity-bath interaction. Specifically, interatomic forces describing ion-atom systems lead to much longer timescales and more pronounced oscillations in the strong coupling regime with respect to local interaction potentials. We also find that the effective masses can differ by a large amount between the two scenarios, even if the number of atoms in the polaron cloud remains similar for both cases.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Regional Service-System Conditions Associated with Facility-Linked Home-Based Specialist Care in Japan: A Claims-Based Ecological Study of Home Dialysis

Authors:

Background Complex chronic care is increasingly delivered in patients' homes while remaining linked to specialist facilities for training, monitoring, and backup care. Home dialysis provides a useful case because peritoneal dialysis (PD) and home hemodialysis (HHD) share a home-facility delivery structure but differ in technical and operational requirements. This study examined regional service-system conditions associated with the presence and scale of PD and HHD in Japan. Methods This ecological study used publicly available claims, administrative, census, and geospatial data harmonized to 334 Secondary Medical Areas. Regional indicators were organized into four domains: dialysis service delivery, implementation support for home-based care, hospital backup capacity, and living and sociodemographic context. Diffusion was examined using claims-based indicators of regional presence and post-presence scale, analyzed separately for PD and HHD with Firth penalized logistic regression and zero-truncated negative binomial regression, respectively. Results PD was observed in 271 regions and HHD in 109. Patterns of associated regional conditions differed by modality and stage. PD was associated mainly with existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was associated with broader regional supports, including home-care delivery, living infrastructure, transition support, and hospital-system indicators. Conditions associated with presence differed from those associated with scale. Cross-modality associations suggested that shared regional factors may shape the distribution of both modalities. Conclusions Regional conditions for home dialysis diffusion in Japan differed by modality and stage. PD was linked mainly to existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was linked to multi-domain regional support for technically demanding home treatment. Under standardized reimbursement, local service-system capacity may remain important for modality- and stage-specific diffusion of home dialysis.

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

Encoder Winners Do Not Reliably Transfer Across VLA Backbone Scale: A Frozen-Backbone Grafting Diagnostic

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically inherit their vision encoder from upstream VLM releases, but it is unclear whether an encoder choice validated on a small VLA transfers to a larger backbone. We introduce a frozen-backbone grafting diagnostic: the vision tower of a released VLA is replaced by a candidate encoder under a fixed protocol (adaptive average pooling, LayerNorm, and a single trainable linear projector), with the language model and action expert frozen. Across four encoders, two LIBERO suites, two backbones (SmolVLA-450M and $\pi_{0.5}$-3.3B), and two-to-three seeds per cell (40 main grafting runs plus native, LoRA, pooling, and zero-/shuffled-image controls, all scored by offline action MSE), the small-backbone winner does not reliably select the large-backbone top tier: SigLIP is best on SmolVLA across both suites, while on $\pi_{0.5}$ DINOv2-small leads the spatial suite and the object suite is a seed-sensitive near-tie band; three of the four backbone-suite comparisons (and 11 of 12 seed-level cells) support backbone-dependent rankings. The grafting wrapper is itself non-neutral with opposite sign across backbones (+45-56% MSE on the SmolVLA native tower, -50-52% on $\pi_{0.5}$), so all conclusions are conditional on the fixed grafting protocol. We position frozen grafting as a cheap target-backbone diagnostic to run before committing to an encoder at scale, not as a closed-loop deployment claim.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Sensitivity of polaron-molecule observables to MDR/GUP-like ultraviolet deformations at low energies via quantum computing

arXiv:2606.14479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that impurity many-body observables can display enhanced sensitivity to ultraviolet deformations of generalized-uncertainty-principle and modified-dispersion-relation type at accessible energy scales. Using a deformed polaron-molecule Hamiltonian constructed to preserve the infrared sector, we quantify the impact of such deformations on spectral and Ramsey observables and implement the corresponding dynamics in a controlled quantum computing setting. We identify regimes near the polaron-molecule crossover where small ultraviolet deformations are strongly amplified, leading to experimentally resolvable changes in quasiparticle properties and spectral response. Our results establish a concrete sensitivity-based route to low-energy quantum-gravity phenomenology in a well-defined many-body platform and delimit the validity of the effective description. Furthermore, we report experimental validation on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS).