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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Scalar Quantum Fields: Theory Space and its Geometry

Authors:
Viola Gattus↗Peter Millington↗

arXiv:2606.12580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scalar fields provide perhaps the simplest playground in which to develop our understanding of quantum field theory. In this lecture, we consider what it means to write down a scalar quantum field theory and how we can give geometrical interpretations to the space of such theories: the theory space.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Trade-offs in Medical LLM Adaptation: An Empirical Study in French QA

Authors:
Ikram Belmadani↗Oumaima El Khettari↗Carlos Ramisch↗Frederic Bechet↗Richard Dufour↗Benoit Favre↗

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Age-related changes in acoustic cue use for speech-in-speech perception

Authors:
Fish↗DiNino↗

Acoustic cues such as pitch and spatial location allow listeners to attend to a target speaker and ignore competing talkers, aiding speech recognition in background noise. Diminished ability to utilize acoustic cues for speech stream segregation may thus contribute to older adults' challenges hearing in noise. Adults aged 18-74 completed a speech-in-speech identification task with three conditions containing 1) only pitch cues (fundamental frequency), 2) only spatial cues (interaural time differences; ITDs), and 3) both pitch and spatial cues for segregating a target talker from competing talkers. Hearing thresholds at standard and extended high frequencies (EHFs), auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), and digit span scores were acquired to examine the influence of sensory and cognitive factors on use of each acoustic cue for speech-in-speech recognition. Significant differences were observed between cue condition scores indicating that use of the available cue(s) drove performance. ABR metrics were not a significant predictor but digit span scores significantly predicted scores on all three cue conditions. Working memory abilities therefore set a baseline for participants' speech-in-speech recognition regardless of the acoustic content. Hearing thresholds at standard frequencies significantly predicted scores on the Pitch condition. EHF hearing thresholds better predicted Spatial and Both Cue condition performance, suggesting that EHF thresholds represent auditory processing important for coding ITDs. Age group analysis revealed that older adults (aged 40+) performed significantly more poorly on all cue conditions of the speech-in-speech recognition task relative to younger adults. Age-related changes in auditory sensory processing may therefore impair older adults' speech-in-noise perception by reducing their ability to use acoustic cues for segregating target and competing speech.

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04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

A lactylation- and autophagy-associated prognostic signature reveals LSEC-derived CLEC3B as a novel mediator of hepatocellular carcinoma suppression

Authors:
Youai Song↗

by Youai Song, Yinkuan Ning, Meihui Li, Jianwei Lan, Liangchen Lei, Yufei Han, Zhuo Meng, Binjie Li, Pengpeng Liu, Quanyan Liu The crosstalk between lactylation and autophagy within the hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) microenvironment is a burgeoning field with profound implications. By integrating multi-omics data from public cohorts, we delineated two molecular subtypes of HCC with divergent clinical outcomes and established a lactylation-autophagy-related prognostic signature. This signature highlighted CLEC3B as a pivotal gene. Subsequent single-cell RNA sequencing and experimental validation unequivocally pinpointed liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) as the principal cellular source of CLEC3B, which was significantly downregulated in HCC tissues. Functionally, conditioned media derived from CLEC3B-overexpressing LSECs potently inhibited HCC cell proliferation. Mechanistic investigations revealed that this tumor-suppressive effect was orchestrated through the concurrent suppression of autophagy and diminution of lactylation levels. Our findings position LSEC-secreted CLEC3B as a novel metabolic mediator in HCC, bridging two key pathways in tumor suppression, and endorse its clinical value both as a prognostic indicator and a promising therapeutic target.

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05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Antibody-Antigen Affinity Prediction with Chain-Aware Protein Language Modeling

Authors:
Singh↗Malhotra↗Srivastava↗S. P↗R. K↗Gorantla↗

Motivation: Antibody-antigen affinity determines which antibodies advance in therapeutic discovery, repertoire analysis and affinity maturation, but experimental measurements are sparse relative to the scale of sequence libraries. Structure-based predictors can exploit interface geometry when reliable complexes are available, yet early discovery often requires ranking many heavy-light chain pairs against antigens for which no complex structure exists. Existing sequence-based models are scalable, but frequently compress heavy and light chains into a single antibody representation or concatenate antibody and antigen features obscuring the chain-specific and epitope-specific signals that drive binding. Results: We present AbAffinity, a sequence-only chain-aware three-stream architecture that maintains heavy chain, light chain and antigen as distinct streams. It integrates frozen ESM-2 embeddings with heavy-chain CDR-focused pooling, heavy-light self-attention, adaptive fusion gating and gated cross-attention, training only a compact interaction module. On the SAAINT-DB benchmark, AbAffinity achieves strong predictive performance under ten-fold cross-validation and maintains robust accuracy on novel antigens. It consistently outperforms recent sequence-based models across external benchmarks including SAbDab, AB-Bind and SKEMPI 2.0. Ablation studies highlight the contributions of chain-specific representations, CDR-focused pooling and the gated interaction pathway. Integrated Gradients attributions recover known paratope and epitope residues at structurally validated interfaces. AbAffinity provides a lightweight, explainable sequence-first framework for antibody triage and prioritisation when structural information is limited or unavailable.

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

Quantum-Accelerated Self-Consistent Field: A Hybrid Algorithm

Authors:
Alexis Ralli↗Tim Weaving↗Thomas M. Bickley↗Peter V. Coveney↗Peter J. Love↗

arXiv:2606.20176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Grover adaptive search self-consistent field (GAS-SCF) algorithm. GAS-SCF leverages quantum arithmetic to construct an efficient oracle that marks target states (Fock states) which improve upon some initial classical energy estimate. Amplitude amplification then increases the probability of measuring these states. This approach offers a theoretical quadratic speed-up for the optimization problem encountered in SCF quantum chemistry and establishes a baseline against which structured optimization algorithms, such as QAOA and DQI may be compared. In this work, we classically simulate three examples as proofs of concept of the algorithm, the largest consisting of 26 qubits. We then extend our analysis to two larger systems, with O3 representing the largest case at 330 qubits. These examples are chosen to probe classically challenging SCF regimes. Achieving chemically relevant applications of GAS-SCF will require large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum hardware.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

S4oP: Operator-level Pruning of Structured State Space Models for Resource-Constrained Devices

Authors:
Marco Deano↗Filippo Ziche↗Nicola Bombieri↗

arXiv:2606.18096v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structured State Space Models (SSMs), including the S4 and S4D architectures, have recently emerged as powerful alternatives to attention-based models for capturing long-range dependencies in sequential data. Despite their strong empirical performance, deploying these models in time- and resource-constrained settings remains challenging due to their computational and memory demands. In this paper, we propose a novel incremental, operator-level pruning approach for S4- and S4D-based models that significantly reduces inference cost while preserving predictive performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically investigate structured operator pruning for SSMs. Our method progressively prunes model operators by interleaving structured masking with fine-tuning, while jointly monitoring accuracy and inference latency. We implement this approach within a unified training and evaluation framework that enables systematic exploration of efficiency-accuracy trade-offs. Experiments across multiple benchmark datasets show that pruning up to 70% of the model operators preserves the performance of the original models in most cases, while substantially reducing inference latency. These results demonstrate that structured operator pruning is an effective and previously unexplored strategy for improving the efficiency of SSMs and facilitate their deployment in practical, resource-constrained scenarios.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Analyzing Defensive Misdirection Against Model-Guided Automated Attacks on Agentic AI Systems

Authors:
Reza Soosahabi↗Vivek Namsani↗

arXiv:2606.20470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks more consequential, especially as attackers adopt model-guided automation to scale probing, prompt refinement, and response evaluation. This work analyzes the resulting attack-defense setting through a probabilistic model of a target system, its defense mechanism, and the attacker's automated judge. Our analysis shows that conventional detect-and-block defenses can allow attacker success rate (ASR) to approach one as the query budget grows, since predictable refusals provide useful feedback to automated search. We then examine detect-and-misdirect, where detected malicious interactions receive controlled, non-operational responses designed to induce false-positive errors in the attacker's judge. This strategy reduces the positive predictive value of attacker-selected candidates and yields a bounded asymptotic ASR. We evaluate a proof-of-concept realization of this strategy through Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), a lightweight conversational misdirection method designed to replace predictable refusal text with safe but strategically misleading responses in automated jailbreak settings. On jailbreak benchmarks, CMPE reduces estimated ASR upper bounds by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in end-to-end PAIR and GPTFuzz attack runs.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Projections for Multi-Copy Quantum Algorithms

Authors:
Xiaoyu Liu↗Jordi Tura↗Johannes Kn\"orzer↗

arXiv:2606.20238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating nonlinear properties of quantum states is a central task in quantum information science. Multivariate traces, $\mathrm{tr}(\rho_1 \cdots \rho_K)$, and nonlinear observables such as $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$, for integer $K$, can be accessed through collective measurements on multiple state copies, but standard protocols based on swap tests require coherent operations on the full Hilbert space and become experimentally unfeasible for large systems. In this work, we introduce a framework for multi-copy measurements based on random projections onto lower-dimensional subspaces prior to the collective measurement, which is then performed only on the reduced Hilbert space. This procedure yields a tunable tradeoff between coherent quantum resources and statistical sampling overhead, allowing the amount of coherent processing to be matched to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. We derive explicit formulas relating the Haar-averaged projected moments to multivariate traces of the original states and analyze the sampling overhead induced by the projection procedure. Specifically, after compressing an $n$-qubit state to a reduced $q$-qubit subspace, estimating $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$ requires approximately $O(2^{(n-q)(K-1)})$ copies of $\rho$, with each qubit projected out increasing the sampling cost by a factor of $2^{K-1}$. Our results establish how coherent multi-copy operations can be traded for additional state copies, enabling multi-copy quantum protocols to be optimized for the available hardware resources.

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

Examining Human-Like Behaviors in LLMs: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Model Behaviors, User Factors, and System Prompts

Authors:
Sunnie S. Y. Kim↗Margit Bowler↗Leon A Gatys↗

arXiv:2606.18258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of human-like behaviors, from expressing thoughts and emotions, to engaging in relationship-building with users, to refusing requests and maintaining boundaries. Despite their prevalence, researchers and practitioners lack methods and empirical insights to make informed decisions about when and what types of human-like behaviors LLMs should exhibit. To fill this gap, we present a multi-dimensional analysis of the prevalence, potential effects, and controllability of these behaviors using LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluation. Across 21,000 multi-turn conversations from four widely used models (gpt-4o, gpt-4.1-mini, claude-sonnet-4.6, gemini-2.5-flash), we find that human-like behaviors are pervasive but vary across models and user factors (conversation goals and user profiles). In terms of perceived appropriateness, human evaluators judged self-referential and relationship-building behaviors as less appropriate from LLMs than from humans, but boundary-maintaining behaviors more appropriate from LLMs than from humans. Finally, we show that system prompting can control these behaviors, though it requires careful evaluation to avoid unintended effects. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for responsible LLM design and evaluation.

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

SAM-Deep-EIoU: Selective Mask Propagation for Multi-Object Tracking

Authors:
Alexander Holmberg↗

Multi-object tracking has a heavy-tailed difficulty distribution: most frames are easy for a lightweight base tracker, while a small fraction are intrinsically hard. Video object segmentation (VOS) models can often preserve identity through the hard frames where the base tracker fails, but they are much more expensive in compute and memory. We propose selective mask propagation, a tracking algorithm that dispatches from a base tracker to a VOS model only on windows where an assignment-uncertainty signal fires. The base tracker's output is modified only when the VOS model makes a confident prediction that contradicts the base tracker's identity assignment; weak or inconclusive predictions preserve the base output. The method is training-free, treats both the base tracker and the VOS model as black boxes, and can benefit from replacing the VOS component with a more capable model. On DanceTrack, selective mask propagation improves three different base trackers. On SportsMOT, where identity preservation is central to sports analytics, SAM3-Deep-EIoU with global track association achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark with 86.8 HOTA.

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12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Higher-order spectral perturbation expansions II: Kernel matrices and manifold learning

Authors:
Bernhard Stankewitz↗Martin Wahl↗

arXiv:2606.16373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study spectral concentration bounds for kernel matrices as approximation of the corresponding kernel integral operator. Results are established under weak assumptions on the data setting and the reproducing kernel relying only on a Mercer condition and a local Weyl law. This allows us to deal with key features of kernel matrices, such as large multiplicities, large effective dimension, and heavy-tailed distributions. Our results apply to infinite dimensional principal component analysis, manifold learning, and Bayesian nonparametric statistics. We illustrate this via two prototypical examples: The heat kernel on the sphere and a wavelet prior from Bayesian nonparametrics.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

The Saturable Electronic Reluctance Switch: Switchable low-power and low-noise generation of magnetic fields using permanent magnets

Authors:
P. D. Taylor-Burdett↗C. A. Burhan↗S. Mason↗F. R. Lebrun-Gallagher↗S. Weidt↗W. K. Hensinger↗

arXiv:2605.05158v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Across many areas of science, there is a need to generate magnetic fields that are both ultra-stable and switchable on and off. Current-carrying wire configurations are switchable but are susceptible to current noise. Existing current-controlled approaches to switching the field produced by a permanent magnet involve altering the magnets magnetisation, which typically requires large field pulses and produces excessive power dissipation in high frequency applications. We present a hybrid technique to switch the field of any arbitrary magnet through use of a non-linear ferromagnetic circuit, named the Saturable Electronic Reluctance Switch (SERS). The circuit achieves a linear and monotonic ramp of the magnetic field up to a current threshold, above which the field becomes constant. Crucially, the applied current has minimal influence on the magnetic field stability and demagnetisation of the magnet is avoided. The power dissipated in each switching cycle is expected to be many orders of magnitude less than for existing permanent magnet switching approaches. SERS is also robust to fabrication errors, suppressing noise in the control current by several orders of magnitude in a non-ideal device. To illustrate its application, a SERS-driven device is proposed for generating ultra-stable magnetic field gradients in a scalable trapped-ion quantum computer. We find this device offers an order of magnitude reduction in power dissipation compared to state-of-the-art current carrying wires, while reducing magnetic field noise originating from current fluctuations by up to five orders of magnitude.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MemSlides: A Hierarchical Memory Driven Agent Framework for Personalized Slide Generation with Multi-turn Local Revision

Authors:
Ye Jin↗Yangyang Xu↗Jun Zhu↗Yibo Yang↗

Personalized presentation generation requires more than conditioning on a current prompt or template: agents must preserve stable user preferences across tasks, retain newly introduced preferences and constraints during multi-turn revision, and carry out local edits reliably. We propose MemSlides, a hierarchical memory framework for personalized presentation agents that separates long-term memory from working memory and further divides long-term memory into user profile memory and tool memory. User profile memory stores intent-conditioned profiles for round-0 personalization, working memory carries active preferences and session constraints across revision rounds, and tool memory stores reusable execution experience for reliable localized editing. MemSlides pairs this memory design with scoped slide-local revision, so targeted updates act on the smallest affected region instead of repeatedly regenerating the full deck. In controlled experiments, user profile memory improves persona-alignment judgments on a multi-persona, multi-intent profile bank, tool-memory injection improves closed-loop modify behavior in diagnostic matched-pair settings, and qualitative cases illustrate working memory's ability to carryover preferences. Taken together, these results suggest that effective personalization in presentation authoring depends on separating persistent user profiles, session-level working memory, and reusable execution experience across generation and localized revision.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Fast Nonparametric Conditional Independence Testing via Two-Stage Regression

Authors:
Eric V. Strobl↗

arXiv:2606.18011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constraint-based causal discovery relies on repeated conditional independence tests, but fast nonparametric tests often sacrifice calibration, especially when variables depend on the conditioning set through nonlinear relationships. We introduce BLITZ (Broad-to-Local Independence Testing via residualiZation), a nonparametric conditional independence test designed to run well under a second while maintaining the accuracy needed for the thousands of queries performed by constraint-based causal discovery algorithms. BLITZ first removes broad smooth dependence on the conditioning set using low-order polynomial regression, then applies a small nonlinear feature map and residualizes those features with shallow tree regressions. The resulting statistic tests residual cross-covariance, with a moment-matched chi-square approximation to the null distribution. We show theoretically that the two-stage design reduces the effective complexity faced by the tree residualizers, allowing shallow trees to control residual conditional-mean bias while avoiding excessive overfitting. In simulations, BLITZ provides better null calibration than fast kernel, random-feature, and regression-based competitors while remaining among the fastest methods tested. In causal discovery experiments on synthetic graphs and flow-cytometry data, BLITZ yields more reliable endpoint orientations among retained adjacencies and competitive structural recovery. These results suggest that broad-to-local residualization is a practical route to calibrated, scalable nonparametric conditional independence testing for causal discovery.

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

Revisiting Chebyshev Polynomial and Anisotropic RBF Models for Tabular Regression

Authors:
Luciano Gerber↗Huw Lloyd↗

arXiv:2602.22422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smooth-basis models such as Chebyshev polynomial regressors and radial basis function (RBF) networks are well established in numerical analysis. Their continuously differentiable prediction surfaces suit surrogate optimisation, sensitivity analysis, and other settings where the response varies gradually with inputs. Despite these properties, smooth models seldom appear in tabular regression, where tree ensembles dominate. We ask whether they can compete, benchmarking models across 55 regression datasets organised by application domain. We develop an anisotropic RBF network with data-driven centre placement and gradient-based width optimisation, a ridge-regularised Chebyshev polynomial regressor, and a smooth-tree hybrid (Chebyshev model tree); all three are released as scikit-learn-compatible packages. We benchmark these against tree ensembles, a pre-trained transformer, and standard baselines, evaluating accuracy alongside generalisation behaviour. The transformer ranks first on accuracy across a majority of datasets, but its GPU dependence, inference latency, and dataset-size limits constrain deployment in the CPU-based settings common across applied science and industry. Among CPU-viable models, smooth models and tree ensembles are statistically tied on accuracy, but the former tend to exhibit tighter generalisation gaps. We recommend routinely including smooth-basis models in the candidate pool, particularly when downstream use benefits from tighter generalisation and gradually varying predictions.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimizing resource allocation for accuracy in noisy variational quantum algorithms

Authors:
Harshit Verma↗Thomas Ayral↗Alexia Auff\`eves↗Robert Whitney↗

arXiv:2606.20153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For quantum algorithms to achieve their full potential, we need methodologies to optimize them, such as reaching a given output accuracy with minimal resource costs. Here, we develop such a methodology for a class of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms. We leverage simulations of a Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to propose a phenomenological model of such algorithms that captures the complex relationship between algorithmic accuracy, algorithmic resource costs, and the noise that exists in realistic quantum hardware. For this, we take the algorithmic resource cost to be the total number of quantum gate-operations in the algorithm; minimizing this cost typically makes the algorithm faster and more energy-efficient. We consider the subtle trade-off between quantum circuit size (small circuits are too imprecise, but large ones are too noisy), and the number of iterations of that quantum circuit for the full algorithm to sufficiently converge. Using a noise-metric-resource methodology, we identify the sweet spot (of circuit size versus iterations) that minimizes the algorithmic resource costs for a desired algorithm accuracy. It also gives the circuit size that maximizes algorithm accuracy for a fixed resource cost. Our methodology provides a practical guideline for near-term deployment of variational algorithms on realistic noisy hardware, including hardware that uses error mitigation.

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

Beyond Self-Attention: Sub-Quadratic Vision Transformers for Fast Image Captioning

Authors:
Chiradeep Ghosh↗Dakshina Ranjan Kisku↗

Image captioning is a challenging and significant task that aims to generate coherent and semantically meaningful textual descriptions for given images. To accomplish this task, it requires a deep understanding of visual content along with the ability to express that understanding in natural language. Despite remarkable progress with transformer-based architectures, existing approaches often suffer from limitations, such as a lack of rich local feature representations and the high computational cost of quadratic self-attention. The proposed model focuses on improving computational efficiency by restructuring the vision transformer architecture. In designing this approach, the standard self-attention mechanism in Vision Transformers is replaced with a probabilistic transformer approach based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), a soft-clustering technique. Instead of computing pairwise attention among all image patches, the model groups similar patches into a fixed number of clusters using an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. This clustering-based mechanism reduces the computational complexity from quadratic O(n^2) to linear O(nK), where K

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

Progressive Pixel-Neighborhood Deformable Cross-Attention for Multispectral Object Detection

Authors:
Tian Qiu↗Jifeng Shen↗Xin Zuo↗

Effective cross-modal feature alignment and interaction are central challenges in multispectral object detection. Although global cross-attention provides strong long-range modeling ability, its quadratic complexity with respect to feature size limits deployment on resource-constrained platforms. We therefore propose Progressive Pixel-Neighborhood Deformable Cross-Attention for multispectral feature fusion, termed PNAFusion. The proposed framework is motivated by two observations: weak misalignment between visible and thermal images is usually concentrated around local neighborhoods, and semantic correspondence across modalities often follows non-linear spatial mappings that fixed receptive fields cannot model well. To address these issues, PNAFusion incorporates local spatial priors into its architectural design to concentrate feature interaction and alignment on the most relevant neighborhoods. Specifically, a Pixel-Neighborhood Cross-Attention (PNCA) module is introduced to avoid redundant global feature matching and suppress background noise. Meanwhile, an Adaptive Deformable Alignment (ADA) module captures non-linear spatial correspondences through learned pixel-wise offsets. These components are further integrated through an iterative feedback mechanism to progressively refine cross-modal feature alignment. Experiments on FLIR, M3FD, and DroneVehicle show that PNAFusion achieves 84.2, 90.5, and 85.5 mAP@0.5, respectively, under the YOLOv5 detector, and further reaches 86.8 mAP@0.5 on FLIR and 90.8 mAP@0.5 on M3FD when transferred to Co-DETR. Efficiency analysis indicates that PNAFusion reduces allocated GPU memory by 33.0\% compared with ICAFusion and reduces theoretical FLOPs from 194.8 G to 156.4 G, although the deformable sampling and iterative refinement introduce additional latency. Our code will be available at https://github.com/DanielQiuTian/PNAFusion.

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

Correct Yourself, Keep My Trust: How Self-Correction and Social Connection Shape Credibility in Social Chatbots

Authors:
Biswadeep Sen↗Yi-Chieh Lee↗

arXiv:2606.19286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When social chatbots make mistakes, and they do, how they recover determines whether users trust them again. Social chatbots are increasingly integrated into everyday life, yet they remain prone to generating convincing but inaccurate information. The social connection they build with users makes such errors particularly consequential. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=120) comparing three error correction strategies: a webpage retraction, self-correction by the same social chatbot, and correction by an expert chatbot. Our results reveal two key findings. First, all three strategies corrected the error equally well, but only self-correction did so without damaging the chatbot's credibility: participants rated self-correcting chatbots significantly higher in both trustworthiness and perceived expertise than chatbots whose errors were corrected by external sources. Second, the strength of the user's social connection with the chatbot, measured through social attraction and self-disclosure, significantly predicted the magnitude of belief change, but only when the chatbot corrected itself. Outsourcing corrections to an external source severed this link entirely. These findings suggest that social chatbots should correct their own mistakes rather than outsource corrections, and that investing in social connection is a functional mechanism that amplifies correction effectiveness, not merely a design feature. We discuss implications for designing chatbots that maintain long-term credibility while effectively addressing their own errors.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Spectral DPPs via NEPv: A Scalable Continuous Relaxation of Determinantal MAP for Diversity-Aware Data Selection

Authors:
Richard Yi Da Xu↗

arXiv:2606.19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning – data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design. Determinantal Point Processes (\operatorname{DPP} s) give a principled, well-calibrated notion of diversity for this task, but their MAP objective – pick a size-$k$ subset $S$ maximizing $\logdet(L_S)$ – is NP-hard, and the standard greedy and sampling algorithms scale superlinearly in the ground-set size $n$. This cost is prohibitive precisely in the data-centric regime where diversity matters most, where $n$ ranges over millions to billions of candidate examples, features, or embeddings. We recast \operatorname{DPP}-MAP as a continuous optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold, and show that its first-order optimality conditions form a Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problem with eigenvector dependency (\operatorname{NEP}v) of a previously unstudied form. This \operatorname{NEP}v\ admits a self-consistent field (\operatorname{SCF}) iteration with a spectral-gap-based local contraction guarantee, giving a principled iterative solver where the diversity objective drives an eigenvector-dependent operator. The resulting algorithm, \OurMethod, requires only matrix-vector products with the kernel and runs in time $O\!\big((ndk+nk^2)\,t\big)$ for a small number of iterations $t$, scaling near-linearly in $n$ and integrating directly with low-rank and feature-map kernels common in ML. This paper focuses on the relaxation, solver, and scaling analysis; full real-data benchmarking is left to a planned empirical study.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum Adaptive Self-Attention for Quantum Transformer Models

Authors:
Chi-Sheng Chen↗En-Jui Kuo↗

arXiv:2504.05336v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A recurring weakness in quantum machine learning (QML) is that reported ``quantum advantages'' are seldom tested against a capacity-matched classical control, leaving it unclear whether a gain comes from the quantum substrate or from the architectural change that accompanies it. Our primary contribution is methodological: a protocol for attributing such gains honestly – a capacity-matched classical bottleneck of identical parameter budget, transparent reporting of where quantum does not help, and validation on real quantum hardware – which we develop and apply through a concrete case study. That case study is Quantum Adaptive Self-Attention (QASA), a hybrid Transformer that replaces the value projection of a single encoder layer with a 36-parameter parameterized quantum circuit (PQC), keeping all other layers classical. Across nine synthetic benchmarks and the real-world ETTh1 dataset, QASA improves on a full-capacity classical Transformer for chaotic and trend-dominated signals. To ask whether this is a genuinely quantum effect, we introduce a control rarely applied in quantum machine learning – a capacity-matched classical bottleneck with the same parameter budget – and find that it matches the PQC on the error metrics. The gain is therefore attributable to the low-rank value-projection bottleneck (an architectural parsimony principle), not to quantumness; adding further quantum layers only degrades performance and trainability. We accordingly position the quantum layer not as a source of accuracy advantage but as a competitive instantiation of this principle: its low-rank compression onto the signal's intrinsic dimensionality is matched by a classical bottleneck, so the gain is architectural rather than quantum.

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

Infant Spontaneous Movement Noise Improves Exploration in Deep RL

Authors:
Francisco M. L\'opez↗Markus R. Ernst↗Francisco Cruz↗Matej Hoffmann↗and Jochen Triesch↗

arXiv:2606.16590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is commonly implemented as temporally uncorrelated white noise. However, recent works show that temporally correlated colored noise can improve exploration efficiency by producing smooth trajectories with better coverage of the state space. We inquire whether action noise inspired by infant spontaneous movements can also improve exploration in deep RL. We find that the power spectral densities of babies' end-effector velocities follow a colored noise process where the spectral exponent increases with age. Inspired by this developmental pattern, we introduce a mechanism that progressively increases the temporal auto-correlation of exploration noise during RL training, matching the infant statistics. Experiments across several RL environments show that infant-inspired noise produces structured exploratory behavior and can improve learning efficiency compared to conventional exploration strategies. These findings suggest that human motor and cognitive development can provide useful guidance for designing learning mechanisms in artificial agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/trieschlab/baby-noise-rl.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Convex Route to Thermoelasticity: Learning Internal Energy and Dissipation

Authors:
Hagen Holthusen↗Paul Steinmann↗Ellen Kuhl↗

arXiv:2603.28707v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a physics-based neural network framework for the discovery of constitutive models in fully coupled thermomechanics. In contrast to classical formulations based on the Helmholtz energy, we adopt the internal energy and a dissipation potential as primary constitutive functions, expressed in terms of deformation and entropy. This choice avoids the need to enforce mixed convexity–concavity conditions and facilitates a consistent incorporation of thermodynamic principles. In this contribution, we focus on materials without preferred directions or internal variables. While the formulation is posed in terms of entropy, the temperature is treated as the independent observable, and the entropy is inferred internally through the constitutive relation, enabling thermodynamically consistent modeling without requiring entropy data. Thermodynamic admissibility of the networks is guaranteed by construction. The internal energy and dissipation potential are represented by input convex neural networks, ensuring convexity and compliance with the second law. Objectivity, material symmetry, and normalization are embedded directly into the architecture through invariant-based representations and zero-anchored formulations. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework on synthetic and experimental datasets, including purely thermal problems and fully coupled thermomechanical responses of soft tissues and filled rubbers. The results show that the learned models accurately capture the underlying constitutive behavior. All code, data, and trained models are made publicly available via https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19248596.

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