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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Topological Data Analysis for High-Dimensional Dynamic Process Monitoring

arXiv:2606.20443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time process monitoring requires methods that extract actionable information from high-dimensional time-series data. In this work, we present a new approach for process monitoring that combines tools of topological data analysis (TDA) and machine learning. In the proposed approach, we represent multivariate time-series data as manifolds and use topological descriptors to summarize the structure of such data; we then use a neural ordinary differential equation to learn the dynamic evolution of the topological structure of the system. Using real data from an industrial process, we show that this trajectory-based event detection approach is effective at detecting diverse types of events. We contrast this approach against reconstruction-based approaches such as principal component analysis and autoencoders and against a trajectory-based approach that uses Koopman autoencoders.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Occupational Prompting Reveals Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

Social roles shape expectations, priorities, and judgments, yet it remains unclear how large language models (LLMs) associate occupational identities with broader cultural value patterns. Prior work used nationality-based cultural prompting to study how LLM responses to value-survey questions align with human cultural benchmarks. In this paper, we extend that framework by replacing cultural prompting with occupational prompting to examine how professional-role cues influence value-survey responses in open-weight LLMs. Using a survey-grounded evaluation pipeline based on questions from the Integrated Values Surveys, we project model responses into the two-dimensional Inglehart–Welzel cultural space. We prompt open-weight LLMs to answer questions under occupational identities such as accountant, teacher, engineer, and nurse, and then analyze how these occupation-conditioned responses are positioned on the cultural map. Our results show that when open-weight LLMs are prompted with occupations rather than national identities, their responses remain within a broadly Western-leaning region of the cultural map. However, different occupations introduce shifts within this region, producing distinct occupational skews. This indicates that occupational prompts are not treated as neutral role labels, but instead elicit structured value patterns. These findings extend survey-based evaluation of cultural bias beyond nationality-based prompting and provide a framework for studying how occupational personas shape value expression in LLMs.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with effective skills is crucial for solving complex tasks in real-world systems like OpenClaw. In this work, we aim to develop a framework that automatically constructs such reusable skills to enhance LLMs in tool use, multi-step reasoning, and dynamic environment interaction. To this end, we propose Collective Skill Tree Search (CSTS), a novel tree-search-based skill construction framework that constructs structured, diverse and generalizable tree of skills. The core idea of CSTS is to leverage collective intelligence to jointly search, identify and compose effective skills via two iterative phases: Collective Skill Node Generation (CSN-Gen) and Collective Skill Node Assessment (CSN-Assess). CSN-Gen exploits collective knowledge from multiple models to explore diverse candidate skills for each subtask, enabling comprehensive skill exploration. CSN-Assess employs multiple models as judges to evaluate and select skill nodes with two scoring mechanisms: (1) collective quality scoring that aggregates independent evaluations to produce a robust estimate of skill effectiveness, and (2) collective transferability scoring that explicitly verifies whether a skill generalizes well across different models. With CSTS, we construct a set of comprehensive tree of skills along with skill-augmented training data, enabling models to effectively learn and utilize skills. Besides, we introduce Collective Skill Reinforcement Learning, which actively selects multiple relevant skills from the tree to broaden solution-space exploration, avoid being trapped by a single skill and its resulting homogeneous or suboptimal solutions. As a result, our trained model, OpenClaw-Skill, exhibits outstanding agentic capabilities in long-horizon planning, tool use and generalization over challenging benchmarks.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MassSpecGym in the Wild: Uncovering and Correcting Evaluation Pitfalls in AI-Driven Molecule Discovery

arXiv:2606.19624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable benchmarking is critical for developing machine learning models for tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based molecule discovery. Subtle issues in experimental design and model evaluation procedures can degrade the trustworthiness of such benchmarks and lead to erroneous conclusions. We conduct a thorough review of model evaluation issues in the recent MS/MS machine learning literature, using the standard MassSpecGym benchmark suite as a case study to illustrate the impact of these issues. We find evaluation issues in at least 17 of 26 papers reporting MassSpecGym benchmark results in the first year of its adoption. We isolate three classes of failures: (i) data leakage, (ii) shortcut learning, and (iii) implementation bugs and metric divergence. Through extensive experimentation and code replication, we quantify the impact of these issues and show how they corrupt the evaluation standards MassSpecGym was designed to enforce. We distill our findings into recommendations generalizable to MS/MS challenges, benchmarks, and custom evaluation setups. We also release MassSpecGym v1.5, an implementation of our recommendations in the MassSpecGym benchmarking suite which addresses the failure modes identified in this audit. MassSpecGym v1.5 is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Redirecting the Flow: Image Customization through Attention Distribution Shift

Subject-driven image customization aims to generate images that not only follow textual instructions but also preserve the identity of a given reference subject. Existing approaches, including test-time fine-tuning, encoder-based methods, and token competition in shared attention spaces, suffer from limited efficiency, misalignment between extracted reference features and the generative process, and interference from irrelevant information. To address these limitations, we formulate the customization task as a distribution shift induced by incorporating reference images into text-to-image generation, and derive a Conditional Attention Distribution Shift formulation grounded in maximum entropy theory. Building on this formulation, we propose CustomShift, a dual-branch architecture based on Stable Diffusion 3. The Reference-Alignment Branch leverages self-attention between reference images and subject names to achieve layer-wise alignment with latent representations, while the Cross-Guidance Branch integrates textual and reference cues to guide generation. Experiments on the DreamBooth and Custom101 benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a better balance between semantic fidelity and subject consistency.

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

VoidPadding: Let [VOID] Handle Padding in Masked Diffusion Language Models so that [EOS] Can Focus on Semantic Termination

MDLMs generate text by denoising a preallocated masked response canvas, making response-length modeling central to instruction tuning. Existing MDLMs often inherit the autoregressive convention of using repeated \texttt{[EOS]} tokens for padding during instruction tuning, giving \texttt{[EOS]} a dual role as both a semantic terminator and a padding token. We show that this dual role is a root cause of \texttt{[EOS]} overflow under large-block decoding. To decouple these roles, we propose VoidPadding, which introduces \texttt{[VOID]} for padding and reserves \texttt{[EOS]} for termination. During inference, the learned \texttt{[EOS]} signal enables early stopping, while the learned \texttt{[VOID]} signal guides adaptive response canvas expansion. On Dream-7B-Instruct, VoidPadding improves the block-size-averaged four-task mean across mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks by \(+17.84\) points over the original model and \(+6.95\) points over RainbowPadding, while reducing decoding NFE by 55.7\% on average. Code is available at https://github.com/Haru-LCY/VoidPadding.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Nous: An Attempt to Extract and Inject the Cognition Behind Prediction-Market Behavior

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents proliferate in prediction markets and collective decision-making, they risk a cognitive monoculture: agents built on shared foundation models produce correlated forecasts, and recent measurement finds frontier-model errors correlated at r ~ 0.77. We ask whether human cognitive diversity can be recovered from behavior and transferred to LLM agents. Nous extracts a structured eight-dimension behavioral profile from real Polymarket trading activity and injects it into agents through prompts. Our central finding is a dissociation between the two halves of that pipeline. Extraction works, partially: across 100 wallets, 8 of 14 parameters are temporally stable (split-half ICC >= 0.5, bootstrap CI lower bound > 0.3; contrarian score reaches ICC ~ 0.9); wallets are identifiable from their profiles well above chance (top-1 retrieval 17-22% vs. 1% chance); and two of four pre-specified dimensions rank-correlate with future realized profit out-of-sample, though the correlations do not survive behavioral-confound controls. Prompt-level injection does not measurably transmit it: on a semantic embedding metric, structured injection shows no significant advantage over a length-matched control on any model, and the diversity it induces neither reduces ensemble error correlation nor improves Brier score – a null that persists across exploratory checks on sampling temperature, profile diversity, and question difficulty. Measuring the prompts themselves locates the compression before the model: the structure-to-narrative translator emits near-uniform prompts whose spread does not track profile spread. We position Nous as measuring the cognitive-monoculture problem and the limits of a prompt-level remedy, motivating deeper, below-the-prompt injection (fine-tuning, activation steering). Code, frozen profiles, prompts, and model outputs: https://github.com/WillChienT/nous-paper

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

Exact Markovian Dissipation Requires Singular Energy Resources

arXiv:2606.19510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Gorini–Kossakowski–Lindblad–Sudarshan (GKLS) equation describes irreversible quantum dynamical semigroups. We show that this description cannot be exact under physically regular energy conditions. We prove that the open-system survival probability under physically regular energy conditions has sublinear decay, whereas any dissipative GKLS semigroup has a linear short-time decay. Hence exact Markovian dissipation requires singular energy resources: an unbounded-below total Hamiltonian or infinite initial energy, and a divergent interaction-energy moment. Therefore, a dissipative time-independent GKLS equation should be regarded as an effective description rather than the exact reduced dynamics of a Hamiltonian dilation satisfying physically regular energy conditions.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Environment-Grounded Automated Prompt Optimization for LLM Game Agents

LLM agents in interactive environments are highly sensitive to their prompts, yet prompt engineering remains a manual, task-specific process. We introduce an automated prompt optimization framework for LLM agents that decomposes the observation-to-action pipeline into a goal-conditioned descriptor agent and an action selection agent, and iteratively refines each module's prompt through an LLM-driven evolutionary loop guided by environment returns. We propose a behavior analyzer to attribute episode outcomes to specific prompt components, and a mutator to propose targeted revisions to the prompt, before validating them through environment rollouts. We evaluate on all five BabyAI tasks in the BALROG benchmark, comparing our pipeline against BALROG's RobustCoTAgent under both plain and guided prompt initializations. Optimization improves performance consistently across tasks and conditions, without requiring updates to the model weights. On PutNext, a multi-step coordination task where the RobustCoTAgent achieves 0% success, our framework reaches up to 72.5% success rate using the same underlying LLM with optimized prompts. These results suggest that a multi-agent framework, combined with automatic prompt optimization, enhances LLMs without the need for fine-tuning or extensive human supervision.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Lignin to adipic acid in a high-yield chemical and biological redox process

Viable manufacturing pathways to produce bio-based chemicals from renewable feedstocks, such as lignin derived from plant biomass, are needed to decarbonize the chemicals manufacturing sector. Converting the recalcitrant lignin polymer to valuable bioproducts remains a longstanding challenge in biorefining, with the highest reported single-product yield from lignin currently around 20 wt% (refs. 1–4). Most existing lignin depolymerization strategies target aryl–ether bond cleavage, which can produce aromatic monomers in yields of only about 30 wt%, and still as complex mixtures with C–C-linked dimers and oligomers5,6. The recalcitrance of these C–C linkages between aromatic moieties fundamentally limits single-product yields from lignin, prompting the development of strategies to efficiently cleave these C–C bonds3,7–9. Here we show how reductive processing of lignin from poplar accesses a hydrocarbon mixture of alkyl-aromatic monomers and oligomers that is privileged for oxidative conversion to monomeric aromatic carboxylic acids, comprising mostly benzoic acid and phthalic acid isomers in up to 73 wt% monomer yields, using a Co/Mn/Br catalyst. The soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida KT2440 was engineered to convert this mixture of aromatic carboxylic acids to muconolactone, a precursor to bio-based nylons, enabling final adipic acid yields up to 26 wt% (gram adipic acid per gram lignin) with a maximum theoretical yield of 57 wt%. This pairing of reductive and oxidative steps with lignin resembles processes in petrochemical refining and shows how lignin may be converted into a single, valuable bioproduct in high yields. A chemical and biological redox process that resembles processes in petrochemical refining is used to convert lignin from poplar into a single, valuable bioproduct, adipic acid, in high yields.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

High Demand, Low Possession: Dilemmas and Strategies for Research Capability Cultivation in Clinical Medicine Postgraduates

Most previous studies have examined medical postgraduate research training from a single dimension, lacking a full-chain analysis that integrates capability demand, actual possession, obstacles, and output. Consequently, the measurement of capability gaps and the analysis of underlying training model deficiencies remain insufficient. To address this gap, we administered a self-designed multidimensional questionnaire to 86 clinical medicine postgraduates at a medical school, covering research cognition, interest, capability demand and possession, participation pathways, difficulties, and outputs. The aim was to systematically characterize the current situation, identify problems, and propose optimization strategies. Over 90% of participants expressed interest in research, yet only 1.16% self-rated as very knowledgeable. The largest demand-possess gap was for writing and publication (86.05% vs. 16.28%), followed by independent research capability (75.58% vs. 11.63%). A total of 59.30% cited lack of foundational knowledge, making experiments very difficult, as the greatest challenge, and 66.28% had no research achievements. The primary source of research topics was supervisor assignment (54.65%), with only 4.65% choosing topics independently. No statistically significant differences were found across grades or training types (P > 0.05). These findings reveal a structural high demand, low possession gap in medical postgraduate research training, with early research experience deficit and a passive research model as key constraining factors. Accordingly, an integrated bachelor-postgraduate progressive research competency training system is proposed.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Degeneracy Cannot Violate the Quantum Hamming Bound

arXiv:2606.15558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum Hamming bound is the standard finite-length sphere-packing bound for exact correction of arbitrary qubit errors. Whether degeneracy can evade this bound has remained unresolved in full generality for nearly three decades: distinct correctable errors may act identically on the code space, so the usual disjoint-sphere argument breaks down. We prove that every exact binary quantum subspace code with $K>1$ obeys the bound, without assuming either nondegeneracy or additivity. Our proof turns the Li–Xing linear-programming polynomial into an exact intersection count for quaternary Hamming balls. Monotonicity in block length and in ball-center separation then reduces the problem to a local node–edge charging inequality at the shortest admissible length. Thus degeneracy can merge correctable error sectors, but cannot enlarge the finite-length binary Hamming bound.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MAMVI: 3D Test-Time Adaptation via Masked Multi-View Point Clouds

3D point cloud models suffer significant performance degradation under distribution shifts caused by sensor noise, occlusions, and environmental changes. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a practical paradigm for mitigating this issue during inference. Recently, leveraging multi-view augmentation has shown promise in improving 3D TTA performance. However, existing multi-view approaches are often constrained by sequential optimization that treats each view independently. This sequential optimization leads to substantial inference latency due to repetitive optimization steps, making real-time adaptation impractical. To address this, we propose Masked Multi-View Test-Time Adaptation (MAMVI), which replaces sequential optimization with a unified single-step adaptation. Specifically, MAMVI utilizes a hybrid masking strategy that combines fixed ratios for stability with Beta-distributed sampling for diversity. By aggregating losses across multiple views, MAMVI performs adaptation through a single backward pass based on multi-view consensus. Additionally, a confidence-based adaptive learning rate is used to dynamically adjust the adaptation intensity for each sample. Extensive experiments on ModelNet-40C, ShapeNet-C, and ScanObjectNN-C demonstrate that MAMVI achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ShapeNet-C and ScanObjectNN-C. Moreover, it remains competitive on ModelNet-40C while delivering 4.9-8.9 times faster inference, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/Inseok-kong/MAMVI

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A 0-1 Law for Multifractal Spectra via the HGDS Scale Derivative

arXiv:2606.15850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the multifractal spectrum D(h,omega) of a stochastic process is almost surely deterministic under a scale decorrelation condition on the HGDS scale derivative. The key difficulty is that the pointwise Hölder exponent lives in the germ sigma-algebra, where classical 0-1 laws do not reach. We get around this by working with the geometry accumulation integral G_Lambda, which is a genuine Lebesgue integral over scales and concentrates almost surely. The boundary case – log-correlated fields – is sharp: the variance summability condition fails exactly there.

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

FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

arXiv:2606.13817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

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

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

PhaseWY: A pipeline for haplotype phasing, sex chromosome identification and extraction of sex-limited sequences

Sex chromosomes are central to many ecological and evolutionary processes. Evidence has accumulated that sex chromosome systems vary extensively in age, turnover and transitions, motivating renewed efforts to study the diversity of sex chromosome systems across the tree of life. However, successful genomic detection of sex chromosomes depends on several factors, including the size and divergence time, background genetic diversity, and the number of sequenced females and males. In addition, technical challenges associated with sequencing and analysing the sex-limited Y/W chromosome remain. Here, we present PhaseWY, an automated Snakemake pipeline that uses whole-genome sequencing data from multiple female and male individuals to identify sex-chromosomal regions and extract the corresponding Y/W sequences. PhaseWY (i) detects sex differences in alignment depth, (ii) applies read-based and statistical haplotype phasing, (iii) identifies sex-linked regions using haplotype clustering, and (iv) subsets autosomal, X/Z- and Y/W-linked variants for downstream analyses. We applied PhaseWY to simulated data to benchmark factors influencing sex-linkage detection and successful extraction of Y/W-linked variants. To demonstrate its practical utility, we further applied PhaseWY to the neo-sex chromosome system in Alauda larks (Alaudidae) and performed a range of downstream analyses demonstrating the scope of applications of the PhaseWY output. We conclude that PhaseWY provides an easy-to-use and reproducible tool for population-genomic analyses in non-model organisms, with particular importance for advancing our understanding of sex-chromosome evolution.

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

Learning and Generating Mixed States Prepared by Shallow Channel Circuits

arXiv:2604.01197v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning quantum states from measurement data is a central problem in quantum information and computational complexity. In this work, we study the problem of learning to generate mixed states on a finite-dimensional lattice. Motivated by recent developments in mixed state phases of matter, we focus on arbitrary states in the trivial phase. A state belongs to the trivial phase if there exists a shallow preparation channel circuit under which local reversibility is preserved throughout the preparation. We prove that any mixed state in this class can be efficiently learned from measurement access alone. Specifically, given copies of an unknown trivial phase mixed state, our algorithm outputs a shallow local channel circuit that approximately generates this state in trace distance. The sample complexity and runtime are polynomial (or quasi-polynomial) in the number of qubits, assuming constant (or polylogarithmic) circuit depth and gate locality. Importantly, the learner is not given the original preparation circuit and relies only on its existence. Our results provide a structural foundation for quantum generative models based on shallow channel circuits. In the classical limit, our framework also inspires an efficient algorithm for classical diffusion models using only a polynomial overhead of training and generation.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Send a SCOUT First: Pre-hoc Reasoning for Adaptive Detector Allocation in Prompt-Injection Defense

arXiv:2605.30837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are heterogeneous: each is strong on a different slice of attacks, and none is always reliable. Yet existing systems still treat detection as a fixed single-detector pipeline, committing every request to one detector's blind spots. We reframe defense as detector allocation: given a heterogeneous pool, decide per request which detectors to run and whether to escalate to an LLM judge. Our framework SCOUT (Scalable and Controllable Outcome-prediction for Uncertainty-aware Triage) makes this decision dynamic by predicting each detector's per-sample reliability and latency from how it behaved on similar past inputs, and exposes a single safety-utility threshold to the operator (where utility bundles benign-pass rate and wall-clock). To evaluate this setting, we build SCOUT-450, a benchmark that captures the structurally complex, agent-facing injections that older prompt-injection sets under-represent. On SCOUT-450, a safety-oriented operating point reduces attack-success rate by 46% and total wall-clock by 40% relative to an always-on GPT-4o judge, at a 5.1-point benign-utility drop. SCOUT also transfers to three external benchmarks (BIPIA, IPI, and IHEval), improving the safety-utility frontier.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Sharing quantum indistinguishability with multiple parties

arXiv:2512.15199v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum indistinguishability of non-orthogonal quantum states is a valuable resource in quantum information applications such as cryptography and randomness generation. In this article, we present a sequential state-discrimination scheme that enables multiple parties to share quantum uncertainty, in terms of the max relative entropy, generated by a single party. Our scheme is based upon maximum-confidence measurements and takes advantages of weak measurements to allow a number of parties to perform state discrimination on a single quantum system. We review known sequential state discrimination and show how our scheme would work through a number of examples where ensembles may or may not contain symmetries. Our results will have a role to play in understanding the ultimate limits of sequential information extraction and guide the development of quantum resource sharing in sequential settings.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

All-valid-state HOBO encoding for constrained combinatorial optimization on NISQ devices

arXiv:2606.20017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continued advancements in quantum computing have stimulated growing interest in translating quantum technologies into real-world applications. Consequently, the investigation of practically motivated NP-hard problems is of significant value. This study investigates the performance of a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) in addressing the traveling salesperson problem (TSP) through noiseless simulations representative of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices using higher-order binary optimization (HOBO) encodings. We construct a HOBO Hamiltonian with an efficient binary representation and propose an all-valid-state HOBO (AVS-HOBO) scheme based on cyclic mapping that eliminates one penalty term and reuses states that would otherwise be invalid. Using TSP instances of up to 20 cities, we compare the original HOBO and AVS-HOBO encodings from multiple perspectives, including the energy convergence behavior and the approximation, tour-length, and feasibility ratios. In addition to simulations, we perform computations on real quantum hardware with different device architectures, where we not only compare the performances of different chips but also investigate the effects of different error-mitigation methods on actual quantum machines. The results indicate that AVS-HOBO encoding enhances the practical reliability of VQE on NISQ devices and improves scalability for larger TSP instances, with broader applicability to constrained quantum optimization problems.

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

Agentic Symbolic Search: Characterizing PDEs Beyond Hand-crafted Expressions, Meshes, and Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mathematicians understand a PDE solution through mathematical structures rather than tables of computed values. Historically, this has been the product of mathematical analysis, carried out by hand for each problem individually. Neither numerical simulation nor neural networks produce those structures directly. We propose Agentic Symbolic Search (ASYS), a prior-guided framework in which an agent translates PDE theory, public problem constraints, and accumulated search experience into testable differentiable symbolic programs. The mathematical forms are refined under evolutionary search, while their continuous parameters are fit by gradient-based optimization. This makes the search an automated form of inductive-bias injection rather than blind symbolic regression. For problems with known analytical forms, ASYS recovers these forms naturally; for other problems, ASYS constructs analytical approximations which can guide mathematicians toward further analysis. In our experiments, across five problems spanning bounded dynamics, finite-time blow-up, and free-boundary focusing, ASYS produces interpretable representations, including a geometric interface formula for Allen-Cahn 2D dynamics and a nine-parameter contraction law for Keller-Segel chemotactic blow-up, in settings where no closed-form description was previously available. ASYS shows the possibility of a new paradigm for characterizing PDE solutions, beyond handcrafted analytical solutions, mesh-based numerical solutions, and neural network approximations.