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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SirenFNO: Efficient and Full Frequency Learning of Fourier Neural Operators

arXiv:2606.11518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fourier neural operators (FNOs) are effective and efficient surrogates for approximating solutions of PDEs and generalize across discretizations. However, owing to the reliance on frequency truncation to maintain learning efficiency of FNOs, empirical studies suggest that FNOs exhibit spectral bias toward low-frequency information, which may hinder the learning capability especially for certain PDEs with strong high-frequency oscillations. To address this limitation, we propose SirenFNO, a novel framework that leverages sinusoidal representation networks (SIRENs) to learn implicit neural representations and performs mode-wise kernel parameterization. Our SIREN parameterization learns a full-grid spectrum with a constant and discretization-independent parameter count, thereby eliminating the need for frequency truncation. We further extend SirenFNO with functional tensor decompositions to enhance parameter and learning efficiency. Empirical results show that our SirenFNO consistently outperforms FNO with approximately $4$ to $15$ times parameter reductions with preserved discretization invariance, and our functional decomposition variants obtain performance improvements with a maximum of $73$ times fewer parameters across multiple PDE benchmarks.

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

Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars

Training psychotherapists in evidence-based interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) requires repeated practice with meaningful feedback, yet opportunities for safe, standardized training are limited by ethical, logistical, and resource constraints. We introduce a system designed to support ACT-oriented psychotherapy training through spoken dialogue with an embodied virtual patient. The system uses large language models to simulate patient behavior conditioned on profiles derived from real therapy sessions and configurable clinical scenarios, while a separate automated evaluator provides turn-by-turn feedback on therapist responses based on established ACT fidelity criteria. Rather than aiming to replace supervision, the system is intended to support deliberate practice by enabling experimentation, reflection, and immediate feedback in low-risk settings. Expert evaluation with practicing psychologists confirmed high realism in patient behavior and demonstrated that immediate turn-by-turn ACT feedback increased therapists' awareness of intervention choices and enabled effective experimentation with alternative responses. Quantitative evaluation across 49 therapy transcripts identified GPT-4o-mini as the optimal feedback model, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE = 6.12) in replicating human supervisor ACT fidelity ratings with statistically significant agreement. This work demonstrates the potential of fidelity-aware simulated patients as a scalable complement to psychotherapy training.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TokaMark: A Comprehensive Benchmark for MAST Tokamak Plasma Models

arXiv:2602.10132v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Development and operation of commercially viable fusion energy reactors such as tokamaks require accurate predictions of plasma dynamics from sparse, noisy, and incomplete sensors readings. The complexity of the underlying physics and the heterogeneity of experimental data pose formidable challenges for conventional numerical methods, and highlight the promise of modern data-native approaches. A major obstacle in realizing this potential is, however, the lack of curated, openly available datasets and standardized benchmarks. Existing fusion datasets are scarce, fragmented across institutions, facility-specific, and inconsistently annotated, which limits reproducibility and prevents a fair and scalable comparison of AI approaches. In this paper, we introduce TokaMark, a structured benchmark to evaluate AI models on real experimental data collected from the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST). TokaMark provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to unify access to multi-modal fusion data and standardize evaluation protocols. The benchmark includes a curated list of 14 tasks spanning a range of physical mechanisms, exploiting a variety of diagnostics and covering multiple operational use cases. A baseline model is provided to facilitate transparent comparison and validation within a unified framework. By establishing a unified benchmark, TokaMark aims to accelerate progress in data-driven AI-based plasma modeling, contributing to the broader goal of achieving sustainable and stable fusion energy. The dataset, benchmark, documentation, and tooling are open-sourced under https://github.com/UKAEA-IBM-STFC-Fusion-FMs/tokamark_baseline.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

When Smaller Wins: Dual-Stage Distillation and Pareto-Guided Compression of Liquid Neural Networks for Edge Battery Prognostics

arXiv:2601.06227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Battery management systems increasingly require accurate battery health prognostics under strict on-device constraints. This paper presents DLNet, a practical framework with dual-stage distillation of liquid neural networks that turns a high-capacity model into compact and edge-deployable models for battery health prediction. DLNet first applies Euler discretization to reformulate liquid dynamics for embedded compatibility. It then performs dual-stage knowledge distillation to transfer the teacher model's temporal behavior and recover it after further compression. Pareto-guided selection under joint error-cost objectives retains student models that balance accuracy and efficiency. We evaluate DLNet on a widely used dataset and validate real-device feasibility on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense using int8 deployment. The final deployed student achieves a low error of 0.0066 when predicting battery health over the next 100 cycles, which is 15.4% lower than the teacher model. It reduces the model size from 616 kB to 94 kB with 84.7% reduction and takes 21 ms per inference on the device. These results support a practical smaller wins observation that a small model can match or exceed a large teacher for edge-based prognostics with proper supervision and selection. Beyond batteries, the DLNet framework can extend to other industrial analytics tasks with strict hardware constraints.

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

Gaussian Mixture Attention: Linear-Time Sequence Mixing via Probabilistic Latent Routing

arXiv:2606.18283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The dense token-to-token interaction pattern of standard dot-product attention remains a central bottleneck in scaling Transformer architectures to long contexts. We introduce Gaussian Mixture Attention (GMA), a probabilistic attention-style sequence mixer that replaces explicit pairwise query–key comparison with routing through $K$ learned Gaussian mixture components. Queries and keys are mapped to posterior responsibility vectors over a shared latent routing space; their overlap defines an implicit responsibility-space affinity, while values are written into and read from a $K$-slot latent memory. By exploiting the associativity of matrix multiplication, GMA avoids materializing the induced $N\times N$ affinity matrix and instead uses two responsibility matrices whose dominant activation storage scales as $\mathcal{O}(NK)$ rather than $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ for fixed $K$. We formulate bidirectional and causal variants of GMA, provide an end-to-end differentiable parameterization of the Gaussian mixture components, and analyze its responsibility-modulated gradient structure, constrained non-negative low-rank affinity interpretation, and local routing stability. Empirically, GMA exhibits the intended fixed-$K$ linear memory scaling and is competitive with attention-style baselines on long-context classification, while causal GMA improves over tested linear/random-feature attention variants on WikiText-103 but remains behind optimized causal SDPA and Mamba in the current implementation. Analysis of learned responsibilities further shows broad component usage and moderate alignment with surface-form token categories, supporting GMA as a probabilistic, interpretable, fixed-$K$ linear-time attention-style alternative rather than a universal replacement for optimized softmax attention or state-space models.

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

A Mechanistic Understanding of Pronoun Fidelity in LLMs

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the interplay of reasoning, repetition, and bias in this task, prior work relies exclusively on behavioural approaches, which may not reflect a model's internal workings. Therefore, we provide a mechanistic, model-internal perspective on pronoun fidelity, testing whether three mechanisms – group entity binding (G), recency bias (R), and stereotypical bias (S) – are causally implemented across several SOTA language models. Using Boundless Distributed Alignment Search, we find all three coexist as causal subspaces distributed across network depth. No single mechanism fully explains model behaviour, but a combination of the three consistently accounts for 91-99.5%. An attention head analysis further reveals two competing copying routes; group binding and stereotype share a localized concept-level route that retrieves a bound occupation-pronoun unit, while recency uses a distributed token-level route that repeats surface forms. In sum, pronoun fidelity arises from competition between simultaneously active causal subspaces.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SpatialAvatar-0: High-Quality 4D Head Avatar with Multi-Stage Reconstruction

High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K–600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Analytic Torsion and Spectral Gap Capture Persistent-Laplacian Performance

arXiv:2606.16990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While persistent Laplacians (PL) offer a richer geometric representation of data than persistent homology, utilizing their full eigenspectrum for learning tasks is often hampered by high dimensionality and the ``varying length'' problem across different filtration scales. We propose a compact spectral representation that distills the persistent Laplacian into three mathematically grounded invariants: Betti numbers, the spectral gap, and analytic torsion. Across benchmark datasets including MNIST, QM-3D, and SKEMPI WT, we demonstrate that this reduced feature space captures the essential predictive signal of the full spectrum, and in some cases outperforms it, while significantly reducing computational overhead and preventing the noise introduced by higher-frequency eigenvalues. Our results suggest that these invariants provide a principled, fixed-length interface between spectral geometry and topological learning.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

TSAssistant: A Human-in-the-Loop Agentic Framework for Automated Target Safety Assessment

Target Safety Assessment (TSA) requires systematic integration of genetic, transcriptomic, target homology, pharmacological, and clinical data to evaluate potential safety liabilities of therapeutic targets. This process is labor-intensive and expert-dependent, posing challenges in scalability and reproducibility. We present TSAssistant, a human-in-the-loop multi-agent framework that decomposes TSA report generation into a workflow of specialized subagents: Research Subagents that each ground and cite a single TSA domain, and Synthesis Subagents that integrate findings across domains. Subagents retrieve and synthesize evidence from curated biomedical sources through standardized tool interfaces and produce individually citable, evidence-grounded sections, with behavior shaped by a hierarchical instruction architecture that separates coordination logic from domain expertise and user intent. To complement these soft constraints, programmatic execution hooks and persistent memory stores enforce hard constraints across the workflow, while an interactive refinement loop allows experts to review and revise individual sections with full conversational context preserved across iterations. Rather than a single holistic comparison, we decompose report quality into reproducibility, evidential grounding, task-level accuracy, and controllability under expert oversight, finding high reproducibility and grounding, substantial agreement with the human reference, and net-positive expert-driven refinement.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Kerr-induced nonreciprocal transparency and group delay in a hybrid cavity magnomechanical system

arXiv:2606.13412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a scheme for realizing nonreciprocal transparency, Fano resonances, and slow/fast light in a hybrid cavity magnomechanical system containing two YIG spheres and a mechanical resonator. The nonreciprocal behavior originates from the magnon Kerr nonlinearity, which induces direction-dependent frequency shifts and modifies the interference pathways among cavity photons, magnons, and phonons. We show that the hybrid system supports multiple transparency windows arising from magnon- and magnomechanical-induced interference processes. The Kerr interaction strongly reshapes these transparency features, producing asymmetric Fano line shapes and enabling controllable nonreciprocal transmission. Furthermore, the associated dispersion exhibits pronounced directional asymmetry, leading to giant differences in the group delay for opposite propagation directions and allowing reversible switching between slow- and fast-light regimes. We investigate the roles of hybrid coupling strengths and dissipation channels and identify parameter regimes where the nonreciprocal response is maximized. These findings establish Kerr-engineered magnomechanical systems as promising platforms for integrated nonreciprocal microwave photonics and quantum information technologies.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal learning of quantum channels in diamond distance

arXiv:2512.10214v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum process tomography, the task of estimating an unknown quantum channel, is a central problem in quantum information theory. A long-standing open question is how many uses of an unknown channel are required to learn it in diamond distance, the standard metric for distinguishing quantum processes. While quantum state tomography is well understood, for general channels the problem remained open beyond the unitary case. Here we establish the query complexity of channel tomography with optimal dependence on the dimension parameters, at any fixed constant accuracy. We design an algorithm showing that any channel with input/output dimensions $d_{\mathrm{in}},d_{\mathrm{out}}$ and Kraus rank at most $k$ can be learned to accuracy $\varepsilon$ using $O(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k/\varepsilon^{2})$ channel uses. Conversely, we prove that $\Omega(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k)$ uses are necessary at constant accuracy and that, for non-minimal Kraus rank, a separate $\Omega(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ contribution is unavoidable. Since channels subsume states, unitaries, isometries, and measurements as special cases, our protocol provides a unified framework for these tomography tasks, yielding new guarantees for isometry and measurement tomography while recovering known optimal scalings for state and unitary tomography. Our algorithm follows the natural strategy of performing optimal tomography on the Choi state. The main technical contribution is to show that this suffices to control the induced diamond-distance error, avoiding the dimension loss incurred by a naive conversion from Choi-state trace distance to channel diamond distance. The protocol uses the channel non-adaptively to prepare Choi-state copies, purifies them in parallel, and performs optimal pure-state tomography on the resulting purifications. Hence, we reduce channel tomography to pure-state tomography.

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

Plan-and-Verify Video Reward Reasoning with Spatio-Temporal Scene Graph Grounding

Reward models for text-to-video (T2V) generation guide post-training but often fail at fine-grained semantic alignment. We trace this to two structural weaknesses in existing reasoning-based reward models: they do not systematically verify every condition described in the prompt, and the visual evidence supporting each judgment remains implicit in their free-form reasoning. We propose SG-PVR, a video reward model that addresses these limitations through plan-and-verify reasoning grounded in spatio-temporal scene graphs. The verification plan decomposes the prompt into atomic claims, ensuring every requirement is checked. The spatio-temporal scene graph, encoding entities, attributes, and temporally-grounded relations, is extracted from the video and maintained as a persistent structured visual reference throughout reasoning. Each claim is verified against both the video and the scene graph, anchoring judgments in explicit visual evidence. SG-PVR achieves strong performance on semantic alignment, including fine-grained temporal semantics. As a test-time reranker, it further enhances compositional alignment in T2V generation.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum mechanics in configuration space in context

arXiv:2606.17622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To enhance the way in which wave-particle duality is implemented in the modelling of quantum mechanical systems, Bukhari et al. [New J. Phys. 27, 084501 (2025)] recently introduced an alternative approach to quantum mechanics, namely quantum mechanics in configuration space. This formalism is based on a physically motivated quantisation of Newtonian mechanics and promotes the classical position-velocity states (x,v) to pairwise distinguishable quantum states. The resulting |x,v> states form the basis of the Hilbert space of individual quantum mechanical particles and evolve along classical trajectories. In this paper, we consider the modelling of a mechanical particle in free space and put quantum mechanics in configuration space into context. It is shown that this formalism increases the continuity between quantum and classical mechanics by avoiding a conceptual inconsistency associated with the definition of momentum in canonical quantisation. In addition, we emphasise that standard quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics in configuration space are based on two distinct formulations of classical mechanics.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum Entanglement, Stratified Spaces, and Topological Matter: Towards Entanglement-Sensitive Langlands Data

arXiv:2601.13467v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the spinless Haldane model, we study the witness-filtered Berry curvature, quantum geometric tensor, and quantum Fisher information on the gapped strata of the parameter space and evaluate them through the Fukui-Hatsugai-Suzuki discretization. The filtered quantities isolate the part of the geometric response carried by sublattice coherence: they suppress contributions from regions where the occupied Bloch state is locally A/B-separable and emphasize regions where curvature and coherence coexist. We derive exact lattice identities, reconstruction formulas for the curvature-weighted coherence, and bounds relating the filtered quantum geometric tensor and quantum Fisher information to single-particle mode entanglement. Across the gap-closing stratum, the quantized response changes admit a natural description in terms of Hecke modifications. We elicit a corresponding Langlands viewpoint – not as a full correspondence, but as an organizational principle and as the mathematical shadow of these physical geometric constructions.

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

Optical Creation of Synthetic Microgravity for Quantum Degenerate Gases

arXiv:2606.14985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Microgravity environments provide unique opportunities for ultracold-atom experiments by enabling long interrogation times and reduced acceleration-induced dynamics. However, their realization has largely been restricted to specialized facilities such as drop towers, sounding rockets, and space-based laboratories. Here we realize synthetic microgravity for quantum degenerate gases using optically engineered force landscapes that compensate Earth's gravity to the milli-g level while maintaining continuous confinement of the atomic ensemble. These force landscapes are generated by dynamically painted optical dipole potentials and calibrated in situ through Bloch oscillations in a vertical optical lattice, enabling precise control of the residual acceleration. We use this capability to demonstrate matter-wave beam splitting with arm separations of several hundred microns. We further implement a Bloch-band atom interferometer in which interaction-induced dephasing is strongly suppressed through controlled three-dimensional expansion in the synthetic microgravity potential. This reduction of mean-field effects restores near-$\sqrt{N}$ scaling of interferometric sensitivity for large quantum degenerate ensembles. Our results establish a versatile platform for realizing synthetic microgravity with trapped quantum gases in terrestrial laboratories, bringing the advantages of microgravity experiments to continuously operating systems and opening new opportunities for quantum sensing, matter-wave interferometry, and precision measurements.

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

Training-Free Metrics for Synthetic Object Detection Data: A Proxy for Detector Performance

With the recent advent of image generative models, synthetic data are increasingly being used to supplement limited real datasets for training computer vision models. However, not all synthetic datasets improve performance equally, and their effectiveness can only be assessed by training a downstream model, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This problem is pronounced in the task of object detection, where the required annotations are much more dense due to bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a pre-computable metric family, dubbed Conditional-Composition Domain Match (CCDM), which serves as a proxy for the relative utility of candidate synthetic training sets for downstream detection. Experiments on the VisDrone-DET dataset show that the CCDM metric families achieve a Spearman correlation of 1.0 with the downstream performance of YOLOv8, clearly outperforming existing metrics for synthetic image evaluation.

17.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

BeetleAtlas 2: An enhanced <i>Tribolium castaneum</i> web resource for tissue and developmental transcriptomics allowing refinement of gene predictions

by David P. Leader, Muhammad T. Naseem, Janina L. Rinke, Kenneth Veland Halberg BeetleAtlas is an online resource for tissue- and stage-specific transcriptomics in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum. On updating from the original Tcas5.2 genome assembly to the more recent improved icTriCast1.1 genome assembly it became evident that there were major discrepancies between the gene models of the two genome annotations in use: the OGS3 and the NCBI gene sets. As neither was clearly superior we implemented a new design in BeetleAtlas 2 (beetleatlas.org) comprising two parallel ‘modes’ — one incorporating results using the NCBI gene models and a second incorporating those using the OGS3 gene models. This allows direct comparison where equivalent gene models exist: 50–57% of cases. To aid resolution of discrepancies between the two gene model sets and verification of results, gene models are linked to a custom visualization of RNA-seq read coverage of the genome in the UCSC Genome Browser. This displays reads from 22 tissues and life stages superimposed on the icTriCast1.1 genome assembly. Reference tracks show the NCBI gene models, the OGS3 gene models after translation of their coordinates from the Tcas5.2 assembly, and 1050 discontinued NCBI gene models from the previous assembly after a similar transfer of coordinates. We document various situations in which distinct patterns of expression of the tissues can be used to confirm and extend correlations between the two gene sets, resolve discrepancies between them, make corrections and identify putative genes or exons absent from the current gene sets. BeetleAtlas 2 allows those involved in Tribolium research to avoid the pitfalls inherent in incorrect gene models when planning experiments on specific genes and interpreting the results. It also demonstrates how BeetleAtlas 2 might play an important role in establishing a revised gene set for Tribolium castaneum in the future.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Evolving Agents in the Dark: Retrospective Harness Optimization via Self-Preference

AI agents rely on a harness of skills, tools, and workflows to solve complex problems. Continually improving this harness is essential for adapting to new tasks. However, existing optimization methods typically require ground-truth validation sets, yet such labeled data is difficult to acquire in practical deployment settings. To address this problem, we introduce Retrospective Harness Optimization (RHO), a self-supervised method that optimizes the agent harness using only past trajectories. Specifically, RHO selects a diverse coreset of challenging tasks from past trajectories and re-solves them in parallel. The agent analyzes these rollouts using self-validation and self-consistency, then generates candidate harness updates and selects the most effective one by its own pairwise self-preference. We evaluate RHO across three diverse domains, spanning software engineering, technical work, and knowledge work. Notably, a single optimization round improves the pass rate on SWE-Bench Pro from 59% to 78% without any external grading. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that RHO effectively targets prior failure modes. As a result, the optimized harness alters the agent's behavior patterns and sustains higher accuracy during long-horizon sessions.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

SIRT7 regulates dosage compensation and safeguards the female X&#xa0;chromosome

Sirtuins are deacetylases implicated in stress responses and longevity in mammals1,2. Although their differential impact on disease for the two sexes has been noted3–7, the underlying reasons are unclear. Here, using Sirt7 as a model in mice, we examine the mechanisms leading to sex differences and find that Sirt7−/− female mice have decreased fitness throughout their lifespan. Notably, SIRT7 preferentially localizes to the sex chromosomes. In female&nbsp;individuals, SIRT7 loss affects X-chromosome inactivation, the first arm of dosage compensation that equalizes X-linked gene expression between males and females8–10. Xist is overexpressed and gene silencing becomes more efficient. However,&nbsp;SIRT7 loss has greatest impact on the active X (Xa) chromosome. The Xa chromosome becomes hyperacetylated at Lys36 of histone H3, structurally disorganized, prone to DNA damage and overexpressed. Increased Xa-chromosome expression leads to genome imbalance and augmented X-chromosome upregulation—the second arm of dosage compensation that balances X-chromosome versus autosomal gene expression. These data reveal an essential crosstalk between sirtuins and the sex chromosomes, with SIRT7 safeguarding X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes. We propose that the sex bias in SIRT7 biology can be explained in part by unequal effects on the sex chromosomes. SIRT7 safeguards X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Trimming the Long-Tail of Visual World Modeling Evaluation

Physical interactions follow a long-tailed distribution: a set of common and regular interactions dominates human experience and visual data, while a broad spectrum of rare and irregular interactions remains underrepresented. Although recent visual world models, including image and video generation models, achieve impressive realism on existing benchmarks, they primarily focus on simulating common physical interactions. This raises a central question: Do current visual world models internalize and generalize physical principles? In this work, we introduce Tailor-Bench, a benchmark that challenges world models to simulate irregular physical interactions. To enable systematic evaluation, we design three scenario modes that progressively challenge model reasoning: Regular scenarios reflect common tool-task pairs, Unconventional scenarios replace conventional tools with attribute-compatible substitutes to test affordance generalization, and Impossible scenarios introduce attribute-violating tools to probe constraint awareness. Additionally, we design two complementary settings under a unified evaluation protocol: predictive generation requires inferring outcomes without guidance, while descriptive generation specifies the target outcome for faithful realization. Our experimental results reveal a clear long-tail gap in physical world modeling: performance degrades from Regular to Unconventional and Impossible scenarios, indicating limited generalization beyond common interactions. Failure analysis further shows that models rely on superficial visual patterns: image models fail to realize correct state changes, while video models further suffer from temporal inconsistencies.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

When Plausible Is Not Realistic: Evaluating Human Mobility in LLM-Based Urban Simulation

LLM-based generative agents are increasingly used in urban simulators, yet it remains unclear whether they reproduce empirically realistic human mobility patterns or merely generate plausible mobility narratives. We introduce a validation framework for evaluating the mobility of generative agents of LLM-based urban simulators against real-world mobility data. For this, we use mobility laws, temporal rhythms, network motifs, semantic activity transitions, and behavioral mobility profiles. Using datasets from the Greater Paris region and Shanghai, we evaluate AgentSociety and CitySim across multiple dimensions of mobility realism. Our analysis reveals a substantial gap between narrative plausibility and empirical mobility realism. Although the simulators capture some high-level semantic activity distributions, they struggle to reproduce core spatial and temporal constraints, including realistic trip-length distributions, origin-destination flows, dwell times, and transition dynamics. We further observe that realistic mobility diversity is unstable across default prompting configurations and may require explicit profile-aware initialization. To support reproducible evaluation, we also contribute scalable and open LLM-driven infrastructure for regional-scale map generation, observability-enhanced simulation, mobility-metric computation, and traffic simulation. Our findings highlight the need for rigorous empirical validation of LLM-based urban simulators and provide practical tools for building more realistic and reproducible urban simulation systems.

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

$K$-Theoretic Obstructions to Linearizing QCA Representations

arXiv:2606.19657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Projective representations arise naturally in physics and representation theory, and determining whether they can be linearized has been a fundamental problem. In this work, we study the analogous problem for quantum cellular automata (QCA) representations, which incorporate locality constraints imposed by a metric space $X$. Over an arbitrary field $\mathbb{F}$, we develop an obstruction theory for the linearization of QCA representations, using the algebraic $K$-theory spectrum of QCA constructed in previous work of the authors. The resulting obstructions are governed by the homotopy type of the QCA spaces, from which we extract universal obstruction classes to linearization. In the complex algebraic and unitary case, we also fully compute the homotopy types of the QCA spaces over a point, a line, and a plane.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Language Shapes Mental Health Evaluations in Large Language Models

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in socially sensitive mental health contexts, including support chatbots, screening, and content moderation. This raises a reliability question: do semantically equivalent mental health inputs elicit comparable evaluations across languages, or systematic shifts consistent with language-associated social and cultural contexts? We examine this question in an English-Chinese setting with GPT-4o and Qwen3-32B using a two-level framework: construct-level evaluative orientation, measured by psychometric stigma instruments, and decision-level behavior, measured by binary stigma detection and four-class depression severity classification. Across instruments and models, Chinese prompts elicit higher stigma-related scores than English prompts. At the decision level, Chinese prompts reduce sensitivity to stigmatizing content and produce more conservative depression severity judgments, leading to more under-estimation errors. These findings show that prompt language can shift both evaluative orientation and downstream behavior in LLM-based mental health evaluation. They highlight the need to evaluate multilingual LLMs not only for aggregate performance, but also for whether they apply comparable evaluative standards across languages in socially sensitive domains.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Structured Adversarial Camouflage via Voronoi Diagrams

Pixel-wise adversarial patches are computationally heavy and often visually detectable, limiting utility in security-critical systems. We present adversarial Voronoi camouflage that optimizes only seed-point locations under fixed, printable palettes using a soft assignment, producing structured, splinter camouflage-like patterns without additional regularization. Evaluated on person detection with COCO-style AP@[.5:.95], naive placement (Inria -> COCO) performs comparably bad, while garment-level application via segmentation mask (3DPeople) results in a significant AP drop. The attack transfers to out-of-domain backgrounds and across detector families (YOLOv9/10/11/12), indicating robustness in black-box settings. Repainting with different palettes largely nullifies the effect, and single-color tweaks show limited tolerance (

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

Optimal scenario design for climate emulation

arXiv:2606.19302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As deep learning for physical systems continues to grow in popularity, efforts to improve generalizability have primarily focused on designing architectures that embed physical constraints. However, for machine-learning surrogate climate models (emulators), we show that the low structural diversity in existing scenarios commonly used to generate training data places a ceiling on predictive skill. Here, we examine whether training datasets themselves can be optimized to improve generalization. We introduce a method to create datasets that produce emulators capable of generalizing to new, structurally different scenarios absent from the training data. We use a differentiable Simple Climate Model (SCM) to calculate the sensitivity of emulator loss to perturbations in the training data, iteratively updating the training data to maximize emulator skill. For an SCM, training on one scenario optimized in this fashion outperforms an emulator trained on six standard ScenarioMIP pathways. We achieve this higher predictive skill despite training on a smaller dataset, finding that our emulator successfully isolates distinct physical behaviors of different climate forcing agents (e.g., greenhouse gases vs. aerosols) without single-forcing runs. We then demonstrate that scenarios optimized using an SCM, when used to drive an intermediate-complexity climate model, produce a training dataset that yields a more skillful emulator than training on ScenarioMIP outputs. Our results suggest that, in the compute-constrained environment of running full-scale climate models, generating a small number of dynamically rich scenarios provides greater marginal value for emulation and characterizing system responses than expanding the suite of traditional emissions pathways.