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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VLADriveBench: Evaluating CoT-Action Relationship in VLA for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning alongside driving trajectories, but existing benchmarks evaluate only trajectory quality and do not assess whether the CoT is relevant, consistent, or causally connected to the driving action. We introduce VLADriveBench, a framework that combines observational metrics (mentioning, hallucination, contradiction, action alignment) with a CoT intervention protocol to provide complementary views of the CoT-action relationship. Applying VLADriveBench to three models across two architectures, we find that the two analyses can diverge sharply: ORION scores highest on observational alignment yet its CoT is epiphenomenal, while Alpamayo v1.5 scores lower yet its CoT is strongly causal, with visual salience gating the extent of CoT influence.

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

Enhancing Fatigue Detection through Heterogeneous Multi-Source Data Integration and Cross-Domain Modality Imputation

arXiv:2507.16859v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fatigue detection for human operators is important in safety-related applications such as aviation, mining, and long-haul transport. Reliable estimation of operator fatigue can support timely warnings, adaptive task scheduling, takeover reminders, and other safety-management decisions in human-machine systems. However, the effectiveness of these functions depends on whether fatigue-related signals can be reliably captured in the deployment environment. While many studies have shown the value of high-fidelity sensors in controlled laboratory environments, their performance often degrades when used in real-world settings because of noise, lighting conditions, and field-of-view constraints, thereby limiting their practical use. This paper formalizes a deployment-oriented setting for real-world fatigue detection, where high-quality sensors are often unavailable in practical applications. To address this issue, we use knowledge from heterogeneous source domains, including high-fidelity sensors that are difficult to deploy in the field but commonly used in controlled environments, to assist fatigue detection in the real-world target domain. Based on this idea, we design a heterogeneous and multi-source fatigue-detection framework that uses the available modalities in the target domain while leveraging diverse configurations in the source domains through cross-domain modality imputation based on shared modalities.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

When does dissipation help neural surrogates learn open quantum dynamics?

arXiv:2606.23894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dissipation is usually viewed as an obstacle to predicting quantum dynamics, yet it can also contract trajectories toward steady states and thereby suppress accumulated prediction errors, leaving it unclear whether dissipation ultimately helps or hinders the learnability of open quantum dynamics. We investigate this question using Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE) surrogates for open Heisenberg XYZ spin chains. Closed-system learnability deteriorates rapidly with system size, culminating in a static-prediction collapse at four qubits; dissipation reverses this trend, creating a broad high-fidelity regime at intermediate system sizes, while at four qubits a fidelity-aware objective recovers learnable rollout structure that is absent under closed-system training. Comparison against static and steady-state baselines reveals that dissipation improves performance through two fundamentally different mechanisms: at weak-to-moderate dissipation the surrogate captures nontrivial transient dynamics and substantially outperforms trivial predictors, whereas at stronger damping high fidelity increasingly reflects trajectory simplification toward the steady state rather than improved learned dynamics. These results show that dissipation can enhance the learnability of open quantum dynamics, but that fidelity alone is insufficient to distinguish genuine dynamical learning from steady-state trivialization: dissipative contraction and trajectory simplification are distinct effects that peak in different regimes and should be disentangled when evaluating learned quantum-dynamical surrogates.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Beyond Shapley: Efficient Computation of Asymmetric Shapley Values

arXiv:2606.25103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We address the problem of explainability in machine learning models through feature attribution methods. In particular, we consider a variant of Shapley values known as Asymmetric Shapley Values (ASV), which enables the incorporation of causal knowledge into model-agnostic explanations through the use of a causal graph. We show that in certain contexts in which the computation of SHAP is $\#P$-hard, the exact computation of ASV can be done in polynomial time. To extend this algorithmic result, we introduce a notion of equivalence classes over the topological orderings of the underlying causal graph, which is useful to reduce the time to compute ASV. In particular, we present a polynomial-time algorithm (in the number of equivalence classes) to compute it whenever the causal graph is a rooted directed tree. Finally, we develop an algorithm for approximating ASV in arbitrary causal DAGs which relies on a procedure to sample topological orderings uniformly at random. To implement this sampling mechanism we leverage known algorithms as well as simpler alternatives. Our experimental results demonstrate the practical viability of the proposed approach in realistic causal structures.

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

PixJail: Self-Evolving Paper-to-Pipeline Reproduction for Text-to-Image Jailbreak Evaluation

arXiv:2606.24081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Text-to-Image (T2I) jailbreak techniques evolve rapidly, existing benchmarks and reproduction workflows often struggle to keep pace. More importantly, T2I jailbreak evaluation is not a single prompt-level test, but a pipeline-level problem shaped by multiple stages, including prompt transformation, image generation, safety filtering, and multimodal judging. This makes results across papers difficult to reliably reproduce and fairly compare. To bridge this gap, we propose PixJail, a self-evolving paper-to-pipeline agent framework for reproducible T2I jailbreak evaluation. Given a T2I jailbreak paper and optional reference code, PixJail rapidly constructs a paper-specific attack module and a runnable evaluation pipeline under a unified contract, while faithfully reproducing the original experimental results. PixJail further maintains a memory bank that stores paper digests, attack evolution patterns, reusable templates, failure cases, and versioned artifacts, enabling future reproduction efforts to reuse prior experience. We reproduce eleven representative T2I jailbreak methods, including both code-available and code-unavailable papers. Under their original settings, our framework accurately recovers prior results with minimal error (2.1\% average, 0\% median). We hope that PixJail can serve as a unified foundation for future T2I jailbreak reproduction and evaluation, significantly reducing manual effort.

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

Unified Multimodal Model for Brain MRI Imputation and Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great potential for medicine, as they inherit knowledge from LLM and allow multiple data modalities to be integrated, analysed and interpreted in natural language. However, the field of medical MLLMs is constrained by non-trivial challenges, notably the scarcity of high-quality training data and the frequent occurrence of missing data in the real-world clinical setting. Here, we propose a novel unified multimodal model, UniBrain, for brain magnetic resonance image (MRI) analysis. To address potential missing brain MRI modalities, we employ a unified training strategy to perform joint imaging modality imputation and brain image understanding. During training, an interleaved and description-enriched data flow is constructed to train the model in an autoregressive manner, enabling medical reasoning with generated multimodal data. A self-alignment strategy is introduced to leverage dense image embeddings to learn fine-grained anatomical features without requiring detailed image captions. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic hidden state mechanism to alleviate the exposure bias during long-context multimodal inference. Extensive experiments on multi-disease brain MRI dataset demonstrate that UniBrain achieves high performance for brain image imputation, understanding, and disease diagnosis under various extents of modality incompleteness.

08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition

by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS: A Robust Decision-Making Framework for Robotic Manipulation in High Uncertainty Environments

Authors:

arXiv:2503.05226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Monte Carlo tree search is attractive for robotic manipulation because it can improve action selection through simulation without requiring a fully differentiable policy. In uncertain domains, however, sparse terminal rewards and noisy transitions can make shallow search brittle: many candidate branches remain indistinguishable until late rollouts, and small simulation budgets amplify this ambiguity. This paper presents Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS, a decision-making framework that decomposes intermediate feedback into rule, heuristic, optional neural, and value-estimation channels, centers the resulting process signal against matched task contexts, and uses it to bias or repair search while preserving terminal-task evaluation. The primary evidence is intentionally tiered. Local tasks and matched ManiSkill diagnostics isolate reward-center mechanisms and ablations; matched option-level ManiSkill sweeps test robustness under primitive failure, observation noise, and initial-pose shifts while not claiming standard benchmark superiority; and an official same-backbone OpenVLA-OFT/LIBERO bridge tests bounded VLA action repair. The OpenVLA-OFT clean reproduction reaches 10/10 LIBERO-Spatial successes both with and without RCRM-Guard. A single-suite same-backbone action-channel stress artifact over ten paired LIBERO-Spatial action-channel stress episodes records 0/10 unguarded successes and 9/10 guarded successes. Additional observation-noise, language-perturbation, and visual-distractor probes are reported as coverage and negative-result context rather than superiority evidence. The resulting claim is bounded: Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS is an inspectable test-time verifier for same-backbone high-uncertainty manipulation, not a replacement VLA policy or a broad standard-benchmark superiority claim.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Physics-informed generative AI for semiconductor manufacturing: Enforcing hard physical constraints in generative models by construction

arXiv:2606.11247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative models are increasingly used to propose designs, data, and control actions for physical systems, yet many such systems are governed by hard physical constraints rather than by perceptual plausibility. Semiconductor manufacturing provides a demanding test case: generated masks, layouts, synthetic defect data, and process recipes must obey lithography, transport, reaction, and device-physics constraints, because physically invalid samples are not merely low quality but unusable. This Perspective argues that semiconductor manufacturing exposes a broader computational-science challenge, namely that generative AI for constrained physical domains must be physics-informed by construction, not corrected only through post-hoc filtering. We survey the emerging architectural toolkit, including physics-informed diffusion, PDE-constrained variational models, neural-operator priors, and conservation-law-respecting generative networks, and show how it connects to differentiable lithography, TCAD, process simulation, and autonomous experimentation. We identify four integration patterns between generative models and physics-based simulators, and we propose a research agenda centered on physics-fidelity benchmarks, differentiable simulator infrastructure, and multimodal foundation models for physical design and manufacturing. The central claim is analytical rather than rhetorical: where physical validity is the binding criterion of success, architectures that enforce it by construction should be expected to outperform those that filter for it after the fact, and the fab is the setting where this distinction is sharpest.

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

Prediction-Powered Causal Inference by Automatic Debiased Machine Learning and Semi-Supervised Riesz Regression

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates semiparametric efficient estimation of causal and structural parameters in a semi-supervised setting. In our setting, unlabeled auxiliary regressors are available in addition to labeled observations consisting of outcomes and regressors. Our goal is to construct estimators of causal and structural parameters whose asymptotic variances are smaller than those of estimators constructed using only labeled data. We refer to this framework as prediction-powered causal inference (PPCI). We first derive the efficient influence function and the efficiency bound, which imply that the use of auxiliary regressors can attain a smaller asymptotic variance than the efficiency bound attainable from labeled observations alone. Then, by combining the efficient influence function with the debiased machine learning (DML) framework, we propose methods that we call DML-PPCI. If we construct an estimating-equation estimator, we refer to the method as EE-DML-PPCI; if we construct a targeted-learning estimator, we refer to the method as TMLE-DML-PPCI. The asymptotic variances of both estimators match our derived efficiency bound. In the construction of the estimators, estimation of the efficient influence function plays an important role. In our study, the efficient influence function is also a Neyman orthogonal score, which depends on the Riesz representer and the regression function. For Riesz representer estimation, we develop semi-supervised generalized Riesz regression with convergence rate guarantees.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Adaptive $k$NN graph model

arXiv:2601.16509v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The $k$-nearest neighbors ($k$NN) algorithm is a cornerstone of non-parametric classification in artificial intelligence, yet its deployment in large-scale applications is persistently constrained by the computational trade-off between inference speed and accuracy. Existing approximate nearest neighbor solutions accelerate retrieval but often degrade classification precision and lack adaptability in selecting the optimal neighborhood size ($k$). Here, we present an adaptive graph model that decouples inference latency from computational complexity. By integrating a Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graph with a pre-computed voting mechanism, our framework completely transfers the computational burden of neighbor selection and weighting to the training phase. Within this topological structure, higher graph layers enable rapid navigation, while lower layers encode precise, node-specific decision boundaries with adaptive neighbor counts. Benchmarking against eight state-of-the-art baselines across six diverse datasets, we demonstrate that this architecture significantly accelerates inference speeds, achieving real-time performance, without compromising classification accuracy. These findings offer a scalable, robust solution to the inherent inference bottleneck of $k$NN, laying an adaptive structural foundation for graph-based nonparametric learning.

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

A matching decomposition algorithm for simulating quantum walk Hamiltonians

arXiv:2601.11418v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present a new algorithm for generating quantum circuits that efficiently implement continuous time quantum walks on arbitrary simple sparse graphs. The algorithm, called matching decomposition, works by decomposing a continuous-time quantum walk Hamiltonian into a collection of exactly implementable Hamiltonians corresponding to matchings in the underlying graph followed by a novel graph compression algorithm that merges edges in the graph. We develop a greedy matching heuristic and a compression-aware matching heuristic, both of which can be used in the quantum circuit algorithm. Lastly, we convert the walks to a circuit and Trotterize over these components. The dynamics of the walker on each edge in the matching can be implemented in the circuit model as sequences of CX and CRx gates. We do not use Pauli decomposition when implementing walks along each matching. Furthermore, we compare greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition to a standard Pauli-based simulation pipeline and find that greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition consistently yields substantial resource reductions, requiring up to 43$\%$ (70\%) fewer controlled gates and up to 54$\%$ (75\%) shallower circuits than Pauli decomposition across multiple graph families. Finally, we also present examples and theoretical results for when matching decomposition can exactly simulate a continuous-time quantum walk on a graph.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning: Self-Aware Policy Execution for VLA Models

arXiv:2606.14375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are powerful action generators for robot manipulation, but they are typically executed with fixed inference and replanning schedules. This rigidity ignores the uneven difficulty of robot control: contact-rich or uncertain states may need more computation and fresher feedback, while easier states can often be handled with fewer inference steps and longer open-loop execution. We propose Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning (EQRL), a framework that makes each VLA policy query elastic. A lightweight latent-schedule adaptor jointly selects the latent input, denoising budget, and action chunk length, without fine-tuning the underlying VLA model. To make scheduling difficulty-aware, EQRL trains a critic over the joint latent-schedule action and derives a state difficulty signal from critic ensemble disagreement. This signal guides compute toward difficult states, while a learned residual allows task-driven correction. We formulate variable chunk execution as query-level macro-action RL with chunk-dependent discounting and an amortized number-of-function-evaluations (NFE) budget. Across simulation and real-robot manipulation, EQRL reduces amortized inference cost while preserving or improving task success.

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

LiveStarPro: Proactive Streaming Video Understanding with Hierarchical Memory for Long-Horizon Streams

Despite the remarkable progress of Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs), current online architectures still struggle to simultaneously process continuous video streams, decide autonomously when to respond, and preserve long-horizon contextual memory. These obstacles undermine real-time responsiveness and cause severe forgetting throughout prolonged interactions. In this work, we introduce LiveStarPro, a live streaming assistant that is designed for proactive video understanding over long-horizon streams. The design of LiveStarPro rests on three complementary components. The first component is Streaming Verification Decoding (SVeD), an inference framework that identifies the appropriate response timing through single-pass perplexity verification, thereby eliminating the dependency on explicit silence tokens. The second component is Streaming Causal Attention Masks (SCAM), a training strategy that enforces incremental video-language alignment over variable-length streams. The third component is Tree-Structured Hierarchical Memory (TSHM), a recursive memory architecture that organizes evicted historical information into event chains and consequently enables efficient retrieval from effectively unbounded video streams. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation under realistic online conditions, we further present OmniStarPro, a large-scale benchmark that spans 15 diverse real-world scenarios and that extends to hour-scale streams for the assessment of long-term recall. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveStarPro consistently surpasses existing methods, attaining a 28.9% improvement in semantic correctness and an 18.2% reduction in timing error, while its streaming key-value cache further yields a 1.58x inference speedup over the same model without caching. The model and the code are publicly available at https://github.com/sotayang/LiveStarPro.

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

Aligning Implied Statements for Implicit Hate Speech Generalizability with Context-Bounded Semi-hard Negative Mining

Classifying implicit hate speech remains a challenge, as intent is often masked through insinuation and context rather than explicit slurs. Prior supervised contrastive approaches improve in-domain detection but can overfit surface cues and struggle to transfer across datasets. We propose ImpSH, a triplet-based framework that aligns posts with implied statements when available and uses context-bounded semi-hard negatives to focus learning on near confusions. We also examine AugSH, which forms positives via data augmentation. In controlled evaluations on IHC, SBIC, and DynaHate with BERT and HateBERT, ImpSH is a viable alternative to standard supervised contrastive baselines and often improves cross-domain performance under matched preprocessing and tuning budgets. Representation analysis using alignment and uniformity indicates tighter positive pairs with balanced global spread, and qualitative nearest-neighbor case studies illustrate typical false negatives under domain shift. These results demonstrate that aligning posts with their implied statements via context-bounded mining provides a more stable, bijective-like mapping to related insinuations, overcoming the volatility inherent in traditional clustering-based representation learning.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Observation of Non-Gaussian Magnon Dynamics in a Two-Dimensional Long-Range XY Model

arXiv:2606.13499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Gaussian evolution of high-order spin correlations characterizes important properties of quantum many-body systems. In practice, decoherence, statistical fluctuation and miscalibration of experimental parameters all hinder the witness of non-Gaussian dynamics. Here we demonstrate the crossover between Gaussian and non-Gaussian dynamics on a two-dimensional XY model with long-range and spatially structured interaction using a trapped ion quantum simulator. We prepare different initial densities of magnon excitations and verify the dynamics of single-spin observables for the engineered Hamiltonian. Then we compare the high-order spin correlations with the mean-field solution and the Holstein-Primakoff approximation, and demonstrate the non-Gaussian behavior in a way independent of the calibration errors. Our work provides a verifiable path from classically simulatable dynamics to regimes where quantum advantage may emerge.

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

SoK: AI Secure Code Generation: Progress, Pitfalls, and Paths Forward

arXiv:2606.25195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing use of AI systems for code generation raises a central security question: what can today's models and coding agents actually do to produce secure code, where do they still fail, and what would move the field forward? Existing work has explored prompting, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and agentic workflows for secure code generation, but the field still lacks a systematic understanding of how these techniques improve security and why substantial failures persist. In this SoK, we systematize the progress, pitfalls, and paths forward for AI secure code generation. We introduce a three-level framework that measures models' natural-language understanding of secure coding principles, their code-level actuation of those principles during generation, and the knowledge–actuation gaps between the two. We instantiate this framework across models and coding agents on benchmarks covering both isolated function-level security and full web-application security. Our results show that secure-coding-principle understanding is a statistically strong predictor of code-level outcomes, including functional correctness, security, and joint functional-security correctness. Yet substantial knowledge–actuation gaps remain: models can recognize relevant security principles but still fail to translate them into secure and functional code. These findings offer a principle-centered account of where AI secure code generation stands today and identify concrete paths forward through principle-guided generation, evaluation, benchmarking, and agentic workflows.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-performance gates on trapped ion qubits using counterpropagating pulse-shaped laser beams

arXiv:2606.15672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly-localized light-matter interactions are necessary for scaling trapped-ion architectures. In hyperfine qubits, counterpropagating beams generate entangling gates by coupling with motion, but this effect is undesirable during single-qubit operations. For that reason, single-qubit gates are traditionally implemented with copropagating beams, and the coexistence of two beam geometries adds hardware and computational overhead. In an effort towards collective performance improvement with minimal overhead, we design and implement pulse-amplitude and dephasing robust dynamically corrected gates using Space Curve Quantum Control (SCQC) and compare them against the constant-amplitude gate implementation. We perform gate set tomography on a four-qubit trapped-ion register, and we discover more than 50% error reduction when robust pulses are used. We find that counterpropagating robust gates often outperform their copropagating counterparts and reach error rates as low as $(3.59 \pm 1.25)\cdot 10^{-3}$, using diamond distance as a metric. This value establishes a laser-driven-gate error reference and is merely an order of magnitude higher than the best reported $microwave$ gate on a $single$ ion. Additional experiments reveal that robust pulses can effectively suppress non-Markovian errors that grow during runtime. Our work challenges the widely accepted belief that copropagating gates should be preferred for their weak motional coupling and invites the adoption of high-performance robust pulses that suppress multiple noise sources of the trapped-ion error budget.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MetaPlate: Counterfactual-Guided RAG-LLM Tool for Personalized Food Recommendation and Hyperglycemia Prevention

arXiv:2606.10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

On Randomized Algorithms in Online Strategic Classification

arXiv:2602.06257v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online strategic classification studies settings in which agents strategically modify their features to obtain favorable predictions. For example, given a classifier that determines loan approval based on credit scores, applicants may open or close credit cards and bank accounts to obtain a positive prediction. The learning goal is to achieve low mistake or regret bounds despite such behavior. While randomized algorithms have the potential to offer advantages to the learner in strategic settings, they have been largely underexplored. In the realizable setting, no lower bound is known for randomized algorithms, and existing lower bound constructions for deterministic learners can be circumvented by randomization. In the agnostic setting, the best known regret upper bound is $O(T^{3/4}\log^{1/4}T|\mathcal H|)$, which is far from the standard online learning rate of $O(\sqrt{T\log|\mathcal H|})$. In this work, we provide refined bounds for online strategic classification in both settings; our bounds depend on the Littlestone dimension $\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H)$ of the hypothesis class $\mathcal H$ and the maximum degree $\Delta$ of the manipulation graph. In the realizable setting, we extend, for $T > \mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \Delta^2$, the existing lower bound $\Omega(\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \Delta)$ for deterministic learners to all learners. This yields the first lower bound that applies to randomized learners. We then provide the first randomized learner that improves the known (deterministic) upper bound of $O(\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \cdot \Delta \log \Delta)$. In the agnostic setting, we give an improper randomized learner that improves the regret upper bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log|\mathcal H|})$, matching the standard online learning rate. We also show a larger lower bound for all proper learning rules, demonstrating that improperness is necessary to achieve the optimal rate.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Attention by Synchronization in Coupled Oscillator Networks

arXiv:2606.12059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We address transformer attention on energy-constrained physical substrates. Softmax attention requires exponentiation and global reduction, operations with high energy cost on von Neumann hardware and no natural physical analog. We show that Kuramoto synchronization dynamics (which arise in electrical, mechanical, superconducting, and charge-density-wave oscillator arrays, among other physical systems) implement a well-defined attention operation without either. The resulting mechanism, fixed-query oscillator attention, replaces softmax's arithmetic with the equilibration of a gradient flow on the sphere: queries are learned anchors fixed on the sphere, and free oscillators evolve under Kuramoto-Lohe dynamics until they settle at positions encoding attention weights via cosine similarity. Because the computation is equilibration, it requires no exponentiation; the only global operation is an affine normalization at readout. The fixed point is provably unique and globally attractive from almost every initial condition, a guarantee that holds across every physical realization. Empirically, at the minimal hardware configuration (oscillator dimension $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2), oscillator attention outperforms softmax on keyword spotting (+1.00 pp) and on subject-verb agreement (+5.27 pp on hard sentences, with zero training failures versus one in five for softmax). On causal language modeling, where softmax retains an advantage, oscillator attention closes the gap as $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ grows: from +11.09 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +2.98 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on WikiText-2, and from +2.39 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +0.57 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on TinyStories. The main objective of this work is not to replace softmax in software but to provide a mathematically grounded blueprint for accurate attention on physical substrates.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

RoPE-Aware Bit Allocation for KV-Cache Quantization

Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector. Under RoPE, however, a key's contribution to a future attention logit decomposes into a position-dependent sum over two-dimensional frequency blocks. This makes key-cache quantization a block-wise bit-allocation problem: high-energy RoPE blocks are more sensitive to quantization error and should receive more bits. We introduce Block-GTQ, a RoPE-aware bit allocator for key-cache quantization built on TurboQuant-MSE(TQ-MSE). For each layer and KV head, Block-GTQ computes a label-free energy score for each RoPE block and greedily allocates integer bit widths by marginal gain. Under matched K/V bit budgets, Block-GTQ better preserves RoPE query-key logits on a ten-model diagnostic panel, cutting per-layer MAE by 32-80% at 2 and 3 b/dim K-only quantization and winning all 367/367 layer comparisons against uniform TQ-MSE. These fidelity gains translate to stronger downstream long-context retrieval, understanding, and reasoning. At K2V2 on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Block-GTQ raises the six-task NIAH average from 70.6 to 97.4, and the LongBench-EN average from 36.87 to 53.31. On AIME 2024/2025 with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, without an fp16 recent-key buffer, Block-GTQ at K3V2 scores 51.7/37.5, close to fp16's 54.2/37.9, whereas uniform TQ-MSE collapses to 0.0/0.0. We further implement a packed-cache serving path. On a single H800 GPU with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, packed K3V3 achieves 3.24x KV-cache compression with fp16-comparable quality, runs 1.34x faster than fp16 FlashAttention2 at 128K context, reduces peak memory from 56.31 GB to 19.85 GB, and remains feasible at 256K and 512K where fp16 OOMs. Code is available at https://github.com/JIA-Lab-research/blockgtq.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Super-Heisenberg Non-Equilibrium Quantum Sensing with Waveguide-Coupled Emitters

arXiv:2606.11975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We explore an array of quantum emitters as non-equilibrium probes, coupled to a one-dimensional photonic waveguide, aiming to estimate its properties such as wave number which encodes the waveguide frequency and dispersive characteristics. By considering transient dynamics following initial excitation, we show that the quantum Fisher information (QFI) can be significantly enhanced through careful emitter positioning. For two-emitter probes, optimal spacing stabilizes populations and coherences in the single-excitation subspace, suppressing super radiant decay and extending both the magnitude and longevity of QFI. Randomized emitter configurations also reveal that vanishing waveguide-mediated cross decay maximizes both achievable sensitivity and the temporal duration over which information about the parameter remains accessible. Extending to multipartite probes, we demonstrate that the maximum QFI and its temporal integral scale with system size, exceeding the Heisenberg limit for all positioning strategies. Our results highlight the potential of waveguide-coupled emitter arrays as versatile quantum sensors, where collective radiative dynamics can be harnessed to achieve tunable, long-lived, and enhanced precision.

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arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Mechanism-level drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction requires identifying which enzyme or pharmacodynamic axis is implicated, in which direction, and with which evidence – not merely whether two drugs interact. We introduce a reproducible mechanism-level DDI labelling and evaluation protocol with a structured 7-family/147-subtype taxonomy, leakage-safe cold-split protocols, and auditable reasoning metrics for evaluating pharmacological prediction beyond flat interaction classification. We propose a pipeline that produces a 7B reasoning MARD (Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation), combining three training innovations: a single-token KL divergence on direction tag that ties the model's prediction, per-loss PRM-weighted DPO with programmatic hard negatives, and a leakage-safe mechanism-aware retrieval channel. Process-reward step labels are automatically verifiable against DrugBank-structured fields, requiring no human or LLM judges. On the April-2026 DrugBank release, our MARD-7B is the only system in a 32-system comparison whose accuracy survives drug-pair novelty, beating the best baseline by +13.9 pp and GPT-4o by +6.7 pp at ~1% of frontier API cost. Further analysis reveals an anti-memorisation signature where accuracy improves on rarely seen drugs, suggesting that gain comes from structured pharmacological reasoning rather than drug-frequency memorisation. We release corpus, DDI-PRM, retrieval index, and training code.