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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Hybrid VQE-CVQE algorithm using diabatic state preparation

Authors:
John P. T. Stenger↗C. Stephen Hellberg↗Daniel Gunlycke↗

arXiv:2512.04801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid variational quantum algorithm that has variational parameters used by both the quantum circuit and the subsequent classical optimization. Similar to the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), this algorithm applies a parameterized unitary operator to the qubit register. We generate this operator using diabatic state preparation. The quantum measurement results then inform the classical optimization procedure used by the Cascaded Variational Quantum Eigensolver (CVQE). We demonstrate the algorithm on a system of interacting electrons and show how it can be used on long-term error-corrected as well as short-term intermediate-scale quantum computers. Our simulations performed on IBM Brisbane produced energies well within chemical accuracy.

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02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the Wasserstein distance between a hyperuniform point process and its mean

Authors:
Raphael Butez↗Sandrine Dallaporta↗David Garc\'ia-Zelada↗

arXiv:2404.09549v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the existence of bounds on the expected $p$-Wasserstein distance between a random measure and its mean under the assumption that the $p$-th centered moments of the counting statistics are controlled uniformly in space. The average Wasserstein transport cost is shown to be bounded from above and from below by some multiples of the number of points. $D$-dimensional versions of those results are also obtained. As a corollary, we prove that for any value of $p\geq 1$ the Ginibre point process can be seen as a perturbed lattice with identically distributed perturbations with a finite $p$-th moment.

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

Skill-Augmented AI Agents for Medical Research Analysis: An Exploratory Multi-Model Human Evaluation in an NSCLC Transcriptomic Biomarker Task

Authors:
Qianyu Yao↗Fei Sun↗Bocheng Huang↗Wei Chen↗Jiarui Jiang↗Shu Quan↗Yifei Chen↗Wenjie Xu↗Bo li↗Liping Su↗Ruoqiong Wu↗Huhai Hong↗…

arXiv:2606.11830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background. Large language models and AI agents are increasingly used to support biomedical research, but native model outputs may omit key analytical steps, misuse methods, or overstate conclusions. We evaluated whether autonomous access to a medical research skill package was associated with higher-quality AI-generated transcriptomic research-analysis outputs compared with native AI without skills. Methods. We conducted an exploratory multi-model human evaluation using a non-small cell lung cancer immunotherapy biomarker task. Six model backbones were tested. The evaluation included 21 anonymized outputs: 9 native-AI outputs and 12 skill-augmented outputs generated through an AI agent implementation represented by OpenClaw. Four non-expert biomedical reviewers and two blinded experts evaluated each output, with two ratings from each reviewer type. The primary outcome was expert-rated overall quality. Results. Skill-augmented outputs showed directionally higher expert overall quality than native-AI outputs (mean 5.50 vs 5.11; difference=0.39; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.04 to 0.90; Welch p=0.156). Non-expert reviewer quality showed the same direction (mean 4.72 vs 4.47; difference=0.26; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.25 to 0.80; Welch p=0.373). Expert agreement was limited (single-rating ICC=-0.15), and model-specific effects were descriptive and heterogeneous. Conclusions. Autonomous skill access showed a directional quality signal in this exploratory sample, but the signal was smaller than expert-rating noise and should not be interpreted as confirmatory evidence. The findings primarily motivate larger evaluations of skill-augmented AI agents with stronger reliability controls, platform replication, and biological-validity assessment.

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

Sub-Semantic Image Segmentation

Authors:
Aviad Cohen Zada↗Nadav Orenstein↗Shai Avidan↗Gal Oren↗

Images can be segmented based on visual cues (i.e., texture segmentation) or into objects (i.e., semantic segmentation). We propose a new category of sub-semantic image segmentation that blurs the line between the two. In sub-semantic image segmentation, language is not used to name whole objects. Instead, it is used to partition an image into stable appearance patterns that can be described by language. To do that, we couple a general-purpose vision-language model to SAM 3, a promptable segmentation backbone whose native text pathway can ground rich descriptions into masks. Simple coupling fails for a number of reasons that we identify in the paper, and we overcome them by introducing DETECTURE that resolves three concrete failure modes – language leakage between texture regions, prompt competition inside the segmentation backbone, and semantic distortion at the language-to-mask interface. Since there is no dataset of sub-semantic image segmentation, we introduce one, termed TextureADE. The new dataset is derived from the ADE20K dataset using a system we designed. We compare DETECTURE to a number of baselines and find that it achieves the strongest performance on several datasets using different metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab/TextureDetecture.

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

Robust Spoofed Speech Detection via Temporal Pyramid Modeling

Authors:
Mahtab Masoudi Nezhad↗Nima Karimian↗

Spoofed speech detection is increasingly challenged by realistic synthesis, voice conversion, and replay attacks, with cross-dataset generalization remaining a major limitation. This work we propose a Temporal Pyramid Adapter that utilize parallel temporal convolutions with varying receptive fields to capture multi-scale spoofing cues, ranging from local artifacts to global prosodic irregularities. We also integrated self-supervised XLS-R representations combined with front-end adapters, including Mel, Sinc, and a Temporal Pyramid design for multi-scale temporal modeling. The proposed model is evaluated cross multiple benchmark including ASVspoof 2017, ASVspoof 2021 (DF/LA), PartialSpoof, DiffSSD, and multilingual HQ-MPSD datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that Temporal Pyramid model obtained AUC of 99.24% and a EER of 3.87% on the PartialSpoof database, which is significantly outperforming the base model and several SOTA baseline such as LCNN-BLSTM (9.87% EER) and TRACE (8.08% EER). Additionally, multilingual evaluations confirm that while spoofing artifact are independent from language. While self-supervised representations improve robustness, performance degrades under domain and language shifts, highlighting the need for better adaptation and calibration strategies.

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

A Simplex Witness Certificate and Escape Force for Constant Collapse in Variational Autoencoders

Authors:
Zegu Zhang↗Jian Zhang↗

arXiv:2605.18224v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study exact constant collapse in variational autoencoders: the deterministic encoder mean becomes independent of the input. The prior remains the standard Gaussian. Before VAE training, we select a fixed teacher posterior from a GMM-based view of the data and attach a fixed latent-only simplex witness to the encoder mean. This construction yields two linked objects. The first is a certificate: if the witness prediction improves on the best constant predictor of the teacher, the encoder mean cannot be input-independent constant. The second is a local escape direction: on the collapsed manifold, the teacher residual gives a sample-dependent descent direction for the alignment loss. For any full-support teacher posterior, the same geometry also gives a closed-form latent code with zero teacher-witness alignment error. Its scaled versions trace a margin-energy path from the constant predictor to the exact teacher code, which quantifies non-collapse inside the protected witness subspace. We instantiate the method on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. With searched unsupervised PCA-GMM teachers, vanilla VAEs fail the teacher-witness certificate in all five seeds on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, while RST variants pass in all five seeds. Under collapse-stress settings with \(\beta_{\mathrm{KL}}\in\{2,4,8\}\), vanilla VAE again fails in all seeds, whereas RST-alpha-prefit remains certificate-positive. Escape trajectories on both natural-image datasets increase the witness margin from a low-margin initialization and exhibit nonzero teacher-induced gradient norms. The analysis is confined to exact constant collapse of the encoder mean; generation quality, decoder use, and other collapse modes remain separate questions.

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

A Large-Scale Multi-Dimensional Empirical Study of LLMs for Conversation Summarization

Authors:
Weixiao Zhou↗Gengyao Li↗Xianfu Cheng↗Junnan Zhu↗Feifei Zhai↗Zhoujun Li↗

Despite the significant advancement of LLMs in conversation summarization, their evaluation remains limited by insufficient scenarios, input lengths, and sample sizes. Furthermore, existing benchmarks often omit frontier reasoning systems and efficient small models, or lack fine-grained, multi-dimensional assessments. To bridge these gaps, we propose OmniCSEval, a unified benchmark comprising 1,800 diverse conversations across six real-world scenarios, featuring context lengths ranging from 128 to 32k tokens. For fine-grained evaluation, we employ a bidirectional fact-checking framework that integrates key fact matching to assess completeness and conciseness, alongside summary fact verification to evaluate faithfulness. To ensure reliable assessment, we establish a human-LLM collaborative pipeline for key fact extraction and a multi-LLM consensus verifier for summary fact decomposition. Leveraging this framework, we evaluate 28 LLMs across four distinct categories grouped by reasoning capability and model scale. Our extensive empirical study reveals critical insights regarding the cross-scenario challenges current LLMs continue to face, the impacts of reasoning and scale, and the efficiency and adaptability of reasoning models. We also provide guidance for system selection in real-world deployments.

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08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Adverse Childhood Experiences Reorganise the Brain-Personality Network Across the Psychosis Spectrum

Authors:
Sarti↗Cecere↗Dallenbach↗H.-L. H↗Huppi↗R. M↗Misra↗A. R↗Edkins↗Omlor↗Blom↗J. M. C↗…

Exposure to adverse childhood experiences is a pervasive risk factor for psychosis, exhibiting a linear relationship across the psychosis spectrum from subclinical schizotypal traits to schizophrenia spectrum disorders. While this association is often conceptualised within the vulnerability-stress framework, the systemic mechanisms through which childhood trauma reconfigures the brain-personality interactome remain poorly understood. We examined clinical, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging data from a sample of low- and high-schizotypy individuals, and patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum disorder (N=120). Our aim was to map how trauma reconfigures interactions between neurobiology and schizotypal phenomenology. We adopted a mixed graphical model approach to jointly estimate conditional dependencies between childhood trauma, regional brain morphometry, and schizotypal traits across the psychosis spectrum. Our results show that childhood trauma reconfigures the brain-personality network, shifting it from a state driven by cognitive processes to one anchored in emotional (limbic) reactivity. This transition is marked by the increased influence of impulsive traits and a significant strengthening of connections within the salience network. These changes converge with a reduced thickness of the frontal executive regions, the brain's control centres, identified in our models. Collectively, our results suggest a structural phenomenological decoupling, where trauma conditioned affective circuits may bypass weakened top-down regulatory controls. These findings highlight the necessity of using integrative frameworks to capture how trauma fundamentally reshapes the relationship between the brain and schizotypal personality.

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

SceneConductor: 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image with Multi-Agent Orchestration

Authors:
Jeonghwan Kim↗Yushi Lan↗Yongwei Chen↗Hieu Trung Nguyen↗Chuanyu Pan↗Xingang Pan↗

Generating complete 3D scenes from a single image requires inferring globally consistent geometry, object relationships, and environmental context from inherently ambiguous visual evidence. Despite recent progress in joint layout-and-mesh generation, existing methods often rely on holistic or weakly decomposed pipelines that entangle many factors at once and demand extensive scene-level supervision, limiting their generalization to complex real-world environments. We propose a multi-agent orchestration framework that decomposes single-image 3D scene generation into three structured stages: scene initialization, environment construction, and multi-agent refinement. The initialization stage extracts image-derived object masks, builds object-level 3D representations, and predicts an initial spatial layout to form a coarse 3D scene. The environment-construction stage then leverages this initialization together with point-map geometry to build an environmental scaffold of supporting surfaces, room boundaries, materials, and illumination. Finally, in the refinement stage, a planner agent identifies structural and visual inconsistencies, applies simple corrections directly, and dispatches specialist agents for complex localized revisions that are reintegrated into the global scene. To provide reliable structural initialization while reducing reliance on scene-level annotations, we further introduce a geometry-aware layout predictor supervised by sparse geometric priors derived from point maps. Unlike fully supervised layout generators, the predictor can be trained from segmentation-level data and generalizes robustly to diverse real-world scenes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches in geometric accuracy, spatial consistency, and perceptual realism.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation

Authors:
Nicolas Houdr\'e↗Diego Marcos↗Hugo Riffaud de Turckheim↗Dino Ienco↗Laurent Wendling↗Camille Kurtz↗Sylvain Lobry↗

Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Photon: Federated LLM Pre-Training

Authors:
Lorenzo Sani↗Alex Iacob↗Zeyu Cao↗Royson Lee↗Bill Marino↗Yan Gao↗Dongqi Cai↗Zexi Li↗Wanru Zhao↗Xinchi Qiu↗Nicholas D. Lane↗

arXiv:2411.02908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) demands extensive data and computing resources, which are traditionally constrained to data centers by the high-bandwidth requirements of distributed training. Low-bandwidth methods like federated learning (FL) could enable collaborative training of larger models across weakly-connected GPUs if they can effectively be used for pre-training. To achieve this, we introduce Photon, the first complete system for federated end-to-end LLM training, leveraging cross-silo FL for global-scale training with minimal communication overheads. Using Photon, we train the first federated family of decoder-only LLMs from scratch. We show that: (1) Photon can train model sizes up to 7B in a federated fashion while reaching an even better perplexity than centralized pre-training; (2) Photon model training time decreases with available compute, achieving a similar compute-time trade-off to centralized; and (3) Photon outperforms the wall-time of baseline distributed training methods by 35% via communicating 64x-512xless. Our proposal is robust to data heterogeneity and converges twice as fast as previous methods like DiLoCo. This surprising data efficiency stems from a unique approach combining small client batch sizes with extremely high learning rates, enabled by federated averaging's robustness to hyperparameters. Photon thus represents the first economical system for global internet-wide LLM pre-training.

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12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Queues with Correlated Service Times – the $M/M_D/c$ Model

Authors:
Qihui Bu↗Suman Thapa↗Yiqiang Q. Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.24881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies multi-server queueing systems with correlated service times, modeled as the $M/M_D/c$ queue, which is a natural extension of the recent work by Thapa and Zhao [Thapa-Zhao:2026]. In this model, arrivals follow a Poisson process, while service times across servers exhibit dependence captured by the Marshall–Olkin multivariate exponential distribution (MO-MVED). We first develop a rigorous sample-path construction of the system and establish that the resulting queueing process is a continuous-time Markov chain. We then analyze the stationary behavior of the $M/M_D/c$ model. In the homogeneous case, we derive a complete solution via geometric tail structure and explicit boundary equations, recovering a tractable one-dimensional representation. In the heterogeneous case, we establish a general framework combining a geometric tail with a finite boundary system, and prove existence, uniqueness, and nonnegativity of the stationary distribution. The above results provide a unified analytic framework extending classical $M/M/c$ theory to correlated-service settings, and reveal how dependence among service times fundamentally affects system performance and structure. Beyond the $M/M_D/c$ model, We next study the interplay between Marshall–Olkin service dependence and queue-state Markovianity. On the one hand, Marshall–Olkin dependent service completions are shown to preserve Markovianity for a broad class of queueing systems. On the other hand, if a queueing process admits a Markovian state description without tracking service ages, residual service times, or service phases, then its service mechanism must satisfy a weak multivariate lack-of-memory property and consequently belongs to the Marshall–Olkin family. These results provide a probabilistic foundation for the use of Marshall–Olkin multivariate exponential service times in Markovian queueing models.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Networks: Unlocking High-Frequency Potential

Authors:
Shijun Zhang↗Hongkai Zhao↗Yimin Zhong↗Haomin Zhou↗

arXiv:2502.18959v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The architecture of a neural network and the choice of its activation function are both fundamental to its performance. Equally important is ensuring that these two elements are well matched, as their alignment is key to effective representation and learning. In this paper, we introduce the Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Network (FMMNN), a model that combines sine-type activations with the multi-component and multi-layer structure of MMNNs. In an FMMNN, each component is represented as a trainable linear combination of fixed random sine-type basis functions, while multi-layer composition generates more complex and adaptive high-frequency features. We establish that FMMNNs retain exponential expressive power for function approximation even under a low-rank architectural structure. We also analyze the optimization landscape of FMMNNs and find it to be substantially more favorable than that of standard fully connected neural networks, especially for high-frequency targets. In addition, we propose a scaled random initialization method for the first-layer weights in FMMNNs, which accelerates training and improves final performance when sufficient samples are available. Extensive numerical experiments support our theoretical insights, showing that FMMNNs achieve strong accuracy and favorable convergence behavior on oscillatory function-approximation benchmarks.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Authors:
NANTALAGA↗K. C↗Nantege↗

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Spectator-transition crosstalk in a spin-3/2 silicon vacancy qudit in silicon carbide revealed by broadband Ramsey interferometry

Authors:
Jun-Jae Choi↗Seung-Jae Hwang↗Seoyoung Paik↗Juhwan Kim↗Jawad Ul-Hassan↗Nguyen Tien Son↗Hiroshi Abe↗Takeshi Ohshima↗Jaekwon Suk↗Hyeon-Ho Jeong↗Dong-Hee Kim↗Sang-Yun Lee↗…

arXiv:2601.15559v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Color center spins in 4H-SiC offer a rare combination of wafer-scale materials maturity with long spin coherence and chip-level photonics, making them promising building blocks for scalable quantum technologies. In particular, the silicon vacancy hosts an S=3/2 ground state, a native qudit that enables compact encodings and subspace-selective control, but also introduces spectator transitions: short, detuned pulses can coherently drive non-addressed level pairs and create crosstalk. Here we use broadband Ramsey interferometry to reveal and quantify such spectator-transition crosstalk. Experimentally, the Ramsey Fourier spectra display multiple lines beyond the addressed single-quantum transition. Analytically, we map each line to a pairwise energy difference between qudit levels of the rotating-frame Hamiltonian and assign its weight via compact amplitudes set by the prepared state and the microwave pulse parameters, predicting a deterministic six-branch structure. Numerical time-domain propagation with the experimental sampling reproduces the detuning map, and the measured peak positions coincide with the analytic branch lines without frequency fitting. Together these results provide a practical, spectator-aware framework for multilevel control in the silicon vacancy qudit. The approach offers clear guidance to suppress crosstalk or, conversely, to exploit spectator lines, for example as additional constraints for in situ pulse calibration and for phase-sensitive quantum state and process estimation.

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

Alternate loss functions and regression models that achieve robustness to outliers by modulating the learning rate

Authors:
Mathew Mithra Noel↗Arindam Banerjee↗Yug D. Oswal↗Geraldine Bessie Amali D↗Venkataraman Muthiah-Nakarajan↗

arXiv:2606.22068v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most real-world datasets used for training supervised learning models are contaminated with noisy data and outliers leading to large prediction errors. This paper proposes a new approach for achieving robustness where the learning rate is modulated by a factor that is sensitive to outliers. In this approach a reduction of the learning rate is shown to be achieved by using alternate loss functions that are infinitely differentiable, strictly convex or quasiconvex and more closely approximate the absolute error than Huber and log-cosh losses. A comparison of the performance of regression models trained with different loss functions on a wide variety of benchmarks and datasets is presented to demonstrate the superior performance of the Square Root Loss (SRL) and Smooth Mean Absolute Error (SMAE) losses proposed in this paper. Two new robust linear regression models are presented. Highly vectorized robust parameter update formulae that take advantage of modern GPUs for both stochastic and batch gradient descent are presented.

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

EgoPhys: Learning Generalizable Physics Models of Deformable Objects from Egocentric Video

Authors:
Hyunjin Kim↗Ri-Zhao Qiu↗Guangqi Jiang↗Xiaolong Wang↗

Humans naturally understand object physics through everyday interactions, but faithfully predicting complex deformable dynamics, such as elastic materials and fabrics, remains a major challenge for computer vision and robotics. We present EgoPhys, a framework that constructs deformable physical digital twins from egocentric RGB-only video using generalizable priors. EgoPhys overcomes the limitations of existing methods to enable controllable deformable digital twin generation from egocentric videos by distilling per-object inverse-physics solutions into a compact codebook, enabling prediction of dense spring stiffness fields for unseen objects without per-spring test-time optimization. Trained with generalizable priors from diverse egocentric interactions, EgoPhys outperforms baselines in reconstruction, future prediction, and zero-shot generalization. To support training and evaluation, we curate an egocentric interaction dataset covering diverse deformable objects, scenes, and manipulation styles. We deploy EgoPhys on a real xArm6 robot, demonstrating that a digital twin initialized from a single egocentric human play video can serve as an internal world representation to aid in deformable-object planning, highlighting egocentric RGB observations as a scalable path toward real-to-sim pipelines.

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

Scaling Human and G2P Supervision for Robust Phonetic Transcription

Authors:
Alexander Metzger↗Aruna Srivastava↗Ruslan Mukhamedvaleev↗

Expert phonetic annotation is costly, especially for non-standard dialects and atypical speech. A common alternative is using Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) models to auto-generate phonetic labels from text transcripts at scale. We study how automatic phonetic transcription performance scales with human and G2P supervision in English. Using a curated 80-hour benchmark spanning native, non-native and post-stroke speech, we identify a supervision quality threshold: G2P supervision helps only when fewer than 20-30 hours of human annotation are available. Beyond this threshold, it provides no significant benefit and can reduce cross-dialect robustness. What is effective after this threshold is ASR pretraining which we use to achieve a 2.3x reduction in weighted phone feature error rate over prior systems, with strong gains on non-native and aphasic speech. These results suggest that quantity-driven G2P scaling may yield diminishing returns for robust generalization.

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

How Far Can Machine Translation Quality Take You? Extrinsic Discourse Evaluation in Goal-Oriented Setups

Authors:
Wafaa Mohammed↗Kata Naszadi↗Vlad Niculae↗

Existing machine translation (MT) metrics and discourse-focused evaluations primarily assess translation quality intrinsically, without measuring the downstream consequences of translation errors. In this work, we focus on extrinsic discourse evaluation of machine translation under two distinct regimes: static and interactive. Under the static regime, we propose an entity counting task as a probe of referential consistency in discourse. We show that high intrinsic MT quality does not reliably predict downstream discourse success and strong MT systems still produce referential inconsistencies. For the interactive regime, we study the goal-oriented multi-agent Welfare Diplomacy game as a probe of long-horizon communication and coordination. We find that interaction-specific translation failures impact downstream coordination. Our results highlight goal-oriented environments as a viable framework for discourse-sensitive extrinsic MT evaluation.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Achieving High-Quality Portfolio Optimization with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver

Authors:
Zhonggang Lv↗Zhenyuan Ma↗Binglei Wang↗Anbang Wang↗

arXiv:2508.18625v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Portfolio optimization lies at the core of quantitative finance and aims to determine how assets should be allocated to balance expected returns against risk. It can be formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem, which is NP-hard. Quantum computing offers the potential to solve such problems more efficiently than classical methods. In this work, we employ the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to address the portfolio optimization problem. To increase the likelihood of converging to high-quality solutions, we propose using the Weighted Conditional Value-at-Risk (WCVaR) as the cost function and the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) as the optimizer. Our experiments are conducted using both classical simulations and quantum hardware on the Wuyue QuantumAI platform. Together, these results demonstrate that the combination of WCVaR and CMA-ES improves the performance of VQE for portfolio optimization and provides a practical route for applications on NISQ devices.

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

Transfer Learning for FHIR Questionnaire Terminology Binding

Authors:
Maxim Gorshkov↗

Electronic prior authorization workflows require FHIR Questionnaire items to carry LOINC codes, yet most items in the HL7 Da Vinci CDS-Library lack these bindings. We treat this as a retrieval problem: given a Questionnaire item's text, find the correct LOINC code in a pool of 97,314 active codes. We compare six methods (TF-IDF, frozen MiniLM, BioBERT, BioLORD, contrastively fine-tuned MiniLM, and a TF-IDF+GPT reranker) on a 54-item evaluation set spanning three query styles (natural question, medium, and terse). No single method wins on every metric. BioLORD, a frozen encoder pre-trained on biomedical ontology definitions, has the best top-rank accuracy (R@1 = 0.185, MRR = 0.246) despite seeing no task-specific data, while a contrastive fine-tune on raw LHC-Forms pairs takes R@5 (0.389) and R@10 (0.426). A distribution-shift ablation shows why the fine-tune in our main table is not the strongest one: adding GPT-generated paraphrases to the raw pairs drops R@5 from 0.389 to 0.296, so the augmented union underperforms raw-only training on every metric except R@1. Performance peaks at 5k training pairs. Error analysis on BioLORD's R@1 failures shows that wrong-specificity and ambiguous-text cases together account for 59% of errors.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Why Sampling Is Not Choosing: Intentionality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Large Language Models

Authors:
Joseph Keshet↗

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionality is derived rather than intrinsic, and their outputs are neither owned as commitments nor guided by reasons. Variability introduced by stochastic sampling does not amount to choice or authorship. We address objections from the intentional stance, functionalism, compatibilism, and the presence of moral reasoning in model outputs, arguing that none suffice to establish genuine agency.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Text-Driven Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images: Achieving Image Scene Adaptation on Hyperbolic Space

Authors:
Huan Kang↗Hui Li↗Tianyang Xu↗Tao Zhou↗Xiao-Jun Wu↗Josef Kittler↗

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary modalities, while existing Euclidean methods impose rigid distance metrics that distort multi-modal interactions and parent-to-child semantic hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a text-driven fusion framework empowered by hyperbolic manifold learning. During training, BLIP-extracted text prompts serve as topological anchors within the hyperbolic space, guiding vision-attribute alignment through hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate varying semantic granularities. By exploiting the exponential volume growth dictated by the Poincaré ball's negative curvature, this approach seamlessly embeds hierarchical trees to encode coarse-to-fine semantics without metric saturation, while the vast peripheral space prevents texture distortion during cross-modal fusion. At inference, the fusion process autonomously adapts to input content using the learned text-attribute priors, completely eliminating the need for textual input. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets, with code available at https://github.com/Shaoyun2023/TEDFusion.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Maximum entropy principle for quantum processes

Authors:
Siddhartha Das↗Ujjwal Sen↗

arXiv:2506.24079v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The maximum entropy principle, as applied to quantum systems, is a fundamental prescript positing that for a quantum system for which we only have partial knowledge, the maximum entropy state consistent with the partial knowledge is a valuable choice as the system's state. An intriguing result is that in case the only prior knowledge is of a fixed energy, the maximum entropy state turns out to be the thermal state, a ubiquitous state in several arenas, especially in statistical mechanics. We extend the consequences of this principle from static quantum states to dynamic quantum processes. We establish that a quantum channel attains maximal output entropy under a fixed energy constraint if and only if it is an absolutely thermalizing channel, where the fixed output is the thermal state corresponding to that energy. Our results have potential implications for understanding the informational and thermodynamic utility of quantum channels under physical constraints. As an application, we examine the consequences for private randomness distillation from fixed energy constrained quantum processes.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions

Authors:
Spyridon Georgiou↗Aggelos Psiris↗Thomas Lagkas↗Vasileios Argyriou↗Panagiotis Sarigiannidis↗Iraklis Varlamis↗Georgios Th. Papadopoulos↗

Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable and dependable services. We review representative progress in static and dynamic expression analysis, action-unit and micro-expression modeling, and modern CNN, Transformer, graph, and hybrid architectures, then interpret these advances by their operational fit in edge, cloud, and hybrid service pipelines. The synthesis emphasizes SoSE concerns that determine deployability: service contracts for uncertainty-aware outputs, latency and availability envelopes, lifecycle monitoring and recalibration, governance-aware integration, and interoperability across independently evolving components. Our analysis shows that benchmark gains alone are insufficient for SoSE readiness; robustness under shift, intervention stability, fairness, privacy posture, and runtime guarantees are equally critical. We conclude with a roadmap for treating FAA as an operational service component with explicit interfaces, measurable quality attributes, and accountable lifecycle management.

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