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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Surveying GenAI-based Automation in Printed Circuit Board Design and Test

arXiv:2606.17074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used for applications in the hardware and software domains. It purports to reduce the manual effort involved in the development and testing of complex systems before release. Within the hardware space, most tasks have focused on design automation of integrated circuits, particularly with hardware description languages. However, other types of hardware also exist! In this survey, we instead examine how GenAI has been and is being across the printed circuit board (PCB) design life cycle. This includes everything from supply chains, system specification, circuit design, layout and optimisation, validation and test, and PCB assembly and distribution. Through this lens we present a taxonomy of discovered works, categorising them according to their intent and contributions. This survey also identifies key technical challenges that GenAI faces in this space, such as domain-specific data scarcity and limited support for integration with existing PCB tools. Finally, future research directions are discussed: our survey shows that there are many opportunities remaining when considering how GenAI may be integrated into various tasks in PCB design and test.

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

CMIP-Forge: An Agentic System that Retrieves, Computes, and Self-Reviews Climate Science

arXiv:2606.17076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) has generated thousands of peer-reviewed publications documenting model configurations, evaluation procedures, emergent constraints, and projection uncertainties. As the community transitions toward CMIP7, efficiently extracting and operationalizing this unstructured knowledge alongside live data analysis represents a critical bottleneck. Here we present CMIP-Forge, a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and autonomous analysis system that bridges the gap between scientific literature and Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data archives. The system pairs a curated corpus of 6,581 CMIP6-related open-access publications (101,828 indexed chunks) with an agentic pipeline in which a tool-augmented worker plans and executes Python workflows over live climate data, while a panel of independent reviewer models audits its methodology end to end. CMIP-Forge introduces a multi-layered Defense-in-Depth architecture that enforces physical and methodological invariants through executable mechanisms: Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) static analysis, audited scientific primitives, and an autonomous adversarial peer-review protocol. We demonstrate the system's capabilities through end-to-end autonomous research pipelines spanning atmospheric teleconnections, ocean dynamics, regional extremes, and global warming projections. An agentic analysis system grounded in peer-reviewed literature, constrained by automated code guardrails, and audited by an independent adversarial review loop can complete complex climate-research workflows autonomously. The same experiments expose concrete failure modes of the review loop (sycophantic regression, REVISE verdicts that are never resolved, and the submission of stub code for review), each diagnosable from the immutable telemetry and provenance record released with the article.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Data Scale, Not Latency, Shapes Cross-Lingual Encoder Transfer in Streaming ASR

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adapting a streaming speech recognition model to a new language requires choosing between two plausible warm starts: a multilingual (ML) encoder or an English-only (EN) encoder. The common intuition is that the multilingual encoder should help most at low data, but it is unclear how long that advantage persists, whether tight streaming latency amplifies it, and whether it survives deployment quantization. We answer these questions with a controlled sweep of a 0.6 B-parameter cache-aware FastConformer transducer across eight European languages, up to five target-language data scales (100 h to 2500 h), three streaming tiers plus offline decoding, and up to four public test sets. The main result is that multilingual initialization is a data-limited advantage, not a latency-limited one. On FLEURS at 160 ms, the mean EN-ML word error rate (WER) gap falls from +4.21 percentage points (pp) at 100 h to +0.20 pp at 2500 h; a power-law fit summarizes this decay, with each doubling of target-language data roughly halving the remaining advantage. Across the three streaming tiers, the across-language mean EN-ML gap is approximately stable at each scale from 100 to 1000 h, and is near zero by 2500 h. Finally, 4-bit weight-only encoder quantization at the matched 560 ms streaming tier reduces the encoder footprint by about 3x, with an average FLEURS WER increase of about 0.5 pp. The resulting guideline is simple: use multilingual initialization in low-data regimes, treat the choice as effectively irrelevant at large data, and make latency and quantization decisions independently.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Comprehensive pKa Data Augmentation from Limited Real Data through an Engineered Models-Quantum Framework

arXiv:2606.17077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proton dissociation constants (pKa) are critical for functional molecule discovery and molecular modeling. Building on iBonD, the largest experimental pKa database established, we and other researchers have developed several methods including machine-learning-based empirical prediction and high-accuracy energy calculations. Despite this foundation, the rapid augmentation of high-quality pKa data remains fundamentally constrained. As part of this work, we performed large-scale regression-based pKa prediction on unlabeled molecular datasets using a collection of extensively optimized machine-learning models. The results indicate that, since the feature distributions of unlabeled molecular datasets, the pKa data distribution approximates normality, with extreme scarcity of tail-region samples. Although such augmentation is highly valuable for improving overall data availability and predictive modeling, it remains insufficient for efficiently discovering molecules with broad-spectrum pKa properties. To address this, we explore the targeted generation of molecules with sparse pKa properties from the vast chemical space. Given that traditional continuous latent space VAE-RNN methods for molecular generation suffer from insufficient stability and fail to demonstrate clear advantages in complementing sparse data, we design and implement a quantum-assisted sparse-pKa molecular generation. Feasibility is validated on a simulated quantum annealer, and superior extreme-value sampling is further achieved on physical coherent Ising machines (CIMs). (to be continued)

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

AI Coding Agents Can Reproduce Social Science Findings

Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that AI coding agents can reproduce published findings when provided with original data and code; yet systematic evaluation across social sciences remains limited. Existing evaluation benchmarks are insufficient, either small or conflate agent performance with problems in the reproduction materials themselves, such as code that fails to execute correctly. Here we introduce SocSci-Repro-Bench, a benchmark of 221 tasks spanning four disciplines and 13 substantive domains, constructed from studies whose results are either fully reproducible with available materials or demonstrably non-reproducible due to missing data, allowing us to isolate agents' reproduction capacity. Evaluating two frontier coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, we find that both can reproduce a large share of social science findings, with Claude Code substantially outperforming Codex. These reproduction rates considerably exceed those previously reported for general-purpose LLM-based agents on comparable reproducibility benchmarks. Both agents also perform strongly on a reasoning task requiring identification of underlying research questions, and additional analyses suggest that results are not primarily driven by memorization. Providing the original paper PDF alongside replication materials modestly improves performance but introduces bias on tasks where reproduction is impossible. We also show that agents can be nudged toward confirmatory specification search through subtle prompt framing. Together, these findings suggest that at least some frontier coding agents can serve as reliable executors of computational workflows while underscoring the need for careful benchmarking and prompt design as AI systems assume larger roles in scientific production.

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

RACL: Reasoning-Agent Control Layers for Continuous Metaheuristic Learning

arXiv:2606.20142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces RACL, a Reasoning-Agent Control Layer for metaheuristics. RACL places a reasoning agent above an existing optimizer. The agent does not replace the optimizer and does not modify business constraints. Instead, it controls the optimizer's internal search behavior by observing operational memory, reasoning over past behavior, formulating bounded hypotheses, testing interventions, evaluating outcomes, applying guardrails, consolidating useful policies and explaining its decisions. The experiment uses vehicle routing as a testbed, but the contribution is not a new routing solver, a particular ALNS configuration or a specific set of routing rules. The contribution is the RACL method: a way for a reasoning agent to discover, validate, consolidate and explain algorithmic control rules for a metaheuristic. In the current experimental setting, RACL improves or ties the Operational Memory Policy in 21 of 21 feasible cases and improves or ties a non-reasoning Stagnation-Triggered Policy in 18 of 21 feasible cases, with an average RACL vs STP cost delta of -0.641%. In the Sevilla-9/10 runtime sample, RACL improves average cost by -8.337% versus Fixed and -1.605% versus STP without showing material computational overhead. During the proof-of-concept, Codex was used as an in-the-loop reasoning agent observing executions, interpreting logs and proposing live bounded interventions. The policy proxy was later used only to make quantitative evaluation reproducible.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation

Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap

arXiv:2509.06216v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic Software Engineering (SE 3.0) represents a new era where intelligent agents are tasked not with simple code generation, but with achieving complex, goal-oriented SE objectives. To harness these new capabilities while ensuring trustworthiness, we must recognize a fundamental duality within the SE field in the Agentic SE era, comprising two symbiotic modalities: SE for Humans and SE for Agents. This duality demands a radical reimagining of the foundational pillars of SE (actors, processes, tools, and artifacts) which manifest differently across each modality. We propose two purpose-built workbenches to support this vision. The Agent Command Environment (ACE) serves as a command center where humans orchestrate and mentor agent teams, handling outputs such as Merge-Readiness Packs (MRPs) and Consultation Request Packs (CRPs). The Agent Execution Environment (AEE) is a digital workspace where agents perform tasks while invoking human expertise when facing ambiguity or complex trade-offs. This bi-directional partnership, which supports agent-initiated human callbacks and handovers, gives rise to new, structured engineering activities (i.e., processes) that redefine human-AI collaboration, elevating the practice from agentic coding to true agentic software engineering. This paper presents the Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE) vision, outlining several of the foundational pillars for the future of SE. The paper culminates in a research roadmap that identifies a few key challenges and opportunities while briefly discussing the resulting impact of this future on SE education. Our goal is not to offer a definitive solution, but to provide a conceptual scaffold with structured vocabulary to catalyze a community-wide dialogue, pushing the SE community to think beyond its classic, human-centric tenets toward a disciplined, scalable, and trustworthy agentic future.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A 3D-Printable Dataset for Fair Testing and Comparisons of Tactile Sensors

arXiv:2606.25886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing texture datasets for tactile sensing primarily consist of sensor readings from a specific sensor interacting with available surfaces/objects rather than describing the textures themselves, limiting fair comparison between tactile sensors and hindering reproducible research. In this work, we introduce a 3D-printable dataset of mathematically defined textures designed to be fabricated reliably across different printers and filament types. The dataset consists of six parametrically generated surface patterns derived from combinations of sine-wave and Fourier-based functions, giving controlled variation in spatial frequency, amplitude, and directional structure. We evaluate the reproducibility of these textures across three popular 3D printers and multiple filament types by measuring variance in images captured using an optical TacTip sensor under controlled contact conditions. Our results show that print quality, particularly peak sharpness and stringing, affects tactile variance, with higher-end printers producing significantly more consistent signatures. Classification experiments using neural networks and PCA-based models further demonstrate that high-quality prints support strong within-printer generalisation, while cross-printer generalisation remains challenging due to geometric inconsistencies. This work establishes the first openly available, physically reproducible 3D-printed texture benchmark, providing a foundation for fair comparison of tactile sensors.

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

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

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

NetBurst: Event-Centric Forecasting of Bursty, Intermittent Time Series

arXiv:2510.22397v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Network operators monitor their infrastructure by collecting telemetry data such as packet counts, byte rates, or flow volumes, yet answering the questions that effective operations demand – forecasting future load, diagnosing and characterizing anomalies, and searching for and retrieving historical precedents – requires more than raw measurements. Bridging this gap calls for learned representations: compact per-entity summaries that capture temporal dynamics from each entity's univariate time series. Time-series foundation models are the natural starting point, but they are designed for dense, periodic benchmark datasets – the mild statistical regime. However, network telemetry data inhabits the wild regime: operationally relevant events are rare, separated by variable-length stretches of low or no activity (``ebbs''), with intermittent bursts of heavy-tailed extremes (``tides''). We present NetBurst, an event-centric pipeline that collapses ebbs, separates each time series into a stream of burst timings and a stream of burst magnitudes, and learns a single representation serving all three operational tasks. Compared to the strongest competitors among eight baselines – including Amazon's Chronos-2 and Datadog's Toto – and across nine production telemetry configurations, NetBurst reduces median forecasting error by $1.3$–$116\times$ on wild-regime data with a $1.0$–$7.5\times$ better match to the true burst distribution, and matches baselines on mild-regime benchmarks. For characterizing anomalies, NetBurst produces balanced, well-spread clusters that are $16\times$ more describable in operator-familiar terms under a novel interpretability score, and cluster-filtered search delivers $7.5\times$ faster end-to-end retrieval.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

The Price of Anarchy in Disaggregated Inference

arXiv:2606.17081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Disaggregated inference architectures physically separate prefill and decode phases onto distinct GPU pools, creating competing "agents" that share a fixed hardware budget. We provide, to our knowledge, the first formal game-theoretic analysis of this architecture, using NVIDIA Dynamo as a concrete case study. We model disaggregated serving as three coupled games: a two-player resource game between prefill and decode pools, a selfish caching game over the hierarchical KV cache, and a congestion game with positive externalities for request routing. We empirically validate the latter two; the P/D resource game is treated analytically (Section 9.2). We characterize how GPU saturation induces regime transitions that shift the game's payoff structure: below saturation, selfish behavior has bounded Price of Anarchy (PoA); at saturation, superlinear latency and cache externalities drive our empirical estimator PoA-hat (defined in Section 6.4) upward. Based on this analysis, we design an adaptive controller that detects saturation transitions in real time and adjusts routing parameters accordingly, shifting from cache-affinity exploitation to load-balanced congestion avoidance. We instantiate our framework on a 3-node NVIDIA B200 cluster running Dynamo with two models, Nemotron-4-340B (TP=8, full-node workers with cross-InfiniBand KV transfers) and Llama-3.1-70B (TP=4), and find the same three-regime PoA-hat structure with the same first post-knee grid point (C=128) on both models. Adaptive routing shifts each model to a better operating point. Our strongest result is on the 70B 1P/5D topology, where PoA-hat drops 3.1x (66.4 to 21.5) in the saturated phase at a 13% throughput cost. On the 70B 1P/2D, PoA-hat drops 2.2x and TTFT P99 drops 7.6x (see Section 8.5).

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optimal Impulse Control for Cyber Risk Management

arXiv:2410.17706v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We explore an optimal impulse control problem wherein an electronic device owner strategically calibrates protection levels against cyber attacks. Utilizing epidemiological compartment models, we qualitatively characterize the dynamics of cyber attacks within the network. We determine the optimal protective measures against effective hacking by formulating and solving a stochastic control problem with optimal switching. We demonstrate that the value function for the cluster owner constitutes a viscosity solution to a system of coupled variational inequalities associated with a fully coupled reflected backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive algorithm alongside a verification procedure to ascertain the optimal timing for network protection across various cyber attack scenarios. Our findings are illustrated through numerical approximations employing deep Galerkin methods for partial differential equations (PDEs). We visualize the optimal protection strategies in the context of two distinct attack scenarios: (1) a constant cyber attack, (2) an exogenous cyber attack strategy modeled with a Poisson process.

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

TEDD: Robust Detection of Unstable Temporal Features

arXiv:2606.12643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When working with real-world temporal data, it is common to encounter features whose distribution is changing over time. The naive employment of Machine Learning models on this unstable data might lead to rapidly degrading performance, especially if the new distribution is much different from what was previously seen during training. In order to cope with this problem, it is critical to automatically identify features that are changing over time. With these features detected, data scientists and other practitioners will be able to mitigate the issue (for instance, by applying data transformations), deploying more robust models that retain high performance for longer periods of time. In this paper, we describe which temporal changes a feature should not suffer from, and propose TEDD, a technique to a) identify when a dataset might lead to an unstable Machine Learning model and b) automatically detect which features cause such lack of robustness. In order to achieve it, we leverage a regression model to highlight which features contribute to a good prediction of an instance's timestamp. We compare our approach to other methods in real and synthetic data, testing their detection capability on all simple change patterns. We show that our method: detects all types of basic changes, both for numerical and categorical features; can detect multivariate drifts; returns a comparable value measuring the amount of change of each feature; requires no parameter tuning; and is scalable both on number of features and instances of the dataset.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

As You Wish: Mission Planning with Formal Verification using LLMs in Precision Agriculture

arXiv:2606.18519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Though robotic systems are now being commercialized and deployed in various industries, many of these systems are highly specialized and often require an advanced skill set to operate and ensure they perform as instructed. To mitigate this problem, we recently introduced a mission planner leveraging LLMs to synthesize mission plans in precision agriculture based on mission descriptions provided in natural language. While the system demonstrates impressive performance, it also suffers from the inherent ambiguities of natural language. In this paper, we extend our system to address this issue by introducing multiple feedback loops in the planning architecture that leverage linear temporal logic (LTL) to ensure the mission planning system meets the specifications formulated by the user while still using natural language. To mitigate potential bias, this is achieved by using two different commercial LLMs in charge of the specification and verification subtasks. Through extensive experiments, we highlight the strengths and limitations of integrating mission verification into a fully autonomous pipeline, particularly regarding an LLM's ability to generate valuable LTL formulas, and show how our proposed implementation addresses and solves these challenges.

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

Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding

Passive models for long video understanding typically rely on a "watch-it-all" paradigm, processing frames uniformly regardless of query difficulty, causing computational cost to grow with video duration. Although interactive frameworks have emerged, they often rely on global pre-scanning, and their context cost still scales with video length. We propose OmniAgent, the first native omni-modal agent that formulates video understanding as a POMDP-based iterative Observation-Thought-Action cycle. OmniAgent executes on-demand actions to selectively distill audio-visual cues into a persistent textual memory, effectively decoupling reasoning complexity from raw video duration. To operationalize this, we introduce (1) Agentic Supervised Fine-Tuning to bootstrap native active perception via best-of-N trajectory synthesis with dual-stage quality control, and (2) Agentic Reinforcement Learning with TAURA (Turn-aware Adaptive Uncertainty Rescaled Advantage), which leverages turn-level entropy to steer credit assignment toward pivotal discovery turns. Crucially, OmniAgent exhibits positive test-time scaling, where performance improves as the number of reasoning turns increases, validating the efficacy of active perception. Empirical results across ten benchmarks (e.g., VideoMME, LVBench) demonstrate that OmniAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models. Notably, on LVBench, our 7B agent outperforms the 10$\times$ larger Qwen2.5-VL-72B (50.5% vs. 47.3%).

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

Detecting Hallucinations for Large Language Model-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Knowledge graph (KG) reasoning infers new knowledge from existing facts and is widely applied in question answering, recommendation, and decision support. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based KG reasoning frameworks have become increasingly popular by leveraging retrieved KG information. However, hallucinations in LLMs remain a critical issue. Even when relevant KG knowledge is incorporated, models may still generate incorrect outputs, leading to misinformation and unreliable decisions. Existing hallucination detection methods either focus on LLM internal states or verify consistency with retrieved contexts, but both overlook the structural information in KGs, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this gap, we propose LUCID, the first halLUcination deteCtIon method for LLM-based knowleDge graph reasoning frameworks. LUCID jointly leverages LLM attention scores, KG semantics, and structural information. Specifically, it extracts node and edge features from attention scores and semantic similarities, and integrates them with KG structure using a graph neural network. We also construct manually annotated benchmark datasets for evaluation. Experiments on nine datasets show that LUCID achieves state of the art performance compared to 15 baselines.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

High-Rate and Resource-Efficient All-Photonic Quantum Repeater Architectures with 9 km Repeater Spacing

arXiv:2606.25314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum communication between two distant parties will serve as a cornerstone of the future quantum internet. However, generating enough entangled Bell pairs over long distances is a critical bottleneck. Although photons are ideal carriers of quantum information, overcoming photon loss and the exponential attenuation of signals remains a major challenge. We propose an all-photonic quantum repeater architecture that enables quantum communication over 1,000 km with an equidistant repeater spacing of 9 km. This repeater spacing is enabled by elementary entangled Bell pairs protected through the concatenation of continuous-variable and discrete-variable quantum error correction codes, namely, the bosonic Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code and the [[7,1,3]] Steane code, whose combination yields a synergistic improvement in robustness against photon loss. This architecture incorporates a new ranking criterion and a multi-reflection mirror-based optical cavity as a free-space photonic memory module, which we model in terms of its length and mirror-reflection efficiency. Additionally, we propose two heuristic construction methods for the elementary entangled Bell pairs. One method introduces up to two-qubit correlated errors within each logical qubit but requires a large number of GKP qubits, while the other allows up to three-qubit correlated errors within each logical qubit but requires fewer GKP qubits. To more accurately capture realistic physical conditions during photonic resource preparation, we include switching-induced imperfections in our simulations, in addition to other standard optical imperfections. In the presence of these imperfections, our realization requires only a few thousand GKP qubits per repeater station per protocol run, a resource requirement significantly smaller than the corresponding resource requirements of prior third-generation all-photonic repeater proposals.

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

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between mechanical oscillators revealed through SU(1,1) interferometry

arXiv:2606.18202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum correlations are essential for achieving quantum advantage in computing, communication and sensing. Moreover, their observation challenges and constrains our fundamental understanding of nature. Mechanical oscillators in the quantum regime provide an appealing platform for preparing and investigating quantum correlations at macroscopic scales. Despite substantial progress, however, continuous-variable quantum correlations stronger than entanglement have not yet been observed in this macroscopic regime. Here, we report the experimental observation of continuous-variable Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between two spatially-separated mechanical oscillators with an effective mass of $\sim 16 \,\mu g$ each. This is achieved by coupling them to a superconducting qubit which allows for engineering a two-mode squeezing interaction when parametrically driven. Crucially, we show that this interaction can be used to witness quantum correlations through the realization of a mechanical SU(1,1) interferometer. Our results expand the toolbox of operations in circuit quantum acoustodynamics and demonstrate that quantum correlations stronger than entanglement can also be observed in macroscopic systems, thereby shedding light on the boundary between quantum and classical regimes.

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

Runtime Analysis of Cartesian Genetic Programming in Evolving Boolean Functions

arXiv:2606.15923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) is among the practical and popular forms of Genetic Programming as it uses a graph-based representation of programs. This paper presents a first runtime analysis of CGP in evolving Boolean functions using complete training sets. We prove an asymptotic bound $O(n D^5)$ for the expected number of fitness evaluations of CGP to construct a conjunction of $n$ inputs using at most $D \geq n-1$ binary gates, a minimal function set, and even with a strict survival selection. When the non-strict selection is used, the bound is improved to $O(n D^4)$. Our analysis reveals interesting characteristics of CGP induced search, which have been only observed empirically. In particular, enabling the acceptance of equally good solutions, including those with connected gates non-contributing to fitness, can lead to a speedup, and consequently a better asymptotic time bound. In contrast to conjunctions, we also prove a negative result which shows that CGP requires exponential time to evolve an exclusive disjunction. Experiments evolving conjunctions complement our theoretical findings. The use of incomplete training sets is found to further reduce the average number of fitness evaluations while maintaining a good level of generalisation.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Stabilizing Bandits using Regularization: Precise Regret and A Quantitative Central Limit Theorem

arXiv:2603.10184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Statistical inference with bandit data presents fundamental challenges owing to adaptive sampling, which violates the independence assumptions underlying classical asymptotic theory. Recent work has identified stability~\citep{laiwei82} as a sufficient condition for valid inference under adaptivity. This paper first provides a refined stability condition, stated in terms of the iterates of an online algorithm, and shows that a large class of regularized stochastic-mirror-descent-style algorithms satisfy it. This refined condition allows us to strengthen the asymptotic results of~\citet{laiwei82} in several ways. First, we derive a non-asymptotic Berry–Esseen bound for the empirical reward estimates under adaptive sampling. Second, we derive matching non-asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the regret of the proposed algorithm, yielding a precise characterization of its regret. Third, we show that these regularized algorithms preserve asymptotic normality and valid inference under a prescribed level of adversarial corruption. Finally, we show that regularization is necessary rather than incidental: Lai–Wei stability is incompatible with the optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret rate – the rate attained by unregularized algorithms such as EXP3 – so that a controlled, polylogarithmic inflation in regret is the price of valid inference.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

WinDOM: Self-Family Distillation for Small-Model GUI Grounding

arXiv:2606.25964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small ($\sim$2B) GUI-grounding agents are attractive for on-device deployment, accessibility tooling, and low-cost iteration, but at this scale they face two open recipe questions: how to obtain bounding-box training data without expensive human annotation, and how to combine supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning. We address both, with the explicit goal of pushing small-model performance rather than scaling up. WinDOM is a $54{,}425$-record grounding corpus harvested by driving an open-source Windows 11 web reimplementation under headless Playwright, with bounding boxes read directly off the DOM and no OCR or human annotation. Self-Family Distillation (SFD) is a single rejection-sampling cold-start parameterised only by the teacher choice: either an EMA of the student (no external model) or a frozen larger same-family teacher. We then treat the saturation depth of the SFD cold-start as an explicit GRPO hyperparameter. On a Qwen3.5-2B student, the under-saturated cold-start is a better GRPO initialiser than the converged one: SFD-4B with Early-init RL gains $+5.4$ OOD-mean ($+3.5$ ScreenSpot-Pro, $+7.0$ OSWorld-G, $+5.8$ ScreenSpot-V2) over the base. The same-size EMA mode lands within roughly one OOD-mean point of the cross-size $4$B variant ($65.2$ vs $66.3$) without an external teacher.

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

DDStereo: Efficient Dual Decoder Transformers for Stereo 3D Road Anomaly Detection

Stereo-based 3D object detection still faces two critical safety challenges: real-time performance and open-set generalization. Existing stereo 3D methods typically achieve twice the accuracy of monocular methods but suffer from significantly lower inference speeds, making them unsuitable for real-time applications. Meanwhile, recent advances in open-world detection have introduced open-set and open-vocabulary algorithms in monocular 2D and 3D settings, yet stereo-based open-set detection remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose DDStereo, a novel Dual-Decoder Stereo Transformer for real-time open-set 3D object detection. DDStereo features two lightweight decoder branches: one for open-set foreground 2D detection and the other for 3D attribute regression. These decoders share object-level queries to achieve unified target-level alignment. To enhance inference efficiency, we designed a compact disparity feature extractor and a streamlined decoder architecture. Experiments on public stereo 3D benchmarks demonstrate that DDStereo achieves state-of-the-art accuracy under both closed-set and open-set protocols. Notably, our method surpasses existing stereo 3D detectors in inference speed and, for the first time, achieves real-time performance comparable to monocular approaches.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

PEARL: Self-Evolving Assistant for Time Management with Reinforcement Learning

Overlapping calendar invitations force busy professionals to repeatedly decide which meetings to attend, reschedule, or decline. We refer to this preference-driven decision process as calendar conflict resolution. Automating this decision process is crucial yet challenging. Scheduling logistics can drain hours, and human delegation often fails at scale, which motivates us to ask: Can we trust large language models (LLMs) or language agents to manage time? To enable a systematic study of this question, we introduce CalConflictBench, a benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution. In CalConflictBench, conflicts are presented to agents round-by-round over a calendar year, requiring them to infer and adapt to user preferences progressively. Our experiments show that current LLM agents perform poorly with high error rates, e.g., Qwen-3-30B-Think has an average error rate of 35%. To address this gap, we propose PEARL, a reinforcement-learning framework that (i) augments the language agent with an external preference memory that stores and updates inferred strategies (e.g., attendee priorities, topic importance, time/location preferences), and (ii) optimizes the agent with round-wise rewards that directly supervise decision correctness, ranking quality, and memory usage across rounds. Experiments on CalConflictBench show that PEARL achieves an error reduction rate of 0.76 and a 55% improvement in average error rate compared to the strongest baseline.