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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

An adaptive framework for the axisymmetric pulsar magnetosphere using physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks

arXiv:2606.10686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pulsar magnetosphere has only recently been addressed using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), by deploying a domain-decomposition approach and treating the separatrix and equatorial current sheet as infinitesimally thin discontinuities. However, this baseline requires extensive manual hyperparameter tuning, achieves limited final accuracy and demands several hours of training. We refine this framework by introducing domain-specific neural architectures based on Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, an automated adaptive training pipeline and a physics-based convergence criterion that eliminate the need for manual calibration. The proposed methodology delivers self-consistent axisymmetric magnetosphere solutions with mean squared errors of the PDE residuals at O(1e-6) in double precision - an improvement of two orders of magnitude over the baseline - while achieving convergence in under 20 minutes in single precision. Importantly, the method reliably resolves stellar radii reduced by up to 80% compared to the baseline, overcoming the severe spatial scale disparities that also challenge traditional solvers. Furthermore, by varying the flux that opens to infinity, we provide a correction to the equation that connects it to the equatorial T-point's position. The complete framework is released as the open-source library PulsarX.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SIMBA: ABidirectional Retrieval Forward Simulation Framework for Modeling FY-4A GIIRS Hyperspectral Infrared Radiances Toward NWP Applications

arXiv:2606.19943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperspectral infrared observations are an important data source for numerical weather prediction (NWP) because they provide rich information on the vertical structure of atmospheric temperature and humidity. However, most existing deep learning methods mainly focus on one-way retrieval from radiances to atmospheric profiles, while the reverse radiance simulation process and the consistency between atmospheric state space and radiance observation space are insufficiently considered. In this study, we propose SIMBA, a unified bidirectional retrieval-forward simulation framework for FY-4A GIIRS hyperspectral infrared radiance modeling toward NWP applications. The framework jointly performs atmospheric profile retrieval and radiance reconstruction, introduces a cycle-consistency constraint to strengthen the coupling between the two processes, and employs a bidirectional Mamba state-space module to capture long-range dependencies along pressure levels. Using collocated FY-4A GIIRS observations and ERA5 reanalysis data, the proposed method is evaluated for temperature retrieval, specific humidity retrieval, long-wave radiance reconstruction, and medium-wave radiance reconstruction. Experimental results show that SIMBA outperforms several representative deep learning baselines across both retrieval and reconstruction tasks, while ablation experiments confirm the contribution of the bidirectional design and cycle-consistency mechanism. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for joint atmospheric profile retrieval and hyperspectral infrared radiance modeling, and suggest potential for future Jacobian-related analysis and NWP-oriented extensions.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Randomized, Controlled, Double Blind Clinical Study to Evaluate Use of Hydron Alkaline Ionised Water (HAIW) in Healthy Participants

Background and Objectives: Alkaline Ionized Water (AIW) is considered among the highest quality healthy drinking water worldwide and is widely discussed for its various health benefits. Hydron Alkaline Ionized Water (HAIW) is produced through electrolysis, resulting in a stable pH of approximately 9.5 with a negative Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), making it an antioxidant beverage. The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety of HAIW and its effects on digestion, sleep, energy, and overall quality of life in healthy participants compared to Packaged Drinking Water (PDW). Materials and Methods: A randomized, controlled, double blind, prospective clinical study was conducted in which a total of 24 healthy participants between the age group of 21 to 40 years were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to either HAIW Group or Packaged Drinking Water Group with equal gender distribution. Participants were hospitalized for 7 days and asked to consume at least 3 litres of the assigned water daily. Primary outcomes were safety-related laboratory parameters and adverse event monitoring. Secondary outcomes included assessment of digestion (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), urine parameters, sleep quality, freshness after waking, fatigue, energy/stamina/strength, quality of life, and global assessment Results: All 24 participants completed the study with no dropouts. Baseline demographics were comparable between the two groups. Assessment of primary safety-related laboratory parameters including Complete Blood count, liver function tests, renal function tests, blood sugar, Electrocardiogram and serum electrolytes showed non-significant change from baseline to 7 days and remained within normal limits in both groups, with non-significant difference between groups (p>0.05). HAIW showed significantly better improvement in appetite, digestion, and bowel habits from Day 2 onwards compared to Packaged drinking water. Sleep quality and freshness after waking up showed significant improvement from Day 3 and Day 2 respectively in the HAIW and PDW group, with significantly better improvement in HAIW group. Fatigue scores showed significant reduction at Day 6 and 7 in both groups with non-significant difference between groups. A total of 5 adverse events were reported (3 in HAIW, 2 in PDW), all unrelated to study products and were mild in nature. Global assessment showed excellent to good overall safety and tolerability in both groups. Conclusion: HAIW was well tolerated by all participants without any adverse effects. All laboratory safety parameters remained within normal range. HAIW demonstrated significant improvements in digestive function (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), sleep quality, and freshness after waking as compared to PDW. The study concludes that HAIW can be safely consumed. HAIW improves digestive and sleep-related functions.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

KG-SoftMAP: Soft Knowledge-Graph Priors for Bayesian Network Structure Learning from Sparse Discrete Data

arXiv:2606.10358v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning Bayesian network (BN) structure from sparse discrete data is hard: when each instance records only a few variables, most variable pairs lack the joint observations needed for reliable scoring, and data-only methods recover little structure. However, imperfect domain knowledge, expressible as a weighted directed knowledge graph (KG), is often available. We propose KG-SoftMAP, which encodes such a KG as a finite-strength, confidence-weighted edge prior and maximizes a MAP objective combining the BDeu score with a logit-form prior; the KG may be expert-curated or LLM-extracted. On synthetic benchmarks with known DAGs, KG-SoftMAP reaches Directed-F1 (DF1) $0.19$–$0.32$ at observation rate $\rho=0.05$ and DF1 $0.44$–$0.97$ at $\rho\geq0.2$, while every data-only learner tested stays near zero under the same sparse masks. Recovery tracks KG quality: controlled corruption degrades it smoothly, a zero-signal KG yields DF1 $0.00$, and a blindly LLM-extracted KG with imperfect precision and recall still drives substantial recovery. On three real sparse educational datasets, the learned BN acts as a concept-level posterior model: on SAF it matches logistic regression (LR) within $0.03$ F1_FAIL while providing an inspectable concept graph, calibrated Fail probabilities, and tractable posterior queries from partial observations.

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

Multi-fidelity aerodynamic data fusion by autoencoder transfer learning

arXiv:2512.13069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate aerodynamic prediction often relies on high-fidelity simulations; however, their prohibitive computational costs severely limit their applicability in data-driven modeling. This limitation motivates the development of multi-fidelity strategies that leverage inexpensive low-fidelity information without compromising accuracy. Addressing this challenge, this work presents a multi-fidelity deep learning framework that combines autoencoder-based transfer learning with a newly developed Multi-Split Conformal Prediction (MSCP) strategy to achieve uncertainty-aware aerodynamic data fusion under extreme data scarcity. The methodology leverages abundant Low-Fidelity (LF) data to learn a compact latent physics representation, which acts as a frozen knowledge base for a decoder that is subsequently fine-tuned using scarce HF samples. Tested on surface-pressure distributions for NACA airfoils (2D) and a transonic wing (3D) databases, the model successfully corrects LF deviations and achieves high-accuracy pressure predictions using minimal HF training data. Furthermore, the MSCP framework produces robust, actionable uncertainty bands with pointwise coverage exceeding 95%. By combining extreme data efficiency with uncertainty quantification, this work offers a scalable and reliable solution for aerodynamic regression in data-scarce environments.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

arXiv:2606.04718v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains. Similarly, humanoid robots should be able to smoothly transition between walking and running while maintaining natural and stable locomotion. However, unifying gait transition and multi-terrain adaptation within a single policy remains challenging due to gradient interference between tasks and the distribution shift caused by terrain variations. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can mitigate multi-skill interference, direct joint training often fails to achieve clear expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe-MoE, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that decouples gait generation from terrain adaptation. In the first stage, a stable locomotion policy is learned to produce natural walking and running behaviors with smooth transitions. In the second stage, a terrain-aware MoE branch is introduced, and the gating network is trained with a contrastive objective to learn structured terrain representations and promote expert specialization. The final action is obtained through weighted fusion of the base gait policy and the terrain-aware branch, enabling the policy to preserve stable locomotion while adapting to complex terrains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate, locomotion stability, and multi-terrain adaptability. Furthermore, zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot validates the effectiveness of our framework, achieving robust walking and running across stairs, slopes, steps, obstacles, and unstructured outdoor terrains while maintaining accurate foothold control and dynamic stability.

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

Detecting Explanatory Insufficiency in Learned Representations: A Framework for Representational Vigilance

arXiv:2606.13172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned representations are central to modern machine learning and are commonly evaluated through predictive performance, robustness, uncertainty estimation, or generalization. However, a learned representation may remain operationally successful while progressively failing to organize persistent residual structures that are not fully captured by conventional evaluation metrics. This article introduces VER, the Vigilant Evaluator of Representations, a conceptual framework for monitoring representational adequacy in learned representations. VER does not propose a new learning algorithm, loss function, or model architecture. Instead, it formalizes a diagnostic process through which persistent residual structures may be identified, analyzed, and interpreted as potential indicators of explanatory insufficiency. The framework distinguishes representational inadequacy from ordinary prediction error, uncertainty, noise, and distribution shift. It introduces a monitoring sequence based on representation identification, explanatory-domain delimitation, residual-structure detection, explanatory-resistance evaluation, and vigilance signaling. VER is intended as a contribution to representation diagnostics in machine learning. Its objective is not to replace existing evaluation methods but to complement them by treating representational adequacy as an explicit object of inquiry. A path toward empirical evaluation through representational-vigilance benchmarks is also outlined.

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

CORE-Bench: Fostering the Credibility of Published Research Through a Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark

AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research. To spur the development of useful agents, we need benchmarks that are challenging, but more crucially, directly correspond to real-world tasks of interest. This paper introduces such a benchmark, designed to measure the accuracy of AI agents in tackling a crucial yet surprisingly challenging aspect of scientific research: computational reproducibility. This task, fundamental to the scientific process, involves reproducing the results of a study using the provided code and data. We introduce CORE-Bench (Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark), a benchmark consisting of 270 tasks based on 90 scientific papers across three disciplines (computer science, social science, and medicine). Tasks in CORE-Bench consist of three difficulty levels and include both language-only and vision-language tasks. We provide an evaluation system to measure the accuracy of agents in a fast and parallelizable way, saving days of evaluation time for each run compared to a sequential implementation. We evaluated two baseline agents: the general-purpose AutoGPT and a task-specific agent called CORE-Agent. We tested both variants using two underlying language models: GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best agent achieved an accuracy of 21% on the hardest task, showing the vast scope for improvement in automating routine scientific tasks. Having agents that can reproduce existing work is a necessary step towards building agents that can conduct novel research and could verify and improve the performance of other research agents. We hope that CORE-Bench can improve the state of reproducibility and spur the development of future research agents.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Sat2City v2: Native 3D City Asset Generation from a Single Satellite Image

Generating explicit 3D city assets from a single satellite image is important for digital twins, urban simulation, and geospatial intelligence. Unlike satellite-to-street-view synthesis, the task requires a reusable textured mesh with plausible geometry and controllable appearance rather than a 3D proxy optimized only for rendering a small set of images or videos. The ICCV Sat2City framework made a first step by conditioning cascaded sparse-voxel latent diffusion on satellite-derived height maps, but its appearance was random, its training data were synthetic, and its task-specific VAE did not scale well to noisy real-world reconstructions. We present Sat2City v2, a journal extension that adapts a pretrained native structured-latent 3D foundation model to weakly aligned satellite images and textured meshes. We build a real-world dataset with 16,241 satellite-mesh pairs across 24 regions in 9 cities. Instead of learning a 3D representation from noisy city meshes, Sat2City v2 encodes each mesh into a pretrained native 3D latent space, fine-tunes a satellite-conditioned geometry flow, and uses the decoded shape to anchor satellite-conditioned texturing. This retains Sat2City's geometry-to-appearance cascade while enabling appearance-controllable generation from the satellite input. Experiments on metric-scale DSM reconstruction and generative city-asset benchmarks for geometry and appearance show that Sat2City v2 achieves the best overall performance among evaluated baselines. Overall, Sat2City v2 advances satellite-to-city generation from rendering-oriented 3D proxies to explicit textured mesh assets, supported by, to the best of our knowledge, the first documented satellite-mesh paired dataset collected from matched geographic crops for this asset-level task. Project page: https://ai4city-hkust.github.io/Sat2City-v2/

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Systemic and Mucosal Antibody Correlates of Protection Against Bordetella pertussis in a Controlled Human Infection Model

Abstract Background Despite high vaccination coverage, pertussis has resurged globally. Whole-cell (wP) and acellular (aP) pertussis vaccines induce distinct immune profiles, yet immune correlates of protection against infection and symptomatic disease remain incompletely defined. We leveraged a controlled human infection model (CHIM) to identify systemic and mucosal humoral signatures associated with resistance to Bordetella pertussis. Methods Adults with documented history of vaccination had previously been enrolled in a CHIM study and challenged intranasally with B. pertussis D420. For the present work, longitudinal serum and nasal wash samples were analyzed using systems serology to comprehensively profile antibody features. Multivariate modeling and network analyses were performed to define discriminatory immune features. Findings Baseline aP vaccine antigen-specific antibodies did not distinguish infection outcomes. In wP-primed individuals, protection from B. pertussis infection was associated with broad, high-magnitude, polyfunctional antibody responses targeting non-canonical antigens, including BrkA, TcfA, OmpP, OmlA, FauA, and Pal. Protective signatures associated with resistance to symptomatic disease in both vaccine groups were characterized by enhanced Fc-receptor-engaging antibody profiles with distinct antigenic patterns shaped by vaccine history. Importantly, while conventional aP vaccine antigens failed to reliably distinguish individuals susceptible to infection or symptom development, correlates generated by integrated serum and mucosal models based on select non-canonical antigens achieved near-perfect discrimination of infection and symptom outcomes, outperforming models restricted to aP-vaccine. antigens only. Interpretation Resistance to infection was largely restricted to wP-primed individuals and was associated with integrated systemic and mucosal antibody responses directed against antigens beyond those included in acellular vaccines. Protection from symptomatic disease in both vaccine groups was linked to distinct antibody response signatures, shaped by prior vaccination history. These findings indicate that immune mechanisms preventing infection differ from those limiting clinical disease and provide a framework for redesign of next-generation pertussis vaccines aimed at blocking infection and symptomatic disease.

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

Perceive, Interact, Reason: Building Tool-Augmented Visual Agents for Spatial Reasoning

While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding, they remain limited in spatial reasoning tasks that require active evidence acquisition and multi-step visual interaction. This limitation suggests that relying solely on implicit visual representations from vision encoders is insufficient for recovering fine-grained spatial evidence. We introduce PERception-Interaction-reason Agent (PERIA), a tool-augmented visual agent for spatial reasoning tasks across map reasoning, visual probing, and vision reconstruction. PERIA uses two lightweight tool families: vision perception tools for exposing textual, symbolic, and spatial evidence, and vision interaction tools for manipulating visual context, tracing paths, and verifying spatial relations. To train PERIA, we develop a unified recipe that combines supervised tool-use trajectory synthesis, composite rewards, and Observation-Relaxed Group-in-Group Policy Optimization (OR-GIGPO) for effective multi-tool behavior. Experiments on 13 benchmarks from 8 datasets show that PERIA-8B improves over the Qwen3-8B backbone by 10.0% on in-distribution benchmarks and 4.4% on out-of-distribution benchmarks, while outperforming previous state-of-the-art baselines of similar size by 7.0%-14.8%. It also achieves performance comparable to much larger models such as Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking and GPT-5, demonstrating the effectiveness of PERIA in enhancing spatial reasoning capabilities.

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

Attacking the First-Principle: A Black-Box, Query-Free Targeted Mimicry Attack on Binary Function Classifiers

arXiv:2605.18231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Binary function classifiers play a crucial role in maintaining the security and integrity of software systems by detecting malicious code and unauthorized modifications. However, machine learning-based classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can evade detection. In this study, we present Kelpie, a novel framework for executing mimicry attacks, a stronger type of targeted evasion attacks, on binary function classifiers in a black-box, zero-query setting. Unlike previous approaches that rely on querying the target classifier to refine untargeted evasion attacks, Kelpie leverages code transformations that preserve the functionality of malicious payloads while causing them to be misclassified as we want. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Kelpie can successfully execute mimicry attacks against six state-of-the-art binary function classifiers representing different model architectures without requiring direct interaction with them. We further validate our approach with a practical demonstration, involving a keylogger and a wiper concealed within benign-looking functions embedded in an application. This work, to our best knowledge, is the first to demonstrate such a mimicry attack in a black-box, zero-query context, raising important questions about the reliability and security of existing machine learning-based binary function classifiers.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a key component for localisation in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments, but its performance critically depends on selecting an image matching threshold (operating point) that balances precision and recall. Thresholds are typically hand-tuned offline for a specific environment and fixed during deployment, leading to degraded performance under environmental change. We propose a method that automatically selects the operating point of a VPR system to maximise recall at 100% precision. The method uses a small calibration traversal with known correspondences and transfers thresholds to deployment via quantile normalisation of similarity score distributions. This quantile transfer ensures that thresholds remain stable across calibration sizes and query subsets. Experiments with seven state-of-the-art VPR techniques across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, enabling the underlying VPR technique to operate at 100% precision in approximately twice as many deployment scenarios (median improvement), while retrieving up to 29% more correct matches at that precision. The method eliminates manual tuning by adapting to new environments and generalising across operating conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/DhyeyR-007/Quantile-Transfer-for-Reliable-VPR.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Local controllability of heralded quantum linear optics

arXiv:2606.19470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photonic linear optical networks provide a versatile platform for quantum information processing and quantum state engineering. However, the set of states that can be generated using passive linear optics alone is fundamentally constrained by bosonic symmetries. Heralding, based on conditional measurements on auxiliary modes, is a widely used technique to overcome these limitations and effectively enlarge the set of accessible states. Despite the widespread use of heralding, it is often unclear how specific ancillary resources impact the overall reachability of the target space. In this work, we investigate the local controllability of photonic states in linear optical networks by analyzing the rank of the Jacobian of the output state with respect to the underlying unitary circuit, which provides a quantitative measure of the dimension of the accessible tangent space at a given configuration. Our analysis ranges from passive linear optics to heralded linear optics, where auxiliary resources and conditional measurements are included. Within this framework, we quantify how different resources enlarge the locally accessible state space beyond that of passive linear optics and determine the resources required for the Jacobian rank to reach its maximal value, thereby achieving full local controllability. As maximal local rank is a necessary condition for global reachability, our framework offers a systematic tool to assess and compare the accessible state space of measurement-based photonic architectures, and to establish practical criteria for the resources needed in high-dimensional quantum state engineering.

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

SURGELLM: Rethinking Multi-Task Evaluation through Task-Aware Feature Gating with Class-Balanced Normalization

Fine-tuned encoders deployed across heterogeneous NLP tasks face three compounding problems: mismatched inductive biases, class-imbalance corruption of feature statistics, and no mechanism to condition attention on external lexical knowledge. We introduce \surgellm, a unified transformer framework that addresses each with a dedicated lightweight module: a surgical feature gate (learned per-dimension sigmoid over curated lexical indicators and \texttt{[CLS]}; provably degenerates to identity when features are uninformative), task-conditioned prefix tokens (quantized feature values and task identity prepended to every input), and Instance-Weighted Normalization (IWN; removes class-prior bias from gate statistics). We prove an excess-risk bound linking gate benefit to surgical feature alignment. Across four tasks, SST-2, multi-hop retrieval, LLM-prompt attribution, and authorship detection, covering 17,830 examples and eleven model variants over three seeds, the IWN variant achieves macro-F1 0.940 ($+0.036$ over the strongest non-IWN baseline; $+0.130$ on authorship detection). A random-vocabulary control ($-0.028$ avg.\ F1) confirms gains are lexical, not parametric. Code, vocabularies, and a $99.5\%$-recovery auto-extraction recipe are released.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

GLACIER: A Multimodal Student-Teacher Foundation Model for Molecular Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning models facilitate the discovery of molecules with tailored properties among billions of candidate compounds. However, the computational burden to develop and deploy state-of-the-art models continuously increases, limiting their scalability. Most large-scale models are unimodal in nature and overlook the potential to leverage complementary molecular data modalities. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces the Graph-Language Alignment for Chemical Inference and Exploration using Representations (GLACIER) model, a student-teacher framework that integrates molecular graphs, SMILES strings, and physicochemical descriptors to learn rich molecular embeddings. Our framework consists of three stages: (1) we pretrain three student encoders on 100,000 drug-like molecules: a message-passing neural network for molecular graphs, a transformer-based encoder for SMILES strings, and a multilayer perceptron for physicochemical descriptors, (2) we fuse these student modalities using a novel Finsler geometry-aware module, and (3) distill complementary knowledge from large teacher models, including MiniMol and MolFormer, into a single lightweight model via contrastive learning. We demonstrate that GLACIER is a robust framework that delivers high predictive performance and computational efficiency in complex molecular property prediction tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/eemokey/glacier.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Erasure cost of a quantum process: A thermodynamic meaning of the dynamical min-entropy

arXiv:2506.05307v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The erasure of information is fundamentally an irreversible logical operation, carrying profound consequences for the energetics of computation and information processing. We investigate the thermodynamic costs associated with erasing (and preparing) quantum processes. Specifically, we analyze an arbitrary bipartite unitary gate acting on logical and ancillary input-output systems, where the ancillary input is always initialized in the ground state. We focus on the adversarial erasure cost of the reduced dynamics - that is, the minimal thermodynamic work cost to erase the logical output of the gate for any logical input, assuming full access to the ancilla but no access to any purifying reference of the logical input state. We determine that this adversarial erasure cost is directly proportional to the negative min-entropy of the reduced dynamics, thereby giving the dynamical min-entropy a clear operational meaning. The dynamical min-entropy can take positive and negative values, depending on the underlying quantum dynamics. The negative value of the erasure cost implies that the extraction of thermodynamic work is possible instead of its consumption during the process. A key foundation of this result is the quantum process decoupling theorem, which quantitatively relates the decoupling ability of a process with its min-entropy. This insight bridges thermodynamics, information theory, and the fundamental limits of quantum computation.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ChartFI: Benchmarking Faithfulness and Insightfulness of Chart Descriptions from Multimodal Large Language Models

Chart descriptions are essential for accessibility, cross-modal retrieval, and assisting readers in extracting insights from complex visualizations. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly adopted for automated chart description generation, a critical question arises: how faithfully and insightfully do these models actually describe charts? Current benchmarks fall short on two fronts: existing datasets consist of simple, homogeneous charts paired with shallow, fact-enumerating descriptions; and prevailing metrics fail to capture the multi-faceted nature of description quality. To address these gaps, we present the Chart Faithfulness and Insightfulness Benchmark (ChartFI-Bench). We first summarize four dimensions that characterize high-quality chart descriptions: factual accuracy, salient feature emphasis, domain-informed guidance, and chart-text complementarity. Guided by these dimensions, we construct a high-quality benchmark comprising 896 chart-description pairs, which feature visually complex charts and semantically rich descriptions. Furthermore, we design four aligned evaluation metrics – Faithfulness, Coverage, Informativeness, and Acuity – to systematically assess the quality of descriptions across these dimensions. Experiments conducted on mainstream MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and reveal common weaknesses among existing models.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Pulling The REINS: Training-Free Safety Alignment of Video Diffusion Models via Representation Steering

Open-weight video diffusion models can generate photorealistic unsafe content, from violence to misinformation, yet existing defenses either require expensive safety fine-tuning that degrades general capability, or apply external filters that are trivially bypassed by adversarial prompts. We present REINS (REpresentation-space INference-time Safety steering), a training-free method that aligns video diffusion models at inference time by steering their internal representations toward safe generation. Our key finding is that safety-relevant structure is linearly encoded in the hidden-state activations of video diffusion transformers, and a single direction, discovered via Supervised PCA on binary safety labels, suffices to separate safe from unsafe generation trajectories. At inference, adding this direction to hidden states at an intermediate transformer layer redirects generation from harmful content to semantically related safe alternatives, with no weight updates, no concept enumeration, and negligible computational overhead. Through mechanistic analysis, we reveal that while safety information accumulates monotonically with transformer depth, steering effectiveness peaks at intermediate layers (~50% depth), exposing a fundamental tradeoff between information availability and downstream propagation capacity. We evaluate REINS across 9 video diffusion models, multiple parameter scales (1.3B-5B), and both text-to-video and image-to-video generation, to our knowledge, the broadest safety evaluation suite in the video generation literature.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Social networks and their association with quality of life among older adults in rural Burkina Faso

Objective: This study aimed to identify the types of social networks present among older adults in a rural, low-income country setting and describe their association with quality of life (QoL). Methods: A population-representative, cross-sectional survey was conducted in 60 villages around Nouna in Burkina Faso from July to August 2021. Data were collected from resident adults aged 40 years and older. Variables captured were sociodemographic status; social network characteristics (using the Practitioner Assessment of Network Typology (PANT)); quality of life (using the EuroHIS-8 tool); presence of non-communicable diseases, mental health conditions, and disability. Additionally, social networks were broadly categorised as aggregated integrated and aggregated less-integrated groups. Social network types and the groups were described separately, and a multivariable linear regression model was used to understand the association between social network types and QoL, adjusted for sociodemographic and morbidity factors. Results: Among the 2390 respondents, median age was 55 yrs (IQR: 47-64 yrs) and 55.8% were female. Locally Integrated (35.4%) or Family Dependent (30.3%) were the most common PANT social network types, followed by a mixed group (having characteristics of two or more social network types) (30.5%). Private Restricted (2.1%), Locally Self-Contained (1.2%), and Wider Community-Focussed (0.4%) types were uncommon. Adults with aggregated integrated network groups (36.1%) and aggregated less-integrated group (36.0%) were near equal, while others were non-aggregable. Although Wider Community-Focused type showed a significantly better QoL ({beta}= 8.69, 95%CI: 4.10 to 13.27), the association between social networks and QoL were subdued when controlled for morbidity factors, and hence no significant associations were observed between other types or the aggregated groups. Conclusion: Although having integrated social networks lead to a better QoL, morbidity has a greater effect on the QoL among older adults in Nouna and hence, investing more on improving the physical and mental health needs appears more beneficial.

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

Beyond Third-Person Audits: Situated Interaction Auditing for User-Centered LLM Bias Research

Research on bias in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on third-person audits, which study how models represent or evaluate demographic groups as external subjects. However, this paradigm overlooks a structural blind spot because the user is absent from the audit. In practice, LLMs are used in open-ended, personal interactions, during which the model implicitly represents the user and adjusts its responses accordingly. When identical requests yield different responses depending on who is asking, bias manifests not in how the model describes others but in how it treats its interlocutor. We propose Situated Interaction Auditing (SIA), a user-centered framework for studying how user profile signals – implicit sociodemographic markers, writing style, and stated identity – systematically shape LLM response quality, content, and tone. We demonstrate the framework through a case study that intersects gender and socioeconomic status signals across multiple task domains and outline a research agenda for SIA as a new mission for natural language processing.

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

Detecting AI Coding Agents in Open Source: A Validated Multi-Method Census of 180 Million Repositories

arXiv:2606.24429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI coding agents are entering the open-source supply chain, yet their diverse and often invisible traces leave their prevalence poorly understood. We introduce a multi-layered detection framework that integrates configuration-file scanning, commit-message analysis, author-identity matching, and bot-signature lookup across World of Code (180M+ Git repositories), classifying agent traces into four behavioral types. No single method captures more than a fraction of activity: multi-method detection identifies 850,157 Claude Code commits in one snapshot, of which bot-account lookup_the signal most adoption studies rely on_recovers only 28,154 (3.3%), a 30x relative-recall gap, so single-signal prevalence estimates are biased low by at least this factor. Every detection pattern is hand-validated (495 labels) with per-cell precision and Wilson confidence intervals. Across snapshots from December 2024 to April 2026, commit-attributed agents generate over 320,000 commits per month; Claude Code leads (886,122 commits across 17,295 projects) and dominates silent, configuration-file-only adoption (21,078 projects). Compared against an independent pull-request census (AIDev), the two channels capture nearly disjoint agent populations_a PR census misses 79% of commit-detected Claude Code adopters and essentially all Codex adopters_and different kinds of work: PR-deployed cloud agents (Codex, Cursor) surface as feature work, while commit-deployed in-editor agents (Claude Code, OpenHands, Aider) surface as maintenance. The observed work profile follows deployment and detection mode rather than the tool itself, so no single channel is representative.

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

GUI vs. CLI: Execution Bottlenecks in Screen-Only and Skill-Mediated Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2606.24551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents can execute software tasks through either graphical interfaces or programmatic command interfaces, but existing evaluations confound interaction modality with differences in tasks, initial states, verifiers, and permitted actions. We introduce a matched execution-layer benchmark of 440 desktop tasks across 18 applications and 12 workflow categories, where screen-only GUI agents and skill-mediated CLI agents receive identical goals, states, and final-state verifiers while being restricted to modality-native actions. In this controlled setting, the strongest GUI agent reaches a 59.1% full pass rate, outperforming the strongest original-skill CLI agent at 48.2%; however, verifier-guided skill augmentation raises CLI success to 69.3%, showing that much of the CLI deficit comes from incomplete skill coverage rather than model capability alone. These results suggest that GUI and CLI expose different execution bottlenecks: GUI agents are limited by reliable grounded interaction over long-horizon workflows, whereas CLI agents are limited by the coverage and scalability of their skill interfaces.

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

Does My Embedding Reflect That $A = B$? Evaluating Mathematical Equivalence in Embedding Models

Because mathematics is highly abstract, a single statement can take very different forms depending on what subfield it is framed in. There are many examples where breakthroughs occurred after researchers discovered that a question had already been answered in a different field. At the same time, the growth of new resources related to formalization has increased the need for tools that enable efficient and reliable navigation between mathematical 'languages' (e.g., from Lean to natural language). In this paper, we investigate whether current embedding models capture mathematical equivalence. To do this, we introduce the Mathematically Equivalent but Lexically Different Pairs (MELD) Dataset, a collection of mathematically equivalent statements that are expressed in very different language. We show that current state-of-the-art embedding models tend to group statements by the terminology used to make them instead of the underlying math. Motivated by this, we propose a contrastive approach to learning embeddings of mathematical text that focuses on aligning informal statements with different formalizations. Our experiments demonstrate that this leads to improvements not only on informal-formal retrieval tasks but also on MELD, which only contains natural language statements.