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

Robust Generation of Topological Biphoton Mode via Adiabatic Passage

arXiv:2606.19786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological waveguide arrays support robust mode propagation in the presence of fabrication imperfections, providing a significant advantage for on-chip quantum information processing. However, this robustness does not fully extend to nonlinear biphoton generation. Structural disorder can enhance the excitation of non-topological biphoton modes during nonlinear interactions, which degrades the quantum properties of the generated state. To overcome this limitation, we propose an adiabatic passage that connects an isolated site to a topological defect array. By initiating the nonlinear process in a strongly isolated regime, nonlinear coupling to unwanted modes is effectively suppressed, thereby preserving the Schmidt number of the generated state. The subsequent adiabatic connection facilitates the high fidelity transfer of the generated biphoton into the topological biphoton mode. Our numerical simulations demonstrate that, unlike conventional topological structures, the adiabatic scheme maintains both high biphoton fidelity and a unit Schmidt number in the presence of waveguide gap disorder. Furthermore, we show that this robustness extends to path entangled NOON states, achieving a near-unity quantum interference visibility. Our approach provides a practical design strategy for disorder-tolerant integrated quantum photonic devices.

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

From Specification to Execution: AI Assisted Scientific Workflow Management

arXiv:2606.18425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific workflow management systems (WMS) support scalable and reproducible execution of complex pipelines, but workflow design, implementation, and debugging remain largely manual and require significant expertise. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) show promise for workflow generation from natural language, but often rely on direct code synthesis, which limits transparency, reproducibility, and integration with workflow systems. We present an AI-assisted approach to scientific workflow management that combines specification-driven workflow generation, automated debugging, and distributed execution. The method introduces a structured specification phase that separates workflow intent, design, and implementation, allowing validation prior to code generation. We also develop an LLM-based debugging agent that diagnoses and resolves failures across multiple system layers. To support distributed execution and user interaction, we integrate Pegasus, a widely used WMS, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, providing a unified interface for workflow submission, monitoring, and control. We evaluate the approach using a federated learning workflow for medical imaging, chosen for its parallel, iterative, and dependency-intensive structure. The system generated and executed large-scale workflows with thousands of jobs, reduced debugging effort, and allowed non-expert users to construct workflows with expert-level design patterns. These results indicate that end-to-end AI-assisted workflow generation and execution is feasible, and point toward AI-driven platforms for managing the scientific workflow lifecycle.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Anterior-superior hypothalamic enlargement as specific marker in episodic migraine: converging evidence from an independent discovery-replication design

Background: Growing evidence implicates the hypothalamus as a key structure in migraine pathophysiology; however, our understanding of its precise role and of the specific nuclei involved remains limited. We combined MRI data from our laboratory with publicly available MRI datasets from OpenNeuro to examine hypothalamic subunit volumes in episodic migraine and assess the specificity of these alterations relative to chronic pain conditions. Methods: Structural MRI combined with an automated atlas-based segmentation algorithm and a discovery-replication design was employed to investigate cross-sectional volumetric differences across 5 bilateral hypothalamic subunits in two independent migraine cohorts: DS1-MIG (DS1-MIG-base, n = 111 patients, n = 35 controls) and DS2-MIG (n = 27 patients, n = 31 controls). The adjusted volumes were compared between groups using MANOVA as an omnibus test, followed by Welch t-tests to test univariate follow-up. Longitudinal volumetric changes were additionally assessed in DS1-MIG participants with available follow-up scans using linear mixed models. To assess the specificity of findings to migraine, the same pipeline was applied to two chronic pain datasets, one including patients with fibromyalgia (DS-FM, n = 33 patients, n = 33 controls) and the other including patients with trigeminal neuralgia (n = 119 patients, n = 55 controls). Results: MANOVA revealed significant multivariate group differences in the discovery and replication migraine cohorts (DS1-MIG-base: = .006; DS2-MIG: = .008). Follow-up univariate analyses identified a consistent enlargement of the left anterior-superior subunit across both cohorts (FDR = .023 in DS1-MIG-base and FDR = .046 in DS2-MIG), representing the only cross-cohort replication finding. Beyond this shared signature, DS2-MIG exhibited additional significant enlargements of the right anterior-inferior and right tubular-inferior subunits. Longitudinal analyses in DS1-MIG showed that hypothalamic subunit volumes remained broadly stable over time within both migraine patients and control participants. No significant volumetric alterations were detected in the fibromyalgia or trigeminal neuralgia cohorts, either in multivariate or univariate analyses, underscoring migraine-specific findings. Conclusions: These findings provide evidence for subunit-specific hypothalamic structural alterations in migraine localized in the left anterior hypothalamic subunit. The stability of these differences over time and their absence in other chronic pain conditions suggest a migraine-specific structural organisation of hypothalamic circuitry.

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

Multimodal Graph Negative Learning

arXiv:2606.12863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal attributed graphs (MAGs) integrate graph topology with heterogeneous modality attributes, such as text and images, thereby enabling richer modeling of complex relational systems. However, such expressiveness also makes learning on MAGs depend on multiple semantic sources, including structural topology, textual and visual attributes, each of which can be regarded as a branch for node representation. Node-level branch semantic imbalance arises when these branches differ across nodes in semantic informativeness and reliability: a branch that provides discriminative semantics for one node may mislead another due to bias in modality quality or structural context. Existing methods often mitigate such heterogeneity through cross-branch agreement or alignment, implicitly treating the dominant prediction as reliable supervision. When the dominant branch is biased, forced imitation may propagate its bias to other branches and suppress original semantics that are useful for classification. We propose GraphMNL, a graph-aware multimodal negative learning framework that addresses this issue by using Negative Learning as cross-branch guidance. Instead of forcing inferior branches to imitate a teacher prediction, the model teaches them which classes a node is unlikely to belong to. GraphMNL builds a branch library, identifies dominant and inferior branches via graph-aware reliability arbitration, gates unstable transfer, and applies target-preserving negative learning over non-target classes. This design decouples target supervision from branch guidance so that supervised losses learn the correct class, while Negative Learning suppresses unlikely alternatives when branch agreement is unreliable. Through the comprehensive experimental evaluation, GraphMNL achieves the best performance on Grocery datasets with 72.47% accuracy and 76.60 F1 score on Reddit M datasets.

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

Adjusted Cup-Product Neural Layer

arXiv:2606.13568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many important observables in physics and geometry are cup products of cochains. The adjusted cup product neural layer has been introduced in this paper. It is a neural primitive that hard wires the cup product with an adjustment term from higher gauge theory. This creates a readout that is gauge invariant by design. Their main theoretical result shows that on a closed cycle the output relies entirely on the adjustment coefficient. Setting this coefficient to zero removes the output completely regardless of other parameters. Thus the adjustment is the only source of gauge invariant signal. They prove this observable is a nonzero quadratic form and is exactly invariant under one and two gauge transformations.

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

When Should Agent Trust Be Conditional? Characterizing and Attacking Skill-Conditional Reputation in Agent Swarms

arXiv:2606.14200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open platforms increasingly route tasks among heterogeneous LLM agents–differing in base model, scaffold, and tool stack–whose competence varies sharply by skill: an agent excellent at one skill may be useless at another. The standard reputation approach summarizes each agent by a single global trust score, but that scalar is the wrong object here, because routing every task to the globally most-trusted agent leaves the value of specialization unclaimed. We study skill-conditional trust R(i | k)–the trust to place in agent i for a task requiring skill k, rather than one score per agent–and pose three falsifiable questions: when is conditioning worth it, how much cross-skill evidence should be borrowed, and whether that borrowing is safe. A controlled phase-diagram analysis answers the first two: conditional trust wins only in a specific regime–high agent heterogeneity, sparse per-skill evidence, and correlated skills–and the coupling strength beta that buys this data efficiency is dual-use, because the same cross-skill borrowing is also a laundering channel. On a public benchmark of 14 genuinely heterogeneous AppWorld agents, real pools land inside the beneficial regime–a small but genuine gain, with the per-skill best agent genuinely changing across skills. We then show that an attacker with cheap evidence in one skill and none in a target skill hijacks the conditional router, driving routing regret from 0 to 0.94 on a pool our zero-cost Conditional Information Value Test (CIVT) rates GREEN–while the ungated trust verdict it contaminates reads -0.06 instead of the honest +0.19. A zero-evidence gate bounds the attack but does not eliminate it; we characterize the residual cost under an explicit budget. We do not claim Sybil-resistance–we quantify the trade-off.

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

No One Knows the State of the Art in Geospatial Foundation Models

Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) have been proposed as generalizable backbones for disaster response, land-cover mapping, food-security monitoring, and other high-stakes Earth-observation tasks. Yet the published work about these models does not give reviewers or users enough information to tell which model fits a given task. We argue that nobody knows what the current state of the art is in geospatial foundation models. The methods may be useful, but the GFM literature does not standardize evaluations, training and testing protocols, released weights, or pretraining controls well enough for anyone to compare or rank them. In a 152-paper audit, we find 46 cross-paper disagreements of at least 10 points for the same model, benchmark, and protocol; 94/126 papers with extractable pretraining data use a configuration no other paper uses; and 39% of GFM papers release no model weights. This lack of community standards can be solved. We propose six concrete expectations: named-license weight release, shared core evaluations, copied-versus-rerun baseline annotations, variance reporting, one shared evaluation harness, and data-vs-architecture-vs-algorithm controls. These gaps are a coordination failure, not a fault of any individual lab; the authors of this paper, like many others in the GFM community, have contributed to them. Rather than just critiquing the community, we aim to provide concrete steps toward a shared understanding of how to innovate GFMs.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

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

Agentic Retrieval and Reinforcement Learned Equation Chains: A Controlled Generation Framework for Complex and Novel Physics Word Problems

Generating high-quality Physics Word Problems (PWPs) that are novel, complex, and solvable remains a challenging and underexplored problem in educational content generation. Existing approaches, many adapted from Math Word Problem (MWP) generation, often produce ambiguous, unsolvable, or structurally simple questions with limited linguistic diversity. We introduce ARVRE (Agentic Retrieval Value Reinforced Equation-chain), a two-stage framework for generating diverse and mathematically valid PWPs. In the first stage, a form of offline temporal-difference learning is used to construct valid chains of physics equations, while an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework dynamically selects topic-specific concepts and vocabulary. This design enables explicit control over problem structure and difficulty. In the second stage, a Large Language Model (LLM) converts the equation chain and retrieved concepts into a natural-language physics question. By grounding generation in valid equation chains, our method preserves mathematical correctness while promoting linguistic diversity and contextual richness. Human and automated evaluations demonstrate that ARVRE generates PWPs that are more complex, novel, and solvable than those produced by existing approaches. These results highlight the potential of combining reinforcement learning, retrieval, and LLMs for reliable generation of educational physics content.

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

Text region detection in historical astronomical diagrams

Text detection is a crucial task in the analysis of historical documents. While datasets and benchmarks exist for text detection in manuscripts and maps, the study of text in mathematical diagrams has received little attention. To address this, we introduce a large-scale, diverse, open-access dataset of 948 historical astronomical diagrams containing 10,940 oriented polygonal text regions. Our dataset spans ten centuries (8th to 18th) and seven main linguistic traditions: Arabic and Persian (115), Chinese (332), Byzantine (233), Latin (185), Hebrew (48), and Sanskrit (35). It captures a wide range of diagram styles and textual content, from symbols to multi-line paragraphs. Each text instance is annotated with ordered polygons that precisely delineate text regions and encode the reading direction. In addition, we annotated the 2,293 regions in Latin diagrams with 20 class labels. We evaluated several strong baselines on our dataset, including TESTR, DeepSolo++, and Poly-DETR, a simple extension of DINO-DETR that we design to predict ordered polygon vertices. Poly-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MTHv2 and cBAD2019 benchmarks and provides a solid, simple baseline on our dataset. Code and dataset available online.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

From Construction to Injection: Edit-Based Fingerprints for Large Language Models

Reliable model fingerprints are essential for protecting large language models (LLMs) against unauthorized redistribution and commercial misuse. In black-box deployment, verification is hindered by defensive filtering of suspected fingerprint queries, as well as by downstream model modifications that may weaken embedded ownership evidence. These risks require fingerprints to be robust in both construction and injection. For construction, prior paradigms face an imperceptibility trade-off: natural-language fingerprints may be accidentally activated, whereas garbled fingerprints are statistically exposed and easier to filter. For injection, existing methods struggle to preserve persistent trigger–target behaviors under model modification. We propose an end-to-end injected fingerprinting framework to address these challenges. Code-mixing Fingerprints (CF) use lowest-perplexity code-mixing under a high-complexity constraint to mitigate this two-sided imperceptibility trade-off. Multi-Candidate Editing (MCEdit) constructs structurally redundant, margin-separated trigger–target mappings to enable graceful degradation under model modification. Extensive evaluations on imperceptibility, detectability, and harmlessness demonstrate robust ownership verification with negligible impact on utility.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A Collective-Spin Derivation of the Uniform Magnon Hamiltonian in Cavity Magnonics

arXiv:2606.13830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a direct collective-spin derivation of the effective uniform-mode Hamiltonian used in cavity magnonics. Starting from a nearest-neighbor Heisenberg ferromagnet coupled to long-wavelength magnetic fields, we show that the relevant dynamics can be restricted to the fully symmetric spin sector, where the exchange interaction contributes only a constant energy shift and the ferromagnet behaves as a macrospin of length $Ns$. Applying the Holstein–Primakoff transformation directly to this total spin yields the usual uniform magnon mode and its leading nonlinear corrections without first introducing site-resolved bosonic operators. This collective formulation makes explicit the interpretation of the ferromagnet as a synthetic large-spin atom and provides a compact route to the effective Hamiltonians used in driven and Floquet cavity magnonics. As a physical consequence, the leading nonlinear correction produces an occupation-dependent reduction of the effective magnon–photon coupling, providing a simple signature of finite-spin saturation under strong uniform-mode driving.

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

Visored: A Controlled-Natural-Language Prover for LLM-Generated Mathematics

arXiv:2606.17581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a dependent-type-based prover designed around the way LLMs (and humans) tend to write mathematics, complementing existing systems such as Lean and Rocq. Its core design choices are a surface that imitates mathematical natural language and a rule-driven automation layer that closes the routine steps a textbook would omit, so that an accepted proof can be re-emitted as a checked Lean file. Early experiments suggest that, even without any prover-specific training data, LLMs can learn to use it effectively on the miniF2F benchmark. Lean output excerpts: https://github.com/xiyuzhai-husky-lang/visored/

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

Robustness Verification of Recurrent Neural Networks with Abstraction Refinement

arXiv:2606.12490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Certified local robustness verification for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is challenging because approximation errors introduced by nonlinear relaxations can propagate through recurrent connections and accumulate over time. As a result, scalable linear bound propagation methods often become overly conservative and fail to certify inputs that are in fact robust, especially when many pre-activation intervals cross zero. We propose an abstraction-refinement framework for RNN verification that partitions such intervals to remove the dominant relaxation error: on each refined branch, ReLU becomes exact, and smooth activations such as tanh and sigmoid admit substantially tighter linear envelopes. To control the combinatorial cost of splitting in long sequences, we introduce a SHAP-guided timestep selection strategy that ranks hidden states by their contribution to the verification objective and refines only the most critical timesteps in temporal order. Experiments on CIFAR10 and MNIST stroke benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in verification success and robustness-margin tightness over abstraction-only baselines, while exposing clear runtime trade-offs between ReLU and tanh models.

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

SGFormer++: Semantic Graph Transformer for Incremental 3D Scene Graph Generation

In this paper, we propose SGFormer++, a novel Semantic Graph Transformer for 3D scene graph generation (SGG), which aims to parse point cloud scenes into semantic structural graphs, where nodes denote detected object instances and edges encode their pairwise relationships, with the core challenge lying in modeling complex global scene structure. While existing graph convolutional network (GCN)-based methods suffer from over-smoothing and limited receptive fields, SGFormer++ leverages Transformer layers as its backbone to enable global message passing. Specifically, we introduce two key components tailored for 3D SGG: (1) a Graph Embedding Layer++ that efficiently integrates edge-aware global context with linear computational complexity, and (2) a Semantic Injection Layer++ that enriches visual features with linguistic priors from large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), boosting semantic representation without introducing extra trainable parameters. To further address the practical challenge of incremental SGG (I-SGG), where new relationship categories arrive sequentially, we equip SGFormer++ with a novel Spatial-guided Feature Adapter, which calibrates predicate features using subject-object spatial geometry to counter scale variation, and a Cascaded Binary Prediction Head that mitigates catastrophic forgetting via task-incremental classifier expansion and logit distillation. Extensive experiments on the 3DSSG benchmark demonstrate that SGFormer++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both standard and incremental settings: it yields a significant 4.49% absolute improvement in Predicate A@1 under the incremental setting. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Andy20178/SGFormer.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tungsten Germanide Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors with Saturated Internal Detection Efficiency at Wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m

arXiv:2511.20868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are among the most sensitive single-photon detectors available and have the potential to transform fields ranging from infrared astrophysics to molecular spectroscopy. However, extending their performance into the mid-infrared spectral region - crucial for applications such as exoplanet transit spectroscopy and vibrational fingerprinting of molecules - has remained a major challenge, primarily due to material limitations and scalability constraints. Here, we report on the development of SNSPDs based on tungsten germanide, a novel material system that combines high mid-infrared sensitivity with compatibility for large-scale fabrication. Our detectors exhibit saturated internal detection efficiency at wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m, while using 2.7x thicker films (8 nm vs 3 nm) and up to 4.5x wider nanowires (360 nm vs 80 nm) compared to mid-infrared-optimized SNSPDs fabricated from tungsten silicide. This advance will enable scalable, high-performance single-photon detection in a spectral region that was previously inaccessible, opening new frontiers in remote sensing, thermal imaging, environmental monitoring, molecular physics, and astronomy.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Scalable estimation of temporal clustering in accelerometry: a kernel-independent dispersion index grounded in the Hawkes process

Background. Self-exciting (Hawkes) point processes are a natural model for the temporal clustering of human physical activity (PA) recorded by accelerometers, yet they have seldom been used in this setting—in part because the usual maximum-likelihood fitting is challenging due to potential estimation bias and convergence failures on these data. A moment-based alternative—estimating the Hawkes branching ratio from the dispersion index, the variance-to-mean ratio of event counts—is kernel-independent and computationally trivial, but it has not been evaluated for accelerometry or adapted to the intensity-marked recordings accelerometers provide. Methods. Treating each minute above a sedentary threshold as an event, we estimated the Hawkes branching ratio $n$ by maximum likelihood and, as a kernel-independent and far cheaper alternative, from the dispersion index. We compared four dispersion-based estimators—event-count-based, intensity-mark-weighted using the mark-moment ratio, and time-of-day (TOD) adjusted variants of each—against the marked and unmarked maximum-likelihood estimates. Estimators were evaluated for mutual agreement, goodness of fit, and finite-window results in two National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) accelerometry cohorts (hip-worn, $n=2{,}560$; wrist-worn, $n=3{,}132$). We related the resulting temporal clustering measures to all-cause mortality using survey-weighted Cox models, adjusting for PA frequency, Peak30 (the average of the 30 highest PA values), and demographic covariates. Results. Event-count-based dispersion estimates agreed strongly with maximum-likelihood branching ratios ($rapprox0.74$ in both cohorts); the intensity-marked variant incorporating PA intensity variability agreed less well. Marked and unmarked Hawkes models yielded similar excitation and decay parameters, suggesting PA intensity added little clustering information beyond event timing. In the survival analysis, temporal clustering was associated with all-cause mortality independently of PA frequency and Peak30; the direction of association differed between the hip- and wrist-worn cohorts. Conclusions. A scalable dispersion-index estimator recovers the Hawkes branching ratio and matches maximum-likelihood estimates without requiring kernel specification or iterative optimization. It offers a practical tool for quantifying temporal clustering in accelerometry, enabling decomposition of temporal PA patterns into its exogenous initiation and endogenous persistence. Such temporal patterns carry health-relevant information beyond PA intensity and volume. Keywords: dispersion index; Hawkes process; branching ratio; temporal clustering; point process estimation; accelerometry; mortality

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CausalDrive: Real-time Causal World Models for Autonomous Driving

World models have emerged as a promising paradigm for scaling autonomous driving (AD) data, yet existing video generative models fall short as interactive simulators. Layout-conditioned renderers rely on "oracle" future trajectories of all background agents, rendering them strictly non-reactive. Conversely, pure action-conditioned predictors lack semantic control over complex interactions and suffer from prohibitive diffusion latencies, hindering closed-loop policy learning. To bridge this gap, we present CausalDrive, a controllable, real-time foundation driving world renderer. CausalDrive operates solely on the initial front-view frame, the ego-vehicle's trajectory, and a macroscopic text prompt. By excluding future NPC layouts, we compel the model to intrinsically predict causal interactions, enabling text-driven control over Driving Sociology, allowing users to dynamically orchestrate diverse counterfactual reactions to identical ego-actions. To overcome the efficiency bottleneck and address the covariate shift in autoregressive generation, we propose a novel Context-Forced DMD architecture. This combines continuous flow-matching with a self-correcting distillation objective, achieving interactive speeds of 12 FPS. This breakthrough transforms the passive video generator into a playable neural simulator. We demonstrate its versatility across three downstream applications: (1) generative closed-loop evaluation with significantly mitigated collision artifacts, (2) large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training driven by a Video2Reward module, and (3) real-time human-in-the-loop simulation. Extensive experiments validate that policies trained within CausalDrive's reactive scenarios exhibit superior interaction capabilities in the real world.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

The Pound-Drever-Hall Method for Superconducting-Qubit Readout

arXiv:2512.03138v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling quantum computers to large sizes requires the implementation of many parallel qubit readouts. Here we present an ultrastable superconducting-qubit readout method using the multi-tone self-phase-referenced Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) technique, originally developed for use with optical cavities. In this work, we benchmark PDH readout of a single transmon qubit, using room-temperature heterodyne detection of all tones to reconstruct the PDH signal. We demonstrate that PDH qubit readout is insensitive to microwave phase drift, displaying $0.73^\circ$ phase stability over 2 hours, and capable of single-shot readout in the presence of phase errors exceeding the phase shift induced by the qubit state. We show that the PDH sideband tones do not cause unwanted measurement-induced state transitions for a transmon qubit, leading to a potential signal enhancement of at least $14$~dB.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Quantum Transition State

Authors:

arXiv:2606.10266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The transition state – the critical configuration separating reactants from products – is the central organizing concept of chemical reaction rate theory, yet for nearly a century it has been thought to have no exact quantum counterpart: the recrossing-free, one-way flux through a transition state appears to demand simultaneous knowledge of position and momentum, in conflict with the uncertainty principle. We show this obstruction is illusory and construct the quantum transition state directly from the exact quantum flow. Its stable and unstable invariant manifolds intersect in a unique bounded trajectory – the quantum transition-state trajectory – anchoring a moving dividing surface that each reactive characteristic crosses exactly once, yielding a one-way flux of the standard quantum probability current. The geometric framework underlying classical transition-state theory thus survives intact in exact quantum mechanics, in a fundamentally quantum form.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SalArt-VQA: Diagnosing Whether VLMs Understand Salient Artifacts in Generated Images

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.

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

The Complexity of Min-Max Optimization for Quadratic Polynomials

arXiv:2606.17000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove that computing approximate stationary points of min-max optimization over the hypercube is PPAD-hard for quadratic polynomials. This holds even when the polynomials are multilinear, each variable appears in at most three monomials, and the approximation factor is inverse polynomial. As a direct consequence, we obtain the first PPAD-hardness results for two-team zero-sum polymatrix games.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin mixing induced dynamics of spinor solitons in $F=1$ Bose Einstein condensates

arXiv:2606.14231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We explore soliton interactions in a homogeneous spinor $F=1$ Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC) in the presence of a magnetic field, focusing on dark bright dark and bright dark bright configurations. We investigate how these interactions depend on the phase differences among bright solitons and their influence during the dynamics. Our findings align with prior non spinor results, i.e., repulsion among in phase bright solitons and attraction among out of phase pairs in self repulsive atomic BECs. The potential bright soliton attraction, added to the short range repulsion of dark dark soliton interactions, can lead to bound states. However, we find that these bound states break in the presence of spinor interactions due to the particle exchange dynamics between the hyperfine states of the components. Additonally, we develop an effective classical model to describe the soliton dynamics, using a Lagrangian approach. The accuracy of the model is tested by comparing it against numerical simulations. Our results suggest that the proposed model captures the essential features of soliton behavior in the presence of spin interactions, and provides congruent soliton trajectories and interspecies particle exchange dynamics in most of the cases.