Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15033

Cloze: An Open Research Platform for Studying Human-AI Conversations in Mental Health Contexts

Authors:

Matthew Flathers↗Francesco Cipriani↗John Torous↗

Cloze is an open-source web platform for conducting controlled, monitored studies of human-AI conversation in mental health research contexts. Consumer large language model (LLM) products such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built for individual productivity, and offer researchers little experimental control, inconsistent data export, and no shared safety scaffolding that holds across providers. Cloze gives research teams a single environment in which they configure which models participants converse with, how the AI is instructed, how conversations are scheduled over time, and which safety constraints apply unconditionally, while every message is captured with full provenance (model version, prompt configuration, timing). The platform currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and locally hosted open-weight models served through Ollama behind a unified interface, and runs in the cloud or fully on premises so that participant data need never leave an institution. Cloze is research infrastructure for building an evidence base on human-AI interaction in mental health contexts. It is not a therapeutic product.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13016

Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer

Authors:

Zhanglu Yan↗Jiayi Mao↗Kaiwen Tang↗Fanfan Li↗Gang Pan↗Tao Luo↗Bowen Zhu↗Qianhui Liu↗Weng-Fai Wong↗

arXiv:2606.13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once. In practice, however, this benefit is often reduced by the cost of computing a temporal decay term and multiplying it by the synaptic weight. We address this issue by turning a physical hardware "bug," the natural signal decay in optoelectronic devices, into the main computation of TTFS, named Otters++. Specifically, we use the measured decay of a custom In$_2$O$_3$ optoelectronic synapse to directly realize the TTFS temporal term, removing the need for explicit digital decay computation. To scale this idea to Transformer models, we establish a layer-wise functional equivalence between the Otters++ and a quantized neural network (QNN), and develop a hybrid training method that uses device-faithful SNN computation in the forward pass and QNN straight-through gradients through the equivalent QNN path in the backward pass, together with model distillation. This avoids differentiation through discrete first-spike events and reduces the over-sparsity problem in direct TTFS-SNN training. We further make training aware of measured device noise by sampling run-to-run variation, and refine the system-level energy model by accounting for device sharing and multi-hop communication. On GLUE dataset, Otters++ improves the average score to 84.17\% while maintaining a clear energy advantage over prior spiking Transformer baselines. These results show that physically grounded TTFS computing can be efficient, trainable, and robust under realistic hardware effects.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2602.04401

Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place Recognition

Authors:

Dhyey Manish Rajani↗Michael Milford↗Tobias Fischer↗

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.

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04.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:f5d8865f0d6cb6fee4e8a106c7c18add

Morpho-FM: spatial molecular reconstruction from routine H&E histology using transcriptomic foundation-model priors

Authors:

Huang↗J.-J↗Feng↗Qu↗L.-H↗Zheng↗L.-L↗

Routine haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histology captures tissue architecture at clinical scale, but lacks a direct molecular readout of the transcriptional programmes that organise tumour epithelium, stroma, vasculature and immune compartments. Spatial transcriptomics provides this context, yet cost, workflow complexity and sparse sampling limit routine use. Most existing histology-to-expression models are trained de novo on small paired cohorts and therefore remain weakly constrained when extrapolating from sparse measurements to dense, tissue-wide molecular maps. Here we introduce Morpho-FM, a weakly supervised framework that predicts spatial gene expression from routine H&E whole-slide images by conditioning a pretrained single-cell transcriptomic foundation-model prior on local histological neighbourhoods. A lightweight morphology-to-transcriptome adapter maps cached whole-slide histology features into a transcriptomic decoder, enabling prediction at measured locations, dense full-section reconstruction, and re-aggregation to the original measurement support. Across harmonized prostate cancer benchmarks, Morpho-FM achieved the strongest overall performance among five representative methods, reaching mean per-gene Pearson correlations of 0.286 in rotating single-slide evaluation and 0.298 in multi-slide held-out validation. The framework reproduced this advantage across kidney cancer sections, achieved a mean correlation of 0.210 across 56 directed single-slide evaluations and retained measurable predictive signal after external transfer to clear-cell renal cell carcinoma sections. Controlled ablation analyses identified pretrained transcriptomic initialization as a reproducible source of performance gain exceeding that attributable to changes in the histology feature backbone. Beyond predictive accuracy benchmarks, Morpho-FM recovered ERBB2-enriched tumour compartments, boundary-associated molecular gradients, and annotation-aligned tissue domains across Xenium and HER2ST breast cancer datasets. Together, these results support transcriptomic foundation-model priors as an effective constraint for morphology-conditioned molecular decoding and demonstrate the potential of Morpho-FM to extend spatial transcriptomic insight across routine pathology sections.

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05.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17517

Killed resolvents and measure-valued stopping gains for reflected optimal stopping with max-type rewards

Authors:

Louis Shuo Wang↗Jiguang Yu↗Ye Liang↗

arXiv:2606.17517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study an infinite-horizon optimal stopping problem for a normally reflected two-dimensional diffusion in the positive quadrant with nonsmooth max-type reward \(G(x_1,x_2)=x_1\vee \alpha x_2\). The paper develops a conditional measure-theoretic framework for the associated reflected obstacle problem. The main innovation is to show that the stopping gain \(\Gamma=c+rG-\mathcal LG\) is a signed measure, not a function: the kink of \(G\) generates an explicit negative surface measure on \(\Delta=\{x_1=\alpha x_2\}\). We then prove that the correct potential representation uses the resolvent of the reflected diffusion killed on first entry into the stopping set, rather than the unrestricted reflected resolvent. Under explicit monotonicity, regularity, and measure-superharmonicity assumptions, we derive an epigraph representation, a continuation-side boundary-trace condition, and a candidate verification theorem. The framework clarifies hidden regularity and uniqueness assumptions in multidimensional nonsmooth optimal stopping.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16278

RealityBridge: Bridging Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting Driving Simulations and Real-World Videos

Authors:

Zhenhua Wu↗Yun Pang↗Mingkun Chang↗Yuwei Ning↗Liangzhi Wang↗Yi Xiao↗Guanbin Li↗

Long-tail hazardous scenarios are essential for safety-oriented autonomous driving, yet they are difficult to collect and reproduce at scale. Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) simulation offers a promising alternative by reconstructing real driving scenes and supporting controllable scene editing. However, edited 3DGS-rendered videos still suffer from a significant Sim-to-Real gap, including rendering artifacts, degraded foreground assets, inconsistent illumination, and temporal flickering. Existing restoration and video generation methods are insufficient for this task, as they often fail to jointly repair 3DGS-specific artifacts, improve visual realism, and ensure temporal consistency. To fill this gap, we propose RealityBridge, a structure-preserving and asset-aware Sim-to-Real framework for edited 3DGS driving videos. RealityBridge uses multimodal controls, including rendered videos, foreground masks, edge maps, and semantic masks, together with a lightweight GateNet for adaptive condition allocation across backbone layers. We further construct targeted training data and introduce autoregressive long-video training with reward-guided post-training to improve restoration quality, temporal stability, and hallucination suppression. Extensive experiments on internal and public driving datasets show that RealityBridge outperforms existing methods in artifact removal, illumination harmonization, and long-sequence temporal consistency.

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07.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2503.18045

Ergodicity for stochastic 2D Boussinesq equations with a highly degenerate pure jump Levy noise

Authors:

Jianhua Huang↗Xuhui Peng↗Xue Wang↗Jiangwei Zhang↗

arXiv:2503.18045v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study aims to analyze the ergodicity for stochastic 2D Boussinesq equations and explore the impact of a highly degenerate pure jump L\'{e}vy noise acting only in the temperature equation, where this noise could appear on only a few Fourier modes. By leveraging the equi-continuity of the semigroup established through Malliavin calculus and an analysis of stochastic calculus, together with the weak irreducibility of the solution process, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the invariant measure. Moreover, we overcome the main challenge of establishing time asymptotic smoothing properties of the Markovian dynamics corresponding to this system by conducting spectral analysis of the Malliavin covariance matrix.

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08.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11731

Quantum Correlation Hierarchy and Teleportation in Dephased Hydrogen Hyperfine System

Authors:

Geerthana Thiyagarajan↗R. Muthuganesan↗

arXiv:2606.11731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of quantum correlations in the hydrogen hyperfine spin system subject to Markovian phase noise. Treating the electron and proton spin degrees of freedom as an open two-qubit system governed by an isotropic hyperfine Hamiltonian and local dephasing, we obtain the exact time-dependent density matrix and derive analytical expressions for the full X-state family. We compute concurrence($C$), trace-distance measurement-induced nonlocality (Trace MIN–$\mathcal{N}_1$), and average steering coherence (ASC) in closed form and establish their strict ordering $ C(t)\leq \mathcal{N}_1(t)\leq \mathrm{ASC}(t) $ at all times. Entanglement is identified as the most fragile resource, undergoing sudden death at a finite time. Trace MIN exhibits dephasing-immune freezing for states with nonzero population imbalance, while ASC is the most robust quantity, persisting longest in every scenario studied.We additionally demonstrate that the dephased thermal hyperfine state serves as a resource for quantum teleportation, deriving a closed-form expression for the average fidelity and establishing that the teleportation advantage window coincides exactly with the entanglement survival interval, $\mathcal{F}_A > 2/3 \Longleftrightarrow \mathcal{C} > 0$, for the full X-state family with maximally mixed marginals. We identify four distinct dynamical regimes and map all three correlation measures onto directly measurable Pauli spin correlators, enabling experimental reconstruction of the full hierarchy without full state tomography.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.09830

Automated Scoring of Arabic Text Using Large Language Models: A Literature Review

Authors:

Khaoula Dahimi↗Hadda Cherroun↗Amel Belabbaci↗

In modern educational systems, Automatic Text Scoring (ATS) plays a central role by enabling scalable and consistent evaluation of learner responses without human intervention. Recently, the increased accessibility of LLMs and Arabic-specific datasets has sparked renewed interest in this area. In this work, we investigate LLM-Based approaches for the automated evaluation of Arabic texts, focusing on both short answer grading (ASAG) and essay scoring (AES). We further introduce a structured taxonomy comprising five dimensions: application domain, feedback generation capability, LLM architecture deployed, alignment with competency referential frameworks, and prompt engineering strategy. By applying this taxonomy, we conduct a comparative analysis of existing studies, examining their methodological approaches, datasets, evaluation metrics, and reported performance. The findings highlight the need for sustained and pedagogically grounded research efforts in Arabic ATS, given its significance for improving educational quality across Arabic-speaking communities.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24440

Perfect State Transfer on Quotient Graphs in Shunt Decomposition-Based Quantum Walks

Authors:

Banita Katuwal↗Srinath M S↗Y Lakshmi Naidu↗Supriyo Dutta↗

arXiv:2606.24440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates perfect state transfer (PST) in discrete-time quantum walks constructed via the shunt decomposition method. The walks are defined on a graph $G$ and its associated quotient graph $G/\pi$, induced by an equitable partition $\pi$. Through the shunt decomposition of $G$, we derive an explicit relation between the shift operator of the parent graph $G$ and that of its quotient graph $G/\pi$. We construct a reflection operator based on the characteristic matrix, which establishes a connection between the transition operator of the parent graph and that of its lower-dimensional quotient graph. We then prove that PST occurs on $G$ if and only if it occurs on $G/\pi$. Furthermore, we express the unitary evolution operator of the quotient graph in terms of Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind, from which we derive explicit criteria for PST. As an application, we establish PST on the cycle graph $C_{n}$ at time $k = n/2$, and lift the result to the parent graph $C_{2n}$ via the equitable partition $\pi$. We further show that if an equitable partition $\pi$ of $G$ induces a quotient isomorphic to $K_n^{\circlearrowleft}$, the complete digraph on $n$ vertices with a loop at every vertex, then PST occurs at step $k = n$, and the walk is periodic at $k = 2n$. This framework is applied to two families of graphs, which are the complete bipartite digraph $K_{n,n}^{\rightleftharpoons}$ and the circulant graph $\operatorname{Circ}(2n, S)$, where $S$ consists of all odd residues modulo $2n$ and $n = 2^s$ for some $s \geq 1$, establishing PST in their respective line digraphs. Collectively, these results also answer the question posed by Godsil and Zhan concerning which shunt decompositions or embeddings of a graph admit PST.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15772

Ellipse Meets Bit-Planes: A Novel Approach to RNFL based Glaucoma Detection Using Advanced Image Processing and Deep Learning

Authors:

Snigdha Paul↗Sambit Mallick↗Anindya Sen↗

This work proposes an integrated pipeline for automatic glaucoma detection method from easily available colour fundas images based on an adaptive algorithm for ellipse-based polar transformation, to enhance the analysis of the Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer (RNFL) as the primary biomarker for observing glaucomatous changes, regardless of optic disc and macula position. Utilizing this transformation, we introduce two distinct frameworks tailored to different operational needs. The first framework, a deep learning-inspired feature fusion approach, achieves a 99.3% detection rate, ideal for settings where high precision is essential, despite higher computational demands. The second framework employs a novel image-processing algorithm based on bit-plane slicing, offering 92.31% accuracy and optimized for environments requiring rapid inference with minimal resource consumption. Both frameworks provide scalable and cost-effective solutions for early glaucoma detection. This study highlights the potential of RNFL-based diagnostic tools in addressing the global challenge of glaucoma, particularly in underserved regions.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18658

On-Manifold Variational Learning with Heat-Kernel Priors

Authors:

Jiarui Xing↗Tal Zeevi↗Nian Wu↗Jian Wang↗

Learning unsupervised representations of medical imaging cohorts can reveal clinically meaningful prototypes without expert labels, which are often noisy and fail to capture true pathological heterogeneity. However, existing deep latent-variable models estimate Gaussian mixture priors via Euclidean averaging, producing prototypes that drift off the curved data manifold and degenerate as the number of sub-populations grows. We propose a manifold-anchored variational framework built on a geometry-aware Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, whose M-step selects each sub-population prototype as the graph medoid with the highest diffusion centrality on a heat-kernel-weighted latent graph, ensuring that every prototype remains on-manifold. A Dirichlet energy regularizer enforces geometric smoothness of the latent space, and a per-sub-population uncertainty score enables label-free quality assessment. \rev{The manifold-anchored EM is a general-purpose geometric tool that extends standard EM and applies readily to other latent-variable models beyond this setting.} On cardiac scar and brain MRI benchmarks, our framework attains the highest accuracy among all compared methods, produces the sharpest prototypes reported to date, and remains stable at large sub-population counts where all baselines degenerate.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11425

JailbreakOPT: Tool-Assisted Iterative Jailbreak Prompt Optimization

Authors:

Ge Shi↗Jun Yin↗Donglin Xie↗Fangyi Liu↗Yucan Li↗Menglin Liu↗

arXiv:2606.11425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks expose persistent safety weaknesses in large language models (LLMs), but existing stateless single-turn methods face a trade-off: hand-crafted prompts are expressive but static, while iterative prompt optimization can adapt but often relies on low-level mutations that require many target queries. We propose JailbreakOPT, a tool-assisted framework for improving iterative single-turn jailbreak prompt optimization. JailbreakOPT organizes diverse atomic jailbreak prompts into an attack tool library and composes them through a unified intra-episode optimization abstraction to generate stronger standalone attack prompts. To reuse experience across attack episodes, JailbreakOPT further frames tool selection as a contextual bandit problem and applies contextual Thompson sampling to guide exploration and exploitation based on past outcomes. Experiments across multiple target LLMs and attack goals show that JailbreakOPT improves attack success rate (ASR) while reducing the number of attacks until success (No.A) compared with atomic single-turn attacks and existing iterative optimization baselines. This paper may contain offensive or harmful content.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2504.21561

Iterative Tool Usage Exploration for Multimodal Agents via Step-wise Preference Tuning

Authors:

Pengxiang Li↗Zhi Gao↗Bofei Zhang↗Yapeng Mi↗Xiaojian Ma↗Chenrui Shi↗Tao Yuan↗Yuwei Wu↗Yunde Jia↗Song-Chun Zhu↗Qing Li↗

Multimodal agents, which integrate a controller e.g., a vision language model) with external tools, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Existing approaches for training these agents, both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, depend on extensive human-annotated task-answer pairs and tool trajectories. However, for complex multimodal tasks, such annotations are prohibitively expensive or impractical to obtain. In this paper, we propose an iterative tool usage exploration method for multimodal agents without any pre-collected data, namely SPORT, via step-wise preference optimization to refine the trajectories of tool usage. Our method enables multimodal agents to autonomously discover effective tool usage strategies through self-exploration and optimization, eliminating the bottleneck of human annotation. SPORT has four iterative components: task synthesis, step sampling, step verification, and preference tuning. We first synthesize multimodal tasks using language models. Then, we introduce a novel trajectory exploration scheme, where step sampling and step verification are executed alternately to solve synthesized tasks. In step sampling, the agent tries different tools and obtains corresponding results. In step verification, we employ a verifier to provide AI feedback to construct step-wise preference data. The data is subsequently used to update the controller for tool usage through preference tuning, producing a SPORT agent. By interacting with real environments, the SPORT agent gradually evolves into a more refined and capable system. Evaluation in the GTA and GAIA benchmarks shows that the SPORT agent achieves 6.41% and 3.64% improvements, underscoring the generalization and effectiveness introduced by our method. The project page is https://SPORT-Agents.github.io.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2510.17816

Cross-Domain Multi-Person Human Activity Recognition via Near-Field Wi-Fi Sensing

Authors:

Xin Li↗Jingzhi Hu↗Yinghui He↗Hongbo Wang↗Jin Gan↗Jun Luo↗

Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition (HAR) provides substantial convenience and has emerged as a thriving research field, yet the coarse spatial resolution inherent to Wi-Fi significantly hinders its ability to distinguish multiple subjects. By exploiting the near-field domination effect, establishing a dedicated sensing link for each subject through their personal Wi-Fi device offers a promising solution for multi-person HAR under native traffic. However, due to the subject-specific characteristics and irregular patterns of near-field signals, HAR neural network models require fine-tuning (FT) for cross-domain adaptation, which becomes particularly challenging with certain categories unavailable. In this paper, we propose WiAnchor, a novel training framework for efficient cross-domain adaptation in the presence of incomplete activity categories. This framework processes Wi-Fi signals embedded with irregular time information in three steps: during pre-training, we enlarge inter-class feature margins to enhance the separability of activities; in the FT stage, we innovate an anchor matching mechanism for cross-domain adaptation, filtering subject-specific interference informed by incomplete activity categories, rather than attempting to extract complete features from them; finally, the recognition of input samples is further improved based on their feature-level similarity with anchors. We construct a comprehensive dataset to thoroughly evaluate WiAnchor, achieving over 90% cross-domain accuracy with absent activity categories.

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16.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:8d9bcc8969e61939289cca4a14c3af3f

StickForStats: automated statistical assumption validation for reproducible computational biology

Authors:

Bharti↗Chakraborty↗

Reproducible computational biology depends on statistical decisions that routine workflows often skip: verifying that a differential-expression test's assumptions hold across all genes, that a strategy-comparison ANOVA is robust to non-normality, or that a meta-analysis is not distorted by publication bias. Surveys consistently find that fewer than 20% of published biomedical studies report checking these assumptions, and existing statistical software leaves validation to the analyst as an optional step. We present StickForStats, an open-source web platform that reframes assumption validation as a default precondition for every analysis. Its Guardian system–a middleware pipeline of eight validators (normality, variance homogeneity, independence, outliers, sample size, modality, linearity, homoscedasticity)–checks assumptions before execution and, on critical violations, reroutes to an appropriate nonparametric alternative with a documented decision trail. At genome scale, applying Guardian to a 91-sample synovial-sarcoma RNA-seq study (GSE271517) cascaded 90.6% of 27,221 genes to a rank-based test and flipped the differential-expression verdict for 553 genes–479 rescued from an under-powered t-test and 74 outlier-driven false positives rejected–materially changing the gene list a biologist would act on. The same automatic validation generalizes across domains: a CRISPR editing-strategy comparison (ANOVA F = 1122, with Guardian recommending Kruskal-Wallis H = 36.6), an ordinal correlation (Pearson r = 0.476 corrected to Spearman {rho} = 0.479), and a sixteen-trial clinical meta-analysis revealing severe publication bias (Egger's t = -5.78, p < 0.001); a complementary module extends the same validators to published manuscripts, checking claims against CONSORT, STROBE, ICH-E9, and JARS-Quant reporting standards. By making assumption validation automatic and transparent, StickForStats targets a tractable, under-served contributor to irreproducibility. The platform is MIT-licensed, validated against SciPy and R, and freely available at https://github.com/visvikbharti/stickforstats_new.

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.04377

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

Authors:

Nitay Mayo↗Tal Mor↗Yossi Weinstein↗

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17762

Symplectic Transversality and Endpoint Green Estimates for Finite-Horizon Pontryagin Systems

Authors:

Pyuyi Chufeng Huang↗Zikang Song↗Xingshu Chen↗

arXiv:2606.17762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study horizon-uniform local branches of finite-horizon discrete-time Pontryagin boundary value systems after smooth control elimination. The central input is a two-point endpoint inverse for the linearization. We verify this inverse from scaled stable–unstable boundary transversality, prove the associated endpoint-corrected Green estimate, and combine it with weighted contractions to obtain existence, uniqueness, Lipschitz dependence, and first-order expansions with constants independent of the horizon. The framework covers smooth nonlinear endpoint maps, including the original Pontryagin rows that fix the initial state and couple the terminal costate to the terminal state. Symplectic and Riccati criteria verify the inverse hypothesis at the level of the matrix data; in particular, every stabilizable linear-quadratic system with invertible dynamics and definite weights is covered, including noncommuting coupled data. A numerical section illustrates the certificates and the horizon-uniform first-order expansion.

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19.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23865

Uniform-in-time Gaussian fluctuations for multiscale nonlinear stochastic systems via Malliavin Calculus

Authors:

Shivam Singh Dhama↗

arXiv:2606.23865v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish a uniform-in-time quantitative central limit theorem (QCLT) for a nonlinear slow-fast stochastic system. We identify significant weaker sufficient conditions that enable us to obtain time-independent bounds for the Wasserstein distance between the fluctuation process and a centered Gaussian random variable. To prove our main result, we utilize tools from Malliavin calculus, specifically the second-order Poincaré inequality. In this context, applying the Poincaré inequality requires demonstrating uniform bounds over time for both the first- and second-order Malliavin derivatives.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11231

CFCamo: A Counterfactual Detect-or-Abstain Framework for Camouflaged Object Detection

Authors:

Suhang Li↗Osamu Yoshie↗Yuya Ieiri↗

Vision-language reinforcement learning has recently shown strong target-present localization for camouflaged object detection (COD). Yet localization is only one side of the decision: when the agent faces an ordinary image with no camouflaged target, will it still claim that a camouflaged object exists? Standard COD training and evaluation data are positive-only, so agents optimized under this setting can acquire an over-detect bias, a task-specific form of object hallucination that standard COD evaluation leaves unmeasured. To quantify this target-absent behavior, we construct Counterfactual COD (CF-COD), a paired benchmark that removes the camouflaged target from each held-out COD evaluation image while preserving a plausible background. CF-COD evaluates whether a model detects the target on the original image and abstains on the target-absent counterfactual, summarized by Pair Accuracy (PA). We further introduce CFCamo, a paired counterfactual framework for COD with abstention. For training, CFCamo optimizes a Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct agent with Counterfactual Sequence Policy Optimization (CSPO), which samples paired original-counterfactual rollouts and uses a Counterfactual Paired Reward (CPR) to couple original-image detection with counterfactual abstention. On CAMO-test, CFCamo improves S_alpha by +3.7 pp over the prior RL-based COD baseline; across CF-COD, it reaches 80.0-90.8% PA. Ablations show that removing counterfactual coupling reduces PA to 1.4-5.2% despite strong target-present COD scores, showing that target-present evaluation alone does not characterize detect-or-abstain behavior. Overall, these results indicate that CFCamo improves COD agents by coupling target-present detection with target-absent abstention, rather than merely strengthening target-present localization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/suhang2000/CFCamo.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19100

AMALIA-VL: A Native European Portuguese Open-Source Vision and Language Model

Authors:

Diogo Gl\'oria-Silva↗Jo\~ao Cardeira↗Manuel Letras da Luz↗Afonso Simpl\'icio↗Gon\c{c}alo Vinagre↗Diogo Tavares↗Rafael Ferreira↗In\^es Calvo↗In\^es Vieira↗David Semedo↗Jo\~ao Magalh\~aes↗

Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open-source multimodal models, which either conflate it with Brazilian Portuguese or severely under-represent it in their training data mixes. We introduce AMALIA-VL, the first open-source instruction-tuned LVLM built natively for pt-PT, pairing a high-resolution vision encoder with dynamic image tiling and a fully open pt-PT-optimized language model via a learned connector. We contribute with a purposefully designed three-stage training process - vision-language alignment, general visual instruction tuning, and preference optimization - together with a pt-PT-centric multimodal data mix combining curated and translated public datasets with novel datasets that address the near-total absence of European Portuguese multimodal resources. Our evaluation shows that AMALIA-VL establishes a strong baseline for open-source pt-PT LVLMs.We will release model weights, training data, and construction pipelines along with machine-translated pt-PT evaluation benchmarks to help democratize pt-PT LVLM development.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18259

Caring Without Feeling: Affective Dynamics as the Control Layer of Human-AI Agent Collaboration

Authors:

Junjie Xu↗Xingjiao Wu↗Zihao Zhang↗Yujia Xu↗Yuzhe Yang↗Jin Zhu↗Luwei Xiao↗Wen Wu↗Liang He↗

arXiv:2606.18259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents that plan, retain memory across sessions, invoke external tools and act with partial autonomy are transforming human–AI collaboration. Research on affective computing, simulated empathy in large language models, trust in automation and AI safety has illuminated important design principles, yet these literatures remain fragmented. No integrated account explains how affective cues operate within agentic collaboration – settings in which humans delegate, monitor and correct consequential tasks. This Review synthesises computational and interactional mechanisms of affective dynamics: the processes through which affective cues, emotion-like behaviour and perceived agent affect shape trust calibration, delegation decisions, error correction, dependence and governance. We trace how model-generated affective signals enter interaction loops that govern reliance, repair and oversight, and propose a framework that treats affect not as an internal property of AI but as a coordination layer through which humans and agents negotiate capability, uncertainty and responsibility. The framework provides a foundation for calibrated measurement, purposeful design and informed governance.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19368

Neural Architectures as Functional Priors in Physics-Informed Control Problems

Authors:

Sonia Rubio Herranz↗Fernando Carlos L\'opez Hern\'andez↗Antonio L\'opez Montes↗

arXiv:2606.19368v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work we investigate the role of neural architectures as implicit functional priors in control problems governed by ordinary differential equations. Rather than focusing on highly complex problems, our objective is to investigate architecture-dependent effects in controlled dynamical systems within the simplest physically interpretable settings possible. In particular, we study a controlled linear RLC electrical circuit and a nonlinear Duffing-type dynamical system. Both systems are analyzed first through classical optimal-control formulations and later through PINN-based approaches. We compare different combinations of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and Fourier-based KAN-like architectures, and analyze their influence on the resulting controls. The numerical experiments suggest that different architectural choices systematically generate qualitatively distinct controls, even under identical governing equations, loss functionals, initial and target states, training parameters and physical constraints. Significant differences appear in the spectral structure, smoothness, energy distribution, and phase-space behavior of the learned solutions. A central observation of this work is the emergence of a functional specialization phenomenon when the neural architectures are allowed sufficient freedom to shape the structure of the learned controls. More specifically, in the systems considered here, Fourier-based architectures tend to produce trajectories with richer oscillatory content, whereas smoother low-frequency-biased architectures tend to generate more regular and energetically efficient controls. This suggests that different functional components of the control problem may be handled more efficiently by different neural architectures, leading to an implicit specialization between state representation and control generation.

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24.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2504.14767

On a class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks

Authors:

Rafik Aguech↗Samir Ben Hariz↗Mohamed El Machkouri↗Youssef Faouzi↗

arXiv:2504.14767v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A step-reinforced random walk is a discrete-time stochastic process with long-range dependence. At each step, with a fixed probability $\alpha$, the so-called positively step-reinforced random walk repeats one of its previous steps, chosen randomly and uniformly from its entire history. Alternatively, with probability $1-\alpha$, it makes an independent move. For the so-called negatively step-reinforced random walk, the process is similar, but any repeated step is taken with its direction reversed. These random walks have been introduced respectively by Simon (1955) and Bertoin (2024) and are sometimes refered to the self-confident step-reinforced random walk and the counterbalanced step-reinforced random walk respectively. In this work, we introduce a new class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks for which we prove the strong law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. In particular, our work provides a unified treatment of the elephant random walk introduced by Schutz and Trimper (2004) and the positively and negatively step-reinforced random walks.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2507.17786

Reinforcement Learning for Accelerated Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation

Authors:

Florian Sobieczky↗Alfredo Lopez↗Erika Dudkin↗Christopher Lackner↗Matthias Hochsteger↗Bernhard Scheichl↗Helmut Sobieczky↗

arXiv:2507.17786v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive optimization algorithm for aerodynamic shape optimization focused on dimensionality reduction. The form in which RL is applied here is that of a surrogate-based, actor-critic policy evaluation MCMC approach allowing for temporal 'freezing' of some of the parameters to be optimized. The goals are to minimize computational effort, and to use the observed optimization results for interpretation of the discovered extrema in terms of their role in achieving the desired flow-field. By a sequence of local optimized parameter changes around intermediate CFD simulations acting as ground truth, it is possible to speed up the global optimization if (a) the local neighbourhoods of the parameters in which the changed parameters must reside are sufficiently large to compete with the grid-sized steps and its large number of simulations, and (b) the estimates of the rewards and costs on these neighbourhoods necessary for a good step-wise parameter adaption are sufficiently accurate. We give an example of a simple fluid-dynamical problem on which the method allows interpretation in the sense of a feature importance scoring.

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