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

Graph Regularized Non-negative Reduced Biquaternion Matrix Factorization for Color Image Recognition

Non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (NRBMF) uses the product of reduced biquaternion (RB) matrices to incorporate the non-negativity constraints of color image pixels into the factorization process. However, NRBMF mainly focuses on reconstruction accuracy and does not explicitly exploit the local geometric structure of image data, which may limit the discriminative ability of the obtained low-dimensional coefficient representations. To address this issue, we propose a graph regularized non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (GNRBMF) model for color image recognition. The proposed model incorporates a graph Laplacian regularizer into the reduced biquaternion coefficient matrix, encouraging nearby samples in the original space to have similar coefficient representations. Meanwhile, GNRBMF retains the non-negativity property of NRBMF in the reduced biquaternion algebra. To solve the optimization problem, a component-wise alternating projected gradient algorithm is derived, and its convergence properties are analyzed. Experimental results on three color image datasets show that the proposed GNRBMF model achieves competitive or superior recognition performance compared with several methods in most tested settings.

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

Predicting Mergeability of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Updates

arXiv:2606.19549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) makes it cheap to train many domain- and task-specific language model adapters, but whether two adapters can be merged is usually discovered only after both have been fully trained and evaluated. This late feedback is costly: adapters that are strong in isolation can interfere destructively once their updates are combined. We ask whether this outcome can be anticipated. We formalize adapter mergeability as the degree to which an adapter preserves its single-task utility after merging, and show that it can be forecast from signals measured in the first few percent of training – chiefly how the low-rank updates and their gradients align across tasks and how much they disturb shared representations. We package these signals into MergeProbe, a lightweight predictor that estimates pairwise and set-level retention and turns the estimate into a concrete decision: merge directly, reweight, prune, or route. On MERGE-PEFT, a five-domain benchmark spanning math, code, science, instruction following, and safety, MergeProbe attains the best average and worst-case retention among strong interference-aware merge baselines while adding far less deployment overhead than full task routing. This turns LoRA merging from a post-hoc engineering step into an anticipatory measurement problem.

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

On the QUEST for Uncertainty Quantification via Highest Density Regions

arXiv:2606.19569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for reliable decision-making in safety-critical applications in probabilistic machine learning. For regression problems, dominant scalar UQ approaches - notably, those based on proper scoring rules - measure uncertainty via pointwise predictive risk. This can lead to counterintuitive results when the target statistic is not the conditional expectation. We propose an alternative framework, in which uncertainty is characterised by the volume of the most probable subset of a distribution's support. QUEST (Quantifying Uncertainty via highest dEnSiTy regions) is a novel approach to UQ based on the concentration of Lebesgue measure at a distribution's peak(s), evaluated at one or more values of a robustness parameter $\alpha$. We establish connections between our measures and classical statistics from information theory and economics. We show that, unlike popular alternatives based on proper scoring rules, QUEST measures of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty satisfy a set of axioms adapted from the UQ literature, including monotonicity under distributional spread and invariance to location shifts. Selective prediction benchmarks confirm that QUEST performs favourably against standard measures such as variance and differential entropy.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Improving Neural Network Training by Decoupling the Magnitude and Direction of Weight Vectors

arXiv:2606.25971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object. Yet every weight matrix carries two distinct quantities – a magnitude and a direction – and all optimizers stepping in the matrix as a whole couple their dynamics: the directional change from an update depends on the current magnitude, while the magnitude drifts as a byproduct of learning the direction, so neither is governed directly by the learning rate. Typical training therefore leans on surrounding recipes such as weight decay and warmup to keep learning stable at scale, though these regulate the coupling only indirectly; other recent methods instead constrain the weight to a fixed-norm sphere, but add no learnable magnitude, leaving scale control to normalization layers alone. We propose Magnitude–Direction (MD) Decoupling, an optimizer modification that factorizes each weight into a fixed-norm direction on a hypersphere and learnable per-row and per-column magnitude gains, updated at separate learning rates, all while the model still sees a single fused weight tensor. The method is agnostic to the base optimizer and removes the need for weight decay and warmup. Across both Adam and Muon, MD Decoupling improves on well-tuned baselines, transfers the optimal LR across model width without retuning, and continues to help at scale on large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. Treating magnitude and direction as separately controlled quantities thus yields more predictable training dynamics and a simple, broadly applicable improvement to modern optimizers.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Impatient Bandits: Optimizing for the Long-Term Without Delay

arXiv:2501.07761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in choosing the learning signal: waiting for the full reward to become available might take several weeks, slowing the rate of learning, whereas using short-term proxy rewards reflects the actual long-term goal only imperfectly. First, we develop a predictive model of delayed rewards that incorporates all information obtained to date. Rewards as well as shorter-term surrogate outcomes are combined through a Bayesian filter to obtain a probabilistic belief. Second, we devise a bandit algorithm that quickly learns to identify content aligned with long-term success using this new predictive model. We prove a regret bound for our algorithm that depends on the Value of Progressive Feedback, an information-theoretic metric that captures the quality of short-term leading indicators that are observed prior to the long-term reward. We apply our approach to a podcast recommendation problem, where we seek to recommend shows that users engage with repeatedly over two months. We empirically validate that our approach significantly outperforms methods that optimize for short-term proxies or rely solely on delayed rewards, as demonstrated by an A/B test in a recommendation system that serves hundreds of millions of users.

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

HOLMES: Evaluating Higher-Order Logical Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.23238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Logical reasoning is essential for reliable AI, yet existing benchmarks are largely first-order-logic-centric, focusing on object-level deduction over fixed predicates. This misses many realistic scenarios where models must reason over rules, predicates, functions, constraints, and decision procedures themselves. We introduce HOLMES (Higher-Order Logic Meets real-world Explainable Symbolic reasoning), the first real-world benchmark for higher-order symbolic reasoning in LLMs, containing 1379 instances. Built on higher-order logic, HOLMES pairs natural-language problems with HOL formalizations, ground-truth answers, verifiable reasoning traces, and fine-grained controllable reasoning factors across law and finance. Experiments show that current LLMs still struggle on HOLMES, with an average accuracy of only 50.64% and the best model reaching 59.54%. Our analyses further reveal that high final-answer accuracy can mask shortcut reasoning in conflict-resolution settings, while performance drops sharply under scope-conditioned and compositional reasoning. These findings identify higher-order symbolic reasoning as a key bottleneck for building reliable and verifiable LLMs. The project code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/wuyucheng2002/HOLMES.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

A Dual Edge Spatial Jacobian Image Graph for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from colour fundus photographs can achieve strong predictive performance, but clinical interpretation requires more than an image-level label. It requires understanding how lesion evidence is distributed around retinal vessels and how this evidence relates to quantitative vascular biomarkers. We present a dual-edge spatial-Jacobian image graph for interpretable DR grading. Each fundus image is represented as a graph node with four aligned evidence streams: AutoMorph vessel information ($X_1$), DR-XAI-style lesion evidence maps ($X_2$), a 128-dimensional lesion-based contrastive image embedding ($X_3$), and AutoMorph morphometric biomarkers ($X_4$). The spatial edge branch ($X_{12}$) encodes vessel-lesion geometry, while the Jacobian branch ($X_{34}$) models embedding-biomarker sensitivity. Lightweight two-token attention fuses both edge families into a final image graph. On 2,910 matched non-augmented APTOS images, the full graph achieves 0.8076 accuracy, 0.8312 quadratic weighted kappa, 0.5915 macro-F1, and 0.9330 adjacent-grade accuracy; referable DR reaches 0.9055 accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC. The framework is positioned as an explainable representation-learning tool for lesion-biomarker hypothesis generation, rather than as a deployment-ready clinical classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/dual-edge-dr-graph-xai.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

How Fragile Are Training-Free AI-Generated Image Detectors? A Controlled Audit of Score Direction, Preprocessing, and Compression

Training-free detectors of AI-generated images promise generator-agnostic deployment without classifier training, yet their reported numbers are rarely compared under a single controlled protocol. We audit two representative training-free scores – an autoencoder-reconstruction score (AEROBLADE-style) and a noise-perturbation feature-similarity score (RIGID-style) – plus a naive feature-kNN control, on a common 1,500-image GenImage-derived benchmark spanning seven generators and JPEG compression at quality 70 and 50. The audit yields three cautionary findings. (i) Implementation details masquerade as method differences: replacing the LPIPS backbone (AlexNet -> VGG-16) changes overall AUROC by +0.085, and switching between resize-to-512 and native-resolution preprocessing flips per-generator conclusions by up to 0.38 AUROC. (ii) Score direction is not a property of the method but of its hyperparameters: the RIGID-style score is inverted (AUROC < 0.5) on SD1.5 and Wukong at noise level sigma=0.05, recovers to >0.5 for every generator at sigma=0.01, and collapses to 0.15 at sigma=0.3. (iii) Dataset format bias inflates robustness claims: without unified re-encoding, AUROC under JPEG-50 exceeds the clean condition for the AlexNet-backbone reconstruction score; after bias correction the residual anomaly localizes to a single generator (BigGAN). The audited scores have complementary per-generator failure sets, but naive z-score fusion does not beat the best single score, indicating that exploiting complementarity requires direction-aware combination.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Fourier Dimensions of Mandelbrot Cascades under Minimal Integrability

Authors:

arXiv:2606.08703v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This note announces exact Fourier dimension formulas for canonical Mandelbrot cascade measures under the minimal Kahane Peyriere integrability condition and records the canonical b adic extension on cubes. In the dyadic interval setting, the theorem is proved in a balanced vector weight model allowing dependence between sibling weights. Almost surely on non extinction, the Fourier, energy, and L2 dimensions all equal the energy exponent. The scalar specialization gives the canonical Mandelbrot Kahane Fourier dimension formula under the minimal integrability condition. On the circle, the endpoint formula is given by the endpoint lower local dimension exponent. For the b adic Mandelbrot cascade on cubes, the Fourier dimension is the minimum of 2 and the energy exponent, with the universal Fourier barrier at dimension two providing the high dimensional obstruction.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

OptEMA: Adaptive Exponential Moving Average for Stochastic Optimization with Zero-Noise Optimality

Authors:

arXiv:2603.09923v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Exponential moving averages (EMAs) are a central component of widely used adaptive optimizers such as Adam. However, existing analyses of Adam-style methods often yield suboptimal guarantees in the zero-noise regime, rely on open-loop parameter schedules, or require prior knowledge of smoothness constants. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce OptEMA and analyze two complementary variants: OptEMA-M, which applies an adaptive, decreasing EMA coefficient to the first moment with a fixed second-moment decay, and OptEMA-V, which swaps these roles. At the heart of these variants is a Corrected AdaGrad-Norm coefficient schedule. This formulation renders OptEMA algorithmically closed-loop and Lipschitz-free, meaning its effective stepsizes are trajectory-dependent and require no parameterization via the Lipschitz constant. Under lower-boundedness, unbiasedness, bounded variance, average smoothness, and a bounded stochastic-gradient condition used to control the adaptive normalizers, we prove that both variants achieve the unified noise-adaptive rate $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} \left(T^{-1/2}+\sigma^{1/2}T^{-1/4}\right)$ for the averaged gradient norm. In the zero-noise regime, these bounds automatically reduce to the nearly optimal deterministic rate $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/2})$ without manual hyperparameter retuning.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Reward Modeling for Multi-Agent Orchestration

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on Large Language Models (LLMs) require effective orchestration to coordinate specialized agents, yet training such orchestrators is hindered by limited supervision and high computational cost. We propose Orchestration Reward Modeling (OrchRM), a self-supervised framework for evaluating orchestration quality without human annotations. OrchRM leverages intermediate artifacts from multi-agent executions to construct win-lose pairs for Bradley-Terry reward model training. Unlike existing MAS test-time scaling and orchestrator training frameworks that rely on costly sub-agent rollouts, OrchRM operates directly at the orchestration level, enabling efficient and high-performing reward-guided orchestrator training and MAS test-time scaling. OrchRM improves training efficiency by up to 10x in token usage while improving MAS test-time scaling performance by up to 8% in accuracy. These gains consistently transfer across multiple domains, including mathematical reasoning, web-based question answering, and multi-hop reasoning, demonstrating orchestration-level reward modeling as a scalable direction for robust multi-agent orchestration. Code will be available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/OrchRM.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

SSH-Net: A Deep Neural Network for Predicting Failure Time Distribution Functions under Competing Risks with Application to GPU Data

arXiv:2606.20451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Competing risks are commonly observed in engineering fields and can bring challenges to time-to-event data modeling when the application scenarios are complicated. Recently, deep neural networks have received great attention for prediction with competing risks, due to their flexibility and high learning capability. However, the complexity of neural network structure brings extra difficulty in hyperparameter tuning based on different data inputs. Additionally, when an engineered system has complex physical structures with multiple hierarchical levels, treating all structural levels as a single group of inputs may fail to capture critical information. To address the issues, we propose a Structured Segmented Hazard Deep Neural Network (SSH-Net) for failure time prediction under cause-specific competing risks framework. Our approach associates neural network structure with data structures, and allows different covariate groups to impact the failure prediction through separate sub-networks. The neural network is constructed based on a cause-specific competing risks model. The SSH-Net outputs cause-specific hazard functions, and utilizes the penalized log-likelihood as the loss function. The prediction accuracy of SSH-Net is validated through simulation studies by evaluating the Brier score, the area under receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC), and the root mean square error (RMSE) of the predicted cause-specific cumulative incident function. We further demonstrate the model's ability to predict failure time distribution functions using the Titan GPU failure time data.

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

Distributionally Robust Set Representation Learning Under Inference-Time Element Corruption

arXiv:2605.30089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard Set Representation Learning methods typically excel on curated data but often overlook the challenge of inference-time element corruption. This refers to scenarios where deployed models encounter element-level degradations, such as outliers or missing components, that may distort set representation and degrade performance. We propose SW-DRSO, a distributionally robust optimization framework tailored for sets. Rather than minimizing loss solely on observed training data, SW-DRSO optimizes a tractable surrogate of the worst-case expected loss over a family of plausible inference-time variations. We introduce a barycentric adversary that approximates the intractable search over corrupted sets by a differentiable training-time optimization over simplex weights. Extensive experiments across four tasks demonstrate that SW-DRSO effectively enhances robustness against corruption while maintaining high overall performance.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Enhanced Tantalum Superconducting Resonator Performance via All-Surface Organic Monolayer Passivation

arXiv:2604.22112v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tantalum is a promising platform for superconducting quantum circuits, yet coherence times remain limited by dielectric losses from interfacial two-level systems (TLS), exacerbated by native oxide regrowth. Here, we implement molecular surface passivation using self-assembled organic monolayers on freshly etched tantalum and silicon in coplanar waveguide resonators. Surface characterization by contact angle, XPS, FTIR and TEM confirm the formation of ordered, nanometer-thick films that suppress oxide formation. Microwave measurements in the ~5-9 GHz range reveal internal quality factors up to 1.8x10^6 in the single-photon regime at 100 mK, representing a ~140% improvement over untreated devices with native oxide. Power and temperature dependent measurements attribute this enhancement to reduced TLS-induced losses. These results demonstrate that molecular passivation effectively engineers low-loss interfaces and provides a scalable route toward high-coherence superconducting quantum devices.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Generative causal testing to bridge data-driven models and scientific theories in language neuroscience

Representations from large language models are highly effective at predicting BOLD fMRI responses to language stimuli. However, these representations are largely opaque: it is unclear what features of the language stimulus drive the response in each brain area. We present generative causal testing (GCT), a framework for generating concise explanations of language selectivity in the brain from predictive models and then testing those explanations in follow-up experiments using LLM-generated stimuli.This approach is successful at explaining selectivity both in individual voxels and cortical regions of interest (ROIs), including newly identified microROIs in prefrontal cortex. We show that explanatory accuracy is closely related to the predictive power and stability of the underlying predictive models. Finally, we show that GCT can dissect fine-grained differences between brain areas with similar functional selectivity. These results demonstrate that LLMs can be used to bridge the widening gap between data-driven models and formal scientific theories.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

GPU-accelerated semidefinite programming for causal games

arXiv:2606.20519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The process matrix formalism describes quantum correlations in scenarios without a fixed causal order between local laboratories. Operational signatures of such correlations can be investigated through causal games. A paradigmatic example is the Guess-Your-Neighbour's-Input game, in which two parties attempt to guess each other's inputs. Correlations compatible with any definite, or probabilistically mixed, causal order cannot achieve a winning probability exceeding $1/2$. The best process-matrix strategy currently known attains a value of approximately $0.6218$ using local dimension $d=5$, while the strongest known dimension-independent upper bound is $0.7592$. In this work, we investigate whether increasing the local dimension beyond $d = 5$ can narrow this gap. To this end, we employ a see-saw optimization scheme in which each step is formulated as a semidefinite program. For scalability, we develop a custom implementation of the SCS solver in which the dominant computational cost, the projection onto the positive-semidefinite cone, is offloaded to a GPU, yielding a six-fold speedup. Using this implementation, we explore local dimensions up to $d = 8$, and we do not find significant improvements over the value at $d=5$. Our results suggest that either qualitatively different strategies are required to approach the known upper bound, or that the bound itself is not tight.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves $\mathsf{NP}$-Complete Problems

arXiv:2606.14806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Assuming the gravitational field is classical and that it couples to quantum fields via the semiclassical Einstein field equations, we show that the weak-field dynamics of a massive and non-relativistic qubit can in principle be used to solve an $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem in polynomial time. We attribute this vast computational power to the non-linear dynamics afforded by the semiclassical Einstein field equations. Consequently, the above two assumptions entail a violation of the Physical Extended Church–Turing Thesis, which we regard as evidence for the quantization of gravity.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SleepMaMi: A Universal Sleep Foundation Model for Integrating Macro- and Micro-structures

arXiv:2602.07628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While the shift toward unified foundation models has revolutionized many deep learning domains, sleep medicine remains largely restricted to task-specific models that focus on localized micro-structure features. These approaches often neglect the rich, multi-modal context of Polysomnography (PSG) and fail to capture the global macro-structure of a full night's sleep. To address this, we introduce SleepMaMi , a Sleep Foundation Model engineered to master both hour-long sleep architectures and fine-grained signal morphologies. Our framework utilizes a hierarchical dual-encoder design: a Macro-Encoder to model full-night temporal dependencies and a Micro-Encoder to capture short-term characteristics from biosignals. Macro-Encoder is trained via Demographic-Guided Contrastive Learning, which aligns overnight sleep patterns with objective subject metadata, such as age, sex and BMI to refine global representations. Micro-Encoder is optimized via a hybrid Masked Autoencoder (MAE) and multi-modal contrastive objective. Pre-trained on a massive corpus of $>$20,000 PSG recordings (158K hours),SleepMaMi outperforms or matches state-of-the-art existing foundation models across a diverse suite of downstream tasks, demonstrating superior generalizability and label-efficient adaptation for clinical sleep analysis.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CineDance: Towards Next-Generation Multi-Shot Long-Form Cinematic Audio-Video Generation

The fidelity and structural diversity of training datasets fundamentally determine the capabilities of video generation models. While commercial systems showremarkableabilitytogeneratecinematicnarratives, the progress of open-source models remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce CineDance-1M, a large-scale, open research Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) dataset designed specifically for multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Averaging 92.8 seconds and 24.2 continuous shots per video, it provides configurable, structured annotations for both audio and video modalities. This exceptional quality is achieved through a rigorous three-stage curation pipeline: i) diverse sourcing and comprehensive cleansing, ii) film-theory-inspired narrative parsing, and iii) hierarchical dual-modal captioning. For a comprehensive assessment, we propose CineBench, featuring a diverse prompt suite and a six-dimensional, human-aligned metric system tailored for complex narrative audio-video evaluation. Furthermore, we adapt LTX-2.3 into CineDance, which demonstrates exceptional single-modality quality alongside precise audio-video alignment and robust subject and environment consistency, effectively validating our curation strategy and the high quality of CineDance-1M. We anticipate that this work will serve as a solid foundation for accelerating future research in multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Our project page is available at https://aliothchen.github.io/projects/CineDance/.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

What Actually Works for Spacecraft Fault-Tolerant Control: An Honest Settled-Gate Benchmark of Learned and Classical Methods

arXiv:2606.25374v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent learned fault-tolerant-control (FTC) work reports high success on spacecraft actuator faults, but often in simulation, on narrow fault sets, and with transient metrics that a trajectory need only touch once. We ask what recovers spacecraft pointing when success means holding it on faults never seen in training. We answer with a benchmark built around a settled gate, pointing held within 0.2 deg over a dwell window and scored on the true state, train/test splits disjoint in inertia, gain, sign pattern, and bias, Wilson intervals over n=500 episodes per cell, and one-command reproduction on a 6-DOF Basilisk testbed. Across classical, adaptive, learned end-to-end, and structured controllers, three findings stand out. Fault-unaware PD/PID and from-scratch end-to-end RL score 0%, so learning capacity alone is not the lever. Classical adaptive laws resolve sign faults but handle gain poorly at 55.2%, and a literature-faithful Nussbaum-gain law reaches 45.2% and 3.2%. A structured estimate-then-control design, with a learned recurrent module that infers actuator gain online and feeds an analytic law, wins on sign and gain faults at 97.8% and 94.4%, approaching the privileged oracle while unstructured methods remain at zero. The hard wall is constant additive bias, which is 0% for every controller including the privileged gain oracle, because an integral-free law cannot null a constant disturbance. We close it with a disturbance observer that recovers bias from the dynamics and is self-correcting for gain-estimate error. Composed with the gain estimate, it recovers 59.4% of held-out bias faults with no sign/gain regression, moving that class off zero. We classify sensor-fault regimes similarly, show that sensor bias is unobservable from the corrupted measurement alone and therefore requires fusion rather than an observer, and release the benchmark so the gate is shared.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Anomalous magneto-optical response at $\mathrm{RuO_2 / WSe_2}$ van der Waals interface

arXiv:2606.20262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ruthenium dioxide ($\mathrm{RuO_2}$) has been proposed as an altermagnetic candidate, although its magnetic ground state remains controversial. Here, we probe weak interfacial magnetic states at the surface of (001)-oriented $\mathrm{RuO_2}$ films using the magnetic proximity effect (MPE) in a van der Waals heterostructure consisting of monolayer tungsten diselenide ($\mathrm{WSe_2}$) atop $\mathrm{RuO_2}$. Temperature-dependent magneto-optical spectroscopy reveals an anomalous excitonic energy shift and a deviation from conventional Varshni behavior below 55 K that are absent in an encapsulated $\mathrm{WSe_2}$ control sample. The anomalous shift reverses sign upon field cooling with opposite magnetic field polarity, indicating a magnetic origin. Polarization-resolved measurements further show a nearly field-independent and fluctuating valley splitting in $\mathrm{WSe_2 / RuO_2}$ in strong contrast to the conventional linear Zeeman splitting observed in the control bare $\mathrm{WSe_2}$ sample. These results suggest that the valley states are governed predominantly by interfacial exchange fields associated with weak surface magnetic states in $\mathrm{RuO_2}$, which do not produce a conventional linear Zeeman response within the applied magnetic field range. Importantly, this approach enables direct optical probing of emergent surface magnetism without introducing an additional ferromagnetic layer, positioning MPE-based optical probing as a tool for investigating weak surface magnetism and offering new possibilities for studying magnetic materials with controversial magnetic states.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Reasoning as Intersection: Consensus-Frame Alignment for Visual Focus in Video-MLLMs

Reinforcement learning has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, but applying outcome-only rewards to video multimodal large language models (Video-MLLMs) provides limited guidance on which visual evidence should support the answer. Inspired by multisensory integration, where consistent cues can enhance the salience and reliability of perceptual estimates, we introduce Consensus Frame GRPO (CF-GRPO), a temporal-annotation-free process-level reward framework for evidence-aware video reasoning. CF-GRPO constructs a consensus frame prior from intrinsic video cues, including temporal coverage, scene-transition cues, and query-conditioned visual relevance. It then computes a model-side frame-use score from visual and response representations and optimizes their agreement through the Consensus Frame Reward (CFR). With salience-aware sparse aggregation and distribution sharpening, CFR provides a high-contrast reward signal without requiring human temporal annotations. Experiments show that VideoCFR achieves competitive performance across complex video reasoning benchmarks and improves several metrics over representative Video-MLLM and RL baselines, while the consensus prior provides an interpretable view of the evidence frames emphasized during training. The implementation is available at https://github.com/1Pansy/VideoCFR.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Asymmetric quantum steering harvested near a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole

arXiv:2606.12766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the harvesting of quantum steering and its directional asymmetry between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors in a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole spacetime. Since the detectors are located at different radial positions outside the black hole, they experience inequivalent local environments induced by gravitational redshift, causing Alice to undergo stronger effective thermal noise than Bob. Remarkably, we uncover a counterintuitive phenomenon in which the detector subjected to a higher effective temperature exhibits stronger steerability than the other one, revealing a nontrivial inversion of thermal intuition in curved spacetime. Furthermore, quantum steering survives only within a finite window of detector energy gaps and reaches its maximum within an optimal regime. We find that Lorentz violation suppresses steering most strongly near this optimal energy gap, indicating an enhanced sensitivity of maximal correlation extraction to symmetry breaking effects. Our results demonstrate that Lorentz violation acts as a geometric constraint on the quantum information capacity of spacetime, simultaneously restricting both the strength and the directionality of quantum correlations.

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

Linear-Time Encodable and Decodable Quantum Error-Correcting Codes

arXiv:2603.04543v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have seen rapid development in the subject of quantum coding theory, with breakthroughs on many exciting classes of codes, including quantum LDPC codes, quantum locally testable codes, and quantum codes with interesting transversal gates. However, a natural class of quantum codes, which has been well-studied classically, has not yet been treated: those which can be quickly encoded and decoded. This problem concerns the channel capacity setting, where a noise channel sits between perfect encoding and unencoding/decoding operations; this is the setting that is relevant for communication between fault-tolerant quantum computers. In this work, we construct asymptotically good quantum codes that can be encoded and unencoded by quantum circuits of logarithmic depth and consisting of a linear total number of gates. The classical decoding algorithms also run in logarithmic depth and use $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ gates, or alternatively a linear number of gates but with higher depth. We further construct explicit and asymptotically good quantum codes whose encoding, unencoding and decoding all use a linear number of gates, and additionally whose encoding and unencoding may be run in logarithmic depth.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $\phi$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $\phi$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants.